The Taken (3 page)

He’d kept busy for part of the afternoon, and then gone home for a two-hour nap. Three days a week now, with Hazel gone, he was working doubles. In at six, break from three to five, and then back in until eleven. When he returned to the station house, the evening shift change was starting. Half the cars were out on the roads already, dealing with the developing mess that was long-weekend traffic. He went to his desk to check his messages and get ready to go through the day’s reports. That was part of his job now, too. Cartwright appeared behind him. “There you are,” she said.

“Where am I supposed to be?”

“You missed all the excitement. We got a call from a hysterical lady up in Caplin. We sent three cars up there.”

“What’s going on?”

“Says she found a body.”

He immediately stood and put on his cap. “A body? Where?”

“She said she found it in Gannon Lake. The body of a woman.”

She was still sitting on the couch, lost in thought, when Glynnis unlocked the basement door and came in. She hated it when Glynnis used her key; she felt she deserved at the very least a courteous knock. Glynnis looked to the bed and then her eyes tacked across the room and found Hazel. “There you are,” she said.

“World explorer.”

“You want to eat lunch there or will you be more comfortable at home base?”

“I’ll lie down.”

Glynnis put a paper bag on the bedspread and came over to offer an arm. Glynnis was the one who lifted her, who carried her. Twice a week, she bathed her and that was the
sine qua non
of Hazel’s humiliation, an unthinkable abasement, to be bathed by the woman for whom her husband had left her. But she had come to accept that there was no other way. She wrapped an arm around Glynnis’s shoulders and the two of them hobbled to the bed. “You need a pill?” Glynnis asked.

“I’m fine for now.”

“I brought us tuna today. Okay if I eat with you?” She asked this even as she dragged one of the chairs to the side of the bed. “I know I’m not your preferred company, but it’s silly for me to eat alone upstairs and you alone down here.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“You should be careful,” said Hazel. “People might start to think you really care.”

“Well, if they do, I can just smack you around a little and clear up any confusion.”

Hazel took a long slug of her coffee. “Do you want to smack me around, Glynnis?”

“I can wait until you’re done your lunch.”

“See, I knew you cared.”

Glynnis smiled. “Keep up that positive thinking, Hazel.”

After lunch, Hazel reset the bed into afternoon sleep-mode, but when she lay down, she wasn’t as tired as she thought she’d be. Visits from Glynnis always rattled her. The woman’s kindness was the hardest thing: it would have been for anyone. Surely Glynnis deserved to be punished for her kindness? Everything else, Hazel had earned: Andrew’s cheating on her, the divorce, her life alone with her smart-mouthed mother. But did she merit this? This awful tenderness?

She reached across to the bedside table to choose something to read. The gardening magazines were too much for a shut-in, and she chose instead Monday’s
Westmuir Record
. Her mother had mentioned it was publishing the summer story. She silently prayed it wouldn’t be a romance this year. She opened
to the story. It was a little mystery called “The Secret of Bass Lake.” A man and his son fishing. A cooler full of beer. The sun peeking up over the horizon. Christ, she thought, it
is
a romance. The writer’s photograph was printed beside his name, a cheesy image of the man standing with his legs set widely apart and his hands in his pockets in a parking lot somewhere. She closed the paper and tossed it onto the floor.

An hour passed. Slowly. She sat up and put her legs over the side of the bed. Dr. Pass hadn’t actually told her she was “coming along.” He’d gone down her left leg with a pin he’d taken out of his bulletin board – a nod to country doctoring – pricking her leg with it every few inches. She knew about these nerve paths because they’d gone dead on her so many times. He wasn’t dissatisfied with the neurological signs, but he told her off for the atrophy he found in the muscle. “You know what this tells me?” he said. She waited him out and he lowered her legs. “This is the sign of a woman feeling sorry for herself.”

“Don’t you have to feel my head for that?”

“These are legs shrivelling from bedrest, Hazel. You can’t heal in bed. You have to move.”

“It hurts to move, Gary.”

