Black Fly Season (26 page)

who you get on the other end of the line. In this case it was a young woman - a young woman with a lot of sandpaper in her voice, as if she’d just recently left off screaming. Cardinal’s first question met with a raspy but firm no.

‘I understand your reluctance,’ Cardinal said. ‘In fact, I admire it. We need people like you to make sure information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.’

‘So why don’t you get a warrant and try again later?’ the woman said.

‘Well, of course I could do that. But it would take a lot of time and I don’t want to go to all that trouble only to find out that you don’t have any information. So - without giving me anything personal - I wonder if you could just confirm whether or not a Miss Terri Tait ever attended school here.’

‘Just confirmation. You don’t want grades or anything?’

‘No, no. I would never ask for anything like that without a warrant.’ Thinking, I’m such a liar, I should have gone into acting. ‘If you could just tell me if Terri Tait ever attended school here or not, I’d really appreciate it.’

There was a pause on the Nipissing School Board’s end of the line. Even in that vacant line tone, Cardinal thought he detected a distinct rasp.

‘How are you spelling that name again?’

‘Terri Tait,’ Cardinal said, and spelled it out. Luckily the spellings were slightly unusual.

He was put on hold. Cardinal twirled through his Rolodex looking for the number for the Separate School Board. He would call them next.

The young woman came back on the line.

‘Yes., a Terri Tait attended Ojibwa High School back in the early nineties. She was with them for two years, grades nine and ten.’

Bingo, Cardinal thought. We’re on a roll.

‘And her parents?’

‘Wing Commander Kenneth Tait. Spouse, Marilyn. Oh, my. There’s a note on the file that says they were killed in a plane crash - a private plane - in 1993. The kids went to live with relatives out west.’

‘I’m wondering about their Algonquin Bay address,’ Cardinal said. ‘You said the father was in the Air Force. Can you tell me, did they live on the base or off?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Last address we have is 145 Deloraine Drive.’

On the base.

‘How’d Terri do in Math and Chemistry?’ He wanted to leave this young woman feeling she’d done a good job.

‘Really, Detective, you can’t expect me to give you information like that without a warrant. You’ll have to get a court order.’

‘Of course,’ Cardinal said. ‘I’ll do that right now.’

He hung up and grabbed his jacket off the hook.

His phone was ringing but he ignored it and headed straight out the door.

The residents of Algonquin Bay don’t like to think so, but it’s all too likely that the city’s best years are behind it. At their peak in the middle of the last century, there had been three railway lines running through town; now there is one.The CNR station burned down a few years back, a shame because it was one of the few buildings in this foursquare town with real character. And the former CPR station, a classic limestone structure on Oak Street, is being transformed into a railway museum. Only the former ONR station is still in operation - but as offices, not as a terminal.

The Cold War had also been very good to Algonquin Bay. Canada beefed up its forces and joined with the US in NORAD, a system of linked radar installations and air force bases designed to intercept any threat coming in over the ice cap from Russia. By the mid-sixties the local air force base boasted three thousand personnel and an arsenal of nuclear-tipped Bomarc missiles. The defence department hollowed out a mountain next to Trout Lake and installed a three-storey radar outfit inside it, a Dr Strangelove set that at one time had been cutting-edge.

But the Cold War ended. The missiles were disarmed and then dismantled. The forces were downsized, and one by one the squadrons mothballed. That left only about a hundred and fifty

military personnel in Algonquin Bay, and no one seemed to know how much longer they’d be there.

Cardinal drove up to the base checkpoint. Sometimes, the checkpoint was manned, sometimes not; it depended on the current level of threat. Today it was unmanned, and Cardinal drove through without even slowing. It made him wonder about his country’s state of readiness.

Cardinal was acting on one little-considered result of the vanished squadrons: empty houses. No one talked much about the empty houses, and the military wasn’t about to publicize them. To put them on the market would destroy the value of all the other homes in town. So, unbeknownst to most of its population, Algonquin Bay contains enough empty houses to fill a subdivision, which is exactly what the air base looks like.

