Way the Crow Flies (58 page)

“Maybe she left a trail.”

“Maybe she did.” Jack leans down to kiss her and she puts her arms around his neck, as she often does, refusing to let him go. He tickles her and she releases him. He makes it halfway to the door.

“What if she got kidnapped?”

“… Well there’d be a note.”

“I thought so.”

“Don’t you worry about Claire, she’ll be home before you know it.” He turns off her light.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to die soon?”

He laughs. “Are you kiddin’? Tough old roosters don’t die in a hurry.”

“Everybody dies.”

“You know what, Madeleine?” and his tone is no longer mollifying, it’s factual. “That day is so far away it’s not even worth thinking about.”

“What if there’s an air raid? Would the siren go off like in October?”

He looks her in the eye. “You know what NORAD is?” He leans in the doorway, framed by the hall light. “It’s a big early warning system that would kick into action long before anyone could get over here with a bomb. We’d send one of our fighters up to blast it out of the sky and that would be it.”

“Dad?”

“Go to sleep now, old buddy.”

“Is Claire dead?”

“Nooo!”—he chuckles—“don’t you worry, now. You know what?”

“What?”

“There’s an old saying: ‘Don’t shake hands with the Devil before you meet him.’”

Madeleine lets him believe he has comforted her. “’Night, Dad.”

Jack heads downstairs and out the door, telling Mimi he needs a breath of fresh air. He’s not lying. But he also needs to make a phone call.

Madeleine strokes Bugs’s long ears back from his merry forehead. “Don’t worry, Bugs.” She doesn’t repeat her dad’s comment about the Devil, however, because, while it’s meant to reassure you that the Devil is nowhere near, implicit is the idea that, sooner or later, you will in fact meet him.

C
LAIRE’S PHOTO IS ON
the cover of the
London Free Press
. Madeleine sees it when she opens the door to get the milk from the front step. The photo is a little smudgy because it’s a black-and-white reproduction of Claire’s school picture—the one everyone had taken in the gym last November. But it is unmistakeably Claire smiling up from the front porch next to the milk. And the caption:
Missing Child
. Claire is famous. Madeleine carries the paper up with the milk, exclaiming, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

Her mother takes the paper and thrusts it at her father, saying, “I don’t want any of these in the house”—as though she were talking about getting rid of all the spinning wheels in the kingdom.

Jack is neither surprised nor offended, he merely folds the paper into his briefcase, and when Mike comes down and turns on the radio for the news, Jack shuts it right back off. They eat breakfast, Mimi dressed and made up as usual, leaning against the counter with her coffee and cigarette. It is as silent as it was during the missile crisis. This time, however, there is not even the crinkle of newspaper pages. Just the sound of crunching. Madeleine looks at Mike. He is wearing the same innocent expression as her father. She pokes her toad-in-the-hole and the yolk streams out.

Today is a holiday. But it’s Good Friday, which means you are not supposed to have too much fun. There is to be no television tonight—Jesus is on the Cross, this is no time to be watching the Three Stooges. Mike is not even allowed to play road hockey. Maman lays down the law every year. And for supper, fish. Not fish ’n’ chips, but a piece of
watery white flesh on the plate next to pallid canned peas and boiled potatoes. No dessert. Offer it up for the suffering of Our Lord. When He was thirsty, all they gave him to drink was vinegar. Remember the poor starving children in Africa. It is raining, because it always rains on Good Friday.

Madeleine leaves to call on Auriel, but sees Colleen out in front of the Froelich house in a rain poncho. She is crouched with her coffee can, parting the grass with her fingers. Madeleine quietly retreats and cuts through several backyards before emerging farther up and crossing the street to the Bouchers’ house. They are going to listen to Auriel’s mum’s Vera Lynn records and let the budgie fly around. Then they’ll go next door and play with Lisa’s new baby brother. They will continue to speculate about Claire’s perilous adventure. Auriel has suggested that she may have run away to Disneyland. As Madeleine knocks on the Bouchers’ door, she glances down the street to where Colleen is making patient progress across her front yard.

