A Widow for One Year (63 page)

Whoever it was hadn’t worn a condom. The murdered girl’s roommates told the policewoman who first talked to them that their dead friend always used a diaphragm. She hadn’t used it this time, which was further indication that she’d been raped. And the flying-hamburger T-shirt pointed to someone who knew her from the Flying Food Circus— not someone who’d met her at Eaton’s, or at the Bra Bar. After all, the murderer had not stabbed the salesgirl and then dressed her in a bra.

The homicide detectives who were partners for this investigation had not been partners for long. The man, Staff Sergeant Michael Cahill, had come to Homicide from the critical-incident team. Although Cahill liked it in Homicide, he was at heart a critical-incident kind of man. He had a still-life mentality, which naturally inclined him to investigate things—not people. He would rather search for hairs on a rug, or semen stains on a pillowcase, than talk to anyone.

The woman, Cahill’s partner, was well matched with him. She’d started as a constable in uniform, with her shoulder-length auburn hair, which had since turned gray, tucked up under her cap. Detective Sergeant Margaret McDermid was good at talking to people and finding out what they knew; she was a virtual vacuum cleaner when it came to sucking up information.

It was Staff Sergeant Cahill who found the congealed trickle of blood in a fold of the shower curtain. He deduced that the murderer had calmly taken the time to have a shower after he’d murdered the salesgirl and had dressed her in the flying-hamburger T-shirt. Detective Cahill also found a bloodstain on the soap dish—it was a smudged print that had been made by the heel of the murderer’s right hand.

It was Detective Sergeant Margaret McDermid who talked to the roommates. She focused on the Flying Food Circus, which anyone would have focused on. The detective was fairly sure that the principal suspect would turn out to be a man with a special feeling for the waitresses in those winged T-shirts—at least he would turn out to be someone who’d had a special feeling for one of them. Perhaps he’d been a co-worker of the dead girl’s, or a frequent customer. Maybe a new boyfriend. Yet clearly the murdered salesgirl had not known the murderer as well as she thought.

From the restaurant, it was too far to walk to the waitress’s apartment. If the murderer had followed her home from work to learn where she lived, he would have had to follow her taxi by car—or in another taxi. (The murdered waitress always took a taxi home from the Flying Food Circus, her roommates said.)

“It must have been messy fitting her into that T-shirt,” Cahill told his partner.

“Hence the shower,” Margaret said. She was liking Homicide less and less, but it wasn’t because of Cahill’s unnecessary remarks. She liked Cahill well enough. What she wished was that she’d had a chance to talk to the murdered salesgirl.

Sergeant McDermid always found herself more interested in the victim than in the murderer—not that finding the murderer was without gratification for her. She just would rather have had the opportunity to tell the salesgirl not to let whoever it was in her door. These were unsuitable or at least impractical sentiments for a homicide detective to have, Margaret knew. Maybe she would be happier in Missing Persons, where there was some hope of finding the person before he or she became a victim.

Margaret concluded that she would rather look for
potential
victims than for murderers. When she told Cahill her thoughts, the staff sergeant was phlegmatic. “Maybe you should try Missing Persons, Margaret,” he told her.

Later, in the car, Cahill said that the sight of that blood-soaked flying hamburger was enough to make a vegetarian out of him, but Margaret didn’t allow herself to be distracted by the remark. She was already imagining herself in Missing Persons, looking for someone to save instead of someone to catch. She speculated that many of the missing would be young women, and that more than a few of these would turn out to be homicides.

In Toronto, women who were abducted were rarely found in the city. The bodies would turn up somewhere off the 401, or—after the ice had broken up in Georgian Bay, and the snow had melted in the forests— the human remains would be discovered off Route 69 between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, or nearer Sudbury. Maybe a farmer would find something in a field off the 11th Line in Brock. In the States, someone snatched in a city would often be found in the same city—in a Dumpster, say, or a stolen car. But in Canada there was all this land.

Some of the young women who were missing would turn out to be runaways. From rural Ontario, they would likely end up in Toronto, where many of them were easily found. (Not infrequently, they would have become prostitutes.) But the missing persons who would interest Margaret the most would be children. What Detective Sergeant McDermid was unprepared for was how much of the business of Missing Persons would entail studying the photographs of children. She was also unprepared for how much the photographs of these missing children would haunt her.

Case by case, the photographs were filed, and as the unfound missing children grew older than their last available photographs, Margaret would mentally revise their appearance. Thus she learned that you needed a good imagination in order to have any success in Missing Persons. The photographs of the missing children were important, but they were only the first drafts—they were pictures of children-in-progress. The ability that the sergeant shared with the parents of these missing children was truly a special but torturous gift: namely, that of seeing, in the mind’s eye, what the six-year-old would look like at the age of ten or twelve, or what the teenager would look like in his or her twenties—“torturous,” because to imagine your missing child grown older, or even entirely grown up, is one of the more painful things that the parents of missing children do. The parents can’t help themselves—they have to do it. But Sergeant McDermid discovered that she had to do it, too.

If this gift made her good at her job, it also kept her from having much of a life. The children she couldn’t find became
her
children. When they were no longer an active case in Missing Persons, she took their photos home.

Two boys especially haunted her. They were Americans who had disappeared during the Vietnam War. The boys’ parents thought that they’d escaped to Canada in 1968—probably the midpoint of Vietnam “war resisters,” as they were called, coming across the border. At the time, the boys would have been seventeen and fifteen. The seventeen-year-old was a year away from being eligible for the draft, but a student deferment would have kept him safe for at least another four years. His younger brother had run away with him—the boys had always been inseparable.

The seventeen-year-old’s flight was probably a mask to hide his deeper disillusionment with his parents’ divorce. To Sergeant McDermid, both boys were more the victims of the hatred that had developed between their parents than they were victims of the war in Vietnam.

