4.
As the day dribbled off its hours, Rex paid little attention to anything but his thoughts of Lydia Botsaris. This wasn't the first time in his life that such a devotion to her crossed many minutes and hours. It was not the first time that, through some mystical power at work in the universe, he'd been drawn towards helping her.
The photograph Mr. Weatherstaff had left behind kept Rex's thoughts fresh, his memories of the past on constant repeat. No facsimile of her was required to guide him across the smooth angles of her face, the tiny hollows below her cheeks, the little dip between chin and plush bottom lip. He remembered the slow curve of her brow, with the dark, soft hair that drooped over it when she had been too hard at work, too lost in the business of war to maintain combs and pins. How her agile, useful hands had swept across loose knots at the back of her head, absentmindedly, disinterestedly, as she fixed her kindness upon a worthy, injured man.
No photograph was required to remind him of her. It was hard to forget a woman of her beauty, means and, most respectfully, power.
The morning he realized she'd floated to the surface in Ontario was the morning he saw her photographed with Mr. Weatherstaff for the first time. He supposed, being a man who collected information, since it was the way his mind worked as it tumbled through the world, he was one of the few men that read the society columns. This was partly due to the information he longed to collect, how one item might be connected to another, and he might be the only person in Toronto with the intelligence to connect Item A with Item B. His business relationship with Mr. Weatherstaff had been lucrative, and was, thanks to the gentleman's rather harsh luck, as continual as it was faithful. But it was a surprise to find Mr. Weatherstaff mentioned in the society column, seen at the theater with a woman identified as Lydia Botsaris.
For many reasons, Rex had been astounded. What was George Weatherstaff, a man inflicted with one scandal after another, doing with a woman who'd supposedly died in France seven years ago?
Naturally, no one knew the answer to that question, and certainly not Rex Malin, to whom all the answers came if he worked hard enough for them. If he wanted to hold within his mind the treasure of that answer, he was surely on the trail of it. Really, only one person he knew could answer the question of misappropriated death, and that was the beautiful woman herself. He had to find Lydia Botsaris.
Or he had to find the woman he'd known in France, the nurse with no name, the nurse with a reputation, a rumor, an unidentified power. Forget finding Ms. Botsaris. Perhaps she'd run off, back to the Continent, once realizing that she didn't fit in so well, after all.
Yet—why leave, if her life was so close and settled and cozy, if she were going to marry George Weatherstaff and settle into the high and gilded rims of Toronto society? With her photograph and name boldly set into the Gazette, she had already climbed to the top and had eked out a means of remaining on the elite plateau. If inclined, she could certainly stay there. She had a fiancé who'd willingly set her on a pedestal every day.
Gone she was. Ergo, Lydia Botsaris, soon to be Lydia Weatherstaff, did not want to stay in Toronto and be with a man who'd willingly set her on a pedestal every day.
Or something had driven her into hiding.
Rex hunted for the photograph Weatherstaff had left behind, and unearthed it from debris that crisscrossed his desk no matter how often he tidied it. Her exquisite image was frozen on a thick sheet of high-quality photographer's paper, from a studio on Cambridge Street. It was only when she was stuck to paper and tinted by hand that he could look at her eyes. In France, he'd had difficulty looking in the eyes of anyone but enemies and commanding officers. The unknown French nurse that he'd encountered multiple times, injured and uninjured, in battle and out of it, was one he had tried to look in the eye. He recalled that her eyes wore no gentle, womanly expressions, either. She was hard and chilled. The photograph failed to catch that.
Could it be a different woman? Identical twins was an option, of course, but the scarcity of finding one in war, one at home in Toronto, were too enormous. The probabilities of it being the same woman, a nurse in France, a socialite in Toronto, were nearly as astronomical as it being a set of twins. Rex was rather resigned to believe it was the same woman—or ghost—or whatever she was. A spectral being flushed from his dreams and into his reality, and for the third time in his life.
He wished he had saved her using the same practices that she had saved his. But the circumstances were different, and six months apart. His had involved specters, of a sort. A pack of beastly wolves crept across the field at night. And a woman, a nurse that he'd never seen before, was trapped between the wolves and the edge of a cliff. He'd caught her in a scene like something in a fairy tale. He'd crept behind the wolves and fired a shot that scattered them, angered them. They were gone long enough for her to run off with him in an ambulance with a cranky, sick motor and hardly any petrol. He returned her to her hospital, had never asked what she was doing away from it, did not think of asking any questions at all thanks to the intensity and sobriety of war, the destitution of the Belgian town around them.
