Tell Anna She's Safe (7 page)

There was one message waiting on my machine when I got home. It was from Curtis. He spoke in a quiet voice that seemed to mask some great emotion. He had got my number from Tim. He hoped I would call him back.

From Tim? Was he in league with Tim? That made no sense. He was, I assumed, the jilted lover. How would I feel if something happened to Marc? Devastated.

I made myself eat dinner to work up my nerve to call him back. His exchange was in the Wakefield area.

Our conversation was awkward. He wanted to hear the story of how I'd found the car. I gave him the same bare bones version I'd given the
CBC.
I remembered he'd gotten my phone number from Tim. “Did you call Tim?” I asked.

“I called
Lucy
,” said Curtis. “On Sunday. Tim said she wasn't home and I hung up, but he called me back. He must have star-sixty-nined me.” He was referring to the phone company last-number-called service. He didn't sound pleased. “He gave me some song and dance about Lucy coming to stay with me on the weekend.”

“Lucy told me she was going to be in the Gatineaus on the weekend,” I said.

“We never made any definite plans.” He sounded adamant. And defensive, as if others had already brought this up. Then, in a disquieting tone, he added, “She wouldn't listen to me.”

No, I thought. There wouldn't be many people Lucy would listen to. I thought about what she'd said about being abandoned by all her lovers. Until Tim. If she'd still been with Curtis when she started seeing Tim, he must have been absent in
some
way. I could well imagine the conflicts that would have created. Still, it must have been a slap in the face when she'd started corresponding with Tim. Had Curtis been jealous? But Anna had said it was
Tim
who'd been jealous.

“Have you talked to the police?” I asked.

“They've been here.”

There was a silence. He obviously didn't want to say more. As I didn't. I tried to think of something neutral. “We're trying to get a media campaign going. I got Tim to call the papers. I talked to
CBC.
Anna and Doug made some posters.”

“I'm knocking on doors in the area,” said Curtis. Then there was a pause, and his voice became more conciliatory. “I don't have any connections to Lucy's friends anymore. If you hear anything, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.”

I reviewed our conversation in my mind after we hung up. He had sounded as wary as I had felt. We had danced around each other, neither giving the other too much information. His reactions were the same as mine. He must be innocent. I caught myself.
What do you know? Trust no one.

I had agreed to call him. But I didn't intend to.

I drifted in and out of sleep. Voices were filling my head with unintelligible words. There were no faces attached to the voices. They kept waking me up. And then the voices faded, and Lucy was again sitting on my bed.

Her mouth begins moving. She speaks as if with great effort. But I hear every word. “He's trying to frighten me. So I'll stay.” An image comes, a silent-screen image. A small figure with long, dark hair lying on a couch, eyes closed, then opening, expression angry, her mouth moving as if yelling. Someone hovers over her. A faceless male figure. He forces something down her throat. Pills. A second, shorter figure watches. Again, no face. Then Lucy's voice, in eerie voice-over: “You've looked in her eyes.”

I am in a vehicle, moving to the end of a street with houses on either side. I see stores on a busy street. Then an odometer, larger than life. The numbers click over. Five, six, seven. The odometer fades and I'm back in the car, watching it stop beside a dark shadow of a building.

Lucy's voice again. “Abandoned buildings—outbuildings. I'm wrapped in something—a man-made material. She's afraid. Follow her.”

Then Lucy reappears on my bed. Looking at me. Pointing at her watch. Frantically.

I sat up in bed, and reached for the light. My heart was pounding, my T-shirt soaked. Oh God, it was happening again.

I got up to get a drink of water. Lucy's voice was still in my head.
He's trying to frighten me. So I'll stay.
“He” could only be Tim.

The images returned, vivid in my memory. Pills being forced down Lucy's throat, her anger. Tim had mentioned Lucy had a supply of Valium. My subconscious had clearly taken that idea and run with it. Because I didn't want to entertain more violent thoughts. Because I didn't want to think about why she might have needed Valium.

But there were lots of things in the dream that couldn't have come from my subconscious. The involvement of a second person. Someone whose eyes I had looked into. Who had I met that Lucy and Tim knew? Only Marnie. Was
Marnie
involved? She was the second person Tim had called from my house. She had been right there with him the next day.
Follow her
. Why? Was Marnie checking on her? Could Marnie lead the police right to her? I had been in a car, driving down a main street, stopping at a building. Abandoned outbuildings.

