Tell Anna She's Safe (10 page)

Trish laughed and threw up her hands. “Okay, you win. Let's see if we can't work a little courage for the road into that frenetic bloodstream of yours.”

*

“ELLEN.” IT WAS MARY FRANCES'S
voice in my ear, waking me out of a deep sleep. “What on earth is going on? I've been reading about you in the papers, and last night you were on the six o'clock news. Are you alright?”

I moved the receiver to the other ear and sat up, disoriented. “What time is it?”

“It's quarter past five. I tried you at work but they said you were here. Were you
sleeping?
Are you ill?”

“No, but I—I didn't sleep very well last night. I was having a nap.”

“Tell me you aren't having anything to do with this man.”

Her obvious distress, overriding apologies she would normally have made at disturbing me, woke me completely. “Well, no, not anymore. We were just trying to get the media involved. The cops are sitting on their goddamn arses.”

“Ellen, forget the policemen's bloody bottoms. Think about your own. This man is more dangerous than you think.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Haven't you seen today's paper? His entire criminal history is there.”

“I haven't seen it yet. Why is he more dangerous than I already think? He got manslaughter. He pinched a nerve in some guy's neck.”

“Girl,” said Mary Frances. “He strangled his girlfriend.”

“He what?” It felt like someone was choking
me
.

“He strangled his girlfriend. With her own stocking. He was originally convicted of murder but he got manslaughter on appeal.”

“Oh God.”

“I gather this is not what Lucy told you.” Her tone managed to sound dry, cynical, and worried all at the same time.

“Um, no.”

“Ellen.”

“Yes?”

“Promise me you won't have anything more to do with him.”

“I promise.” I was only paying half attention. I told her I had to go.

I forced myself to eat something to get rid of the spaced-out feeling and the shock of Mary Frances's words. Tim had lied to Lucy. No. She must have known. There would be ways of finding out. Lucy had lied to me. Why? To lessen the shock? To bring me on side? But she had believed it was an accident. She would never have got involved with him if she hadn't.

I had walked down the pitch-black railway tracks with a man who had choked the life out of a woman. Maybe two women. I might have become the third. I might still become the third. How could I ever walk out of my house now?

I did though. I drove down the 105 to the
depanneur
. The general store, in a converted house on a big empty lot, carried all the papers. The story was on the bottom of the second page of the
Ottawa Citizen
, next to a bad photograph of Tim. He still looked like a little boy. But this boy wasn't lost. This boy was pouting. This boy had done something bad.

I drove home and took the paper up to my office couch. Beau and Belle thumped down on the carpet in front of me.

I read the story. It was all there. The murder conviction, the lesser conviction of manslaughter after he'd won his appeal. He'd served a ten-year sentence for that. And there was a litany of other crimes. When Lucy had met him he'd been in the middle of serving a five-and-a-half year combined sentence for robbery with violence, fraud, and escaped lawful custody. He had been in prison far longer than the ten years Lucy had told me. But then, she'd neglected to mention anything but the manslaughter conviction. How would I have responded if she'd told me the whole truth?

I kept reading. Tim was quoted as saying he knew he would be considered a suspect. It had been while appealing his sentence during his first year as an inmate that he had come into contact with Archie Crowe. He was worried, quoted the article, that Lucy might have been a victim of Crowe trying to get back at him. “I testified against this man at the Colin Fajber hearing. My name was used, when they promised me it wouldn't be. I heard he's out of prison now. I'm scared.”

The Colin Fajber hearing. Lucy had been there. She'd been there to see justice served. Justice quite possibly had backfired on her.

I dropped the paper on my desk. The light on the phone was blinking. I stared at it. How long had it been blinking? I pressed the codes for my messages. Tim's voice sounded in my ear. “It's Thursday afternoon. I'd appreciate it if you could give me a call.”

I checked the time on the call display. He had phoned while I was at the
depanneur
. He knew my phone number. He knew where I lived. He knew I knew about him….

I erased the message. I punched other numbers to get out of the answering service. I tried to dial another number. My fingers were shaking. I kept hitting the wrong keys.

*

SHE HADN'T KNOWN HOW TO
bring it up without sounding like she was interrogating him. But the question came out naturally. “Tell me what happened, Tim.”

