Waiting For Sarah (11 page)

Fireworks exploded on the Fairview Slopes; rockets rode the night sky.

The first day of January wore another heavy gray cloak of unseasonable fog.

It was Y2K, the year 2000. It was supposed to be a techno version of the Black Death. But the world hadn't almost come to an end as many so-called experts had foretold; computer microchips had somehow managed to slide digits efficiently and obligingly from 1 to 2, from 1999 to 2000. Airplanes failed to fall from the skies; telephones and electrical grids did not break down; civilization failed to crumble. Everything, in fact, seemed perfectly normal. No Doomsday, no meltdown, nothing. It was, Mike thought, a little disappointing.

He stayed home, working half-heartedly on an English essay, due soon after the holiday. The semester had been a hard one; taking three heavies like History, Math and English in the same semester had been tough. Then there was the additional eleventh grade work; what was supposed to have been a “few make-up units” had turned out to be a heavy burden: reading
Macbeth
for English, and extra work in math, chemistry and physics, not to mention Dorfman's
history essays. Teachers saw their own subjects as the most important — miss reading
Macbeth
, for example, and your brain would self-destruct. He had kept telling himself that none of it mattered, but ingrained work habits demanded that he do the best he could. In the evening he watched TV with Norma until the news came on. Norma liked to watch the news. He didn't. TV news was as bad as radio news, a continuous litany of tragedy and death. Who needed it? He took his English essay and a few
Clarions
to his room. The newspapers were on his lap. The headlines on the front page jumped out at him.

His heart froze.

CARLETON STUDENT MURDER VICTIM

BODY OF MISSING TEENAGER FOUND

The search for thirteen-year-old Sarah Francis, missing since the evening of Friday, December 17, 1982, came to a tragic end the next morning when her body was found in bushes near Charleson Park in False Creek.

The Carleton High eighth grader was reported missing by her parents, John and Frances Francis of 2230 Ash Street after she failed to return home from a school debating practice.

Sarah was the Francis's only child. Her funeral will take place on Thursday, 10 a.m., at St. Augustine's church.

The Vancouver Police Department is asking for help in
their investigation: anyone who saw Sarah on the Friday evening, or who saw anything or anyone suspicious is asked to contact the Vancouver Police immediately (more on p.3).

His hands trembled as he examined the date of the newspaper: January 1983, New Year Edition.

A thirteen-year-old girl named Sarah Francis died seventeen years ago.

Murdered.

His heart bursting, he turned to page three. In the center was a picture of Sarah, his Sarah, the same Sarah Francis who had helped him in the archives room.

The picture appeared to be her seventh grade elementary school photograph, with a black border around it. She was smiling.

Then followed:

(cont'd from p.1) All of us at Carleton High, students and faculty, mourn the loss of one of our brightest and best. Eighth grader Sarah Francis's brutal murder has caused a loud scream of anger and grief to be heard throughout the city.

Sarah came to Carleton High in September from Sanderson Elementary. Teachers there characterized her as a bright and popular student. A gifted pianist and musician, she was the winner of several trophies for her outstanding performances in music festivals and competitions throughout the Lower Mainland.

Jennifer Galt, her best friend, told the
Clarion
in a tearful interview, “Sarah was the kindest and most genuine person I've ever met,” and, “I'm going to miss her every day for the rest of my life.”

The Attorney General is calling on the federal government to institute the death penalty for child killers.

Sarah, torn and bleeding, sobbing wildly. The image seared his mind. It was there forever; it would never go away. She had been murdered on Friday, December 17, 1982. He struggled to recall the date of their last meeting, when she was sobbing in the archives room. He remembered: it was also Friday, December 17, the same day and date exactly — except it was seventeen years later, in 1999!

