“Back to my original purpose, I have to ask...I mean...off the record...” She swallowed back her hesitation. Kim Bass was a likable person, trustworthy and credible, or so it seemed.
“I get you. This is a Catholic school, Charter of Rights be damned. It’s not exactly Don’t ask. Don’t tell. But close enough.”
“I understand.”
“I live with another woman who writes romance novels. We’ve been together for three years. I was glad to take this job to repay my student loans. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the boomers have been retiring in droves. I’ll be out of here in June. I have an offer back home in Canmore. With her occupation, Judi can relocate anywhere. Oddly enough, I miss the snow and cold. It’s so much cleaner.” She looked out the window, where it had clouded over. Sooke weather changed on the hour. Fat raindrops teared runnels down the window. “How I hate the rain. I think I have SAD. Thank god they put in those special lights in the library. Fifteen minutes a day, and you cheer right up. I’m overdue for my fix.”
“Your personal information will be confidential.” Holly heard a bell ring. Her watch read eleven. “Time for the memorial service, I guess. One more question. Did Angie confide in you about other students?”
“Absolutely not. She was no gossip. All the same, Angie was mature for her age, but she wasn’t one to make a teacher a pal. We’re supposed to be leaders, not friends. I looked over that essay on meth for her. It was passionate. No way in hell she took those drugs herself.” She checked her watch. “Guess I better make sure I have some tissues. If that’s all, I’ll leave you now and hit the bathroom before the service.”
Minutes later, Holly found herself in the last row of the bleachers. At least half the seats were empty, a far cry from the old days. Perhaps the school would close after all, just desserts for the discomfort it had inflicted upon her. Standing in for the principal, Gable began the service as the crowd quieted. A large screen showed videos of Angie’s triumphs in her swim meets. She poised on the starting blocks, intent, focused, a picture of youthful perfection. Then the video faded to black. Across to the podium came the president of the senior class, a boy with Harry Potter glasses, poking them back on his nose every two minutes. For his age, the comments were surprisingly mature. He ended by reading Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”. Had Kim given him the idea?
Then came the head counsellor, followed by Coach Grove, awkward in a role other than pep talks. She noticed that his gaze kept gravitating toward the statuesque Katie. But the girl next to her, Janice, was it? was fixated on Paul Gable. Such temptations lay in wait in the educational minefield. Now female teachers were being accused of seducing young male students. Women were proving to be as reprehensible as men when it came to sexual foibles.
The choir finished the hour-long service by singing “I’ll Fly Away”. By then nearly everyone except the most stoic was wiping their eyes, and a chorus of sniffs filled the air as tissues emerged among the females. Angie might not have had any close friends, but her peers recognized the tragedy as a harbinger of their own passing. A lone kilted piper played “Amazing Grace”, walking out at dirge pace until the sound faded in the halls and the gym was totally quiet, except for the drip of water from the metal roof. Then the bustle of finding umbrellas began as people got up.
As Holly stood to the side, she noticed Nate Didrickson filing out, Buster the golden retriever plodding at his heels, bleary eyes searching the crowd for its lost mistress to part the clouds in its vision. Nate was with a woman with similar facial features, perhaps his sister, and had the boy Robin by one hand. The lad’s dark suit echoed his father’s, down to the white carnation boutonniere. Then the last handshake and hug had been accepted, and everyone had left for the cafeteria to take refreshments and sign the guest book.
Nate saw Holly and whispered to the woman, who then said to the youngster, “Come on, dear. We’ll get some cake. Dad will be right along.” They walked off as the senior dog slumped down with a relieved sigh and appeared to nod off. Buster had been freshly groomed and given a bright blue collar ribbon, no slight chore under the demands of such grief.
“My condolences again. It was a lovely service,” she said. “Corporal Martin. Thank you for coming.” He took both her hands in his in a warm embrace. “I didn’t expect...” His voice trailed off.
“I understand that Detective Whitehouse visited your home.” He coughed into his hand. “Sorry. This time of year, the debris burning starts my allergies going. What were you... Oh, yeah. Whitehouse. What a know-it-all. You should have seen the mess he left in my little girl’s room. Clothes and books all over the place. It took me...” Then he broke off and turned away, one hand shifting to his swollen, puffy eyes. “Funny, but I still think she’s coming back.”