“It should. Your back is a mess. But movement and pain are the only way through to as full a healing as you’re going to get.”

Now, after Wingate’s visit and lunch with Glynnis, she was so bored even exercise seemed an escape. She decided to try the stairs. She crossed the basement to the door that led to upstairs and opened it. The stairs looked like a job for a professional climber. She grabbed the banister and started up. She felt like she was emerging from a cave.

The upper part of the house was full of light. The upstairs clocks her mother had told her about she now saw for the first time; their incessant ticking gave the house a fugitive presence, like there were people whispering in its rooms. What kind of person needed to know the time wherever they stood? Perhaps a woman who was counting her luck, and had to mark every blessed second of it.

She strolled slowly through the living room, with its leather couch and chairs, the widescreen television sentinel in a corner, the fireplace with its pristine unburnt logs waiting for another winter to lend their hearthy romantic glow to the house. She saw Glynnis and Andrew cuddling on the couch, murmuring things to each other, indulging whatever conversational shorthand they’d developed with each other, only a word of which would be enough to make her crazy. She touched nothing, but looked closely. A line of old, heavy books lined the mantelpiece on either side of a rococo silver clock. Decorator books, never read. Probably cost them a pretty penny, too. There was another set of stairs off the living room that led to the bedrooms, although she knew her mother slept on the main floor, in what was Andrew’s office. She went there next, passing the dining room. She glanced in and saw the exact centrepiece she imagined would be there: a tangle of twigs with dried berries and little silver objects in it, stars and planets, and a big, thick red candle sticking up out of the middle of it. The wick was white; Glynnis had never lit it. Perhaps they argued about it.
Why did I buy you this nice thing if you never use it?
But then Glynnis’s answer presented itself right away:
Because if I use it, it won’t be the lovely, thoughtful thing you bought me one day for no reason but that you loved me
. Goddamnit.

Emily’s bed was tightly made and covered with a thick hand-sewn quilt. She didn’t recognize it. Did Glynnis quilt, too? There was a pile of books by the bed. A couple of puzzle books with a pen clipped into one of them, and a novel or two. But the book on top was one of Glynnis’s for sure:
Talking to Yourself: A Dreamer’s Guide
. Hazel hoped it was evidence of her mother ingratiating herself; it frightened her to think of Glynnis trying to inculcate her mother. But she couldn’t imagine it; Emily was the original skeptic. She opened the book at random:

She closed the book and put it back exactly where she found it. The phone began to ring in the kitchen and she hobbled down the hall to it. When she picked it up, she was out of breath.

“You okay?” came Wingate’s voice.

“Fine, I’m fine.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No, James. What’s wrong?”

“I think you better come in. Can I send a car around?”

“What’s going on? What happened?”

“I’m sending a car.”

Hazel knew the name Barlow. A George Barlow had once owned one of the largest apple orchards in Westmuir County. He’d sold it fifteen years ago and now it was a pick-your-own operation
that was gradually transforming into a county fair/family amusement park that did most of its business during pumpkin season. Hazel remembered going there with her father in the fifties and coming home with bushels of tart, mottled apples. Not supermarket fruits designed for long journeys, but misshapen, delicious real apples.

The woman sitting in front of them – Pat Barlow – might have been a relation. She looked about as pale and shiny as a supermarket apple right now. She was on the other side of the slightly warped table that sat in the middle of the room, in her worn quilted coat, her black hair done up messily on top of her head. She had a smoker’s complexion: watery eyes, greying, pellucid skin. One hand curled loosely around a Styrofoam cup of coffee, her gaze lost in the dark liquid it held. Hazel sat down across the table from her, lowering herself slowly into the chair and hooking the cane over its arm. All eyes had settled on her when she walked into the station house and a couple of her people had come forward almost reverently to shake her hand. No one commented on her being half in uniform, for which she was grateful, but Barlow had cast her a strange look when she came into the room. Wingate brought another chair to the table and sat beside her. “Can you tell DI Micallef what you told me, Miss Barlow?” The woman nodded. “Take your time.”

