Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery (19 page)

“You want to know what I’m thinking?” Donny said at last.

“No, actually I don’t, so I should probably hang up….”

“No — you’re right. You don’t want to know.” The voice remained cool, smoke trapped in ice — there was no stopping this boy. “But I’m going to tell you anyway. What I’m thinking is that maybe you like it this way.”

“Like what?”

“Your relationships. You date high-class losers to make yourself feel better. It’s why all your relationships are at arms-length. You don’t trust anyone and you don’t let anyone get close to you. And sooner or later, either they leave you or you dump them.”

Dan felt the lump in his throat. He felt flattened, as though his heart had been run over by a garbage truck. “Is that what you really think?”

“It is.”

Dan affected a lighter tone, but the strain came through. “What are friends for,” his voice cracked, “if not to beat up on you and tell you how screwed up you really are?”

“Well, then I hope you’re listening, Daniel, because
I am your last friend
.”

It was true. Dan thought of all the people he’d pushed away, ignored, or abandoned in the past few years alone. He thought of his father and how he’d cut off contact between them for the final decade of his life. He wouldn’t be surprised if the line stretched back through his entire existence. He felt annihilated.

Dan wanted the conversation to end, for the combatants to remove their gloves and shake hands, to prove themselves simply worthy opponents, neither with a desire to destroy the other. But Donny’s voice had taken on an edge.

“By your own admission, you seem to have run everybody else off. How do you like your island, Mr. Crusoe?” Just as suddenly, his tone softened. “You know, I keep waiting for you to snap on me and shut me out. I thought this little talk might do it, but I guess I haven’t crossed the line yet. Or dare I hope I’m exempt from your anger?”

Dan shut his eyes and leaned his head against the chair. He wasn’t willing to admit how close to home Donny had hit. “You’re too amusing for me to get rid of,” he said.

“I think it’s very clever how you avoid answering the real questions. Still — I think you like it when I challenge you, because everyone else is too scared to tell you off. Am I right?”

“Everyone but you and Ked,” Dan said, his voice too far gone for a joking tone. He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, making the darkness sparkle under the lids.

“The kid’s got balls the size of grenades. He’d have to, with a father like you.”

“Okay, enough!” Any farther and he’d say things he might never be able to take back. “I have to go,” Dan said, but kept the phone to his ear.

“Will I hear from you again?” Donny asked quietly. “Or is this the big flush?”

Dan felt the ice running in his veins, a dead cold that made him want to strike back. He wanted to put distance between them. There were things even friends shouldn’t say.

“Do you hate me now?” Donny asked.

“Why would I hate you?”

“Just answer the question.”

Dan opened his eyes, the sparkles slipping into a lacy-edged nothingness. “Maybe.” He waited. “And maybe I’d be justified if I did.”

“Justified.” Donny sighed. “I think you do hate me right now, even though you won’t admit it. You hate me for telling you the truth about yourself. I can hear that detached tone you WASP-y folk get in your voices when you talk about the people you don’t talk about any more.”

“I’m pretty angry about some of the things you said just now.”

“Good — anger’s fine. It’s okay. You can toss it right back at me. You’ve pissed me off plenty too. But I don’t want to lose your friendship, Dan. I respect you and, yes, I love you too. I really love you. And that’s the bottom line for me.” Donny took a drag and exhaled. Dan heard the sound of a cigarette being stabbed out with finality. “I just hope you know that.”

Silence stretched between them. Donny was right. How could you not hate someone who exposed your lies and contradictions, and left you defenceless against your carefully constructed fictions? “Thanks,” Dan said, politeness being the makeshift best he could do.

“For what? For pissing you off?”

“For challenging me. Maybe I needed someone to say those things.”

The haughty tone came back into Donny’s voice. “I guarantee you needed it. But if I have to,” the tone shifted again, “I’ll take back everything and we can just pretend I never said a word of it. So we can still be friends.”

“No. Don’t do that. Just give me time to think it over.”

“Okay.” Donny waited. “Talk to you soon?”

“Sure.”

“You call me or I’ll call you?”

“I’ll call you.”

Dan put the receiver down and stared at the wall. The room had shrunk over the last few minutes. He tried to ignore the nameless sorrow under his skin, the gnawing doubts that mocked his hope that life could be a fine thing or that happiness was possible. An acid loneliness came pouring in — the same loneliness that enticed him to drink and told him he had no friends except the one on the table in front of him.

