Normie
All the kids were over at cousin Louise’s house on Friday. Her dad is called Red Archie. Anyway, the kids were there and they were talking about a guy from their school who got picked up by the police! For breaking into Bonnie’s dad’s house! And then there was more bad news about that guy. Two of Bonnie’s friends from school, Laurie and Danuta, were with us because they always hung around with Louise. And Laurie said, “I saw him and Bonnie together one time. It was at night. And she saw me looking at her and she just said ‘hi’ really quick and looked away because she didn’t want me to stop and talk.”
“What?” Danuta yelled out. “She would never go around with Jeff McCurdy. He got kicked out of school last year. He’s a criminal. A juvenile delinquent!”
“They don’t call them that anymore, Danuta. Young offenders.” That was John Rory, who came up behind the group of us.
“Well, okay, then he’s a young offender. He’s bad. He comes from a really bad home. I’ve heard my mum and dad talk about them. The father is really mean, and the mother doesn’t do anything about it. I can’t picture Bonnie going anywhere near the son of people like that.”
“Well, she did,” Laurie said again. “I saw them.”
“Where?”
“On Barra Street.”
“What were they doing?”
“Nothing! Just walking beside each other.”
“And it was at night?”
“Yeah. My dad was walking me home from babysitting, and it was nearly midnight. And there they were.”
“She never told me that,” said Danuta, and it sounded as if her feelings were hurt. I knew she was Bonnie’s best friend at school.
“That’s weird, if she didn’t want you to know. She must have been sneaking out with him and knew what you would say. You would have told her not to be so crazy.”
“I would have for sure.”
“We should tell Sharon and Andy.”
“But that’s telling on her.”
“Danuta, she has been kidnapped! And Jeff, her secret boyfriend, broke into her dad’s house! Jeff may be the guy who stole her away!”
“But he’s only fifteen, and he’s been hanging around like normal. If he had done something to Bonnie, he wouldn’t dare show his face! He’d be scared somebody would catch on.”
“Some of these guys,” John Rory said, “don’t give a shit if anybody catches on. Or they’re so full of themselves they think they’re too smart to get caught.”
“Jeff isn’t any Einstein, John Rory,” Laurie replied. “All he ever gets are crappy marks in school.”
“Well, there you go. He’s not bright enough to worry about looking guilty!”
“What are we going to do with this knowledge?” I asked them all.
“Tell Sharon and Andy,” Laurie said again.
“Yeah, we have to tell them. But let’s do some checking into it ourselves first, so we don’t look stupid if it turns out it couldn’t have been him.”
“Who cares, John Rory?” Danuta said. “He’s already been caught breaking into Bonnie’s dad’s place!”
“Yeah, I know. But he’d be in a lot deeper shit if he k— if he kidnapped Bonnie and did something to her. And if we say he did that, and he didn’t, we’ll be in trouble ourselves.”
Laurie and Danuta went and made a phone call to another friend of theirs from school and asked her if she had seen Bonnie and Jeff together, and that friend called someone else, and later that day, one of them phoned back. She said her brother had seen Jeff McCurdy hanging around an old abandoned grocery store on one of the side streets in the village. So, you know what we did. Laurie and Danuta and John Rory and I went to that store on our bikes. We got off and pretended we were just hanging around on the street and then, when there was nobody else in sight, we snuck into the building. It had front windows with an old scale and some shelves, and one window was broken. There was a back door, and it wasn’t hard to wrench it open, so we went in that way. There wasn’t much left of the grocery store, just dusty, empty wooden and metal shelves, and an old counter where the cash register must have been. There were some faded posters on the walls showing orange trees and cows in a field. But the important thing for us was the staircase leading to the basement. There was no electricity, so it was dark. But we went down. More shelves and crates and rotten orange peels and some scraps of mouldy bread. There was a bit of a stink in there, the way old places smell. But one corner was clean. A big wooden crate had been turned upside down, and two smaller ones were up against it like chairs. And there was more.
“Oh my God!” Danuta cried out. “This is Bonnie’s stuff! That’s her warm-up jacket for the soccer team, and those two scribblers are hers, too. Her English and French notes. And that book, Poets of the Twentieth Century. She loves that stuff. She’s been here.”
Laurie said, “When I saw her and Jeff McCurdy that time, they were close to here.”
Danuta still couldn’t believe it. “Imagine sneaking off to meet Jeff McCurdy! That’s sick.”
“She may not have been down here herself,” said John Rory. “He may have stolen that stuff off her. That would make more sense than her coming in here with her English and French notebooks to do her homework!”
“But why would he take her schoolwork?”
“Only thing he could get his hands on at the time, maybe. Just wanted something of hers. Who knows? The world is full of fruitcakes and shitheads.”
There was also stuff that the other kids said was Jeff’s, including a ball team jacket with his name on it and a baseball bat signed by a guy named Bill Lee.
“We have to tell somebody,” I said to them. They all said yeah, they knew that. “But we can’t just blab it all over the place, because then he’ll hear about it. And he’ll come here and destroy all the evidence.”
Everybody agreed that would happen. “One of us will tell,” John Rory said.
“I’ll do it,” I offered. “My mum and dad are lawyers. They’re on the other side from the police, at least Dad always is, because he acts for the guys who are charged with the crimes, but he’ll tell the Mounties about this, I know.”
“He gets the bad guys off?” Laurie asked. “How can he stand doing that?”
That hurt my feelings, so I told her, “Dad says everybody is allowed to have a defence, just in case they didn’t really do it. If you got arrested and charged with murder, you’d be glad to have a lawyer. Otherwise, they would just throw you in jail for the rest of your life.”
“But I wouldn’t do it.”
“Sometimes people didn’t do it, and they get charged anyway. The police can make mistakes. But they can’t just arrest people they don’t like, because they know the defence lawyers will be there to argue in court against them.”
“I suppose so.”
“There have been famous cases of innocent guys sent to prison for murder. There was one right here in Cape Breton. I forget the guy’s name, but it took years before the lawyers got him out and proved he didn’t really do it.”
“Donald Marshall. People called him Junior,” said John Rory. “It happened in Sydney.”
