The Wandering Soul Murders (17 page)

“You can’t be in here with a kid.” The man behind me was huge and menacing; they grow their bouncers big in the north.

“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m just looking for someone.”

His hand didn’t relax its grip.

“I’m looking for Jackie Desjarlais,” I said.

He looked at me stonily.

“Can you help me?” I said.

“If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re lookin’,” he said, and he started pushing me toward the door.

“Tell him I’m a friend of Theresa’s,” I said. “My name is Joanne and I’m staying at the shacks down by the lake.”

By the time I finished the sentence, I was out the front door, blinking in the sunlight.

I had just started down the steps when I heard someone call my name. I turned and I was face to face with Jackie Desjarlais. I would have known him anywhere. He was, as my grandmother would have said, the dead spit of his sister: the same slight body, the same dark eyes, the same wide, generous mouth. Except that everything that was fluid and graceful in her had gone slack in him.

I smiled at him. “Hello, Jackie,” I said.

“You know me?” he asked, surprised.

“You look so much like her,” I said.

“No,” he said, “she was beautiful.”

Unexpectedly, his eyes filled with tears. He lit a cigarette and began to cough. He coughed so hard that he bent over double; finally, he straightened and wiped his lips and eyes.

“Fuck,” he said. “These things are goin’ to fuckin’ kill me.” For the first time he noticed Taylor. “I’m sorry,” he said to her.

She moved toward him. “It’s okay. My brother Angus says that, too.”

Despite everything, I felt a warmth. “My brother Angus.” The words sounded good.

Jackie’s face seemed to open a little.

I touched his arm. “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me about Theresa. She was my son’s girlfriend, but I never really got to know her.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “Terry showed me the Christmas pictures.”

“You must have been so proud of her,” I said.

He looked at me as if I was insane. “Proud?” He repeated the word uncomprehendingly.

“Proud of all she accomplished. Going to university. Putting the sadness she knew here behind her. How did she get out of here, Jackie? Tell me.”

He drew deeply on his cigarette and blew a careful smoke ring. “There’s only one way for girls to get out of here,” he said. “I got nothin’ more to say.”

He opened the door to the hotel. Somewhere in that stale-aired darkness Dan Seals was singing “All That Glitters Is Not Gold.” Jackie looked at Taylor. For the first time, he smiled. His smile was Theresa’s smile. As his mouth curved into that familiar mocking line, my heart lurched. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a loonie and handed the coin to Taylor.

“Little Sister,” he said, and he turned and walked through the door.

I guess I had known how Theresa Desjarlais became Christy Sinclair from the moment I saw the bleak sandy streets of Blue Heron Point: no businesses or offices where a young girl could work to earn enough money to get away, just hotels and bars where women’s work was menial and permanent.

As Taylor and I walked down the incline from the hotel, I felt leaden. Taylor’s hand was small in mine, something to hold on to. The rain started when we were halfway down the hill. Just a few drops at first, then more, closer together. By the time we reached the fishing shacks the heavens had opened, the wind had picked up, and there were whitecaps on the lake.

Taylor and I were soaked to the skin. We got inside, towelled off and changed into dry clothes. Taylor pulled down the bedspread and crawled into bed.

“I didn’t sleep on the island, Jo,” she said. “I had to watch.”

I sat at the table by the window, listened to the rain pounding into the turbulent lake and thought about the lonely life of Christy Sinclair.

She had been a prostitute. The little girl who had been beaten by her drunken parents had used her only asset to get out. Somewhere between Blue Heron Point and the University of Saskatchewan, where Peter met her, Theresa Desjarlais had transformed herself. She’d become educated, learned how to dress, changed her name. She’d walked away from everything that made her a victim, started a new life. She’d escaped.

At least for a while. But the past was there, as permanent as the teddy bear tattoo on her left buttock, the teddy bear tattoo that was the same as Bernice Morin’s. And then … And then what? Christy had walked into Mieka’s store one afternoon, and Bernice Morin had been there. What had happened after that?

