A Door in the River (32 page)

Now, on Thursday afternoon, she entered the cordoned-off space where Wingate’s body was still being operated from without and said hello to Michael. After half an hour of silence, he said, “I can tell you a little about myself, if you want.”

“Only stuff I could find out by Googling you,” she said. “I don’t know what the rules are here.”

“That’s fair. Google would tell you I’m a props master for film and TV. I handle all mechanical props, like appliances, weapons, devices – ”

“Devices?”

“You know, the box with the switch and the light on it that’s in every other episode of
24
?”

“I don’t watch TV.”

“Anyway, I make that box.”

“Okay.”

“And I live in New York, and I have for thirteen years.”

“And you are … married? Single? Kids?”

“You wouldn’t find that on Google,” he said, and he offered her a conciliatory smile.

They sat on either side of Wingate’s bed for half an hour after that, not saying much. The machines breathed for him, and the monitors watched him, and it felt like it would take a long time before anyone could tell her what his fate might be.

Normally, she’d just have taken it. But she was going by the books now: she requisitioned it out of evidence. Then Greene had asked her about it and told her he’d have to check with Willan. He told her to come back after lunch. She had two hours to kill then, and she decided to use them wisely: she decided to take in the late August air
and try to settle her jangling nerves. She had the thought of driving somewhere and just sitting and watching the leaves move around in the wind. But instead she stayed in town and walked down Main Street a ways, and then up, north, into the oldest residential streets of the town. She’d known that part her whole life, and she looked at some of the houses she’d been inside. On some streets, she’d been in all of the houses; she’d known the names of successive generations, successive owners. It was like she could pass through the very walls. Although some of these houses had been the homes of childhood friends, most of her experiences within them were adult ones. After thirty-five years on the force, she’d had cause to be in many of these houses.

After her walk, she went back down to Main Street to The Station House Grill for lunch and let herself have a BLT. She’d eaten lunch in the Station House at least a thousand times. It had been on this same spot for eighty years, forty years more than the now-demolished train station it had been named for. It had never changed. Dmitri Agnostopolis had opened it, his son Jim took it over, and Jim’s daughter-in-law, Grace Wong, owned it now. Grace made a coconut cream pie almost as good as Cathy Wiest’s.

But the Station House and the houses in the old part of town were among the few things that weren’t changing here. Not only were the crimes Port Dundas was seeing becoming more serious, but the outside world was truly
infecting it now. When she was a kid, no one particularly cared for this part of the province in the summer, with its bug-infested waterways and its tiny towns with nothing to recommend them except for a few guesthouses on the water for fishermen. It changed slowly at first. The urban middle class learned how to swim. Motorboats became affordable. The moneyed crowd figured out it was prestigious to have a summer place in the same province they made their money, a place of their own they could go to all summer, forever.

And towns like Port Dundas couldn’t say no. Not to all that commerce, all that foot traffic. People got rich off it. But the gargantuan houses that were built on the new lots lasted a lot longer than the money did. Westmuirians had been squeezed out of their own countryside. It made her angry, but she’d accepted it by now.

What was left of the town of her childhood she felt fiercely protective of. Main Street was the map of her life. She was eleven before her parents decided she was old enough to walk to town on her own, but the moment she was allowed to go, she was there all the time, running in and out of her father’s store, “helping customers,” going to the bank for change, looking at the river under Kilmartin Bridge, following the leaves skirling in rainwater in the gutters, buying sodas at Ladyman’s. (She looked at the venerable old restaurant now, through the window of the Station House. It was badly in need of three coats of
paint both inside and out. The great old sign that poked out over the sidewalk, and famously had 109 lightbulbs in it, had been gone now for twenty-five years.) When she was eleven, the heart of the main drag had been O’Connor’s Stationery, the S. Baker Pharmacy, L’il Folks Shoes (and beside it, the more solemn, leathery-smelling Famous Footware), Micallef’s, The Station House, Ladyman’s, the Riverside Café, Porelli’s Grocery, Porelli’s Meats, the Red Door Bakery, a Stedman’s, and the cinema – The Beverly – which had been her favourite place in town.

