Parish felt paralyzed with fear, anger, confusion.
She’d lost track of how long she’d been sitting on the floor of her office reading Melissa’s notebook. The way she used to sit on the floor of her bedroom when she was a young girl and read Nancy Drew mystery books one after another for hours and hours.
Everything Melissa had written to Parish in the last few years—all her texts and email letters—had been disjointed and paranoid, but here in her secret book Parish could see the work of the brilliant lawyer Melissa had once been.
She’d done an exhaustive study of the problem of homelessness in the city. It started back in the 1960s when the federal government poured money into housing projects both downtown and in the suburbs, creating ghettoized communities that featured circular roads that kept through traffic out and the poor people in. No surprise, in time they became major crime centres. And even worse, over the years as the buildings decayed, there was never substantial funding to keep them in good repair.
Next Melissa outlined in detail the lack of basic facilities for poor people in the city: transportation, parks, and decent schools. Then she charted the city’s rapid expansion in the next decades, the influx of immigrants from all over the world, and indigenous Canadians drawn to Toronto. And how, at the same time, the federal government retreated from its commitment to public housing and the provincial government downloaded the cost of housing and welfare onto the city. The drip, drip, drip of decay.
In the next chapters she wrote about the closing of mental-health facilities and the broken promise of providing services for the most needy and mentally ill in the community. Then came the drugs. The crack cocaine, the heroin, and finally the fentanyl, all while the public housing, which had been poorly built decades earlier, was falling apart as the waiting list for apartments grew exponentially longer. And now the massive building boom and skyrocketing rents were forcing anyone marginal who ran into some bad luck out onto the street.
Parish was transfixed. Melissa had written this all out by hand, in her meticulous handwriting. She must have done hours and hours of research.
The next section was an extensive review of the homeless problem in other countries. The overrun streets of San Francisco. The tent city outside the Prado Museum in Madrid. And a long section on Finland, the only European country that had had success with the problem. Why? Because as soon as someone was identified as homeless, that person was provided with a decent place to live and support
There was a chart. Melissa loved charts. This one analyzed the true cost of homelessness. An emergency hospital visit even for a simple matter cost the government a thousand dollars. She had stats on the cost of running shelters, social workers, food, criminal charges for petty crimes. To say nothing of the human cost. It went on and on for pages, building a brilliant argument that putting money into housing, instead of relief and support programs, was a large long-term financial saving.
As Parish got near the end of the book, Melissa’s handwriting changed. Her penmanship was no longer precise and clean but erratic. A new chapter was headed: “Who Profits?: Homelessness is a Money-Making Machine!”
She pointed her finger at the social workers and shelter workers who had good jobs, at the drug counsellors and therapists who had a constant supply of patients, and at the doctors who ran homeless drug addicts through their offices on ten-minute weekly visits. But most of her anger was directed at the pharmaceutical companies. They had an endless lineup of customers who needed their product and governments only too happy to pay their bills to keep the homeless out of sight.
“Everyone wins, everyone makes money!!!” she’d written. “Except the people who needed help!!!!”
Parish turned the page. Melissa had written a new heading in capital letters. “TWO MURDERS: J’ACCUSE” It was dated yesterday.
Parish read on transfixed. Melissa had laid out in precise detail, as if it were a well-argued lawyer’s brief, the case against the person who she claimed was the killer. Her conclusion was devastating.
Parish exhaled and slammed the book shut.
She didn’t believe it. Or didn’t want to believe it. Really, could it be?