Crimes Against My Brother (51 page)

That is, like many mothers and fathers, there were years of lost time and wasted moments that plagued her. Was this because she was infinitely bad? No—she was at moments in her life infinitely good. She simply needed to concentrate on winning Liam back.

She asked DD what Liam might like.

“I don’t know—maybe a bicycle?” DD said. Annette could tell DD was bored with her now—and had once told her she had better stop drinking. But Annette did not seem to be able to.

I will buy him a new bike, she thought. Yes—he would like that!

She pawned her diamond—the one she and DD had picked out. Harold told her he didn’t want to take it. But she begged him to.

Then she picked out the bike she thought Liam would like, and people soon realized she herself had never ridden one. She was seen
walking it along the street toward the house, as proud as any child, with a red bow on it. She was even singing.

“But you can’t afford it, Mom,” Liam said.

“Ha—what do you mean, can’t afford? And I don’t want you down working for Harold Dew anymore. That won’t happen with my son.” And she kissed him. After she kissed him, she said, “See!”—as if she was trying to make up for something now gone away. Years that had drifted out into the street and had disappeared.

“You and I will live together. We will buy a smaller place—and you know what? Well, anyway—wait and see. Now …” She tried to think. “It is your father’s birthday—I want you to write him a letter.”

“You really want me to?”

“It is not hard—once you forgive him” she said. That is, she was trying to forgive Ian because she had to forgive herself. She tried not to think of the money they might have had, or the store she had tried to destroy.

“I promise I will never see Wally Bickle again,” she said. “And you are not to roam around the town anymore,” she told him. “I will be the mother I was supposed to be!”

She sat upstairs, refusing to allow Liam to go out at night. “You have to stay away from Harold,” she pleaded. “And I will change—I promise.”

But Liam still tried to get back to Harold to work his shift. One evening, knowing she was in the hallway, he opened the bedroom window and got out on the drain far above the ground. From there he tried to jump to the maple tree nine feet away. And he fell, knocking himself out cold, his wrist broken. Annette was terrified he had died.

But he simply sat up in the driveway with a smile. “Ouch,” he said.

He got a cast, and Harold wrote on it: “Big Harold Dew—like a father to you.”

Liam came home that day hoping his mother would sign it too, but like the child she always was, her old self had come back. She had gone to Halifax for a facelift.

I love you
, she wrote.
Please don’t be angry, Liam. I want to look pretty again, so just you wait and see!

PART NINE

T
HE CASE OF
L
ONNIE
S
ULLIVAN HAD FIRST BEEN TERMED
an accident, then “undetermined,” and finally it had been declared a homicide.

In the weeks after Easter in 1998, Markus Paul and John Delano compiled lists of names of those who may have had something to do with the case, and sent them to me, a social psychologist and profiler who had worked on these things before, both in Boston and here on the river. I had never thought that these kids, who were in a photo I had of them from grade two, would now become my focus.

The police officers as well were known to me.

John Delano was a boy I had taught in summer school, years and years gone by, when I was still working on my degree. The thing I most remembered about him was his forceful personality—and yet this forcefulness is what it would take to see the case through. Markus Paul was a young tough First Nations constable, and in his own way as clever as John. They sent me names and asked for my opinion.

So after three weeks, I came up with three names out of the twenty or so on the list. And of those three—and I believed the guilty person was one of them—one name stuck out. I said nothing was written in stone, but I was almost certain it must be one of these men. I met John Delano and Markus Paul in Markus Paul’s office on a day of wind and rain, and placed these names down:

Harold Dew.

Ian Preston.

Evan Young.

We talked it over for more than an hour.

Harold Dew?

Yes, it may have been, but we did not think so—for of them all, Harold had the best relationship with Lonnie and was a relative in the traditional sense; he was the one that was treated the most fairly, we felt. That is, we missed what was most obvious—that crimes are not always overt or recognized.

Ian Preston?

We thought it might be Ian because of something Lonnie had on his wife—some secret. Some said it was a pregnancy test. But nothing like that was found and no one could be sure what Lonnie had on her.

Then there was Evan Young, the man who had left the church to visit Sullivan that night in order to get some kind of dispensation for what he owed.

“That would be about the right time,” Markus said.

So we concentrated on Evan Young. For Evan had changed from being a champion of skeptics, went to church, fasted, took the Eucharist. Neither Harold nor Ian had changed in this radical way. That is, neither had made such a substantive change in their very persons. Only Evan had done so.

John Delano and Markus Paul began to collaborate fully in June of 1998. They already had solved many cases, but this one, which they worked on only in their spare time, puzzled them.

“He may have gone in to ask for some kind of leniency—and Sullivan wouldn’t give it to him,” John said finally.

“That would be enough to enrage anyone,” Markus noted. “So he finally snapped, after losing his wife and boy. After having his compensation taken from him, after being almost killed himself, only to be back where he started when he was a child.”

“But he could have told Sullivan that he would earn what he needed to pay him back—or more for that matter, and in half the time,” I ventured.

“Sullivan would have still refused—for he had Evan at his beck and call. And he loved that idea,” John said.

