The Glass House (20 page)

“Tell Mallory to make the call.”

“Okay,” Emerson said and turned to his phone, although he knew Mallory had already booked them on that flight.

Yslan took a few steps closer to Dr. Petronius Chumley in his wheelchair and whispered in his ear, “I hope to meet you one day, Doctor.” Then the oddest thought shot through her mind:
I'm talking to this man the way I address my father's name carved into the war memorial.
The one who loved bacon.

TRISH HAD NEVER BEEN IN
a place like this. Graveyards certainly—she was at the age when funerals of elderly family members and even the odd acquaintance were a somewhat frequent occurrence—but this was not a cemetery the likes of which she'd ever seen.

To one side were tall concrete towers for sand and other building materials. Across the way were the railway tracks. The place screamed that it was of no commercial value.

She got there by driving up Keele Street, then making a sharp right before she got to the big-box stores on what had been slaughterhouse lands.

She noted in the near distance the remains of the Junction railroad station, where the trunk line from the west used to join the lines going into Toronto. It was also the starting place for the tunnel system that ran under much of the Junction. Now what remained of the old depot was rotting—ignored, like the rest of this forgotten patch of land.

Once out of her car she did a quick three-sixty. To the south she saw the spires of three churches—
Just far enough away not to be infected by this cesspool,
she thought.

She pushed the broken wire gate aside and stepped into the muddy field. To her left was a shed, ahead of her was a
rock-strewn field. If there were graves here they were not going to be easy to find.

Then what she had thought was a small boulder in the distance moved, rose and approached her. The boulder proved to be a short stocky man dressed entirely in grey—grey pants, grey shirt, grey shoes, grey hair, almost grey skin, with a wispy grey beard and dancing grey eyes. “Does he know you're here?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The snarler,” he said, pointing towards the shed.

“No, I guess not. Does he object to visitors?”

“Hates 'em.”

“But he likes you?”

“ ‘Likes' is the wrong word. ‘Puts up with' is better.”

“And why does he put up with you?”

The little man reached into his pocket and withdrew a handful of herbs. “He makes me split the profit with him.”

“You grow them here?”

“Some will only grow in graveyards.” He reached into the plastic bag he was carrying and withdrew a long plant with a slender root. He told her the Latin name, then said, “Only grows around the oldest of graves and is worth a small fortune to the Chinese medical practitioners.”

“Down on Spadina.”

“And up in Richmond Hill, Thornhill, Aurora and points north, east and west.”

“Only around old graves, you said?”

Suddenly the man was cautious. Trish held up a hand. “I'm not interested in the plants. I'm interested in the old graves. Will you show them to me?”

“Not the herbs? Just the old graves?”

Trish nodded.

“Promise?”

“On a stack of Bibles.”

The man indicated that she should follow him. She did, and around a corner back behind the shed were the graves—if you could call them that. There were only a few gravestones, maybe five or six. The rest was simply unmarked ground. She assumed there were several hundred bodies all told. She checked the photo that Theo had given her and quickly found the headstone. It was, unlike the others, clean and neither chipped nor cracked, though clearly old and weathered to the point that it was very hard to make out the lettering.

She knelt by the headstone and withdrawing some parchment paper from her purse pressed it against the old stone. But as she began to apply pressure against the parchment with a flat stone to get an impression on the paper, she heard a gruff voice shouting at her; “Hey there, missy, what is it that you're on about?”

The boulder man skittered away, mumbling something about his plants—being careful with his plants.

Trish stood and stepped towards the man who had evidently come out of the shed. Shed Man was as wide as he was tall and wore overalls that clearly had not seen the inside of a washing machine in this millennium.

“Eh? I asked yer what yer doin' here?”

Trish was happy to see that she was about seven inches taller than he was. “I'm a film producer,” she said, holding out a business card.

The man ignored the proffered card and said, “What are yer doin' here?”

“Looking at a gravestone.”

“Why?”

“This was the Junction's potter's field, wasn't it?”

“Come again?”

“Potter's field. Burial ground for the indigent.”

“For poor people, aye.”

“And criminals?”

“I think yer know the answer ta' that question already.”

“Well, yes. I wonder if you could identify the person buried here,” she said, pointing at the gravestone.

“Don't it say on the stone itself?”

“It's weathered so it's hard to read.”

“Well that happens in Canada. We get some weather in this part of the world. You may have noticed that.”

“Do you have records?”

“O' what?”

“Of who's buried here?”

“This ain't no cemetery lady, it's a dumping ground.”

“Still . . .”

“Still wha'?”

“There has to be a record of who's here.”

“Lady, nobody's here—that's the point of a place like this. Now take your long legs and your tight ass and hie your way out of—What did you call it?”

“Potter's field.”

“Yeah, get yourself out of my potter's field. And don't come back. This is private property. Didn't you read the sign? No snooping allowed.”

• • •

Five minutes later a black rotary phone rang on a rectory desk in the church on Annette beside the Masonic Temple.

The old priest took a long time getting to the thing. The weight of the receiver, as usual, was a comfort to him. He listened to the gruff voice on the other end and was not pleased with what he heard.

He barked a command, then hung up.

He wandered into the sanctuary of the church. His church. It was empty and cold. He sat heavily in the front pew.
So it hasn't gone away. After all these years it rises from cold obstruction and the duty falls to me.

He'd been warned about what his predecessor had called “the parish debt,” but he hadn't thought it would ever come to light, to this.

He got up slowly, heavily, and wondered how long he had before this would literally land on his doorstep.

