Erasing Memory (3 page)

So there it was, he thought: the dream cottage on the lake all lit up with more people in it than likely it had ever seen, and he thought of the young violinist in the chiffon gown who had become the centre of attention. Unlocking the car, he glanced at Palmer still sitting there on his cell, talking the talk to someone who’d regret it later. Wearily he opened the car door and sank behind the wheel.

He picked up the CD wallet from the passenger seat, flipping through the sleeves until he found one of Kate’s
favourites—
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
—a soundtrack by Miles Davis for an old French film. When she’d brought it home, he’d pointed out her resemblance to the blonde in the liner notes. “Look, it’s a very sexy picture of someone who looks like you, with Miles.” And she’d smiled a smile that took several minutes to wear off.

He turned on the ignition, then slipped Miles into the dashboard player. He tucked cummings into the glove box beside his holstered weapon, removed the camera from his pocket and tossed it onto the passenger seat, then buckled himself in and listened for a moment to the low, comforting rumble of the car until the deep opening bass notes of the CD took over, Miles’s horn mellow in the early morning.

The digital clock on the dash read 5:31 a.m. and the sun was minutes away from its big ta-dah of the day. MacNeice ached with fatigue, and something deeper. He eased his old Chevy out of the circular drive and over the grated ditch that ran alongside the road to keep the cottages from sliding into the lake when the November rains came. The chassis groaned as the wheels took on the uneven surface. Three times he’d been offered one of the new fleet cars and had declined. “As long as there’s a mechanic willing to keep her going, I’ll stick with her.” There was a willing mechanic, though the man suspected, rightly, that MacNeice’s loyalty to his ride was all about the CD player and the superior sound system that had been installed in a factory error.

MacNeice drove south on the road that skirted the lake for a few miles, the distant ridge of maple and pine backlit by the deep purple of pre-dawn. Accelerating onto the four-lane highway, he appreciated the way the slow, languorous rhythm of the CD seemed in synch with the pale yellow sodium lamps
flashing over the hood. He glanced over at the camera and suddenly regretted not taking photographs of the dead girl. Then he thought how strange it was that she’d become a girl to him, no longer the woman he had first encountered. The effect of staring at the snapshot, no doubt.

There would be no shortage of clinical photos, of course, but he would have attempted to capture her beauty. He was convinced that insights would come as much from those images as from the other. And if images needed to be shown to the family—but then again, maybe that was just him.

Soon he was approaching the cut-off to Greater Dundurn—if he took the exit to the right he could come into town along a treed Victorian promenade with a manicured park on one side and a 2,700-acre nature reserve on the other, conceived and built by a people certain of an industrial future that promised prosperity for all and forever. While the golden era of heavy industry had passed, the trees, plantings, stone crown-adorned abutments and ornate balustrades of the bridges high above the bay were still elegant symbols of a long-forgotten optimism.

He chose the other way, powering the Chevy towards the great soaring bridge that separated the lake from Dundurn Bay. Built in the late 1950s, the Sky-High Bridge allowed both access to the inner harbour for what had been an endless parade of lake freighters and uninterrupted flow of traffic to and from New York and Ohio to the city of Toronto. To MacNeice, taking the bridge was simply the best way to get a view of everything.

Though he’d lived here all his life, it was still a thrill to see the sun rising over the lake and shining across to the old steel mills and factories that lined the bay. Most visitors thought Dundurn was ugly. MacNeice could never understand that. The
harbour was inspiring to him—even the smokestacks, the towering cranes and the enormous rust-coloured, dust-covered buildings with long piers that clawed like fingers into the bay towards the few freighters that still eased their way in and out.

T
HE CITY, LIKE ALL CITIES
, measured its prosperity geographically. With Dundurn, the best measure was how far you lived from the plants that provided its robust economy. The north end—closest to the factories and the bay—was the poorest and toughest, its houses forever coated in red dust. Depending on the prevailing wind, residents rarely knew anything but the smell of sulphur in the air. The sweet spot in Dundurn was still the west end, farthest away from the prevailing breezes of the steel plants. And the sweetest spot of all was close to the escarpment that ran the length of the city, referred to by everyone as “the mountain.”

