The Night Bell (24 page)

“Let me help you.” She took them from him one by one and put them down on the sidewalk. He unlocked the trunk, and she helped him load everything in.

“You had a good lunch I trust. Any change?”

“Actually, no,” she said. “I used it all.”

He clasped her on the shoulder. “It was your dollar to spend anyway. Come on, or we’ll be late for Mother.”

She got into the car and they pulled out into traffic. She felt in her pocket for her own little string-wrapped parcel, the one with Carol Lim’s voice rolled up in it, and when her fingers brushed over it, she closed them and held it tightly in her palm.

Clearly, Leon – Lionel – Cutter had worked his last day at the Westmuir County Archives and Licensing Centre.

Mayfair OPS could not find him or his car at the archives or at his home address. Instead, they found someone else at that address, someone with no connection at all to Cutter or the case. They went back to the archives and discovered that entire card catalogues and their corresponding files had been removed. DC Torrance called Hazel on her cell and reported what they knew. “Want an APB?” she asked.

“Do you think there’s any point? He’s planned this out pretty meticulously. I mean, I doubt he’s driving anything he actually owns.”

“We have two licence plates registered to him,” Torrance said. “We might as well cover all our bases.” Hazel agreed
and thanked Torrance for her help. Mayfair had already sent a picture of him out to every PD in Ontario.

Hazel hoped Claude Maracle’s test result would come in today – she needed the link and it would be good to have it before the weekend began. It felt like the case was beginning to consolidate. They had uncovered only six names in the archives, but the DNA test results she’d glanced at yesterday afternoon had proved the existence of sixteen victims. All twelve to eighteen years of age. Most of the evidence had been scoured by fire – it was impossible to know how the boys had died. But some fragments of their scorched bones had survived, despite the attempt to obliterate all proof that they’d ever walked the earth.

There had to be more witnesses. The people Cutter was sending her to were three men out of many who must have heard the whispers or had even seen something. These three were perhaps the ones he knew best. Clemson had given her the impression they were friends; that Cutter had promised him something. But maybe the remaining witnesses were dead or had left the province. Or changed their names, like Claude Maracle had.

Caplin was the last town on the northern shore of Lake Gannon, thirty kilometres from Port Dundas. It was a twenty-minute drive along the scenic end of Highway 117, where the speed limit was, ridiculously, thirty kilometres
an hour. A woman answered the door – the wife, Hazel presumed. She presented her credentials. Looking them over, the woman said, “Oh, he doesn’t like to talk about those years. He doesn’t have much good to say about Dublin Home when he does.”

“It wouldn’t take very long.”

“He’s in a wheelchair, Detective.”

Hazel tried to see around Mrs. Eppert, but she reacted by moving her hips to block her view. “What if you tell him Leon Cutter sent me? Maybe he’ll talk to me then.”

“Wait right there,” she said, indicating a tile on the floor. She disappeared into the house and then there was silence. After a minute, she returned. “He’s got five minutes, OK?”

She led Hazel into a spacious front hall. An empty chair lift was at the bottom of the stairs, ready to take someone up its track to the second floor. “He had an accident down on Beech Road five years ago,” she said
sotto voce
. “Collided with a Canada Post van. He’s not the same person. Rene? Sweetheart?” she called. “Can you meet me in the den?”

She beckoned Hazel down a hall. A man in a wheelchair navigated toward them using a little stick shift on the arm. His head was thrown back, as if he were about to catch a peanut in his mouth. “This is Detective Inspector Micallef, from the OPS.”

“How do you do,” said Rene Eppert. She’d expected him to speak with difficulty, but his voice was clear. She wasn’t sure where to look. “Will this take long?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Coffee?” Mrs. Eppert offered, and they both said they’d have a cup. Her husband gestured to an open doorway, and Hazel went into the den and found a seat that wouldn’t cause her to sink too much into the cushions. He parked across from her.

“How do you know Leon Cutter?” she asked him. “And what’s his birth name, if you know it.”

“Lionel Couture.” He tried to lower his head a bit, but the best he could do was to lay it on his shoulder. “His bed was in the same dormitory as mine.”

“And you were friends.”

“I suppose.”

“Why did he send me to talk to you?”

