Rehab Run Page 11

  “Whatever happens now, this place will be shut down,” Laurence said. “No one will ever want to come here again. For anything, as a matter of fact. I mean, even if Dickie managed to sell the property, would this be where you’d want to come on a relaxing holiday?” He lit another cigarette. “If shutting Rose’s Place down was someone’s goal, I’d say they’ve already succeeded, with today’s… events.”

  I shook my head. “It’s more than that. This is more personal. To someone,” I said.

  Des looked at me. “Danny, I agree, and there are people looking into that. Mary was and will be helping a couple of our people, sorting through files, telling anything she can remember about each and every resident who’s ever been here. It’s been open for just a few years, and it only houses a dozen residents at a time. She knows where all the bodies are buried.” Then Des looked at the ground. “Jesus Christ. My mouth.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I do that all the time,” I said. I touched his arm. I wanted to hug him suddenly. Then I realized: He reminded me a bit of our late father.

  “She does,” Laurence said. “Think nothing of it, Sergeant.”

  “Des. My God. Des, please.” Des looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here. He’d mentioned something about being so happy to be posted here, this beautiful part of the world. He and his wife had dreamed of their retirement here.

  Mary. “Where is she now?” I said. “Mary.” Crime scene people, some of whom I recognized from being at Ferryman Lake the night before, were unloading equipment. Colin’s body probably wouldn’t be removed for a while yet. I wasn’t sure what the procedure was vis-à-vis the coroner, but I hoped it would all get wrapped up before Mary came anywhere near here.

  “Home, thank God,” Des said. “She was up half the night going through those files, and her husband was calling. He worries about her, and she worries about him. He wanted her home for a nap, ’cause he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her away from the search party.”

  The search party. Party. I almost asked if I should bring a bottle or some cupcakes, and nearly laughed. Would there be a DJ? I nearly let out a hysterical bark of laughter, but somehow managed to keep it in, for once.

  “Who will tell her?”

  “I will. Going to drive up there very shortly,” he said. “I was Colin’s sergeant.” Nobody said anything for a minute.

  “You’re both covered in evidence, by the way,” he continued. “We’ll get someone to escort you back so you can change and we can bag your clothes. And of course we still have to do formal statements.”

  Evidence. Colin’s blood and brain matter was all over me, despite the fact that I’d taken my outer shirt off. My cargo pants were black, but as soon as Des mentioned evidence, I could feel the blood weighing them down, soaking into my skin underneath.

  “Yes, I need to change,” I said. It seemed urgent, now, to get these clothes off. “But we need to be included on that search. Or I do,” I added, looking at Laurence. Behind him, I could count more than a dozen red uniforms. And after this snafu, I highly doubted this property would be left without at least that many of them hanging around. Especially now that a cop had been killed here.

  For better or worse, I was pretty sure that this property would be the safest place in the Valley for miles, just now.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” Des said. “Talk to one or two people. You were both in that room. You could have been targets.”

  “We weren’t,” I said. For once, I actually mostly believed it, too. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “You have to let us help,” Laurence said. He stepped forward, and stood, I thought, too close to Des. Very tall people have to be aware of their physical presence; it can be seen as confrontational to stand too close while speaking, as if you’re exerting your size. “Please. Dickie is my oldest friend. And I’m the one who gave Sarah my reservation at the B and B.”

  Shut up, Laurence, I wanted to say. Des looked at him, and really for the first time I could see him as the tough law enforcement leader. “I’ll get back to you,” he said eventually. He motioned for two constables to come over, and instructed them to escort us into the dorms and wait while we changed.

  “I’m heading up the mountain to see Mary,” Des said. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. In the meantime, I’m instructing you to stay in the dorms. Like I said last night: the kitchen, your rooms, bathroom, whatever. Nobody is getting in or out of here. Not this time.”

  Laurence and I trudged back to the dorms in silence under the forbidding sky, flanked on either side by our bodyguards with guns. I didn’t have to ask my brother what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same thing.

