Stolen Life (47 page)

The plain-clothes man yells and shoves the uniform back into the kitchen. Yvonne lies motionless, watching them. Right now she’s still okay with her T-shirt and jeans on, she’s quiet in bed. But then the squatting cop with his gun levelled, the tan plain-clothes man, waddles in on her low; he is saying something, maybe identifying himself again, maybe barking to keep her hands in sight; and a horde of men in uniform are crowding into the doorway, all pump-actions levelled. She hears herself moaning, she is trying to somehow stay herself, be her own believable person, but he’s moving in, his gun won’t stop boring in, and then he jerks her blanket away, throws it into the corner. She tries to crawl after it, the reality of her blanket, but he shouts:

“Don’t move! Do you have a weapon in your bed?”

She has nothing. Arrest strips her of every possible thing, especially choice. After Chuck, Lyle sealed it: someone had to make her choices and now they are made. She recognizes that this man she has never seen before with his revolver and tan jacket will do it. He is reading, very distinctly, from a card taped inside his notebook:

“You need not say anything. You have nothing to hope from any promise or favour, and nothing to fear from any threat. Whether or not you say anything, anything you say may be used as evidence at your trial.”

If you want to, speak, but you have the right to remain silent. Silent … it’s hard on the brain, it destroys the spirit—just go back inside the hole you already know so well; be silent. Yes, I can be that.

“You are under arrest for murder. Do you understand?”

The policeman attempts to turn her over, she is so limp her arm falls back on the bed where it was when he picked it up. She sees but does not particularly feel herself handled by this man with his gun in her face, rolling her over on her stomach. She is gone, not floating out of herself but gone inside. Like a turtle.

His knee is between her shoulder blades; he reaches for the other arm but the first flops back. Finally he tells someone angrily to come snap on the cuffs.

“… legal right to have a lawyer present when you are questioned …”

She has heard that before. But never in her bedroom, never in her own house where her children live.

Yvonne sees two plain-clothes men are trying to wake Ernie on the couch; two uniformed police climb in through the patio doors and shove aside the chairs, let’s get the bugger hauled out, but Yvonne’s Tan Jacket yells at them, “Don’t mess up a crime scene!” and they hastily try to push the furniture back where it was. They’re dragging Ernie’s arms together for handcuffs, “No!” Tan Jacket orders again, “He’s gotta be awake; you have to read him his rights!”

Yvonne asks, “Where are my kids?”

“Hey,” Tan Jacket says, “someone better round up the kids before Social Services gets here. How many have you got?”

“Three.”

“Find three kids,” he orders.

A uniformed officer brings her knee-high leather boots, her classiest shoes, into the crowded kitchen, bends, sticks her feet into them, hauls them up her legs, and then pushes her jeans down over them. She is being shoved out, moves mechanically, gripped by someone holding her elbows back; she’s bumping into the huge men standing all about her like trees.

“I want to talk to my kids!”

But they’ve got her out on the porch, pushing her, helpless with her hands cuffed and ankles shackled, and a photographer is flashing pictures. “No!” her Tan Jacket yells behind her. “You, get that camera, take out all the film!”

She can hear James behind her and she jerks her elbow loose, turning, and he says, “Okay, okay—let her.”

James—her Little Big Man—stands on the top step, staring about, very frightened. She kneels in front of him, into him since she has no hands to touch him; he nuzzles closer and she places her forehead against his. She tells him she has to go away for a while, these men say she has done something bad, but she will be back as soon as she can. His lips quiver, his eyes fill, and there’s her Suzie Q squeezing between cop legs.

“Hi, Baby. Mommy loves you. James, you go take care of your sister, both your sisters, watch out for them …”

She wants to hug them; it is unbearable not to be able to hold them, and she jerks herself away so they won’t see her cry. She tells Tan Jacket, “Take me, now!”

Then Chantal comes running from school, bouncing through the trees, and sees Yvonne being pushed towards the cruiser, weeping, falling to one knee, and the seven-year-old freezes. The police haul Yvonne to her feet beside the car, and then she sees Chantal. She forces herself to think, to speak clearly through the pain that is breaking her, “Chantal, tell them you want to go to Aunty Bev’s. Get them to let you.”