“Yeah, that’s his name. So anyway, I’m going to tell Mum and Dad. They’ll know what to do.”
Pierre
Once again, information just fell onto our desks. Hope Ottawa doesn’t get wind of this or they might shut us down, send me back to Montreal and organized crime, so I’ll be earning my pay. This time it was a pack of young kids. They heard the news about Jeff McCurdy, and it turns out one of them had seen Jeff on a midnight stroll with Bonnie MacDonald. Sharon’s cousin, Maura MacNeil, called us with the information just minutes after Dougald received another tip about McCurdy, giving the location of a basement hideout where McCurdy used to spend some of his idle time. The witness who gave us the tip said he had noticed McCurdy loitering about the door of the old Kinlochiel Good Food Shop, which had gone out of business a couple of years before.
The Ident officers went down into the basement of the abandoned shop and struck gold. By that, I mean they found several items belonging to Bonnie MacDonald. A jacket, a couple of school books, and some notes in her handwriting. Same writing as in the sexy-dress note found in her little friend’s knapsack. There was also a pair of reading glasses, the kind you get in the drugstore. They had heavy black frames, not the kind a young girl would wear, and one of the lenses was missing. None of the stuff tested positive for blood, including a baseball bat, and there were no signs of a struggle in or around the cellar. We didn’t have a crime scene, but we had Bonnie and Jeff McCurdy together, and we had Jeff breaking into her father’s house. Time to lean on young McCurdy.
We picked him up and brought him to the detachment and went through his rights again. And once again, he turned down the opportunity to have Maman listen in on the questions and answers.
Dougald and I agreed that I would conduct the interview since I was less of a known quantity to the McCurdy family.
“Jeff, how well did you know Bonnie MacDonald?”
“I already told you. I knew her at school, just like I know a lot of other people.”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“No!”
“Did you wish she was your girlfriend?”
“If I want a girlfriend, I’ll get a girlfriend, okay? She’s what, twelve?”
“Did you spend time with her, just the two of you?”
That got him rattled. He was wondering what we knew. The best he could come up with was, “I don’t remember.”
“So you did.”
“Hey, I never said that!”
“If you hadn’t spent time with her, you would have said no. So, okay, tell us about the times you spent together.”
“I never.”
“Never what?”
“Spent time with her.”
“Don’t waste our time, Jeff. We know you were with her. You were seen with her. Now tell us.”
We could almost see the wheels turning in his head. He had to own up now. “I’m supposed to remember every time I talked to a kid at school?”
“What did you talk about?”
“I just said I don’t remember.”
The kid was fidgeting and obviously trying to think of something to say that would get us out of his hair. But he knew we were going to be in his hair for the foreseeable future, because any day now we would be charging him with the B&E at Collie MacDonald’s house. The only reason for delaying an arrest was the whole wonky situation with Bonnie’s disappearance. There was the possibility that someone else may have been involved in the break-in, or maybe ordered it. If someone else besides McCurdy was involved, we didn’t want to jump the gun.
Finally, he said, “Any time I saw her, we just talked about school, I guess.”
“What about school?”
“The work.”
“You talked about schoolwork.”
He had a belligerent look about him then, as if he was saying, You wanna make something of it?
“What grade are you in at school, Jeff? Going into which grade in September?”
“Ten. Starting at the high school.”
“And Bonnie is going into seven?”
I was surprised to see a painful-looking flush creep up into Jeff’s face. Caught out in a stupid lie, claiming he was discussing school assignments with a girl three years behind him? I shouldn’t have been surprised. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things suspects think we are dumb enough to accept. This was at the low end of that spectrum of bullshit. I had a guy in Montreal tell me, with a face as straight as a poker, that he was doing undercover work for the Canadian Army at the time the crime was committed, and that nobody would back up his alibi because his assignment was classified top secret. When we laughed at his claims, he pulled out his ace. “Try and prove I wasn’t undercover.” We told him we would prove he was at the wash house of Camp Tinkiwinki or whatever it was, stealing little girls’ panties. Which we did, ’cause he was. So much for his macho-man alibi. As I say, Jeff’s line that he was doing homework with the young girl who disappeared was hardly worth a reply from us.
It was time to cut the crap. “We found your hideout, Jeff, with Bonnie’s clothing in it.”
All of a sudden he looked as if he was having trouble breathing. We let him suffer for a few minutes, then we changed directions.
“Do you wear glasses?”
From the look on his face, you’d think we asked him if he wore diapers. But he managed to give a sarcastic twist to his voice when he answered, “No. I can see you just fine, even though there’s things I’d rather be looking at than you.”
“Where is she, Jeff?”
“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know!”
“Come clean with us, Jeff, and it will go a lot better for you later on. We will look kindly, the court will look kindly, the whole island of Cape Breton will look kindly on a guy who helps us find this young girl, who doesn’t hold out on us any longer, who doesn’t make it any more agonizing for her family. Rather than the way everybody will look on a guy who keeps the agony going for us all.”
The kid seemed to shrink into himself. I leaned in closer. “You’re only fifteen years old. A young offender. You probably didn’t mean to hurt Bonnie. Something happened. You didn’t intend to do it. The court will take that into consideration, along with your young age, if you cooperate and put an end to this now.”
He was white in the face and shaky, no doubt picturing the day the door clanged shut behind him as he began to serve his remaining teenage years in custody. When he finally spoke, though, it was another denial. He was nearly in tears, but he said, “I didn’t touch her. I don’t know where she went.”
“Went?” My voice was sharper than I intended. “Are you saying she went somewhere, as in went of her own free will?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
Monty
It wasn’t the kind of visit we had promised when we enticed Father Brennan Burke to take the Cape Breton option for his priestly retreat this summer. Not that he needed much persuading. He had been with us in Cape Breton before and knew he could anticipate lots of music and tall tales and a little dileag and relaxation, and maybe a tune from Normie on her fiddle. Everything would be copacetic. And that’s how we had billed it. Of course he had lots of notice to the contrary, once the news came out about Bonnie in July. So, even before he crossed the causeway, he knew things were going to be considerably more subdued than originally planned. But that did not mean he had to spend all his time at Holy Cross church in Glace Bay; that would not do anything to solve the problem.
