“Thanks,” said Hazel.
“What’s this about?”
“He’s not in trouble,” she said, putting down a toonie.
She crossed the grass again, cutting diagonally to the top of 6th Street. She walked down to the bottom of the street. The front of Swallowflight’s house was somehow even more antic than the back, the porch busy with pinwheels and silk windsocks and spinning colourful plates. It looked like the house couldn’t sit still. She went up the steps and was about to knock on the frame of the screen door when a tall, muscular man in long pink pants and a tank top appeared in the hallway. His bare scalp gleamed. “Hello,” he said, pushing the door open as if he expected her. “Come in.”
“Did someone call you?” she asked.
“No, but I saw you make a beeline from the café. I was upstairs sewing up a hole.” He pinched his pant leg, a light linen weave that now had a line of yellow thread traversing the knee. “They’re too comfortable to throw out, you know?”
“Okay,” she said. His manner was calming and off-putting all at once. “What’s a ‘sensei’?”
“It just means ‘teacher,’” he said. “I teach meditation.” He stood away from the door. She realized she was apprehensive. Something smelled like burning grass. “Come on in.”
He led her into the house and she sat on a futon couch in the large living room. It looked out along the shoreline toward where the ferry had docked. He stood in front of her, his head tilted just a little as if he was thinking of painting her, and then he left the room, holding a finger up. He returned with a tray holding two rubber-gripped glasses of tea.
“This will calm your nerves a little.”
“My nerves?”
He sat across from her and held a glass out. “You’re practically your own siren, Officer. There are brilliant flashes of red and green going off behind your head.”
She took the tea and sipped it; it was pleasant if a little bitter. She put it down on the low table in front of her. “I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”
“The stone is never disturbed by the river.”
“I’m sorry?”
“An inner stillness can never be disturbed, is what I mean. I don’t control the river. In other words, you’re not disturbing me, Officer.”
“Detective Inspector,” she said.
He blinked twice in quick succession. “How can I help you?”
“I wanted to talk to you about a stolen rowboat.”
“You think I stole a boat?”
“No. I’m talking about the one that was stolen from you.”
“Oh,” he said, sadly. “You’re here about Brenda Cameron.”
“I am.”
“That poor girl.”
“Mr., um, Swallowflight, I don’t suppose you still have the boat, do you?”
He was swirling his tea lightly in his hand. “I still have it,” he said. “I don’t use it, though. I can feel her on it.”
“What do you mean you can ‘feel’ her?”
“The room where a person dies… something lingers there. That’s all I mean.”
“Where is the boat?”
“They were here, you know. They did all this already. In 2002. For two weeks I was a suspect. How do you think that felt?”
She put the tea down with a neat clack on the tabletop. “It must have felt good when they ruled you out.”
“I was out of the city when she died.”
“I know all this, Mr. Swallowflight. You’re not a suspect.”
He sighed, blowing his cheeks out. He didn’t look so peaceful anymore. “People respect me here,” he said quietly.
“Where is it?”
“Under the back deck.”
She stood up, her forearms tingling. “Let’s go.”
He led her out around the side of the house to the back. Hazel cast a look over the water. It would have been easy for Brenda to take the ferry from downtown and walk along the shoreline to the bottom of 6th Street. Swallowflight’s backyard was open to the water, but the house itself blocked a view of the rest of the street. Stealing a rowboat from his yard under the cover of darkness would have been child’s play. He leaned under his deck and was about to pull the boat out when she stopped him. “Do you mind putting these on?” she said, passing him a pair of latex gloves she’d pocketed in the station house. “I’d drag it out myself, but I have a bad back.”
He looked at the gloves uneasily, as if they implicated him in something, and then put them on. He went under the deck and she heard the sound of a metal hull scraping against the white pebbles that lined the dark space underneath. The simple rowboat emerged behind him. She watched the knobs of his spine shifting. The boat was a flat-bottomed number with a white fibreglass interior. There was no seat. “Where does a person sit in this thing?” she asked.
“Milk carton,” he said. “You want that, too?”
“No,” she said. “This’ll be fine. How long have you had the boat?”
“I found it junked at the back of Hanlan’s Point about six years ago. Bottom was rusted through in a couple of places and I put this insert in.” He ran his latexed hand along the white interior. “I sealed up the rust and riveted this into place, but it still leaked.”
She got down on her knees and looked closely at the insert. It followed the contours of the boat, including the three runnels in its bottom. But she could see he’d done a poor job of sealing it and the bottom of the insert was springy rather than tight against the hull. There was a slip-proof pattern on it which matched the mark on Brenda Cameron’s forehead. “Do you still have the oars?”
He went back under the deck and brought out two standard wooden oars, their metal pins dangling from midshaft. She gestured that he should put them down on the grass and she kneeled over them, blinking to clear her eyes, and stared hard at one of the shafts. After three years of disuse, they were covered in a thin layer of dust and the varnish was cracked. Thin edges of it stood up where it was beginning to flake away. Examining these oars would be like trying to dust sand for fingerprints and she blew as lightly as she could at the surface to loosen the dust. The translucent layers of varnish rattled like dragonfly wings.
She stilled her attention to take in just a couple of square inches of the oar. Flecks of grit and thin filaments of fibre came in and out of focus among the yellowy parchment-like varnish. Some of the fibre was bits of old spider webbing, or dust strung up in some strange order. But there were also tiny strands of black fibre as well. She narrowed her eyes and tried to filter out everything but the black and as she did, more of it appeared, like a detail popping out of a landscape. She saw it accumulating – tiny black exclamation points – until it became a pattern and the pattern was heaviest in the middle of the oar, the thin part, and then its density diminished as she traced it down toward the blade. The marks stopped about six inches from the end of the blade. She turned to the other oar, but it was clean and she stared at it a moment until she realized she was looking at the wrong side. She used two sticks to turn it over: the same pattern – almost a mirror image – of black fibre ran down the shaft to within six inches of the end of the blade. A drop of rain hit the oar and instantly the fibres within the drop leapt to life.
“Mr. Swallowflight, did you lend this boat out to friends, or would you say you were the main person to use it?”
“A lot of people used it. Not these days, though. Back then.” She stared at the oars. He leaned in closer behind her. “What is it?”
“A murder,” she said, wiping her cheek. The rain was beginning to come down heavier. “Can I use your phone?”
Ilunga was standing far behind his desk, as if he wanted to vanish through the wall behind him. His right arm was crossed stiffly over his chest and he seemed to be choking the life out of his left bicep. He was furious. On the phone, he wouldn’t even entertain dispatching any of his SOCO people. If she wanted to talk to him, she’d have to come in, and then he hung up. Now he was looking at her as if trying to decide what part of her to rip off first. “I told you to go home.”