The only difference between the air base and other sixties-era subdivisions is that all its houses are not just similar but identical: ranch-style split levels with two-car garages and sunken living rooms. The streets look the same, too, all drives, lanes, circles, and courts with spurious curves and dead ends apparently designed to frustrate the Soviet invader.

Cardinal had thought he knew where Deloraine Drive was, but it turned out he didn’t. After he passed the same crooked Stop sign for the third time he pulled over on to the shoulder. There was a solitary man coming up the road on the other side, dressed in the Canada Post summer outfit

of white short-sleeve shirt and blue shorts. The figure was engaged in an idiosyncratic form of locomotion. He stopped every three or four steps and reared back in a rocking motion, left hand fingering the invisible fretboard of an invisible guitar.

If anyone had earned the right to play air guitar, Cardinal figured, it was Spike Willis. Spike had been a little ahead of him in school, and since the age of sixteen had always been in the best rock bands Algonquin Bay had produced. He had done his stint in Toronto in the seventies, changed bands every year, released lots of recordings, and pretty quickly developed a reputation for making his battered Telecaster talk. Then he threw it all over to come back to Algonquin Bay and raise a family up north. Why, Cardinal never knew. Nor did he know Spike well enough to ask. All he knew was that Spike Willis played the kind of blues guitar that can make grown men cry.

He called him over.

‘Oh, shit. I surrender, officer.’ Spike threw his hands up with a big grin. He had always struck Cardinal as one of nature’s few truly happy men.

‘You know, I grew up in this town,’ Cardinal said. ‘And I’ve been back now for about twelve years. So how the hell is it possible that I’m lost?’

‘Oh, hell, everyone gets lost up here,’ Spike said. He hitched his mail sack higher and waved away a black fly, his good nature apparently insectproof. ‘I grew up right here on the base and I’ll

tell you something. True story. One night after I’d had a few - well, more than a few, really - I came home, opened the door, went inside, and suddenly realized my entire family had moved out of town. Mom, Dad, Sis, all gone. Some other family had moved into my house and changed all the furniture. Even the aquarium was gone. It was like I was the victim of a magic trick. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

‘You’d staggered into the wrong house?’

‘I had the wrong house. And I lived here, man. Isn’t that too much? What are you looking for?’

Cardinal told him, and Spike gave him the directions.

‘How many of these houses are actually empty?’

‘Oh, geez. Tons of ‘em. I don’t even need the mail cart up here any more.’

‘They don’t look empty.’

‘No, the military keeps ‘em looking sharp. They figure once they start to go the whole place’ll cave in. Probably right, too.’

‘What about Deloraine, is it a ghost town?’

‘Not really. They haven’t let any one street get completely empty. They rent the houses out, you know. Pretty low rents, from what I hear.’

‘You notice anything unusual up Deloraine?’

‘Nope. Same old same old.’

‘Okay, thanks. Where you playing next?’ Cardinal said.

‘Toad Hall, two Saturdays from now.’

‘I’ll try to be there.’

‘Do that. Got a guest vocalist. Black babe can really wail.’

Spike headed off down the road, rocking and tilting, sending another blistering - if silent - solo up to the wide blue sky.

Deloraine Drive proved to be a cul-de-sac. Cardinal parked in a cramped turning circle and walked over to number 145, the last split-level in a row of three. The grass was trimmed and the porch swept, everything ship-shape as Spike had said. The blinds were lowered, but there was no other indication that the house was vacant.

Cardinal walked up to the front door. It was still on the latch and did not appear to have been tampered with. The sliding sections of the front picture window were also unmarked. He stepped down on to the lawn, and checked the front window of what would be the master bedroom. The dust was thick along the ledge, and undisturbed.

He went around to the back and saw that one of the basement windows had been broken, just enough to reach inside and slide it open. Cardinal knelt on the grass and a black fly bit his ear. He slapped at it too late. He slid the window open, turned around and backed into the open window, lowering himself to the basement floor.

It was only a half basement; just big enough for the washer and dryer, which were still there. He lifted the lid of the washer. Empty. In fact the entire basement was empty and smelled of nothing except concrete.

