Death in the Age of Steam (9 page)

Three quarters of an hour later, Theresa's face traced onto tissue paper stared up from the writing surface of the secretary desk in Harris's drawing room. The likeness was crude, but still—he felt—more helpful than a description on its own.

He tried to compare this face to the one he remembered. Did she look older because three years had passed or because of some particular experience? Or was it because to a child artist every adult looks old? He couldn't even decide if her face had narrowed or filled out until he realized she had simply changed the style of dressing her hair. While it had been puffed at the crown to either side of the centre part, it now lay flat on top and fell smoothly to where it turned under in a loose roll secured at the nape. That rich, reddish brown roll of hair mere pencil lines had no hope of capturing. It must look glorious, thought Harris.

He turned off the gas and found his way to bed by the glow of the street lamps below his windows. Having already removed his wet clothes, he had only to slip out of a light dressing gown. Stretched on his back with the sheet thrown off, he listened to the rain drumming on the plank sidewalks and to the passage of a couple of pedestrians. Well-spaced, heavy treads accompanied by quick and light. Through the moist air rose the clear tone of a woman's laugh. The double set of footfalls ceased sounding in the mud of Bay Street, then resumed on the far sidewalk and faded away to the west. Harris rolled onto his side and felt, as he had not allowed himself to feel for years, the weight of his loneliness.

Always he had contrived to be busy with work, or with superficial social engagements and exhausting recreations—long
rides, billiards, card parties, curling and ice boating in winter, sailing and swimming in summer, hunting in fall. Or, if all else failed, voracious reading with the lights turned up full. He had managed never to lie down till he was too tired to remember. Too tired to miss her.

In the darkened room, he rolled over several times more, dozed, and fell more or less asleep.

He was awake again by dawn but far from certain in which direction to ride. No horsewoman herself, Kate MacFarlane said she had never accompanied Theresa to the Rouge Valley and didn't know which part of it she favoured. The Rouge River rose some twenty miles north of town, but didn't begin to carve out anything Harris believed could be called a valley till it had passed Markham. He decided, without much conviction, to start there and follow the stream south to the lake. This had not been a haunt of Theresa's when Harris had known her. The whole area did seem too remote for a spot of Sunday afternoon exercise, and for a refuge not remote enough.

Pond-sized puddles sprawled over the ungraded dirt streets, but were no longer growing—the rain having tapered off to something between a drizzle and a mist. Harris let it settle on the shoulders of his fustian hunting jacket as he strode towards the livery stable. The oilskin cape he had brought was too hot to wear in anything less than a downpour.

He was presently trotting up Yonge Street, which was surfaced with crushed stone on the Macadam system and cambered to shed the water. North of Yorkville, progress was slower because he had not yet made inquiries at the numerous inns and taverns. Nor, of course, had anyone else.

Harris now had the tracing to show, though he began to doubt its utility when a market gardener at Gallows Hill said he definitely knew the subject—a Negress in her sixties, was she not? Then a Thornhill ostler thought he had seen the lady a week ago. She had been dressed in bright green and riding north, but not on a black palfrey with one white hind foot. Harris turned east and galloped on.

On joining the river, he began asking at mills, which at first were nearly as frequent as the inns on Yonge Street. Sawmills predominated, though the white pine had mostly been logged out. Forward-looking owners were also having their wheels grind corn or card wool. Shrubs and trees of no commercial value still lined the riverbanks, but this was far from wilderness. One surmised that Crane's opposition to Theresa's visits was based on the lengthy absences they entailed rather than on anything sinister or threatening about the valley.

Towards eleven a.m., Harris reached a place in the fourth concession of Scarboro Township where the stream flowed east, sharply south, then sharply west again. Over this peninsula, the homey smell of damp sawdust lay thick as porridge. Picking his way between piles of fresh lumber, he dismounted at the open end of a long frame shed. Inside, the rising and falling blade was tearing through a log so clamorously that—rather than speak—he simply touched the elbow of the older of the two men at the machinery and with an interrogative hoist of his eyebrows gestured to the doorway.

The bearded miller nodded and followed agreeably enough, but once outside responded to every question with a noncommittal grunt. An unproductive morning had its disheartening cap.

