Читать книгу Death in October - Lowell Inc. Green - Страница 11

It was Jake who found Lee’s hair. His nerves were screaming at him; he found the waiting intolerable, but there was something else, something poking around at the edges of his consciousness. What had he seen during his wild ride down the laneway? A movement of some kind. Where? Puzzled, he slouched to his feet and, ignoring Charron’s glare and admonition not to touch anything, borrowed Stapley’s flashlight and stepped outside.

The rain had stopped, a few stars were out, and to the east across the Gatineau River, a faint glow indicated the roosters’ instincts were correct. Dawn was just on the other side of the mountain.

Jake began to explore the patio, casting the cone of light from side to side. Something drew him to Grant’s car, the empty socket of its smashed headlight faintly visible in the growing light. He opened the driver’s side door and augmenting the overhead light with his flash, explored first the front seat and floor then the back. Nothing. Slowly he withdrew and closed the door. His heart was pounding. What was it? And then the veil dissolved. He saw it clearly. Something moving beside him on the seat. Running around to the passenger side, he threw open the door.

He didn’t need the flashlight to see it. There it was, almost under the seat, tight against the gearshift hump where it had fallen during his wild ride down the laneway. A clump of blonde hair, maybe five inches long, tightly tied with a blue ribbon. Lee’s.

* * *

The pregnancy had been a delightful surprise and the cause of considerable concern. Only three months into their marriage, Carol had suffered a traumatic miscarriage late in the second trimester, and her doctor was not at all sure if she could become pregnant again, let alone carry a child to term. Fortunately the doctor’s concerns were unfounded. Aside from the fact the birth had to be induced ten days late, the pregnancy had been absolutely normal. Lee could not have been a happier, more lovable child.

Her great-great paternal grandfather had been a Danish sea captain from whom she had inherited, as had all his descendants, the blonde hair and blue eyes which once prompted someone to remark that Henry family reunions, with their ever-increasing swarms of children swooping about, were beginning to look a lot like gatherings of little Viking munchkins!

The fact she was an only child occasionally concerned both Grant and Carol. They discussed adoption several times, but while neither would ever admit it, even to themselves, they sensed their own relationship was too fragile to risk another ingredient. If Lee missed the company of siblings, she gave no indication of it.

Carol was determined Lee was going to be raised, not as she had been, like one of a large brood of cute, rough and tumble puppies, but by the book. Any book it seemed, so long as it dealt with child development or psychology. From Spock to Burton-White, Lee was guinea pig to it all, and none of it appeared to make the slightest difference. No matter what school of psychology Carol was avidly devoted to that particular month, Lee just kept doing what she had done since birth, what just seemed to come naturally: Smiling, laughing, singing, exploring and bouncing about.

Their home movies and videos were an endless montage of Lee mugging for the camera, Lee opening Christmas presents with big smiles, Lee singing at the school concert, Lee playing with Niki, Lee coming up laughing after taking a tumble on her new bike. The only variant was one shot which they used to play over and over, to great guffaws every time, of Lee, aged about five, carefully feeding her newly acquired chickens. To shouts of “watch this, watch this,” every time they screened it, one of the roosters, not much bigger than Grant’s fist, marched boldly up to Lee’s leg, and without warning, landed a vigorous peck. You could see Lee’s look of astonishment, only inches from the camera, then the eyes crinkling into tears, not of pain, but of absolute shock and disbelief at the discovery that the world held anything but kindness and love for her.

Grant remembered thinking more than once, while watching that scene, that Lee was destined for a few more shocks in her life.

The decision to move to the Gatineau Hills of Quebec shortly after Grant and Carol were married had been easy. House prices were about a third less than on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River and the spectacularly rugged mountain terrain entranced them both; but it was the house, from the moment they saw it, that convinced them this was where they wanted to live.

Built originally as a large and ornate summer cottage, bits and pieces had been tacked on over the years, until now it sprawled and rambled so much neighbours began calling it Chateau Henri as a local joke.

That first winter they almost froze to death, the oil furnace and huge fireplace no match for the arctic winds which whistled merrily through the walls and floor. Residents of the tiny nearby village of Poisson Blanc were obviously more than a little amused at the crazy Anglais who dared spend a Gatineau winter in a summer cottage, chateau or not.

A local wit suggested to his buddies one day that his wife was so upset with him over a weekend drunk, she had become frois comme le Chateau Henri, as cold as the Chateau Henry. And so was born a bit of local folklore.

Separatism was not an issue most Canadians gave much thought to when Grant and Carol first moved to Quebec.

For Grant, the first inkling of what lay ahead occurred one evening in that bastion of the ruling Westmount class at the time, the Ritz Café, on the lower floor of Montreal’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. They were there to celebrate the launch of his talk show in Ottawa.

As was the custom at the Ritz, seating was in concentric circles, according to power and wealth. The richest and most powerful were carefully placed in the booths circling the outer edges of the dining room. Everyone else was pretty well relegated to the centre of the room. “Just a little,” Grant told Carol as they were seated, “like the good old days, when all we sinners had to sit in the back rows of my grandfather’s church, except here at the Ritz it’s not the back rows for those of us not among the chosen few, it’s the middle of the room!”

