Alexandra mumbled an uninterested hello and returned to her book, which some head-tilting of my own helped me recognize as A Wrinkle in Time, one of my old favourites.
Jane pulled me aside. The cloud of worry that had surrounded her in front of my parents’ house was back. “You’ll have gathered Alexandra’s not big on social interaction,” she said. I had gathered Alexandra used reading as a way to avoid social interaction, a coping strategy with which I had both personal and professional experience. Jane went on, so low I had trouble hearing her,“There was an incident this week at school — some in-group out-group nonsense among the girls in her class. It’s been hard on her. “
I twinged with sympathy, and from behind us, Alexandra’s voice said, loudly, “What’s all that barking?”
The library’s picture windows provided a lovely view ofTup straining on his leash and shouting his head off. “Oh no,” I said, “that’s my dog,” and I ran off. Somewhere in my wake, I heard Alexandra say, “She has a dog?”
Outside, I yelled at Tup to be quiet, untied him from the bike rack, and saw why he’d barked: a pack of six dogs of varying sizes lay on the sidewalk. Unlike Tup, these dogs were peaceful and panting, and seemed well under the control of a young man in jeans and a T-shirt who sat on the library bench. He held the dogs’ different-coloured leashes in one hand, and in the other, a paperback book — a mystery novel, it looked like. A baseball cap was pulled down over his eyes. He pointed to Tup, who had begun to sniff around the dog cluster. “Your dog?”
“I’m sorry if he was disturbed by your entourage there. He doesn’t get out in public much.”
He looked up at me from under the cap brim. His eyes were light blue, or rather, blue streaked with white. He said, “My entourage?”
“I meant all the dogs.”
“I know what you meant. Is that black lab yours?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Tup.”
“Yeah. I used to walk him.”
I’m sure I looked as surprised to hear this news as I felt. “You did?”
“He was on my weekday run for the last couple of years.” He gestured to the dogs at his feet. “With some of these guys. Are you the daughter that came home, then?”
I stammered yes and he introduced himself as Patrick Hennessy, a name that stirred in me vague recollections of a large family from a small house on Hillside Road in Rose Park. A large family that included several boys, though the one I could dimly remember had been older than me, and not named Patrick.
Alexandra’s voice spoke up, tugged on my thoughts. “Can I meet the dogs?” She was standing on the library steps, very still, and making direct eye contact with me for the first time. Jane stood beside her, holding Joshua by the hand. “Alexandra loves dogs,” she said.
“I can introduce you to Tup.” I tugged on Tup’s leash, got his nose away from another dog’s behind, and showed Alexandra how to have him smell her hand, let her do some timid head-patting. “And maybe Patrick here will show you his dogs.”
“They’re not all mine,” Patrick said. “I just walk them.” He pointed them out one by one. “The black lab is Pedro. He likes to chase squirrels. The border collie is Kristi — all she wants to do is catch Frisbees. The little pug is Napoleon, the old schnauzer is Asta, the weimaraner is Marmalade, and this brown mutt is Buck. Go ahead and pat them if you like. Except Pedro. He doesn’t like people much.”
Alexandra made her way through the dogs, patted each one on the head, steered clear of Pedro, and finished off with Buck, who licked her hands and made her laugh. “I like Buck the best,” she said to Patrick.
He grinned. “Me, too. Buck’s my dog”
Alexandra restarted her petting circuit, and Jane said to me, aside, “Now she won’t mind so much that I dragged her along this morning. Thank you. And your friend.”
I almost explained that Patrick wasn’t my friend, but didn’t know how to without sounding rude, so I watched Alexandra instead. The encounter with the dog congress had softened the expression on her face, made her look different, happy, like someone who could care less about grade five in-groups and out-groups. I said to Jane, “If Alexandra would like to come with me to the park sometime to walk Tup, she’d be welcome.”
“Thank you” Jane said, “but I don’t know. She’s a little shy with strangers.”
Alexandra said, “I’d like to go. When?”
We made a date for the next day, Sunday, in the afternoon, Jane and family hustled back into the library for Red Riding Hood, and I went ten steps down the sidewalk with Tup before I thought of saying goodbye and thank you to Patrick. I turned back to do so, but he was already a block away, walking in the other direction, his book stuffed into a back pocket, the dogs trotting at his side.
At home, I read through the architectural guide in a few hours and found out about several Rose Park houses I’d never noticed before. One house in particular caught my fancy, a small peak-roofed cottage on Green Street that the guide identified as an example of the Gothic Revival style. I’d have to go see it sometime, see if its charm was more than photograph-deep.
I cracked open Mary Elizabeth Bishop’s account of her life and rambles next, and learned that she was the only daughter of a prosperous brewer who lived on William Street. I also learned that her high-spirited and repetitive account of her daily walks through the area’s sylvan glades was skimworthy, at best. When I came to about the twentieth mention of her faithful terrier Jock — the rabbit-chasing scoundrel — I called an eager Tup, slipped the architectural guide and a new sketchbook I’d bought into a backpack, and set off on a ramble of our own.
Our usual walk destination was the Rose Park sports park — a lively place that was home to tennis courts, a children’s playground, and a football field, and was located four blocks away. This time, I headed off in the other direction, east, to Cawley Gardens, where I took Tup off his leash, let him roam, sat on a bench, and started contemplating the site for its potential as a piece of Molly’s puzzle.
The architectural book contained a 1901 photograph of the Cawley Gardens house, a massive château-style, three-storey, stone-faced mansion that boasted twenty windows on the front alone, multiple roofs dotted with towerettes, and a drive-through columned entranceway termed a porte-cochère. According to the short history on the page, the house reigned in splendour as a private residence for forty years, was sold to the government and used as a convalescent home after World War II, fell into disrepair, and was demolished — a white elephant — in 1960.
Not a sign of it remained. Not a brick, stone, or roof tile. Where the photo showed the house and paved forecourt to have been was now an expanse of thick grass studded with trees grown to heights and breadths sufficient to provide shade for park visitors and climbing opportunities for intrepid children. Where there had been outbuildings and formal landscaped gardens, more grass and trees. I looked around. There had to be some evidence remaining of such a significant house other than the historical society plaque nailed to a rock at the park entrance. Without some sign, how could Molly use the green scene before me for the puzzle book? What could she ask her readers to do? Count the squirrels, name the tree types, match the unleashed dogs with their owners?
There was the house’s old driveway, or drive, still extant, in the form of the rutted roadway that bisected the park. The drive entered the park on the south, flowed over a rampart built to bridge the beginning of the ravine’s slope, led to the tree-dotted lawn where the house’s front had been, and turned west to exit on Highpoint Road. There, the roadway was barred to vehicular traffic by a waist-high steel gate painted in green and white stripes, the colours of the city parks department. Circa nineteen-sixty or seventy-something was my guess for the gate’s vintage. Not any older.
I checked for Tup, spotted him moseying