A Door in the River (13 page)

The water was cool but not cold; it was getting close to the middle of August now. She’d seen the date on a newspaper: yesterday had been Wednesday, August 10, 2005. Now the lakes would be keeping some of the daytime’s warmth in the nighttime. She gratefully slid in waist-deep and dunked herself. When had she last felt this kind of peace? She washed herself from head to toe and even used the soap to wash her hair. It wasn’t shampoo, but it would do.

She swam out in the calm, past the ends of the few docks where watercraft were moored. There was plenty of evidence of children here in the form of bathing rings and blow-up toys. She had the feeling that she’d stumbled on to a little community, the kind of place where you could leave your kids for a few minutes and you knew someone would be watching them. You wouldn’t even have to ask.
When she’d been a child, her parents sometimes had rented a place like this, usually once a summer, where her father could get away from his desk job in the city. Sometimes they’d go with their neighbours – Anton and his wife, Theodora, and their son, Nicolas, whom she had liked. They’d splash around in the water and make elaborate meals at one or the other’s cabin, and then the adults would stay up clinking glasses and telling stories. Larysa thought back on those days, and remembered herself at ten, and twelve, and fourteen, thinking about a boy her age, just one wall away, one wall separating them. She’d been a romantic girl, imagining her wedding, the look on her father’s face. Of course she’d marry Nicolas. There was no question of that. She wondered where he was now. Last she’d heard, he’d moved away to school. She’d stayed at home while she studied for her masters in human physiology, and rarely thought of him anymore.

She floated on her back beneath the clear, star-filled sky and the moonlight glinted off the parts of her that stayed above the water: her toes, the tops of her thighs, the little mound of belly, the tops of her breasts. A prickling of pubic hair floated on the surface of the water like tiny fronds. Her body had changed later than most. Her mother had reassured her that the same thing had happened to her when she was a girl, and it took sixteen years for Larysa’s body to wake up and change. Now she liked what she saw: she was slender, but not thin, with good
legs and breasts, and even her face had changed in the last three years: all the teenaged roundness was now gone. There was an angularity to her face, something longer and more adult had settled into her features. She felt she had a face that had to be taken seriously, a face that would look all right if she smoked with it. But she was training to be a nurse, so smoking was out. At least smoking tobacco was. She was still a kid, after all. No more. She’d never be able to think of herself as young girl again.

When she got out of the water, the air set her skin ablaze with cold and she felt every hair stand on end. She rushed back between the cottages where she’d left the bike and used the sweatshirt to towel off. When she was dry enough, she dressed and huddled, bent over for warmth, against the wall. It was too late now to get anywhere else, and she had to sleep. It would have been possible to use some of Henry’s money to get a motel room, but she was too tired to carry on for the night. Instead, she waited, bundled up in her clothing, until she was sure no one had seen her, and then she broke into one of the cottages she was certain was empty, quietly cutting the screen out of a back door with the knife Henry had given her. Then she used it to pry the plate off the base of the door handle and unscrew the mechanism. She was in luck: in a place like this, people didn’t worry too much about the security of their doors. She wheeled the bike into the cottage.

Inside it was silent and the air was stale and cool. She was certain that no one was living here right now. She moved through the rooms in the dark and only switched on a light over the bathroom sink. It was enough to see by in the rest of the cottage. It was clear that no one had stayed here recently, and perhaps that meant she could spend a couple of days here, recovering. The fridge was empty, and the beds were unmade, but by the glow of diffused light, she was able to find some bedding, which she threw on the couch. She lay down and closed her eyes, but her mind was still revving from everything she’d done and been through in the last few days, and she could not sleep. By now, she realized, Henry’s wife would have gone to the police and her existence would be confirmed. She could have killed Henry’s wife. What would another have mattered? They’d be looking for her now. They knew what she looked like.

