Sergeant McDermid always found herself more interested in the victim than in the murderer--not that finding the murderer was without gratification for her. She just would rather have had the opportunity to tell the salesgirl not to let whoever it was in her door. These were unsuitable or at least impractical sentiments for a homicide detective to have, Margaret knew. Maybe she would be happier in Missing Persons, where there was some hope of finding the person before he or she became a victim.
Margaret concluded that she would rather look for potential victims than for murderers. When she told Cahill her thoughts, the staff sergeant was phlegmatic. "Maybe you should try Missing Persons, Margaret," he told her.
Later, in the car, Cahill said that the sight of that blood-soaked flying hamburger was enough to make a vegetarian out of him, but Margaret didn't allow herself to be distracted by the remark. She was already imagining herself in Missing Persons, looking for someone to save instead of someone to catch. She speculated that many of the missing would be young women, and that more than a few of these would turn out to be homicides.
In Toronto, women who were abducted were rarely found in the city. The bodies would turn up somewhere off the 401, or--after the ice had broken up in Georgian Bay, and the snow had melted in the forests-- the human remains would be discovered off Route 69 between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, or nearer Sudbury. Maybe a farmer would find something in a field off the 11th Line in Brock. In the States, someone snatched in a city would often be found in the same city--in a Dumpster, say, or a stolen car. But in Canada there was all this land.
Some of the young women who were missing would turn out to be runaways. From rural Ontario, they would likely end up in Toronto, where many of them were easily found. (Not infrequently, they would have become prostitutes.) But the missing persons who would interest Margaret the most would be children. What Detective Sergeant McDermid was unprepared for was how much of the business of Missing Persons would entail studying the photographs of children. She was also unprepared for how much the photographs of these missing children would haunt her.
Case by case, the photographs were filed, and as the unfound missing children grew older than their last available photographs, Margaret would mentally revise their appearance. Thus she learned that you needed a good imagination in order to have any success in Missing Persons. The photographs of the missing children were important, but they were only the first drafts--they were pictures of children-in-progress. The ability that the sergeant shared with the parents of these missing children was truly a special but torturous gift: namely, that of seeing, in the mind's eye, what the six-year-old would look like at the age of ten or twelve, or what the teenager would look like in his or her twenties--"torturous," because to imagine your missing child grown older, or even entirely grown up, is one of the more painful things that the parents of missing children do. The parents can't help themselves--they have to do it. But Sergeant McDermid discovered that she had to do it, too.
If this gift made her good at her job, it also kept her from having much of a life. The children she couldn't find became her children. When they were no longer an active case in Missing Persons, she took their photos home.
Two boys especially haunted her. They were Americans who had disappeared during the Vietnam War. The boys' parents thought that they'd escaped to Canada in 1968--probably the midpoint of Vietnam "war resisters," as they were called, coming across the border. At the time, the boys would have been seventeen and fifteen. The seventeen-year-old was a year away from being eligible for the draft, but a student deferment would have kept him safe for at least another four years. His younger brother had run away with him--the boys had always been inseparable.
The seventeen-year-old's flight was probably a mask to hide his deeper disillusionment with his parents' divorce. To Sergeant McDermid, both boys were more the victims of the hatred that had developed between their parents than they were victims of the war in Vietnam.
Anyway, the boys' case in Missing Persons was no longer under active investigation. If that seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old were alive today, they would be in their early thirties! Yet their case was not "retired" for either of their parents, or for Margaret.
The father, who'd said he was "something of a realist," had provided Missing Persons with the boys' dental records. The mother had sent the photographs that Sergeant McDermid had taken home.
That Margaret was unmarried, and past the age of ever having children of her own, doubtless contributed to her obsession with the handsome boys she saw in those photographs--and to her equally enduring obsession with what might have become of them. If they were alive, where were they now? What did they look like? What women might have loved them? What children of their own might they have fathered? What would their lives be like? If they still lived . . .
Over time, the bulletin board on which Margaret tacked the boys' photos had been moved from the combination living-dining room in her apartment--where it had occasionally drawn comment from dinner guests--to her bedroom, which no one but Margaret ever saw.
Sergeant McDermid was almost sixty, although she could still successfully lie about her age. In a few years, she would be as retired as the case of the missing young Americans. In the meantime, she was past the age of inviting anyone to see her bedroom, where the bulletin board with the unfound boys' pictures was the principal view from her bed.
There were times, when she couldn't sleep at night, that she regretted moving the many images of those boys this close to her. And the alternately anxious and grieving mother still sent photographs. Of these, the mother would comment: "I know they don't look like this anymore, but there's something about William's personality that comes through in this picture." (William was the older of the boys.)
Or the mother would write: "I realize you can't see their faces clearly in this one--I mean, you can't see their faces at all, I know--but there is something about Henry's mischievousness that might be useful to you in your search." The particular photograph that accompanied this note was of the mother herself as a young, attractive woman.
She's in bed, in a hotel room somewhere. From the look of it, Margaret guessed that the hotel was in Europe. The young mother is smiling, perhaps laughing, and both her boys are in bed with her--only they're under the covers. All you can see of the boys is their bare feet. She thinks I can identify them by their feet ! Margaret thought despairingly. Yet she could not stop looking at the photograph.
