The Way the Crow Flies

  By the time Jack got through to the office of First Secretary Crawford at the British Embassy in Washington, it had begun to rain again. Grey streaked the glass and obscured the view from the phone booth. The McCarrolls’ little girl was still out there somewhere. At best, she had fallen and broken a limb, was frightened and disoriented and unable to make her way back to the PMQs. It was possible.

  “Crawford here.”

  “Si, McCarroll’s nine-year-old daughter has gone missing.”

  A pause, then “Poor bastard.” Simon agreed that Jack ought not to brief McCarroll until and unless his daughter turned up safely. “Call me at the night number the moment you hear anything.” He sighed. “This operation has been plagued by more gremlins….”

  “What do you want me to do with the car, Si?”

  “Oh right, the bloody car. Keep it.”

  “What am I supposed to tell my wife? That I robbed a bank?”

  “I’ll have to have someone pick it up, or … Christ. Where is it now?”

  “I moved it to Exeter. I’ll have to move it again at some point or it’ll be towed for scrap.”

  “Let it be. Finders keepers.”

  “CIA’s budget, I hope.”

  “I’m going to miss you, sunshine.”

  Jack was still smiling when he left the phone booth, but his smile faded when he saw an OPP cruiser pull up to Number 4 Hangar. McCarroll came out and got in the car. Jack was wearing his government-issue rain poncho and rubber overshoes. He made his way quickly to the hangar to join one of the search parties. All male personnel, including kitchen staff, were out looking.

  Miss Lang is taking Mr. March’s place while he talks to the police. They are interviewing the staff, trying to find clues. He has been gone for half an hour already. There was a knock at the classroom door and Mr. March went to open it, singing, “‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’” But he stopped when he saw the police officer standing there, and said, “Just let me get my glasses.” He returned to collect them from his desk, took his hanky from his pocket and cleaned the lenses. It was the first time Madeleine had ever seen him use his hanky for anything but his wiener.

  Miss Lang asks what the class would like to do and the choice is unanimous: art. Never before has the grade four class had art on a Thursday afternoon; one good thing has come of Claire McCarroll getting lost. Even Grace puts up her hand and votes for art, although it’s difficult to see how she will be able to hold a crayon with her hands bandaged. They are bound in thick white gauze that has frayed and turned grey with the passage of the day. Mr. March seemed not to notice, but Miss Lang asks if Grace has hurt herself. Grace manages to explain that her father has had enough of her with her fingers always in her mouth. He gave her a choice: “I’ll break them or bandage them.”

  The class is quiet. Miss Lang is allowing them to draw anything they like as long as it’s on an Easter theme. They are permitted to use any kind of medium—pastels, water colours, anything but fingerpaints. Madeleine has chosen to work with pencil crayons, drawing a day in the life of the Dynamic Duo. In the cocoon of the classroom, with its school smells, the comforting fug of orange peels, pencil shavings, damp wool and chalk, with the soothing rain against the windows, Miss Lang puts on an LP she brought from home. The Mantovani Strings release their magic in a slow waterfall of sound, The-ere’s … a sum-mer place….

  Madeleine bends to her drawing, her tongue toying with a molar that has come loose, concentrating on the Boy Wonder disguised as a baby in a rocket-powered pram in pursuit of the Joker. The afternoon glows grey outside although it is not yet two-thirty. The patient rain embroiders the puddles that have formed in the shallow depressions at either end of the teeter-totters, beneath each swing and at the foot of the slide. Beyond the baseball diamond, the bungalows and duplexes of the PMQs are hunkered down but cheerful in their rainbow colours, all the brighter against the pewter sky.

  Madeleine directs her gaze across Algonquin Drive, to the farmer’s field—the farmer with the fabled shotgun. There is activity over there. Cars are pulling up and parking on the shoulder of the road—ordinary ones and several black-and-white OPP cruisers.

