Fifth Son (26 page)

“Down the street at the Elgin Street Diner.”

“What are you...” He checked himself just in time. In the four months she'd been with them, she'd never once called him at work. “Be there in five,” he said before she could change her mind.

She didn't even try to protest, simply hung up, which was another first. She was normally fond of the last word.

He grabbed his jacket off his chair and ducked out of his office with only the briefest twinge of guilt about the case he was abandoning. Even he was entitled to a coffee break once or twice a year. If ever there was a time to work on that fragile bond between his daughter and him, this was it.

She was perched at the counter on a stool so high her tiny feet did not touch the ground, sipping a huge frothy cappuccino and flirting with the young man cleaning the coffee pot. She cast Green a desultory glance.

“I could have told you on the phone, you know.”

“I felt like a coffee.” He glanced at the young man. “I'll have the same as her, and toss in two cinnamon buns.”

Out of years of habit, he took the table in the back corner, and she joined him with lagging feet. Gazed into her coffee, twirled her spoon.

Eventually, “Any word on Kyle?”

He shook his head. “But it's early yet.”

“I saw the news. The village is really pissed at you.”

“I think Kyle is pretty special to them. As he is to a lot of people.”

She shrugged, as if to count herself out. “He was scared, you know. That afternoon that we went out to his place? When you left us alone in the barn? I don't know if it's important, if maybe...” She licked foam off her spoon, concentrating on every speck. Green restrained himself with an effort. “Maybe if I'd said something then, this wouldn't have happened.”

“Hannah, it was an accident that he was in the truck.”

“No, it's because he was hiding. Because he was scared his parents would be mad. He knew he shouldn't have been where he was, so he was afraid to say what he saw.”

In spite of himself, he stiffened. The young waiter set his cappuccino and plate of buns on the table with a clatter, which Green barely heard. “Maybe you'd better start at the beginning, honey. Tell me everything that you and Kyle talked about that afternoon.”

A faint scowl of resistance creased her brow, as if she hated being forced to part with secrets. “At first nothing. He was upset, scared like, that his mom would see him not working. I even took up a pitchfork and cleaned up some cow crap.” She wrinkled up her pert nose. “So be grateful. Anyway, I asked him where he got the crucifix for real, and he said he just found it on the ground. In his special place.”

“What special place?”

“He said it was a secret, and I shouldn't tell anyone, because some bad man might come after him.”

Green sucked in his breath. “What did he mean by bad man?”

She shrugged. “He said he saw a bad man running in the woods. Kyle was scared, so he hid from him. Sometimes it's hard to understand what he's trying to say, but later I got to thinking—what if he saw this man who died in the church yard? What if he saw something he shouldn't have? He acted really scared, Mike. Like he'd seen something that freaked him out.” Green mulled this fragment of evidence over carefully. To a child, Lawrence would have looked like a bad man, dressed in ragged clothing, covered in grime like a wild mountain man. The sight of such a figure running would have been scary. The question was—where and when had Kyle seen him? It could have been right after Isabelle chased him away, in which case he would have been running out of confusion and panic at the disappearance of all he'd come back for. Or it could have been right before he reached the village, in which case Kyle might have been the last person to see him alive.

“Did Kyle say where he saw this man running?” he asked casually. “Near his house?”

She shook her head, reaching over to steal a small corner of cinnamon bun. “It didn't sound like that. But Kyle always tells things in a jumble, and you have to connect it together. He was talking about these kids playing hockey and some church bell ringing and the bad man running in the graves, and how he had to hide so they wouldn't see him. But when I asked who wouldn't see him, he just shrugged.”

“But he definitely said the bad man was running away?”

She nodded. Raised anxious eyes to face him. “Kyle's such a bad liar, Mike. Something was bothering him. Not just the crucifix he knew he shouldn't have had, but something he saw. What if he knows something about that man who died? What if he saw something he doesn't even know he saw, and now he's in danger—”

He resisted the urge to take her hands. “But honey, the man is dead. Even if Kyle saw him running away, he's not a threat any more.”

