Once Upon a Time (8 page)

“Ozorkow. Sounds Polish,” he muttered. Then to his surprise, he felt the bottom shift and as he turned the box over, a false bottom came away in his hand. In the tiny space between the inner and outer plates, he found a small, tattered booklet. Inside, it was covered in cramped, foreign script. He flipped through it, then gasped.

“Fuck! This could be why Walker didn't fit in with the Polish community. This is a goddamn German identity card!”

*    *    *

Back in the car, heading down the lane to the highway, Green sat in the passenger seat and pored over the document. The black metal box and the rolls of film sat on the seat behind them. The Ottawa Ident Unit had been called to come up to dust the house and check out the tracks in the snow.

“Jeez, this language has long words. My German's not the greatest, but it's a lot like Yiddish. I can't understand everything, but enough to tell that these papers belong to a Wilhelm Ganz from Potsdam, and he's some kind of rank in the Wehrmacht. Unterfeldwebel or something.”

“Walker a Kraut? Do you think Mrs. Walker would lie about something like that?”

“I wonder if she even knew. If he'd even tell her. After two world wars, the Brits hated the Germans' guts.”

Sullivan whistled. “Boy, that would be some secret to keep from her.”

“Still think this is just an old stiff in a parking lot?”

Sullivan smiled. “An interesting old stiff, that's for sure.” He drew the car to a halt at the end of the lane and scanned the highway in both directions. On one side, a multi-gabled red brick farmhouse could be seen far in the distance. On the other side, nothing but fields of stubbled corn half buried in white. But across the highway, about two hundred yards further west, stood a white clapboard Victorian farmhouse with a sagging veranda and a steeply pitched tin roof. It had never aspired to greatness but had clearly seen better times.

“Where to, boss?”

“Neighbours,” Green said, pointing to the Victorian farmhouse. “Let's start right there.”

Green and Sullivan mounted the wooden veranda with trepidation as the splintered boards moaned beneath their weight. Black paint peeled from the door, which proudly sported a shiny new brass door knob. Odd the priorities some people have, Green thought.

His knock was answered immediately by a middle-aged woman bent from hard work but still brisk in her movements. She had a broad Slavic face, steel-wool hair forced haphazardly into a bun, and deep-set, sun-parched blue eyes which bored through the detectives warily as they settled on the aging parlour couch. In the corner, a smoky black woodstove was turning the claustrophobic room into a sauna. Oblivious, the woman hugged a cardigan around her and folded her arms across her chest.

“I don't know my neighbours,” she stated flatly as soon as they posed the question. She had no discernible accent, but spoke as if communication were a rarely practised art. Perhaps out here it is, Green thought with a glance out the window at the endless vista of fields. “They had a store in Renfrew, this I know. But we didn't see them much, especially not him. He never came out. She came out sometimes to go to Eganville or Renfrew, maybe to shop. Sometimes she stopped here to buy corn in the summer. She'd say hello, very nice, but he stayed in the car. Never talked. That's all I can tell you. I didn't see nobody, nothing.”

Green tried a variety of questions about the Walkers' habits, their relationship to the rest of the community, and any rumours about them. Mrs. Wiecowska stubbornly maintained that she knew and had heard nothing.

Finally, Green smiled at her with what he hoped was a mournful air. “Mrs. Wiecowska, Eugene Walker seems to have been a very sad old man, and very lonely. Maybe he brought it on himself, but who can know what life does to a man, eh? Who knows what he's been through? I think it is terrible that someone left him alone to die in the snow. No person at the end of their life should be left like that.”

She was frowning at him in bewilderment, as if trying to follow him but wary of traps along the way. He paused to let her catch up, then shook his head sadly. “Did no one ever come to visit him?”

“Oh,” she replied hastily, as if somehow she herself were being chastised. “His family, sure. His daughter, her children.”

“Son-in-law?”

She shrugged expressively. “Son, son-in-law? I don't know them. Sometimes a car would come and go. I don't know who.”

“Same car?”

