The Monster of Twenty Mile Pond Read online

  “Esme,” said Molly, “you aren’t—”

  “I am,” Esme said, dry-eyed and gaunt-faced. “Dad said that my name shouts out ‘I am.’ But honest to God, I wish I wasn’t. ‘I am not’ would be better.”

  I kissed her temple and we all stayed quiet for a while. Molly and I held her free hand. Then Esme murmured, “Dad’s great-great-great-uncle Robert could have written a pretty good poem about this: ‘The glorious fruit of illicit love leads relentless to death by moose guts—Oh, the grandeur and the splendour.’”

  That night, Jennifer said to me, “My God, Bill, did you hear her? ‘The fruit of illicit love leads to death by moose guts’? On top of all the blame? She’s twelve years old, for heaven’s sake. She’s more than traumatized by this. She’s . . . you—we—need to keep a close watch on this.”

  A few years before that, Jack and Maggie had started a construction business, and were doing pretty well. Jack managed the fieldwork and Maggie ran the office. Two months before the accident, their company had won a sizable road building contract. The job was a big challenge, but their smarts and work ethic were carrying them on their way to prosperity. After the accident, though, with Jack’s key-man life insurance going to investors, with their house mortgaged to the hilt to cover their own investment, with the government’s decision to pass the contract over to another company under the completion bond, my sister was broke and in debt.

  She was also severely paralyzed. In a coma for two weeks, Maggie emerged into consciousness following operations to remove a large blood clot from her brain and to repair the damage to her skull. She had no use of her right side, arm or leg, and restricted use of her left side. After a number of months, her speech came back, just a little laboured, and her intelligence began to restore itself. But her physical condition, which included incapacitating headaches and muscle spasms, meant she would not be able to work for a long time, perhaps forever.

  I did the best I could on her behalf by threatening lawsuits, backed by the full force of the law firm’s reputation, and succeeded in salvaging a pathetic $100,000 for her out of the construction company’s wreckage. Even with extremely frugal management, considering the costs of a decent wheelchair and other mobility equipment, plus proper nursing assistance at home, much of which would not be paid for by the government, the money could only last a year or so. Then Maggie and Esme would be on welfare.

  I was going to have to tell my wife that I couldn’t let this happen to my sister and my niece: she and I would be looking at a huge burden of care and expenses. We could expect no help from anywhere else. Jack’s parents had sided from the beginning with his first wife, and every extra dollar they had they spent on her two boys, now at university, and on their other grandchildren. My mother had nothing to spare from my deceased father’s meagre civil service pension. I thought I knew what to expect from Jennifer: she’d smile and shoulder the burden with me without complaint, but I wondered in unspoken anxiety how this would tax our excellent marriage.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I’d met Jennifer Ward in a courtroom just weeks after breaking up with Ramona on the day of my vision by Twenty Mile Pond. She was a new accountant and a minor witness in our opponent’s case. She was there to back up the testimony given by the senior main witness. I was junior counsel, so my mentor put me up to cross-examining this junior witness to hone my non-existent skills.

  During my questioning, I told her—kindly, I thought—that I was having some difficulty grasping whatever point it might be that she was struggling so hard to make. She smiled sweetly and said, “You may not understand my point, sir, but then exhaustive studies have shown that the IQ of the average chartered accountant is significantly higher than that of the average lawyer.”

  Everyone in the courtroom laughed, including the judge, and of course I joined in as a good sport, pretending I didn’t mind one little bit having the tables turned on me and being made to look like a clown. But I stopped being kind to her, and gradually went aboard of her verbally to the point where, a couple of times, her client’s lawyer objected that I was badgering the witness. After I was finished, the other lawyer asked the judge for a recess, with our consent, to explore a possible settlement. The judge retired to his chambers, and the matter was in fact settled within an hour right there in the courtroom.