He had been with us in the afternoon when we celebrated the third birthday of little Dominic. Maura and her mum, Catherine, put up balloons and streamers and the other accoutrements of a little kid’s party, and we invited a bunch of young cousins for lunch and cake and games. The little fellow nearly expired with joy when he opened all his presents, but his favourite was a toy airplane, a turboprop, that Normie had spotted on a shopping trip to Sydney. So he and his cousins got to work constructing an airport with a control tower and runway. Sure there was a bit of broken crockery when the plane veered off course, and a tearful scene when somebody suggested pilot error as the likely cause. But all in all it was a smashing success.
After that, Brennan and I decided to go out “on tour.” He had expressed an interest in seeing New Waterford, named as it was after the city of Waterford in the country of his birth.
“Will the MacNeil be joining us?” he asked, with a nod to Maura.
The MacNeil graciously agreed to come along if someone would mind the two young children. “Mum,” she said to Catherine, “can I leave these two little hooligans with you for a while?” She pointed to Normie and Dominic, who were doing air traffic control and paying scant attention to their elders.
“Oh, I think I can handle them, dear. If I survived you and your sisters and brothers, I can take care of these two little angels.”
“Good, because these two larger hooligans need supervision.” This time it was me and Brennan at the end of her pointer finger. “It pains me to say it, but they cannot be left to their own devices. Not when they have care and control of a motor vehicle, and there are drinking establishments along the route. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this.”
“Go ahead then, my dear. Lead, kindly light.”
“Thank you, Mother.” She thought for a moment and then said, “We should call Sharon. Get her out of the house for a little jaunt.”
“No, she’s at Ginny’s today, and Morag is with them. A little gathering of the three generations. I’m sure Ginny and Morag are doing their best to boost Sharon’s spirits, for all the good it will do.”
“Okay. We’ll leave them to it. All right, boys, let’s hit the road. I may as well take the wheel now, because I’ll end up being the designated driver anyway.”
“I take issue with that,” I said to her.
“Take issue with this,” she said but did not display any particular finger or body part, so I concluded we might not be in her doomsday book yet.
“We won’t be legless with drink,” Brennan assured her, “just because we might spot a refreshment stand here and there along the way.”
“Good. Don’t be legless. Don’t be useless. You never know if you might be called upon to have a clear head.”
With that established, we took a drive out along the edge of the continent on a perfect sunny summer’s day. By unspoken agreement, it seemed, we all avoided talking about Bonnie’s disappearance. We were determined to enjoy a day out on the road. There was just enough of a breeze to create whitecaps on the water. Maura drove us to the World War Two naval fortifications and observation tower on the shore at New Victoria. Then we were in New Waterford, which is a coastal town with streets laid out pretty much on a grid. Like Glace Bay, this had been a “company town,” built around coal mining, and several of the streets were named after coal company officials. Dominating the skyline were the two white and black steeples of Mount Carmel church. Boats rocked in the waves along the piers as we drove by.
Maura asked Brennan whether he’d like to stop for awhile in the town and he said, “I’ve a thirst on me,” so we headed for Tom’s bar, where Brennan and I each ordered a beer, and Maura a ginger ale.
A man sitting alone at the next table nodded to us and said, “Powerful day.”
“It certainly is,” I agreed.
His name was Gerry Dan Murphy and he appeared to be in his fifties. Following our introductions, he said he had a brother and an uncle who were priests and a sister who was a nun. Father Burke asked him to pass along his blessings to them, and he asked Murphy a bit about the town. Murphy told us about his family and other Irish immigrants to this part of Cape Breton, about New Waterford’s history as a mining town, and about the miners’ struggles in the 1920s with the British Empire Steel Corporation, which owned the mines.
“What’s this I’m hearing now?” asked Brennan. “The Irish left Ireland, which had been occupied by the British since the twelfth century, and they came here and they were still under the boot of the Brits?”
“Yeah, BESCO. They even had their own police, who ended up shooting one of our miners, William Davis, during the strike of 1925.”
“Sounds like a rough time in history.”
“It was. Be sure to go over and take a look at the monument the town put up. We have a holiday in Davis’s name every year in June.”
“Biggest day on my father’s calendar,” Maura said. “He always made sure we observed Davis Day.”
“Oh, was your dad in the mines?”
“And a major shit-disturber in the union. Alec MacNeil.”
“Alec the Trot! I’ve met your dad. Say hello to him for me.”
“I will.”
Then Murphy returned to his own family’s history. “But before all those hard-fought strikes in the twenties, my mother’s father and her uncle were killed in the mine explosion here in 1917.” The family had rallied, though, and turned to fishing, and they now had several boats to their name. Murphy speculated about taking one of them across the Atlantic from New Waterford to old Waterford, then said, “I guess I shouldn’t say ‘old.’ I should say ‘the original Waterford,’” and Brennan assured him that “old” was a fitting word for the Irish city, which had been founded by the Vikings in the year 914 AD.
“I’m a history buff,” said Murphy. “I would definitely like to see that. I’ll rig up one of our boats and head out. It’s just on the opposite shore of the Atlantic after all. She’s a fishing boat, so I won’t go hungry. I’ll load ’er up with beer and push off and away I go.”
“No reason you shouldn’t,” said Brennan. “The Vikings made it to Newfoundland a thousand years ago, and some say Saint Brendan the Navigator got there from Ireland a few centuries before that. Gives us the opportunity to sit on barstools —”
“As if you’ve had to wait for an opportunity to sit on a barstool and pour vats of beer down your throat,” Maura put in.
“I resent that slander on my throat, which has been duly blessed with holy candles on Saint Blaise’s day. And I equally regret your denigration of beer. Are you not familiar with the prayer of Saint Brigid of Kildare? She was born in Ireland back in 451, Anno Domini, so that should have given you loads of time to familiarize yourself with her work.”
“I’m sure it will come back to me when I hear it proclaimed from your blessed throat, Father.”
“Brigid opened her prayer with this immortal line: ‘I’d like to give a lake of beer to God.’”
“She did not!”
“She did. And she performed a miracle whereby she turned bath water into beer.”
“Well, you people certainly have your bases covered here and in the beyond, don’t you?”
