Way the Crow Flies (56 page)

And so it went, until the streets of the PMQs were full of dads behind the wheels of crawling cars, going door to door, playground to playground, peering between houses, eventually with an eye on the ditch.

Jack had raised the window on his screen door to get the warm spring air flowing through the house, then he set out walking down St. Lawrence Avenue a few minutes behind his wife and children. On the way, he saw McCarroll’s car parked in the driveway. He was back. He’d be going to the schoolyard too, with his little girl, and Jack would take the opportunity for a private word. He would need only to say, “I have a special task for you, McCarroll, concerning a mutual friend.” McCarroll would know that Jack was the “officer of superior rank” who was overdue briefing him, and Jack would have fulfilled the favour he had promised Simon. Over and out.

As he neared the little green bungalow, Jack saw McCarroll come out of his house—still in uniform at ten to seven—toss his hat onto
the passenger side and get into his car. He drove up the street toward Jack, who waved. McCarroll jerked to a stop alongside him. Jack bent to the open window, about to deliver his simple message, but the words died on his lips. McCarroll was chalky white.

His little girl had not come home yet. Jack got in the car beside him, tossing McCarroll’s hat into the back seat. The police had told Blair that they could not consider her “missing” after merely three hours. Jack did not remark on the stupidity of this, not wanting to stoke McCarroll’s distress. Instead, he asked, “Have you called the service police?” They drove to the MPs’ office, where Corporal Novotny climbed immediately into his patrol car and radioed another to join the search.

They had just driven past the willow tree, crawling south along the Huron County road, when Jack suggested Blair turn back and head for the schoolyard where the Brownies were gathered. They could ask Claire’s assembled friends if they knew where she might be.

The driver’s door opens as the car lurches to a halt beside the toadstool. Madeleine watches as Mr. McCarroll gets out, along with a second man from the passenger side. Dad. A winged Brownie has stopped short on the golden pathway; everyone waits while Mr. McCarroll speaks quietly to Miss Lang. Behind the two of them, the sun is setting fast. It will be dark before the Brownies have their refreshments. Madeleine waits to catch her father’s eye, but he looks past her at her mother.

“Attention Brownies,” says Miss Lang. “Mr. McCarroll would like to know if anyone has seen Claire recently?”

Recently
. When you are nine or ten years old, “recently” means a minute ago. Certainly it refers to nothing that occurred before supper or in the remote reaches of this afternoon. No hands go up.

Mr. McCarroll turns to them. “Girls and boys—”

Madeleine looks at Lisa Ridelle, Lisa looks back and they burst into stifled giggles.
Boys?!
There are no boys in Brownies! Madeleine looks up. Her father is staring at her now, one eyebrow slightly raised. She stops giggling.

“I would appreciate knowing,” continues Mr. McCarroll, unaware of his gaffe, “if any of you saw Claire today at any time at all.”

Several hands go up. She was seen by almost everyone at school today. She was seen afterwards in the schoolyard by Madeleine, Marjorie—who jogs Grace’s memory with a jab—and by Cathy Baxter and the other girls who were helping Miss Lang. Diane Vogel saw her out her living-room window, talking into a drainpipe in the ditch near the corner of Columbia Drive and St. Lawrence—it must have been between three-thirty and four because her mother was watching
Secret Storm
. Madeleine’s hand is still up and Miss Lang says, “Yes Madeleine?”

“Me and Colleen—I mean Colleen and I—saw her on the county road.”

“Walking south?” asks Dad.

“Um,” says Madeleine, “she was going to Rock Bass.”

Claire’s father walks so suddenly toward Madeleine that she starts. He drops to one knee, his face a bit too close to hers—is she in trouble or something? No, it’s Mr. McCarroll who is in trouble. There are lines between his eyebrows, his Adam’s apple looks raw as he swallows and says in his soft southern voice, “Where’s that at, honey?”

“Um, you turn at the dirt road.”

“What dirt road?”

“At the willow tree. Before the quarry.”

“Quarry?”

“Where kids swim.”

“Oh my God—” Mr. McCarroll gets up and places a hand over his mouth.

Dad is there suddenly. He leans in and asks, as though making himself perfectly clear in a foreign language, “That’s where you would turn right if you were going to Rock Bass?”

Is he mad at me? “Yeah.”

Miss Lang and Maman have joined them now, they are standing over her; all the Brownies are staring. Madeleine starts to feel strange, as though she were hiding something—Claire in a sack. Why are they leaning so close?

Her father says to Mr. McCarroll, “Rock Bass is about half a mile west of the county road, if she was going there she’d’ve turned long before the quarry, Blair, she’s nowhere near the water.”

