Anarchy (11 page)

“Someone drive up there!” she yelled, but one of the younger men was already jumping into a truck; he gunned it hard enough to squeal and was away at joyrider pace almost before she'd finished shouting.

“Dan's a volunteer,” the woman said. “Up that way.” But Goose didn't need directions now. Smoke was rising, grey as the slow clouds but billowing and dancing as if possessed. The road ran out at the end of town and became a dirt track turning away from the shore. It humped over a woody ridge and led to a line of houses dismal even by Rupert's standards, lots carved apparently at random out of the trees, dwellings thrown up in the first temporarily cleared patch that came to hand. The last of them was burning. Already its feeble walls were black silhouettes, and the trees around were juggling sparks in their droopy branches.

“Oh my God,” the woman said. “Oh my God.”

People were running up along the road behind them, but it was already and obviously too late to do anything but watch. The house was crumpling as if squeezed by an orange fist, tumbling in on itself, fragile as ash. Goose stopped at a safe distance and ran out, trying to expel Annie from her head and concentrate on her job. Make sure everyone's clear of the neighboring properties, she thought, that was the next thing. But everyone was already outside. A huddle of spectators stood in the road ahead of her, a few older folk, a woman with a baby, a boy. They turned as she sprinted up, still in her wetsuit. The boy shrunk anxiously up against the woman with the baby. Muffled by the wet forest, they heard the siren from the firehouse above the town.

“Is anyone—” Goose began.

“They all got out,” an older man said.

Against that infernal background, Goose slowly realized who she was looking at.

“Okay,” she said, breathing a little easier. “Okay. No one's hurt?”

“That's my whole house,” said the woman with the baby, who had to be Patience, Jennifer's mother. “Everything I got.” The elderly man put his arm around her shoulders awkwardly. The boy—she remembered his name from the file now; Cody, the kid with the problems—squeezed himself hard against her. He didn't seem to be able to take his eyes off Goose. He scratched tentatively at his mother's waist. Goose thought it was some spasmodic twitch and then noticed, with an unexpected wrench of pity, that the poor kid was waiting for someone to hold his hand.

“No casualties?”

No one answered her. The house had chosen that moment to surrender its roof. They all backed away a step at the slow-motion collapse, retreating from a wheezing puff of lateral fire.

The engine arrived a few minutes later. The guy who'd jumped in the truck to fetch it was driving it himself. He'd only been able to raise a couple of his buddies. They yelled at people and wrestled with their equipment and stared at the burning house as if challenging it to step outside, but already the conflagration was calming. It had burned the building inward and now met itself in the middle and found itself out of fuel. The heat on their faces was fading. The volunteer guys ran into the property's yard and made a great show of dragging some of the stuff piled there away from the blaze. It was the correct protocol, she supposed, but even to her inexpert eye there didn't seem to be any danger of the fire spreading. The permanently damp trees rebuffed any sparks and burning fragments as thoroughly as the ocean would have.

She'd left the radio lying in the road back by the beach. Her own phone was in the car. She went and called Jonas. Her fingers hesitated with unaccountable fear before prodding out the number, but he answered right away, and he'd heard about the emergency, and officers were on their way.

She rubbed her face. The wetsuit felt simultaneously hot and clammy. She felt as if she'd done most of the right things. No one was hurt; the engine was here. She went back to the group around Ms. Knox, who was still holding her baby, a squashy-faced upright girl interested in the extra attention. The boy Cody was sitting cross-legged on the dirt road, staring at his lap, completely ignoring a woman who was trying to say something comforting.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Hi.” The group let her in. “Officer Maculloch. I'm police. Off duty,” she added, feeling her hair salty and frazzled and her face flushing. “The patrol car's on its way. May I just talk to Ms. Knox for a moment, please? I'm very sorry about your loss, Ms. Knox.” Crap, that was what you said when someone died. “Your home.” The mother stared grimly, jiggling her daughter. “How about over by my car, if that's okay? Can someone bring her out a coffee and some blankets?”

She persuaded the gathering to disperse. Ms. Knox followed her along the road to her car. The pink kayak strapped atop it looked particularly inappropriate. She didn't say a word and didn't look back. Her son leaped up like a startled insect when she set off and followed, mouth opening and closing. Whenever Goose looked at him, she found him staring at her as if she were an alien.

She composed herself for a moment, then put on what her own mother (dark) called, not kindly,
ton sourire blond.
My blond smile.

“Hi,” she said, in a bright kindergarten teacher tone. “Cody, right?” The boy stopped like in a game of statues.

The trick, she'd once discovered, was to imagine you were talking to a dog.

“I know, I don't look much like a policeman, huh?” She grinned, picturing herself as an idiot sorority girl. “I've been kayaking. That's my kayak.” She patted it. “My name's Séverine but everyone calls me Goose.”

