Into the Fall

Chapter 9

A loud phone splintered the quiet of the police station waiting room. Sarah looked at the empty desk where moments before a duty officer had pretended to look busy. When she and the kids had arrived a little after eight o’clock in the morning, the smooth-cheeked desk officer had given her bad coffee and an apologetic smile and asked her to have a seat while she waited for Boychuk. It was now almost nine.

Beside her, Charlie and Bella sat on hard plastic chairs, their heads touching over an iPad. A second ring of the phone pounded against Sarah’s forehead. By the third ring, she stood, ready to leap over the desk and yank the phone from its cradle. The officer returned to intercept the call.

Sarah went back to her seat. The request to come to the detachment contained no explanation, no information. Just a polite demand. Stress and lack of sleep perched like twin beasts on her shoulders. After an hour in the no-man’s-land of the station waiting room, Sarah felt like she was blindfolded and left to balance without a reference point.

The kids had protested loudly when she woke them. “I want to wait here,” Bella said, pulling the final word to a pitch that reverberated in Sarah’s head long after it had stopped. Sarah, her hands shaking, reeled around to face her daughter; the tenuous threads that had been holding her together were snapping. She held the collapse at bay, but just barely.

“I know, Bella, but you can’t stay here by yourself. Please get dressed.” Clipped words disintegrated her mother-soft form. Sarah saw the struggle in Bella’s eyes; the accounting of consequences as she weighed the cost of a rude retort. Mother and daughter stared each other down, playing out an intense microcosm of their relationship.

“Can we get hot chocolate with breakfast?” Charlie said from the bathroom, toothpaste spittle dripping from his mouth to stitch the room’s fault line. Sarah had held her daughter’s gaze for a second longer before turning to her son.

Hot chocolates long gone, the three of them still waited in the windowless front room of the station. Sarah wondered what other traumas had played out in this room: How many families had experienced the worst moment of their lives? A local country music station buzzed from a desk radio; twangy singers complained of lost marriages, lost jobs, or drinking too much. Sarah thought of an old joke: What do you get if you play a country song backward? You get your house back, your job back, your car back ... your husband back. She stood again and paced the tiny room. Every few steps, she alternated between focusing on her impatience and her nausea, each distracting her from the other.

Sarah was standing in the middle room when sunshine exploded from the front doors. She held her hand up against the glare, as if flesh and blood could hold back the light.

“Sarah?” A familiar voice surfaced.

An hourglass of color stepped out from the glare. Before Sarah could make sense of the vision in front of her, she felt a hug wrap around her shoulders, pinning her arms to her sides.

“Oh God, Sarah! I can’t believe this is happening to you.”

“Izzy?” Sarah croaked before dissolving into her sister’s arms. “How did you—”

“Find you? It wasn’t hard. Seems to be only one motel open in this town. Bit of a dreary place at this time of year, isn’t it? Guy at the front desk sent me here.”

Sarah closed her eyes as waves of relief crushed her. “You came.”

“Of course I came,” Izzy said, with a self-assurance Sarah had known from girlhood. “I’ll always come.”

Izzy stepped back, holding Sarah at arm’s length. “Goodness! You look a wreck.” She handed Sarah a handkerchief from her purse. The piece of cloth, like Izzy, was steeped in color. “Ah, perfect,” she said, turning to the young desk officer coming toward them. “Would you mind getting my sister a glass of water? Please.”

Izzy had a way of making people act, even when they weren’t sure they wanted to.

“Thanks,” Sarah said with a snort, as she took the handkerchief from her sister. She buried her face in the cloth and took in the citrus-accented smell of her sister’s perfume. It was a scent Izzy had specially made in a small perfumery in Paris and was as unique to her as her fingerprint. It hadn’t changed in the two years the sisters had been apart.

Izzy, long limbs and tempestuous red curls tucked into designer labels, wore curve-hugging jeans beneath a long red coat. A black-and-white tartan scarf draped her neck. As always, Sarah felt like a clumsy disaster beside her effortlessly elegant sister.

The sisters were a yin and yang combination from the day Sarah came into the world two years behind Izzy. Sarah was the yin—soft and yielding as water—with her own quiet strength and a tranquil way of moving through life. Izzy was the yang—fierce and forceful as wildfire—taking air out of any room she strode through and leaving a wake of energy and expectations. It had not escaped Sarah that a similar lifelong dynamic was also playing itself out in her own children.