There was a long, slow sigh from the other end of the phone. “It was an accident. She was my business partner. She was a hooker too, but that didn't have anything to do with me. I wasn't her pimp. I wasn't her boyfriend. We were in the con business. We got in a fight one night. Arguing about something. I don't even remember. It was stupid. I was trying to get her to see some sense. Trying to scare her. I grabbed one of her stockings, pretended to choke her. Except….”

She let out an involuntary sound.

“Lu?”

“Yes, sorry. It's just—well, it is a bit shocking.”

“I know. I'm not proud of it. I'm really sorry. I thought she was faking it—you know, making a face like she was choking. But she wasn't faking. I was an idiot even to think she was. I tried to revive her. I couldn't.” He sounded like he was crying.

She didn't know what to say.

“I got what I deserved,” Tim continued. “I didn't begrudge doing my time. Every day of my sentence I was sorry.”

“But you were convicted of—murder first.” She was trying to take it all in.

“Yeah, but it wasn't murder. I didn't mean to do it. I was just trying to scare her. I appealed that conviction. Anyways, they had no proof. The first trial was a total scam. I would never kill anybody. 'Specially someone I cared about. And I did care about her. Lisa was her name. She was like family to me.”

A niggle of doubt: what on earth was she doing?

He was crying again, this time openly. “I served my time on that, Lu,” he said through tears. “I served the whole sentence. And I deserved to. But these other sentences. I done my time and they're just screwing me around. But I can't do nothing from in here.”

“No, but I can do something.” The doubts had melted.

“Are you sure? I mean, are you sure you want to help me? I mean, I'd understand if you didn't want to have anything to do with me. I wouldn't blame you. I been wanting to tell you about this for a long time now.” He heaved a sigh. “I just didn't know how to bring it up. And I was scared too. You been so nice to me, and I keep thinking, I don't deserve it. Not if you don't know the full story. And even now you do, I don't deserve you helping me.”

She took a breath. “You do deserve it, Tim. You deserve a second chance.”

7.

T
HE FIRST SCOTCH PROVIDED THE
anaesthetic my nerves needed. I was safe in this metal box at ten thousand metres.

But Lucy isn't.

The thought was a rock dropping into the pit of my stomach. It was my first thought of Lucy since Tim's message. I had been so relieved to get a flight. I had thrown things into a bag and called Mary Frances. She had been willing to take the dogs, and drive me to the airport. The price was a half-hearted lecture on running to Marc.

I barely heard it. The blood was hammering in my ears. I couldn't miss this flight. I couldn't spend another night alone in that house. I couldn't endanger my friends' lives. Marc had been receptive. More than receptive. Relieved. He would be there to meet my plane. I willed the car to go faster.

Mary Frances dropped me at Departures just in time for me to make the connector flight to Toronto.

Now, en route to Thunder Bay, I looked around the plane as if someone had plunked me into the middle of a bad dream. I leaned back and shut my eyes. With every second I was getting farther away from Lucy. Who might be getting closer to death. Or already dead. But with every second I was also getting closer to Marc and I imagined his arms already around me, grounding me.

But I knew I couldn't stay. Marc might reground me for the moment, but that wouldn't solve anything. Not for Marc and me. And certainly not for Lucy. I resolved to get the first flight out in the morning. Then I signalled the flight attendant and ordered another Scotch.

At the Thunder Bay airport, I tried to tell Marc I needed to go to the booking desk, but exhaustion and alcohol slurred my words. And I needed some help with my bag, and with walking. Marc led me to his truck, not the ticket desk.

I had no recollection of arriving at his house or going to bed. I was only aware of Lucy visiting once again, with more of her macabre messages.

The return of consciousness brought the return of panic. It wasn't about Tim. Or Lucy. The walls of my bedroom were closing in on me.

I shut my eyes to get rid of the illusion. I opened them again. The walls were one foot from the bed on three sides. But they weren't moving. That was one relief. And it wasn't my bed, or my bedroom. That was another relief. Followed by momentous claustrophobia.

I bolted from the room. There wasn't far to bolt. Marc's bedroom opened onto the only other room in the tiny house—a combined kitchen and living room. The clock on the microwave said four o'clock. Outside it was bright daylight. I was shocked. I had slept for fourteen hours.

I took in the room around me. The unmistakable imprint of Marc was everywhere: canoe paddles propped up against the walls, posters and prints of northern rivers, scattered photographs, topographic maps pinned to the walls. All the things that had, until six days ago, cluttered up our house. The sight of all the familiar things dissolved the panic. Among the clutter I found a box of granola and a note: “Be back @ 5.”

