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The trouble with being told to ‘keep it to yourself’ I’d that quite often, later, and unexpectedly, it comes back to bite you.

I was put in that position, once, by my younger sister Josephine when she started dating this charismatic older boy she met when he came to her college as a substitute teacher.

I met him once and I didn’t like him.  He was the sort of person that you just know is bad, if not evil.  I told her so, but that didn’t seem to have any effect.  Perhaps it was only men who saw it because all her friends agreed with her; he was dreamy.

It was not as if we had any idea she would do anything silly, because at college she was away, and very lax at reporting back that everything was fine, so as far as we knew it was.  Our parents had cut her some slack after she complained they were smothering her.

I thought there was a good reason for that, but she persuaded them, like she always did, to loosen the shackles as she called them.  It seemed to work, six months passed, and everything was fine.

Until…

I was going home, and I had to pass the college so thought I would surprise her with a visit.  I went to the cafeteria where she and her friends spent every waking moment only to find two of the girls she was studying with.

Jo was not there.  Two of her friends were Debbie and Anne.  I’d met them once before when I’d dropped in.  “How is she doing?” I asked, not what I was going to ask, which was, where was she?

“Oh,” Debbie said hesitantly, “I thought you knew.  She dropped out and said she was going home.  Didn’t she tell you?”

She knew I wasn’t at home and was not as regular at communicating as I should be.  It also appeared to me she knew more but was reluctant to say more.

“No.  But I’m always the last to know.  I’ll call home and talk to her.”  I knew Jo’s aversion to cell phones, so I couldn’t call her directly.  “But she did say the last time I was here, she was losing interest.  Thanks anyway.”

Walking from the cafeteria to the car park, I had a thought and made a slight detour via the main office.

There was no one at the counter, so I pressed the button on the counter and heard a distant buzzing sound.  Three or four minutes later an elderly lady shuffled out from behind a half-closed door.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes.  I’m looking for my cousin, Albert Dmitri, he’s a teacher here.”

Her facial expression told me that she recognised the name, but her manner suggested that she didn’t like him.  She looked me up and down as people do when making an assessment.

“He no longer works here.”

The way she said it told me that there would be no further discussion, and that told me everything I needed to know, and probably not what I wanted to hear.  And the look she gave me, that being ‘tarred with the same brush’ made me shiver.

My initial assessment of him was right.

“Thank you for your help, ma’am.”

I don’t think I needed to ask any more questions.  I made it to the car and was just about to get in when I heard a voice calling my name.

I looked over the car roof to see Anne walking quickly towards me.  I waited until she arrived, slightly out of breath.

She took several deep breaths before saying, “She didn’t go home, not directly.  She had told me a week before she left that Albert had invited her to stay for a few days at his chalet in Banff.  She didn’t mention it again, just told me she didn’t like school anymore and was going home.  Nothing about Albert, which made me think she went.  She did say before she left that if anyone asked about Albert and her, I should keep it to myself, that it was nothing but a flirtation.”

‘You think it was more?”

“He was obsessed with her.  Certainly, he didn’t respect the boundaries between a student and a responsible adult, and she was not the only one.  I personally now think he’s a creepy guy.  You say you haven’t heard from her?”

“I haven’t, no, which is not exactly a red flag.  I’ll get home and see if she is there.  She probably is because our parents haven’t said anything otherwise.”

“I hope so. She hasn’t called or texted or written, which considering our friendship is unusual.  Let me know when you find out.  I’d hate anything to happen to her.  I told her once she was too trusting.”

“I’m sure everything will be alright.  And thanks. “

I always felt a sense of well-being the moment I walked in the front door of what I had always called home.  It was a house that had been handed down through the generations, and one day, it would be mine.

We had never known any other address, and I had grown up here, went to grade and middle school here, and had all my friends here, and family too.

Josephine and I were the only two who had strayed from town, seeking lives elsewhere as a part of the process of living our lives, but there was never any doubt we would come home.  Our brothers had always been content to stay, aspiring only to learn or work on the ranch, marry local girls, and start families.  My turn would come, one day.

The outside world, my father said, was just a distraction.  Everything we really needed was here.  I was inclined to agree with him.

Andy Barnes, one of the farm hands, was outside tending the kitchen garden.  Coincidentally, he was Josephine’s first love, and she had promised him that when she returned, they would be married.

He would wait until the end of the world, which was how much he loved her, but with this new fellow she was smitten with, I was not sure where that plan was. I wondered if she had said anything but wasn’t going to bring it up unless he did.

He didn’t, just waving and getting back to work.

I dropped my bag in the front hall and went through to the back of the house where my mother would be, or should I say where she usually was.

On the way, I steeled myself for the expected barrage of questions, mostly centred around why I had not found a nice woman I would want to marry and start a family, and my mother was not the only one to get on that horse.

