Authors: Scott Thornley
“You need a government-issued photo ID to get a box, but to be honest, with some effort you could probably get around that.”
MacNeice thanked the manager, asked for his card, put the list and card in the envelope and left the building. It had started pouring again, so he tucked the envelope inside his overcoat and jogged the rest of the way back to Division.
Not only was there not a Nicholson, Nicolson or Nickelson on the list, there wasn’t a Grant, either. MacNeice made himself an espresso and went through the list again, worried he’d simply missed it. He hadn’t.
As he pondered another approach, Aziz arrived from Forensics. “All they have are clothes, travel brochures, souvenirs, toiletries and fingerprints. And on the computer, camera and cellphone, no mention of Duguald.” She looked over his shoulder at a page of small type. “What have you got there?”
“The P.O. box key list,” he said. “The last names of every renter in Dundurn. Nicholson didn’t use his own name, or Jennifer Grant’s.”
Their eyes met for a moment and a flash of guilt sliced through him. He quickly looked back at the page.
“So maybe he invented a name?”
“Not impossible, I’m told. Wait, he was an English teacher who loved history. If he was using a pseudonym for some reason, he likely defaulted to some recognizable figure. You take three pages and I’ll take three.”
“What am I looking for, Mac?”
“Great writers, authors, poets, living or dead—no, probably dead.”
They found twenty-three candidates among the 1,453 names on the list, at least trusting that the two of them knew enough about literature.
From Cooper to James, Fitzgerald to Johnson, they were all very common names except for one: Marlowe. MacNeice circled it. Aziz reached for the Dundurn phone book and found three Marlows, none with an
e
tacked on the end.
“A contemporary of Shakespeare—it has to be him. Shakespeare would have been way too obvious.” MacNeice pulled Tekatch’s card out of the envelope and dialed the number.
Within a half-hour, MacNeice and Aziz were on their way to check out Box 3220 at the post office on Railroad Avenue. Standing in front of the box, he handed Aziz the key.
Aziz unlocked it. Inside, they found three envelopes, all bills addressed to Nicholson.
“Why wouldn’t he just have them sent to his house on Tisdale? I mean, why come all the way out here?” Aziz asked.
MacNeice shrugged. “Check the address … It’s not Tisdale. It’s another property, 1012 Ryder Road.”
They drove east on Main Street until they were in farm country. Large farmhouses sat solidly on treed lawns next to the highway, some of them no longer attached to their farms, but spruced up for folks who loved country living without all the manure and flies. Ryder was a north-south access road beginning at the foot of the escarpment on one end and stopping at the lake on the other. On either side, a half-mile apart, were two modest homes used by itinerant labourers who came to work in the local orchards. However, on the east side of the road, there weren’t any fruit trees or vineyards, and the surrounding land, like the house, looked abandoned.
There was a small, weedy yard and gravel driveway at 1012 Ryder Road. The windows were boarded up, and the white plastic imitation aluminum siding was yellowed by the sun. The roof shingles were curling from neglect. And yet the front and back doors were steel, still carrying the primer and lot number. Neither had ever known paint. Both had been hit with graffiti, but there
was no sign that anyone had broken in.
Aziz looked up and down the road. “Not exactly a romantic cottage in the country.”
MacNeice didn’t respond—he had a sinking feeling about the whole set-up. He tried one key, then the next on the front door. With the second, the heavy door swung free of its steel jamb with a loud groan, sending a knifelike shard of light into the otherwise black room.
He turned to Aziz. “Flashlight and latex gloves.” He retrieved his own from the inside pocket of his coat and waited as she put on gloves and took out her pocket flashlight.
MacNeice switched on his flashlight and stepped inside. He was struck by the smell of exhausted space; if it could, the room would gasp with the arrival of fresh air. There was nothing rancid, rotting or organic in the atmosphere; it was simply devoid of life. Aziz tried the switch and, surprisingly, a ceiling light just above MacNeice’s head clicked on. He put the flashlight away and surveyed the space.
There were two wooden chairs, a worn-out sofa and an equally tired linoleum floor cracking in the middle, presumably from the plywood subfloor he could feel sagging beneath him. The bedroom had a single bed with a bare mattress, heavily stained in the middle and dirty all over. There was no other furniture—not a dresser or a chair—just the filthy bed. Though hinges were mounted on the door frame, the bedroom door was missing.