He's trying to frighten me. So I'll stay.
Of everything in the dream, those words made the most sense. She'd been trying to get away. Maybe she
had
got away. Maybe she'd abandoned her car to make it look like Tim had done something to her. The car had been found up somewhere near where Curtis lived. Maybe Curtis was in on this. Maybe he had helped her get away. Maybe he had called Lucy on Sunday to look innocent.

Or maybe the figure in the dream was Curtis….

I splashed water on my face. It was a
dream
. Nothing more. I would get a grip.

But it was fear that had the grip. Had I locked the door? Could he get in?

At the front door, Belle and Beau waited, mouths drawn back in expectant smiles, tails wagging.

“We're
not
going out.” I punctuated my words with a pull on the door knob to make sure it was locked. It was almost funny: their eagerness to go out, mine to stay in.

I started at my reflection in each window. I had never seen the need for curtains. Before.

“No one's out there,” I said aloud. I looked at the dogs. “What reason would anyone have to be out there? What threat am I? No one knows I know anything. I
don't
know anything.”

But I did know some things. Things that weren't the suspect messages from a bizarre dream. They were there, on the videotape of my memory, waiting to be replayed once again: the odd things from my encounter with Tim on Monday evening.

I looked at the dogs again. I wanted them to tell me I was being irrational. Instead, I heard Lucy and her second message from the previous night:
Write it in a book
.

Oh Lucy, what are you doing to me?

But I couldn't refuse her. Whether she was a figment of my imagination or not. I went in search of paper and pen.

It took an hour. I finished the description of my dealings and conversations with Tim, all the odd things he had said. But I didn't stop writing. The things Lucy had said in my dream, the scenes she'd shown me, were still vivid in my memory. The dream, hallucination, whatever it had been, it fit with all the odd things. I couldn't dismiss it. There was no way around it. I was going to have to go to the police.

I paced up and down the living room, avoiding the windows. Belle and Beau paced with me and whimpered. Every few minutes I deviated from my path to check the clock on the stove.

At two a.m. Lundy and Roach were not likely to be on duty. Was it worth getting them out of bed to hear my far-fetched tale? They would never believe me. I didn't believe myself.

But even if everything else was bunk, the odd things were probably worth something. The odd things might get their attention. And then what? Entertain them with visions visited on me by the victim? The dreams were so convoluted, so vague. The first seemed more believable, more straightforward in its messages. Maybe I should simplify the second. The kilometres must have been indicating how far from her house they had gone. I needed a map of Ottawa. Please let there be one in the house. I wasn't ready to go outside.

I found an old torn city map buried under the shoes in the coat closet. I pieced it back together on the kitchen counter and pulled up a bar stool. I found Lucy's street on the map. The nearest street with stores on it would be Bank. North would take them downtown. That made no sense. South headed out of town. I checked the map scale and measured, with my fingers, the equivalent of seven kilometres south on Bank from the intersection with Lucy's street. I noted the name of the closest main artery: Hunt Club Road.

Then I reached for a pen and paraphrased additional one-line instructions from Lucy.

I wouldn't bring her into it at all. I would just say I had heard a voice in my head. Oh God, they were going to think I was certifiable, no matter what I said.

I sat at the kitchen counter with my head in one hand and the other on the phone receiver. In my mind, I could see Lucy, pointing frantically at her watch.

Ellen
. It was a voice in my head. Not an imaginary voice. My own. And it was loud and clear:
You might find her. She might still be alive
.

The words shot through my brain like a bolt of lightning. They snapped me to attention. They triggered an adrenalin rush that didn't let up for ten weeks.

*

THE PHONE CALLS HAD TO
come collect from Tim. “The operator comes on right away,” he explained. “I hate to make you pay. I got no choice. I got no choice about time either. We only have six phones in our cell block, and there's a few dozen of us who gotta share it. We have a system worked out, a schedule of who gets to talk when. I'm working during the day—doing maintenance, taking mechanics and carpentry courses. I put myself down for six-thirty p.m. on Tuesdays. We got twenty minutes. Is that okay? I don't mean to be presumptive about us talking every week—it's just easier to book it ahead. It's totally up to you.”