Then he smiled. He had a role to play, and he'd been trained for just such a role—all his life had led to this. “In harness at last,” he said aloud. The vaulted space echoed his words, and it pleased him.

• • •

“Ouch, that's my foot!”

“Shhh, Theo!” Eddie said.

“How did we ever let Trish talk us into—”

“No filing cabinets or three by five card files,” Eddie said.

“So?”

“So they must have scanned the records.”

“Or thrown them out.”

Eddie flicked on his flashlight and quickly scanned the interior of the potter's field shed. He found the electronic hookup and swore softly. “No, they scanned them.”

“How do—”

“There was an old desktop computer hooked up here.”

“But now—”

“Now it's gone.”

“Maybe he has a laptop or an iPad or a smart phone,” Theo suggested.

“Or maybe he yanked his old desktop out of the wall after he spoke to Trish.”

“Why do you—”

Eddie directed the older man's eye from the wall hookup to a tangle of wires. “Remember when we all used to have those coiled snakes beneath our desks?”

“Ten years ago.”

Now the wires were there, but no sign of the computer.

“So?” Theo demanded.

“Probably didn't know how to destroy the hard drive, so he took it with him.”

“Okay, so now what?”

Crazy Eddie was on his knees scanning the side of the desk with his flashlight. “Something there?”

“Yeah, tape.”

“Tape?”

“Well, actually tape residue.”

“So?”

“So he may have taped his computer warranty extensions to the side of his desk. I used to do that when I first got suckered into buying them.”

“And this helps us why?”

“ 'Cause, my ancient gay friend,” he said as he riffled through a stack of scrap paper in the desk drawer, “if we can find the warranty, then I can identify the computer, and if I can identify the computer I can find it—if it still exists.” Then, pulling a torn warranty from the pile he said, “Yes, yes, yes.”

At 10:15 a.m. Eddie located the computer and called Trish. “So, what do you want to know?”

“You have full access to his computer?”

“Why else would I be calling? What do you want to know?”

“Get me a printout of everyone who's been buried in that potter's field.”

“Hey, I can't hear you—what's that noise?”

“Airplanes. I'm down on Lake Shore Boulevard.”

“To see the air show, maybe find a nice pilot to take you for a ride?”

“Eddie!”

“Right. What do you want from this guy's computer?”

She repeated her request for the names of everyone buried in the potter's field.

“Be more exact.”

“Okay. Everyone buried there on or around the time the Junction joined the big bad city.”

“Year?”

“1902.”

There was a pause, and Trish asked, “Okay?”

“Piece of digital pie.”

“How long?”

“If it's on his computer, you'll have it on your BlackBerry in ten minutes—tops. I could include several celebrity strippers with that—both male and female if you so wish.”

“I don't—just the list of those buried there.”

“You mean thrown away there.”

After a pause, Trish said, “Yeah—thrown away there.”

Eddie suddenly sensed that he was being watched and turned to the door.

Marina was standing there—in her nightgown, sucking her thumb.

“Eddie, you still there?”

Keeping his eyes on Marina, he replied to Trish, “Yeah, we're still here. Gotta go, Trish. You need anything else?” But before she could answer Eddie hung up and walked over to Marina. His foot lift clacked. He gently took her hand from her mouth, but she pulled it away and stuck her thumb back between her lips.

Then she began to cry.

“Why are you crying, sweetie?”

Around her thumb she said, “Because I'll miss being with you.”

• • •

While Trish waited those ten minutes, her mind wandered to Decker. How Decker had changed her perception of so many things.

THE SNOWBIRDS ROARED OVERHEAD AND
executed a midair dive that had the throngs along the Lake Shore roar with approval. Trish pushed her way through the crowd. She checked her BlackBerry—no message yet from Eddie.

A drunk called out to her and pointed at his crotch.

Trish used to forgive Toronto its sins. She'd lived in London and Tokyo and was used to the trials and tribulations of large cities. But in both Tokyo and London, when things got too hairy she'd retreat to the galleries or the theatre—and understand that's why she put up with the big-city nonsense. But of late Toronto was more and more hectic—crazy—and she couldn't find a reason to put up with it. She knew that Toronto was at that uncomfortable stage of growth where the inevitable problems of large cities—violence, inconvenience, rudeness—were on the rise, but it had not yet grown enough to offer the rewards that only a large older city can present to its citizens.

She didn't use to see the problems. Sure, she knew about the shootings in downtown malls—young men with weapons and something to prove—that at times ended with innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. Even the Mafia-style execution across the road from her favourite coffee shop on College Street hadn't fazed her—but now it did. Since she'd gotten close to Decker they did.

Like the hoarding,
she thought.

Decker had a troublingly discerning eye for hypocrisy.

She remembered going with him to Koerner Hall (one of the few truly world-class venues in the city). The concert featured three famous elderly Cuban jazz musicians. At intermission the musicians came on stage for a question and answer session.

Each of them complained bitterly that the communists had destroyed their beautiful country. They were particularly vehement about what had happened to Havana, which they had adored.

It was the reaction of the Toronto audience that drew Decker's ire. As the musicians criticized their communist government, Decker said, “See how this audience is pulling away from these men? Before the intermission they were stars.”

Trish had seen it.

“They don't want to hear it, Trish.”

“What?”

“That the communist paradise is hardly that.”

And Trish looked at the people around her and felt that she was not part of this—whatever this was.

Then there were the times he had been with her in a crowd in Toronto and abruptly asked, “Are these really your people, Trish?” Actually he hadn't asked, he'd demanded an answer to his question.

She'd never answered but instead would ask, “Are these
your
people, Decker?”

“No,” he'd answer.