I was so deep in thought that I guess I didn’t hear him knocking. Finally, frustrated and soaked to the skin, he opened the door. It was the boy who had delivered the message the night before. He was wearing a bright neon shirt and a cap like the one of Taylor’s he’d admired so much.

I smiled and told him I liked his hat, but he didn’t smile back. He was solemn with the importance of his message. “There’s a phone call at the hotel for you. An emergency, they said, for Joanne. They sent me to get you. Quick.”

I looked at Taylor sleeping, warm in her bed, and I looked at the rain outside.

I decided in a second.

I grabbed my bag, took out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the boy. “You remember Taylor. Stay with her for a while, will you? I don’t want to take her out in this, and she’ll be scared if she wakes up and I’m gone.”

His hand shot out and grabbed the five dollars.

“I’ll give you five more if you’re here when I get back,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

I grabbed my jacket. It wasn’t much use against a rain that seemed torrential, but it was something. As I climbed the hill, the gravel gave way beneath my feet. It seemed I took one step forward and slid back two. The whole summer had been like that – filled with frustration, filled with rain, filled with death. I was glad to see the soft fuzz of light from the hotel through the grey. I ran across the parking lot. Incredibly, the kids were still sitting on the steps. A couple of the more sober ones were holding green plastic garbage bags over their heads as protection, but the rest were so drunk they didn’t seem to realize it was raining. A girl was standing at the side of the steps vomiting. I could hear her retching as I ran past her into the hotel.

The hotel manager was wearing the shirt he’d been wearing the night Taylor and I arrived, the one that said, “Jackfish in Lard Makes a Fisherman Hard.”

“There’s a message for me,” I said. “An emergency phone call.”

“Says who?” He was smiling, enjoying his role as rustic funny man. This was going to be rich.

“The boy who brought the message last night came by the fishing shacks a few minutes ago. A little guy about ten, wearing a neon T-shirt and a new cap.”

“He must’ve been playing a joke,” the proprietor said.

“A joke?” I said.

“Yeah, a joke.” His face rearranged itself into a mask of concern. “Of course, he could be a thief. These kids around here learn fast. If you’ve got valuables in that shack, you might be smart to hightail it back there. This hotel is not liable for anything that gets taken from a guest’s room. You’re warned. There’s a sign on your door.”

“There aren’t any valuables there,” I said. And then I thought of Taylor. Taylor was there.

For a split second I considered asking him to help me. Then I looked into his eyes. He wouldn’t have crossed the room to save his own mother. I was on my own. I ran down the hill, slipping in the loose wet gravel, catching myself on bush branches to keep from falling. I ran and fell and picked myself up and ran again. I went as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The front door to the shack was open. There was no one at the table. There was no one in the bed.

I called her name. I called and called, but as I sank down in the chair at the kitchen table, I knew she couldn’t hear me.

I ran outside and looked along the shoreline. It was deserted. I thought I saw a boat heading through the north channel, but it was raining so hard I wasn’t sure. I tried to listen for the sound of a motor, but it was no use.

As I walked to the shack, I could feel the panic rising. I opened the screen door and went in. “This is how it starts,” I said, and my voice echoed in the empty room. “This is how it starts.”

In the mirror above the dresser, I could see myself. My hair was dark with rain, and my face was wet, but I looked like my ordinary self. I thought of the dozens of times I had seen the parents of abducted children on television. For all of them, the nightmare must have started just like this, on an ordinary day when, just for a moment, they had dropped their guard, and everything had changed forever. They had been ordinary people living anonymous lives, and then, in the blink of an eye, they were famous, their tense faces flickering across our television sets, their voices breaking as they justified themselves to the audience. “I only turned my back for a second; she was right there.” “We never left him alone.” “I always told him not to talk to strangers.”

After the media wearied of their stories, the lost children’s pictures cropped up on bus shelters and milk cartons. And I would look at the pictures of these children, faces shining, hair freshly cut for the school photographer, and tell myself this wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been careful. This wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been conscientious; if they had really loved their kids; if they hadn’t taken chances. It was a mantra to distance myself, protect myself, and it had worked for twenty-one years.

