Authors: Carolyn Davidson
Fifteen minutes passed and one of the men from Tom’s crew crumpled his soda can and threw it in the garbage, missing, but leaving the can on the grass where it landed. The other man stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of his jeans, and they got back into their pickup truck. Only Tom stayed, waving them away. She wasn’t close enough to hear what was said, but heard laughter and the vague murmur of his dismissal, a cheerful indication that he would meet them later.
Before long one of the nurses had walked over from the hospital, not one of the salad eating ladies she’d seen on previous days, but a younger girl, she looked vaguely familiar. Too young to have been in her year at school, but maybe she had met her on the street, or perhaps when she was in the hospital giving birth to Tommy. The girl’s hair was dark and glossy in the sun, and her glossed lips were smiling. Tom also smiled when he saw her, but he didn’t move, staying where he was lounged against the maple tree’s trunk. He didn’t budge except to smile more widely when she came close enough to put her chest against his, her crotch against his, and then he lifted his arms to put them around her neck.
It was just one of the things Clare saw on her outings, and although she didn’t own a camera she kept the image clear in her mind, tucked carefully away as if in a photo album.
“I was able to confirm Sarah’s appointment at the Morgentaler Clinic in April three years ago,” Alex told Susan, effortlessly keeping up with her hurried gait as she headed towards her office.
“The Morgentaler?” Susan glanced up at Alex. “That’s in Toronto. Any way of finding out who took her there?”
“My thought exactly,” Alex responded, watching Susan as she shrugged her bag from her shoulder while simultaneously keying into her computer. “Did you stop at home for more than a change of clothes?” he asked her.
“Nope,” Susan replied, running a hand through her hair which she knew could have done with a brush. “So what did you find?”
“The clinic was pretty helpful when I told them the situation. They were able to check the schedule to locate the receptionist and nurse who were on staff that day; apparently the doctor who looked after her died of a heart attack two years ago. I faxed them a picture of Sarah, the nurse couldn’t remember her, but the receptionist said she recognized her face. She’s from this area coincidentally.”
“Apparently they don’t go ahead with the procedure unless someone is there to drive the patient home, so there had to have been someone with her. The receptionist said she remembers Sarah arriving alone, and has a vague memory of an older man picking her up from the recovery room. She said she always feels bad when there’s a younger patient with no one there to hold her hand through the process.”
“Any description of the man?” Susan asked.
“Nothing concrete. She said she pictures an older man, tall and thin, but doesn’t think she’d be able to pick him out after all this time.”
“Tall and thin,” Susan considered. “I wouldn’t describe Mr. Harmon as either particularly. Did you question the Harmon’s?”
“Yup,” Alex replied. “Both parents say they had no knowledge of the abortion. From their reactions I’d tend to believe them.”
“Alright,” Susan tapped her fingers on her desk. “Looks like we have lots to work with. I’ll have Maggie arrange to have the clinic receptionist come in, we can run some pictures by her.”
“My ears are burning,” Maggie smiled as she cracked the door open and poked her head into the office. “I was just tracking Alex down, someone’s here to talk to him.”
“We’re done here anyway,” Susan waved Alex away. “In case your super powers missed the details through the closed door Maggie, I’ll email you what I need.”
“No problem,” Maggie nodded, magically procuring a box of iced pastries from behind her back. “Donuts for sustenance?”
“Sure,” Susan shrugged, helping herself to a Danish, “a bit of sugar can’t hurt.”
Standing at her desk as she ate she took a quick scroll through her emails. Some photo and print updates from Derek, a status request from the Commissioner, the usual administrative pile to sift through. And, as always, the spectre of endless reports waiting to be written.
Susan turned the screen off. She’d wait until she had a chance to assemble all the information her team came up with at the station meeting into something manageable, and then she would fill the boss in.
It looked like Janey’s latest info was the first priority then. Deciding to put off unpacking her bag for the moment, Susan grabbed her keys and cell phone from her desk and headed towards the station entrance.
The office was fairly quiet, with only two of her men at their desks on the phones. Calls that had poured into the station in the hours following the press release of the murder had slowed considerably, not necessarily a bad thing as the majority of them took man hours following up on and seldom revealed any relevant information.
