“Very well, Christina,” Adeline said, her voice as sweet as frozen
sugar water. “You two go out and reacquaint yourselves with the town.
Perhaps it’s a good idea after your drive. It won’t hurt you to see how far
you are from Toronto, both geographically and otherwise. It would be a
mistake to think otherwise, as I’m sure you’ll remember after a day out
driving around. And Jeremy is quite correct. I also heard on the radio
how lovely the weather is going to be today. Just be back by dinner. It
gets dark very quickly out here and the night comes down fast. You don’t
want to get lost.”
“Your concern is touching, Mother,” Jeremy said. The sarcasm in
his tone was a facsimile of his mother’s own. “Considering that both
Christina and I grew up here, it hardly seems likely that we’d get lost, but
I promise you we’ll be careful.”
“Good,” Adeline said briskly. “Now, since everyone’s plans for the
day have been arranged, I believe I’ll take my coffee in my sitting room.”
She rang the bell beside her plate, and Beatrice appeared in the doorway.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Beatrice, Mr. Jeremy and Miss Christina won’t be here for lunch,
and I believe Miss Morgan has eaten all she’s going to eat of your delicious
breakfast. Would you please bring my coffee into the sitting room? And
the newspapers? And tell James that Miss Morgan will be ready to leave
for school in five minutes. Have him bring the car around to the front of
the house.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Beatrice poured Adeline a fresh cup of coffee from the
silver coffeepot, adding a small splash of cream. She placed it on a silver
tray and carried it out of the dining room without a word.
In spite of themselves, Christina and Jeremy watched her
performance, spellbound. The time between Adeline Parr deciding
something would happen and it happening was minuscule, whether
ordering a cup of coffee from the housekeeper, or ordering her younger
son to spend six months incarcerated in a mental hospital.
For her part, Morgan read the subtitles in the room. They were not
yet entirely clear, but she had the first serious inklings that they were not
as welcome in this house as her mother and uncle had initially led her to
believe. Her eyes travelled to the far wall of the dining room. She noticed
two more formal oil portraits, this time two boys: her father, immediately
recognizable, and her uncle, fairer and frailer, more delicate even then.
She tried to read the expression in their eyes, looking for some clue to
help her understand better what was going on, but she was too far away.
She promised herself that she would examine them when she had more
time, perhaps after school.
Adeline laid her napkin on the table. She pushed herself away from
the dining room table and rose to her feet in one languorous, elegant
movement. “How nice to have our first meal under this roof as a family,”
she said. “I shall expect to see you all at dinner. Six-thirty on the dot,
mind.” And just like that, she was gone, leaving a faint trace of Bulgarian
rose perfume in her wake like a contrail.
Elliot McKitrick was
in the back office of the station looking for a file
when he heard the bell above the door tinkle again. He grimaced. If it was
that goddamn pushy Indian again, he swore he wasn’t going to be as nice
this time. He closed the file cabinet with an audible bang and marched
into the main room of the station expecting to see Billy Lightning looking
down at him from his fancy-mouthed height, but it was Dave Thomson,
his sergeant, looking none too pleased, and paler than a goddamn albino
underneath his permanent ruddy windburn.
“Hey, Sarge, you’re back,” Elliot said. “How were things in Gyles Point?”
“Not good,” Thomson replied. “Get me a glass of water, would you? Make sure it’s cold.”
Elliot went into the back room again and took a glass from the cupboard above the sink. Then he let the tap run until the water was like ice before filling the glass. He brought it back into the main office. Thomson sat at his desk looking through some papers. Elliot handed him the glass. He took it without a word and drank it down in one long, deep draught.
“What’s going on, Sarge? What happened over in Gyles? You look . . . well, what’s up?”
“Murder, maybe. Fella by the name of Carstairs, from out by North Bay. Has a fishing cabin outside of Gyles. A neighbour saw lights on in there last night and went over this morning early, thinking the man might’ve come up. First time in years, apparently, since his wife died. The neighbour found the place empty but said it smelled like something had turned. There’s blood all over the upstairs bedroom, but no body anywhere, and no car. He called the RCMP, and Gill Styles called me in as local backup. The neighbour was right. It smelled like a meat locker. Styles’s men are trying to locate Mr. Carstairs, but so far no luck.”
