The Taken (21 page)

He did some typing. “Yes. This is being processed through Anonymice as well.” He pointed to a string of numbers. “That’s their IP address.”

“Right now?” she asked. “The connection is live right now?”

“Yes.”

She patted him on the head, and he shrunk a little under her touch. “You can go.”

She went out the back of the pen toward her office. “Cartwright?” Melanie Cartwright appeared in the hallway. “Where’s my bacon sandwich?”

“Do you mean Mr. Pedersen?”

“Him, too.”

“I’m expecting him any minute,” she said.

Hazel went into her office. The missing link to Eldwin was some internet service that existed solely to allow people to work untraceably on the internet. But she knew what the average person didn’t: even a buried footprint still exists.

Something landed on her desk. The homey scent of peameal bacon wafted up from it. “I serve two masters,” said Andrew Pedersen.

“Thanks for coming in,” she said. “Have a seat. There’s something I want to show you.”

He sat in the chair opposite her, looking around the office. Another phantasm of the past settled on them both, him in that chair, having brought her lunch. The comfortable silence of ritual. Would there come a time when she wouldn’t be stumbling into these hollows, shaped like her, that belonged to another time?

She opened the wax paper that wrapped the sandwich and passed him a small sheaf of papers. “I’m wondering if you can look at this for me. We think it’s written in a kind of code you might be familiar with.”

“Really.”

“It’s the fourth and fifth chapters of the short story in the
Record
. We’re not sure it’s still the same writer, and we think he might be leading us to something. Only we’re not sure what and we’re not sure where he’s telling us to look.”

His eyebrows went up. “Interesting.” He accepted the papers as she took her first bite of the thick, fatty sandwich. It was gorgeous. She let him read the papers in silence. When he’d finished them, he went back to the first page and read them
through again. By the time she was done her sandwich, he’d finished as well. “Pretty sick stuff.”

“It’s not the plot that’s got us confused. It’s the sense that there’s something buried in it. Did you notice how many times he used the word
damage?”

“I did.”

“So?”

“Well, he
is
better than the first writer –”

“So you agree it’s not the same person.”

“Absolutely.”

For some reason, his confirmation of what they believed weighed on her. “That’s what we thought, too.”

“The guy who wrote the first two chapters is incapable of something like …” He shuffled the pages. “‘Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel.’ That’s almost good.”

“Fine. So someone’s taken over the story.”

“That doesn’t bode too well for the first writer.”

“No. It doesn’t,” she said, and she decided not to say anything else. “Go back to ‘damage.’ Does it point to anything for you?”

Andrew looked down at the pages in his lap. “Well, there’s some pretty graphic ‘damage’ in the story, don’t you think? Maybe the writer’s just pointing you to its importance. Telling you it’s meaningful.”

“And nothing else? I’m of the mind that these two chapters are telling us what to do. The Wise character talks to this dead woman. Tries to destroy her again by burning something he’s written.
This
story. Then he finds himself trapped. I shouldn’t
tell you this, but the man who wrote the first two chapters of this story seems to be missing. This isn’t a yarn anymore.”

He flipped through the story again. On the last page, he began to nod.

“What is it?”

“You might be on to something.” He got up and came behind the desk. “Look at these three lines at the end.” “Someone’s speaking to him.”

“No. Someone’s speaking to
you.”
He reached for a pen. “A good cryptic clue gives you a definition, an action, and something to perform the action on. Listen again …” He read the lines:

“Repunctuate that first line –
You’re inside it now. Aren’t you wise?
Maybe that’s a challenge. ‘Aren’t you wise?’”

“Wise to what?”

“The first part is the action.” He nodded at the paper. “This is actually kind of smart.
You’re inside it
– that’s a container clue. It means that what you’re looking for here is hidden inside other words. The next two lines are ‘Who … me?’ and ‘Draw closer.’ Do you see it now?”

“Andrew, I don’t! That’s why you’re here.”

“What does ‘draw closer’ mean?”

