Anarchy (6 page)

“No sign of it. People are sitting on their hands anyway. You heard about those people in Wenatchee?”

“That's in America.”

“It's not that far.”

“You'd have been out of business a long time ago if everyone stopped spending money every time Americans acted weird.”

“I dunno. They say it's happening some place in California too, bunch of people going off the grid. There's a funny mood around.”

“People watch too much TV.”

“Someone saw that bird thing up at Punchaw.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Dad.” She loosened her shirt, checked the time, reached down for the folder and started getting its contents back in order.

“You know. That thing in England. The angel of death.”

“Oh yeah, that thing.”

“They got photos.”

“Dad. Jeez. People have seen that thing everywhere. I bet there's scientists in Antarctica who looked at a penguin funny and said it was that thing. People see what they want to see, you know?”

“You should be here. Thérèse said it's the same in Montreal. What are you doing?”

The papers were rustling loudly. “Oh. Just some unpacking.”

“At this time of night?”

“I've been busy, Dad. New job. New place.”

“You sound tired.”

“Yeah.” She knew she ought to spend a few minutes trying to talk a bit of sense into him, especially if he'd just been listening to Tess and getting wound up by her drama-queen thing, but she wasn't in the mood. She was in another mood, and wanted to get rid of him. “Really tired.”

He let her go a few minutes later, by which time she'd got the folders straight and every disk in the right case. She pushed them out of sight behind the bed. Out of sight, out of mind. She was going to forget the Knoxes for a little while, forget that she might be officially reprimanded the next day, forget what it might mean for her career. She'd figure something out tomorrow. She'd start early.

She twisted the lamp back down until the light softened, moved the laptop around to the foot of the bed, and settled herself on her stomach facing it. She pulled up the site. She examined herself in the window on her own screen again. Another window listed
scrumgrrl
's friends online, a little pink heart next to each name. She sent an inquiry to
daisy19ab
, who wasn't too much of a talker and liked to get going quickly.

Moments later a little strip of text blipped onto her screen.

hey u

A powder-blue bedroom, a spiky-faced spotty girl with a phone to her ear. Goose typed:

u busy?

The girl tapped at a keyboard with her free hand.

no a boy brt

boys suck

The jaw opened and closed, the head tilted from side to side, while the finger tapped slowly. Two conversations at once. Goose, as so often, wondered why she bothered.

brt 1 min

All right, Goose thought. One minute exactly.

ok

where ur pic

?

no pic

??

o wait

The girl blew kisses into the phone and tossed it aside onto her bed. She shifted around to lie on her elbows, propping the keyboard in front of her, and typed rapidly.

couldn c u 1st comin up now

ok

Goose watched as the girl, who probably wasn't nineteen or called Daisy or even in Alberta, frowned and cocked her head. She went very still; her eyes seemed to grow too wide, and younger, a child's eyes. They lit up with shock. She pushed herself violently away from her computer, her mouth opening in what looked like a scream. Her hand swooped with blurry speed down onto her keyboard and the window vanished. Goose's laptop trilled at her, and then again, over and over again: a window appeared saying “Begin Live Chat With?” and then another, and another, windows spilling all over the screen like the unstoppable iterations in a hall of mirrors. She slammed the machine shut and pulled out the cable.

6

N
o luck?”

Goose handed the folder back to Jonas, shaking her head.

“You look like you were up all night.”

“I didn't sleep too good.”

“You worry too much.”

“Yeah. It's only my freaking job.”

“Whoa.”

She stared out of the window. As soon as it had turned light she'd done a circuit of the town, without knowing what she'd hoped to find. Footprints, maybe. Torn clothes in the undergrowth. A suicide note. The crows flitted from pole to pole, passing compulsive opinions on her efforts.
Plotte. Chienne.

“You told me you'd find her, Jonas.”

“Mmmm. Guess I lied.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Hey.” He ambled over to stand behind her. “It's gonna be okay. She'll show up.”

