Way the Crow Flies (60 page)

He goes upstairs and Madeleine says, “Can I have his bacon?”

Maman looks as though she’s about to reprimand her, but Dad says, “Sure, sweetie, eat up.” And he piles it onto her plate.

At six o’clock this morning, Rick was out running with Rex before it was light. He would be home by eight, in time to hunt for eggs with the kids. Time to shower, then over to Marsha’s house for Easter brunch. He left the PMQs and turned south down the Huron County road, Rex loping at his side.

It was a good time to run. The world soaked from three days of rain, the unvarnished sun coming up and the countryside steaming
like a wool blanket. He got to the big willow tree and continued straight through the intersection, pale mud spritzing from his heels, flecking his bare calves, cresting Rex’s belly fur with clay.

Rick wasn’t looking for her, he was just out for a run.

When he got to the quarry the sun was on it like a veil, gauzy except near the centre, where light floated crisp on the last delicate breath of ice, blacker and brighter than the surrounding water, which was already taking on the haze of early summer, the first insects skating on its surface. Still too cold for leeches. Perfect.

He lifted off his singlet, pulled off his denim cut-offs and runners and dived.

A shock of pure life—he hooted and pelted toward the centre; Rex had run the perimeter and found a manageable spot on the far side to zigzag down. He splashed in and swam, they would meet in the middle. Rick reached the edge of the fragile crust. He knew he shouldn’t stay in too long. He breaststroked into it, an ice breaker, his chin the prow; the ice parted like a curtain, shimmered in his wake like a robe.

Rex panted and swam in a circle, biting at the surface, bearding his chops with light. Rick turned onto his back, squinted up at the sun, spread his limbs and made an angel in the crinkling water. Then he arched backwards, diving so as not to destroy his silhouette, and surfaced several feet away. Rex’s head turned like a periscope, scanning the surface for him. He saw Rick and surged toward him, whimpering, as Rick began his powerful crawl toward the bank.

His arms were numbing, his hands like bricks, shoulders heavy hinges by the time he grabbed hold of a hunk of stone and hauled himself out. Rex dripped at his side, his mass reduced by his drenched fur coat fringed already with ice. Rick stood, his flesh burning with cold, and saw at the centre of the quarry his angel drifting and distending, one wing higher than the other now. As though it were waving.

He jammed his feet back into his sneakers, hauled on his shorts, grabbed his shirt and they trotted up the jagged face of the quarry. His lungs wide open like a grassy prairie, every pore on his scalp singing, Rick started to jog, turning tight circles like a boxer. Rex leapt, nipping his forearms, growling, boxing back.

Rick turned and ran into a lumpy field of collapsed grass and new milkpods, heading for the woods. He would travel through
the trees, across the fallow field beyond, and skirt the newly planted cornfield that bordered Rock Bass, where he would pick up the road back to the PMQs.

He ran, shaking out his tingling hands, lifting his face, craving the speed of twigs strafing his bare legs, the bob and weave of branches coming at his face, dodging stones and deadfalls.

He was not quite out of the woods when he saw his dog stop up ahead, a little ways into the meadow, and begin sniffing busily around a pile of vegetation. Under a big elm tree. Ricky’s pace slackened. He was about twenty-five feet away when he saw her hand, the light blue of her dress through the mound of rushes and dry wild-flowers. He went closer, drawing shallow breaths through his mouth, almost panting, he knew she was dead. But there was no question of the pull, like a force of nature, the necessity of making sure. Part of him was already running away across the marshy field, but that part was too insubstantial to make it very far. He came closer. She was dead. There was something covering her face. Cloth. He heard a faint sobbing—the sound of his own breathing as he bent, lifted the fabric, then let it drop again.

Rex began to bark.

Mimi lifts the ham out of the oven and places it sizzling on a trivet. Tilting her mixing bowl, she stands at the counter in front of the window and stirs biscuit batter. She sees a police car pull into the Froelichs’ driveway. They have driven Ricky home. It’s about time. A boy of his age shouldn’t have to dwell on tragedy. It was Steve Ridelle who called this morning to tell them that Ricky Froelich had found her. Mimi went down the street to be with Sharon, but Sharon insisted on accompanying her husband to Exeter to see their daughter. The police are not going to lay charges against Blair; he broke someone’s nose last night when they told him they were calling off the search.

