Tell Anna She's Safe (16 page)

The case? Or my eyes? “But then you'll have to drive me home.”

“I'd rather do that than….”

“Than what?”

Quinn sent a quick glance my way. “Than eat in your boyfriend's house.”

“It's my house too.” I was indignant. Though it wasn't, technically, true. I would get my own. Soon.

“I'd rather have you at my place.” He shrugged. “Call it male territoriality. I don't mind driving you home.”

Under my too-light jacket, I was starting to shiver.

“What do your tastes run to?”

I looked around Quinn's living room. It was sparsely furnished, and needed a carpet, though the hardwood floors were beautiful. “Well, I think I'd prefer red wine, if you have any.” Wine, more than Scotch, would take the chill out of my bones. And hopefully slow my pulse too. What was I
doing
here?

Quinn laughed. “In music, my girl. I meant in music.” He gestured to his
CD
cabinet. “Pick anything you like. And you can even have red wine. I'll be back in a sec.”

I listened to his footsteps retreating on the hardwood of the long narrow hallway. The stairs inside the walk-up had led us to an apartment on the second floor, with rooms off the long narrow hall. The kitchen was at the back, south-facing. The living room was in the front, with a small glassed-in balcony jutting out from it above the front porch. In between were two rooms. Quinn had opened the door to each in turn, his bedroom and the guest room. I had given the first room only a quick self-conscious glance. At the second, Quinn had said, “If I have too much to drink you can stay here.”

“If
you
have too much to drink?” Then I realized what he meant. I was here without my car. My
getaway
car.

Something must have shown on my face. Quinn gave me a light punch on the arm. “I'm kidding, El. I promise I'll get you home tonight. Something to drink?”

He led the way down the hall.

“Are you giving me a choice this time?”

“You always have a choice,” he said over his shoulder. “As long as it's Scotch. And here's the living room.”

I had Blue Rodeo's
Five Days in July
playing when he returned with two bulbous glasses of wine. Between the two of them, they looked like they held the contents of the entire bottle. Quinn handed me one and gestured to the couch. Blue Rodeo's familiar distinctive sound was calming me down. The wine would do the rest. Quinn was a cop, for God's sake; who would I be safer with?

Facing me from a decorous distance, my cop held his glass out. “To nailing Brennan.”

The toast undid my newly achieved calm. “To finding Lucy,” I said.

Quinn clinked his glass to mine and took a sip. “Hmm, not bad for something I found in the bottom of my liquor cabinet.”

“You could have had Scotch.
I
could have had Scotch.”

He held up a hand. “I like wine. Just don't have it very often. Wine you need someone to drink with.” He gave me a significant look.

I took a large swallow then and offered to put some food together to go with the wine.

“Relax. To be honest I'm not very hungry. Unless you are.”

I shrugged. “I ate something before you came.”

“Then there's no rush. This is nice. Good music choice. I haven't had a guest here since….”

“How long
have
you been here?” I couldn't remember when he had said he'd split up with his wife.

“Bordering on a year now. It's not really my kind of place, but it'll do for now.”

“Oh, don't you like it? I love these older buildings.”

Quinn looked around the living room and his face brightened. “It's not bad, is it? I haven't had much chance to do much in the way of decorating yet. I'm barely here.”

“But you're—” On half-time, I was going to say, but it didn't feel like a topic I should initiate.

“I'm just not the kind of guy who spends much time at home when it's just me. Was different when I was married.”

“Do you have kids?” I wasn't sure if this was safer ground or not.

Quinn shook his head. “No, thank God for that. I mean, if it wasn't going to work out.”

His comment brought to memory something Lucy had said early on about a pregnancy scare while Tim had still been in prison. I took another swallow of wine. The bottle had been in the bottom of Quinn's liquor cabinet just a bit too long, I guessed, but I welcomed the relaxing buzz it was giving me. “How does that work in prison, anyway—exercising your conjugal rights?” I was willing myself not to blush.

“Ah yes, the notorious private family visits.
PFV
s they call them. They take place in the fuck trailers. Pardon my language.”

“Fuck trailers?” God, why had I asked?

“They used to be actual trailers, but at Warkworth—that's where Tim was transferred after Lucy met him—they had started building small semi-detached houses by the time she was visiting.”

“So how would it work? I mean getting a
PFV
?”

I couldn't bring myself to look at him, but his voice sounded amused. “Tell me you haven't got your eye on someone serving time in the slammer, Ellen McGinn.”

“
No.
Forget I—”

“Sorry. I'm being a brat. You want to know. You have a right. The way it works, as far as I understand, is: in Lucy's case, meeting Tim after he was already behind bars, they'd have to know each other for a year before they could declare themselves common law. Then they could apply to have
PFV
s. You're eligible every six weeks. You go for a weekend—three days actually, I think, Friday to Monday. Or Tuesday to Thursday. Lucy would have ordered—and paid for—all the food. Tim would have brought it from the kitchen. They would be locked into one of the fuck—sorry, I mean one of the houses—for the duration. Private time. He'd be allowed to wear civilian clothes.”

Locked into a small house on prison grounds for three days with an inmate. I couldn't imagine it. Though of course it would be entirely different if the inmate was your partner or husband. But for a person like Lucy, with all her fears. She must have felt supremely comfortable with Tim to risk doing that. I looked at Quinn then. I thought about visiting him in a prison. Being locked up for three days. Something in my abdomen, and lower, responded. I took a sip of wine, hoping the big glass would hide my face.