And Chantal understands; Bev is a friend who takes in foster children; the kids are always playing back and forth between their houses.

But then her private life is over. She’s pushed into the back seat of the cruiser, Tan Jacket follows, and already there are only questions.

“Where’d you guys take him? He may still be alive, where?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

A grand, public departure with an
RCMP
in uniform driving a uniformed car and all the neighbours at attention. She’ll never see the door, the house again. Or her wide Dodge van, standing there, waiting for her to get all the children together, to climb in and turn the key.

They are pulling her out at the jail when she says, “Get my mom … Red Pheasant Reserve … she’ll come for my children.”

“Where, your mother, where is she?”

“Saskatchewan. Cecilia Bear Knight. No phone.”

“Her name is Ceas—Ceas—what? Bear?”

“Knight, Red Pheasant … Ce-cil-i-a.”

They are in control.

Except for one thing: her silence. Questions, questions, let them pull out strands of hair, even offer them more—here, take it—so that they will finally let her sink into a chair and she can tilt forward, lay her head face down on another chair, go away. Long ago she knew this, as a tiny child she was taught this over and over: cry if you must, but don’t speak a word. Not to anyone. But the questions persist; surrounded by uniformed chests she realizes her menstruation has begun. They don’t know what to do; they all leave and a woman officer appears. She leads
her to a bathroom, strips her naked, and gives her coveralls of paper. And a pad, when she asks for it.

Then it’s back to the interview room. Tan Jacket appears, more questions. She tells him that last night a cab driver named Lyle raped her and she is hauled to the hospital, to the clinic and lab; she’s shivering in the monkey suit, very nearly hidden in it, but not her head, and of course her hands are sentenced to exposure in handcuffs, her legs to shackles; she’s on public view and led about with her hands over her crotch—no panties are permitted, only the coveralls. Pulled by men in and out of cars, past hospital and clinic workers, patients, past policemen, prisoners, janitors, lawyers, all of them men and all of them glancing sideways at her again and again, at her handcuffed hands bunching her sagging paper suit up high between her legs because she must hold the pad in place somehow.

Finally, late Friday evening, the endless dragging around is over and she is locked in a cell; she can lie down. She knows that Dwayne and Ernie have also been arrested; that Shirley Anne is nowhere to be found—but there will be time to think, more than enough time.

Sequence of Events Continued

The Boys and the Cell Shot

[Dialogue selected from the official record of “cell shot” made between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Monday, 18 September 1989; other details are added from the sworn testimony given by Constable Harvey Jones at the preliminary inquiry, 1 February 1990.]

The parkland world of fall evergreen and glazing gold aspen shimmers over the Medicine Lodge Hills to the west, and the Bear Hills of the Hobbema reserves to the east, as Constable Harvey R. Jones of the
RCMP
General Investigation Services, Red Deer, drives north to Wetaskiwin. It is Monday, 18 September 1989. He listens to the country-music station that highlights area news, and its “Top of the Hour” report is about the three Wetaskiwin people who have been arrested in connection with the murder, last Friday, of an unemployed
man of no fixed address; another suspect, a woman, is still at large.

The three will appear before a judge this morning to be formally charged in court.

With his long hair, beard, and rough clothes, Constable Jones looks like a biker; his official assignment is to be an actor who fishes for information. He will describe his job to Judge H.B. Casson at the preliminary inquiry as follows: “I had been advised [by Corporal Bradley] that I was going to be placed in the cells with one or possibly two suspects in relation to a homicide. I was given no details—I heard some basic details on a radio broadcast […]. It’s generally found, if a person goes in in an undercover capacity … the less they know the better.”

Around ten o’clock, he gets himself shoved into the largest cell in the Wetaskiwin City Police Station. He is armed with all he needs: a tiny radio transmitter concealed under his shirt collar, low enough on his neck so his beard won’t affect it.

Dwayne Wenger is seated on a bottom bunk; he glances up as the guard locks the door behind Jones.

“How ya doin’?” Jones says with just the right edge of careless cheeriness to get a momentum started.