Tell Anna She's Safe (8 page)

I expected them to run. But they didn't seem to hear me. I expected them to run for sure when they saw the police officers. But they had obviously thought fast. They went right up to the officers, and Tim spoke. “Officer, my girlfriend is missing.”

I ran over to the police officers. I grabbed the nearest one by the arm. “Arrest these two.”

The officer sent a lazy look down at me from a great height. “And why would I do that?”

I opened my mouth to explain. At the same time, I turned my head in slow motion to look at Tim and Marnie. And saw two strangers. Two completely different faces. Younger faces. Smirking faces.

I was stunned. Disoriented.

“I'm so sorry,” I said.

“Hey, no problem,” said the male. He was grinning, as if it were all a joke. It was a joke: a cosmic joke, on me.

I walked away. Spooked. Confused. The face had been clear. Not a hazy image that might have been Marnie's. It had been her face. And then it hadn't. I was going crazy. Truly crazy.

As if it were a film soundtrack running without the visuals, I could hear the young man telling their story to the officer. He lived just down the street. His girlfriend and this woman were best friends. They had come over for the evening. His girlfriend, a black girl, had just walked out of the house a few minutes ago. They didn't know why. They couldn't find her.

I didn't hear the police officer's response. It was an odd story. It wasn't the whole story. Why had she left? Had they had a fight? Maybe she had wanted to leave. Maybe she didn't want to be found.

Maybe the police officer thought so too. A minute later the two young people were walking back the way they had come.

I called out before I could stop myself: “Sorry!”

A cheerful “No problem!” wafted back to me from under the street light. The two disappeared in one direction, and a beam of light appeared from another. The beam of light became Sergeant Quinn and his flashlight.

There was no conversation between us. I knew he had found nothing. Maybe some poplars. Maybe not. I was afraid to ask.

We peered one more time into the windows of the building. Our beam shone back at us.

“Someone's got in there,” said Sergeant Quinn suddenly.

“They have?” I jerked around so fast, I tripped. He reached out to steady me.

“Careful!” he admonished again.

The beam was not ours reflected in the window. The light emanated, hazily, from within, through the layer of plastic and glass.

I followed Sergeant Quinn at a run. He shone the flashlight behind for me. I sensed his hands ready to pick me up. My clumsiness embarrassed me.

The steel door at the back was now ajar. We stepped inside.

“We're Vanier,” said one of the cops, naming a rough Ottawa suburb. “We have a key.”

Quinn's laugh filled the vast black space. He shone his flashlight around.

The interior was a skeleton of wooden beams and joists and temporary walkways separating the “floors” over our heads. Everywhere were bales of fibreglass and garbage bags filled with debris. Or maybe, one of them, something else.

“Stay right behind me,” ordered Quinn. It was another order I was happy to obey.

We walked all around the ground floor. We were thorough. Quinn's flashlight exposed every corner. I kicked and prodded every bale and bag. I called out Lucy's name. Self-conscious but not caring if I was embarrassing myself. I was in a state of tension I had never experienced before.

Sergeant Quinn shone his flashlight above us. A wooden ladder was nailed to a beam. I was going up into that flimsy skeletal framework. What if I fell? But I didn't hesitate. Sergeant Quinn was already halfway up the ladder. I wasn't going to be left behind. I climbed without allowing myself to think. The dark somehow made it easier.

The Vanier officers stayed below. Then Quinn and I were alone in the building. Quinn didn't reach down from the top of the ladder to give me a hand up. Professional protocol would not allow that. But I was aware that he was aware of my every move. He would have grabbed me if I'd fallen. It helped to know that.

The second “floor” was a narrow walkway with great gaps and open places where a woman, clumsy in her terror, could fall through. There were fewer bags and bales to prod. We searched for the ladder to the next floor.

I kept my eyes fixed on Quinn's leather-jacketed back, not on the gaping blackness beneath us. I walked close enough to grab hold if I needed to. Close enough to step on his heels.

“At least I know you're there,” he joked in a grim voice after my third apology.

It was a slow, methodical, eerie search. I kept calling Lucy's name. My voice echoed around the black hollow shell. Every moment I expected the flashlight to expose her crumpled body in a corner, to hear a moan, or to feel the thunk of my foot on soft flesh inside a bag or bale.

And all the time I couldn't stop the irrational thought that this wasn't the right building. There was no right building.

In all, we climbed four ladders. We made our way around four narrow walkways.

We came, finally, to a metal door exiting to the flat roof.

Quinn walked to the edge and looked over the side. I stayed rooted in the centre, absorbing the solid ground into the soles of my feet. I took in long breaths of cool night air. I made them slow. Deep. It wasn't over yet. I had to go back in. Back down.

There was no way anyone else had got in here to hide a body. No one said it. No one had to. Quinn held the door open for me, and I braced myself to go back into the black cavern.

At each floor, we had to creep along the narrow walkways in search of the next ladder. Again I walked barely two steps behind Quinn. And kept my hand outstretched, ready to grab him if I tripped.

At each ladder Quinn turned to me. “Come down right after me.” It was a needless request. My feet landed where his hands had just been—and sometimes on them.

At the bottom of each ladder, Quinn shone the light on the steps for the rest of my descent. His arms were outstretched. His hands all but touched me. He didn't drop them until he made sure I had safely reached the bottom.

There was no way to shut the steel door; there was no handle. There was only a keyhole, and Vanier had the “key.” And Vanier was gone. We left the door slightly open.

We got in the car. We didn't speak. We drove back down to the main street. We turned right, and drove under the Airport Parkway overpass. And past another set of uninhabitable buildings.

