Inger Wolfe - The Taken

“Thank you,” said Eldwin, taking her hand. She looked disoriented and exhausted. Hazel guessed that the bottle had been her companion the night before. “You’re soaked. Have you been out all night?”

“All night,” confirmed Childress.

“You must be freezing. I’ll put on some coffee and get dressed.” She disappeared into the kitchen. They heard the beeps and grinding of the coffeemaker being started. “It’ll take three minutes. Make yourself at home.”

They went into the kitchen and Childress opened the fridge. It was nearly empty, but she found a carrot in the crisper and began to eat it. “Sorry, I’m starving.”

“Go ahead,” said Hazel. She watched the coffeemaker fill. Her eyes were drifting over the cupboards and countertops and she thought she might fall asleep in the chair. But her night was not over yet.

Eldwin returned in jeans and a black shirt and poured the coffees. She had a bag full of clothes for her husband. “Should we take the coffees with us?”

“No,” said Hazel. “Maybe you should sit for a couple minutes with us. So we can prepare you.”

“God,” said Claire Eldwin, sitting. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It’s not good. He was set adrift in a canoe, wrapped in cloth, and it rained on him all night. He was barely alive when we found him, half drowned and freezing. He didn’t have much of a pulse.” She waited a moment as Eldwin took this in. “Mrs. Eldwin, he’s missing a hand.”

Claire set her coffee down with a jolt. “Oh no -”

“There’ll be time to explain everything later. But I just want you to be prepared.”

Eldwin stood. “We should go.”

“Just another minute. There’s more.”

She sat.

“Your husband’s innocent.”

“I told you he couldn’t have done it. He might be an unrepentant cheat, but he’s not a killer.”

“I guess you knew him better than we did.”

“I am his wife,” she said. Hazel turned to Childress, as if looking for confirmation of something, and when she brought her eyes back, Claire said, “What else?”

“There’s this,” said Hazel. She reached into her jacket and took out the book she’d bought in Toronto. She tossed it onto the table and watched Claire Eldwin’s reaction. “Before we go, I’m wondering if you’d sign this?” It was a mystery novel called Utter Death , by Clarence Earles. Claire Eldwin extended her hand slowly and picked it up. She held it almost tenderly. “I thought the inheritance story I heard sounded like a load of bull.”

“Clarence has been very good to us,” she said. She turned it over. “This is an early one. I started it before Colin and I met. Taking his class helped me finish it.”

“Did Colin even know he had a story in the Westmuir Record ?”

Eldwin was still staring at the back of the book. “No,” she said softly. “He got the New York Times . He thought the local papers were garbage. There was no risk he’d see it.”

“But someone else did.”

“Clearly,” said Eldwin. She turned the novel idly in her hands and looked at the back cover.

“I’m betting Colin didn’t even know it’d been published under his name until they showed it to him. Imagine what your husband’s denials must have sounded like. Pretty far-fetched. I bet it made them bloody mad.”

“I stopped writing it when Colin vanished. Then more chapters appeared.”

“I’ve spent two weeks reading between the lines. Joanne Cameron was almost right, she just had the wrong Eldwin.”

“I never meant -”

“Three years is a long time to live with the kind of secret you’ve been keeping, Claire. I guess you never imagined what it might cost to get it out of your system. He might die for your sins now, too.”

“They’re his sins as well.” She looked at Hazel for the first time. “Putting two and two together is impressive, Detective Inspector. But it won’t stand up in court. If you’ve ever read these books, you’ll know deduction isn’t the same as proof.”

“I don’t have to read books to know that, and you’re wrong,” said Hazel. “The glass you drank from yesterday when you came in? We took the prints off it and matched them to prints taken from the oars of the boat you and Brenda Cameron stole that night.” Hazel waited for a response, a denial, but instead, a serene look stole across Claire Eldwin’s face. “Tell me, Claire… how’d you convince her to take a boat ride with you?”

Eldwin exhaled deeply. “That girl would have done anything if she thought it meant she’d get something out of it.”

“She got more out of it than she was planning, didn’t she?”

“She came to me after Colin kicked her out. She told me that she was pregnant.”

“You offered to help her confront him again.”

Claire Eldwin pulled her coffee across the table toward herself. “There were so many girls. He had that place downtown for them, but he never really tried to hide them from me. They found me somehow. Complained about the way he treated them. Sometimes I thought he wanted me to know.”

“How come you never left him?”

“Why does anyone put up with being treated badly? Because you think you deserve it. And because, despite yourself, you’re still in love. And then this one shows up at the house.” Her eyes were faraway, opening her door that August night three years earlier. “She’s flying on something, her face all red and pale from crying. She apologizes for disturbing me, but there’s something I should know.” A tear splashed in her coffee. She looked up, her eyes distant. “She’s pregnant! All this time, he’d been sharing something with these foolish women that at least he didn’t deny me. But he’d never wanted kids. Always said he was too selfish to be a father, and I certainly believed him. Brenda said she wanted me to hear it from her: that he was leaving me, that they were starting a family. ‘Why aren’t you happy, then?’ I ask her. ‘You got what you wanted.’ But she sits down… at this table, in fact – we had it in the old house – and puts her head in her hands. Then she tells me the ‘truth’… that he’s rejected her. He doesn’t care that she’s pregnant. But he loves her, she’s sure of that. And she’s come to tell me in person, out of a sense of honour, she says. Her story keeps changing, like a crazy person’s. I feel pity for her. I pour her a brandy to calm her down. She drinks it like it’s apple juice and I refill her glass. She must have been drunk when she arrived.”

“She was full of sedatives.”

“Glossy, staring eyes. I pour myself one. I tell her, we’re going to sort this out tonight. He’s got another place, one not even she knows about.”

“On the island.”

“She’d have believed anything I told her. She thought I wanted to help her.” She laughed hoarsely. “We drove down to the lakeshore and took a ferry over… I kept telling her everything was going to be fine.” Her eyes flashed up. “And everything was. I got Colin away from all that, we started over. I hid us better. I got us an unlisted number. None of them could find us. Find me. When he came home at night, it was just him and me. They didn’t exist.”

“Well, Brenda Cameron didn’t.”

“She was no longer a problem.”

“Not at least until she started haunting you.”

There was a glint of understanding in Claire Eldwin’s eye. “Well, then there was that.”

Hazel regarded the woman before them, a woman so sick with love that she’d considered anything she had to do to preserve it within bounds. Hazel had learned more about love this last week than she’d cared to, learned what it could do to those who are diseased with it. That it starts in longing and hope, but it can change, it can become something full of fear and anger, and she thought that Joanne Cameron and Claire Eldwin were linked in this. They had stripped the human patina off love, that social layer that makes people give of themselves, makes them put the loved one ahead of themselves. But under this human love was something more primitive; it stank of territory and possessions. It was something people would kill for, if they felt it threatened. She recalled times in her life when the thought had crossed her mind to go down to Toronto and give a quick pistol-whipping to one of the deadbeats who were making Martha’s life a misery. What had held her back? Mere hope? Or simply the fact she knew it was wrong? Maybe people like Cameron and Eldwin were missing some kind of moral gene. Or did they have an extra one? Was their kind of love a higher love, that knew no bounds? She would never know.