“Never doubt it. Now, as I was saying, Gerry, before I was so crassly interrupted by this teetotalling heathen, we can recount the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan as we sit on our barstools and claim that our people ‘discovered’ North America. Or, more accurately, were the first Europeans to drop in on the native populations here.” The four of us spent some time weighing the pros and cons of that claim, and then Maura, Brennan, and I wished Murphy well and left the bar.
Before leaving town, we stopped to have a look at the “Standing the Gaff” monument commemorating the miners’ strike of 1925. The mine owner had declared that the miners would never be able to “stand the gaff,” wouldn’t be able to stand the pain and the pressure. The company would wait the miners out, starve them out, and they’d come back begging at the table. Well, the men stood the gaff. And William Davis is still a hallowed name in the mining communities of Cape Breton.
We hit the road again, and Maura asked Brennan whether he would like to see Sydney. He said yes, so we drove into the city. She directed his attention to the steel mill. “Now, don’t go wading in the tar ponds while you’re here, Brennan. It’s all toxic sludge, which will dirty your shoes and make you sick to boot.” Not much chance of the fastidious priest exploring that area of the city. “At least the coke ovens aren’t sending up clouds of sulfurous smoke over the city anymore. Would have been a good backdrop for a fire and brimstone sermon, Father.”
“What a shame, in a beautiful place like this.”
“The price to be paid for jobs.”
We turned from the industrial part of the city to the downtown and residential areas, and we admired the gorgeous view along the harbour and the great old wooden houses that lined the streets. I was feeling a bit peckish by this time. “Are you hungry, Brennan?”
“I’ve a mouth on me.”
“What would you like?”
“Red meat.”
“We know just the place,” said Maura.
There was a line to get into the Bonnie Prince, but there always was, and it would be worth the wait. When we were shown to our table a few minutes later, our waitress was a young girl who looked like an older version of our daughter, Normie, without any of her shyness, so we gabbed with her, and she talked Brennan into ordering the sixteen-ounce T-bone steak. Not to be outdone, I demanded sixteen ounces of flesh as well, and we each ordered a beer. Maura ordered salmon and a glass of lemonade. Brennan was interested in the Bonnie Prince theme and the references to Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald, who had helped Charlie escape after the Jacobites’ defeat at Culloden. “He was disguised as somebody named Burke, as I remember the story, Brennan.”
“Good man. Burkes are welcome everywhere, and why would they not be?”
“Why not indeed? So tell me again why your old man hasn’t felt able to return to Ireland four decades after leaving the country?”
He made a gun shape with his right hand and pointed it at my left kneecap. An indication of the welcome that awaited Declan Burke if he showed his face in Ireland, or of my own fate if I didn’t shut up about it?
“A topic best left for another day, perhaps? Very well, back to Charlie. He lost the battle but he was reputed to be quite the swordsman, in the other sense of the word.”
“Bit of a ladies’ man, was he?”
“Apparently so. Fond of a dram as well, was Charlie.”
“The Scottish heroes are no stranger to the bottle, I see, MacNeil. What do you have to say about that?”
“Tòn air deigh dhut!”
“Should I even ask what that means? It sounds a bit like something in Irish that I’m sure none of us in polite society would want to hear.”
“Sure we would. May your arse fall on the ice!”
“Sir,” Brennan said to me, “is there nothing you can do to put manners on this woman?”
“If the past is any indication, the answer is not a thing.”
We turned our attention to our meals then. I remembered hearing that Constable Dougald MacDougald and his wife had had a family party of some kind here, and there were so many people at the tables that two of MacDougald’s nieces got up to help the wait staff and ended up getting hired in the place. One of the girls was still here. So I wasn’t at all surprised to see a Mountie walk in, though it was Pierre Maguire, not Dougald. He was in even plainer clothes than usual, jeans and a Université de Moncton sweatshirt, so he must have been off duty. He could hardly be working undercover in a place where everybody recognized him. I knew the Mounties liked to congregate in places a bit out of the way of their superiors and their clientele; this was the polar opposite of that. As far as I knew, everybody in Sydney came here. But it was a restaurant, not just a drinking hole, so I figured they could relax in here and not raise any eyebrows or generate any gossip.
“Pierre!” I greeted him, and invited him to join us.
“Salut les gars,” he greeted us and sat down.
The topic of conversation at the next table was the summer hockey camp their sons were attending, which was the same one Sharon’s son, Jockie, was in. Andy and Sharon had left the party early the night Bonnie disappeared so the boy could get a good sleep for hockey the next morning.
“Hockey?” Brennan exclaimed. “In the summer?”
“What? No hockey in the summer where you come from?”
“You’ll have to forgive him, Pierre. He hasn’t had our advantages. I doubt they even had winter hockey where he started out. In Dublin. He probably caught a game or two after his family immigrated to New York.”
“We are a hockey nation, Father Burke. We are so busy playing hockey all winter that we have to wait till summer to brush up on our hockey skills.”
“Ah.”
“Monty here will have to get you out on the ice.”
“Funny you should say that, Pierre,” Maura told him. “We were just talking about ice. And falling on it.”
“All part of the game. I grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick, and I played hockey with a priest there. Peter McKee, a good hockey player and a damn good priest, too. He’s at Saint Augustine’s now. Been there for years. He was one of the guys that started up the Flying Fathers. Ever hear of them?”
Brennan thought for a minute and then the light came on. “Yes. A team made up of priests who play hockey to raise money for charities.”
“Oui, c’est ça. They help the poor, the sick, the blind, and all kinds of people in need. And they play a fine game of hockey. One of the other priests who founded the team played with the Leafs before entering the seminary. He was with them when they won the Stanley Cup in the late 1940s. No surprise that there’s a religious connection with hockey, especially with the Montreal Canadiens. Their jerseys are known as La Sainte-Flanelle, after all. My mother used to say the rosary for Montreal when the Canadiens were in a tight spot in the playoffs!”
“And her prayers were answered, I have no doubt,” said Father Burke.
“Bien sûr! Look at the stats.”
