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  “Should we tell the chief that everything was right there in the files already, or just let him go on thinking we’re brilliant?” Scoville said.

  “I doubt very much that brilliant is the word he’s thinking of,” Dean answered.

  They’d told the chief they were ready to close their first file. They’d decided that he didn’t really need to know why, that it could mean trouble for the original investigating officers.

  Dean and Scoville knew St. John’s — hell, the whole city held barely more than 200,000 people — so when they had three different files in which three different women had been assaulted, and in their witness statements all said that the man who had attacked them smelled like mould, the two detectives just looked at each other across their desks.

  “Was Frankie Beaton in jail then?” Dean asked.

  “Simple enough to find out.” Scoville pulled the computer keyboard over toward his stomach. “Whoever took the statements must have been new if they didn’t have Frank in their sights.”

  Frank Beaton had been a regular at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary for almost twenty years: he was there again when the two detectives went to interview him, and it wasn’t long before he admitted to all three of the offences, telling them how he’d picked the women and why — the why mostly being that he was drunk and he’d see them walking home at night.

  “Not much of a planner, then,” Dean said as he and Scoville signed out of the prison.

  Scoville made a humphing sound.

  “He never was. He’s probably told half the guys in here all about it, and was just waiting for the first question from a cop so he could spill it.”

  Chief Adams spent a long time in front of the microphones explaining how the RNC had finally solved the cases: he was big on diligence and thoroughness and careful police work, not above tossing in the fact that it wasn’t only the Mounties who always got their man. Dean was relegated, along with Scoville, to being the chief’s stern backdrop, spending the time thinking about how Julie had called to tell him that she had a new boyfriend, a lawyer, and that the lawyer had suggested that maybe Dean should be paying spousal support.

  Half the time, he couldn’t fathom what she wanted.

  The other half, he thought, he couldn’t care less about: it didn’t matter that Julie was all locked up in the practical side of things, like who should pay for what and who should use which credit card, or whether their credit ratings were going to be affected because he’d left every single one of their bills, still in their envelopes and unopened, in a pile like some kind of shrine at the end of the counter.

  He didn’t drive down the street where she now lived — he’d managed to come up with a range of careful detours, one of them past the narrow trench of row houses on Cabot Street, a neighbourhood you only drove through because you lived there. It was, he thought, the kind of street where people looked at you as if they already knew whether or not you belonged — and if you didn’t, as if they thought you should probably be minding your own business.

  He’d gotten stuck there once, waiting for a pickup to squeeze through, and an older man had come close enough that it seemed his face was pressed right up against the driver’s side window on Dean’s car, looking in as if he was wondering just who the hell Dean was and why the hell he was there.

  Parked cars tight along the uphill side, one narrow lane where cars always took turns threading their way forward, Cabot Street’s greatest benefit was that it was one full block below LeMarchant Road, where Julie had gotten herself set up in a two-bedroom apartment filled with the best of both their furniture.

  Then he started thinking about Scoville instead, and how the new job was actually turning out better than he’d thought it would, that they’d settled into an easy offhandedness that he hadn’t had with another detective since he had started upstairs in crime stats. And that it was all right.

  With a start, he heard the chief speak his name.

  “Inspector Hill and Sergeant Scoville would be happy to answer some questions for you,” the chief said. Just like that, the questions began.

  Chapter 18

  Baked beans

  Sausages

  White bread

  Margarine

  Tea bags

  Milk

  Matches

  I used to get out into the country a lot — I mean a lot.

  In the summertime, I’d take the car down to the North Harbour Road to go fly fishing, my lunch with me in the knapsack, teabags and a bottle with milk and sugar tucked right inside the kettle I’d use to boil the tea I’d have while I was eating.

  There are five or six rivers down there where no one else ever fishes. All around them are big wet stretches of impassable barrens with yellow standing threads of marsh grass, the small patches of white-capped sticks of cotton grass — the kind of grasses that tell you exactly what week of summer it is, if you have enough experience to know what you’re looking at. The same grasses that leave a clear trail behind if you walk through them, a clearly made path after one single pass. You’d leave a trail, but you’d also be exhausted, because you sink almost knee-deep into the wet black peat that’s down underneath that lovely green field, and there’s even more effort involved in pulling your foot back out, that great sucking reverse step that leaves a hole ready to fill in with boggy water. You can imagine that there are thousands, millions of trees down there under the surface, all dark strands and acidic brown water. How anything under there must break down fast. Walking, it’s hard on the joints, pulls your knees apart into the loose knot of bones and gristle that they actually are, and all the time, being in the place is somehow close to a religious experience.

  Of all of those rivers, I like the O’Keefe best — Mary’s father told me about it, like he was giving me special permission to fish there. You won’t find people where I fish, not two or three miles up a stony, scrabbling stretch where there might be a few pools and steadies every hundred yards or so — and steadies that change, because last year, a tree dropped across one part of the river, and the next, ice froze around the branches and the spring flood carried the whole snag away. All the time I fished on the O’Keefe, I only ever saw moose and caribou. And even they were occasional visitors, nosing slightly out of cover just long enough to realize I was there.