She assured him once a week was fine. And she didn't mind paying. She didn't mind the time of day either. She found it interesting that he couldn't call during the day when Curtis was at work. It was going to have to be out in the open, this time, whether she liked it or not. She liked it. A pattern was being broken. The days of covertly running from one man to another were over. Maybe by breaking that pattern, she'd break another. Maybe this was about not expecting everything from one man. Maybe in getting the intimacy of sharing with Tim she would stop expecting it from Curtis. Maybe she could let him be. And then maybe he'd stay.

When the second phone call came, Curtis announced that he was leaving.

“I am not,” he said, “accepting calls in my house from a murderer.”

“It is not your house! And he's not a murderer! If you call him a murderer one more time, I'll—”

“Great.” Curtis gave a grim smile. “He's teaching you well. No, you already knew the fine art of threatening. You two are obviously made for each other.”

“Yes,” she threw back. “We are. Which is a lot more than I can say for you and me.”

There was a deep, unexpected, sigh from Curtis. And a long look. Then that quiet voice: “You're wrong, you know. And if you weren't so pigheaded, you'd see it.”

He suddenly smiled—a teasing, affectionate smile she hadn't seen in awhile.

She steeled herself against that smile. She would not let it suck her in, not anymore. She crossed her arms. “If you weren't so pigheaded, you'd show it.”

Curtis shrugged. “You mean I'd show it in the way you want me to show it. You may as well be having this relationship with yourself.”

“I am,” she snapped.

5.

T
HE DETECTIVE ON THE OTHER
end of the phone invited me to come down to the station to tell him my story. He even offered to send a car.

I told him I had a car. I didn't tell him it was going to take all my nerve to run to it from the front door. I didn't tell him Tim Brennan was outside my door, lurking behind every bush.

My rational mind, usually in control, could only stand by and watch. It watched me scramble behind the wheel and lean over to lock all the doors. It watched me accelerate down the dirt road, make the sharp uphill turn onto Cameron without stopping, and then speed down the highway towards Ottawa. It heard me muttering under my breath, over and over, “Hang on, Lucy. Just hang on. I'm coming.”

Reason just barely stopped me from thanking God for all the green lights on the city streets and for the absence of cops stopping me for speeding. Reason watched me walk into the cavernous police station on Elgin Street with the certainty that I was going to be thrown in jail for my tall tales.

By the time Detective Sergeant Stephen Quinn of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police shook my hand, reason was back in control. His grip was firm and warm and attached to a man with his feet on the ground.

Sergeant Quinn was not bursting out of his suit like Lundy. He did not drink too much Scotch like Roach. He was not haggard from too many eighteen-hour shifts, or hardened from making the acquaintance of too many nasty criminal minds. He did not have an unhappy wife at home who nagged him for neglecting her and the kids.

Sergeant Quinn had a solid build and a smooth roundish face with a five o'clock shadow I suspected even a fresh shave would not completely remove. His hair was shaved close to his head. Thick chest hair showed above the neckline of the T-shirt he wore under his dress shirt. He had steel blue eyes. He looked to be barely forty.

He also looked like he had nothing better to do than to sit in an airless interrogation room with a tensed-up woman in the middle of the night. He gestured to a chair at the table in the tiny room and pulled up another for himself. “You tell me your story, and then I'll decide if we should wake up Sergeants Lundy and Roach. They were here 'til midnight and I'm kind of reluctant to disturb their slumbers.” Then he smiled. The smile put me at ease, a little.

I started with the facts. My acquaintance with Lucy. Finding her car. Dealing with Tim. I outlined all his odd comments and actions. I spoke in a monotone that kept me calm.

Sergeant Quinn didn't take his eyes from me.

I finished reciting the facts and looked at him hard. “Now we get to the part where my tale becomes what you might call fairly unbelievable, and you get to send me home.”

My ability to joke startled me. Sergeant Quinn's laugh startled me even more. “Try me,” he said. “Maybe I'll surprise you.” He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back.

