CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sergeant Thomson was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone, when Elliot walked through the door of the Parr’s Landing police station. He looked up irritably and motioned with his hand for Elliot to sit down. The gesture pushed Thomson’s coffee cup perilously close to the edge of the desk. Elliot lunged forward and grabbed the coffee cup just before it pitched over the edge of the desk. Pleased with himself for this act of minor heroism, he grinned and mimed relief. Elliot whispered, “Whew!” but Thomson was jotting down notes on a pad of paper and didn’t even look up.

“You say the yard was secure? Right, of course. Well, you know how some dogs are. What kind did you say he was? She, sorry. A Lab? Well, was she in heat? Spayed. OK, I see. Well, maybe . . . no, I don’t know. But we’ll definitely keep an eye out. Of course. No, I wouldn’t worry. Yes, we’re going out a bit later. We’ll do a loop of the town and take a look. Yes, I promise. Of course. Yes, it’s hard. Had one myself when I was a boy. Yes, they do, don’t they? All right Mrs. Miller. Thanks. We’ll let you know. All right. Bye, now.” Then, to Elliot: “Where the hell have you been? The phone has been ringing off the hook. What the hell happened last night? Was it a full moon?”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Elliot lied, thinking fast on his feet. “Someone thought they heard guns up at the lake. I thought, hunters. Didn’t see anything.”

Thomson was brusque. “Never mind, I don’t care. OK, aside from the call I just took from some woman about her son’s lost dog, I also had a call from the mother of that waitress from O’Toole’s—Donna something. Donna Lemieux.”

Elliot froze. “What about Donna Lemieux? What happened to her?”

“What happened? Nothing, probably. Her mother went to her house this morning and she wasn’t there. I told her—nicely—that it’s not suspicious for someone not to be at home during the day. Her car was in the driveway, too, according to her mother, so she probably went out with friends or something. Her mother said she had ‘a feeling about it’ and wanted us to know. Mothers, Jesus.”

“We all have them,” Elliot said automatically, treading water. “Did she say anything else?”

“Just that she went into her daughter’s house and said it didn’t look like she’d slept there last night.”

“But the car . . .”

“That’s what I told her. The car is in the driveway. All we can do is wait and see what develops. I’m sure it’ll be nothing. It’s too early to raise the panic alarm at this point. Besides, we have other things to think about. Early this morning I was talking with my contact at the RCMP in Toronto. Surprise, surprise—Dr. Lightning’s story about his father’s murder and the fact that he thinks it was committed by that student of his father’s—the crazy one, Weal—just got a bit more complicated.”

“Oh, yeah? How so, Sergeant?” Elliot hoped that the forced neutrality of his tone had effectively camouflaged his relief at the fact that they had moved on, away from the minefield topic of the possible disappearance of Donna Lemieux.

“According to the RCMP, Richard Weal is dead,” Thomson said. “Has been for a bit less than a year now.”

“Dead?”

“Dead as a damn doornail,” Thomson said. To Elliot, he sounded more satisfied than bemused. Maybe the Indian had pissed him off, too, more than Elliot had realized. “Car-over-the-cliff crash, apparently. Suicide. In January of this year. A car went off the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto. They found a pile of clothing and Weal’s identification. Neat little folded pile, just like a crazy person would do on a bloody cold winter night. He must have gotten into the car naked and just driven it over the edge, right onto the beach. Metro Police in Toronto said the body inside the wreck was pretty burned up, but the I.D. was right there on top of the pile of clothes. Old I.D.,” he added. “From the time when he was locked up in the loony bin, years ago. But it was definitely him. Metro said it was an open-and-shut case, once they contacted the nuthatch where he’d been locked up. His doctors said they weren’t surprised.”

Elliot said, “So where does this leave the Indian’s story?”

“Well,” Thomson said. “I’m thinking we can pretty much put the notion of Richard Weal running around committing murders in Gyles Point and roaming around Parr’s Landing to rest. Whoever did that to that old man on the Point, it wasn’t Richard Weal.”