Eppert looked uncomfortable. “To let me know he’s keeping his promise.”

“To you?”

“Yes.”

“And to Rex Clemson and Hibiki Yoshida?”

“I don’t know either of those names.”

“What about Claude Miracle?” His eyes jumped away. “You knew him. And Eloy?”

“Claude is alive?”

“You know Eloy is not?” He didn’t answer. “You were a ward of the province of Ontario at the Dublin Home for Boys from 1951 to 1958.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go after 1958?”

“I was eighteen. I was on my own.” The coffee arrived. His mug had a lid and a bendy straw sticking out of it. “I got a job in Uxbridge. I met Helen.” His wife put a warm, proprietary hand on his shoulder and fitted the coffee cup into a harness. He turned to suck.

“Did you stay in touch with any of the boys you knew there? Did you keep in contact with Cutter or anyone else?”

“I haven’t spoken to Couture in almost fifty years. And no. Why would I want to know anyone from that time? If you’ve been looking into the history of that place, then you know what it was.”

“What was it, Rene? In your own words.”

“An abattoir.”

Helen Eppert’s left eye started to twitch. “Inspector, I don’t want Rene to –”

“Do you remember the names of any other boys from back then?” Hazel asked.

“I remember a lot of them. Orman Vadum, Jimmy Tirana – Italian – a bunch of black kids and Indians, the Miracles, Sammy Rideout. Ronnie Morristown –”

“Charles Shearing?”

“Yes.”

Hazel took a sip from the mug. The coffee was merely warm. She imagined this was the hottest it could be for him. “Do you know how Eloy died?”

“No. One morning he was gone.”

“Did you hear or see anyone in the night?”

“No. I heard the bell and I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.”

“The night bell.”

“At the back of the home. The front entrance had a buzzer, but the back door had a small brass bell over it. The door struck it when it was opened. It was a little jingle, very distinctive.”

“But if you heard it, you knew that someone had come into the building. And you would be scared?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“You didn’t dare look. Maybe that was the reason he took someone. Because they looked at him.”

She’d taken out her notebook, hoping he’d continue to talk freely. “Was there anyone at Dublin Home who frightened you? Among the staff?”

“All of the adults. You were never shown a moment’s compassion in that place.”

“How did Eloy die?”

Eppert took a deep breath, as if he was going to hiccup, and he moved his upper body to get upright. It threw his head back farther. “You had to keep your group small in that place. At one point in the … in the fifties, there were almost two hundred of us in Dublin Home.”

“Do you know how any of the missing boys died, Rene?”

“He’s told me some of the things that happened there,”
his wife offered, to speed things along. She was watching him with a worried, tender expression. “I’ve told him that a lot of people write their memoirs and get them published. It lets the public know the truth about something that’s important.”

“M-may-m-maybe I will some day,” he assured her.

“Did you know any of the medical or nursing staff? Did you ever go see the nurse, or get sick? Kids must have gotten hurt from time to time.” Hazel read from the papers in her hands. “What about Dr. Donald Rosen?” Eppert made a cancelling sound in his throat. “Frank Inman? Harald Groet? Frances Kelly? Nothing?”

Rene Eppert was making an effort to bring his eyes down. He pulled his skull forward, but his eyes stayed rolled up as if they were locked to some point in space. “I don’t … I don’t. Know.” He swallowed hard. “Those names.”

“Inman was at Dublin Home for over twenty years, Rene. You must’ve seen him at least once. What about Peter Lynch?”

“Idaknow.”

“Dale Whitman?”

“No,” he said, in a strangled voice.

His wife leapt up. “Oh my god!”

Eppert’s left hand sprang open and he said
“Oh oh oh!”
like he was having a panic attack.

“He’s seizing,” Helen Eppert said, trying to hold his arms down.

“Oh, I have a nurse!” Eppert crooned. His irises swelled from pinpricks to nail heads.

“Is it Whitman?” Hazel asked him urgently.

His hand jammed on the joystick and the chair rumbled toward a wall. Helen pulled his hand off the stick and righted him. “I’m sorry Detective, but that’s all for now I think.”

“He’s scared. Rene? They’re all dead. No one can hurt you now.” Eppert shook his head spastically. “Did you know Dale Whitman? Did you know Peter Lynch?”

