Four Months Earlier: May
The cookware set was Lagostina. Hand-hammered copper. Top of the line. Even on sale the price topped a thousand dollars. The box was bigger than a large microwave oven. It had two pre-punched handgrips, factory perforated, one on each side, to make it carriable.
Eleanor was hiding in a rack of reduced shirts: old-school black and red check with a black quilted liner. Her right cheek was against a soft, silky liner, her left against the scratchy fibres of the 30 percent wool outer shirt. She knew the guy was going to steal the cookware set as soon as he picked it up. There was a blindered way people looked at what they were about to steal, completely the opposite of how thieves were depicted in TV shows. No looking guiltily over each shoulder, just a brisk approach, a matter-of-fact planting of the feet.
The man bent from the waist, like the bad example in an occupational safety video. He straightened up more slowly than he expected to, Eleanor noticed. His hands gripped the box, he started to lift, then as the full weight of the cookware connected with his extended arms, his rise slowed noticeably. He’d decided to steal something based on the dollar value without asking himself how heavy it was going to be.
The shirt rack Eleanor was hiding in was circular, with a small space in the centre just large enough for her to retreat into for a minute to contact her manager. One of the cardinal rules of being a floor walker was not to take your eyes off the shoplifter while you were still in pursuit. They stuff a package of batteries under their shirt in aisle 94, but if they’ve gotten cold feet between there and the door and you missed them dumping the package in the paint aisle, that is a major embarrassment and a waste of several people’s time.
But there was no way for this guy to dump that massive cookware set without her noticing. So she retreated into the shirt rack and retrieved the palm-sized VHF radio from the cargo pocket on the thigh of her pants. “Following a male suspect. He’s headed for the Garden Centre doors,” she said into the black plastic grille of the radio.
A moment later, her phone buzzed against the side of her leg. She rolled her eyes in frustration. “Please answer using radio,” she said into the VHF. Again more buzzing. “What is the point of making me carry this stupid radio and insisting that I use it to contact you if you’re not going to use it to reply to me?”
In frustration, she reached into a different pocket and pulled out her phone. Three texts in a row from her manager:
Can you describe him?
I can’t find the radio. It’s here in my office. I can hear it, but I can’t see it.
Garden Centre is not open till June.
Jesus, Eleanor thought. I know when the Garden Centre opens. But now that she was limited to thumbing texts, she was going to have to keep her communication to its essentials.
Pls send someone to help. Send Brian. Or Tyler. Pls.
She poked her head out through the top of the shirt rack and looked down the sale aisle toward the Garden Centre doors. An older lady in a striped shirt was pulling a massive shelving unit, still in its box, from a top shelf. She had big, black-rimmed glasses, a white, floppy bucket hat. Her wiry grey hair ran straight down the sides of her face, the length and texture of the business end of a corn broom.
The lady was standing on the edge of a bottom shelf, gripping the box of shelving at the corners, which were wider apart than her shoulders, and she was partially swinging from the box she was struggling to budge, as though it were a piece of gym equipment. With her feet barely reaching the outer edge of the steel shelf beneath her, she swung her hips inward, then back. Each back swing inched the giant box above her farther out over her head. Two or three more successful pushes and pulls and the pressboard TV stand and entertainment centre, the size of a one-man kayak from Sporting Goods and, with the weight of a large man, was going to flatten this lady into the polished tiles of the sale aisle, between a tower of three-ply toilet paper and a pegboard display of pocket tools.
“Ma’am! Ma’am!” Eleanor ran down the sale aisle, getting within earshot of the dangling lady just as the box she was hanging from began to reach the point at which it would teeter over.
“Ma’am, please! An associate will get that for you!” The woman’s toes lost their purchase on the shelf she’d been standing on, and at the sound of Eleanor’s voice, she turned her head as far as it would turn in Eleanor’s direction, her right cheek hard against the upper part of her arm as she clung, hanging off the edge of the package she was so anxious to dislodge.
“Please let go of the box, ma’am,” Eleanor said. She could feel the emotion building in her voice. “Tyler! Brian!”
A look of anger and fear crossed the old lady’s face. “God damn it!” the lady shouted. Eleanor did not have the height to catch the box before it came down. She caught the woman around the waist, hugged her hard, her face pressed into the back of the woman’s ribcage, and lifted.
“Let go, ma’am! Please let go!” The old lady smelled of baby powder and nicotine.
“I need a new TV stand,” the lady was saying.
“We’ll get that for you. Tyler!” Tyler was a sweet-faced high school boy, a year older than Eleanor’s daughter, Patricia.