We continued to talk sports for a while, until we were interrupted by somebody calling “Pierre!” and we turned to see Dougald MacDougald coming in through the crowd lined up waiting for a seat. “There’s something you have to see. I was just out —” That’s when he got close enough to see me and Maura and Brennan at the table with Pierre. Dougald shot a quick glance in my direction, and I caught it. Pierre caught the next glance, evidently a signal to him to get up and follow Dougald outside where they could speak privately. Pierre nodded to us and left to join his fellow Mountie. Dougald must have started briefing his partner right away because, before they even cleared the building, we heard Pierre exclaim, “Tabarnak!” The rest of us were left to speculate.
“It could be anything,” Brennan said.
“True.”
Maura didn’t say a word.
We continued with our meal in silence, all of us aware that Constable Dougald MacDougald was out of uniform and working with Sergeant Pierre Maguire on only one case, as far as we were aware, the disappearance of Bonnie MacDonald.
Not five minutes later, the Mounties were back, resolution written all over their faces. They had made a decision. They sat down at the table, and Dougald leaned towards Maura. “We have found something — something strange — and we’d like to see whether it makes any sense or rings any bells for you.”
Maura had her glass in hand, about to finish off her lemonade; she put it down and gave the Mounties her full attention.
Dougald asked the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee, and then he filled us in. “We received a call from Lee Kaulbeck. You know who I mean. The paramedic, goes out with Nancy Campbell. The ambulance service got a call to go out to the old Lewis place on the outskirts of Kinlochiel. Lewis is dead, and nobody lives there now. The caller said somebody had fallen through a trap door and was hurt. This guy on the phone couldn’t get the man out. Or at least that was the story. So dispatch gave Kaulbeck the directions, and he headed to the scene. There’s a gardening shed out in the back of the property.”
“Yes?” I said. What I meant was, what is in the shed?
“When Kaulbeck got there with the ambulance, there was nobody injured. Nobody there at all. Turns out Lewis had a cellar dug beneath the shed, with a big trap door over it, and there’s a still under there for making moonshine. Bootlegging operation.”
“Illegal,” I said, “but not unusual here in Cape Breton.”
“No. Anyway, Kaulbeck got the trap door open and climbed down into the cellar to have a look around and make sure there wasn’t somebody lying there hurt. Or dead. But, again, nobody there.”
“And then?”
“He found a little tableau set up in there. Whoever called this in wanted somebody — maybe wanted us — to see it.”
“So why not call us in the first place?” Pierre asked. “Why the story about the guy being injured?”
“Lee had no idea. Maybe the caller was afraid we’d recognize his voice, or somebody at the detachment would.”
“Callers won’t be able to bypass us once they set up the nine-one-one system here, when all emergency calls will go through the one number.”
“And all the crank calls, too. That’s right. But anyway, this guy knew that if one of the ambulance drivers saw this, he’d bring us in.”
“And the girl at dispatch for the ambulance had no idea who the caller was?”
“No.”
Maura had maintained a tense silence, but I interrupted them. Couldn’t help it. “What was in there?”
That’s when Dougald produced the photographs. Four-by-sixes, in colour. He shoved our plates, cups, and glasses out of the way and spread the pictures out on the table. There was a quick intake of breath but no other sound from Maura as she took in the scene. There, in the old bootlegger’s cellar, in front of a moonshine still made of copper, were two teddy bears seated at a child’s wooden table. There was a little china teapot, and a cup and saucer in front of each of the bears. The china was emblazoned with the green, gold, grey, and black Cape Breton tartan. I remember being told that grey was for the steel, black for the coal. But this was something of a danse macabre, because one of the close-ups showed a bear dressed in a kid-size Clan Donnie T-shirt, a tartan kilt — I was willing to bet it was a MacDonald tartan — and a bright blue scarf loosely tied around its neck. It had on a pair of doll-size dancing shoes, and someone had fashioned a mop of black curly hair, presumably taken from a doll. There was not a shadow of a doubt that this was meant to be Bonnie Clan Donnie MacDonald.
The second bear, shown in another close-up, was dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt depicting an old-style television set with a “rabbit ears” antenna. In the centre of the screen was the face of Elvis Presley, his lip curled up in a snarl. The caption underneath read “Really Big Show,” an obvious reference to the Ed Sullivan Show back in the heyday of 1950s TV. I was not aware of any connection between the Clan Donnie band and the music of Elvis Presley, but that was probably beside the point. Whatever the point was, it was about Bonnie. And whoever had staged this scene was sending a message: a taunt or a hint or just a bit of viciousness at the expense of the family. It was certainly a remote setting, where the perpetrator could have carried the items in and set them up without being observed. Then all he had to do to bring attention to his handiwork was make an emergency call to bring in the authorities.
“The Ident section is there now,” Dougald said. The technical team, checking for fingerprints, shoe prints, and other evidence. Including blood. He looked at Maura. “Does this tell you anything?”
“Not a thing, aside from the fact that that is obviously Bonnie. If there is some other kind of message or link, it’s beyond me. And if there is no meaning, if this is just some sick bastard’s idea of a joke, that’s beyond me, too. Jesus!”
Pierre was glaring at the pictures. “Somebody’s trying to fuck with our heads.”
“We’re going out now to tell the family,” said Dougald. “See if they can shed any light on this.”
“They’re all at Ginny’s place today, Dougald.” Maura’s voice was so soft as to be almost unrecognizable.
“We’ll follow you out,” I said. “We won’t get in the way.” In other words, we wouldn’t burst into the house first and blow it for the police, who would want the family’s unprepared — unrehearsed — reaction.
Maura got behind the wheel, and the three of us drove to Kinlochiel behind the Mounties in their unmarked car. All the way there, we asked each other rhetorical questions about the kind of person who would achieve gratification by putting on such a display. We could do no better than repeat the Acadian-French-accented words of Sergeant Pierre Maguire: “Somebody’s trying to fuck with our heads.”
The police pulled in at Ginny’s house, and we waited outside to give them a few minutes. Then we headed in. Sharon was there with Ginny and old Morag. Bonnie’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. The women were all in the living room with glasses of red wine.
I thought the two Mounties would have delivered the news by now, but they must have opened with small talk, maybe to relax everyone, because they were just at the beginning of their tale. “. . . old shed with gardening tools and flower boxes and a cellar underneath, with a home distillery in it.”