“Aren't those abandoned buildings?” I was sounding like a broken record.

Again Sergeant Quinn pulled a
U
-turn in the middle of the road. A patient pulling of the steering wheel into the short incline of a driveway: to stare at the ruined barns in front of us.

They were charred black from a fire. The roofs were caved in. It didn't look recent.

“Those are burnt-out buildings,” said Quinn. “And we're not going in there at night.” His voice was firm, his decision final.

He backed the car out of the driveway. We headed east and turned onto the on-ramp for the Airport Parkway, back downtown.

“In these economic times,” said Sergeant Quinn, for what seemed like the dozenth time.

“I know. There are a lot of abandoned buildings. I know it's a long shot. But I had to—”

“Yes, I know.”

We stopped talking. The Parkway merged with Bronson Avenue and we continued north. Then we were turning onto Colonel By Drive. Beside us, the Rideau Canal was a long, dark presence. A long exposed tunnel, with a foot of water in the bottom. The water level was always lowered before winter, to transform the canal into the world's longest skating rink. The real sign of spring in Ottawa was the sky-reflecting water lapping at the top of the canal walls and rowing shells gliding effortlessly up and down its length.

I finally worked up the nerve to ask. “Could you at least follow Marnie?”

“Tomorrow morning you call Sergeant Roach and tell him what we did tonight and let him decide.”

“Will you still be on duty when he comes in?”

“I hope to be home in bed. I've been on shift since one. I'm supposed to be on half time. I was supposed to leave at seven o'clock tonight. I'm still here.” His voice was sharp in its weariness.

I sat in a terrible silence. It lasted the length of the long fast ride beside the canal. Through the red lights we ran at the deserted intersections. Down the ramp into the underground parking off a side street from Elgin. Into the empty parking space we'd backed out of almost two hours before.

Sergeant Quinn killed the engine. He didn't move.

“I didn't mean that to sound as harsh as it did,” he said, as if the five- or six-kilometre silence since his last words had been seconds.

He turned to look at me. Thoughtful. Appraising. There were dark shadows under his eyes I hadn't noticed before. Fatigue emanated from him. I had the sudden feeling it wasn't just from the long day, but from whatever had put him onto half time. Something I hadn't noticed on first meeting him. Cop burn-out? I dismissed the thought. I had just dragged him out in the middle of the night on a wild goose chase after his shift was supposed to be over. “It's okay.”

“It's not okay,” he said, “when women go missing.” There was anger in his voice.

He paused. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “sometimes they want to go missing. Sometimes they don't want to be found.”

I nodded. “That occurred to me. I know. Like the girl in the parking lot.”

He stared at me. “What girl in what parking lot?”

“I don't mean parking lot. I mean that first street we were on, outside that apartment building. And she wasn't there.”

“Ellen. You need to go home and get some sleep. You're not making any sense.”

“Sorry.” I leaned my head back on the headrest. I was suddenly overwhelmingly weary. I turned my head without raising it from the headrest. “I forgot to tell you. It was when you were in the grove. This guy came up the street with a woman, and I—oh, it's stupid, but I could have sworn the woman was Marnie. Her face was so clear.” I sat up straight. “I know it's nuts, but I saw it—her face. Clearly. The street light was shining on it. And then—to freak me out even more—the guy told the cop his girlfriend was missing. So I was sure it was them. I ran over to the cop and told him to arrest them.” I let out a shaky laugh. “And then I looked at them again, and it wasn't them. They were completely different people.” My voice was breaking.

Sergeant Quinn was staring at me. There was a strange look on his face. “And what's that got to do with her not wanting to be found?” he asked, finally.

“Oh, they said she'd just walked out of the house, and they couldn't find her. I thought it was an odd story, that there was lots they weren't saying. That maybe she'd left on purpose.”

“Indeed,” said Quinn quietly.

I turned to face him. “I know what you're thinking. But I don't think Lucy walked away of her own volition.”

“But one of your dream messages was that she was safe.”

I nodded. “I know. I thought maybe that was what it meant too, at first. But then I had the second dream….”

“We follow long shots all the time.” Even crazy ones, I thought he wanted to add.

Before I could respond, Quinn flipped the locks on the doors from his side and got out.

We took the elevator back upstairs, back to the door on the second floor where he had met me.

He shook my hand, and then he put a card in it. “I'm back on duty tomorrow at one,” he said. “I'm on 'til seven. I hope. I'm not carrying a pager these days. I'm on desk duty. But I'm usually at the end of that phone.” He pointed to the card in my hand.

He paused again. Then he reached out a hand for his card, and took a pen out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it.

He held out the card again. He didn't let go when I took it.

“Sergeants Roach and Lundy are good men,” he said. “And good cops. Very good cops. If anyone can solve this case, they can. They will. But they don't give much credence to psychics. We get a lot of them, offering to help. Most of them are….”

“Kooks,” I supplied.

“I don't think you're a kook,” he said. “All I'm saying is: if you don't get anywhere, don't be surprised. Or frustrated. And if you need someone who'll listen, or help, call me. Anytime. And if you have another experience, I insist you call me—at work or home. Even if it's the middle of the night. I live alone. You won't be disturbing anyone but me.”

The warm smile he gave me made me suddenly want to tell him everything. Instead I thanked him and pocketed the card.

In the car I took the card out of my pocket and stared at it for a long time. On the back was another number: his home number. I committed it to memory.

I couldn't get warm, even with all the blankets on. It was five in the morning. The alarm was set for eight. I was too exhausted and too cold to sleep.