Hazel already knew what this woman had told Wingate, but when there was suspicion about a witness, a twice-told story usually shook loose its inconsistencies. Barlow brought the coffee to her mouth, sipped it, and grimaced. “I took a couple out this afternoon. They wanted to go for pike.”

“You and –” Hazel checked Wingate’s notes, which were open
on the table between them. “– Calvin Jellinek own Charter Anglers, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And what were the names of your clients yesterday?”

“Dean Bellocque and Jill Perry-something.”

The second name was Paritas. The woman spelled her name “Gil.” The other name checked out in Wingate’s notes. “Okay, go on.”

“We were about two kilometres out, on a shelf in like ten metres of water. I saw a school of something in the finder, probably bass, hugging the edge of the shelf, four or five metres down. We’d fished two beds and got nothing, so I told them this was their best chance to catch today.”

“You knew these people?”

“Never seen ’em before.”

“So you fished the shelf.”

“Yeah. And we caught a couple little ones. We threw them back.” She swirled her cup and looked into it like she was expecting to see a tiny school of something to go by in its surface. “I had an eight o’clock and I told them we had to go back, but they wanted ten more minutes. That’s when they hooked it.”

“Hooked what?” said Hazel.

Barlow sent a worried look across the table to Wingate, and he gave her a faint nod. “A body,” said Barlow, her voice almost inaudible.

“Keep going.”

“One of them – Gil – says,
Jesus Christ
, and I look at her rod, and it’s bent double, you know, like she’s hooked a monster. But there’s no action on the line – it’s a dead weight. I take the
rod from her and let the line out because I figure she’s caught on a log, but it’s hooked hard. I whip the line a little to unsnag it, ’cuz it’s in there good, but then, when I try to reel in, I feel the log come off the bottom and I start drawing it in. And then I can see the log there under the water, the shape of it, and it’s coming up. I figure I can save my rig and not have to redo it for the four o’clock. Then Gil starts screaming. And we see it.”

Hazel was writing in her own pad now. “You see what, exactly?”

“A body. Tangled in some kind of net and completely naked. I’m surprised it didn’t snap the line. I dropped the whole rod and it went over the edge and the whole thing went back down. I about almost puked.”

“How did you know it was a body if you dropped the rod right away?”

“I saw it.”

“Tell me what you saw,” Hazel said.

Barlow looked to Wingate again, and received his silent reassurance to go on. “I seen a person’s rear, okay? She was bent double, like she was touching her toes, and her … ass was coming up out of the water.”

“How did you know it was a woman?”

“Geez,” said Barlow, shaking her head. “I know what a woman looks like.”

“What happened to your customers?”

“They got in their cars and left.”

“You have contact information for them?”

“We’ve got the numbers in our log at the shack.”

“Okay,” said Hazel. “So you called us, but when the cops showed up, you were back on the lake.”

“Season’s just opened,” said Barlow unhappily. “I got bills piled up from winter. Gannon doesn’t freeze anymore, you know, I lose all my ice-fishing gigs and I’m drydocked for five months. I can’t turn down customers when I get them.”

“You’ve got quite a constitution. You find a body in the lake, you’re almost sick to your stomach, but ninety minutes later, you’re back on the water.”

“I didn’t go anywhere near that place, trust me,” said Barlow, splaying her hands as if to fend something off. “I just left that thing where it was. I don’t want anything to do with it. The whole thing is way too eerie.”

“Eerie,” said Wingate, “why is it eerie?”

Barlow tilted her head at them. “Don’t you read the paper?”

“Oh,
Jesus,”
said Hazel.

She told Wingate to go get Monday’s and Thursday’s
Records
. He brought them in, and they opened them to the two story instalments, spreading the papers out over the table in an empty interview room. Hazel hadn’t read past the first paragraph of the first chapter. Now the two of them leaned over the papers, Hazel supported on her cane, and hurriedly read through both. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” by Colin Eldwin, began: