“It’s Helen’s story,” he said. “She’ll tell you.”
“Okay, fine. So what do we say when the police get here?”
“You came looking for Vinnie, and you picked me up to help you.”
“I talked to Reynaud just before I got here. I didn’t say anything about you being with me.”
“So you didn’t say anything. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t with you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We might be able to sell it.”
“We split up and searched the place, looking for Helen and Vinnie. Then those men got here. They started shooting at you, so we had to kill them. It was self-defense.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the story, Alex. We never saw Vinnie, and we never saw Helen. We have no idea where they are.”
A few minutes later, we heard the police cars coming down to the lodge.
“As soon as we’re done here, I get all the answers, right?”
He gave me a tired smile. “You and me both. They still haven’t told me.”
I stood there looking at him. The police cars got closer.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s showtime.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maskwa and I spent the next four hours at the lodge, telling our story over and over to several different constables. Staff Sergeant Moreland was there, of course, and as he listened to me go over the whole thing one more time, he had a look on his face like he wished I had never set foot in Ontario. Not that I could blame him. As I watched him standing over the body by the stairs, it occurred to me he was probably near retirement himself. For all I knew, he and DeMers had been making plans to go fishing together when they had both hung it up. Now DeMers was dead. DeMers and Gannon and Tom LeBlanc and four men from Detroit were dead, and now there were two more.
I saw Boxer Face and Suntan standing there for a moment, looking down at the other body, the one by the shed, and I saw a couple other constables who had kept guard over me in the medical center. The one person I didn’t see was Natalie Reynaud. When I asked the sergeant where she was, he told me she was back at the detachment and left it at that. Then he told me to go home and to wait by my phone in case he needed me for more questions. Aside from that, he didn’t want to ever see me or hear from me again.
When we were finally in my truck, I took my last look at the lodge and then turned the ignition. “Come on, Maskwa,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I turned the truck around and headed out the gravel road. A minute later, we passed the sedan, its front wheels off the road.
“This wasn’t the best way to do this,” I said.
Maskwa looked over at me. “What do you mean?”
“Setting the trap so far from the lodge. You gave them a chance to regroup.”
He looked back out the window. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were going to take Helen to the lodge, get her settled in there, and then come back out. Those guys would have never made it out of the car.”
“Did they get here too soon?”
He shrugged. “Vinnie misjudged how much of a lead we had.”
“Why not just leave her at your house?”
“She wouldn’t let us do that.”
“I wouldn’t have given her the choice.”
“You weren’t there, Alex.”
I shook my head and kept driving. We hit the main highway, took a left, and headed east, toward the reserve.
“You saw what they did to Helen’s friends,” Maskwa said. “I didn’t see it myself, you’ve got to understand that. Vinnie just told me about it. But you were there in the house.”
“Yes.”
“Did they really burn them alive?”
I hesitated as the scene came back to me. “It looked like they were still alive, yes.”
“They would have done the same to Helen. They were coming for her. We weren’t going to let her out of our sight.”
“So why did Vinnie come up here?” I said. “And why did he come alone?”
“He told me he didn’t want to drag you up here again.”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Yeah, he’ll hear about that one later.”
“Vinnie called me,” he said. “He was driving right by the reserve. It was a spur of the moment thing.”
That hit me in the gut. Spur of the moment or not, when Vinnie needed help, he chose one of his own people again. Not me.
Maskwa seemed to pick up on it. “It was too late to call you,” he said. “He needed help and I was right here.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept driving. I turned onto the road to Calstock, passing the sawmill and the power plant, then the spot in the woods where we had found the Suburban. The crime scene tape was gone now. There was no trace of what had happened here.
We drove past the sign welcoming us to the Constance Lake Reserve. The lake appeared on our left, and then the road to Maskwa’s house. Vinnie’s truck was parked outside.
When we pulled in, Guy and his mother both came out of their house next door. It was a cold and bitter day and they were walking with their heads down, Guy’s mother in a housecoat with her arms wrapped around her chest, and Guy in his baseball jacket. They joined us in Maskwa’s living room, all six of us in that one small room. Maskwa threw some more wood into his stove.
“How did it go?” Vinnie asked. He was sitting in the back corner, farthest away from the fire. Helen was on the couch, watching the fire through the glass door on the stove.
“We got through it,” I said. “They want to know where you and Helen are.”
“I imagine.”
“We told them we didn’t know.”
“Thank you.”
I was just about to ask when the explanations would begin, but then I found a measure of patience for the first time in my life. I kept my mouth shut and sat down.
Maskwa made coffee, and the rest of us sat there in silence. Finally, Vinnie took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to me. Helen didn’t look at me. She didn’t move.
I unfolded the paper and read it. It was a reprint from the Detroit News, dated January 21, 1985. The headline read “Death Toll in Hotel Fire Grows to 27.”
I glanced up at Helen. She had her hands clasped tight together in her lap.
The picture. It showed the burned-out remains of a building, a hotel on Warren Avenue, near Wayne State University. It was a grainy black-and-white photo, made even grainier in the reprint. It looked like something from a hundred years ago.
The story itself started out with two more people dying at the hospital, plus another person who had not been included in the initial count. Most of the dead were Canadians. A junior high school class had come down from Sudbury to take part in a choral concert at the college. Nineteen of the dead were students.
I looked up at Helen again. She kept staring at the fire. Something came to me then, something she had said to me at the lodge.
No kids. None of them had kids. Helen, Hank, Ron, and Millie-it was what they all had in common. The strange gloom that was hanging over the lodge when we got there-it occurred to me now that it wasn’t just because they were closing down the business. There was a much bigger reason.
I went back to the article. The fire had started next door, in a dry cleaner’s. It had spread into the hotel.