“Oh my god,” she heard Tyler say. But with her face pressed hard into the wide stripes of the woman’s shirt, she could not see him.
“Tyler will get that down for you, ma’am,” Eleanor said. She could hear Tyler laughing from over her shoulder. “Tyler. FFS, tell her you’ll get it for her.” None of the younger people she worked with actually said FFS. It was texting shorthand. But they all knew what it meant. And she’d found it a useful intensifier on more than one occasion.
“Let me get that, ma’am,” Tyler said at last. Eleanor watched as Tyler gently pried the lady’s fingers from the box. The full weight of the woman’s body fell into Eleanor’s grip, and she could feel something let go in her lower back as she set the lady gently on the floor. There was a twinge just above her waist, about a hand’s length from her right butt cheek. The pain jabbed into her lower back, then flashed down the leg to her ankle in repeated pulses.
She was bent over, her hands on the epicentre of pain, as the old lady turned angrily on her and Tyler.
“Yar yar yar,” the woman seemed to be saying. Eleanor did not have time to contemplate whether the incomprehensibility of the woman’s words was a result of her own pain or the woman’s agitation. When she turned to Tyler, he had a hand on the upright of a shelf and was leaning back, laughing out loud, pointing at something behind her. “The same box is on the two lower shelves,” he managed to say between guffaws.
“Look. I don’t have time for this,” Eleanor said. “I’m following…” She raised her eyebrows significantly. “Somebody.”
She left Tyler to look after the old lady, but her progress toward where she’d last seen the cookware thief was severely impeded by the pain that was now shooting from her lower back, through her right butt cheek, and down the back of her leg almost to the ankle.
Her phone must have buzzed as she was dealing with the dangling grey-haired lady. When she flicked to her texting app, there were several messages from the manager, the last of which was What’s going on?
She shuffled to the end of the store. On a hunch, she turned left at the locked Garden Centre doors, and began a counter-clockwise route around the store’s periphery. She was bent over and shuffling, and counter to the proven method of floor walking, which began and ended with being as close to invisible as possible, she noticed that her wounded, shuffling gait was drawing the attention of customers as she dragged her throbbing right leg behind her.
She caught up to the guy with the box of cookware as he passed in front of the Customer Service desk.
I’m at Customer Service. Send Brian here now!
Where’s Tyler? I sent Tyler.
Jesus! Tyler’s busy. Brian, pls.
The guy did three laps of the store with the heavy box against the tops of his legs, his arms hung the whole way down at his sides. His face locked dead straight forward, never seeming to look left or right. And Eleanor followed him the whole way round each time, the pain in her back and down her leg worse and worse until by the end, her right leg felt all but paralyzed from the hip down. The only feeling she had below the knee was a painful explosion of pins and needles every time her foot made contact with the floor.
By the third time past the customer service desk, there was not an employee in the store who was unaware of the cookware thief. When he hooked right at last and exited the main doors, all four cashiers on duty got up on their tiptoes to watch him walk out.
“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, sir,” Eleanor called from behind him. He quickened his pace slightly, but otherwise showed no sign that he’d heard her at all. “Sir. You have not paid for that item. Stop, sir! Stop!” There was a concrete walkway that ran the length of the store, and Eleanor was halfway down that when she stopped. She had to lean over, her hand on her right thigh to support her throbbing back and leg.
Both Tyler and Brian were behind her by now. “Here,” she said. She passed Tyler the VHF radio. “Follow that guy. Do not let him out of your sight. Keep telling him to stop. Do not try to stop him.”
“What the hell,” Tyler said.
Brian was only a few years older than Tyler. Already graduated from high school. He’d worked out west a couple of years, then came back to Nova Scotia for some sort of corrections course at the NSCC. He had shaggy brown hair and a frustrated scowl on his face. “I fucking love working at Canadian Tire,” he said sarcastically. Eleanor managed to thumb Cookware thief did not stop at door. Call police. Tyler and Brian are following him into her phone and sent that off to Steve, the manager. She’d made her way back almost to the main doors when Steve came through them. He waggled the yellow and black VHF radio at her. “Hey! I found the radio,” he said. He had a big grin on his face. He did not give one shit that she’d just ruined her back for the sake of a pea-brained old lady and an overpriced cookware set.
“I found the radio!” he said into the radio. When he released the call button, Tyler’s voice came back: “What?”
Eleanor put out her hand for the radio and Steve passed it over. “Did you call the police?” she asked Steve.
“Police?” Fuck.
“Where are you now?” she said into the radio. Tyler, Brian, and the thief had walked the whole length of the store and were out of her sight.
“Can you please just call the cops?” she said to Steve.
