The Taken (41 page)

“I never meant –”

“Three years is a long time to live with the kind of secret you’ve been keeping, Claire. I guess you never imagined what it might cost to get it out of your system. He might die for your sins now, too.”

“They’re his sins as well.” She looked at Hazel for the first time. “Putting two and two together is impressive, Detective Inspector. But it won’t stand up in court. If you’ve ever read these books, you’ll know deduction isn’t the same as proof.”

“I don’t have to read books to know that, and you’re wrong,” said Hazel. “The glass you drank from yesterday when you came in? We took the prints off it and matched them to prints taken from the oars of the boat you and Brenda Cameron stole that night.” Hazel waited for a response, a denial, but instead, a serene look stole across Claire Eldwin’s face. “Tell me, Claire … how’d you convince her to take a boat ride with you?”

Eldwin exhaled deeply. “That girl would have done anything if she thought it meant she’d get something out of it.”

“She got more out of it than she was planning, didn’t she?”

“She came to me after Colin kicked her out. She told me that she was pregnant.”

“You offered to help her confront him again.”

Claire Eldwin pulled her coffee across the table toward herself. “There were so many girls. He had that place downtown for them, but he never really tried to hide them from me. They found me somehow. Complained about the way he treated them. Sometimes I thought he wanted me to know.”

“How come you never left him?”

“Why does anyone put up with being treated badly? Because you think you deserve it. And because, despite yourself, you’re still in love. And then this one shows up at the house.” Her eyes were faraway, opening her door that August night three years earlier. “She’s flying on something, her face all red and pale from crying. She apologizes for disturbing me, but there’s something I should know.” A tear splashed in her coffee. She looked up, her eyes distant. “She’s pregnant! All this time, he’d been sharing something with these foolish women that at least he didn’t deny me. But he’d never wanted kids. Always said he was too selfish to be a father, and I certainly believed him. Brenda said she wanted me to hear it from her: that he was leaving me, that they were starting a family. ‘Why aren’t you happy, then?’ I ask her. ‘You got what you wanted.’ But she sits down … at this table, in fact – we had it in the old house – and puts her head in her hands. Then she tells me the ‘truth’ … that he’s rejected her. He doesn’t care that she’s pregnant. But he loves her, she’s sure of that. And she’s come to tell me in person, out of a sense of honour, she says. Her story keeps changing, like a crazy person’s. I feel pity for her. I pour her a brandy to calm her down. She drinks it like it’s apple juice and I refill her glass. She must have been drunk when she arrived.”

“She was full of sedatives.”

“Glossy, staring eyes. I pour myself one. I tell her, we’re going to sort this out tonight. He’s got another place, one not even she knows about.”

“On the island.”

“She’d have believed anything I told her. She thought I wanted to
help
her.” She laughed hoarsely. “We drove down to the lakeshore and took a ferry over … I kept telling her everything was going to be fine.” Her eyes flashed up. “And everything was. I got Colin away from all that, we started over. I hid us better. I got us an unlisted number. None of them could find us. Find me. When he came home at night, it was just him and me. They didn’t exist.”

“Well, Brenda Cameron didn’t.”

“She was no longer a problem.”

“Not at least until she started haunting you.”

There was a glint of understanding in Claire Eldwin’s eye. “Well, then there was that.”

Hazel regarded the woman before them, a woman so sick with love that she’d considered anything she had to do to preserve it within bounds. Hazel had learned more about love this last week than she’d cared to, learned what it could do to those who are diseased with it. That it starts in longing and hope, but it can change, it can become something full of fear and anger, and she thought that Joanne Cameron and Claire Eldwin were linked in this. They had stripped the human patina off love, that social layer that makes people give of themselves, makes them put the loved one ahead of themselves. But under this human love was something more primitive; it stank of territory and possessions. It was something people would kill
for, if they felt it threatened. She recalled times in her life when the thought had crossed her mind to go down to Toronto and give a quick pistol-whipping to one of the deadbeats who were making Martha’s life a misery. What had held her back? Mere hope? Or simply the fact she knew it was wrong? Maybe people like Cameron and Eldwin were missing some kind of moral gene. Or did they have an extra one? Was their kind of love a higher love, that knew no bounds? She would never know.