Anyway, the boys’ case in Missing Persons was no longer under active investigation. If that seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old were alive today, they would be in their early thirties! Yet their case was not “retired” for either of their parents, or for Margaret.

The father, who’d said he was “something of a realist,” had provided Missing Persons with the boys’ dental records. The mother had sent the photographs that Sergeant McDermid had taken home.

That Margaret was unmarried, and past the age of ever having children of her own, doubtless contributed to her obsession with the handsome boys she saw in those photographs—and to her equally enduring obsession with what might have become of them. If they were alive, where were they now? What did they look like? What women might have loved them? What children of their own might they have fathered? What would their lives be like? If they still lived . . .

Over time, the bulletin board on which Margaret tacked the boys’ photos had been moved from the combination living-dining room in her apartment—where it had occasionally drawn comment from dinner guests—to her bedroom, which no one but Margaret ever saw.

Sergeant McDermid was almost sixty, although she could still successfully lie about her age. In a few years, she would be as retired as the case of the missing young Americans. In the meantime, she was past the age of inviting anyone to see her bedroom, where the bulletin board with the unfound boys’ pictures was the principal view from her bed.

There were times, when she couldn’t sleep at night, that she regretted moving the many images of those boys this close to her. And the alternately anxious and grieving mother still sent photographs. Of these, the mother would comment: “I know they don’t look like this anymore, but there’s something about William’s personality that comes through in this picture.” (William was the older of the boys.)

Or the mother would write: “I realize you can’t see their faces clearly in this one—I mean, you can’t see their faces at all, I know—but there is something about Henry’s mischievousness that might be useful to you in your search.” The particular photograph that accompanied this note was of the mother herself as a young, attractive woman.

She’s in bed, in a hotel room somewhere. From the look of it, Margaret guessed that the hotel was in Europe. The young mother is smiling, perhaps laughing, and both her boys are in bed with her—only they’re under the covers. All you can see of the boys is their bare feet. She thinks I can identify them by their
feet
! Margaret thought despairingly. Yet she could not stop looking at the photograph.

Or at the one of William as a little boy, playing doctor to Henry’s knee. Or the one where the boys, at the ages of about five and seven, are both dismantling lobsters—William with a certain technical ease and zeal, while Henry is finding the task both gruesome and beyond his abilities. (To their mother, this also demonstrated the boys’ different personalities.)

But the best photograph of the boys, taken near the time of their disappearance, was after a hockey game—presumably at the boys’ school. William is taller than his mother—he’s holding a hockey puck in his teeth—and Henry is still shorter than his mom. Both boys are wearing their hockey uniforms, but they have traded their skates for high-top basketball shoes.

It had been a popular photograph among Margaret’s colleagues in Missing Persons—when the case was still active—not only because the mother was pretty but because both boys, in their hockey uniforms, looked so Canadian. Yet to Margaret there was something identifiably American about these missing boys, a kind of cocksure combination of mischief and unstoppable optimism—as if each of them thought that his opinion would always be unchallengeable, his car never in the wrong lane.

But it was only when she couldn’t sleep, or when she’d looked too often and too long at these photographs, that Sergeant McDermid ever regretted leaving Homicide for Missing Persons. When she’d been looking for the murderer of the youngwaitress in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, Margaret had slept very well. Yet they’d never found that murderer, or the missing American boys.

When Margaret would run into Michael Cahill, who was still in Homicide, it was natural for her to ask him, as a colleague, about what he was working on—as he asked her. When they had cases that weren’t going anywhere—cases that had “unsolved” written all over them, from the start—they would express their frustration in the same way: “I’m working on one of those followed-home-from-the-Flying-Food-Circus kinds of cases.”

Missing Persons

Ruth could have stopped reading right there, at the end of Chapter One. There was no question in her mind that Alice Somerset was Marion Cole. The photographs that the Canadian writer had described could not be coincidental—not to mention the
effect
of the photographs on the haunted detective in Missing Persons.

That her mother was still preoccupied with the photos of her missing boys came as no surprise to Ruth, nor did the fact that Marion must have obsessed on the subject of what Thomas and Timothy would have looked like as grown men—and what their lives would have been like, had they lived. The surprise to Ruth, after the initial shock of establishing her mother’s existence, was that her mother had been able to write indirectly about what most haunted her. Simply that her mother was a
writer
—if not a good one—was the greatest shock to Ruth of all.

Ruth had to read on. There would be more photographs described, of course, and Ruth could remember each one. The novel was true to the genre of crime fiction only in that it eventually pursued a single case of Missing Persons to its solution: two little girls, sisters, are safely recovered from their abductor, who turns out to be neither a sex fiend nor a child molester (as one first fears) but a barely less terrible estranged father and divorced husband.

As for the waitress found in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, she remains a metaphor for the unsolved or unsolvable crime—as do the missing American boys, whose images (both real and imagined) are still haunting Detective Sergeant McDermid at the end of the novel. In this sense,
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
succeeds beyond the genre of crime fiction; it establishes Missing Persons as a psychological condition. Missing Persons becomes the permanent state of mind of the melancholic main character.

Even before she finished reading her mother’s first novel, Ruth desperately wanted to talk to Eddie O’Hare—for she assumed (correctly) that Eddie knew something about Marion’s career as a writer. Surely Alice Somerset had written more than this one book.
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
had been published in 1984; it was not a long novel. By 1990, Ruth guessed, her mother might have written and published a couple more.

Ruth would soon learn from Eddie that there
were
two more, each of them entailing additional casework in the field of Missing Persons. Titles were not her mother’s strength.
Missing Persons McDermid
had a certain alliterative charm, but the alliteration seemed strained in
McDermid Reaches a Milestone
.