A Door in the River (2 page)

Henry Wiest owned the hardware store in Kehoe Glenn – called, simply, Wiest’s – and at one time or another most people in a fifty-kilometre radius had called on him for some reason. The family-owned hardware store in Port Dundas had closed in 2001 when the Canadian Tire had moved into town from the highway and expanded, and Wiest’s reputation for driving out to fix a lock or get a chipmunk out of a wall was, by that point, legend. There were plenty of contractors and electricians, roofers and excavators in the region, but small jobs tended to flow Henry’s way: he was reliable, friendly, and cheap, and he never did anything that wasn’t necessary.

His wife, Cathy, owned Kehoe Glenn’s best-loved café, The Frog Pond, which apart from having an excellent breakfast and lunch menu also boasted the best coconut cream pie in all of Westmuir County. Both husband and wife were the kind of local celebrities only small towns
have: he could fix anything; she made amazing pies. Between the two of them, a childless couple, they made a fine living, but they lived in almost obsessive modesty. Sometimes people had gossiped that Henry Wiest had more than $5 million in savings. Yet they had occupied that pretty house on Church Road since 1986, the year they were married, and it was no bigger a house than two people needed. Henry drove the company pickup on business and otherwise drove a used Camry. Cathy drove a new one. Her Camrys eventually became his used Camrys and then they’d buy her a new one. Every five years, when the warranties ran out.

In the afternoon, people were going to pay their respects. Hazel went home first to change into civilian clothes and then continued on to Kehoe Glenn. The Wiest house was set back a ways, against a ravine, and there was a beautifully kept garden in the front. The smaller second storey of the house sloped down asymmetrically over the garage. Huge orange day lilies nodded against the front of the house below a big bay window, and blue delphinium, echinacea, and foxglove stood tall in their beds leading away from the house in serpentine patterns. Soft tufts of lamb’s ear lined the edge of the bed. Hazel went up the walk, her attention drawn to the riot of colour and scent, and felt especially sad that Henry’s widow had to cope with his death in the context of such rude and splendid life.

The house was already full of people – friends, relations, townsfolk – and Cathy’s employees had brought over a groaning board’s worth of food from the café. In a cynical part of herself, Hazel wondered how many of those who’d come to give their condolences hadn’t just come for the food.

She gave a wide berth to the buffet. How people could eat at a time like this was beyond her. Cathy was sitting at one end of a couch, receiving people. She looked to be in shock a little, but it hadn’t caused her natural warmth to flag. She was a beautiful, capable woman of thirty-six, and it was hard to imagine anyone bearing up with as much grace as she was.

There was a clutch of people standing around Cathy and not talking so much as they were emoting to each other. Professional criers, Hazel recalled, had once been hired by mourners to bring the proper gravity to a sad situation. It seemed the performance came naturally to some. She threaded her way eventually to the couch and took Cathy’s hand in hers. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What is there to say?”

“I thought he was indestructible.”

“Apparently not. It’s unimaginable to me that he could have fallen off as many ladders as he did but be
killed
by something that tiny.”

“Why was he down there?”

“He told me he was going to Mayfair to pick up some
filters. Maybe he got a call on the way back. I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him after he left the store.”

“It’s awful, Cathy. Just awful.”

Hazel hung back for a while after that, and shook hands, and made the appropriate gestures to the family. She overheard quite a few Henry Wiest stories that she already knew. The time he came in the middle of the night and enticed a family of raccoons out of Robert Moss’s attic with nothing more than a net and one of The Frog Pond’s meatballs. His uncle was talking about how Henry had three wild years in his teens when nobody thought he’d ever settle down. He was obviously never going to take over Bill’s store. His father, my brother, said the uncle, pausing.
But
there was always a lot more to Henry and he wanted to be able to be with that woman, there, he said, pointing at the couch. Hazel watched people coming up to the uncle, smiling and touching him. She’d never heard of a wild version of Henry Wiest, and she’d known him from babyhood. The Wiest family went as far back in Westmuir as the Micallefs. Hazel had been fifteen when Henry was born; maybe his wild years coincided with her child-rearing years. She filed it away, though. She had her own collection of stories. Her ex, Andrew, had once needed a hand to help trim heavy branches hanging over their roof: Henry had insisted Andrew go back inside and watch the football game, it was a two-man job he could
do on his own. And once, when Martha was fourteen and alone at home, an attempt at teaching herself to drive had found her backsliding down the hill behind the house in their 1982 Volvo station wagon. Henry had answered her panicked call for help and he came to winch her back uphill and show her how to fill the tire tracks in the snow with cedar switches. (Martha told them the truth, anyway. They debated whether the elder Wiest would have approved of Henry’s abetting. He’d been a Calvinist type, William Wiest.)

