The Way the Crow Flies

“If you remember seeing anyone or anything at all, you just sing out, young fella,” says the cop in the passenger seat.

  When they reach Highway 4—the stretch that doglegs west just north of Lucan—Rick says, “I saw a car.”

  The officer looks at him in the rearview mirror.

  Rick says, “Going west, yeah, like we are now. He passed me, right around here.”

  The cruiser slows, pulls over and stops. The cop looks at Rick in the mirror and asks, “What kind of car?”

  “Ford Galaxy.”

  “You could tell, eh?”

  “Oh yeah, went right past me, eh, brand-new.”

  “You like cars?”

  “I love cars.”

  The cop chuckles. “Me too. What colour was this Chevy?”

  “It was a Ford,” Rick corrects him politely. “Galaxy, brand-new. Blue.”

  “Brand-new, eh?”

  “Yeah, ’63, I could tell ’cause it has the new fastback.”

  “What else could you tell?”

  “Well I could see where it had a dent in the rear bumper.”

  “Oh yeah?” The officer digs his notebook from his chest pocket and starts writing it all down. The one behind the wheel seems not to be taking any notice. The back of his head, his wide neck, impassive.

  Rick leans forward between the two blue hats and searches his memory for any stray detail that might help. “It had a bumper sticker.”

  “What kind of sticker?”

  “Yellow. You know, like from Storybook Gardens.”

  The policeman smiles slightly and nods, slowly repeating Rick’s words as he writes: “Story … book … Gardens.”

  Rick feels suddenly a bit guilty. “I don’t think it’s going to help you much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, whoever it was was wearing an air force hat, so….”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t see who ’cause of the sun, but he’s prob’ly not the guy you’re looking for.”

  “Who are we looking for, Rick?”

  “Well”—Rick hesitates—“whoever, you know. Took her.”

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  The cop smiles in the mirror, “Well we’re in the same boat then, ’cause neither do we.” He returns his eyes to his notebook. “Let me get this straight,” he says, pen poised. “You couldn’t see his face, but you saw his hat.”

  “Like the outline of his hat,” says Rick.

  “Right.” Then to his partner, “Rudy, how do you spell ‘silhouette’?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  Rick laughs with them and says he can’t spell it either. The cop clicks his tongue thoughtfully, then says, “I’m just trying to calculate…. How long would you say it takes to jog from here back to the intersection where you left her?”

  “Oh, uh. I got home around five-thirty, quarter to six, so … and that’s about the same distance, so I guess an hour or so?”

  The cop raises his eyebrows companionably and writes it down, saying, “How can you be so sure when you got home?”

  “I had a game. Basketball.”

  “Who you play for?”

  “Huron County Braves.”

  “Good stuff.”

  No discernible signal passes between the officers, but the car pulls away from the shoulder once more and gathers speed. They travel in silence through the rain until the cop behind the wheel says, “You sure it was an air force hat? Could’ve been a cop.”

  “Naw,” says Rick.

  “How do you know?” asks his partner.

  “He waved.”

  “Thought you said you didn’t know him,” says the driver.

  “I couldn’t see him,” says Rick. “But I must’ve known him.”

  “I guess all the air force guys know all the air force brats, eh?” says his partner with a smile.

  “I’m not an air force brat.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

  “No, I know,” says Rick. “I just mean my dad’s not personnel, he’s a teacher at the school.”

  They drive on and the officer behind the wheel says, “Just because a man is in uniform doesn’t make him a saint.”

  “You can say that again,” says Rick.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothin’.” And the other cop winks at him in the mirror.

  When Rick gets home, he taps the roof of the cruiser as it backs out of the driveway and touches two fingers to his forehead, the way the air force men do. The cop on the passenger side does likewise.

  Upstairs, Colleen holds Elizabeth steady in the tub while Karen Froelich washes her. The door is closed to prevent the baby from crawling out and getting into everything. The other baby is down in the living room, sound asleep on Henry Froelich’s sleeping chest, serenaded by Joan Baez.

