The Night Bell (33 page)

“How did your mother die?”

“I thought you wanted to know how
Carol
died. I went back and found her. ‘One more nip before you go?’ I asked her. Then she lost her footing.”

“We’ve found the bones of almost two dozen boys in the fields at Dublin Home.”

Gloria felt along her side of her head with a fingertip. It came away bloody. She smiled at it. “I looked over the
edge and she was lying on a slanty rock face, her arms and legs pointing all over. She began to slip down between the cracks –”

“He came at night and drugged them in their beds and carried them out. Did to them whatever he felt like doing to them.” Gloria listened impassively. Her face was still, her pupils tiny. “He killed them. And he hacked them apart. And burned their bodies in an incinerator. Anything that survived the fire, he scattered in the fields. He was a murderer. Did he teach you how to do it?”

Gloria gave her a cockeyed look. “Maybe I taught him.”

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Carol Lim. Do you understand? You have the right to retain and instruct council as soon as you wish. If you don’t have your own lawyer, we will provide you with a toll-free telephone referral service.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Gloria said. She seemed not the least perturbed by the situation she was in. For a moment, Hazel wondered if they were alone in the house.

“Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand what I’ve said to you?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Gloria replied, and Hazel cold-cocked her. She slumped against the back of the couch. Hazel cuffed her.

“Would you like to see a lawyer?” she said, completing the recitation of Gloria’s rights over her insensate form. “We’ll never get your dad for what he did, but we’ve got
you.”
How much blood can there be in a person’s face?
she thought with a dreamy abstraction that she realized meant she was losing consciousness. She sat down on the couch beside Gloria, who was breathing the even, steady breaths of the unconscious.
How much blood can there be in your head?

She dialled Wingate’s home number. “What are you doing right now?”

“Michael and I are combing through data.”

“Why?”

“What’s going on? Did you find her?”

“I found her.”

She heard his chair squeak back. “What’s wrong?”

“Gloria tried to drink coffee out of my skull.”

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m a little shaky, but I think I’m OK. I have her. She’s asleep. Can you drive? How much of your brother’s happy tea have you had?”

“None.”

“Then get going. Head north on 33, flashers no sirens. I’ll do the same.”

“What did you do to Gloria Whitman?”

“Only what was necessary,” she said.

It took two hours for Ray Greene to get the information he wanted and the warrant he needed to enter 2 Chamber Street. He had the stats on Mrs. Whitman: death certificate
signed by her husband; no ashes, no urn in the Port Dundas columbarium; a certificate of cremation signed, by the director of the now-defunct crematorium, in a hand it took a half-hour to determine was Dale Whitman’s and not Edwin Curry’s, whoever that was.

The current owners objected to entry on the grounds that they were members of the local community
in good standing
and there was no nefarious activity going on in their old stone house. “We don’t even have teenagers,” the wife protested. Greene asked them politely to wait either at a neighbour’s house or in the community policing van, where there was hot coffee and Peek Freans. Muttering to each other, the couple elected to visit friends across the road, friends whose combined income, the husband said loud enough for all to hear, exempted them from being bothered by the police.

When they were gone, Greene deployed Fraser and a local stonecutter named Fred Steptoe, who came in his truck and went into the house with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. Ray had never been in any of these old houses near the river, although he’d grown up in the town. His parents preferred to be on the outskirts, where they could farm a small plot and still take advantage of the nearby services. That was in the forties, the old house having long since been replaced by an ATV and Ski-Doo store.

This house was dark and unfriendly. Low ceilings, uneven floors. Musty smelling.

“Basement?” Fraser asked.

“If there’s anything it would be down there.” Ray opened the door to a ramshackle flight of wooden steps that led down into the dark.

Fraser took the lead.

“Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Steptoe said.

A pull-string switched on the single bare bulb in the basement. The three men stood at the bottom of the stairs getting their bearings. No windows. A furnace, a storage area, and a discarded toilet. The corners of the room were blurred with dust and cobwebbing. “We need more light than this,” said Greene, and Fraser snapped his flashlight on. The commodious space sprang to life where he pointed it: strands of old spiderwebs hung in the corners; a white fungus at the base of the wall glowed silver in the beam. In one of the walls there was a small larder door painted green with a lock on it. Steptoe said it would have been common in a house this old for there to be a root cellar. He’d seen a lot of them just like this one, a small, green, cross-braced door. “Always green,” he said. “I’ve never understood that.”