He wished he knew someone he could talk to about the ache that never went away. Not just for the things Donny had said, but for all the times he’d given his best and life had short-changed him. All the times he’d wished for things to be different. And while he was wishing, why not wish for a partner who cared about him the way he, Dan, cared about others? He wished he could phone Bill and pour his heart out and make things right between them, but Bill was only interested in repairing hearts, not soothing or reassuring them.

Fifteen

Services Rendered

Saylor called again the following week. Given his increasing involvement in the case, Dan wasn’t surprised to hear from the Picton cop a second time. He listened patiently while Saylor updated him. He was exhibiting all the symptoms of over-zealous determination, including tracking the girl’s whereabouts before her death. The long arm of the law reaching out beyond the grave.

“By the way, are you still talking to those people?” Saylor asked.

“The Killingworths?”

“Those would be the ones.”

“No — I’ve left off with that.”

“Very interesting, what I’ve come up with.” This apparently was Dan’s cue to ask him to elaborate. When Dan said nothing, Saylor continued. “The girl had actually been in the country almost a month before the wedding, which is curious when you consider that she was here with her husband and not her brother. It gets more interesting though. That pregnancy?” Dan’s ears picked up. “She was booked into an abortion clinic in Montreal.”

“What?” Suddenly Dan was very interested.

“She went in for a consultation two weeks ago. She was supposed to have gone in for the full procedure last week, but she never showed up.”

Dan whistled. “I wonder who was behind it?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Saylor said. “The operation was arranged and paid for by Lucille Killingworth.”

A surprise piece of the puzzle slipping into a very unexpected space. “Oh, man!” Dan said.

“I’d give a million bucks to know what was going on there,” Saylor said. “How did they react when you told them about the pregnancy?”

Dan flashed on the scene in the drawing room at the Killingworth home. He recalled the tense looks on both faces, but it had only been Thom who’d disavowed any knowledge of it.

“And she never said anything to the contrary?” Saylor asked.

“No, but she looked pretty shocked too.”

“I guess she would be if she thought she’d taken care of it.” There was a silence on the line then Saylor said, “Do you think the son was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about it?”

“I’m inclined to believe it,” Dan said, sketching in Thom’s revelation about provisions for a first grandchild in his grandfather’s will.

“So legally speaking, because of the marriage any inheritance money would have belonged to the baby, whether it was Thom Killingworth’s DNA or not?”

“I guess. I can’t say for sure. I’m sure a lawyer would happily argue that.”

“Well, well — that’s interesting news,” Saylor said.

“When you put it that way, yes.”

“I’m all over it, buddy. You keep in touch now.”

The date was circled on his calendar. He’d scheduled a meeting with the family of the missing fifteen-year-old. He was too rushed to eat so he ordered coffee in and tried to concentrate on the file. Telling parents their teenage son was involved in prostitution was always a delicate matter. Dan thought about his own boyhood. If he’d disappeared without telling anyone, would his father have found himself sitting through an interview like this, explaining how Dan had run away because he felt unloved and unwanted? If asked about identifying markings, would he have mentioned the scar running down the right side of Dan’s face from the time he’d thrown him against a doorframe? Probably not. Dan had let his father off easy by announcing his departure.

Just before one o’clock, Sally knocked and opened the door, giving Dan an odd look. The Philips entered, introduced themselves as Gloria and Paul, and sat before Dan could offer. Everything about them was loud. The only thing standing between the father and a caveman, in Dan’s estimation, was about three grunts. He could have been a mail-order hitman — muscles constricted in his shirtsleeves, his neck a bulbous pillar wider than his face, hair a shock of white greased to his skull. The mother had the air of a woman whose glory days ran along the lines of head cheerleader at Wawa Senior High. Dressed in a Hallelujah Pink sweater with matching lipstick and nails, plunging neckline, and thigh-high skirt, she’d toned down the look with a black nylon windbreaker, placing her one solitary rung above her husband on the evolutionary ladder.

Dan thought he detected an odour — it might have been two — of something faintly melony covering the scent of fried fish. A moment passed before he could distinguish that the fruity smell was coming from her and the fried smell from her husband. He wished he’d eaten. The combination was going to be difficult on an empty stomach.