“Hello pet, come in out of the rain,” says Mrs. Boucher. Madeleine smells cinnamon buns baking—Mrs. Boucher is Anglican, they don’t have to suffer as much on Good Friday. Something in her expression changes as she looks over Madeleine’s head toward the street. Madeleine turns to see a police car coming up St. Lawrence Avenue. It crawls past them, then turns into the Froelichs’ driveway. Colleen Froelich stands up with her coffee can.

Mrs. Boucher says, “In you go, love,” turning to call up the stairs: “Auriel, Madeleine’s here.”

A
N OPP HELICOPTER
chops across the grey sky over the PMQs and kids stop what they are doing and look up. By now, everyone knows that the helicopter is searching for Claire. So are the bright yellow Chipmunks that have been flying low, tracing an aerial grid, each with a pilot and an observer to peer down through the rain. The grown-ups can no longer hide their fear. Kids openly speculate that Claire has drowned in a ditch, fallen down an air shaft—although there were never any mines around here—or been chopped to bits by a maniac with a hook.
The Exeter Times-Advocate
has urged farmers to check their barns and outbuildings, and to shine flashlights down their wells.

On the way back to the car after Holy Saturday Mass, Madeleine sees again the rows of men in rain gear, fanning out from the airfield into the meadows and woodlots. A brace of German shepherds strain on their leashes and sniff the ground frantically. Madeleine knows they have been given something of Claire’s to smell. Just like Dale the Police Dog who found the little girl asleep in the corn. They should get Rex to help.

Jack makes no secret of going out to search again with the other men, and Mimi gets her children to kneel down in the living room and say the rosary with her for the safe return of Claire McCarroll.

Ricky Froelich has been helping with the search. He brought Rex along at first, but the policemen asked him to take the dog home since he was not a trained search-and-rescue animal. Rick wanted to say, “How do you know?” because Rex’s origins before he wound up at the Goderich pound are unknown. But he didn’t want to be smart to the cop. Those days are behind him.

On Friday a couple of policemen whom Rick knew from the search came by the house to ask him the same questions a couple of others had on Thursday. He didn’t mind. If they were overlapping their efforts it meant they were working overtime to find the kid. He told the officers what he had told their colleagues: he had been out running with his sister and his dog when he met Claire McCarroll heading south down the Huron County road. She had told him she
was going to Rock Bass. He had hitched her up to the dog and they had continued together to the intersection. When they had got to the willow tree they had stopped and he had unhitched Rex. She had turned right down the dirt road, heading for Rock Bass on her bike, and he and his sister and his dog had turned left toward the highway.

Rick has just returned home from searching all morning, and is in the middle of making and devouring sandwiches, when the same two cops arrive again on Saturday afternoon.

This time they ask him, “Did you meet anyone on the road after you left her?” This is a new question and Rick realizes that they now suspect someone may have harmed her.

“No, I didn’t, sorry.”

They ask him to come for a ride with them this time and point out precisely where it was he left her. As he is on his way out, his mother comes to the door and says, “Wait Ricky, I’ll call Papa to go with you.”

“It’s okay, Mum, I’ll be right back.”

But she says, “Hang on a minute, honey, Papa’s just down the basement.”

Rick smiles, a bit embarrassed in front of the cops. One of the officers—the one who has asked most of the questions—says, “Mrs. Froelich, we just want to borrow your boy for a few minutes to show us exactly where he let the little girl off at, it might help him to remember if he saw anyone else in the vicinity.”

Karen pauses, looking at the policemen, then turns and calls again, “Hank.”

But Rick leaves with the officers, saying, “I’ll be right back, Ma.”

Karen watches them pull out of the driveway with her son in the back of the police car.

But they don’t turn south on the Huron County road. They turn north, toward Exeter. The windshield wipers thunk back and forth and Rick says, “It’s back there.”

“Yeah, we’re just going to make a circle, you said you were out running, is that right?”

“Oh yeah,” says Rick, and leans back. He directs them in reverse along the path he took on Wednesday afternoon. The police radio crackles unintelligibly.

“If you remember seeing anyone or anything at all, you just sing out, young fella,” says the cop in the passenger seat.

When they reach Highway 4—the stretch that doglegs west just north of Lucan—Rick says, “I saw a car.”

The officer looks at him in the rearview mirror.

