She looked at her own eyes again, the mark on her forehead. Her stomach fell two storeys.

She rushed downstairs, where Wingate was waiting in one of the chairs in the lobby. “What is it?”

“There’s something I want to do.”

“What is it?”

“Alone.”

He hesitated a moment. “Do you want me to wait?”

“No. I want you to get back to town. Get every available car out looking for Goodman or Cameron. I’ll be back tonight.”

29

The Ward’s Island ferry was loading when she got to the docks at three-fifteen, men and women and children weighed down with everything imaginable it could take to make a Tuesday afternoon on an overcast May day better. Bikes and rollerblades and kites with their strings wound tight, kids dabbed with hopeful sunblock, the granola locals with their organics, headed for home. She knew only a little bit about what was called the island “Community,” but she understood it to be a tight-knit group of middle-class back-to-earthers and urban pioneers. They were living on city land, though, which in turn was also laid claim to by an aboriginal group, and every few years, the pot boiled over and you read of lawsuits and petitions and people saying things like “possession is nine-tenths”: exactly the thing people said when they wanted to get away with straight-up theft. She wondered why the folks who were buying up the land around Goodman’s place weren’t these people, seeking peaceful enclaves, instead of the rich idiots who drove huge, disgusting cars and built cottages to impress others.

She’d rather a self-satisfied urban fool than the kinds of poisonous money that found its way north.

But just the same, she sort of knew these people. They were the ones who made a fetish of sticking up for the community, as if such a thing shouldn’t be second nature; they were the ones who helped their neighbours paint their houses and look for lost cats. They were socially conscious, whatever that meant, and she was going to have to use it to her benefit this afternoon.

She sat on the upper deck, watching the docks and the high-rises of downtown Toronto recede. They were calling for three days of rain now and there were stormclouds in the east and a telltale curtain of grey reached down somewhere over the eastern suburbs. Someone in town who still swore by The Farmer’s Almanac had told her that the summer of 2005 was going to be the wettest on record. Maybe the almanac would be right for once.

The boat moved over the surface of the water like a huge innertube, bobbing and tilting, and once they’d reached the centre of the harbour, she thought of Lana Baichwell, waiting for the right moment. She had to push the image of the dead woman’s swollen face out of her mind.

As the water passed under the boat, throwing up its white foam, she took out the autopsy photos she’d stolen from Room 32. She looked closely at them again. Brenda Cameron’s eyes were half open, that expression of the mindlessly dead, one eye hidden beneath its lid. The mark from hitting her forehead as she went over the side of the boat was almost exactly centred above her eyes, and symmetrical. The mark on her own forehead, the one Dana Goodman had imprinted on her, was just a random thing, his choice of where to put the gun barrel, but as she looked in the hotel mirror, the question had come to her mind: what had actually made the mark on Brenda Cameron’s forehead? Bumping one’s head on the way out of a tilting boat would have been a moving injury; it would have broken the skin and left an abrasion. The marks on Cameron’s head – and the closer she looked at them the more they looked like miniature griddle marks – were perfectly even, as if someone had carefully pressed something against her head. And the symmetry of the marks, like a Rorschach blot…

The boat arrived at the Ward’s Island dock about three minutes later, and she watched the forward deck disgorge its eager band of locals and merrymakers. They flowed forward onto a road that soon forked off, and she slowly made her way to the stairs that led down and out. There was a building with a café in it straight ahead on an emerald patch of lawn. She recalled that the file had stated that the owner of the stolen boat was a man named Peace Swallowflight, a name not exactly hard to memorize, and that, in 2002, he lived on 6th Street. She hoped the slow turnover of houses on the island would work in her favour and that Swallowflight would still be a resident. She went to the café and ordered a coffee and the tall, pierced girl behind the counter passed the time of day with her. When she offered Hazel a refill, the girl said, “Come a long way for your coffee break, huh?”

It had been so long since she’d worn her uniform more than a few hours at a time that she’d forgotten what she looked like.

“Almost two hundred kilometres,” Hazel said.

“I know the coffee is good, but…”

Hazel smiled. “You know a Peace Swallowflight?”

“Yeah. But he didn’t do it.”

That was strange. “Didn’t do what?”

“Whatever it is you’re investigating. He’s the island sensei. He wouldn’t steal a glance, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do. I’m not here to accuse him of anything. I just want to talk to him.”

“Well, he’s right there,” the girl said, pointing through the window and over the porch. “That’s the back of his house.” She was indicating a wooden structure close to the shoreline, festooned with prayer wheels and colourful flags.

“Thanks,” said Hazel.

“What’s this about?”

“He’s not in trouble,” she said, putting down a toonie.

She crossed the grass again, cutting diagonally to the top of 6th Street. She walked down to the bottom of the street. The front of Swallowflight’s house was somehow even more antic than the back, the porch busy with pinwheels and silk windsocks and spinning colourful plates. It looked like the house couldn’t sit still. She went up the steps and was about to knock on the frame of the screen door when a tall, muscular man in long pink pants and a tank top appeared in the hallway. His bare scalp gleamed. “Hello,” he said, pushing the door open as if he expected her. “Come in.”

“Did someone call you?” she asked.

“No, but I saw you make a beeline from the café. I was upstairs sewing up a hole.” He pinched his pant leg, a light linen weave that now had a line of yellow thread traversing the knee. “They’re too comfortable to throw out, you know?”

“Okay,” she said. His manner was calming and off-putting all at once. “What’s a ‘sensei’?”

“It just means ‘teacher,’” he said. “I teach meditation.” He stood away from the door. She realized she was apprehensive. Something smelled like burning grass. “Come on in.”

He led her into the house and she sat on a futon couch in the large living room. It looked out along the shoreline toward where the ferry had docked. He stood in front of her, his head tilted just a little as if he was thinking of painting her, and then he left the room, holding a finger up. He returned with a tray holding two rubber-gripped glasses of tea.

“This will calm your nerves a little.”

“My nerves?”

He sat across from her and held a glass out. “You’re practically your own siren, Officer. There are brilliant flashes of red and green going off behind your head.”

She took the tea and sipped it; it was pleasant if a little bitter. She put it down on the low table in front of her. “I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

“The stone is never disturbed by the river.”

“I’m sorry?”

“An inner stillness can never be disturbed, is what I mean. I don’t control the river. In other words, you’re not disturbing me, Officer.”

“Detective Inspector,” she said.

He blinked twice in quick succession. “How can I help you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about a stolen rowboat.”