Early retirement from the Toronto Police Service and a quiet life as a P.I. catching cheating spouses beckons. But Quinn has a new tenant in his upstairs apartment, the sexy and bewitching Kirsten, who is somehow tied into a cold case from his past.
Early retirement from the Toronto Police Service and a quiet life as a P.I. catching cheating spouses beckons. But Quinn has a new tenant in his upstairs apartment, the sexy and bewitching Kirsten, who is somehow tied into a cold case from his past.
FROM MUDDY WATER
PROLOGUE
The twelve-room Victorian red-brick mansion on Brunswick Street, built in 1880 by a wealthy lumber broker, had been sold in 1960 to Dr. Gabriel Lazore, chief of staff at the Provincial Mental Hospital at 999 Queen Street East in Toronto. Dr. Lazore, whose hobby was experimenting with electrical gadgets, had invented a home-use blood pressure monitor to be used by his obese wife, who had a heart condition. He had also perfected a timing device for cameras that allowed him to take pictures of his family with him included. His favorite pose centreed Mrs. Lazore in a high-backed chair, with the baby, Isabela, in her lap. He would stand behind the chair with nine-year-old Gabriella, deathly pale and thin as an empty dress, on his left. These photos he framed and hung in the living room and dining room and along the lower and upper hallways of the Lazore mansion.
Dr. Lazore also invented a battery small enough to fit into a doll for Gabriella. The doll cried when Gabriella laid it down and stopped when she picked it up and rocked it. The doctor, who worked long hours at the asylum, didn’t realize that when the rocking motion would not quiet the doll’s annoying screech, Gabriella would smack the doll’s head with her open palm until it fell silent. When she could not silence the racket with a smack, she beat the doll with her fist. When this did not work, she would take it into the basement, a spooky place with empty rooms and damp hallways filled with hollow noises, and bashed the doll’s head against the stone foundation until the crying stopped.
The baby Isabela developed colic soon after her birth. She cried day and night. Mrs. Lazore paced from kitchen to dining room to living room to library, rocking and swaying the baby, humming a lullaby until the child fell asleep. But no sooner did Mrs. Lazore put Isabela down than the wailing resumed. This continued night after night until one hot June day in 1969, Mrs. Lazore collapsed from exhaustion. Gabriella, tired of the wailing, carried her baby sister into the basement and beat her head against the wall until the crying stopped. When Mrs. Lazore regained consciousness later that afternoon, she found Gabriella playing quietly with her doll, her dress spattered with blood. Fearing Gabriella would be locked up for life, either in 999 Queen Street or the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital, Mrs. Lazore took the blame. She told her husband that the baby’s non-stop screeching had caused her mind to snap. He believed her. He pick-axed a hole in the concrete floor of the basement and buried the infant under three inches of cement.
That night Dr. Lazore helped his wife pack a few belongings into their car. He drew her a map with instructions to his sister’s house in Montreal. After Mrs. Lazore left, he informed the neighbours and his employer that the death of his wealthy father-in-law had necessitated his immediate return to Montreal to settle an estate worth millions, his wife being the sole benefactor. He implied he might not need to return.
The Brunswick Avenue mansion sat abandoned until, on January 4, 1990, the city was notified by the law firm of Williams and Smith that Dr. Lazore had died, followed shortly by Mrs. Lazore.
Mrs. Lazore stated in her will that the house should go to the provincial government to be used as a family-style home for mentally challenged adults. She specified that the province was to erect a statue of the doctor to stand on an eight foot square slab next to the front walk. She asked that, to protect this monument against vandals, the province erect a black iron fence around the property.
The stonemason hired to design the statue, Arnie Lenssen, worked from a photograph of Dr. Lazore and Gabriella standing side by side, but confusion with names — Gabriel or Gabriella? — resulted in Mr. Lenssen carving the wrong subject. The workmen erected a statue of Gabriella—not the doctor—in a shady spot in the side yard, well back but visible from the protective iron fence running along the front of the property.
