I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (44 page)

“Oh, she felt she shouldn't bother you. I told her, ‘Nonsense. Arthur doesn't retain awkward feelings. The past is past.' ”

“And you suggested I wouldn't mind getting together.”

“I assumed that, naturally. Good lord, you were married thirty years. You shared the raising of a wonderful daughter.”

Deborah, a high school principal in Australia, cherished mother of my cherished grandchild, Nick. Deborah was a supporting angel during the stressful final years of that marriage.

I check my watch. “Time flies. I can't stay for coffee. You'll be fine with a taxi?”

I drop a credit card on the table but Hubbell returns it. “Not a chance – you're buying dinner instead. I've reserved at Hy's.”

I am finding this a bit much. Has Hubbell no other friends?

“So everything is fine with you and Margaret?”

That is obviously what Annabelle is seeking, through Hubbell's agency, to squirrel out of me. “We are inconceivably happy.”

Hubbell nods, skeptical. “Where are you staying? I've been stumbling around my condo like a ghoul in an echo chamber. There's a vacant room with an en suite Jacuzzi and a view over English Bay. I've even had the maid perfume the sheets for you.”

“A handsome offer, but Gertrude has reserved other digs.” A white lie. Hubbell seems needy for my friendship, but that may be a cover for his role as fifth columnist for the stalking divorcée.

I hesitate, then embrace him. As I hurry to my car, I call Gertrude on my cell. “If you've checked me into any of my preferred hotels, check me out.” Annabelle knows all of them.

“Well, where am I supposed to put you?”

“You're not to worry, I'll find something. I may not be back today.”

“Riley will have his brief on your desk by this evening.”

“Buy him those chocolate-covered macadamias he likes. Annabelle?”

“Nothing.”

I hurry off to the tarted-up part of Chinatown, East Pender. There, on the top floor of a low-rise near the Sun-Yat Sen Gardens, is the April Wu Detective Agency, established three years ago after she quit a major investigative service in Hong Kong, where she'd learned her trade. Most of her work entails following disloyal husbands, but she prefers the more dramatic assignments from the several criminal lawyers who conspire to keep her a secret from the rest of the bar.

April's burly male assistant escorts me to an inner office, where awaits the slender Oriental temptress. She is posing for me, framed in the sunshine from a tall window behind her desk. Normally she's a sun-avoider, a night person, and her face seems extraordinarily pale against the jet-black hair that frames it and the blue-black eye shadow. Early thirties, though it's hard to tell. I have always assumed that her air of witchy mystery is an elaborate masque. She knows lawyers love theatre.

She advances and busses me on the lips – just a bunt, but it startles me. I hadn't known we were that well acquainted.

“Everything is well in your life?” British accent with an underlay of Cantonese. She directs me to a well-padded rattan chair. The prints that adorn the walls are of terraced hills, ancient palaces, pagodas.

“Everything is not well. Margaret is off to Ottawa, my ex-wife is on the prowl, and I am back practising law when I should be selling goat cheese at the farmers' market. How are you, my dear?”

“Content. Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Who says?”

“Confucius.”

I counter with something I'd read on a bumper sticker: “When you realize there is nowhere to go, you have arrived.”

“Sounds New Agey. I want you to relax, Arthur.” An ethereal smile as she draws the drapes across her windows. “I have just come back from a Cree reserve in Saskatchewan. I talked to a number of elders there, students at Pius Eleven in the early 1940s.”

The room is in semi-darkness. April has paused, fully expecting me to beg for more. I give in. “What inspired you to go to there?”

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

That body has had some engine problems but is soon to chug off on a coast-to-coast tour. The First Nations are preparing for it, gathering and publishing histories of those abused in residential schools. I've read Gabriel's critique of it in the
New Internationalist
. The “forgiveness game,” he called it, a sly government effort to forestall heavy reparations and keep the churches solvent.

“I've been on the phone to various band councils.” April clicks a remote and a wall screen lights up. “I finally had some luck with the Pelican Lake band. They're a people of the woods and lakes. This is from my camcorder.”

A man at a microphone. A high school teacher, April explains, addressing some kind of forum: “Over many years, the children of Pelican Lake were regularly taken hundreds of kilometres away from their parents and their homes, to the town of Torch River, to the hell they still call Pie Eleven.”

He recites a litany of injustices: children treated like herds of sheep; one-size-fits-all instruction; denial of free speech; kids with welts on arms and backsides, black and blue and bleeding, forced to sign happy letters home that they copied from blackboards. I've heard similar and worse from Gabriel Swift, and more recently in the press, so such accounts no longer shock. But I didn't want to believe that Dermot knew this was going on.

April pauses the tape and draws a chair close to me, her solemn eyes studying me for reaction. “They emailed me statements from three elders, all in their eighties, who remembered Dermot Mulligan from those years. Only one woman had a memory that was sharp.
Ethel Brière, who is eighty-three. It's she I went out to see. Are you comfortable, Arthur?”

“Becoming less so. Please don't tease – lay it out.”

“She was fourteen in 1942. Her best friend was a girl named Caroline Snow, same age. In early June, in a whispered exchange in the girl's dormitory, Caroline told her … Well, you will hear.”

She fast-forwards. Ethel Brière is sitting on a sofa, a sturdy, clear-eyed woman with a weathered face and flowing white hair. Around her neck, a silver chain and crucifix.

April's voice: “Who else have you told this to, Mrs. Brière?”