She rolled her eyes as if in exasperation at his lack of imagination. “But what if there's more, Mike? That's the feeling Kyle gave me—that the bad guy was running away from someone. And that's the person Kyle was scared of.” Green was so astonished that he was barely aware of reassuring Hannah and setting off back down Elgin Street toward the station. His mind was racing. Isabelle had spotted Lawrence around eleven and had chased him into the woods behind her property. He could have covered the two kilometres to town in half an hour, less if he'd kept running full tilt. Yet Kyle had been walking in the woods in the late afternoon just before dinner. He had gone towards town and perhaps caught sight of some village boys playing. If he had seen Lawrence running away at that time, long after his earlier fright, then something else must have frightened him.

It wasn't much, but put together with the other tiny pieces of evidence—the torn jacket, the odd position of the body and the unlocked church door—it was enough to banish his last lingering doubts. Lawrence had not jumped to his death of his own volition. Someone had chased him into the church and up the tower. Someone had either pushed him or frightened him into jumping. Not just someone, Green thought grimly as he reached the station. Tom. Hannah's story merely confirmed his fears. Only worse, because not only was Tom probably a killer, but now he was off in the wilderness with the fragile, confused youngster who had witnessed it all.

As soon as Green reached his office, he picked up his phone. He needed more than the vague, jumbled impressions that Kyle had reported to Hannah. He needed to know exactly what Kyle had seen that afternoon. Since he couldn't ask Kyle or Lawrence, that left only two other people he could ask. As unwelcome as the intrusion would be.

Jeb McMartin snatched up the phone before the second ring, a tremor of hope ringing through the fear in his voice.

“Sorry, Mr. McMartin, I've had no word as yet. Have you?”

“No.” Green could almost see the man's shoulders droop. “We had a hope earlier on, someone spotted a old black Ford on the highway near Napanee, but it was the wrong truck.”

“I have a question about Kyle,” Green said. “Did he tell you anything about the afternoon he went for his walk?”

“What do you mean? The day the fella died?”

“Yes. Did he mention seeing anyone? In the woods or near the church?”

There was a pause. “Are you saying Kyle saw something? About Lawrence Pettigrew?”

“I don't know.” Green cursed his need to alarm the man further. “He said something about a bad man who was running away. I was hoping he'd told you more.”

“He never...” The man's voice dropped warily. “He never said he was in the woods. Or that he went to town.”

Green backtracked quickly. “Sorry, false lead. When I—”

“Just a minute!” Panic snagged Jeb's voice. “Are you saying my son could have seen something? That he's in danger?”

“We have no reason—”

“Bull! Why else would you ask? We know Tom Pettigrew beat that poor Boisvert woman half to death. What the hell else is he up to?”

I wish to God I knew, Green thought, extricating himself as hastily as he could so as not to have to lie any further. When he hung up, he wondered how the McMartins would feel when the first of the Ident vans arrived to turn the Boisvert front yard into an archeological dig.

He sat at his desk a few minutes, calming his nerves and trying to sort out his next move. All the bases were covered. Sullivan was handling the warrant and coordinating the excavation. Sue Peters was acting as liaison with the
OPP
—a straight-forward, one-of-the-boys job which shouldn't tax her diplomacy skills. Gibbs had been dispatched to snap at the heels of the
RCMP
forensics lab to see what they could glean from Lawrence's tin can and from Tom's letter to Benji. There was nothing else to do. He could sit by the phone, working on budget projections and chewing his nails.

Or he could go back out to the village and see for himself what Kyle McMartin might have seen.

In the true spirit of a Canadian October, the torrential bluster of the day before had given way to a cold, brittle sun which sliced through the denuded trees and streaked the forest floor in red and gold. Green parked at the edge of the village square and paused to get his bearings. On the far corner of the square nearest the river sat the deserted church. Beside the church was a modest cemetery filled with lichen-covered stones and surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Behind the cemetery and the church lay the woods, which stretched in a broad swath along the river's edge all the way north past the McMartin and Boisvert farms.