What I wanted was a phone book to call the airline. Or just a cab to get me to the airport. Lucy needed me. Marc didn't.

Marc had hidden the phone book.

When that paranoid thought occurred, I knew I was in trouble. Marc didn't have a sly bone in his body.

I wondered if he had slept beside me. The crumpled sheets on the couch answered that question. The sight depressed me. I looked out the front window. I seemed to be on a suburban street of small bungalows. White smoke billowing out from several smokestacks in the distance marred a view of striking cliffs. The sight of the smokestacks depressed me too.

Getting some food into me brought me out of my thoughts about Marc and back to those I'd been trying to escape. I couldn't escape Lucy even if I tried. She was in my brain, right there wherever I went, waiting for me to go to sleep so she could come to me. Was this a huge guilt complex surfacing because I hadn't been there for her? I thought of how negative she had sounded all through the fall. How physically weak she had sounded just the previous week.
Some
thing had been going on this past year. Something bad.

The dream images had been briefer this time, but no less disturbing. The hazy figure of a woman peering over Lucy in a darkened building. Seeming to be worried about animals getting in through cracks in the walls, getting to Lucy, lying there, on some kind of bench. She was alive, but just barely, and only until Saturday night. On Saturday night, Lucy's weakened whispering voice had said, she was going to be dumped in the Gatineau River.

I scrounged around the house for a pen and paper. It was a fantastic story. My imagination, it seemed, had no limits. But as long as there was even a remote chance Lucy might be alive, that she might be found in time, I had no choice but to listen. And act.

I put down my pen and picked up the spoon again, still hungry. So much seemed to point to Marnie being the woman. Her arrival at the site with Tim the very next day. Their stroll together down the tracks. Tim calling her that night from my house (the only friend he called). Trish's bizarrely volunteered information:
I don't know why I'm calling.
As if something had compelled her.
I found it odd they were talking so long on the phone when we knew Lucy was missing.

The contradiction hit me on the last spoonful.

That night at my house, Tim had told me he had left a message for Marnie, and that he had to call her because she would be worried about
why
he'd been trying to get hold of her. He'd said he was waiting for her to call back. But Trish had said that Tim had phoned late Sunday afternoon. She had said
they knew
Lucy was missing.

That would explain why Tim's first words to Marnie when he'd called from my house had been not an explanation of why he was calling but simply, “We found the car.” Because Marnie already knew why he was calling. Because, while Trish had been away, and for whatever bizarre reason, Marnie had helped him do whatever he had done to Lucy.

And my vision of Marnie on that dark street? I could put it down to hallucination, but maybe—just maybe—it wasn't. Maybe it was a sign. For me. Clarification. That she
was
involved. Maybe she
was
checking on Lucy. I couldn't believe I was thinking this way. But whatever was going on with my sanity, the fact remained that Lucy's instructions had borne out; they had led me to abandoned outbuildings in a part of Ottawa I had barely ever been to.

Outbuildings. The word I had got in that second dream had been
out
buildings. Abandoned outbuildings. But I had only told Quinn abandoned “buildings.” Buildings could be any kind of building. Like the one we had searched through. Outbuildings meant storage or farm buildings. And farm buildings meant barns. And barns could be burnt-out barns….

I thought back to the dark shadowy shapes of the barns and their charred, caved-in roofs and walls. There wouldn't just be “cracks” in those walls; animals could presumably roam those ruins freely. She couldn't be in those barns. But there could well be other outbuildings close by. Buildings we hadn't seen in the dark.

Had a tail been put on Marnie? They had to follow her before Saturday night. Maybe if I offered them the information about Marnie—the contradictory things people were saying, not the suspect offerings of my dreams—maybe they would finally listen.

I pushed the bowl away and reached for the phone. There was no question: I was going to have to keep making a fool of myself for Lucy.

At the other end of the line, Lundy was pleasant but preoccupied. “Are you sure he didn't call before Lucy went missing?”

“Trish said he called Sunday afternoon. She said they knew then that Lucy was missing.”

He was silent. I sensed he was taking notes. Finally.

I overcame my embarrassment. “Did a tail get put on Marnie?”