Or at the one of William as a little boy, playing doctor to Henry's knee. Or the one where the boys, at the ages of about five and seven, are both dismantling lobsters--William with a certain technical ease and zeal, while Henry is finding the task both gruesome and beyond his abilities. (To their mother, this also demonstrated the boys' different personalities.)
But the best photograph of the boys, taken near the time of their disappearance, was after a hockey game--presumably at the boys' school. William is taller than his mother--he's holding a hockey puck in his teeth--and Henry is still shorter than his mom. Both boys are wearing their hockey uniforms, but they have traded their skates for high-top basketball shoes.
It had been a popular photograph among Margaret's colleagues in Missing Persons--when the case was still active--not only because the mother was pretty but because both boys, in their hockey uniforms, looked so Canadian. Yet to Margaret there was something identifiably American about these missing boys, a kind of cocksure combination of mischief and unstoppable optimism--as if each of them thought that his opinion would always be unchallengeable, his car never in the wrong lane.
But it was only when she couldn't sleep, or when she'd looked too often and too long at these photographs, that Sergeant McDermid ever regretted leaving Homicide for Missing Persons. When she'd been looking for the murderer of the youngwaitress in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, Margaret had slept very well. Yet they'd never found that murderer, or the missing American boys.
When Margaret would run into Mi
chael Cahill, who was still in Homicide, it was natural for her to ask him, as a colleague, about what he was working on--as he asked her. When they had cases that weren't going anywhere--cases that had "unsolved" written all over them, from the start--they would express their frustration in the same way: "I'm working on one of those followed-home-from-the-Flying-Food-Circus kinds of cases."
Missing Persons
Ruth could have stopped reading right there, at the end of Chapter One. There was no question in her mind that Alice Somerset was Marion Cole. The photographs that the Canadian writer had described could not be coincidental--not to mention the effect of the photographs on the haunted detective in Missing Persons.
That her mother was still preoccupied with the photos of her missing boys came as no surprise to Ruth, nor did the fact that Marion must have obsessed on the subject of what Thomas and Timothy would have looked like as grown men--and what their lives would have been like, had they lived. The surprise to Ruth, after the initial shock of establishing her mother's existence, was that her mother had been able to write indirectly about what most haunted her. Simply that her mother was a writer --if not a good one--was the greatest shock to Ruth of all.
Ruth had to read on. There would be more photographs described, of course, and Ruth could remember each one. The novel was true to the genre of crime fiction only in that it eventually pursued a single case of Missing Persons to its solution: two little girls, sisters, are safely recovered from their abductor, who turns out to be neither a sex fiend nor a child molester (as one first fears) but a barely less terrible estranged father and divorced husband.
As for the waitress found in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, she remains a metaphor for the unsolved or unsolvable crime--as do the missing American boys, whose images (both real and imagined) are still haunting Detective Sergeant McDermid at the end of the novel. In this sense, Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus succeeds beyond the genre of crime fiction; it establishes Missing Persons as a psychological condition. Missing Persons becomes the permanent state of mind of the melancholic main character.
Even before she finished reading her mother's first novel, Ruth desperately wanted to talk to Eddie O'Hare--for she assumed (correctly) that Eddie knew something about Marion's career as a writer. Surely Alice Somerset had written more than this one book. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus had been published in 1984; it was not a long novel. By 1990, Ruth guessed, her mother might have written and published a couple more.
Ruth would soon learn from Eddie that there were two more, each of them entailing additional casework in the field of Missing Persons. Titles were not her mother's strength. Missing Persons McDermid had a certain alliterative charm, but the alliteration seemed strained in McDermid Reaches a Milestone .
The principal story in Missing Persons McDermid details Sergeant McDermid's efforts to find a runaway wife and mother. In this case, a woman from the States abandons her husband and child; the husband, who is looking for her, is convinced that his wife has run away to Canada. In the course of setting out to find the missing wife and mother, Margaret uncovers some unseemly incidents involving the husband's myriad infidelities. Worse, the detective realizes that the distraught mother's love for a previous child (who was killed in a plane crash) has made her run away from the fearful responsibility of loving a new child--that is, the child she has abandoned. When Sergeant McDermid finds the woman, who was formerly a waitress at the Flying Food Circus, the policewoman is so sympathetic toward her that she allows her to slip away. The bad husband never finds her.
"We have reason to suspect that she's in Vancouver," Margaret tells the husband, knowing full well that the runaway woman is in Toronto. (In this novel, the photographs of those missing American boys retain their place of prominence in the detective's monastic bedroom.)
In McDermid Reaches a Milestone, Margaret--who has been "almost sixty, although she could still lie about her age," over the course of two novels-- finally becomes a sexagenarian. Ruth would instantly understand why Eddie O'Hare was particularly impressed by the third of Alice Somerset's novels: the story concerns the return of a former lover of the sixty-year-old detective.
When Margaret McDermid had been in her forties, she'd been deeply committed to volunteer counseling of young American men coming to Canada to escape the Vietnam War. One of the young men falls in love with her--a boy not yet in his twenties with a woman already in her forties! The affair, described in frankly erotic terms, is quickly over.
