“She was full of sedatives.”
“Glossy, staring eyes. I pour myself one. I tell her, we’re going to sort this out tonight. He’s got another place, one not even she knows about.”
“On the island.”
“She’d have believed anything I told her. She thought I wanted to help her.” She laughed hoarsely. “We drove down to the lakeshore and took a ferry over… I kept telling her everything was going to be fine.” Her eyes flashed up. “And everything was. I got Colin away from all that, we started over. I hid us better. I got us an unlisted number. None of them could find us. Find me. When he came home at night, it was just him and me. They didn’t exist.”
“Well, Brenda Cameron didn’t.”
“She was no longer a problem.”
“Not at least until she started haunting you.”
There was a glint of understanding in Claire Eldwin’s eye. “Well, then there was that.”
Hazel regarded the woman before them, a woman so sick with love that she’d considered anything she had to do to preserve it within bounds. Hazel had learned more about love this last week than she’d cared to, learned what it could do to those who are diseased with it. That it starts in longing and hope, but it can change, it can become something full of fear and anger, and she thought that Joanne Cameron and Claire Eldwin were linked in this. They had stripped the human patina off love, that social layer that makes people give of themselves, makes them put the loved one ahead of themselves. But under this human love was something more primitive; it stank of territory and possessions. It was something people would kill for, if they felt it threatened. She recalled times in her life when the thought had crossed her mind to go down to Toronto and give a quick pistol-whipping to one of the deadbeats who were making Martha’s life a misery. What had held her back? Mere hope? Or simply the fact she knew it was wrong? Maybe people like Cameron and Eldwin were missing some kind of moral gene. Or did they have an extra one? Was their kind of love a higher love, that knew no bounds? She would never know.
Hazel gave Childress a faint nod, and the constable sprung forward and took her cuffs off her belt. Claire Eldwin heard the clink and stood. “She’s your collar,” said Hazel. “Still feel like it was a wasted night?”
“Mrs. Eldwin,” said Constable Childress, “you are under arrest for the murder of Brenda Cameron, do you understand? You have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. We will provide you with a toll-free telephone lawyer referral service, if you do not have your own lawyer. Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand? Would you like to speak to a lawyer?”
“I want to see my husband.”
“Do you understand the charges against you?” Childress repeated.
“I do.”
She turned Eldwin toward the kitchen door and began to walk her out of the house. Hazel refilled her coffee cup and followed. “Do you have a key to the house?” she asked.
“On the hook by the door.”
Hazel locked up and followed Childress and Eldwin to the car. She could swear Childress was walking taller now. She folded herself into the driver’s seat and waited for Childress to belt Claire Eldwin in. “One more thing, Claire,” she said.
“What?”
“Brenda Cameron wasn’t pregnant. She lied.”
They turned back onto Highway 79 and headed for Mayfair, Claire Eldwin’s last stop before the city of Toronto.
37
The girl lay utterly still in the boat, her hands laced together in her lap. She had closed her eyes and her head felt like it had doubled in weight on Claire’s leg. Her jaw fell open. She’s so drunk. Her face was peaceful, her eyes shuddering under her lids. What was she dreaming of?
They were going to the island to confront him together, to find him and make him choose. She’d believed Claire; she was a creature of faith. But when the ferry put in, the girl was too drunk to walk and she’d ranged up the little streets looking for a couple of bikes to borrow, still pulling on a bottle of red wine. Coming down behind 6th Street and looking into backyards, they’d seen the boat and Claire knew what they would do. It had been a challenge getting the little vessel out of the gate without making too much noise, and when the girl dropped her end on the sidewalk and collapsed laughing, Claire was sure they’d be caught. But no lights went on and they made it to a concrete launch at the bottom of the residential streets and slid the boat into the water. The girl lay on her back, cradling the bottle against her belly, and murmuring. “You’re good… you’re good to take care of me,” she said, and she raised the bottle to her lips and emptied it. “Crap,” she said. “Another dead soldier.” She put the bottle down as Claire navigated the boat into the dark channel that ran into the centre of the Islands.
The moon slid along the curve of the bottle as she angled into the thin waterway with small sailboats and motorboats moored along its edge. She rinsed the bottle out in the water. When it was half full, it bobbed on the surface like a buoy, but if she filled it to the rim, it began to sink. She watched the bottle begin to vanish into the black water, but then she plunged her hand in and pulled it out. She put it down on its side in the hull. The water gurgled out of it, running into the lowest parts of the boat and filling the little channel in the middle. She filled the bottle and emptied it out eight more times. There was a long, two-inch-wide puddle running down the middle of the boat’s hull, but nothing was going to wake the girl now.
She shifted her body and cradled the back of the girl’s head in her hands. As she lowered her to the floor of the boat, she turned her face so her body would follow onto its side and the girl adjusted and turned into a fetal position, as if she were in bed. The boat bobbed with the shifting weight of the two women. The oars hung in their locks, the paddles dragging in the water as they drifted slowly up the channel between Ward’s and Algonquin islands. Claire kneeled down and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and pulled it gently toward her. Slowly, receptive to the pressure, the girl turned on her belly, sighing. With one more nudge, her face was centred over the runnel that ran down the middle of the boat, and Claire could hear her blowing bubbles in the inch of water she’d emptied out into the bottom.
Leaning down, she could see her own face in the thin line of water, her long, sad face, full of knowledge. Because knowledge was the problem: if she had known nothing, if she had remained blissfully free of what he’d been careless enough to let her find out, she could have gone on. Welcomed him home in the evenings joyously ignorant, shared her meals with him, his bed, his stories of his work, those stories she knew also to be lies, but she would believe them just the same. It was all she wanted: to remain in the dark. But he could not even do that for her, the women he destroyed found their way to her, full of sorrow and anger and spite, and she could do nothing for them. But this one, this one she could help.
The sky above was clear but empty: all the stars that hung above the city were devoured by its light and the only light in the sky came from the moon. It was a half-moon now, a drowsing moon, and it was as if nothing knew they were here, no mind, no heart knew her heart or mind. She was alone. In some ways, she’d always been alone, victim to a helpless love, but now she was more alone than she’d ever been, decided on an action that she knew would change nothing.