‘So if you’re into AA and all that, how do you explain an afternoon like this?’
‘It’s simple, really: every other month, when I sense the need to get drunk, I come in here and I get drunk. Tommy knows when I’m having one of those days and what to do when I get to the point where
I
don’t know what to do. There was a time when I was blotto every day. Now I get smashed under controlled circumstances.’
Over the three hours we were in the bar, Vern did most of the talking. The rye loosened him up considerably and he ranged over a wide variety of subjects, from interpretations of Mahler on record, to the lingering despair he felt about most things to do with the Central Public Library, to a brief mention of a woman he’d fallen in love with while he was at the Royal College of Music.
‘Her name was Veronique. She was a cellist from Lyon. Brilliant and, to my eyes, very beautiful in a rather severe way. I once accompanied her in the Second Cello Sonata of Mendelssohn. And I sensed – from the hints she was dropping – that she was more than interested in me. God knows, I was smitten with her. But . . . I was just never good at that sort of thing.’
‘By which you mean: seduction?’
‘By which I mean: being normal.’
‘Who’s normal?’
‘Oh, there are people who seem to get through life with a limited amount of difficulty; who know how to make their luck, to capitalize on their talents, to allow things to happen for them.’
‘But the majority of people don’t cut through life like it’s very soft, malleable butter. It’s always a brawl . . .’
‘Especially against the one great force that none of us can counteract: death.’
‘Does it scare you, death?’
‘It’s going to arrive, that’s for sure. And I guess the one and only thing that perplexes me is the idea that I will be no more, that my entire story will vanish with me. No “me”. How can that be?’
‘“
No me
”,’ I said, repeating the phrase. ‘A year ago that struck me as a very viable alternative.’
‘And now?’
‘Now . . . I have to live with myself, and all that that means.’
That was the only mention during the afternoon of all that had been articulated earlier that day. More drinks arrived. We kept talking. I felt the rye take hold of me – but I liked its alcoholic balm. I needed to get drunk for the same reason I needed to talk about ‘that day’: it had to be done. It was a necessity.
By keeping up a steady, but not rapid-fire pace of imbibing, neither of us pitched into incoherency until around five that afternoon . . . at which point Tommy phoned for two separate taxis (was he ensuring that we didn’t wake up next to each other?) and helped each of us out of the bar and into the waiting vehicles. But around two hours before this, I made a momentary observation which – as it turned out – was to direct the course of events in my life for the next few months. Like so many events that manage to alter things for us, this one came about merely because I looked a certain way at a certain moment – glancing up at the television behind the bar just when . . .
‘About time they nabbed that lying sonofabitch.’
That was Tommy the bartender staring up at the television. On the screen, George MacIntyre – the father of the missing thirteen-year-old girl, Ivy – was being led out of his very simple frame house. He was a man in his early forties – overweight, balding, with a wispy beard. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and pajama bottoms – the cops evidently deciding to arrest him while he was still in bed. But though I took in all the grubby details of his appearance – and the fact that he so seemed to fit the identikit portrait of a child molester – it was his eyes that really grabbed my attention. They were red from crying. But what I saw in them wasn’t fear or guilt or denial; rather, it was anguish. The same anguish I caught in my own eyes on those occasions after Emily’s death when I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror. The eyes of someone who had also lost a child and now knew a sorrow beyond dreams. And at that precise moment, I knew:
that man did not kill his daughter.
MacIntyre was now being perp-walked to a waiting cop car while dozens of reporters and paparazzi shouted questions and clicked camera shutters.
‘As George MacIntyre was led away,’ the CBC reporter said, ‘he was heard shouting: “I would never hurt my daughter. Never.” Since his daughter’s disappearance he has made several dramatic public appeals for her safe return. MacIntyre, forty-two years old, is known to the police. His wife, Brenda, is very active in the local Assemblies of God church, and according to her pastor, Rev. Larry Coursen . . .’
The report cut to Larry Coursen. He was blond, square-jawed, with very good teeth, dressed in a light brown leather jacket and a dog collar, and oozing sanctimonious concern.