She couldn’t sleep. She got off the couch and looked at her drawn, thin face in the mirror. Too thin. Her hair was straggly. If the police had a likeness of her, this hair would give her away. She got her knife out and took a hank of hair in her fist. She leaned over the bathroom sink and hacked it off. Her hand came free again and again with sheaves of light brown hair. She stared at them in her palm and thought with wonder that the tips of the hairs in her hand had probably emerged from her scalp at a time in her life when there had been no trouble at all except getting
her essays in on time. These dead cells had been alive briefly in their follicle and then, like a shadow expressing the passage of time, they had been pushed out. They’d had one of the old movie channels in the living room in Bochko’s house. In one of them, a woman said, “Here I was born, and here I died.” That was what the body did, measuring out its hours and days in hair and nails. Rings around your years.

Larysa dropped the hair into the sink and took another handful of it up.

When she was done, it looked pretty ragged, but it was different. She didn’t look at all as she had before, and that was what mattered.

She woke to a smart rapping on the door. She’d fallen asleep. It was late morning now – perhaps even early afternoon – and someone knew she was in there. She called out, “Just a second!” and threw on her pants and pulled the hoodie down over herself. She put the knife into the pocket in her sweats.

It was a woman standing at the door, a giant thing holding a zippered portfolio the size of a laptop against her chest. Larysa opened the door, hoping she could somehow skate through whatever this was going to be and then go on to plan the rest of her day.

The woman offered a cheery “Hullo!” and stepped into the cottage, looking around. She saw the bedsheets on the
couch and turned and frowned at Larysa. “Why didn’t you sleep in the bedroom?” She made an angry face. “Are the beds not made? I told the girl to make the beds.”

“No, no,” said Larysa. “She made the bed. I thought bed was too soft.”

“Nonsense,” said the woman. “They’re Posturepedics. They’re new, too.” She walked into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. “I’m just here to give you your receipt. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow morning – didn’t you have the place from tomorrow?”

“Oh, well, I get off early and I thought I come up –”

“How’d you get in?” said the lady now, her head just slightly tilted.

“Back door.”

She was still for a moment. “You French Canadian or something?”

Larysa hesitated. “Yes. From Quebec.”

“I can tell from your accent. Subtle, but I can pick up those kinds of things. Nothing gets past Rita.
Nest pah?
” Larysa laughed. It came out sounding a little strangled. “And you rode your bike in from the train in Port Dundas? Rather desperate to start your vacation!”

They shared a laugh now, the landlady’s rough burble covering Larysa’s anxiousness. She’d become talented of late in the game of playing along, and luckily the landlady had never met the woman she thought Larysa was.

“Hubby’s coming up with your daughter?”

“Ah, she has school early tomorrow, and they come up after.”

“Funny, you said in your email that she had already finished her summer school,” the woman said, looking up.

“I mean,
ballet
school.”

“Ah, of course. Who has school on a Saturday in the middle of summer, anyway?”

The lady tore a thin white piece of paper out of a receipt book and handed it to Larysa. “Well, that makes it official. You’ll get the damage deposit back by mail once we’ve checked everything.” She stepped forward to give Larysa the paper slip and took the opportunity to look around. “Did you bring
anything
with you?”

“My husband is bring everything we need.”

“Milk? Butter?” Larysa shook her head. “Well, this is silly. Do you have money, at least?”

“Of course.”

“Well, give me ten minutes and I’ll drive you into town. Ridiculous sitting in the dark without so much as a cup of tea and a piece of toast.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, waving the woman away in as friendly a fashion as she could muster. But she was going to have to get out of here right now. No more resting, which was unfortunate, because her energy was still building. She needed more time to plan, but the landlady was insisting on being helpful.

“Splash some water on your face and meet me outside in five minutes, young lady. What’s your name, again?”

“Kitty,” she said, and she went to get ready to be seen in the world.

