of here, as you know, and we’ve got roadblocks up everywhere. Until we get some daylight, there isn’t much else we can do.” He paused, then turned to look directly at Jake sprawled on the floor, his head propped on a feedbag. “And as for the Ottawa Police, they have no business up here at all in any kind of official capacity.”
There was no response from Jake whose mind was on something else.
Constable Stapley had managed to round up a few light bulbs, but Charron had instructed that nothing in the house was to be touched until the special investigators arrived from Montreal.
Shortly after his arrival, the superintendent, alone, careful not to disturb anything, had gone from room to room with a flashlight to insure there was no obvious evidence, or so he told Grant. What he really wanted to be certain of was that a body, or perhaps even two, had not been left sprawled inside, but he found nothing amiss other than the broken lights, the gruesome desk lamp and the licence plate. There was not the slightest sign of a struggle.
He spent a long time staring at the licence plate still lying on the desk in the eerie light.
“Damn,” he whispered into the shadows, “has it come to this?”
4:33 AM • DAY ONE
It was Jake who found Lee’s hair. His nerves were screaming at him; he found the waiting intolerable, but there was something else, something poking around at the edges of his consciousness. What had he seen during his wild ride down the laneway? A movement of some kind. Where? Puzzled, he slouched to his feet and, ignoring Charron’s glare and admonition not to touch anything, borrowed Stapley’s flashlight and stepped outside.
The rain had stopped, a few stars were out, and to the east across the Gatineau River, a faint glow indicated the roosters’ instincts were correct. Dawn was just on the other side of the mountain.
Jake began to explore the patio, casting the cone of light from side to side. Something drew him to Grant’s car, the empty socket of its smashed headlight faintly visible in the growing light. He opened the driver’s side door and augmenting the overhead light with his flash, explored first the front seat and floor then the back. Nothing. Slowly he withdrew and closed the door. His heart was pounding. What was it? And then the veil dissolved. He saw it clearly. Something moving beside him on the seat. Running around to the passenger side, he threw open the door.
He didn’t need the flashlight to see it. There it was, almost under the seat, tight against the gearshift hump where it had fallen during his wild ride down the laneway. A clump of blonde hair, maybe five inches long, tightly tied with a blue ribbon. Lee’s.
* * *
The pregnancy had been a delightful surprise and the cause of considerable concern. Only three months into their marriage, Carol had suffered a traumatic miscarriage late in the second trimester, and her doctor was not at all sure if she could become pregnant again, let alone carry a child to term. Fortunately the doctor’s concerns were unfounded. Aside from the fact the birth had to be induced ten days late, the pregnancy had been absolutely normal. Lee could not have been a happier, more lovable child.
Her great-great paternal grandfather had been a Danish sea captain from whom she had inherited, as had all his descendants, the blonde hair and blue eyes which once prompted someone to remark that Henry family reunions, with their ever-increasing swarms of children swooping about, were beginning to look a lot like gatherings of little Viking munchkins!
The fact she was an only child occasionally concerned both Grant and Carol. They discussed adoption several times, but while neither would ever admit it, even to themselves, they sensed their own relationship was too fragile to risk another ingredient. If Lee missed the company of siblings, she gave no indication of it.
Carol was determined Lee was going to be raised, not as she had been, like one of a large brood of cute, rough and tumble puppies, but by the book. Any book it seemed, so long as it dealt with child development or psychology. From Spock to Burton-White, Lee was guinea pig to it all, and none of it appeared to make the slightest difference. No matter what school of psychology Carol was avidly devoted to that particular month, Lee just kept doing what she had done since birth, what just seemed to come naturally: Smiling, laughing, singing, exploring and bouncing about.
Their home movies and videos were an endless montage of Lee mugging for the camera, Lee opening Christmas presents with big smiles, Lee singing at the school concert, Lee playing with Niki, Lee coming up laughing after taking a tumble on her new bike. The only variant was one shot which they used to play over and over, to great guffaws every time, of Lee, aged about five, carefully feeding her newly acquired chickens. To shouts of “watch this, watch this,” every time they screened it, one of the roosters, not much bigger than Grant’s fist, marched boldly up to Lee’s leg, and without warning, landed a vigorous peck. You could see Lee’s look of astonishment, only inches from the camera, then the eyes crinkling into tears, not of pain, but of absolute shock and disbelief at the discovery that the world held anything but kindness and love for her.
Grant remembered thinking more than once, while watching that scene, that Lee was destined for a few more shocks in her life.
The decision to move to the Gatineau Hills of Quebec shortly after Grant and Carol were married had been easy. House prices were about a third less than on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River and the spectacularly rugged mountain terrain entranced them both; but it was the house, from the moment they saw it, that convinced them this was where they wanted to live.
Built originally as a large and ornate summer cottage, bits and pieces had been tacked on over the years, until now it sprawled and rambled so much neighbours began calling it Chateau Henri as a local joke.
That first winter they almost froze to death, the oil furnace and huge fireplace no match for the arctic winds which whistled merrily through the walls and floor. Residents of the tiny nearby village of Poisson Blanc were obviously more than a little amused at the crazy Anglais who dared spend a Gatineau winter in a summer cottage, chateau or not.
A local wit suggested to his buddies one day that his wife was so upset with him over a weekend drunk, she had become frois comme le Chateau Henri, as cold as the Chateau Henry. And so was born a bit of local folklore.
Separatism was not an issue most Canadians gave much thought to when Grant and Carol first moved to Quebec.
For Grant, the first inkling of what lay ahead occurred one evening in that bastion of the ruling Westmount class at the time, the Ritz Café, on the lower floor of Montreal’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. They were there to celebrate the launch of his talk show in Ottawa.
As was the custom at the Ritz, seating was in concentric circles, according to power and wealth. The richest and most powerful were carefully placed in the booths circling the outer edges of the dining room. Everyone else was pretty well relegated to the centre of the room. “Just a little,” Grant told Carol as they were seated, “like the good old days, when all we sinners had to sit in the back rows of my grandfather’s church, except here at the Ritz it’s not the back rows for those of us not among the chosen few, it’s the middle of the room!”
The evening was about half over when the tempo of the Café suddenly changed; a quickening of its pulse, a subtle shift to a higher gear. Voices switched from English to French, a decibel louder, then up another notch. Waiters, almost torpid with servitude and acquiescence, began bustling with excitement and purpose. All eyes, including those which otherwise would have been focused on the outer circle to detect the slightest arched eyebrow, or raised finger, snapped to the front entrance where a beautiful ash blonde woman, dressed entirely in black leather, swept in. Amazingly, she was virtually ignored. The excitement was generated, not by her, but by the little wizened bantam rooster of a guy, hair carelessly thrown over to one side, stained fingers clutching a cigarette, strutting cockily behind her.
René Levesque, recently elected leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, was greeted and escorted across the room with great ceremony by the headwaiter, then immediately surrounded by a small bubbling army of waiters and bus boys at the table