Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

The Froelich boy gets out of the cruiser, raises a hand in leave-taking, then turns and goes into his house, his head hanging. Pauvre p’tit .

Madeleine is at the Froelich house when Ricky returns from helping the police. She and Colleen have made a fort out of Lego. It’s strange that, when Claire was here, Madeleine barely noticed her. Now that she has gone, Madeleine keeps expecting to turn and see her, and when she doesn’t, it’s as though there’s an empty space, like a page torn out. Where is Claire? It is not possible that she will never be here on the Froelichs’ rug, playing with Lego, ever again.

Ricky comes in and goes straight upstairs to his room. Colleen tells Madeleine why: “He saw her dead body.” Madeleine goes home soon after Colleen tells her that. There is death in the Froelich house. Darkness and the smell of last fall, although she can’t tell why — the smell of shame, as though dead were the most shameful thing you could be. She needs to be back with her own clean family.

The police arrived to pick Rick up at nine o’clock this morning, a half-hour after his father made the call on his behalf. The boy was chalk-white and his father wanted to accompany him, if not in the cruiser, then following in the old station wagon, but the officers asked him not to: “Sir, we could be dealing with a crime scene. The fewer people the better.”

Henry Froelich understood. But when he re-entered his house, Karen said, “I thought you were going with him?”

Rick sat in the back of the cruiser. The radio crackled and this time the driver spoke into the mike, using a series of numbered codes to relay the fact that they had just turned west off the Huron County road and were proceeding toward the scene with the witness.

By the time they pulled over at the spot with the break in the fence, Rick heard a siren approaching. He looked in the sideview mirror to see another cruiser pulling up and, behind it, a plain Ford sedan. Last came the wan, daytime flashing red of an ambulance.

He led them to the ravine, down and across the stream, past the maple, up the other side of the steep bank, between the furrows of germinating corn into the meadow beyond, and stopped just short of the elm tree.

He pointed and felt suddenly faint. He dropped to his haunches and allowed his head to sink between his knees. They left him and walked toward the pile of clothes mixed up with the withered bluebells and last year’s bulrushes.

When Rick opened his eyes he saw a pair of black brogues, and looked up. The man was in plainclothes, beige raincoat and hat. Sharp planes to his face. A lean man, but one who gave the impression of weight. Like a steel rail.

“I’m Inspector Bradley, Rick.”

Ricky stood, shook hands, then lurched off to one side and threw up.

The inspector watched. This was the boy who had last seen the child. This was the boy who had found her body, after a legion of police and air force personnel were unable to. These facts did not make the boy guilty, but they made him worth questioning.

Ricky returned and apologized.

The police were cordoning off the area. Dr. Ridelle arrived and made his way to the elm tree. Rick saw him bend to look, then nod. A man in a trench coat started taking pictures and Rick was asked to move to one side. Then the medical examiner arrived and everyone stood back.

Rick followed the inspector to an unmarked car and got in. Bradley offered him a cigarette but Rick told him he’d quit when he was twelve, he was an athlete. He couldn’t stop shaking, however, so he asked the inspector for a smoke after all. The nicotine soothed his nerves. Like old times.

He told the inspector what he had told the other police officers. Bradley was especially interested in the Buick. “Ford,” Rick corrected him. He readily agreed to drive with the inspector up to Goderich, where they could speak in the comfort of his office at the OPP station.

Rick had been waiting for over an hour in a plain green concrete room, nursing a Coke, by the time the inspector returned and asked if he would mind repeating his story for the benefit of a stenographer. He made no further mention of the comfort of his office.

Rick told the whole story again, the Coke gnawing at his empty stomach, and it was the hunger that reminded him. “Sir, I just remembered, I should call my parents.”

“Oh we’ll do that for you, son, what’s the number?”

Inspector Bradley and the stenographer stepped out. For another hour. Finally, a cop — the passenger-side one — came in, “just to say hi.” He was curious and wanted to hear all about the morning too, “if you don’t mind.” So Rick told him. The cop asked if Rick had caught sight of that Chevy again since Wednesday, and Rick said, “Ford. No sir. Do you know if they’ve called my parents?”

“They shoulda by now, by jeez, I’ll check.”

The cop returned five minutes later. “You’re sprung, kid, let’s get you home.”

Throughout the PMQs, the mothers have been in touch in person and over the phone, assuring one another that they will be looking out their windows, tracking each child as though he or she were their own. The fathers have made themselves perfectly clear, and the kids have listened without interrupting while being told what the standard operating procedure will be until further notice. Siblings are never to lose sight of one another. If a child is visiting another’s house, he or she must call immediately upon arrival and before setting out again for home. “I don’t care if it’s right across the street.” It’s to be straight home from school after the bell, no playing outdoors after dark and, above all, do not leave the PMQs.

“They just wanted to know how I found her, and all about the other day when we went to the intersection together,” says Rick.

Karen has persuaded her son to come downstairs and eat something. Colleen joins them, squeezing into a chair between the wall and the kitchen table. “That’s all, Ma, no big deal. I told them what I saw.”

“For four hours?” asks Henry from the stove. He was on the phone all afternoon, but the dummkopf constable at the Goderich police station was deaf, dumb and blind.

Karen says to her son, “You’ve told them that fifty times already.”

“I was just sitting there staring into space most of the time, Ma, they’re pretty busy.”

Colleen says, “J’mi fi pa a ci batar la.”

The parents ignore the curse word, but Ricky reprimands her, “Sacri pa a la table .”

Karen says, “So what did they want to know?”

His parents’ concern prompts him to downplay the whole thing.

“They gave me a Coke and we pretty much just shot the breeze while I waited for the head honcho to show up.” He obliges his parents with a detailed account of what he told the police. When he gets to the part about the blue Ford Galaxy with its dented bumper and yellow sticker, his father slumps back in his chair and shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut a few times. “Hank, what’s wrong?” asks Karen.

“Karen, that is the man — the car of the man I saw, that is his car.”

Jack uses the night number to call Simon. No clicks, no succession of lackeys, just Simon. “Christ,” he says, when Jack tells him. A sigh. “And our friend?”

“Fit as a fiddle.” Jack can see the moon, high and cold through the glass. McCarroll’s daughter would be alive now if he’d never been posted up here.

“Jack, you still there, mate?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“It’s not feasible to have a grieving father in the loop.”

McCarroll doesn’t know why he was posted to Centralia. He never will.

INSPECTOR BRADLEY has offered the man coffee and invited him to be seated in the comfort of his office in Goderich.