“There’s a man tied to a chair somewhere, James. A man we were pointed to by a broken, drowned mannequin. What about that seems not urgent?”

He breathed slowly to get his heart to stop pounding. “I hear you, Skip. But the truth is, we don’t know if that man is ‘tied’ to a chair, or if he’s in any danger, or even if what we’re seeing is real. And the truth is…”

“What? What is the truth?”

“The truth is, I’m not sure who’s the lead on this now. Is it me? Because if it is, I think you need to trust me to run it my way.”

She looked at him flatly, but he saw the fire behind her eyes. “Thirty-six hours have passed in idleness over a question of chain of command? Is that why you’ve been sitting on your ass?”

He stilled his face. She’d never spoken to him like this before. “I should go run Mrs. Eldwin through the database. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

“Go see Burt Levitt and show him a picture of the mannequin. See if it means anything to him. Ask where a person could buy one or find something like it.”

“Fine,” said Wingate, and he left without another word. The space he’d been standing in seemed to be buzzing. She had an instinct to call him back in and apologize right away, but she let him go. She’d been itching for weeks to come back to work, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure her head was right.

She’d spent much of Sunday in Glynnis’s office with the door closed, reading the newspaper and keeping an eye on the site, but nothing had changed from the night before. Against their expectations, the camera’s pan hadn’t progressed anymore. It was as if someone had jarred it during that first hour after Wingate had discovered the page. It had been panning through the same visual field since then and it was making her more and more nervous. Maybe this was why she’d snapped at Wingate. She wanted them to make something happen.

She returned her attention to the screen. The camera was midway through its usual movement. In a minute, it would terminate on that mysterious, nervous leg. She watched it until it did. Was this the house? The house where a corpse with a note attached to it had just been dropped off, according to “The Mystery of Bass Lake”? She didn’t want to make the wrong connections, but her mind was eager to find a link, any link, between these things.

She looked at her watch. It was just past noon. In three hours, the highways heading south were going to fill with sad revellers returning to the city, and she was going to have to have more cars on the road to deal with the inevitable mess. Like the first snowfall of the year, when it seemed as if people simply lost their minds, the end of the Victoria Day weekend always meant a massive traffic snafu. By 5 p.m. every tow truck in the county would be on call.

She popped the lid of her Percocets and gazed into the vial. There were still twenty or more left in the bottle. She put one of the white pills in her mouth and swallowed it dry. On Sunday, she’d taken only two, and at their correct intervals. And she’d had only one this morning, but foresaw it would take at least three to get through the day, and she knew the next one she took would be more out of want than need. If she could get down to only the ones she needed, then she’d come off them. It was probably a good idea to come off them. Soon.

She knew, and she’d been told, how addicting these pills were, but she’d been on them in one form or another for almost three years, and although she depended on them now, she still told herself she was not dependent on them. And if she was, wouldn’t someone tell her? Wouldn’t someone notice? In any case, if she really wanted to stop, she would and could. Of course she knew addicts always told themselves they could stop at any time, so her confidence was not evidence one way or the other.

But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses were things she could exercise her will over when she wanted to. The things you told yourself tended to come true, and Hazel told herself she did not have a problem. If she did, she’d have to wait until she was out of the woods before she dealt with it.

She checked the screen on her desk again and watched the feed from the beginning of the pan. Now that she knew how it ended, just the sight of the waterstained back wall of the space was enough to get her heart pounding. She stared at it, willing it to show her something new, and her phone rang. She jumped.

“Jesus,” she said into the receiver.

“No, Spere.”

“Tell me you’ve got something for me, Howard.”

“Nothing good,” he said. “The DNS number resolves to gobbledegook. Not even a provider we can trace comes up. It’s just out there, beaming in from outer space, for all we know.”

“What about those pictures James sent you? What are they?”

“Just badly exposed snaps, I’m afraid. I’ve sent them to Allen Barry, our imaging guy, but he’s in Toronto, so it might be a while before he weighs in.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

“A pleasure as usual,” said Howard Spere.

8

Burt Levitt’s store was still called Micallef’s; it had been the town’s largest clothing store since 1890, and no one was ever going to change its name. It had been sold to Levitt after Hazel’s father died in 1988, and when people came in asking for Mr. Micallef, he presented himself without correcting them. In small towns like Port Dundas, the forces of multinational retail had been successfully held at bay for a long time, but now the tendrils of Walmart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse and other bottom-liners were reaching further and further, and a cornfield to the south of town had been asphalted over and planted with big box stores. Levitt was feeling it, but not as badly as the mom-and-pop grocery stores, the few that had survived on the main drag. His time was coming, he knew it, but there were still enough of the older generation who were loyal to him that he could keep going.

James Wingate had never seen the store in its heyday. The ceiling was still wired with the capsule and pulley system that had once been used to shoot cash from various departments to the cashier, who sat at the back of the store, receiving payments and making change, which would be ferried back across the ceiling to the customer. Hazel could remember the sound of the little compartments zipping over her head and the squeak of a wooden cup being unscrewed to disgorge its contents. Micallef’s was the only store in Ontario to still have its original cash trolley.

Now the system was dusty and rusted in places and the various departments had been collapsed to make a single room. Levitt had cut employees back from the five who came with the store in 1988 to three, including himself. James had never been inside the store before now, and it had never occurred to him, in his six months in Port Dundas, to go in. But crossing its threshold, he was reminded of the Simpson’s store at Yonge and Queen streets in Toronto that his mother had taken him to to shop for a suit when he was nine. It smelled the same way and the fixtures looked the same. He had the instinct that Levitt would know something about mannequins.

Levitt, now almost eighty, came around from the cash desk and shook Wingate’s hand. “I’d heard rumours about new blood during that nastiness with poor Delia Chandler, but I admit this is the first time I have proof of your existence, Sir.”

“I guess it’s a good sign that you rarely see a detective in the shop.”

“Not necessarily,” said Levitt. “Even detectives have to buy underwear.”

Wingate smiled sadly and made a mental note to come to Main Street next time he needed something. He unsnapped his dossier case and pulled out three pictures of the Gannon Lake mannequin. His walkie buzzed; it was Hazel. He said, “I’m where you told me to go,” and he turned it off. He held the pictures out to Levitt. “Hazel sent me over to show you these. It’s of something we found. We’re wondering what you make of it.”