  We were going to search for Sarah. And Dickie. And if we weren’t allowed on the volunteer search, we would go alone.

  FIFTEEN

  Constable MacLean kept her back turned while I stripped out of my bloody clothes. Layer by layer, I handed each item back to her until she had everything bagged and I had nothing but a towel wrapped around me. I managed to take the Kevlar gloves out of my pocket and throw them on the floor along with the mess that was already there. They wouldn’t tell the police anything, except that I had possibly been expecting trouble when I came to rehab, and that was a kettle of fish I didn’t want to deal with. Laurence was in one of the abandoned resident rooms close by, doing the same thing with the male constable.

  When I was left alone I immediately got into the shower for the second time that day. I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to look at what I washed out of my hair and off my skin. The small cuts on the back of my head stung under the hot water, and I was almost glad. I brushed my teeth while the mirror was still steamy, happy I couldn’t see my reflection properly. I often found seeing my reflection jarring, especially after I’d seen or participated in any kind of violence. I expected to look different, for the experience to have made more of an impact on my appearance. But unless I’d been hit in the face, I always seemed to look the same. Something about that made me feel empty, bereft. I sometimes wished my outside matched the chaos of what went on inside me and around me, at times like this.

  I sat on the bed with the towel around me and ran my hand along the tattoo on my inner thigh. Dave’s number, in my tattoo. And by now, tattooed into my brain as well.

  I wondered if I should call it.

  And then I wondered if I would get out of this with my tattoo still attached to me.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, I was dressed again, and wishing I’d packed differently. I wore jeans and my last clean t-shirt, with a ratty old cardigan. They had even taken away my Docs with the rest of my clothes, so I was down to my running shoes, flip-flops in case the showers had been communal – ha, it was a nicer bathroom than I’d ever had – and a pair of ancient knock-off Uggs I’d thrown into my bag at the last minute. I’d really expected to be shuffling around from basket weaving to food hall to dorms.

  I wondered whether there was time to check out the shopping in the area. See if I could find some new boots. And maybe, I don’t know, a couple of machetes. They go well with any ensemble.

  I made sure I had my keys, and grabbed the keys to the Beast from where Laurence had tossed them on the dresser. It would be safe to leave Laurence here now, just for a little while, just so I could run into town and pick up a couple of things, and be away from my brother for half an hour while I thought a bit more about Dickie Doyle. I could hear footsteps all over the house, and when I opened the door to my room, Constable MacLean was standing there. It looked like I had caught her mid-pace.

  “Hi,” I said. “Are you on bodyguard duty?” I really didn’t want the company, and I thought I’d be pretty safe in town for a little while.

  She shook her head, and I could see that she was trying not to cry.

  Of course, I thought. She looked to be about Colin’s age. They were probably friends. All the police around here were probably good friends, or at least had worked together closely. “I’m so sorry
for your loss,” I found myself saying. “Were you and Colin very close?” She nodded, and something made me hug her. Unlike me, yes, but the woman had been in the room while I stripped naked. That tends to form a bit of a sisterhood bond, whether you want it to or not.

  But she was a professional. She patted my back briefly but pulled away. We were almost exactly the same height.

  “I know who you are,” she said quietly. “Everybody knows who you are. Well, we do, I mean.” The RCMP, I presumed she meant. I nodded. She lowered her voice further, and I had to lean in.

  “If we don’t catch him, you have to,” she said. “A few of us – well, we hope you find him first.”

  “Him?”

  “Dickie Doyle,” she said. “Whoever’s working for him.”

  Well, I no longer had to wonder what law enforcement’s take on all this was. I opened my mouth to speak, but she shut me down.

  “No,” she said. She was calm again, calm and angry. I knew that look. I’ve had that look myself before. She was nearly whispering. “If you catch him, you shut him down. Do you understand? Shut him down.” I didn’t have to ask what that meant. And I didn’t blame her for the sentiment. And she couldn’t do it; none of them could. They were sworn officers of the law, and this wasn’t some corrupt big-city American police force. These people had gone through extensive training, as I understood it, and were educated. Civilized.