He asked for their version of events the night Richard disappeared. He listened with considered solemnity as Gloria Philips retold the story, tapping her pink nails on his desk for emphasis. It all sounded familiar except for one detail: Richard had been getting money from somewhere. Dan nodded as Gloria told of a series of unexpected electronic gadgets — cell phones, iPods — and overnight trips to Toronto that her son had explained as being a friend’s invitation to concerts.

Gloria’s account ended. She eyed her husband. “His version’s the same as mine.” The human grunt nodded as Gloria looked Dan in the eye. “But I didn’t come here to hear myself talk,” she said, tapping the file. “I want you to tell me what’s being done to find my son.”

Dan closed the file and sat back. “The reason I asked you to repeat the story is because there’s often a detail that gets overlooked, and sometimes it comes out when people talk it through. The detail that stands out here is that Richard seems to have been getting money from somewhere. Do you have any idea where it came from?”

Gloria looked at Paul then back at Dan. “No. Maybe he was stealing it from somewhere, but not from me. I always know what’s in my purse.”

“What do you know about the place where the police picked up your son twice in the weeks before he ran away?”

She shook her head. “It was some place queers went to prey on young boys.”

And yet somehow those boys always managed to find themselves in those places by accident or were inexplicably drawn to them against their will time and again,
Dan finished silently, thinking of the shadows beneath the trestle that had shaped his own adolescent sex life. “Do you think that’s where your son got the money?”

The look of disgust on Gloria’s face could have wiped the rust off a nail. “Are you telling me someone was paying my son for sex? Is that what I’m hearing you say?”

“I’m trying to determine where he got his money.”

Gloria’s voice was hard as flint. “He was fourteen years old! He’s too young for sex.”

“That’s the legal age for sex. Prostitution is another matter.”

“Who the hell made it legal for some pervert to fuck my kid up the ass at the age of fourteen?”

Her husband squirmed in his seat. Gloria reached out and clutched his forearm, driving five pink nails into his skin, either to pacify or restrain him.

“He’s not old enough to engage in anal sex, just oral,” Dan said.

“Nice distinction!”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Dan said. “We have reason to believe your son has been involved in prostitution and possibly in the pornography industry here in Toronto.”

Her husband interrupted. “Let’s get out of here.” He looked over at Dan. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Shut up, Paul. He’s my kid and I want him back.”

“Yeah? Cry me a fucking river. He’ll come back with some faggot disease. And I don’t want him in my house if he does!” Her husband stood and went out, having a moment of indecision whether to slam the door with its glass plates and risk breakage or just close it loudly on his way out. His cuff caught on the knob and he effected what was, all things considered, a very prissy exit for a very large man.

Gloria Philips leaned over the desk. She stabbed at the file with a buffed fingernail. “Find my kid. You find my kid and bring him home or I’ll have you taken off this case!”

Dan sat rigid. “You’re welcome to request another investigator at any time, Mrs. Philips. Just as I’m free to pass the file along to somebody else.”

“I don’t like being told off,” she said icily.

“Neither do I. But I probably know more about finding missing teenagers than anybody else in this town. I’ve already made some progress on Richard’s case and I may make some more. If I do, I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

“You do that, buster.” She stood and walked out of the office.

Scary,
Dan thought, wondering what reasonable chance any kid with those parents would have to grow up to be anything other than fucked up.

Sally opened his door and peeked in. “Are they gone?”

“It’s safe.”

“Thank goddess!”

“What were you saying about people not being colourful anymore?”

“Sometimes white trash is too colourful.” She slapped something down on his desk. “Sorry to spoil your afternoon, but the fun’s over,” she said.

Dan saw the name Daniella Ballancourt in capital letters. He opened the file. Her death was no longer being considered suspicious. The coroner had determined the bump on her head was caused during her fall from the boat. The skin around it contained traces of paint consistent with samples taken from a lifeboat strapped directly below the upper deck where she was believed to have fallen. More importantly, a couple had come forward and testified they’d observed Daniella alone on deck moments before she disappeared. She’d been bent over the rail, vomiting. When asked if she needed help, she’d turned them away. The account had been given by a respected judge and his wife. Dan recalled the older couple who’d seemed annoyed by the fright they’d had. He thought they’d said they were on the lower deck when she fell, but perhaps that was another couple. He was on the phone with Saylor again.

“It just showed up on my desk, too,” Saylor said. “Damn!”

“Why did it take so long for them to come forward?” Dan asked.

“I’ve got the inside scoop on that. From what I heard, they didn’t want to be associated with the whole event, from the gay wedding right on down.”

“Then what were they doing there in the first place?”

“They were Lucille Killingworth’s business associates. Apparently she pressured half the Canadian establishment into going to the wedding.”

“I heard that, too.”

“Anyway, it looks like the case is closed. I guess that’s that.”

“So it would seem,” Dan said. He paused. “Did you bring up the fact that Lucille Killingworth had paid for the girl’s abortion?”

There was a hum on the line. “I did,” Saylor said. “It wasn’t well-received. Everyone here was eager to accept the verdict of accidental death. Say no more.”

“Seems odd,” Dan said.

“That’s what I thought.” Saylor seemed anxious to be off the phone. “Well, better luck next time. If you’re out this way, drop in and see me.”

“Will do.”

For once, Dan was on time to pick Ked up. His friend the “ruffian” was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’d had a falling out, though Ked didn’t really fight with other kids. Maybe he’d decided the boy wasn’t friendship material. Probably better than finding out the hard way. They made it home without hitting any traffic snarls. No annoying neighbours or dog turds on the step. The universe had stopped targeting him with booby traps. Dan was a little surprised, but grateful nonetheless. He plucked a bundle of mail from the box as he entered. Bills, flyers, restaurant menus, lists of services available, items for sale, requests for donations to build a water filtration plant in Namibia, feed the hungry in Libya, stop the proliferation of landmines, and put an end to the seal hunt. A thousand plans for saving the world. None asking whether it was worth saving.

An envelope caught his eye — parchment yellow, good quality paper. He flipped it over and caught the name: L. Killingworth. Surely it wasn’t a thank-you note for his presence at the wedding. He opened it and a cheque for $10,000 dropped into his hands. On the memo line were the words “For services rendered” next to Lucille Killingworth’s signature.

He carried the envelope and cheque upstairs to his office and laid them on his desk. His first instinct was to call Bill, but he knew there’d be no response. He picked up the cheque and dialled the number under the address. To his surprise, Lucille answered. Her voice remained unchanged when he identified himself. Dan thanked her for the cheque and explained that he wouldn’t be able to accept it.

Her voice expressed concern, with a tone of annoyance shaded in. “But you did some valuable work for me — important work. I simply wished to express my gratitude for your loyalty to my family.”

“Actually, Lucille, I never considered it work. As for loyalty, I simply did a favour on Bill’s behalf.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

“I can’t accept it. It would look bad.”

“Nevertheless, I am grateful,” she said with quiet insistence.

“And I accept your gratitude,” Dan said. “But there’s no need to pay me for what I did.”

“Well, then I guess I will have to respect your wishes,” Lucille replied with reluctance. “Though it seems silly you won’t accept it.” She gave pause. “What about a charity? I could donate it to some cause of your choice.”

“Thank you — it’s not necessary. I’m happy to know the case turned out all right.”

“Yes, it has, hasn’t it?”

And all so very neatly,
Dan thought. He wondered for a moment if the judge and his wife had received a cheque in nice yellow parchment paper as well. “I’m just wondering, though….”

“Yes?”

“When we spoke the other day, I told you Daniella was pregnant.”

“Yes. A dreadful thing.”

“You seemed surprised.”

“I was — shocked.”

“But you didn’t mention you’d paid for her to have an abortion.” The pause was long enough. “So I take it your shock was actually on learning that she was
still
pregnant.”

The voice remained unchanged. Dan admired her cool. “It was between me and the girl. It had nothing to do with what happened afterwards.”

“How did you learn she was pregnant? Did she come to you for help?”

“A woman knows these things.” There was another slight pause, and Dan wondered if she was considering calling “Larry” again. “I think I had best not say any more,” she said with hostess perfection, the unassailable “thank you for your kindness” to someone whose name meant not the slightest thing to her. Though the voice remained unchanged, the tone of conversation had altered imperceptibly. “Thank you again, you’ve been most helpful.”