He put up both of his hands. “Okay! Okay!” He looked over his shoulder into the store. “I’d better use the store’s phone. I’m out of minutes.”
“We’re out behind the store,” came Tyler’s voice over the radio.
“There’s nothing back there. Where’s he going?” Eleanor said.
“He’s headed through the field.”
“He won’t get far. The river’s back there.”
There was a long moment of quiet, during which it occurred to Eleanor that she had not had a text from Patricia in several hours. She leaned back against the concrete storefront of the Canadian Tire building and rested her shoulders against the wall. She stretched both legs from her butt cheeks to the backs of her ankles. After being indoors for her whole shift, the late light of May reinvigorated her brain. She took in a deep breath and opened her texting app. The last text she’d had from her daughter was at the end of the school day.
Getting on the bus to Morganne’s.
Hey, Pattycakes, Eleanor texted. Just checking in. Still at Morganne’s?
“He’s in the river,” came Tyler’s voice over the VHF.
“What!” she yelled back.
“He’s in the river. He’s walking into the river. There he goes. He’s swimming. He’s swimming across the river.”
“With that fucking cookware set?”
“No. No cookware. No box. Just him. Swimming. He’s a pretty good swimmer, too. Overhand stroke.”
“Where’s the Lagostina?”
“The what?”
“The Lagostina. The cookware. The box.”
“No sign of it. We can’t see it anywhere.”
By the time the police were pulling up in front of the main doors with the thief in the back seat of the cruiser, forty-five minutes had elapsed since Eleanor yelled for Steve to call them. The store was closed. Steve had told both Brian and Tyler they could go home. The police had the swimmer handcuffed in the backseat and they just needed Eleanor to ID him. She’d been sitting at the empty Customer Service counter, the pain shooting down her leg had dulled to a tender stiffness, and she was texting Patricia every five minutes with no text back.
When Eleanor was a girl, the town had had its own police force. But the town had shrunken. Policing had gotten expensive. Almost a decade ago, town council had voted to contract the job to the RCMP. The guy who came through the main entrance of the store for her was someone she knew pretty well. Corporal Vernon was his name, though she was not certain if that was his first or last name. He was about thirty. Slim waist. He looked like he might be jacked beneath his bulletproof vest, his holster, and the bulky cop shirt.
The cops were laughing and calling the guy they’d arrested The Triathlete. He’d swum to the opposite bank of the river, then collapsed from exhaustion and exposure. He was still lying face up in the reeds when the police arrived.
Eleanor limped out to the Mounties’ car and poked her head through the driver’s side back door, opposite to where the thief was sitting.
The thief did not turn in her direction, and Eleanor wondered if the guy had some kind of condition. Autism, maybe. Why else would he not look at her now? His clothing was ragged and soaked. His hair was matted against the side of his face. The river water must have been freezing this time of year, and he was hunched over his handcuffed wrists, shivering. His teeth chattering audibly.
“He needs a blanket,” Eleanor said.
“It’s him?” asked Corporal Vernon. She nodded.
Steve was back at the entrance to the store. “Any sign of that cookware set?”
Vernon shook his head. “He doesn’t want to talk about that, apparently. That or anything else.” He pointed at the black bulb of the camera over the doorway. “But you’ve got him on tape, right? Leaving the store with it?”
Steve nodded. “I have not checked. But it’ll be there.”
“I’ll need that first thing in the morning,” Vernon said. “Put it on a whatever. A thumb stick.”
“Wait a minute,” Eleanor said. She went back into the store, which was fully lit, but empty. She looked back over her shoulder at the glass of the front entrance, which looked like polished black marble now that darkness had fully fallen. She shuffled as fast as her sore leg would allow and found the rack of quilted shirts she’d been hiding in earlier. She pulled a 2XL off its hanger and went back outside.
“What are you doing with that?” Steve said. He and the two police officers were standing back against the concrete storefront. Eleanor walked straight past without replying.
The back door of the cop car was still open. She crawled across the nylon fabric of the seat and draped the shirt over the shoulders of the thief, who wiggled to nestle his shoulders into the shirt, but still did not look at her. He smelled like river water and mouldy tomato sauce.
“Who’s paying for that shirt?” Steve was saying as she crossed back into the store, but she did not feel like talking to him.
By the time Eleanor got home, it had been hours since she’d heard from Patricia. She was not in a panic. Not yet. But the only thing that kept her from being in a panic was her own inner voice telling her again and again not to.
The light over the front door came on automatically in the dark, but it was the only light on in the rundown mini home, and she could tell at a glance that the house was empty.
