Hippie House (7 page)

Laying a hand on Eric's shoulder, my father bent down to speak to him. It was a body. In the Hippie House. A dead body strapped by what he thought was an extension cord to the center post. No, it was not a man. It was not a woman.

“A child?”

“No, a girl. Like Emma. Maybe a little older.”

“Oh my god,” my father whispered, dropping his eyes to the floor.

I didn't realize I was shrieking until Mom pulled me close to her.

“Do you know who she is?”

Eric shook his head. “I only saw her for a second.”

Dad did not ask him anything more. Uncle Pat's truck could now be heard chortling up the laneway. After patting Eric's knee, Dad stood up and walked into the dining room, where he poured brandy into a tumbler. He returned to the kitchen and handed the glass to Eric. Eric shook his head.

“Drink it,” my father insisted. He then told Mom to call the Pike Creek police before meeting Uncle Pat at the door. Halley tried to follow. “Emma, keep her in the house.”

Halley resisted, but I held her by the collar as the door closed and I continued to hold her long after I had watched Dad and Uncle Pat hurry up the lane and disappear behind the barn. Mom was in the hallway. In a voice straining for control she was giving directions to the police over the telephone. Holding the empty glass in trembling fingers, Eric was staring at the floor. After a while, I lifted it from his hands.

“The door was open,” he suddenly told me. “Just a crack. And when I pushed it—Emma, she was staring right at me.”

I set the glass on the counter. And for a fleeting moment I wished I had seen what my brother had seen. I wished that I had shared in the horror of finding the body. Leaning over the sink,
I pumped a large amount of hand lotion into my palm. Taking one of Eric's hands in mine, I began to rub the lotion into the rough surface. It was not something I would normally do, and it was certainly not something he would normally let me do. But it was all I could think of to do at that moment and he didn't care.

“The police are on their way.” Mom pushed tears from her cheeks, brushed her hands across her apron and dropped into a chair. She stretched her arms across the table. She squeezed Eric's hand—the one I had attempted to soften. Seeing that I was crying, she squeezed one of mine.

Dad and Uncle Pat returned, but for many minutes they stood outside the door. I could see them through the kitchen window. They did not talk, but stood apart and I somehow realized that as they straightened their shoulders, they were preparing themselves—regrouping against an unusually ruthless and savage opponent—one that had hit them blindside. I had never thought of my father as old, but I remember thinking at that moment how he looked every one of his fifty-three years.

We were not to leave the house. Aunt Alice, Megan and Carl were not to leave the house, and for his own peace of mind, my uncle drove home to pick them up and bring them all to Ruddy Duck Farm. We were to stay put until the police arrived and told us what to do.

We filed into the living room as Dad directed. We were full of questions, but at that moment the three who had been down to the Hippie House had nothing to say and the rest of us understood not to ask. Except Carl, who began grilling Eric. Never given to physical discipline, Aunt Alice quickly hushed him up with a cuff to the back of the head. Under normal circumstances, she and my mother would rush into the kitchen to prepare food when we were together. But today they ignored their instincts and listened only to my father and Uncle Pat.
Who is she? Who was she? Megan and I wanted so desperately to know. It was a small reassurance that Eric had not recognized her immediately.

“It's Katie Russell, isn't it?” Megan insisted.

“Yes—most probably,” my father finally agreed.

My mother and Aunt Alice tried to calm us. But it was apparent in their eyes that they were as terrified as we were that a horror of this magnitude could be unfolding in our small corner of the world.

It amazed and bewildered us that we had heard nothing. That we had seen nothing. How could a crime so vile take place less than a quarter of a mile from us and we be oblivious to it all? How was it that we had not heard the violence or caught the scent of a struggle?

These were questions we not only asked ourselves, but that we would be asked by many people in the months to come. Not that they meant to place blame, but in trying to understand.

