Black Feathers (13 page)

“Sorry,” Skylark said, as if suddenly remembering the seriousness of what they were talking about. “So, do they have any leads? Do they think it was the same guy?”

At first, she couldn’t understand what Skylark was asking. “Oh. No.” She shook her head. “They think she killed herself.”

“What?” Skylark’s voice rose.

“That’s what I said. But the knife was in her hand,” Cassie said, as if that explained everything. “They asked me if she had seemed upset.”

“And what did you tell them?” There was something brittle about her tone, defensive.

“I said that she had, yeah.”

“Why would you tell them that?” Skylark snapped.

“Because she was,” Cassie snapped back.

“How would you—”

“Because she sat right there, right where you’re sitting. Yesterday. And she
was
upset.”

Skylark’s eyes widened.

“About what?” Curious now. Not confrontational.

“About the murders.” Cassie shook her head to shake off the memory. “I think. I don’t know. She was totally freaked out.”

“About what?”

It’s happening here now.

Cassie told Skylark about the conversation the day before and the way the woman had rushed off, talking to herself, waving her arms.

“And did you notice her last night?”

Skylark looked down at the ground.

“She was sitting there all night long, all wrapped up. Not moving. Staring.”

Staring at me,
Cassie thought, but she kept that to herself.

Skylark nodded. “Yeah. Sarah had some problems.” She blew out a deep, fog-silver breath. “I talked to her a few times. I think she’d been institutionalized …” At the thought of the hospital, Cassie looked down at the ground, willing her face not to give anything away.

Two toonies fell into her hat. She glanced up in time to see Cliff Wolcott speeding up again as he passed. He had a cardboard tray with four coffee cups stuck in it, and she thought he was going to stop, but he kept walking.

“Anyway, that’s what I told the police. Is that all right?” Unable to keep the hurt from her voice.

Skylark looked away. “Yeah.” She nodded. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I overreacted. I get nervous when it comes to the police, and I—”

“I just told them about talking to her. I didn’t really have anything else to tell them.”

“They just make shit up anyhow.”

Cassie had to bite back the questions on her lips. Instead, she gestured toward the courthouse. “Speaking of,” she said.

“Yeah.” Resting one hand on her knapsack, Skylark rose smoothly to her feet. “Are you going to be okay here?”

Cassie glanced up and down the block, nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” She lifted the knapsack onto her shoulder. “I’ll swing by in a bit, all right? Maybe we can figure out something to eat.”

The crash was brutal.

The wanting, the hunger, had so filled him it was like he was high. In the van, on the beach, he knew he could do anything.

And he did.

After, lying in bed next to Alice, he had vibrated, every muscle tingling, every neuron firing. When he closed his eyes, the insides of his eyelids exploded with light and colour.

He had lain in bed for hours savouring the sensations, unable to keep himself from smiling. He didn’t need to sleep; he could do anything.

But sometime later, sometime the next day, the crash came. He was sitting at his desk, and the exhaustion hit him, all at once. Every muscle gave out and cried in pain. His head
fogged, and he couldn’t hold a thought. More than exhaustion; it felt like a complete collapse.

He trudged through the rest of his day like a walking shell, listening to the hum of his computer, counting down the minutes until he could go home.

But there was no respite. With the kids, Alice, there wasn’t time to draw a breath, let alone a few moments to rest. He still thought of it as a sanctuary, but in truth home was just another job, just another series of tasks he had to complete, another block of time to count down through.

Sleep, when it came, didn’t help.

The only thing that burned through the fog, that woke him up, was the hunger.

It was only with that yearning in his veins that he felt alive.

Everything was different in the camp that night.

At first, it seemed like no one was going to be there at all. Skylark and Cassie arrived at City Hall shortly after nightfall: the Outreach van was already parked out front, the table set up with its pot of soup and basket of bread, but there was no lineup, no crowd, and the Outreach workers were looking at one another uneasily, shifting from foot to foot in the cold.

People started to arrive after a while, slipping warily out of the dark, but it wasn’t the same as previous nights.

“People are scared,” Skylark said, finishing off her soup.

They were sitting on the bench in front of City Hall, watching people creep up to the table, get their soup, then retreat into the dark.

“But Sarah—”

“They don’t know that she killed herself. They just know that something happened and they had to split before the police came. A lot of people, they won’t come back.”

