The Night Bell (10 page)

Hazel’s father was cutting his meat. “That seems to fit with what I’ve heard Herbert Lim say. That she probably ran off. Problems at home, and the first fellow who cocks his hat is reason enough to throw in her lot with him.”

“Today’s generation just wants to get everything done quick-quick,” said Grandpa Craig. “They want to grow up quick, make their money, buy their houses and cars. Hope they don’t want to live and die quick too.”

“Well, I guess you just don’t know how things work in other people’s families, and certainly not among people like that.”

“Evan,”
said Emily. “Like
what
?”

“I mean folks who have no experience with the Canadian way. Maybe they did things differently at home.”

“You mean chase their kids away because they didn’t approve of them?”

“Shacking up at the age of seventeen?” Grandpa Craig hooted. “And where? In the Ward? Who would approve of that?”

Nana hushed him. Hazel wasn’t sure what they were talking about now, but she was relieved to know that people who understood things better than she did were concluding that Carol was OK. If in a whole lot of hot water with her parents.

“I see the Lims in the shop all the time,” her father continued. “Lovely people. But they don’t join in, do they? You can’t live in a place this small and keep to your ways. People talk.”

“People talk anyway,” said Grandpa Craig. “It’s never any good being different.” Here he looked at Alan, and Alan looked back, and the two of them stuck their tongues out at each other and laughed. “Then again, sometimes a person can’t help it. Sometimes, if you arrive here from another planet, it’s hard to hide it, isn’t it?”

Alan turned his mouth into what was supposed to be a threatening-looking sneer, but the only effect it had was to reduce the table to warm giggling. “I’m from Earf,” he said. “I eat all of you.”

“Anyway,” said Emily, trying to bring one part of the conversation to a close, “Gord Drury is sure they’ll hear
from her eventually. And there’s no sign that foul play was involved, so what can anyone do but wait? You know what they say about the course of true love.”

Her father looked at her mother, and something passed between them, an adult thing that might otherwise be expressed in words.

Once her grandparents had left and she had done her share of the cleaning up, Hazel rode her bicycle over to Gloria’s house. Dr. Whitman opened the door and gave her a warm smile. “Look who’s here,” he said. “Miss Micallef.” He shook her hand.

“Hi Dr. Whitman.” He preferred to be called Dale, even by Gloria’s friends, but as Hazel could not bring herself to do so, he deferred to her preference and addressed her with a warm, but comical, formality. He was a tall man with a round, bald head and a salt-and-pepper moustache somewhat like Gord Drury’s, if not quite as walrussy.

Hazel admired Gloria’s father, but he was a man of such high standing that he also intimidated her. He was confident and witty. He was handsome, although a bachelor since Gloria’s mother – his beloved Wilma – passed away from cancer. He’d vowed he would never remarry. Whenever Hazel visited them, he would clasp her shoulders and squeeze them and look into her eyes. “You are the spitting image of your mother,” he would say, and sometimes,
jokingly, he’d add, “and a good thing too, since your father is nothing special to look at, am I right? Gloria! Hazel has arrived!” He ushered her in. “Come, come.”

Gloria came prancing down the stairs. “Hazel. Hi!”

“Hey,” Hazel said, shyly.

“You girls up to no good again?”

Gloria shushed her father. “I’m cutting pictures out of
Photoplay
. Wanna see?”

Hazel followed her friend up the stairs and they shut the door behind them. Gloria’s bedroom was a teenager’s paradise. She had a stereo LP player and a bed with a canopy. When they were younger, Hazel had sometimes slept in that bed, the two of them under the covers with one of her father’s penlights. When they were still little, they’d read comic books together, but by the time they were eleven Hazel had begun to tire of Gloria’s bragging. After a while, she stopped going over at all. There were other things of interest, like boys, by the time she turned fourteen.

“Did you really meet a Chinese guy coming down the bluff?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

Gloria put on a record: Doris Day singing “You made me love you (I didn’t want to do it).” She mouthed the words, swaying her hips. “I saw a couple of people on the way back to my house, but you always see people. It wasn’t
until Commander Drury asked me if I’d noticed anything unusual that I thought maybe it was unusual that this Chinese guy was coming onto the trail just a little while after we saw Carol, and then Carol disappears. It’s not like there are hundreds of Chinese people in this place.”

