Chipper wiggled his fingers. “Call me the salamander whisperer.”
I
t was a gloomy Saturday, and the arrival of the paper at 5:15 a.m. always smacked Holly in the face as lights flashed into the driveway like a Hollywood premiere. Rain pattered on the skylights. October was supposed to begin the monsoons, but this was ridiculous. It had poured every day for the last three weeks, closing in on a record.
An hour later, she collected a coffee in the kitchen and peeked around the corner. “Tell me the weather report. No, I’m not that much of a masochist.”
“Paper says RATH.” Translation: “Rain, at times heavy.” In his dressing gown, Norman read in his recliner from the
Times
Colonist
as she came down the stairs to the tiled solarium. With the bright sun in summer, the room was warm and inviting, but another month, and it would turn into a deep freeze without the propane wall stove. Norman refused to light it until January. “Poor kid. Is this what you told me about?” He held out a section of the paper to her.
Wrapped in a cozy afghan, Holly sat on the blue leather sofa, sipped her coffee and read the article. “A Port Renfrew teenager is still in critical condition after being found hanging by a rope in his family’s boathouse. Doctors say that there is an excellent chance of his recovery. The next three days will make the difference. Police are looking for a person of interest who apparently left the scene just before the teen was found by a friend.”
“A person of interest. Silly jargon. Even I know what that means,” Norman said. “Does the law have to tread that lightly?”
“I guess we’re not allowed to use the word
suspect
any more. When did that happen?”
“Says here the young man may recover. That’s good.”
Holly remembered giving only bare-boned but optimistic facts to the reporter who had called the detachment. Were she right about the attack, the
person of interest
would know that he had not succeeded and that an unmasking might come with Billy’s awakening. Then again, Billy might not have seen his attacker. “Odds are in his favour. He’s getting the best help.” She made herself a note to call the hospital.
Late nights for her and early beds for him had made them ships in the night recently. As the aroma of maple-smoked bacon filled the solarium, she watched him turn pages, always finishing with the personals column. A slender thread of faith led him to believe that he might find a message from Bonnie or someone who knew her. Every three months, he placed an ad asking for information, an indulgence foreign to his frugal nature. She’d seen it once or twice, nothing more than a simple notice: “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Bonnie Martin of Sooke, B.C., please contact 250-643-1496. Reward for information.” As far as she knew, no one had ever answered. He would have told her, wouldn’t he?
She still felt awkward about hiding her recent trip to Camosun. He’d always been forthcoming. “We’ll work it out” had been his motto, whether or not such resolution was possible. The word “Dad” was forming on her lips when something caught her eye.
He lifted a plastic bag from the floor and removed a strange apparatus of hooks and belts. “I wanted to show you this.”
She examined the oddity. “What the heck is it? Are you going in for aerial window cleaning? Becoming a trapeze artist?”
“A seat belt for Shogun from PetSmart. So he’ll be safe. I may take him to my office. With that intelligent mind, he shouldn’t be left alone all day. It’s cruel. And maybe we’ll go see those agility trials on the peninsula.”
“Good idea. Dogs riding untied in pickup beds drive me up the wall. Don’t people care that in an accident their animal could become an unguided missile?” She paused. Through the patio doors and across the deck down to the street, the same seagull arrived every morning to pick worms from the road. Smart bird. His own supermarket. Then she steeled herself for the inevitable. “I visited Larry Gall.”
“You what? My god, Holly, I didn’t want you to humour the poor deluded fellow. That’s the last thing he needs. Joining into his fantasy. People who go into the social sciences to supposedly help others need to cure themselves first.”
He sounded as close to angry as he ever got. Judging from his conservative, almost prim façade, people felt he could never do violence, but she suspected that they hadn’t seen the side of him that was red in tooth and claw. Once a spurned boyfriend of hers had been spreading lies about her. She knew he was behind the ugly rumours, but there was no evidence to take to authorities. In tears, she had told her father. That night Norman confronted the boy leaving his job at a pizza shop. The harassment stopped. In fact, the boy did an about face every time he saw her. “What did you say to Rick?” she had asked, puzzled. Calmly, he pulled on his pipe, blew out concentric rings of cherry blend tobacco. “That if he ever bothered you again, I’d kill him.”
