She mentioned it to him after dinner. “Gas has gone up to 1.295 a litre with hell between us and peak oil, and you think I should get a larger car? My dear girl.” He finished the last crumb of chocolate layer cake and tossed down his serviette. “Follow me. I want you to see something amazing. I did not purchase that vehicle on a whim or because I’m merely...frugal. Give your paterfamilias credit.”
They went upstairs to his computer, where he spent a few minutes clicking on Google, then Videos. Bouncing in his seat like a kid, he turned to her with a grin. “Here we are. Road tests of the Smart Car. It’s made by Mercedes, you know. Precision German mechanics. They lost the war but not the engineering race.” Then he turned up the sound.
She watched in horror as the unpiloted car barrelled down the road cartoon-style, hellbent on its mission, then smashed into a concrete barrier and bounced to a stop. When the dust settled, the cage was intact, the integrity complete. She let out a giant breath. “Whooee. I am so impressed.”
Her father stood back, arms folded in an “I told you so” pose. “Now where am I going to get into an accident like that? Eighty miles per hour. I’m hardly driving over fifty kilometres most of the time. Your mother was the speed demon, remember?”
Later that night, reading in bed, she welcomed Shogun up with her for moral support. Then she started examining the letters. At first they were innocuous enough. Something about missing him, which could have a collegial interpretation. But the last two seemed to support Gall’s scenario. Her mother’s idiosyncratic angular handwriting made time disappear. “I’ll need to think about your proposal,” it read. “But my heart tells me that we have such little time on earth. Holly is on her way, building her own life as it should be.” Then in the final letter, dated the week before she disappeared, she said, “I’ve made up my mind. Leaving will sting Norman, but his career will sustain him. And he’s a good-looking man. It’s possible he’ll find someone else, given time. Next week I’ll contact Richard Mayhue. If he can’t handle the divorce, he’ll know someone who can. This time in a few months, my love, we’ll be together forever. Or as much together as my life can manage.” Something rose in Holly’s throat as lyrics from an inane disco song wormed into her ears. “Together forever, forever, we two.”
Holly moved her legs under the quilt, and Shogun growled and jumped off the bed, looking at her accusingly. Had an event in his past spooked him about certain movements? Had he been kicked off a bed as a pup? She heard a toilet flush and shoved the letters under a pillow. Sometime she might tell her father. Perhaps he already knew. But that gave him a motive for...she didn’t want to follow that thread. It would destroy her life.
The door, already ajar, opened as she heard a discreet “knock, knock.” She looked up, afraid that the letters under the pillow were burning a hole in the mattress. “So there you are, Shogie. In a lady’s boudoir, no less.” Norman gazed at Holly in assumed innocence. “Are you two good friends now?”
She cast a suspicious glance at the dog, now lying on the carpet and grooming one foot in a meticulous fashion, the little prince. “Whenever I move my legs, he does this Charlie Manson act.”
Her father chuckled, rubbing his chin. “Just a border collie. Ignore him.”
She laughed. “Like you’ve been reading to me from the forums on the net? My dog eats holes in the drywall. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Barks my ears deaf if I stop to talk to someone. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Rolls in dead salmon. Oh, it’s... You get the point. These dogs get forgiven for everything.”
Her father snapped his fingers, and Shogun got up to leave. “Be a realist, Holly. He’s not a GSD. To serve and protect is not his watchword.”
She fluffed her pillow, then sat back. “I wonder what his watchword is?”
“He’ll let us know. Don’t they always?”
She slept fitfully that night. Two geese, identified by their companionable chatter, had put her house on their flight path. Not at all migratory, the local flock flew daily rounds to visit farms and pastureland. Why bother with that north and south nonsense when they could stay in paradise? Where in this unnatural Eden did they nest safe from cougars, in swamps where the skunk cabbage grew? Their honking, at times canine and at others almost human, kept awakening her from the deep REM levels that would refresh her. Pounding the pillow, she remembered a news story about a grandmother killing her family after hearing “commands” from the geese. Now there was a unique excuse. Had it worked?
Nine
Ann came into Holly’s office a few days later, bearing a fax. “This just in.”
A “Thanks.” A smile passed between the women. Mike was in the clear on the condom package prints, but Billy’s prints from the left thumb and forefinger matched in twelve different ways, substantial proof. Disappointing news. The young man had seemed honest. Now he was in serious trouble. After studying the whorled diagrams and the arrows of comparison, she called Whitehouse. “It’s still ambiguous. Maybe there’s another girl involved. Maybe the package was there from an earlier rendezvous.”
“Give me a break.” He snorted. “But how did you get those fingerprints again?”
“Purely voluntary. There had been a car broken into at the park.”
“That’s one thing you did right. My compliments. Get those boys in this afternoon. I’ll be right over. Our problems with this annoying case are nearly over. When they’re faced with hard evidence, they crumble like burnt toast.” He hung up with a perfunctory grunt.
Holly craned her head into the main office. Chipper was at one of the computers. She’d assigned him to looking into the sporadic radio connections on the southern island. In a crisis, communication lines were crucial, especially with only one coastal artery. A killer tsunami, well-documented in native oral history, could leave them as helpless as the Salish woman tossed into a tree. She fell from the branches and became a hunchback, but lived to tell a tale so amazing that it had survived without paper for three hundred years.
A mug of fragrant jasmine tea by his side, he was making notes, biting his lower lip in such concentration that he looked like a schoolboy. “Chipper,” she called. “We need you over at Edward Milne for a pickup. Tell them to send a counsellor if the parents can’t come. Whitehouse wants this done ASAP. And don’t let the boys sit together. Put one in the front.”
Holly gave serious thought to the way she had entrapped Billy, the specious reason for taking prints. But both boys had volunteered. If they had been innocent of that crime, why would they have refused? Did they play a role in Angie’s death? Within legal limitations, bringing out the truth was the goal. An officer without compassion was a danger, but too much empathy was an emotional straitjacket. She thought of Mrs. Jenkins and felt strangely disloyal.
The boys arrived at noon. Whitehouse took Billy first and Holly sat nearby, along with a mousy female counsellor who seemed more attentive to the condition of her cuticles than the unfolding scene. She wore designer jeans, plastic barrettes in her unnaturally russet hair, and a peasant blouse, giving her the appearance of a student who had stayed too long at the fair.
The shabby interview room was silent as Holly began the recording at Whitehouse’s nod. He didn’t open the window but let the heat build. Holly’s tie choked her as she fought the urge to adjust it. Sweating characters in search of an author. Opening with ponderous formalities, the Inspector stared down his long nose and used pauses like whips, watching Billy’s pupils enlarge as an open condom package was taken from a labelled brown paper bag and placed on the desk.
His eyes sought Holly’s, making her uncomfortable. “But I thought...you said—”
“We’re