The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (79 page)

At least for a while. But the past was there, as permanent as the teddy bear tattoo on her left buttock, the teddy bear tattoo that was the same as Bernice Morin’s. And then … And then what? Christy had walked into Mieka’s store one
afternoon, and Bernice Morin had been there. What had happened after that?

I was so deep in thought that I guess I didn’t hear him knocking. Finally, frustrated and soaked to the skin, he opened the door. It was the boy who had delivered the message the night before. He was wearing a bright neon shirt and a cap like the one of Taylor’s he’d admired so much.

I smiled and told him I liked his hat, but he didn’t smile back. He was solemn with the importance of his message. “There’s a phone call at the hotel for you. An emergency, they said, for Joanne. They sent me to get you. Quick.”

I looked at Taylor sleeping, warm in her bed, and I looked at the rain outside.

I decided in a second.

I grabbed my bag, took out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the boy. “You remember Taylor. Stay with her for a while, will you? I don’t want to take her out in this, and she’ll be scared if she wakes up and I’m gone.”

His hand shot out and grabbed the five dollars.

“I’ll give you five more if you’re here when I get back,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

I grabbed my jacket. It wasn’t much use against a rain that seemed torrential, but it was something. As I climbed the hill, the gravel gave way beneath my feet. It seemed I took one step forward and slid back two. The whole summer had been like that – filled with frustration, filled with rain, filled with death. I was glad to see the soft fuzz of light from the hotel through the grey. I ran across the parking lot. Incredibly, the kids were still sitting on the steps. A couple of the more sober ones were holding green plastic garbage bags over their heads as protection, but the rest were so drunk they didn’t seem to realize it was raining. A girl was standing at
the side of the steps vomiting. I could hear her retching as I ran past her into the hotel.

The hotel manager was wearing the shirt he’d been wearing the night Taylor and I arrived, the one that said, “Jackfish in Lard Makes a Fisherman Hard.”

“There’s a message for me,” I said. “An emergency phone call.”

“Says who?” He was smiling, enjoying his role as rustic funny man. This was going to be rich.

“The boy who brought the message last night came by the fishing shacks a few minutes ago. A little guy about ten, wearing a neon T-shirt and a new cap.”

“He must’ve been playing a joke,” the proprietor said.

“A joke?” I said.

“Yeah, a joke.” His face rearranged itself into a mask of concern. “Of course, he could be a thief. These kids around here learn fast. If you’ve got valuables in that shack, you might be smart to hightail it back there. This hotel is not liable for anything that gets taken from a guest’s room. You’re warned. There’s a sign on your door.”

“There aren’t any valuables there,” I said. And then I thought of Taylor. Taylor was there.

For a split second I considered asking him to help me. Then I looked into his eyes. He wouldn’t have crossed the room to save his own mother. I was on my own. I ran down the hill, slipping in the loose wet gravel, catching myself on bush branches to keep from falling. I ran and fell and picked myself up and ran again. I went as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The front door to the shack was open. There was no one at the table. There was no one in the bed.

I called her name. I called and called, but as I sank down in the chair at the kitchen table, I knew she couldn’t hear me.

I ran outside and looked along the shoreline. It was deserted. I thought I saw a boat heading through the north
channel, but it was raining so hard I wasn’t sure. I tried to listen for the sound of a motor, but it was no use.

As I walked to the shack, I could feel the panic rising. I opened the screen door and went in. “This is how it starts,” I said, and my voice echoed in the empty room. “This is how it starts.”

In the mirror above the dresser, I could see myself. My hair was dark with rain, and my face was wet, but I looked like my ordinary self. I thought of the dozens of times I had seen the parents of abducted children on television. For all of them, the nightmare must have started just like this, on an ordinary day when, just for a moment, they had dropped their guard, and everything had changed forever. They had been ordinary people living anonymous lives, and then, in the blink of an eye, they were famous, their tense faces flickering across our television sets, their voices breaking as they justified themselves to the audience. “I only turned my back for a second; she was right there.” “We never left him alone.” “I always told him not to talk to strangers.”

