The Night Bell (4 page)

“Oh, no no no,” he said, suddenly laughing. He was going to try being affable. “It was just some heated words. I understand why people are frustrated, Detective. A development like Tournament Acres, you can’t predict all the challenges in advance.”

“What did you tell Sergeant Macdonald? The same thing?” The man nodded. “Did he buy it?”

“Buy it?”

“Where did he go when he was done with you?”

“He, you know, he went to talk to her.”

“Honey Eisen. She said he was coming to see you.”

“Oh no, he’s already been and gone.” There was a knock at the door. “What now?” Givens muttered, but Hazel got up to answer it. It was a woman in an OPS uniform, rail thin with sprigs of red hair sticking out from under her cap. The veins on her arms seemed to be keeping her muscles lashed to her body.

“DC Torrance,” she said. “You must be the legendary Detective Inspector Micallef.”

“You pronounced it right, at least.”

“Have you gone over to see Eisen?”

“Yes. She’s in a panic.” Hazel brought her attention back to Givens. He shrank under her gaze.

“Getting the second course started is taking longer than we thought,” he said. “She wants us to move her.”

“I don’t really care about that. I only want to know two things: what is this bone Mrs. Eisen is talking about, and where is my sergeant?”

“I gave him the bone,” Givens said, pushing the whole mess away with his palms. “You people have what you need. But I just wanna say …” His eyes flicked back and forth between the two women.

“What?”

“Honey Eisen signed a
contract
.” He fixed her with a conspiratorial look. “You know what people are like. One person panics, then there’s the stampede. I’ve seen this before, people threatening lawsuits, people making stuff up, anything to get out of an investment if someone starts whispering things to them. But we’re going to do everything we said we’re going to do here. This is going to be a very desirable address.” He stopped to catch his breath and read her face. He decided not to say anything else.

Hazel said, “We may want to talk to you again.” She nodded at DC Torrance to show she could leave first.

“Oh sure! Come on back anytime!” His voice was moist with false bonhomie.

It was funny what people told you by not telling you anything. It took a chessmaster’s intelligence to lie, and most people had already revealed themselves before a word was out of their mouths. You didn’t look at faces, you looked at
eyes, mouths, teeth, ears. Anything that might give you a clue to what a person was really feeling. You had to use this knowledge against people. To keep them off balance or on their toes, to see what they’d do. Givens’s eyelids had not stopped ticcing the whole time Hazel was in his office. Through his face, he’d told her something was up. He’d pooched his lips out from time to time in a gesture that was supposed to look like he was thinking. But he was hiding something.

Torrance was going to do a slow crawl around the development to see if anything seemed out of order. Hazel had barely had a chance to take a read of her Mayfair partner, but the woman looked like she could bend metal. She had a buzzy alertness that came from too many power smoothies.

Hazel drove back to Eisen’s house and had to blink a couple of times: Macdonald’s cruiser was gone. What the hell? “Torrance,” she said over her radio.

“Inspector?”

“You haven’t seen another OPS cruiser have you?”

“Hold on … yeah! There’s one coming toward me right now.”

“Flag ’im down, would you?”

“Whoops! He blew right past me.”

Hazel thanked her and tried Macdonald. He answered right away.

“Sean?”

“Skip?”

“I’m not your skip. Where were you?”

“When?”

“Just now. MacTier said you vanished off the radar.”

Macdonald made a dismissive sound. “He asks me to come down here over my lunch and then starts panicking when I don’t check in with him. He’s a mother hen.”

“Where were you, though?”

“I went for lunch.”

“Without your cruiser?”

“Ah,” Macdonald said, clearly disappointed. “Well, I know someone down here. I just went over for lunch.”

“What about your radio? MacTier said he tried to raise you for an hour.”

“Listen, Hazel. It’s nothing.”

She saw him now, half a kilometre in front of her on the 41. “You sound weird to me, Sean. Where are you now?”

“Heading north on the 41,” he said. “I’m taking this thing back to Greene. I think it’s from a cow or something. It’s old and smooth.”

“I saw the old lady. She told me she thought she was getting it back. But then she also said she just wanted to turn it over to the police.”

