“It’s possible.” Delorme shrugged, a gesture that always made her look, to Cardinal’s mind at least, very French. “Maybe it’s because I resent it more when women behave badly. Or when they don’t seem to know what’s in their own best interests.”
“I don’t think Miss Tait falls into either category.”
Delorme shook her head. “You’re so transparent, Cardinal. You don’t even know this woman, but you seem to think—just because she’s the same age as your daughter—that you understand her through and through.”
“That’s so far from being true, I’m not even going to discuss it.”
“But it is true.”
“Really, I’m not even going to talk about it.”
“Fine with me.”
“You heading to Lakeshore or what?”
Delorme shifted lanes to get around an SUV and stepped on the gas.
In the forties and fifties, a lot of motels and cottages sprung up along Lakeshore Drive to take advantage of the beautiful view of Lake Nipissing. Then, in the sixties and seventies, they were followed by boxy apartment buildings. Naturally, the beautiful view no longer exists. On the north side you have the malls and the fast-food joints, and on the south side you have the motels.
Close to town, you find the Phoenix, the Avalon and Kathy’s Kute Li’l Kottages, and there’s another cluster further along that includes Loon Lodge, the Pines and the ominously named Journey’s End. No one has ever satisfactorily explained how the last motel on the road, a plain red-brick bungalow, came to be called the Catalonia.
The Catalonia is on the stretch of Lakeshore that curves up to join Highway 11. It is not right on the lake, but across the road, which is why its sign boasts of such amenities as free local calls, air conditioning and clean rooms. Cardinal and Delorme started at the Catalonia and worked their way back toward town, asking the proprietors if any of their guests had recently disappeared.
Late spring is a slow time of year for these motels. Ice fishing and snowmobiling are long over, but the summer sports have not yet begun. And anyone who has visited Algonquin Bay and experienced the blackflies at this time of year is unlikely to make that mistake a second time. In short, there were very few tourists to go missing and, according to these old hands at the hospitality trade, none had.
Over the next couple of hours, Cardinal and Delorme stopped at every motel on Lakeshore. None of the proprietors reported a missing guest, and none of them recognized Terri Tait’s picture.
“Well, that was fun,” Delorme said when they were back at the town end of the strip.
“She could have stayed somewhere else,” Cardinal said. “Some place we haven’t checked yet.”
“She said it was by the lake.”
“A lake, not the lake. There’s more than one, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Okay, but why hasn’t anyone reported her missing? Even if only to get the motel bill paid?”
“Motels get stuck a lot. They’re not going to call the police every time. And there’s always the other possibility…”
“Which is?”
“The people she stayed with are the ones who tried to kill her.”
16
MARTIN AMIS SET ASIDE his notepad and took a swig of beer. He was wearing blue jeans that looked just the right degree of lived in, and a cool white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It had been Kevin’s idea to do the interview at the Gladstone Hotel. He wanted the famous novelist to realize that Toronto was just as hip as London or New York. Hipper.
“Tell us about your working habits. Assuming you have some.” Martin’s tone was easygoing, but the Oxford baritone, not to mention his own literary achievements, gave his every utterance weight. “By which I mean, you make it look easy. One imagines Kevin Tait scribbling lines of verse on airplane napkins and parking tickets.”
“Well, there’s some truth in that,” Kevin said. “I have been known to scribble down an idea or two on a napkin. But you have to have discipline. You have to be willing to put in the time to make something work. I try to be at my desk anywhere from six to eight hours a day.”
“That sounds more like a novelist’s schedule than a poet’s.”
“That’s the way it is, Martin. I put in the hours like anybody else.” A little common touch, there. Never hurt anyone.
“But I heard—and tell me if this is just legend—that you don’t even own a desk.”
“My desk is wherever I put pen to paper. Doesn’t matter if it’s a table in Starbucks or a tree stump in a field.”
“Sorry, mate. Six hours at a tree stump sounds uncomfortable. Six hours at a tree stump sounds crippling”
Kevin took a sip of his single malt. Amis had assured him Vanity Fair would be picking up the tab.
“You can write in a hurricane if it’s going well. Sometimes, it’s like the poem is just flowing in your veins. I’ll tell you, one time I made my morning coffee and I sat down at the kitchen table and started to write. I was working on ‘Needle’—lots of stanzas—and the words were just flowing. And then the light dimmed and I thought the bulb must have burned out. I got up to change it, and I realized there wasn’t any problem with the bulb. It was night.”
“You’d worked through the entire day without realizing it? God, I wish that happened to me. I’d like to write for one minute and not realize it. One nanosecond. You have that sort of experience a lot?”
“Once in a while. Not often enough.”
Amis drank some more of his ale, set his glass aside and leaned forward. “Listen to me,” he said. This delivered sotto voce, a fellow conspirator. “The brutal truth of the matter is you haven’t finished a poem in six months, right?”
“Things are a bit slow just now, that’s true, but—”
“You’ve chased off the one person who truly loves you, who really cares about your talent, who really wants you to do well, in a fit of righteous idiocy. And you’re rotting in some kind of defunct summer camp with a couple of drug dealers any sane person would flee at warp speed.”
Maybe Martin Amis wasn’t the best choice for an interviewer. Maybe he should have held out for Larry King. Someone a little less … prickly.
“I’ll tell you what I think, sunshine,” Amis went on. “I think you’re in way over your head, looking at a sentence of eternity if convicted of trafficking, and by way of medication for the anxiety you’ve been skin-popping morning, noon and night. It looks to me, Kevin, that you’re caught between the mother of all rocks and the daddy of all hard places, because you don’t really—not really, deep down in your wholesome colonial heart—want to be a drug dealer at all. But you just can’t stand to be parted from your supply. You’re a stone junkie, Tait. It’s heroin running through your veins, not poetry, and the chances of you ever writing a single line worth reading are receding by the minute.”
The reverie popped, and Kevin was once again staring at the rough, grubby wood of his cabin wall. The yellow legal pad under his forearm bore the crossed-out attempts at new verses for his ballad.
Well, that moved along all right. It was the next line, The border guards who killed him, that really stumped him. The border guards killed him and then what? And how can they kill a ghost? Maybe I’m too literal-minded to write poetry. The impasse had sent him veering off into another interview. And Amis had been getting pretty hostile there.