Читать книгу Beautiful Lie the Dead - Barbara Fradkin - Страница 12

SEVEN

When Frankie Robitaille finally had a chance to sleep, he didn’t wake for thirteen hours. During the two-day storm, which saw wave after wave of snow and sleet blanket the capital, he had put in eighteen-hour days behind the wheel of his plow, keeping himself awake with Tim Hortons coffee and endless country and western songs on his iPod. For over two days, he managed no more than the occasional break to grab some food and a catnap on the couch before heading out again.

By Wednesday evening, the snow was under control and his shift supervisor had sent him home before he became a serious hazard on the road. Dinner, a quick stop to give his kids a goodnight kiss and a promise of Disney World at March break, and he fell into bed. He slept through the alarm the next morning and the kids’ preparations for school, not waking until the dog shoved her cold, impatient nose into his face. Frankie stared at the clock in disbelief. It was almost noon.

He turned on the television as he stumbled around the kitchen brewing coffee and fixing himself a heaping plate of bacon, eggs and toast. Every muscle of his body ached. He allowed the local news show to drone on in the background with a mixture of patter, features and brief news bytes. Gradually he became aware of a story about a missing woman. The camera panned the scene of volunteers trudging through snowy streets, probing snowbanks with ski poles.

He picked up his plate and carried it to sit down in front of the TV. A police spokeswoman was asking all residents throughout the city to check their own properties for any sign of the woman, who was believed to be wearing a hooded red jacket. She had last been heard from on Monday evening, and if she had been injured, she might be lying beneath forty centimetres of snow. So far the official search had concentrated on the residential areas between downtown and Carlingwood, but the woman could have gone anywhere.

More than two days beneath the snow, Frankie thought. She’s dead, no doubt about it. He got to thinking about all the miles he’d covered in those days, all the acres of pure white snow. The garbage bins, snow shovels and kid’s sleds he’d tossed up from under that pristine cover. A memory rose up, of a slight bump, a flash of red on the snow behind him. Slowly he set his fork down. A strange sensation churned in his gut. Was it possible? What day had that been? Where had he been? On a residential street somewhere, in the dead of night. Wednesday. No, Tuesday.

He felt sick. Tuesday morning, more than fifty-four hours ago.

He grabbed a city map and began to retrace his routes, trying to remember where he had been plowing early Tuesday morning. Somewhere in the east end not far from downtown, but nowhere near where the police thought she might be. But what if they were wrong? After five minutes he threw the map aside in frustration. He had to see the streets for himself and replay the night in his mind’s eye.

He revved his pick-up out of the drive and headed into town. The roads were clear now and a brittle sun glared on the fresh snow. Salt crews had covered the main roads, polishing them a glossy black. Frankie lived in Cumberland at the far eastern extremity of the city, but at midday it took him less than half an hour to reach the fashionable old neighbourhood nestled in the crook where the Rideau River joined the Ottawa. He had covered Vanier to Manor Park that night, but as near as he could remember, he had been around Lindenlea and New Edinburgh when he’d bumped something. Both neighbourhoods bordered the more exclusive enclave of Rockcliffe Park, home to ambassadors and wealthy CEOs, and Frankie was never sure where one area ended and the other began. Rockcliffe had no sidewalks and had an English village feel, despite the multi-million dollar homes set back on huge properties. Lindenlea was quaint and smaller in scale, but still way beyond his bank balance even if he had wanted to rub shoulders with associate deputy ministers and university profs. His black pick-up with the roof rack and the trailer hitch would look like a bouncer at a tea party among the Audis and Volvos in the drives.