The kitchen cupboards and ancient Frigidaire were empty, and the stove showed signs of a heavy infestation of mice. On the floor, scattered like tiny leaves, were the aging husks of dozens of cluster flies and ladybugs. They crunched underfoot and sent Aziz back into the living room, where she chose a clearing devoid of dead bugs to stand.
MacNeice checked the bathroom. The tub had a permanent dark ring inside it and the toilet and sink were soiled almost black. He tried the flusher and it worked. Though there was no
hot water, cold ran from both faucets. The bathroom window, like the others, was boarded up from the outside but also featured an iron grid on the inside. “Check the thermostat, Fiza. On the wall just outside the bedroom.”
Aziz tapped the small screen several times. “Sixty degrees. The place is heated, for God’s sake.”
MacNeice opened the cellar door, which separated the bedroom from the kitchen, and flicked the switch. It worked too. He walked down the wooden stairs into a brightly lit space with a concrete floor. In the centre, a small table and a bookcase filled with classics from Shakespeare to Hemingway flanked an upholstered chair that sat opposite a sturdy wooden chair. On top of the table was a half-empty bottle of single malt with two glasses, one dusty, the other with amber residue in the bottom.
The only sound was the hum of a decades-old gas furnace soldiering on for no particular reason. He looked at the small ensemble of furniture, the books and whisky, and called, “Fiza.”
As she came slowly down the stairs, she said, “Oh, I hate this. Seriously, this is truly creepy. I want to go home.” She crossed the floor to him and looked down at the table. “What
is
this place?”
Images of Jennifer Grant’s bruised face and stomach flashed before him. “Christ!”
Terrified by his sudden reaction, Aziz instinctively grabbed his arm. “What? Shit. You’re scaring the hell out of me, Mac. This place is fucking awful.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her swear. Taking out his flashlight again, he stepped in front of the chair, squatted and shone the beam on the grey painted concrete floor. He got up and walked over to the outside wall, where he squatted again and looked back.
“What are you seeing?” Aziz was looking the way people do when they’re standing on a
rock in the middle of a river. She could see nothing but the concrete floor.
“As seasons come and go, concrete floors that don’t have expansion joints—like this one—will develop stress cracks, often very fine.” He walked back and forth, shining his light along the surface, before finally laying it on the floor and rolling it along with his foot. “Look at this. Watch the cone of light.”
“It looks perfect to me.”
“Keep watching.” With his next step, the cone rolled and distorted slightly. “Did you see it?”
“I think the shape changed as you rolled it.”
He left the flashlight in position, knelt down and ran his hand over the stress crack and into the cone. “Beyond the crack, there’s a slight rise.” He stood up and rolled the light toward the front of the house. For seven or eight feet, the shape of the cone didn’t change, but then it did.
“What does it mean?”
“This floor’s been re-poured or repaired, then refinished and repainted. See, there’s another crack here.” He picked up the flashlight and ran the beam the length of the crack to the outside wall. He looked back at Aziz. “Something’s under here,” he said.
“It could have been a plumbing issue … or bad workmanship.”
“I don’t think so.” MacNeice squatted down beside the glass with the amber residue and passed his light over its surface. “There are prints on the glass. We’ll check those against Tisdale and Nicholson’s car. For now, let’s get out of here.”
Aziz was up the stairs and outside before he’d made it to the first floor. He found her waiting in the Chevy. MacNeice climbed into the car and called Division to request a full
forensics team with a jackhammer and shovels. Ending the call, he started the engine and turned on the heater and defroster.
They sat in silence looking at the sad little house. To everyone passing by on the lonely road, it would appear to have been abandoned or boarded up for demolition to make way for something grander. But it was the secret retreat of David Nicholson, a place where he would read and drink in the middle of an empty basement in a house in the middle of nowhere.
Aziz shook her head. “Nothing good or kind or loving ever happened in there.” She took off the latex gloves, shoved them into her pocket and unbuttoned her coat.
MacNeice wiped away the last of the windshield fog in front of him but said nothing.
“I know you’ve got a theory,” she said. “So what is it?”