  Karen hears the front door and says to Colleen, “Everything’s fine, baby.” Elizabeth reaches for her mother, Karen catches her wrist and kisses the back of her hand. “See? Ricky’s back already.”

  Though television is permitted on Holy Saturday, Perry Mason is strictly verboten at all times, but Madeleine is not deriving as much guilty pleasure as she should because things are out of joint. When Dad came in from helping with the search, her mother turned on the television herself, and told her to watch something. Now, Perry’s theme music comes up, sexy and swaggering, but her parents continue to confer, oblivious, at the kitchen table.

  Madeleine catches the tail end of her mother’s sentence. “… they’ll go to pieces.”

  “Who’s going to pieces?” pipes up Madeleine from the living room.

  “Never you mind, go back to your program.”

  Ordered to watch Perry Mason. Things are coming apart. She curls up on the couch with a cushion in her lap and resists an atavistic urge to suck her thumb.

  Perry, Paul, Della and a “B-girl” with fishnet stockings and brassy hair are in a bar. The B-girl flirts with Paul, batting her eyelashes, chin raised to emphasize her industrial-size chest—bosom. This is supposed to be Holy Saturday, doesn’t anyone care? Madeleine looks imploringly toward the kitchen, but her parents are huddled in the gathering darkness. Twenty-five minutes later, the B-girl winds up murdered and we are in court. “What in the name of time are you watching?”

  “But Dad, Maman said I could watch it.”

  “Maman said you could watch TV.”

  “It’s almost over.”

  “You mean to tell me you’ve digested most of this garbage already?”

  “We’re just about to find out who did it.”

  “Oh,” he says, sitting down. “Well, let’s see.”

  They watch, Madeleine curled in the crook of his arm. After two minutes, Jack says, “The gardener did it.” Twenty minutes later, Perry points to a bony-faced man on the stand who is clutching a crumpled hat. “The hose you used to water the grounds; the hose you used to strangle Miss Delaney; the hose you then disposed of at the Fairmont Country Club!”

  Madeleine gasps, “How did you know?!”

  “You can’t fool the old rooster. Now let’s go get some supper.”

  Rick has taken his sisters to see Kim at the movie theatre on the station. On their way home, he tells them to wait while he stops in at the search headquarters set up in Number 4 Hangar.

  He looks at the enlarged wall map of Huron County and sees that the search has been expanded to include the route of his Wednesday run. He wonders if the police are wasting their time—how likely is it that an air force man could have had anything to do with Claire’s disappearance? On the other hand, there’s over a thousand personnel on the station—Rick doesn’t know them all. No one does.

  It is turning out to be an excellent Holy Saturday. Madeleine piously reminds herself that it would be better if Maman were enjoying it with them, but she is down the street “keeping Mrs. McCarroll company.” It wouldn’t be very nice to say so out loud, but sometimes it’
s more fun to be on your own with your dad.

  After they paint the hard-boiled eggs for Easter Sunday morning, Madeleine and Mike drive into Exeter with their father to pick up Dixie Lee fried chicken. Aroma! Flavour! Tenderness!

  At the counter Jack leaves the kids to wait for the food. “I’ll be right back.” He drives down the main street, past the empty fairgrounds on the outskirts, to the old train station. It’s boarded up, weeds flourishing between the tracks. He drives around the back. The Ford Galaxy is still there.

  Too bad he can’t simply keep it as Simon suggested. The police will auction it off. If this were a big city like New York, the car would have been lifted by now, or stripped. But this is Exeter—not exactly the crime capital of Canada. As Jack pulls away again he thinks of the McCarroll child and revises that last thought.

  The day’s festivities are capped with Mike tying one end of a string around Madeleine’s loose tooth. He ties the other end to his doorknob, then slams the door. “Presto! That’s worth a dime at least,” he says, presenting her with the dangling, bloody molar.

  Mimi is waiting for Karen Froelich to arrive before leaving Sharon McCarroll. It will be dark soon. The casserole she brought remains untouched in the oven. She has not been able to persuade Sharon, but hopes Blair will eat something when he gets home from the day’s search. It’s not right that routine should have entered into this picture to make it at all recognizable—“home from the day’s search.” As if looking for the body of his child were his job.

