Flashback (3 page)

“Merry Christmas, David,” she said.

“Hey, didn’t you want Castlegate Park?”

Max woke up to the sound of the driver’s voice. The bus had stopped beside the park. In the seat across the aisle, beside the window, sat a boy in a black tee shirt and jeans, with a thick mop of dark hair almost covering his eyes.

“Excuse me,” said Max, “but do I know you?”

“No, we’ve never met,” said the boy.

“Are you sure?” Max pressed him. “I’ve been to a lot of different schools and you look very familiar.”

“Isn’t this your stop?” said the boy.

“Yeah, it is,” said Max, “but I’m certain I’ve seen you before.”

“You must have me mixed up with someone else.”

The boy turned away to face the window.

“But I—” Max began.

“Hey,” shouted the driver, “are you getting off here or what?”

“Yeah,” Max called back, “I’m coming.”

He stood up from his seat and walked to the front of the bus. At the top of the steps, Max looked back to where he’d been sitting, but the boy was gone.

“What the . . .” he started to say.

“Are you okay?” said the driver, with a frown.

“Yeah,” Max replied haltingly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

But he certainly wasn’t fine. As he watched the empty bus pull away, Max knew that something was desperately wrong. He couldn’t talk to anyone about it, not his friends and certainly not his dad. He certainly wasn’t going to confide in the old man. Yet, Max reminded himself, his strange visions had started after he’d been in the cemetery. Maybe chatting with Carrington, who seemed to know something about the Dexter family, might be able to provide some clues as to what the hell was happening.

Max wasn’t that familiar with Castlegate Park, although it wasn’t that far from where he lived. He remembered going to the outdoor wading pool a few times with his dad when he was very small, but that was about it.

There were plenty of people at the park that day
. Men and women taking advantage of a beautiful sunny day ate their lunches on the park benches. Joggers overtook young mothers pushing strollers along the pathway. The wading pool was particularly busy and nearby, children chased each other noisily around the brightly painted playground.

Max was wondering if he’d be able to find Carrington when he saw a small black dog relaxing on the grass beside a bench under one of the park’s taller trees. Max adjusted his phone to turn off the ringer as he walked over to the bench.

“Hi, I wasn’t sure whether you’d come or not,” said Carrington, reaching down to calm his dog. “It’s okay, Doogie, he’s a friend.”

“Hi,” said Max, petting the dog as it licked his hand.

“So how’s that project?” Carrington asked.

“What?”

“The school project, about old newspaper stories,” said Carrington.

“Oh, right,” Max replied.

He’d forgotten what he’d told Carrington the day before about his reason for looking into the Dexter family.

“It’s coming along,” he said. “I’m using the Dexter story, but I thought more research might be good.”

“I certainly know something about it, depends how much you’d like to know. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Max.”

He sat down on the other end of the bench and the dog settled back down beside Carrington. The park was full of people, so Max thought his surroundings were pretty secure.

“Well,” he began, “I read about the case online at the library and know about his dad and the politics and everything.”

“Yeah,” said Carrington, “David Dexter’s dad was pretty well known, so it was in all the papers. I started out in the city police, but I was a private detective back then. I had a lot of experience in missing person cases, so they brought me in to help.
I uncovered what I thought was a connection to a lot of other similar cases. I thought we were getting somewhere, but they suddenly shut the whole investigation down. They eventually found David’s remains in the woods, as you probably know, but I was never convinced it was such a simple case. There was a lot more to it than met the eye.”

“Like what?” Max asked.

“Just things that didn’t add up,” replied Carrington. “Dexter resigned from politics not long after. It was officially because of the trauma of David’s disappearance, but I always thought that wasn’t the only reason. Then of course there was David’s mother.”

“What about her?” said Max, not recalling anything specific about Mrs. Dexter from his own research.

“Poor Vanessa Dexter was confined to an asylum,” replied Carrington.

“An asylum?” said Max, shocked. “What for?”

“Driven ‘mad with grief’ after losing her son, I think was the official explanation. She’s been in and out of hospitals ever since but she’s in a nursing home now called Belvedere Mansions.”

“I didn’t know that,” Max admitted.

“Again, it just seemed so unlikely to me. I met her once, just after her son disappeared and she seemed like one of the people least likely to go off the rails. I mean yes, it was a traumatic experience and who knows what went through her mind, but it just didn’t ring true. Then of course, look what happened to Jonathan Dexter.”

“Didn’t he die in a fire?”

“So they say,” said Carrington. “One afternoon, years after David’s disappearance, I received a message that Jonathan Dexter was trying to contact me with some important information.”

“What was it?” said Max.

“I never found out,” Carrington admitted. “The next day, Dexter was dead. I was there at the house with the police the day after the fire. The wall safe had been forced open, but the valuables were left behind. It was very suspicious. I think maybe some documents were the only things taken.
Yeah, there are still a lot of questions about that whole Dexter business. So, do you think you’ll be able to use some of this stuff in your school project?”

“Maybe,” said Max.

For the most part, he’d listened to Carrington, trying to work out whether the old guy was really on the level. It did seem as if Carrington had actually worked on the case and was very well informed. Admittedly, he could also just have read a lot about it and formed his own crazy theories. But so far, Max hadn’t heard anything that helped him understand more about his own recent bizarre experiences.

“If you’re really interested in the case,” said Carrington, “maybe you’d like to help me? I’ve been looking into these things for years, trying to get to the truth. The police aren’t interested anymore and there are still probably people who’d kill to keep it all quiet.”

