LIAM
The police officer was in his late thirties, Liam guessed, a couple of years older than he was. Not tall but broad and exceedingly solid-looking, which, given the lumber camps and the bars in town, he probably needed to be. But he looked friendly enough.
“Good morning,” he said, coming up the steps.
“Good morning,” Liam said.
“This is just a kind of courtesy call,” the officer said. “I’m Sergeant Barnes.”
“Nice to meet you.” A courtesy call? Did every newcomer to the area get a courtesy call from the cops? “What can I do for you?”
“Maybe I could come in for a minute. I won’t keep you long.”
“Sure, yeah, come in.” Liam held the door open and ushered him into the living room. “Have a seat.”
“You arrived yesterday?” the cop asked, lowering himself into one of the big stuffed armchairs. “That right?”
“Yes, I drove up from Toronto.”
“A long drive. Afraid I missed your name.”
“Oh,” Liam said. “Sorry. Kane. Liam Kane.”
“You’re a relative of Mrs. Orchard, Mr. Kane? A nephew, maybe? We were all sorry to learn of her passing, by the way. She was a very nice woman—as was her sister, I must say. Did you know Miss Godwin?”
“No, I didn’t,” Liam said, feeling like a fraud. “And actually, I’m not any relation of Mrs. Orchard’s either. She and her husband were neighbours of my parents when I was a kid. They lived next door to us. In Guelph, down in Southern Ontario. Her husband and my father both taught at the agriculture college there.”
Sergeant Barnes nodded but said nothing.
“They didn’t have any kids,” Liam explained. “I guess I was sort of a substitute. I spent a lot of time at their place.” The cop nodded again. Again said nothing. Liam added, “I was a bit…surprised about her leaving me everything. Very surprised, in fact. I guess she had no one else to leave things to.”
“A nice little legacy,” the sergeant said at last. Still perfectly pleasant, still not satisfied about something.
“Yes.”
“Wish someone would give me a surprise like that. I always seem to get the other kind.” The sergeant smiled and shifted in his chair. “It all seems to have gone through pretty quick, doesn’t it, Mr. Kane? You know what I mean? Normally with wills, probate takes a good while and Mrs. Orchard hasn’t been deceased all that long. About a week, in fact.
“Yeah, I know.” He was conscious that his pulse was picking up speed. “But, actually, the house was already mine.”
“That’s interesting,” Sergeant Barnes said. “How did that come about?”
“She gave it to me before she died. A couple of weeks before. Everything else was covered by the will, but she gave me the house outright. As a gift.”
“Why did she do that, d’you think? Like, what was the urgency?”
“I don’t know. I guess she just wanted me to have something straight away.” He’d asked the lawyer the same question and the lawyer had given the same answer.
Sergeant Barnes regarded him thoughtfully. After a minute he said, “Mr. Kane, I have no right to ask you this and you don’t have to comply, but it would ease my mind if you happened to have a letter from your lawyer or something else that would confirm all this. And some photo ID would be good too. Though, like I say, you aren’t under any obligation to provide it.”
“The papers are upstairs,” Liam said. “I’ll get them.”
It would ease my mind, he thought, going up the stairs. You don’t have to comply. Right.
He went to the bedroom and dug out the will, his passport and the papers relating to Mrs. Orchard’s gift of the house from his suitcase, took them downstairs and gave them to the police officer. Then he sat down again and pretended to relax.
The cop took his time. He got out a little black notebook and made a note of the lawyer’s name and address, flicked his eyes over Liam’s face as he check ed the passport photo, went through the letters regarding the will and Mrs. Orchard’s gift. Finally, he smiled and handed everything back. “All looks good, Mr. Kane,” he said. “Thanks very much.”
It seemed to Liam that the sergeant looked relieved, and he felt his own muscles start to loosen in response. He took a deep breath and surreptitiously let it out.
“Let me tell you what all this is about,” the sergeant said. “Kid next door—sixteen-year-old girl—ran off a couple of weeks ago. Had a row with her mom, said she was leaving and wouldn’t be back. She’s done it before, apparently, but always been back within a couple of days. Whereas this time it’s been coming on for two weeks. Her parents are getting pretty worried.”
“Oh,” Liam said. “Right. Must be…difficult.”
Sergeant Barnes nodded. “Being sixteen she’s old enough to leave home if she chooses, and no one can make her come back. But two weeks without any one seeing her or hearing from her is cause for concern.”
Liam nodded. “Do you…is there any reason to suspect…what do you call it, foul play?”