“No, but I’m sure they still go for walks. Did you recognize this guy?”

“No.”

“So what did you tell Commander Drury about him?”

Gloria shrugged. She stood beside the record player, watching the record turn. Then there was a knock at the door, and her father called from the other side. “Come in,” she shouted.

He pushed the door open with his knee and came in holding a tray. There was a small pitcher of lemonade and some Hydrox cookies. “Don’t let me interrupt.” He put the tray down and left. Hazel’s mother bought Oreos. There was no reason Dr. Whitman couldn’t afford Oreos, but there had always been Hydroxes here, and Gloria claimed to prefer them.

“What did you tell Commander Drury?”

“That I’d run into this man just as I was coming off the path, and he was in a green jacket with a hat, and he nodded to me and I nodded to him.”

“That’s it?”

“I looked back,” said Gloria, twisting a cookie open. “Just for a second. He looked back at the same time. He
wasn’t much older than her, either – I guess you could say he was even sort of cute. I just didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“So you think he was a boyfriend? I thought you said she was going out with Tommy Landers.”

“How do I know who she’s going out with?” Gloria snapped. “Why do you think I’m an expert on how many boys Carol Lim sleeps with? Do you want lemonade or not?”

“Fine, yeah.” She accepted a glass of lemonade from her friend. “But you think this guy knew Carol.”

“Why not? I didn’t know how unhappy things were for her though. My dad told me she’d threatened to run away before. She did it for real this time. Anyway, wouldn’t you get away from here if you could?”

“I like it here,” said Hazel. “Don’t you like Port Dundas?”

“Are you kidding? I want to be where the excitement is.” Gloria stretched luxuriously and her shirt rode up her belly, showing the soft undulations of muscle beneath her glowing skin. There were paper cut-outs behind her on the bed. She’d snipped the glamorous faces of film stars and entertainers out of her movie magazine. Their bodiless heads lay in rows, all smiling, some smoking cigarettes with panache. The display looked like a room full of people enjoying themselves, but you couldn’t hear what they were saying. Hazel imagined that she and Gloria were standing at a window, looking into a Hollywood ballroom.

“Who cares where she went anyway?” Gloria said. “Carol
Lim? She’s almost eighteen, she can do what she wants. It’s not our problem.”

Hazel looked along a row of faces that included Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau, and Connie Francis. “What is all this?”

“Oh!” said Gloria, delighted to explain. “I put them in order.” She came over to the bed and shooed Hazel aside. “Who’s better looking? Eva Marie Saint or Angie Dickinson?”

“Oh, Angie for sure.”

“Angie or Elizabeth?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Which one is smarter?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “I think Angie Dickinson is smarter. She looks smart.”

Gloria Whitman considered Angie Dickinson’s face, comparing it to Elizabeth Taylor’s. “The ones who are both very good-looking and also very smart go into a special row,” she said. “They’re the best of the best. Cary Grant is in that row.” She pointed to a section of her bed where Hazel also saw Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Ingrid Bergman.

“Are you sending them prizes or something?”

“They
are
the prizes. I like to look at their faces and try to think how the world appears to them.”

“I don’t think you can know how a person feels just by looking at their face,” said Hazel. Gloria had strange enthusiasms. One time, during one of their final sleepovers,
she’d forced Hazel to hold her cat Dennis while she covered his nose and mouth with her hand. She wanted Hazel to feel how fast the cat’s heart went when he was scared. Dennis had licked Gloria’s hand afterward, as if he understood that she didn’t mean, as she had explained, to do him any harm.

Detective Sergeant James Wingate looked Oscar Fremont in the eye. He was standing on the stairs leading up to the second floor; Fremont lay on his belly, glued to the shag carpet. The lake of sticky blood beneath him had all but fastened him to the floor. A crime scene officer was cutting the carpet around him, and back in the bedroom, two attendants waited beside a gurney.

