Undertow. R.M. Greenaway
within reach was gone, and Dion found himself looking at the parrot — if that’s what it was — instead of the suspect. He noticed the white bird with its punk hairdo was bobbing its head to the conversation, trying to get a word in. A bit of a power struggle was being waged now between Torr and Blatt, with Torr fielding questions instead of asking his own. Dion lost the thread of their dialogue, and without the thread there was no fabric.
He focussed on Blatt again when Blatt swore on his grandmother’s grave that he didn’t know where Lance was. “All right, sir,” Torr said, and finally Blatt was free to sink onto his sofa and bury his face in his arms.
Only on the stairs did it come to Dion, the perfect description for Blatt’s reaction. Misplaced confusion. He stopped to capture the words in his notebook. Torr kept stomping down, griping as he went. The stairwell was a vertical tower of concrete and iron, and every sound within it rang bell-like. Even Torr’s griping had a musical resonance as it floated back. Dion stood with notebook open, startled off task by déjà vu. A different stairwell, but the same effect. Voices and boot thuds echoing up and down. The boom of Looch’s laughter.
Out of sight now, Torr bellowed up, “Hey, what’s up?”
It was a good question, and it brought Dion back to where he was, on somebody’s stairwell, notebook open in his hands. He looked at what he’d scribbled there — confusion — and couldn’t for the life of him think why.
Five
The Crumbling Shores
Over the last several hours Leith had crossed the road from detachment to hospital more than once, anxious not to miss the cabinet kid’s first words. The cabinet kid’s name, he’d discovered through the team’s research, was Joseph Liu. Joseph had suffered a panic attack in the examination room and had been given a mild sedative. Now he was asleep. Leith had posted JD Temple at the boy’s bedside to be there when he woke.
But not knowing JD well enough to know how far he could trust her vigilance, he continued to check in from time to time. It irked her, he could tell. “What, you think I’ll forget?” she said, looking up from some kind of pencil puzzle.
She was in an armchair, backlit by fuzzy spring sunlight. She wasn’t only as snarky as a man, but dressed like one, too, in easy-fit canvas trousers and a fleece vest over a grey hoodie.
“You’re looking at your magazine there,” Leith pointed out. “Not Joseph here.”
“I’m looking at both,” she said. “People don’t just pop awake and start chatting. I’ll notice that he’s stirring when he’s stirring, if that’s okay with you.”
Leith felt like he’d just been peppered with rubber bullets. “Anyway, I was just passing by,” he lied. He stood by the bed, looking down at his greatest hope right now, the living witness. Joseph seemed unharmed. His clothes had been bagged as evidence. Maybe he wasn’t just asleep, but had sunken into a deep freeze to escape the horrors of what he’d seen and heard. Maybe the deep freeze would last for years.
The fact that Joseph had been hiding told Leith something. Joseph’s mom had probably seen trouble brewing, and she’d pushed him inside the cabinet for safety. This implied that the intruder had burst in rather unexpectedly. Enough time to hide the son, but not enough time to protect the infant, Rosalie — or Rosie, another name he had since added to the file — or herself.
What had Joseph seen, heard? What would he forget and what would he remember for the rest of his life?
“Hey, Joseph,” Leith tried.
Nothing.
From her chair, JD said, “Who calls their kid Joseph? He goes by Joey.”
“You figure?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, Joey,” Leith said.
Still nothing.
“Let me try,” JD said.
She switched places with him, and her voice softened as she leaned over the bed. “How are you feeling, Joey?”
Leith admired the simple tactic. Joseph was not only human, but Canadian, and as such he would feel obliged to answer if asked a direct question, even if that meant struggling out of a drugged sleep.
Leith was ready to give up and leave when Joseph’s foot gave a kick. The boy’s eyes flew open, now looking at the ceiling, and now at JD.
There was no fright in those eyes that Leith could see from where he sat. Just bleary astonishment. Leith could see JD’s smile reflected in the pale-blue windows that spanned the room, and he marvelled again at her transformation from tomboy to angel.
“Are you hungry?” she was asking.
Joey nodded.
“What would you like?” she asked, and she took the extra step of touching his face, smoothing his hair. “You can have anything you want. You name it.”
The boy considered. There would be a battle going on inside his soul, Leith knew. Memories and fear clashing with relief and hunger. Being human, he would suppress the bad and seek out the good. Damn, he’d spend the next however many years suppressing the bad.
“Taco,” was the kid’s first word, with a bit of a question mark on the end.
“Ooh, sounds lovely,” JD said. “I’ll get my assistant here to order some up, okay?”
She glanced around at Leith, and she wasn’t quite smirking, but there was a mean glint in her eye. Leith was already making the call. One taco for Joey, one for JD as a reward for good work. And two for himself, because he was suddenly ravenously hungry.
* * *
In the end, though, there were no breakthroughs. Joey — the name he responded to best — could tell them little they didn’t already know. Except that, no, mom hadn’t pushed him in the cabinet. He’d been playing hide-and-seek with her. Leith doubted mom and child had been playing hide-and-seek, at least not in the playful sense. Cheryl had probably only said so to make Joey hide. And fast.
And then — only a teaser — Joey said he had seen the man.
He couldn’t say whether this man knocked or rang the bell first. He couldn’t say where he had come from, either, the front door or back. Or whether he was admitted or barged in without invitation. He couldn’t say how long the man was in the house before the violence began. He didn’t know if his mom knew this man, or what they had said to one another, except the man was shouting at his mom. If she had addressed the man by name, he couldn’t say. Joey had never seen him before, he didn’t think. He couldn’t describe him, except he was big. Between every answer, he had a question, piercing and plaintive: Where’s my mom? Sometimes it switched to Where’s my dad?
How do you tell a four-year-old that all he considers safe and forever is gone? JD explained that something had happened to his mom, and she couldn’t be here with him, but she loved him very much. They would find his dad soon, she promised. She also reassured him — this time it wasn’t a big white lie — that his grandmother Zan was on her way to see him. This news seemed to ease his heart a bit. Just a bit, though his chin wobbled and his eyes filled with tears.
When JD asked what colour the man’s hair was, he couldn’t say. If he had a beard or not, couldn’t say. Joey didn’t see anybody else except the big man shouting at his mom. Rosie was crying. He heard his mom screaming. Joey demonstrated how he had covered his ears so as not to hear.
JD asked Joey if he’d been hiding before the man came, or after. Again, he couldn’t say. He was beginning to withdraw again, softly sobbing, and Leith decided it was enough for now.
He returned to the house on Mahon with JD, and they looked at the cabinet where the boy had hidden. JD squatted down and looked inside. “This is the kind of useless space where things get lost, so people end up installing those spinny rack things.”
Leith