The Night Bell (12 page)

“Whose grip are your balls in?” He bored a hole through her with his eyes. “I understand.”

“Does
I understand
mean
I won’t
?”

“It means I won’t. I won’t go near it.”

“I don’t like it either,” he said, relaxing some. “The union is muttering about it, too. They’re saying this affects the whole membership and makes them look weak.”

“If anything, it makes the minister look like he’s covering something up.”

“The reputation of the force is reflected in how the community sees its individual members. I’m just telling you how they see it.”

“Willan must be relieved, at least. No more overtime. I guess I’ll go back to my desk,” she said, “to work a case or something.”
Like hell
, she thought, getting into her cruiser.

The Dublin Home for Boys had been built on the corner of a plot of land that belonged to the home but was rent-farmed. From a cursory online search, Hazel learned that it had opened in 1911 and functioned as a home for neglected and abandoned boys until the mid-1960s, when it was closed. It had rarely been used since that time, although when Hazel was in her twenties it was sometimes the site of a bingo fundraiser for one of the charities in nearby Dublin, or the county rented it out for small concerts or cultural festivals. She also vaguely remembered a corn maze in that field – how old had she been then?

She’d been in the building only once in recent times, and that was for a local meeting convened in the 1980s to discuss county highway improvements – ironic (she thought now) given what was passing for improvement these days. The conversation – in when was it, 1988? – had been about how to accommodate increased traffic in the region in a way that would most benefit the businesses along such an artery. It was about local economic health, not
consolidation, not cost-cutting, not bang for buck. It was about people and livelihoods. Quality of life.

They’d finally shuttered the building in 1993.

She drove her own car there and pulled off the overgrown driveway into a scatter of apple trees that hid the vehicle from the roads. The cold, stone building still dominated its square of earth like an abandoned castle. Behind it was the grey-green muck of the field and the tall, wood-slat fence that kept the mess out of view for those who lived along its perimeter. The fencing behind the houses on the 17th Sideroad came only partway toward Concession Road 7 – “Augusta Avenue” – as there were no houses or tenants yet beyond the finished bungalows. The finished ten holes were in the southeastern part of the development, and she could barely see the course from where she stood.

Most of these provincial institutions – including old age homes and sanitariums – had been self-sufficient in some way. There would have been a vegetable garden here, and the apple trees had once been a small orchard, judging from the way the surviving trees were spaced.

There was no graveyard on this side of the home, and there was nothing she could see beyond it but the development’s soggy fields. The home had fallen into total disrepair after fourteen years. All of the windows were boarded up, but many of the boards, over time, had come loose or fallen off. It gave the house an aura of silent chaos. The lights along the driveway and above the door had been
smashed a long time ago, and none of the glass remained on the ground. She imagined a whole generation of teenagers on banana bikes testing their arms with stones until there was nothing left to bust.

A piece of plywood sealed the entryway. Warped and cracked with years of weathering, it was still tight. It wouldn’t budge. She went around to the west side of the building, where she was still concealed from view, and looked for another way in. There were no ground-level windows and no doors, but around the back she encountered evidence of the home’s mechanical functions: pipes poked out of the mortar in a couple of places and two steel ducts beside a chute of some kind angled down from the wall. Below the chute, a yellow patch of poisoned vegetation.

With much caution, ensuring she was not visible, even distantly, Hazel went over to take a closer look. She bent down and peered up into the chute. It was caked in black soot and smelled of decades of smoke and ash. She swept her hand around in the yellow bramble, but found nothing.

Beside the chute, a small wooden door had been nailed shut, but she was able to work a corner open and then tear the whole door off. She snapped on her penlight and stepped into the dark, musty space beyond. She passed the thin penlight beam around the room and discovered an all-purpose workshop, with a large metal box against one wall that vented to the chute she’d seen. The incinerator. Its mouth was too high up to look into, and anyway,
she wasn’t so sure she wanted to see what was inside it on her own.