Hazel gave Childress a faint nod, and the constable sprung forward and took her cuffs off her belt. Claire Eldwin heard the clink and stood. “She’s your collar,” said Hazel. “Still feel like it was a wasted night?”

“Mrs. Eldwin,” said Constable Childress, “you are under arrest for the murder of Brenda Cameron, do you understand? You have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. We will provide you with a toll-free telephone lawyer referral service, if you do not have your own lawyer. Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand? Would you like to speak to a lawyer?”

“I want to see my husband.”

“Do you understand the charges against you?” Childress repeated.

“I do.”

She turned Eldwin toward the kitchen door and began to walk her out of the house. Hazel refilled her coffee cup and followed. “Do you have a key to the house?” she asked.

“On the hook by the door.”

Hazel locked up and followed Childress and Eldwin to the car. She could swear Childress was walking taller now. She
folded herself into the driver’s seat and waited for Childress to belt Claire Eldwin in. “One more thing, Claire,” she said.

“What?”

“Brenda Cameron wasn’t pregnant. She lied.”

They turned back onto Highway 79 and headed for Mayfair, Claire Eldwin’s last stop before the city of Toronto.

The girl lay utterly still in the boat, her hands laced together in her lap. She had closed her eyes and her head felt like it had doubled in weight on Claire’s leg. Her jaw fell open. She’s so drunk. Her face was peaceful, her eyes shuddering under her lids. What was she dreaming of?

They were going to the island to confront him together, to find him and make him choose. She’d believed Claire; she was a creature of faith. But when the ferry put in, the girl was too drunk to walk and she’d ranged up the little streets looking for a couple of bikes to borrow, still pulling on a bottle of red wine. Coming down behind 6th Street and looking into backyards, they’d seen the boat and Claire knew what they would do. It had been a challenge getting the little vessel out of the gate without making too much noise, and when the girl dropped her end on the sidewalk and collapsed laughing, Claire was sure they’d be caught. But no lights went on and they made it to a concrete launch at the bottom of the residential streets
and slid the boat into the water. The girl lay on her back, cradling the bottle against her belly, and murmuring. “You’re good … you’re good to take care of me,” she said, and she raised the bottle to her lips and emptied it. “Crap,” she said. “Another dead soldier.” She put the bottle down as Claire navigated the boat into the dark channel that ran into the centre of the Islands.

The moon slid along the curve of the bottle as she angled into the thin waterway with small sailboats and motorboats moored along its edge. She rinsed the bottle out in the water. When it was half full, it bobbed on the surface like a buoy, but if she filled it to the rim, it began to sink. She watched the bottle begin to vanish into the black water, but then she plunged her hand in and pulled it out. She put it down on its side in the hull. The water gurgled out of it, running into the lowest parts of the boat and filling the little channel in the middle. She filled the bottle and emptied it out eight more times. There was a long, two-inch-wide puddle running down the middle of the boat’s hull, but nothing was going to wake the girl now.

She shifted her body and cradled the back of the girl’s head in her hands. As she lowered her to the floor of the boat, she turned her face so her body would follow onto its side and the girl adjusted and turned into a fetal position, as if she were in bed. The boat bobbed with the shifting weight of the two women. The oars hung in their locks, the paddles dragging in the water as they drifted slowly up the channel between Ward’s and Algonquin islands. Claire kneeled down and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and pulled it gently toward her. Slowly, receptive to the pressure, the girl turned on her belly, sighing. With one more nudge, her face was centred over the runnel that ran down the middle of the boat, and Claire could hear her blowing bubbles in the inch of water she’d emptied out into the bottom.

Leaning down, she could see her own face in the thin line of water, her long, sad face, full of knowledge. Because knowledge was the problem: if she had known nothing, if she had remained blissfully free of what he’d been careless enough to let her find out, she could have gone on. Welcomed him home in the evenings joyously ignorant, shared her meals with him, his bed, his stories of his work, those stories she knew also to be lies, but she would believe them just the same. It was all she wanted: to remain in the dark. But he could not even do that for her, the women he destroyed found their way to her, full of sorrow and anger and spite, and she could do nothing for them. But this one, this one she could help.