Morag said, “That’d be Glory Hally Lewis’s place.”
“Who?”
“Harold Lewis. Called himself Hal, so of course he became Glory Hally Lewis. I remember your Collie,” she said to Sharon, “would tell Glory Hally he was going to write a song someday about him, and Collie would spread his arms out and say, ‘Glory Hallelujah! Have a drink of shine and praise the Lord!’ Anyway, Glory Hally built a shed over the cellar to hide the entrance.”
“Sharon,” Dougald said, and she immediately tensed up. “There were some items down in the cellar.”
“What?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Did Bonnie have a teddy bear about this big?” He spread his hands about eighteen inches apart to show its height.
“I . . . I . . .” Sharon looked at her mother and grandmother as if they might be able to help.
“Would she have dressed a teddy to look like her, in her kilt and dancing shoes and a wig of black hair?”
“She . . . she would love that, but she’s never done it. I’d know if she had. She would have asked me to make the clothes or help her. Bonnie’s efforts at sewing aren’t very, well . . . it’s not one of her strengths, let’s say. Heather and Jockie have teddy bears, but I saw them when I cleaned their rooms this morning. Why? What did you see down there?”
“There was a teddy bear dressed like . . . dressed the way I described.”
“Oh God!”
“It was a teddy bears’ picnic sort of thing, with a doll’s china tea set.”
“What on earth? It must have been just kids playing. They shouldn’t be down there, but you know kids.”
“Well, it probably wasn’t little children who set this up. We’re trying to trace the call from whoever phoned to draw attention to the display. Now, at the table, there was another bear as well. The bear looked fairly new, like the other one, but it had on an old-fashioned T-shirt, with a picture of Elvis. Does that mean anything at all to you?”
Sharon merely shook her head.
“There are still lots of Elvis fans around so it may have no meaning, just a shirt that was available. This one showed him on the Ed Sullivan Show.”
“I remember that!” Maura said.
“Me, too,” I chimed in. “Ed Sullivan had declared that he would never have Elvis on his show.”
“No, young Presley was considered quite naughty back in 1956, with that eff-you expression on his face and those hip movements.”
“But when Sullivan saw the size of the audience that tuned in to Elvis on another show, he did an about-face and booked him for the program.”
I knew we were babbling. It was a case of the nerves. I looked over at Sharon and her mother and grandmother and tried to think of something comforting to say. But it was strange. Ginny MacDonald’s face was nearly as white as her hair, and she was clutching the armrests of her chair as if she were afraid of falling off. Morag had her in the sights of her coal black eyes.
Maura asked what they were thinking, but neither Ginny nor Morag breathed a word. It was as if there was nobody else in the room.
Normie
It was so much fun having the birthday party for Dominic at Grandma Catherine’s house in Glace Bay that I could almost pretend life was good and normal. Could almost put out of my mind the picture Morag described — a picture I had nightmares about — of evil all around Bonnie like poison gas. When I was with Dominic, I pushed that out of my head. My little brother is so cute! He has black hair and dark eyes and looks Italian, which they say he is. Half, anyway. He was born when my mum and dad were separated, but Daddy moved back in with us last year, and nobody cares about all that now. And Dominic loved the airplane I got for him, and he sat on my knee and used the table as a runway when we were having our cake.
I came back to Kinlochiel the day after that, Sunday, and I heard everybody talking about the teddy bears’ picnic they found under some old guy’s shed. It was a place where the guy made booze that was against the law. And I wanted to see it. So did John Rory, after I phoned him and told him all about it. He couldn’t come to Kinlochiel till Monday, so I waited. By the time he came over to Morag’s and we got on our bikes, he knew exactly how to get there, out on the country roads. So we rode out there. We hopped off our bikes and hid them behind the gardening shed, so nobody could tell from driving by on the road that we were sneaking in there. John Rory’s bike had a light, so he unhooked it and brought it with him. We knew it would be dark in the cellar.
“We’re not going in if there’s crime scene tape around the place,” John Rory said.
But there wasn’t any. The police must have finished their investigation. The little shack that the guy had built over the booze factory just had garden rakes and stuff in it. And Captain Morgan rum bottles. He must have guzzled all the Captain Morgan and then used the bottles for the stuff he made himself. The interesting part was the floor; it was really a secret trap door, except that the secret was out now. John Rory picked up one end of it, and I took the other. It was really heavy but we were able to move it out of place so we could go underground. There was no ladder or set of stairs; you had to jump down to the dirt floor. He went first and helped me down, so I didn’t hurt myself. Good thing we had the light. Before he turned it on, I had never been in such a dark place.
But we did have the light. And there was the picnic, Bonnie and the other teddy with a little china tea set. I was wishing I could have it, but I knew I couldn’t steal something from there. All these things might be clues to whatever happened to Bonnie. And I felt really spooked down there. This was all put together by somebody who was mean. Somebody who was bad. Because if he had wanted to set up a nice little picnic scene to say, “We miss you, Bonnie, and we hope you are somewhere as safe as a teddy bears’ picnic,” he wouldn’t have hidden it under the ground. The guy who did it had made a fake call to the Mounties or the ambulance or somebody else important to get them to see this. I didn’t dare touch anything because of how my fingers got burned the time I picked up the papers in that crazy-looking house with the garages.
“What a creep, whoever did this,” John Rory said. “It’s as if he’s making fun of Bonnie, or making a joke out of her being missing. Why else would he go to all the trouble of doing this? He must be a complete sicko.”
“Yeah, I know. How come there are people like that in the world?”
“I don’t know. Makes me think I should study criminals and weirdoes when I grow up. Go into the prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane and try to find out what makes them tick.”
“What would you be? A scientist?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Or a doctor. A shrink, I suppose.”
“Wouldn’t you be scared? Or really upset, spending all that time with dangerous people? My dad has to do that because he’s a criminal lawyer. He has to act for the bad guys. He says sometimes they didn’t do it. But most of them are guilty.”
“Pretty depressing, I imagine.”
“He says he gets ‘burnt out’ sometimes by all the bad stuff.”
“Yeah, I would think so.”