She touched his shoulder gently, hoping that the light contact would be accepted. Common perception was that female officers had brought a new sensitivity to policing. Often they were of greater use in domestic violence cases because of the way they could defuse a situation without using brute force.
“He got me steamed, searching for drugs in my angel’s room. There is no way she took that toxic junk or drank more than a beer, probably a light one at that.”
There had been some alcohol in Angie’s system, but he might have been right. For some, the excitement of the illicit beer itself was as much a charge as the small buzz of a single drink. She hadn’t intended to bother Nate again after Whitehouse had done his job, but while she had him here... “I’ve been speaking with her teachers to get to know her better. Did she confide in you? I mean as much as a teenager does.”
“She had some concerns about Robin. He’s been her responsibility ever since her mother...passed. She went over his homework with him every night.” Nate gave a nod to a very old bow-backed man and his wife with a walker who had been slowly making their way across the gym. The woman gave a sob as she hugged him. The man said, “We’ll miss our girl, Nate. You come by to talk any time.”
“Thanks for your support.” Nate returned his attention to Holly.
“Sweet people. They live next door. Angie was like a granddaughter to them. Anyway, she said there were drugs at school sometimes. It disgusted her. I wanted her to tell the authorities, but you know how kids are about that. We used to call them squealers.” His quiet tones took on an edge. “Now it’s ‘dropping the dime’. Gangster talk. Makes me sick.”
“Did she mention any names?”
He gave a contemptuous snort. “If she had, I would have passed them on to the authorities. She knew that. That’s the problem today. Everyone’s covering up. The whole community has to work together to make this a safe place, and I’m not just talking about Neighbourhood Watch.” He ran fingers through his hair, freshly trimmed for the occasion. “Just see out the year, I told her. Concentrate on your classes, your swimming. Get to university, and you’ll forget there ever was a time called high school. Life will sort itself out.”
Holly felt a kinship with this girl and her dislike of childish cliques. In a time warp, they might have been friends. Finding out why and how she died assumed the nature of a personal challenge, more than a job. Was that wise? She had no choice, and she hoped she never would.
She left the school wondering whether she should have dismissed Kim so quickly. Was she naïve to discard the gossip? Did this partner of hers even exist? Yet why plant the seeds of doubt in a father’s imagination? She was beginning to understand how damaging passing on information in a case could be. Discretion was a narrow line between total candour and silence. And the coach. Loyal husband or playing his own little games with Katie? Should she do a background check, or was that overkill? She felt certain that the meth had come from someone at the school, a student or, god forbid, the staff. Then there was the wild card. The boys from Rennie.
Chipper met her at the Otter Point Bakery. They opted for the pizza buffet and started chowing down as the friendly owner brought more selections hot from the ovens. “No chicken pie for you today, Officer?” she asked Chipper, who grinned as he took another slice. The quaint room had Chinese antiques in wicker cases, along with silk scarves and carvings. They advertised a high tea as well as fresh meat and vegetable pies. Tourists crammed the place in summer.
Chipper nodded as Holly told him about the school. “Whitehouse checked in,” he said. “He’s off to Vancouver for a couple of days. Since there are no new leads in our case, I guess he’s shelved it. Told me he thought that Angie took the meth on her own.”
“Like hell she did. This is so frustrating.”
“Too right. What does he care about us? No surprise, though. First lesson I learned in my first year. Ninety-five per cent of police work is dreary and routine. Glory boy wants none of that.”
“And the other five, you get your head shot off and an official funeral better than you could afford.” She munched on a Greek pizza slice, then selected a pepperoni piece.
“Don’t forgetting shooting someone yourself.” He wiped his mouth on a serviette. “Did you ever have to do that?”
Her memories had to be pried from their dark corners. “I drew my gun once...after a dangerous car chase. The guy was cornered, and I was afraid he was going to run me over or drive into a crowd. The warning shot stopped him.”
Chipper stared at her. “Wow. You made the right choice and lucked out.”
“It’s not always that easy.” She checked her watch. “We’d better get a move on.”
“More interviews?”
“Just one. The boys from Port Renfrew. Maybe I can combine it with a speed check in the French Beach area. Sun’s back out. Good travelling weather.”
