She sat on the toilet beside the shower, ran her eyes over the grid of grey grout between the tiles, a little moldy in places, thinking of Woolf’s words about her own mother.
Rachel never lingered in the shower like some teenagers did.She’d lather and rinse as fast as possible, fighting against the memories of water ricocheting off her mother’s body into her face.
Blood, so much blood, in the cracks between the tiles.
The madness in her swollen eyes that seemed never to fully fade.
She has haunted me.
TORONTO—JUNE, 1996
MWP.The Mercer Women’s Prison.
Rachel has no idea what that place is.The old Toronto psych hospital and the Kingston Penitentiary, she knows; they’re both still in operation.But she’s never heard of the Mercer Women’s Prison.
Her stomach growls.It’s lunchtime.She locks the files in the trunk of her car and drives around the corner beneath the railroad tracks, pulling into a street parking space on Dundas.She gets out and locates a hot dog cart a block over.Then, hungrily chomping in the shade of a tattoo shop, considers her next move.
She needs to locate this prison.If it’s right in the city, she can go there next, before she heads back up to Huron County.
She scarfs the rest of the street dog, washes it down with a Pepsi, then scans the sidewalks along the sunny stretch of Dundas West for a phone booth.She heads for a heavily graffitied one three blocks down.Her HQ doesn’t have cellular phones yet, though there’s been buzz about the Toronto Police Service testing out that new Motorola one in their squads.Knowing Green, it’ll probably be at least a decade before he’s willing to advocate for funding to have them.Until then, they all have to use pay phones.Rachel should probably just bite the bullet and get her own car phone in the meantime.
When she reaches the booth, she realizes that the phone book that’s meant to be hanging from a cord has been ripped out.Only shreds of the spine remain on the metal coil, like a fish skeleton picked clean.She walks another three blocks to the next booth, which does still have its book intact.She balances it on one raised knee, flipping through the government pages in search of the Mercer Women’s Prison, but doesn’t find it.She rummages in her pocket for the change from her lunch, presses a quarter in with aclinkto call a colleague in the Toronto OPP office.
“Hey, Chapman.It’s Mackenzie, from Clinton.”She recaps the morning’s discoveries quickly.“I haven’t heard of this Mercer Women’s Prison; can’t see it in the phone book I’ve got here.Know anything about it?”
“Women’s prison?”he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.I didn’t think there was one here.Just Vanier in Brampton, and Kingston obviously.And uh…”
Rachel clears her throat.“Grand River.Yeah, I’m aware—”
“Mackenzie—,” Chapman begins, tone thick with apology.
“I’m actually wondering if the Mercer is defunct,” she says, plowing on.“The case dates from the sixties, so it could be.”
“Yeah, sure, uh…Hang on a sec, I’ll ask Deb in our finance office.She’s been around for decades.Don’t think she’s ever going to retire.Too stubborn.But she might know.”
Rachel smiles despite herself.“Thanks, Chapman.”
She takes in the street as standard-issue tinny elevator music crackles through the line.It’s always a bit strange when she’s in plain clothes, which is more often now that she’s a detective.People act differently around cops—for better or worse—when they see the uniform.Which is, in large part, the point of wearing one.But when she looks like a civilian, she can observe with a little more ease, so long as no one notices the firearm on her hip holster beneath the blazer.
Some teens from the school down the street are still roaming during their lunch hour, pushing one another and laughing on the sidewalk.Rachel looks at her watch.They aren’t truant yet, but will be in about six minutes.A man wearing an apron emerges from the Chinese restaurant twenty metres away, dumps a couple of garbage bags at the curb between the newspaper box and the telephone pole.A curious pigeon lands on the garbage, then takes off again as a streetcar rattles past.Rachel misses the city sometimes.She came here a lot more as a teenager than she does now.
The music on the phone stops.“Mackenzie?”
“Here, Chapman.”
“All right, apparently the Mercer Women’s Prison was in Liberty Village until the sixties sometime, Deb says.But the building is gone.It was where the Allan Lamport Stadium is now.”
“Huh.Okay.Thanks, Chapman.”
She signs off and steps away from the booth, thinking.There’s no point going to the site, really, if the building’s been razed—at least not yet.What she needs are prisoner records.
And for that, she needs a librarian.
Rachel moves her car to a parking lot near Dundas West Station, where she boards the subway, heading to College Station and the Ontario archives.It’s been ages since she’s taken the Toronto subway, and she takes a moment to enjoy the memories it conjures, of summer visits to the city with Kimberly or Lori to see concerts at the Forum down at the waterfront.The outdoor concert space drew in their rebellious teen selves with its revolving round stage surrounded by screaming, singing, drunken fans and a haze of pot smoke.She was appalled when they demolished it two years ago.The last concert she’d seen there was Radiohead, at Edgefest in 1993, with her friend Steve.They’d originally met at Pineview and dated on and off after they left, which was at best a mistake and at worst scraped against the outline of the rules.They stayed friends for a while, mostly because—aside from Tom Stevens—he was one of the few people Rachel could relate to.But she hasn’t heard from him since he relapsed last year.
