The Night Bell (5 page)

Her decline was gradual but, a year on, Hazel could detect the difference, not least of all in her mother’s appetite. She had taken to eating as many meals with her as possible, but even supervised, Emily wouldn’t eat very much. To say her mother had given up would have suggested that she had been vivacious before the diagnosis. The truth was, she had gotten old ten years ago. If she made it to next summer, she’d turn ninety-one, and the thought of it made Hazel grin and feel sad all at the same time.

Lunch was grilled cheese. Hot and fragrant. She could entice her mother with only salt or sugar now.

Emily’s reminiscences of distant things were becoming more frequent. Dipping a corner of her sandwich into a small pool of ketchup, she said, “Do you remember when your brother broke his collarbone in the church parking lot?” Hazel recalled it vaguely. “I haven’t thought of that in years.” A lot of her memories were of Hazel’s adopted brother, Alan. He’d died in the north of Ontario, a parolee and an addict, at the age of thirty-nine, in 1984, the year Hazel made detective constable.

“He drove your father to distraction,” Emily said. Hazel cleared the dishes. There was a neat semi-circle cut out of one half of the sandwich, where her mother’s dentures had clipped a bite. “After everything we did for him, he’d say.”

“None of it was your fault.”

“None of it,” her mother said wistfully. “It wouldn’t happen these days. Children don’t find themselves in such
circumstances now. Imagine living in an orphanage until the age of ten, raised like an animal on garbage. Do you remember how he used to eat? Like a wild boar. We gave him the best chance we could.”

It was the only thing Emily had ever been sentimental or maudlin about, the fate of her adopted son, a broken boy by the time he’d arrived at the Boys’ Industrial Home up in Fort Leonard at the age of two. Dead mother; abusive, drunken father. Born in oblivion somewhere in the north of the province, he made a beeline back there for most of his short life, as if he were magnetized to tragedy.

“He’ll work it out,” Emily mused from the table.

“Who?”

“Your brother,” she said.

Hazel rinsed the dishes and put them in the rack. “He’s dead, Mother. I don’t think he’s going to work it out.”

Emily slapped her hand hard against the tabletop. Hazel spun around and caught the savage look on her mother’s face. “I’m not demented, god damn you,” she growled. “I know he’s dead.”

Alan and Emily came through the door bearing paper bags of groceries. “Take those from him,” their mother said to Hazel. She was holding three bags in one arm.

Hazel took possession of the two her brother held. One of them was cold at the bottom. Her mother leaned over the linoleum countertop and dropped the car keys. Then she chested her groceries forward. She began unpacking boxes of Hallowe’en candy and small paper bags. “Start putting this stuff away. Alan?”

Her brother shuffled over. He was twelve years old with permanently bent hair. There was always a shelf of it sticking straight out from one side or the other. He was what they called slow, but he wasn’t dumb. A lot of the boys who came from homes were slow. He liked toy cars. He got lost
in comic books. And he was sweet.

Her mother passed him a small box and he pried the lid off and removed a black eye-mask from inside. There was also a wand. Alan hadn’t been able to make up his mind between Cardini or the Lone Ranger, so he was going as both. He’d been warned if he didn’t have his bath as soon as they got home they weren’t going for shell-out because they weren’t going after dark. He replaced the lid on the box and marched immediately to the bathroom.

“Nothing for me?” Hazel asked.

Her mother tapped a cigarette out of its package. “You’re too old to go trick-or-treating.”

“I’m
almost
fifteen.”

“Well, you can go out without a costume anyway. You’re scary enough.” She came around the counter and squeezed Hazel by the shoulder, blowing smoke to the side. “Stay home, help me with the door, and you can eat some of that junk.”

“I know you bought candy corn and Swedish berries. I hate those things. You just don’t want me to eat any.”

Emily stalked away acting hurt, then took out a whole bag of Neilson chocolate rosettes, opened it, and held it out to Hazel. Hazel snatched it away, grinning. “Just a handful, piggy.” Hazel chewed and her mother smoked and they listened to the sound of Alan’s bum squeaking against the porcelain above their heads. “OK, that’s enough.” She took the bag back and closed it with a twist-tie. “Oh! I’ve
been meaning to ask you, sweetheart – have you seen Carol Lim recently?”

“Carol Lim?” Hazel’s heart started pounding. If her mother knew she’d been drinking, she’d be marched straight to her father. Her father was hardline on what was appropriate for a young woman to do. “Not a woman, not a girl,” he would say. “Somewhere in between, where it is very important to make intelligent choices: What kinds of people you want to be seen with. Who you trust your feelings to. What money is.”

“You know her, right?”

“Yes, I
know
her,” Hazel said, flustered. Flustering was a very bad thing to do in front of Emily Micallef. It was like a scent to her. “Why are you asking?”

“Because she’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“Since Saturday afternoon.” She gestured for Hazel to bring her the remaining bags.

Saturday was when Carol had showed up on the path. “I don’t really know her, Mom. She’s older than us.”

“Us?”

“I mean me and my friends.”

Her mother stared down at Hazel with a question in her eyes, but then she let it go. “Will you ask some of your friends if they’ve seen her? Mrs. Lim thinks she may have gone to visit relations in Toronto … or maybe even a boy. Ask around, OK?”

“Sure,” Hazel said as casually as she could. “I’ll ask around.”