I looked at him for a moment. “Okay, but here's the deal. I want to state for the record that I don't normally pay attention to my dreams. I don't believe in dreams. Or psychics. Or telepathy. Or any of that stuff. I don't think of myself as psychic. I'm not psychic. But, unfortunately, I recently had a couple of dreams that I haven't been able to ignore.”

I took my notes out from my pocket, unfolded the paper, and placed it in front of me on the table. I let in and out a deep breath. “I was hearing a voice. It dictated lines to me. It happened twice. Both times I got up and wrote down the messages. They were about Lucy.” My voice had returned to that monotone that kept it from shaking. I looked at Sergeant Quinn to see how he was taking this.

Quinn's expression stayed neutral. He nodded at my notes. “Tell me what you heard.”

I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. I read off the first two phrases from my first dream and then stumbled over the third. “Tell Anna I'm.… Tell Anna
she's
safe.” There was no way I was going to tell him it was Lucy who had given me these messages; he would send me home for sure.

I told Sergeant Quinn what I thought they meant.

“So,” he summed up, “you think this woman is in a poplar grove somewhere. And you're supposed to tell her sister she's safe.” He couldn't keep the amusement out of his voice.

I gave him a wry look. “I told you….”

“Go on,” Quinn prompted. His voice was very gentle.

I fought a sudden tightness in my throat. I couldn't look at him. “I got another set of messages tonight.” I read the phrases I had partially made up: “Abandoned buildings. Bank and Hunt Club. Wrapped in a man-made material. Follow Marnie.”

Quinn sat up straight and leaned forward. “Say all that again.”

I repeated the three phrases from the first dream and the four phrases I'd made up from the second dream.

“Okay,” he said. “She's wrapped in some kind of synthetic material and being held in some abandoned buildings near Bank and Hunt Club, and possibly the building is surrounded by or near a poplar grove.” He kept his voice neutral. It impressed me, and disconcerted me. I couldn't read him. It didn't matter. He was listening.

“Are there poplar groves near Bank and Hunt Club? Are there abandoned buildings down there?”

Quinn looked stern. Cop stern. “Have you ever been down in that area?”

I shook my head. “No, not that I can think of.”

“Never?” He had shifted to interrogation mode.

I shook my head again. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. This whole night was beginning to seem absurd.

Quinn leaned back again and sighed. “That entire area is woods, beyond the main road and the shopping malls. And in these economic times, it's full of abandoned buildings. These women's names,” he went on. “Anna, you say, is her sister. Who's Marnie?”

“She's the woman Tim called from my place the night I found the car. And then she was with him the next day at the site. He said she was a friend of theirs.”

“And we're supposed to follow her because—what? She's checking on Lucy?”

“That's the sense I got.”

It was bad enough telling my story, not knowing if I was implicating an innocent woman. It was worse hearing it come out of Sergeant Quinn's mouth. I should never have come.

Quinn looked at me for some time without saying anything. He leaned forward again. He had his elbow on the table and his hand over his mouth. He tapped his fingers against his mouth, and breathed audibly through his nose. He never took his eyes from mine. They were narrowed, as if trying to read my mind. I didn't want him to read my mind. He'd hear the irrational voice that kept screaming:
she might be alive.

I didn't realize I had spoken aloud until I saw the look Sergeant Quinn gave me. Then he released a breath. “I think we'd better go for a drive.”

He smiled at the look on my face. “I told you I might surprise you.”

The unmarked cruiser was big and blue and luxuriously comfortable. There was the faint smell of leather, coming from Sergeant Quinn's jacket.

“You say you're not psychic. Your experiences sound psychic.” The voice came out of the soft darkness of the plush interior.

“You mean ‘crazy.'”

“You don't have to be afraid to admit it. My grandmother was psychic. She called it having the ‘sight.' She was Scottish. In your case, it sounds more like clairaudience. Hearing things—messages—”

“Oh, I'm hearing things alright.” My attempt at humour came out in a shaky voice. Quinn made no response.

Ottawa's busiest street was empty. I kept my eyes on the side roads. There it was, Glen Avenue: Lucy's street. I tried to read the odometer without leaning over in a noticeable way. It wasn't easy to see it, but I wanted to make sure Hunt Club really was six or seven kilometres from Lucy's street as I'd determined from the map.

