Страница 55 из 59
“Yes, sir.”
“Inspector?” Hazel tightened her chest. “Ray Greene is your boss. Everything you do from now on is hand-stamped, green-lighted, and approved, and not just in principle, by Superintendent Greene. Is that unambiguous enough for you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when James Wingate gets out of hospital, we’ll have a party for him and give him a commendation in front of the whole town. When he gets out.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and this time, when he offered his hand, she took it.
He left them together in the office. Greene sat.
“That was interesting,” he said.
She couldn’t think of what to say. “I better get started on my reports.”
“Good,” he said.
“Is Cathy still at – ”
“She went home last night. Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe. Not right away, though. I don’t know what to –”
He was writing something. She strained to see what it was. He was making figure eights with the tip of his pen.
“Can I go?”
“I’ll be at the hospital this afternoon.”
“I’ll see you there then.”
That was the extent of it for now.
______
After trying to write her report, Hazel went back to the house in Pember Lake. It was mid-afternoon. There were a lot of loose ends now; matters she’d left unattended. There were some plates in the sink and she washed them. She flashed on her memory of Cathy standing at her own sink, washing her entire house with that look in her eye. She thought she knew now what Cathy had been feeling. Like the world was floating away. She noticed her mother’s pill organizer still had its morning doses in it. Emily was upstairs taking a nap. A little wave of anger suddenly went through her.
She took a glass of water and the pills up the stairs, with a plate of Coffee Breaks, and went into her mother’s room. She was asleep with her face turned to the wall. The covers were pulled up to her ears and the sheet barely moved with her breathing. Hazel turned on the bedside lamp, but the sudden little flood of light had no effect on her mother’s wakefulness. A jolt of fear went through her and Hazel reached out and touched her mother’s shoulder and shook her lightly. The shoulder was warm, and her mother shuddered beneath her touch and said something, and Hazel shook her a little more.
“It’s okay. It’s just me. Can you sit up?”
Her mother inhaled deeply through her nostrils and sat up, blinking and confused. “What time is it?”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m sorry I woke you. You forgot to take your pills.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” her mother said, fully awake now. “I’m not going to die in my sleep for lack of pills.”
“You don’t know that. Now sit up and take them.” Emily pushed herself up farther in the bed and held out her hand angrily for the medications. Hazel lay them in her cool, leathery, white palm. “I know you’re not pleased with this situation, but this is the way things are. Take these pills, and take all your pills, and eat food, and stop acting like you have a date with the Grim Reaper. You never gave up a fight in your life, Mother, and you’re not starting now.” Her mother swallowed the pills without the water and then held her hand out for the glass because they wouldn’t go down. “Jesus Christ,” Hazel said.
“Am I allowed to go back to sleep?”
“Not yet.”
Her mother blinked slowly and Hazel told her what had happened in the last few days. Wingate’s injuries. The reappearance of Ray Greene. Willan laying down the law. Her long reign as interim CO was over. Emily had been summarily turfed in her fourth term as mayor, by a blinkered town council. Worse than what Hazel was going through now, but it was a commonality, and Hazel had lately been having the instinct to seek out as much co
“Well, now we can both curl up and die,” her mother said. “You want me to move over?” Hazel laughed. “What’re you chuckling at?”
“I thought maybe you’d pat my head and tell me everything’s going to be okay.”
“I’ve never told you everything was going to be okay. In fact, if I recall, I’ve spent most of my life warning you that things go to pieces as a matter of routine. How come you haven’t learned that yet?”
“I know it in my work life. I just thought …”
“You thought that if you could convince me I still have work to do as your mother, I wouldn’t die yet?”
Hazel’s smile faltered. “Well, when you put it like that …”
“I’ll take my medicine, Hazel,” her mother said. “If you’ll promise not to make both our lives impossible when it’s time to make important decisions.”
“Gary says you can live with myeloma for years.”
“But not forever.”
“No,” said Hazel. Emily swivelled her body on the mattress and slipped her frail feet out. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to the hospital.”
“You don’t have to take me that seriously.”
“No, dummy, I want to see James. Get me my grey slacks and something warm.”
“Oh …”
“Your timing stinks, though. I was just skiing with your father in New York.”
“Really.”
“Ellicotteville, 1941. Two years before you were born.”
“Simpler times.”
Hazel got her mother’s clothes out and told her she’d make some tea and then they’d go. But for herself, she didn’t want any tea. She went back down the stairs and got a half-full bottle of J&B out of the cupboard and sat in the rocking chair with it. She listened to her mother in the bathroom and she took one good glug out of the bottle and then another. Then she put the cap back on and put the bottle away. She filled the kettle for her mother and then went back out into the living room to wait. The Weather Cha
Her mother was taking the stairs slowly. “Every system in this body is shorting out but my hearing,” she said. “And there’s no mistaking the crack of the cap on a whiskey bottle.”
Hazel turned the kettle off.
] 38 [
Wednesday, August 17, afternoon
Over the Tuesday and into the Wednesday, as Katrina Volkov began to recover from her ordeal, the heartbreaking and sickening details of the case began to come to light. Volkov knew of a total of five girls, but the cramped history of the place suggested the operation had begun three years earlier. The story came down as oral tradition – from the girls who had once been there to the ones who were still alive. Two women Volkov had personally known had died before Kitty’s escape, and she had thought Kitty was dead as well. Now she was the only witness to a crime so horrifying that media from as far away as Miami were waiting in the parking lot of Mayfair General, hoping to get a word with somebody, anybody. Deliverymen were being handed wads of cash. LeJeune had dispatched every free body she had to the hospital on the Friday morning and her uniforms took up positions every thirty metres around Mayfair General.
Friday afternoon, a Russian-speaking officer was bussed up from Toronto, in case he was needed. But Katrina’s English was good: she put her captivity at seven months. She’d been there long enough to learn English.
They co
“She is saying she was not in school,” said the interpreter.
They left her alone, and let her rest. They had as clear a picture of what had happened under that little grove of trees as they would ever get. The last piece of information Hazel had really wanted had come out as well: Volkov had given Larysa’s last name as Kirilenko.