But wait—what if the man could not hear, if his saw had ruined his ears? Harris unfolded the portrait.

“Mrs. Crane,” said the miller with surprising force. “She used to ride here often. In the concession road and down the valley or up the valley and out the concession.”

“Last Sunday?” Harris bellowed.

“She had a black mare, skittish, but a treat to look at. I tried to buy it for my daughter.”

“Was Mrs. Crane here last Sunday?”

“Um.”

Harris found a stub of pencil in his jacket and wrote the question on a corner of the tissue paper.

“No, like I said. In the spring, she and another lady, but not
since May or April.” The miller gave the coins in his pocket a wistful, indiscreet rattle of which he was doubtless unaware. “I would have paid sterling too,” he said, “no paper money.”

Continuing the interview would have been awkward enough even if the man had been willing to acknowledge his deafness. Harris approached the helper.

A young immigrant working to bring his betrothed out from Cork, he became cooperation itself on learning that Mrs. Crane's parents had come from that very county. Of her mount's markings he gave a detailed description. It fit Spat exactly. In declining the miller's offers, Theresa had reportedly said the animal was too old and nervous to change stables. The other lady was remembered as dark and fine-featured. The Irishman had not caught her name, nor had he understood anything the horsewomen said to each other. They seemed not to be speaking English. Not Gaelic either. Neither had been seen for weeks.

Harris accepted a slice of pork pie and a glass of cider for his lunch before pursuing an old settlers' road down the east brink of the river. Thirty-foot cliffs shut out any glimpse of the wheat fields and orchards he knew lay to either side and above him. On occasion he would clamber out of the valley to ask well-rehearsed questions at farm houses. Then he would rejoin the Rouge none the wiser. What kept him going was that no one south of the fourth concession could swear that Theresa had not ridden this way last Sunday.

Afternoon passed into evening. He had just left the last mill on the river when the rain began again, tentative and caressing at first. By the time he thought of his cape, his clothes were soaked through.

The valley grew swampy and desolate in its final mile. Enormous steps carved at one point into the cliffs from top to bottom constituted the only sign of human passage. These Harris recognized as the terraced graves of a long-abandoned Seneca Indian village. They were not a comforting omen. Nearer Lake Ontario, the aggrieved shrieks of gulls began to
drown out the patter of raindrops on willow leaves.

Then Harris turned the last bend and found himself facing a wall of earth, a great hand pressed over the river's mouth. This must be the embankment of the Grand Trunk Railway. In fact, a narrow outlet spanned by a trestle had been left for the Rouge water to escape to the lake, but the flow was too great and the river had backed up into a lagoon. Its waters had drowned a frame factory building labelled, “COWAN'S SHIPYARD: 2 & 3 masted schooners built to order.”

So, another blind alley. Wet and saddle-sore, Harris concluded that the best place for him now was in front of his own fire with a glass of something warming at his side. First, though, he stopped to mop the water from his face and pull his hat brim lower. Standing a moment in the stirrups, he stretched his legs and redistributed his weight. Before his inattentive eyes, two gulls picked and tore at a long white fish that lay on a patch of sand at the foot of the railway trestle. The G.T.R. wasn't yet accepting passengers or freight west of Brockville, but this section of the line seemed to be complete.

Harris settled back in the saddle, preparing to move on. Which end of that fish, he wondered, was the head and which the tail? No, the head must be missing. That end was ragged and torn.

Wearily he tried again to make sense of what he was seeing. It was long and pale, but it was not a fish. Where the tail fins should have been were fingers.

The inside of his stomach began to twitch. Harris was daring enough in a physical sense and not too squeamish to clean and dress the game he killed, but that was a sportsman's courage—not a soldier's—and he had no practice in dealing with severed human limbs.

Only by ignoring this twitching was he able to urge Banshee forward into the water and across the lagoon's sandy bottom. The scolding gulls hoisted themselves into the air and spiralled tightly over their interrupted meal.

