Stanley Park Read Online Free PDF

Professor described how dozens had been Scotch-taped to the walls of the concrete bunker that the man called home. National Geographic maps of the earth’s polar regions. A black starlight globe. Various cylindrical and conical projections. All these hung in the relative darkness of the concrete room, glowering obscurely from the shadows in a bunker that had once been a pillbox, an armed outpost on a rock outcropping above Siwash Rock. A vantage point from which the authorities once thought theycould repel Japanese invaders during the dark and paranoid days of Vancouver’s World War II.
    But what about this counting? “Is there a number?” At their second meeting, the Professor tried to press down on this issue. He had decided the tea was China Black. “Is it a number you’re waiting to reach? Like a thousand, or ten thousand?”
    “No number,” Siwash told him, and became elusive.
    “Maybe a head count of some kind,” Jeremy offered, intrigued by the idea. The map-lined pillbox in a public park was richly eccentric, certainly, but it sounded cosier than his father’s set-up.
    “Caruzo thinks it is a tally, yes. But even he doesn’t know,” the Professor said, nodding. In fact, Caruzo did not speak of Siwash often, and the Professor had never seen them together. He imagined it would be like having two evangelists in the same room. They could talk, but they already had views on everything, and their words were better directed at others.
    “Caruzo,” Jeremy said. “I suppose he is another story.”
    “I would think so, perhaps even the first chapter of a longer story. I understand you see him from time to time at the restaurant around breakfast.”
    “Yes, thank you. He’s been a Friday regular for the past month. If you have any more people living around here who want free coffee and cigarettes and maybe a snack in the morning, you send them along.”
    “Those volumes you couldn’t handle,” the Professor pointed out.
    “I suppose you sent him to see how I was doing?” Jeremy said.
    “And you also sent him back with word that you wanted to see me,” the Professor responded. “So we have both used him as a messenger, haven’t we?”
    They drifted into silence for a moment, the fire dropped to coals.
    “I remember a photograph. The three of us at the lagoon,” the Professor said eventually.
    Jeremy looked up sharply at the mention of it. “Under the cherry trees.”
    “That’s the one,” the Professor said, smiling. He cut off some more duck. “You see how there is also a great deal of us held in this wilderness.”
    Jeremy didn’t know what to think of that comment. They were silent for a few minutes.
    “You wanted to see me. To ask me something, I suspect,” the Professor said finally. “But I sense you are suddenly shy. Perhaps I can balance the scale by asking my favour of you first.”
    Jeremy nodded in agreement.
    “I need someone in the city. Someone to do some research.”
    It surprised him. “Why not Caruzo?” he heard himself say.
    “Well, Caruzo can’t read, for one.”
    “Why not you?”
    “Fine then.”
    “Sorry. Tell me.”
    The Professor took a moment before continuing. “Babes in the Wood,” he said finally.
    Jeremy waited for more, and when nothing came said: “Who are …”
    “Who
were
murdered in Stanley Park, not far from here. Two children, conventionally understood to be brothers, although there have been different views on this over the years. In any case, two children, unsolved murder. Still, this story is not a murder mystery, understand. I am interested in the myths surrounding their death, about their bodies still being buried here in the park. About related matters.”
    “And when exactly?” Jeremy said, growing faintly nervous.
    “Oh,” the Professor said. “A long time ago. Fifty years. It was in all the papers at the time. Two little kids, murdered with a small hatchet in the park. Not half a mile from where we’re sitting, in fact. The