Helix: Plague of Ghouls (27 page)
The first piece of paper was a photocopied article dated two weeks after the Pritchard Park incident. He speed-read the synopsis of the Pritchard Park investigation, spotted the missing girl’s name several paragraphs down, quickly folded the page, and put it back in his pocket.
The next was a photocopy of the banns of marriage.
The hell good does this do me?
He folded that up, too, and stashed it with the article.
The last was the handwritten page full of website links, along with brief paragraphs written mostly in double-vowel Ojibwe, with English thrown in where a term wouldn’t easily translate. This meant that Two-Trees would have to spend an hour or two with his nose wedged in his Ojibwe-to-English dictionary. However, he had to give credit to his old mentor Michael Crow: at nearly eighty years old, he’d taken to the internet like it was a new but odd sort of screwdriver. Now all he had to do was learn how to copy and paste links and send them by email.
Old Michael Crow had no fear of prepaid cell phones or text messaging, either.
PRITCHARD PARK BROUGHT
back so many memories that Two-Trees had to stop and collect his thoughts. He stood at the new entrance to Pritchard Park—some shit-crap piece of cultural appropriation made to look like an
inuksuk
that people could walk under—where he waited for his mental slide projector to stop clicking through frames. Here was a superimposed image of Trickster Two-Trees flying a kite; over there was an image of getting drunk with friends and narrowly evading arrest by swimming across Steeper Lake and hiding in the mill; there, a fight with two homeless men who thought he was hiding gin in his school bag; and way over there, down by the water’s edge, was Two-Trees losing his virginity with Callie Green and having many, many body parts bitten by blackflies.
Further to the north, a new park maintenance shed had been erected in the place where dog walkers had found the dead Reid’s remains.
And somewhere nearby, three jungle punks had sat around drinking wine out of a skull.
The paving had been part of the municipality’s efforts not only to bury the Reid murder but to whitewash the overall infamy of Pritchard Park. Twice a year, a body was found either washed up or curled up dead. The Reids were the final straw. They’d thrust Elmbury into the national spotlight, and that was when the mayor decided enough was enough. The town spent half a million dollars turning the park into a sanitized lawn no one wanted to walk on. All the undergrowth had been uprooted and replaced with wood chips and marigolds. The staghorn sumac had been burned down and replaced with carefully tended dogwood bushes. They’d even started “naturalizing” Steeper Lake by dredging it clean of algae and weeds. Paths now meandered around gently rolling clean-fill hills and led to memorials about this unknown soldier or that benefactor no one gave a shit about, and all paths led to the Grand Pavilion, which was a fancy name for the gazebo where local bands would play charity events, and where self-important college kids would host fringe festivals.
At that moment, city workers were using gas-powered blowers to scatter autumn leaves from the skirts of those few elm trees that remained. Otherwise, Two-Trees had the place to himself, so he walked toward the lake, deliberately stepping off the cobbled path. Another memory popped up: all of Halo County sitting on lawn chairs or beach towels, smacking blackflies against their necks, drinking legal soft drinks with illegal additives, watching fireworks launched from a boat in the middle of Steeper Lake.
If Two-Trees dumped all the things he hated about Halo County onto one pan, and all the things that brought him comfort on another, the two might balance each other out, but the scales would break under the weight.
His phone rang. He checked the number before answering.
“Hey,” he said.
“Where are you?” Bridget asked.
“I’m headed back to the hotel in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m at Pritchard Park. I figured it would be better if I came here alone.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“The local police picked up a few kids near here,” he explained. “They’d been formally charged with public intoxication—local custom, don’t even know why police bother anymore—but one of them was caught with a human skull.”
He wondered if all three punks were still in jail. If that were the case, and if they were lycanthropes, then their biological clocks were swiftly ticking toward their next cycles.
“Do I want to know what they were doing to the skull?” Bridget asked.
“Using it as a goblet.”
“For satanic rites?”
“Who knows? Anyhow, I thought I might be able to see if they’d left anything else behind.”
In the ’70s, there had been a dock stretching out partway across Steeper Lake, used most often as a jetty for canoes, but because of its rustic quality, because of the lake, the weeping willows, the sunset, and the old paper mill in the background, it was the place to get your wedding photos taken, so long as the photographer knew how to angle his camera just right and leave the hydroelectric dam out of the picture. In the ’80s, they added large signs that said “No Diving” and ruined all wedding photos for the next seven years. In the ’90s, they rebuilt it in time for the city’s sesquicentennial and even had the Governor General come out to help celebrate. After the Reid thing, they’d taken out the jetty completely and built a “historic covered bridge”, from which no one could swan dive into the currents of the Oxley Dam and bob up dead in Pouch Lake below.
“You know, in my high school days, I probably would have been a jungle punk myself,” he said to Bridget as he stepped onto what should have been a romantic dock. His footsteps echoed, as the bridge engineers had intended. “And this is where I’d go for a little anarchy.”
“So what do you expect to find out there?” she asked. “More punks or more skulls?”
“Maybe the rest of a body,” he said.
Facing east from the bridge, all he could see was Steeper Lake and the horseshoe-shaped Pritchard Park. Only the tops of the tallest apartment buildings rose over the trees. He turned west and took in Oxley Paper Mill and Pouch Lake. There had been a millwheel once, powered by the water flowing in rapids from one lake to the next. The lower lake was skirted in maples, pines, oaks, willows, and sumac, all at the height of their fall colours. He stopped there a moment and thought,
It doesn’t look half so bad from up here.
