The Taken (11 page)

“Gotta get in line if you want to be of use.”

“You’re just worried you’re going to have to see me naked.”

Emily smiled in a pained fashion. She sat down on the edge
of the bed, in exactly the same place Andrew had been sitting. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s hard. Him up there and me down here, and he seems so reluctant to see me.”

“Well, wouldn’t you be?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on,” said Emily.

“You’re right.” She stuck her chin out so as not to appear to be capitulating completely. “But to be
this
close, you know? And stuck down here, aware of where they are at night?”

“You’ve known where they are at night for three years. Four, really. What difference can it make?”

“It wasn’t above my head before now.” She sipped the coffee. “When he was sitting in the bathroom, it could have been any time in my life but now. It felt that natural.” Emily let her talk, although Hazel could tell her mother was going to run out of patience for this line of conversation quickly. “The way he smells … that’s … it’s impossible. When’s
that
going to go away?”

“I can’t say,” said Emily, brushing crumbs off the blanket. “I couldn’t smell your father after he passed.”

“I’m not joking.”

Her mother looked up at her, and her eyes were impossible to read. “There’s always something, Hazel, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. It never goes. And why would it? You just have to live with it, that’s what it costs you to have had someone. You remember that fringed leather bag your father carried books in? I use it sometimes for shopping and when I put it over my arm, that stiff old strap is still curved to fit his shoulder. I have to brace myself when I pick it up.”

She covered her mother’s hand with her own. That was the most grief she’d ever admitted to after the day of her father’s death. It moved her. “Did I wreck the weekend?”

Emily withdrew her hand and stroked the corner of her mouth with her index finger. “No. Glynnis mentioned it to me, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

“Did they fight?”

“No,” said her mother. “Not at all. Glynnis didn’t seem angry, to be honest.”

Hazel took the plate down from the table and laid it on her lap. She didn’t usually eat before brushing her teeth, but she was famished this morning. There was a single fried egg sitting on a piece of seedy toast on the plate with the bacon. She picked up the toast and took a large bite of it. Salty and hot: perfect. “She didn’t really seem angry on Friday night, either.”

“She’s not that kind of person, I guess. You’ve got an appetite, I can see.”

“I think I’m making progress,” Hazel said, and washed down the egg and toast with another glug of coffee. “I told Wingate I was going to take the day off, but I might go in.”

“Good for you.” She borrowed the teaspoon off Hazel’s tray and stirred the dregs of her coffee with it. “They have the idea that you could behave yourself if they threw you a birthday dinner Thursday night.”

“Really.”

“You can decide later.” Emily put her coffee cup down on the tray. “Well, that’s enough bonding for one morning, I think.”

She removed the tray and pulled back the covers. Hazel got out of the bed and walked slowly to the bathroom. She did her morning ablutions and brushed her teeth. In the cabinet was a
small pile of pills and she pushed her finger through them, selecting a Percocet. On her way out of the bathroom, it rolled over her palm and onto the floor. She leaned over and picked it up. “Hey,” said Emily, standing at the door to upstairs with the tray in her hands.

“What?”

“You bent over.”

Hazel nodded approvingly. “So I did.”

“Maybe you should leave that thing on the floor then.”

When her mother was gone, she popped the pill into the back of her throat and washed it down with the rest of the coffee. She dressed, fully this time, right to the cap. Her mother had left one of the city papers behind and she flipped through it as she finished her coffee. The long weekend in Toronto had met statistical expectations: a car crash on Lakeshore Boulevard in the middle of the night had claimed the lives of two young idiots who’d been using one of the straightaways to race. A few shootings: two downtown at clubs, one in the city’s northeast corridor. A large number of people ticketed or arrested for DUIs.

She turned to the amusements page whose puzzles were even more impenetrable than human nature. The regular crosswords, which she attempted from time to time, were hard enough, but the cryptics seemed designed for a different kind of person altogether. Was Andrew a different kind of person? Altogether? She suddenly wanted to be able to solve this one, to build a secret bridge to him. One of the clues was “direct a bull.” Five letters. She knew the answer wasn’t the name for a cattle driver; it was too simple, even if she could think of the word. (A “drover”? – six letters, though.) She stared at the clue, willing the answer to appear, but it wouldn’t. If, in her heart,
she wanted to feel closer to Andrew, she wasn’t sure her head was going to cooperate.