The Froelich boy gets out of the cruiser, raises a hand in leave-taking, then turns and goes into his house, his head hanging.
Pauvre p’tit
.

Madeleine is at the Froelich house when Ricky returns from helping the police. She and Colleen have made a fort out of Lego. It’s strange
that, when Claire was here, Madeleine barely noticed her. Now that she has gone, Madeleine keeps expecting to turn and see her, and when she doesn’t, it’s as though there’s an empty space, like a page torn out. Where is Claire? It is not possible that she will never be here on the Froelichs’ rug, playing with Lego, ever again.

Ricky comes in and goes straight upstairs to his room. Colleen tells Madeleine why: “He saw her dead body.” Madeleine goes home soon after Colleen tells her that. There is death in the Froelich house. Darkness and the smell of last fall, although she can’t tell why—the smell of shame, as though dead were the most shameful thing you could be. She needs to be back with her own clean family.

The police arrived to pick Rick up at nine o’clock this morning, a half-hour after his father made the call on his behalf. The boy was chalk-white and his father wanted to accompany him, if not in the cruiser, then following in the old station wagon, but the officers asked him not to: “Sir, we could be dealing with a crime scene. The fewer people the better.”

Henry Froelich understood. But when he re-entered his house, Karen said, “I thought you were going with him?”

Rick sat in the back of the cruiser. The radio crackled and this time the driver spoke into the mike, using a series of numbered codes to relay the fact that they had just turned west off the Huron County road and were proceeding toward the scene with the witness.

By the time they pulled over at the spot with the break in the fence, Rick heard a siren approaching. He looked in the sideview mirror to see another cruiser pulling up and, behind it, a plain Ford sedan. Last came the wan, daytime flashing red of an ambulance.

He led them to the ravine, down and across the stream, past the maple, up the other side of the steep bank, between the furrows of germinating corn into the meadow beyond, and stopped just short of the elm tree.

He pointed and felt suddenly faint. He dropped to his haunches and allowed his head to sink between his knees. They left him and walked toward the pile of clothes mixed up with the withered bluebells and last year’s bulrushes.

When Rick opened his eyes he saw a pair of black brogues, and looked up. The man was in plainclothes, beige raincoat and hat. Sharp planes to his face. A lean man, but one who gave the impression of weight. Like a steel rail.

“I’m Inspector Bradley, Rick.”

Ricky stood, shook hands, then lurched off to one side and threw up.

The inspector watched. This was the boy who had last seen the child. This was the boy who had found her body, after a legion of police and air force personnel were unable to. These facts did not make the boy guilty, but they made him worth questioning.

Ricky returned and apologized.

The police were cordoning off the area. Dr. Ridelle arrived and made his way to the elm tree. Rick saw him bend to look, then nod. A man in a trench coat started taking pictures and Rick was asked to move to one side. Then the medical examiner arrived and everyone stood back.

Rick followed the inspector to an unmarked car and got in. Bradley offered him a cigarette but Rick told him he’d quit when he was twelve, he was an athlete. He couldn’t stop shaking, however, so he asked the inspector for a smoke after all. The nicotine soothed his nerves. Like old times.

He told the inspector what he had told the other police officers. Bradley was especially interested in the Buick. “Ford,” Rick corrected him. He readily agreed to drive with the inspector up to Goderich, where they could speak in the comfort of his office at the OPP station.

Rick had been waiting for over an hour in a plain green concrete room, nursing a Coke, by the time the inspector returned and asked if he would mind repeating his story for the benefit of a stenographer. He made no further mention of the comfort of his office.

Rick told the whole story again, the Coke gnawing at his empty stomach, and it was the hunger that reminded him. “Sir, I just remembered, I should call my parents.”

“Oh we’ll do that for you, son, what’s the number?”

Inspector Bradley and the stenographer stepped out. For another hour. Finally, a cop—the passenger-side one—came in, “just to say
hi.” He was curious and wanted to hear all about the morning too, “if you don’t mind.” So Rick told him. The cop asked if Rick had caught sight of that Chevy again since Wednesday, and Rick said, “Ford. No sir. Do you know if they’ve called my parents?”

