The Glass Harmonica (29 page)

What Vincent did hear was the snowplow slowing down and taking the corner at the top of McKay Street, heard it nose into the sidewalk to spill the snow off the plow in a huge mound and then lift the blade and back up. When the blade dropped to the pavement again, it rang like a great funeral bell, and Vincent heard the truck's engine rev up and muscle the plow into the snow and down the street towards his house. Vincent shut his eyes tight and concentrated on the sound of the plow, imagining himself in the big front seat, heading away. Just away.

Later, from the living room, he watched Glenn Coughlin head out to his truck, fumble with the keys for a moment, and then turn around and look back at the front of the workshop, his arm in the air, middle finger extended.

“You'll need something again, O'Reilly. You know you will—you'll get in over your head before you know it. You always do,” the big man shouted towards the house. “You'll need something again, but don't even think about calling me.”

111
McKay Street

BRENDAN HAYDEN

AUGUST 6, 2006

B
RENDAN
read about the skeleton a hunter found in an Ontario provincial park in 1968, nothing more than bones, the remains of a man believed to be Eastern European, with the oddity of an extra rib on his right side and a looped and knotted rope tangled through the collection of small bones from his wrists and hands. The suggestion, the police said on the web page, was that he might have been tied up when he died.

The police had gotten someone to sculpt a face out of clay based on the bone structure beneath, and the clay face stared out of the computer monitor at Brendan as blankly as Brendan stared back at it. At him. At it. Brendan couldn't make up his mind about which it was. Glass eyes, flat and even and empty like any photograph—mirrors of the soul they may be, Brendan thought, but you can't take a believable photograph of a mirror either.

He tried to limit his searches so that he didn't spend much time on the website when he was at work, but small things were so compelling. One corpse, found in the shallows of Lake Ontario, was wearing only a pair of pants, the only distinctive feature some blurry writing in black ink on the inside of the waistband. It had remained unidentified for long enough that the inventory of the corpse's pockets—ten dollars in all and a fistful of small change, every penny accounted for—listed two two-dollar bills, two one-dollar bills. It was a man's body—the corpse's pockets, his pockets: Brendan kept having to remind himself that the corpse was a person, not simply an “it.” Brendan couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a one-dollar bill, but he could remember the light green of the paper, and the way it would soften from frequent touch on the oldest bills until they were almost like worn fabric.

Looking at the website was easier at work. At home, in front of the computer in the dark of the front room upstairs, the faces were altogether too haunting—sometimes they'd come back to him late at night or when he woke up in the darkness, that strange, plasticine rigidity they sported around their mouths sharp in front of his eyes. They hung in his memory, faces caught exactly at the point of death like bugs in amber, except this amber had a short half-life, the faces bending and turning with rigor mortis and the inevitable workings of decay.

Brendan read about bodies in water, expanding his research, read about how they might sink for a while but that they'd always rise as the biology in their insides blew them up like fleshy inflatable rafts, pressurized flesh pressing out between the buttons and against the zippers of their clothing. Brendan went to work, went home, divided his life completely between the two. He looked out the window. Took notes. He read impassively about bloat and even about the havoc wreaked on bodies by the ocean, about the way saltwater shrimp could strip away exposed flesh in an afternoon, so that the only parts of a body that would hold together were the parts inside the clothes, like the straw inside a scarecrow—feet inside long rubber boots or sneakers: hands inside fireball-orange rubber fisherman's gloves, the rest of the body long since disjointed and washed away in scattered pieces.

A newspaper article about a coroner's career stuck in his mind, the coroner complaining that it took seven years to have a missing fisherman declared dead so that his family could have a funeral and make claims on things like insurance policies.

“That's a hell of a long time for closure, isn't it?” the coroner had said.

“If an arm washes up with a ten-dollar wristwatch on it anywhere in this province, maybe twenty thousand of that same watch on the market at the same time,” the coroner went on, “then I've got six or eight women in here insisting that they're absolutely sure it's their husband's watch, and they're ready to swear an affidavit on it. Pretty much anything to let them move on, to close that door. It's simpler for them to lie than to try and just wait for a truth that's never going to come.”

Women seeking any body whatsoever: bodies on a public website seeking any owner whatsoever. It made Brendan think it would be possible to run some kind of macabre matchmaking agency: “Need a body? Find a body.” It wouldn't be that hard to do, either, he thought.

Many of the drowning victims on the website didn't even have photographs. Brendan shuddered and decided he could imagine why. Anyone with the brass to do it could probably claim one of those lost souls, haul it home in an airline casket and bury it good and deep before anyone got around to asking the tough questions.

Other bodies would be more difficult.

There were always full-face photos for the bodies found in Toronto subway stations—slurred, smeared faces that looked as if, when death had come, gravity had immediately taken on a new role, one of trying to work up a successful disguise. An expression of gravity—Brendan tucked that thought away, a bad joke he didn't want to admit he'd made, even to himself.

And each individual body was a small but crucial story all by itself.