Elliot paused for a moment. “Sarge?” he said.

“What?”

“Sarge, the other day I was out at Bradley Lake looking around.”

“So?”

“So,” he said. “I think I saw something.”

“You think you saw something? You think you saw something, or you saw something?”

“No, I did see something,” Elliot said firmly. “Up by the cliffs. It was a man, I think. Prowling up on the ledges. I thought it was a kid, or some hikers or something. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.” Not strictly true, Elliot admitted to himself. It spooked me something fierce. “I’m just wondering if . . .”

“If what?” Thomson said impatiently. “Come on, McKitrick, get to the point.”

“Well, in light of this new development, my question is, why is the Indian in Parr’s Landing, and isn’t it kind of a coincidence that he arrives here with some story about a guy who just so happens to be dead, right around the time that somebody commits a murder a few miles from here?”

“Still nothing solid connecting Billy Lightning to what happened at Gyles Point,” Thomson said. “And the assumption is that there was a murder, but we can’t rule it a murder since there’s no body,” Thomson said. “The dead man wasn’t connected with either Lightning, his father, or Weal—Weal, who we now know to be deceased. As far as the law is concerned, Billy Lightning may be an odd duck, but he’s not a criminal. Not yet, anyway.”

“Something doesn’t add up here,” Elliot said stubbornly. “I just feel it. I feel it in my bones that there’s something wrong here.”

“There could be something wrong, but until there’s some evidence, there isn’t anything I can do. Look, Elliot,” Thomson warned. “I know you don’t like Dr. Lightning, but I don’t want you jumping any guns, or making any accusations you can’t back up that are going to come back and bite you—or me—in the ass. The man’s a professor; he’s not just some random vagrant. Be careful.”

“But—”

“If you find something solid, we can move on it,” Thomson said with finality. “Until then, hands off. I don’t want any problems.”

Elliot remembered Lightning’s threat to him that very morning and kept his mouth shut.

Thomson’s own instincts, honed over many more years of police work than Elliot’s, signalled to him that there was something going on, not with Billy Lightning, but with Elliot himself. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, and there was a sullenness and a tension to the younger man that was entirely alien to his character as Thomson knew it. Disappearing for two hours under some bullshit pretext of looking for illegal hunters wasn’t like Elliot McKitrick at all. He wasn’t dating anyone in particular, as far as Thomson knew, which more or less ruled out woman trouble. But then again, who knew? Something was very clearly bothering the younger man.

Thomson said, “McKitrick, is everything all right?”

“What do you mean, Sarge?”

“Just what I said. Is everything all right?”

Elliot looked at him neutrally. “Yeah, everything is fine, Sarge, why?”

“You seem like you have something on your mind,” Thomson replied. “Anything you want to talk about? Anything bothering you?”

“No, Sarge,” Elliot said. “Just thinking about that murder in Gyles Point. And about what you just told me, about that crazy guy killing himself in the car in Toronto.”

Thomson sighed. “OK, McKitrick.” Clearly whatever was bothering him, Elliot would be keeping it to himself for the moment, which was fine. But the next time he disappeared for two hours, Thomson was going to hand him his head. Steering the conversation back to the business at hand, he said, “Have you been back up to the cliffs where you saw . . . well, whatever you saw? Did you check it out?”

“No, Sarge,” Elliot replied. “I haven’t. No reason to, I guess.”

“Well, now you have a reason. Why don’t you drive up there and take a look around? Check it out. Just to rule everything out. It’s probably nothing, but it never hurts to be sure.”

“No, sir. When do you want me to go?”

Thomson sighed again. As irritated as he had been by Elliot being AWOL this morning for two hours, the tension was coming off the younger man in waves, and it was irritating as hell. Maybe a hike up to Spirit Rock would help him realign his priorities, or at the very least adjust his attitude a bit. The murder at Gyles Point wasn’t officially Thomson’s headache—yet—so he could afford to focus on the stack of paperwork that had been building up on his desk.