  Except once — I did meet a fishing warden down there, but it turned out he was looking for someone else, for a poacher with a car that looked like mine, so he worked his way through the brush and up on top of me before I had any idea he was even there. And when he stepped out of the trees and I saw it was actually a person, materializing virtually right next to me, I was both relieved and so frightened that I could literally feel my guts turn to water.

  He just wanted to see who I was and what I was up to, and then I watched him melt away downstream and disappear, his khaki backpack and dun jacket merging right into the colours of the brush, and the second he was gone, it was like I could imagine that he had never even been there. Funny, though: moments after catching up with me, he knew I wasn’t the person he was looking for — at the same time, he managed to keep that official facade, that “Let’s see your licence, sir, and could I have a look at your fish,” even though he’d already decided that he wouldn’t really want anything from me. There’s a message there: everyone falls back on the formulaic, the process, the questions they ask by rote. I was glad to see him go: I didn’t fish again until he was truly out of sight, as if fishing while he was still in the distant background would damage that spot forever.

  With enough water holding in the headlands and draining down, the O’Keefe can be remarkably fast, even at the top, even right below the highway where it’s narrow and working its way around the foot of a long draining bog in a deep, gentle curve.

  Walk over that bog to reach the river and you can’t help but have the feeling that you’re standing on a huge sucking sponge — that
there’s more water tied up in that living soggy peat than there is in the entire river that’s racing by in front of you in little white-water rips and then pooling in great curling steadies.

  I know there are plenty of moose down there: I’ve found their lies in the brush and grass and wild strawberries — great flattened circles where the plants are all crushed down — but I’ve never found a sleeping moose. I suppose they hear you coming long before you ever get close, and that they’re up on those spindly strong legs, alert and quietly on the move while you’re still splashing awkwardly through the shallows and noisily toppling the loose rocks along the shore.

  That’s the only way to travel any of those rivers: right in them. Otherwise, you’re just forcing your way straight through scrub, and pitching into bog holes and moss pits you don’t even see until you’re right in them. It’s all wild hedges of stunted spruce and hanging deadman’s moss, light-green netted tufts of lichen that grab the moisture they need right out of the air. If you’re hiking the river, and you’re lucky enough, there’s a bit of beach gravel now and then, just a thin shoulder of it, really, and just enough for you to get something of a rest while you walk, because mostly you’re knee-deep in water and standing on uneven rocks.

  When I’m in the woods, everything around me kind of overloads my brain — the combination of the heat of the sun, the smell of the low brush baking in the heat, the small bright-coloured needles of the dragonflies hovering in the air and then suddenly darting away — on top of the fishing and the walking, too, the sheer complexity of all of it has a way of capturing every single scrap of my attention, so that I couldn’t think about anything else even if I wanted to.

  You come up the gravel bank to the road completely soaked with sweat, filthy and bug-bitten and ragged, and yet shriven — completely, fantastically, wonderfully whole and clean again.

  I don’t know anything else like it.

  I don’t think I ever will.

  Chapter 19

  Whip cream

  Kidney beans

  Liquor store

  Dollar Store

  • paint brush

  Walmart

  • Chandelier bulbs

  • Whoppers

  • Cedar mulch (4 bags)

  • sympathy card

  Home Depot

  • cedar stain

  So much there — I’ve thought about that note a lot. On notepaper with her name, Lori Neville, right there on the top, the name of her company, too, along with her fax, phone, and email. The paper was all rough and stippled from getting wet and being run over in the parking lot before I found it.

  It looked different when it was in the box, when it was just mine, different from when someone was holding on to it and waving it at me.

  “Know her, do ya?”

  A police officer with the name “Davis” on a piece of fabric tape stuck to the front of his jacket had it between his fingertips, held delicately as if it were contaminated waste or something. One of the shoeboxes was open on the kitchen table and the lists were starting to get spread out all haphazard on the counter; I caught a glimpse as I was being ushered out. “How about this one? This Alisha a friend of yours?” Davis asked, holding another one of the lists. He was the only cop in the room right then.

  “An acquaintance,” I said. “I’ve seen her once or twice.”

  It’s smart to be as honest as you can — the best lies are packed full of truth.

  The police weren’t saying what they’re looking for. They rang the doorbell at six in the morning, shoved the papers at me, and told me a judge had signed them, so now they could search the house. The guys in charge weren’t in uniform, but they were definitely in charge. The tall one was Inspector Hill; Sergeant Scoville, the other one, was shorter and rounder. Hill told me straight off that I could call my lawyer if I wanted. Scoville said it would be better to just shut up and leave, because “lawyer or not, it’s going to turn out the same way.”