“She spent a long time tryna change the subject with me, like I wasn’t down there to talk to her about whacking the guy in the office.”

“Givens.”

“Him. He smells good and fishy to me, that guy.”

“Me too. I’ll see you back in town.”

He was still on the highway, heading exactly where he said he was. “OK, Hazel.”

“What were you doing over lunch, Sean?”

“Jesus,” he said, laughing. “You’re a bloodhound! I’m selling guns to retirees.”

“Come on.”

“I know a girl. Remember Alison Freemey?” Hazel didn’t. “From the academy? Anyway. She lives up here. I come and say hello from time to time.”

“How does Mrs. Macdonald feel about that?”

“Mrs. Macdonald wouldn’t notice if I came home in a dress. Am I done being interrogated? What d’you think I was doing?”

“I understand now. None of my business, you’re right. See you at HQ.”

At thirty-eight, Charles S. Willan was the youngest deputy commissioner of the Ontario Police Services ever appointed. He was some kind of a whiz kid, a visionary who knew how to keep departments lean and clean. His pet project since he’d been installed was amalgamating OPS Central. He was going to combine a number of smaller detachments into one; make the scattered and distant outposts of OPS North–Central into a gathered force, and build it an HQ in the middle of a new shopping mall. It was going to save the OPS forty million a year. He was unflappable, friendly, and ruthless. Hazel had wondered at times if he was human.

He stood in the middle of the pen in a yellow hard hat and a silvery suit.

“Groundbreaking is less than two weeks away!” he enthused. “The beginning of a new era in policing in Westmuir County. With all of
you
” – his index finger did a tour of the room – “at the very centre.”

There were two loud clappers and a smattering besides. Ray Greene and Gerry Costamides had been the clappers. “One because he has to,” Hazel muttered to Roland Forbes, “the other because she doesn’t have an unkind bone in her body.”

Willan held his hands up to quiet the already quiet room. This was the guy who had come in and replaced the previous commissioner, the heartless lizard Ian Mason. Now they looked back on Mason’s rule as halcyon days. When amalgamation took effect, everything was going to change, and not for the better. This was the era of organizational change and streamlined services, when efficiencies would be found and value added and everyone was a partner in change, even if they were about to lose their job. Chip Willan was only the most local instance of this ideology in human form – there was an epidemic of them. Everyone knew someone who was going to be out of a job. And those whose livelihoods depended on the survival of Main Street had plenty of their own worries. Gateway Plaza would catch fish much higher upstream. Who would come downtown to shop?

It was foolhardy, many thought. It would only increase the difficulties of policing such a large area.

Willan had heard it all too. “I know some of you aren’t onside yet. I know some of you are worried what will happen when we open in Gateway Plaza. I’m not going to tell you that the fact that
your
jobs are safe should make you feel good. No. Change is hard, people. But it comes whether we want it or not. The old ways drop away. Next summer, when we open the North–Central Ontario Police Service Headquarters right here, in your town, all of your friends will have landed on their feet. Because that is what you people do, you people of the land, who wear so proudly the badge.” He took a sip of water. “What I am trying to say, trying to impart to you, is that this is the very beginning of a great adventure. You will be the doorway to the entire region, coming or going, and every surge of growth that comes this way will hit you first. You will have the best services in the entire region. You will have the Internet in your streets. You’re gonna be able to get signal
anywhere
.”

“What about our colleagues who won’t be able to afford a phone?” Dietrich Fraser asked. “What about them?”

“The Internet will come to their towns, too.”

“No, Superintendent Willan. What is going to happen to
them
? How is the OPS going to make it right for their families?”

Willan’s face morphed into a mask of concern. “There are going to be hardships. But everyone will have our support. No one will be abandoned.”

“We have your word on that? Can I bring that to the union?”

“You can bring it home and serve it to your children, Sergeant Fraser.” Willan addressed the room: “It is natural to go forward with trepidation. Things need to be proven to you. You are police; you want to see the evidence. I am here today to tell you that you will. You have my word.”

He stepped forward purposefully with his hand out toward Gerry Costamides, who took it without hesitation, and then everyone had to shake the man’s hand. Gerry waited until Willan was deep in the crowd before coming over to talk to Hazel.