“No time like the present, McKitrick. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour or so, I should think. Just check it out.” He briefly considered joining Elliot, thinking that it had been a while since he’d done that particular hike on a fall morning, before realizing that the prospect of traipsing through the bush this morning on what was likely a make-work mission was entirely without appeal. And it was getting colder outside, too. He was starting to feel the coming winter in his joints, though Thomson wouldn’t have confessed to that under torture. “This time,” he added pointedly. “Keep in touch.”

“Yes, sir, will do.” Elliot said.

To Thomson, he sounded relieved. Whatever the kid was going through—girls, or whatever—Thomson hoped he’d get it out of his system soon, because it would become a pain in the ass very quickly if he didn’t.

Still, as he watched Elliot leave, he was barely aware that, as the father of two daughters and no sons, he was far more fond of the kid than he’d ever admit, even to himself.

Well before the lunch bell rang, Finn had made his decision. He knew that there was an excellent chance that he’d catch holy hell, and very likely get suspended, but he didn’t care. Sadie was lost and no classroom could hold him this afternoon.

He’d barely heard anything that his teacher, Mrs. Marshall, had said all morning, though he’d kept a bright, pleasantly neutral expression on his face. Only his eyes, red from crying, would have given any indication that there was something wrong. Since he’d deftly avoided one-on-one contact with anyone else in his class (and because Mrs. Marshall tended not to look too hard at students unless she had to) no one had any idea that he was teetering on the verge of his own personal hell.

He needed to find his dog, and he needed to find her before something terrible happened to her. There was no one in his life he loved more than Sadie—not even his parents. No one. Sadie was his baby. She was his world.

When he’d woken his parents that morning, his father was initially irritated—hardly unusual for his father in the morning, especially before he’d had his coffee and locked himself in the upstairs bathroom with the newspaper—but that irritation had quickly turned to a level of concern that stunned and comforted Finn. His father had even driven around the neighbourhood looking for Sadie. Finn had waited by the picture window in the living room for any sign of his father’s car, praying that he’d see Sadie, grinning foolishly in the back seat when he came back. When his father had returned alone, looking frustrated, Finn had burst into fresh tears.

His mother was almost as frantic as Finn, calling the neighbours on either side to see if, by some miracle, Sadie had wandered into their yards. But even as she did, in between calls, his mother kept muttering,

“There’s no way she could have gotten out of that yard. No way at all.”

“Do you think she . . . do you think some sort of animal might have . . .” Finn couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought.

“Don’t be silly, Finnegan,” his mother said, dialling the next number in her book. “Sadie is too big for an owl or a hawk to have carried her off. And any other animal would have had to get in—and out—with her. She probably found some way to jump the fence.”

“There was a lot of barking last night,” Finn said hopefully. “Maybe she wanted to join in with the other dogs?”

“Was there? I slept right through . . . Laura?” his mother said brightly. “Hi, it’s Anne Miller. Good morning! Yes, fine, thank you! Listen, Laura, I’m sorry to bother you, but Sadie’s missing. Yes, I know. I don’t know. Would you mind taking a look in your back yard and see if she’s there?”

His mother looked up at the ceiling, tapping her fingers along the counter by the wall as she waited for Mrs. Smythe to come back on the line. The finger tapping was something Finn knew she did when she was more upset about something then she wanted to let on. When she spoke again, Finn heard the disappointment in her voice and his heart sank. “No? Isn’t that strange. No, we have no idea. Thanks for looking, though, Laura. Oh, would you? That would be so nice. Yes, I hope she turns up, too. Finn is a little upset. All right, give my best to Al. Yes, goodbye, Laura.”

“Mom,” Finn said. His bottom lip had begun to quiver. “I want to stay home from school today. I want to look for Sadie.”

“Finn, there’s nothing you can do. Go get dressed for school. You can look for her when you get home. I’ll call around. I’ll even call the police station and let them know to keep an eye out for her.”

“Mom, I don’t want to go to school! I want to stay home and look for my dog!”

“Finn, please.” His mother sighed. “I know you’re upset, but you being upset isn’t going to bring Sadie home any sooner. It’ll all be fine, you’ll see. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far. We’ll find her. I’ll take you out in the car after school and we’ll look together.”

