The Night Bell (19 page)

“That’s all, my darlings. It’s still early enough for the breakfast special at Ladyman’s. Why don’t we go park ourselves and have a feast?”

“I’m hungry,” said Alan.

“You’re always hungry,” Hazel said, eyeing her brother.

“I’m energetic.”

“You’re a human garbage can.”

“Be nice to him,” their mother said. “He’s been through a lot today.”

All through the breakfast, Alan applied himself to his plate like a miner hammering at a seam of coal. The food went everywhere, but by the end, as at most meals, Alan had thumbed up the crumbs and pinched the stray fleck of meat off the side of the salt shaker. “You do clean your plate … and the surrounding area,” their mother sometimes joked, but to Hazel it seemed as if her mother admired his appetite. Hazel she warned about getting fat, but she couldn’t feed Alan too much.

Over the pancakes and coffee, Hazel watched her parents communicating silently with each other through the occasional held gaze or a look askance. Once, they locked eyes and then simultaneously looked at Alan. They traded copious information with each other without so much as uttering a syllable.

The feelings of adults were difficult to decipher, and Hazel had long ago stopped trying to understand who her parents were together. One day, in the distant future it felt, a man would look at her and just like that she’d know everything he was thinking and feeling. But for now, she was lost in a sea of signals. She didn’t know how she felt about Andrew Pedersen, really. Was it enough that someone was nice to you?

She was aware of her heart beating. She looked up and her father’s head seemed very far away, as if she were looking down the wrong end of a telescope. It was a scary feeling. She could hear every sound in the place. The dirty dishes clattering in the sinks; laughter and voices; the cough of a car starting. Calls from the street, a horn in the distance. Then her heart felt like it stopped. A high-pitched whine sounded inside her head that reduced all the ambient noise to something distant, and she looked at her brother. He was sitting on the other side of the table, picked out in a column of light as if the angels were going to take him away.

At their appointment earlier that week, Dr. Pass had suggested a visit to a neurologist in Mayfair, a specialist in aging and changes in the brain. After making a phone call, he wrote a referral and marked it
URGENT
. “Most people have to wait months for a visit with Dr. White – I can get you in Thursday morning at eight.”

However, after she’d made some scrambled eggs and toast, Hazel found her mother unwilling to get out of bed. “This is ridiculous,” she told her. “Adults don’t behave like this.”

“I’m taking a stand,” her mother protested.

“Would
you
accept this kind of behaviour from anyone?”

“I’m not
anyone
,” Emily snarled. “I am your mother.”

“That’s correct. And, right now, my mother needs to get her skeleton out of bed so I can take her to see the nice
doctor and then go to work.”

“What’s her field?” asked Emily. “This nice doctor.”

“Gerontological neurology.”

It took further cajoling, but eventually Hazel was able to get Emily dressed and feed her a couple forkfuls of egg before leaving the house. Emily took forever to lock the front door and then she turned around and saw Hazel had brought her cruiser. “Mother of Jesus,” she snarled. “Are you taking me in
that
goddamned thing?”

“I’m on duty, Mom. But we can go fast.”

“How fast?”

“I can punch it to one-fifty on a straightaway.”

Emily got in and sat glowering in the passenger seat, and Hazel had to do her seat belt for her. Then they headed towards the 41, passing the turn-off to Port Dundas where the new headquarters was going to go. A banner hanging between two stanchions on the prow of land below the granite cliff read:

“An abomination,” said Emily. “Main Street will be dead in two years.”

“Just think: if you could drive straight north from Toronto and have all your needs met without ever having to pull off into some ratty little town, wouldn’t that be wonderful? How much you want to bet there’ll be a McDonald’s here in six months?”

In the rear-view mirror, Hazel saw the outcrop of scrub with two roads joining in front of it. One led to the heart of Port Dundas, the other would soon be applied like a garrotte to the throat of the town.

“When you get to my age, try to stay out of doctors’ offices,” Emily said. “They are employed by government forces to make people shuffle off their mortal coils, thus saving the economy billions a year.”

“It would be nice to put an end to that plot.”

“There’s no plot. When it’s your time you don’t have any say in it.”

“You talk like I’m driving you to your execution.”

“You could be,” Emily said. “Too bad it isn’t covered.”

Hazel had read recently in a not-entirely disreputable women’s magazine that sometimes when people expressed negative feelings they weren’t looking for advice or a counterpoint, they just needed someone to hear them. Someone to listen. And listening was easier than responding to the carping. She would try harder to hear what her mother was saying.

The clinic was in a house at the end of a rural road outside Brigham. Aspens in full colour hung over the roof and there was a basketball hoop at the side of the house. It had a calming effect. By the time Emily was welcomed into the doctor’s office, all the fight had gone out of her. Sooner or later in your life, you have to put yourself in someone else’s hands. Just surrender. Hazel watched her mother being walked away. A small figure following a white coat down a hallway.

The magazines were atrocious. They were a contributing factor to the ongoing fall of civilization. The television suspended from the ceiling played a game show silently. The grand prize was plastic surgery. No one should be surprised by anything people may be capable of, including competing on television for a new face.

Her phone rang. Ray Greene. “Brendan Givens is dead.”

“What?” She went out into the hallway.

“Stabbed to death in a hotel room. Yesterday. In Toronto.”

Toronto
? “And who caught
that
case?”

“Fifty-one Division.”

“God. I feel like we’re on the losing side of a game of keep-away.”

“Did you look into the complaint I left for you?”

