Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe
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above a djembe store.”
“Smells kind of funny,” Ben said.
“It does smell awful,” Katherine agreed.
“It’s the dog,” I told them. That prompted an explanation and medical history. By the time I’d finished, the dog had clambered down the stairs and buried her face in Katherine’s crotch. She pushed the dog away firmly and crossed her legs.
“What’s her name?” Ben asked.
“When she was a baby we called her Babe — real creative, I know. Years later we decided she needed a real name, so I named her Odetta, after the blues singer. Only she doesn’t look like an Odetta and she doesn’t answer to Odetta, so I went back to calling her Babe. But she’s not a baby anymore and that doesn’t fit, and because it’s been so long, she doesn’t come to that name either. So I just call her ‘dog’, or the dog if I have to differentiate her from other dogs.”
The dog in question walked to her corner and with a laboured wheeze collapsed on her mat.
“Poor girl,” Ben said, stooping over to rub two knuckles against the dog’s skull.
“Anyway,” I said, “there anything else going on?”
“I just drove here because he asked me to,” Katherine said, pointing at Ben. “If it was up to me I’d’ve let you sleep.”
“Are you pissed at me?” I asked.
“Of course not,” she said, in what she probably thought was a convincing tone.
I turned my attention to Ben. “Out with it.”
“Not a big deal, really. It’s just my mother wants to hire someone else.”
“I see,” I said, leaning back against the head-board. I hoped at least it wasn’t McEachern. “She’s entitled to do that, of course. Tell her I understand.”
“No, she doesn’t want to replace you.” Ben held up a card, pink with blue script. “It’s just that someone told her about this and now she can’t get it out of her head. I was actually hoping you could talk her out of it.”
I looked at the card. MADAME THIBODEAU, ETHEREAL CONSULTATIONS followed by an address near the foothills of Burnaby Mountain.
“She’s serious?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Who told your mom about her?”
“No idea.” His expression turned strangely credulous. “It’s all bullshit, right?”
“What do you think?”
I got up and walked to the washroom and splashed cold water on my face.
“I know your mother,” I said. “The more we try to talk her out of this the more she’ll want it. So let her book the session.”
“She already did. Sundown tonight.”
I sat back down on the bed and started buttoning my shirt. “If it’s one session and your mom is willing to waste the dough, there’s no real harm. But some of these people are lampreys. They’ll string her along, week after week, with nothing to show for it.”
“And that’s our job,” Katherine said. Immediately she added, “I’m kidding, of course.”
“We’ll go and see,” I said, ignoring her. “And if Madame Thibodeau starts with that ‘To find your daughter you must purify your bank account’ shit, we’ll call her on it.” Looking at Katherine I added, “After all, we can’t have her honing in on our turf.”
Before the illness, when I took the dog to Douglas Park, she’d take off across the field, ruining ball games, harassing little children and stalking the wildlife. Now when I loosed her collar and tossed her ratty tennis ball, she loped after it as if the activity held no pleasure for her, like it was a huge favor to me. The next time she ignored the ball and squatted behind the home team dugout. I watched a crumbling deuce fall from between her legs.
“Lovely,” I said.
I was sitting on the bleachers on the Laurel Street side, watching the convoy of SUVs and minivans pick up kids from Day Care. I watched the vehicles recede down the block. An assembly line of similar kids and similar cars.
I thought about Cynthia Loeb. I do that often. I know more about her than anyone except her mother, more even than Ben. I’d read her journal eight times. I knew the seating plan of her second-grade art class. I could draw her dental charts from memory. I felt like the host of some sort of virus.
My last girlfriend, Mira Das, walked out after seven months of listening to me babble about time tables and partial license plates. She told me she’d slept with Gavin Fisk just to feel like she mattered in some way to someone. What kind of a non-entity do you have to become to make a woman feel like that?
But at least with the Loebs I’d exhausted everything. With Django there were the pawn shop owners. They weren’t speaking, though that could be due to healthy distrust rather than conspiracy. That left me at an impasse. The Ford Taurus wasn’t recovered. Ditto the bike. I’d exhausted a comprehensive list of people who knew Django or saw him that day. Everyone else thought Django had run off or Cliff had been complicit in his disappearance. I didn’t believe either scenario.
Eventually the dog brought the ball to me. I stood up and pocketed it. We started home to get ready for the psychic.
I expected the parlor of Madame Thibodeau to be dusty and low-lit, the shelves crowded with occult knicknacks. I was half-hoping for a crystal ball. She ushered Ben and Mrs. Loeb and I into a sparse eggshell-coloured room, drew the teal drapes and sat us on a pair of L-shaped couches that formed a U facing the Madame’s rattan throne. The Madame herself eschewed kerchiefs and beads in favor of a teal pants suit with silver hoop earrings and a half-dozen silver bracelets on her left wrist. Her hands were soft and she had honey-coloured press-on nails. Her hair was blonde and swept back from a puffy pink face with a hefty amount of concealer. Her expression was earnest.
“I’m not a fortune teller or a prognosticator,” she said. “I think of myself as part of a conduit. What comes through the conduit depends on what is put in.”
Mrs. Loeb, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion, nodded. She held clutched in her hands a folded photo of her missing daughter. Ben sat on her other side, stealing glances at me over his mother’s head. I fiddled with my wallet.
It was a slick pitch, delivered directly to Mrs. Loeb’s heartstrings, ignoring the scoffs of her son and the disinterest of their family friend. The Madame cautioned her on what not to expect, in a way that would produce in Mrs. Loeb’s mind a strong hope for the miraculous without making any claims to it. At the end of the spiel Mrs. Loeb handed over her daughter’s picture and an envelope containing five hundred dollars. Madame Thibodeau did not accept checks.
Before she could stow the money in her pocket, my wallet slipped out of my hands, spilling business cards across the floor. The Madame used the toe of her slipper to scoot a pair of cards towards me. Each card said MORRISS CARGILL, INVESTMENT STRATEGIST. They’d come with the calendar.
“We’d like to speak to Cynthia,” the Madame said. “We’d like to talk to someone who knows her. This woman is her mother. She must be allowed an audience.”
Ben looked at his mother, who had closed her eyes, and at me, who shot him a look that said: patience. Madame Thibodeau did not close her eyes, but kept them trained on a corner of the room, at the juncture of walls and ceiling. I could almost imagine a disembodied torso floating there.
“Someone is telling me that your uncertainty is almost at an end,” the Madame said. “They want me to tell you to be strong. That hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.”
“How powerful?” Ben said.
His mother shushed him.
“They are