Finn wanted to shout that his mother didn’t care about Sadie, and if she cared, she’d let him stay home, but he knew that wasn’t true. She did care. He also knew that he was already as upset as he could stand to be, and that a fight with his mother over whether or not he could stay home was a fight he was bound to lose.

He’d gotten dressed and left for school, Sadie’s red rubber ball tucked into the pocket of his jacket, thinking he could keep it together. By noon, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it, because Sadie was all he could think of.

All morning he’d mentally explored the horror show of possibilities of what might have happened to Sadie—some more realistic than others, but all equally awful.

He was haunted by one particular image—Sadie wandering, injured, lost in the cliff area around Bradley Lake, perhaps with a broken leg, or worse. Somehow the mechanics of how this might have occurred was less important than the absolute vividness of the image.

He could see her, as though he were gazing into the Wicked Witch of the West’s crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz, a movie his mother had taken him to in Sault Ste. Marie when he’d been eight, and which had both terrified and thrilled him. One particular scene in the film returned to him now: the scene in the witch’s castle, where Dorothy sees Auntie Em in the crystal ball, plaintively crying out her name, unable to find her. At the time the scene had spoken to him about the terror of loss, of separation from his mother, his home, and everything safe. But now it just filled him with dread.

He pictured Sadie in the crystal ball instead of Auntie Em—lost, hurt, terrified, and looking for Finn to protect her and bring her home. The scene repeated itself in his mind all morning at school until the possibility of sitting in his seat and listening to Mrs. Marshall drone on about the geography of countries he knew he’d never visit made him want to scream.

When the lunch bell rang, he waited till no one was looking, then climbed the chain-link fence behind the schoolyard and ran like hell along the streets behind the school, heading for Bradley Lake. He’d considered meeting Morgan in their usual spot and telling her that he wouldn’t be able to stay and eat lunch with her today because Sadie was lost and he was going to go look for her, but he realized he didn’t even want to waste the extra ten minutes it would take him to detour to Matthew Browning.

In truth, Finn was wracked with guilt over his selfishness last night in leaving Sadie out in the yard to fend for herself against whatever had taken her away, just so he could get back to his horny dream about Morgan naked in the lake.

For a treacherous fraction of a second, he considered blaming Morgan for Sadie’s disappearance, then realized it was his dream, not hers. She’d had no part in it. If there was any blame for abandoning Sadie—and that was what he was now convinced he had done—the blame was Finn’s alone, and he hated himself for it.

Elliot heard the boy calling for his dog before he saw the flash of his red jacket moving through the yellow leaves.

He had spent the last hour scouring the ledge area where he thought he’d seen the crouching figure the previous day, but there was nothing at all—none of the usual indicators of passage: no cigarette butts, no obvious footprints, no noticeable disturbances of the foliage and undergrowth. He hadn’t really expected to find them, but he still hoped there would be something there he could tie to the Indian, even tangentially. Nothing would have pleased Elliot more than to nail that smug bastard in such a way that none of his fancy academic credentials and smooth talking would help him out.

Elliot wasn’t a stupid man, nor was he unaware of the fact that his feelings about Billy Lightning had as much to do with what he represented—like Jeremy, a threat to the established social order of the world with which he’d compacted—as they did with the Indian’s snooty way of talking to him, as though the fact that he was a university professor made him anything more than an Indian or, more to the point, anything more than Elliot himself. Still, even separating all of those variables from the mix, it still seemed a noteworthy coincidence that Billy Lightning should just show up in Parr’s Landing the day after what had happened in Gyles Point, and be talking about murders and crazy people (as it turned out, dead crazy people) and local legends.

And now, it appeared that what he’d seen had been a trick of the light, after all, or maybe a hiker. Or a kid, like this one who was calling Sadie! Sadie! in a high-pitched, ruptured voice as though he were being broken on the rack.

