Stanley Park (15 page)

The forest inhaled. It grew darker. The sound of voices had stopped or gone away. He sensed the subsuming presence of the park instead, the silent and perpetual riot of growth and decay going on all around him: in ponds, in the trunks of cedars, in between the nurse logs where the ivy
and the foam flower spread, in the secret paths of snails and squirrels. In the other secrets held in the forest floor.

He woke with the sun, which slanted in between the towers of the West End, prismed itself off the tall aquarium-green glass of the monolithic condominium that stood at the foot of Haro Street. He woke stretched out on a park bench.

He started sharply, sat halfway up. “Gawd.”

A glance at his watch revealed that it was five in the morning, but also that something was wrong with his eyes. His vision was obscured, his eyelids unreasonably sticky. He put both hands up to his face, rubbing free what seemed like a resin of some kind, a spray, a coating on his face.

His hands came away flecked black.

“Jesus.” He was sitting straight up now, brain tumbling, starting assessments and rejecting them. And then, continuing to rub his eyes, his face, he felt a faint throb begin across the bridge of his nose. Pain that punched through the dull ache in his head. Pain that produced a new set of red smears across his palms. His own blood. Dried and fresh.

The flow had been opened again.

“Oh, gawd,” Jeremy said again. And now he planted his feet on the ground and fished in his pockets for a tissue. A branch, maybe? He thought he remembered the slash of a salmonberry cane across the bridge of his nose. The irritation momentary at the time. Fleeting. And now.

Now there was blood on his hand, on his cheek and chin. In his hair. There was new blood dripping from his nose to his chin, and from there to his shirt.

He jogged around the lagoon, head aching, two fingers pressed to the cut. He jogged under the purple cherry trees, up the hill towards home. Past the green monolithic condominium with its million-dollar suites. Without looking at it, eyes to the pavement ahead, he remembered a story about an old woman who had lived in the walk-up co-op that had
previously occupied the lot. About how the developers had been forced to buy out every aging co-op resident at exorbitant prices and how she had held out. She didn’t want the money, only to stay living on the same spot. And how in the end she had settled for a suite in the new building. She would take no cash, only a suite, which would allow her to keep a nail-hold on the land that held so much of her. A tendril of remaining connection snaking down twenty stories to the ground from her half-floor, 2,400-square-foot condo with its marble and hardwood and stainless steel kitchen. She held out. She faced down the monolith, and she remained.

It was the bridge of the nose. A horizontal boxer’s cut. Not deep but well supplied with veins. He stood with toilet paper mashed between his eyes for a full five minutes before the blood hardened enough to hold his pulse without breaking. He found gauze and tape. He fashioned a bandage, thought about his next move for a full ten minutes. Then went to bed.

He missed the morning service. It was a hundred dollars’ worth of coffee and Nanaimo bars, fine. It was also the first time in his life he’d not been in a kitchen at the time he was supposed to be.

“Your father OK?” Jules asked, first question, when he phoned. A death in the family might explain why she had to let herself in, might explain no breakfast service or how it could be that Jeremy was ten minutes away from being late for lunch prep.

“Yeah,” he said. “Um …”

She waited.

“I’m running behind. Something unusual. Something I promised to someone. It’s a one-time thing.”

Of course it was fine, Jules assured him. Speaking quickly.

He phoned in the orders. Also a first-time thing. Xiang cooperated only with much cajoling and many reminders about the long period of cash payment The Monkey’s Paw had endured. He agreed to take a credit card number, to be followed by a cheque. And so Jeremy compensated by ordering more from everybody than he needed. Salmon, thick-cut pork chops, lamb shanks.

“How about mushrooms?” Xiang asked him. “Chanterelle, very good.”

“Sure. Four pounds of those and some eggplant.”

Then he went to the library. He stood outside the building for a moment, considering both the task before him and the new building itself. Vancouver had replaced its old library, and Jeremy still missed it. Certainly it had been cramped and a bit dusty, but it had also been an architectural rarity from Vancouver’s early boom days. Crisp sheets of glass opened the inside to the outside. He remembered how, from the opposite street corner, you could make out people reading, taking books off the shelves. People from around here using their library as it was meant to be used. This late-modernist gem had now been converted into a Virgin record store and a Planet Hollywood.

The new library, meanwhile (in front of which Jeremy now stood), was built to resemble the Roman Coliseum, complete with arches and pillars in a ring around the central building. Overt unoriginality aside, Jeremy was offended more by the greasy pizza fumes. In their infinite commercial wisdom, the developers had opened the atrium outside the library to retail activity, the first, very prescient, client in which had been a pizzeria. Nothing wrong with street pizza, Chef Jeremy thought, just this particular street pizza, which went beyond fast and cheap and standardized, and was striving also for the exotic, the novelty niche. Wolfgang Puck meets the Inferno Franchising Group: pineapple, pine nuts and Chinese sausage, or spinach, blue cheese and maple syrup. A commodified
splatter of culinary incoherence on a shingle. Jeremy tried meatball and green olives once and couldn’t swallow his first bite. He had to walk gingerly outside, holding this mess in his mouth, the rest of it at arm’s length in one hand. He felt like a kid who’d wet his pants, hobbling stiff-legged for the washroom. Outside he leaned over a garbage can and deposited this tapenade of ground beef and dough and pimento-stuffed manzanilla olives onto the cans and newspapers therein.

He took a breath and went upstairs.

“Babes in the Wood,” the librarian at the history desk said to him. “Nobody wants to know about Babes in the Wood any more.”

The librarian was staring right at the bandage between his eyes.

“Some people do,” Jeremy answered.

“Well, not many people. There was a little spate of interest in the sixties.”

He was bearded, wore thick glasses with heavy black frames and what looked like hospital greens. He used a wheelchair.