The rest of the space was clogged with machines draped in cobwebs, and huge dustballs had gathered at the base of the few bolted to the floor: a drill press, a table saw, and a lathe. These had been stripped for parts over the years. She noted some folded tarps in a corner, and a few cans of old paint with rusted lids. There was nothing else of interest in the room. The door in the far wall was locked by a bolt, which Hazel wiggled open with a bit of effort. The door gave onto a set of tilted wooden steps that led up to the main floor.

The foyer behind the boarded front door was cavernous and intimidating. She recalled an assembly room at the rear of the building, over the workshop in fact, and started there. Wooden bleachers lined both sides of the room, but the middle was empty. The rotted stage curtain was drawn back. Her footsteps echoed crisply against the hard surface of the walls. She took the steps up to the stage carefully and stood looking out at the abandoned auditorium, imagining faces in the gloom. The faces of unwanted children at the mercy of whatever system had landed them here. Was this a place of celebration or of worship, or was it disquiet that ruled here? Or fear?

The rest of the ground level was given over to classrooms behind imposing wooden doors. They were all empty, their furniture long ago redistributed to other schools.
Chalkboards busy with pale grey lines looked blankly out over empty rooms. Layers of ground-in chalk from the hundreds of classes taught here made a diary of sorts, its pages all jumbled. In Room 103, she made out the words
to eat soap
, and in 107, down the opposite hallway, a rolling chalkboard crawled with numbers and symbols. The classrooms were drab, washed-out, as if they were old pictures that had been left in the sun. The only other rooms on this floor were the registrar’s office, the dining room, and the kitchen.

The second floor was dormitories and bathrooms. Here, she pictured the throng of small bodies rushing to and fro. Voices. She imagined the dorm rooms, with their white, iron bedframes arranged higgledy-piggledy everywhere, cold from the air coming through the windows. Standing at one of them, she looked out over the fields where her colleagues had swept for bone. Why no windows in the sides of the building? Maybe it had been a cost issue. It would have been hard to heat a stone monstrosity such as this; windows would have let out much of the warmth generated.

Alan had remembered his dormitory at Fort Leonard as cold. That was all he talked about when he described what it had been like. The cold. The cold floors, the cold beds, the cold toilet seats. The cold food. She’d never been to the place where Alan spent the first ten years of his life, but she couldn’t imagine it being much different than this one. This was how her little brother had lived. Crowded
in with others, forced to line up to eat, to pee, to enter class. She wondered if they’d ever been let out into the fields to play.

Her brother had come into her life like a firecracker thrown through her window. He arrived when he was ten and she was twelve, and he had stayed in their home to the age of twenty. By then he was too much to handle. Drinking, petty theft, getting into fights and accidents. He confided to her later on that he’d suffered from crushing depression for as long as he could remember. She knew this about him, although he’d not spoken of it until they were both adults. She remembered how his face would change colour when a dark mood took over. It would purple, was how she saw it in her mind’s eye. Like a bruise.

Dead twenty-three years. Made it to thirty-nine. He’d surprised people by making it to thirty. Standing in this empty dorm room at Dublin Home, she felt the shadow of her brother’s despair laid out before her.

Outside, the air smelled clean again. Hazel leaned over, her palms braced against her thighs, and breathed in and out, slowly. After a minute she’d collected herself, and she lifted her head. Across the road, the fields went on north, with little stands of trees where stone had been deposited when the woods were first cleared. Here and there, among the scarlet and orange, a flare of pure yellow, the yellow of
a lemon tart, caught her eye – maple leaves, all bursting bright at the same time. They gilded the distance, too. Patches of gold pasted to a blue sky.

So how would you get rid of a lot of bone? Flesh is nothing, it boils away in fire and sometimes leaves nothing but a slick. The bone burns too, but some of it always remains. There was bone at Hiroshima. An incinerator wouldn’t do the job.

And how many bodies? Had all the unburned chunks been strewn in the fields?