It was a silent drive. An unreal drive in a big smooth car down a deserted main artery. It was another dream. I was unsure what we were going to find. I didn't think it would come to anything. I was terrified it would.

We neared the Hunt Club area. I
had
been down here before. I saw that now. It was the shopping mall strip. The street names on the map had meant nothing to me. I didn't come this way very often.

I kept my eyes peeled for abandoned buildings on side streets. I saw how hopeless this was and understood the reasons for Sergeant Quinn's heavy sighs.

“I think it was just the general Bank and Hunt Club area.” I wanted him to slow the car.

“I know that,” said Sergeant Quinn. He slowed down, and held the wheel loosely, at the top, with one hand. “I also know there are dozens of abandoned buildings down here. In these economic times, everyone's abandoned something.”

“I see that.”

We were approaching another main artery. Hunt Club. Sergeant Quinn turned right.

It felt right to turn right. It was bizarre, that feeling. But at least the number of kilometres we'd travelled from Lucy's street to Hunt Club seemed to be correct.

I glanced to my right. There was a building at the end of a short intersecting street—a building several storeys high, with boards over the windows.

“Isn't that an abandoned building?”

Sergeant Quinn slowed the car right down and peered past me. “That's an apartment building under construction.” He drove on.

“Are you sure? Those looked like boarded-up windows.”

Sergeant Quinn swung the wheel around with one hand and pulled a
U
-turn in the middle of Hunt Club. He turned up the street. It was a court, with the building on the west side.

Quinn stopped the car so that it was facing the building. A window directly in front of us wasn't boarded up. The glass was broken at one corner. Eerie lights shone out. It took me a heart-stopping minute to realize what they were: our headlights reflecting back at us.

“There's a grove of trees over there,” said Sergeant Quinn. His voice was odd.

I looked beyond the building. There was, as he said, a dark wooded area. I couldn't tell what the trees were. The skin on my arms began to feel prickly.

“Have you ever seen this building before?” Quinn's voice was cop-stern again. But pitched to a slightly higher key.

“I have never seen this building before.” My voice was that monotone again. Also pitched slightly higher.

I began to shiver.

Sergeant Quinn got out of the car. I did the same. We approached the building.

The corner of the window that had appeared to be broken was merely a corner of torn plastic over the still-glassed-in window.

We cupped our hands on the plastic-covered glass and peered inside. In the dim light I made out bales of pink fibreglass strewn about the floor.

“That's a man-made material!”

“I know that's a man-made material,” said Sergeant Quinn. Then he added in a calmer voice, “I'm not laughing at you.”

I knew he wasn't. I knew he was as shaken as I was.

We walked around the building. All the other windows were boarded up tight. The only door was a solid metal one at the back. It had a keyhole but no handle. It couldn't be the right building if there was no way someone could get in.

I followed Sergeant Quinn back to the car.

Back in the driver's seat, he radioed the dispatcher. “I have a strange request,” he said. “I'd like a police cruiser with two officers. And make sure they have flashlights.”

“Can I go in with you?” My voice was peculiar. Flat.

“Yes,” he said. “But do me a favour. Don't tell these officers what brought us here.”

“You don't have to worry about me.”

We waited in the darkness. In the silence. A few minutes later, a set of headlights arced onto the road and snapped off a short distance away.

Quinn went to speak to the officers. A moment later he was back with a flashlight.

I got out of the car. The officers made no move to get out of theirs.

I stumbled and tripped behind Quinn and his flashlight beam.

“Careful,” he admonished.

We circled the entire building. There were no breaks in the windows. There were no other doors. My disappointment was acute.

We arrived back at the front of the building

“Stay here,” said Sergeant Quinn. His tone softened the order into a suggestion. There was no question I would stay. He disappeared into the wooded grove behind the building.

One of the officers spoke from a rolled-down window. “What are we doing here, anyway?”

I approached the cruiser. “A friend of mine is missing and I thought she might be in this building.” That didn't sound too crazy.

The two officers got out to stretch their legs.

I hung back, waiting for Sergeant Quinn to reappear from the woods. That's when Tim and Marnie strolled up the street. I could see Marnie's face under the street light from thirty metres away. Her face was clear—so clear I called out her name.