  When I asked, they said no, they weren’t charging me with anything.

  They had twelve hours to go through the place, they said. I had to go, “but not too far, ha ha,” and they sent a cop named Roberts upstairs with me, and he stood there while I hung up my robe and got my pants and shirt out of the closet — and then he checked the pockets on both of them, and even went through my wallet right there in front of me, taking the bills out, fingering his way through the little pockets, taking out all the cards before slipping them back in and handing it to me. Never saying what it was he was looking for.

  The wallet’s black, real worn, and Mary gave it to me one Christmas six or seven years ago. I can still remember taking everything out of my old wallet and moving it over, the kind of task that gets you thinking about every scrap of paper you’ve got in there and how long you’ve been hauling it all around. The two of us, sitting on the couch in the living room, wrapping paper around our feet and Mary still in her nightgown. Christmas was always a kind of low-key affair; we took things pretty slowly, because everything had a way of being over all at once and then we’d be left alone with each other. Do that — get left alone with each other — and Christmas dinner can be wreckage before it’s even out of the oven, a couple of bottles of white wine gone before you’ve gotten around to making the gravy, and someone spoiling for a fight and only keeping it in because of the holidays. At least that’s the way it was by the Christmas with the wallet, a Christmas where Mary ended up passed out on the sofa while I, violently drunk and unable to even slow down, threw up over a railing into the ocean, every street in the city empty except for the people who had a place to go and were busy going there.

  I stood there in front of the policeman for a minute, stubbornly sorting everything back into the right places, putting the credit cards in upside down the way I like them, so that the ridges of the numbers are above the leather slits and you can pull them out quick with your fingertips. I hate being behind someone who can’t get their card out quick at the cash, and I won’t ever be that person.

  While I was doing that, Roberts was fidgeting like he was supposed to have taken me downstairs long ago. He’s just an extra in this film, I knew that. The main characters were downstairs, carefully somewhere else and out of sight.

  They can’t rush you, though — they’re not allowed to. I know the drill. They’ll go through the whole house — taking things out of their places, moving them around, putting them where they want, sometimes bagging things they think are important. Eventually, they’ll give it all back — at least they do with me — but they can sure as hell make a mess while they’re looking. They can even cut open the mattresses and haul out all the drawers to see if you’re stupid enough to have taped something incriminating to the bottom, and they can leave all the contents spread right out on the bed. But they can’t rush you — they just chivvy you along, using the same official voice they always use to say “nothing to see here, sir” and “move along” at car accidents.

  They’ve got a job to do — that’s the way I try to think about it — and I try not to get annoyed with them and the mess they’re going to make, even though it will be weeks before everything’s sorted out and back to where it’s supposed to be. Sometimes they’re gentle, taking stuff out and stacking it in order so you can put it back. Other times, though, the search is more like a punishment.

  What I mean is that it’s like they’ve already decided you’re guilty, that they think it’s just a matter of them proving it, and so you deserve the mess they’re going to be making, just for the fact that you’re not giving up the ghost and confessing or something.

  Ask someone who’s been on the wrong side: it’s amazing what kind of behaviour the police can justify if they think they’re in the right. And there’s absolutely not one single thing you can do to convince them otherwise.

  This time, it meant an unexpected day out for me: late November, and everythin
g dying back into beiges and yellows, sometime beaten down flat by the first of the snow.

  I got out to the car, trying not to look around at any of the windows on the street where there were bound to be busybodies back in the shadows having themselves a good look.

  They let me pick up my coat near the back door before I left, but not before they went through all those pockets carefully, too, even the inside ones, like I might have known they were coming and slipped something incriminating in there. You feel like asking them just what it is they’re looking for, as if you really should be helping them or something. It’s a hard habit to break. I looked at my backpack and decided not to even ask. I already had my long boots in the trunk, and they hadn’t said anything about wanting to look through the car. Maybe they’re saving that for another day. Maybe the warrant doesn’t go that far, some cop inside the house already kicking himself for not getting that extra bit of permission, too, imagining I’m about to trundle off for the distant horizon with every single thing they’re looking for.

  The whole thing makes me wonder about judges, what their worlds must be like, signing off on warrants for people they don’t even know, when what they have is half the story, and only the half the police want to give them: Do they just suspend all disbelief, sign their names, and let the police get on with things?

  I don’t know how many warrants they’ve brought to my place; I don’t know how many different judges it’s been, either. All I know is that judges seem to cough up permission to go through my place pretty darned quick, and pretty darned regularly, too. And then the cops come in like the tide, only one or two of them frequently enough for me to recognize.

  I was at the highway and filling up the gas tank before I really even thought about where I wanted to go.

  I knew I had twelve hours to kill — by then, I guess, it was maybe only eleven, but I’d have to be out until six in the evening, anyway — so I cut down the Salmonier Line and then pointed the car toward Branch, right at the foot of the peninsula.