By the time she was thirteen, she felt like she owned the town. She knew every inch of it, was a repository for its dailiness, its history. People used to joke that the mother was in City Hall and the kid was directing traffic out on Main Street. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t know her on sight.

Now her mother was coming to the end of her life, and her own personal Port Dundas was vanishing. Charles O’Connor had died in 1965, the Porellis closed up both their shops and moved to Kitchener in the 1970s. Stores came and went, although the ornately carved keystones above their doors, and the beautiful lintels and soffits were still there if you traced your gaze up the rain-softened stone. She had truly kept watch over this place her whole life, and now she felt the first moment of the final act beginning. Ray Greene was in charge. Willan had anointed him. And they
were
going to straighten the 41 so it ran
east of the townsite, that was surely going to happen. They’d connect Mayfair in a straight shot to Port Dundas and Fort Leonard without actually running the highway through the middle of town. It was going to miss Dublin entirely. She wondered if the investors in Tournament Acres knew anything about that. She suspected not. Then again, maybe that town would be saved. Maybe only Port Dundas would die.

After lunch, Greene gave her permission to do what she’d asked to do, and Hazel filled out the rest of the paperwork. She waited for Wilton while he was in the evidence locker in the basement, and then she drove down to Kehoe Glenn with the knife they’d found in Travers’s chest.

There was a little cool sting in the air now. Summer was not officially over until September 21, but this always happened in the second half of August, this sudden encroachment into the heat. It never stopped shocking her when the summer began to end. You wait so long for it and then, like a switch being thrown, the cold makes its appearance.

Cathy looked at Hazel through the screen door and then opened it, and Hazel walked in past her, touching the widow softly on the upper arm. She went into the kitchen and sat down, placing a paper bag on the table. Cathy came in hesitantly, seeing the bag and not liking it. But she took a seat.

“I hope those are french fries,” she said.

“No.”

“Then I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

Cathy went to make the drinks and dropped an ice cube in each glass. “This is going to be an unpleasant experience, isn’t it? I can feel it.” She was weaving a little, side to side, against the counter.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have another,” Hazel said.

“This is my first, Officer. But I
am
stoned. I presume I am not arrested.”

“No.”

She brought the drinks to the table. “So, why are you here?”

“The girl’s name, the one you saw, her name was Larysa Kirilenko.”

“Is she dead?”

“No. And we haven’t captured her. Yet,” she added and reached for her drink.

“So I have to leave my home again?”

“No,” said Hazel. “I promise you, she’s gone. You’ll never see her again.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I know what happened to her now.”

Cathy didn’t want to know, though. Hazel could see the fear in her eyes. Now was the moment she would learn how her husband had earned his death.

“What’s in the bag, Hazel?”

“I told you Henry might have been trying to help her. She was in a place … a place there was no way out of. I saw it. I do think that Henry was trying to help her. I think he found out somehow through Jordie Dunn and that’s why he went there. Somehow Larysa was able to stab a guard with a knife and she took the guard’s stun gun. That’s how she got out. But she was six kilometres from where Henry’s truck was found. So either she tracked him, with an intent to kill him, or he told her where to go, to meet him.”

“And what was he going to do with her when she showed up?”

“Bring her to the police? Get help? But she killed him instead. She used the stun gun, which she had probably seen used down there. They’re not supposed to kill, not even this type. It was an early kind of stun gun, called a Lea Stinger. Russian. She must have known it wasn’t lethal. And she had the knife, which she did use to kill with. Twice.”

“So she didn’t
want
to kill him? They were friends? She
did
kill him!”

“I want to show you the knife, Cathy. It came out of evidence, so it’s pretty awful. We can’t clean it yet. Do you think you can look at it?”

Cathy was shaking her head
no
but looking anxiously at the bag. “Why?”

