The Night Bell (35 page)

The foyer of the abandoned building was still lit with late-day sun, and Hazel stepped inside with her gun drawn. Immediately, she saw Renald on the upper landing with his arm around Gloria Whitman’s throat. He pulled her
away and they disappeared through one of the doors to the upstairs dorms.

“Mel!” she shouted. “We have Leon. This was all his idea. I don’t know what he told you, but you are a police officer
first
!” Another door closed distantly. She began up the stairs. When she got to the landing, Martin Scott was standing inside the front door. She went into the first dorm room and walked through it to the door leading to the one beyond.

“Sergeant Renald?” she called. “This isn’t you. You believe in justice. You’ve spent thirty years in the force.”

“Waiting for my chance,” he said, but she couldn’t tell which of the other rooms he was in. “Like Lionel. Like Rex. Cutter always said we were going to need the law if the truth was ever going to be known! About what happened to us.” Hazel put her hand on the doorknob.

“Let her go,” she said.

“Is that what you would do?”

She felt the vibration of his voice in her palm and she threw open the door. He was standing silhouetted against the back window, with Gloria Whitman in front of him, his arm around her midsection. When he saw Hazel, he shoved Gloria away and turned his gun on his colleague.

“Shoot him!” Gloria said. “The sick fuck!”

Hazel ignored her. “It’s over,” she said to Renald.

“Get your gun off me and put it on her,” he told her. She didn’t. “She’s just going to go free?”

“No. She’s going to jail.”

“It’s you or her,” Renald said. “Make a statement, Hazel. Shoot her.”

“Why?”

“Full circle.” He wagged the gun at her. “Justice comes and has its fill. You end the killer’s line, just like he tried to end ours.”

“He’s already dead, Melvin.”

“Not so,” he replied. “He lives on.”

She put her gun on the floor.

He looked disappointed. “Well,” he said, “they must be on their way. Time’s a-wasting.”

“Drop it,” Martin Scott said from the other doorway.

“Not a chance,” said Renald, and he spun and fired a single bullet through Gloria Whitman’s forehead. Hazel lunged for him and Scott held fire. She knocked Melvin Renald to the ground and he simply let go of the gun. Gloria lay on her side, one eye open and one closed. She looked surprised.

On Main Street there were children dressed as cartoon characters and spacemen and all manner of evil spirits. The scene was cheerful and dark at the same time. So much fake blood. Hazel walked in the direction of the Kilmartin Bridge.

Herbert Lim Grocery had long ago changed hands. It was called Kilmartin Convenience now, and a neon sign in the window said
INTERNET
. Buzz Lightyear and a gorilla
came out of the shop and a large peanut went in. She listened for a moment to all the happy chatter.

Mrs. Lim still owned the building and lived in the apartment above it. Hazel had been here a few months ago, just to check in. Mrs. Lim had offered her tea and gingersnaps, and they’d spent an hour together. She’d given up on a happy life, she told Hazel. Being alive was almost enough after the disappearance of her daughter. Almost.

It would be all over the papers tomorrow, even the big ones. Hazel opened the gate and climbed the stairs. She rang the doorbell and after a brief wait Mrs. Lim answered. She moved slowly; she was brittle and bird-like. “Hazel.”

“I’ve come to bring you some news.”

Mrs. Lim blinked a couple of times. “I see. Are you coming in?”

“Yes.”

This time no tea was offered. Hazel sat at the kitchen table trying to think of how to say it. Mrs. Lim watched her with glassy eyes, her hand a fist over her mouth. “You found her,” she said.

Hazel couldn’t look up. “Yes.”

“I want to bury her.”

“You’ll be able to do that soon, Mrs. Lim. I’m sorry to bring such sad news.”

“Thank you,” the old woman said. “I prayed for this, that god would let me know in my lifetime. Yes, thank you. It is good news.”

“Mrs. Lim –”

“Now I know she is dead I will stop thinking about the life she had in my dreams. The children she had. She was happy, but I was alone. I am glad I’ll be able to put flowers on her grave.”

