Puppet (33 page)

“Oh.”

“Sorry I can’t help you.”

“Thank you,” Amanda says instead of good-bye. “Reference Library, here I come.” She thinks of calling Ben as she is pulling on her boots and slipping into her coat, but he’s in court, and besides, what is there to say to him really?
Idiot—you missed your chance?
“I don’t think so,” she says, shivering even before she opens the front door, lowering her head and shielding her face from the biting wind.

Except the wind isn’t biting. It isn’t even blowing. And while it is far from balmy, the temperature is substantially warmer than the day before. A good omen, she hopes, walking down the front path, about to turn toward Bloor, when she sees old Mrs. MacGiver staring at her from her front window. “Just ignore her,” she whispers into the upturned collar of her coat. “Keep walking.”

In spite of her admonitions, Amanda finds herself negotiating the front steps of Mrs. MacGiver’s home, and ringing the bell. What the hell am I doing now? she wonders, looking toward the living room window when no one comes to the door, seeing nothing. Maybe I scared her, Amanda thinks. Maybe the poor old woman saw me walking over here and died of fright. And what then? Would her family, who already think she’s lived too long, bother putting a notice of her death in the newspapers?

The sound of locks jiggling, and then the door opens. Just a crack. An ancient head peeks through, crowned by a thin halo of white hair that sprouts like weeds from patches of dry, pink scalp.

“It’s me. Amanda. Gwen Price’s daughter,” Amanda tells the woman. “I’m going out for a few hours, and I
just wondered if there was anything you needed I could pick up for you.”

“I need a pair of red shoes,” the woman replies.

“What?”

“There’s a dance at the Royal York this weekend,” Mrs. MacGiver says, her face becoming quite animated as she flings open the door. She’s wearing an old, coffee-stained, yellow housecoat and heavy, gray-and-white gym socks. “It’s my senior prom, you know, and this year they’re holding it at the Royal York. I’ve been so looking forward to it.”

“Mrs. MacGiver …”

“My father wasn’t going to let me go at first. He’s very strict. Very strict,” she repeats with a shake of her head, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “He doesn’t like Marshall MacGiver. But my mother thinks he’s a very nice young man, and she talked him into letting me go. She even bought me a new dress.” She looks down at her feet. “But how can I go to the prom without matching shoes?”

“I’m afraid I can’t go to the shoe store today, Mrs. MacGiver. Maybe tomorrow,” Amanda offers, trying to back away.

“Then where are you going?” Mrs. MacGiver’s tone is harsh, almost accusatory.

“To the library.”

“I don’t need any books.”

“Yes, I know that. I just thought you might need some orange juice or milk or maybe some tea.”

The woman smiles, revealing several missing upper teeth. “Tea would be nice.”

Amanda breathes a sigh of relief. “Okay, then. I’ll bring you some tea.”

“Yes, tea would be very nice. Red Rose, if they have it.”

Amanda feels the burn of last night’s tea on the tip of her tongue. “Red Rose it is.”

“I didn’t know they sold groceries at the library,” Mrs. MacGiver marvels.

“You should go back inside the house now. You’ll catch cold.”

“Yes, it
is
cold,” the old woman says. “Well, thanks for stopping by. You’re a good girl, Puppet.”

The door shuts in Amanda’s face.

The Reference Library is a stunning glass and redbrick structure located at 789 Yonge Street, a block north of Bloor. Designed by award-winning architect Raymond Moriyama in the late 1970s, it contains almost 4.5 million items that are readily accessible to over a million visitors annually. Amanda discovered these facts during her last visit two days ago, and she is reminded of them as she pushes through the glass doors into the huge entrance hall that looks and functions like a public square. She strides through the light-filled, five-story atrium, around the clear, decorative pool that occupies most of the center of the floor, which is surrounded, she is pleased to note, by
real
plants, heading for the staircase to the lower level. Water trickles soothingly along stones and concrete into the pool’s shallow surface, and the smell of coffee wafts from a small snack bar to her left, although a sign at the entrance to the turnstiles advises her that no food or beverages are allowed beyond this point.

