Helen came in through the front door. “Are they still in there talking to your friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m next.”
She stood by the door, looking uncertain. “I wanted to start packing up the office. I was hoping we could get out of here by tomorrow morning.”
“This is quite a fireplace you’ve got here,” I said.
“Oh, that. Yeah, we don’t use it anymore. Hank says it doesn’t draw well.”
“Are you kidding? It’s practically sucking me up the chimney.”
“I think there was a nest up there,” she said. “Raccoons or something. Maybe they’re gone now. God, what a horrible thought. All those animals crawling around up there.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. Listen to me. Now that I know we’re leaving for good, I just can’t stand being here another minute. I hate it like a sickness. I think we all feel that way now, all four of us.”
“You said you’re all gonna move back to Sudbury?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have family back there?”
“We have each other,” she said. “We are a family.”
“No children?”
“No,” she said. “We sort of all have that in common.”
I looked outside the window again. Ron was still standing at the end of the dock, his wife’s head still on his shoulder. Her back was shaking now, like she was crying. Ron put his head on her head and pulled her closer.
Gannon had picked the broom up. He was holding it in both hands, his eyes closed. He kept tapping the dock with it, again and again.
A thought hit me. “The Indian you use as a guide,” I said. “He was here yesterday, too. I saw him on the dock as we were leaving.”
“Guy? No, I doubt it,” she said. “I think he left as soon as he got back from the hunt.”
“Those men who were hanging around, he was out on a moose hunt with them?”
“Yes, his last one of the year. The last one he’ll ever do here, I guess. He left without even saying goodbye.”
“I suppose if I was out in the woods for a week, I’d be anxious to get home, too.”
“No, that was a four-day hunt, over on a different lake,” she said. “Thank God. If it was a seven-day hunt, we’d still be stuck here waiting for them to get back.”
“Well, either way, I’m sure I saw him.”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe he was still here. He’s such an odd young man, I have to say. I never could figure out what made him tick.”
The office door opened and DeMers stuck his head out. “What’s going on out here?”
“We’re just talking,” I said. “If you’re about done in there, Helen would like her office back.”
“We’re done with Mr. LeBlanc,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
This will be loads of fun, I thought. I gave Helen a little smile and stepped up to the plate. As Vinnie came out of the office, he looked cool and unruffled, like he’d spent the last hour just having a nice chat. But that was something Vinnie had in his blood, going back a thousand years. I didn’t have that. Not one drop.
“Right in here, Mr. McKnight,” DeMers said. “Make yourself comfortable.” As he closed the door I thought I heard the moose wailing again.
Chapter Seven
“Let’s talk about you first,” the senior constable said. He was sitting in Helen’s office chair. Constable Reynaud was sitting next to him in another chair. A real chair. I got the rickety folding chair.
“Those men apparently told Gannon they were gonna have some fun before heading home,” I said. “So they might not have gone straight home. Are you looking for them in Toronto? Windsor, maybe?”
“Constable Reynaud, did you say something?” he said. “I must be hearing things, because I know you and I are the only ones asking questions here.”
“I didn’t say a thing,” she said.
“It’s all part of getting old,” he said. “Half of what you do hear is only in your head.”
“Okay,” I said. “I get the point.”
“Alex McKnight of Paradise, Michigan,” he said, smoothing out a wrinkle in his pants. I was starting to get a little better picture of the man. I was sure all of his socks were neatly folded and organized by color. “Constable Reynaud did some checking up on you. Turns out you were a police officer.”
“Eight years in Detroit,” she said, looking at her notepad. She was another type of cop entirely. The old line about a woman having to be twice as smart as a man to get half the credit was never more true than in a police station. I was sure her partner would do most of the talking, but she would be the one who really knew how to listen.
“More recently,” she said, “you were granted a private investigator’s license.”
“I understand that’s a pretty easy ticket in Michigan,” DeMers said. “As long as you’ve got the years in law enforcement, it’s pretty much automatic. Just fill in a form and you’re in business, no matter what kind of person you are.”
“I’m not practicing,” I said. “That has nothing to do with why we’re up here.”
“In Ontario, it’s a whole different ball game,” he said. “You’ve got to be interviewed by the deputy registrar, provide a list of references. Then they do a thorough investigation, really turn you inside out. If anything looks fishy, you don’t get that license.”
“Yeah, good thing I didn’t apply up here,” I said. “I would have missed out on so much fun.” I was trying very hard to keep cool. It was starting to make my stomach hurt. “Look, I’m not working as a private investigator. I came up here with Vinnie to help him out, because he’s my friend.”
And this is what I get for my trouble, I thought. I help out a friend and I end up getting grilled by another hard-ass cop. It was pretty much automatic. Come to think of it, maybe this senior constable was the only hard-ass cop left in the entire OPP. They wouldn’t let him retire yet, just in case I ever decided to come to Ontario.
“Yes, about that friend,” he said. “About Mr. LeBlanc. He told us quite a tale about his brother Tom, and why he felt it necessary to have him misrepresent his identity. Would you care to tell us your version?”
“He knows better than I do,” I said. “I’m sure he gave you the whole story.”
“Yes, but you know, it was such a compelling story, I think I need to hear it again.”
“I know it looks bad,” I said. “But this business with Tom is really a separate issue, okay?”
“Give me your version,” he said. “And then we’ll talk about how bad it looks, and how it may or may not be related to our situation.”
Our situation, he calls it. I was about to say something cute, but restrained myself. No sense making it any worse. Instead I took a deep breath and gave them a quick rundown, beginning with Tom’s release from prison, continuing through Vinnie’s brilliant plan to let his wayward brother use his identification because it was just the thing to get his head on straight, and ending with our attempt to find out what the hell happened up here. Constable DeMers made an elaborate show of cleaning his glasses while I talked, while his partner hung on my every word and wrote notes on her pad. It may have been a new twist on the old good cop, bad cop thing. Or maybe he just liked clean glasses.
Either way, he put his glasses back on just as I finished. He took a moment to adjust them on his ears, gave his partner a quick glance, and then looked back at me. “Thank you,” he said. “That was illuminating. Although I think you may have left out a couple of details.”
“Such as?”
“Well, number one, where you fit into this whole thing. Surely you must have had some part in it from the beginning.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “If I had any idea what they were trying to do, I would have stopped them.”
“Being a former police officer and all.”
“Former police officer or not, I would have known it was a bad idea.”