“Jennifer Grant came home. She promised she would and she did, for Dylan’s sake. There was no record of her returning by air, so Nicholson met her at the train or bus station and brought her here. This was solitary confinement—her crime was running away.”
Aziz wrapped her arms about herself and looked away toward the escarpment. When they finally spoke again, it was about the weather and how oppressive the rain was and how it seemed like London in a very bad year.
After a half-hour had passed, the radio phone burped to life. The forensics team had overshot the road and were making their way back; the jackhammer was coming separately and would arrive in ten minutes.
While they waited, Vertesi and Williams called in to report on their interview with Jennifer Grant’s brother. MacNeice put his cell on speaker mode.
“Boss, he seems like a loving brother. The only flag is that when he was eighteen, over
twenty years ago, he joined the Royal Dundurn Light Infantry. He was in the militia for three years,” Vertesi said.
“It’s not like he stuffed a grenade down his shorts to sneak it home back then,” Williams chimed in. “And anyway, they would have been using the pineapple ones—the kind some hero’s always falling on in the war movies.”
Vertesi picked it up. “He said he has no ill feelings toward David Nicholson, and I believed him. His explanation as to why Nicholson didn’t pitch in with the search in California was that he was focused on caring for Dylan and making a living to support him. As far as he was concerned, Nicholson was a great father. And he thinks that his sister simply ran off to live in California, that she wasn’t really concerned about her son or her own family. Basically he thinks his sister was a free spirit and hasn’t been found because she doesn’t want to be found.”
Aziz glanced at MacNeice, who was staring through the rain at the house. “I have another theory,” MacNeice said. “I want you both here at 1012 Ryder Road.”
Within minutes, the first of the black Suburbans came tearing down the road and pulled onto the grass beside the Chevy. Five people climbed out. The driver came over as the others were donning their haz-mat suits and pulling equipment out of the trunk. He leaned down to MacNeice’s window while stepping into his yellow Tyvek. “What have we got here, sir?”
“The house belongs to the bombing victim, David Nicholson, but he didn’t appear to want anyone to know about it. I think we need to excavate the basement.” MacNeice got out of
the car and handed the front door key over. “Until your jackhammer gets here, do a thorough search for prints on the first floor and basement.”
Vertesi and Williams showed up with lunch: burgers and milkshakes from the Secord Dairy. When the jackhammering finally stopped, they waited until the steel front door opened and the team leader appeared, pulling off his yellow hoodie and sliding down his face mask. He stood on the front step and stared at them but made no indication of what they should do.
“That doesn’t look good,” Aziz said.
“Let’s go.” MacNeice opened the car door.
When they were lined up in front of him, the team leader shook his head. “I need to give each of you a mask, not because it’s rank in there, but just in case. This is a no-shit spooky one.” He walked over to the Suburban, popped the trunk and came back with four masks and goggles.
“Seriously? Goggles?” Williams screwed his face up. “I look like a dweeb in goggles.”
“No goggles, no look-see, detective. Trust me, you’ll thank me for them. We don’t know what’s in the dust down there.”
After Williams put the goggles and mask on, the forensics leader pulled the hoodie over his head again and adjusted his mask, then turned back to them. “Ready?”
They all nodded and followed him to the basement, past a couple members of the team who were scanning the bedroom. The jackhammer operator was dismantling his rig. Standing beside a pit roughly ten feet square were two members of the forensics unit, both female. Large and small chunks of concrete were piled neatly against the outside wall, along with a door that
might be the one missing from the bedroom. The women moved back a few paces to provide them full access to the pit.
MacNeice stepped toward the edge and looked down. He inhaled sharply. When Aziz came to stand beside him, she took one look and buckled. Williams caught her before she hit the floor. They all stared at what the digging had revealed: a mummified female body in a soiled wedding dress complete with its train and veil. The nose and cheekbones were flattened. MacNeice glanced toward the door. The forensics leader noticed and said, “Yeah, it was on top of her, and on top of that was the gravel and concrete.” The dead woman’s hands were folded across her stomach, pressed deep into the folds of the dress, which MacNeice recognized from the wedding photo Dylan had loaned him. On the left hand was a wedding ring. Her flesh was dried and leathery over the bones, covered with concrete or gravel dust. The lips were pulled back as sharply as an incision, exposing grey teeth.