Pretty furious, p.16
Pretty Furious, page 16
Louise finished with the mess she was making of her list, and went to throw it out. Some went in the regular garbage, some in the office garbage—wrapped in Kleenex—and some she even flushed down the toilet. Then she went to the fridge and got my birthday cake out. She set it on the counter and pressed the candles into the icing, three rows of six. She picked up the lighter, and then passed it over to me.
“I know it’s not exactly traditional,” she said. “But I think it’s fitting.”
I flicked the lighter on and held it carefully to the wicks. By the time I got to the last one, the first was dripping wax onto the top of the cake, but no one rushed me while I set the lighter down and pulled myself together. We looked at each other across the flames, a little solemn for a birthday party, but we all knew why. Louise squeezed my hand and Mags nodded at me. I closed my eyes and leaned forwards to blow out the candles.
* * *
—
The Londsett Marsh wasn’t particularly exciting as far as conservation areas went. It was municipal, so it wasn’t even crown land. Aside from a pair of bald eagles that had nested here for one summer half a decade ago, there weren’t any notable animals. You could see deer and maybe a muskrat or two, but those were just as easily viewable from any farmhouse window.
What the marsh did have was a lot of bird boxes. They were built by shop classes at both ECSS and the public Catholic high school, though the funding for ECSS woodworking had long since dried up. New boxes were added every season, but most of the action was in the older boxes, because that’s where the established birds would make their nests. It was still only home for things like red-winged blackbirds and chickadees, but there were a lot of them, and so that’s what people came to see.
I realized the advantages of bird watching very quickly. Even though getting Constable Postma’s attention was the last thing I wanted, his book had been surprisingly useful. Looking at birds meant less hiking, which I was not super into as an excuse to be out here. It also gave me a reason to be at the marsh at various times of day, particularly in the evening, when the birds were coming home. Most importantly, it provided the perfect excuse to be out here with binoculars, and if sometimes they were trained on the Pedersen farmhouse instead of seeking out elusive woodpeckers, well, there usually weren’t too many people around to notice.
Also, it turned out that birds were sort of neat.
We still had the last few weeks of school to get through, of course, but having a plan always made me feel better. Our teachers had more or less given up on actual classwork, and we split our time between exam prep and messing around. Jenny got into Western and Fanshaw but didn’t want to talk about it, so none of us pressed, and the rest of us all had our first choices. Jen and I were deferring because we had been accepted into Katimavik. We were being sent to opposite ends of the country, but it was still exciting. My parents had been pretty thrilled about it, in the end, which was nice.
It was finally going to happen. The thing that we’d resisted since nursery school, when the five of us banded together for the first time. We were going to split up. And yes, there were phones and the internet, but it was never going to be the same again. I was excited and a little bit scared, but mostly I felt like I had unfinished business. And I wasn’t talking about my exams.
We had something else to take care of first.
27.
Maddie Carter
The third week of July, a concerned parent wrote an anonymous letter to the local paper. This was not completely unheard of, but it did take some effort to pull off when most submissions came online. I wondered if the sender had paid for a stamp or if they’d just dropped it through the mail slot one evening when the office was closed. The Record published it in the news section instead of the opinion section because it was a slow week, and because the opinion section was completely filled up by people arguing about if we needed a second stoplight (technically a crosswalk). It might have gone unnoticed due to incredibly low readership, but the library was doing a local news reading program with their teen group that summer, and so a bunch of them read it the day the paper came out.
The concern was that the police, specifically Constable Postma because he was the most recognizable, were being called to the swimming pool too frequently. After all, the boys had just as much a right to be there as anyone else. Never mind that they traveled in a leering pack and almost always targeted kids who were by themselves or with one other friend. I was supposed to be watching kids swimming, so I didn’t always see it when Postma was there, but by the third week of July, I figured it was something close to every other day. That still wasn’t every time the boys showed up.
The mother, because it was so obviously one of the boys’ mothers, worried that not only was her sweet boy getting a complex about being confronted by an armed officer so frequently, it was a misuse of local resources. Eganston only had one police officer on patrol in town at any given time, though of course more could be brought in if they were required. Constable Postma did not belong at the pool. He belonged elsewhere in town, solving actual crime.
“Has Constable Postma ever solved a crime in his life?” Jenny asked dismissively. “Like, do speeding tickets count?”
She rolled up the newspaper and threw it at Mags so she could put it in the bonfire. It was too hot for a fire, but Mags’s little sisters had wanted s’mores, and we’d been forcibly evicted from the kitchens of both houses. The girls had run off, covered in sugar, to go brag about the treat while presumably attracting every mosquito in the county. Which was fine with me, because I hated mosquito bites.
“That’s not really the point,” Jen said. She poked the fire with a marshmallow spike, burning off the remaining gooeyness so she could start over on the next one. “I’m more worried that we’re calling too frequently.”
“I’ve only called twice,” I said. Everyone looked at me, and I shrugged. I rummaged through the basket Mags’s grandma had sent outside with us, hoping to find hot dogs. “The first week of summer vacation, I called the Wednesday evening and the Sunday afternoon.”