Three boys were playing street hockey in the parking lot of St. James Church across the road, and they watched him through oblique eyes. He headed down to the river, which curved into a natural bay, where a small marina had been erected long ago to serve the commercial boats travelling the Rideau Canal system. A boarded-up bait shop and ice cream stand gave testimony to the changing fortunes of river life, but the shoreline and docks were still lined with boats that had been pulled up and covered with blue tarpaulins for the winter. Wind gusted across the clearing, snapping the tarpaulins and swirling leaves about. Green shivered and balled his hands into the pockets of his thin jacket.

To his left, he spotted the entrance to the footpath through an opening in the underbrush, and he picked his way across the sodden leaves and discarded wrappers that littered the marina. Once inside the woods, the wind died down, and the faded grays and browns of the waterfront gave way to the golds and reds of the forest floor. The path spooled out ahead of him, dipping and weaving around trees and over rocks into the distance. He could see nothing that looked like the special hiding place Kyle might have meant. But Green was a city boy; his secret lairs had been the crawlspaces of back porches and old bridges, or the recesses of abandoned garden sheds. What did he know of country hiding places?

He retreated into the open and called to the boys playing by the church. They sauntered over, hitching their pants and tugging their caps down low. One wore a Sens cap, another a Maple Leafs cap. The third, a small, wiry boy with dirt an inch thick on his face, wore a plain black one. Green took out his badge and introduced himself, enjoying their efforts to maintain their casual air.

“Do any of you boys know Kyle McMartin?”

They bobbed their heads as one. “Yeah, we all used to go to school with him.”

“You know he's missing, eh?”

Again the heads bobbed. “I saw him the day before,” the Leafs fan said.

“Me too,” echoed the Sens fan.

“Did you ever see him walking in these woods?”

“He wasn't allowed,” said Maple Leaf.

“But sometimes he did,” countered the small boy darkly.

“Did you see him Sunday afternoon? Just before dinner?”

The boys exchanged baffled looks followed by shrugs of disappointment. “But he hides if people come,” the small one said.

“I'm told he has a special place where he hides in the woods,” Green said. “Do you know where it is?”

The two taller boys looked chagrined that they could shed no light, but the small one brightened. “I bet it's Bear Rock.”

Bears, Green thought with a wary glance at the woods. “Can you show me?”

In unison, they volunteered and scrambled down the path at such a pace that Green found himself leaping over rocks and ducking boughs to keep up. Fortunately, it gave him little chance to think about bears. A hundred yards along the path, the boys veered away from the river and followed a thin, barely discernible trail that threaded through the undergrowth. Up ahead, the path climbed a small knoll dominated by a massive rock covered in lichen and dead vines. Near the top of it, an overhang created a sheltered, mossy niche trampled flat by many visitors. The boys clambered up the rock excitedly, using small cracks and knobs to gain a foothold, and once they'd reached the top they looked down on him with triumph.

“Kyle's mom thinks he'll fall, so he's not supposed to come here. But I've see him here.”

Green approached the slick rock with caution and tested his footing on the first toehold. The niche was just above his head, hardly high enough to present much danger in a fall. He pulled himself up to the first toehold, cursing his stupid city pants and his leather shoes. Overhead, the boys danced and gave him climbing advice. After a few precarious moments and a string of silent curses, he reached the niche, clambered gratefully on all fours over the damp moss and sat down. To his left, down the knoll through the trees, he could see anyone who passed by on the path. About a hundred yards directly ahead, just as he'd thought, was a clear view of the graveyard and the back door of Ashford Methodist Church.

He glanced up at the grinning boys who commanded the top of the rock. “Were any of you boys playing in the square last Sunday afternoon when the man died?”

All their heads bobbed.

“Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

“Well, we were playing a game, eh?” Maple Leaf began. “So—”