He went up the stairs and pushed open the door; it opened on to the kitchen. The fridge and stove were still there but the kitchen was otherwise empty. He stood there for a minute and absorbed the emptiness of the place. Not the emptiness of a house between rentals but the desolation of a place that had once been home to many and was now nothing more than bricks and wood and stale air. He could almost hear the voices of children, the adult voices of old arguments, ancient apologies. He could almost smell the thousands of dinners that had been cooked on that Kenmore stove.

The sink was wet. Someone had turned the water on and used it quite recently. Cardinal opened the cupboard underneath and found a paper bag with nothing in it except an apple core and a banana peel not yet black.

He walked quickly into the living/dining area. There were obvious places where the dust had been disturbed. He went up the half-flight of stairs. Nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the master bedroom. But in the smaller bedroom he found finger marks on the blinds where someone had lifted them. He opened the folding doors of the closet, but there were just a couple of hangers bearing ghostly shapes of dry-cleaning plastic.

He stepped out into the hallway and looked up at the square in the ceiling that led to the attic. He knew the attics in these places. They were tiny, airless spaces full of fibreglass insulation and not

much else, big enough to stuff a few suitcases. You needed a ladder or a high stool to reach them, and the square looked undisturbed.

He went downstairs again and opened the front closet. Empty. He stood in the vestibule wondering what to do next. Terri Tait had been here, he was certain, but now she was out. All units were on the lookout for an AWOL patient with red hair, but the hooded T-shirt would hide that. Then he noticed the cupboard under the stairs and for a moment was flooded with memories.

When he was about nine years old, he had been best friends with a boy named Tommy Brown who lived up here at the base. His house had been identical to this one, and the two of them had had great fun hiding in that crawl space, telling Twilight Zone stories and in general trying to scare the hell out of each other. Tommy used to bring his collie, Tango, in there with them and the space would reek of dog breath.

Cardinal stepped up to the little door. The bolt was open. He pulled on the handle and the door swung outward. He got down on one knee and looked inside. In the shadows of the back corner, he could just make out the frightened, pale features of Terri Tait.

‘Terri,’ Cardinal said. ‘Are you all right?’ She looked away from him, and her face vanished in shadow. ‘Please go away.’

‘Come on out, Terri. No one’s going to hurt you.’

Cardinal thought he had never seen anything as sad as this young woman huddled in a crawl space hiding from the - as far as he knew - only person who was trying to help her.

She sniffed wetly; tears glistened on her cheeks.

‘Terri, come on out and let’s see if I can help you with whatever it is you want to do. All right? Let’s work together on this.’

Cardinal was wishing Delorme was with him. Mind you, Delorme would probably just drag her out of there and ask what the hell was on her mind.

Terri crawled out of the cupboard and stood up, hugging herself although it was not cold.

Cardinal pointed to the stairs.

‘Why don’t you sit there?’

‘I think I’ll just stand.’

‘Sit, for God’s sake. You look like you’re going to faint.’

He took her by the shoulders and gently lowered her to the stairs.

‘Why were you so frightened?’ he asked. ‘Who did you think I was?’

Terri shrugged. She was wearing the pilfered hoodie. The sleeves hung over her wrists and made her look like an orphan, which of course she was.

‘Did you think it was whoever might’ve shot you?’

‘No. I don’t even know who that would be.’

‘Come back to the hospital with me. You won’t have to hide in any cupboards there.’

‘I don’t need a hospital. I’m not sick.’

‘Someone tried to kill you, Terri. Until we find that person, you’re still in danger. Come back with me.’

‘I don’t want to. Believe it or not, I do have a life and if you don’t mind I’d like to get back to it.’

‘In an empty house? Where you haven’t lived for, what, ten or twelve years?’

Terri looked at him. The green eyes, informed now by memory and who knew what personal history, no longer looked so innocent.

‘Tell me about your brother Kevin.’

‘I don’t want to talk about Kevin.’

‘You called him last night. His number’s not in service.’