“I think I once saw him sucking the air from a baby’s mouth,” Hazel said.

Costamides made a pugilistic face and cocked her fist at Hazel. Both women smiled. “He wants to do good things for our town, Skip.”

“Don’t call me Skip anymore, Gerry.”

“But you like him, right? Hazel?”

“Sure I like him. But I don’t trust him. He’ll say anything.”

“Make sure he doesn’t hear you say
that
, Sk … Inspector.”

Ray appeared to be skulking away, so Hazel followed him into his office. “Hello?”

“Oh, it’s you. Thanks for the enthusiasm during Willan’s speech.”

“At least I didn’t vomit. Did Macdonald bring in his find yesterday? He said he brought a bone in.”

“It’s already sent down to Mayfair. Deacon’s looking at it. It’s from a horse or a deer or a something.”

“Did he tell you what he’d been doing the whole time half the local constabulary was looking for him?”

“He said he was walking the perimeter.”

“Oh yeah. He was walking the perimeter.”

Ray waited for her to explain her skeptical tone, but the door opened again. “In hiding?” said Chip Willan.

“Yes,” said Hazel. “From you. Because you give off a light too intense for mortals.”

“It’s my natural bronze colour. I heard there was some unpleasantness at Tournament Acres. Someone found a bone in her garden?”

“It’s gone down to Jack Deacon,” Ray said.

“You see any heavy machinery while you were out there?” Willan asked.

Hazel knitted her brows at him. “What? You mean tanks?”

He withstood her jibes good-naturedly. Despite their best efforts, they had grudgingly begun to work together. “I mean construction.”

“As far as I could tell, it was a giant, muddy field surrounded by unfinished houses.”

“There’s a limited number of earth-movers in the county. You’d be surprised.” They gave him blank faces to look at. “Can I count on the two of you, who are well respected by the men and women who work here, to help foster a positive attitude toward Gateway Plaza? Even if they disagree in their hearts, surely you can see how important it is that the civic leaders of Port Dundas demonstrate
faith
in this important process, and
model acceptance
of it. For everyone.”

“Well, it’s coming whether they like it or not,” said Hazel. “So I suppose we’ll have to do our best.”

“That is my baseline for you, Hazel. I expect no less. Commander Greene? Please tell your wife that I enjoyed her vegan meatballs very much. Keep ’em coming.”

Hazel decided to go home for lunch. The autumn made her feel hopeless as well as nostalgic, but it was a feeling more like an ache than a wound. The leaves were already red and yellow; the yellow leaves were pocked with vegetal liver spots and about to fall. Time was in layers on the forest floor; it went down and down.

She drove over the Kilmartin Bridge out of Port Dundas and slowed to take a look at the grading machines that were preparing the roads at the base of the Lion’s Paw. She hadn’t participated in the town meetings or the protests that had greeted the announcement of the OPS’s plan to
centralize services at Port Dundas. The idea of Gateway Plaza bothered her so much that she had completely avoided all the public meetings on it to save her sanity. She knew a done deal when she saw one. Where Highway 117 became a country road, there would soon be a mammoth new retail and service development, featuring a community centre with a two-pad skating rink, a Walmart, a Sobey’s, a Canadian Tire, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and the brand new North–Central OPS Headquarters, into which all the detachments north of Mayfair would be folded.

The groundbreaking was less than two weeks away, on the day before Hallowe’en, fittingly. Above the site was the bluff of Canadian Shield that marked the end of the river valley beyond. The smooth, treed rock of south-central Ontario protruded everywhere in the county, like stone fingers covered in moss, creating features of tremendous beauty such as Kilmartin Bluff Park.

Hazel was no longer surprised by the way things changed. Here the highways and not the towns would become the focus of much of the region’s commercial and service activity.

Change was everywhere, even at home. Her mother had been diagnosed with myeloma more than a year ago, and Dr. Pass had explained to them both that it was a slow-moving illness. She could live five, ten more years with it and not feel much more diminished than any person of her age. “Excellent,” Emily had said. “Maybe I’ll start a blog now.”