No one noticed or cared about the mix-up.
Heritage property designations in the city prevented the Lazore mansion from being turned into a group home, so it sat deserted for years. Gabriella’s statue stood in the shadows, watching neighbours come and go. Rumors about the spooky property grew. Long-time residents admitted they had not known the family well, but the former owner of the Pilot Tavern on Bloor Street remembered Dr. Lazore as a slight man with thinning hair who sometimes stopped by after his shift at the Queen Street facility to fortify himself before returning home to a crying baby, a strange daughter, and a neurotic wife who outweighed the doctor by a hundred pounds. According to the tavern’s owner, now in a retirement home, Gabriella, white-faced, pale-eyed, and skeletal-thin, was a mental case. Add the three hundred pounds of jiggling fat mother and that crying baby, and it was plain to see that the poor doctor had been in a nasty situation.
The owner of Betty’s Quick Cuts on Bloor Street said her mother, now dead, had lived in the house behind the Lazore mansion at 220 Howland. She had gotten so accustomed to the crying child that when she stopped hearing it one day, she wondered what was different and looked over the back fence in time to see Dr. Lazore open the hurricane doors leading to the basement and disappear inside. The next day, the family was gone. “My mother’s opinion,” said Betty to her clients, “is that story about inheriting millions was baloney. That baby Isabela is buried somewhere on the Lazore property, and that weird statue is Gabriella, come back in a different form to make certain that wailing baby stays buried.”
Speculations by neighbours were not a good enough reason for the police to dig for anything suspicious. Most of the original neighbours moved away or died. The new faces that took their place complained to the city that the property was an eyesore and should be torn down. The Historical Society argued that it should be renovated as an historic site.
Unfortunately, the city had no money for such renovations. Not until the spring of 2000, with the help of the law firm Carson and Cranks, did the city manage to sell what was now known as the Lazore to a Mr. Chong, a Chinese real-estate speculator who wanted to knock it down and build condos.
Approval for demolition was blocked by the Historical Society, and Mr. Chong bankrupted himself through fruitless litigation. The Lazore, a decrepit blight on the affluent neighbourhood, awaited its fate, which arrived on June 15, 2017, when the first of the three little neighbourhood girls went missing.
Quinn is a retired police officer - one too many bad calls led him to early retirement. But the urge to investigate is still in his bones, so he opens up a PI business where he catches cheating spouses instead. But along comes Kirsten, a mysterious barmaid with almost nothing in her possession, looking to rent out the upstairs apartment. Except, she spends an awful lot of time in Quinn's part of the house. Eventually she weasels her way into an investigation that falls in his lap - 3 little girls have all gone missing; one a year, each in June. It's June now, and another little girl has gone missing. They know these vanishings are tied into the gruesome history of The Lazore house, left vacant, but not empty. Together they will uncover the secrets of the Lazore family and try to find out what really happened there.
So first of all, I want to say I liked this book. I get why Quinn left the force - traumatic calls really take a toll on your mental health. But he's also a sucker for a good mystery. In the beginning, his relationship with Kirsten was confusing. Kirsten has a lot of secrets and Quinn doesn't know quite what to do with her, but he wants to protect her. Kirsten is hippy-dippy and into tarot cards and spiritual readings.
I admire how he takes a fatherly role. But this is where I start to teeter off. I could never tell if the vibe between Kirsten and Quinn was going to switch. There were certain things, like the way he describes her outfits, that give it a sexual vibe - not fatherly. I would have given this book 4/5 stars if I didn't feel so uncomfortable sometimes. They even "pretend" in public situations that they are father/daughter, but alone I still wasn't 100% sure.
I really liked Kirsten's knack for investigation and I think the hippy-dippiness just gave her a quirk, but there wasn't any real supernatural event that she needed this power for, but it made her more of a unique character.
Together, they make a great team and have each other's backs. Quinn also learns who Kirsten really is and it's kind of a shocker.