The information desk is straight ahead, but Amanda already knows where to go. She follows the beige carpet past the two circular glass elevators to the winding,
purple-carpeted staircase, amazed to see that the more than one hundred computers on the library’s main level are all occupied, and there is already a line of people waiting to access the free Internet service.

How could she have lived in this city for so many years and not set foot inside this magnificent building? How ironic that she has found out more about the city of her birth in the last few days than in all the twenty years she lived here. Why is it we never appreciate the things we have until we lose them? she wonders, shaking away the unpleasant cliché with a toss of her hair, trying not to see Ben’s face in the face of a young man passing her on the stairs.

The Toronto Star Newspaper Centre—
Centre
spelled with an
re
—is located at the bottom of the stairs. It is a vast, open area, enclosed by glass, and full of light, despite its basement location. An abstract, wire-mesh sculpture of newspapers being swept into the air by an imaginary gust of wind stands in front of the glass doors. Amanda pushes her way inside, her eyes scanning the sitting area to her left, furnished with fourteen gold-and-purple leather chairs in front of a curved wall lined with newspapers from all over the world. The main room, carpeted in oddly subtle gold-and-purple berber and punctuated by huge glass panels etched with copies of historical front pages, is filled with glass lecterns that rest like open books atop steel stands, in front of modern wooden chairs. These lecterns are arranged in clusters of six, three to a side, and are large enough to accommodate an entire newspaper, spread out to its full height and width. Computers run along the glass walls of the main room, behind which is another room for newspapers consigned
to microfilm. Amanda doesn’t need to access the microfilm. She discovered the last time she was here that the library keeps actual copies of the Toronto dailies for the previous three months. Of course the last time she was here, she was checking the death notices for anyone named Mallins. This morning she’ll be looking for Turlingtons, Turecks, Turgovs, or Turofskys. Only the names have been changed, she thinks, approaching the plump, middle-aged woman behind the main desk. To protect the innocent or the guilty?

“Hi. I’m back,” she tells the woman, wondering if she recognizes her from her last visit. “I need a month’s worth of
Globes
and Stars, dating from last week. Again,” she adds, hoping for some small sign of recognition.

“We can only give you two weeks at a time,” says the woman, the same thing she said last time.

“Of course. Sorry. I forgot.”

The woman, Wendy Kearns by the nameplate on her desk, smiles blankly and leaves her desk to retrieve the requested papers from the storage area at the back, returning moments later with a stack of newspapers whose spines are neatly bound in plastic wrap. She hands them across the desk to Amanda. “Have fun.”

“Thanks.” Amanda balances the neat stack of papers underneath her chin, carrying them over to the closest vacant spot, and dropping them to the heavy glass as softly as she can manage, which isn’t as softly as the man next to her would like. “Sorry about that,” she whispers, but his nose is already back in his newspaper. Literally. Obviously very nearsighted, Amanda decides, throwing her coat over the back of her chair and sitting down, then taking a few deep breaths before opening the paper on
the top of the pile. “Okay, so let’s get started.” Beside her, the nearsighted man makes a great show of clearing his throat. “Sorry,” Amanda apologizes again quickly. “I’ll try to keep it down.”

She flips to the birth and death notices at the back of the sports section in the
Globe
, thinking somebody has a strange sense of humor, and scanning through the names. Avison, Laura; Danylkiw, Dimitri; Parnass, Sylvia; Ramone, Ricardo; Torrey, Catherine; Tyrrell, Stanley. Not a Turlington, Turgov, Tureck, or Turofsky in the bunch. “Of course not,” she mumbles under her breath. “Did I really think it was going to be that simple?” She checks the
Star
, finds the same names and more, the
Star
clearly the paper of choice for the dearly departed. Amanda goes through each of the papers in turn, finding nothing, then returns to the main desk for another two weeks’ worth of dailies, back and forth, up and down, deciding, what the hell, might as well go for broke, and looking through the library’s complete collection, three months’ worth of dead people passing before her tired eyes. Taggart, Timmons, Toolsie, Trent, Vintner, Young. The closest she comes to what she’s looking for is Margaret Tulle, who died on December 2, after a courageous battle with cancer, at age fifty-one.

Not the woman she’s looking for.

