Sundowner Ubunta (5 page)

I skipped down the stairs to the front door, tossing the paper at a surprised Lilly as I passed by on my way out. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, lass.” (A good detective is always trying out new accents for use in undercover work.)

She gave me her usual wide smile, brimful of happy, not even blinking an eye at my brogue. “You too!”

she called after me as I exited.

I decided the best place to start my search for Matthew Ridge would be the place where his parents first lost track of him: his high school. Mount Royal Collegiate is a west side public school, a typical, institutional-looking building which probably hadn’t appeared much cheerier on ribbon cutting day. I entered through the front doors and found the hallways echoingly empty, as they should be in the middle of a school day, I suppose. I made my way to the counter of the Support Services area, home to several secretary-types behind computer monitors, but realm of one little Ms.

Frances Frey, the school’s chief secretary and keeper of all important information. She was all of four feet tall in shabby heels. She wore a thick, navy sweater over a plain, white blouse, and a skirt that had seen a great deal of duty. Her thin, brown hair was masterfully feathered over her ears and forehead, but the rest just kind of hung there-out of sight, out of mind.

For quite some time I stood at the counter, watching as Ms. Frey, hunched at a desk, typed something into the bowels of her computer, something so vitally imperative to the continued existence of the school (and possibly the world) that she soundly ignored my presence. When it appeared she might finally take a break, disaster averted, I cleared my throat and shifted from one foot to the other, hoping for some attention. I tried a dashing smile, which went resolutely unappreciated.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said as she referred to a pile of correspondence, no doubt time-sensitive missives from the principal and maybe the Prime Minister of Canada.

Glancing at some of the other faces in the room-thinking one of them might offer me assistance-it was wholly apparent by their averted eyes that it was solely Ms. Frey’s job to deal with outsiders. I scoured the pale, blank walls for something to look at and settled on a large, round clock and watched it as the seconds ticked by with irritating regularity. The phone rang and Frances Frey answered it as if its clangorous ring somehow gave it priority over me and the computer. She talked a bit into the receiver, giving the caller some rather brusque instructions on how to load a photocopier with paper. I hoped, for the sake of the caller, she wouldn’t have to go over there and do it herself.

“Can I help you?” she asked once she’d hung up the phone, her tone imperious and not at all friendly.

“I’d like to inquire about a student.”

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She looked at me without voicing her response, which was probably something like, “I’d like to run naked through a raging surf with Tom Cruise, but so what?”

I forged ahead. “He’s an ex-student actually, and I was wondering if there was any information I could obtain about his time at Mount Royal.”

“Student number?”

“No, I…”

“Name.” Then she added succinctly, assuming my stupidity, “Of the student, not yours.”

“Matthew Ridge.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” she murmured as she typed furiously at her keyboard, studying the screen in front of her with laserlike intent. “Was he a student in term one? Before Christmas?”

“Ah, nope, a little longer ago than that.”

She looked up at me with incredulity as if I should have already told her that. Maybe I should have.

“Year?”

“Excuse me?” I’d heard her, but something about Ms. Frey made me want to piss her off.

“In what year did Mr. Ridge graduate?”

The phone rang and she picked it up with one sharp motion, eying me the entire time, her stubby fingers at the ready above the computer’s defenseless keys, the nail of her middle finger vigorously clicking that of her thumb. She began speaking in impatient, clipped tones to the same person with the paperless photocopier problem-God help him or her-and told me with sharp eyes that she still expected an answer from me, for she was quite capable of dealing with more than one irritant at a time.

“He attended school here twenty years ago,” I mouthed the words to her. Let’s see what she makes of that.

She arched a severely plucked eyebrow at me before focusing all her attention on dressing down her caller for their inability to follow simple instructions. When that task was dispensed with, she hung up the phone and scoured me with a particularly abrasive look. Someone really needed to get out of the school system. “Just who are you sir, and why do you wish to know about a student who attended this school twenty years ago?”

So she could read lips. “My name is Russell Quant and I’m investigating the disappearance of one of your students, Matthew Ridge, twenty years ago.”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t here then,” she told me, as if wanting to clear up any misconception that she could possibly have had any culpability in the misplacement of a student.