So much for the surprise, she was not there.  But there was bread in the oven, and jam bubbling on the cooktop.  She wasn’t very far away.

I went over to the jam pot and had a peek.

“Ah, there you are.”  My mother had come inside from the back doorway with a basket of vegetables.  “Andy said you had arrived.  Did you see Jo on the way?”

I had told her I would drop in.  Perhaps I should have kept that to myself and made a mental note for the next time.  “I did, and she wasn’t there.  I spoke to her friends.  Busy, busy, busy.”

“Then you didn’t find out if she was coming home for Christmas.”

“I didn’t see her, remember.  Maybe I’ll be luckier when I return.  I’ll call her but you know what she’s like.”

She looked me up and down as mothers do, checking to see if I was taller, heavier, lighter, or stressed.  Everything was stressful on the roads these days.

“I’ll leave that in your hands.  You haven’t changed.”  She said the final verdict.  “Are you still working at that dreadful place?”

I’d taken on employment in a private detective agency that seemed to only deal with divorces and scandalous affairs.  I was getting quite adept at covert surveillance.

“It’s just a job,”

“You should be doing more with your life with those three degrees and such.”

She dropped the vegetable basket on the kitchen bench and stirred the jam, then gave me a welcome hug.

The bread had a short time to go.  Fresh bread and jam were looking good.

It seemed that Jo had not told our parents anything, so she could be anywhere, but my best guess was that she had gone with Albert Dmitri.  The only lead was Banff.  I would stay a day or two, then go find her, before our parents found out what she’d done.

Before I left home, I called my boss at the investigation agency and told him my suspicions, and he agreed to do a search on Dmitri.  I had a photograph of him with Jo taken when he didn’t know I had.  The first time I tried, he got very defensive, and that was one of the red flags that started to bother me.

He said I could do it when I returned, but I told him I was in the Banff area where Dmitri had a cabin, and if that was the case, I would go there.

He asked if I needed help from one of their enforcers, men who did the hard tasks like bodyguard, or backup in certain investigations when they were dealing with violent targets.

I thought it would be a good idea.  I had no idea what to expect.  He would meet me in Banff.

I think by the time I left home, sooner than I intended, and no matter how hard I tried to hide it, my mother knew something was wrong and that it involved Jo.

She gave me one of those looks, the one that said I know you’re not telling me something, gave me a hug, and said, call me when you see Jo, and let her know we love her.

“I think she already knows that.”

“Maybe so, but since you’ve both grown up, we don’t say it often enough.”

“Then I will.  I’ll get her to call you.”

What I received in my email several hours into the trip to Banff didn’t fill me with confidence.

From the photographs, the investigation of his case uncovered four different names and employment in various provincial universities or tertiary education institutions where there were missing girls.

We might have uncovered a serial killer, or at the very least predator.

The investigation into relatives and property was ongoing, but they needed to find out his real name because all they had so far were aliases.

The Banff police had been notified of the investigation, and I was told to visit an RCMP officer who had been working on the theory that the university disappearances were connected.  He was very interested in speaking to me and was laying the necessary groundwork to make Jo an official missing person, though I had to ask him to hold off until we had more on Dmitri because we had the advantage of knowing about him and he not knowing we had that information.  Publishing it would spook him, and he would disappear.

There was more available when I arrived at the Banff police station, I had Dmitri’s real name, and the fact his father, now deceased, owned a cabin in Canmore near the Palliser Trail.  That was conveyed to me but the company agent that had been sent to help me, and we agreed not to tell the police yet.  The agent, Phillip Rogers, was going to conduct discreet surveillance on the cabin and see if he was there or anyone else.  At the very least, he was hoping to thoroughly check the cabin itself while I was talking to the Police.

The officer’s name was Hercule Benoit and was a specialist in finding missing persons.  He’d been working on what he called the university disappearances for two years and had uncovered 13 cases, some of whom simply left, for various reasons, without telling anyone, and later found alive.  Two were dead, not necessarily murdered, but there were six missing possibly dead.  For us to eliminate you from our enquiries, we will require you to tell us where you were for five specific periods in the past seven years.

Jo was one he didn’t have on his list, simply because she left after telling those closest to her what seemed to be the truth, and everyone took it for granted.  Other cases in his book had done the same, suggesting a pattern.

And yes, each could be assumed to be connected with the departure some weeks later of a teacher, young, and able, though the descriptions were different, the base details were the same, height, weight, and mannerisms.  The differencing details were hair colour and length, beard, moustache, eye colour, glasses, dress style, and speech patterns or language.

Dmitri spoke like a refined Russian immigrant.  Another had a French accent, and one had none.  To my mind, Dmitri had theatrical training and could disguise himself, and I suspect the girls he took with him altered their appearance too. I was expecting Jo to look very different.

The question would be whether she was under his spell or if she was coerced or threatened.