Both of them had been fixtures in the town. Cathy had sat on town council. If someone was having a party in Kehoe Glenn, there was a good chance they were at it. Henry had been fun to know. A party they’d had once at the house in Pember Lake had gone so late he’d fallen asleep on the couch with a blanket over his head. They’d left him there until noon the next day, tiptoeing around, and then decided to wake him. But when they pulled the blanket back there was a pile of pillows under it and a note that read,
Keep it down, please
.

She was going to miss him.

When people began to leave (and when the vittles began to dwindle), Hazel went up to Cathy a second time, to say goodbye. “There were a lot of people here,” she said. “He was well loved.”

“Thank you for coming, Hazel. You know it was your father’s generation that set the example for Hank, once he
was ready to come around to it. His dad, yours, all those nice old guys who used to curl together at the bonspiel … they were the template. I wonder what this place is going to be like when their influence is finally gone.”

“Well, it’s up to us to keep it alive. Henry was the best example of it, though.”

Cathy half smiled at Hazel. “Thank you for saying that.”

Hazel gave the mourning woman a huge hug. Then, gently, she said, “Do you mind if I ask you something, Cathy?”

“Like what?” Hazel’s tone had put her on alert.

“I’m just wondering if Henry smoked.”

“Oh, he quit years ago. But he bought the occasional pack. I sometimes found them.”

“Do you think he would have gone down to Queesik Bay to buy a pack of cigarettes?”

“Hazel …”

“I know,” she said, “Sorry. Force of habit.”

She squeezed Hazel’s hand and turned her reddened face to the next well-wisher. Hazel went back to her car. She drove home with the radio off, thinking. Why had Henry Wiest parked far in the back of the smoke shop? There was a drive-through there if he’d wanted to be subtle about it. But he’d parked. So maybe he hadn’t gone for smokes. She sincerely doubted that he’d gone for souvenirs, either.

] 2 [

Late afternoon

Things were changing at the Port Dundas Police Department. Years of talk about amalgamating some of the region’s smaller shops was turning into a reality, and the Port Dundas detachment was about to experience that in the form of Ray Greene returning to his old shop as the new commanding officer. Supposedly this was the beginning of a renaissance for Port Dundas: the detachment was going to grow, become more central to Westmuir operations. She wondered what Ray was going to be called. Probably superintendent. It made her skin itch to think of it. He’d been gone for almost a year, after quitting the force over Hazel’s methods, as
his
CO, and now he was coming back, not as her deputy but her boss. Ray himself had informed Hazel of Commissioner Willan’s decision
in person back in May: he was going to be installed in January. So she had five months, five more months to do things her way.

After the gathering at the Wiest house, she called down to Queesik Bay to get a copy of the band police report on the discovery of the body, and a copy of the autopsy. The report was faxed up from the reserve police department. It was detailed and unprovocative. Under the details of time and place, the reporting officer, a Lydia Bellecourt, had written:

I responded to the location at 12:35 a.m. in regards to a report of a body in the rear of the parking lot behind Eagle Smoke and Souvenir. Upon arrival at the time noted above, a customer of Eagle Smoke and Souvenir, full name
LOUIS PETER HARKEMAS
, directed me to the location of the body, which he first saw when he was parking his car and his headlights illuminated it. He reassured me that no one had touched or moved the body from when he first saw it. The victim was found lying on his back, on the gravel of the rear parking lot, between a red, 2003 Ford F-150 pickup with the licence plate AAZW 229, and a grey 1997 Volkswagen Jetta with no plates. The victim was dressed in jeans, a blue shirt, and was wearing black Blundstone boots. The victim had vomited.