The evening was about half over when the tempo of the Café suddenly changed; a quickening of its pulse, a subtle shift to a higher gear. Voices switched from English to French, a decibel louder, then up another notch. Waiters, almost torpid with servitude and acquiescence, began bustling with excitement and purpose. All eyes, including those which otherwise would have been focused on the outer circle to detect the slightest arched eyebrow, or raised finger, snapped to the front entrance where a beautiful ash blonde woman, dressed entirely in black leather, swept in. Amazingly, she was virtually ignored. The excitement was generated, not by her, but by the little wizened bantam rooster of a guy, hair carelessly thrown over to one side, stained fingers clutching a cigarette, strutting cockily behind her.

René Levesque, recently elected leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, was greeted and escorted across the room with great ceremony by the headwaiter, then immediately surrounded by a small bubbling army of waiters and bus boys at the table furthest from the centre.

Thick black clouds of hostility, precursors of the gathering storm, drifted up from the English power booths of the outer circle.

The reaction in the dining room was so fascinating, Grant discussed it the following Monday on his show, and issued what was probably English Canada’s first warning of what lay smouldering on the horizon. Most of the diners were Anglophone, the majority old Montreal money from upper Westmount, with a sparkling of the nouveau riche here and there, also English speaking. The waiters and bus boys were all working class French Canadians.

“What you have to remember,” Grant told his listeners, “is that for every English speaking Quebecker, there are about eight whose mother tongue is French.” And judging from what he had seen, there was absolutely no question of where French Canada stood concerning René Levesque and the Parti Quebecois!

The P.Q. victory at the polls less than a year later, which shocked most Canadians, and scared the hell out of English speaking residents of the province, came as no surprise to Grant. Unlike thousands of other Quebec Anglos who fled Quebec, frightened or frustrated, or both, the Henry’s decided to stay. At no time did they feel anything but total acceptance by their neighbours, the majority of whom were Francophone.

Grant was surprised to learn how much common experience he shared with the hard-working farmers who scraped a bare existence from the thin, mean soil of the Gatineau Hills. Growing up poor in Ontario in English he decided was pretty much like growing up poor in Quebec in French. One day, not long before his thirty-first birthday, he found himself rolling around in the dirt, flailing away at an Irish tough who’d been heckling a couple of the younger members of his Poisson Blanc softball team.

“Hey,” whined the tough, through bloodied lips, “you’re English, what in hell ya doin’ cuddlin’ wit da frogs?”

Grant belted him again, having learned very early in life that when something important had to be done he’d best get on with it himself.

But as the years progressed, Grant became more and more disenchanted with what he was seeing and hearing. The election of the Bloc Quebecois to official opposition status in the House of Commons several years ago disturbed him deeply but he had no intention of leaving. Quebec was his home.

The decision to stay became extremely difficult for him during the divorce two years ago. It was Lee, actually, who made up Grant’s mind for him. He was helping her feed her chickens one evening not long after the final split with Carol, when his daughter very solemnly announced that since they wouldn’t be able to live together as a family anymore, she had decided she wanted to live with him here in the “chateau”, where she could keep her friends and her chickens.

Afraid she might try legal action to remove Lee, Grant had not told Carol about the telephone threats which had begun about three months ago. Not until he found one of Lee’s chickens nailed to the garage door with a note scrawled in English saying, “fuck off Anglais,” had he even bothered to tell Jake.

“I have no idea who’s doing this,” he told a very concerned Jake, “but it’s really starting to worry me. These days you really don’t know what’s happening. From what I understand, half the Quebec police force has turned separatist and I don’t imagine they’re exactly too crazy about me, with what I’ve had to say about their speed traps for Anglos.”

Jake had made no bones about what he thought of it.

“Lay off the Quebec stuff for awhile,” he warned Grant. “Some of the kooks out there today will shoot you for a dollar, let alone an insult. And you’re right about the Quebec coppers. They hate your guts.”

But, with only the slightest twinge of worry, Grant continued with a series of broadcasts exposing discriminatory practices against the English-speaking minority in Quebec by government officials and the Quebec bureaucracy. Most of the recent information came from an anonymous source who obviously had access to government files. The material, which had begun arriving about six weeks before, was well researched and documented, always arriving by mail postmarked Quebec City. Thus far the information had been accurate.

Two days ago he had received a tape recording apparently from the same source. It was accompanied by a scrawled note that claimed it had been recorded during a meeting of the Quebec cabinet the previous day. If it was authentic, and Grant would soon know, the recording provided him with his best ammunition yet. It was a piece of dynamite, which, if made public, would cause tremendous embarrassment to the separatist government.

The voice was badly muffled, as though recorded from a distance, but someone, presumably a cabinet minister, could be heard quite clearly making outrageously racist statements about Anglophones, and in one case, native Indians.

Jake had warned him the recording could be dangerous stuff but Grant, accustomed to warnings and even death threats over the years, from various sources for various reasons, had only laughed and said, “Come on Jake, you’ve been watching too much Robocop. This is Canada! As soon as our technicians can identify the voice I’m going to broadcast the whole thing and for sure some Quebec cabinet minister is going to have more than just his feet in the fire.”