“The sixties?”

“Flower power and all that crap. Some of these hippie academic guys kind of dug the image of the little kids in the forest. Forever free.”

“Are the bodies still in the park?” Jeremy asked, raising his eyebrows.

“No,” the librarian said, with something like distaste. Ejecting the negative syllable and smirking at the question, shaking his head. “They were found by a city parks worker. Bodies went to autopsy.”

“I see.”

“You don’t know the story?”

“Not really,” Jeremy admitted.

“It’s a quick study. Nineteen fifty-three. A city works crew is clearing bush up on Reservoir Trail in Stanley Park. They uncover two little skeletons buried in the leaves.”

Here the librarian paused for a second and scratched his beard. Then he reached under the desk and pulled out a red cardboard Closed sign, placed it on the countertop and wheeled himself out from behind the desk. He beckoned to Jeremy and pushed himself towards the elevator.

“Social Sciences,” he said when they were inside. “They have a file of related stuff. Research?”

Jeremy nodded. “For a friend.”

“Albert Tong,” the librarian said.

“Jeremy Papier,” Jeremy said, reaching out his hand.

“Not me. The guy who found the bodies. I’m Gil.”

They shook.

“So Tong finds a human skull. Bits of clothing. A little lunch box. He calls the cops, of course.”

Here the elevator dinged their arrival at the right floor. Gil wheeled out in front of Jeremy, talking over his shoulder. “They dig around some more. They uncover the skeletons, still fully clothed. And then, buried with the skeletons, they find a shoe. A single adult shoe. Also a fur coat.”

“The killer’s?” Jeremy said.

Gil shrugged. “You might think so.”

At the Social Sciences desk, Gil greeted the woman behind the counter.

“Nobody was ever arrested?” Jeremy asked.

“Nope. Some people came forward who had been in the park around that time and thought they saw a woman with two little kids, a boy and a girl. The cops did a country-wide search for anybody who knew about a brother-sister set gone missing. Sifted through hundreds of tips. Didn’t amount to much. Which might be explained by the fact that a couple years ago DNA testing proved the kids were brothers.”

Jeremy nodded. “But the bodies. Not there any more.”

“I once heard rumours but it’s urban legend stuff. They dug up the skeletons and took them to the morgue. That’s generally what cops do, as opposed to leaving them lying around.”

The woman returned with a thick brown envelope. Gil wished him luck and wheeled off to the elevators.

In a nearby carrel he hefted the large manila folder, which was tied shut with waxed string wound around two paper discs. Inside, there were dusty newspaper clippings stacked in sequence. At the bottom of the pile there was also a sheaf of pages with handwritten notes. A dozen messy pages. Almost indecipherable. Still, he leafed dutifully through the pages, moistening his thumb as he went, words slipping past unread. When he reached the last page, he realized he hadn’t processed a single sentence and felt honour-bound to read the last words in full. They read:

Jeremy shook his head, baffled. It could mean anything. He yawned and ran a finger down the envelope’s contents list. The newspaper articles were neatly listed. No mention of the handwritten notes. So that was it, he decided, nodding. The latter-day addition of some random nutcase.

He started at the top of the pile of newspaper articles, grateful for the frank broadsheet English. There were still gaps in the story, large unknowns, but over the years an accepted frame had fallen around the newspaper account of the Babes in the Wood. Two children, maybe five or six years old, brutally murdered. The decayed bodies were discovered by city parks workers in 1953. Over an unfocused picture of a clearing in a forest,
The Province
had superimposed a cutout photo of the murder weapon, found at the scene. It was a rough, two-headed axe, one head the conventional vertical blade, the other a square mallet. Other articles confirmed that the weapon was a lather’s adze and that it matched the
broken opening in each of the skulls perfectly. Also found at the scene: a woman’s fur coat and a single red loafer.

The murderer’s trail, however, was long cold. Police searched fruitlessly for further clues, learning little that wasn’t evident at the crime scene until the appearance of one Miss Harker.

Jeremy’s finger, tracing down the newspaper column, had just reached a large pencil star in the margin next to the words:
The Witness
.

A young woman—a girl, really—she was only sixteen at the time. But she had been in Stanley Park on October 5, 1947, and had seen a woman with two kids (a boy and girl, she thought) and then, sometime later, without. She hadn’t thought of it further until those six years had passed, the parks workers made their grisly discovery and the story first hit the press. Her family had since moved to Toronto, but she read the news accounts and contacted the Vancouver City Police. She told them what she had seen that day. It dated the murder, but in the end, provided no substantial lead.

Perhaps as a result of this frustration, an accepted theme had developed in the small body of Babes in the Wood literature. The articles were inevitably printed in October, the anniversary month, and most of these cast the murder as an at-once tragic and inaugural event in the city’s history. For Vancouver, the first of the self-inflicted wounds North Americans would come to associate with late-twentieth-century urban life. Murder, burglary, arson, carjacking, child abduction, rape, stalking, the drive-by and the home invasion … all these would follow. But the murder of those two children ushered this unsettling aspect of modernity onto the stage of Canada’s third city, quiet at that time in its West Coast rain forest. Gently dozing in the mists that rolled in off the as-yet toxin-free and salmon-filled ocean. And thinking of it each year, or more accurately every ten years or so, the press in Vancouver would disinter the tale. The
journalists would open their articles sounding as perplexed as they had been the first time. They would run over the tragic facts, grafting on the pale analysis of sociologists or psychologists or members of the still-stymied Vancouver City Police Unsolved Crime Unit. And they would finish as perplexed as they began, as perplexed as they would be for Octobers stretching into the future. Flipping from article to article, Jeremy was forced to consider a calendar of civic passage, guilt and confusion, tracing itself up through the decades.