Armed with Lucy's welcome input, some telephone numbers, an overnight bag and my survival kit, I booked Air Canada to Saint John's, a provincial shuttle to Deer Lake, and rented a car for the long journey to Saint Anthony.
The nursing home itself sat high atop a craggy bluff overlooking a small inlet on the Strait of Belle Isle. My arrival was greeted by shrill winds, high seas and chilling temperatures that were destined to hold the tourist traffic to an absolute minimum. Saint Anthony itself — and particularly Dormain House where Myron Bell reportedly spent his tortured hours and endless days — was an austere and somber and uninviting world.
If the setting of Dormain House was intimidating, Mrs. Lancaster was just the opposite. She was a warm, round, white-haired lady of uncertain vintage who was quick to seat me in the parlor and offer me tea and crumb cake.
"You've come a long way, Mr. Wages," she said smiling. I had the distinct impression Mrs. Lancaster had very few opportunities to display her hospitality.
My previous contact with the woman had been confined to a brief telephone conversation that had in fact confirmed Myron Bell's residency and that I would be able to talk to him if I made the journey. Outside of that, I had no assurances that I was going to learn anything over and above what was contained in the text of the CBC transcript. Consequently, I was anxious to get on with it. "How is Reverend Bell?"
"You are fortunate," she assured me. "He seems quite at peace these days. He has been intensely devoted to his scripture over these past several weeks."
"Does he have bad times?"
The woman's pleasant smile faded, and she nodded dourly.
"When may I see him?"
Mrs. Lancaster finished her tea, stood up and motioned for me to follow. We left the warmth of the parlor and walked down an austere corridor with a series of varnished hardwood doors. She stopped at the last one on the left and knocked quietly.
Myron Bell's door isn't the first door I've passed through only to be astonished. Perhaps that's because my mind paints elaborate mental images of things as I expect them to be under a set of given circumstances. At any rate, I was expecting the worst — after all, Myron Bell had been through the worst — but there he sat, a cherub of a man with a round soft face, beaming broadly. A massive, gilt-edged volume of the Bible was perched precariously on his robed lap. For some reason, he was younger than I had anticipated — late forties to early fifties — and he was confined to a rickety old wheelchair.
"This is the man I told you about, Reverend Bell, the American. Won't you say hello to Mr. Wages?"
The reverend extended a pudgy, too white, too soft hand in greeting. All traces of masculinity had vanished. "How do you do, Mr. Wages." His greeting was soft, almost musical. "Am I correct in assuming that you're here to talk about Battle Harbor?"
The question surprised me. Obviously I wasn't the first one to follow this path. "How did you know?"
The man sighed, laid his book aside and wheeled his chair over to the window overlooking the churning waters of the strait. "Because that's the way of things; it's my destiny. You see, Mr. Wages, I hope I don't offend you, but every so often, someone, usually a writer, uncovers that sordid little piece of provincial history. That discovery is usually followed by a visit to Saint Anthony to see what else they can learn."
My ego had been abruptly deflated.
"You see, Mr. Wages, it s really quite a shame that I'm remembered for being a part of one of our darker hours, because the truth is, I have so much more to offer. I'm really a quite knowledgeable Biblical scholar. I have had a great deal of time to study the holy word. There is much I could tell you of things far more important than the tragedy at Battle Harbor."
I was disarmed. Hostility or senility I was prepared for and could have handled, but I wasn't prepared for this lucid, gentle soul that had survived a tragedy and was forced to relive it each time someone paging through history discovered it. I glanced over at Mrs. Lancaster; she understood and smiled compassionately.
"Tell me, Mr. Wages, what is it you want to know about Battle Harbor?"
"I have the transcript of the remote coverage of the CBC and a few newspaper clippings. Outside of that I must admit that I don't know a great deal."
The little man didn't look at me. His gaze was still fixed on the watery panorama spread out before him. "It was a terrible thing," he whispered, "all those sweet, lovely children with their innocent bodies mutilated. Do you understand that they were budding temples of our Savior, and they were desecrated and defiled?"
"I don't want you to relive that part of it, Reverend Bell. I'm more concerned with what you felt, what you observed, the experiencing of it."
The reverend was still not looking at me. Instead he seemed to be reflecting back on that day. His soft, unlined and peaceful face was a deception, hiding the real torture that lived in his mind. "I went back, you know. I went back several times. Then the holy mother church decided I should come here to Dormain to study."
I was doing all I could to keep my own voice on an even keel without stress or anxiety. "What were your impressions?"
"It was very strange, Mr. Wages. There was more to it than just the mutilation of those lovely children. There was something else, something very ominous. You could feel it and see evidence of it — the way the bark was stripped off the trees, the way things were smashed. It was a scene of total devastation. Everything was dead — trees, animals, even the flowers." His voice trailed off, and he began to sob.
"I take it from what you've just said that the three boys had nothing to do with the murder of those children?"
"Oh, no, Mr. Wages. The authorities had nothing else to go on. For a while they were inclined to suspect young Capers and Maccar had enticed the Breathwaite boy to join them in the despicable act, but I personally never supported that theory."
"Were the boys ever found?"
Bell sighed and shook his head. "Not to my knowledge," he said sleepily. His eyes were beginning to drift shut, and his head nodded. Mrs. Lancaster discreetly cleared her throat, a signal that, for the moment at least, my conversation with the Right Reverend Myron Bell was at an end. Despite her bulk, she gracefully maneuvered us out of the room without disturbing the slumbering man.
Writing fiction, for the most part, is a crawl-off-in-some-dark-corner and do-your-duty kind of thing. Most of the writers I know write because they have no choice; it's what my friend Cosmo Leach would call obsessive-compulsive behavior. Writing, I have discovered, since I became addicted to it at a very early age, is very much like being hooked on anything. I have known both men and women who were addicted to sex; some of them would screw anything, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. Others get hooked on alcohol, drugs, even their careers. It doesn't seem to matter much; if they're hooked, they're hooked. I'll admit to being hooked on telling a story.
The problem with this view is that it is a far too narrow perspective of the phenomenon known as an addiction, and it is an unbecoming assessment of a perfectly acceptable way of making a living. There is the rewarding side of being a writer — and that is, of course, the good story. And the session with Myron Bell only served to convince me that I was onto one.
I worked my way back to Saint John's, my tape machine in one hand and one eye on the often spectacular scenery. I stopped in the port city just long enough to exchange pleasantries with an old college chum and then crawled onto a flight for New York. Somewhere during the course of all of this, I made a mental note to call Brenda Cashman to see if she had come up with anything new on her digging up more information on the Coalition commune in Owl's Head. Based on what I knew so far, the two girls who deserted their charge and fled the commune, the three boys from Battle Harbor and the wife of Gunther Erickson had just disappeared. Were they dead? I had no way of knowing. But if they were alive and if they could be located (two very big "ifs"), they would certainly be able to shed some light on what happened in each of the incidents. Like I said, every now and then you've got to be willing to follow a hunch and chase a long shot.