The Night Bell

Copyright © 2015 by Caribou River, Ltd

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request

ISBN: 978-0-7710-8868-1
ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-8869-8

Cover design: Five Seventeen
Cover images: (background) © my inner child photography | Getty Images;
(bunny) © Lantapix |
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McClelland & Stewart,
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v3.1

Hibiki Yoshida drank green tea from a blue ceramic cup. The steam hid his face. “I had been at Dublin Home for only one year when I heard it the first time,” he said. “I was eight years old.”

Detective Sergeant James Wingate began to write the numeral
8
in his notebook, but accidentally made a zero and crossed it out. He concentrated on his handwriting. The bareness of Yoshida’s walls was distracting. The tea smelled like burning leaves. Wingate shook the pen. “What year was this?” he asked.

“Nineteen fifty-one. There were four dormitories on the second floor, two in front and two in back, all connected by doors.” He waited for Wingate to write it down. “There were no hallways, so if you were in one of
the two front rooms, there were always people walking through. I was in the back at the beginning.” Wingate saw the room taking form in Yoshida’s eyes. “Our dormitory had two stone walls. It was cold. But we were away from the stairs, farther away than the rest of the boys, and if someone came in the night, they would find what they were looking for
before
they got to us. That’s what we believed.

“I only had a few friends because my English was so poor, and I tried to spend time among boys who seemed at least as hopeless as me. We kept each other company. Being in a group, we thought we’d be protected from the orderlies, the nurses, the older boys, and the teachers. But of course we weren’t. We were like herring in a school, hiding from barracudas. The barracudas still ate.

“The first night I heard the bell jingle, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. Some of the older boys tried to scare us with stories of someone who came in the night and stole children to eat them. They called him Old Father Crumb. He had a key to the basement door made out of human bone, and when he opened it it rang a bell. That’s how you’d know it was him.”

Yoshida raised his cup to his mouth, and drank from it slowly, his hand trembling. Wingate waited for him to regain his composure. “Take your time,” he said.

“I closed my eyes and lay very still,” Yoshida said, putting the cup down. “I heard nothing, and after a while the
restless feeling that had taken hold of me ebbed away and I went back to sleep.”

The man stopped speaking, but it felt to Wingate that there was more. “Go on.”

“It happened one other time. When I was sixteen. I’d been moved into the front dorms, where the older boys slept. The sound was nearer the second time I heard it. On New Year’s Eve 1958. We raised our cups of apple juice at midnight and I still wonder what was in the juice. I didn’t finish mine, but I fell asleep very quickly just the same. Some of the boys were asleep on their feet when they marched us up the stairs.

“I dreamt that there was a girl standing behind my bed, and she leaned over me and dangled a little bell on a chain. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. I woke up with a start. My heart was still pounding from the dream, and I pulled the blanket up over my face. I heard the other boys breathing shallowly, like panting dogs.

“The door opened in the room next to ours and footsteps came closer, slow and even. The door to our room opened and he came in and shut the door behind him. A shadow fell across me and I thought I was going to start crying, but he went by. I tried to count how many beds. One … two … he stopped three beds away from me.”

Yoshida’s eyes reddened. “My friend Valentijn slept in that bed. He was a good kid. Only fourteen. He’d had his growth spurt, and he was bigger than the sixteen-year-olds,
but he was slow. And he’d become violent if he was upset.” He fell silent and swallowed nervously. The corners of his mouth moved a number of times but he could not speak.

“It’s OK, Hiro –”

“I heard a man’s voice. He said something to Valentijn, and Valentijn said yes, very quietly. And then … I heard the footsteps go past again, but not Valentijn’s voice, not the sound of his feet. I listened to Old Father Crumb go out the door and when they opened the curtains in the morning, Valentijn’s bed was empty.”

“What happened to him?” Wingate asked. He’d gone as cold as his tea.

“They found him dead in the snow. They said he had gone out in the night and climbed to the roof, and he’d slipped on the icy slates.”

“That’s awful. I’m sorry you had to experience that.” He gave Yoshida another minute. His notes, which were difficult even for him to read, would prove he was ready to return to active duty. He wrote
Pushed?
in his notebook. “What did you hear that night, Mr. Yoshida? Did you hear what Old Father Crumb said to your friend?”

A drop of tea leapt up from Yoshida’s cup. “He asked him if he wanted to see the stars.”

In 1957, there were five convenience stores in Port Dundas. The ones at either end of Main Street were robbed more frequently than the three in the middle, and consequently their insurance cost more. However, in an act of neighbourliness not uncommon in those parts at that time, the owners of the three middle stores reimbursed the other two, so that all five paid the same amount.

The store that suffered the greatest number of thefts – and to date, the only robbery at gunpoint – was Herbert Lim Grocery, right at the gateway to the town, behind the sign that numbered its population at 4,280. A bridge ferried cars and bicycles and pedestrians into Port Dundas over the rushing Kilmartin River and delivered them to his doorstep. The bridge brought him a lot of business, but it came in handy for fast getaways too.

Saturday was market day, and on the afternoon of October 26, 1957, the streets were full of shoppers and strollers, visitors and locals, among them the odd drunk, depressive, and pickpocket. Shrinkage was worst on Saturdays. Some of the larger stores in town even hired security guards on the weekends and in the weeks leading up to Christmas and Easter, because a study had shown theft
doubled
in the weeks before those holy days.

The cost of lost merchandise was the cost of business, even in a small town.

Evan Micallef, the second-generation owner of Micallef’s department store, was one of the local businessmen who had hired a security guard. “This is what things have come to,” he told his daughter, Hazel. “You can’t trust anybody anymore.”

At the urging of his insurance company, Micallef had a plainclothes guard two days a week. The fellow walked around sizing up suit jackets and trying on caps, all the while shooting dramatic, sidelong glances up and down the floor. Every week, a different guy. They caught their fair share of thieves, though; it saved Evan Micallef a lot of money.

Herbert Lim had no need of a security guard. He sold milk, bacon, butter, comic books, magazines, cigarettes, detergent, a small selection of fruits and vegetables, and dry goods of various sorts. Lim’s also had higher prices than the other stores, owing to its prominent position at
the gateway to Port Dundas and being the easiest place to knock off in practically all of Westmuir County. He kept a baseball bat under the counter that he called extra insurance. Some days, when Mr. Lim heard a car idling at the curb outside, he’d steal a glance at the baseball bat. The townie kids knew he had it because he’d brandished it at some of them, just to show he meant business.