*

SHE FOLLOWED THE SENIOR VISITS
and Correspondence Officer outside into the bright May sunshine and along a narrow flagstone path that bisected the lawn. High in the corners of the prison yard the cameras watched her every move.

They watched her follow the officer toward the row of semi-detached houses. He stopped at one of two gates right next to each other. The gates led to two walkways across two tiny front lawns up to two front doors. A high chain-link fence surrounded both yards and ran between them. A green nylon sheet covered the portion of the fence between the two small patches of lawn.

Except for the unusual highness of the fence and the heavy mesh covering the windows, the building looked like a normal house—a white clapboard bungalow, with a small cement stoop; it might have been out of the fifties. Lucy could pretend she was a war bride—as her mother had been, more or less. Except that her mother's incarceration, starting out in a small post-war bungalow in North Toronto, had been permanent. Not a three-day visit.

Lucy banished the thoughts of her mother; she had not invited her on this weekend. She watched the officer beside her. He shook out his ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the gate. He swung it open and smiled for Lucy to go through. Inside the yard, she turned to watch him shut the gate between them. She watched, in horrified fascination, as the lock snapped shut.

She looked up to the top of the fence and was suddenly dizzy. Before her eyes the fence seemed to be stretching upward higher and higher. The panic was rising inside her along with the fence. She reached out to grasp the metal and looked down at the grass. She was aware of the officer watching her. She concentrated on the blades of grass at her feet. If they could thrive in here, continue to grow and live, so could she. She wouldn't need to scream. The guard would not have to re-open the gate and take her away.

And, she reminded herself, there was a phone inside. All she needed to do was pick it up and a guard would be at the other end. Twice a day, a guard would be coming around to do a count, to see that everything was alright. She wasn't being abandoned; there was an out if she needed it.

She was so intent on bracing herself for her voluntary incarceration, she didn't hear the front door open. It was the officer looking beyond her that made her turn.

Tim stood on the cement stoop, in a white T-shirt and blue-jeans.

Lucy stared up at the man on the stoop. This was not a numbered prisoner. This was Tim Brennan of Brudenell. And on his face were reflected all her own fear and excitement, anticipation and terror.

She turned back to the V. and C. Officer. He was looking at her with a question in his eyes. A kind concern. And encouragement.

She nodded and made her way up the walkway to Tim and the open door behind him.

*

“WHAT IS IT ABOUT YOU
women, anyway?” Quinn was shaking his head. “There are so many documented cases of women befriending—and marrying—losers in prison. Trying to rescue them. And then ending up dead.”

Lucy wasn't trying to rescue anyone but herself
.

Lucy's old friend Kevin's words. I had a feeling they might be true. But Quinn's view was probably going to be the prevailing view. That she had walked into a trap, possibly had deserved what she got. “She wasn't trying to rescue him,” I said, knowing I couldn't defend myself.

“Well, I just don't get it. Especially since his records show there was evidence of yelling and fighting even when he was in prison. He probably physically abused her there. Why would a smart, sane woman continue in a relationship like that?”

I let out an audible sigh through my nose. I didn't have any answer to that. I had no experience of violence. My impression of abused women had always been one of helpless women who got battered around by much stronger men. But Lucy was not helpless. Despite her fears. Despite her size. I knew how feisty she was. Even in my second dream she had not been lying there passively. Each time she'd come to, she'd been furious. Yelling at Tim. Provoking him so that he'd drugged her again and again. I had been assuming that whatever Tim had done to her—drugged her, strangled her, whatever it had been—had been an isolated act of violence. Now, here was Quinn telling me there had been violence even while he was still in prison. They would have been alone during their
PFV
s. Had it started there?

“Anyway, enough about those two,” Quinn added. “I don't want to talk about any of that disturbing stuff tonight.”

You don't want me running away.
There was, I mused, no chance of that tonight. The wine was having its intended effect. I felt my body and my mind relaxing. I pulled a leg up onto the couch, tucked it under my other leg. I concentrated on the man beside me. He wasn't a handsome man. His face was too round, his features too blunt. But he had physical presence. A confidence exuded from him. And there was no denying the chemical energy between us.

He smiled at me now. “Tell me more about yourself, Ellen McGinn. You want kids?”

I shrugged. “Maybe some day, before I'm forty.”

“You've got years then.”

“Flatterer.”

“You can't be more than twenty-eight.”

I laughed and made a “keep it coming” gesture with my free hand. “I thought cops were supposed to be able to see through all that.”

“We see through
everything
, Ellen. Make no mistake about it.”

“So, how old am I?” I gave him a challenging look.

He pretended to scrutinize me. I enjoyed the scrutiny.

“You're thirty-three,” he said.

“You read my driver's licence.”

Quinn adopted an innocent look. “Now when would I have seen your driver's licence?”

“I don't know, it must be on a computer system somewhere.”

“Yes, all your vitals are there, for the entire force to read: single—newly single—beautiful strawberry blonde, five foot, hmmm, eight. Very fit. Likes biking, skiing, running, but
not
canoeing or swimming or anything related to water.” He was checking off the items on his fingers. Strong-looking square fingers.

I couldn't quite hide my smile. I didn't even mind him mentioning the water. It was an understanding kind of teasing. Not a mocking. “Quite the system you've got there,” I commented.