Mr. McCarroll nods and frowns. Her father continues, “That puts her there at around four, four-thirty, eh? We can be there in ten minutes.”

Madeleine says, “Ricky might know.”

Everyone looks at her again. Mr. McCarroll, his lips no longer stiff but parted now, kneels back down. Madeleine can see his five o’clock shadow; his face, bony and almost as young as Ricky Froelich’s, white scalp visible through his brush cut. He looks at Madeleine in a way that no adult ever has. Supplicant. Like the faces at the foot of the Cross.

She says, relieved to have come up with the right answer, “She was with Ricky and Elizabeth. And Rex.”

The adults look somewhat reassured at the mention of Ricky’s name. If Claire was with him, she is bound to be all right.

Dad pats her on the head. “Good girl,” he says, moving to follow Mr. McCarroll back to the car.

Marjorie Nolan pipes up, “She was going for a picnic with him.” The men stop and turn again.

Madeleine says, “No she wasn’t, Claire probably just made that up,” and looks at Mr. McCarroll, concerned lest she has been rude. “Sometimes she just likes to pretend.” Mr. McCarroll smiles at her and goes to his car. Jack follows.

The car backs over the grass, then fishtails a little as it accelerates out of the parking lot, onto the road, and they’re gone.

Marjorie Nolan raises her hand. “Miss Lang, could I please have my wings now?” she says, in a sarcastic voice that is intended to be funny. Several girls laugh, and Miss Lang smiles. There is a general sense of relief. They’ll find Claire. If she was with Ricky Froelich, then no harm can have befallen her.

The two men drive to a spot where the fence has been left unrepaired, and Blair follows Jack along the path to the edge of the ravine. They skid down and walk for a mile in opposite directions along the stream. It is deeper and faster at this time of year, but it wouldn’t come above the waist of a nine-year-old, and it’s well furnished with logs and stepping stones. Still, both men look not only to left and right, they look also into the water as they go.

Darkness falls and Jack rides with McCarroll well into the night, at a snail’s pace, the headlights of the Chrysler illuminating stark fields on either side of one dirt road after another, in an ever-widening circle that takes in the Huron County seat of Goderich and grazes the eastern shore of the great lake glimmering beyond the dunes. Inland once more, past the lights of farmhouses, pulling in at a gas station to call again—has Claire turned up yet?—the look on McCarroll’s face as he hangs up and walks back to the car: disoriented, as though he had only recently arrived on this planet. Driving, driving, between columns of trees whose shadows grow more animated with the passing minutes, until Jack is able to persuade him, “for your wife’s sake,” to head for home.

Jack doesn’t mention having seen Ricky Froelich out running shortly after four-thirty this afternoon on Highway 4. At this point, it doesn’t seem necessary to discourage McCarroll by telling him that Claire was not with the boy.

A
T NINE P.M.,
the Ontario Provincial Police had a local radio station broadcast Claire’s description, and every squad car in the area was alerted; this despite the fact that she was not yet officially missing. For anyone who knew Claire, her failure to show up at the most important Brownie pack meeting of the year was enough to indicate that she was missing. But the OPP didn’t know her. They were able to say things like “You never know with kids, they get strange ideas, she may turn up at a relative’s place.”

“All our relatives are in Virginia.”

“Oh. Well, Mrs. McCarroll, it’s a bit soon to jump to conclusions. Our officers are keeping a sharp eye out. Why don’t you get some rest and give us a call in the morning.”

The morning
. It is a far-off country reachable only through night, and Mrs. McCarroll does not know how to get through this one. Sit
still, and the night will pass through you and around you. Then it will be morning. And Claire will be “missing.”

That first night leaves a residue of cold ash within the mother. The light has been on in Claire’s bedroom and the mother has sat on the chair by the bed with her hands folded, looking at the bed. She has smoothed the bed. She has looked in the closet where her child’s clothes are hung, at the bookcase lined with dolls and fairy tales and stuffed animals—Claire’s things are here, it is impossible that Claire should not return to them. Already Mrs. McCarroll has thought, “Why did I close her book?”—
Black Beauty
—“Why did I pick it up off the floor? I should not have done a wash this morning, I should have saved her crusts from breakfast.” Crumbs are alive and immediate, they say, “The person who ate this toast cannot be gone from the earth.” The clothes, the dolls, the crumbs, the laundry basket all say, “She’ll be right back.” This is her life, in progress, this is a pause only. These crumbs, this turned page, this undershirt in the laundry basket, these are not final things.