“The racket ruckus on Fraser Street? I put Eileen Bail on it. She won’t punch anyone.”

“Then what have you been doing?”

“I haven’t been in Tournament Acres.”

“But you
have
been …?”

“Doing research.”

“On?”

“These boys lived in our county, Ray. They weren’t even given the courtesy of an unmarked grave, they were … murdered, incinerated, and their remains were scattered in the corn. They have a right to their names.”

He moaned something unintelligible. “You’re as reliable as tides, Hazel. You don’t have a case, but someone says no to you and you see a red cape.”

“You can’t stop me from reading public files.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Silence. “You’ve got Wingate on it, too?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I got a pretty furious phone call –”

“From Michael Wingate? He tore me a new one, too. Don’t change the subject. James has the names of six boys who vanished off the public record after doing a stint at Dublin Home. Six candidates for murder. There’ll be more. All we have to do is attach a name to one victim and we have the foundation of a huge case.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“Find a relation. Do a DNA test. And, um, well …”

“Well what?”

“I’ve actually already found a relation. Deacon sent someone to get a hair sample. They can get markers in three days to compare to the results Deacon’s lab got on the bones.”

“Do you have an assignment for me?”

“What do you mean?” A nurse entered the hallway and gestured for Hazel to come through.

“I mean, since you’re still obviously in charge, what do you want me to do? Should I go down the chimney at Fifty-one Division and steal the file on Givens?”

“I might have something for you later.” It made him laugh, but she knew he was mad as hell. Before he could form another objection, she said, “Nothing on Renald?”

“Nada. How do I know he didn’t disappear on your say-so, huh? Maybe you have him out there dressed up as a Mountie.”

“I gotta go, Ray.” She went back into the doctor’s office. Emily emerged from the back with Dr. White in tow. Her mother wore a look of frank triumph.

“Not a thing wrong with me. Tell her.”

“Hello Hazel. Nice to see you again.”

“Nancy.” Her eyes shuttled back and forth between her mother and the doctor. “So we’re to carry on?”

“Come back here for a minute, and we’ll talk about it in private.”

Hazel followed Nancy White, but her mother stayed behind. “You don’t want to be a part of this conversation?”

“I’ve seen all I need to see back there for now. I’ll wait out here with the hopeless cases.”

Dr. White’s office was the standard-issue professional inner sanctum, with diplomas and wood accents and a steel
lamp on the desk. “People weren’t meant to live into their nineties,” Dr. White said. “What’s happening to your mother is normal. She forgets, she remembers, she’s herself, she’s not herself. She’s been working with that brain since she was in her mother’s tummy. Things get old.”

“What about the myeloma?” Hazel said with half a smile.

“It could be contributing, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s no sense in pathologizing the aging process – not all of us are lucky enough to have one! But we do live in an era of options and one of those options is drugs. I could, for instance, put your mother on five milligrams of Aricept. Good drug. My father was on it. I think it kept him going, cognitive-wise, maybe an extra year or two.”

“Do you have a drug that can make me
forget
stuff?”

“I know of one, but it’s around three hundred dollars an ounce.” They both laughed. “We don’t know very much about the brain, I’m afraid. We go at it with the equivalent of boxing gloves on.”

Hazel had begun to feel heavy. “Can we think about it?”

“Of course.”

“What did she say?”

“Your mother? She asked me if I could euthanize her with Jim Beam.” They both laughed again, but Hazel found herself snorting back tears.

A Mountie leaning against his cruiser at the corner of Sam Snead and Pebble Beach held up his hand to stop the approaching OPS cruiser. Hazel rolled down her window to report she had an appointment with the CO up in the command truck. She didn’t, but the Mountie read her warrant card and let her through anyway.

Hazel drove up and parked her car. The RCMP remote command vehicle was an RV decked out in red, yellow, white, and blue. Stairs led up at one end and down at the other, like a haunted house at a county fair, but with Mounties in it.

She walked up to the door marked
IN
and knocked. The big, bearded man who answered smiled at her. “Ya?” He dried his hands on a white tea towel.

“Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef. OPS. I was wondering who the commanding officer here is?”

“That role falls to me. Superintendent Martin Scott. Come in. Which OPS?”

She stepped up into the vehicle. “Port Dundas.”

“That nearby?”

“Not too far.” It was a single room inside, complete with red carpeting. There were a few desks and a white eraser board on one wall. A kitchen and a curtained-off area took up the far end. It smelled of sock. “We were actually on the case here. You know about … the bones of the kids, and also the dead couple. The Fremonts. Do you know about them?”

“I do.”

“Is that your case?”

“Sort of. Tea?”

“Sort of?”

“I can only make small talk, Detective Inspector. Tea?”

“Do some of you live in here?”

“There’s always someone on the barge,” said Scott. “And we’ve got one guest in the cell.”

“You have a suspect?”

“No, I have Mr. Givens’s secretary. Justine. She got apoplectic.”

Hazel looked at the near end and noted a locked door flush with a particleboard wall. “And you locked her up?”

“She’s tanked.”

“Can I see her?”

Without hesitation, Scott tossed her his keys. “Green key fob thingy.”

She went to the door and unlocked it. Behind it was another door, a steel one, with a large, barred window in it. A woman was sleeping under a Hudson’s Bay blanket on a comfortable-looking cot. “Justine,” she called. “Hazel Micallef. Everything OK in here?”

“I threw up.”

“All right, sweetheart. You can probably leave now if you want.”