She turned on her heel. Say this was the epicentre. If half as much bone lay in the nearest fields, that would be, conservatively – what? – a total of twenty fragments? Possibly upward of a dozen young men and boys, none of whom had ever been reported missing, whose bodies had been carefully disposed of under the eye of someone with total freedom of movement. A headmaster? A cook or janitor? The groundskeeper?

She’d hoped a small, hidden patch of headstones would offer her another interpretation. But she walked the periphery of the small plot, and there was nothing.

The ash would have been easy to get rid of. It would have been incorporated into the soil wherever it landed or was dumped. A dozen rainstorms and it was gone. There would have been meal once the bone fragments were sifted away, probably a lot of it. It’s good mixed into garden soil.

The apple tree beside her car twisted down and in on itself, and the last of its fruit clung to the orange-leaved branches. The apples were diseased. She picked one and inspected it. Black impressions pocked its wrinkled skin – a
canker
, the farmers called it. It meant cancer. The apple felt hollow in her hand. She dropped it onto the ground where it cracked into halves.

When she looked up, she saw flashing lights streaming toward her. They came from the south and the east, along the old 17th Sideroad and Concession Road 7. They were white cars with a slash of multicoloured ribbon across their doors and a big coat of arms. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The autopsy report on the Fremonts arrived at the end of the day.
COURTESY
, the RCMP envelope was stamped. The photographs were appalling.

Since they had the murder weapon – it remained firmly lodged in Sandra Fremont’s skull – the report merely made official what they already knew: Oscar Fremont had suffered a fatal loss of blood as a result of being stabbed multiple times in the face and throat. Sandra Fremont died from a single knife wound to the head. She’d already been stabbed when she struck the desk, and the killer used extra force to drive the knife into the floor.

Hazel and Ray were still looking over the report when Melanie Cartwright advised Hazel that DC Torrance had sent a copy of her report from the crime scene. Fraser had
written a report of his own on the weekend and submitted it. Neither report made any mention of Wingate. “The forensics and the reports look fine, but there’s nothing to build a case out of,” Ray said.

“I guess it’s their problem now,” Hazel said. “What about our further instructions? You know, on the case we’re permitted to work?”

“There’s nothing,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“More cryptic gibberish.
Pronounce his name. End his line
. Came in an hour ago.”

“Pronounce his name.”

“End his line.”

“Show me.”

He spun his screen around toward her and she read the six words written in full caps. “What do you make of it?” Hazel asked.

“Someone thinks we’re going to jump when they tell us to.”

“We’re not? Oh, right. Depends what direction they want us to jump in.”

He looked right at her, and his expression clouded. “I swear to god, as soon as Willan unties my hands –”

She just laughed. “Good thing no one’s given you a real clue yet. Then what would you do?” She didn’t give him a chance to reply. The bad taste in her mouth was beginning to sour her stomach, too.

She returned to her glass-windowed office and accidentally glowered at Cartwright, who held her palms up in questioning supplication. Hazel waved her off. Clearly, word of her trespass hadn’t arrived yet. None of the Queen’s representatives were in the lobby brandishing their gleaming crops. Let them come on their ceremonial black horses and try to cover up one of
her
investigations. She stabbed a key on her keyboard and her computer sputtered to life, issuing clicky creaks from deep within its plastic shell. She wasn’t going to break her word to Ray again unless she
really, really
had to. But he’d said nothing about continuing her research, so she logged on and went to the BMD archive at gov.on.ca and looked under
DEATHS
. You could search by year and sub-search by county. She typed in
1951
and
Westmuir
.

There had been eighty-six deaths in Westmuir County in 1951. The website let you refine your search by date of birth, sex, marital status, or date of death. If you found something you liked, you could click through to the detailed listing. And then, for fifteen bucks, they’d send you an official copy of the certificate. Compared to the olden days, when information was stored in drawers and files and stacks, it was a snap. But it was insubstantial whereas index cards were real. You could trust an index card.