The photos were obscure and we could not be certain if there had been one or two sets of footprints because of the snowfall that had started later that night and turned into a blizzard. But worse was how little evidence had been collected at the scene, for it was presumed to be an accident.

“If Evan had got the money from Joyce Fitzroy—would his life have been different?” Delano asked.

“I am sure of it,” Markus said, “but in what way, I do not know.”

“If he had got the money—Molly and he—well, what would have happened?”

“Who did get the money?” Markus asked.

“Ian Preston,” I said.

Wally Bickle had suddenly been given a good deal of authority at about this same time. It was a promotion that he did not expect and was not prepared for. He was by June no longer a junior manager but on-site manager of the mill itself. And his was therefore the main management signature on the closing of the Kraft mill and the firing of Mr. Ticks, his onetime boss.

He had been called to the main office on a bright cold day in late May. He walked in certain he was being fired. Then suddenly someone handed him a telephone, and from the main office in Finland, he was told that he would oversee the function of the entire mill for the best part of the next six months.

There were two main reasons for this.

By June of 1998 the company had almost filled their contractual obligation. All the wood was cut, much of it yarded and ready to be transported to the great lots near the mill ground. But suddenly there was talk that the mill would close.

Helinkiscor’s obligation, firmly stated in the last bailout, had been fulfilled. That is, they had paid the power rates, and paid the men, and
brought in the wood from the woodlots in three counties. But staying to process the wood at this mill would cost them too much money. And there was no stipulation that they must process the wood here. Their contract said the wood belonged to the company, but nothing in the contract ever said they had to process the wood at the New Brunswick mill.

No, they did not want to betray the fine people of New Brunswick. The company too was part of the family. They did not want to seem ruthless. But if being ruthless was in their best interest, then they would be.

Since there was no actual stipulation that they must process the tons of wood cut, either in the woodlots or onsite, they were in a fundamentally untouchable position. Now, anyone in an untouchable position has a moral dilemma. A company in an untouchable position can easily sidestep ethics. This was the catch that the government itself had allowed by its own negotiator’s incompetence.

“Oh,” that negotiator kept saying as he lapsed into subservience, “yes, that can be done—of course. Well, let me say this, we treat our companies well here—always have!”

Helinkiscor knew by 1997 that they could cut their costs dramatically if they processed this wood at their other Canadian mill in Quebec, on the far side of Bay Chaleur. It was just a hundred miles away, and they had a ready-made road—plowed out of the wilderness by New Brunswick men cutting the New Brunswick wood for them over the last five years.

But in order to facilitate their next move, the company needed a Canadian in place to take over Ticks’s job. And Ticks, a man from Maine who wore his hair like men did in the fifties, and his tweed suit jacket and heavy boots, was simply lied to and replaced. Then the company started full-scale layoffs of men both in the yards and in the mill.

“Coming into fall we will feel the pinch,” they told Wally, not only as if it was natural but as if it was the workers’ fault. They told him he was their last hope. He was the one they had chosen to get them out of a financial mess. If he couldn’t, in October he was to oversee the closure of the mill, and destroy all the machines the province had bought. That
is, get the very men they had hired to work the mill to rip out and destroy it, so no other company from Europe or North America could ever take over and be in competition with them, Helinkiscor.

They told him they didn’t want to do this.

“Yes, sir. I know—I see—it’s a large responsibility. I will try my very best!” Wally looked at them with stupefaction and a childlike hope for approval, and nodded around the room.

The government could easily have stopped this by moving in, confiscating the wood and demanding repayment of the bailouts. By the time Wally got his promotion they knew what was going to happen. But, you see, “principle” was involved. They had given their word, and in the way of unworldly people they believed others would take note of this, even as their land was being plundered and raped, their people ridiculed and falsely accused of poor workmanship (for this is what Helinkiscor was telling stakeholders, that the New Brunswick worker was incompetent), and laid off.

Sometime after her facelift, hearing of Wally’s promotion, which appeared in the second section of the provincial paper, Annette dropped by his place with a bottle of champagne.

No matter how much she had told herself she would not speak to him again, she could not help herself. This became her last desperate gambit. Just as Sara had once walked to the store in the rain to see Ian, now Annette came in the rain to see Wally.

But she did not look at all like Sara.

“We finally got rid of him,” she said as she knocked quickly and opened the door. She was speaking of Mr. Ticks.

Wally stood up in a flash, looked at her, mortified that she had come to his house.

In fact, Wally’s mom was there. And Mrs. Bickle was shocked to see this woman, much older than her boy and divorced. His mom could
feel the tension and knew in a second what was what between Wally and the woman.

Wally’s mother, Verna, was a stern, big-bosomed Baptist woman from Bicklesfield. Everyone knew Verna and her raspberry pies. Everyone knew how she could make jokes about men, and laugh so loud she shook the cutlery at the church suppers. Everyone up and down Bicklesfield knew her boy had a big promotion, a white hat at the mill. Everyone believed in Bicklesfield what people wanted to believe here: that he had been promoted because he alone could save the mill.