A Door in the River (22 page)

In her pocket, however, there was a folding knife. The good, heavy knife that Henry had given her. It was in her sidepocket and it tapped her as she ran, over and over, like a crop against horseflesh. The rhythmic urgency of her footfalls paired to the metronome of the knife pushed her. Along this road were little fruit and vegetable stands with trust boxes lying on the rough-hewn tables. She grabbed an apple at one, a bell pepper at another. She had
brought a single bottle of water with her, and she drank from it slowly, pacing herself with the slap of her feet against the pavement, counting to a thousand and then taking a mouthful.

Within an hour, she had covered half the distance and it was mid-afternoon. She took a risk at a corner store at the base of the road that led up into the escarpment and stopped there for a sandwich and asked to have her bottle refilled. The man who served her noticed she was barefoot, but he didn’t say anything, and she was in and out in five minutes. After that, the land began to rise at the base of the lake, and her energy flagged momentarily. Then she thought about how close she was to completing her mission here, and she drew herself up and ran harder.

She was running in cover, taking paths through the woods when she could still see the road, running on loam and moss. Somewhere she’d cut her foot on a piece of wood, or a stone, but she felt no pain at all. She was perilously alive. Maybe this was the end of her life. She was running to her death, rushing to it. She knew what Mr. Sugar – Duffy – was capable of. Her little hunting knife would be no match for him. She wouldn’t be surprised if his arsenal extended beyond chains, locks, prods, and gags. When he’d won her back the week after Terry ran out of money, he’d turned up the torture, putting cigarettes out on her skin, slapping her, crushing her with his disgusting
body. “Now Kitty is home,” he’d said to her, and never before had the word
home
seemed so lifeless.

He was planning on keeping her forever, and he could afford it. There were special offers for people like Carl Duffy. People like Carl Duffy liked to have souvenirs. Who knows how many girls he’d had from Bochko before her, how many keepsakes he had. She had thought perhaps Terry had exercised that right before quitting her and she’d had to know for sure, which was why she’d visited him. But now she knew she’d gone to see Brennan because he had to be punished. Carl Duffy would have what she was looking for, and she would see the blood spurt from his throat before she took it away from him.

The map told her she was just a few kilometres northwest of Kehoe Glenn. She had no worries that she would fail to find Mr. Sugar at home; he ordered all his food off a website. It was brought to the door three, four, five times a day. He sent out for breakfast, for fresh coffee, for snacks. She had watched in raving hunger as he devoured pizzas, Chinese food, and burritos in front of her. He would toss her a crust or a noodle and she’d have no choice but to accept these scraps. After his meals and entertainment, the huge man would often lapse into sleep and leave her manacled for hours.

She’d only escaped the threatened permanence because Sugar had been careless and that Henry man had been a fool. Chance was the only way she was going to get out, and
chance had favoured her. She ran up onto the escarpment, feeling her blood surging in her veins. She was an animal now, a machine, an agent of deliverance. Carl Duffy was about to die, and she was about to be free. It was August 15, a Monday evening in her twenty-sixth year on earth.

] 26 [

Monday, August 15, morning

The morning after Wingate’s underground ordeal, Hazel woke to a quiet house. She’d had a fitful sleep as her legs had jumped and woken her repeatedly. She’d wanted to go right back out, to mobilize whatever was needed to get those girls out of there, but both Wingate and Greene had convinced her they needed a better plan than that. And backup. And the aid of the Queesik Bay Police Department.

Cathy had gone to Greene’s wife’s B&B, but Emily would have nothing to do with it and insisted on sleeping in her own bed. Now, at 8 a.m., Hazel opened her mother’s room and called to her. There was no reply: it was early, and her mother had taken to sleeping late. But Hazel noticed that her breathing was strange. It was shallow and raspy. She went closer to the bed and called to her mother again.

“Jesus Christ, Hazel, what time is it?”

“Eight in the morning. I have to go in.”

“Fine. Go in. Have a blast. Leave me alone.”

“You’re breathing funny.”