Mrs. Eppert pushed her husband out of the room. “Please see yourself out –”

“He knows something! What do you know, Rene? Who was killing children at Dublin Home?”

Eppert’s head ticced violently over his shoulder, a physical stammer that denied knowledge of what had brought on his terror and shut him down.

At the station house, Ray brought both Hazel and Fraser in for a debriefing. Wingate was overstaying his hours again, but he was not in uniform, and Hazel had him looking through name change records on a provincial database. If Cutter had been Couture, were the trio of names he’d given them authentic? Clemson, Eppert, Yoshida? Wingate confirmed that all three of them appeared in the Dublin Home records under the same names. Wingate asked her if
he could sit in on her and Fraser’s debriefing with the skip. She told him he couldn’t.

Ray Greene agreed with both of their assessments of the case: Cutter wouldn’t reappear until they’d gone through all the hoops, and that meant locating and interviewing Yoshida. Hazel had already tried the number for him she’d found, via Motor Vehicles. He wasn’t home or he wasn’t answering. If he was where he was supposed to be, someone was going to have to make the two-hour drive to Dunneview. They agreed Hazel would continue to call.

She briefed both of them on her interviews with Clemson and Eppert. “I’m going to look more closely at the medical and nursing staff. Someone who knew what was happening, but has never told. There’s got to be somebody who can tell us about the other people who worked there.”

“Are you concluding it was someone on staff at the home?” Ray asked.

“No. Not concluding. But my interview with Eppert ended with him literally seizing up at the mention of some of the doctors’ names.”

“Which ones?”

“Peter Lynch and Dale Whitman.” They both wrote the names down. “I knew Dale Whitman. He was a GP in town, and his daughter and I were the same age. We went to school together.”

“Do you think it could be him?” Fraser asked.

“He was a nice man. He was well respected in town, and he was a presence in the community. But I always did get a strange feeling in their house. It had cold, stone floors downstairs that I didn’t like, and there was gas lighting all through the house. They lived there together, just the two of them. Gloria’s mother died when she was nine. But could Whitman have killed children?”

“Well?” said Ray.

“Anyone is capable of murder,” she said after a pause. “We know that better than most.”

“Is he still alive? Or his daughter?”

“I don’t know about either of them. I’ll check. Gloria and I kept in touch by letter for a year or two after high school, then she went to Toronto for work. I think she tried modelling for a while. I don’t know when we stopped talking, but I think it was mainly my idea.”

“Would you rather someone else locate her?”

“No. I’ll look her up,” she said. “Her father is probably dead, though. He was in his forties when I last knew him.”

“Maybe you could just call Cutter for the information,” Fraser said.

“Haha,” she replied, flatly. “I don’t know if he’s
that
far ahead of us. He might have gotten to this point – to thinking about medical staff. But I think Cutter wants proof.”

Fraser scoffed. “Maybe he’s forcing Renald to work the case inside a locked closet.”

“Renald isn’t a detective. Cutter left us all our detectives. He took Renald to force us to solve the crime.”

“And then what?”

“Then justice?’ She shrugged. “Listen to me. Cutter’s known the shape of this case for decades. He needed us to start pulling on the threads. So now we’re his puppets because one of our own is at risk. He calculated well.”

“Oh shit,” said Ray Greene, slapping the tabletop. “Maybe Cutter
has
been reading our minds. Renald’s radio was found destroyed. But what if he got Renald to …? Goddamn it.” Greene picked up his phone. “Melanie? Ask MacTier if Melvin Renald has logged onto any of our servers since his disappearance. I want to hear back from you in sixty seconds.” He hung up. “Fuck.”

Silence fell on them and Hazel found herself staring at Ray’s phone. Her eyes fixed and it began to blur and throb.

“Cutter could be in Quebec City by now,” Fraser whispered.

“No. He’s nearby,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

She narrowed her eyes at him like he was some species of idiot. “Stop whispering,” she whispered. “He’s nearby because he wants to be ready when we find our man.”

“Or woman,” said Ray. “Maybe there was a crazy nurse in that place. Why does it have to be a man?”

“Sensitivity training has worked wonders for you,” Hazel said as Ray’s phone rang.