“Any success?” Wendy Kearns asks as Amanda drops the last of the newspapers back onto her desk.

“It was a long shot.” Amanda shrugs. “Do you have a copy of the yellow pages?”

Wendy Kearns stretches for the phone book on a low shelf beside her desk.

“Is it okay if I take it in there?” Amanda motions
toward the room with the gold-and-purple chairs.

The woman nods and hands over the heavy tome. Amanda carries it into the adjoining room, settling into a chair against the end wall, beneath two framed newspaper clippings. She opens the phone book, laughs when she sees she’s turned to the page headed
Lawyers.
“Don’t want any of those nasty people,” she whispers, glancing toward the four other occupants of the room. But they’re either engrossed in their newspapers or napping. Not a bad idea, she thinks, sleep tugging at her tired eyes. “Later,” she says, flipping through
Maids, Mufflers
, and
Naturopaths
, to
Office & Desk Space.
“Uh-oh. Missed it.” She turns back several pages.
Nuts and Bolts.
“See Bolts and Nuts.” Figures.
Nutritionists, Nutrition Consultants, Nursing Homes.
“Here we go,” she says, retrieving her cell phone from her purse, punching in the phone number at the top of almost two columns of such numbers, wondering what the hell she’s planning to say.

“Extendicare Bayview,” a woman answers promptly.

“Excuse me, but who would I speak to about a possible former resident?” Amanda ventures.

“I’m sorry. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.” The woman’s thick Eastern European accent grows wary.

“I’m trying to find out about a woman who may have been a resident at your place until very recently.”

“What is her name?”

“It’s either Turlington or Turgov or Tureck or Turofsky. Something that starts with Tur. Hello?” she asks when no answer is forthcoming.

“Is this a joke?”

“No. Trust me. I’m not joking.”

“Who is speaking, please?”

“Look. I know it’s a rather peculiar request, but it’s really important. If you could just tell me whether you had a woman living there who died in the last month or so, whose last name is either Turlington or Turgov or—”

The line goes dead in her hands.

“This is going to be fun.” Amanda takes a deep breath, then calls the next number on the list.

And then the next one after that, and then the next, and the next.

H
ER
name was Rose Tureck and she died of congestive heart failure at age ninety-two on January thirty-first,” Amanda says, strolling into Ben’s office on the twenty-fourth floor of the Royal Bank Tower at precisely two o’clock that afternoon. Her tone is brisk, almost breezy, something she’s been working on ever since she left the library. The tone says, Nothing of consequence happened last night. The tone says, Don’t worry about me—I am neither hurt nor wounded. The tone says, It’s business as usual.

Ben jumps to his feet behind his desk, knocking the file he’s working on to the floor. “What are you talking about?”

“Rose Tureck, mother of Rodney Tureck, aka Turk. Do you think I could trouble your secretary for a cup of coffee before we head out to see my mother?”

Ben looks as if he’s just been mowed down by a truck. “Sandy,” he calls through the open doorway. “Could you bring Ms. Travis a cup of coffee, please. Cream and sugar.”

“Sure thing,” Sandy calls back.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?” Ben motions toward the chair in front of his cherry-oak desk.

Amanda flops down on the chair, pushes her hair away from her face, stares Ben straight in the eye. This is also something she’s been practicing since she left the library. The full-on stare, the one that informs her first ex-husband that he’s of little or no consequence to her, that what he does with his life is of no real concern to her, and that what happened between them last night, what
almost
happened, what
should have
happened, has already been forgotten. “I made another trip to the library this morning,” she begins.

“Are you all right?” he interrupts unexpectedly.

Amanda’s shoulders stiffen. Is it possible he missed the professional tone in her voice, the look of indifference on her face? “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

“Last night—”

“—is over. Case closed. Move on, Counselor.” She smiles. The smile says, Get over yourself. You take things much too seriously. You always did.

Ben’s smile in return is tenuous and doesn’t last long. “Okay, so you went to the library,” he repeats, sitting back down and waiting for her to continue.

Amanda leans back in her chair, crosses one leg over the other. “I went back to the library because I thought I might be able to find a listing in the death notices for either Turlington, Turgov, Tureck, or Turofsky.”