“Nope. Nothing going on beforehand that anyone knows. I talked with her friends, the school, kids in her class, sent out photos and missing persons bulletins to towns she might have gone to, checked the police info centre…all the usual stuff. We did a big search, everyone in town turned out including a couple of trackers from the Ojibway reserve. Got two police dogs and their handlers from North Bay. Combed the bush, barns, outhouses, you name it, everything for miles around. Found exactly nothing. Not a trace.
“Anyway, reason I’m sitting here taking up your time is that you’re a stranger in town and you’ve moved in right next door. Plus you arrived kinda quick, like I said, and Mr. and Mrs. Jordon are a little wound up at the moment. They’ll be anxious about their younger daughter too, she’s seven or eight. I wanted to be able to assure them that you are who you say you are, for your sake as well as theirs. Also thought you should know what’s going on next door.”
Liam nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks for telling me.”
There was a brief pause and then the cop said, “You planning to settle down here, Mr. Kane, or you going to sell the house?” He smiled at Liam and made a random motion with his pencil. “This is just me being nosy, not me being a cop.”
“I’ll be selling it but I thought I’d have a couple of weeks’ holiday before putting it on the market,” Liam said. “I haven’t decided exactly how long I’ll stay. It’ll depend partly on the weather. I’ve just quit my job so I don’t have to get back at any particular time.”
“Yeah? What was the job?”
“I’m an accountant. I worked for an accountancy firm—Jarvis and Jones—in Toronto.”
“Sounds like a good job.”
“Good money, lousy job.”
Resigning had not been a rational decision—he had no new job to go to—but he wasn’t thinking straight at the time; his brain had still been clotted with the bile and vitriol of his last meeting with Fiona. Everything in his life seemed to be falling apart, he’d been bored at work for years, why not quit? He was between projects and had a lot of vacation owing to him, so he was able to leave straight away. Which gave him a lot of time to sit staring at the walls of his box-like, newly rented Toronto apartment, paralysed with inertia, wondering if he was going nuts.
Ten days after he’d left Jarvis and Jones, a letter arrived from Mrs. Orchard’s lawyer in Sudbury informing him that he was now the owner of a house in Northern Ontario. Grateful but baffled, Liam phoned his father.
“An old woman’s just given me a house,” he said. “Mrs. Orchard. Do you remember her?”
There was a moment’s pause. Then his father said, “That’s very nice. Did this come out of nowhere?”
“Well, not quite. She got in touch a few years ago, when her husband died. We’ve been writing back and forth since then—just the odd letter. I’ve never met her or anything.”
“Really,” his father said. He sounded, Liam thought, as if he was staring into space. “Well, she was very fond of you when you were small. They were childless, so I guess…” The sentence trailed off. “Have you told your mother?”
“No.” He rarely phoned his mother and then only out of duty.
“Might be best not to,” his father said. “Look”—his voice became brisk—“I have a meeting in five minutes so I have to go, but congratulations. You were due for some good news.”
Liam cut in, “Why shouldn’t I tell Mom?”
“Oh, there was bad feeling of some sort between them. I don’t know the details. I wouldn’t worry about it, just enjoy your legacy.”
He intended to write to Mrs. Orchard that day, thanking her for her remarkable gift, but he didn’t get round to it, and a couple of days passed, and then a few more, guilt growing all the time. And then a second letter from the lawyer arrived, saying that she had died, and that apart from a small sum left to the woman who came in to clean the house Liam was the sole beneficiary of her will.
Before he’d finished reading the letter he’d known he was going north; there was no sense to it, it just seemed the only thing to do. All of his belongings were still in boxes so he loaded them into the car that evening and, at four in the morning, unable to sleep, he set off. By a quarter to five he was on Highway 400; after Barrie he had the road to himself. When he reached Sudbury he went to the lawyer’s offices, signed documents and picked up the keys to the house. By six in the evening, nightmarish northern roads notwithstanding, he was walking up the steps of Mrs. Orchard’s porch, with Toronto, his career and his marriage behind him.
And now, not much more than twelve hours later, somewhat dazed and very short of sleep, he was sitting in a strange house, which he happened to own, trying to explain it all to a cop.
“Plus my wife and I are in the process of getting a divorce,” Liam heard himself say. “So things are a bit…up in the air.”
“Sounds like, what do they call it, a mid-life crisis.”
“Guess so.” He was trying to figure out why he’d just said what he’d just said.
“These things happen,” Sergeant Barnes said. “Kinda rough, though.”
“Yes.”
The cop got to his feet, stuffing the little black notebook into a back pocket. “Well, thanks for your time, Mr. Kane. Hope you enjoy your holiday.” He smiled. “In fact, hope you decide to stay, we need some new faces up here, we’re all getting tired of each other.”