She paused for a moment, and then added,
“Honk
.
”

A flicker of a grin came and went in his face, fast as an eyeblink. Like all the aboriginal kids he had very dark eyes that looked somehow wary: maybe it was the contrast between the whites and the almost black iris, and the woody tinge of the skin.

The only pair of eyes, she thought, which might have seen what happened in the house that night at the beginning of December.

She stuck her arms out at her sides and flapped them, thinking,
Nice puppy. Good dog.

“Honk honk
,
”
she said, goosily.

“Cody don't want to talk to you,” said the mother, but the boy had almost smiled. Almost.

“I'm sorry, ma'am. Can I get you anything for now? Someone'll bring some coffee right out.”

“We have nothing left,” she said.

“I'm very sorry.” The duty officers would do all this properly in a couple of minutes when they got here. Still, she had to make a bit of an effort, though the woman radiated the sullenness of anger and shock. “Can you describe to me what happened?”

“I smelled smoke. Ran upstairs to get the kids.”

Something like seventy percent of these incidents turned out to be smoking in bed, they'd told her. “You were downstairs at the time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see how the fire started?”

“I was just cleaning up. I turned round and smelled the smoke.”

The woman would barely look at her. The woman who'd accused her own daughter of murder and thrown her out and, as far as Goose could tell, forgotten about her. All right, she thought. It's too early for this. Leave it to someone else. “Okay. We'll get you a hot drink and somewhere to sit down. One of my colleagues will need to ask some questions later but there's no hurry. Okay?” She couldn't do the smile on adults; it hurt her mouth to try.

Two patrol cars came, and then the other engine, from the firehouse on the far side of the district. By then there was no fire at all, only a lightly smoldering ruin. People milled around everywhere. She told Webber and Gudgeon what she needed to say and let the two duty cops start gathering information. Now that uniformed officers were present as well as all the volunteer guys kitted up in their helmets and heavy boots, the small crowd's attention drifted away from her. She went back to her car and leaned against it, resting her head on the molded plastic of her boat. She closed her eyes for a few moments, gratefully separate from the hubbub.

“Her coat's gone.”

She jumped. Cody flinched back a step. He hadn't made a sound as he'd come up to her.

“Whoa! Hey, sorry. You startled me there for a second.”

“Cody!” Patience shouted from the front of the neighbors' house. “Get over here!”

“Wait. Whose coat?”
Crap,
she thought,
I forgot the fricking smile.
“Cody?” But the boy was running away, still looking back at her. He bumped into a fireman. She started after him, but he ran to his mother, who fixed Goose with a nakedly hostile stare. The baby started to cry.

9

W
hose coat?

She knew whose coat.

• • •

She stopped on the road at the place she thought she'd dropped the radio and got out to have a look. She found its cracked fragments in the messy grass by the cemetery fence. It looked like the fire truck had run it over.

She used her mobile to ring Jonas and tell him she was on her way. She also called Janice to confess about the radio. Janice, sounding excited, promised to get the relevant paperwork ready. She made all the calls while she was driving over to Alice. She promised herself she'd call Annie as soon as things seemed quiet enough that evening.

She jogged up the stairs to her apartment, left the wetsuit in a smelly heap by the front door, and took a rapid shower. The hiss of hot water had a vacant echo. Perhaps it was the bare walls, she thought. The place wouldn't feel so empty once she got some pictures up. Tomorrow, definitely.

Jonas wasn't in the station when she got there, and the car was gone. He rolled in fifteen minutes later, looking as harassed as she'd ever seen him.

“Sight for sore eyes,” he said.

“I'll make it up to you.” She meant it too. She wouldn't mind spending a bit more time in the station and a bit less time alone in her apartment with only the Internet for company.

“Hey. Duty calls, you know. All must obey. Comes with the territory. Did they get that fire out?”

“Yeah. Kind of died all by itself.”

“The Knox house, huh.”

“Yep.”

“It's like they're the family of doom. They don't need the rescue squad, they need an exorcist.”

Says she put a curse on him
. Her head was buzzing with little disturbances, things she couldn't seem to forget about but also couldn't quite identify. It was as if Jennifer's file had infected her. Reams of paper that added up to a great big question mark. Information without comprehension. A total silence at the heart of it, like fog.

Jonas was watching her sympathetically. “I'm kidding,” he went on. “You know most likely the mom lit up a smoke and fell asleep? Right?”

“I guess.”

He smiled to himself and did his slow-motion headshake. “You're thinking Jennifer's out there burning her own house down?”

“I don't know what I'm thinking.”

“You got to get some proper sleep. Listen, I can be on call tonight—”

She cut him off quickly, and more aggressively than she intended. “No. I can do my job. I'm okay. You go on home.”