Passing by the first windowed room she saw Alex in the middle of an interview. Surprisingly late in the day for a drop in, Susan thought to herself. It looked like the girl seated across from him was telling him something important, or something emotional anyway, judging by the tears streaking down her cheeks. Susan slowed as she passed the window; maybe a break at last, she told herself. Or maybe something completely unrelated like a shoplifting charge. Unlikely – all of other usual station activity seemed to have slowed to a stop in the wake of the murder, whether due to police focus or the temporary paralysis of a community in shock, she wasn’t sure.
The window was mirrored from the inside, but Susan saw Alex shift uncomfortably in his chair as if he sensed someone watching. In her late teens or early twenties, the girl was reaching across the table, stretching her hands towards Alex. In response he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
Strange, Susan thought to herself, watching as Alex stood up and gestured towards the door. The girl followed suit reluctantly, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of a hand.
Susan jumped as she heard the door open, and busied herself with the papers in her hands, miming a casual walk by as first the girl, and then Alex, left the interview room. Alex escorted her to the station door, and the two exchanged terse goodbyes before Alex returned to his desk.
“Anything interesting?” Susan asked the Sergeant, stopping at his desk as he lowered himself into his chair.
“What’s that?” Alex asked distractedly, and Susan studied him as he rubbed his forehead wearily.
“No, not really,” he replied when she repeated the question. “Just a friend of Sarah’s, she dropped in to see if she had any information that could help.”
“Did she?” Susan asked when he stopped at that.
“Nah, nothing we didn’t already know,” Alex said, clicking his mouse to turn the computer screen on.
Odd, Susan thought to herself as she walked away from the Sergeant, but then these were not normal times, everyone’s tension levels were higher than usual.
Still, doesn’t hurt to look into it, she told herself, stopping by Maggie’s desk on the way to the station’s front door. Maggie had a pretty good grip on the comings and goings of the station, at both the official and personal level.
“Hey Maggie,” Susan greeted the receptionist casually. “What was the name of the girl Alex was interviewing?”
Maggie looked up from her screen to assess her boss for a moment before speaking.
“That would be Jolene,” she said, fingers not slowing their quick dance over the keyboard.
There was an extended pause as Susan waited for Maggie to flesh out the details in her usual forthcoming manner.
“Alright.” Susan shrugged, giving up. “You can put the interview notes on my desk. I’ll have a look at them later.”
“I’m off to meet with Janey,” she added unnecessarily, heading towards the door.
“I wouldn’t waste much time on those interview notes,” Maggie called after her, unable to resist supplying more information.
“Why’s that?” Susan turned back quickly.
“She was likely just looking for an excuse to talk to Alex,” Maggie said, not making eye contact with Susan. Susan stood motionless, waiting for the receptionist to fill in the details of the story she obviously wanted to dish.
“I think they may have had a thing a while back.”
“Alex dated that girl he was interviewing?” Susan demanded before she could stop herself. The floor seemed to tilt beneath her and she forced her voice to remain even. “He dated Sarah’s friend?”
Feeling her stomach turn, Susan willed her face to remain impassive. Alex had told her he never met Sarah, in fact that was what he had told the entire staff at the first station meeting to address the murder. He knew of the family, but he had reportedly never met Sarah before her death.
“Jolene would be what, twenty years old?” she tried to keep her voice casual.
“Nineteen,” Maggie replied, rolling her eyes theatrically. “Men”.
“Yeah,” Susan said, leaving the station abruptly. The cool of the outdoor wind rushed at her face, a relief after the recycled heated air of the station, and Susan felt her pulse racing unpleasantly in her ears.
Forget the fact that it was completely inappropriate age-wise, what the hell was Alex doing lying about knowing the victim? If he had something going on with a friend of Sarah’s it seemed highly unlikely he hadn’t met the victim herself.
Slamming the door of the Nissan shut behind her Sarah sat with the motor idling for a moment. Don’t take anything for granted in life, she reminded herself. Something that was very easy to forget when things got even slightly comfortable. The betrayal she felt had as much to do with the fact that her gut instinct, something she had as much faith in as pretty well anything in the world, had let her down, as well as the fact that Alex had turned out to be less than she thought him to be. Or that is what she would tell herself anyway, she acknowledged.
