We Find What Is Lost: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 1)

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Rachel, Months Later

It was a grey day. No rain, luckily, so the children could play in the yard, Tej supervising, while Marjorie took a picture of the five of them standing roughly where that iconic photo of them on their bikes was taken, the one projected on the wall at the memorial. She liked that it was cloudy, it was the best picture taking weather. "No faces in shadow," she said. Mrs. Anderson wasn't there to smile benevolently upon them while they looked adoringly at her, and they didn't have their own bikes to sit astride; that would have been too regressive, and Rachel laughed inwardly at the idea of seeing Joe try to negotiate a bike, like a Tyrannosaurus on a unicycle. Marjorie did have them positioned in the same order as they were in the original photo, for the full before and after effect.

She took multiple photos, asking them to smile plainly, then flat-faced, then laughing as if at some joke; Sunny provided one for them, and the laughter was genuine. Sunny's eye twinkle and gleaming teeth were on full display, and Lauren's dimples popped, and she couldn't have been more beautiful.

Then Marjorie asked Tej and the kids to get in the photo, because she wanted to document how their little group had grown. Tosh DiTomaso, named for Lauren's father Toshiro, and Naomi, his big sister; Harpreet and Ajit Parhar, Ajit looking so much like his father did when he was roaming the streets of this neighbourhood thirty years ago. Tej, the newest member of the LSDC. Al and Rachel, childless, were relegated to one side of the group, happy to hold on to each other and stare into each other's eyes, the moment captured in one of the photos displayed later in the museum.

Marjorie interviewed each of them for a blurb on how their lives had turned out since they left the neighbourhood. The blurbs, in a few of the cases, weren't entirely complete, but were sufficient for the purposes of the display. What would Mrs. Anderson think, for example, of the Lawrence Street Detective Club making a dead body disappear? That might not have been one of her ambitions for her group of young charges, nor would she want that recorded as one of the exploits of the grown-up LSDC, to be displayed in a museum housed in her family home. Rachel wouldn't have considered it an official commission anyway, as no one had ever paid them for it. The only reward they had was the knowledge that a slimebag was never going to ruin another woman's life, but the cost was the constant looking over of the shoulder, wondering if the police would ever become interested in Martin Heath's disappearance and track his movements to Julia's apartment.

The only suggestions anyone noticed he was missing were conveyed to Rachel by Julia when she called from time to time to check up on her or just talk. She was becoming more of a friend now than she'd ever been when they went to SFU together, their bond solidified by the harrowing events of that night. At her lowest point in life Rachel had no friends at all, but now she had her reunited LSDC plus Allison and Julia as auxiliaries when she couldn't get together with the others, and Apple an added bonus she could spoil from time to time while avoiding babysitting her.

Word only filtered to Julia through the office grapevine. The Board of Martin's company was concerned that they couldn't find him. They became even more concerned when the respondent to a court petition they had filed hired their own investigator and discovered some troubling transactions Martin made from his computer using Julia's own logins. Julia expressed shock and dismay to the Board, claiming to know nothing of these transactions. The transactions resembled a pattern they'd detected at the previous accounting firm they employed, and they really, really wanted to find Martin and ask him to explain himself, because those transactions had gotten the accountant working on their file fired from that firm, and they might not have been her fault.

The Board apparently attempted to contact Martin's wife, to no avail. Visits to their residence in the upscale Shaughnessy neighbourhood of Vancouver never brought her to the door. Her car was missing, as was Martin's own. The cars were later discovered in a long term parking lot of Vancouver International Airport, but neither of their names were on the manifests of any flights. Suspicion abounded that both Martin and his wife had flown on false passports specifically to get out of the country, with tickets purchased on the same identities, but no footage from the airport showed their faces in any check-in line. There was further confusion when Martin's cell phone was pinged leaving Vancouver and travelling east to Fort McMurray, Alberta, until either the SIM card was removed or the phone was broken, but a search of the oil boomtown turned up no trace of him. There was even further confusion when his credit cards made purchases in cities all across Canada.