Rick says, “Going west, yeah, like we are now. He passed me, right around here.”

The cruiser slows, pulls over and stops. The cop looks at Rick in the mirror and asks, “What kind of car?”

“Ford Galaxy.”

“You could tell, eh?”

“Oh yeah, went right past me, eh, brand-new.”

“You like cars?”

“I love cars.”

The cop chuckles. “Me too. What colour was this Chevy?”

“It was a Ford,” Rick corrects him politely. “Galaxy, brand-new. Blue.”

“Brand-new, eh?”

“Yeah, ’63, I could tell ’cause it has the new fastback.”

“What else could you tell?”

“Well I could see where it had a dent in the rear bumper.”

“Oh yeah?” The officer digs his notebook from his chest pocket and starts writing it all down. The one behind the wheel seems not to be taking any notice. The back of his head, his wide neck, impassive.

Rick leans forward between the two blue hats and searches his memory for any stray detail that might help. “It had a bumper sticker.”

“What kind of sticker?”

“Yellow. You know, like from Storybook Gardens.”

The policeman smiles slightly and nods, slowly repeating Rick’s words as he writes: “Story … book … Gardens.”

Rick feels suddenly a bit guilty. “I don’t think it’s going to help you much.”

“Why not?”

“Well, whoever it was was wearing an air force hat, so….”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t see who ’cause of the sun, but he’s prob’ly not the guy you’re looking for.”

“Who are we looking for, Rick?”

“Well”—Rick hesitates—“whoever, you know. Took her.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

The cop smiles in the mirror, “Well we’re in the same boat then, ’cause neither do we.” He returns his eyes to his notebook. “Let me get this straight,” he says, pen poised. “You couldn’t see his face, but you saw his hat.”

“Like the outline of his hat,” says Rick.

“Right.” Then to his partner, “Rudy, how do you spell ‘silhouette’?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Rick laughs with them and says he can’t spell it either. The cop clicks his tongue thoughtfully, then says, “I’m just trying to calculate…. How long would you say it takes to jog from here back to the intersection where you left her?”

“Oh, uh. I got home around five-thirty, quarter to six, so … and that’s about the same distance, so I guess an hour or so?”

The cop raises his eyebrows companionably and writes it down, saying, “How can you be so sure when you got home?”

“I had a game. Basketball.”

“Who you play for?”

“Huron County Braves.”

“Good stuff.”

No discernible signal passes between the officers, but the car pulls away from the shoulder once more and gathers speed. They travel in silence through the rain until the cop behind the wheel says, “You sure it was an air force hat? Could’ve been a cop.”

“Naw,” says Rick.

“How do you know?” asks his partner.

“He waved.”

“Thought you said you didn’t know him,” says the driver.

“I couldn’t
see
him,” says Rick. “But I must’ve known him.”

“I guess all the air force guys know all the air force brats, eh?” says his partner with a smile.

“I’m not an air force brat.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

“No, I know,” says Rick. “I just mean my dad’s not personnel, he’s a teacher at the school.”

They drive on and the officer behind the wheel says, “Just because a man is in uniform doesn’t make him a saint.”

“You can say that again,” says Rick.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothin’.” And the other cop winks at him in the mirror.

When Rick gets home, he taps the roof of the cruiser as it backs out of the driveway and touches two fingers to his forehead, the way the air force men do. The cop on the passenger side does likewise.

Upstairs, Colleen holds Elizabeth steady in the tub while Karen Froelich washes her. The door is closed to prevent the baby from crawling out and getting into everything. The other baby is down in the living room, sound asleep on Henry Froelich’s sleeping chest, serenaded by Joan Baez.

Karen hears the front door and says to Colleen, “Everything’s fine, baby.” Elizabeth reaches for her mother, Karen catches her wrist and kisses the back of her hand. “See? Ricky’s back already.”

Though television is permitted on Holy Saturday,
Perry Mason
is strictly verboten at all times, but Madeleine is not deriving as much guilty pleasure as she should because things are out of joint. When Dad came in from helping with the search, her mother turned on the television herself, and told her to watch something. Now, Perry’s theme music comes up, sexy and swaggering, but her parents continue to confer, oblivious, at the kitchen table.