Dale dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Listen to me, Gus. You can get the boat back to the dock, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to go with this guy, okay? Answer some questions if they need me to. There’s no reason for you to get mixed up in this.”
“I’m not leaving you, Dad.”
“And then you get in the car and go home and you tell your mother I went to the Super C to get lemons, okay? I’ll be home after lunch.”
The approaching boat had cut its motor and the driver was angling the wheel to pull up sideways against them. The boat moved in a slow, unnatural skid toward them. The man in the boat wasn’t in uniform. “What’s going on, Dad?”
Dale took his son by the shoulders. “I want you to trust me. Tell me you trust me.”
“I do.”
“Can you get the boat back and then get home?” Gus was looking over his shoulder at the man standing in the other boat. Dale put his hand under his son’s chin and tenderly brought his attention back to him. “Gus?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you wish you never saw this, but I have to do the right thing, and you’ve got no place in it, do you understand?”
“No. But I’ll do what you tell me to if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want.” He released his boy and then stepped to the railing and put his foot on it. The man in the other boat held his hand out, and Dale gripped it and leapt the space between the two crafts. “Hand me the other end of that rope, Gus,” he said, and his son untied the rope where they’d secured it to the railing. Dale caught it and began to draw it in, hand over hand. The body bobbed in the water and then sank a little under the weight of being dragged. The other man leaned over, bracing his knees against the gunwale of his boat, and gripped the arm furthest away from him, and the two men began to lift the inert form into the other boat. And as it came out of the water, resisting them, magnetized to its resting place, Gus saw the corpse turning and his heart seized in his chest. It was a woman.
“Go!” said Dale, and Gus started from his staring and turned the key in the ignition. He pushed the throttle and the boat curved away from the scene in a wide circle.
The body was almost in the boat. “Where’s your truck?” Dale asked the other man.
“It’s backed up against the dock.”
“Anyone there?”
“We’ll be sure before we tie up.”
The other man put his boat in drive again, and headed back in the direction he’d come in. Dale sat in one of the leather seats, his eyes locked to the heartbreaking form, and for the first time, he wept. Even without her eyes to look emptily on him, it was as if her entire body could see him.
When they came around into the island’s lee, the shore seemed quiet, and they went directly to the dock. The other man backed his truck down as far as it was safe, and the two of them wrapped the body in a tarp and hefted it together into the flatbed. They drove the short distance to town and down into its streets. “There,” said Dale, pointing at one of the pretty gabled houses in the middle of the street. “Pull into that driveway.”
They parked under the big willow. Its feathery flowers had gone to seed and a carpet of soft catkins lay on the asphalt. “He’s done well for himself,” said Dale. The garden was well kept, with rare trees and a small burbling fountain in the bend of a serpentine flagstone path that led to the door. They lifted the corpse out of the back of the truck and carried it down the path and laid it on the broad granite step in front of a heavy oak door. Dale took a note out of his breast pocket and, with a fishhook, attached it to the tarp. Then he rang the doorbell and the two men walked in a leisurely fashion back down the path. “What the good goddamn?” said Hazel Micallef. Wingate was looking at his copy and held his finger up. He was a slower reader. He was sitting across from her in her office, the first time she’d tried to occupy that chair since the end of March. She realized, a little surprised by the thought, that she was finally on the uptick. After a minute, Wingate laid the newspaper against her desktop.
“I didn’t see that coming,” he said.
“Is this Eldwin character back yet? I want him in here, like now.”
“I did try him again, this morning, but his wife doesn’t expect him back up until this afternoon.”
“Did she say where he went?”
“ Toronto. He had meetings, she said.”
“He writes three chapters of this thing, all hell breaks loose, and he’s in meetings in the Big Smoke? Who is this guy? Call his wife back. Tell her we want to talk to him. Now.”
“Okay -” He flipped open his PNB and found Eldwin’s number. “You want me to do this here?”
“On speakerphone.”
He dialled and a woman answered. “What is it?”
“Um, Mrs. Eldwin?”
“Speaking.” She sounded mad as hell.
“This is Detective Constable James Wingate calling again.” “You called this morning.”
He and Hazel traded a look. “That’s right, Ma’am. I was hoping your husband was home. You said you were expecting him.”
“‘Expecting’ is the wrong word to use in relation to my husband.”
“So he isn’t home?”
“Wow, you are a detective.”
Hazel bent over the phone. “Mrs. Eldwin,” she said firmly. “This is Inspector Detective Hazel Micallef. I’d advise you to drop your tone.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Eldwin muttered. “What did he do?”
“Why do you think he did something?”
“Well, you’re bloody eager to get him on the phone.”
“We just need to talk to him,” said Wingate. “Clear a couple of things up.”
The unmistakable sound of ice tinkling in a glass came over the speakers. “Let me ask you something, detectives. What do you know about PIs?”
“I’m sorry?” said Wingate.
“Do they even exist?”
“Private investigators?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Eldwin -” he began in an effort to get her back on track, but Hazel interrupted.
“Are you considering hiring a PI? Do you think something’s happened to your husband?”
Eldwin snorted derisively. “God no. At least I hope not. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him before I got my hands around his neck myself.”
“What is going on here, Mrs. Eldwin?”
“He goes to town Friday, saying he’s got meetings and research – who has meetings on the May long weekend, huh?”
“Well, some people -”
“- and then calls and says he’s stuck in town until Monday. And then he stops answering his phone. What does that sound like to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “What does it sound like to you?”
She swallowed something lustily. “It sounds like the same old story to me.”
“Is he not the kind of person to have meetings?”
“He’s the kind of person to penetrate other women.”
“I see,” said Hazel. “So you think he’s having an affair. And you want to hire a PI to catch him in the act?”
“So how much?” Eldwin asked.
“How much what?”
“How much for a PI? And do I have to pay expenses too?”
Hazel was getting frustrated, but she could tell this Mrs. Eldwin wasn’t going to turn out to be willing, so Hazel was going to have to be careful if she wanted to get anything useful out of the conversation. “I’d say a hundred a day is fair,” she said. “But you could save that money.”
“Oh yeah? You guys going to offer me a twofer?”
“We’ve got resources private eyes don’t. We might be able to track him down for you. But we need somewhere to start. Do you know the names of any of his associates in Toronto? What about the number of the person he went down to meet?”
“Look in the gutters,” she said. “Back alleys, whorehouses, dingy bars, that sort of thing. You’ll find him sooner or later. Let me know when you do.”
She took another big long drag on a cigarette and hung up. There was a pause and then a dial tone. “Wow,” said Hazel, “did you run her through CPIC?”