Hazel had been inside Gloria Whitman’s house only a couple of times in recent years. It was a grand, old stone house that sat on a bit of property overlooking the Kilmartin River at the end of Chamber Street. She’d told Hazel it had been an inn a hundred years earlier. Her parents had made it cozy inside, but Hazel found it dark. All of the appliances were from the 1930s.

Gloria’s mother had died when she was nine, but five years later she rarely spoke of her, and sometimes it was as if she had never known her. Her father doted on her, had her playing the cello, and drove her to and from her dance classes and tutors.

Hazel knocked and waited anxiously on the porch. Gloria answered and her face registered surprise. Long gone were the days when Hazel showed up out of the blue to play. “Hazel? What a nice surprise.”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

When she closed the door, Hazel turned to her and said quietly, “Did you know that Carol Lim was missing?

“Missing? Since when? I mean, how do they know?”

“She hasn’t been seen since Saturday afternoon.
We
saw her Saturday afternoon. Did you see her again?”

“I knew she was skulking off somewhere. You think she’d miss a chance to yank me down the hill to meet her dad? No, she was running away. Probably to get married. Since she’s so popular with the guys.”

“Are you sure she has a boyfriend?”

“Remember Tommy Landers? He’s in Toronto now and I’ve heard from people who know that they’re an item. Probably.”

“Wow,” Hazel said. She couldn’t imagine leaving her family. For a boy. “What if someone saw us up there? And her. And then they hear she’s missing?”

“What does it matter if anyone saw us? What did we do? She stole my cigarettes, and then we all said
ciao
and went our separate ways.”

“I don’t want to go up there again,” Hazel said.

“People walk around the bluff all day and night,” Gloria said. “Nothing ever happens.”

“You don’t know that.”

“When’s the last time anything happened in this town? She’s probably making her new husband dinner as we speak. Moo goo wing wah with chicken. Hey, feel like a Pepsi?”

“I don’t know. What did Ray say about Andrew and me? You never told me.”

“I thought I did. I don’t remember now.” She left the room with a flounce. “I’m having a soda.”

Gloria led Hazel deeper into the house. The floors were made of heavily trodden wood and there were exposed
beams in the ceilings of the ground storey. It smelled like a century of pipe smoke. Hazel followed her into the kitchen. A half-wall recalled the house’s previous life as an inn: the kitchen was just the right size for a bar.

“We should tell Commander Drury we saw her, Gloria. Before she went missing. We can leave out what we were doing up there.”

“Sure. I don’t care. We can’t help, though. What can we tell them?”

“I don’t know. But I think we should go anyway.”

“You’ll never get a boyfriend being a goody-goody.”

“She lives in our town,” said Hazel. “My own mother is asking where she could be. What if she turns up and says people should have asked us? Maybe she said something about where she was going and we weren’t really listening.”

“She didn’t say where she was going. She just helped herself to my smokes and went on her merry way.” She opened two bottles of Pepsi and put one down on the counter for Hazel.

“No.” Hazel shook her head. “I’m going to have to tell my mom. You have to tell your dad.”

Gloria shrugged. “Fine, I’ll tell him.” She rummaged in the fridge and came out with a carrot in her hand. She grinned at Hazel as she cleaned it by stroking it up and down. “I guess we can’t be too careful,” she said.

The conversation with her parents went as well as she could have expected. Her mother had always told her that it was better to admit to a lie than to be found out. Being caught in a lie cast a long shadow over you, but knowing you were wrong and fixing it was a commendable sign of strength, and they did commend her, after asking why she’d done it. She decided the truth – an incomplete but still damning version of it – would do. She told them they’d gone to the Pit to share a cigarette.

“You’re too young to smoke,” her father said, looking at his wife. “Do you not agree?”

Her mother tapped out ash into the large ceramic ashtray beside the couch. “Of course I agree. But if you didn’t want a wild streak in your children, you shouldn’t have married me.”

“I don’t really like them,” Hazel said, and that was the truth as well. “Gloria smokes Luckys. She gave me one. I only smoked half of it to see what it was like.”

“Uh-huh,” said her father. “That was your first one ever?”

“No. I’ve tried before and I didn’t like it then either.”

“One day you’ll suddenly not mind it. And then you’ll want one.” Her father had quit just the previous year. A lot of people believed they were bad for you.

“Well, anyway, it’s good you thought about it and came to us. I’ll call Dale Whitman at his clinic tomorrow and we’ll just all have to go in and see Gord Drury.”

The Port Dundas Police station was on Porter Street, south of Main. It had a parking lot out back where for three days every fall there were kiddy rides. Her mother used to take her when she was little and Alan still liked it, but she’d never been inside the station. It was a red brick building, about the size of a church, and they went up the steps into a waiting area in front of a wooden counter. There were rows of tables behind the counter. Hazel felt her stomach tighten. Gloria was already there.

“How interesting to see how the system works, huh?” Emily said to Gloria, and Gloria mutely agreed. Her face was colourless. “Where’s your father?”

“He said I got myself into this by lying, and now I have to get myself out.”

“It’s all right, dear,” Emily said, putting her hand on the girl’s arm. “You were scared, but you did the right thing quickly enough. Now, I’ve spoken with Mrs. Lim, and they’re very worried, but this isn’t the first time Carol has done this. Once she took the train down to the city without telling her parents. To see a
jazz trio
. If you think you girls are trouble at fourteen …”

“Mayor Micallef, do you think the officers
here
will get help from the police in
Toronto
?”