Skylark was right: the circle that night was the smallest that Cassie had seen, half the size of the night before.

When Brother Paul stepped into the circle, there was something different about him too. He seemed smaller, somehow, but tensed, like he was trying to hold something in.

When he started to speak, his voice was stronger than Cassie had ever heard it.

He didn’t say anything about himself or invite people to introduce themselves.

The air crackled when he said Sarah’s name.

“Sarah had only been a part of this community for a short time.” He paced slowly in the middle of the circle. “She kept mostly to herself.” He was twisting his hands together. “I know that she had a hard life. I know that she was struggling. That she was haunted. But I never expected this.”

He stopped and took a long, slow look at everyone in the circle, turning in place to look at every face.

“Something terrible happened here last night,” he said. “We lost one of our own.”

A low buzz of voices rose from the circle.

“Sarah killed herself this morning, just before dawn.”

The voices changed, the tone suddenly questioning, defiant.

Brother Paul raised one hand. “I have spoken to the police,” he said. “At length. They say there is no question that Sarah took her own life, in a most terrible fashion.” He shook his head at the distant, half-formed questions. “But it was not her hand that held the knife.”

Cassie flinched and glanced toward Skylark, hoping that she hadn’t noticed.

“Every person who saw her struggling, who walked by instead of lending a kindly hand, they’re the ones who killed her. How many more of us have to die before people see us as anything more than animals, more than their dirty little secret?” He raised his head. “I should have done more. I should have seen that Sarah’s struggles had started to take her from us. But at least I tried. At least we tried. Society didn’t try. Society treated her like trash. Her family, her community, threw her away. Just like they threw all of us away.” He stopped and turned, looking around the circle again. “And now they’re using her death against us.” The whole circle seemed to gasp. “When I spoke to the police this morning, they told me that we would have to move on. That if I didn’t disband this camp, if I didn’t tear this community apart, I would be arrested. We would all be arrested.”

A murmur of voices and a flurry of exchanged glances.

“But this is our land,” he almost shouted. “This is our home. This is our community. And no one is going to take that away from us.” Someone shouted in agreement. “We will not hide anymore. We will not slink into the shadows so we don’t offend their delicate sensibilities. We will stand,” he said. “We will fight. All of us. Together.” He took a long, slow blink. “And we will do it for Sarah. And for every victim of brutality and neglect. In their names. In their names. Blessed be.”

And with that, he stepped out of the circle, into the shadows of the square, leaving everyone silent, watching him as he disappeared into the darkness.

When Cassie looked at Skylark, she was crying.

He couldn’t tear his eyes from the two girls. Even in their sadness, they shone and burned. Brighter, it seemed, but perhaps that was because of the dimness around them: the whole ridiculous little encampment shrouded in grey, shadows moving wraithlike through the mist.

There was a beauty to that sadness, a bittersweet flavour he could almost taste.

He knew that no matter how strongly Skylark shone, how brightly Dorothy burned, they could not escape the sadness they were bathing in. It would seep into their pores, work its way into their flesh.

He imagined how their hearts would taste, brined in sadness, but still sweet, still tender.

The thought made him ache.

A black shadow fell from the sky, a crow alighting on the bicycle rack next to where he stood.

Their eyes met, glistening in the dark.

“You wanna get high?”

Cassie didn’t know if it was Frank or Joe who called out the question as she and Skylark crossed the square. Bob was silent, occupied with a tiny glass pipe and a lighter that arced with a rich blue flame.

“No thanks,” Skylark said. “We’re taken care of.”

The boys smirked at them, but it was the truth. They had spent the time since Brother Paul’s speech sitting on the rooftop level of the parkade, looking out over Chinatown. They
hadn’t said much of anything, just silently passed Skylark’s joint hand to hand.

The boys were standing near the bench close to the door to the parkade. Had they chosen that spot deliberately? Cassie wondered.

“You’re such snobs,” Bob said slowly, blowing out a cloud of rank, chemically smoke. There was something strange about his voice, though: it wasn’t bitter or threatening. His words almost made it seem like he was joking around.

“We had other plans,” Skylark said, in the same light tone of voice.

Frank and Joe smirked, but Bob nodded, pondering the idea.

The girls were almost past when Bob said, “Did you know her? That Sarah?”

“Not really,” Skylark said, stopping. “She’d been here for a few days, but I never really—”