“No, no. Different cars. Yesterday—no, two days ago— there was a car. Strange, because no one was home. The old man died the day before. I watched, because I thought it would come out again soon. But it was not very soon.”

Green's pulse soared, but he strove to keep his tone on the same gentle level. “How soon?”

“Thirty minutes?”

“What did the car look like?”

“A small car. With a flat back.” She demonstrated with her hand the shape of a hatchback. “Black, maybe?”

“Did you ever see it going to the house before?”

She shook her head. “But I don't watch everything.”

“Oh, I'm sure you're much too busy. But did you see who was in the car?”

She straightened her shoulders and brushed back an errant strand of steel wool. “My eyes are very good, but it was far away. The person had a hat and dark glasses, so it was hard to see more.”

“Did it look like a man or a woman?”

“Hard to say. Woman, maybe?”

Once the two policemen had thanked Mrs. Wiecowska for her help and were walking back across the muddy snow towards the car, Green kicked a chunk of ice across the yard with a curse of frustration.

“Well, that's just great, Sullivan. This time we are screwed by our own stupidity. We just completely obliterated that car's tracks when we drove up the lane ourselves.”

*    *    *

At the red brick farm house further down the road they encountered a plump, elderly woman in a flowered apron who was only too delighted to talk. She ushered them cheerfully into her kitchen, which smelled of apples and cinnamon. Both men shed their coats as she poured them cups of tea. Without thinking, she added milk to the tea, causing Green to grimace inwardly. Milk in tea was anathema to his Yiddish soul.

Sullivan set aside his notebook and gulped at his eagerly, but Green took a cautious sip. The woman, who had introduced herself as Eleanor MacLeod, watched Sullivan with lively eyes.

“I'd make a guess you're hungry, Sergeant. Would you like an apple turnover? Freshly baked this morning. You'll have to excuse the clutter, gentlemen, but I have all these apples picked weeks ago, and if I don't get them into jars or baking soon, they'll spoil.” She placed a turnover in front of each of them, which both men pounced on. It was now past one o'clock, and they hadn't eaten since leaving Ottawa at eight.

“What an ordeal for poor Ruth,” she said as she busied herself at the stove. Fragrant steam rose from the pots bubbling at her elbow. “I wish I knew where I could call her, just to give her my sympathies. Not that she didn't know it was coming. She's been saying for two years now that she thought he wouldn't hold on long, almost as if she hoped he'd go—” She checked herself. “Although of course she didn't. But I'm glad in a way that it's over for her. It was so hard for her to get out, even to come over here. She always seemed to have one eye on the clock, and she'd be rushing back to Eugene almost before she'd finished her tea. He was all she thought about — I know what that's like, I nursed Arthur through his last five years, and you do find that your whole life closes in around their routine. Is his colour good today, is his mind lucid, is he in pain? She'll have to find new interests now. For me, having this farm kept me going. The apples would ripen, the strawberries kept coming up. I don't farm it the way I did when we were younger, mind you, but there's still plenty for me to do. I think Ruth will sell, though, and move into the city with her daughter. She wasn't raised on the land, and she really doesn't like being so isolated. It was Eugene's idea, and she did it to keep him happy. I kept telling her she had a right to be happy too in her old age, and she said she was, that it took less to make her happy, and Eugene had been through so much—I never knew what, she didn't say. I don't think he was happy, even with his little retirement cottage. The very rare times I saw him, he was half pickled. But I'm rambling too much, I'm sorry. Inspector, you haven't touched your tea.”

He was licking the last flakes of the apple turnover off his fingers when she turned around. “Actually, a cold glass of water would suit me just as well. And please go on. I'm trying to get as complete a picture of their life as I can.”

She shook her finger at him as if mere water would never meet the needs of a strong, active man. “I know just the thing for you.” She reached into the fridge and extracted a large jug filled with a pale amber liquid, which she poured into a glass. It proved to be a delightfully tart apple cider.