  She recalls the poor dog trapped in the stormpipe. Did it get out? Did it drown? She feels a terrible sorrow coming on, and consoles herself with the prospect of asking her father what happened to the dog. He’ll know. She returns her eyes to her drawing and remembers that they were supposed to do art on an Easter theme. She draws a speech bubble for Robin and in it she prints, “Holy Thursday, Batman!”

  She lifts her eyes from her drawing with satisfaction and studies the back of Grace Novotny’s head and shoulders. Grace’s profile is partially visible, contorted as she is over her desk in the manner common to all when colouring. She is licking her chapped lips, breathing through her mouth because her nose is plugged. Grace doesn’t usually do anything without her eyes wandering a great deal, but today she is concentrating extra hard, perhaps because of the bandages on her hands. Madeleine can see the yellow pencil crayon sticking up from Grace’s filthy fist. What can she be drawing?

  Madeleine looks out the window again and sees cars parked on both sides of the road now. In the field, a line of men in rain ponchos comes into view, walking slowly, shoulder to shoulder, across the field. They are looking for something very small, thinks Madeleine. And valuable. A watch, or a diamond.

  Beside the window, Claire’s desk sits empty. It’s as though she were away sick with the flu. She will be back tomorrow.

  Madeleine raises her hand. “Miss Lang, may I please sharpen my pencil?”

  “Yes, Madeleine, you may.”

  On her way back from the pencil sharpener, Madeleine slows when she gets to Grace’s desk and gazes in wonder on Grace’s picture. A storm of yellow butterflies.

  There are so many, so many it’s dizzying, each one perfectly drawn and coloured in, each wing intricately outlined, no two the same, like snowflakes. It’s so good, you could probably make wallpaper out of it.

  Miss Lang lifts the needle from the record and it’s as if the whole class has been in the court of Sleeping Beauty. Everyone looks up groggily, tousled and calm. They hand in their work, and it turns out there was some very good art done that day.

  “They were looking for Claire,” says Colleen. “I seen them too.”

  “That’s a dumb place to look,” says Madeleine. “Right out in the open? In a field?” They are walking up St. Lawrence Avenue. While they never leave the schoolyard together, they have taken to drifting toward one another at some point if Madeleine is on her own.

  “No it isn’t,” says Colleen.

  The world is suffused with rain glow, the air soft and scented, all so vivid and promising; as though the three o’clock bell had heralded a widening of the world, a release into the future, unknown and yet contained within a frame, like a movie screen. Madeleine savours a keen anticipation. Something is going to happen. Something wonderful.

  She says, “It is so, Colleen, it’s dumb, because if Claire was in a field in broad daylight they’d see her right away, unless she was hiding, and who would hide in a field, and besides she’s lost and you can’t get lost in a field right across from the school.” Madeleine takes a breath and adds, “Stunned one.” She steps back, hoping for a reckoning. But Colleen neglects to take the bait.

  Madeleine glances over her shoulder to see Mike and his friends following at a secure distance, like bodyguards. She is about to point them out but Colleen has said something. “What’d you say?”

  “That’s because they don’t expect to find her alive,” Colleen repeats.

  It takes Madeleine a moment, and then it’s as though she had stumbled down an unexpected step. And the world is a different colour. Metallic now, no longer lambent. The warm feeling of being in a movie is gone. Now she is not in anything. Except the rain. And it has no borders that mean anything at all.

  That night, she requests Winnie the Pooh. There is no shame in returning to old favouri
tes. And her father says one is never too old to appreciate great literature. She opts not to do the voices, requesting that he read it all. She contemplates the stick in the water rushing beneath the bridge and it soothes her mind. But when it comes time for him to turn out her light, she asks, “Dad, do they expect to find Claire alive?”

  Jack pauses, his hand on the switch. He returns and sits on the edge of her bed.

  “Sure they do.”

  “Then how come they were looking for her in a field?”

  He turns and glances around the room. “Where’s old Bugsy?” He finds him under the bed, plucks the nap off his ears and tucks him in beside her, saying, “They figure maybe she dropped something in the field and that’ll help them find her.”

  “Maybe she left a trail.”