They walked the perimeter of the basement looking for broken or discoloured concrete. Fraser bent close to the floor and felt some of the cracks he found with his fingertips. With the end of the sledgehammer, Steptoe tapped the join between the walls and the floor. “Unlikely anyone would dig at the edge of the room. Too much risk of leaking. If what you think is down here is down here, I’m sure
they were counting on the basement staying dry and undisturbed.” He continued to tap, moving now in a spiral toward the centre of the room.

Fraser reached the green door. “Can you come break this lock?”

Steptoe inspected the combination lock and produced a long-shafted screwdriver from his back pocket. He put the shaft through the steel shackle, torqued it, and snapped the lock open.

“Handy,” said Fraser. He opened the door all the way. It was solid wood, two inches thick. “Holy shit,” he said. “Look at this.”

The back of the door was pocked with black gashes about an inch in length. Fraser looked closer and saw they were narrow openings in the wood, about a millimetre wide at the top and pointy at the bottom. He ran his finger down one.

“Wow … someone was in here with a knife. They stabbed the door about a hundred times.”

Ray came over. “You think they were locked in there?”

“Why with a knife?” Fraser asked.

They stepped into the root cellar. A couple of empty vegetable crates lay on the floor with their weathered paper labels drooping. The few shelves were all but empty. A bottle of something in a murky liquid sat with an air of menace on a top shelf, an old paint tray to its left. Fraser passed the bottle to Greene, who set it down carefully.
When Fraser pulled the paint tray down, he almost dropped it – it was incredibly heavy. He set it down on the floor and shone his light on it.

“Oh, yeah,” said Greene. “Concrete.” A wooden paint stick was stuck fast in about two inches of it. Ray tilted his head and read the faded pink stamp on the stick:
MAIN STREET HARDWARE
Proudly representing Canadian Paint Co. Tel: WE 6-9521
.

Steptoe’s hammer had been going
tok tok tok
all around the basement. In the root cellar it went
tok tok tok
and then it went
tonk
. He tapped again. The floor made the sound again. “Could be hollow here. Might just be pipes,” he said. “You want me to break it?”

Greene’s glare said
What are you waiting for?

Steptoe swung the hammer.

In 1984, all OPS cruisers were fitted with reinforced separators to keep cops safe from their prisoners. In all the time since, Hazel almost always kept the heavy Plexiglas window between back and front open, mainly for ventilation.

She wasn’t taking any chances now, though. Gloria, although groggy and in agony, had woken. Hazel piloted her soundlessly into the back seat and then closed and locked the separator. She lowered herself into the driver’s seat, holding her breath and then breathing, until she was sitting behind the wheel. Her acrobatics were beginning to have consequences and her lower back was seizing. She wondered how fast Wingate could drive. He was already not just in over his head – his feet were planted in the muck, too, so it didn’t matter now. They had to get Renald back. They had to bring boys who had been in the dark back into the light and name their killer. In the rear-view
mirror, the murderer’s daughter stared uninterestedly out the window. Her face had swollen up. The gun had split her left cheek against the bone, and her lips as well. Her blonde hair on one side was sticky with blood.
Try to get that colour at the Betty French Hair Emporium
, Hazel thought. Gloria turned to look at Hazel in the mirror with dead eyes.

The Plexiglas barrier was soundproof. To talk, Hazel had to push a button. “Are there others?” Dead eyes. “Did he teach you? Your father?” Gloria’s mouth remained sealed in a thin line. Her eyes said nothing.

Hazel pulled her gaze back to the highway. Her pulse was irregular and she’d had a few palpitations: heavy thuds in her chest, as if her heart were falling down the stairs. Her temple throbbed where Gloria had stuck her, and the wooziness ebbed and flowed. She grabbed a bunch of napkins out of the glove compartment and held them against the wound. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Her hair was a sticky mess. The combined smell of blood and sweat made her feel sick. She was dizzy. “How did your mother die, Gloria? How old were you?”