“Bella!” Izzy turned to the kids, giving Sarah time to compose herself. “Sweetie, get over here.”

Bella jumped off her seat and scurried over. “Hi, Auntie Izzy,” she said, a rivalry between delight and reticence in her face.

“Let me look at you, my girl. Look how tall you’ve gotten. Who said you could do that?” Izzy squatted down and grabbed Bella’s face in her hands. “Oh my goodness, I could just swallow you whole!” She wrapped Bella in a crushing hug.

Though she hadn’t been with the kids in person for a couple of years, Izzy regularly spoke with Bella over FaceTime. The two shared a special relationship, and Sarah marveled at her sister’s ability to keep a conversation going through a screen. Bella always took great pains to announce to the house when she “had a call” with Auntie Izzy, making it clear no one was to disturb her. As the hurdles in Sarah’s own relationship with Izzy became harder to manage, she didn’t have the heart to break the bond between aunt and niece. Izzy took on her role as aunt with enthusiasm and earnestness, and Sarah found reassurance in knowing someone else in the world loved her children so intensely.

“And Charlie. Not such a little peanut anymore, are ya?” Izzy said, her tone serious but with a wink thrown in. Charlie watched her, as if appraising the woman whom he knew but of whom he had no memories of his own. He looked at Bella, who had an arm draped around Izzy’s neck. The girl nodded once. Charlie ambled toward them and plunked his head on Izzy’s shoulder, arms still at his side. Izzy drew them into her protective orbit; three heads huddled in a conspiracy.

When Izzy stood, she kept a hand on each of the kids. “It looks like you have things to do, sis,” she said and rolled her eyes over their surroundings. “Why don’t the kids and I get out of here? We can catch up later.”

Charlie looked to his mother; his brows furrowed into a question.

“That’s a great idea,” Sarah said with a forced smile. “I have to talk to Officer Boychuk for a bit. You guys head back to the motel, and I’ll meet you there when I’m done. I can’t imagine I’ll be too long.” Sarah handed over the key.

Rob Boychuk knew a few tricks. You didn’t police over a thousand miles of roads, sixteen thousand people, and the wildlands that ran in between without learning a thing or two. As he watched Sarah Anderson on the other side of the waiting room’s one-way glass, he found himself in a dance between sympathy and cynicism. Sarah paced, sat, stood again, and absentmindedly touched her hair. A few minutes later, she started again, trailing anxiety in an endless loop.

Though he wasn’t yet sure what to make of Sarah, something about her story had slipped under his skin. His wife called it his cop-sense and knew to give him space when a case wedged itself in his brain. Every case had a knife edge—victim or offender. Sarah Anderson could be either, of course. Or both.

Matthew Anderson’s case should have been simple. There were a few lost-camper incidents every year—weekend adventurers turned around in the woods or hikers unprepared for a change in weather. Most turned out to be minor. By all accounts, Matthew was a woodsman; he had some inkling of what to expect out there. At least a trace of him should have shown up by now. But they had nothing.

It seemed even after all his years on the force, there could still be surprises. Rarely had a camper disappeared without leaving some sort of trail. As he watched Sarah pace, another case came to Boychuk’s mind. It was over fifteen years ago now. Boychuk was new to Patricia Bay then, recently arrived from the academy with a new bride and a young man’s thirst for the wilderness. The Lussier family had been camping close to Algonquin Provincial Park, on a small tributary of the Madawaska River. It was a gorgeous clear night when their little boy, Josh, disappeared. Ten years old. The case alone would have been enough to haunt him, but the aftermath scarred Boychuk.

A full search had been organized, but there was no trace of Josh. Rumors started to circulate—he’d been abducted by a passing traveler, his parents had killed him, even alien abduction—none supported by the paltry evidence they’d managed to find. Eventually, they’d been forced to admit failure, which translated into a cold case. The Lussiers, though, wouldn’t give up. The parents, James and Maddy, moved to the area afterward, determined to either find their boy or be near where he vanished. But grief hit them instead. It was like that, grief. Dormant, but always ravenous, waking in its own time to steal away moments of contentment. Two years after Josh disappeared, Boychuk responded to a call at the house the Lussiers had rented just outside town. Their bodies hung from a rafter; a note left on the kitchen table explained they could no longer live in a world where Josh may or may not be.