Thomson paused, his eyes dark-rimmed. “Not the sort of thing we’re used to up here at all. No, not one bit.”
“Jesus,” Elliot said. He cleared his throat. “Sarge?”
“What is it, McKitrick?”
“Sarge, we had a visitor earlier. Sort of weird, really. An Indian. Came by asking all sorts of strange questions about whether or not we’d hand any break-ins or anything weird in the last few days. It didn’t seem like he was, you know . . . right in the head. Also, he was real uppity. Pushy. Not like the ones we have around here.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Fancy leather jacket. Jeans. Shirt. Had a real snooty way about him, like he was looking down on us. On me.” Elliot looked outraged.
Thomson raised his eyebrows and smiled faintly at Elliot’s entirely out-of-place indignation, considering the circumstances. Insecurity had never been one of Elliot McKitrick’s problems. Thomson had known him since he was a kid—he hadn’t been lacking in self-esteem, or female attention—since he first sprouted pubes, maybe even before. Every town had its golden boy, and in Parr’s Landing, Elliot was it. In high school, he’d been a big, strong, handsome kid, star forward on the Parr’s Landing Predators hockey team, and star teenage swordsman in private, if the gossip down at the Legion hall—enthusiastically confirmed by Bill McKitrick, Elliot’s father—was to be believed.
This Indian must have really gotten under the kid’s skin,
Thomson thought. If he hadn’t just visited what was very likely a murder scene before breakfast, and if the stink of copper wasn’t clinging to the inside of his nostrils and, he imagined, his clothes, he might smile. He might even take a bit of piss out of the kid. But he didn’t feel like smiling, and he didn’t feel like teasing.
“Did he give a name?”
“Yeah, let me see. He wrote it down.” Elliot went to his desk and retrieved the piece of paper. “William Lightning,” he read. Elliot omitted the title “Dr.” out of spite, then thought better of it, just in case it might be important. “
Dr
. William Lightning, if you can dig that. Medicine man, more likely.”
Thomson sat upright. “What did you say? William Lightning?
Billy
Lightning?”
“You know him, Sarge?” Elliot frowned. This wasn’t the reaction he’d been counting on.
Thomson paused. “Not sure. There was a Billy Lightning here some years ago. This guy was a young fella, though. He was here with his father—some sort of archaeologist from a university down in the States
or something. They were here doing some kind of dig out by Bradley.
Something to do with the Indian village from the olden days that used
to be here. They got old lady Parr’s permission to dig and everything, I
heard. They had to leave. Something to do with one of the students they
had with them. He got sick or something. They had to shut the whole thing down.”
“And this Lightning was there? You sure? What happened?”
“I don’t remember,” Thomson said. “It was just before I transferred out here from Sault Ste. Marie and I never got all the details. It was all finished and done with by the time I took over in ’58.” Thomson paused.
“I wonder what he’s doing back here? And why he’d show up right about now?”
“You think he might’ve done it, Sarge? Those questions he was asking seemed really, really strange.”
“Did he say where he was staying?”
“He’s at the Nugget. He said to phone him after twelve noon.”
Now Thomson
did
laugh. “Did he, indeed? Well, that’s interesting. I’m thinking it might be worth a drive out to see Mr.—excuse me,
Dr
. Lightning. Maybe we won’t phone him first. Maybe we’ll just pay him a surprise visit and see who’s who and what’s what. What do you say, Elliot?”
“Sounds good to me, Sarge,” Elliot replied. Privately he hoped that the Indian would put up a fight. He was itching to use his nightstick on him, and this seemed like it might be as good a time as any to break some bones.
It is a curious paradox
about small towns: although there is less
distance to traverse, from one end to another, than in cities, almost no
one walks anywhere. Unlike cities, where there are never any shortage of
cars and trucks belting exhaust, people all seem to be from somewhere
else. In cities, pedestrians walk to their destinations. In small towns
like Parr’s Landing, on the other hand, the average citizen would be as
unlikely to walk to the store around the corner to get a quart of milk as
they would be to do without altogether.
