LITMIR.BIZ

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him with their jerky, spastic walk, propping each other up like badly conjoined twins. Purple hair glinted in the moonlight. She wore a tight clingy skirt and leopard print leotards. The boy was in jeans with a black T. A tattooed dragon clawed its way up his throat and wrapped itself around his neck. Both had on pricey leather jackets. Between them they had enough piercings to fill a small jewellery box. Must’ve been hell getting through airport security.

      “Did you hear me? I said what are you doing?” She snarled like a Ringwraith. There should have been smoke wreathing from her lips. “I want money, you cocksucker!” Her arm clutched a purse in a ridiculous parody of a woman. “How much you got, fuckin’ dickhead?”

      “Yeah!” said the guy. “We want your money. How much you got?” He laughed and rattled a chain wrapped around his fist. They were close enough for Dan to see their faces. The flat-eyed, no-mind stare of heroin addicts doing their diddly dance. Sid and Nancy in On The Town.

      “Scum,” Dan mumbled.

      The chain quivered in quick junkie twitches. “You talkin’ to me?” the boy demanded. Make that Sid and Nancy in Taxi Driver. The perfect couple. She had a cunt for a mouth; he had an arsehole for a brain.

      Behind him, a fire escape traced a route to the roof, but it was blocked above the first floor. The only way out of the alley lay behind this highly colourful odd couple. At least Sally would be impressed. Dan reasoned he could bluff his way out or, if it came to it, he could manage the two of them without much trouble. They weren’t big and they were addicts. They were probably used to rolling drunks who couldn’t put up much of a fight. Then again, he was drunk.

      They moved faster than he expected. She swung the purse, clipping Dan on the bridge of the nose with a wallop. His hands went up to his face as his throat constricted in rage. The sky pitched, shrank, then resumed normal proportions above. The brick had found its mark.

      Sid raised an arm to follow up with the chain. Fuelled by anger and pain, Dan booted him in the balls. The boy staggered and fell to the sidewalk, the slither of leather on concrete. Through his outraged howl, Dan heard the click. Something glinted. Metal. Longer and sharper than a piercing. Nancy came at him, blade in hand, suddenly looking more than capable as Sid writhed on the ground. She would have at him for her man. Adrenaline surged like lightning. With no time for niceties, Dan kicked her in the stomach and sent her and her purple hair reeling.

      He watched, awed by the slow-motion trajectory as she flipped and rolled and landed against the curb. Her head hit, making an ugly, disturbing sound like the clack of false teeth. She lay still. Was she breathing? In that light, it was impossible to tell. If anyone came around the corner, they’d be calling him the assailant. The boy would claim he’d attacked them. That he’d been bigger and faster — maybe fast enough to kill a teenaged girl. Self-defence had brought out the knife.

      Over by the curb. An arm moved. Reached up to feel the head. Thank. Fuck. He hadn’t killed her after all. For a moment he wanted to go over and help, but quickly thought better of it. The head looked around, fixing him with a hateful stare. Hands planted themselves in the dirt. The body twitched, inching upwards. She was like the Evil Dead, already coming after him again.

      He flashed on the pub. Remembered he’d paid in cash. No paper trail. No one knew his name. Wasn’t a regular. And was very very grateful.

      Time to go.

      Twenty-One

      Drink and Resurrection

      Dan had never endangered anybody’s life — his own included — by mixing driving with alcohol. Even this latest zigzag life had thrown him wasn’t going to make him change that. There were some rules no amount of alcohol could waive, though if drinking encouraged a state in which you could convince yourself of almost anything, then that went a long way toward explaining why so many drinkers didn’t consider themselves subject to those rules. He sobered up long enough to patch his face, say goodbye to his aunt and cousin and get safely back down the 69.

      Somewhere between Parry Sound and Mactier his mind got stuck in a loop as he imagined his mother returning home to find herself locked out in the snow, knocking without getting an answer. And always, just out of reach, himself as a four-year-old, listening to a strange scratching sound that came intermittently before fading out for good. You wouldn’t remember — you were just a little kid, Daniel. His aunt’s words. Try as he might, he couldn’t erase the memory’s sepia glow.

      Despite what he’d learned about his mother’s death, Dan was determined not to fall apart over it. At least not any more than he had already. She’d been dead for more than thirty years. That wasn’t about to change. Knowledge stopped the hoping, he reminded himself, but it didn’t make things better.

      In his mind there were two women who occupied his memory and vied for the title of mother: one was light and feathery, a rustle of flowers in the morning air, a woman who made Eskimo villages out of discarded half-shells of eggs upended on drifts of cotton batten snow. The other was slovenly, weepy-eyed, didn’t dress before three in the afternoon, and made promises she didn’t keep or remember. Neither of them seemed real, just illusions he’d invented to fill in the shadows where a mother was supposed to be. He’d always felt that if he could know which version was true — or neither — then he could stop trying to remember her, stop trying to piece her together after all these years.

      Just outside Barrie he pulled over to the side of the highway and leaned his forehead into the steering wheel. A squadron of eighteen-wheelers roared past, rocking him like a child as he choked back his sobs, tears staining his pant-legs. The only thing that revived him was the thought of more drink waiting at home. Normally a draft or two would have stood him in good stead at a local pub, but the thought that he might not be able to stop there, coupled with the fear of getting stranded in Barrie, held sway. So there was hope, was how he saw it. If he still had priorities on where he would and would not allow himself to get pissed-drunk, there was still a little humanity left.

      By the time he turned in his driveway, his mind had re-focused on Craig Killingworth’s disappearance. It was an excuse, he knew, to keep from thinking about his mother’s death. He dropped his bag in the hall and went upstairs to wash his face, marvelling at the yellow and purple stain spreading beneath the skin on the right side. In the kitchen, he cracked the ice tray against the counter, splashed a healthy hit of Scotch into a glass, filled a plastic bag with the rest of the ice, and went to the living room. There, holding the bag to his face, he spread the file and photos on the floor like a mad haberdasher’s shop. He had a case to finish.

      The whiskey brought clarity to his thinking. It helped him concentrate as it dulled the ache in his head and the pain in his heart. As he drank, he contemplated the code that might or might not unlock the past: a missing bicycle, a ferry captain who said he saw Craig Killingworth crossing just one way. All this time Dan had imagined a clean break or, at worst, death by mishap somewhere down the highway. But the lost portion of the file and the missing bicycle had entwined in his mind. It seemed as though they’d been telling him something different. He just wished he knew what.

      He picked up Craig Killingworth’s photograph, trying to read into its depths. No smiles were always the hardest to interpret. Sadness or just a lack of expression? Cheese or no cheese? There was a shot of Killingworth with his sons, the dolphin-like Thom, already beautiful, and the darker, thought-ravaged features of the slightly older Theodore. Ted. Even here, Craig Killingworth’s upturned mouth was hard to press into service as a smile. What lay hidden behind those eyes? What held back the joy he might have felt at being with his boys?

      A final shot showed the interior of what looked a lot like the stables Dan had explored behind the summerhouse the day before the wedding. Killingworth’s trim figure was outfitted in jodhpurs and sport-shirt, collar turned up. He held a grooming brush in one hand; his other lay on the waxy brown flank of a gelding. Here, at last, he exhibited what looked like the ghost of a smile.

      “Where did you go?” Dan spoke to the empty room. “And why does your family not want you found?”

      A man had disappeared, leaving behind a wife and two sons. How had

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