“But he told me and my brother Tommy Douglas that most of his clients aren’t really bad. They come from bad homes where they learn bad habits. They do bad things, or they do stupid things on the spur of the moment and get caught. But he says most of them aren’t truly evil. Only a few.”
“Well, I’d say it’s one of those few that’s done this. Taken Bonnie and then rubbed everybody’s nose in it by setting up this scene.”
“What if he comes back?” I knew I sounded like a scaredy-cat, but I couldn’t help it. “What if he set this up and made the secret call, just so he can catch people coming to look, and then he’ll grab them?! He could even . . .” I whipped around and looked behind me into the blackness. I banged into something and jumped a foot off the ground. John Rory shone his light on it. It was a big copper tank with skinny tubes going to smaller copper containers. The booze machine. But I was too scared to even look it over or wonder how it worked. I had to make myself whisper because a really terrifying idea had come into my head. “What if he’s lurking there in the dark? And he’s going to come and get us? We have to get out of here!”
John Rory reached out and patted me on top of my curls. “Fear not, cuz. The guy’s not in here. He wouldn’t come back this soon. He can’t be sure that the Mounties don’t have a surveillance team watching the place. That’s probably why they left everything in place; they’ll want to see if anyone shows up, maybe changes things or adds something new.”
“Do you think the Mounties are out there hidden somewhere and looking through binoculars?”
“Could be.”
“Oh my God!”
“What?”
“They already caught me, and they let me off with a warning!”
He looked at me as if I was loony. “Caught you doing what?”
I whispered again. “Drinking.”
He cracked up at that. “Normie. They have better things to do than go after somebody like you for . . . What were you drinking?”
“Wine.”
“Where were you drinking at? Out behind the barn? Or were you swilling cheap wine out of a bottle in a brown paper bag out behind the Legion in Glace Bay?”
He was teasing me. “No, at Morag’s house. One of the Mounties came in and saw me.”
“But he didn’t put you in handcuffs and haul you away.”
“No, he said he’d let it go. This time. I think he was joking. But now I’m being bad again, sneaking into a crime scene, and if they’re out there with binoculars . . .”
“They’re gonna take ya downtown. Book ’er, Danno.”
“Ha ha. They can’t because I’m only eleven. But wait! Can they keep a list and hold off and arrest me later for the things I did this year?”
“No. Let’s get you out of here. This place has you spooked.”
“Aren’t you spooked yourself, John Rory?”
“Nah, I’m a man.”
He made himself walk funny, like a tough guy in the movies, and I started to laugh. Then I felt guilty, laughing in front of this creepy scene that was making a joke out of Bonnie being gone.
“Here,” he said, and he bent down and picked something up. There were pieces of coal on the floor up against the basement wall. “Glory Hally was using coal for his stone furnace.”
“Furnace?”
“Yeah, you need a heat source under the still to heat the mash so the alcohol will evaporate. That’s how it’s distilled. Hence the word ‘still.’”
“So that’s what it means?”
“Right. And, being a good Caper, he used coal. The perp — the sicko who set up this picnic — must have shoved the coal out of the way when he put the table and chairs in place.” John Rory had picked up two big lumps of it. “This is bootleg coal.”
“What? Bootleggers don’t make coal! You dig it out of the ground. The miners do.”
“No, I mean they dig their own mines on their own properties. Or they used to, anyway. So they wouldn’t have to pay for it.” He held one chunk of it out to me. “An early Christmas present. I’m John Rory Santa MacDonald, and this is your lump of coal.” Then he said, “I should give you a whole stack of it to take up and sell. I’ll take half the profits. You’ll be the mule.”
“Mule!”
“Yeah, the courier. When drug dealers want to get drugs moved somewhere, they give it to somebody else to carry, and they call the guy a mule. That’s you, because you’re too young to get arrested. So you do my dirty work, and I get half the money from the bootleg coal. And we’ll fire up the still and sell moonshine while we’re at it.”
“What are you trying to do, b’y, get me in trouble?”
“Yes!” It sounded like “yayss.”
“My very own cousin turns out to be ‘the wrong crowd.’ The type I’m not supposed to hang around with!”
“All right, we won’t go into business. I’ll find another henchman. But here, take one anyway.”
“You keep it.” I didn’t want to touch anything down there.
“Okay. I’m gonna save these for my sisters. Their stockings at Christmas. There. My shopping is done four months early!”
I laughed and then I felt bad again about seeming to have fun when Bonnie was the victim of a crime. I looked at John Rory and saw him looking back at the tea party, and I could tell from his face that he felt bad, too. But he didn’t say anything about it, so neither did I.
When we were out in the daylight again, I peered all around. “I don’t see any Mounties.”
“You wouldn’t. They’d be in hiding. Or maybe they set up a camera in one of the trees.”
That was the fastest I ever rode a bike in my life, getting away from there. When we got back to Morag’s and wheeled the bikes into the barn, we went into the house, and Morag invited us to supper with an old couple she had visiting. We both said yes and thanks. John Rory put the lumps of coal down on the counter and washed his hands because they were black. Then he whispered to me that the two old people had asked for haggis for supper, and Morag had it all ready to serve. It’s not polite to refuse to eat what’s put in front of you. Haggis is — I know this sounds unbelievable, but it’s true — haggis is a bunch of sheep’s guts. The heart and liver and lungs! It’s all mixed up with other stuff. Inside the sheep’s own stomach! I know this because one time Father Burke was over at our house, and Mum pretended we were going to serve him haggis for supper, and she read out the recipe listing all the gross things that were in it, and his face turned white. And she cracked up laughing at him. But it wasn’t so funny now, when I thought I might have to eat it myself or even have to look at it.
Maybe I could offer to get on a bike and go to the store and get something else. Did I have any money? Probably not enough to feed five people. Okay, I would just fake being sick. But I’d check first, just in case. “Greatgran Morag, is there anything I can help with for the dinner?”
“Thank you, little one. But it’s all ready. Just has to be heated up a bit.”
“Oh, good.” Then I couldn’t help myself. “What is it?”
“Fettuccine Alfredo.” Whew! Something Italian, so it would be good.