Elliot gauged that the kid was about 200 yards directly above him, close to the highest accessible point of the cliffs around the lake. It was a dangerous place for a kid to wander for any reason, and not just because of the ever-present danger of accidentally falling through some grown over mineshaft entrance, but because of the time of day—especially now, at this time of the year when the dusk came so much earlier.

Elliot turned towards the sound of the kid’s voice and walked towards it. He called out, “Hey, kid! Stay where you are—I’m coming for you. I’m a police officer. Don’t move. It’s dangerous up there. Let’s get you down.”

He still couldn’t see the kid, but he’d stopped calling for his dog. Elliot figured that he might have startled him, so he called out again, “It’s OK, kid. Just hold on. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Silence answered him. A sharp arrow of late-season Canada geese streaked southward across the sky. The light was burnishing as the late afternoon slouched towards evening. Elliot rounded a sharp turn on the hill and, with three wide steps, he reached the plateau. He vaguely recognized the kid standing there from one of his annual Elmer the Safety Elephant police visits to the primary school, but couldn’t think of his name—Frankie? Fenny? The kid’s face was pale and he’d obviously been crying. His red windbreaker was muddy and there were pine needles in his hair.

“Hey, kid, you all right?” Elliot said in his best Officer Friendly voice. “What are you doing up here all by yourself?”

But the kid wasn’t looking at Elliot. He was staring into the opening of a filthy hockey bag—a heavy one, too, judging by the way he was holding it. Even from six feet away, Elliot caught a whiff of something rotten coming from inside it. At the same moment, the kid seemed to smell it, too, and he dropped the bag. It landed on the ground, making a jangling metallic sound as it struck the earth.

The boy took two steps back, away from the bag. He pointed at it and said, “That’s not mine.” He wiped his hands frantically on the legs of his jeans as though he were trying to scrub them clean.

“Whose is it?” Elliot’s question was automatic, reflexive. When the kid didn’t answer, but instead kept wiping his hands, Elliot walked over to the bag, knelt down, and pulled open the flaps.

At first he didn’t know what he was looking at—metal, paper, grease. No, more than just metal. Knives, some hammers. The blades were stained, and there were streaks of red on the T-shirt inside. The stench was awful—old blood, obviously, and something like putrescent raw chicken skin, but also shit and sweat. He moved the bag away from his face and held his breath. When he was sure he wasn’t going to throw up, he took a deep breath of fresh air.

First and foremost in Elliot’s mind was that this was very likely connected to the murder in Gyles Point. He knelt down and pulled his hand up inside his sleeve, forming a cloth barrier against his hand. It wasn’t gloves, but it was better than touching the bloody knives and catching God-knew-what disease from the stinking T-shirt. He nudged aside the metal and saw that there was a bound typescript underneath. The title page was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was able to read part of it:

Being the Last True Testament and Relation of Father

The rest of the text was unintelligible. The paper was warped from exposure to water, the ink smeared and bedaubed with rain and mud. It was a hefty manuscript. He judged there were at least 70 double-spaced typed pages in all. Awkwardly, he nudged the papers with his cloth-covered knuckles, but it was futile. To see more, he was going to have to turn the pages with his fingers, and he wasn’t going to do that without gloves. At the very least, Thomson would kill him for messing up evidence with his own fingerprints.

Turning his attention to the boy, he said, “What’s your name, kid?”

“Finn Miller,” the boy replied. “Am I in trouble?”

“No, you’re not in any trouble,” Elliot said in a reassuring voice. “What are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you still be in school?”

Finn’s eyes brimmed. “I was looking for my duh-duh-dog,” he said. His eyes spilled over. “My dog is lost. She’s been lost since last night.”

“Don’t cry, Finn,” Elliot said. “I’m sure your dog is all right. What’s her name?”

“Sadie,” he replied. Elliot saw that Finn was struggling to regain his composure. He admired the kid for that. “Her name is Sadie.”

“Is this where she usually likes to play?” he asked. He was consciously easing the conversation so he could ask about the bag without spooking the kid.

“We were up here a few days ago,” Finn said, glancing around. “Sadie was scared by something up here.”