I ascertained that the victim was not breathing and
did not have a pulse, whereupon I radioed QBAS to state that the victim appeared to be deceased and that in addition to life-saving equipment that had already been dispatched, a coroner would be needed. The ambulance arrived on the scene at 12:41 a.m. and pronounced the victim dead. The coroner,
CALVIN BRETT
, arrived shortly afterwards and did his own exam and wrote his report on the scene (#38174490). He estimated the time of death at between 11 p.m. and midnight. A driver’s licence and an Ontario Health Card confirmed the victim’s identity as
HENRY PHILLIP WIEST
, of 72 Church Road in Kehoe Glenn, Ontario. DOB June 11, 1959. Contents of the victim’s pockets were a wallet with $45 in cash, a cellphone, and a comb. All items were bagged. There was no damage to the victim’s vehicle, and there was nothing of interest in the truck except for a load of home furnace filters, and a half-drunk Tim Hortons coffee in a cup-holder. There were no personal belongings in the truck except for a folded blanket. Papers confirming victim’s ownership of the truck were found in the glove compartment. The victim’s last name is also painted on the side of the truck and refers to a well-known business in Kehoe Glenn, Wiest’s.

There appear to be no witnesses to the victim’s death. There was no evidence of a struggle, no blood or bullet wound on the victim, no clear signs of strangulation or blunt force trauma. The victim had his truck keys in his
hand. Nothing at the scene suggested foul play; investigation reserved until results of autopsy.

Signed,

LYDIA BELLECOURT, RC QBPS

The band police had sent a car to pick Cathy up and she’d given permission for the autopsy to be performed on the reserve. It had its own lab – Westmuir’s chief pathologist, Dr. Jack Deacon, often just sent his tests there. The report said that Wiest had edema associated with an insect sting causing anaphylaxis and that a single sting to his face had caused his death. The toxicology had come back negative. So that was it. She called James Wingate, her detective constable, into her office and showed him the faxes.

“It was a wasp,” she said. He was standing in front of her desk, studying the report quickly. She put her finger down on the
Cause of Death
. It read,
Anaphylaxis due to wasp sting
. “My luck.”

“Why your luck?”

“No stinger. That would be proof of something at least.” She took the police report back and sorted it with the other pages. The cover sheet read,
Please let me know if I can be of any further service
and was signed by Bellecourt. “Did you ever meet him?”

“I’ve only been here nine months, Hazel.”

“You would have met him eventually,” she said. “You’ve probably seen his pickup a dozen times without even knowing it. One day you were going to have trouble with the wiring in your living room, or you were going to find a leak under your sink, and you’d ask someone for a name and that name would have been Henry. Everyone knew him. That’s why there were three hundred people in that church. I bet there were fifty underemployed contractors handing out their cards yesterday.”

“So he was well liked.”

“Loved.”

He continued reading the stapled fax pages and felt backwards for the seat of the chair in front of her desk. “There were no cigarettes in his pickup,” he said. He sat with a faint thud. “So he must have been stung just as he was getting out.”

“Hey, does it
say
pickup? It does, doesn’t it? He was driving the store’s pickup.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It kind of puts the kibosh on the cigarette-buying idea. He’d have gone down in his car.”

“Why.”

“Because he’s buying cigarettes on the sly, dummy. You don’t do that in a vehicle with your name painted on the door.”

“I’m still working on my detectivating skills.”

“But he must have gone down for a reason, right? If not cigarettes, then what?”

“Souvenirs.”

“On his way home with a load of filters?”

“Why is the pickup so important to you all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to know what he was doing down there. It would
help
me to know.”

He leaned over in the chair and slid his copy of the police report back onto her desk. “Why would it
help
you?”

“I knew him his whole life, James. But not on a daily basis – right? You see people around. But how well do you really know them?”