Dad positioned himself before the large window. Here he listened for the familiar crunch of gravel that could be heard before a car appeared on the crest of the hill as it traveled down the main road. I could not remember ever seeing my father's face so drawn. I had never known him to not at least attempt an explanation, smile reassuringly, or in a difficult situation, catch my eye and wink. He looked at none of us now. This was a discovery so unthinkable that even he had no experience to relate it to, and so, along with us, he waited for the police to arrive as though suspended in time.

Constable Wagner arrived with another police officer within twenty minutes. My father and Uncle Pat once again marched up the lane and down to the Hippie House, where they did not stay long. When they returned, my father and uncle looked very close to collapsing. The police officers were careful not to commit, but they also admitted the girl was likely Katie Russell. They were
certainly not experts, they were quick to emphasize, but judging by the condition of the body they would estimate the girl had been dead at least a month.

Now they waited for detectives and forensic units to arrive from the provincial police department and the RCMP It was a day of many arrivals and few departures. By mid-afternoon our lane had become a parking lot, and the once snowy trail to the Hippie House had been trampled by so many feet it was muddy and worn. Men stood talking among the black-and-white cars while the photographer first walked through the Hippie House. A large area around the small building was cordoned off. No one was to enter from the road; a barricade was erected. The entrance through the woods, just past the duck house, was also blocked, as was a significant portion of the surrounding woods.

Dad was asked if he would be willing to take the photographer over the area for some aerial shots. Yes, he said, he would. It would require that he plow a strip of snow from the field, but between his neighbor, Grant Fraser, and brother-in-law, Pat, it shouldn't take long. The three men were relieved to be doing something useful and they worked quickly to clear a narrow runway. Cocking her head as if something wasn't quite right, Halley was the first to hear the engine of the Maul Rocket as it struggled, unaccustomed as it was to being dragged into the cold.

Once the plane was in flight, Uncle Pat plowed the trail down to the duck house, allowing the coroner's long dark vehicle to pass. It would be several hours before it would carry the body back to the main road.

The first reporters and cameramen began to show up very soon after the police. They continued to arrive from the larger and more distant cities all day. They took pictures and they filmed the house, the workshop and the frozen pond. With each snap of the shutter, anger rose inside me—who were they, these people tramping all over our farm?

Megan and I spent most of the day in the sunroom, which had the best view of the yard. We chattered on the edge of hysterics. Eric's friends drove up in Jimmy's pickup truck. For a few minutes they joined us in the sunroom.

Jimmy toyed with the change in his pockets as he blinked at Eric, who sat slouched in a chair. “What a drag, man, to find a dead chick in your own backyard.”

Malcolm agreed. “And what sick head would do something like that?”

Staring across the pond in the direction of the Hippie House, Jimmy rubbed his head in disbelief. He turned and lay a hand on Eric's shoulder. “Are you going to be alright? Can we do anything—get anything for you?”

Mrs. Fraser and Ruby were two of the many neighbors from miles around who brought casseroles as if we personally had suffered a death. They did not know what else to do.

Once the police were in control, Mom and Aunt Alice were thankful to be in the kitchen, where they prepared sandwiches and served endless cups of coffee. They were women who thrived when given something nurturing to do. It was cold outside and there was no reason for the investigators to suffer physically along with everything else they had to see. Knowing that Carl would be nothing but an annoyance, they had relegated him to wash dishes so that no officer in my mother's kitchen would be forced to drink from a Styrofoam cup.

I did not know what role each of these people played, mostly men, but a few women, who worked well into the night with spotlights fixed on the Hippie House, the officers who took measurements and those who planted markers in our fields. But at some point I wanted them all to pack up and leave us alone.

The sunroom had doors to both the kitchen and living room. This allowed Megan and me to watch the activity outside as we strained for details in the conversations in both these rooms.

Late in the afternoon, Eric was interviewed in the living room by a man who had introduced himself as Detective Mather. From where I sat I could see a woman sitting off to the side in my mother's brocade chair. She did not speak during the interview, but she stayed after the detective had left, reassuring Eric in a comforting voice when he began to weep.