Hints of Doritos and Skittles hit Sarah as she stepped into the hotel room. The kids and Izzy had spent the afternoon in the ambitiously named Aquatic Center attached to the hotel, running between the pool and the hot tub until they were dizzy. Izzy let them be kids in a way they hadn’t been since waking up in the tent three days ago. Afterward, she’d stuffed them full of junk food as they watched pirated Disney movies on her laptop. By the time Sarah joined them in the early evening, the kids were too full for dinner and exhausted. They fell into a sugar-crash sleep as Izzy and Sarah shared cold pizza and a bottle of cheap red wine across the room’s only table. Though unspoken, they hit a temporary pause on the rift that had kept the sisters apart for the last two years.

“So,” Izzy said after the kids had gone to bed and Sarah had spooled out the story beginning with the camping trip. “What was today about?”

“I really don’t know.”

Boychuk had collected Sarah from the waiting room shortly after Izzy left with the kids. His first words were an apology for making her wait, though they rang like the beginning of a form letter. She followed him through an open door leading into the bowels of the building and a small squared-off room with a battered table and conference chairs. The walls had been white once but were so scuffed that the original color remained a suggestion; the air hung with the smell of bad coffee and body odor. It was not a room designed for comfort.

Sarah pulled out a chair and started at the screech of metal across the linoleum. She sat and wrapped her coat tighter around her. After some perfunctory politeness about how she and the kids were doing, Boychuk launched into the reason for the visit.

“Sarah, I hate to be the bearer of crappy news here, but we can’t seem to catch a break on this one. This is day four, and still no trace of Matthew. The weather’s been a bugger. Rain has left the trails soup, but even then, we can usually find a trace. This one has us stumped.”

Sarah kept her eyes on the wall behind Boychuk.

“In a case like this, we’ll keep looking, but I don’t want to lie to you. The likelihood of success diminishes with each passing day. Do you understand what that means?” he asked.

Sarah shook her head.

“Search and rescue will make a few more passes, and the ground search will go back over already searched ground.”

“But you found the canoe. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“It did. It gave us a starting point for the search, but it’s a well-traveled spot, even at this time of year, with lots of traffic, none of it necessarily Matthew. His fingerprints are all over the canoe, but that’s to be expected. We’ve made some assumptions, but at this point, we have to start thinking our assumptions may be off.”

“So, what happens now?” Sarah said, her voice breaking.

“Two things. Though we have nothing to suggest he may have gone into the water, we’re going to dredge the lake to be certain. It’s just to make absolutely sure, Sarah. I’m not expecting we’ll find him there.” Boychuk took a breath, as if distancing himself from what he had to say next.

Sarah imagined Matthew sinking into the bottomless cold, the waves covering his face. She heard his struggling breath as he fought to keep himself at the surface, saw the panic in his eyes as realization dawned that the water had betrayed him.

“The SAR team may need to consider recovery work,” Boychuk said.

He laid the words out gently, but they clawed at Sarah’s skin. Recovery. The room blurred, creating a watercolor background behind Boychuk.

“Sarah?” Boychuk’s voice came to her like a fading echo. “Let me get you some water.”

She heard the screech of metal against linoleum and felt the rush of air as the door opened, bringing with it the stench of disinfectant that had dogged her since she set foot in the building. Sarah drew a scalding breath of it.

Boychuk returned with a tepid glass of water. Sarah gulped at it, then sent him back for a second glass before sharper edges came back into her vision. She fixed her eyes on the floor and concentrated on keeping her breathing slow and even.

“At this point, I’m just trying to prepare you, Sarah. The search will start to broaden geographically, but the investigation will also broaden. We’ll have to look into some more possibilities.”

Sarah looked up.

“I know it’s not easy to hear, but it’s standard procedure. We have to consider that this wasn’t an accident.”

“But why? How could that possibly be? He disappeared from a canoe trip, not from the middle of Toronto. There aren’t any canoe-jackers roaming the woods. Have bears formed a cartel I’m not aware of?” The sarcasm was unwarranted but not misplaced.