“It was the children Ruth worried about most,” she continued once she'd returned to her seat. “It was a great hardship for them to drive all the way out from Ottawa and Montreal to check on their parents, in the winters especially. When it snowed Ruth couldn't always get the car out, and last winter she fell and broke her arm. She isn't strong, Ruth, I believe she has that bone disease with the fancy name they talk about nowadays. Her daughter worries about her a great deal, and I think that troubles Ruth. That's the way of it, though, isn't it? Your children grow up and they move out on their own, and you still worry about them.” She paused to rest a maternal eye on Sullivan, who was busily picking up every flake that remained on his plate. Then abruptly she went to her pantry and removed a mixing bowl and a large canister.

“My youngest is a sergeant in the army. He'd be about your age. Although of course I don't know if the ranks are the same in the police.” She broke an egg into the bowl. “I'm going to make you boys some apple pancakes for lunch. None of my children have stayed on the farm. It's true all around here. All the children have gone to the city for better jobs. Soon there will be no one left farming the land. You can't make a living on a hundred-acre farm nowadays, and the children find the life too hard. I'm not blaming them. I don't think things are the same as when I grew up. When I was a girl, you only knew the towns and the people right around you. Who even got to Ottawa, let alone saw what life could be like in Hollywood or Paris. Today communities are losing that bond. Families are moving out, and incomers are buying up the land to escape the city. Ironic, isn't it? But no matter how long a stranger has been here, he's a stranger if he wasn't born on the land. Silly, really. I liked Ruth, and I was glad for her friendship, but a lot of people wondered about her. They knew she'd grown up in London in a fancy house before the war, and they wondered why she would marry a drunken foreigner and come to live a poor life in a small Ottawa Valley town. People left here, they didn't move here. Folks wondered that they never showed up for church except Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday at St. James Anglican. It raises eyebrows and suspicions, I can tell you. I always meant to speak to Ruth about it, but—well, the time never seemed right.”

The sweet fragrance of butter and cinnamon filled the air as Mrs. MacLeod dropped the batter into the pan. Green's stomach contracted emptily, distracting him from the questions he wished to ask. With an effort he forced his mind back on track.

“Did you know them when they lived in Renfrew as well?”

She shook her head. “We did most of our shopping in Eganville, which is closer. Only occasionally did we go into Renfrew, and never to their hardware store. But some of the folks around here knew of them, and that's how the rumours spread.”

“What rumours?”

“Oh, I meant about her fancy house in London and them not going to church. There's even a rumour one of the children was not baptized.”

Hardly a crime in today's day and age, Green thought but behaved himself.

“What did Ruth tell you about her life in England and about meeting Eugene?”

“Not much. She was very loyal to Eugene and seemed to act like everyone thought the worst of him. She said both her parents had died just after the war, so she really had no reason to stay in England. She had a brother, but he'd been killed in the war. Eugene was the big mystery, though.”

Green glanced up sharply. “How so?”

“Ruth confided to me once that he had no idea what his life had been before the war.”

Five

May 13th, 1940

Three days three nights blurred together by my fear.

Eyes shut, ears tuned to every sound.

Her screams, the sibilant hush of Marzina's voice,
the squeak of bedsprings and footfalls around the room.

Dimly from down below, the drumming of hooves up to the gate.

Later Marzina weeps in prayer, rosary beads clicking,
And a black terror swamps me.

I drown, washed numb by my liebling's screams
until a thin wail wavers out through the door.

They invite me in to the miracle, swaddled in white,
And she wraps tiny fingers around my thumb.

Smiles and vodka all around, but new sadness in the farmer's eyes.

His own two sons kidnapped to serve the master race.

Deutschland has devoured us, left only the old and powerless.

We must hide you, Tadeuzs says, erase all sign that you are here.

So the farmer and I begin to dig.

“This case gets weirder
and weirder,” Green remarked as they headed back towards the OPP station in Renfrew. “Now we've got a dead German World War Two vet who claimed he didn't know who the hell he was.”

“You don't really buy that crap, do you?” Sullivan asked.