At thirty-eight, Charles S. Willan was the youngest deputy commissioner of the Ontario Police Services ever appointed. He was some kind of a whiz kid, a visionary who knew how to keep departments lean and clean. His pet project since he’d been installed was amalgamating OPS Central. He was going to combine a number of smaller detachments into one; make the scattered and distant outposts of OPS North–Central into a gathered force, and build it an HQ in the middle of a new shopping mall. It was going to save the OPS forty million a year. He was unflappable, friendly, and ruthless. Hazel had wondered at times if he was human.
He stood in the middle of the pen in a yellow hard hat and a silvery suit.
“Groundbreaking is less than two weeks away!” he enthused. “The beginning of a new era in policing in Westmuir County. With all of you” – his index finger did a tour of the room – “at the very centre.”
There were two loud clappers and a smattering besides. Ray Greene and Gerry Costamides had been the clappers. “One because he has to,” Hazel muttered to Roland Forbes, “the other because she doesn’t have an unkind bone in her body.”
Willan held his hands up to quiet the already quiet room. This was the guy who had come in and replaced the previous commissioner, the heartless lizard Ian Mason. Now they looked back on Mason’s rule as halcyon days. When amalgamation took effect, everything was going to change, and not for the better. This was the era of organizational change and streamlined services, when efficiencies would be found and value added and everyone was a partner in change, even if they were about to lose their job. Chip Willan was only the most local instance of this ideology in human form – there was an epidemic of them. Everyone knew someone who was going to be out of a job. And those whose livelihoods depended on the survival of Main Street had plenty of their own worries. Gateway Plaza would catch fish much higher upstream. Who would come downtown to shop?
It was foolhardy, many thought. It would only increase the difficulties of policing such a large area.
Willan had heard it all too. “I know some of you aren’t onside yet. I know some of you are worried what will happen when we open in Gateway Plaza. I’m not going to tell you that the fact that your jobs are safe should make you feel good. No. Change is hard, people. But it comes whether we want it or not. The old ways drop away. Next summer, when we open the North–Central Ontario Police Service Headquarters right here, in your town, all of your friends will have landed on their feet. Because that is what you people do, you people of the land, who wear so proudly the badge.” He took a sip of water. “What I am trying to say, trying to impart to you, is that this is the very beginning of a great adventure. You will be the doorway to the entire region, coming or going, and every surge of growth that comes this way will hit you first. You will have the best services in the entire region. You will have the Internet in your streets. You’re gonna be able to get signal anywhere.”
“What about our colleagues who won’t be able to afford a phone?” Dietrich Fraser asked. “What about them?”
“The Internet will come to their towns, too.”
“No, Superintendent Willan. What is going to happen to them? How is the OPS going to make it right for their families?”
Willan’s face morphed into a mask of concern. “There are going to be hardships. But everyone will have our support. No one will be abandoned.”
“We have your word on that? Can I bring that to the union?”
“You can bring it home and serve it to your children, Sergeant Fraser.” Willan addressed the room: “It is natural to go forward with trepidation. Things need to be proven to you. You are police; you want to see the evidence. I am here today to tell you that you will. You have my word.”
He stepped forward purposefully with his hand out toward Gerry Costamides, who took it without hesitation, and then everyone had to shake the man’s hand. Gerry waited until Willan was deep in the crowd before coming over to talk to Hazel.
“I think I once saw him sucking the air from a baby’s mouth,” Hazel said.
Costamides made a pugilistic face and cocked her fist at Hazel. Both women smiled. “He wants to do good things for our town, Skip.”
“Don’t call me Skip anymore, Gerry.”
“But you like him, right? Hazel?”
“Sure I like him. But I don’t trust him. He’ll say anything.”
“Make sure he doesn’t hear you say that, Sk … Inspector.”
Ray appeared to be skulking away, so Hazel followed him into his office. “Hello?”
“Oh, it’s you. Thanks for the enthusiasm during Willan’s speech.”
“At least I didn’t vomit. Did Macdonald bring in his find yesterday? He said he brought a bone in.”
“It’s already sent down to Mayfair. Deacon’s looking at it. It’s from a horse or a deer or a something.”
“Did he tell you what he’d been doing the whole time half the local constabulary was looking for him?”
“He said he was walking the perimeter.”
“Oh yeah. He was walking the perimeter.”
Ray waited for her to explain her skeptical tone, but the door opened again. “In hiding?” said Chip Willan.
“Yes,” said Hazel. “From you. Because you give off a light too intense for mortals.”
“It’s my natural bronze colour. I heard there was some unpleasantness at Tournament Acres. Someone found a bone in her garden?”
“It’s gone down to Jack Deacon,” Ray said.
“You see any heavy machinery while you were out there?” Willan asked.
Hazel knitted her brows at him. “What? You mean tanks?”
