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.