Now, without warning, I had crossed the line that separates the lucky ones from the losers. Now I would be the one on
TV
, and it would be Taylor’s picture that would be … A thought struck me, terrible, annihilating. I didn’t have a picture of Taylor. She had only been with us since February. I hadn’t taken her picture. I wasn’t a good parent. I was negligent. Without a picture, I could lose her forever. I could forget her face, and it would be as if she had never existed. Suddenly, finding a picture was the most important thing. There had to be one somewhere. My mind spun crazily through the possibilities. And then, I remembered.

The new bike. The morning we bought her new bike, I had taken pictures of Taylor wobbling down the driveway. I remembered looking through the view finder and noticing that the pink stripe on her safety helmet was exactly the shade of pink on her two-wheeler.

I hadn’t failed her, after all. Suddenly, as if it had appeared as a reward for my diligence, I saw the postcard. It was on top of the dresser. The printing looked hurried. “Don’t call the police for 24 hours and she’ll be back safe.” I turned it over; on the other side there was a picture of the Kingfisher Hotel, seductive under picture-book turquoise skies.

Twenty-four hours … I began to shake at the thought of what they could do to her in twenty-four hours. I thought about the men next door. “So where’s the hairless pussy around here?” My stomach heaved, but I pushed myself up from the table and walked next door. Their car was still out back, but they could have taken her in a boat. A boat would have been the thing. They could have taken her out in the channel to the big lake, to the islands where you couldn’t hear a child screaming. Their screen door was unlatched. I went onto the porch and pounded on their front door. There was no answer, but I had to be sure. I tried to smash down the door, but it was surprisingly solid. They had left the front window open an inch. Only the screen protected it, but when I tried to loosen the screen by hand, it wouldn’t budge. Years of paint had stuck it firm. I went back to our place and picked up a butcher knife. I used the knife to cut through the screen and I reached in and raised the window. I crawled through onto the kitchen table. There was no one there.

Their suitcases were open on the floor. I started rummaging in them, looking for something that might help me know what had happened. The cases were filled with clothes for the fishermen. Someone had bought these things for a man who was a husband and father. (“This will be a good shirt for Dad when he goes up north.”) At the bottom of the suitcases were the magazines. They were unspeakable. Think of the worst thing you know, and this was worse. The children looked as if they had been drugged. I hoped to God they had been drugged, anything so they wouldn’t feel the things that were being done to their bodies, those fragile, perfect bodies.

When I looked at the magazines, I knew there was a connection between this perversion and Taylor’s disappearance. And I knew something else. Everything was connected somehow to the Lily Pad. But how? As I climbed the hill to the hotel, I repeated the word, pounding it into the ground with every leaden footstep.

This time I didn’t use the phone in the hotel. There was a pay phone outside the restaurant where Taylor and I had eaten that first night. I went into the restaurant and got change, then I came back out and called Jill Osiowy.

She answered on the first ring. “They’ve taken Taylor,” I said. “They left a postcard with instructions. They say if I don’t call the police, they’ll bring her back safe in twenty-four hours.”

“Do what they say,” Jill said. Her voice was dead. “Jo, Helmut Keating called. The people who own the Lily Pad are after him. He found out something about Kim Barilko’s murder, and he got greedy. He says they’re going to kill him. Jo, I believe him. He wants me to get into their computer. He says if I key in the word ‘teddy,’ I’ll get everything I need. I can stop them, Jo. I can stop those bastards.”

Suddenly, Jill’s voice broke. “Do you know what they did? They killed Murray and Lou. They slit their throats and dropped them in my garbage can.”

There were black spots in front of my eyes, and my knees went weak. I thought I was going to pass out. I opened the door to the telephone booth and took deep breaths till the faintness passed.

All the time, Jill was talking to me. “Jo, do what they say about Taylor. Don’t call the police. Don’t take a chance with her.”

The line went dead. For a moment my options flashed wildly through my mind. There weren’t many. I thought of Jill’s old tortoiseshell-cats, killed as a warning, and I knew I wasn’t going to leave Taylor with those monsters for twenty-four hours.