“I called from my phone once, and I used Dottie’s phone once,” Jenny said. She was eating the chocolate plain, and Louise was pointedly ignoring her. “But that’s it.”
“I called when they were using the wheelchair ramps at town hall as a skate park,” Louise said. She passed me one of the multipronged skewers so I could cook my hot dog without dropping it. “The mayor was yelling at them when Jake showed up because the actual skate park is literally two blocks away.”
“So who else is calling?” Mags said. Free of younger siblings, she leaned back in her lawn chair and looked up at the darkening sky.
None of us knew the answer, but the next week there were two letters to the editor, both written as responses. Again, they were printed in the news section (the crosswalk debate raged on hotly in opinion), but this time they were closer to the front of the paper, and the headlines were marginally bigger. Clearly someone thought this was getting interesting.
The first letter was anonymous, asking the “concerned parent” what crimes exactly they thought Constable Postma should be looking at if there were kids in the park who were worried enough about their safety to call him. The writer argued that Postma would, at the very least, be providing a good example for the boys, and literally used the expression “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The second letter was not anonymous. It was from Alice MacGregor, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been in youth group with Mags. Her family was well-known in town because they were all athletes outside of school. Her brother Davy played broomball, two of her cousins curled at the provincial level, and her younger sisters comprised approximately half the girls’ hockey program in their age group. Alice was a swimmer, so she was at the pool almost as much as I was. She was too young to have a lifeguard job yet, but it was only a matter of time, and meanwhile, she was on the swim team. Alice admitted to calling Postma twice herself, because the boys made her nervous and said rude things to her about her bathing suit in front of her younger sisters.
“Holy shit,” Jen said.
We hadn’t been expecting a follow-up in the paper, so we hadn’t planned a get-together for that afternoon. Jenny had texted everyone after picking Dottie up from the library, where she and the rest of the teen group had once again been amongst the first to read the news. My parents were in London, so everyone came to my house as they finished their shifts at work. I meant to order a pizza, but it was so hot we ended up just taking every popsicle we could find and heading out to the backyard.
We inflated my old kiddie pool and filled it with all the ice cubes from the freezer. It wasn’t a lot, and it melted pretty fast, but we could sit in a circle around the pool and at least keep our feet at a reasonable temperature. Jen had brought a cooler of ice from her house, but we were using it for drinks and to hold off the sticky end the popsicles were headed for. It was after six, but the humidity didn’t show any signs of breaking.
“The best part is that everyone knows Alice is on the swim team,” Jenny said. “They literally did a feature with a picture of her at the beginning of summer. Everyone knows what her bathing suit looks like.”
“Not to mention some random adult took her side,” I said. “Probably without knowing it, but still.”
I wondered if those were the only two letters the paper had received, or if those were just the two that were chosen. I wondered what would happen next week when the paper came out. I wondered if readership would go up, however briefly, like it had the time a reporter covered all the fall fair events over the course of two months and accidentally printed Mrs. Phillips’s secret chicken recipe.
“How’s the stakeout going?” Louise asked.
We hadn’t talked that much about the fire since my birthday, aside from my brief run-in with Constable Postma at the very beginning. There was no point in gathering the materials this far out, so there wasn’t much to do. We had a vague idea of what we’d need and a rough concept of the timeline, but planning anything too much seemed like a good way to get caught. Or worry ourselves silly. It seemed best to leave it alone until circumstances were ready.
“Pretty quiet,” I said. “The Chasers go up to their cottage a lot, and the Pedersens just do normal farm stuff. I did see a cedar waxwing this week, though. That was cool.”
Jenny looked at me like I was off my gourd, but didn’t say anything.
“Any other people?” Mags asked.
“Well,” I said. “There are a few other bird watchers. There’s a club, apparently. I told them I wasn’t really interested in joining since I was going to school in the fall. They might all be octogenarians.”
The club was actually pretty chill, and not as old as I joked, though they were definitely all in the retirement age bracket. In the winter, one of their husbands used a snowmobile to make a ski trail through the old sugar bush for them so they could go cross-country skiing without having to break the snow. It was only kind of trespassing. In the summer they just wandered around looking for birds. They’d all lived in Eganston for years, and they’d tried having a book club, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t bring their snacks with them into the woods. I didn’t for a moment imagine that the five of us would turn out like them, but it was nice to know that grown-ups still did unconventional things just for the sake of being together and getting out of the house.
“They don’t think it’s weird that you’re out there by yourself?” Louise asked. I think she still felt bad about leaving me by myself at the pool, even though I had told her it was fine. I even meant it. I missed her, of course, but I wasn’t insulted about it, or upset.
“No,” I said. “I think they have all accepted a certain level of weird.”
Jenny got a lime popsicle out of the cooler, deftly broke it in half, opened the package, and handed the other stick to Mags.
“Are there any—” Jen began, and then caught the banana popsicle that Jenny had already thrown at her head. “Thanks.”