The city’s crime played out the same way. The white-collar stuff was almost exclusively a west-end affair. In the north end, violence was frequent and always visceral. As Swetsky, who had grown up in the north end, put it, “If your everyday vocabulary includes the words
blast furnace
, you can expect some
spillover in the kitchen at night.” When MacNeice was walking a beat there as a new recruit, people would joke that the local rats were bigger than the local cats, and more numerous. His sergeant told him that in the old Mafia days of the 1920s and 1930s, bodies wearing cement overshoes were dumped in the bay by the dozens. They were probably still there.

Slowing, MacNeice moved to the inside lane of the bridge, lowered the volume on the music and switched on his two-way. Within two connections he was speaking to Betty Fernihough, the head of the precinct’s IT unit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries—Betty liked it that way, as did he—he asked, “Have you found out who owns the cottage?”

“Yes, I gave the name to Swetsky about ten minutes ago. A Dr. Michael Hadley—he has a dental clinic in the west end. We think he may keep the beach house as a rental property.”

“Swets hit you early, Betty. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mac, I’m an early riser anyway. I was in at five thirty this morning.”

“Can you do me a favour, then? Look and see if you can find any images of young women just graduating or beginning their careers as violinists. First name Lydia. She was probably in her mid-twenties.”

“Christ, Mac, how the hell did you come up with that?”

“Just a hunch. Look at the university, the Conservatory of Music, chamber music societies, orchestras and soloists between here and Toronto. You’ll know this girl when you see her—tall, brunette, beautiful, and blessed—or cursed—with an optimistic smile.”

“Whatever the hell that is,” Betty said distractedly. If it weren’t for the road noise and the faint bluesy Miles, he was certain he’d be able to hear her already clicking away on her
keyboard. “Get some sleep, Mac—you’re sounding borderline crispy. Swets told me how come you got there first.”

M
AC
N
EICE EASED THE
C
HEVY
off the highway onto Mountain Road South, cranking down both driver and passenger windows to breathe in the early morning air. The sun was streaking through the houses and trees on his left, flickering through the car. The stripes on the road unfolded; the streetlights had gone out, but he couldn’t remember when. He wound the fingers of his left hand through his hair—it was long for him, and showing signs of grey.

As the wind blew the strands out of his grasp, he realized he was falling asleep. “Two hands,” he told himself sternly, shoving his butt into the back of the seat and pulling himself erect. He glanced down at the Sony. “I would love to have seen you play.”

The sun was already warming up the hill below the escarpment where the hundreds of happy-looking houses of Pleasant Park defined the eastern end of the city. Beyond it lay the town of Secord, as quiet and bucolic as ever. PP, as it’s known over the two-way, had been finished three years earlier, and from a distance it admittedly looked lovely spread along the hillside. The development had been the subject of a community brawl between those who wanted the hill to remain a place of quiet beauty, of songbird, deer and fox—MacNeice’s perspective—and those who saw it as the best opportunity to expand the city and “take the pressure off the inner core.” He knew little about the design of successful cities but had assumed that compression was one aspect that made them work. In his travels with Kate to France and Italy, he’d never once felt that the narrow streets, or the shops, apartments and houses that had been built
around and above them, lacked for anything, least of all space.

MacNeice made a hard right up the long, winding lane towards the Cedarway Estate, which had sat for almost a century on a vast property that crested the escarpment. Easing to a stop in the gravel drive of the Gatehouse, the Edwardian folly a hundred feet below the top that he called home, he put the car in park and turned off the ignition. Electronic rolling fences and video security systems had long ago made the gatehouse redundant to the estate above, which suited MacNeice just fine.

As a young patrolman he had arrested the gateman several times for drunk driving. Coming here each time to inform the man’s wife, he had grown to admire the solidity of the building. When the gateman and his wife retired and moved into town, the owner carved the building and the quarter-acre stand of pine and cedar that adjoined it from the main estate and put it on the market. MacNeice and Kate had put up everything they’d saved to make the down payment. The owner likely remembered his name, or his father’s, from the MacNeice Marina on Raven Lake, where as a kid Mac had pumped gas into the tank of the man’s sleek twelve-cylinder mahogany motor launch. Or perhaps he had a soft spot for young cops or violinists, because the estate agent told MacNeice and Kate that theirs wasn’t even close to the highest bid—it was just the one he accepted. They took that as a good omen for their lives, and for the most part it had been.

