“I’m okay,” she said.

“Because you seem -”

“I know,” she said. “Apart from having a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on my desk, a CO who thinks I’ve outlived my usefulness, and expensive gifts coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem. And it appears I’m to quit in the midst of all this nonsense. So, I’m slightly less than okay.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Just do your job and don’t think about me. We need to get in front of this.”

“I should have thought through what I was doing at Eldwin’s.”

“You did. You’re not a dinosaur, remember that. Now go back to your desk and have a good think. At the rate things are going for that man in the chair, we all need to get on our game.”

18

Sergeant Geraldine Costamides had been successful, as Hazel knew she would. She returned to the station house looking slightly shame-faced, which meant that she’d spun a particularly good story for the benefit of Becca Portman and managed to shake loose everything they needed. There were two unpublished chapters now. Costamides made copies of them and passed them out to Hazel, Wingate, and Fraser. Then she stood at the lectern, her glasses hanging around her neck. She cleared her throat. “Are we ready? Everyone tucked in with their hot milk?” “Go ahead, Gerry,” said Hazel.

Costamides lifted her glasses clear of her long chin and settled them on the bridge of her nose. She curled the pages she held in her hands and clacked the bottom of them against the lectern before laying them flat. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” she began, “chapters four and five.”

Nick Wise had been sitting at his kitchen table, the newspaper open in front of him, his pen hovering over the page, when his doorbell rang. Ah, he thought, “damaged,” but then there was the sound of a car driving off and he laid his pen down and went to the door.

What he saw on his front stoop froze his blood. Wise looked hurriedly up and down the street, but there was no one and he quickly stepped around the form and got his arms under the greasy tarp. There was a note pinned to it with a fishhook, but it would have to wait until he got inside. He struggled with the weight and finally got it into his living room, rivulets of sweat running off his chin. Then he went back to the door and shut it hard, turning the lock and putting on the chain.

He stood in the hallway looking at the grey thing staining his fireplace rug. He’d moved away to make sure she’d never find him again, but here she was. The bitch. He leaned over the tarp and unpinned the note. It said, “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours.” He put the note aside and slipped his finger under the edge of the wet tarp and slid it back. It fell away from its contents with a wet slap against the floor and there she was, at least, there was most of her. She lay headless on his floor, immutable as an eternal verity. He reached behind himself and pulled a chair toward him. “What am I going to do with you?” he said. Brackish water was damaging his floor. She stank. He sighed heavily. “Fine. Wait here.”

He went out the back, across the big lawn to the garage, and got into his car. The old house was almost two hundred kilometres away, but obviously, whatever plans he had for a quiet afternoon were shot, so he might as well drive. Two hours later, entering the city, he felt like the past two years had never happened: he was still in that city, still living that life. He drove in along the lakeside highway, up past the no-longer-new baseball stadium, through the bustle of Chinatown, and up into the university district. There, he turned onto Cherry Tree Lane, drove under the chestnut trees, and parked. Perhaps there had once been cherry trees here. Maybe the street was misnamed. He stood on his old front porch under one of the hundred-year-old chestnut trees and turned to take in the view he’d had for so many years: the two little parks, the old church. But there was no time for nostalgia: he had a mouldering body lying in his front room.

A path in the alleyway between houses led to a gate. He pulled the little string that opened the latch and went into the little laneway separating them. There was a second gate leading into his old backyard; the same old string that lifted the latch hung out from between the slats. In the tiny yard behind – there had only ever been enough space there for a couple of tomato plants in tubs and maybe a little pot of basil – he went directly to the corner farthest away from the gate and got on his knees. Luckily, nobody walked back here and the soil was pretty loose, so he could dig at it with his hands. How he hated to get his nails all dirty, but this had to be done, and so he dug concertedly until his nails scraped against the top of something made of wood. He worked around the object until he’d revealed a little damaged casket big enough to hold a bowling ball.

No one had seen him. He knew people barely paid attention in cities. You could get away with anything in cities if you were just a bit careful. You could get away with murder.

He drove at a good clip back to the house, made it in ninety minutes, and parked in the rear. Before he went in, he grabbed a little round tin from the shed in the garden, of the type that once held pastilles. Her body was exactly where he’d left it (he’d had, perhaps, an ounce of doubt about that, considering the fact that it had found its way to his house), and he kneeled beside it and opened the little wooden box. Her head – green, shrivelled, hollow – was inside. He laid it on the floor, face-up, pressing the two halves of her cut throat together. Dirt trickled out of her dry eye sockets. The little pastille tin was full of fishhooks and he used them to pin her head to her neck, a neat little row of black, gleaming stitches. When the last one was on, she sat bolt upright in her place and swivelled her face to him. Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel. “Hello, Nick,” she said. “Long time.”

“Not long enough,” he said.

Sergeant Costamides laid the pages down flat and slipped her glasses off. “Well, that was interesting.”

Her audience appeared riveted. “Keep going,” said Hazel.

“I just want to get this straight. Someone has dropped off a two-year-old corpse at this gentleman’s house, and he’s not in the least surprised to see it, so he goes back to his old house -”

“- in Toronto,” said Wingate.

“Yes, and digs up the victim’s head so he can have a chat with her.”

Fraser studied his copy of the story. He said, “That seems to be it.”

“Okay,” said Costamides, and she smiled brightly at them. “Just checking. Chapter five.”

“What am I going to do with you?” said Nick Wise, leaning against his bathroom door. The dead girl was standing at his sink, gazing at herself in the mirror.

“I look like shit,” she said.

“You look like death warmed over.” She smiled at him in the reflection, one of those playful, sexy smiles that used to do wonders for him. It made him a little sad to see it, but he put the feeling aside. “I’m serious, sweetheart. You can’t be seen wandering around. People’ll talk.”

“I bet they will.” She opened his medicine cabinet and pushed aside a can of shaving cream and a bottle of Tylenol and lifted out a comb. She closed the mirror, and her face came back into view and she began to pull the comb through her twisted, ratty hair. It came out in clumps. “Goddamnit,” she said, “I had awesome hair.”

“I told you it was over between us, doll, but that wasn’t good enough for you. You could never take no for an answer.”

“You never said it was over, Nick.”

“Well, it was.”

“You never said it.” Her eyes rested on his in the mirror, knowing.