“Those ones are gross,” Jenny said. “You can have them.”
“Emily ate all the grape,” I said. “But she’s gone next week, and I put fudgsicles on the grocery list, so we’ll see what happens.”
We heard the wail of a police siren, and everyone tensed. All the times Constable Postma or whoever had come to the pool, it had never been lights and siren. The sound was fading out fast. They were probably on the highway towards Seaforth, called away by who knows what. There were meth labs, but I couldn’t imagine Jake Postma going into any of those. I didn’t think of him as that kind of cop, even though he absolutely was. He tried to be everyone’s big brother or favourite son in town, but that didn’t change the badge.
Maybe he just really wanted fish and chips.
28.
Maddie Carter
In the end, it was very easy to start a fire.
The Chasers headed up to their cottage the second last week of August with no plans to return until after Labour Day Weekend. The Pedersens brought the beans in a week after that. It was a dry August, so the field was light brown and cracked. The furrows were deep and uneven, but not unmanageable. The birding club even took the week off, because they were so sick of wild turkeys that they were just going to go to the beach instead.
Jenny had the gas in her car. Louise had bought it a few days ago in Kincardine, after driving Paul up for a baseball game. The plan was that we would have a sleepover at Louise’s house. Her parents were gone, Paul slept like a rock, and Aaron was finally living in the second house, since he’d managed to fix the electric and plumbing. Jenny would drive.
The night of the fire, we were all too excited to sleep. It was nominally Jenny’s birthday party, so Louise had decorated and baked just like she usually would. I was too worked up to eat much, but at least I didn’t get a sugar buzz. We watched movies, and Mags might have dozed a little, but finally it was two a.m., and time to go.
“There might be a thunderstorm,” Jen whispered as we pulled on our shoes and headed for Jenny’s car as stealthily as possible.
“Why are you whispering?” I asked at a normal volume.
“I don’t know.” Jen sounded disgruntled. “It felt like I should.”
“Please don’t make me more nervous than I am,” Jenny said. “I still have to drive.”
Louise had plotted the route carefully, drawing it on a paper map from the local tourist kiosk and then burning it at one of Mags’s bonfire nights. It was by no means the direct way, but it was the quietest streets and the emptiest side roads. She even mapped out where Jenny would turn her lights off. On the way back, we wouldn’t come through town at all.
We all piled into the car, Louise in the front because she was absolutely the most likely to keep a level head and give directions. I was squeezed between Mags and Jen in the back. Mags grabbed my hand, and even though it was almost completely dark, I could see the gleam in her eyes.
It’s hard to explain darkness to someone who has only ever lived in cities or what passes for a small town on television. The Jantzis had barn lights and porch lights, but at this time of night, only the lone streetlight they had attached to the hydro pole was still on. The whole front yard was bathed in an orange glow that was much more customarily seen on pavement than it was on grass. We had spent hours playing under that light over the years. Louise’s parents had installed it so the kids could play outside after dark, and we certainly had.
Jenny started the car and pulled slowly out of the driveway and onto the concession. Once she was facing away from Aaron’s house, she turned the headlights on. She drove down to the paved side road that led into town and turned onto it. I’d been driving on these roads my whole life, but Louise sent us on so many twists and turns that I felt like I was lost about ten minutes in. Now there were no lights at all, only the occasional house or warning light on top of a silo. The glow of Eganston was in front of us, a beacon to orient us in the night.
It took ten more minutes to turn onto the Pedersens’ concession. The Chaser house was totally dark, only a few security lights on the barn. The Pedersens had a row of trees along the side of their property. During the day, they were distinguished and interesting yard markers. At night, we could only see the odd spindly branch when it was in front of a light. Jenny put the car in park and turned off the headlights. She reached up and pressed the button that would stop the inside light from coming on when one of us opened a door.
We had decided that only two of us would go into the field. I had the gas container, and Mags had a BBQ starter, along with like four backups. We waited in the car, giving our eyes a while to get used to the dark. We had to do this and cause as little disturbance to the ground as we could, which meant we couldn’t just go blundering through the ditch. After five agonizing minutes, Mags took a deep breath.
“Ready?” I asked, pulling on my gloves.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Jen kissed me on the forehead, and Mags and I slid out of the back seat. Jenny popped the trunk and then took Louise’s hand. When we were moving, Louise was fine, but waiting was difficult for her nerves. I hefted the gas can, Mags checked the lighters for the fifteenth time, and we headed slowly down the bank.
There wasn’t enough light for us to be able to read the billboard. Its hateful message was obscured. Amelia couldn’t accidentally look out her bedroom window at night and see the message her ex’s parents wanted to make sure she got. I wondered if she had curtains.
In the dark, the furrows seemed about a million times more uneven. Mags and I went slowly. It was almost pitch black and super quiet. We could hear cars on the highway two concessions over, but only one every few minutes. Once we heard the speed bumps on Mill Road. Those noises were always clearer at night. You could hear the speed bumps in town if it was quiet enough.