“Where, though?”

“Kid's gotta eat.”

“Don't tell me. You're going to go sit in Traders and wait for her to show up asking for a sandwich.”

“Whoa, that's some smart thinking. They should make you an inspector.”

She'd even thought about locking herself in the cell, to see whether there was some trick about the door that meant you could open it from the inside. It was hard to think straight. A churning in her belly was telling her she'd screwed up. Everyone would know she'd screwed up.

“I'll tell you something,” Jonas went on. “She's nowhere in Alice. I guarantee it.”

She bit back a retort.

“Musta hidden out somewhere in the trees and walked away in the dark. Over toward Hardy, if I had to guess. She'll be getting hungry. Can't hide out forever. Someone's gonna see her on the roads.”

“I'm not too sure about your predictions anymore, Jonas.”

“Hey. You know I'm right. Look, Goose, we've had kids go running off before. It's not a big deal. You should get a couple hours' rest, drive over to Hardy. Someone's gonna call in saying they picked her up trying to hitch a ride south. That's how it usually goes.”

“This kid's different,” Goose said.

“Can't argue with that.”

She saw what he was getting at, though. She thought about it as she drove out of town on 30, turning away from the inlet, up the steep switchbacks where unexpected stands of silver birch broke up the forest's usual dark wet monotone. The persistent weirdness of the file had distracted her, or maybe her memory of the girl's uncanny stare when she'd tried talking with her in the cell. She should have ignored all that and concentrated on the simple facts, the way Jonas did. Think of the girl as a runaway seventeen-year-old and it suddenly didn't seem so hard to guess where they'd eventually find her.

Of course, when seventeen-year-old girls went missing they fairly often showed up dead. Goose pushed that thought away, ashamed of her first reaction to it:
well, that would make things a lot simpler.

Food. The kid would need to find food. Whether she broke into someone's house or stole from a store, there were only three places she could get it: Alice, Hardy, Rupert. Beyond them was nothing but trees and water until you got to the next towns down-island, too far for her to reach unless she had a vehicle, and if she'd got a ride somehow then the game was up anyway, there'd be nothing Goose could do. Alice she could rule out already. Jonas was right. It wasn't the sort of place anyone could go half a day without being noticed. So if the kid hadn't already been driven south, or if she wasn't dead in the forest somewhere, most likely she'd walked all night over the pass and would now be tired, cold, hungry, and sneaking around the edge of Hardy looking for a way of getting something to eat.

And if she managed that, then what? There was still nowhere to go. Hardy was, literally, the end of the road. The asphalt tangle that represented civilization here reached one of its terminal threads. The highway came up all the way from the other end of the huge island, from Victoria, where she'd been living for a year until the Hardy detachment lost a constable to long-term sickness and she was assigned to replace him. She'd driven its whole length. It narrowed and emptied as it went north. About halfway up it started avoiding the port towns on the east coast, swinging inland, forgetting everything but forest and logging roads. A couple of kilometers short of Hardy it reached its only significant destination, the ferry terminus on the south side of Hardy Bay, where most of the summer traffic that traveled it would go aboard for the long passage to the northern mainland. Its work done, it immediately gave up any further pretense of being a highway and debouched almost shamefacedly into Hardy proper, kicking around an entirely unnecessary roundabout and dropping down the hill like any of the town's other wide, badly surfaced, unpopulated roads until it ran into the strip of park at the edge of the bay, where its last gasp was marked—for reasons Goose has never got to grips with, even after she'd paused in her jog one morning to read the sign—by a meter-high wooden carrot.

Hardy was an invisible frontier. You could get in your car there and start driving and never have to worry too much about how far it was to the next gas station or flush toilet or place where you could pay money and get what you needed. You'd be on roads with laws and fellow travelers, and within a few hours you'd be looking out the window at somewhere that bore no more indication of proximity to the wilderness than a retirement suburb in Florida. (Goose's maternal grandparents wintered in one of those, the setting for family Christmases that had turned her Anglo as well as atheist.) Here—she drove over the pass and down toward the east coast and Hardy Bay, passing blitzed disaster zones of freshly logged land—you still had a toehold on the asphalt. But beyond . . .