  During the discussion, Jennifer murmured to me, “By the way, Mr. McGill, you didn’t have to get so mad at me. I said ‘average lawyer.’” Then, while we were waiting for the judge to come back to adjourn the case sine die, she glanced at the other lawyer, and leaned toward me and said, “After the hosing you guys just gave our client, I’m going to be recommending to all our clients from now on that they retain your firm.” She smiled at me. “I certainly don’t want to go through that ever again.”

  My mentor at the firm didn’t offer the high opinion of my performance that Jennifer had, but then, as she told me a couple of weeks later over dinner in a fancy restaurant, he hadn’t been trying to sweet-talk me into asking him out.

  We married within a couple of years, had our daughter Molly and son Matthew in quick succession, and were on our way to living happily ever after. We got on our feet financially and were planning major renovations to our lovely old house and annual family travel vacations—this year up the Nile for the four of us, next year the Mediterranean. All of which adventures were now jeopardized or completely off the table as a result of what had happened to Maggie and Esme.

  I was in the process of telling Jennifer I was sorry that my sister’s accident would set back many of our dreams, when she put her fingers on my lips. “Maggie and Esme are part of our own family from now on,” she said, “and entitled to exactly the same attention and financial support in every way as ourselves. If necessary, I’ll go back to full-time practice.” That would more than double the twenty-hour week she was punching in now, trying to juggle home and profession.

  “How on earth did I get someone as compassionate and understanding as you to marry me?”

  “I never let that stand in my way,” she replied. “You never would’ve proposed if you knew you’d have to struggle so hard to keep up.”

  While Maggie was in the hospital recuperating and then at the Miller Centre for therapy, Esme lived at our house. I was about to clear out my home office to provide her with her own bedroom, but she and Molly insisted on using the same room. “We’ll just move in another single bed,” Molly whispered to me when we were alone in the kitchen. “Esme won’t be happy here if she has to turf you out of your den.”

  Already close, the two became inseparable. “Joined at the hip,” is how schoolmates started to describe them, which progressed to “and at the shoulder, the neck, and the head, to boot.”

  When Maggie came out of the Miller Centre and was pronounced capable of living on her own with nursing assistance, she wouldn’t hear of staying with us. Everyone needed their space, she said. Esme went back home, too, much to our regret. We loved having her with us. Apart from the times we could see her melancholia coming on and she went for long walks alone or with Molly, my niece and my daughter had been a constant source of bright amusing chatter, livening up the house.

  Esme even treated our son, Matthew, nearly two years her junior, with a respect and consideration not always present from Molly alone. They went to many of his minor hockey games at Esme’s suggestion, where their presence and enthusiasm, more than Jennifer’s or my own, we knew, encouraged him to rise to all-star team status in the Atom and Pee Wee divisions.

  Matthew teased both girls that the high school players all wanted to be his best friend as soon as they learned that those two “hotties” leaning over the boards were his cousin and his sister. It was almost too adorable for Jennifer and me to bear as we listened from the kitchen to the three of them earnestly discussing hockey strategy for Matthew in the TV room, while the show on the screen went ignored.

 
The financial situation did become more onerous than I expected because of Maggie’s unforeseen expenses, which she would never tell me about. I had to extract the data from her as if I was pulling teeth. And of course Esme’s occasional falling off the rails, once she moved back home, added to the load.

  When I complained to Jennifer in private in order to dig out her true feelings, she only said, “The poor little girl. When you think of what she’s been through . . . I think Esme is forever in pain. Not only for herself, but for Maggie. I heard her mention to Molly that she can’t bear what her mother has to suffer every night, unable to sleep a wink because of constant muscle spasms. The medicine doesn’t seem to be working very well. So, Esme’s experiment with the pot makes sense. And the beer that time? I’d say she feels driven sometimes to try to self-medicate her distress, her agony, away.”

  “And the shoplifting and the impulsive attack on the fox? That fits in with her self-medication how, exactly?”

