There was some question about the sprinkler system in the old hotel, and the fire exits. An investigation was underway.
I looked at the date on the article again. I thought back to January of 1985. That was right in the middle of my lost year, the year after my partner and I were gunned down in that apartment building on Woodward, the year after my marriage ended and I left the police force. I remembered the fire, but only vaguely. It was just something on the front page of the newspaper.
The last paragraph was a long list, each name followed by an age and a home town. I scanned through the names. I found Stephanie Gannon, 13, Sudbury. I found Melissa St. Jean, 13, Sudbury. I found Brett Trembley, 13, Sudbury, and Barry Trembley, 13, Sudbury.
This time when I looked up at Helen she cleared her throat and spoke. “Now you know,” she said. She didn’t look at me.
Maskwa handed me a hot cup of coffee. He sat down next to Guy’s mother. Guy was sitting on the floor next to Vinnie. They were all watching the flames in the wood stove.
“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Hank wasn’t there. Ron and Millie weren’t there. The kids wanted to go by themselves. Just their friends and a couple of chaperones. They were so excited.”
She looked down at the cup in her hands. She didn’t drink from it.
“Melissa and Stephanie were best friends. They were in that room together. They were planning on going to college together. They were going to be bridesmaids for each other.”
She swallowed hard.
“At least they were together when they died,” she said. “They had that much.”
There was silence in the room for a while.
“They say the smoke gets you first,” she finally said. “They say you never feel the fire itself. You don’t even wake up. But it started at midnight. That’s the thing. In a hotel room by themselves for the first time, there’s no way those two kids would have been sleeping at midnight.”
A single tear ran down her cheek.
“Afterward, we’d all get together once a week. All the parents. Sort of like a support group. We’d try to help each other. After about a year, people started to drop out of the group. It was time to move on, they said. It was time to stop dwelling on it. That’s what one woman said to me. It’s not healthy, she said. You’ve got to let go.”
Another long silence. The wood crackled in the stove.
“She had another child. That’s why she said that. She had somebody else. We didn’t. We had nobody. Maybe it was unhealthy, holding on to each other like that. All these years. But we were all we had. Nobody else could understand. I couldn’t be with somebody else, somebody who didn’t know how it felt. So we stayed together.”
She wiped her nose with her hand.
“Claude tried to look after us,” she said. It took me a second to realize who she was talking about now. “As much as he was grieving himself, losing his daughter, I think he felt responsible for us.”
Claude. I looked back down at the article, scanned the list of names. I didn’t see anyone named DeMers.
“Her name was Olivia Markel,” Helen said. “That was her married name. She was the music teacher.”
I found the name. Olivia Markel, 27, Sudbury.
“Claude found out about the investigation,” she said. “He had a friend, a detective down in Detroit.”
I skimmed through the article again. “The hotel,” I said. “The sprinklers and the fire exits.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“No?”
“The dry cleaner’s next door,” she said. “They were trying to put an arson case together. I guess it’s a hard thing to do. Especially a place like that, with all the chemicals… It’s not enough to prove that it was set intentionally. You have to prove that the owners did it themselves, or paid somebody else to do it.”
“The owners-”
“Red Albright. And his little gang. There were five of them. They owned a lot of businesses back then. The dry cleaner’s wasn’t doing so well, so they burned it down. That’s what happened. The police couldn’t prove it. But that’s what happened.”
“I’m not getting some of this,” I said. “I’m sorry. How did they get up here, all these years later?”
She shook her head. “Claude shouldn’t have told us about the investigation. I know he regretted it ever since. The way it just kept eating at us… Especially Hank. It was driving him crazy. He was going to go after them himself, he said. For a while, it was all he ever thought about. When we all bought the lodge together, he used to sit there by the fireplace… This was the fireplace you saw, the one he never let anybody build a fire in.”
I saw the empty fireplace in my mind. I heard the moaning sound it made when the wind rushed over the chimney.
“He’d sit there,” she said, “and try to come up with the best way to get those men, every one of them. He knew he could find them. He knew he could go down there and ring their doorbells and see their faces. It was just… what to do next. I thought I finally convinced him, he’d just ruin his life, what was left of it. Or whatever life we might be able to have together. I thought he was getting over it. Finally, I thought maybe he had let it go. And then they called us, just like that. Albright himself. This man. This voice on the phone. Back when our phone was working. He called us.”
“Of all the places to go hunting in Canada,” I said, “they called you?”
“They got tired of hunting deer and they wanted to try something bigger. They heard there were some good moose lakes up here, and there aren’t that many lodges left. Ours just happened to be the one they chose. After all these years, just when I thought Hank was getting to be himself again… He told me it was just a twist of fate. But that maybe it was supposed to work out that way. Like God sent them up here. He actually said that. Like we were finally being given the chance to see the men who killed our children.”
I knew it wasn’t that simple. They may have burned down their business, whether they had been charged for it or not. The fire spread into the hotel, which may or may not have been up to fire codes. It was a whole chain of events that might have turned out a hundred different ways. But I wasn’t going to say that to her.
“I know what you must be thinking. I know how it sounds. But you can’t understand what it feels like until it happens to you. I’d have dreams about my daughter. About the fire. I couldn’t get to her.”
Her voice was ragged now.
“I can’t make you understand,” she said. “The dreams-”
We heard the rumble of a car passing by outside. The sound got farther and farther away, and then it was quiet again.
“When those men got here, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was afraid to even look at them. But Hank, my God, he was out there shaking their hands, looking each one of them in the eyes. If I had done that-”
She stopped. She looked back at Vinnie.
“If I had done that, I might have seen your brother. I might have known he wasn’t one of them. I might have seen that he didn’t belong.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything. The light from the fire was reflected in his eyes.
Five men. That’s all Hank had seen. Albright and his business associates.
Five men.
“Hank flew them out to Lake Agawaatese. It’s the farthest away. There aren’t even many moose up there. Just bears.”
She kept looking at Vinnie.
“I didn’t know, Vinnie.” She said it like she was still trying to convince him. “I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
“You knew he was going to kill them,” Vinnie said.
“Vinnie-”
“How could you not know? All of you.”
“Ron knew. He was there with Hank, out at the lake. He and Hank… They were there. They did it together. And then Ron and Hank took the Suburban out that morning, the morning they were supposed to have flown back. They took the Suburban and Hank’s truck, I mean, and left the Suburban in the woods. I didn’t know at the time. I wasn’t there. Hank told us to go away, me and Millie. We came back that Saturday. The Suburban was gone. At first