He did not show the newspaper to Norma or to Robbie, but kept the story to himself, saying nothing. Instead, he lay on his bed staring at Sarah's watercolor pinned on the wall — the one of himself in his chair as a dark head and red heart — and at the clouds of his Westland Lysander ceiling poster, thinking of Sarah, hearing again that wild sobbing, seeing her thin body in its ripped dress falling through clouds, falling and falling.

Century 21. Tuesday, January 4.

Leinster Co-op seemed to exist in an endless state of semi-completion. The repairs were still unfinished. The contractors had added more blue tarps, this time to the east end of the building, and there seemed to be more scaffolding, more ropes, more ladders and buckets. The building was suffocating under its blue mantle; Mike could swear he could hear it sighing and groaning. Outside, the mist and fog continued, everything dark, damp, dull.

Norma spoke with the doctors at Rehab and tried to persuade Mike to cooperate with them, but he refused to go. “I'm not crazy,” he said. She brought a psychiatric nurse to the apartment, but Mike refused to speak to her, locking himself in his room and not coming out until the woman had gone.

Norma had started going out once a week, on a Tuesday evening, to a support group at the Rehab Center.

Mike returned to school after the holiday and was happy to be allowed back in his own dusty library
room; Mr. Holeman thought it best that he finish what he had started. This time, however, the door was to be left open and someone, Miss Pringle or another staff member, would look in on him from time to time to make sure he was all right.

Sarah did not come.

He missed her.

Later, as he sat in Mr. Talbot's Math class, only half listening to Talbot's gravelly bleat, the door opened and in she walked. Mike blinked and shook his head, not believing his eyes. It was Sarah! She was scanning the faces, searching for him. The sight of her squeezed his chest, made his heart plunge like he was bungee jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge.

Sarah had come back.

She spotted him and walked deliberately across the room and down the aisle. Nobody saw her, he could tell, for she caused not a ripple in the motionless air; Talbot continued his bleating, and the kids went on with their glassy-eyed listening.

She was invisible to everyone in the room except him. Unless he was hallucinating.

But then he heard her voice. “Michael!” Her eyes shone. She smiled, then glanced over her shoulder at the teacher, now writing on the blackboard. “Come outside.”

“What ...?”

Talbot said, “Are you all right at the back there, Mike?”

“Gotta go to the washroom,” he yelled back.

Talbot blinked and nodded.

He followed Sarah out of the classroom — nobody
looked at her — and along the deserted hallway to his locker and took out his jacket. “It's damp outside. Wear this.” He handed her the jacket.

She hung it over her shoulders and followed him out across the foggy school quadrangle, down a misty lane of maples to a row of benches decorated with scatterings of yellow-gold leaves. She brushed away a few leaves and sat on a bench facing him, her outline indistinct and shifting as wisps of fog curled about her.

She wore a plain blue fitted cotton dress that made her look older. There was something else different: it was in the way she sat, quiet and composed and serious. Gone was the naïve, excited, motor-mouth kid, chattering about music and painting and arguing about nothing. Aware that he was staring at her, but unable to stop, he was noticing tiny details, like the soft dark crescents of short hair behind her ears curling forward onto the pale skin of her neck, the attractive shape of her mouth and the way she had of biting her lower lip when she was thinking. Everything about her was perfect ... her dark hair, shining and abundantly soft ...

“You're different, Sarah. Older.”

She looked pleased. “You promised to wait for me, Michael, remember? I'm hurrying as fast as I can.”

“I don't understand, Sarah. Tell me. What ...” Confused and inarticulate, he wheeled closer. “I worried about you, Sarah. You were so ... I wanted to help ...”

She stopped him with a finger to his lips. “You helped more than you know.”

She pushed a curl of dark hair back behind her ear
The fog drifted closer and surrounded them. Her eyes were the same color as the fog. They were alone.

“The others in Talbot's classroom couldn't see you.”

She said nothing.

“Nobody ever saw you, did they; even Miss Pringle in the library, she didn't see you either.”

She smiled. “You're the only one, Michael.”

“You died in 1982. And I looked for your house on Ash, an old white house with green shutters, remember? It isn't there.”