Six months later, she patched up a hole in his shoulder. "A graze," she called it, accent thick, neither French nor German, not the combination of the two that his ears had grown accustomed to. He liked the way she'd made it sound, "a graze," as if it were a pastoral landscape, something that sheep were likely to do. But when he squinted at her, the soft slope of her cheek, the velvet softness of the arc of her bottom lip, he knew her, and tried to tell her that he knew her. She'd smiled weakly, saying it was possible. A woman might do better to remember the fairytale knight who'd saved her from a pack of hungry wolves.
He tossed the photograph back on the desk, disgusted. Maybe women like that simply forgot, over and over again, as it was convenient for them.
After his shoulder had healed, and he was on the verge of being released, his orders yet unknown, he'd tracked his mystery maiden to the nearest old church and found her sitting in a pew. He slipped next to her, held her hand, didn't say a word. Three minutes like that, he'd always estimated it'd been three minutes, and she kissed his cheek—and vanished. As soon as he'd gathered the nerve required to follow her, he'd stepped in her wake out the back door, to an abandoned laneway of cobblestones, litter and snow. No one was there.
Less than an hour later, a transporter came and left him and twenty-six others at a camp in Rouen, France. He started the war all over again. He then piloted primitive airplanes rather than taking out Germans with a shot his wrists had grown too shaky to commit adequately. But whenever he happened to fly near a Belgian town, he looked for the church where he'd met her, where they'd sat for an estimated three minutes, holding hands and not saying a word. He never found it again.
By the time he'd taken up three different planes, hadn't shot down a single one, the war was over. He stayed for a while longer, drifting about listlessly, restlessly, like many of the men in Rouen. And, finally, the barriers began to come down, and if they couldn't get out someone, inevitably, came to them. A rich and bored brother, curious as to how the war had scarred France, listed his way down the Seine and found Rex in Rouen. Oswald was rather unchanged, his general soupçon of indifference, humor, charm and cynicism as well represented as ever. He cheered the men with his tales, his flippancy, his mannerisms and his fine suits. Oswald couldn't make any man feel the need to ridicule him, even if he was something of a caricature sprung to life out of the pages of a novel. Nonetheless, Rex had been pleased to see him, to hear his tales, his artfully-tongued mysteries about his doings in Britain during the whole of the war. "Ah, that is a secret. I'm afraid I can't tell you, but I'll be more than happy to spend the money I've made from that secret, and perhaps some others, on you and Mother, if you'll permit me."
When the day came to leave France, mustered out with the skeletal remains of his company, Rex was taken to London in Oswald's own plane, flown by his own hands. If nothing else, Oswald hadn't been idle while in
England, and, for certain, he had made a great deal of money. Rex knew this by Oswald's careful extravagance: his fine pied-à-terre in London's most fashionable and upscale neighborhood; he tongued off a list of his elite-named neighbors with laughter and ease. He bought his brother, who had nothing but khaki and a blue pilot's uniform to his name, the smartest of clothes, made sure that he had the best hot shaves by the finest barbers, the finest soaps for his evening ablutions. And, through all of this, their grand six months in London, Rex felt different, somehow more alive, somehow less familiar with his past and less afraid of his future. He thought there must be something wrong with him. He never told Oswald how he felt, and the doctor who'd examined him said he was "fit as a fiddle." Rex had never told Oswald about the nameless nurse in France. He'd told a handful of the guys he used to fly with in Rouen, two of whom were dead, and the other four had whereabouts and lives unknown.
For a long while, Rex had supposed that the woman with her photograph in the newspaper was not the same nameless nurse he'd known in France.
How on earth was he going to find her again?
An idea struck him, and leaving the Weatherstaff file a mess upon his desk, slipped into the rest of the office. Estella, behind the typewriter, glanced up at him the instant he was there. He fumbled excuses, attempted to vocalize words that might, if strung together, present an excuse viable to her, as he flung on hat and coat and scarf against the fierce weather. She mouthed a phrase he didn't hear, but, in hindsight, as he took the gritty granite stairs, that it was about Oswald having taken off to Hamilton, and perhaps something in regards to the meanness of the climate.