Alice had to be one of the smallest, dinkiest postings in the whole of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The building looked like a holiday bungalow pretending to be a police station because that was what it in fact was. Jonas eyed her and then raised a sarcastic finger to point through the office wall, in the direction of his bedroom, ten paces distant, as if she'd forgotten that his home was under the same roof.

“Or go fishing,” she said.

He chuckled.

“Sorry.” He raised his hands to show he didn't need an apology. “I'm okay, Jonas, honest. I could do with a regular evening's work. Cope was right, I need to stop thinking about that kid.”

“I know how that is.”

“Off you go. Going to get some fishing in before dark?”

“Nah. Hockey's on in . . .” He glanced at the wall clock. “Dang. East Coast game's already started.” He was already circling the desk to switch on the small TV he kept in the corner, moving with an urgency she'd never seen him apply to police work. “Only a few weeks till the play-offs. Things starting to get tight.”

She watched in mild disbelief as he waited for it to tune in. “Jonas. You live next door. Go watch in your own room.”

“Yeah.” He was too absorbed to care. “Just checking the score real quick.”

“Jeez.”

“Here we go.” Quacking commentary burst from the TV; he turned it down sheepishly. “Oh, man. Not again. Wait.” He flipped channels up and down, as if trying to enrage her. Goose didn't even have a TV. She associated television with her mother's infuriating inattentiveness, and anyway, she watched the Internet instead. “What's this?”

She looked at the screen. “Looks like hockey to me.”

“That's yesterday's game. They're showing the wrong game. Oh, man. Oh, man.”

“Jonas. Go home.”

“What the heck . . .” He poked buttons on the remote.

“Turn it off and go home, okay?”

He sighed. “Okay.”

“I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Maybe it's a sign. God wants me to go catch fish.”

“Yeah. Fresh air. TV rots your brain.”

“That's why you're so smart, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right. You know how to get hold of me if you need me.”

“I'm good. Go relax.”

He gazed at the TV like a disappointed lover. “Yeah.”

Completely inexplicably, and to her secret horror, her mortification, there was a little voice inside her shouting,
Don't leave, Jonas, please don't leave me here alone.
She had no idea what was wrong with her. She blurted something out as he opened the door. Was she really trying to delay the moment when he closed it behind him? Really? “Oh. You didn't see any news, did you?”

“What sort of news?”

“I don't know. I heard . . .” She clasped her hands together under the desk, out of his sight.
Goose, I'm scared.
“Something. Something happening in Toronto.”

“Toronto?”

“Just something I thought I heard. I might have got it wrong.”

“Stuff doesn't happen in Toronto. There's a law. Like, a total event ban.”

She'd never heard Annie scared before. Annie could be temperamental, crazy, hyper, but not frightened. She was too heedless to worry about anything.

On the other hand, she couldn't possibly have heard Annie at all. Not on the police radio.

“Everything okay?”

Goose nodded and motioned him out the door before she was tempted to confess that it wasn't okay but she didn't know why. “Go fish.”

• • •

She rang Annie, got her voice mail, left a couple of messages. Annie was a sulker. If she'd been offended by the way Goose had cut her off she might well not be answering her phone. There was a kind of rhythm to their relationship now, after a couple of years, a predictable pattern of peak following trough. Goose didn't think it was all that likely to survive the long-distance stress much longer, but she was in no hurry to reach the crisis. It wasn't like she was going to find anyone else up here.

She rang her father.

“Séverine! God, you had me worried.”

And already wished she hadn't. “What are you worrying about now, Dad?”

“You weren't answering.”

“I have a lot to do. You know I can't talk to you every day, right? Dad? I grew up. They let me join the police.”

“Is everything okay up there?”

“Sure. Usual thing. How about you?”

“You're not getting any of this stuff?”

“What stuff ?”

“Christ, angel, I'd have thought the police would know what was going on.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Dad.”

“I'm talking about the whole country going down the crapper.”

“You've been talking about that for as long as I can remember you talking.”

“Bank runs? Satnavs? The CBC?”

She paused before answering, looking around the quiet office, and out between the slats of the blinds at the unchanging stillness beyond.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” she said. “I haven't had time to catch up with the news.”

He made an incredulous bark. “I know you're a long way from anywhere up there, but shit. Don't you people at least sit around and come up with some kind of plan?”

“I heard about something in Toronto.”

His turn to go silent for a while, now.

“You heard about something in Toronto,” he said.

She should just get him off the phone. She wasn't in the mood for this. “Okay, Dad—”

“I think maybe you and your colleagues should go turn on the news. If you have news. They're saying the CBC got the plague now and half the country has no TV.”