It was therefore entirely in keeping with small town tradition—even
poetic, though perhaps only to Jeremy Parr himself—that he and Elliot
McKitrick should each get the first glimpse of each other in ten years
through the windows of two cars going in opposite directions down a wet
country road littered with fallen leaves in deepest October.
Jeremy, who had been expecting something of this sort today, was
still taken aback to see Elliot, much less behind the wheel of a cop car.
He recognized him immediately, even though Elliot was wearing aviator
shades. The square jaw, the perfectly formed brow, and the close-cropped
dark crew cut was unmistakably that of Elliot McKitrick, as were the
powerful shoulders and arms beneath the blue uniform jacket.
Yes, it was Elliot—his Elliot. Changed, but still somehow exactly the
same.
Something flared somewhere in the region of his chest. Not pain
exactly, definitely not joy, and certainly nothing as clichéd as his “heart
stopping.” But he was suddenly acutely aware of a profound absence and
loss, the sharpness of which shocked him.
“Was that him?” Christina asked as the cars passed each other. “It
was, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jeremy said, not trusting himself to say anything further, or
perhaps simply incapable of it. “Just
drive,
Christina.” He hunched down
in his seat, eyes straight ahead. “Move it, for God’s sake.”
For his part,
Elliot’s well-honed policeman’s instinct for danger set off
warning bells in his head in the same instant he experienced a similar
emotional reaction to Jeremy Parr’s, minus Jeremy’s internal poetry
about absence and loss. Elliot’s life had thus far been divided between
pleasure and pain, hunger and satiation, success and failure, desire and
repulsion, safety and danger. It had been a jock’s life, a warrior’s life. Now
it was a cop’s life, or at least the way Elliot imagined a cop’s life to be, an
extension of his physicality and prowess elsewhere.
The sight of Jeremy Parr—whom he recognized as effortlessly as
Jeremy had recognized him—inspired both desire and danger. The first
impulse went directly to his groin, briefly slapping his heart the way a
buddy might slap his shoulder. The second, more dominant, impulse was
awareness of acute danger, in a robotic Lost in Space sort of way.
Danger, Elliot McKitrick!
warned the metallic voice in his head.
Danger,
Elliot McKitrick!
“Who’s that, do you suppose?” Thomson grunted, turning around
to follow the retreating Chevy Chevelle as it headed in the direction of
Bradley Lake.
“Dunno,” Elliot said noncommittally, looking straight ahead, exactly
the way Jeremy Parr had seconds before. “Didn’t get a good look. If you
want me to find out, I can track ’em down after we catch up with that
Indian at the Nugget. Those two were probably just lost tourists, coming
up here to check out the goddamn leaves.”
Billy Lightning was sleeping
when the knock came on the door of
his motel room. It was not a friendly, managerial knock. It was as sharp
and definitive as brass knuckles. He hadn’t realized he had a splitting
headache until he’d woken to that rapping sound.
God,
he thought.
It’s that stupid young cop. Idiotic of me to think they’d
use the phone like I asked.
He squinted down at his watch. It was ten forty five.
Or, for that matter, wait until after twelve noon like I very politely asked.
“Just a minute,” Billy called out. “I’ll be right there.” The knock came
again, harder. “I’m coming!” he shouted. “Jesus
Christ
!”
He opened the door of the motel room. There were two of them
this time. The young one from the station, and an older one with a more
seasoned and rational mien.
The older one spoke first. “Mr. Lightning?”
Billy sighed. “
Dr
. Lightning, but yes, that’s me. And you’re Mr.
Thomson?
“
Sergeant
Dave Thomson, Dr. Lightning.” Thomson smiled dryly
and Billy relaxed somewhat. The younger one stood behind Thomson at
attention, like a plastic G.I. Joe doll, his face impassive.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Billy said. “I’ve just checked in.” He gestured
to the two chairs on either side of the Formica kitchen table on the far
side of the room. “Would you like to sit down?”
“No, thank you, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said politely. The younger
one—McKitrick—just shook his head and continued to stare at Billy.
“Dr. Lightning, I wonder if you’d mind if I asked you a few questions?
Constable McKitrick told me you stopped by the station today with
some of your own. Perhaps we can sort this out and answer each other’s
questions. How about that?”