She looked at her father’s mug. “Refill?”
Coming back with two full mugs, she sat and looked at him. They were a reserved pair, not much kissing and hugging, but love underpinning all. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want me to go, but...”
A heavy sadness settled onto his face, still pink from shaving. “Not a day goes by that I—”
She touched his hand, counting more age spots. What had he been like in his teens? Had he ever enjoyed a wild and abandoned moment? His passion for popular culture seemed his only amusement. “If we really want to know...” she began, then stuttered to a stop.
He swallowed hard and blinked. “Where she went, where she might...might be.” His voice was rich and quiet, one of his assets.
“No matter what we might find, isn’t it better to know than to wonder? I hate the word
closure
, but there’s something to it,” she said.
Why salt his wounds with the news about the planned divorce? Yet something in the back of her mind wondered if someone wouldn’t interpret that imminent blow as a motive for murder. She had to tell herself that he hadn’t suspected that Bonnie was planning to leave him. He’d fasten to the best memories, Holly’s baby steps, first day at school, the rare laugh shared, the kind word, not the increasing arguments. “Remember her silver amulet, that raven?”
He turned as if recalling an old friend. “Of course. She was never without it.”
“Gall says he gave it to her.” She flashed a look at him, though she wanted to spare his pride.
His thin shoulder drooped as if lashed. The weight of grief cast a pall of mourning over his voice. She couldn’t pursue this punishment much longer. “And your mother never took it off. Even when...” His voice faded out.
Holly had no stomach for the intimate details, scenes in their former bedroom, now hers. Physicians shouldn’t minister to their own families. Emotions obstructed objectivity. What about a police officer? “Did you see it before she...disappeared? The week she went up island?”
He looked far past the patio doors, out across the water. The strait was enveloped in fog, only the odd ghostly light, perhaps a trick of the eye. From far away, a fog horn moaned a lugubrious warning. “Like it was part of her. I wondered where it came from, her family perhaps. Raven figures in many Native American cultures, but I never asked.” He gave a self-deprecatory snort. “Why didn’t I pay more attention? People need that.”
She finished the last gulp of coffee, bitter as memories best left unearthed. “This is awkward, but let’s try. The first cut is the deepest.”
Pain was in his sea-blue eyes as he looked at her, absentmindedly rubbing his reading glasses. “Not knowing is the worst part. It torments the imagination.”
Then the clouds parted for a brief encounter. She found herself momentarily blinded by the fierce sunlight suddenly streaming through the wall-to-ceiling windows. She plunged ahead to clear fog from their minds. If only it were that easy. “Gall says Mom was planning to ask you for a divorce. That they were planning to be married.”
Only his set jaw revealed that he was holding himself in check. In the long silence, Shogun trotted over, first with his rubber hoop, then with his tug rope, then with Baby, a stuffed Dalmatian, nuzzling into Norman’s hand. Ignored, the dog padded off and slouched down on his bed. Finally, Norman nodded slowly. “She mentioned nothing, but the signs were clear...even for a cockeyed optimist. I thought we’d work it out. We always had. Twenty-four years is a long time, nearly our silver anniversary. I hoped she’d mellow, stop chasing these useless causes and settle down.”
Useless? Because in the human drama someone always needed help? “Can you tell me anything else about that last week.”
A deep sigh came from him. “She closed one of our savings accounts.”
“What?” Holly cursed herself for not abandoning her exams and coming home immediately. If she’d been on the spot, she might have noticed something. Was that absurd? She hadn’t been a trained officer. But Norman had insisted that she carry on with her studies, that her mother would return. Then weeks and months had passed.
He waved his hand in a half-hearted gesture. “It wasn’t that much. Maybe ten thousand dollars. Not like the RRSPs. Those resource funds my father left me.”
This mention of money sent electricity down her core. Suddenly the substance of it demanded answers to obvious questions. “Why did she need money? She wasn’t in debt, was she?”
Norman steepled his fingers, making order as he always did. “She didn’t care much about money, making it, that is. I don’t remember the time she had new clothes or the kind of silly outfits women seem to want. Instead of a purse, she lugged things around in an old canvas tote bag with an embroidered German shepherd. A birthday present from you, as I recall. She spent money helping others. Gas, that guzzling Bronco, motels en route. Mostly time away from a job where she could have pulled in a salary. Everyone thinks lawyers are rich. Only the unethical ones are. That’s what she said.” He gave a bittersweet chuckle. “Your mother had a sense of humour.”