  “Maybe she did.” Jack leans down to kiss her and she puts her arms around his neck, as she often does, refusing to let him go. He tickles her and she releases him. He makes it halfway to the door.

  “What if she got kidnapped?”

  “… Well there’d be a note.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Don’t you worry about Claire, she’ll be home before you know it.” He turns off her light.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to die soon?”

  He laughs. “Are you kiddin’? Tough old roosters don’t die in a hurry.”

  “Everybody dies.”

  “You know what, Madeleine?” and his tone is no longer mollifying, it’s factual. “That day is so far away it’s not even worth thinking about.”

  “What if there’s an air raid? Would the siren go off like in October?”

  He looks her in the eye. “You know what NORAD is?” He leans in the doorway, framed by the hall light. “It’s a big early warning system that would kick into action long before anyone could get over here with a bomb. We’d send one of our fighters up to blast it out of the sky and that would be it.”

  “Dad?”

  “Go to sleep now, old buddy.”

  “Is Claire dead?”

  “Nooo!”—he chuckles—“don’t you worry, now. You know what?”

  “What?”

  “There’s an old saying: ‘Don’t shake hands with the Devil before you meet him.’”

  Madeleine lets him believe he has comforted her. “’Night, Dad.”

  Jack heads downstairs and out the door, telling Mimi he needs a breath of fresh air. He’s not lying. But he also needs to make a phone call.

  Madeleine strokes Bugs’s long ears back from his merry forehead. “Don’t worry, Bugs.” She doesn’t repeat her dad’s comment about the Devil, however, because, while it’s meant to reassure you that the Devil is nowhere near, implicit is the idea that, sooner or later, you will in fact meet him.

  GOOD FRIDAY

  CLAIRE’S PHOTO IS ON the cover of the London Free Press. Madeleine sees it when she opens the door to get the milk from the front step. The photo is a little smudgy because it’s a black-and-white reproduction of Claire’s school picture—the one everyone had taken in the gym last November. But it is unmistakeably Claire smiling up from the front porch next to the milk. And the caption: Missing Child. Claire is famous. Madeleine carries the paper up with the milk, exclaiming, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

  Her mother takes the paper and thrusts it at her father, saying, “I don’t want any of these in the house”—as though she were talking about getting rid of all the spinning wheels in the kingdom.

  Jack is neither surprised nor offended, he merely folds the paper into his briefcase, and when Mike comes down and turns on the radio for the news, Jack shuts it right back off. They eat breakfast, Mimi dressed and made up as usual, leaning against the counter with her coffee and cigarette. It is as silent as it was during the missile crisis. This time, however, there is not even the crinkle of newspaper pages. Just the sound of crunching. Madeleine looks at Mike. He is wearing the same innocent expression as her father. She pokes her toad-in-the-hole and the yolk streams out.

  Today is a holiday. But it’s Good Friday, which means you are not supposed to have too much fun. There is to be no television tonight—Jesus is on the Cross, this is no time to be watching the Three Stooges. Mike is not even allowed to play road hockey. Maman lays down the law every year. And for supper, fish. Not fish ’n’ chips, but a piece of watery white flesh on the plate next to pallid canned peas and boiled potatoes. No dessert. Offer it up for the suffering of Our Lord. When He was thirsty, all they gave him to drink was vinegar. Remember the poor starving children in Africa. It is raining, because it always rains on Good Friday.

  Madeleine leaves to call on Auriel, but sees Colleen out in front of the Froelich house in a rain poncho. She is crouched with her coffee can, parting the grass with her fingers. Madeleine quietly retreats and cuts through several backyards before emerging farther up and crossing the street to the Bouchers’ house. They are going to listen to Auriel’s mum’s Vera Lynn records and let the budgie fly around. Then they’ll go next door and play with Lisa’s new baby brother. They will continue to speculate about Claire’s perilous adventure. Auriel has suggested that she may have run away to Disneyland. As Madeleine knocks on the Bouchers’ door, she glances down the street to where Colleen is making patient progress across her front yard.