Then, as Margaret turns sixty, her "young" lover comes to her-- again in need of her help. This time, it is because his wife and child are missing--presumed kidnapped. He's now a man in his thirties, and Sergeant McDermid is distracted by wondering if he still finds her attractive. ("But how could he? Margaret wondered--an old hag like me.")
" I would still find her attractive!" Eddie would tell Ruth.
"Tell her --not me, Eddie," Ruth would say.
In the end, the former young man is happily reunited with his wife and child, and Margaret consoles herself by once more imagining the lives of those missing American boys whose pictures stare back at her in her lonely bedroom.
Ruth would relish a jacket blurb on McDermid Reaches a Milestone : "the best living crime writer!" (This from the president of the British Crime Writers Association, although it was not a widely held opinion.) And Missing Persons McDermid was awarded the so-called Arthur for Best Novel. (The Crime Writers of Canada named the award after Arthur Ellis, which was the name adopted by Arthur English, the Canadian hangman from 1913 until 1935; his uncle John Ellis was the hangman in England at that same period of time. Subsequent Canadian hangmen took the name "Arthur Ellis" as their nom de travail.)
However, it was not uncommon that success in Canada--and an even more measurable success in her French and German translations--did not mean that Alice Somerset was similarly well known or even well published in the United States; indeed, she had barely been published in the States. A U.S. distributor for her Canadian publisher had tried unsuccessfully to promote McDermid Reaches a Milestone in a modest way. (The third of the three novels was the only one of sufficient interest to the Americans for them to publish it at all.)
Eddie O'Hare was envious of Alice Somerset's foreign sales, but he was no less proud of Marion for her efforts to convert her personal tragedy and unhappiness to fiction. "Good for your mother," Eddie would tell Ruth. "She's taken everything that hurt her and turned it into a detective series!"
But Eddie was unsure if he was the model for the young lover who re-enters Margaret McDermid's life when she's sixty, or if Marion had taken another young American as her lover during the Vietnam War.
"Don't be silly, Eddie," Ruth would tell him. "She's writing about you, only you."
About Marion, Eddie and Ruth would agree on the most important thing: they would let Ruth's mother remain a missing person for as long as she wanted to be. "She knows where to find us, Eddie," Ruth would tell her newfound friend, but Eddie bore the unlikelihood of Marion ever wanting to see him again like a permanent sorrow.
Arriving at JFK, Ruth expected to find Allan waiting for her when she passed through customs; that she found Allan waiting with Hannah was a surprise. To Ruth's knowledge, they had never met before; the sight of them together caused Ruth the most acute distress. She knew she should have slept with Allan before she left for Europe--now he'd slept with Hannah instead! But how could that be? They didn't even know each other; yet there they were, looking like a couple.
In Ruth's view, they looked "like a couple" because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them--they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever have imagined such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious.)
"Oh, baby, baby . . ." Hannah was saying to her. "It's all my fault!" Hannah held a mangled copy of The New York Times; the newspaper was in a lumpy roll, a
s if Hannah had wrung it to death.
Ruth stood waiting for Allan to kiss her, but he spoke to Hannah: "She doesn't know."
"Know what ?" Ruth asked in alarm.
"Your father's dead, Ruth," Allan told her.
"Baby, he killed himself," Hannah said.
Ruth was shocked. She'd not thought her father capable of suicide, because she'd never thought him capable of blaming himself for anything.
Hannah was offering her the Times --or, rather, its wrinkled remains. "It's a shitty obit," Hannah said. "It's all about his bad reviews. I never knew he had so many bad reviews."
Numbly, Ruth read the obituary. It was easier than talking to Hannah.
"I ran into Hannah at the airport," Allan was explaining. "She introduced herself."
"I read the lousy obit in the paper," Hannah said. "I knew you were coming back today, so I called the house in Sagaponack and talked to Eduardo--it was Eduardo who found him. That's how I got your flight number, from Eduardo," Hannah said.
"Poor Eduardo," Ruth replied.
"Yeah, he's a fucking wreck," Hannah said. "And when I got to the airport, of course I was looking for Allan. I assumed he'd be here. I recognized him from his photo . . ."
"I know what my mother is doing," Ruth told them. "She's a writer. Crime fiction, but there's more to it than that."
"She's in denial," Hannah explained to Allan. "Poor baby," Hannah told her. "It's my fault--blame me, blame me !"
"It's not your fault, Hannah. Daddy didn't give you a second thought," Ruth said. "It's my fault. I killed him. First I kicked his ass at squash, then I killed him. You had nothing to do with it."
"She's angry--it's good that she's angry," Hannah said to Allan. " Outward anger is good for you--what's bad for you is to implode ."
"Go fuck yourself !" Ruth told her best friend.
"That's good, baby. I mean it--your anger is good for you."
"I brought the car," Allan told Ruth. "I can take you into the city, or we can drive out to Sagaponack."
"I want to go to Sagaponack," Ruth told him. "I want to see Eddie O'Hare. First I want to see Eduardo, then Eddie."