The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [156]
“Young who?” I said, glancing out the window.
“Pay attention, darling. Laura’s pal. The dark one. The young thug who burned down your father’s factory.”
“It didn’t burn down,” I said. “They put it out in time. Anyway, they never proved it.”
“He skedaddled,” said Richard. “Ran like a rabbit. That’s proof enough for me.”
The marchers on Ottawa had been trapped through a clever back-room stratagem suggested – or so he said – by Richard himself, who moved in high circles these days. The leaders of the march had been decoyed to Ottawa for “official talks,” and the whole kit and kaboodle had been stalled in Regina. The talks came to nothing, as planned, but then there had been riots: the subversives had stirred things up, the crowd had gone out of control, men had been killed and injured. It was the Communists who were behind it, because they had a finger in every dubious pie, and who was to say that waylaying Laura was not one of the pies?
I thought Richard was working himself up unduly. I was upset too, but I believed Laura had merely wandered off – been distracted somehow. That would be more like her. She’d got off at the wrong station, forgotten our telephone number, lost her way.
Winifred said we should check the hospitals: Laura might have been taken ill, or had an accident. But she was not in a hospital.
After two days of worrying we informed the police, and soon after that, despite Richard’s precautions, the story hit the papers. Reporters besieged the sidewalk outside our house. They took pictures, if only of our doors and windows; they telephoned; they begged for interviews. What they wanted was a scandal. “Prominent Socialite Schoolgirl in Love Nest.” “Union Station Site of Grisly Remains.” They wanted to be told that Laura had run away with a married man, or had been abducted by anarchists, or had been found dead in a checked suitcase in the baggage room. Sex or death, or both together – that was what they had in mind.
Richard said we should be gracious but uninformative. He said there was no point in antagonizing the newspapers unduly, because reporters were vindictive little vermin who would hold a grudge for years and pay you back later, when you were least expecting it. He said he would handle things.
First he put it about that I was on the brink of collapse, and asked that my privacy and my delicate health be respected. That made the reporters back off some; they assumed of course that I was pregnant, which still counted for something in those days, and was also thought to scramble a woman’s brain. Then he let it be known that there would be a reward for information, though he did not say how much. On the eighth day there was an anonymous phone call: Laura was not dead, but was working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park. The caller claimed to have recognized her, from the description of her that was in all the papers.
It was decided that Richard and I would drive down together to reclaim her. Winifred said Laura was most likely in a state of delayed shock, considering Father’s unseemly death and her discovery of the body. Anyone would be disturbed after such an ordeal, and Laura was a girl with a nervous temperament. Most likely she hardly knew what she was doing or saying. Once we got her back, she must be given a strong sedative and carted off to the doctor.
But the most important thing, said Winifred, was that not a word of all this must leak out. A fifteen-year-old running away from home like that – it would reflect badly on the family. People might think she’d been mistreated, and this could become a serious impediment. To Richard and his future political prospects, was what she meant.
Sunnyside was where people went in summer, then. Not people like Richard and Winifred – it was too rowdy for them, too sweaty. Merry-go-rounds, Red Hots, root beer, shooting galleries, beauty contests, public bathing: in a word, vulgar diversions. Richard and Winifred would not have wished to be in such close proximity to other people’s armpits, or to