Holly remembered her mother in jeans and sweatshirts. She didn’t even own pajamas; she wore T-shirts instead. “Ten thousand sounds like a stake for a fast exit. Nothing long term. Even Mexico isn’t that cheap.” But she’d never leave
me,
Holly thought.
She regretted her quick words. He looked wounded as a kicked pup. “If your mother had ever asked for a separation, or god forbid, a divorce, she was welcome to it. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy. If I hadn’t been so blind, I would have realized from the start that I wasn’t the man for her. She was just so damn wonderful, and I felt lucky. Then the years passed. I got involved in securing tenure. Remember how the university made those cuts? Thought I was going to be laid off. Mortgage rates jumped to nearly nineteen per cent. I took her for granted. In some ways, that’s worse than cheating. Such a stupid man I was.”
Then the phone rang. “Just a second, Dad.” In the middle of their first frank conversation about Bonnie, she would have preferred to ignore this summons. Was it news about Billy?
“I wasn’t sure if you had heard. Janice Mercer has disappeared,” Ann said. “In our own community. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto maybe, but not here.”
Holly recalled the interview with Janice. A strange girl, serious and studious to the point of being a prig. “I interviewed her at Botanical. Tell me more.”
“I went in to do some cross-filing when a fax arrived. The Sooke detachment alerted us in case she’s been hitchhiking west. She never came home from school yesterday. No call, nothing. She doesn’t have any close friends. A couple kids saw her start off walking home alone. The parents are beating themselves up for not getting her a cell phone.”
“Is there an amber alert?” A lot of good that would do without the hardware. The only flashing signs she had seen were on the Island Highway alerting drivers to the condition of the Malahat to the north or to ferry delays at the end of Pat Bay Highway.
“No go. That requires the child to be seen leaving with an adult, often a family member. As in abductions in spousal estrangement.”
“True. And it’s Sooke’s case, but we’ll do what we can. Contact Andrea, Sean and the rest of our volunteers. Tell them to keep an eye out. Is there a picture?”
“Just sent over. I’ll run off copies and get them out to businesses out here. Could be a tourist noticed something.”
Holly rang off with an increased appreciation for Ann’s gifts. If not for the accident, she would have made a top-notch commander, the perfect combination of instinct and skills.
C
hipper had taken the initiative and decided to do the Port Renfrew interviews on his own time on the weekend. He could hardly escape from his mother that morning as she pressed forward breakfast treats. Sliced mangos and bananas, scrambled eggs, parathas, even a sweet ladoo made of chick pea flour, sugar, ghee, cashews and almonds. Normally he didn’t take the food to work. Once he’d kept a chicken tandoori lunch in the cruiser and earned a stinging comment from a drunk in the rear seat. “What’s that Paki shit?” the man asked. “It stinks.” He’d thought of the care his mother had taken to marinate the meat in garam masala, but he kept quiet, biting down his indignation.
His father, Gopal, a genial but small man with a resemblance to the Mahatma, was off to open the store downstairs. “Extra work on the weekend. I am very proud of you, son. It will not be long before you can take your staff-sergeant’s exam, yes?” He dressed in slacks and a cardigan, unlike Isha Singh, who loved her saris. Finding a source of cloth had been difficult before a new fabric shop opened in Victoria.
“A few more years, Dad. I’m not even a corporal yet.” After turning off the CBC news, Isha began to clean the table, a hint that both her men should be on their way. Chipper finished a last piece of kulcha stuffed with potato and onion and baked. He washed down the morsel with a mango lassi.
Isha, pleasantly plump, her lustrous black hair in a bun, wearing full white pants and a loose top for the house, added in the lilting tones he tried to repress in his own voice, “And we have a perfect girl for you. Father met the family last week. Just arrived from Jullundur. You remember that Auntie Bithika lives in Ludhiana, not far. Why, you might have met over there as babies when we visited.” She plucked a few pieces of lint from his shoulder and straightened his tie.