“Um, to approach … to look into …”

“To home in on?”

“Okay.”

“The container is ‘Who … me?’ The word is
home
. It’s inside in the line. Wise ends up in a box, something he’s
inside
, but the writer wants you to
draw closer
. To what?”

She became very still and touched the lines on the page as if they were embossed there and she could feel their contours. “Home. He wants us to go to the house.”

“Cherry Tree Lane.”

She pressed the intercom. “Melanie, get me Wingate.”

Her Detective Constable was in the office within seconds. Andrew showed him what he’d found. “Are you sure that’s what it means?”

“Once it’s unravelled, it doesn’t seem at all accidental,” said Andrew.

Hazel pointed to the words
Cherry Tree Lane
in the story. “Where is this?” she asked.

“Umm … There’s a Cherry
Street
, but I’ve never heard of a Cherry Tree Lane. At least not downtown.” He thought for a second. “Yeah, I don’t know what street he’s referring to. Maybe something out of downtown.”

“But he describes a drive to the city centre, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

She looked at her watch. “It’s too late to go now.” She looked up at him. “I need you to start on something else, James.” “You don’t want me downtown?”

“No. I want you to get some legal advice for me concerning a company that operates on the internet.”

He squinted at her, a bit confused, but he could wait for the details.

She continued, now talking to Andrew. “Anyway, I think I need someone who knows downtown and cryptic crosswords
about equally.” He was looking at her suspiciously. “What? Were you planning on having a quiet Saturday?”

“No. But I wasn’t planning on being seconded by my ex either.”

“Would a decent sushi lunch make it worth your while?”

“Define ‘decent,’” he said.

“Set your alarm for eight.”

It was a drive like any they’d taken to visit one or the other daughter at school in Toronto, drives to campuses, the back seat loaded with Chelsea buns from the bakery, a box of Tide, a crate of apples, perhaps a couple new shirts or a case of local beer, and a suitcase packed for one night. Often these trips down to the city were precipitated by some crisis, usually minor, in one of the girls’ lives, and yes, if Hazel were honest with herself, it was usually Martha who spurred them to action. So often these drives were punctuated by feelings of anxiety and anticipation: what untoward shock had the girl prepared for them this time? And they’d arrive at her downtown sorority and try to ignore the accusing or worried looks of the sisters as they went up the stairs to Martha’s room to see what needed putting back together again.

They drove out of town and stopped at Tim’s, him ordering her what she’d always order: a large double-double and a raisin
tea biscuit. He got himself a steeped tea and a maple dip. These first twenty or so kilometres were the most familiar to them: they paced them out of everything that meant home to them, or told them that they were returning to it. But even here, things were changing; the suburban imperative was spreading farther north. Just before the town of Dublin, cornfields were being converted to “Modern Country Living,” which was to say, a grid of streets surrounding a shopping centre were going to be plunked down in the middle of what was still good land. The sign along the highway announced excitedly that the ground-breaking would take place in the fall. She noticed Andrew shaking his head.

An hour later, they passed Barrie and the highway angled into its final, long approach to the city. This length of road always soured her stomach and made her heart race – in anticipation of the difficulties to come or just because she was truly out of her element – and this time it was no different. The urban lichen was well established at this latitude (a preview of what awaited them at Dublin), and the new suburbs, each one built around an unwieldy palace of worship – a giant mosque, a towering white church, an outlet mall – had much the same architectural weight as the plastic buildings on a Monopoly board: a tidy arrangement of buildings that hid the fact that the environment was built for money, not for people. It was intended to capture and keep captive some segment of the population, upend them in the crush of prettiness, and empty their pockets. It occurred to her that, at least, the city itself could not hide its agendas. What it wanted from you it asked for once you passed through its gates.