Witnesses had seen one man walking purposefully out across the ice, had watched him fall through and not even try to swim. By the time rescuers reached him, the man had died in the cold water, his only identification a worn leather bracelet on his left wrist. Lit brightly for the photograph, the bracelet was now stretched flat, and you could see the faint black tracery of some sort of pattern that might have been pressed into the leather and stained dark when the bracelet had been brand new.

Outside the house, the winter wind was blowing again. Brendan looked outside, looked at the matte black of the trees flat against the sky, the street lights bouncing off the low clouds, the houses across the backyard cut into simple planes of light and shadow.

And then he was thinking about Albert Carter's dark blue house, hearing the wind outside and thinking it had been the same kind of February night a couple of years earlier when the fire trucks had shrieked up the street to the address where Carter's house had simply collapsed, like a tooth missing in an otherwise healthy jaw, its roofline shrugged down like a dropped shoulder, splintered clapboard blown right off the front of the house and into the street as if there'd been some kind of quiet explosion inside.

The firefighters had inched into and through the house, slipping jacks and wooden cribbing up under sagging beams until they found Carter, crushed in his own kitchen beneath the weight of a packed second-floor bedroom, and in his mind's eye Brendan imagined that it must have looked like something out of
The Wizard of Oz
, Mr. Carter's legs sticking out all haphazardly from underneath a wardrobe and a bed and the ruckled-up carpet from the room above.

Word on the street was that the inside of the house was even more bizarre than people had expected, even for Mr. Carter: the workers who finished the demolition the collapse had started talked about rooms with their doors nailed shut, about beams sawn through and glass bottles filled with gasoline lined up along shelves on the verge of toppling into the deep V that had been the very middle of the house.

“Only luck the whole place didn't explode,” Chris Wheeler had said.

Wheeler had been hired on as a casual labourer by the company that was cleaning up the remains of the house, and walling up the neighbour's row house that Carter's place had pressed against on one side. Wheeler had been hired simply because he had strong arms and a strong back, and because he was standing across the street and watching when the crew arrived, a work crew short of hands, as always. And as he talked to Brendan about the state of Mr. Carter's house, the group of other workmen shook their heads slowly, as if every one of them could see what a time bomb the place had become.

“It should've caved in years ago,” Wheeler said. “He had tons of paper upstairs, tons of it. He must have kept every letter he ever got. And there were piles and piles of notebooks all over the place—took me half a day just to pitch them all out into the Dumpster.” Brendan wasn't sure how much of what Wheeler was saying he should believe.

He turned away from the front window and went back to the computer screen, to a man found in a subway station by the cleaners after the line finally shut down, a man found wearing four T-shirts, and with one index finger deformed by an old injury. There were carefully posed photographs of the finger that were obviously taken well after death, the hand wrinkled and wet-looking, with a sheet tucked cleanly under and around the wrist so that it all looked like some bizarre kind of trophy.

Then he opened the file for a body “found in a sewer on Lansdowne Avenue.”

“Lighter, package Rothman's Mild, $11.57 in change, chewing gum and TTC tokens,” read the man's pocket contents. Brendan wondered if there really was any way to end up in a sewer by accident, and he had a nightmare about that later, a simple nightmare where it was dark out and he was up to his waist in water, looking up at a street light through the closed metal grate of a storm drain.

How could so many people just be lost, he thought, lost without anyone really looking for them? There were teenaged girls described as “probable homicides,” other bodies “presumably involved with gangs” with garishly tattooed torsos that should be easily enough remembered by anyone who had ever touched that colourful skin. But how could you lose a nineteen-year-old daughter and not keep looking for her forever? Brendan thought. So much different from a nineteen-year-old son, and then he stopped and wondered why.

And finally, one night, Brendan found Case #2006026.

That just could be Larry, Brendan thought, squinting to look past the cheap glasses frames, trying to find a familiar order in the twisted features in the photograph. The mouth gaping open, lips bent downwards in an unnatural curve, but that could just be the result of the last few moments of life, and the rough-and-tumble of post-mortem. He had been found out past the end of the King Street subway platform, in behind the thin rungs of the Employees Only gate. In late January, when the cold wind would be whistling down the tunnels and sapping the heat right out of him, even worse because under him was only heat-sucking concrete, Brendan thought.

It really could be him. It really could.

And it wasn't hard to believe at all.

And that had Brendan thinking about the pictures in an entirely different way. What had Larry been thinking about, Brendan wondered, just then, when he died?

What sort of thoughts had been circling around in his head? Was he wondering whether things might have turned out differently? Was he thinking about who was to blame for where he ended up? Or was he more concerned about how cold he was, and how sleepy the cold was making him?

Brendan looked at the telephone, sitting in a pool of light under the lamp. There was a 1-800 number on the web page you could call if you had “any information as to the identity of the deceased.” The file number was repeated at the bottom of the page as well, so that no matter where you were on the web page, the number would be right in front of you, ready to read over the phone, impossible for you to lose your place in the filing cabinet of the dead.

But then . . . But then there would be police officers, Brendan thought. Police officers and questions and more questions, and maybe even tests.

Fingerprints.

Dental records. DNA.

Brendan moved the mouse back and forth across the screen, looking at the face, at the white sheet pulled up right to the man's neck, a sheet that looked as if it was carefully hiding whatever horrors were going on beneath it.