  Steve Ridelle prescribed some pills and Elaine brought them when she came to do her shift with Sharon. Just three doses. Better she shouldn’t have too many on hand. Mimi saw the bottle by the bathroom sink—Valium.

  “Works wonders,” Elaine told her.

  Mimi has just turned the heat down on the casserole when there is a tap at the door. It’s a small stab in her heart to see how Sharon looks up with a moment’s hope, before the door opens and Karen Froelich appears.

  Mimi exchanges a word and a squeeze of the hand with Karen and leaves—she is still not someone Mimi would pick for a friend but, as Jack says, it takes all kinds. Outside, the clouds have begun to part, revealing a star or two, but the darkness is still too complete, too close. She walks up the street toward the lights of her own house. Blair McCarroll should be home by now. They can’t search in the dark.

  When she gets in, Jack rises from the couch. “I’m going over to the station. The police called off the search till Monday and Blair lost his cool.”

  Madeleine is in Mike’s room, at his desk by the window. He’s sitting on his bed tying a baseball into his new glove. He has allowed her to stick a decal onto his model Lancaster bomber and told her not to breathe in the airplane glue. She sniffs it surreptitiously, then replaces the cap and ponders the snarled snout of the Lanc. Dad would have sat right there, behind the tiny plastic window of the cockpit. She picks it up and, as she flies it past the window, sees her father heading for the car. “Dad’s going out,” she says.

  That means Maman is home. Madeleine remembers that she was supposed to have a bath. On her way down the hall, she pauses to hear something so unfamiliar that it takes her a moment to recognize the sound. Maman is crying.

  EASTER SUNDAY

  THIS MORNING there was no money under Madeleine’s pillow, just the tooth still, with its straggly root. She said nothing; it would be churlish to complain about the Tooth Fairy when the Easter Bunny has outdone himself. She and Mike have found all the chocolate eggs, Dad has won the hard-boiled egg battle and Madeleine has eaten the ears off her chocolate bunny, able to savour the dark richness for the first time since before the exercise group last September. This morning, chocolate has been redeemed along with all of us by the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus and the miracle of His resurrection.

  Mike has just decapitated his rooster when the phone rings. Mimi answers, and a second later Madeleine sees her mother sink into a kitchen chair, then glance over at her and Mike in the living room and make a gesture as though reaching to draw a curtain. Mike pauses, chocolate beak halfway to his mouth, but Madeleine plucks out a bunny eye and eats it, her warning systems jammed by sugar.

  “When?” their mother asks into the phone.

  Their father joins her. She looks up at him and he bends to put an arm around her, obscuring her from the children’s view. A moment later he strides jauntily into the room. “Upstairs now and get ready for Mass.”

  They obey. Madeleine wonders what is wrong. They were supposed to fast for an hour before Mass but Maman forgot. Madeleine licks melted chocolate from the palm of her hand and steels herself for the ordeal of getting into the scratchy strangulating dress of tulle with matching pillbox hat.

  Madeleine thinks she’s in trouble for something when Maman says to her after Mass, “Your father wants to talk to you.” On the way home from church, in the Rambler, Mike won’t look at her. He is quietly examining a stack of baseball cards. She watches the back of her father’s head for a sign, but he is silent and still. Maman’s white chapeau with the grey silk roses is likewise inscrutable.

  Mike nudges her. He is holding a card so new it still has bubblegum dust on it. Roger Maris at the bat, his signature scrawled across his Yankees uniform. Mike nods to her—it’s yours. She hesitates in disbelief, then takes the card. Mike has waited over a year to open that pack of bubble gum. It’s gold. It’s hers. Why?

  They pull into the driveway and the butterflies wake up in her stomach. Mike and Maman go inside but Dad waits and says, “Let’s you and I go for a little walk.”

