ON MONDAY EVENING Aileen saw the lights of the police boat heading out, red and blue lights flashing, and briefly she could also hear the sound of the engines. She watched from her window as the lights moved away and eventually she lost them on the horizon. The police boat, going where?
Next morning, when she was up in the roadside blueberry patch, a car came her way trailing dust. It slowed at the turnoff, drove past it, then stopped.
She shielded her eyes with her hand to see against the low sun. The car backed up and turned into their gravel road. A black car with wide tires and something mounted on the dash. The sun gleamed on its side and dust danced around it. Small stones leapt away from the rolling tires. She saw all this with an ominous clarity,the black car and the way it came rolling into her world.
There was just one man in it, a man in a suit jacket and a blue shirt and tie, and he turned her way going past and gave a quick nod and drove on. On the rock shelf in front of her house he stopped and climbed out and looked around.
Franklin was there, working on her Vauxhall, and he saw the man and put down the tools and spoke to him. There was a short exchange and then Franklin looked her way and waved an arm for her to come down.
She took up the blueberry pail and climbed slowly down from the rise onto the road, holding on to plants and roots. She was annoyed at the interruption. Her hands were blue and sticky, and she was dressed not for company but for picking, in a windbreaker and a balding pair of corduroys and her old boots.
Franklin had gone back to working on the car, and the visitor stood waiting for her by the picnic bench. Under one arm he held a yellow file folder, and he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a card. He held it out to her.
“Inspector Jack Sorensen, Mrs. McInnis. I was hoping to find your son Danny here.”
She took the card and looked at it.
“And what’s this all about?”
“We want to talk to him.”
“What about?”
“Ma’am, is he here?”
“No. Danny doesn’t really live here any more. He just visits.”
“He owns a boat, right? And he looks after summer properties in the off-season?”
“Yes, he does do that.”
She put the card on the picnic table and stepped to the outside tap and turned it on. She rinsed her hands and then took her time with the towel, hoping it would calm her.
Over her shoulder she said, “Danny is a grown man and I’m not checking up on him any more.”
“But surely you know where we can find him.”
“Well, no. It depends on which loop he’s doing. North or south, and in his truck or in the boat.” She hung up the towel and turned to him. “The boy is busy and he often stays over at places.”
“When was the last time you talked with him?”
“That would be a few days, maybe a week now. Maybe more. A good while, anyway.”
“You don’t know how long ago, Mrs. McInnis?”
“No. Not exactly.”
He stood looking at her, taking his time, and she disliked him for his calm, for the trouble he was bringing.
“All right,” he said finally. “If he calls or shows up, please tell him to call the number on the card. Or call Sergeant Sullivan at the station. They’ll find me. It’s important.” “You still haven’t told me what it’s about.” “Ma’am. Your son is wanted for questioning by the police. It’s as simple as that.”
He nodded at her and then climbed into his car, closed the door, and started the engine. He didn’t bother to look at her again, just made a three-point turn with pebbles grinding on the rock and drove off.
She walked over to Franklin where he stood by the open hood of the Vauxhall, watching her, holding a rag and a spanner.
“What was that all about?”
“A policeman. Wants to talk to Danny.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. Wouldn’t give an inch.” She felt upset, and before Franklin’s questions could make it any worse she changed the topic and nodded at the car. “What’s it this time?” “Same old thing. The electrics. I think you should replace the cables and the distributor cap. The cables get brittle and the cap gets cracks, and when it’s damp the sparks go everywhere. I never understood why you had to buy one of these foreign things anyway.”
“Because it was cheap and I needed a car. What’s that going to cost, Franklin?”
“Not much. Sixty or seventy at the dealership.”
“That’s still a lot,” she said. “Nine years ago the whole car cost just a thousand new. Can you fix it for now?”
“I did already.”
He leaned into the cabin and started the motor. It ran a bit ragged at first, then it smoothed out. In the darkness of the engine compartment she could see electricity, blue like St. Elmo’s fire, crawling around the distributor cap and along the wires.
Franklin grinned at her. He picked up his tools and wrapped them in the rag and left.
Less than two hours later he was back.
He and another man stood knocking at her door and when she opened, Franklin said, “You know Galway. I bumped into him at the marina just now. He has quite a story, and I said he should tell it to you because I think Crieff Island is one of the places Danny is looking after. Maybe that’s why the inspector was here.”
They sat in the kitchen and she took beers for the men out of the fridge and uncapped them. Then she and Franklin sat listening to Galway’s story and no one interrupted him even once. As she listened she felt cold suddenly, and got colder and colder as his story went on.
Last evening, Galway said to them, he’d been heading home from Medway when his engine developed problems. He changed course to Crieff Island, where he made fast at the floating dock.
He saw some unusual footprints, like blood, he thought, but could it be? So much of it, and he followed them up the ladder to the cribbed dock and then up there he could see it clearly all over the planks, the reflections and the darkness of it. Yes, it was blood. A lot of it. It hadn’t rained in days and some of it was dried and soaked into the wood grain, some of it congealed and cracked where it lay thickest.
He walked to the edge of the dock and looked down, and that was when he saw something in maybe four feet of water, snagged in the rocks and beams of the cribbing. He got a hand light from his boat and shone it down. And then he went to his wheelhouse, picked up the phone and made the call.
The police took his name and location and the name of his boat. They ordered him to remain at the scene, and he sat and waited as the sky went from orange to black.
When they came he saw them from far off, the flashing lights, and not long thereafter there was the sound of the big outboards. They made fast on the other side of the floater and told him to remain on his boat. There were three of them. One of them was Sullivan, a local boy but a sergeant now, and he was in charge.