After the media wearied of their stories, the lost children’s pictures cropped up on bus shelters and milk cartons. And I would look at the pictures of these children, faces shining, hair freshly cut for the school photographer, and tell myself this wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been careful. This wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been conscientious; if they had really loved their kids; if they hadn’t taken chances. It was a mantra to distance myself, protect myself, and it had worked for twenty-one years.

Now, without warning, I had crossed the line that separates the lucky ones from the losers. Now I would be the one on
TV
, and it would be Taylor’s picture that would be … A thought struck me, terrible, annihilating. I didn’t have a picture of Taylor. She had only been with us since February. I hadn’t taken her picture. I wasn’t a good parent. I was negligent.
Without a picture, I could lose her forever. I could forget her face, and it would be as if she had never existed. Suddenly, finding a picture was the most important thing. There had to be one somewhere. My mind spun crazily through the possibilities. And then, I remembered.

The new bike. The morning we bought her new bike, I had taken pictures of Taylor wobbling down the driveway. I remembered looking through the view finder and noticing that the pink stripe on her safety helmet was exactly the shade of pink on her two-wheeler.

I hadn’t failed her, after all. Suddenly, as if it had appeared as a reward for my diligence, I saw the postcard. It was on top of the dresser. The printing looked hurried. “Don’t call the police for 24 hours and she’ll be back safe.” I turned it over; on the other side there was a picture of the Kingfisher Hotel, seductive under picture-book turquoise skies.

Twenty-four hours … I began to shake at the thought of what they could do to her in twenty-four hours. I thought about the men next door. “So where’s the hairless pussy around here?” My stomach heaved, but I pushed myself up from the table and walked next door. Their car was still out back, but they could have taken her in a boat. A boat would have been the thing. They could have taken her out in the channel to the big lake, to the islands where you couldn’t hear a child screaming. Their screen door was unlatched. I went onto the porch and pounded on their front door. There was no answer, but I had to be sure. I tried to smash down the door, but it was surprisingly solid. They had left the front window open an inch. Only the screen protected it, but when I tried to loosen the screen by hand, it wouldn’t budge. Years of paint had stuck it firm. I went back to our place and picked up a butcher knife. I used the knife to cut through the screen and I reached in and raised the window. I crawled
through onto the kitchen table. There was no one there.

Their suitcases were open on the floor. I started rummaging in them, looking for something that might help me know what had happened. The cases were filled with clothes for the fishermen. Someone had bought these things for a man who was a husband and father. (“This will be a good shirt for Dad when he goes up north.”) At the bottom of the suitcases were the magazines. They were unspeakable. Think of the worst thing you know, and this was worse. The children looked as if they had been drugged. I hoped to God they had been drugged, anything so they wouldn’t feel the things that were being done to their bodies, those fragile, perfect bodies.

When I looked at the magazines, I knew there was a connection between this perversion and Taylor’s disappearance. And I knew something else. Everything was connected somehow to the Lily Pad. But how? As I climbed the hill to the hotel, I repeated the word, pounding it into the ground with every leaden footstep.

This time I didn’t use the phone in the hotel. There was a pay phone outside the restaurant where Taylor and I had eaten that first night. I went into the restaurant and got change, then I came back out and called Jill Osiowy.

She answered on the first ring. “They’ve taken Taylor,” I said. “They left a postcard with instructions. They say if I don’t call the police, they’ll bring her back safe in twenty-four hours.”

“Do what they say,” Jill said. Her voice was dead. “Jo, Helmut Keating called. The people who own the Lily Pad are after him. He found out something about Kim Barilko’s murder, and he got greedy. He says they’re going to kill him. Jo, I believe him. He wants me to get into their computer. He says if I key in the word ‘teddy,’ I’ll get everything I need. I can stop them, Jo. I can stop those bastards.”

Suddenly, Jill’s voice broke. “Do you know what they did? They killed Murray and Lou. They slit their throats and dropped them in my garbage can.”