Beechwood Avenue bisected the area, dividing the haves from the have-nots in neighbouring Vanier. Once he’d turned onto the narrow streets of Lindenlea, he eased off the gas and tried to visualize that night. It had been dark and dead quiet, poorly lit by streetlights. He’d been driving around a sharp curve and was just picking up a bit of speed when he’d felt the jolt. Now he drove slowly through the looping streets, searching for the right layout. Nothing. The neighbourhood was full of short, curvy streets clogged with snowbanks. He widened his net, venturing into the nearby fringes of Rockcliffe, where unassuming bungalows worth close to a million peeked from behind snowladen cedar hedges. Turning off Juliana Road onto Maple Lane, he had a memory flash. The stretch had looked like this. He had turned left just like this and had been accelerating towards a wide-open stretch when the bump occurred.

He inched down the street peering closely at the snowbanks made by plows over the past days. No hint of red. No telltale lump in the snow. He parked his truck and began to walk. There was almost no one out on the street. No volunteers probing the snowbanks or checking under the boughs of huge spruces that drooped to the ground under the weight of snow. Only a solitary woman walking her Labrador retriever off leash. The dog looked at him suspiciously and barked, like a stranger was a weird sight in the area.

The woman took in his salt-splattered pick-up, his well-worn bomber jacket and his three-inch growth—he’d left without shaving that morning—and her eyebrows shot up. “Can I help you?”

He started to shake his head then stopped himself. “I’m a snowplow operator, and I think I hit something with my plow a couple of days ago. I’m just checking around.”

Her eyebrows drew together now, like a teacher who’d heard that line before. “What did you hit?”

“I don’t know. A sled, maybe? Red shovel? Do you live around here? Did anyone find anything like that?” He wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell her the real reason. Maybe just because she looked like she could get him in a whole lot of trouble if he even mentioned he might have hit someone.

She was backing away now, her dog tightly leashed at her side. “I think you’re wasting your time. Wait till the snow melts in the spring.”

He watched her stride off up the street and knew she didn’t believe him for a minute. He took a deep breath. Now what? He hadn’t brought a ski pole, and although he had a shovel in the back on the truck, it was a hell of a big snowbank to be digging up.

Nonetheless he took out his snow shovel and tested the mound of snow left by his plow. It was granular now and hard to penetrate. New snow had been blown on top of it by the homeowners clearing their own driveways. It seemed an impossible task. He needed help, but if the dog lady was any indication, the neighbours on this street wouldn’t lend a hand. On the other hand, it was too early to call the police.

Up ahead the dog was barking again, and when Frankie looked up, he saw the animal circling a pile of snow by a driveway halfway up the block. The dog was pawing excitedly.

Jesus, Frankie thought. Grabbing his shovel, he headed up the block. The woman glanced towards him, her jaw dropping. She yanked at her dog, dragged it away from the snowbank and set off almost at a run.

I bet she calls the police, Frankie thought. Well, at this point, maybe that’s not a bad idea.

* * *

Brandon entered his mother’s home office, which was located on the second storey at the back of the house. Her desk was positioned in the bow window and flooded with sunlight. In the summer, the yard would be a paisley print of perennial beds but a blanket of pristine snow hid them all, and even the snow-laden Colorado blue spruce at the rear of the yard could not improve his mood. The Valium was wearing off, leaving him a brain of cotton wool through which thought moved sluggishly.

He knew his mother would be out most of the day. The Superior Court calendar had been booked months in advance and nothing, not even the disappearance of her future daughter-in-law, would keep her from the arcane motion being heard today. She hadn’t even tried to send her junior. It was as if she knew there was no great crisis and Meredith was off somewhere for her own selfish reasons, as if the police were poking snowbanks in vain and there would be no gruesome discovery to disrupt her in the middle of her argument.

What the hell did she know?