It struck Liam as the police car was driving off that this was the first time he’d spoken more than two words to anyone apart from lawyers since he’d walked out of his office at Jarvis and Jones three weeks ago. In fact, if you left out work-related discussions with his colleagues, it might be a contender for the longest conversation he’d had with anyone, including his wife, in the past year.
Fiona would have said this was a perfect illustration of what she’d figured out years ago, namely that Liam had no close friends for the simple reason that he was incapable of forming relationships, just as he was incapable of love. She had made the observation many times, most recently in an eye-poppingly expensive restaurant (her choice, of course) on their eighth and final wedding anniversary. He had replied that he’d managed to stay married to her for eight years, which was an achievement in anybody’s book. The conversation had ended with them agreeing to divorce. “It’s nice that we can agree on something,” Fiona had said. “Don’t you think?”
In Mrs. Orchard’s kitchen he stood with hands in his pockets, staring blankly at the still-unpacked bags of groceries on the counter. The talk with the police officer had added to the rabble of undigested thoughts and emotions churning around in his mind. Clearly the cop had been suspicious of his story, and though the lawyer’s papers had seemed to satisfy him, it was possible he was still unconvinced. The more Liam thought about it the more likely that seemed, and if so, it changed things: he’d thought spending a couple of weeks up here might be relaxing, a holiday during which he could recover from the stresses of the past few months and figure out what came next. Being a suspect in a case involving a teenager’s disappearance or abduction didn’t fit the bill.
There was nothing to stop him from changing his plans; the sergeant hadn’t told him he had to stay in town. He could pack his boxes back into the car and take off right now. The clearance of the contents and the sale of the house could be arranged from anywhere in the country; if he put his mind to it, he could be out of Solace in a couple of hours, make it as far as North Bay tonight. Then in the morning he’d have an early start and head to…where, exactly? To do what?
In the course of thinking all this, as if his brain was going in one direction and his body another, he discovered he’d unpacked the groceries, which were now standing on the counter waiting to be put away. If he was leaving he should pack them up again and take them with him.
He studied the groceries for a minute. Toss a coin, he thought vaguely. He wandered into the hallway and sat on the stairs, elbows on knees, hands dangling, listening to the utter silence of the house, and suddenly, out of nowhere, was blindsided by a feeling of desolation and despair so profound it left him breathless. Afraid he was going to pass out, he bent forward, head in hands, eyes closed, breathing carefully. He didn’t know what was happening. It was like being caught up in an avalanche.
After a time, the feeling began to recede. He opened his eyes, focused on the floor. Pale, honey-coloured beech, like the floor in the hallway of his parents’ home in Calgary, where they’d moved after leaving Guelph. There’d been a small rug. Red and blue. It was inclined to slide about, particularly if you were running.
He saw himself, aged ten or so, not running but sitting on the stairs as he was now, listening to his sisters giggling up in their bedrooms. Saw the four of them—two older than him, two younger—streaming down the stairs past him, into the kitchen where their mother was getting supper. Heard her laughing at some story they were reporting. He remembered how empty the hall had felt, with all of them in there. Their laughter. The hollowness inside him. In his memory, this had happened many times, it was always happening. If he walked into a room where they were all chattering, they would stop. Turn to him and say hi, their faces expressionless.
There must have been a reason, it couldn’t have been simply that they were girls and, as the only boy, he was naturally excluded. There had been a barrier between him and the rest of them—particularly between him and his mother; the girls, he decided now, probably took their cue from her. Mostly, his mother had seemed indifferent to him, but there had been times when he’d felt something close to hostility emanating from her, which he’d been, and still was, completely at a loss to understand. It was as if he’d unknowingly committed an unforgivable crime.
He shifted on the step. Why are you thinking about all this now? he thought. It was decades ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.
Cautiously, he straightened up and pushed himself to his feet. He felt OK. The avalanche had moved on.
He decided he wasn’t up to making a decision about staying or going; he needed to do something mindless, something physical. He went upstairs, into the bathroom, squatted down and felt the floorboards again. Still wet and spongy. He ran his hand around the U-bend of the waste pipe. Wet. Mystery solved. He tried tightening the joint by hand; it didn’t budge. He needed a wrench. He’d seen no tools in the house or garage but there was a hardware store in town.
Exercise seemed called for and it was a nice day, hot sun, cool breeze off the lake, so he walked. In the ten minutes it took him to reach the centre of town only one car passed him, but in town there were people on the street. Mostly residents, he guessed; the tourist season was over. Some of them smiled at him and said good morning. He managed a nod in return. In Toronto—in any big city, no doubt—people focused straight ahead or on their feet and didn’t so much as acknowledge your existence. He decided he preferred it that way, it was less effort.
