“Um.”
Harris found a stub of pencil in his jacket and wrote the question on a corner of the tissue paper.
“No, like I said. In the spring, she and another lady, but not since May or April.” The miller gave the coins in his pocket a wistful, indiscreet rattle of which he was doubtless unaware. “I would have paid sterling too,” he said, “no paper money.”
Continuing the interview would have been awkward enough even if the man had been willing to acknowledge his deafness. Harris approached the helper.
A young immigrant working to bring his betrothed out from Cork, he became cooperation itself on learning that Mrs. Crane’s parents had come from that very county. Of her mount’s markings he gave a detailed description. It fit Spat exactly. In declining the miller’s offers, Theresa had reportedly said the animal was too old and nervous to change stables. The other lady was remembered as dark and fine-featured. The Irishman had not caught her name, nor had he understood anything the horsewomen said to each other. They seemed not to be speaking English. Not Gaelic either. Neither had been seen for weeks.
Harris accepted a slice of pork pie and a glass of cider for his lunch before pursuing an old settlers’ road down the east brink of the river. Thirty-foot cliffs shut out any glimpse of the wheat fields and orchards he knew lay to either side and above him. On occasion he would clamber out of the valley to ask well-rehearsed questions at farm houses. Then he would rejoin the Rouge none the wiser. What kept him going was that no one south of the fourth concession could swear that Theresa had not ridden this way last Sunday.
Afternoon passed into evening. He had just left the last mill on the river when the rain began again, tentative and caressing at first. By the time he thought of his cape, his clothes were soaked through.
The valley grew swampy and desolate in its final mile. Enormous steps carved at one point into the cliffs from top to bottom constituted the only sign of human passage. These Harris recognized as the terraced graves of a long-abandoned Seneca Indian village. They were not a comforting omen. Nearer Lake Ontario, the aggrieved shrieks of gulls began to drown out the patter of raindrops on willow leaves.
Then Harris turned the last bend and found himself facing a wall of earth, a great hand pressed over the river’s mouth. This must be the embankment of the Grand Trunk Railway. In fact, a narrow outlet spanned by a trestle had been left for the Rouge water to escape to the lake, but the flow was too great and the river had backed up into a lagoon. Its waters had drowned a frame factory building labelled, “COWAN’S SHIPYARD: 2 & 3 masted schooners built to order.”
So, another blind alley. Wet and saddle-sore, Harris concluded that the best place for him now was in front of his own fire with a glass of something warming at his side. First, though, he stopped to mop the water from his face and pull his hat brim lower. Standing a moment in the stirrups, he stretched his legs and redistributed his weight. Before his inattentive eyes, two gulls picked and tore at a long white fish that lay on a patch of sand at the foot of the railway trestle. The G.T.R. wasn’t yet accepting passengers or freight west of Brockville, but this section of the line seemed to be complete.
Harris settled back in the saddle, preparing to move on. Which end of that fish, he wondered, was the head and which the tail? No, the head must be missing. That end was ragged and torn.
Wearily he tried again to make sense of what he was seeing. It was long and pale, but it was not a fish. Where the tail fins should have been were fingers.
The inside of his stomach began to twitch. Harris was daring enough in a physical sense and not too squeamish to clean and dress the game he killed, but that was a sportsman’s courage—not a soldier’s—and he had no practice in dealing with severed human limbs.
Only by ignoring this twitching was he able to urge Banshee forward into the water and across the lagoon’s sandy bottom. The scolding gulls hoisted themselves into the air and spiralled tightly over their interrupted meal.
Harris could bear to look at it only in glances. Bone seemed to be exposed below the elbow as well as at the shoulder. His first thought was to stop further pillage by burying the remains, but perhaps the topography should be disturbed as little as possible until seen by official eyes. At the water’s edge he dismounted and unrolled his oilskin. As he covered the arm, he glimpsed clinging to it green shreds of cloth and circling the wrist a bracelet of silver medallions. The edges of the cape he weighted down with stones.
He did not believe it was Theresa’s arm. There were thousands of miles of green cloth in the world. The bracelet . . .
Remounting a little queasily, he picked his way up the valley in the fading light. If he could only get away from this place, he should be able to think. The place went with him, however. The barest whiff of something rancid and waxy seemed to have rooted in the back of his throat and to be growing there. His nausea made even Banshee’s gentlest gait insupportable.
He got down and vomited. The waxy taste was still there, but he felt steadier—steady enough, at least, to realize that he had no idea where to report his discovery.
The last mill was shut this Saturday evening and empty. In the taverns at the east end of the Kingston Road bridge, advice would flow like stagger juice, but anyone asking for a constable would face insistent questions. Harris accordingly turned west at the bridge, back towards Toronto. A talk with the Rouge Hill toll collector some half a mile later did nothing to deflect him from his course.
The toll booth consisted of a faded, two-storey frame house with a roof that extended north across the highway to a blank supporting wall on the other side. The collector had had enough experience with sneaks and bullies to appreciate the difficulty of finding the police. The nearest lived in Highland Creek, but that was Scarboro and this was Pickering. The Pickering lock-up might as well have been on the moon. You would never get a constable out at night anyway.
Harris continued townwards. The pine-planked surface of the Kingston Road clattered horribly beneath the horse’s hoofs—an ear-splitting amplification of the agitation in Harris’s breast. He quickly switched over to the dirt shoulder. The panic followed him, merely growing more stealthily in the dark and lonely night.
The remains were not Theresa’s. Someone must tell him that. He feared, with a fear approaching a certainty, that no one would.
When he reached Market Square, mad fiddle music was spilling out of taverns and breaking against the austere face of Toronto’s dark and all-but empty City Hall. Down in Station No. 1, an unfamiliar constable kept vigil. He denied any knowledge of Inspector John Vandervoort. Harris could try coming back on Monday.
Harris tried the Dog and Duck. The taproom was so dimly lit that the elk and whitetail trophy heads along the wall were mutually indistinguishable. Indeed, gloom seemed to clothe the few women present more effectually than their gowns which, as far as Harris could see when he began moving from table to table, all had buttons undone if not actually missing. Overheard conversations between them and their companions often touched on “going upstairs.” Impeded by modesty, but more by the dark, Harris completed his tour of the room without finding his man. He applied to the proprietor.
Vandervoort was known to that individual as a dedicated drinker, though by no means a troublesome one. Indeed, his patronage was an asset at licence-renewal time. This was as candid as Harris could wish, but when he asked about tonight in particular, the bluff hotel-keeper turned smarmy.
“Don’t see him, I’m afraid. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Couldn’t say, sir. I might just get a message to him, though, if it’s urgent.”
“It’s urgent that I see him,” said Harris—but he was again assured that a message was the most that could be undertaken.
At the stable of the less furtive-looking hotel next door, Harris left his horse to be watered and fed. Returning to the bank on foot, he changed into dry clothes and wrote a letter