I’d play it her way. “As it seems your computer records don’t go back that far, can you tell me if there is anyone currently on staff who might have been here at that time, or maybe you have old paper files?”

“Unless you have a subpoena that instructs me to release that information, I’m afraid that, for you Mr.

Quant, that information will not be forthcoming.”

Subpoena? Oh Kee-rist. I’d gone about this the wrong way. Ms. Frey was not to be bullied or flirted with, she was to be yielded to.

“Of course,” I responded. “I certainly understand, and I admire your diligence in the protection of your 24 of 170

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students’ information, and I’m sure they appreciate it too. I’ll certainly mention that when I speak with Principal Rudnitsky.” I had noticed one or two things other than the clock while I was waiting, including a staff roster posted to a bulletin board.

I turned to leave when I heard her say, “Mr. Rudnitsky wouldn’t be the one you want to talk to.”

My eyes fell back upon the sovereign queen. “Oh?”

“Mr. Rudnitsky has been here for less than a decade.” Damned outsider! “Mr. Slavins, he’s the PE

instructor. He would have been here at the time Mr. Ridge went to school here. And there’s one more thing you might find useful.” She bopped up from her chair (giving her not much more clearance above the reception desk counter than when she was seated) and crossed her empire to a shelving unit, returning seconds later with a thin, bound book about the size of an eight-by-ten picture frame.

“What’s this?”

“The yearbook for the year in question.”

Smart cookie. I was warming to Ms. Frey. “May I have this for a while, Ms. Frey?”

“Absolutely,” she told me as she whipped out a receipt book from a drawer. “That’ll be twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents.”

After confirming that indeed he’d been a teacher at the school during the era in question, Donald Slavins agreed to meet me in the parking lot at the rear of the school during his morning break.

“Care for a chip?” he asked, holding forth a freshly opened bag of Zesty Nacho tortilla chips.

Yes! “No, thank you,” I said, abstemiously.

The PE teacher was in his fifties sliding fast into sixties, bald as a drag queen’s chest, and near on three hundred pounds. After washing down the last of the zesty triangles with half a can of no-name cola, he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and withdrew a pack of smokes. I concluded he must teach by the “do as I say, not as I do” method.

“Now what’s this all about? You said you’re doing some research or something?”

“Not exactly,” I said, wishing I’d worn a thicker coat. I had on a grey suede number that looked rocking (according to my menswear boutique-owning friend Anthony), but did little to keep tentacles of arctic air from slipping through its thin lining to nip at my skin. It wasn’t spring yet. “I’m looking for one of your ex-students, and anything you could tell me about him or where he might have gone after leaving this school would be helpful.”

“Oh,” he replied between deep drags of smoke, not sounding very interested. “Why’s that?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why you looking for this kid? He do something wrong or something?”

“No, not at all. I’ve been hired by his mother. She lost track of him and would like to see him again.”

“Lost track!” he guffawed. “Not much of a mother, is she?”

Rude bugger. I let my eyes do the talking.

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“So who’s the kid?” he asked, ignoring my eyes.

“Matthew Ridge.”

“Never heard of him,” he answered, stamping his feet as if the cold had finally made it through his stratum of trans fat causing him to register the sub-zero temperature.

He was lying to me. I heard the hesitation in his voice, but, thankfully, I had Ms. Frey on my side. I just happened to have the yearbook from Matthew Ridge’s tenth-grade school year. I turned to a page of individual photos, mostly acne-ravaged, gawky looking boys and heavily made up girls with hair so big at times it did not entirely fit within the frame of the picture. I pointed to one of the boys, a handsome lad with hair so blond it was almost white and a dimpled smile: the unrefined beginnings of a Hollywood hunk.

“So who’s that?” Slavins asked in a manner that told me why he hadn’t become a drama teacher.

“That would be Matthew Ridge.”

“Yeah? Don’t recognize the kid. Y’know, what year is that? I might have been teaching over at Hardy that year. Moved around a bit in those days, before I ended up here.”

