Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Her mother takes the paper and thrusts it at her father, saying, “I don’t want any of these in the house”—as though she were talking about getting rid of all the spinning wheels in the kingdom.

Jack is neither surprised nor offended, he merely folds the paper into his briefcase, and when Mike comes down and turns on the radio for the news, Jack shuts it right back off. They eat breakfast, Mimi dressed and made up as usual, leaning against the counter with her coffee and cigarette. It is as silent as it was during the missile crisis. This time, however, there is not even the crinkle of newspaper pages. Just the sound of crunching. Madeleine looks at Mike. He is wearing the same innocent expression as her father. She pokes her toad-in-the-hole and the yolk streams out.

Today is a holiday. But it’s Good Friday, which means you are not supposed to have too much fun. There is to be no television tonight — Jesus is on the Cross, this is no time to be watching the Three Stooges. Mike is not even allowed to play road hockey. Maman lays down the law every year. And for supper, fish. Not fish ’n’ chips, but a piece of watery white flesh on the plate next to pallid canned peas and boiled potatoes. No dessert. Offer it up for the suffering of Our Lord. When He was thirsty, all they gave him to drink was vinegar. Remember the poor starving children in Africa. It is raining, because it always rains on Good Friday.

Madeleine leaves to call on Auriel, but sees Colleen out in front of the Froelich house in a rain poncho. She is crouched with her coffee can, parting the grass with her fingers. Madeleine quietly retreats and cuts through several backyards before emerging farther up and crossing the street to the Bouchers’ house. They are going to listen to Auriel’s mum’s Vera Lynn records and let the budgie fly around. Then they’ll go next door and play with Lisa’s new baby brother. They will continue to speculate about Claire’s perilous adventure. Auriel has suggested that she may have run away to Disneyland. As Madeleine knocks on the Bouchers’ door, she glances down the street to where Colleen is making patient progress across her front yard.

“Hello pet, come in out of the rain,” says Mrs. Boucher. Madeleine smells cinnamon buns baking — Mrs. Boucher is Anglican, they don’t have to suffer as much on Good Friday. Something in her expression changes as she looks over Madeleine’s head toward the street. Madeleine turns to see a police car coming up St. Lawrence Avenue. It crawls past them, then turns into the Froelichs’ driveway. Colleen Froelich stands up with her coffee can.

Mrs. Boucher says, “In you go, love,” turning to call up the stairs: “Auriel, Madeleine’s here.”

AN OPP HELICOPTER chops across the grey sky over the PMQs and kids stop what they are doing and look up. By now, everyone knows that the helicopter is searching for Claire. So are the bright yellow Chipmunks that have been flying low, tracing an aerial grid, each with a pilot and an observer to peer down through the rain. The grown-ups can no longer hide their fear. Kids openly speculate that Claire has drowned in a ditch, fallen down an air shaft — although there were never any mines around here — or been chopped to bits by a maniac with a hook. The Exeter Times-Advocate has urged farmers to check their barns and outbuildings, and to shine flashlights down their wells.

On the way back to the car after Holy Saturday Mass, Madeleine sees again the rows of men in rain gear, fanning out from the airfield into the meadows and woodlots. A brace of German shepherds strain on their leashes and sniff the ground frantically. Madeleine knows they have been given something of Claire’s to smell. Just like Dale the Police Dog who found the little girl asleep in the corn. They should get Rex to help.

Jack makes no secret of going out to search again with the other men, and Mimi gets her children to kneel down in the living room and say the rosary with her for the safe return of Claire McCarroll.

Ricky Froelich has been helping with the search. He brought Rex along at first, but the policemen asked him to take the dog home since he was not a trained search-and-rescue animal. Rick wanted to say, “How do you know?” because Rex’s origins before he wound up at the Goderich pound are unknown. But he didn’t want to be smart to the cop. Those days are behind him.

On Friday a couple of policemen whom Rick knew from the search came by the house to ask him the same questions a couple of others had on Thursday. He didn’t mind. If they were overlapping their efforts it meant they were working overtime to find the kid. He told the officers what he had told their colleagues: he had been out running with his sister and his dog when he met Claire McCarroll heading south down the Huron County road. She had told him she was going to Rock Bass. He had hitched her up to the dog and they had continued together to the intersection. When they had got to the willow tree they had stopped and he had unhitched Rex. She had turned right down the dirt road, heading for Rock Bass on her bike, and he and his sister and his dog had turned left toward the highway.

Rick has just returned home from searching all morning, and is in the middle of making and devouring sandwiches, when the same two cops arrive again on Saturday afternoon.

This time they ask him, “Did you meet anyone on the road after you left her?” This is a new question and Rick realizes that they now suspect someone may have harmed her.

“No, I didn’t, sorry.”

They ask him to come for a ride with them this time and point out precisely where it was he left her. As he is on his way out, his mother comes to the door and says, “Wait Ricky, I’ll call Papa to go with you.”

“It’s okay, Mum, I’ll be right back.”

But she says, “Hang on a minute, honey, Papa’s just down the basement.”

Rick smiles, a bit embarrassed in front of the cops. One of the officers — the one who has asked most of the questions — says, “Mrs. Froelich, we just want to borrow your boy for a few minutes to show us exactly where he let the little girl off at, it might help him to remember if he saw anyone else in the vicinity.”

Karen pauses, looking at the policemen, then turns and calls again, “Hank.”

But Rick leaves with the officers, saying, “I’ll be right back, Ma.”

Karen watches them pull out of the driveway with her son in the back of the police car.

But they don’t turn south on the Huron County road. They turn north, toward Exeter. The windshield wipers thunk back and forth and Rick says, “It’s back there.”

“Yeah, we’re just going to make a circle, you said you were out running, is that right?”

“Oh yeah,” says Rick, and leans back. He directs them in reverse along the path he took on Wednesday afternoon. The police radio crackles unintelligibly.

“If you remember seeing anyone or anything at all, you just sing out, young fella,” says the cop in the passenger seat.

When they reach Highway 4—the stretch that doglegs west just north of Lucan — Rick says, “I saw a car.”

The officer looks at him in the rearview mirror.

Rick says, “Going west, yeah, like we are now. He passed me, right around here.”

The cruiser slows, pulls over and stops. The cop looks at Rick in the mirror and asks, “What kind of car?”

“Ford Galaxy.”

“You could tell, eh?”

“Oh yeah, went right past me, eh, brand-new.”

“You like cars?”

“I love cars.”

The cop chuckles. “Me too. What colour was this Chevy?”

“It was a Ford,” Rick corrects him politely. “Galaxy, brand-new. Blue.”

“Brand-new, eh?”