‘This is an immensely sad day for Brenda MacIntyre, for all members of our Assembly of God congregation and, yes, for George MacIntyre too. What has happened is so tragic. We are praying very hard for Ivy’s safe return – just as we are also praying that the light of our Lord Jesus Christ shines down upon her and also upon George MacIntyre.’
I pulled my glass towards me and threw back the dregs of rye.
‘Praise the Lord,’ I whispered under my breath. Vern heard me and favored me with a small smile.
Now onscreen was an RCMP officer named Floyd McKay. He explained that George MacIntyre had been transferred to Calgary for further investigation.
‘Know what I heard this morning from one of the cops that drink here?’ Tommy the bartender said to someone perched on a stool and drinking a Labatt’s by the neck. ‘That they found a “bloodied undergarment” under a pile of wood in MacIntyre’s workshop, and that’s what led to his arrest this morning.’
‘If I was the cops I’d castrate him,’ the other guy said.
That’s when I heard myself say: ‘He didn’t do it.’
Tommy the bartender glared at me.
‘Did I hear you correctly?’
I met his gaze.
‘You did,’ I said. ‘He didn’t do it.’
‘And how the hell do you know that?’
‘I just do.’
‘Even though they found his daughter’s bloodstained panties hidden in his workshop?’
‘That’s hearsay. And I’m telling you, sir – the man is innocent.’
‘And I’m telling you, ma’am, he’s guilty as hell. And Vern . . . I don’t know who your friend is, but I think all that Crown Royal you’ve both been drinking has clouded her judgment.’
‘Think what you like,’ I whispered under my breath. Vern held up his hand to me and gave me the sort of imploring look that let it be known I should now shut the hell up.
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, sir,’ I shouted to the bartender.
‘Hey, just be grateful that Vern’s a regular here. Otherwise you’d’ve been out on the street by now.’
Two more ryes later, the cabs arrived. I muttered a goodbye to Vern as I flopped across the back seat of my taxi. The driver asked me if I was going to be sick, and I assured him that I would keep the contents of my stomach within me until we got to my apartment, and he assured me he would deposit me in the minus-nineteen night air if I failed to make good on my promise.
I don’t remember much after that, except tossing twenty dollars at the driver as I got out and somehow making my way upstairs. I unlocked my front door and fell face first on my bed. When I woke it was eleven the next morning. I felt as if my head had been cleaved by a very sharp instrument. I looked at the time and groaned. I was never late for work – and now I knew that, even if I wanted to make it in, I was too hungover. So I picked up my cellphone and called Mrs Woods and apologized profusely for only informing her now that I was out sick, but explained that I’d picked up some stomach bug and was up for most of the night.
‘Something’s obviously going around,’ Mrs Woods said, ‘because Vern Byrne also phoned in sick with the same complaint.’
Great hungover minds think alike.
I lolled in bed for another hour, thinking, thinking. As I replayed the insanity of that drinking session, it was clear to me that Vern had decided he was not the only person who needed to get drunk yesterday.
But the thoughts of this drinking contest – and its toxic aftermath – were soon overshadowed by a larger consideration: George MacIntyre. The way his eyes seemed to become haunted when faced with the specter of all those popping camera lights and shouted questions. The sense of resignation that seemed to dapple his face – as if this new fresh hell was nothing compared to that of his daughter’s disappearance. A guilty man would have signaled his culpability by doing that Raskolnikov thing of self-incrimination. Something in his countenance would have given the game away. But MacIntyre simply looked crushed by all that had befallen him. He was a man who had lost hope, and who had now entered the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare: being accused of killing his own daughter while simultaneously knowing that he was completely innocent . . .
And yet, from the little I’d heard in passing about the case, MacIntyre had a history of violent behavior. If it was true that he had beaten his wife and was considered dangerous by his son . . . of course, he’d be immediately regarded as the prime suspect in the case, though none of this could be publicized prior to his trial.
