hundred kilometres away, but obviously, whatever plans he had for a quiet afternoon were shot, so he might as well drive. Two hours later, entering the city, he felt like the past two years had never happened: he was still in that city, still living that life. He drove in along the lakeside highway, up past the no-longer-new baseball stadium, through the bustle of Chinatown, and up into the university district. There, he turned onto Cherry Tree Lane, drove under the chestnut trees, and parked. Perhaps there had once been cherry trees here. Maybe the street was misnamed. He stood on his old front porch under one of the hundred-year-old chestnut trees and turned to take in the view he’d had for so many years: the two little parks, the old church. But there was no time for nostalgia: he had a mouldering body lying in his front room.
A path in the alleyway between houses led to a gate. He pulled the little string that opened the latch and went into the little laneway separating them. There was a second gate leading into his old backyard; the same old string that lifted the latch hung out from between the slats. In the tiny yard behind – there had only ever been enough space there for a couple of tomato plants in tubs and maybe a little pot of basil – he went directly to the corner farthest away from the gate and got on his knees. Luckily, nobody walked back here and the soil was pretty loose, so he could dig at it with his hands. How he hated to get his nails all dirty, but this had to be done, and so he dug concertedly until his nails scraped against the top of something made of wood. He worked around the object until he’d revealed a little damaged casket big enough to hold a bowling ball.
No one had seen him. He knew people barely paid attention in cities. You could get away with anything in cities if you were just a bit careful. You could get away with murder.
He drove at a good clip back to the house, made it in ninety minutes, and parked in the rear. Before he went in, he grabbed a little round tin from the shed in the garden, of the type that once held pastilles. Her body was exactly where he’d left it (he’d had, perhaps, an ounce of doubt about that, considering the fact that it had found its way to his house), and he kneeled beside it and opened the little wooden box. Her head – green, shrivelled, hollow – was inside. He laid it on the floor, face-up, pressing the two halves of her cut throat together. Dirt trickled out of her dry eye sockets. The little pastille tin was full of fishhooks and he used them to pin her head to her neck, a neat little row of black, gleaming stitches. When the last one was on, she sat bolt upright in her place and swivelled her face to him. Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel. “Hello, Nick,” she said. “Long time.”
“Not long enough,” he said.
Sergeant Costamides laid the pages down flat and slipped her glasses off. “Well, that was interesting.”
Her audience appeared riveted. “Keep going,” said Hazel.
“I just want to get this straight. Someone has dropped off a two-year-old corpse at this gentleman’s house, and he’s not in the least surprised to see it, so he goes back to his old house -”
“- in Toronto,” said Wingate.
“Yes, and digs up the victim’s head so he can have a chat with her.”
Fraser studied his copy of the story. He said, “That seems to be it.”
“Okay,” said Costamides, and she smiled brightly at them. “Just checking. Chapter five.”
“What am I going to do with you?” said Nick Wise, leaning against his bathroom door. The dead girl was standing at his sink, gazing at herself in the mirror.
“I look like shit,” she said.
“You look like death warmed over.” She smiled at him in the reflection, one of those playful, sexy smiles that used to do wonders for him. It made him a little sad to see it, but he put the feeling aside. “I’m serious, sweetheart. You can’t be seen wandering around. People’ll talk.”
“I bet they will.” She opened his medicine cabinet and pushed aside a can of shaving cream and a bottle of Tylenol and lifted out a comb. She closed the mirror, and her face came back into view and she began to pull the comb through her twisted, ratty hair. It came out in clumps. “Goddamnit,” she said, “I had awesome hair.”
“I told you it was over between us, doll, but that wasn’t good enough for you. You could never take no for an answer.”
“You never said it was over, Nick.”
“Well, it was.”
“You never said it.” Her eyes rested on his in the mirror, knowing.
“Well, showing you didn’t fucking work either, did it? Because here you are.”
She turned away from the mirror now, and he saw her eyes were gleaming with tears. One rolled down a cracked, brown cheek, washing the dirt clean and revealing pink skin beneath. “But you called me back, Nick. Why did you do that? If you really didn’t want me anymore?”
“Just because I remember you doesn’t mean I want you.”
She was crying now, crying for real, and as the tears swept down her dirty cheeks, they wiped away the dry, encrusted dirt, and she was under there, her true face. Those round cheeks, the full, gentle mouth. Why would anyone have ever hurt her? When all she knew was how to love?
“Maybe you called me back for another reason? Maybe you had second thoughts?” She was walking backwards through the bathroom door, back into the house, her hands supplicating in front of her. “Maybe you really did want everyone to know about us?”
He was following her back into the living room, as if magnetized to her. He could not tell a lie: he remembered now how much he’d loved her, how, in the beginning, when they lived in that house together, he would have done anything for her. Why the heart runs out of fuel for loving was a mystery that had evaded him over and over in his life. He’d always been one to lose heart, to see his passions fade, and he’d never known why.
“Because you’ve never really made anything of yourself,” she said. She was standing over the tarp, and she was whole and unclothed, the way she was that night, that last night. She tilted her head at him and her luxuriant bronze hair fell over one breast. “But you had your chance, didn’t you?”
“I should have burned you up, so there was nothing left of you. I should have chopped you into little pieces -”
“Why didn’t you, Nick? Why didn’t you just have done with me and no one would ever have found me?”
“I won’t make that mistake again,” he said and he wheeled and strode into the kitchen to find his weapon. It was lying on its side on the counter beside the stove, and he snatched it up and then went down the hall to his office. A sheaf of paper lay on his desk, months’ worth of work, and he strode back down the hall, brandishing it in front of him. In his other hand, he held the lighter.
She saw him and laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it, Nick? I mean, it’s like you conjured me out of thin air and now you want to make me vanish again? Again? You’re just not that good, honey.”
He lit the paper and it flared in his hands like a magician’s trick. And then, just as quickly, it was ash at his feet and he was alone. The room was empty. The walls were blank. He was standing in a room with no windows and just a single closed door in one wall. The light flooded in and he looked up and she was standing above him now, towering over him, a giant, and she leaned her face down into the light, her angry, tearful face, and she almost blotted out the light. “You better hope they learn the truth about me before it’s too late, Nick.”
“Where am I?” he said, a note of fear finally creeping into his voice.
“Why, honey, you’re caught in a lie,” she said, and then she closed the lid of the box. In the deep, awful dark, he heard the door in the wall open.
A voice said, “You’re inside it now, aren’t you, Wise?”
Nick looked around. “Who… me?”
“Draw closer.”
He waited to hear more, but there was only silence and darkness.
Costamides flipped the last page of the story, in case there was more, but she looked up at them shrugging, and laid the papers aside. “Well, if you were wondering how your friend on the internet ended up in that basement -”
“We know as little now as we did twenty minutes ago,” Hazel said.
Fraser was staring down at the pages. “And we’re thinking of letting the
“Is that our prime concern right now?” asked Wingate. “Whether they run it or not, we have to decide what it means to us and what our next move is going to be.” He held up his sheaf of papers. Hazel had noticed he’d been underlining words on it. “If I understand this correctly, we’re being alerted to a murder, as well as a suspect.”
“Or someone wants to watch us dance like marionettes,” said Fraser.
