Lewis looked up from her notebook at the sound of the back door. A moment later, Shoe’s sister, Rachel, came up the stairs into the kitchen. She was wearing shorts and an athletic top darkened with perspiration. She had a tiny white MP3 player clipped to the waistband of her shorts, the earbuds hanging around her neck on fine, white wires.
“Hey, Joe,” she said brightly. “I smell coffee — ” She saw Lewis and Timmons. “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Shoe introduced Detective Sergeant Lewis and Detective Constable Timmons. Rachel’s expression darkened as Timmons’s eyes moved quickly up and down her body. Her shorts and damp top clung like a second skin.
“What’s happened?” she said.
“We’re investigating the death of a man named Marvin Cartwright,” Sergeant Lewis said.
“Marvin … ” Rachel blinked and for a moment she was far away. She blinked again as she returned to the present. “My god. I haven’t thought of him in years.” Her eyes narrowed. “How did he die? I mean, you wouldn’t be investigating his death if he’d died of natural causes, would you?”
“Sometime late last night or early this morning he was beaten to death in the wooded area behind your parents’ house.”
“Beaten to death? By whom?”
“That’s what we’re investigating,” Lewis said.
“Yes, of course.” She shivered. “Would you mind if I got dressed? I’m getting chilled. The air conditioning is set too high again,” she added, in a disapproving tone of voice.
“We just have a couple of questions … ”
“Which I’ll gladly answer after I’ve changed.” Without waiting for a reply, Rachel turned and strode down the hall toward the bedrooms.
Lewis looked at Timmons. He shrugged, as if to say, “What can you do?”
Lewis looked at her notebook, then at Shoe. “Were you one of the kids Cartwright invited into his house?”
“No,” he replied. “But my sister was.”
“How old was she?”
“She was eleven when he moved away.” Shoe said. “I don’t remember how long he’d been having the kids in.”
“Couldn’t’ve been more’n two or three years, eh, Mother?” Shoe’s father said.
“She and the other children started visiting Mr. Cartwright around the time Rachel turned six,” Shoe’s mother said. “She was very upset when he left. She adored him.”
“You said he left after his mother died. What was wrong with her?”
Vera Schumacher shook her head, dark eyes unfocused. “No one knew. No one ever saw her, except when the ambulance came. Not even the children who visited him. He’d shoo them out whenever she called to him. Then one day an ambulance took her away and never brought her back. A week later a moving van came and packed everything up. The people who bought the house, the Bronsteins, said that except for a broken basement window it was like no one had ever lived there. No one ever saw Mr. Cartwright again.”
Rachel came into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her dark hair brushed back from her face. Shoe was struck by how much she resembled their mother when she was younger: her compact physique, her broad cheekbones, dark eyes, and slightly square jaw.
“For the record, Ms. Schumacher,” Lewis said. “Where were you between midnight and 2:00 a.m. last night?”
“I was here,” Rachel replied.
“You live here?”
“Sort of,” she replied. “I have a house in Port Credit, but — ”
“Thinks we’re gettin’ too old to take care of ourselves,” Shoe’s father grumbled.
Rachel sighed. “That’s not it at all, Pop. It’s just easier this way.”
“Humph,” Howard Schumacher said.
“Why do you think Cartwright came back after all these years?” Lewis asked.
“I haven’t any idea,” Rachel said.
“Your mother told the officers that there was a homecoming festival this weekend. Could he have come for that?”
“I suppose. We ran some ads in local newspapers. We also have a website. Maybe he saw it, but he wasn’t registered.”
“Have you been in touch with him at all since he left?”
“No.”
Lewis studied her notebook, ostensibly reviewing her notes in preparation for her next question. Shoe recognized it as a common interview technique. Many subjects, to fill the silence, will volunteer information, often taking the interview in unexpected directions. It wasn’t a tactic that was likely to work well with his parents, however, especially his mother. She had inherited her Native ancestors’ distrust of unnecessary talk, and had passed the trait on to Rachel and him — he wasn’t sure about their older brother, Hal. To some degree, it had also rubbed off on his father.
“Besides the boys who played practical jokes on him,” Lewis said after a moment, “was there anyone who particularly disliked him or who had a run-in with him? Maybe someone who didn’t like the little kids visiting him in his house?”
“Well,” Shoe’s father said slowly, hesitantly.
“What?” Lewis asked.
“Howard,” Shoe’s mother said. “Those were simply ugly rumours spread by people with nothing better to do than think the worst of others.”
“Sorry, Mother,” Shoe’s father said uncomfortably. “It might be important.” Shoe knew what his mother was referring to and didn’t blame his father for being uncomfortable. “Maybe we could go into the other room,” Shoe’s father said to Sergeant Lewis.
“Howard,” Shoe’s mother said sternly. “I’m not a child to be sent to her room when the grown-ups want to talk.”
“What is it?” Lewis asked, unable to hide her impatience.
“Well,” Shoe’s father said again.
Shoe put his hand on his father’s shoulder, and said to Sergeant Lewis, “That summer, before Cartwright moved away, there were a series of sexual assaults in the woods. One of the victims died. The media dubbed the perpetrator the Black Creek Rapist. As far as I know, the case was never solved.”
“God,” Rachel said. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
“Cartwright was a suspect?” Lewis asked.
“A lot of people in the neighbourhood seemed to think so,” Shoe said.
“Damn fools, if you ask me,” his father interjected.
“If for no other reason that he was different,” Shoe continued. “A forty-year-old single man, with no apparent means of support — apparent to his neighbours, anyway — and living with his invalid mother. But the police interviewed most of the men and older boys in the neighbourhood. The thing is, to the best of my recollection, there were no more assaults after Cartwright moved away.”
“Did you know any of the victims?”
“I was acquainted with three of them,” Shoe said.
“How many were there?”
“Four, that I’m aware of.”
“What can you tell us?”
Shoe cast his mind back. “The first victim was a girl I knew from junior high school. Her name was Daphne McKinnon.” Shoe recalled a shy, slightly