all. For a moment he wanted to go over and help, but quickly thought better of it. The head looked around, fixing him with a hateful stare. Hands planted themselves in the dirt. The body twitched, inching upwards. She was like the Evil Dead, already coming after him again.
He flashed on the pub. Remembered he’d paid in cash. No paper trail. No one knew his name. Wasn’t a regular. And was very very grateful.
Time to go.
Twenty-One
Drink and Resurrection
Dan had never endangered anybody’s life — his own included — by mixing driving with alcohol. Even this latest zigzag life had thrown him wasn’t going to make him change that. There were some rules no amount of alcohol could waive, though if drinking encouraged a state in which you could convince yourself of almost anything, then that went a long way toward explaining why so many drinkers didn’t consider themselves subject to those rules. He sobered up long enough to patch his face, say goodbye to his aunt and cousin and get safely back down the 69.
Somewhere between Parry Sound and Mactier his mind got stuck in a loop as he imagined his mother returning home to find herself locked out in the snow, knocking without getting an answer. And always, just out of reach, himself as a four-year-old, listening to a strange scratching sound that came intermittently before fading out for good. You wouldn’t remember — you were just a little kid, Daniel. His aunt’s words. Try as he might, he couldn’t erase the memory’s sepia glow.
Despite what he’d learned about his mother’s death, Dan was determined not to fall apart over it. At least not any more than he had already. She’d been dead for more than thirty years. That wasn’t about to change. Knowledge stopped the hoping, he reminded himself, but it didn’t make things better.
In his mind there were two women who occupied his memory and vied for the title of mother: one was light and feathery, a rustle of flowers in the morning air, a woman who made Eskimo villages out of discarded half-shells of eggs upended on drifts of cotton batten snow. The other was slovenly, weepy-eyed, didn’t dress before three in the afternoon, and made promises she didn’t keep or remember. Neither of them seemed real, just illusions he’d invented to fill in the shadows where a mother was supposed to be. He’d always felt that if he could know which version was true — or neither — then he could stop trying to remember her, stop trying to piece her together after all these years.
Just outside Barrie he pulled over to the side of the highway and leaned his forehead into the steering wheel. A squadron of eighteen-wheelers roared past, rocking him like a child as he choked back his sobs, tears staining his pant-legs. The only thing that revived him was the thought of more drink waiting at home. Normally a draft or two would have stood him in good stead at a local pub, but the thought that he might not be able to stop there, coupled with the fear of getting stranded in Barrie, held sway. So there was hope, was how he saw it. If he still had priorities on where he would and would not allow himself to get pissed-drunk, there was still a little humanity left.
By the time he turned in his driveway, his mind had re-focused on Craig Killingworth’s disappearance. It was an excuse, he knew, to keep from thinking about his mother’s death. He dropped his bag in the hall and went upstairs to wash his face, marvelling at the yellow and purple stain spreading beneath the skin on the right side. In the kitchen, he cracked the ice tray against the counter, splashed a healthy hit of Scotch into a glass, filled a plastic bag with the rest of the ice, and went to the living room. There, holding the bag to his face, he spread the file and photos on the floor like a mad haberdasher’s shop. He had a case to finish.
The whiskey brought clarity to his thinking. It helped him concentrate as it dulled the ache in his head and the pain in his heart. As he drank, he contemplated the code that might or might not unlock the past: a missing bicycle, a ferry captain who said he saw Craig Killingworth crossing just one way. All this time Dan had imagined a clean break or, at worst, death by mishap somewhere down the highway. But the lost portion of the file and the missing bicycle had entwined in his mind. It seemed as though they’d been telling him something different. He just wished he knew what.
He picked up Craig Killingworth’s photograph, trying to read into its depths. No smiles were always the hardest to interpret. Sadness or just a lack of expression? Cheese or no cheese? There was a shot of Killingworth with his sons, the dolphin-like Thom, already beautiful, and the darker, thought-ravaged features of the slightly older Theodore. Ted. Even here, Craig Killingworth’s upturned mouth was hard to press into service as a smile. What lay hidden behind those eyes? What held back the joy he might have felt at being with his boys?
A final shot showed the interior of what looked a lot like the stables Dan had explored behind the summerhouse the day before the wedding. Killingworth’s trim figure was outfitted in jodhpurs and sport-shirt, collar turned up. He held a grooming brush in one hand; his other lay on the waxy brown flank of a gelding. Here, at last, he exhibited what looked like the ghost of a smile.
“Where did you go?” Dan spoke to the empty room. “And why does your family not want you found?”
A man had disappeared, leaving behind a wife and two sons. How had he not cared enough to come back? Suicide was one possible answer. For a moment, Dan pictured himself up on Lake on the Mountain. He saw himself grasping the oars as the rowboat slid over the surface of the lake. It just plunges, Thom had said. Whatever was below lay so deep it might never be found.
He moved the pictures and file memos around, rearranging the pieces of the puzzle to make them fit. They stubbornly resisted interpretation. He reached for the bottle — empty. There was another in the kitchen, but when he tried to pour from it, it flew from his hands, smashing on the tiles. He picked up the larger pieces, cutting his fingers. Blood trailed across the floor. He cursed the perversity of inanimate objects and wiped his bloodied hand on a dishtowel.
Did he really prefer being drunk? What a pathetic statement that made. More important, what to do about it? Why did despair always look so much better through the prism of a filled glass? Drink went into the body, through the mouth and down the throat, then on to the underbelly and, eventually, it left in a wash of fine yellow spray. And that was it for all that alcohol, pricey or not. Time to refill your glass and get on with your life. But the despair stayed, seeming to need no entry or exit, no replenishing, like mercury or some other poison that sickened without killing. Ingested by accident or by design, once in and never to leave. To rot your guts and muddle your mind till you were long past having a mind. What was it about the barrel’s bottom that looked so good from the inside? Because surely it was hell from the outside, judging by the looks others gave you when you were down there.
The expression on Ked’s face was pure disgust. His son turned and went into the kitchen without a word. Dan glanced around. It was morning, but still early by the feel of it. He lay stretched on the living room floor like a schoolboy after pulling an all-nighter, the contents of Craig Killingworth’s missing person report strewn around him. He sat up. His eyelids felt as though they’d been peeled back with a can opener. His reading glasses lay on the floor beneath him, road-kill written all over them. He coughed and gasped at the pain searing his lungs. Obviously it hadn’t been an easy landing.
Dan picked his way out to the kitchen where Ked had begun cleaning up. Glass glittered in the morning light. A bloodied tea towel lay in the middle of the floor. He might have believed the place had been broken into if he hadn’t recalled searching for the third bottle of Scotch in his upstairs office drawer.
“I would’ve cleaned up. I wasn’t expecting you home till later,” Dan offered.
“I live here too, you know.”
It wasn’t a question