The sky above was clear but empty: all the stars that hung above the city were devoured by its light and the only light in the sky came from the moon. It was a half-moon now, a drowsing moon, and it was as if nothing knew they were here, no mind, no heart knew her heart or mind. She was alone. In some ways, she’d always been alone, victim to a helpless love, but now she was more alone than she’d ever been, decided on an action that she knew would change nothing.

Where were the people who loved this girl, who could have preserved her from herself? These people had failed her when she needed them most, and here she was, alone and insensate, in the dark, with the wrong kind of person. For a moment, Claire felt protective of her, as if, for that moment, she was her mother, trying to show her the error of her ways. But such a love could smother. You could not make other people’s choices for them, you could only suffer along with them and hope they would survive their mistakes.

Claire straddled the girl’s lower back, letting her weight press down. Then she leaned forward, her fingers interlaced, and pressed the girl’s face into the bottom of the boat, her nose and mouth in the water.

At first, nothing happened. Then Claire felt the girl go rigid and resist, her animal self alert to the threat even as her human self was already drowned in drugs and brandy. She bucked, lifting Claire off the bottom of the boat, but Claire kept her tenacious hold, pressing the girl’s forehead hard against the boat’s bottom, keeping her face in the channel, keeping her out of the saving air.

The girl began to thrash now, but even as her body struggled more and more desperately, Claire kept her in place, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Go, she urged the girl. And then the power of the girl’s will and her bodily strength began to run down, and the sounds of choking diminished, the girl’s force began to leak out, and the kicking of her legs became more and more involuntary, until, at last, she lay inert. Claire waited another minute, counting the seconds, and then gradually lifted her hands away from the girl’s skull.

Nothing. No movement at all.

She would have to move quickly now. She lifted the girl off her belly by putting her arms under her shoulders, but as Claire tried to tip her into the water, the boat teetered perilously and she knew both of them would go in. Then someone would see a drenched woman crossing back to the mainland on the ferry. She laid the girl back down and thought for a moment, alert for sounds from the shoreline. Then it came to her. She pulled the oars from their locks and laid them crossways over the gunwales, as if she were going to sit on them.

With effort, she turned the girl over on her back. Her long black hair fell away from her face and the wet skin on her cheeks shuddered a little, as if she were fearful of what was about to happen to her. Her eyes were open, distant, a look of faint surprise on her face. Claire leaned to her left and gripped the heel of the girl’s left foot, lifting it over one of the oars. Then she lifted the other as well, moving the oar
into place under the girl’s knees. The torso would be more difficult. She stood behind the girl’s head, her knees braced against the other oar and, balancing herself as carefully as she could, she leaned over the oar and lifted the girl’s head and then shoulders and, with her knees, nudged the oar forward beneath her. The little rowboat shook with the repeated jolts, but it quickly stilled, and then the girl was suspended there, the backs of her hands still resting against the bottom of the boat, as if she were levitating.

Claire rested a moment, but she would have to be done quickly now. She slipped crosswise under the girl, her knees bent up against the side of the boat, and pulled the thin ends of the oars together over her head in a V. The black canopy of the sweater hung down in front of her face.

Then there was a voice, a murmur in the distance, someone on the shore of one of the islands, calling out to her. She lay as still as possible, her heart pounding. And then she realized it wasn’t a voice coming from the island: it was coming from above her.

It was the girl.

Quietly, she was moaning. Words, unintelligible, although she thought she heard her name. Claire reached up and covered the girl’s mouth with her hand, the cold lips brushing against her skin, slowing down, and then stopping. Then Claire braced her feet hard against the side of the boat and, straining, began to push the oars into the air. They curved heavily with the weight on them, but slowly, the girl’s body began to slide toward the opposite thwart. Claire could hear the sound of her sweater rubbing down the wood. She pushed the makeshift slip higher into the air and the girl began to slide faster and faster and now Claire had to hold the ends of the oars down to keep them from flipping into the water with the girl’s mass sliding toward the paddles. Her body flipped once onto her face
and then, with a sound like a boulder plunging from the sky, she disappeared beneath the surface.