When is morning? Is it morning when you can see the dew on the grass? When the paper lands on the front step? When the lamp by the small bed is drowned in the tepid light from the window? Turn it off. The bedspread remains unwrinkled. Already, life is ebbing from the room. All that was poised, just put down or about to be picked up, appears a little more static; the afterimage of movement fading from objects, the leaves of books exhaling softly, clothes hanging more quietly in the closet. Like a multitude of small scarves flowing from the sleeve of a magician, the room and everything in it is being gently deserted by the spirits and currents that move things. The earth wants it. When is morning?

If you are waiting for enough light so that the authorites can thoroughly search for your child, morning doesn’t come until six A.M., and right now it’s only five-thirty. Sharon McCarroll didn’t know how she would get through the night, but now the darkness seems gentle in retrospect, because during that empty night it was fewer hours since her daughter had left the house this afternoon—yesterday afternoon. And now another morning has arrived, taking the place of the previous one, blowing over it, depositing grains, beginning a slow obliteration.

“Don’t worry, hon.”

He is in his bathrobe. He put on his pajamas last night, in order to comfort his wife with the appearance of normalcy. At midnight he chose to stay home with her rather than roam the countryside in his car—that would only have alarmed her, and lit up the roadside, the damp ditches. Instead, he panicked quietly in the living room, looking in on his wife from time to time in Claire’s bedroom to say, “Do you want some tea, hon?”

She remained fully dressed, but each time he looked in she did her part to reassure him by smoothing her hair, forming a smile and saying, “That’s okay, hon, why don’t you get some sleep?”

They have both prayed throughout the night but they have yet to pray together. They have swallowed the retch of emptiness that lunges from the gut, swallowed it back, the howl of something bottomless. Be careful, it smells your despair. Too much prayer can awaken it. Insufficient prayer can awaken it.

How can she have dozed off? For forty minutes in the chair. Fresh pain of surgery upon awakening, this is not a dream. Rising from the chair, empty bed,
my child is not at home
. The brief hallway to the kitchen; one hand grazes the wall, her feet hurt, she has slept in her heels that match her scarf because her husband likes her to look nice and now a chorus starts up in her head, it whips through all the acceptable reasons why her child is not at home, patters through lists of what-I-have-to-do-today, what-I-will-do-when-my-child-gets-home, this Christmas we are going home to Virginia, my mother and sisters will not believe how Claire has grown, take the meat out of the freezer for tonight. All staving off the sound of something deeper still—the bass line, slow-wave, the only reassuring voice because the one that promises an end to all this waking and waiting; deep and patient in its refrain until the mother is ready to make out the words it sings so regretfully: “Your child is dead.”

S
HE RODE HER BIKE
down the dirt road to Rock Bass. She got off and pulled it through the opening in the wire fence left cordially unrepaired by the farmer, and walked it along the semi-path to Rock Bass.

She carefully descended the ravine, traversing the slope, holding her bike, skidding a little with its weight. She laid it on the bank, mindful not to crush the sparkly pink streamers, and crossed the water on the stepping stones.

Claire sat under the maple at Rock Bass, in the worn place where everyone always sat, opened her Frankie and Annette lunch-box and scattered the remains of her picnic in a semicircle at her feet. There was always one chipmunk bold enough to come up and snatch a morsel, but Claire imagined the other little creatures watching and trembling until she had left, when finally they would approach and nibble. She imagined they knew her now and might one day come to visit her at home. They might talk to her and be her friends. Or merely perch on her windowsill and watch while she slept, chattering away softly about the magic gift they were preparing.

She wiped her hands on a paper serviette which she then returned to her lunchbox. She looked at Frankie and Annette, each beaming brunette head framed in a pink heart. Ricky and Claire.

She began making her way up the other side of the ravine. This was a good place to look for fallen eggs that needed rescuing. She got a burr in her ankle sock and stooped to pick it out.

When she straightened up, there were the familiar feet.

“Hi little girl.”

“Hi.”

“Look what I’ve got.”

“What?”

“Come here a minute.”

Claire walked up toward the open hand. When she arrived, she looked into the palm and saw a pale blue egg.

“A robin’s egg,” she breathed. It was so rare to find one whole.

“You can have it.”

The egg weighed nothing in Claire’s hand, because it was empty.

“I know where there are more eggs, little girl.”

You could see the pinprick where a snake had sucked out the insides.

“Alive ones.”

And so Claire set off. She would never have gone off with a stranger.

“The nest is on the other side of the cornfield.” And when they had passed through the cornfield—

“Across the meadow, just inside the woods.”

And when they got to the woods, Claire said, “No.” Her mother would not let her enter the woods.

“The cornfield is worse than the woods, Claire.”

But it turns out that the meadow is worst of all.

When the squeezing started, Claire said, “I have to go home.”

“It’s okay, Claire.”

And she didn’t know, right away, that it wasn’t.