Then there was the fact that a bloody piece of underwear belonging to his daughter was allegedly (according to Tommy the bartender) found in his workshop. Why would he store that item of incredibly incriminating clothing there? Surely if he was the man behind her disappearance he would do everything in his power to hide evidence? Even if he was determined to have his guilt proclaimed by being ‘found out’, he wouldn’t resort to something as lame as a pair of underwear in an obvious location. Self-denunciation – especially when something like infanticide is involved – would involve something leading directly to the body; a true sign of guilt, and one which would be quickly substantiated.
But the cops – needing to break the case as fast as possible – would jump on the bloody panties as proof that MacIntyre was guilty as hell (that is, if that bar-room rumor about this piece of evidence was even true). But until lab reports came back stating that the blood matched that of Ivy’s . . .
Listen to you. Nancy goddamn Drew, with her Dostoevsky references and her hungover need to defend a much-touted sociopath. Talk about displacement activity
. . .
But try as I did to put the case to one side, it continued to nag at me all day. Having finally hauled myself out of bed and into a penitential cold shower, followed by a further two-hour act of physical contrition at the gym, I found myself inextricably drawn to my local newspaper shop, where I bought the
Globe and Mail
, the
Calgary Herald
and the
Edmonton Journal
to get that day’s journalistic take on George MacIntyre’s arrest. I took my newspapers around the corner to Caffé Beano and started reading. The
Herald
had a full page on ‘
The Ivy MacIntyre Case
’ and noted that this was the third time in six years that an adolescent girl had gone missing from the Townsend area. In all of the previous cases, no traces of the vanished child had ever been found.
The
Herald
also noted that George MacIntyre was ‘
known to the police
’ – that phrase again. It mentioned that he had a previous job driving long-haul trucks, but said little more because – as I was learning – the Canadian press wasn’t like the American press when it came to reporting somebody under investigation for murder. No past misdeeds could be reported. No incriminating comments from neighbors or colleagues at work. The law stopped them from reporting, prior to a trial, anything but the basic facts of the case.
But the
Edmonton Journal
did carry a quote from the ‘
MacIntyre Family Minister
’, Larry Coursen, saying that ‘“
Ivy was one of God’s little angels
”’. He also noted that, when he first met Brenda MacIntyre, she was in desperate need of healing. ‘“
But when she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, the healing process began
. . .”’
Yeah, sure it did . . .
Within weeks of getting that telephone call from Jesus, Brenda was ‘“
clean and sober
”’. She’d found a job in the local Safeway supermarket. She’d begun to ‘“
take responsibility for her actions
”’ and had completely cleaned up the family home and had ‘“
re-established her relationship with her children
”’. (What exactly did he mean by that?) But – as the Rev. Larry Coursen was quick to point out – there was an ‘“
ongoing sadness in her life
”’.
No doubt this ‘sadness’ was her very unsaved, deadbeat husband George.
The
Herald
, meanwhile, had a quote from a local Townsend guy named Stu Pattison. He knew MacIntyre from a local hockey team they both played on, and said that he ‘“
doted on Ivy and actually once went crazy in Townsend when some kids in a pickup drove her off the road while she was on a bicycle
”’.
I scribbled in my notebook the name Larry Coursen and that of Stu Pattison. I also noted the detail about MacIntyre driving long-haul trucks and placed a comment: ‘
Did she ever file a domestic abuse charge?
’ next to an entry I made labeled: ‘
Brenda MacIntyre
’. Then I asked the woman behind the café counter for a pair of scissors and clipped all the articles I had just read. I folded them inside my notebook, walked up to Reid’s stationers and bought some plain white paper, several files and a bottle of white glue. Down a little alleyway from Reid’s was an internet café. I spent the next three hours there. Using assorted search engines I found out everything I could about George and Brenda MacIntyre and their two children, printing copious amounts of information along the way.
From the
Regina Leader-Post
in 2002 I learned that, in February of that year, MacIntyre had been arrested after manhandling a woman in a truck-stop bar. The woman didn’t press charges – but it seems he also directly solicited sex from her and ‘
exposed himself to her
’ while they were on the way back to his truck.