He’d come in through the back. He didn’t recognize any of the SOCOs. Fraser was somewhere else at the scene, so Wingate was waiting where he wouldn’t get in the way. He hadn’t taken off his uniform, so it had been easy to get through the police tape, but he hadn’t counted on running into Oscar Fremont. The dead man’s carotid artery gaped pink on the side of his neck where it had been cut right
through. There was a yawning wound at the top of his neck that extended to under his chin. It was clogged with pale, fleshy structures that were speckled with black clots. Wingate could see the underside of Fremont’s tongue through the gash. He felt his own throat tightening.

Where was Melvin Renald in all of this? He had to hope Renald was still alive. He had the idea of trying to raise Sean Macdonald on his walkie-talkie, to see if he’d found anything, but he thought better of it. The fewer people who knew he was here, the better.

Wingate hadn’t known at first whom Hazel had meant when she said
Mel
. No one, at least in his presence, had ever called Sergeant Renald “Mel.” Or Melvin, for that matter. The man was
Renald
, through and through. Wingate had been surprised to learn he wasn’t a lifer. He had the look of one: he could size you up in a tenth of a second, and get away with anything because he’d been there so long. But that wasn’t the case – he was a bouncing bear. He’d been in half a dozen detachments. You learned to give guys like that a wide berth: they’re just passing through. But Renald felt like a guy who’d come to settle. More than once, he’d given Wingate a careful look, and Wingate couldn’t tell what worth had been determined. Bringing his eye level with Fremont’s carotid again, Wingate wondered if Melvin Renald was even more tightly wound than he seemed. But who was he to the Fremonts? Or they to him?

He took another two steps up toward the body to get out of its eyeline, and nodded at the red-haired officer who was almost done cutting Oscar Fremont out of the hall carpet. She wore a surgical mask over her mouth and was ripping the broadloom with a small, curved knife. The gurney-bearers were gazing at their phones. Wingate looked to the right and saw Sandra Fremont’s shoes, heels up, the toes splayed outward. The murder weapon wasn’t hard to spot. It was sticking out of the back of her head. She could have run down the stairs he was on now, but she’d run into her office instead, into a cul-de-sac where the murderer had had an easy time of it. What must it be like to have your death come so unexpectedly, in a place of apparent safety?

The female officer and the attendants tore Oscar Fremont free of the wooden floor beneath him and loaded him onto the gurney. Wingate had to step up into the hall to let them past. On his stretcher of bloody carpet, Fremont looked like he’d died falling onto a fluffy cloud. Wingate watched them take him out the rear of the house. No way they could load him out the front, and he wouldn’t fit into a body bag like that. They’d have to figure it out in the backyard.

The door closed below him. He jumped onto the exposed wood where Fremont’s dead eyes had stared at him from the edge of the top step. Wingate was alone now, without paper booties or gloves. He looked upon the crisply imprinted
bloody boot treads leading to where Sandy Fremont lay on a small circular carpet in her office. There were no such prints leading out of the room. Whoever’s boots they were, they’d been taken off and removed from the scene.

Wingate crept toward the office on the tips of his shoes, taking care to avoid the bloody marks on the shag runner. Sandy Fremont bisected the colourful rag carpet she lay on. She’d struck her temple on the corner of the desk going down and left a smear of bright gore there with some hair in it. She was face down, her nose pointed to the floor. Wingate took his shoes off and kneeled beside her. There was very little blood.

“That took some force,” Dietrich Fraser said from the doorway. “Getting a knife that far into someone’s head.” Wingate leaned over and looked straight down at the butt of the knife. A big, eight- to ten-inch chef’s knife. Only two of those inches were visible. The handle was made of a hard, dark-brown wood, held together with four rivets.

“Don’t touch it,” Fraser said.

“Why’d Greene send you?”

“Why’d he send you?”

Wingate stood up. “You know Hazel’s got her hands tied with her mother right now. I’m here in a more unofficial capacity. So there’s an investigating officer present.”

“Present, but on admin duty. And in uniform.”

“Skip says you’re taking the exam.” Fraser didn’t answer. “I’m sure you’ll make a good detective.”

“Thanks, James. Listen, there’re enough people here. Three SOCOs and a photographer. You can –”

“Look at this. C’mere,” Wingate said.

Fraser stood silently in the doorway a moment longer to register his continuing objection to Wingate’s presence, but then he came over. “What am I looking at?” he asked.

“The angle of the knife.”

Fraser tilted his head this way and that. “Sort of straight in, isn’t it?”