“Only the lady over there from the band office.”

“You had kept it to yourself until then?”

“Caroline asked me to swear, and I did. In God's name. For years I kept that secret.” A sigh. “She was such a pretty girl. The most beautiful, the smartest. So pious. But she is long gone, and times have changed.” She sits up, a firm set to her chin.

“And she didn't report it?”

“She was ashamed. She was afraid. You would have been too, miss.”

The image wobbles. “Oops, I almost lost you.”

A third voice, off-screen: “Ethel, can we go back a bit?” The camera pans toward a young woman whom I presume to be a band counsellor. “Tell us what used to go on in the discipline room – isn't that what you called it?”

“Yes, in the basement. There was a table there. That's where the nuns used to strap us down to get whipped for speaking Indian. They used to force us bigger girls to hold a little girl on the table while they strapped her for … it might be bedwetting, or you got lickings for not doing the bed, not eating, being late. The boys who ran away got punished in front of everyone. You also got strapped for lying if you complained about the sex they forced on us.”

“Thank you.”

That was a kind of public service announcement, but far from irrelevant. April's voice again: “Did Caroline talk to you about this incident more than once?”

“A few times, when we were able to get alone. But earlier I saw what started it. We were on recess in the schoolyard and a monitor heard Caroline talking Cree, and she was reported to the principal and sent to his office after school.”

I feel queasy as Ethel recounts Caroline's confidences. “It started off as a scolding for speaking Indian, and then Mr. Mulligan told her he didn't want to punish her if he could avoid it. And then he began touching her, and she didn't know what to do.”

I am aghast, yet an emphatic inner voice tells me I should have expected something like this.
Evil
, he wrote.
Unforgivable evil
.

April's assistant enters with a tray and silently serves us tea as I listen in utter discomfort to a predictable tale of touches and fondling and the victim's frozen lack of response. All efforts to disbelieve this elder are bound to fail. I can see the truth in her eyes, her gestures, as she recalls Caroline Snow's account of standing rooted to the floor while Mulligan undid her buttons, bizarrely caressing in turn each item of clothing, playing with her brassiere and panties.

“And so the principal laid Caroline down on the rug, and that's where he did it to her.”

April presses pause, and the image holds on the doughty Mrs. Brière snorting into a hankie. That inspires me to do so too, out of sadness in large part, but also out of need, to expel the shock that seems to have clogged my throat and nasal orifices. Rome has fallen.

As if in prayer I say, “Lord, what am I to do with this?” It's hearsay, strictly speaking, inadmissible, but I am dizzy with the deeper implications. None of this was known in 1962. How differently I would have handled the case had this outrage come to light. The
naissains d'huîtres
are rebelling.

“There's more. There were consequences,” April says. “Have some more tea. It's herbal, very soothing.” A brutally suspenseful pause as she pours. “Mulligan impregnated Caroline Snow.”

I nearly choke on the soothing herbal tea.

“I've written all this down, but let me summarize. Caroline didn't return to Pie Eleven after learning she was pregnant, and Ethel Brière did not hear from her for two and a half years. They
chanced on each other in Regina at the end of the war. Caroline Snow was then seventeen, working in the sex trade, supporting herself and her toddler. Sebastien. Sebastien Snow.”

I lean back in my chair, feeling the colour drain from my face.

“And what ultimately became of Ms. Snow?”

“After Social Services took her son into care, she had a breakdown and had to be restrained from making noisy, unwelcome visits to the foster home. Ultimately she let her pimp take her to Vancouver, where she died in December 1957, at twenty-nine, of a heroin overdose. The band council located her death certificate. They are perusing Sebastien's foster care records. It appears that when he was fourteen he ran away, apparently intent on finding his mother. That would be not long before she died. No one back then seems to have bothered trying to trace him.”

She touches my hand gently. “Are you okay?”

“I'll be fine.” But I'm shaking.

“I'll have more in a few days. Apparently Sebastien has a police record. So, now tell me how I can help you with your prowling ex-wife.”

I laugh hollowly. Numbly, as a distraction, I tell her the bare bones: Annabelle's return, my fear that she will make mischief, disrupt my life. “I'm looking for a safe house for a few days.”

She suggests the Ritz, just a walk away, where Chinatown melds into skid road. I vaguely recall it as a Main Street dump with a pub, but April has heard it's been done over nicely into suites, the area gentrified.

Outside the Ritz, a skinny man with a sad, lined face extends a palm. “Can you help a friend out with some bus fare?” His breath sour with beer. In his sixties, about Sebastien Snow's age were he alive today. Indeed, there is a resemblance to Mulligan. Put horn-rims on, imagine him with more hair … I'm seeing phantoms again.

I give him a couple of loonies. “God bless,” he says. “When my ship comes in, I'll pay you back.”

The small lobby is clean, the clerk polite. As she checks me in, I put my glasses on to read a poster pinned to a notice board. “Have you seen this girl?” The missing fourteen-year-old, Kestrel Dubois: a new photo, taken only two days ago, in colour but not sharp. She wears a brown jacket and carries a small pack. Long hair, tied back. She is leaning over the railing of a B.C. ferry, contemplative. “Anyone seeing this person or who saw her aboard the
Queen of Coquitlam
on its Vancouver-to-Nanaimo run between ten a.m. and twelve-thirty p.m. on Tuesday, September 6th, please call 911 or contact
GIS RCMP
, Nanaimo.”