“Madeleine McCarthy.”
“Just a moment, Madeleine,” and, calling away from the phone, “Tom,” her voice retreating, “Tom? … on the phone … spector Bradley.”
She will tell him everything. About Mr. March. About her father. And Ricky’s name will be cleared. The right thing.
“Hello”—manly and businesslike.
“Hello, Inspector Bradley?”
“No such person here, there’s just me, Tom Bradley, retired, what can I do you for?”
“This is Madeleine McCarthy speaking.” She sees the planes of his face, unsmiling line of his mouth, and feels as though she is lying again.
He pauses, then says, “I know you….” She knows he is probably not thinking of After-Three TV.
“I was a witness at Ricky Froelich’s trial.”
“Bingo.” Silence. The ball is in her court.
“I have new information,” she says.
“Well I’m retired, young lady, but I can give you a number—”
“I was a pupil of Mr. March’s, he was Claire’s — he was our grade four teacher.” She hears a sigh. “I think he was responsible.”
“What do you mean, ‘responsible’?”
“He did it. He murdered her.”
“I wish you gals would co-ordinate your efforts.”
“What do you mean?”
“You and — another girl, what was her name, Deanne, Diane something—”
“Diane Vogel.”
“Right you are, she called me last year, wanting to press charges.”
“Against Mr. March?”
“That’s right. Is that your story too?”
“It’s not a story, it happened.”
“Be that as it may—”
“He raped us. Grace and Marjorie included, that’s why they lied, he played games involving strangulation—”
“Even if—”
“He did it.”
“Yeah okay, look, number one, that was almost twenty-five years ago—”
“So?”
“Number two, he’s dead, all right? So much for that. Number three—”
“Thanks for nothing, buddy.” She will hire a lawyer. “Goodbye.”
“Wait! Wait. Number three: he had an alibi.”
And she knows it as he says it. That day in the schoolyard. The afternoon of flying up.
Bradley says, “You know, I’m sick and tired of people digging this up, I did my job—”
She can hear it, fractured melody on the air, struggling out the windows of the gym. Flat trombones, hesitant woodwinds — the school band bleating out a song, reaching them where they lounged on the grass of the outfield, she and Colleen, as Claire rode up on her pink bike. It’s a world of laughter a world of tears …
“Want to come for a picnic?” Her lunchbox in the basket between her handlebars. Two pink streamers. It’s a world of hope and a world of fears …
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” says Bradley. “Your generation—”
There’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware, it’s a small world after all…. Mr. March conducting the band from the piano, pounding out fat chords at odd intervals so it sounded as though the piece were ending every few bars.
“We can look for a nest,” said Claire.
“—you like to sit in judgement of every bloody thing we did,” says Bradley, pitch rising to a whine—
Claire rode off on her own, and the band was still playing when Madeleine and Colleen left the schoolyard. Mr. March was still in the gym, at band practice, which always went till four-thirty. Madeleine has always known that. It’s a small world after all, it’s a small world after all, it’s a small world after all …
“—but let me tell you something,” says Bradley, “we worked with what we had at the time—”
… it’s a small, small world.
“Thanks, Mr. Bradley.”
“Wait now, I’m not—”
She hangs up. Inspector Bradley is retired. He has all the time in the world. She has three hours to make it up to Tobermory, at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula, where the vastness of Lake Superior flows out into Huron. If she wants to arrive before dark. She opens the folding glass door of the booth and feels the sweat immediately begin to dry on her forehead.
For a moment she can’t recall where she left her car. But she sees it, beyond the hangars, parked on the simmering tarmac. She has a vision of her tires sticking to the viscous black strands as she tries to leave Centralia. But she runs to it, starts the engine, shifts into gear and the bug leaps forward eagerly, like Noddy’s Little Car, parp parp!
She doesn’t see the white buildings receding on either side of her car as she follows Canada Avenue, she doesn’t see the empty guardhouse up ahead. Everything shimmers and melts around her like a mirage, her visual cortex has taken over and will guide her off this old base and toward her destination without her conscious help, because she is seeing something quite different now behind her eyes. It fills the screen in Panavision. Shot from below in rich early sixties pastels, lusher than life, like an illustration from an outdated grade-school reader. Except that this is not a still photo or a drawing. There is a breeze. Caressing the long grass; rippling the leaves in the elm high above, where two or three crows dot the new foliage; lifting the yellow ringlets of the girl to his right. Marjorie. Kissing the curls of the girl to his left. Grace. Playing at the hems of their dresses, their innocent white knees. Mr. March is standing between them in his big grey suit. His glasses glint back the sun, he is holding their hands. All three of them are looking up and to their right, into the sunny blue. Then Mr. March disappears from the picture. And the two little girls are left on their own.
Madeleine passes through the old gates where her father used to touch the brim of his hat to the guard. She passes the cement scar in the ground where the Spitfire once flew on its pedestal. She smells tar and resin and looks up at the telephone pole. Thrusting from a shambles of straw and twigs, a rusting mouth. The old air-raid siren. It’s still there, and so are the crows who made it their home so long ago. It hasn’t sounded since 1962, the crows have had no need to move. So many years of peace in our time.
She turns north on Highway 4. She will pass through Exeter, Clinton, Goderich … the dust will turn to gold behind her car, the lake will wink crystal-blue beyond the dunes, the pines will become more numerous, the landscape rockier and more grand, but she will not see any of it. Instead, she will see what happens after Mr. March vanishes from the picture.
The truth was always there. And it’s far sadder than anything she has imagined. But she knows now: it could never have been her, left lying in that tamped-down spot.
~ ~ ~
“WE’RE NOT GOING TO HURT YOU.” And they weren’t.
“We just want to see something.”
“Yeah Claire.”
They have given her the robin’s egg. She has taken it from Marjorie’s outstretched palm, its shell perfectly intact. Boys are rough with delicate things, but girls know how to be careful. Marjorie says they know where to find more eggs. “Alive ones,” adds Grace.
Claire cups her hands around the egg, hollow and weightless, and follows Marjorie and Grace.
The cornfield is on the other side of the ravine, and beyond it is the meadow where, if you are lucky, you might see a deer — if you are very quiet. And bordering the meadow are the woods.
“That’s where the nest is,” says Marjorie.
They climb the embankment out of Rock Bass. Marjorie leads the way, and Grace lets Claire go ahead.