Black Fly Season (37 page)

Terri told him.

‘Where’d you see him last?’

‘In town here.’ She thought it might be dangerous to mention the camp.

The guy shrugged. ‘I know a couple of Kevins. What’s he look like?’

Terri looked at him. His bony face showed curiosity, no big deal. He didn’t look dangerous. She described Kevin to him.

‘Sure, I know him. In fact, I saw him this morning.’

‘Where!’

‘You know where the Chinook Tavern is?’

Terri shook her head. ‘Is it far?’

‘Yeah, it is.You’d have to get over to Front Street and then catch a bus out to Trout Lake. Take you an hour, hour and a half. It’s a little complicated, too. Why don’t I just drive you there?’

‘No, that’s okay. I’ll find it.’

‘It’s no big deal. I’m heading back that way now.’ He checked his watch. ‘In fact, I’m running late. So if you want the ride you gotta come now.’

He turned his back and headed across Oak Street toward a sleek black car.

‘Wait up,’ Terri said. ‘I’m coming with you.’

She ran across the street and climbed in the passenger side. The car had one of those big engines that pushed you back into the seat with every acceleration. It smelled of leather and new carpet. As they drove through the downtown streets, the guy fired questions at her - where was

she from, what did she do, had she been in town long? He seemed curious but not pushy. A little nervous, maybe. Every once in a while, he reached up and rubbed at a small scar on his brow.

ť

They were waiting for the light to change. Normally Cardinal was a patient driver, but now he was hunched in the driver’s seat, cursing under his breath.

‘Maybe you should go home,’ Delorme said. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘I’m fine. I’m just a little tired.’

Delorme had seen Cardinal tired, but not like this. His face was pale and drawn, the circles under his eyes deep, and there was a bitter edge in his manner that she couldn’t place. She didn’t think it had anything to do with work.

‘Is it Catherine?’ she said.

Cardinal let out a deep sigh. All he said was, ‘Yeah.’

‘She’s in hospital again?’

The light changed, and Cardinal gunned it. Not his style at all.

‘You’ve been through these times, before, John. She’ll be okay, don’t you think?’

‘I never know how Catherine’s going to be. Nearly two years, now, she’s been okay. Somehow I managed to convince myself that this time it was for good.’

It was the most he had ever said about his wife’s illness. Lines of pain radiated across his face like stress fractures in a pane of glass. Delorme wanted to say something - she’ll get better, it won’t last long, try not to worry too much - but nothing was adequate, and so she went silent and that didn’t seem adequate, either.

At the Crisis Centre Ned Fellowes left them in the office while he went to get Terri. Leaning against the disused fireplace, Cardinal looked like he was going to fall asleep standing up.

‘Wonder what’s taking him so long,’ Delorme said.

Cardinal just closed his eyes.

Fellowes came back a few moments later. ‘It appears our young friend has gone out,’ he said. ‘She’s not answering her door, she’s not in the TV room, not in the dining room. And nobody’s seen her for the past half-hour. I told her explicitly she should not leave the building.’

‘So did we,’ Cardinal said. ‘And she knew we were coming.’

‘Of course, she wouldn’t be the first person to avoid the police.’

‘No, but she called us. She wanted us to come.’

Fellowes pulled a ring of keys out of his desk and led them upstairs. Delorme knew the Crisis Centre well. As the only female in criminal investigations she always got to escort the bruised and frightened victims of domestic quarrels to this place. The familiar smells of the

carpeting and the old wood made her stomach tense up.

‘As I pointed out when Terri arrived.’ he said, ‘we’re not a jail. I can’t keep people here against their will. ‘

He put a key in the lock and opened the door.

‘Her jacket’s gone.’ Fellowes said.

‘I think something’s happened to her,’ Cardinal said. ‘She was very definite about wanting to talk to us. She knew we were coming.’

Fellowes started to close the door. Cardinal held it open.

‘Not without a warrant,’ Fellowes said. ‘I can’t allow that.’

‘Ned,’ Delorme said, ‘this young woman is in danger. Somebody tried to kill her and we have every reason to think they’ll try again. We can go ask for a warrant, but that’s going to take half a day. That’s time she may not have.’

Fellowes looked at Delorme, then over at Cardinal. Delorme silently urged him to come through.