  Above the kind of mayhem, therefore, that she was hoping I would unleash on the person responsible for the death of her friend. But from what she knew about me, she was pretty sure that I was not.

  “I don’t even know where to begin,” I said, my voice as low as hers. “I’m not from here. I was going to join the search party for Sarah.”

  Constable MacLean shook her head and stepped into my room, pulling me inside with her. She shut the door behind us, but she kept her voice low and spoke quickly. “Don’t bother with that search. There will be dozens and dozens of locals searching the farmland and beaches in concentric circles from where she was taken. They may find Ms. Gilbert’s body, but not Dickie Doyle.”

  “Why are you sure it’s Dickie?” I said. I grabbed a pack of Laurence’s cigarettes from the dresser and lit one, breaking the rules about smoking in the dorms, but I was willing to take the risk.

  “I’m not sure. None of us is sure,” she said. She looked at my cigarette longingly, but didn’t ask for one. “But it seems the most likely answer, and at the very least, whoever is doing this has something to do with him. Go back to Ferryman Lake. Go back to the cabin, except don’t go all the way in by car. A couple of our guys are still out there.” She pulled a keyring out of her pocket, with two keys. “There’s a cabin a few doors down from Dickie’s,” she said. “It belongs to my family. It’s got a weird paint job, with stripes…” she started to say, and I stopped her.

  “I know it. We passed it.” The lavender cottage. And her, a constable of the RCMP. People always surprise you.

  “Nobody is there,” she said. “You can stay there, you and your brother.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Dickie is somewhere out there,” she said. “Nobody has found him, but because of the yellow pickup you guys saw, the assumption is that he’s gone or been taken away – he’s certainly not at the lake anymore. But he’s always in the woods. He basically spends more time wandering around in the woods than he does in his cottage, from what we can tell.” I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “I don’t have time to explain. But we’ve been distant neighbors since he moved out there.”

  “This is…” I stopped. I didn’t know what to say. “Why are you trusting me with keys to your home?” I was starting to think that perhaps this woman was, in the parlance of my adolescent nephews, cray-cray. And yet, with a day that started with me crawling out the window and continued with getting shot at, it was really par for the course. “You just want my brother and I to what, go there as bait, and for me to kill him if I see him?”

  “No! I don’t know what I mean. But knowing what I do about you, I trust you to do the right thing.” I stared at her. “Besides, it’s not home, it’s just a cottage.” She sounded impatient, as though she had expected me to take the keys and run, no questions asked. “We wouldn’t be going there this early in the season anyway. And I read about your story. I don’t know all of it but I know you went after the people who killed your sister and your husband. And you got away with it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I started to say, but someone was walking around in the hallway. Sounded like Laurence, from his heavy footsteps.

  “I know it is,” she whispered. She pushed the keyring into my hand and leaned in, whispering in my ear. She smelled like lilac perfume and bubble gum. “The smaller key is to the gun safe. It’s under the bed in the first bedroom on your left upstairs. My room. If someone stops you, I gave you the keys to give you somewhere safe to stay. Nobody will question it.”

  Laurence knocked at the door. “Danny?”

  “Just a second, finishing getting dressed,” I called out. I took the keys and put them in my pack. “Thanks, Constable,” I said, in a normal voice. “And again, sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Cleary,” she said, just slightly too loudly. She handed me her card. “If I’m off shift, don’t hesitate to call with any concerns or questions.” Her cell number was written on the back. She turned and opened the door, and motioned for Laurence to step in before she walked out.

  “Don’t forget, both of you, leave your cell numbers with the constable by the gate if you leave the property, and your estimated time of return.”