“A missing persons investigation broadens the search and the suspicion, Sarah. It means everyone in Matthew’s life has the potential to be a suspect. We’ll have to ask some more questions.”

“But I have nothing more to say! I’ve already answered your questions. What more could you possibly ask me?” Sarah felt her pulse surge against her temples.

“Look, Sarah. I want to help you. I really do.” There was sympathy in Boychuk’s tone but something more in his eyes. Cautiousness. “I know this is hard. Why don’t we start with a few easy questions. Get them out of the way. I can pass that information along to Missing Persons, and maybe they won’t need anything else from you.”

What choice did she have? Sarah nodded.

Would Matthew have gone back home without you? No. Was he happy at work? Yes. Did he have money problems? No. Do you know of any disagreements he’s had with anyone? No. Is there anyone who might want to hurt him? Someone from his past, maybe? No.

For most of the day, Boychuk held Sarah in a ring of challenge and recollection. Each question seemed innocent, but she couldn’t help but feel there was a pattern, a rationale, to the randomness. She’d answered, all the while trying to see between the words.

“He asked so many questions,” Sarah said to Izzy as she poured more red wine into a plastic cup. They had moved to the hotel hallway floor, cold pizza and a half-drunk bottle of wine between them, just outside the room where the kids slept. “That’s all they ever seem to do. Ask endless questions. He asked about my marriage, Matthew’s relationship with the kids, whether he had been close with his parents, did I know his colleagues. It went on for hours. Half of them, I didn’t even have any answers for. And I’m not even sure he even needed the answers.”

“What do you mean?”

As Sarah spoke, she pulled at a lock of hair, pinching it near the scalp and pulling the length of it. Her knuckles whitened with each pull.

“I have no idea. I’m probably being crazy. I mean, Boychuk would ask a bunch of questions, scribble down some notes and then step out to ‘check on something.’ After what seemed like forever, he’d come back in with more questions.

“I kept getting this feeling he already knew all the answers. Like it was all some test. It felt creepy, like every answer triggered some invisible thread in a web. I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe I’ve watched too many of those stupid crime dramas. The scene where the cop is looking to trip up a suspect.”

Izzy’s mouth was pinched, as if biting back a question lurking behind her lips.

“It’s been four days, Izzy, countless search hours, and they still haven’t found him. In fact, they’ve found fuck all.” Sarah’s voice rose. “They have an idea—they think—of where he may have been but no idea where he went, no clue what’s happened to him or, as far as I can tell, any idea how to find him. They don’t even know if he’s alive, Izzy.” She was pacing now, flailing arms punctuating her shout-whispered words.

Sarah didn’t remember standing. She was startled to find herself breathless, her hands holding her phone in front of her like a weapon. Izzy sat against the wall with one leg tucked beneath her, the other dangling across her knee, a detached gaze, one Sarah knew too well, on her face. She’d seen that look since they were kids. Reserved for when they had their biggest fights, when Izzy felt a need to demonstrate cool mastery over her emotions. Despite the fierce, predatory face she showed the world, Izzy guarded her emotions jealously.

In the silence that followed, Sarah heard the ticking of an electric radiator and the hum of passing traffic. She was besieged by the stench of grease and cheap wine, as if a putrid creature slithered beside them. Sarah stared down at her sister.

Izzy stood slowly, took a slow, deep sip from her cup, leaving a wine stain on her lips. “It’s going to be okay, Sarah,” she said. “We’ll find the bastard ... and then we’ll kill him for putting you through this.”

A beat of silence passed. And then Sarah laughed.

“Oh Jesus, Izzy,” she said through helpless cackles. “How did I get here?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I’d say marrying a man who thinks sleeping on the ground under bug-coated pieces of nylon is fun was your first mistake.”

The sisters were off, powerless against the surge of laughter feeding on the strain of the day. The laughter felt like being scrubbed by a steel brush: it tore away the coating of tension until Sarah was raw and exposed, a speck on the floor of a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere.

Asking questions was an art more than a science, and Boychuk considered himself a passably good artist. He knew how to mix emotions in the same way a painter blended colors to get a truer picture. He had let Sarah Anderson’s colors blend for a few hours and knew it was time to tease out a little more of the portrait.