Insoluble puzzles put her in mind of OPS Central, and she put the paper away and picked up the phone. She dialled headquarters in Barrie and asked for Chip Willan. There was a long pause on the line, and then the secretary, a man, came back on the line and said the commander was not available. “I’d like to make an appointment to see him,” she said. “Can I come down this afternoon?”

“Oh god, no,” said the man. “Commander Willan is booked solid today.”
Golf
, thought Hazel. “The earliest he can see you is Thursday. Can you make it down for seven-thirty?”

“The commander works late, does he?”

“In the morning, Inspector. He starts early and ends late. He’s got a lot of work.”

“I bet he does,” she said. “I’ll be there. Tell him it’s my birthday so he’ll be extra nice to me.”

Gilmore was the town every other town in Westmuir was hoping it wouldn’t turn into. Everyone had watched it happen, but no one had done anything about it and now it was too late and the town, about ninety kilometres northeast of Port Dundas, was a sort of kitsch midway. At one end of Lake Munroe, it had once been a pretty lumber town; now it was hemmed in on one side by garish summer homes (for here were the so-called cottages of the media elite, both Canadian and American, and at least one steroidal movie star had bought an entire island in Munroe and used Gilmore as his home base), and on the other side, in summer, the highway go-kart tracks, the waterslides, the paintball fiefdoms, and in winter, the
manmade giant-innertube snowruns, the maple-syrup tours, the winter carnival site. There seemed no licence the municipal government wouldn’t sell, and during fifteen bad years ending in the nineties, when “cooler heads” finally prevailed, Gilmore had been boxed up and made available to all comers.

Bellocque lived on one of the lakeshore roads, where the loggers’ shacks used to be, and Hazel expected to find him living in one. And indeed, 41 Alder Road was a beat-up wooden house with its shutters hanging off the windows like broken wings on a big, cluttered lot full of broken farm machinery – tractors, tillers, threshers – held in place by years of growth. The collection extended up the hill into the forest behind the house, like an outdoor museum of metal dinosaurs vanishing into the wild. She got out of the car in his weed-choked driveway and went up to the door.

After knocking, she heard the movement of a body coming toward the door and then it opened and she was looking at a kind face behind a woodsman’s salt-and-pepper beard. He was wearing half-lens reading glasses partway down his nose, and his small, grey eyes regarded her with curiosity. He was huge, she thought, more a bear than a man, but a bear in a flannel shirt. He was holding what looked like a small magnifying glass in his hand.

“Mr. Bellocque?” she said.

He looked her uniform up and down. “Oh-oh. What have I done now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there something you should tell me?”

His mouth broadened into a smile. The whiskers of his moustache (which she saw now had a tinge of red in it) had not
been cut in some time. “This sounds like it’s going to take a pot of coffee.” He left the door open and retreated to the kitchen.

She shut the door behind her. The inside of the house echoed the state of the lawn. It was a mass of clutter; the room was packed with every imaginable kind of detritus: old newspaper, broken furniture, piles of hardware catalogues, and everywhere objects in half-repair – birdhouses, motors, little machines or parts of machines, broken crockery half-mended, and on a table in the middle of the room, a reel-to-reel tape recorder taken down to its springs, motors, and belts. The walls were festooned with stuffed fish, exactly as Gil Paritas had said. They were a little creepy. “Have a seat if you can find one,” he called from the narrow galley kitchen.

“I’m afraid to touch anything.”

“I wouldn’t worry about breaking stuff. Take a look at that little fellow in the uniform.” She scanned the table and saw what he was talking about: a little jointed wood and tin soldier in a red uniform and a strange conical hat. Bellocque entered the room with two mugs and put them down.

“He’s an acrobat,” he said. “I made him out of birch and paperclips. Look at what he does.” Bellocque put the little soldier at the top of a set of stairs he’d made out of matchstick boxes and bent him backwards over the top edge. The soldier did backflips down all the steps, until he got to the tabletop, stood upright, and his head popped off on a spring.