I flipped a few pages to the teachers’ photos and pointed out Mr. Slavins minus twenty years, a hundred pounds and the disillusioned attitude; it looked good on him.

He lit up a second cigarette. “Oh, yeah, well, there ya go, there I am. Guess I was here that year. Don’t remember the kid though.”

I paged forward to near the back of the yearbook, to the section on sports teams, and indicated a picture of the basketball team. There was Matthew Ridge, and there was Donald Slavins as team coach.

“Yeah well, he was one kid of twenty; how’s a guy supposed to remember one kid, eh?” he said with a forced chuckle. “Getting old y’know. Memory is the first to go; that’s what they say, right?”

I turned to the next page. Volleyball: Matthew and coach Slavins. I regarded the teacher with a questioning eye and doubting look.

Slavins dropped his cigarette into the squishy snow beneath our feet where it spit its disappointment at being extinguished before its time. The big man stepped close to me and poked a sausage finger into my chest. I reeeeeeeeeally hate when people do that. “I told you I don’t know the kid, didn’t I?”

After a few seconds of him breathing his nacho smoker’s breath at me I guessed he wanted an answer.

“That’s what you said,” I admitted, but not without some attitude of my own.

“Well then, that’s what I meant,” he told me. “And you got no right snooping into this business anyway. His mother wants to see him so much? Misses him? Well maybe she shoulda thought about that twenty years ago? Eh? Right?”

I stood my ground silently.

“I don’t wanna see your face again,” he told-no, warned- me, then turned on his heel and entered the school through a win-dowless back door.

To the untrained eye, things hadn’t gone so well. But to my way of thinking, they’d gone swell. Mr.

PE’s resistance to telling the truth told me one thing: I had a bona fide mystery on my hands.

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By mid-afternoon, I had successfully tracked down two of Matthew Ridge’s high school buddies-from names I’d pulled from sports team rosters in the yearbook-but with little results. Both men certainly remembered their friend, but all they could recall is that he simply never came back to school after tenth grade, and they had no idea what happened to him. I moved on to a third name that I matched to a listing in the Saskatoon phone book: Allan Dartmouth. If it was the same guy, he’d become a massage therapist with his own business, Dartmouth Wellness Clinic, located in a busy strip mall on Circle Drive.

As I searched the mall’s lot for a spot to leave my car, I found myself guessing what Mr. Dartmouth would look like compared to his yearbook photo. I was finding it fascinating to view the impact of time on the people who filled Matthew Ridge’s life twenty years ago. When I first met them-or rather their pictures in a high school yearbook-they were fresh-faced and smiley, anxious to tackle the world and, if I correctly recalled how the mind of a sixteen or seventeen year old works, ready to party hard and always trying to get laid. Now they were adults in their mid-thirties, deep into careers they either chose or fell into and would likely keep for the rest of their working lives. They had families or wanted none. They had gained weight or lost weight, gained wrinkles, lost hair. They were either accomplished or, if not by this point, probably never would be. A lot of life is packed into twenty years and it changes a person. I wondered how it had changed Matthew Ridge. When I found him, what would he be like?

The young man behind the reception desk at Dartmouth Wellness Clinic was a no-nonsense kind of fellow who I guessed was the real control-wielder of the place, running the business with a firm hand and efficient manner. I could tell that nothing slipped by him, except maybe a wee detective?

“Good afternoon, which practitioner do you have an appointment with?” the young man, with a name badge that said Edward on it, asked me three seconds after I’d come through the front doors of the place.

I noted a casually elegant waiting room full of clients as I approached the desk. I debated a lie, telling him I had an appointment and making a scene when he didn’t have it written down, but even I didn’t buy it. Just by looking at the supercilious face of Edward-he’d never, ever, forgotten to write down an appointment (or, for that matter, made any other mistake throughout his entire life. I wondered if he was related to Ms. Frances Frey.) This was obviously a thriving business with little chance of downtime, so I went with an alternate lie. “I don’t have an appointment,” I began, “but I’d really like to get in to see Allan-he’s an old school buddy of mine. I can see he’s busy, but I just need a quick rub to sort out a sports injury before tonight’s game. Is there anything at all you can do?”