The question was enough. She had to see it. Hazel removed a ziplock evidence bag from within and lay it
on the table. The hunting knife they’d removed from Lee Travers’s chest was inside, still in its open position, and encrusted with dried blood from its tip to the end of the handle. “This is what killed that guard and also Terry Brennan and Lee Travers, who ran the whole thing. It’s a brand-new Buck knife. Your husband’s was the only store north of Mayfair and south of Sudbury to sell this brand of knife. This particular one is a Buck/Simonich Raven Legacy, a top-of-the-line knife that costs almost four hundred dollars. Someone at the store confirmed for me yesterday that the one they had in the case is missing. He hadn’t noticed it until I asked him. Henry gave Larysa this knife, Cathy. Because he wanted to help her escape.”

“You said she was looking for something.”

“We still don’t what it was.”

Cathy picked up the clear plastic bag. It had a date and a code scrawled on a white patch in permanent black marker.

“And you think he gave her this.”

“I believe he did.”

“And is this supposed to make me feel better?” She fell silent and dropped the gruesome object to the tabletop. “This isn’t proof my husband was a good man.”

“No, you’re right,” Hazel said. “It isn’t. But if you can believe he was, then proof is nothing.”

Epilogue

Late August

The man at the customs desk at Kiev Borispol stamped her passport and handed it back to her. Her visa had been for a full year. He asked her why she came back so soon. “I didn’t like it in Canada,” she said. “I got homesick.”

She’d paid cash for the cheapest flight: a one-hopper from Toronto on Delta and Aerosvit. When she stepped out of the airport at noontime on a Friday at the end of August, it was hotter than she ever remembered the summer being. She hadn’t eaten real food in three months, her
own
food, and she stopped in the first decent place she could find and ordered smoked whitefish, potatoes, and a Heineken. Afterwards, she purchased a package of Yava
Golds and had the first cigarette she’d smoked in ten years.

She’d exchanged the rest of the Canadian money in the airport and received a total of almost ten thousand hryvnia. This was a lot more money in Ukraine than twelve hundred Canadian would have been in Canada. She could be independent for three months on that money, thinking through what her next move should be, planning how to execute it. She did not have to stay in Ukraine. She could opt never to be found by emigrating to Russia. In Moscow, she could change her name, her looks, her life. This was very appealing. It was desirable. But she could not leave Ukraine without
knowing
. For a week she lived in a cheap hotel and thought, and ate, and smoked, and slept.

When she felt stronger at the end of that week, she paid 350 hryvnia for a ticket to Lviv and arrived in her hometown late one afternoon. She walked from the station to her and Matthieu’s flat on Doroschenka strasse and simply rang the bell. She did not expect him to answer. She did not expect to find him there. But if he
was
there, she would know from the instant she saw his face whether he had played a role in what had happened to her, and she would know what to do.

She buzzed again and this time, she heard his voice. “Yes?”

“Matthieu?” she said, feeling an unexpected thrill in her stomach. Maybe it had been a mere terrible dream, a life gone temporarily off course. It could not have been him!
Just hearing him say the simple word “Yes” convinced her of this, and she said her own name. There was silence. Then he released the door and she walked in and up the stairs to their flat. He was waiting on the landing, looking perplexed and delighted all at once.

“Laruschka? Oh my goodness, my goodness –” He opened his arms to her and stepped forward to grasp her tightly. Now she could not see his face, and she pushed back to look in his eyes.

“Hello, Matthieu.”

“I don’t understand. Did you … did you quit school? Come in, my goodness, my love, come in! Why did you not call?” He threw the door wide, but she saw he had a worried look on his face, and she could not interpret it. She entered, keeping her eyes open, and she went into the kitchen, where she dropped the satchel she had bought at the airport in Toronto and sat. The kitchen smelled good. Matthieu was making a stew on top of the stove in one of her crockpots. It was an innocent scene. He stood on the other side of the kitchen, in the doorway, studying her. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t ask me why you haven’t heard from me in ten weeks?”

He pulled his head back sharply on his neck. “What do you mean? We’ve been emailing every other day. Sometimes
every
day.”