  This can only be about one thing, Madeleine realizes as she gets slowly out of the car. They have found out about Mr. March. What she thought was so far behind her as to have been a dream has risen up whole and reeking. They have found Claire McCarroll and she has told them everything. Madeleine knows now that’s why Claire ran away. She was afraid, when Mr. March made her be the Easter Bunny, that he would put her back in the exercise group. And Madeleine knows that Claire never would have gotten into the exercise group in the first place if Madeleine hadn’t gotten out of it. It is all her fault. Her insides melt like chocolate, her thighs feel suddenly heavy. She looks up at her father and takes his hand with her small white gloved one and says, “Okay.”

  Everyone is being so quiet and gentle, it can only mean that they will send her away—for how can they continue to live with her now that they know what she has done? They will cast her out of the family. They walk. Up St. Lawrence Avenue to Columbia Drive.

  It’s a crisp day, but Madeleine’s dress of salmon tulle, her hat tied with a ribbon under her chin, all of it is a hot, choking mass of burrs. This is the outfit she will be wearing when the Children’s Aid comes to take her away. The sun is too bright, so much light she can barely squint to see, the buildings of the base like blinding snow across the county road. Her father puts on his sunglasses. “You want to walk over to the airfield?” he asks.

  When Snow White’s stepmother wanted to be rid of her, she sent her off with a woodsman who took her by the hand. He had an axe. “Bring me back her heart,” said the Queen. But when they reached the forest, the woodsman took pity on Snow White and abandoned her in the woods. He returned to the Queen with the heart of a deer. “Okay,” replies Madeleine.

  Maman said, Take Madeleine to the airfield. Then what? Put her on a plane. They cross the county road. To one side of the gates, the crows’ nest, still atop the wooden pole, bristles against the sun. It is sparser but intact after the winter, the rusted mouth of the siren protruding more rudely now. On the other side of the gate, the old Spitfire throws back the sun in sheets.

  Madeleine walks into the shade of its wing and says, “I’m tired.”

  “Well, we don’t have to go all the way to the airfield,” says her father.

  She is relieved. It wasn’t part of the plan after all, to send her away by plane. She sits on the grass with her back against the pedestal.

  “Madeleine,” says her father, ?
??I have to talk to you about Claire McCarroll.”

  She looks down. Drops fall from her eyes. She was right, they know. They know about the coat hooks and the exercises and all the bad things she has done. Too many ever to be forgiven. Her hands feel clammy, and she longs to inhale the bad smell off them before it reaches her father’s nostrils. “It’s my fault he picked her,” she says, barely audible.

  “What?” says Jack. “Who?” He squats down beside his daughter. She won’t look at him. She’s upset. Deep down she must know what he is going to tell her.

  “That’s how come I wrote the letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “The Human Sword. To save her.”

  He shakes his head slightly. She’s in a world of her own, an innocent world. And he is about to shatter it. He doesn’t know how to say what he must tell her. “Madeleine”—he speaks as gently as possible—“something happened to Claire McCarroll.”

  Madeleine nods and starts to cry. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Jack strokes her head and says, “It’s okay, sweetie.”

  Madeleine says something but Jack can’t make it out. It’s garbled through her sobs. “Listen now,” he says, wishing Mimi were here. Madeleine cries with her forehead against her crinolined knees, shaking with grief.

  “Madeleine,” he says.

  “I’m—sorry—Daddy—” hiccupping.

  Jack takes her face, shining with tears and mucus, between his hands. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about, old buddy….” He holds her chin and reaches inside his suit jacket for his hanky. He wipes her face.

  The pressure of Dad’s hand, the scouring of the hanky, is comforting. He holds it against her nose and she blows, feeling ragged with sorrow, but calmer now.

  “Listen, now,” he says. “Claire died.”

  Madeleine stops crying.

  He waits. She looks up at him, lips parted. Big brown eyes taking it in. He would give anything not to have to tell her, so soon, that the world can be such a terrible place.

  “Dad?” says Madeleine.

  “Yeah old buddy?” He has his answer ready. He knows he can’t protect her from it, the whole country will know with tomorrow’s news. But he can at least choose the words with which to tell her. Claire was taken away by a sick man. She was killed.