“Does he always lose his head?”

“It’s a warning to the kiddies not to try it themselves. I’ve also made a crocodile bank that eats quarters, but you can never get them out.”

“What’s the use of that?”

“Don’t feed crocodiles,” he said, looking at her like it should have been obvious.

“Might be hard to market.” She stared at the soldier’s bobbing head. Bellocque nodded to a chair at the end of the table and Hazel sat. It was hard to tell what all the bits and pieces of things were for and she wondered if he was in the business of building sinister moralistic toys for children. She noticed a rotary phone on a table near the front door that had been broken down into parts. He was cannibalizing working things to make his little oddities. He passed her a cup of coffee, which he’d already milked and sugared, and retreated to sit beside one of his bookshelves in a rocking chair. “Now,” he said, “let’s discuss the trouble I must be in.”

“You’re rather jovial for a man being visited by a highranking police officer.”

“Oh, I’m just relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“Gil called me from the road and told me what you showed her. I knew it wasn’t a body, but it was still a relief to have it confirmed. Is that hot enough?”

She looked down into her mug. “It’s fine. How did she call you, Mr. Bellocque?”

“On the phone?”

She cast a look at the dismantled rotary phone on the table near the door. “Really.”

“Really,” he said, and when she turned around, he was holding a cellphone like a tiny biscuit between thumb and forefinger. His hand was enormous. Bigger, much bigger, than the hand in the video.

“And here I thought you were a Luddite.”

“Is that the word she used?”

“Among others,” she said, and he laughed heartily, throwing his head back. “I’m curious about something,” she continued. “If that phone there doesn’t work, why would you have given it as a contact number to Pat Barlow?”

“I didn’t,” he said, then he squinted one eye at her. “Did I?
Crud
, I might have. The grey matter isn’t what it used to be.”

She lifted the mug to her face and looked over the rim at the room, searching it for a door. The coffee was excellent. “Ms. Paritas is reluctant to call you her boyfriend. Did you know that?”

“It sounds silly to her. That’s what she says. A woman her age having a boyfriend. I just let her struggle with the proper word on her own and let things be what they are. I suppose it matters what things are called.” He crossed one leg over the other, a strangely dainty thing for a man like Bellocque to do.

“What’s that thing for?” she asked, looking at a strange metal object on the table. It seemed to have a lens in it – she wondered if it was something that could be used on a video camera.

He looked a bit perplexed for a moment, then, following her sightline, reached for a small black square that opened into a box with three sides. “This? It’s a loupe, you know? So many of the things I build have little parts.” He passed it to her, then gestured her to look behind where she sat, at the reel-to-reel. “For instance, do you think you could get these screws in or out without aid?”

The screws on the magnetic head assembly were almost as small as the tip of a ballpoint pen. She took the loupe from him and looked down into the machine. The screwheads seemed almost manageable through the magnifier. “I guess not.”

“Try it.” He passed her a screwdriver with the screw already magnetized to it. She held the loupe to her glasses and manoeuvred the screwdriver over the head assembly and put it in.

“It is easier.”

“Even
with
that thing, I feel like my eyeballs are going to start bleeding.”

Hazel nodded. It was hard to tell where things were going here. Bellocque was too friendly for it not to mean something, unless, of course, it meant nothing. What if he was just a nice guy? Policework inclined you to think about what people might be capable of, rather than what they’re actually doing. It was a good habit for work, but it failed you everywhere else. She couldn’t help but think of what happened in just about every cop flick she’d ever seen: there was always some nice-seeming guy with a hobby who turned out to be a lunatic. If Bellocque was a lunatic, she didn’t want it coming as a surprise. She laid the small screwdriver down on its side. “So,” she said, nonchalantly, “how did you manage to get Ms. Paritas to fish exactly where you wanted her to?”

“Ms
. Paritas doesn’t do anything Ms. Paritas doesn’t want to do, trust me. Not only that, but she’s skilled at making it appear as if you’ve chosen to do something she
wants
you to do. But I like that about her.” He smiled at Hazel. “I like anyone who can think for herself.”