  “We will,” Laurence said. Constable MacLean shut the door on her way out, and I sat down on the bed. I wanted a few minutes alone to process that strange encounter, but it didn’t seem as though I was going to get it. Laurence took the cigarette from my hand and took a last drag before walking to the window and flipping it outside.

  “I gave Janet a couple of blank cheques and a credit card,” he said. “She was pretty hysterical.”

  “She’ll probably rob you blind,” I said, flopping down on my back.

  “Undoubtedly,” he said. He sank onto the other bed and stretched out. “Hookers and heroin.”

  “Things of that nature,” I agreed. “Shenanigans of the illegal and immoral kind.”

  “It’s always the quiet ones.” We smiled at each other. He wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Let’s stay in tonight, dear,” I said. “Play gin rummy.” I looked out the window. There would be no sunset tonight; the sky was too dark with clouds. I looked at my watch.

  “Do you think they’re doing the volunteer search tonight?” Laurence said. “In this weather? After what happened today? Nobody seemed to have an answer yet, when I went downstairs.” He sounded very tired.

  “I think they’re crazy if they do.” I did, actually. The Apple Blossom parade was scheduled for the next day, and the area was thick with tourists. Not that we saw many, cloistered as we were on the grounds at Rose’s. But no matter how many floodlights they set up, having volunteers who didn’t know the terrain searching in the cold, dark, and wet while a killer or killers were not only slicing people up, but now shooting at them? I doubted they’d be keeping that plan.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, kid,” Laurence said. “I am as exhausted as I’ve ever been in my life.”

  I looked over at him. He was ten years older than me, in his forties now, a smoker, and not fighting fit. And he wasn’t used to the adrenaline spikes we had had over the last twenty-four hours. The mental strain would be almost as exhausting.

  “Only a day,” I said. “Do you realize you’ve only been here a day?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I should call Antonio.” His current flame, a retired restaurateur who’d had three children with his ex-wife before he came out as gay in his fifties. Now he divided his time equally between Manhattan and Key West.

  “Am I going to meet him?” I snapped my fingers fo
r the cigarettes and Laurence tossed them over.

  “You could buy your own, Danielle,” Laurence said.

  “Yours taste better, Larry,” I said. I was smoking too much, but it seemed like the thing to do. Helped me think. “So. No meeting Tony?”

  “Antonio. Please. Whenever I hear ‘Tony’ I think of his ex, who, by the way, I have had the honor of meeting on several occasions now. They’ve been very civilized about it all. But she’s so…”

  “Jersey? Carmela Soprano?” I was obsessed with The Sopranos. Smoking crack, I would watch the series from beginning to end two or three times a year.

  “Not at all. She’s more of a Dr. Melfi. All muted good taste and political correctness.”

  “Huh,” I said. Part of me wished we could lie here all evening and riff on pop culture, play cards, and go to sleep by nine o’clock. And that’s what I intended that Laurence do, once I made sure for myself that the house was safe. I hadn’t wanted to let him out of my sight, but he was safer here at this point than he would be with me. And while I didn’t know what I was going to do yet – I didn’t fancy driving out to the lake tonight and creeping through strange woods in the dark – I knew I wanted to get this over with.

  I didn’t know if I should be looking for Dickie alive or dead. And if alive, was he carrying a rifle? Wearing a red cap? Running around with an axe? Driving a yellow pickup? Between Des’s oversharing and Constable MacLean’s bizarre request, I couldn’t really know what the police’s plans were. Finding Sarah Gilbert would probably be the priority, if only because she had been abducted while supposedly under RCMP protection.

  I just wanted it to be over. I wanted Dickie to be found alive, and innocent, and for the police to find some lead with the old resident records. Maybe by morning they’d make an arrest, the bad guy or guys would give something away about what they had done with Dickie and Sarah, and I could go home to Toronto and see Darren and the boys, hire a sober companion after all. Maybe even visit Laurence and Antonio in New York before it got too hot in Manhattan. Kick back, sort out the rest of what I was going to do with Jack’s money, and try to live some kind of life.