She keyed open the front door and despite herself, shouted hopefully: “Patty! Pattycakes!” But it was only her own voice she heard, thin and desperate in the empty rooms.
She checked the caller ID on the landline in the kitchen: nothing. She opened the beat-up laptop in her bedroom and logged into her Gmail account, as though Patricia were going to email her from somewhere.
She opened her Facebook, looked at Patricia’s profile, then made a post on her own account:
Has anyone seen Patricia? Please contact me immediately.
A slow trickle of responses to the Facebook post began to come in. Exclamations of dismay. Sincere expressions of concern. Fake expressions of concern that anyone could see were nothing more than nosey attempts to get more information. Her phone began to light up with text messages from people who had seen the post.
Let me know if I can help.
Keep me posted, girl.
I hope everything is okay over there.
The only one she replied to was from her son, Simon, in Alberta. WTF. Where is Trisha?
I have a terrible feeling, she texted back. And within a minute, Simon called on the landline.
“Mom. I can tell you’re upset. But this is irresponsible. It’s irresponsible to post what you did, then tell me nothing but that you have a terrible feeling.”
“Simon, I don’t know what to do. I was at work. I came home. She’s not here. I have not heard from her in hours.”
“Where do you think she might be?”
“I thought she was at Morganne’s house. But I have no number for Morganne. I have no number for her parents.”
“You have to go over there. Get in the car and drive over to the house.”
The dark had set in hard by the time Eleanor got into her car and drove to Morganne’s house. She had taken an extra-strength Advil, and that, plus her growing feeling that something terrible had happened, had completely eliminated the pain in her lower back and leg.
The sky was cold black. No stars. No moon. Some neighbourhoods, the few with street lamps that lit them up, illuminated a grey halo of cloud above them.
If she passed a car coming in the opposite direction, it did not register in her memory. It was almost midnight and people were cocooned in their homes. Cars in yards. Curtains closed. Each house made a dim little bubble of illumined earth about it. The car radio was tuned to that pop station from Halifax that Patricia was obsessed with. The signal was coming from so far away that it was mostly static and white noise. As soon as Eleanor registered its presence, which took more than half the twenty-minute drive, she shut it off with a push of a button.
Morganne’s house was completely dark. Eleanor pulled the car over to the curb. Even in the dark, even from a car parked at the curb, Eleanor could see that Morganne’s house was for people with a level of income that she herself would never attain. There were raised, cedar-mulched garden beds shaped in curved lines by a landscape designer, in which grew thick, healthy evergreen shrubs. The front door, the windows, the siding were all up to date in style and in tip-top repair. Eleanor had registered all these details before, when dropping Patricia off or picking her up from Morganne’s house. But the stark contrast between the dumpy, rundown mini home she could barely afford and the house where all afternoon and most the evening she’d just assumed Trisha to be, that contrast was so sharp there was just no way not to register it. Along with everything else she felt as she sat there in her rundown car, the fear, the panic even, the helplessness in the face of the looming white unknown, she also felt self-conscious, a lower-class person out of place in an upper-class neighbourhood.
Her phone buzzed against the plastic in the change holder where she’d placed it.
Well? It was Simon texting her.
I’m here, she replied. Morganne’s house. Nothing. No sign of her.
Did you knock on the door?
She looked at the time in the corner of the phone’s screen. It was now well after midnight.
Knock on the door.
It’s late. It’s after midnight.
This is more important than how late it is. Knock.
I did.
No you did not.
There was almost a half tank of gas when she pulled away from the curb at the front of Morganne’s house. And she used it to cruise slowly and aimlessly through street after residential street. More and more houses were dark as she drove, several of them turning dark before her eyes as the last person awake inside it flipped off the light and went to bed.
Simon was three time zones away and getting ready for an overnight shift. As Eleanor drove, her phone stopped buzzing with Simon’s texts, and she was left alone in the muffled interior of the car. Homes and cars and neighbourhoods drifted past on the outside. Cutouts. They felt as unreal to her as props in a puppet theatre.
It was almost 3:00 a.m. when she turned the corner onto her own street. The Mountie car was sitting in her driveway, the lights mercifully turned off so its presence was not alerting the entire neighbourhood. Eleanor parked on the street. The two cops were silhouettes in the front seat as she approached. Only the driver got out. It was Corporal Vernon, nearing the end of a shift that had begun with chasing down the swimming cookware thief out behind Canadian Tire.
“Eleanor,” he said. And the buttons and badges and metal and plastic fasteners across his chest caught what ambient light there was in the dark driveway. They glittered against his dark shirt, blurring, becoming larger and less distinct, light reaching out across darkness to light.