‘Look,’ he said to Cardinal. ‘Why don’t you and I go downstairs and discuss it. Say for about five minutes?’

‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ Cardinal said.

He and Fellowes headed back toward the stairs, and Delorme shut the door after them.

There wasn’t much of Terri Tait in this room. It Was an old-fashioned place, still with much of its oak wainscoting and heavy cornices. The walls looked like they had been papered half a dozen

times before being painted their current shade of off-white. There were no clothes hanging in the closet.

Near the window, a large notebook lay on the floor. Delorme opened it and found that it wasn’t a notebook, it was a sketchpad. The girl had been drawing something. Doodling bird shapes.

She opened a drawer in a small dresser. A lonely pair of socks rolled in a semicircle. There were several pairs of underwear and a bra in another, newly purchased, probably courtesy of the Crisis Centre.

On top of the dresser were a brush, a package of bandages, a nail file and a small plastic bag containing sundry toiletries, also new.

Delorme got down on her knees and checked under the bed. Nothing.

I’m striking out, Delorme thought. We need to find this girl and I’m coming up empty here. Another minute and Ned Fellowes would be hauling her out of there and she would have nothing to show for her furtive little search.

She checked the wastebasket. An old bandage, a candy-bar wrapper, an empty Coke can, and a folded piece of paper. Delorme spread it out on the dresser. It was another version of the doodles on the writing tablet on the desk. This one was much more detailed. It showed an eagle with huge talons, about to lift off from a branch. It looked like the sort of thing that might decorate the wall of a hunting lodge. Why had she taken so much time

over this? The highlighting, the crosshatching, the detailed beak and feathers. Surely she must have other things on her mind?

Delorme tucked it into her inside pocket and went back downstairs. She shook her head at Cardinal as she entered the office. No need to mention her removal of the drawing to Fellowes.

‘A one-time-only occurrence, you two,’ Fellowes said. ‘Last thing I need is to get a reputation for letting the cops snoop through people’s rooms.’

‘It’s unusual circumstances,’ Delorme said. ‘You have to admit.’

‘That doesn’t make me feel better. Anyway, if she shows up here I’ll let you know right away.’

As he started the car, Cardinal said, ‘Did you really come up empty?’

‘It’s not like she had any luggage with her. There were just some things the Crisis Centre must’ve got for her. But I did find this ‘

Delorme pulled the drawing from her jacket pocket.

Cardinal frowned at the bird for a few seconds. ‘Okay, so she can draw a bird. That’s all you got?’

‘That’s it.’

‘All right. We’ll put out an all-points. We could get lucky - she’s only been gone a short time.’

Cardinal stepped on the gas, and Delorme reached for her seatbelt.

David Letterman had never looked so evil. You couldn’t be sure if this was really Letterman or a pod-born version animated by the spirit of some creature fresh out of hell. Wisps of smoke curled from the famous gap in the front teeth, and the ears seemed to be capped with tiny tongues of flame; it was hard to tell in the slats of daylight that seeped around the edges of the boarded-up windows.

‘You look like you could use a drink, there, Kevin.’ Letterman flashed his boyish grin, and twin plumes of smoke issued from his nostrils. ‘How about a shot of Cold Turkey?’

He pulled a bottle and two glasses from a drawer in his desk and flashed the label for the audience. There was laughter and a wry comment from the band leader, Paul What’s-his-name, that Kevin couldn’t quite make out.

Letterman poured two shot-glasses of whiskey. He drank his down in one toss before throwing the glass over his shoulder.

Kevin knew it wasn’t real. The stink of this place was making the withdrawal symptoms worse - the

smell of death and things rotting, the cauldron, those two sturdy hooks screwed into the beam above it. The buzzing of the blowflies. Sometimes Kevin was certain they were evil spirits who had taken the forms of flies, but most of the time he knew they were just flies.

The firmest reality was his own body; it is supremely difficult to doubt the messages of your own body. The sweats, he could deal with. Sweat poured off him, stinging his eyes, and he knew aside from the fact that he had thrown up more times than he could count - this would account for the thirst that claimed the entire territory of his throat.