I never knew Morag could be so funny. The old folks who were at dinner with us were really nice. They were Mr. and Mrs. Fraser from Inverness County on the other side of the island, and they told Morag that where they lived was the true home of Celtic music and the Gaelic language, and not our side of the island. And they started talking really fast in Gaelic, so they could then show that Morag couldn’t understand them. But she did and said something that must have been saucy back at them, and they said she probably hadn’t really understood their words, but that she had cheated and read their minds before they spoke. Morag said, “Ye will never know, will ye?”
Mr. Fraser started poking fun at Morag, calling her a psychic, and he said they should call in a reporter from that crazy newspaper, the National Enquirer, and have a séance and bring some dead person back into the room. Please, please, please, I said to myself, hoping she would do it. It would be scary, but still. It would be worth it for us to see or hear a ghost. Imagine telling the kids back home about that when school started again. She didn’t really do it, but she had a pretend séance. She made us all hold hands around the table, and she put on this fake-scary voice. “I see somebody. I can barely make him out. Wait, wait. It’s old Alastair Fraser!” She looked across at Mr. Fraser; she meant it was his dad in the spirit world. “How do I know you are his daddy? What? Does he?” Morag looked at Mr. Fraser over the tops of her glasses. She looked as if she was trying to see behind him. “No, Alastair, I can’t do that. This is a respectable house. There are wee bairns present. I can’t ask him if he has a birthmark in the shape of a sheep air a thòn.” A birthmark on his arse!
Morag went on again about Mr. Fraser, letting on that his father’s ghost was talking. “Did he? No! All right, I’d better tell her. I’ll wait till I’m alone with her to break the bad news.” She shook her head and made a fake-sad face at his wife. “You may never feel the same way about him again.” And it went on like that, her pretending that the ghost was telling embarrassing secrets about Mr. Fraser, and him pretending to be worried. They all had a great laugh, and so did John Rory and I. Morag ended it by saying, “Ach, Alastair, I’d better let you go. You’ve got a long climb back down to where you’re abiding now.”
We all ate the fettuccine and then butterscotch pie for dessert. It was the best I ever tasted, and Morag had made it all by herself in the house! They all had glasses of wine and Scotch. I had nothing to drink myself. Better that way. When we were getting up from the table, Mr. Fraser said, “If you’re such a wise woman, Morag, tell me some good news, something I can look forward to in my old age.”
“You can start fixing up that little house you have at the tag end of your land out there in Inverness.”
“I said good news, not a whole lot of work for me to do on a place that nobody is ever going to rent!”
“It’ll be a lovely place for Barbara and the triplets till Johnny finds a job here on the island.”
Mrs. Fraser’s jaw fell open, and she stared at Morag. Then she said, “Morag! How did you know that? Nobody does. I hadn’t even told him yet that he’s going to be a grandfather three times over.” She pointed to her husband. “Barbara wants to wait to make sure everything’s all right with the pregnancy before she makes her announcement.”
“Everything’s fine. Three healthy wee babes on their way.”
They both gawked at Morag, then they said their goodbyes and were kind of babbling when they went out the door.
Morag invited John Rory to stay overnight with us, but he said no thanks because his mum was coming to get him and take him home to Ben Eoin. So I went to the little bedroom next to Morag’s where I always slept. I liked my bed there, which had metal curlicues at the head and the foot of it. Rot iron, she said it’s called, maybe because of the holes in it, but they’re just part of the design, so I don’t know why they call it that. Anyway, I had two drawers in the dresser for my own clothes. I fell asleep but I woke up in the middle of the night because I had to pee. I got up and looked out my window. The moon was full and bright, but a cloud passed over it, and all I could see was the glow from behind the cloud. There was an old bent tree in the yard, and it looked as if every living leaf had been stripped off it. While I was staring at it, all of a sudden I saw a pair of yellow eyes fixed right on me from beside the old tree. Whatever it was, it never blinked. Just kept its eyes on me. It gave me the shivers. I turned away from the window so I could tiptoe down the hall into the bathroom. I didn’t want to wake Morag up. Her door was open a crack, so I was as quiet as a mouse going by. After I finished and washed my hands, I started to tiptoe back to my room.
It was then that I heard Morag’s voice. I turned towards her door, figuring she must have said something to me. Just before I touched the door to go in, though, I heard her again, and I peeked in through the crack. She was standing at the window in a long white nightgown. And she had something in her hand. Both hands. The lumps of coal! The pieces of coal that John Rory had brought back to the house. He forgot to take them when he left. She was staring out the window, and her face was lit up for a few seconds by the moon. Then the clouds must have covered the moon again because her face was in shadow. I was — it took a minute for me to think of the word — spellbound. I stood there watching her and did not want to go back to my room.
She started speaking again. “Be gone! There is nothing for you here. I know what you are, what you were. And I can divine exactly what you want. You want to take her with you. But she cannot be with you, not where you are. You have no right to be in this world. Go! Go back to hell where you belong!”
Her voice was ragged; it was so frightening that I must have jumped in my place, because she turned from the window and stood looking towards the partly open door. With me behind it. Was I going to be in trouble for spying and listening in? I was stuck in my place; I couldn’t move. Old Morag turned her terrifying eyes on me. She didn’t seem to recognize me. She started talking in Gaelic. I couldn’t understand what she said, except a few words: dead, world, fog, dark. But I wanted to know. I had to know. “What were you saying, Greatgran Morag?”
She switched to English, and her voice sounded tired, ancient. “It is not natural for the dead to return to this world. But return they do. The veil between this world and the other is gossamer thin, a wavering curtain of fog and darkness. They should not pierce that veil and come among us. But they are unsettled, those who return. Beware of summoning what you cannot understand.” Then she went back to the Gaelic and mumbled some more words. All I made out was “Saor sinn o’n olc,” which meant “Deliver us from evil,” and a feeling of icy coldness started at the base of my spine and travelled out to the tips of my fingers. Evil. She sank down into her bed and fell back on her pillow. Her eyes closed and she said no more.
I walked back to my room, shaking. I looked out the window but the moon was gone, hidden by the clouds. I lay on my back staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t dare close my eyes. Was there something evil amongst us? Did she mean that an evil spirit had come into the world to take Bonnie? How could that be?