“Scared? Scared by what?”

“I don’t know,” Finn said. “By something. She was really upset. I thought maybe she came back here to . . . I don’t know, to check it out or something.”

“Is this where you found the bag?” Elliot said calmly. “Right here? Or did you move it?”

Finn pointed to a clump of rocks and overgrowth a few feet away. “There,” he said. “I found it there.”

Elliot walked over to the spot and nudged aside some of the branches and broken tree limbs with the toe of his boot. It looked like a crack in the rocks, about four and a half feet long, maybe six inches across. It could be the opening to some sort of animal’s burrow, perhaps, or a snake hole. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not somewhere a man could hide. And yet, as he glanced around again, he knew that somewhere the owner of this bag was very likely hiding. For the first time in two days, he reached down to his holster and touched the gun, just to feel its reassuring solidity against his hip.

“Finn,” Elliot said. “I think you’d better come with me. We can stop off at your house and see your Mom and Dad, and they can come to the police station with us. Is that OK with you?”

“What’s in the bag? I saw knives and stuff. It sure stinks, too.”

“Yeah,” Elliot said casually. “Knives and stuff. Probably left behind by a hunter. But we have to make sure it’s all OK and that nobody got hurt up here. Gave you a scare, did it?” Elliot tried to chuckle, but he realized it sounded fake and this kid wasn’t stupid. Elliot knew he would see right through it.

“I’m not scared by a stupid hockey bag full of knives,” Finn said. “I’m scared about not knowing where my dog is.

“You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Finn continued. “Right? You said.”

“Right,” Elliot said soothingly. “You’re not in trouble. It just looks like you might have found something important, and my sergeant would probably like to hear how you found it.”

“But what about Sadie?” Finn said urgently. “I can’t leave. I have to look for my dog. It’s getting dark. I can’t leave her out here.” He looked around wildly. For a moment Elliot thought he was going to bolt back off into the woods.

“I’ll tell you what, Finn,” Elliot said, reaching out and putting his hand on Finn’s shoulder. “After we go to the police station and you talk to the sergeant, I’ll drive you home, then I’ll take a drive around and look for Sadie myself. I’ll even come back here—well, maybe not all the way up here, since you’ve already looked, but around the lake. I’ll see what I can find. I bet she’s home by tomorrow, one way or another. But we really have to get to the police station, just in case what you found is really important.”

“Promise?” Finn looked doubtful. “You promise you’ll come back and look for her?”

“I promise,” Elliot said. “Now let’s get back down to the car. Have you ever been in police car before? It’s kinda fun.”

Finn didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed past Elliot and started down the path from the cliff towards the lake without looking back.

When the police cruiser pulled into the driveway, the first thing Anne Miller thought was, They found Sadie! Finn would be so relieved. That is, he’d be relieved after he was told he’d been grounded for a month. Mrs. Brocklehurst, the school secretary, had called her that afternoon to ask if Finn had her permission to leave school.

Anne had told Mrs. Brocklehurst that Finn had just lost his dog and was very upset. No, he didn’t have her permission, Anne explained, but she’d appreciate it if the school would look the other way just this one time. She’d speak to Finnegan when he got home and she personally guaranteed he’d be in school tomorrow.

Mrs. Brocklehurst, who had been the primary school secretary for twenty years, loved animals, said it would be fine, and she hoped Finnegan found Sadie soon, too. She’d lost a collie named Mingus when she was a little girl and it just about broke her heart. “I think a cougar got him,” she said sadly. “I have nightmares about it even today.”

Anne hadn’t even considered cougars, or jackals, or anything of the kind, and her heart sank. But she’d thanked Mrs. Brocklehurst and hung up the phone. Then she went to the kitchen and fixed herself a stiff rum and coke, even though she never drank during the day.

When she saw Finn in the back seat of the police cruiser, her hand flew to her chest and she gasped in shock. She opened the front door and said, “Finn, what happened? Are you all right?” The driver’s side door opened, and the policeman stepped out. Anne recognized him, of course.