They were driving eastward beside Lake Ontario. Its bright blue-black expanse shone in the sun, with the green gem of the Toronto Islands just a kilometre offshore. Ahead of them the towers of the city rose over the downtown like crystal, the needle of the CN Tower at its centre; from this vantage point the buildings looked like massive toys ajumble in a box. It seemed impossible that this much steel and glass and concrete could be in the same place, but as they approached it, the buildings stepped apart and the streets appeared between them, and then the cars and the bicycles and the people themselves and they were within it and part of it. There was always a strange thrill here, for Hazel, to be in this bustle, no matter how it scared her. “I think this is the first time since the girls moved out that we’ve been here for some reason other than to put out some fire in their lives.”

“Well, Emmie lives in Vancouver now. Harder to drive to.”

“It just seems like a different city without some small problem to attend to. Like anything could happen here.”

“And it usually does,” said Andrew.

“Let’s get the street guide out and let’s try to follow this guy’s directions.”

Andrew took the Perly’s out of the glove compartment and flipped it open to the page they were driving over. The world outside the car windows flattened out to red and yellow lines. “Spadina goes up past the
no longer new
stadium,” he said. “And into Chinatown.” They drove north past the theatre district and into bustling Chinatown. At a stoplight, a vegetable seller hacked the tops off coconuts with a heavy machete. North of Chinatown, the crazy quilt of restaurants and grocery stores gave way to more institutional buildings. This was the western
boundary of the University of Toronto. They tracked up to Russell Street and pulled over.

“Okay,” said Hazel. “This is where you get to shine. Find me a tree-street. Or a fruit-street. With a church on it or somewhere near.”

He held the mapbook open in his lap and clutched the page from the story with the directions to the house in his right hand. His eyes shuttled back and forth between his hand and the Perly’s. She leaned over toward him and scanned the pages along with him. There was a Hazelton Avenue, but not a Hazelnut, and a Concord, as in grape, but no Apple Street, no Banana Avenue. Leaning this close to his shoulder, she was reminded of what her mother had said about her father’s book bag and she pulled back a little.

“There’s a Chestnut Street pretty close to here. Beside City Hall,” he said.

“Church?”

“Not close by. Holy Trinity tucked in behind the Eaton Centre.”

“What else?”

“Birch Avenue, up at Summerhill. Oh, there’s Elm Street too. That’s close. And there’s a church on St. Patrick Street, right around the corner.”

“Well, let’s go take a look at it,” she said.

He directed her into a U-turn and sent her east along College Street as he continued to study the mapbook.

“I just wanted to thank you again, Andrew.”

“For what?”

“For coming to our aid.”

“Your aid, you mean,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m getting a sushi lunch out of it, don’t forget. Turn right here.”

She drove south down Beverly, cut across Baldwin to McCaul. Elm Street was a short jog south, and they parked illegally and got out. There were no houses on the street, just big apartment buildings and offices. They were behind the hospital strip of University Avenue. Midtown rose up at the end of the street. “Doesn’t feel right,” she said.

They walked down the street. From the top of St. Patrick, they could see the spire of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. But the topography was all wrong. There wasn’t a front porch for miles around. Nor chestnut trees. “Maybe we
should
go down to City Hall and look around,” she said.

Andrew had the Perly’s open with the story held against one of the pages. He’d narrowed his eyes to slits. “No,” he said. “Listen to this.”

“What?”

“‘He was following her back into the living room,’” Andrew read, “‘as if magnetized to her. He could not tell a lie: he remembered now how much he’d loved her, how, in the beginning, when they lived in that house together, he would have done anything for her.’” Andrew looked up into Hazel’s questioning eyes.
“He could not tell a lie
. When they lived in that house together? On Cherry Tree Lane?”

“You really have always thought I’m much smarter than I actually am. Spell it out, Andrew.”

“Who cannot tell a lie?”

“Pinocchio?”

“George Washington, dummy.” He shifted the story over to the right-hand page. “There’s a Washington Avenue back off Spadina.”

“Why doesn’t he just
say
this, if it’s so fucking important to him.”

“I think he wants it to be important to you too.”