The Taken

writer’s photograph was printed beside his name, a cheesy image of the man standing with his legs set widely apart and his hands in his pockets in a parking lot somewhere. She closed the paper and tossed it onto the floor.

An hour passed. Slowly. She sat up and put her legs over the side of the bed. Dr. Pass hadn’t actually told her she was “coming along.” He’d gone down her left leg with a pin he’d taken out of his bulletin board – a nod to country doctoring – pricking her leg with it every few inches. She knew about these nerve paths because they’d gone dead on her so many times. He wasn’t dissatisfied with the neurological signs, but he told her off for the atrophy he found in the muscle. “You know what this tells me?” he said. She waited him out and he lowered her legs. “This is the sign of a woman feeling sorry for herself.”

“Don’t you have to feel my head for that?”

“These are legs shrivelling from bedrest, Hazel. You can’t heal in bed. You have to move.”

“It hurts to move, Gary.”

“It should. Your back is a mess. But movement and pain are the only way through to as full a healing as you’re going to get.”

Now, after Wingate’s visit and lunch with Glynnis, she was so bored even exercise seemed an escape. She decided to try the stairs. She crossed the basement to the door that led to upstairs and opened it. The stairs looked like a job for a professional climber. She grabbed the banister and started up. She felt like she was emerging from a cave.

The upper part of the house was full of light. The upstairs clocks her mother had told her about she now saw for the first time; their incessant ticking gave the house a fugitive presence, like there were people whispering in its rooms. What kind of person needed to know the time wherever they stood? Perhaps a woman who was counting her luck, and had to mark every blessed second of it.

She strolled slowly through the living room, with its leather couch and chairs, the widescreen television sentinel in a corner, the fireplace with its pristine unburnt logs waiting for another winter to lend their hearthy romantic glow to the house. She saw Glynnis and Andrew cuddling on the couch, murmuring things to each other, indulging whatever conversational shorthand they’d developed with each other, only a word of which would be enough to make her crazy. She touched nothing, but looked closely. A line of old, heavy books lined the mantelpiece on either side of a rococo silver clock. Decorator books, never read. Probably cost them a pretty penny, too. There was another set of stairs off the living room that led to the bedrooms, although she knew her mother slept on the main floor, in what was Andrew’s office. She went there next, passing the dining room. She glanced in and saw the exact centrepiece she imagined would be there: a tangle of twigs with dried berries and little silver objects in it, stars and planets, and a big, thick red candle sticking up out of the middle of it. The wick was white; Glynnis had never lit it. Perhaps they argued about it. Why did I buy you this nice thing if you never use it? But then Glynnis’s answer presented itself right away: Because if I use it, it won’t be the lovely, thoughtful thing you bought me one day for no reason but that you loved me. Goddamnit.

Emily’s bed was tightly made and covered with a thick hand-sewn quilt. She didn’t recognize it. Did Glynnis quilt, too? There was a pile of books by the bed. A couple of puzzle books with a pen clipped into one of them, and a novel or two. But the book on top was one of Glynnis’s for sure: Talking to Yourself: A Dreamer’s Guide. Hazel hoped it was evidence of her mother ingratiating herself; it frightened her to think of Glynnis trying to inculcate her mother. But she couldn’t imagine it; Emily was the original skeptic. She opened the book at random:

SHRUBS, SMALL FLOWERING PLANTS: Red or yellow flowers signify financial windfall; white flowers are unexpected visitors. Flowerless shrubs can mean respiratory problems or digestive issues. A dream of potted flowers is a warning of a suffocating relationship, especially if the petals have begun to fall.

She closed the book and put it back exactly where she found it. The phone began to ring in the kitchen and she hobbled down the hall to it. When she picked it up, she was out of breath.

“You okay?” came Wingate’s voice.

“Fine, I’m fine.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No, James. What’s wrong?”

“I think you better come in. Can I send a car around?”

“What’s going on? What happened?”

“I’m sending a car.”

Hazel knew the name Barlow. A George Barlow had once owned one of the largest apple orchards in Westmuir County. He’d sold it fifteen years ago and now it was a pick-your-own operation that was gradually transforming into a county fair/family amusement park that did most of its business during pumpkin season. Hazel remembered going there with her father in the fifties and coming home with bushels of tart, mottled apples. Not supermarket fruits designed for long journeys, but misshapen, delicious real apples.

The woman sitting in front of them – Pat Barlow – might have been a relation. She looked about as pale and shiny as a supermarket apple right now. She was on the other side of the slightly warped table that sat in the middle of the room, in her worn quilted coat, her black hair done up messily on top of her head. She had a smoker’s complexion: watery eyes, greying, pellucid skin. One hand curled loosely around a Styrofoam cup of coffee, her gaze lost in the dark liquid it held. Hazel sat down across the table from her, lowering herself slowly into the chair and hooking the cane over its arm. All eyes had settled on her when she walked into the station house and a couple of her people had come forward almost reverently to shake her hand. No one commented on her being half in uniform, for which she was grateful, but Barlow had cast her a strange look when she came into the room. Wingate brought another chair to the table and sat beside her. “Can you tell DI Micallef what you told me, Miss Barlow?” The woman nodded. “Take your time.”

Hazel already knew what this woman had told Wingate, but when there was suspicion about a witness, a twice-told story usually shook loose its inconsistencies. Barlow brought the coffee to her mouth, sipped it, and grimaced. “I took a couple out this afternoon. They wanted to go for pike.”

“You and -” Hazel checked Wingate’s notes, which were open on the table between them. “- Calvin Jellinek own Charter Anglers, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And what were the names of your clients yesterday?”

“Dean Bellocque and Jill Perry-something.”

The second name was Paritas. The woman spelled her name “Gil.” The other name checked out in Wingate’s notes. “Okay, go on.”

“We were about two kilometres out, on a shelf in like ten metres of water. I saw a school of something in the finder, probably bass, hugging the edge of the shelf, four or five metres down. We’d fished two beds and got nothing, so I told them this was their best chance to catch today.”

“You knew these people?”

“Never seen ’em before.”

“So you fished the shelf.”

“Yeah. And we caught a couple little ones. We threw them back.” She swirled her cup and looked into it like she was expecting to see a tiny school of something to go by in its surface. “I had an eight o’clock and I told them we had to go back, but they wanted ten more minutes. That’s when they hooked it.”

“Hooked what?” said Hazel.

Barlow sent a worried look across the table to Wingate, and he gave her a faint nod. “A body,” said Barlow, her voice almost inaudible.

“Keep going.”

“One of them – Gil – says, Jesus Christ, and I look at her rod, and it’s bent double, you know, like she’s hooked a monster. But there’s no action on the line – it’s a dead weight. I take the rod from her and let the line out because I figure she’s caught on a log, but it’s hooked hard. I whip the line a little to unsnag it, ’cuz it’s in there good, but then, when I try to reel in, I feel the log come off the bottom and I start drawing it in. And then I can see the log there under the water, the shape of it, and it’s coming up. I figure I can save my rig and not have to redo it for the four o’clock. Then Gil starts screaming. And we see it.”

Hazel was writing in her own pad now. “You see what, exactly?”