A Door in the River

“This stuff with girls.”

“Yes. I’ll come see you tomorrow and explain it. As best I understand it.”

LeJeune let her go. The ambulance was pulling away from the curb, its siren silent, its beacons off. Travers was dead.

Hazel raised the radio to her mouth.

4 Tuesday, August 16—Wednesday, August 17

] 36 [

Tuesday, August 16, midnight

By the time she returned to the soy fields, they’d brought in two more excavators and a flatbed-mounted bank of klieg lights and they were excavating from the side now. They had been communicating through the pipe with a girl named Katrina Volkov. She was trapped in a corner of the room, where “James,” she said, had told them to crouch and pin themselves. The roof had come in. She was alive, and she could hear breathing from somewhere else in the pit, but just one breathing.

Hazel stood by helplessly, watching the machines. She thought of the girl, probably still on her way toward them through the woods. Somewhere to the west, she’d pass them later that night. Probably on her way to the States, or another province. Maybe she would try to go home.

At three in the morning on the sixteenth, they extracted a dead girl from the pit. Her body was still warm. Above, through the pipe, Ray talked to Volkov. “I still hear the breathing,” she said. “And I hear the machines.”

“We’re almost there.”

“You know who is breathing?”

“No,” he lied. He tried to listen for the breathing, but he could only hear her voice, thready and faint, scraping against the inside of the steel tube.

“I want to shake the hand of your polisman. For what he did.”

“I hope you will,” he said. Then the excavators were through again and they called to them and both Hazel and Ray Greene went over to see what they had found. Wingate was face down, half buried in an inverted cone of earth, but his upper half was free; his head wasn’t injured. But his pelvis was crushed, and his pale skin suggested he’d lost blood, although there was not much blood in evidence. The paramedic who’d been waiting in the field since eight o’clock pronounced Wingate in hypovolemic shock. More than 40 per cent of his blood was floating around inside of him. The rest of the excavation was rushed: he was too close to death to be careful getting him out.

He was “alive.” This is what Hazel heard when the doctors talked. It seemed to be a matter of opinion. Some people made it out of this kind of thing, some didn’t. It was better to be young.

He lay in the ICU of Mayfair General bundled up like a baby with layers of gauze. Allowances had been made in his wrappings for IVs and tubes and he appeared to be something that had been caught in a web and bound in silk. The spider took the form of the machines that stood sentry beside and behind him, unspooling their webbing on screens in shuddering lines of red, green, and blue. The doctors had induced a coma to keep him deeply asleep, and in the hour Hazel sat in the chair beside him, six doctors and three nurses paused within the curtained space to mark something on a chart, or adjust a drip, or just to gaze at what was the day’s most interesting case.

Touch-and-go. That was the term they settled on. Greene checked in over the phone. There was an active collection of evidence going on in the field and below in the river and grove, and he had to stay on top of it, although she could hear his anxiety and concern. He’d been there the day James Wingate arrived in Port Dundas. They had not worked together long, but he’d liked James, and Hazel knew he was looking forward to working with him again. Greene filled her in on what they were finding. Katrina Volkov had been successfully extracted, and she was in another room in Mayfair General. That room had been a rough dirt chamber with a heavy door in a concrete frame in one wall, and not much else. It appeared that Wingate had used his flat steel belt-buckle to carve out shallow crawl spaces, about half a metre wide, in two of the corners. Volkov had tucked into one; the girl called Star had been found close to the other one. Wingate had just started his when the roof came down. Volkov kept saying she wanted to shake his hand. She was in love with him, she said. She was in shock.

Hyperspecialized specialists were being sent in to register their opinions. She overheard one doctor discussing the value of removing the top of Wingate’s skull to “give the brain room.”

No one would give her specifics. She was not his next of kin. She knew Greene was trying to look into it, but Wingate had never spoken of siblings or parents. She called Jack Deacon at home, and an hour later, he came into the hospital just as they were taking Wingate away for surgery.

“They have to do some work on him,” he told her after talking to a colleague.

“Do I want to know?”

“I don’t think so.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You know they’ll do whatever they can.”

“That’s what they say on TV shows before someone dies.”

“He’s strong. He’ll fight. But it’s not good.”

“Give me a number. Chance he’ll survive.”

“He’s going to have a long road.”

“Chance he’ll survive.”

“I don’t know.”

“Better than fifty?”

“Sure. Better than fifty.”

“How much.”

“I don’t know, Hazel. I wish I could tell you.”

They were bringing someone else into what had been Wingate’s bed. An elderly man with a grey face. She began to explain that the space was taken, but one of the interns told her they needed the bed. The man who’d been here was going to be in recovery for a while, when he got out of the ER.

“Come on,” said Deacon. “You should go home. I’ll call you if I hear anything. Go home.”

But she couldn’t. She stayed in the hospital waiting room and read magazines and fretted. When Greene learned where she was, he called her and ordered her to go home and get some sleep. She snorted at him and hung up and then turned the cell off so no one else could suggest she do something else with her time. Twice, hospital employees came out and asked her if she was Hazel Micallef because there was a phone call for her. Both times she declined to accept her identity. She knew her mother would be asleep and any other news from the outside world she had no interest in at all.

She was woken by a hand on her shoulder gently shaking her, and she opened her eyes and it was James Wingate. He looked fine. It was possible she wasn’t awake. Maybe the surgery had worked and it wasn’t so serious after all. Or this was a dream and he’d come to tell her he was dead. She held his hand down on her shoulder, and the hand was corporeal and she was awake. “What time is it?”

“Seven in the morning.”

“You don’t sound like James, but –”

“I’m Michael.” He took his hand off her shoulder. “I gather you don’t know about me.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s a complicated story. But I’m the next of kin. I got a call.”

“Well,” she said, unsure what role she was to play here, “I’m sorry you’re being … reunited under these circumstances. What did they tell you?”

“Severe internal bleeding. Broken pelvis, broken legs, two broken vertebrae. Eight broken ribs, lacerated spleen, lacerated liver, varied vascular damage. Swelling of the brain. Cuts and bruises. Coma.”

“Not good.”

“Not good.”

If not for her deranging exhaustion and worry, the fact that James had a twin might have disturbed her. But in an odd way, it was comforting now. To have that face in the room. “Where did you come from?”

“New York City. I drove.”

“Oh, god,” she said. “Do you want a coffee or something?”

“No. I’m fine. I ate on the road and got a room near the hospital and showered. So I’m good for the day. But if you want to go home and rest or something, I could call you if anything changes.”