They climbed the fixed dock and looked around and talked about it. They had good hand lamps and they beamed them down into the water, and then they cordoned it all off with police tape and Sully came stepping across the float to talk to him.
“Come aboard, Galway?” he asked, and Galway stood up and said, “Sure, yes, of course.”
He gave the boy the transom bench, and he sat down on a lobster crate. Then Sully began asking questions and writing down the answers. He asked about times and conditions, what Galway had seen and his reasons for tying up at the dock. Galway said he was running an old two-stroke engine and the spark plugs kept fouling, and he’d tied up for some quick maintenance.
“Would you happen to know them?” said Sully. “Those two.”
“It’s hard to tell from up here. But I don’t think so. They look like just kids. A boy and a girl, are they?”
“Could be. This is a summer property, right?”
“Yes. I hear it’s people from New York that own it. I don’t know their names.”
“We can find that out. Who is looking after it in the off-season?”
“Not me,” said Galway.
“Okay. But do you know who is?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Want to take a guess?”
“No. But right now there’s only a few guys doing the islands. Guys with boats big enough for out here.”
“But you wouldn’t want to take a guess?”
“And get them in trouble? No, I wouldn’t,” Galway said.
When the men had left, Aileen went outside and sat for a while on her rock. She had put on a wool cardigan and she sat hugging her knees, looking out to sea. Gull Rock deep red out there in the last sun. The tidal pools like molten silver and the cold sea foaming across rocks that moved and rumbled and spoke in the dark. You had to be quiet inside to hear that.
The very bones of this patient earth laid bare by glaciers long ago, her father used to say. He’d liked reading National Geographic. Vast slabs of stone, just look at them, Aillie, he’d say. Bald and smoothed and ancient. Like whales petrified in the very act of breaching. Colossal foundling rocks on these barren shores. Look at them. Rock slabs balancing on other rocks for a thousand years and impossible to fathom how.
She stood up and wiped at the seat of her cords and walked away toward the house. The wind was turning. She could feel it. Backing to nor’east. Something was coming this way.
In her house she kept the cardigan on but kicked off her boots and walked around in sock feet. She heated some of yesterday’s stew and then she sat by the window, eating with the light out. Waiting for the fox.
And eventually she heard it. She set down the plate and looked out the window, but there was no moon and she couldn’t see anything. But she could hear the fox close by, loud and clear—five, six long yelping barks that most nights still gave her goosebumps and made her smile. But tonight her heart wasn’t in it.
Later a wind did come up. She woke and listened to it, and after a while she could tell that it had backed right through the nor’east corner and kept going and it would not be so bad. She could hear the house coming alive and creaking and shouldering the wind, and she felt safe in it. Her mother’s house, and her grandmother’s before that. Dorothy Dundonnell from the Island of Mull. Called Dotty. A day labourer’s daughter in wooden shoes, come here on a settler boat with a good young husband and a few bundles and a baby in a basket. Her husband worked as a fisherman and she worked in the cannery with the baby on her back, and when they had saved enough money they bought this wooden house and the two-hundred-foot shoreline of rock as their very own, like a dream come true.
The baby would grow up to be Aileen’s mother, who had no memory of Mull of course, but she would always know her cradle song, and in time when Aileen was a baby in that same little room under the eaves, the room that was now Danny’s, her mother would sit by her crib and sing it softly to her: Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing / Onward, the sailors cry / Carry the lass who’s born to be queen over the sea to Skye…
For a while Aileen lay listening to those words and to the ones she’d changed them back to with Danny, the lad who’s born to be king, and she lay listening to the wind and the waves and to her good house. She tried not to think of Galway’s story, and eventually she fell asleep.
On Wednesday morning in Toronto, Margaret was at her desk when Aileen’s call was put through. She listened and wrote down the names of the fisherman and the detective. “You really don’t know where Danny is?”
“No. He comes and goes. He’s busy. Especially this time of year. I think he’s looking after more than thirty properties now. People give him keys and he often stays over. Bunks on couches in his sleeping bag. The owners even encourage that because it makes the places look lived-in.” “And Crieff Island is a property that you know he’s looking after?”
“Yes, it is.”
Already she knew what Aileen was going to ask, and she knew without question that she’d do it.
When she’d hung up she walked down the hall to Hugh’s office and knocked and entered.
Hugh, grandfatherly and very rich, sat at his rosewood desk, in one of his suits where even the vests had lapels. He looked up.
“Margaret. Is everything all right?”
“Yes. But I need to take a few days off, Hugh. A good friend of mine on the East Coast needs my help with something.”
“Really? But we’re very busy right now. You are. The upcoming Hong Kong deal. The Toronto Hydro case, the airport land acquisition. And any day now there’ll be that conference call with Chicago. You’ve got to wrap that up.” “I know, Hugh. I can do all that on the phone from the coast.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. I’ll bring the files, and if there’s the least indication that I should be here in person, I’ll be on the next plane. This is important, Hugh. I’d like to catch the one-thirty flight.” “So soon. Really? Hmm. Just a few days, though, right? Because I need you here, Margaret.”
“Just a few days, Hugh. Two or three. I promise, absolutely.”
She left a note on Jack’s typewriter telling him where she was going, and two hours later she sat by a window halfway down the plane as it taxied toward the runway. Rain on the tarmac. Pulsing reflections everywhere.
The small bottle with the new, stronger codeine pills was in her purse, and one of the pills was ready in her jacket pocket. She put on sunglasses and fussed down the window blind and took the glasses off again. She hated flying. The insanity of a rattling aluminum tube stuffed with all these people strapped into their seats miles up in thin air.
Under her the wheels were racing over the cracks in the tarmac now, taking her away faster and faster. Then liftoff.