“Constable McKitrick, what’s going on ? What’s my son doing in a police car?”

“It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said politely. “Finn here was up by Bradley Lake looking for Sadie. I found him and brought him home. That’s all.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Anne replied. To her son, she said, “Finn, the school called, young man. You left early today. You and I are going to have a talk once your father gets home from the mill. Go on up to your room.”

“Actually, Mrs. Miller, Finn found something up on the slope near Spirit Rock, and we’d really appreciate it if you and he could come down to the police station and have a talk with Sergeant Thomson and I about how that happened.”

“I’m sorry, I’m confused—he ‘found something’?” Anne said. “What did he find? And what does that have to do with him coming down to the police station? I thought this was about him playing hookey. Or that you’d found Sadie. That’s his dog. I called the station about her earlier today.”

“No, ma’am,” Elliot said. “No sign of Sadie yet, but I’m sure she’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about, Mrs. Miller, but there was an . . . incident up at Gyles Point recently, and we just want to make sure that what Finn found isn’t connected in any way to that incident.”

“What on earth did he find? Finn? What did you find?”

“It was a bag of knives, Mom,” Finn said. He wrinkled his nose.

“They’re all bloody and stuff, and they stink.”

“Oh my God,” Anne said, gasping. “And you think they’re . . .”

“We don’t know anything yet, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said. “But if you

and Finn would come down to the police station, we might be able to put this together and make some sense of it. Then,” he added winningly, winking at Finn, “we can get back to looking for Sadie.”

Anne hesitated. She looked at Finn standing awkwardly beside the police car. His hair was askew and his clothes were filthy. The emotional fracture of his separation from Sadie seemed to have actually bent Finn’s posture, and there was something broken in his demeanour that she’d never seen before. The last thing she wanted to do was go down to the police station right now to discuss Finn’s gruesome discovery just before dinnertime—it was probably nothing but hunters’ debris anyway. At the same time, she realized that if they cooperated now, she’d have the attention of the Parr’s Landing constabulary, which might chivvy them on when it came to looking for Sadie.

“I’ll just call my husband and let him know where we’ll be,” Anne said. “That way he can meet us there. I’d really prefer if my husband was present if you’re going to question Finnegan.”

“Would it be all right if we called your husband from the station, Mrs. Miller?” Elliot countered. “This is sort of important, and I’d rather not waste your time any more than we have to. And we’re not going to ‘question’ Finnegan, we’re just going to ask him some things and take a statement. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Anne looked from Elliot to Finn, then back to Elliot. “All right, if it’s that important. Is it?”

“It is, ma’am,” Elliot said firmly. “It is. I’d appreciate it.”

Without another word, Anne went into the house and took her purse off the hall table and took her coat out of the closet. When she came back out, Finn was already in the back seat of the car, waiting for her, and Elliot was holding the passenger-side door open.

As they drove through town towards the police station, Anne realized she’d never been inside a police car in her life and, fancifully, that Parr’s Landing looked different through its windows. The plain houses and shops they passed—houses and shops she’d passed her whole life— suddenly seemed alive with the possibilities of secret lives occurring behind their closed doors. This must be the way policemen see the town, she thought. She supposed that was what the police were for—to make sure that the secret lives of other people remained, if not pure, then at least contained.

The more practical part of her hoped against hope that none of her neighbours would see her and Finn in the police car and start gossiping.

Anne glanced at Finn, who was staring out his window. He was lost in his own thoughts—doubtless thoughts about Sadie. Anne was also grieving for Sadie’s disappearance, and worried, but she knew better than to break down in front of Finn.

She reached over and gently squeezed his hand.

When Finn didn’t respond, Anne held his hand until he extricated it from hers. Finn did this gently, as though to reassure his mother that it wasn’t her hand, per se, that he found unbearable, but rather that any human contact at all right now was a sorry substitute for the feeling of Sadie’s head under his chin, the soft black fur tickling his neck as he held her body close to his and inhaled her warm dog scent, and felt her heartbeat.