Eric told them why he had made the trip down to the Hippie House. He told them he had not actually entered it; he had done nothing but push open the door. He had last been down there about the third week of September. Yes, he would try and remember the exact day. He would ask his sister, Emma, she would know. Of course lots of people knew about the Hippie House. His band had practiced there all summer, which is how it got its name. No, today he saw nothing unusual outside the shed that he could remember, everything was deep in snow. No tire tracks, ski tracks, nothing. He did not have any idea who the girl was, although he knew Katie Russell was missing. To be honest, he had seen her for no more than a second and really only knew that her hair was black.

For now, Detective Mather had no more questions. As he stood to leave, his shadow fell across the door.

“How did she die?” my brother asked. I heard his voice break, but despite his fear, he wanted to know.

Detective Mather was obviously hesitant to answer him for he did not say anything right away. They would have to wait for the results of the autopsy, but it looked like she had been strangled.

“But there was blood,” my brother commented. “A lot of blood. Around her neck.”

“Yes. It appears the cord was pulled very tight.”

Eric was silent a moment, but then he asked another question that I knew was not due to morbid curiosity but the kind of detail I would expect him to ask.

“What kind of cord was it?”

“Again, we won't know until the autopsy is performed. It's embedded quite deeply in the neck. But likely something quite fine. Like a piece of heavy gage wire.”

“Or a guitar string,” I heard Eric say.

Detective Mather's shadow grew huge as he put on his coat. “Yes. Or a guitar string,” he agreed.

My aunt and cousins stayed over that night. Somehow it seemed best that we remain together. Megan shared my large bed, where we slept very little but spoke of our fears until dawn.

In the early hours of the morning I was returning from the bathroom when I noticed a light shining from beneath Eric's bedroom door. I knocked, but after receiving no reply, I walked in with Halley following me. Eric sat at his desk. Using an Exacto knife, he was carving the wings for a model biplane from balsa wood. It was a hobby from when he was a child, and I had not seen him build one for several years. The double-hung window was wide open. Even in the cold, Eric was careful to keep the room ventilated when he was using the dope needed to strengthen the tissue paper that would cover the frame.

Halley jumped on the bed and I sat down beside her. Eric did not look up from his work. For a moment, I looked at the many models lining his shelves and dangling from the ceiling, slowly circling in the air currents. I looked at the posters of musicians he had tacked on his walls. In one corner of his room stood an old radio he had refinished. Dad had discovered it in the barn when we'd first moved to Ruddy Duck Farm. Eric's guitar was propped against it. My brother's room was neat compared to mine, where thread and fabric chased dust from every corner. Only a paint-stained shirt and a braided guitar strap tossed beneath the window cluttered his floor.

“You found it,” I said.

“What?”

“The guitar strap.”

Eric shrugged, “It was under this pile of stuff on my desk.” Having completed one wing, he set it aside and began working on another. “I'm never going back there,” he said.

“I wouldn't either if I were you.”

How strange it was to hear voices conferring, police radios crackling and car doors slamming outside our quiet farmhouse in the small hours on a cold winter night. How odd to have the dark sky washed in floodlights when we were used to only the small pool of yellow light cast from the lamp in our yard.

“Was it really awful?”

“Yes,” was all he said.

“I wish I didn't know her.”

“Yeah, well, you didn't know her very well. And anyway, it's not you. Or Megan. It could have been, you know.”

The thought had already occurred to both Megan and me. “But the killer must be from around here. The killer must be somebody we know.”

“Emma, nobody in Pike Creek would do that. Nobody that we know would do what I saw down there.”

“But how else would he know about the Hippie House?”

Sighing heavily, my brother set the Exacto knife aside. “I don't know.”

Eric didn't know, but he did believe that it was someone who had been out to the Hippie House. It was a thought that would torment him for many months to come.