“
We
were nine,” Gloria said. “You were at my mother’s funeral service.”

“Yes. You know, I’d forgotten there was no casket.”

“She was cremated. Dust to dust.” Gloria leaned into the barrier and Hazel shifted to her left instinctively, as if it didn’t matter that Gloria was cuffed behind glass. There’s
no evidence linking me to anything. A judge will set me free in two minutes.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

Gloria took a deep breath and let it out. “Oh, Hazel. Such a goodie.”

“Did your father show you how to kill?”

“What happened to you and Andrew?”

“Did your father teach you to kill?”

“Only when I was old enough,” she said.

Hazel stabbed the talk button and her cell rang at the same time, startling her. She flipped it open. “We found her,” Ray Greene said in her ear. Hazel pushed the button again, bringing Gloria Whitman back into the conversation. She put her cell on speaker.

“Oh yeah, where was she?”

“Buried under the floor. Inside a root cellar. Stab marks all over the door.”

“Stab marks?”

“On the inside of the door. Looks like she was shut in there with a knife. Maybe to put herself out of her own misery if it got to be too much.” Hazel watched Gloria’s reaction. There was none. She wore the countenance of someone sitting on a bench in the park. Ray continued, “Fraser said he imagined when she finally died, Whitman just dug the hole and rolled her into it. He fitted a plank of plywood over her and poured two inches of concrete on top. Done.”

“What’s left?”

“Not a lot. Acidic soil. That’ll break down bones in less than forty years. But there’s teeth, a jawbone, and some of the pelvis. There’s enough. Where are you?”

“Bringing in Gloria Whitman.”

There was a brief silence on his end. “Good for you, Hazel. Nice collar.” He hung up.

“What did your mother die of?”

“Her imperfections,” Gloria said. “She cut my balls off in her womb.”

“What?”

“My father thought I was perfect. ‘My issue goes through you alone,’ he told me. No siblings, no half-siblings. He said he hoped I’d have a hundred children. My mother … he put her down.”

Hazel shuddered at the phrasing. “You knew she was locked up in there. Her screams must’ve … You helped him kill her.”

“We kept it in the family. I helped him a couple of other times, too.”

Hazel thought about turning her off again. Gloria’s face in the mirror had begun to glow. She was flushing. She remembered that look from when they were kids: wide-eyed and greedy. Just as she was seeing her in the rear-view, so had she seen Gloria in mirrors throughout their youth, hungrily grazing her own face with her eyes. It hadn’t changed in all these decades: a psychopath’s intense
love for the beloved. Dale Whitman was the beloved; that was who she preened for in the mirror, he the father-husband, she the mirror-wife.

“Once he brought a boy home,” she said. “A black boy with a funny name. Nobody wanted him. They kept trying to get some couple to take him, but nobody would. My dad gave him a needle and brought him home in the middle of the night. He was sleepy, but he was awake. He smiled at me.”

“Black?” Hazel asked.

“Brown, whatever. Not white.”

“Charles Shearing.”

Gloria shoved herself forward and pressed her face to the Plexiglas beside Hazel’s head. “Maybe Charlie.”

“Confess your part in all of this and maybe I can keep your father’s name out of the news. Preserve his reputation. You could give Carol’s mother some closure.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

Dead eyes.

Wingate sped north. Hazel hadn’t sounded very good on the phone. When they talked to each other these days, it was by cell, not radio. Who was she going to call when he was gone, he wondered.

Now he was driving up the 41 at 145 kilometres an hour to intercept her. She told him she’d lost “some” blood.

His phone rang: Michael. He put the call on speaker.

“I found Cutter,” Michael said. “He came to Charterhouse as Couture and Dublin Place –”

“Home –”

“As Couture, and then when he leaves, he’s still Couture. No name change, like you say.”

“I’ve been staring at my notes on Cutter. They’re on a yellow legal pad. You see them?”

“This collection of scribbled symbols?”