When the desk itself yielded no answers, he spent an hour meticulously going through the papers in her filing cabinet. Like her life, they were carefully compartmentalized. Her university lectures, course notes and student assignments were all in her faculty office, and her case files, court transcripts and legal research were in her law office downtown. Only her personal papers, and perhaps the occasional work in progress, were kept at home, but even so, thirty years of personal papers presented a daunting challenge. Bank and investment statements, household bills and receipts, tax records, minutes of her charitable and committee work. He was astonished to discover an entire file drawer devoted to him. Not just every report card he’d ever received, but every letter he’d sent from camp, every crayoned art offering and handmade Mother’s Day card he’d ever drawn. He knew that as an only child he was important to her, but he’d always thought she had a busy, fulfilling life beyond the home. He remembered her being constantly on the phone, delayed at meetings, and listening with half an ear to his childish chatter while she scanned the latest judge’s decision. He remembered a childhood of cleaning ladies, babysitters and even catered meals when she was in the middle of a case.

She’d always seemed slightly aloof, avoiding the mushy cuddling that Meredith’s family bestowed at the smallest excuse. He couldn’t recall her ever saying “I love you” except in jest, and the unfamiliar words had not come easily to his own lips when Meredith had first demanded them. His reticence had almost cost him the warmest, most exciting woman who had ever come into his life.

He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the open file cabinet, his child’s drawings crackling with age as they filtered through his hands. She had cherished every single artefact of his past, squirrelled it silently away in her own private drawer, never told him how much she loved them or how proud she was of him. In rare moments, uttered only the words “Your father would be so proud.” He had no memory of his father, who had died when he was two months old, but his mother had painted an idealized image. Even as a child he’d suspected no one could be as loving a husband, as devoted a father, as brilliant a lawyer nor as beloved a professor as the Harvey Kent Longstreet of her descriptions. He’d been her professor, thirteen years her senior and light years ahead of all her other suitors in maturity, wisdom and allure. Brandon had once overheard her saying to a friend that, despite plenty of offers, she’d never remarried because a love like Harvey Longstreet came along only once in a lifetime. At the time, he’d been startled, even discomfited, by the tremor of passion in her impeccably modulated voice.

Now she surprised him again with the strength of her devotion to him. He remembered the urgency in that fragment he’d overheard that morning. “He mustn’t know!” took on a less sinister, more protective meaning. Was she just trying to shield him from something? What? The answer was not on her desk, which was filled with mundane household matters, nor among the drawings and letters of his childhood. He shut the file cabinet and pulled open another one, chock full of carefully labelled file folders. Taxes, telephone, travel, wedding, will... Neither the wedding folder nor the will held anything unusual.

On a whim, he pulled open an upper drawer for the H’s. Nothing under husband, but thumbing through files in search of Harvey, he came across a file labelled “Hatfield”. Not recognizing the name, he almost skipped by, but its thick, unruly contents gave him pause. He pulled it out, and a jumble of yellowed newspaper clippings from the Montreal Star fell out. He caught the reporter’s name—Cam Hatfield—and a couple of headlines. Tributes pour in for dead professor. The private anguish of a public man. A new brand of teacher.

His scalp prickled. He picked up one article, unfolded it along its brittle seam, and began to read:

Confusion continues to surround the death of one of McGill’s most popular professors, who was found dead in his McTavish Street apartment on Monday morning. Harvey Longstreet was a member of the prominent Montreal family that founded the Anglo- Canadian Transportation Company, now known as CanTransco, in 1855. The professor’s young widow and two-month old son are in seclusion at his uncle’s Westmount home and the family is requesting privacy to deal with the tragedy. Colleagues willing to speak to the newspaper expressed shock and disbelief, stating that Longstreet had shown no signs of depression or stress—

The doorbell rang distantly. Brandon looked up, confusion giving way to fear. Meredith! Quickly he stuffed the articles back into the filing cabinet and kicked the drawer shut as he headed out the door.

A young woman stood on the doorstep, bundled against the cold in a blue parka, a red tuque with a red and white pompom and matching mittens. Was there a hint of excitement in those blue eyes, he wondered? His hopes stirred.

Then she held up her badge. “Detective Peters, Ottawa Police,” she said, enunciating carefully as if the label were unfamiliar to her. “Are you Brandon Longstreet?”

He nodded. “Any news?”

“We haven’t found her, no sir, but we’re making progress on her movements. May I come in?”