The shivers, too, were bearable. The chattering teeth, the quaking arms, the legs that trembled like horse flesh, even when he pressed them together to try and calm the shaking. He wept for heroin. Red Bear had had the presence of mind to pluck it from his pocket before he had tied his hands behind his back and locked the door on him, and Kevin cried like a child now for heroin. Not to ease the shaking, or the sweats, or the nausea - he could live with those. Kevin had never had any idea whether anybody else experienced it this way, but for him the prime symptom of his addiction was the ache in his chest. It came and went, but when it came it felt as if it would never leave again. This ferocious gnawing in the chest was as if his lungs and blood vessels had been chewed away, leaving

only his heart to beat out its eternal., abject longing.

‘What about bone pain?’ Letterman wanted to know. ‘How are you handling the bone pain, Kevin?’

Of the physical withdrawal symptoms the bone pain was the worst. It was as if iron rods had been inserted through the marrow of all the hundreds of bones in his body, from the tiniest hinges of fingers and toes to the beams of his spine and legs, chest and arms, and now some demon was banging on them with a hammer so that they hummed and howled like tuning forks.

Nothing helped. Not deep breathing, not trying to imagine beautiful things, not trying to concentrate on one object: that widest crack of light, for example, or that paint drip on the floor not more than a foot from his nose. Kevin was not so sure that brown stain was in fact paint. He didn’t want to know what it was.

‘Say, what do you suppose that brown stain is on the floor there, Kevin?’

‘I don’t know, Dave.’

‘No, really. I’m just curious. It’s not blood, is it?’

‘I don’t know, Dave.’

‘Who do you suppose that came from? I thought Guthrie was killed someplace else.’

‘I don’t know where he was killed, Dave.’

‘I guess it could be Terri’s then.’

‘It’s not Terri’s. Terri went back to Vancouver.’

‘Hard to say, really, without more to go on. Could

be hers, could be Wombat’s. I mean, that is his head in the pot there, Kevin, so I don’t know - draw your own conclusions. Those are probably his fingers as well, I imagine. Say, Kevin, do you suppose you’re going to end up in there, too? Weren’t you supposed to be a poet at one point?’ Kevin lifted his face from the floor and tried to focus. It was hard with Letterman yammering at him, and the clatter in his bones, the sweat pouring into his eyes. He blinked hard several times and squinted. There was a tiny dark spot in the wall beneath the table, about six inches above the floor. The point of a nail.

The Ontario Psychiatric Hospital - or OH, as it is familiarly known - sits off the side of Highway 11 a few kilometres west of Algonquin Bay. It’s a beautiful location - long drive, wide field, enveloped in pine forest - that reflects the view of an earlier age that those who suffer from mental or emotional turmoil need more than anything to be ensconced in peaceful surroundings. Asylum.

Advances in drugs - and tightened health-care budgets - have emptied out many of the Ontario Hospital’s beds. But at any given time it still houses some three to four hundred patients. Most of these, so-called chronic-care patients, will not be going home. They include the severely retarded, or those suffering from cruel and irreversible dementia. It’s not clear, in most of these cases, whether the patient is even aware of his or her present circumstances, let alone what the future will hold or, more accurately, withhold.

A few of the inmates, such as Catherine Cardinal, stay in the hospital from time to time

until the acute phase of their difficulties is over and they can be returned safely to the community. Dr Jonas had given her a sedative and kept her overnight in Toronto. Then, feeling that the most important thing in her recovery would be nearness to her husband, he put her on a new medication, and sent her up to the Ontario Hospital by ambulance. He would remain in close touch with her doctor up there.

John Cardinal sat with her now in the sun room on the third floor. They always sat in the sun room when he came to visit. Later, when she was better, they would go for a walk, maybe even a trip downtown. But for now it was just this overheated, glassed-in room with its vinyl couches and its view of the highway and the trees. The sun itself was hidden behind heavy cloud, and rain dripped down the windows in thick rivulets.

‘They should call it the rain room,’ Cardinal said.

Catherine didn’t respond. She sat on the far end of the couch, elbows on knees, head sunk low, her face hidden by her hair, an allegory of defeat. Cardinal found his sympathy and concern warring with his frustration at not going all-out for Terri Tait. True, they had all units on alert, and there wasn’t much else he could do for her right at this moment, but there were other angles of the case that had to be pursued.