There was an old man behind the counter in the hardware store. He had a stoop and a suspicious look. He nodded—a mere jerk of the head—at Liam, who nodded back. Another misanthrope, Liam thought; we should get on well. The store was a windowless cave, a couple of bare light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. There were tools hanging on walls, piled in bins, stacked on counters, heaped on the floor. Hooks had been screwed into beams in the ceiling; suspended from them were axes, handsaws, scythe blades—anything with a hole for a string to hang it by.
“Whatcha looking for?” the old man asked. His manner was brusque, as if he wanted to get this over with and Liam out of his store as fast as he could.
“I need a wrench,” Liam said.
“What for?”
A woman walked in from the back room carrying a mug of coffee. “Here you are, Dad,” she said, then nodded at Liam. “Good morning,” she said, polite rather than friendly.
“Good morning,” Liam said. The woman was mid-thirties. Good-looking. Nice figure.
“What for?” the old man repeated sharply. The woman put down the coffee and left. Liam watched her go.
“Pardon?” he said.
“What do you want the wrench for!” A near-bellow. “What do you want to do with it!”
Smash your head in, for a start, Liam thought. He considered walking out but decided against it, this being the only hardware in town. “The U-bend on the bathroom sink. The joint’s leaking.”
“OK. What you want is this.” The old man shuffled down to the end of the counter and took a large wrench out of a bushel basket. Liam paid for it, skipped the thanks and left.
He walked home thinking about sex, about how unrelenting the drive was. The very last thing he wanted right now was a woman in his life and yet his body—that bit of it, anyway—couldn’t help hunting, like a gun dog scenting deer.
It had been sex, of course, that first attracted him to Fiona. She had lots of other things going for her, she was beautiful and clever and witty and he appreciated all of those things, but most of all she was sexy. She was exceedingly aware of her body and liked it and was happy to share it, which made a change from other girls he’d gone out with, who were tediously worried about how they looked. Fiona was very confident about how she looked. Very sure of herself. It had turned him on.
He hadn’t realized that, in the daily routine of earning a living, shopping, cooking and all the rest, with the best will in the world, you don’t spend all that much time in bed. There’s the rest of the day to get through. The rest of your life.
Unlocking the door of Mrs. Orchard’s house (now his house), going upstairs to the bathroom with its leaky sink (now his leaky sink and hence his problem, a positively welcome one because, unlike all his other problems, it had a solution), squatting down and tightening the joint above the U-bend with his new wrench, Liam decided that if he and Fiona had ever been genuinely “in love,” which he doubted, it had been for a year and a half at most. Eighteen very exciting months followed by seven years of gradually increasing disillusionment and boredom, towards the end of which sex had been just about the only thing that was still any good.
And then, closer to the end, Fiona had lost interest even in that. Bitterly, Liam had turned elsewhere.
There was a knock at the front door. He straightened up, wrench in hand, and went downstairs.
“Me again,” Sergeant Barnes said.
Liam felt a lurch of apprehension. “Come in,” he said, opening the door wider.
“That looks kind of ominous,” the cop said, nodding at the wrench. “You expecting trouble?”
“Oh,” Liam said. He put the wrench down on the small table by the door. “Sorry. I’ve been trying to fix a leak in the U-bend upstairs.”
The cop grinned. “That’s a relief. For a minute there I thought things were going to get lively. Yeah, there must be a lot of stuff like that to do, old people tend not to notice things. You need to look at the roof, by the way, those shingles have had it. Anyway, I won’t keep you. Just something I meant to say this morning and forgot. Don’t know if you’re aware it’s bear hunting season. Lots of happy hunters wandering round with .30-30 Winchesters, way more dangerous than the bears. It’s a good idea to give the bears some distance too, though. In other words, it’s not a great time for a walk in the woods. Just thought I’d mention it.”
“Thanks,” said Liam, who’d had no intention of walking in the woods now or ever. He was trying to work out if this second visit had an ulterior motive; if the cop was trying to catch him doing something incriminating.
“Good luck with the repairs.” The cop raised his hand in a sort-of salute and turned to go back to his car.
“Um…” Liam stopped him, “a question. You know if there’s a carpenter or builder or someone like that in town? The bathroom floor’s rotten where it’s been leaking, might be a big job.”
“Sure. Jim Peake. He can do pretty much anything. He’s busy, though, so you might have to wait a bit. You’ll find him at the gas station. He has a workshop round the back.”
“Thanks. Another thing—the cafés in town, I saw two of them. Is there one you’d recommend?”