Later, at the station, while Anne tried unsuccessfully to reach her husband on the telephone, Finn told the police everything he could think of about how he’d found the bag up by Spirit Rock. The two cops listened closely, but gave no indication one way other another what they were thinking.

The older one—Sergeant Thomson—put on plastic gloves and looked through the bag. He’d kept his back turned to Finn and his mother while he did so, and all they heard was the clink of metal on metal, and then the sound of the hockey bag being zipped closed.

When he turned around again, Thomson asked Finn a series of questions that Finn answered as best he could while the younger one— McKitrick—took notes.

No, Finn said, he couldn’t think of anything else. No, he hadn’t seen anyone. No, he hadn’t been alerted by any noise—he’d only gone up that far because of Sadie’s terror of it when they’d walked there that morning a few days ago. He thought maybe she’d gone back up there. He didn’t know why he thought that—it was just a possibility.

“That’s what dogs are like sometimes,” he’d said with a shrug. “I thought maybe I’d find her there. I hoped I would.” He paused, his voice thickening. “I didn’t.”

“I think that’s all, Finn,” Thomson said. “I think we’ve pretty well covered everything we need to know. Mrs. Miller, thank you so much for coming in with Finn. Constable McKitrick will drive you home now.”

“You’ll look for Sadie?” Finn said hopefully. He turned to Elliot and said, “You said you would, remember? You promised.”

“I will, Finn,” Elliot said. He glanced uneasily at Thomson. “I promise.”

“Mrs. Miller, Finn?” Thomson said. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about this for a bit. Don’t tell your neighbours or— especially you, Finn—your friends. Let’s consider this our secret for a while, until we figure out what’s going on. It wouldn’t do for rumours to be circulating about something that may well be . . . well, nothing.”

May well be?” Anne demanded. “It’s a hunter’s bag, isn’t it? You’re not suggesting it might be something else? You don’t think that someone was . . . well, that people were hurt, do you?”

“Very likely it’s a hunter’s bag, Mrs. Miller,” he replied calmly. “But you know how these stories grow in small towns. Like I said, I’d appreciate it if you folks would just keep it under your hat for a little bit. I will personally call you when we know for sure what’s going on.”

After Elliot had left to drive Finn and Anne home, Thomson stared thoughtfully at the hockey bag for a long moment. Then he put the plastic gloves back on and reexamined the contents. The knives and the hammer had obviously been used to achieve a violent end. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the hammers, he might have considered the possibility that they’d belonged to a hunter, and that the blood was animal’s blood, not human blood. There was hair on the head of the hammer and thin matted clumps of it where the base of the knife blade met the handle.

Thomson lifted the bound typescript from the bottom of the bag and read the first few pages. It was obviously the document that Billy Lightning had told them about, Professor Phenius Osborne’s translation from the original French that he claimed had been stolen from his father’s desk by Richard Weal after Weal had murdered him. Except it couldn’t be Richard Weal, since Weal had apparently committed suicide months before the murder, according to the Toronto police.

Which left Billy Lightning as the only link between the bag and its contents and—very likely—the recent events in Gyles Point.

Whatever else was true, the fact that the bag had been found at Spirit Rock meant that its owner had to be in the vicinity. Thomson sighed— his gut told him that Billy Lightning was no murderer, and he tended to trust his gut in cases like this. But facts were facts, and facts trumped gut feelings when it came to him doing his job.

He considered calling Bill Lefferts, the senior officer over at the Gyles Point detachment, to let him know what they’d found, but he told himself that the situation was still unfolding and he had more questions that needed answering before bringing anyone else into the mix.

Thomson reminded himself to commend McKitrick on having found the bag—or, if not actually having found it, at least having identified and brought it in. He had been checking out the area based on something he’d seen, so if there was to be any credit given, it was rightfully Elliot’s.

As soon as Elliot was back from the Miller house, they’d take another run out to the Gold Nugget to talk to Billy Lightning. Thomson hoped that the professor would be cooperative, because under the circumstances, if he wasn’t, it wasn’t going to go well for any of them, least of all for Billy Lightning.