“I understand your reluctance,” Cardinal said. “In fact, I admire it. We need people like you to make sure information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
“So why don’t you get a warrant and try again later?” the woman said.
“Well, of course I could do that. But it would take a lot of time and I don’t want to go to all that trouble only to find out that you don’t have any information. So—without giving me anything personal—I wonder if you could just confirm whether or not a Miss Terri Tait ever attended school here.”
“Just confirmation. You don’t want grades or anything?”
“No, no. I would never ask for anything like that without a warrant.” Thinking, I’m such a liar, I should have gone into acting. “If you could just tell me if Terri Tait ever attended school here or not, I’d really appreciate it.”
There was a pause on the Nipissing School Board’s end of the line. Even in that vacant line tone, Cardinal thought he detected a distinct rasp.
“How are you spelling that name again?”
“Terri Tait,” Cardinal said, and spelled it out. Luckily the spellings were slightly unusual.
He was put on hold. Cardinal twirled through his Rolodex, looking for the number for the separate school board. He would call them next.
The young woman came back on the line.
“Yes, a Terri Tait attended Ojibwa High School back in the early nineties. She was with them for two years, grades nine and ten.”
Bingo, Cardinal thought. We’re on a roll.
“And her parents?”
“Wing Commander Kenneth Tait. Spouse, Marilyn. Oh, my. There’s a note on the file that says they were killed in a plane crash—a private plane—in 1993. The kids went to live with relatives out west.”
“I’m wondering about their Algonquin Bay address,” Cardinal said. “You said the father was in the air force. Can you tell me, did they live on the base or off?”
“I wouldn’t know. Last address we have is 145 Deloraine Drive.”
On the base.
“How’d Terri do in math and chemistry?” He wanted to leave this young woman feeling she’d done a good job.
“Really, Detective, you can’t expect me to give you information like that without a warrant. You’ll have to get a court order.”
“Of course,” Cardinal said. “I’ll do that right now.”
He hung up and grabbed his jacket. His phone was ringing but he ignored it and headed straight out the door.
The residents of Algonquin Bay don’t like to think so, but it’s all too probable that the city’s best years are behind it. At their peak in the middle of the last century, there were three railway lines running through town; now there is one. The CNR station burned down a few years back, a shame because it was one of the few buildings in this four-square town with real character. And the former CPR station, a classic limestone structure on Oak Street, is being transformed into a railway museum. Only the former ONR station is still in operation—but as offices, not as a terminal.
The Cold War had also been very good to Algonquin Bay. Canada had beefed up its armed forces and joined the United States in NORAD, a system of linked radar installations and air force bases designed to intercept any threat coming in over the ice cap from Russia. By the mid-sixties, the local air force base boasted three thousand personnel and an arsenal of nuclear-tipped Bomarc missiles. The defence department hollowed out a mountain next to Trout Lake and installed a three-storey radar outfit inside it, a Dr. Strangelove set that at one time had been cutting edge.
But the Cold War had ended. The missiles were disarmed and then dismantled. The armed forces were downsized, and one by one the squadrons mothballed. That left only about 150 military personnel in Algonquin Bay, and no one seemed to know how much longer they’d be there.
Cardinal drove up to the base checkpoint. Sometimes the checkpoint was manned, sometimes not; it depended on the current level of threat. Today it was unmanned, and Cardinal drove through without even slowing. It made him wonder about his country’s state of readiness.
Cardinal was acting on one little-considered result of the vanished squadrons: empty houses. No one talked much about the empty houses, and the military wasn’t about to publicize them. To put them on the market would destroy the value of all the other homes in town. So, unbeknownst to most of its population, Algonquin Bay contains enough empty houses to fill a subdivision, which is exactly what the air base looks like.
The only difference between the air base and other sixties-era subdivisions is that all its houses are not just similar but identicaclass="underline" ranch-style split-levels with two-car garages and sunken living rooms. The streets look the same, too—all drives, lanes, circles and courts with spurious curves and dead ends apparently designed to frustrate the Soviet invader.
Cardinal had thought he knew where Deloraine Drive was, but it turned out he didn’t. After he passed the same crooked stop sign for the third time, he pulled over onto the shoulder. There was a solitary man coming up the road on the other side, dressed in the Canada Post summer outfit of white short-sleeved shirt and blue shorts. The man was engaged in an idiosyncratic form of locomotion. He stopped every three or four steps and reared back in a rocking motion, left hand fingering the invisible fretboard of an invisible guitar.
If anyone had earned the right to play air guitar, Cardinal figured, it was Spike Willis. Spike had been a little ahead of him in school, and since the age of sixteen had always been in the best rock bands Algonquin Bay had produced. He had done his stint in Toronto in the seventies, changed bands every year, released a lot of recordings and pretty quickly developed a reputation for making his battered Telecaster talk. Then he threw it all over to come back to Algonquin Bay and raise a family. Why, Cardinal never knew. Nor did he know Spike well enough to ask. All he knew was that Spike Willis played the kind of blues guitar that can make grown men cry.
He called him over.
“Oh, shit. I surrender, Officer.” Spike threw his hands up with a big grin. He had always struck Cardinal as one of nature’s few truly happy men.
“You know, I grew up in this town,” Cardinal said. “And I’ve been back now for about twelve years. So how the hell is it possible that I’m lost?”
“Oh, hell, everyone gets lost up here,” Spike said. He hitched his mail sack higher and waved away a blackfly, his good nature apparently insect-proof. “I grew up right here on the base and I’ll tell you something. True story. One night after I’d had a few—well, more than a few, really—I came home, opened the door, went inside and suddenly realized my entire family had moved out of town. Mom, Dad, Sis: all gone. Some other family had moved into my house and changed all the furniture. Even the aquarium was gone. It was like I was the victim of a magic trick. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“You’d staggered into the wrong house?”
“I had the wrong house. And I lived here, man. Isn’t that too much? What are you looking for?”
Cardinal told him, and Spike gave him the directions.
“How many of these houses are actually empty?”
“Oh, geez. Tons of ’em. I don’t even need the mail cart up here any more.”
“They don’t look empty.”
“No, the military keeps ’em looking sharp. They figure once they start to go, the whole place’ll cave in. Probably right, too.”
“What about Deloraine, is it a ghost town?”
“Not really. They haven’t let any one street get completely empty. They rent the houses out, you know. Pretty low rents, from what I hear.”
“You notice anything unusual on Deloraine?”