“French Beach. Good idea. The locals have been complaining to Ann.” He looked at her uncertainly. “But the boys. By yourself? Do you want—”
She shot him a cool, sideways glance, and he backed off. “I’ve made a preliminary call.” She explained that Billy’s mother had sounded worried, until Holly had insisted that they were talking to everyone who’d been around the park that night in hopes of finding someone who’d seen Angie riding the bike.
They took the bill to the counter in the adjoining bakery where she picked up an apple pie and a loaf of seven-grain bread. “Routine. Do people still believe that? It’s such a cliché on television and in movies,” Chipper said.
“Even if it turns out that they were on the beach, we can’t haul them in like felons unless we have a good reason. And don’t forget that relations between the races have been prickly lately.” In Sooke, a native man had been seen sleeping on a cardboard mat. Since he was in a bushy area with makeshift shelters where the homeless crashed behind the dumpsters at the Evergreen Mall, he was ignored. By the time he was discovered to be in a diabetic coma instead of drunk, he came close to dying. A tragedy borne of neglect. Good Samaritans were vanishing in a fog of perceived danger or possible lawsuits.
“That sounds like a double standard. We already brought in the two students from the high school.”
She cleared her throat. “Because they were directly involved that night...or part of an alibi.”
Back at the office, Chipper began reading the latest bulletins. Ann was under a pile of paperwork, requisitions for stationery and equipment. “It’s so quiet here that I heard a hummingbird outside,” she said. “Guess they didn’t all head for California.”
Just as Holly was leaving with the radar equipment and ticket pad, Ann answered the phone. A few tsks erupted while the other party talked in a voice nearly loud enough for all to hear. “We’ll send someone right out,” she said and hung up. “More theft from a construction site in Shirley. Six new strata homes with ocean views. Big money. But it’s remote, so no one’s minding the store at night. Broke into a metal storage shed. This time it’s a generator, nail gun, a small table saw and a houseful of exotic hardwood flooring.” Shirley was a small community formerly known as Sheringham Point after the picture-perfect lighthouse on the bluffs. When it had got its own post office, the name was too long for a stamp.
Holly whistled. “And they’d need a truck to haul that equipment.” She turned to Chipper. “Take the Suburban and canvass the nearest neighbours. Ask the guys at the volunteer fire station. A few of them sit out front around lunch time. See if you can get any latents in the place where they broke into the shed.” Thanks to his bush postings in Saskatchewan, Chipper had SOCO training.
He rubbed his neck. “A construction site? Fifty people have had their hands on things, not to mention deliveries.”
She shook her head. “I know, but we could get lucky running them through CPIC. They should haul out an on-site trailer and hire a guard. A junkyard dog’s no use if the place isn’t fenced.” The Canadian Police Information Centre catalogued the names of anyone currently accused, cases pending, probation and criminal records.
She headed back down West Coast Road, the window open, enjoying the warm breeze and the bright sun. In the summer droughts, when they held their breath that forest fires wouldn’t start in the bone-dry duff, even logging was halted in the sere woods. Then the fall and winter brought exponential rains. Finally the precipitation slowed as March brought daffodils. Or so it had gone. Global warming was causing new weather patterns, and they weren’t pretty. Her father had told her of a rare storm last April. One hundred millimetres of rain in a day. Some blamed the clouds of pollution from coal-power generation in burgeoning China.
Still uncomfortable from stuffing at the trough and feeling dangerously like a snooze, Holly settled in about five kilometres east of Fossil Bay. She cozied the car behind a rickety fence once belonging to a farm hacked out of the wilderness and now reclaimed by brambles and salal. Big city units had the new Stalker LIDAR laser guns, better suited to dense traffic areas. She used the old Basic Handheld K Band Radar, heavy but reliable. Some alert drivers saw her in time and braked quickly, slipping under the radar. Others must have been gawking at the stunning oceanfront or listening to music. Along with several gentle warnings, two of the three tickets went to tourists, one in a rented Mustang and the other in a Buick. The most satisfying citation tagged a yee-haw roofer flying low-level at 110 kmh in a battered Ford pickup. Like a primitive telegraph, the message would be received from other drivers, who observed the ticketing, that speeding in this area was unwise today.