Harris could bear to look at it only in glances. Bone seemed to
be exposed below the elbow as well as at the shoulder. His first thought was to stop further pillage by burying the remains, but perhaps the topography should be disturbed as little as possible until seen by official eyes. At the water's edge he dismounted and unrolled his oilskin. As he covered the arm, he glimpsed clinging to it green shreds of cloth and circling the wrist a bracelet of silver medallions. The edges of the cape he weighted down with stones.

He did not believe it was Theresa's arm. There were thousands of miles of green cloth in the world. The bracelet . . .

Remounting a little queasily, he picked his way up the valley in the fading light. If he could only get away from this place, he should be able to think. The place went with him, however. The barest whiff of something rancid and waxy seemed to have rooted in the back of his throat and to be growing there. His nausea made even Banshee's gentlest gait insupportable.

He got down and vomited. The waxy taste was still there, but he felt steadier—steady enough, at least, to realize that he had no idea where to report his discovery.

The last mill was shut this Saturday evening and empty. In the taverns at the east end of the Kingston Road bridge, advice would flow like stagger juice, but anyone asking for a constable would face insistent questions. Harris accordingly turned west at the bridge, back towards Toronto. A talk with the Rouge Hill toll collector some half a mile later did nothing to deflect him from his course.

The toll booth consisted of a faded, two-storey frame house with a roof that extended north across the highway to a blank supporting wall on the other side. The collector had had enough experience with sneaks and bullies to appreciate the difficulty of finding the police. The nearest lived in Highland Creek, but that was Scarboro and this was Pickering. The Pickering lock-up might as well have been on the moon. You would never get a constable out at night anyway.

Harris continued townwards. The pine-planked surface of the Kingston Road clattered horribly beneath the horse's hoofs—an ear-splitting amplification of the agitation in Harris's breast. He
quickly switched over to the dirt shoulder. The panic followed him, merely growing more stealthily in the dark and lonely night.

The remains were not Theresa's. Someone must tell him that. He feared, with a fear approaching a certainty, that no one would.

When he reached Market Square, mad fiddle music was spilling out of taverns and breaking against the austere face of Toronto's dark and all-but empty City Hall. Down in Station No. 1, an unfamiliar constable kept vigil. He denied any knowledge of Inspector John Vandervoort. Harris could try coming back on Monday.

Harris tried the Dog and Duck. The taproom was so dimly lit that the elk and whitetail trophy heads along the wall were mutually indistinguishable. Indeed, gloom seemed to clothe the few women present more effectually than their gowns which, as far as Harris could see when he began moving from table to table, all had buttons undone if not actually missing. Overheard conversations between them and their companions often touched on “going upstairs.” Impeded by modesty, but more by the dark, Harris completed his tour of the room without finding his man. He applied to the proprietor.

Vandervoort was known to that individual as a dedicated drinker, though by no means a troublesome one. Indeed, his patronage was an asset at licence-renewal time. This was as candid as Harris could wish, but when he asked about tonight in particular, the bluff hotel-keeper turned smarmy.

“Don't see him, I'm afraid. He'll be sorry to have missed you.”

“Where's he live?”

“Couldn't say, sir. I might just get a message to him, though, if it's urgent.”

“It's urgent that I see him,” said Harris—but he was again assured that a message was the most that could be undertaken.

At the stable of the less furtive-looking hotel next door, Harris left his horse to be watered and fed. Returning to the bank on foot, he changed into dry clothes and wrote a letter
detailing the discovery of the arm. He asked the inspector to meet him as soon as possible under the Rouge River G.T.R. trestle, where Harris promised to remain until Sunday noon. He then packed a knapsack for a night in the open. Nagged by doubts as to whether the letter would be received or acted upon, he next proceeded to the Union Station at the foot of York Street and sent the Pickering constable a telegram, a copy of which he added to the envelope for Vandervoort.

Back in the Dog and Duck, a leering fiddler was scraping out “Pop Goes the Weasel.” One of the pudgier of the unbuttoned women was using her right index finger and left cheek to sound the pops, more or less on cue, and to show her freedom from constraint. These moist little explosions did nothing to revive Harris's long-dead appetite. Notwithstanding, he providently bought some dark stew of unknown composition to take with him and, dodging the murky dancers, managed to place his sealed envelope in the hotel-keeper's hands.