“So, who decided on Nagadon Lake? You or Matthew?” Boychuk asked.

“Matthew. He always picked the routes. Camping is really his thing. I just tag along and keep the kids out of trouble.”

Sarah leaned back in the chair. She reached across her body to rub at an ache beneath her shoulder blades. Boychuk knew the spot. It was an ache that could slither across to the neck and threaten to become a headache.

“And so you don’t organize anything? Not the packing, not the route, not the safety gear?”

“I rely on Matthew for all of that. I just paddle where he tells me to.”

“Right, you mentioned that. Makes sense.”

Sarah breathed deep. Boychuk leaned in, doing his best Columbo imitation, genial and folksy.

“Remind me again, Sarah. Did Matthew have a wet suit?”

“He did. A good one.”

“Did he not bring it with him on the trip?”

“Yes ... I mean, no. He didn’t. Not this trip.” It was subtle, but Boychuk just managed to hear it in Sarah’s voice. An edge of anger being reeled back.

“How are you so sure? If Matthew did all the packing?”

“I—He must have mentioned it. I can’t really remember. It’s not a detail that sticks in the brain.”

“Isn’t that a bit strange? Most swimmers I know take a wet suit with them for a lake swim, especially in the fall.”

“Maybe he forgot it. I really don’t know.”

“Right.”

Finally, Boychuk thought, as he studied her face. Sarah’s eyes had hardened, and her lips strained against themselves.

He had initially expected Sarah’s emotions would be more pliable. Certainly, she’d seemed fragile enough that a few questions should have brought her to just the right shade. But he’d kept her here for hours longer than he planned before he saw the flare of red. It could still turn out to be nothing: fatigue or frustration or even the typical baggage that dogged every marriage. But Boychuk had shaken things up, and the colors had run.

After the wine bottle had been drained to its last dregs, the sisters tiptoed back into the room. The kids were asleep, curled beside each other on the far bed as if adrift together in an endless sea. Izzy crawled beneath the scratchy polyester blanket beside Sarah. It had been years since they’d shared a bed, but muscle memories returned, taking away the foreign edges of the moment and leading Sarah into a comfortable familiarity. She lay in the dark, unable to sleep, as night crept forward.

“You’re going to get through this, Sarah,” Izzy said. “You’ve always been the strongest person in our family. Whatever happens, you’re going to get through it.” She reached for Sarah’s hand. Izzy’s touch was warm beneath the paltry covers.

A small sob escaped Sarah, quiet and contained.

“Remember Angie MacNeil? I mean, if you could survive that bitch, you can survive anything,” Izzy said.

“Oh God, that was years ago.” Sarah said.

Angie MacNeil had been beautiful, popular, and cruel. Angie had taken an inexplicable dislike to Sarah, and bullying ensued—name-calling, sniggering, adolescent humiliations thrown like water balloons in the halls. Izzy had tried to get Sarah to tell their parents, but Sarah was convinced it would just make things worse.

“I wonder what happened to her. She disappeared in your sophomore year, didn’t she?” Izzy said.

“I heard she changed schools.”

“Did you ever find out why?”

Sarah stayed silent, but even after all this time, Izzy could always tell when Sarah was hiding something.

“Sarah? What happened?” Izzy nudged her with an elbow, then sat up and flicked on the bedside table light. “Spill.”

Sarah kept her face unyielding and her secrets wrapped tight despite her sister’s mock-stern glare. “She—I heard she ran into a few problems, that’s all.”

Rumors had started circulating about Angie. Drips here and there—social arsenic in the stew of teenage angst.

“I may have said a thing or two about her that got out,” Sarah told her sister.

None of it could be verified, of course. But it was enough to fuel the rumor mill. Did Angie really sleep with Daisy Schneider while she was dating Steve Isaacs, the soccer team captain? Was Angie selling pot and uppers out of her locker after school? Never anything concrete, but enough to get people wondering, talking, and sidestepping Angie in the halls. The specifics were left up to adolescent imagination. When the principal’s impromptu locker search had turned up a baggie in Angie’s locker, no one was surprised.

“It was time she got a taste of her own medicine,” Sarah said.

“Well color me surprised! I had no idea you had that in you?” Izzy said, a look of genuine admiration crossing her face.

“I don’t like bullies.”