  “Yeah, okay, touché.” She came over to me. “You’re starting to turn me on. I feel like I’m back on the witness stand facing the world’s greatest cross-examiner again. Anyway, I just hope she doesn’t fall in with the hard drug crowd as she thrashes her way through this.”

  Jennifer’s words were like a cue in a stage play.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I was in Calgary when Molly called me on my cellphone. Early on, I’d told her—and Jennifer and Matthew and Esme and Maggie—to call me on my cell at any time, any place, about anything, and if it was an emergency, and I didn’t answer on the first call, to call me twice in rapid succession and I would answer it immediately no matter what I was doing or who I was with. Usually I loved it when they now and again actually did the double call. It made me feel like the best husband, father, uncle, and brother going, even if their definition of an emergency was somewhat looser than mine.

  Once I said to Molly, upon taking her rapid second call on the cell outside my office door while my client anxiously paced the floor inside, that perhaps her request for permission to buy tickets to a Tragically Hip concert scheduled six months down the road might not qualify as an emergency. To which she rejoined, “Dad, what? They’re selling like hotcakes. Da-ad, this is what fathers are for.”

  I was about to start the meeting in Calgary with the leaders of a consortium who were going to develop a multi-billion dollar oil reserve on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. They wanted to talk personally with us, the principals of the local St. John’s law firm recommended by their main firm in Calgary. When the phone vibrated in my pocket, I ignored it and prayed that it wouldn’t buzz again.

  When it immediately throbbed a second time, feeling like a jackhammer against my kidney, I saw looks of irritation exchanged between the executives as I rose and said I had to take an emergency call. They’d made it clear that they always liked meetings to start right on time. The exasperation on my partners’ faces said to me, “Now, McGill, don’t you bugger this up.” I left the boardroom and took the call outside in the hall.

  “Dad,” Molly said, “the police have arrested Esme. You need to talk to them.”

  “The police what? Molly, get hold of Brian Keeping. I can’t talk right now, I’m in the middle of a big meeting. What have they arrested her for?”

  “They’re saying it was a drug deal gone bad.”

  “A what? A drug deal gone—oh, for the love of—what is this, Molly, a Hollywood gangster movie? Where is she? I’ll call Brian myself and ask him to handle it. He and Esme should be getting used to each other by now.”

  “Dad, you’d better come back. The police say they’re going to charge her with murder—second-degree murder, they said.”

  “Murd—what? Good Lord. What about you? Were you involved, too?”

  “Not in the actual murder itself. But I was in the car waiting for her. The police said they’re still trying to figure out what to do with me.”

  “My God. Don’t say anything to the police, sweetheart—you or her. Tell them you’re waiting till your lawyer gets there. Where are you now?”

  “I think Esme already told them what happened. I heard them say it was the most ridiculous story they ever heard. They were even laughing, Dad, and here’s this guy lying on the ground dead.”

  “Molly, where are you?”

  “We’re in police cars out by Windsor Lake. But they’re taking us in to the police station.”

  “I’ll tell Brian to meet you there. Let me know if he hasn’t turned up by the time you get there. Tell Esme I’ll call her mother, and get Brian to call her, too, so she’s not in the dark.” By the time I’d called the law firm and lined up Brian and a senior associate to go to the station with him, and then spent five minutes on the phone with Maggie vainly attempting to allay her anxiety with spotty information, and left a message on Jennifer’s phone, twenty minutes of meeting time had gone by.

  When I walked back into the boardroom, everyone was fidgety and fuming. They couldn’t start without me because I was designated to make the primary presentation. My face must have looked ghastly because one of my partners stood up and stared at me, and one of the oil executives demanded, “My good God, Mr. McGill, are you all right?”