He had good memories of bad trouble, lounging around the park, sharing a joint, and hiding out in that old fieldstone mill whenever cops came in sight. Once the rapids were dammed, the bottom two storeys flooded every spring, but there was always some way onto the top floors.
Sometimes Two-Trees marvelled at fate. There was no good reason why a kid like him should have been let into the OPP, let alone the RCMP later. He remembered the arrogance of the jungle punk in Palmer’s interrogation room.
I guess we were better at talking ourselves out of trouble, back then
, he thought.
“You still there?” Bridget asked.
“A little.”
“You have a theory?”
The bridge led to the western side of Steeper Lake, where a path lead north toward Prince Street and downtown Elmbury. South of the bridge, on the western lakeshore, were the fenced off ruins of the mill. His eyes watered with the need to sneeze.
“I’ve got one idea,” he said. “So far.”
“You need backup?”
“Not yet. But stick on the line and keep me company for a while. Convince me why it’s a good idea to keep the Padre in town.”
“I never said it was a good idea. But until we can get in touch with Harvey, Padre’s the best bad idea we’ve got.”
Two-Trees made some noncommittal but hopeful noises at that. Here, the rushing water over the spillway sounded like static, and Bridget complained about the quality of her reception. “Listen, there’s something else you can do with your time, if you’re interested,” he said.
“Speak!”
“See if you can find a Facebook profile for me, or any other social media outlets.”
“For who?”
“Something Laura Maurelli said—”
“Who?”
“Vice-principal at one of the local high schools,” Two-Trees said.
“Wait, you think we can find Sydney online? Dude, they’d have tried that by now.”
“What I want you to do, actually,” he said, “is see if you can find Laura Maurelli.”
“Wow, Two-Trees, really? You’ve been back for what, two days, and already you’re hooking up with old girlfriends?”
“Maurelli seems like the crusader type. She might have turned to other public options, if she thought the police were too slow.”
“Right. I’ll see if she reached out to her Facebook crowd. Maybe a local kid had a lead.”
“Or maybe another parent spoke up. I don’t know. Just . . . whatever you can find.”
“Right,” Bridget said. “Get on Facebook, find Laura Maurelli, see who wrote on her wall—parents, staff members . . . check out
their
Facebook friends—their own children, students, gaming friends . . . see if we can get a bead on Sydney’s cohort. Read what they’ve been posting about her.”
“It’s scary how much kids put out there in public,” Two-Trees said.
“Oof, don’t I know it.”
Against strict Wyrd policies, posing as Claire Bambridge’s long lost sister, Bridget maintained contact with her own children and grandchildren. She knew all too well what kids and adults foolishly posted online.
“At the very least, if she’s infected, we can start a new containment list,” Two-Trees said.
“Bloody hell . . . All right. Just don’t be out there too late, and don’t go into any dark corners.”
“Too late for that,” he said. He was already at the end of the bridge and off the beaten track. “You have the county map there?”
“Yeah—what the
hell
is all that noise?”
“Hydroelectric dam’s spillway,” he said. “Find it on the map. Go to the north-western edge of Steeper Lake. See where the two lakes join?”
“Hang on.” Bridget shuffled papers while Two-Trees pressed on into thicker weeds, following a well-trodden path.
The fence had been solidly built once, and it was plastered with No Trespassing signs, as if that would do any good. He pushed deeper into familiar territory, where the wind blew through the fall colours. The sun never quite reached the dirty floor, though it wasn’t exactly a forest. It was derelict ground with good overhead cover. He followed the chain link south, following the chutes and the spillway past the ruins of the mill. Even from a distance, between the choking weeds, he could see graffiti tags from three generations of trespassers. There wasn’t a pane of glass left, and not much of a roof either.
“Yeah, here it is,” she said. “What am I looking at?”
“Paper mill,” Two-Trees replied. “The place has been abandoned since the early ’80s, but it’s still a truant’s paradise.”
He stepped over a very old, very abused-looking mattress. There were signs of regular campfires here, complete with fire stones, a charred aluminum cooking grill, and chewed up plastic bags half buried in the mud. There was a torn backpack, logs converted into benches, a yellow plastic soap dish, and the mottled remains of an old math textbook.
“And you think you’ll find a body inside the mill?” Bridget asked.
“Maybe,” he said. He stopped a step later. Police had taped off the area where the fence had been cut and bent over. “Actually . . . I think someone already has. Whoop—hang on. Someone’s coming.”
Two-Trees slipped behind some bushes and watched as lead detective Richard Palmer came skidding down the hill on his heel and stopped inside the personal space of another officer, pretending like he’d meant to do it.
“You still there?” Bridget asked.
“Never mind, I’ll ask Buckle if they found anything,” Two-Trees murmured.
“Buckle who?”
“I’ll explain it when I get there. You just get started on that Facebook angle.”
“Way ahead of you,” Bridget said, just as Detective Sergeant Richard Palmer looked up and Two-Trees turned away, pretending to be just another vagrant who thought it best to get out of The Man’s way. “You all right?” she asked. “You sound like you’ve got a mouthful of marbles.”
“It’s nothing,” Two-Trees said. “Just get cracking. Sooner I’m out of Halo County, the happier I’ll be.”
BRIDGET HAD TAKEN
over the job of looking at the websites Michael Crow had written down, though she often had to try several times before she had the correct address. After printing countless articles from innumerable sites, using Two-Trees’ portable laser printer, she sat back, rubbing her eyes, yawned, and crossed her feet at the ankles before dropping them on Two-Trees’ lap. The printouts were scattered everywhere, some highlighted, some covered in point-form notes.