It was Benoit’s plan to visit the cabin where I believed we would find Dmitri.  I was not going to tell him and take Rogers with me, but I had second thoughts because it might prejudice any chance of getting the truth, or later justice if we made a mistake.

There was also the possibility that Dmitri would run once alerted we were on to him, and we’d never find him, or Jo, though right now I was more hoping that believing she would be unharmed.

So, the new plan Benoit and I would visit, and Rogers, whom I had not told Benoit about, would maintain surveillance, and if Dmitri tried to run, he would stop him.  I didn’t ask him how he would do it. It was best not to know.

Then, suddenly, we had stopped outside the cabin, next to a RAM 2500, which Rogers had texted belonged to the man in the photograph he had sent me, a man who looked like Dmitri but was externally different.

This time, he had very short blonde hair and was wearing thick glasses accentuating blindness and was about 20 to 30 pounds lighter.  Out of the business suit and dressed like a lumberjack, unless you could be positive, he was hardly recognisable.

That same man answered the door, taking in the police vehicle, the RMCP officer in uniform, which was quite daunting even for me, and then he looked at me, squinting through those glasses.

Perhaps he hoped that flicker of recognition would be hidden behind the layers of glass, but it was not.  I glared at him until she turned back to Benoit.

“Is there a problem, officer?”

“There might not be.  Do you mind if we come in, Mr Francois?”

The office had discovered that the photo of Dmitri was that of Antoine Francoise, originally from Montreal and the grandson of Albert Francoise, the heir to a fortune the family had made from the Railways and shipping.

Dmitri or Antoine didn’t need to work, and it appeared kidnapping and murdering college girls was his hobby.  Perhaps he had the belief that being rich, the laws didn’t apply to him.

“Not unless you have a warrant or evidence, I’ve done anything wrong.”

And the arrogance to go with it.  I saw Benoit’s expression change and not for the better.

“If that’s the way you want this to go, Mr Francois, so be it.” He pulled out his cell phone and started dialling a number.

Perhaps the notion of giving a dozen police crawling all over his property changed his mind.  “I’m sorry.  I can be a little prickly in the morning.  By all means, come in.” He stepped to one side, and we went in.

“Good choice.”

The cabin looked to have a main room with a kitchen, a dinner table, set for one, a fireplace and two chairs, one looking very used, the other less so, and a bedroom, door open, bed unmade, what one might expect of a single man living on his own.

“What’s this about?”

“A man with similar features to you has been identified as a suspect in a kidnapping case, well, more than one.  You are one of three men picked out of a set of photographs of male teachers who worked at various colleges and universities where girls have disappeared or been found dead.  For us to eliminate you from our enquiries, you will need to tell us where you were for five specific periods over the last seven years.”

I was watching Antoine carefully, and he was good, showing no emotional response to what was tantamount to an outright accusation.  Didn’t bat an eyelid, as the saying goes.

“That’s a particularly tall order, as you can imagine.  But, I’m sure you are well aware of who I am, and as it turns out, a philanthropist with an office and a gaggle of assistants running it, shouldn’t be too hard.  I will make a call and have that information on your desk tomorrow morning.  Is that all?”

“We’d like to have a look around?”

I watched Antoine very carefully as Benoit asked the question, and had I not been carefully watching his eyes, which flicked to a carpet square under the dining table for a fraction of a second, I would have missed it.

“Here?  There’s only two rooms, what you see is all there is.”

Benoit shrugged and perhaps conveyed the fact a demolition team could beg to differ in his expression because a moment later Antoine waved his hand, “Search away.”

Benoit missed the inference, but I didn’t.  Why use the word search when there was no reason for us to, if he was not guilty.  I would mention it to Benoit after we left.

The search took all of a minute.  There was nothing to confirm anyone, but Antione lived there, and then only temporarily.  There was a half-filled suitcase on a corner and a few items hanging in a closet.  He had not been there long nor apparently staying.

“Thank you, Mr Francois.  I will be expecting your communication tomorrow.  We will speak further on this.”

Antoine was eager to get us out the door, but she didn’t push it.  He was, in my opinion, slightly agitated and definitely guilty of something.

Of course, it might be my imagination, or simply that I wanted it to be him, inventing in my mind those two tells, but it felt like it was him because I had that creepily feeling when I saw him after opening the door, and initially reactions were usually right.

He remained on the doorstep watching us leave.  I watched him watch us.

“It’s him,” I said. “I’m sure of it.  Innocent people don’t ask for search warrants.”

“You’d be surprised. If it is, he’s long practised at being what I would call detached.  And he’s had a string of assault charges, all dismissed.  Money talks, especially lots of it.”

“What’s the next step?”

“Wait for his alibi.  He’ll already have one for each of the dates with photographic evidence.  Mark my words.  People like him have alibis before they need them.  The thing about that cabin is that it’s a manufactured scene, everything in its place, and a place for everything.  In other words, staged.  He knew we were coming.”

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©  Charles Heath 2024

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