  What was I supposed to say? Oh yes, I’m fine, it’s just that my teenaged niece has been charged with a drug-related murder and my daughter will probably be charged as an accessory to murder. Did credentials for a lawyer trying to get retained by uptight corporate types get any better than that? I apologized for the delay and told them the truth, a strictly technical truth: The seventeen-year-old daughter of a client of the firm, which Maggie was, had gotten herself mixed up in a drug bust and an allegation of murder, I said, and I had to make sure of proper representation by someone qualified in the firm back home. I told them that the timing was unfortunate, but I considered attending to the matter to be a higher priority, frankly, than starting our meeting on time.

  My partners looked down and said nothing, probably suspecting the fuller truth. The CEO said, “You did the right thing, Bill. There but for the grace of God go I—go all of us.” He looked around at the nodding heads. Each of them must have had teenaged kids or grandchildren out of control or tending that way.

  We began our presentation and, to be honest, if immodest, I outdid myself. My desire to make up for the wasted time, and to blank out whatever nightmare was mushrooming back home, concentrated my mind wonderfully, and I could feel that we were making a very positive impression on the group.

  Afterwards, the CEO said he found my judgment call on the relative importance of a personal catastrophe of a client, compared with getting the meeting going, to be notable. It showed the kind of solid wisdom and acumen that, as a human being and a parent and grandparent, he wanted a piece of. Corporate heads nodded. Lawyerly faces beamed. With our firm solidly retained, I marvelled over the ironic quirk: my sought-after success was at least partly caused by an adversity that I would not have wished on that guy in grade eight who’d deliberately tripped me in soccer and broke my leg.

  I rushed down to get a taxi back to the hotel, where I could lock myself in my room and plumb the depths by telephone of this fresh upheaval in our family life. On the way, my mind brought back the location of the crime Molly had mentioned. Near Windsor Lake. Lots of the drug trafficking seemed to take place just outside the city, and Windsor Lake, a reservoir fifteen minutes away from the city, with no houses close to it and with trails leading into the woods hidden from prying law-enforcement eyes, was a perfect spot for it. So, at the time, I thought nothing else about the locale.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I reached Brian Keeping by phone in his car outside the police station. He’d just finished meeting with the investigating detectives and the girls. First in line had been Molly. They had kept her in a small room by herself, seated at a table. A detective told Brian that they didn’t have a handle yet on what she’d been
doing out there in the car. She might have just been innocently along for the ride with the other one or she might be somehow involved, either in the drug purchase or the murder, or both.

  They weren’t charging her with anything at the moment, but that could change fast. They’d see what their investigation brought forward. Meanwhile, they were releasing her into the custody of her mother on the condition that she wouldn’t leave town and would be available at any time for more questioning.

  A female constable wondered out loud, said Brian, why parents would give seventeen-year-old girls the dangerous independence and freedom of owning their own car. What do moms and dads expect, she asked her partner, but mischief and foul play from such permissive, overindulgent spoiling of their kids? Molly told them her mom and dad had bought the old second-hand car for her and Esme because Esme’s mother was paralyzed and the girls picked up her groceries and medications and other shopping with it.

  The officers were unmoved. One of them nodded and said sarcastically, rolling his eyes, “Oh, of course, you certainly need a car these days for shopping for dope for your paralyzed mother.”

  The cops seemed very hard-nosed, said Brian, and frankly he would not be surprised if Molly were to be charged with, as one of them put it, being at least an accessory to murder—to wit, the driver of the getaway car—and maybe even an accomplice. Brian told the police that I was Molly’s father and Esme’s guardian, since her father was dead and her mother nearly quadriplegic. On hearing that, the police exchanged a look of what could only be described as satisfaction. They’d lucked onto a good one. Not as good as, say, the premier’s or the lieutenant-governor’s daughter, perhaps, but still a nice medium-sized fish hefty enough to make a noticeable splash, and to emphasize to the public their zero tolerance of drugs, no matter who was involved, the low or the high.

  When they brought in Esme, Brian said, they had her in leg shackles and handcuffs. He’d protested, saying, “Surely that’s not necessary.”