okay,” Dan cut him off. “I don’t want you to replace me. I’ve decided to stay on with it. If that’s all right.”
He heard his boss give a confused chuckle. “Yes — by all means. It’s fine with me. More than fine.”
“Good,” Dan said. “In fact,” he checked his watch, “I’m off in about three hours to catch a plane to B.C. to follow up on a lead there.”
“Fascinating. Enjoy the weather.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.”
Eighteen
Islands in the Strait
From the windows of the plane, the green span of Lion’s Gate Bridge glinted in the sunlight. Below, the city was a quilt of urban crosshatches rolled up against the mountains and edged down to the sea. For the first time in weeks, Dan felt a sense of relief. Maybe it was just the rush of flying, the release of escape. Flight brought a sense of endless possibility, of life lived elsewhere than the city he’d planned and failed to leave every year for the last ten years. (Then again, he reminded himself, it always felt a little like failure to think he might actually leave it for good.) Or it may have been his proximity to Trevor, the Mayne Island Hermit, whom he hadn’t yet made up his mind to see. It wouldn’t do to get Trevor’s hopes up if things were suddenly to take him elsewhere. The vicissitudes of fate did not smile favourably upon chance love affairs in strange cities. The gardener he’d come to find might prove not to be here after all, putting an abrupt end to his trip. Still, a call at least was in order: Hello, I’m here. Goodbye again. But what was the point?
Beneath them, the Earth turned while the plane resisted gravity. For the moment he was a pirate, an Old World explorer circling the new one, with endless opportunities stretched out below. And in those limitless seconds of suspension, right up until the moment the wheels touched ground and life resumed its expected course, it seemed as though anything could happen.
They were over the Strait of Georgia. Below, the Earth lay fractured in a myriad broken pieces. Mayne Island was one of them, a soft bed to land in. The dying light gave the islands a magical cast, their dismembered outlines surrounded by silvery moats and darkening shorelines.
Surrey, on the other hand, was anything but magical. It was tawdry and squalid, though unlike other urban disasters this one wore its squalor with a sort of hometown pride. B.C.’s moderate climate and reputation as a haven for drug users had created an underclass of addicts and an attendant criminal fringe element. The push to ready Vancouver for the Olympics had unsettled its transient population, and many had migrated to the tidal plains to the south.
Picking up his rental car at the airport, Dan watched a wreck of a man scouring the asphalt for cigarette butts. The ride got grimmer the closer he got. Surrey made the unseemly parts of Toronto look like a picnic basket on a checkered tablecloth. He stopped for directions at a 7-Eleven. A Native woman approached him holding a can of Schlitz, tab clicked open. She held it out, her expression childlike. “Drink?”
“No thanks.”
“What’s your story, honey?” she asked.
“No story — just looking for directions.”
She smiled hopefully. “You want directions to my place?”
Dan shook his head.
“I got beer,” she said.
“I can see that. Thanks anyway.”
His hotel lobby was bright and cheerful, but the effect ended there. A doughy young man handed Dan his keys and pointed down a dim hallway with a carpet one shade away from dog vomit. It bulged when he stepped on it, as though he were walking on something alive. Irregular stains indicated either an errant house pet or water leakage. He looked up. Sure enough, the ceiling bore telltale signs of dripping.
At first glance his room appeared fine, apart from a faint odour of wet fur that permeated everything. Dan opened his suitcase and hung up his clothes. Jet lag was hitting him in the back of the neck. At home it was already past midnight. He stripped off his shirt and pants and lay on the bed in his underwear. He looked up at a sudden sound. Ten feet outside his window, a very large woman appeared on a balcony and began to pull laundry from a line. She was backlit, dressed in a shift that emphasized her shapelessness. Dan crept sheepishly over and drew the curtains.
He thought of Bill and laughed, imagining his distaste at being stuck in such a place. Then he thought of Trevor again — so near, yet so far. He toyed with the idea of calling but decided against it. He watched part of a movie and a bit of news, then turned off the television and slept.
The neighbourhood would have been hard put to say it had seen better days. Nor did it look like it ever would. It was a shameless, almost desperate mismatching of poorly constructed warehouses, chemical plants, and odd-fitting homes with yards buried under debris that seemed like they’d never had the temerity to hope for anything better. Nor, in all likelihood, had its denizens.
Dan approached a row of townhouses that appeared to have survived a bombing blitz, but only barely, one of which bore the number listed as the last known address for Magnus Ferguson. The fenced-in front yard resembled a dustbin and suggested the wrecker’s ball would not be far off. To each his own, Dan thought. He knocked, but no one answered. The stillness that came back might have been the stillness of a mausoleum.
A window lifted on the second floor of an attached house. A scruffy head poked out, little more than a skull with a wisp of grey fleece stretched over it. “Who is there?” called down a gap-toothed East Indian, a smile shifting his unshaven jowls.
“I’m looking for Magnus Ferguson,” Dan said. “Do you know if he still lives here?”
The man chuckled. “Maggie? No, sir — he doesn’t live here no more. I haven’t seen him in years.” He stopped to scratch his head. “He could be dead, for all I know.” He smiled, as if the thought brought him some small comfort.
“Is there anyone else around who might know where he went?”
The man shook his head. “No, sir. If I don’t know it, no one does. I see everything around here. Whatever goes on, I hear about it. I’m in the wheelchair, you see?” He lifted himself up by the arms and pressed closer to the sill, as if willing Dan to see the chair he claimed lay under him. His head and torso slumped back down.
Dan pulled a card from his pocket and held it up for the man to see. “My name’s Sharp,” he said. “Dan Sharp. I’m going to stick this under your door. I’ll write my hotel number on it. If anything comes to mind, please call me.”
“Sir, excuse me for asking, but does it pay?”
Dan looked up from where he’d knelt to insert the card. “It could,” he said. “If it leads to anything, it could.”
“I’ll see, sir, if I can turn anything up for you.” The man poked his head with a finger. “I am all the time having ideas.”
“I’d be much obliged.”
The second address turned out to be only blocks away, though Magnus Ferguson’s tenancy there predated the other by more than a decade. A pair of raggedly dressed men lay on the steps, their legs barring the doorway. One was an older man, small and wiry. He looked like he’d lived a