“Nope,” Sergeant Barnes said. “But the Light Bite’s closed for the winter so it’s the Hot Potato or nothing. I’d recommend nothing, but suit yourself.”
The waitress was a big woman, getting bigger the further south you went: a small head with a frizz of yellow hair, no neck, sloping shoulders, gigantic bosom flowing lava-like down and along the rolling foothills of her gut, God alone knew what lay below.
“What’s it to be?” she said, standing over Liam. You wouldn’t want to pick a fight with her, that was for sure. The place was empty but for the two of them—there was no one to come to his aid.
“Could I see the menu?”
“No menus this time of year.”
“Oh. OK, what’ve you got?” For a moment, foolishly, he entertained the hope that Sergeant Barnes had got it wrong and out back in the kitchen there happened to be a world-class chef who’d come north to get away from it all.
“Burgers and fries or poutine.”
“Nothing else?”
“No one round here wants anything else.” Behind her, from the direction of the kitchen, came an anguished cry. The waitress ignored it.
“Guess I’ll have a burger and fries,” Liam said. “With all the trimmings.” He hesitated: “D’you have trimmings?”
“Onions mustard ketchup relish.”
“A slice of tomato?” Tomato was good if the burger was overcooked, which it would be.
“No tomatoes.”
“I’ll have everything you’ve got,” Liam said.
“Coffee?”
“You have coffee? That’s great!” He overdid it a bit and the look she gave him reminded him of a rattle snake, though he’d never seen a rattlesnake. She rolled off with his order.
Unaccountably the conversation had cheered him up. The door opened and two men in Ontario Hydro gear walked in. They nodded at Liam and he nodded back and watched as they wedged themselves into a booth by the window. His coffee arrived, bitter but drinkable; in fact, loaded with sugar and cream it was almost good. In the empty booth opposite him there was a crumpled newspaper; he retrieved it and sat back down. It was called the Temiskaming Speaker and was published in New Liskeard—he’d driven through New Liskeard on his way here, a small northern town, though a metropolis compared to Solace. He looked for news about the shooting at the Munich Olympics, then realized the paper was a weekly, and also a week out of date. On the front page was a photo of the winner of a ploughing competition, and beneath it an article on a building boom in New Liskeard. Local news, farming reports, no mention of Nixon or Vietnam. It was kind of restful, Liam decided. Like being on a desert island or somewhere out in space.
The waitress reappeared with his burger and fries. Liam thanked her as profusely as he dared; he didn’t want to find dead flies in his burgers from here on. When she left he peered under the top bun, under the onion rings, under the beef itself. All clear so far. He sampled a fry. Not too bad.
He read the Speaker while he ate. Solace didn’t get a mention until the bottom of page five, where there was a small photo of a girl, her hair backcombed into a huge beehive, eyes ringed with black, staring belligerently at the camera. Underneath was the caption: “Solace Girl Still Missing.”
The door was opened by the girl’s father, which was a relief. Liam didn’t feel up to meeting a distraught mother.
“Sorry to bother you,” Liam said. “Just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Liam Kane, I’m…next door. In Mrs. Orchard’s house. Moved in this afternoon.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Right.” He held out his hand. “John Jordon, good to meet you. Karl—Sergeant Barnes—told us you’d moved in.” He paused. “He said he’d told you about…things here.” He forced a smile.
“Yeah, he did. Sorry, it must be…”
“I’d invite you in but my wife’s kind of…”
“Yeah, no, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ll see you another time.”
He closed all the curtains when he got home. If there had been shutters he’d have closed those too. Shut out the world. There was too much pain out there.
He went into the kitchen. The hamburger hadn’t satisfied him. In fact, he felt as if nothing would satisfy him, ever. He looked at the groceries still scattered on the counter. It seemed like weeks since he’d bought them. He wanted something sweet; ice cream would be good, he should have bought some. The only thing on the counter that had any appeal was the blueberries. He ate them directly from the basket. They were small and piercingly sweet, entirely different from the fat, tasteless farmed variety you got further south. He ate them by the handful, spitting out twigs and the occasional leaf.
It was when he was about to leave the kitchen that he noticed the electric can opener on the wall by the fridge. There was a lid stuck to its magnet. He walked over, took the lid carefully between finger and thumb and pulled it off the magnet, turned it over and sniffed. It smelled disgusting. There was a smear of whatever the can had contained on the inside of the lid; he drew his finger across it: sticky. Drying out but not dry. It had been there a day or two at most.
He went over to the sink, opened the cupboard underneath it and looked in the garbage bag. No cans. He dropped the lid into it, stared at it for a moment more, then shrugged and went to bed.