Her eye fell on the cube of plastic with its blank screen, Jonas's household god. A normal thing. Every house had one, every building here in this tiny town in its long valley under its huge sky.

“You're telling me you haven't heard any of this?”

Any what? Nothing was happening. She could hear it not happening, hear the usual silence of Alice, peppered by foulmouthed crows.

“Dad, sorry, I'll talk to you later, okay? I'm on duty.”

“You carrying a gun?”

“What?”

“Do you have a gun? Do they give you a gun?”

“Of course I'm not carrying a gun. This is Vancouver Island, it's not freaking Somalia.”

“Will you promise me you'll wear one? Séverine? Promise?”

“No, Dad. No. Try and calm down, okay?”

“Do it. For me.”

“I'll call you later.” Much later. By a stroke of luck the station phone began to ring. “Got to go. Bye, Dad.”

Her evening's work began.

• • •

She considered going around the back of the station and knocking on the apartment door. Jonas was still the only person she knew in town, knew properly, that is. She'd stopped to chat with neighbors in her own building a couple of times, until they'd begun asking her whether she accepted Jesus as her savior.

But Jonas was a colleague. She couldn't treat him like a buddy. It would make it impossible for them to work together. God knew she wouldn't have wanted
him
knocking on
her
door on her off nights, wanting to come in and watch TV.

She went home. She picked the wetsuit off the floor and tossed it in the bathtub, not wanting to deal with the laundry room. She hung her uniform up by the door in readiness. There hadn't yet been a call-out at night, but she had a feeling tonight might be different.

What she wanted to do was get straight into bed. The kayak had done its job; she was exhausted, properly tired, her body full of that odd lightweight feeling suggesting that she'd probably get to sleep pretty quickly no matter what was going around in her head. But . . .

She looked at her laptop.

A very weird feeling came over her.
You don't want to know
, it whispered. It was as though the laptop were one of those stars, a white dwarf or whichever, a tiny dense ball hot with energy, waiting to explode into the silent vacant zero of the apartment. It contained everything, all the information, all the knowledge, the whole rest of the world; without it she was floating as if alone in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific.

She rubbed her face crossly. Just not used to small-town living, she told herself. New place, new job, missing Annie. Twenty-four hours worrying she was going to be fired. No wonder she felt a bit below par. She'd look up whatever had got Dad all freaked out, not that it took much. Maybe spend half an hour clicking around her bookmarks before settling down.

She squatted comfortably on the bed and opened her browser.

Instead of her home page the window displayed a grey rectangle with three words, large, white, upper case.

VOUS ÊTES ICI

As many times as she quit and restarted the browser, as many times as she rebooted the machine, however often she ran her antivirus and security software, she could not get past that page. The information, the knowledge, the rest of the world had all gone, replaced by that one message.

VOUS ÊTES ICI

• • •

In the middle of the night she thought: it would be different if the sun would come out. Even if just for an hour. Everything always looked so much better under the face of the sun.

• • •

Staff Sergeant Cope came to the station the next morning at nine, unannounced. The first Goose knew of it was the rattling of the door.

“Maculloch?”

She straightened in the chair. Her neck felt horrible. She must have been slumped sideways. “Sarge.”

“Were you asleep?”

All the lights were on. There was a quarter of a mug of cold coffee on the desk in front of her. She'd kicked her shoes off; she felt for them with half-numb toes as discreetly as she could manage. “I guess I must have been. Sorry, sir.”

“You look like shit. Where's Paul?”

She'd tried so hard not to fall asleep. She remembered now, leaving her apartment before six and walking through the dark town, finally giving up on her own bed. Switching on the lights, making coffee. She'd even tried watching TV. Some rolling news report was all she could find. It kept returning to shots of people in coats and scarves queuing on wide sidewalks, in Ottawa, in Edmonton, in Toronto. A peculiarly Canadian version of a crisis. In America there were people arming themselves, filling shopping carts with canned goods and heading off into the hills. Their northern cousins lined up in the cold and waited their turn. She tried to think of them as real people, worried people, whole cities full of people worrying, Annie among them, but the predawn hour and the scratchy picture made it all seem so far away. The heart of it wasn't in whatever glitch in the banking system had got people panicking and lining up to get their cash out, or in whatever was wrong with the transmission satellites (sunspots? cyberterrorism? aliens?—there was a panel discussion about it on the rolling news, people she didn't know in a studio thousands of kilometers distant; what did they have to do with her?). The heart of it was here. Her apartment. The cell the girl had walked out of. The burned shell of her house. The fog.

“He, um . . . He should be here any minute.”

“What kept you up all night? Anything I need to know?”

She picked up the mug by reflex, sniffed its contents, put it down. “No, sir. I've been having trouble sleeping.”