Max gasped. “What did you say?”

“Just kidding, Max,” said Carrington, with a smile. “So, what do you say? I’m here most afternoons with Doogie. We could chat some more another day, whenever you’ve got time? I have to go shopping for a new computer in the morning, but I should be here again just after lunch. I could even bring some papers and pictures about the case from the office for you to take a look at?”

“Why me?” said Max. “We don’t even know each other.”

Carrington took a tissue from his pocket, then removed his glasses and quickly cleaned them.

“I don’t have long to live,” Carrington explained. “I’ve been told my heart could stop at any time. All this will die with me.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Max.

“That’s not all,” Carrington continued, as he replaced his glasses. “I had a dream the other night. I can’t exactly recall every detail, but I remember a voice telling me to go to the library yesterday evening. It told me I’d see someone looking into the Dexter case, someone who would help put things right.”

Max almost froze in his seat on the bench. Now someone else was having weird dreams about the Dexter family?

“Are you okay?” Carrington asked.

“Look, I really have to go,” Max told him.

Carrington’s dog started to get excited, but this time Max ignored him.

“Yeah, I, look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I really have to go.”

Max hurried away and didn’t look back. If Carrington said anything else, Max didn’t hear him. As he neared the wading pool he broke into a run, not stopping until he reached the bus stop. Catching his breath, Max was relieved to see a bus approaching. He climbed aboard and took a seat as close to the driver as he could. His mind was racing.

Max couldn’t make sense of any of it and kept going over the same things again and again. He hardly noticed as he entered his own neighbourhood and nearly missed his stop.

It was still a beautiful warm afternoon, but when Max reached the front door of the condo, a shiver ran down his spine. He put the key in the lock and opened the door. He went straight to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of pieces of cold pizza from the fridge, flopped down on the couch and clicked on the TV.

Aimlessly surfing through the channels, nothing really grabbed his attention. He eventually settled on a rerun of a sitcom episode he’d seen countless times before. Yet Max wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening on the screen. He couldn’t stop thinking about his conversation with John Carrington at the park. The guy had seemed nice enough at first and was probably harmless. But Max also knew that he could also just be another wacko, wandering around the park looking for someone to talk to about his wild stories. Max had no intention of meeting Carrington again. He had no doubt that the old man would subject some other poor unsuspecting passerby to his ramblings the following day.

Eventually, Max’s eyelids grew heavy. It was only mid-afternoon, but for some reason he was utterly exhausted. He yawned as the sitcom’s credits rolled, before making his way upstairs. He took his cell phone out of his pocket to turn it off for the night. There was a text message from Jeff, asking how Max was feeling. Another text from Jason asked Max if he was coming over on Saturday night. Max was going to reply, but could barely keep his eyes open. He turned off the phone and placed it on the desk. Resolving to message his friends in the morning, Max got undressed and climbed into bed. Minutes later he was sound asleep.

If Max had any dreams overnight, he couldn’t remember them when he awoke the next day. He switched on his phone, noting the messages from Jeff and Jason, and told himself he’d reply to them while he ate breakfast. However, when Max headed downstairs and picked up the newspaper lying on the porch, he immediately noticed the headline above a short article at the edge of the front page.

Man Found Dead in Castlegate Park.

AT THE KITCHEN
table, Max read the newspaper story four times.

A body found last night in Castlegate Park has been identified as John Carrington, aged sixty four. The cause of death has not been officially released, but police have ruled out foul play. It is suspected that Mr. Carrington had a heart attack and fell into the wading pool, where he was found face down by a jogger just after ten thirty. Mr. Carrington was a former employee of the city police, who also worked for a number of years as a private detective.

There was a photograph of Carrington, taken years earlier, yet Max clearly recognized the man he’d so recently spoken to at the park. Max remembered how Carrington had told him that he didn’t have long to live, but it seemed so tragic that he’d just drop dead like that. And so soon after Max had talked to him. The old man had indicated that there were still a lot of unanswered questions about the Dexter case. He’d joked about people being prepared to kill to keep things quiet, but now Max wondered if there had been a grain of truth in that. And if Carrington had been murdered, someone might have seen Max talking to him at the park.

He desperately needed time to think. A sound from upstairs told Max that his dad was out of bed and would soon be coming down for breakfast. Max put the newspaper to one side and hurried out the door. At the end of the street, he fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a handful of coins, amounting to a few dollars, and Carrington’s business card. The old man had mentioned that he was willing to show Max some material about the Dexter case. Max memorized Carrington’s office address. Shoving the business card back into his pocket, Max hurried to the nearest bus stop.

It took Max about twenty minutes to reach the office, located in a single story commercial building not far from the coffee shop where he and Carrington had first met. There were only a few cars in the parking lot since it was Saturday. A van from a plumbing company and a pickup truck belonging to a construction firm were parked outside the front doors. On the wall inside the building’s front entrance was a plaque listing the building’s tenants. Suite 111 belonged to “John Carrington, Private Investigator”.

An insurance agent and a financial consultant were open for business, but otherwise the building was quiet. Max saw men tearing up carpet and replacing lights and wiring in one suite, and doing some work on the plumbing and heating systems in another. The fact that there were people working in some of the offices made Max appear a little less conspicuous as he wandered around. Even the woman who was vacuuming the hallway didn’t give Max a second glance.