these days. A minivan and a dusty turquoise Sunbird sat in the gravel drive and as Sullivan drew to a stop behind them, a tiny poodle burst through the front door, yapping.
A young woman strode out, waving her arms. “Chouchou, stop! Assez!”
The dog raced around the car like a frenzied cotton ball, growling and snapping every time Sullivan tried to open the door. Green knew better, having become somewhat more versed in the canine psyche since acquiring his oversized Humane Society reject. He showed the woman his badge through the window and sat in the car waiting for her to capture her dog. By the time she pounced on it and shoved it under her arm, she was panting as hard as it was. As she approached the car again, the odour of turpentine grew stronger and Green saw flecks of white paint on her hands. She leaned against the car, her chest heaving and her cheeks flushed. Even in tattered jeans and T-shirt with a paint smudge on her nose, she was a sexy, vibrant woman.
“Sorry, officers. We just moved in, and Chouchou is...” She ended the explanation with a Gallic shrug. Her accent was slightly French Canadian, more in its cadence than its words. “He’ll be all right once he gets to know you. What is this about?”
The two detectives exchanged quick glances before Sullivan took the lead. “We’re looking for Mr. or Mrs. Pettigrew.”
She looked puzzled. “They were the previous owners, but they don’t live here any more.”
“Can you tell us where we might reach them?”
“We only met them one time. We communicated through a real estate agent.”
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” A reedy young man appeared around the edge of the house carrying a leaf rake. He was smiling, but behind thick glasses his gaze was wary. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the police looking for the former owners.”
The detectives climbed out of the car and introduced themselves. Sullivan handed them his card, then indicated his notebook. “For our paperwork, could you give us your names?”
Jacques and Isabelle Boisvert, the woman said, but they could be of little help since they had only met one of the sons.
Sullivan pulled out the photo. “Is this the son?”
Jacques took the photo and recoiled in dismay. “This man is dead!”
“That’s why we’re anxious to reach the family. Have you the name and phone number of the real estate agent you dealt with?”
Isabelle fetched a business card, which Sullivan took back to the car to make the call. The husband was eyeing the photo with almost morbid fascination.
“Could that be the son?” Green prompted.
He shivered and shook his head. “This man is more aged. The man we met was Robert Pettigrew, and he was only in his twenties. No beard, very pleasant-looking.”
“Perhaps this is the father. You never met him?”
“He was in hospital. He had a stroke, the agent said. That’s why the son had to sell the farm so fast.” He cast an anxious glance at the vast unkempt meadow that surrounded them. In the distance, a copse of maples flamed red and gold against the blue sky. “The whole place is falling to pieces. Like nobody takes care of it since twenty years.”
Green appraised the house with his new expertise in disintegrating buildings. On closer inspection, he could see the tell-tale signs. The house was a stately, red brick Victorian with a steeply pitched roof. Its intricate wood trim had once been white but was now a weathered gray, and its windows were caked with grime. Roof shingles were lifting, and the front porch listed dangerously to one side.
Isabelle had taken the photo and was studying it thoughtfully. As if hearing the bitterness in her husband’s voice, she gave his arm a quick squeeze. “We will make it beautiful, I promise you. Why don’t you take Chouchou in the back to work with you, and I will walk these gentlemen to their car.”
With one last weary glance at his wife, Jacques slumped back around the house with the dog under one arm and the rake in the other. An oddly lifeless man to have snagged such a tantalizing woman, Green thought. Quietly, she gestured to the photo as she walked.
“I have seen this man. I didn’t want to say in front of Jacques, because he is negative enough about this place. He’s from Vanier, and he finds it very isolating here.”
I’ll just bet, Green thought. It would be a massive culture shock to move to this pastoral desolation from the close-knit clamour of the francophone inner city. “Where did you see this man?”
Isabelle nodded towards the right of the grounds and began to walk. About a hundred feet in front of the house was a rundown, square-timbered barn, and beside it, a wooden shed of similar vintage. But in the far corner of the yard opposite was an overgrown thicket of brush. It was here that Isabelle stopped.
“Yesterday, after Jacques left for church, Chouchou began to bark at something. It was fog outside, and frost on the ground, but I’m positive it was this man. He was in the brush here, ducking down, trying to hide. I thought he was a bum, and I yelled at him. He took off.”
“In what direction?”
Isabelle gestured towards the maple woods behind the farm house. “He went into those trees, and it’s the last I saw of him.”
“What’s beyond the trees?”
“The river. But there is a path along the shore through the trees, and I guess he escaped that way.”
Green peered through the dying foliage of the thicket where the man had hidden. Raspberry canes and scrub had been allowed to grow undisturbed for years, but there were signs that someone had been there recently. A path had been trampled into the centre, and the weeds had been flattened as if someone had lain there. Gingerly, Green got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the thicket, praying that he wouldn’t encounter any crawly things. In the middle of the thicket, charred wooden planking had been strewn about, and the grass had been dug up in little patches all over.
It looked for all the world as if someone had been searching for something.
* * *
Green gazed out the car window at the passing fields, deep in thought. In the distance, the ribbon of maple trees was slowly fading into the horizon.
“We should send an eager young constable out there to see where that path through the trees leads to,” he said.
Sullivan took his eyes off the road long enough to follow Green’s gaze. His eyes revealed nothing behind his mirrored sunglasses, but his lips twitched in a smile. “It leads to Ashford Landing.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s the way the country works. Farmers usually leave a border of trees along the river, and in the old days they’d bring their produce to the village either by boat or along the river’s edge in the shade. The Boisvert farm is about two kilometres from town. Perfect distance for foot paths.”
Green looked at the straight, flat road ahead of them. Why would the man go along the shore, he wondered, and have to contend with mud, cow crap, underbrush and swamp when he could walk straight