He felt it on him as soon as he was out the door. The wind had turned colder since the morning excursion to the murdered man in the laneway, and he passed a fleeting wish for Oswald's trusty car rather than the use of his two feet. By luck, his destination lay two blocks east, but was glad when the short hike ended. The wind was far more fierce than the snow, too arctic for November, too eerie to be natural.
Inside the Church of St. James, the oldest church in Toronto, Rex took off his hat and slipped into the sanctuary. Though its Gothic Revival style was a far cry from the simplistic architecture of the church in Belgium, it was no less solemn and regal. Eagerly, Rex scanned the pews for any woman befitting Lydia Botsaris' physical characteristics. So few people were present, on a day of terrible weather that certainly lowered the piety of parishioners, that his inspection was finished far too early and unsuccessfully.
He sat in an empty pew near the rear of the church, and let himself regroup. If not there, where was she? Did she know he was in Toronto, too? Is that why she'd appeared there?
Out the corner of his eye, he saw a moving mass silhouetted by the light of the pointy glass windows. As the mass neared, knowing it was too wide and misshaped to be the nameless nurse, and unsure who it would turn out to be, Rex kept still. Eventually, the man sat, and by the natural odors he emanated, Rex's shoulders relaxed, his insides stopped leaping, and he looked up.
"I've never seen you in an Anglican place of worship," Rex whispered to his old friend, Egbert Watching Moon. Rex hoped he sounded snippy and offensive; Watching Moon often appreciated the sarcasm and meanness they bandied about. The two of them had worked on one of Cavendish's more difficult cases in the last four years, the death of a young girl and the suspect a young Algonquian man. Rex and Watching Moon were both collectors of information, built to be observant through the years, and had become fast friends. Inspector Cavendish, on the other hand, had used Egbert Watching Moon only to wring pertinent facts from him, then quickly discarded him, yet crawled—Watching Moon had used the word "slinked"—back to "Mr. Egbert" in the event that he required a tribal liaison. Rex thought it was best to keep on the good side of another culture, and he appreciated Watching Moon's skills and strengths, his quirky sense of humor. They hadn't seen one another in months.
"Well," Rex had his temper rise at Watching Moon's provoking silence, "what are you doing here?"
"Isn't that obvious? I came to find you. And I have. Now," he grunted, his bad leg giving him spasms of pain in the cold weather, "we must get out of here so I can explain to you why I wanted to find you."
Not far from the Church of St. James was a local eatery, cozy with its old-fashioned parlor stove and rows behind the U-shaped counters of candy jars and oddments. Watching Moon seemed to be known and welcomed there, for he sat at the counter without a qualm, his big coat billowing out behind him, hanging down from the stool. His fingerless gloves took off his hat, and his expert aim tossed it successfully to the nearest hook on the coat rack. Rex left his hat and coat in place, the weather having left him chilled to the bone. Watching Moon sized him up.
"Do you want me to get prophetic about the weather? I say it won't last. Two coffees, please, Tony," Watching Moon said to the lad behind the counter, apron shirt and hat stark white and as fresh as he was. Tony brought the coffees a moment later, and Watching Moon enjoyed seeing his friend not hesitate to sip the too-hot brew. "You look very unhealthy."
Rex sputtered into the coffee, laughed. "Thank you very much. Kinder words have never been spoken."
"Truer words have never needed to be said. I suppose that you are in with Cavendish on the dead body in the laneway off Mutual." He turned the cup around on the plain porcelain saucer, emoting no eagerness for a response.
"I guess you already know the answer. Oswald's away now, following a tip that may lead to the boy's identity. Why? Do you know who he is?"
After a moment, Watching Moon pressed his hands together beneath his chin, eyes wincing, eyebrows squeezed together in the middle. "No, I don't think I do. I thought I would see Cavendish about it, anyway. There was something strange about the scene."
"Following dead bodies around again, are you?"
"The dead are not my hobby, at least not when I don't want them to be," Watching Moon replied in his typical mysteriousness and ambiguity, laced with just a touch of humor. He shot his gaze to Tony, washing spots off clean sundae glasses with another stark white item, a towel. From the pocket of his coat, Watching Moon scrounged up twenty cents. He left it in Tony's outstretched palm. "Go powder your nose, kid."