“Honestly, Hazel,” she said, and her intake of breath was accompanied by a small whooping sound.

“Let me see you,” her daughter said, but Emily just settled back under the covers. Hazel sat on the bed and reached for her, and started pulling, and to her surprise, her mother shot up in bed with an unbuttoned look of rage on her face.

“
JUST GO TO WORK
!” she shouted, but Hazel wasn’t paying attention to her mother’s words. Her skin was almost yellow and her eyes were lividly bright. She was in the grip of a high fever. Hazel thought she saw a tinge of madness in her mother’s eyes.

“Oh my god, Mum. You’re sick.”

“I know I’m sick –”

“No, you have to get up. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Get me a couple of aspirins and stop meddling. Where is your father? I work all week, I expect to sleep in!”

“Mother, get up!”

Emily shook her head in exasperation and threw the covers back. “Get out of the way.”

Hazel got up off the bed, and her mother stood, surprisingly steady. She walked to the bathroom in the hallway. Hazel heard her peeing and flushing, then the water in the
sink ran. When she came back in, it was clear the little journey had taken all of her strength. Emily sat heavily on the edge of the bed.

“What day is it?” she said querulously. Then she pitched forward and Hazel had to lunge to keep her from falling off the bed.

There was no choice about how to spend the morning, even though, at this moment, Forbes and Wingate were meeting Greene at the station house. Hazel was already forty minutes late for the meeting when she was able to call in from the ER. They’d told her to take her time, but that was the very thing it felt they’d already run out of.

“Ketones,” Gary Pass had said. “That’s the sweet smell.”

“What does it mean? What’s happening to her?”

He explained that she hadn’t been getting enough nutrition, that her body had been cannibalizing itself. She’d come very close to being gravely ill, but they were pumping her full of fluids, and she would recover.

Had she missed
all
of the signs? Her mother had been tired, depressed, she wasn’t eating much, but she’d been
present
, more or less. Hadn’t she?
Or
, Hazel wondered,
was I too distracted with the case?
The diagnosis of myeloma had come in Saturday morning. Pass had called her with the news, and it was only two days later. How could she have declined that much in forty-eight hours? Pass reappeared in the hallway mid-morning and beckoned to her quietly.

“She’s more alert now,” he said.

“Is she happy about it?”

“Ecstatic.”

He held the doors open to the ICU, and Hazel went in before him. He came around and led the way to Emily’s curtained space. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her head turned away. Dr. Pass left Hazel there and drew the curtain.

She called to her, but there was no response, so Hazel took the seat beside the bed and looked at the nape of her neck where the hospital gown drooped. Her mother had always had a strong neck, a neck to support her bullheadedness, and from where Hazel sat, it looked like a tiny machine shot through with cables. Small hairs stood up on it. Hazel had wrapped her little arms around that neck, she’d smelled her mother’s cascading hair as she clung to her with her legs circling her waist. It was hard to imagine that body capitulating to anything. It had withstood so many insults, so many setbacks.

She leaned forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Mum? Are you awake?”

Emily shrugged the hand off her shoulder and Hazel withdrew it into mid-air.

“Don’t be upset with me. What did you expect me to do? Let you die in bed?”

Silence. Hazel let her have it. She slumped back in the chair and waited. “I don’t want you to die,” she said, almost under her breath. “I could take … twenty more
years of your mulishness, your forked tongue, your shitty cooking, your game shows, your wattled friends … I could take a lot more of it, Mother. All you have to do is sign on. Gary says the myeloma will move so slowly you could live to a hundred with it.”

Emily sighed deeply. “I’m not a shitty cook.”

“You burn tea, Mother.”

Emily turned over onto her back, a compromise between ignoring her daughter and looking at her. “Your speeches must rally your troops to joyful insubordination.”

In profile, her mother’s face was like a broken half of something. Her nose was thinner and sharper, her cheekbones stuck out of her face like tiny elbows. “Are you feeling a little better?”

“They’re pumping me full of chocolate malts.”