Hazel suddenly covered her mouth. Mrs. Lim put her hand on Hazel’s arm and stroked it. She felt deeply embarrassed to cry, and she tried to apologize, but Mrs. Lim stopped her by squeezing her arm hard. “You have never forgotten her,” she said. “You didn’t know her very well, but you have always acted as her friend.”

“The message wasn’t from her,” Hazel said.

“No, dear. It wasn’t.”

Hazel tried to grapple with the enormity of Mrs. Lim’s kindness. “Part of me still really believed she was alive.”

“You were a good girl, Hazel. And you are a good and compassionate woman. Thank you for coming to see me.”

Hazel walked back to her car among the older kids, the ones who’d put little or no effort into their costumes. Most of them were no older than she and Gloria had been when Carol disappeared. At that age, Hazel had not yet developed a grounded belief in human evil. When you’re fourteen, death is abstract. A vague and distant place. She’d been happy to troop in these streets with her bag full of candy. When she got too old for it, she took Alan, whose
preferred costume – even when it was too small to wear any longer – was a skunk. For a while, before he left home, Hazel had called him Stink. Affectionately and accurately.

She went back to the station house but didn’t go in. She got into her car and drove back to Pember Lake. Her mother seemed to be living in 2007 when she arrived home. Tiny mercies, Hazel thought. She made a quick plate of scrambled eggs for them both and they ate together in a companionable silence. “Do you remember Carol Lim?” Hazel asked.

“I still think about her.”

“We found her body. Yesterday.”

Emily put her fork down on her plate. “No end of bad news. Can’t do anything about it.”

“We got the person who killed her.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Emily said with a distracted air. She pushed a couple of curds of egg around her plate.

Hazel changed the subject. “I was thinking we might have Martha and Emilia here this year for Christmas. Would you like that?”

“If you do the cooking,” her mother said. “And the cleaning up. And will it be a dreary, dry Christmas?”

“I don’t know what the weather will be like.”

“I mean will there be liquor?”

Hazel laughed. “If we don’t top you up sooner or later, you won’t stay so beautifully preserved.”

That night, after her mother had gone to bed, Hazel went to the end of the second floor hall and pulled down the attic stair. She tested its solidity and climbed up. At the top, the light switch was where she remembered it. Attics were where things you couldn’t let go of spent their decades hidden and misremembered.

A warm, orange light flooded the cramped space filled with boxes and a dress form and paintings everyone had stopped liking. Blocking the only window in the place were bankers boxes, piled three deep. Both she and her mother were meticulous about such things as packed boxes. Not only did every one have written on it a summary of its contents, but somewhere up here there was also a manifest that collected the details in one place. Emily could file with the best of them from her years in public service.

Hazel began reading lids and moving boxes off their piles. There were nine of them on the floor behind her when she found the box marked, simply,
ALAN
. She brought it over to where the light was strongest. Inside were some of the books he’d left behind, along with pads full of his drawings, several 45s, a few hockey cards, his high-school diploma, and a handful of postcards he’d sent from travels in Thailand and Cambodia. That was his life: things in a box. She thought of the plastic bin containing Carol Lim’s rotted belongings.

Under this pile of oddments, at the bottom, Hazel found the white inventory box Alan had taken her to see
that Christmas Day. She took it out, feeling its weight, and rested it on her lap. The lid slid up off with the sound of a hollow kiss. Inside, catching the light in their angled faces, the silver hearts were as bright as the day they’d been struck.

First and foremost to Dinah Forbes, Hazel’s closest ally, and the person I want to impress the most. A great editor keeps you honest and finds all the shine in you she can. Thank you, Dinah.

Thank you, Ellen Levine, for being on both of my sides for so long.

Thank you, Ellen Seligman, for guiding all of Inger’s books through the press with grace, good humour, and enthusiasm. M&S is a good place to be an author and I and Redhill are proud to be McClelland & Stewart author(s).

Some good people volunteered to read a next-to-final draft of this novel in May 2015. My thanks to them all: Scott Abramovitch, Adam Honsinger, Susan Kendal Urbach, Joanna Knoopathuis, Elaine Meehan, and Lesley Slack.

You can keep track of all things Inger via my website,
michaelredhill.com
.