The town was called Compton Mills. She remembered seeing the name on the map. Gilchrist wasn’t far away. When the landlady was deep in the frozen-foods aisle, Larysa told her she was going to use the washroom, and she walked back out to the parking lot. It was the kind of place where people just left their car keys in the ignition, or tucked up under the visor. It was a pity because back at the cottages the children from other cabins had already filed out, laughing and fighting, and the water would be full of them. Just an hour among children would have done wonders for her, and she could have had the cottage for the whole day. But she had to get going now. She had not been careful enough. There would be too many people looking for her now.

] 16 [

Saturday, August 13, morning

He called her at home at 5 a.m. He’d been awake since before dawn. “James?” she said when she heard his voice on the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?”

“I couldn’t sleep. Thinking about the case.”

“Nothing is happening, James. You’re on vacation, remember?”

“I’m not so good at it. How’s your mother?”

“Imperfect.”

“What did Forbes discover?”

She squeezed her eyes together; she wasn’t quite awake. Her body could manage to stay asleep until six most mornings; five was still too early. “Something about the taxicabs down there.”

“What about them?”

“Like I said, Detective, I’ll be in touch if there’s anything you need to know about. Right now, your orders are to tan and drink, okay? And stay out of my way.”

“I’ll have my phone with me,” he said.

Hazel made it to the station house by eight, around shift change. There were cars coming in and out of the rear lot of the detachment, more than usual for a Saturday morning. As she got out of the cruiser, she flashed on the image of Wiest’s pickup parked well behind Eagle Smoke and Souvenir and wondered if he’d been one of the special passengers. Then she wondered if possibly everything that they had seen at the Eagle was unrelated to what had happened to Henry Wiest. What if this girl was pregnant, what if this had to do with paternity, and they were meeting to settle something? How well had he known this girl? Another wild guess to file away.

She was at the back door of the station house, and she could see three officers standing with their back to her at the end of the hallway through the door’s windows. They were looking into the pen. Something was going on.

She entered and heard a strong, low voice coming from the pen. She took her cap off and held it at her side as she walked down the hall. A scrabbling sound caught her attention from inside the photocopy room halfway down the hall and she saw the Wiest bird sitting on its branch inside its cage beside the paper cutter. She had time enough to say,
What the fuck is
 … to herself before she
came to the end of the hallway and Melanie Cartwright stepped directly in front of her. “Hi.”

“Uh, hi. What’s happening?”

“Willan is happening.”

Hazel’s expression turned dark. “Is he here?”

“Not exactly.”

She strode down the hall toward the pen, and when she turned the corner and came into the big, open area, she saw Ray Greene sitting on the edge of a desk and many of her officers standing around listening, some with looks of bewilderment on their faces. Greene saw some of the staff look past him, and he turned and there was Hazel standing at the back of the pen. His hands, which had been busy in the air as he spoke, froze and settled in his lap.

“Detective Inspector,” he said.

“Mr. Greene.” He winced slightly at the lack of protocol and got up to offer his hand. She took it and shook perfunctorily. “My punishment?”

“If you choose to look at it that way.”

“I choose.”

He turned his attention back to the rest of the pen and said, “That’ll be it for now, everyone. We’ll be sorting out various details in the weeks to come, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. In fact, as I said, you’ll be getting
more
resources, not fewer. You’ll have what you need.”

He pushed off the desk and walked past Hazel into the hallway she’d come down.

“Let’s go to your office,” he said.

She followed him. “You want me to clean it out now?”

“Look, Hazel, you’ve got your hands full. With one body and an attack on someone else, this is a big case now. Commissioner Willan thought you could use me.”

“I could use
you
?”

He waved his hands around at the mess on her desk. “I can make do in the pen for the time being.”

“Are you looking forward to being a mall cop, Ray? Because that’s what Willan is dreaming of. A big shiny Cops ’R’ Us for the whole county.”

“Chip Willan is going to bring OPS Central into the twenty-first century, Hazel. You should come along.”

“Are all the kids doing it?”

He shook his head and decided to sit behind her desk. He was done trying the soft landing. “Why don’t you just do the rest of your script, Hazel? Then we’ll do mine, and then you can call me some names, and this’ll be over and done with.”