“Something like that.” She got out of the chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Her mother’s eyes tracked over to her. “You’re going to be eighty-eight in a week and a half –”

“Is this the pep talk continuing?”

“Let’s have a party. Drinks and everything, screw Dr. Pass’s injunctions. We’ll get everyone together.”

“A party of scarecrows.”

“We’ll change the mood in the house, Mother. Say yes. It’ll be good for both of us.”

Her mother shook her head slowly. “I don’t want any bloody parties. Save it for the wake.”

______

While her mother napped, Hazel waited for Greene, Forbes, and Wingate to arrive at the hospital, where she had arranged to use an empty chapel as a meeting place. Greene arrived with a large bouquet of flowers for Emily and left them at the nursing station, unaware that Hazel could see him from the window in the door. She wanted to hate him for trying so hard to seem like a good man. Then she remembered that he’d always
been
a good man. She was the one who had driven him out and only her shame and her pride prevented her from seeing him now the way she’d once seen him. This thought arrived whole, slipping in alongside her worries.

She opened the door to the chapel. “In here,” she called to them.

“How is she?” Wingate inquired when the door was closed behind them. There were four pews inside the small room with an aisle running down the middle, a podium with a cloth draped over it, and a stained-glass window that was actually a glass box with a few lightbulbs in it. They arranged themselves at the ends of pews like four priests having a convocation.

“She’s stable,” Hazel said. She found she couldn’t look any of them in the eye. “I stopped seeing her. I stopped noticing.”

“It’s not your fault,” Wingate said.

“She doesn’t want to live. How do you make a person want to live?”

The three men nodded, acknowledging her difficulties, but, like most people, they didn’t know what to say.
Wingate said, “Cherry gave a name. She said Kitty would kill a man named Sugar. I’ve already looked through six Westmuir directories. There are, like, eighty people with that name in the county.”

“Mr. Sugar.”

“If that’s his real name. I’m René Arsenault now.” He dug into the inner pocket of his jacket and removed the laminated ID card in Arsenault’s name. He handed it to Hazel.

“He gave you this?” she asked.

“Someone in that place could make a fake ID in less than three minutes. It looks real, too. There’s even a hologram in it.”

She held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth. “So they have a way of assigning memberships to false names and they generate their own ID. That’s how they know who’s getting into the cabs. They take reservations or something. Or there’s something on the ID that confirms membership.” She ran her hand along the surface, feeling a difference in textures, and held it against the light again. “You were lucky this Ronnie didn’t run your own fake ID. Christ. He figured you got in legitimately, and he didn’t check. Now you’re in for real.”

“But I have to reserve. Or arrange a time, or something like that. I don’t think you can just swan in …”

“So how?”

“Wherever it is you sign up in the first place and they issue you your ID. There’s probably only one way to
communicate with them.” He held his hand out for the card, but she’d slipped it into her pocket.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “I know where it is. It’s the casino. Five Nations. That’s why they ask you for your driver’s licence.”

“Back up?”

“You go to the pickup window and they hand you back a brand-new Five Nations players card and your driver’s licence. Like everyone else. The thing is, you never gave them
your
licence in the first place.”

“The card they give you operates the door,” said Forbes.

Wingate looked at him, a little sharply, Hazel thought. “I know that,” he said. “And the name I registered with the service is on the card they made for me.”

“So how do you arrange a second visit?”

By mid-afternoon, her mother’s colour had returned. As far as Hazel could tell, they’d now pumped about ten litres of fluid and nutrition into her and damned if she didn’t look fresh as a three-day-old daisy.

“How are you?”

“I feel reanimated. Like Frankenstein’s monster.”

“You just needed watering.”

“Don’t get too used to this. My miraculous comebacks.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon annoying the nurses at their station, reading the newspaper standing up, and
making and receiving phone calls. She went back and forth to her mother, bringing water, magazines, and cookies. She was taking an early supper with her when one of the exasperated nurses came into the room to tell her she was wanted again.

It was Wingate, waiting out by the nurses’ station. “How’s she doing now?”

“They’re still rehydrating her. She was like a dried-out old washcloth.”