  “Hello pet, come in out of the rain,” says Mrs. Boucher. Madeleine smells cinnamon buns baking—Mrs. Boucher is Anglican, they don’t have to suffer as much on Good Friday. Something in her expression changes as she looks over Madeleine’s head toward the street. Madeleine turns to see a police car coming up St. Lawrence Avenue. It crawls past them, then turns into the Froelichs’ driveway. Colleen Froelich stands up with her coffee can.

  Mrs. Boucher says, “In you go, love,” turning to call up the stairs: “Auriel, Madeleine’s here.”

  HOLY SATURDAY

  AN OPP HELICOPTER chops across the grey sky over the PMQs and kids stop what they are doing and look up. By now, everyone knows that the helicopter is searching for Claire. So are the bright yellow Chipmunks that have been flying low, tracing an aerial grid, each with a pilot and an observer to peer down through the rain. The grown-ups can no longer hide their fear. Kids openly speculate that Claire has drowned in a ditch, fallen down an air shaft—although there were never any mines around here—or been chopped to bits by a maniac with a hook. The Exeter Times-Advocate has urged farmers to check their barns and outbuildings, and to shine flashlights down their wells.

  On the way back to the car after Holy Saturday Mass, Madeleine sees again the rows of men in rain gear, fanning out from the airfield into the meadows and woodlots. A brace of German shepherds strain on their leashes and sniff the ground frantically. Madeleine knows they have been given something of Claire’s to smell. Just like Dale the Police Dog who found the little girl asleep in the corn. They should get Rex to help.

  Jack makes no secret of going out to search again with the other men, and Mimi gets her children to kneel down in the living room and say the rosary with her for the safe return of Claire McCarroll.

  Ricky Froelich has been helping with the search. He brought Rex along at first, but the policemen asked him to take the dog home since he was not a trained search-and-rescue animal. Rick wanted to say, “How do you know?” because Rex’s origins before he wound up at the Goderich pound are unknown. But he didn’t want to be smart to the cop. Those days are behind him.

  On Friday a couple of policemen whom Rick knew from the search came by the house to ask him the same questions a couple of others had on Thursday. He didn’t mind. If they were overlapping their efforts it meant they were working overtime to find the kid. He told the officers what he had told their colleagues: he had been out running with his sister and his dog when he met Claire McCarroll heading south down the Huron County road. She had told him she was going to Rock Bass. He had hitched her up to the dog and they had continued together to the intersection. When they had got to the willow tre
e they had stopped and he had unhitched Rex. She had turned right down the dirt road, heading for Rock Bass on her bike, and he and his sister and his dog had turned left toward the highway.

  Rick has just returned home from searching all morning, and is in the middle of making and devouring sandwiches, when the same two cops arrive again on Saturday afternoon.

  This time they ask him, “Did you meet anyone on the road after you left her?” This is a new question and Rick realizes that they now suspect someone may have harmed her.

  “No, I didn’t, sorry.”

  They ask him to come for a ride with them this time and point out precisely where it was he left her. As he is on his way out, his mother comes to the door and says, “Wait Ricky, I’ll call Papa to go with you.”

  “It’s okay, Mum, I’ll be right back.”

  But she says, “Hang on a minute, honey, Papa’s just down the basement.”

  Rick smiles, a bit embarrassed in front of the cops. One of the officers—the one who has asked most of the questions—says, “Mrs. Froelich, we just want to borrow your boy for a few minutes to show us exactly where he let the little girl off at, it might help him to remember if he saw anyone else in the vicinity.”

  Karen pauses, looking at the policemen, then turns and calls again, “Hank.”

  But Rick leaves with the officers, saying, “I’ll be right back, Ma.”

  Karen watches them pull out of the driveway with her son in the back of the police car.

  But they don’t turn south on the Huron County road. They turn north, toward Exeter. The windshield wipers thunk back and forth and Rick says, “It’s back there.”

  “Yeah, we’re just going to make a circle, you said you were out running, is that right?”

  “Oh yeah,” says Rick, and leans back. He directs them in reverse along the path he took on Wednesday afternoon. The police radio crackles unintelligibly.