“Paint dries,” said Renald. “Blood clots. Look at the lumps forming.”
She wanted to puke. “Jesus Christ.” There was a whirring, tinny noise coming from somewhere, and she turned her head to listen to the speakers built into the computer, but the sound wasn’t coming from the video.
“So, ‘save’ who?” Renald repeated.
She pulled her head away from the computer but she still saw the letters bleeding down the wall in a basement somewhere. “That’s it,” she said, talking to the room. “I’m getting heartily sick of being the dog wagged by the tail. I want control, people – let’s everyone get working on what’s happening here. This town can go without parking tickets for a while until we figure this out.”
Bail said, “I don’t think any of us know where to start.”
“Begin by thinking it through. By the end of the day, I want one good idea from each of you… does everyone… what the hell is that sound?”
The irregular, metallic noise was coming from somewhere behind her. Without another word, she pushed into the back of the pen and went in the direction of the sound. It wasn’t a fan, it was too loose, too rattly. No one stopped her as she made her way to the coffee station behind Windemere’s desk. There, beside the creamers sitting in their little plastic tub of ice, in a cage, and spinning a tiny exercise wheel at top speed, was the mouse that had popped out of the box. There was a small black scab on its lower lip. Its fur had faded to pale pink. Windemere was standing beside her. “We named him Mason,” she said. “We gave him a bath, which he didn’t much like. But he’s a lot better now.”
Wingate was standing beside her. “Do you think someone is asking us to raise the dead?” he asked.
She put her hand into her pants pocket and pushed past the little pill-shaped ball of tinfoil between her thumb and finger to her car keys. She passed them to Wingate. “Go see Claire Eldwin. Right now.”
“On my own?”
“On your own. And come back with some answers.”
14
Claire Eldwin lived thirty kilometres away in a town he’d never heard of, Mulhouse Springs. There were so many small towns in this part of Ontario that he figured you could live here for thirty years and not find them all. He was driving along Highway 79, to the west, below Gannon. There was a road every five hundred metres leading to cottages. If you owned a cottage up along here, then you were from away. It was like having another country nestled inside this one and he could see how the summers changed what home felt like for those who actually lived here.
The disconnect between this landscape and what sometimes went on in it was still hard for Wingate to accommodate. In Toronto, it didn’t take a great effort to sense the seething chaos that moved beneath the surface of civilized life in the city. There was always something on the verge of happening: as an experienced police officer, you could scent it under the patina of order. You could almost move yourself to its contrapuntal beat, be in the right place just as something was about to happen.
Only in the neighbourhoods where there was enough money and white skin to presume a kind of harmony did crime ever surprise you. Although not enough: there was always someone breaking down, a domestic that went ugly, someone craving silverware. Even so, his life at Twenty-one Division was truly clockwork: a drug bust at ten, a stolen bike at noon, a gunshot at two, high-school students threatening more than mere unrest at the Eaton Centre at exactly three-fifteen.
But here, here in Westmuir County, everything had a fugitive nature. You couldn’t read those closest to you, and this was because everyone’s guard was down. (Well, except for Hazel. He felt naturally closer to Hazel than anyone, precisely because she was slightly paranoid.) And because it seemed no one had anything to hide, and not even the police lived in a state of alert suspicion, it was possible to run the kind of plot they were caught in now: someone using a lake, a newspaper, the internet, and colourfully wrapped packages to tie a leash around an entire police force and tug it in the direction they wanted it to go in. It made him wonder if someone had specifically chosen Westmuir to bring all this stuff to life. It was worth a thought.
He’d called Eldwin’s house again on the way up and found the wife at home. She didn’t seem particularly surprised that he wanted to see her in person, just gave him proper directions and rang off. That only confirmed his theory. In Toronto, the police don’t call ahead, and what’s more, if they did, both sides of the conversation would hang up and immediately begin forming dire anticipations. Claire Eldwin, he found when he arrived, had put on the kettle.
She came to the door in a shiny gold housecoat with pale blue jeans underneath, and she was smoking a handrolled. Out of habit, he sniffed the smoke and checked off the tobacco box mentally. She blinked at him in her doorway, looking him over with interest and gripping the doorframe like she was going to twist it out of the wall.
It was a big house for two people, he thought, but it looked small because it was stuffed with furniture and knick-knacks. Either Eldwin or his wife collected obsessively. Cloth flowers, paperweights, small busts of famous composers, colourful replicas of birds in tiny gold cages. It all crowded in, making the rooms seem darker. She led him to an oval dining room table in wood that looked out onto a big garden full of larger, but equally extraneous, baubles. Cement arches, birdbaths, four little doghouses scattered along the serpentine flagstone paths that wound toward a stone fountain in the middle of the yard from its edges, looking as stranded as a ship run aground. There wasn’t a dog to be seen anywhere. He stood at the window as Mrs. Eldwin made tea. “It’s a quiet week,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “You’re wondering why I have so many empty doghouses, aren’t you?”
“It occurred to me.” There was something strange about that yard, he thought. It wasn’t just its busy emptiness, it was something else…
“I sit dogs,” she said. “It was crazy busy over the long weekend, but there’s no one now. I had a St. Bernard, a Brittany spaniel, and a chihuahua for three days.”
“Sounds like a Disney film.”
“It wasn’t.”
He turned away from the window. She was pouring hot water into a teapot. “How long have you lived in Mulhouse Springs, Mrs. Eldwin?”
“You don’t look like your phone voice,” she said. “You sound like a small man on the phone, but you’re not.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”
“It’s a compliment.”
He sat, accepting tea from her. “Well, thank you. You didn’t answer my question.”
“We moved a year after the wedding.”
She was at the very least extremely drunk. He could tell she’d been drinking when he spoke to her on the phone. A drunk interview could be good, but if you needed any of it later in court, someone might argue that the statements were unreliable. Still, he needed to know the basics. “And the wedding was when?”
“What?”
“When did you get married, Mrs. Eldwin?”
“September… two thousand and one. It’ll be four years this fall.”
“And before Mulhouse Springs, where did you live?”
“ Toronto,” she said.
“And why did you folks move up here? Mulhouse Springs isn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor.”
“It was Colin’s decision,” she said, coming to the table. “He wanted more space.”
“For what?”
“To ‘think,’ he said.” She gave a nasty little laugh. “Writers, huh?”
“What does he need to think about that he couldn’t think about in Toronto?”
Her face suddenly became serious. “I’ve stopped asking.”
Wingate put a cube of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Tell me more about Colin.”