Leaving his keys on the table inside the door, MacNeice went to the living room to set the Sony camera next to his computer. He looked out the large window at the trees. Its mullions broke the scene into a soft grey grid—good for a moment like this.

The window—ten by six, with an industrial frame—was something he’d seen while checking out a wrecker’s yard on
Harbour Street after the owner had been found—cold as slate, crack pipe in hand—sprawled on the floor of the yard’s office. Next to him was his Doberman. It had guarded him right up to the point when hunger overtook its desire to serve and protect. Most of the wrecker’s face and neck were gone, and when the first officer opened the door, the animal, presumably now protecting its food source, lunged at him. He put it down with two rounds from his service revolver.

When MacNeice arrived, the young patrolman was leaning against the railing in front of the office, having a smoke. After warning him about what he was going to see, he said, “You know, I’ve patrolled by this yard so many times and that damn dog would always come snarlin’ and snappin’ to the fence, but he never came at me like that before. He knew he had some good eatin’ in there.”

The yard was the resting place for most of the doors and windows, wood panels and plaster mouldings, cornices and ironwork, and even flooring of the century homes and factories torn down in the city. For anyone wanting to recreate the town the way it was, this yard was one big erector set. But then, no one had ever wanted to do that.

He’d found the window that now occupied most of the eastern wall of his living room rusting away underneath the stair to the office. When the wrecker’s estate was settled, MacNeice purchased it for a hundred dollars, which, the wrecker’s widow told him, would go to the local animal shelter, because “no animal should ever go hungry.”

J
UNE WAS GIVING WAY
to summer, and the dappled light through the stand of trees outside was so intense it made the whole room dance as if it was the happiest place on earth.
MacNeice went to the kitchen, took out the grappa, poured a shot and took it back to the window. Through the trees he could see fragments of the deep blue lake in the far distance. He was aware of the birds, especially the swallows that came every spring to the birdhouses his father had built and mounted on the trees as a house-warming gift. But after the long night he found the light too much, and slowly he drew the drapes on the scene.

Grappa. Even the word was comforting to him. He’d first tasted it in Italy with Kate, but it was years before he tasted a smooth grappa like the one he now enjoyed just before bed or occasionally combined with espresso in the morning. Easing into the old club chair he’d rescued from the lobby of an abandoned theatre, he held the narrow shot glass to his right eye. The details of the room twisted into vertical streaks—tall Giacometti shafts. MacNeice emptied the glass and, letting his hand drop, allowed the heavy cylinder to swing gently between his fingers before putting it down on
Birds of North America
on the floor next to the chair.

He took out his cellphone and found Wallace’s number. It rang three times before he heard a voice say crisply, “Deputy Chief Wallace.”

“Good morning, sir, it’s MacNeice.”

“What can I do for you, Mac?”

“I am requesting the lead on a case I responded to last night—the young woman found dead in the cottage on Lake Charles.”

“I’m just reading Swetsky’s report. What’s so special about this one?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I just think I have a feel for it.” MacNeice wasn’t sure that made a convincing argument but waited for a response, which came moments later.

“Swetsky thinks you do too. I’m fine with that.” It sounded as if Wallace was outside, being buffeted by the morning breeze off the lake.

M
AC
N
EICE NEEDED TO SLEEP
. He switched off his cellphone and put the glass in the sink on his way through to the master bedroom.

In the three years since Kate had died, he had yet to sign a truce with the place. The rest of the house and property held traces of her—the garden she had planted and he maintained, the dishes and assorted cutlery, the painting she’d bought at auction because it reminded her of the lavender fields in the south of France—but they all co-existed with him. The master bedroom, and especially the bed, had betrayed him—comfort and intimacy stripped from them both—and only when he was exhausted, like now, would he go there.