She was silent, looking at him with wide gray eyes.

“Sarah? What does it all mean? Why are you here?”

“I came to help you, remember?”

“Yes, but I don't understand any of it, Sarah. How can you be here, older, when you were ... murd — ”

She cut him off. “I don't know. But it doesn't matter. What matters is I'm here. That's all; I'm here and we're together.”

“Yes.” She was right; that was all that mattered: her joyful smile, his feeling of happiness.

“Do you like how I look?” She sat up straight as if for an inspection, a remnant of the childish, playful Sarah.

“You look ... good, Sarah.”

“It won't be long, Michael. I'm hurrying for you.” She leaned forward and took his hands in hers. “I've missed you. I came back. I wanted you to know.”

“Who ... did it to you, Sarah? Was he ... did the police ... ?”

She withdrew her hands. Her eyes darkened and she shook her head. “I told you. It doesn't matter.”

“But you know who.”

She made no reply.

“Tell me his name.”

She shook her head, agitated.

“Why not? If you know who it is then you must tell me.”

Sarah looked down at her feet.

The fog slid and shifted, closing thickly about them.

“Tell me, Sarah, and I will see he pays. Or write his name! Here! Take this branch and write his name in the dirt.”

“No. Let me show you.” She stood and wheeled him back to the school, through the hallways, to Dorfman's history class. She stood outside the door. She pushed the chair forward into the classroom. The students raised their heads from their note-taking, watching Mike in his wheelchair. Mr. Dorfman looked up from his lighted projector. “Yes, Scott, what is it?”

Sarah raised an arm and pointed at Dorfman. “There, Michael. He is the one.”

Mike stared at Dorfman. When he turned back to Sarah she had gone.

He telephoned the police that same afternoon, as soon as he got home, and asked the Homicide Department for information on the Sarah Francis murder of 1982. He was asked to leave his name and number; someone would get back to him.

It was early; Norma wouldn't be home for at least two hours.

An hour later a Detective Inspector Samson called. He could not discuss the case on the telephone, but could Mike come downtown to police headquarters in the morning? Say nine o'clock? Or a detective could be sent to his home.

Chris drove him downtown the next morning and dropped him off at the Public Safety Building. He would wait for him in Starbucks across the street.

Samson was a tall thin man with weary brown eyes and bushy gray hair. His clothes were casual: jeans, golf shirt, cable-knit sweater, tweed jacket. The office, or interview room, was small and bare: table, three chairs, picture of the Queen. The detective had difficulty closing the door because of the space
taken by Mike's wheelchair. He perched on the edge of the desk and read aloud from a file, his voice a bass rumble. “The body of Sarah Francis, white female, thirteen, was found in Charleson Park, False Creek, December 1982.” He looked down at Mike. “Is this the Sarah Francis you were asking about?”

Mike nodded.

“Well?” said Samson. “What can you tell me about this case?”

“I know you didn't catch her killer.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he's still out there.”

Samson said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

“I know who killed her.”

“Who?”

“My history teacher, Mr. Dorfman.”

“You don't say.”

“I do say,” said Mike calmly.

Samson slid off the desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a tape recorder. “Any objection if we get this on tape?”

Mike shrugged.

Samson spoke into the microphone, recording the date, time and place, and Mike's name, age and address. Then he sat behind the desk. “You're a senior at Carleton High. You say your history teacher, Mr. Dorfman, murdered Sarah Francis in 1982, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“That would be about the same year you were born, right?”

“Right.”

“What kind of marks do you get in history, Mike?”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“I've got to rule out ... ”

“You think I'm a nut.”

“I didn't say that. But I've got to be sure this information you're giving me is unbiased.”

“My marks are not a problem.”

“Do you like Mr. Dorfman? Is he a good teacher?”

“I don't think my opinion of the murderer has anything to do with it. He killed a thirteen-year-old kid and you're asking me if I like him.”