Tony smirked, took the hint, and left the front unattended. Rex sipped his coffee, again waiting for Watching Moon to say what he wanted to say in the privacy of a desolated eatery.
"The body of that boy was gnawed and mauled," Watching Moon said.
"I noticed. What are you thinking? A disgruntled dog, a starving one?"
"More like a pack of wild dogs."
"In Toronto?"
Watching Moon took a long sip of coffee, smoothing back his pepper-and-salt hair. The light of levity had been snuffed from his eyes. "There have been many strange things happening in Toronto lately. Haven't you noticed? You've been busier than usual. So has Cavendish. That's why he's been crankier than usual."
Rex picked up on this. "And why he was so eager to have me do most of the work on this case."
"See, you are much smarter than you let on." Watching Moon smirked.
Rex's concentration went from Cavendish to the hint that a pack of wild dogs had killed that boy in the alleyway. Wasn't it too coincidental that he'd once saved Lydia Botsaris from a pack of wolves, and was looking for her at the same time a young man is murdered, then presumably eaten by giant canines? He mulled, and Watching Moon aided him.
"There are two full moons this month. We are coming upon the second. Two eclipses this month, too. One was earlier this month, a small solar eclipse we couldn't see here in Canada. And the other is in three days, a lunar eclipse coinciding with the hunter's moon. It doesn't take my cultural imprint to say that things are always stranger when eclipses and full moons come much too close together. It is the time of year when the veil between our powerful and realistic world, and the intangible, spiritual world is a very fragile, flimsy thing, capable of being shredded—if someone or something is powerful enough to do it." r />
Rex played with this. "Hence, wolves come out of the dark and kill an innocent victim."
"Could be. But wolves such as that have a master that is a part of them, that controls them. That's what all the legends tell us." The glare Rex gave flung insight to him. "This is not your first encounter with such a legend. H'mm, yes, that's very impressive. I'm agog. Every time we meet, Rex, you surprise me. You're made of layers, and underneath every one of them there lurks another story. What is your story?"
With Tony still off powdering his nose, or, more appropriately, starching his apron, Rex confided in Watching Moon. As quickly and succinctly as he could, Rex informed him of the missing affianced to George Weatherstaff, a name that did not impress Watching Moon; he told of his meeting with Lydia Botsaris, or the woman he supposed was she, in the wilds of Belgium. Mentioning that he'd saved her from wolves, that among the allied soldiers there had been told a ghost story of a wolf keeper that floated around abandoned battlefields, but that he hadn't connected the two until that day.
Watching Moon expressed his reaction in the typical manner that irked and amused Rex. "You should have left her to die with the wolves. You've made your life too interesting as a result."
Rex's knees began to tremble, his insides quake. To put them to rest, he gulped down the remains of his coffee. "Are you going to stay and help me?"
"No," Watching Moon said, sliding off the stool and patting his friend on the back. "I'm going home to pray for your spirit. Someone else will come along and help you, if I pray the right way. Here's some change," he left it on the table to pay for the coffee, and there was a bit extra. "Get yourself some sweets. I have a feeling you will need to feel like a little kid again."
Rex held him back. "Any idea how I can start finding her?"
Watching Moon shook his head, ducking it into the wide-brimmed hat, speckled in melted snowflakes. "I suggest you ask the wolves."
"You've come here just to fill me with ominous warnings, Egbert Watching Moon."
"That depends entirely on how you look at it, Rex Malin."
He disappeared into the snow, the small brass bell upon the door tinkling. It announced a departure to Tony, for the kid returned swiftly to the front counter.
"Anything else for you, sir?"
Dejectedly, lethargically, Rex inched the coins forward. "Give us a bar of chocolate, Tony. I've got one very long day ahead of me."
He still didn't know how he was going to find Lydia Botsaris. He couldn't very well wait for an anthropomorphic wolf to tell him where she was. And he couldn't wait for Lydia to fall into his lap for the third time in his life. Though he had a feeling that if he waited around long enough, she might wind up doing just that.
He ought to get to George Weatherstaff. Whether the distinguished gentleman was at home or at his office, he deserved to know that his lady was not likely to return to him in the near future. She was as likely to vanish into the snowflakes and blue twilight as Watching Moon had done, as those spectral wolves he'd witnessed in Belgium.
Another scandal tacked upon the figure and form of George Weatherstaff. As if the poor man needed another one.
* * * *