“We wouldn't have had a reason to put a tail on Marnie.” He said it without a trace of self-consciousness. As if our encounter the previous morning had never taken place. “But,” he added, “we'll check this out. Thanks Ellen.”

I hung up so angry I forgot to tell him about the outbuildings.

I punched in the numbers to access my messages. There were two new ones. I pressed 1. I dreaded the sound of Tim's voice.

But it was a woman's voice. Anna's. “I hope you don't mind my calling. I haven't been able to sleep. The police are telling us nothing. I wondered if you might have heard anything. If you get a chance, could you please call me back?”

I wrote down the number she recited, and played the next message.

“Hello. This is Kevin Hopkins calling. I'm an old friend of Lucy Stockman's. I heard you being interviewed on the radio and understand you are involved in searching for Lucy. I was wondering if you would mind giving me a call? I can be reached at….”

I wrote down the second phone number, an Ottawa exchange, under the first. His voice was so sad, it impelled me to call. And I thought he might be the easier of the two to talk to.

He was. I didn't have to talk at all. He was an outpouring of stories about Lucy. “I didn't know who else to call,” he said. It was the voice on my answering machine, full of sadness and grief. “I don't know any of Lucy's other friends. I hope you don't mind. I needed to talk to someone who knew her.”

“I don't mind,” I said. And realized I meant it.

“I've known Lucy for over twenty years. I introduced her to yoga. She became my teacher. And she was a good friend. But in the last year or two I let that go.”

“She had become so negative,” I offered, in empathy.

There was a deep sigh on the line. “Yes. But she wasn't always like that. She was a bombshell in her twenties. She mesmerized us all. She was so sharp and witty and fun.”

His words amazed me. And then, suddenly, I could see it. From my first meeting with her at the Gallery: the bombshell Kevin was describing. I had forgotten that Lucy.

“She could have had anyone she wanted,” he said. And then he laughed. “She
did
have anyone she wanted. But she always dumped them eventually. I was never sorry. Until Curtis.”

“You knew Curtis?”

“Oh yes. I had high hopes for Lucy and Curtis. He really did fit all her criteria. They had so much in common. Music. Food. Dancing. He loved to dance as much as she did. They moved in together. Worked on their issues together. He was good for her. He called her bluff, and he wouldn't let her run away. He made her stay and fight her demons.”

I was relieved to hear Kevin talking about Curtis this way. Maybe I would call him. Some day when this was all over.

“But she did run away, in the end,” I said. “She ran to Tim.”

“Lucy was always running away,” said Kevin, flatly.

“So she wouldn't be abandoned,” I said. The word was suddenly there in my head, from one of our early conversations.

“She told you about that?”

“She called it her abandonment issue, didn't she? She seemed kind of, I don't know, almost excited by it.”

“I know what you mean. I think it was enthusiasm to work it out. It went way back.”

Back to her early childhood. I was starting to remember what Lucy had told me. She'd been quarantined in hospital with chicken pox as a toddler. She'd said her mother had never come to see her. “I confess I never really believed the part where her mother never visited her in hospital,” I told Kevin now. “How could you not visit your baby in hospital?”

“I guess you never met Mrs. Stockman.” His tone was wry. “She really was off in her own world. Did Lucy tell you she was a poet? She could have been a model as well. She was very poised. And very absent. That seemed to suit Lucy's father. He just wanted his wife to look beautiful and to have his dinner on the table by six-thirty every evening. I don't know how she accomplished even that. I think that was all the domesticity she
could
manage—certainly not raising two girls. I don't think Lucy was so far off the mark when she claimed the house had raised her.”

“So she felt abandoned by both parents?”

“Pretty much,” said Kevin. “And you know what those formative experiences can do. You end up repeating them in your adult relationships. That's what happened with Lucy. She was always choosing men who weren't there. But she was very aware of the pattern. She was determined to break it.”

“But, from what you said, it sounds like Curtis
was
there. What happened?”

“Lucy Stockman's famous unrealistic expectations.” The words were harsh; the tone was fond. “She wanted Curtis to be something he wasn't. She wanted him to be there all the time. On her terms. Oh, that's not entirely fair. It takes two, as they say. Curtis was no saint either. And he didn't have a very good job. Lucy was the breadwinner. She was pretty proud of being financially independent. Of being secure. Obsessed, you might say.”

“So she started a relationship with Tim,” I said, to get him onto Tim.