Beyond was the north. At this time of year you could still feel it, the huge darkness coming down too early and leaving too late, not quite willing to retreat into its arctic lair of permanent ice, and the ocean air blowing over the top of the island, heavy with the memory of storms. South of where she was there were schools, jobs, houses that got bought and sold, wireless networks, which meant that anywhere might as well be anywhere else, local differences erased by shared information. North were canneries (but the salmon runs were failing), logging (but the age of paper was ending), tourism for a third of the year, the government's guilt at having abandoned the remnants of the coastal passage's aboriginal nations to their “heritage,” and otherwise only the great inhospitable emptiness where tourists came to fish or to look at from the safety of their ships.

People told her Hardy had seen better days. She found it hard to believe. Although she had to admit that its parking lots were hilariously optimistic. Virtually every building that wasn't a private house lorded over wide concrete skirts with parking spaces neatly painted out, as if it expected tens or hundreds of visitors to show up at any moment. When she closed her eyes and thought of Hardy, it was those white-striped grey wastes she saw, tragically deserted, filling up with puddles when it rained (it often rained), coming to life only late at night when drunk kids used them to practice handbrake turns. She drove slowly into town. People didn't walk around, as a rule. With all those empty parking spaces there wasn't much call for walking. Pedestrians tended to be the old native guys, not usually looking their best, or young couples, also usually native, pushing strollers. If Jennifer showed up here, scurrying across the concrete wastes, she'd stick out a mile. Goose circled a couple of times and then pulled over opposite the market.

It felt wrong. She couldn't have said why. Maybe it was just the after­effects of a bad night's sleep (she was trying not to think too much about the look on the girl's face as she slammed her computer shut). She did a few more circuits, watched a couple of other spots, left town to drive a few kilometers south along the highway and back again. The longer she spent looking, the harder it became to imagine the silent, intense girl from the cell skulking around town trying to steal some pop and a candy bar. There was a mismatch somewhere. Jennifer had opted out of all this, the dreary stores with too many parking spaces, the kids her age pushing strollers, the little that was going on. She'd stopped doing it. If her case file told you anything, it told you that. Logic said she had to go somewhere to eat, but then logic said a lot of stuff. Jennifer didn't say anything.

Goose wasn't cut out for watching and waiting anyway. She'd never been any good at sitting still. Better to get it over with, she decided. She made her way to the station in Hardy to face Cope.

Take away the flagpole and the patrol cars parked in front and the station could have been a small-town community center, or even an unusually large and ugly house. It looked like it might have been shipped from Ottawa in prefabricated sections, to keep the budget down.

“Morning, Marie.” Janice took the idea of first names very literally, or so it seemed, or perhaps she'd just been flustered by Goose's full name and fastened on the only element she was confident of pronouncing; for whatever reason she couldn't be persuaded to use “Séverine,” let alone anything as far beneath her dignity as a nickname. But then her own official title was “front office support staff,” which actually meant “receptionist,” so Goose tried to be sympathetic.

“Morning, Janice.”

“You're not on rota today, are you?”

“I wanted to have a word with the sarge.”

“Oh. He's out. It's been crazy crazy this morning. Crazy crazy crazy. Six calls already. Can I get you a— Oh, would you look at that.” She flicked a switch in front of her and settled her mouth into a receptionist smile for the benefit of her headset. “Hardy Police, how may I help you?” Goose turned away as Janice listened, wondering how to occupy herself for the next hour, and was about to head back out to the car when she noticed the receptionist waving urgently.

“Okay. All right. Let me note that down.” Janice made big eyes, and mouthed something at her. “All right. We'll get an officer over there as soon as we can. All right, Margaret, dear. All right. Bye. Marie, would you be a dear?”