Shaking her head to clear it, she reversed the car out of its parking spot and headed towards Highway 6. The drive to Owen Sound passed in a blur, and Susan was soon standing with Janey in the lab office, hardly remembering how she got there.
Derek had pictures of footprints from the scene spread on the table in front of them. “Not much, is there,” he said apologetically, nodding at the images of leaves and rocks in front of them. “The pine needles and rocks aren’t great for lifting prints, and it didn’t help that it rained heavily between Sarah’s death and the time the body was found.”
“Are you with me?” he asked her with concern when Susan didn’t respond. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah,” Susan responded, hesitating as she considered her words. She was speaking about a colleague, and any suspicion she had should be kept to herself until it was proven or discounted. “You’ve hung out with Alex a fair amount over the years. Have you noticed anything out of order about the age of some of the women he dates?”
Derek shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know about his personal situation, Susan. I don’t want to get involved in anything going on between you guys. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“I’m not asking on a personal level,” Susan said, feeling the heat rush to her face. If ever she needed a reason not to mix work relationships with personal, this was it. She knew from her years at various stations that there were often affairs between colleagues, likely due to the strains of shift work and the intense nature of the job. She also knew they were liable to end in unpleasantness, when things went wrong and former lovers were left seeing each other at work on a daily basis.
“Forget I said anything,” Susan told Derek now, returning her attention to the pictures in front of her. “It’s probably nothing.”
*
She wasn’t stupid. She noticed the way her husband looked at Sarah, the naked desire obvious in the looks he snuck when he thought no one was watching, the way he held his shoulders back when the girl was around. Ridiculous in a middle aged man, but there you go. She had no great illusions about romance. It was just nature’s way that the smooth skin of youth, firm with the young flesh beneath it, was more appealing than the looser and more lined face of middle age.
That didn’t mean she didn’t take pride in her appearance. Regular trips to the hair colourist and spa, and vigorous sessions on the treadmill four times a week kept her looking as good as she imagined any fifty-three year old woman could.
Her husband was no ethereal romantic himself; she had known from the beginning that he was the type whose mind fixed primarily on what was in front of him. Introduced by friends of her family who had invited them both to their long weekend celebration, the two had immediately hit it off. Tom had told Evelyn of his plans to begin a construction company of his own, not wanting to follow in the farming footsteps of his father. Building was a field she understood; her own father ran a construction company which had made her family wealthy building subdivisions in the suburbs springing up in the southern towns of Brampton and Orangeville.
Tom had been excited when Evelyn promised to introduce him to her parents, to give him the opportunity to ask her father for advice. And she in turn checked into his background and potentials. He had a young son from his first marriage which had ended in the tragic death of his wife. Evelyn had never considered herself particularly maternal, and the thought of helping raise a pre-existing child seemed less strenuous than bringing one into the world herself. Tom was a handsome man, and you could tell he would be successful in whatever venture he took on. She could envisage the weekends spent together at her family’s lakeside cottage, or entertaining in their future home. Any baggage he brought with him didn’t seem to be something he carried too heavily.
Evelyn brought her own money to the partnership. She knew from the beginning that were things to go wrong, she would have no worries in that department. And it had been for the most part a successful marriage. Tom’s business had done very well after her father’s start up support, and their home was everything she had imagined it would be. Tommy was a good boy who didn’t cause them any trouble, spending most of his hours at school, and in more recent years, with his girlfriend Sarah.
So she didn’t know why she recently found herself with the uncomfortable realisation that she thought there would be more somehow. What exactly she had expected she wasn’t sure, just that undefined more. It crossed her mind that maybe if she’d had a child of her own, that would somehow have made her feel more fulfilled, that this sensation was a menopausal echo of her missing maternal urge, but it didn’t seem likely. She couldn’t find an actual complaint, just the bitter tasting sensation that she’s missed the boat, that life had moved on without her and she was left behind, old. Almost old.