There were black spots in front of my eyes, and my knees went weak. I thought I was going to pass out. I opened the door to the telephone booth and took deep breaths till the faintness passed.

All the time, Jill was talking to me. “Jo, do what they say about Taylor. Don’t call the police. Don’t take a chance with her.”

The line went dead. For a moment my options flashed wildly through my mind. There weren’t many. I thought of Jill’s old tortoiseshell-cats, killed as a warning, and I knew I wasn’t going to leave Taylor with those monsters for twenty-four hours.

When I walked through the door to the Angler’s Corner, I was cold with anger. No one was going to hurt Taylor. Jackie Desjarlais was in the corner playing pool. I grabbed his arm and started dragging him toward the door.

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“Are you crazy?” he said.

I jerked him toward me till our faces were almost touching. “Do I look crazy?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “you do.” He tried to wrench away from me.

“Someone’s taken Taylor,” I said, “and I think they’re going to hurt her.”

“Little Sister,” he said.

He had been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk.

“I think they’ve taken her somewhere in the lake. To an island. I need you to –”

“The Lily Pad,” he said.

I felt as if I’d stepped through the looking glass.

His voice was dead. “The Lily Pad. That’s where Theresa
was. It’s a place where men can do things to kids. Theresa said it was just a business. That’s how much they fucked her over. That she would think it was just a business.”

“Please,” I said.

“Let’s go,” he said. “My boat’s down at the dock. You got money for gas? I drank my last five bucks.”

“I’ve got money,” I said.

When he came back, he had a gas can and a bottle of rye. His boat was a new one, fibreglass with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor. It looked sturdy. Then I looked out at the lake, and suddenly Jackie’s boat seemed very small. He reached under the front and pulled out a khaki slicker.

“Put this on,” he said. He opened the rye. “Take a slug.”

I did. The whisky burned my throat, but it warmed and calmed me.

It took us forty-five minutes to get to the island, forty-five minutes of being pounded by the storm and my own fear. We were heading into the wind and the rain was blinding. Every time Jackie’s boat slapped against the whitecaps, it shuddered as if it was about to split in two. My panic about Taylor hit in waves, overwhelming me. At one point, I looked out and I couldn’t see anything: no islands, no shoreline, no line dividing earth from heaven. In that moment I felt a stab of existential terror. I was alone in the universe in a frail boat with a stranger. It was a metaphor the psalmist would have understood.

And then Jackie Desjarlais looked up and smiled at me.

“Some fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “some fun.”

Those were the only words we spoke until the island came into view. The rain had stopped, and as we came closer to shore, I turned to Jackie.

“Shouldn’t we try to keep out of sight?” I asked.

“They know the boat,” he said flatly.

For a moment, I thought I’d fallen into a trap. I remembered Jill Osiowy’s warning: “Don’t take things at face value. For once in your life, Jo, don’t assume the best.”

“Everybody here works for them one way or another,” Jackie was saying. “I’m one of the ones that brings the clients over.” He shuddered. “And I feel like shit. Theresa always said it was a business, a service. You asked me back there how she got out of Blue Heron Point. She worked for them. She started when she was a kid. Maybe eleven. She didn’t have no choice then. Our old man was a drunken son of a bitch and our mother …” He spat into the water. He looked at me and his eyes were dark with fury. “Our mother was no mother. A woman from town told Theresa that Social Services was going to take me and her, too, unless Theresa did something. So she did something …”

“She must have loved you very much,” I said.

“She woulda done anything for me,” he said flatly. “When she was older, they brought her into the business. They sent her down south to go to high school and look for more kids. For a couple of years she was a kind of manager at their place in Regina. She made a lotta money, bought me this boat, bought me everything. She always took care of me.” His voice broke. “Fuck,” he said.

We were almost ashore. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. I looked into my bag for a Kleenex, and there, folded neatly, forgotten, was the picture Taylor had drawn the morning after Theresa died.

I closed my eyes and remembered how Taylor had looked, running down the hill, hair tangled from sleep, laughing, eager to get the day started. And she had drawn this. I unfolded it and felt the tears come.