She would. Some actual work would come as a relief. “What's up?”

“Vandalism. Rupert. I'm sorry, everyone else is so busy. Did you hear that the plane couldn't come in? It's these problems they're having. I'm sure it won't take you more than a moment. That was Margaret Sampson. Some damage to the artwork outside the hall. I can't say the name properly. Do you need the address? You know, the big hall in Rupert. It's the Band building.”

Goose had only been to Rupert once, but she knew. Rupert was smaller even than Alice.

“She sounded kind of upset,” Janice said, cautiously.

“I'll be nice.” Goose had the impression that Janice had been looking forward to the arrival of a female officer, and was more than slightly disappointed when said officer had turned out to show no obvious aptitude for her vision of empathetic, tactful, X-chromosome policing.

If Hardy was the back end of Canada, Rupert was the back end of Hardy. The whole town was on a meager square of reservation land tucked against the next bay south. It amounted to a long crescent beach of grey sand and pebbles, two rows of houses on either side of the shore road, and a hectare of trailer homes on the slope above. It had its own tiny store for coffee, cigarettes, and DVDs. Goose hadn't even thought about keeping an eye on it. Everyone would know within minutes if Jennifer showed up in Rupert. It was her hometown and, by the perverse law of celebrity, she was probably its most famous inhabitant ever.

Margaret Sampson turned out to be the small round liaison officer Goose had already met. She was one of a group of four small round women all aged and dressed more or less the same, standing unhappily outside the Band hall. The building was much more impressive than the RCMP station in Hardy, a pleasantly weathered barn of two significant stories. On the street side it was supposed to look like one of the big houses the coastal people used to live in. They'd decorated its long flat windowless front with a mythical creature painted in the distinctive northwest coastal manner and put up a kind of statue in front in the same traditional style.

As she got out of the car, Goose saw that both the painting and the statue had been defaced.

They must have used charcoal. The effect was worse on the painting, where both heads of the double-headed serpent thing had been all but blotted out. The statue was in the shape of two bearlike creatures supporting a pole across their shoulders, and a bird—probably a raven, Goose knew they were big on ravens—sitting on the pole. All three animals had been smeared black around their mouths. Margaret Sampson was close to tears. “It's so disrespectful,” she kept saying, as Goose opened her notebook. “They should be ashamed.”

“When did this happen?”

“This morning.” They all agreed. “Just now.”

“Just now?”

One of them had walked by not half an hour ago, she said. “Plain daylight.”

“But someone must have seen something?”

They looked at each other. No one had seen anything.

“You're sure this happened in the last half hour?”

“Absolutely sure.”

A man walking with a cane had come out of one of the ramshackle houses nearby. “Hey, are you the police?”

“Officer Maculloch, sir. From Hardy.”

“You gonna fix the TV?”

“Why don't you keep quiet?” one of the women asked.

“TV isn't working.”

Goose concentrated on Mrs. Sampson. “No one saw anything at all? It might not have been kids. Anyone on the street? A car?”

“Keeps showing junk.”

“Will you be quiet?”

Goose stepped away to give herself some room and found herself looking out across the bay. It was the same kind of day it had been ever since she'd arrived, as wet as the weather could be without rain, the clouds like a misty lid resting on top of the world, everything you looked at—sea, sky, trees, or the abrupt sawtooth silhouette of the mainland peaks far across the water—a variation on the underlying green-grey. Like every other stretch of the fifteen-hundred-kilometer waterway that ran tight under the mountainous shadow of the continent's northwest coast, the bay was studded with islands, overlapping each other in perspective so that water, rock, and damp conifer forest blended together in the middle distance as if they were all the same substance. In the summer, so they told her, there'd be cruise ships going up and down the Inside Passage every day, and cruising yachts stopping off in all the bays, but all Goose had ever seen offshore was the endless indistinct jumbled wilderness.