“They shoulda by now, by jeez, I’ll check.”

The cop returned five minutes later. “You’re sprung, kid, let’s get you home.”

Throughout the PMQs, the mothers have been in touch in person and over the phone, assuring one another that they will be looking out their windows, tracking each child as though he or she were their own. The fathers have made themselves perfectly clear, and the kids have listened without interrupting while being told what the standard operating procedure will be until further notice. Siblings are never to lose sight of one another. If a child is visiting another’s house, he or she must call immediately upon arrival and before setting out again for home. “I don’t care if it’s right across the street.” It’s to be straight home from school after the bell, no playing outdoors after dark and, above all, do not leave the PMQs.

“They just wanted to know how I found her, and all about the other day when we went to the intersection together,” says Rick.

Karen has persuaded her son to come downstairs and eat something. Colleen joins them, squeezing into a chair between the wall and the kitchen table. “That’s all, Ma, no big deal. I told them what I saw.”

“For four hours?” asks Henry from the stove. He was on the phone all afternoon, but the
dummkopf
constable at the Goderich police station was deaf, dumb and blind.

Karen says to her son, “You’ve told them that fifty times already.”

“I was just sitting there staring into space most of the time, Ma, they’re pretty busy.”

Colleen says,
“J’mi fi pa a ci batar la.”

The parents ignore the curse word, but Ricky reprimands her,
“Sacri pa a la table
.”

Karen says, “So what did they want to know?”

His parents’ concern prompts him to downplay the whole thing.

“They gave me a Coke and we pretty much just shot the breeze while I waited for the head honcho to show up.” He obliges his parents with a detailed account of what he told the police. When he gets to the part about the blue Ford Galaxy with its dented bumper and yellow sticker, his father slumps back in his chair and shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut a few times. “Hank, what’s wrong?” asks Karen.

“Karen, that is the man—the car of the man I saw, that is his car.”

Jack uses the night number to call Simon. No clicks, no succession of lackeys, just Simon. “Christ,” he says, when Jack tells him. A sigh. “And our friend?”

“Fit as a fiddle.” Jack can see the moon, high and cold through the glass. McCarroll’s daughter would be alive now if he’d never been posted up here.

“Jack, you still there, mate?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“It’s not feasible to have a grieving father in the loop.”

McCarroll doesn’t know why he was posted to Centralia. He never will.

I
NSPECTOR BRADLEY
has offered the man coffee and invited him to be seated in the comfort of his office in Goderich.

“Cigarette, Mr. Frolick?”

“No thank you.”

Bradley lights up and inhales. The man is clearly agitated; his son was detained for hours, then sent home hungry and scared—he’s bound to be irate. Bradley is prepared to be patient.

Henry is sitting at attention. “Inspector Bradley, I come because I have information about a murderer in this area.”

Bradley blinks. “In connection with what, sir?”

“In …? In this, this, the child, Claire.”

“You think she was murdered?” Froelich is taken aback. He starts to answer but Bradley asks, “Did your son tell you that?”

Froelich hesitates. “He found her in the field, yes? The police—”

“We haven’t got the coroner’s report yet.”

“… You think it was an accident?” The inspector says nothing. Henry nods. “I understand, you cannot tell me. Who am I? But I am telling you of a murderer in this area, I have seen him.”

Bradley resists the urge to lean forward. “Who have you seen?”

“A Nazi, a—war criminal.”

“A war criminal?” Bradley reaches for a pen. “What’s his name, sir?”

Froelich’s tone implies that the answer is self-evident. “I don’t know his name.”

“How do you know he’s a war criminal?”

“Because I am a—I was a prisoner!”

“Where was this?”

“First Auschwitz, then Dora—”

“I’m not familiar with Dora.”

“It was a factory—”

“You say you saw this man in the area?”

“Yes, yes, this is what I am saying.” Froelich leans in now, trembling. He tells the inspector about the man he saw getting into the blue Ford Galaxy outside the marketplace in London; of seeing him back into a parking meter, then speed off. He tells of the yellow sticker, of the partial plate number, and pauses for breath as the inspector writes it down. “And this is the same car that my son sees on this afternoon, on that afternoon that the child is—that she becomes lost.” He is having difficulty keeping hold of his English. “
1st klar
now,
ja?”