He withstood her jibes good-naturedly. Despite their best efforts, they had grudgingly begun to work together. “I mean construction.”
“As far as I could tell, it was a giant, muddy field surrounded by unfinished houses.”
“There’s a limited number of earth-movers in the county. You’d be surprised.” They gave him blank faces to look at. “Can I count on the two of you, who are well respected by the men and women who work here, to help foster a positive attitude toward Gateway Plaza? Even if they disagree in their hearts, surely you can see how important it is that the civic leaders of Port Dundas demonstrate faith in this important process, and model acceptance of it. For everyone.”
“Well, it’s coming whether they like it or not,” said Hazel. “So I suppose we’ll have to do our best.”
“That is my baseline for you, Hazel. I expect no less. Commander Greene? Please tell your wife that I enjoyed her vegan meatballs very much. Keep ’em coming.”
Hazel decided to go home for lunch. The autumn made her feel hopeless as well as nostalgic, but it was a feeling more like an ache than a wound. The leaves were already red and yellow; the yellow leaves were pocked with vegetal liver spots and about to fall. Time was in layers on the forest floor; it went down and down.
She drove over the Kilmartin Bridge out of Port Dundas and slowed to take a look at the grading machines that were preparing the roads at the base of the Lion’s Paw. She hadn’t participated in the town meetings or the protests that had greeted the announcement of the OPS’s plan to centralize services at Port Dundas. The idea of Gateway Plaza bothered her so much that she had completely avoided all the public meetings on it to save her sanity. She knew a done deal when she saw one. Where Highway 117 became a country road, there would soon be a mammoth new retail and service development, featuring a community centre with a two-pad skating rink, a Walmart, a Sobey’s, a Canadian Tire, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and the brand new North–Central OPS Headquarters, into which all the detachments north of Mayfair would be folded.
The groundbreaking was less than two weeks away, on the day before Hallowe’en, fittingly. Above the site was the bluff of Canadian Shield that marked the end of the river valley beyond. The smooth, treed rock of south-central Ontario protruded everywhere in the county, like stone fingers covered in moss, creating features of tremendous beauty such as Kilmartin Bluff Park.
Hazel was no longer surprised by the way things changed. Here the highways and not the towns would become the focus of much of the region’s commercial and service activity.
Change was everywhere, even at home. Her mother had been diagnosed with myeloma more than a year ago, and Dr. Pass had explained to them both that it was a slow-moving illness. She could live five, ten more years with it and not feel much more diminished than any person of her age. “Excellent,” Emily had said. “Maybe I’ll start a blog now.”
Her decline was gradual but, a year on, Hazel could detect the difference, not least of all in her mother’s appetite. She had taken to eating as many meals with her as possible, but even supervised, Emily wouldn’t eat very much. To say her mother had given up would have suggested that she had been vivacious before the diagnosis. The truth was, she had gotten old ten years ago. If she made it to next summer, she’d turn ninety-one, and the thought of it made Hazel grin and feel sad all at the same time.
Lunch was grilled cheese. Hot and fragrant. She could entice her mother with only salt or sugar now.
Emily’s reminiscences of distant things were becoming more frequent. Dipping a corner of her sandwich into a small pool of ketchup, she said, “Do you remember when your brother broke his collarbone in the church parking lot?” Hazel recalled it vaguely. “I haven’t thought of that in years.” A lot of her memories were of Hazel’s adopted brother, Alan. He’d died in the north of Ontario, a parolee and an addict, at the age of thirty-nine, in 1984, the year Hazel made detective constable.
“He drove your father to distraction,” Emily said. Hazel cleared the dishes. There was a neat semi-circle cut out of one half of the sandwich, where her mother’s dentures had clipped a bite. “After everything we did for him, he’d say.”
“None of it was your fault.”
“None of it,” her mother said wistfully. “It wouldn’t happen these days. Children don’t find themselves in such circumstances now. Imagine living in an orphanage until the age of ten, raised like an animal on garbage. Do you remember how he used to eat? Like a wild boar. We gave him the best chance we could.”
It was the only thing Emily had ever been sentimental or maudlin about, the fate of her adopted son, a broken boy by the time he’d arrived at the Boys’ Industrial Home up in Fort Leonard at the age of two. Dead mother; abusive, drunken father. Born in oblivion somewhere in the north of the province, he made a beeline back there for most of his short life, as if he were magnetized to tragedy.
“He’ll work it out,” Emily mused from the table.
“Who?”
“Your brother,” she said.
Hazel rinsed the dishes and put them in the rack. “He’s dead, Mother. I don’t think he’s going to work it out.”
Emily slapped her hand hard against the tabletop. Hazel spun around and caught the savage look on her mother’s face. “I’m not demented, god damn you,” she growled. “I know he’s dead.”