Gail Gallant's Blog

DETECTIVE GRIERSON FINDS MATTHEW'S BODY IN THE BARN

A policeman stands at the entrance of a huge old barn on 12th Line. He pushes on the old barn door, slowly opening inwards, and he peeks inside. Then he pushes it open some more, so that sunlight streams like rays of heaven into a dark wooden cathedral. He steps inside. He can see the boy standing, slouching forward against something along the far wall. It looks like something is sticking out of his back, and on the ground in front of him, the dirt floor is dark. The officer takes two steps in, stops, then steps back into the sunlight outside.
“The kid is in there. He’s dead. Call it in. Grierson too. And better tell the old man he’ll be coming in for questioning.” Then he turns, head down, and walks back into the barn.
Detective Dave Grierson arrives on the Telford property about 27 minutes after he gets the call. He parks his blue sedan on the long gravel driveway that leads from the road up to the Telford farmhouse, grabs a canvas bag from the car floor on the passenger side, and steps out. There are already three police cruisers and an ambulance parked ahead of him. He walks across a rough field to the right behind the house, towards the old abandoned barn. It’s one of those very faded forgotten buildings in the landscape that don’t catch your eye. There are two officers examining the exterior, two more inside, taking notes and pictures, and two paramedics standing by, waiting for their cue to take the body out. Grierson’s seen a couple of dozen or so murder scenes in his 20 years on the Grey County force. Mostly they’ve been the result of people getting on each other’s nerves. Also drinking, doing drugs and being stupid. But this Sorenson kid was an “A” student from one of the cleanest families in town. He knows the parents. They do fundraising every year for the Annual Police BBQ Picnic. He steps just inside the barn door and sees the victim, a dark-haired teenage boy, standing upright near the far wall. This is the oddest, most brutal murder he’s seen in years. This is going to be a very big deal in Grey County.
The barn is mostly empty, probably hasn’t been used in decades. He’d noticed a second outbuilding on the other side of the farmhouse, brown aluminum siding. That’s what the farmer uses for his tractor, other equipment. Not this one. He walks inside. There are a few broken and rusted pieces of antique-looking farm machinery, tools, and old hardware junk piled up in corners. Nothing out of the ordinary. No signs of vagrants. No recent garbage. No pop cans or beer bottles. Not a hang-out. No illicit business venue. Just a sad, abandoned piece of local history.
Grierson looks up, through the massive timbers and rafters, towards the roof. The grey boards are weathered and loose, a few missing. In the fragments of sunlight the air is filled with dust. He looks back down at the figure before him, propped up like a hunch-backed puppet standing, facing the back stall. Pinned there, it seems, by a pitchfork. “What the devil?” he mutters to himself.
Grierson walks in the direction of the boy’s body, eyes on the ground, scouring for footprints, markings, anything loose, anything odd. He walks a half-circle around the corpse. He’s guessing dead less than a day. He pulls a worn notepad from his bag, pulls a pen from his shirt pocket, and begins to write. Pitchfork entered abdomen at a near right angle, parallel to the floor. He digs into his bag and pulls out a small metal tape measure. The handle end of the pitchfork rests on a horizontal stall ledge about 44 inches above the ground, extending into the stall by about 13 inches, wedged tight between two vertical boards in the stall door, held in place by another horizontal beam inside the stall. The rusty prongs, now sticky and caked, protruding through the abdomen just below the rib cage and out the back by an inch or so, four of the five prongs clear through, one on the right scraping the body. It’s the rib cage resting on the pitchfork that’s kept him upright. Arms limp at sides. Blood running south from the puncture wounds, down the jeans, front and back, on the running shoes and the ground. Grierson stares at the young face. He watches a fly crawling across the lower lip, over the dried blood that spilt down his chin from his mouth.
No sign of defensive wounds. No sign of struggle. Was the penetration made before or after the pitchfork was wedged into place? Could he have been killed, then propped up in this position? And if afterwards, and the pitchfork wasn’t plunged into him, was he pushed into it? Facing it? Did he resist? And looking at the tips of the prongs, how much force to be run right through? Quite a bit of force he reckons. Quite a bit. Ridiculous, really. He continues to write, focusing on questions for the coroner. What’s under the fingernails, on the palms?
The legs are slightly bent at the knees and ankles, not taking the body’s weight. From a distance, it almost looks like he’s standing. Grierson pulls out a flashlight and takes a closer look at the straw floor around the feet. He brings the flashlight back behind the body and slowly circles the light onto the ground. He can see what looks like tracks in the straw and dust leading away and down the barn floor, the kind of trail that might be made by someone kicking up straw as they pace back and forth. He brings the flashlight back to the body. The running shoes are dusty, covered in dry streams of blood and bits of straw. Grierson stands close to the boy’s face now, bowed chin on chest, black hair hanging over the eyes, the buzz of flies in the air, and thinks. Matthew Sorenson. This was a decent kid. Then he nods to one of the paramedics, and they move in to begin the delicate task of freeing the body from the metal grip. He flips through a few pages of his notebook, looking for the Sorensons’ address. This part he hates.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of the central character in YA novels – namely, her personality.

ApparitionCoverSomeone once told me that the key to the success of a particular, wildly popular novel was that the central character, a teenage girl, had hardly any personality traits at all. No obvious quirks or flaws or qualities. No distinguishing marks. Even her appearance was indistinctive. She was attractive, without any details.

The reason, he said, was simple. This allows every reader to put herself into the story, to imagine that she is the protagonist of the book, to fantasize that she is the heroine. Sure, things happened to the central character, and around her, but it is what life does to her that is important, not what she does with her life, he said. If a central character has a distinctive way of acting or thinking, it can interfere with the average reader imagining themselves being her.

I wondered about that at the time, and I still do, but it seems a little cynical to me. Maybe it is a good strategy for some YA writers, but I couldn’t imagine bringing such a girl to life. The only way I can bring a character to life on the page, to make her talk and think and feel, is to make her real to me – which means giving her all the complexity that I see in myself and in the people around me, and especially in the girls that I remember in my teenage years.

That means imagining a person who isn’t perfect, isn’t an angel or a saint or a genius or empty-head either. It also means imagining someone with a checkered history, with both precious and painful memories, with insecurities and doubts and fears and desires. She has to have scars, hang-ups and emotional baggage. She sometimes makes mistakes and has regrets. She isn’t a role model. She’s a human being in the midst of huge change, ie teenagehood.

I’m thinking about this because I sometimes get feedback from Apparition readers that they aren’t wild about my central character Amelia, saying she lacks confidence, suffers from too much doubt, and too much indecision about the boys in her life. Also, she thinks a lot, and ruminates about everything too much and seems to contradict herself sometimes.

But I’m happy knowing there are quite a few readers out there who do like Amelia, and cut her some slack. After all, she is suffering from grief and loneliness and depression, but she still has a sense of dark humour and she doesn’t run away when the going gets tough. She will walk alone into a haunted barn if she thinks she should – knowing that she won’t actually be in there alone at all.

In the end, I’m totally okay with readers who don’t identify with Amelia so much, because we don’t always identify with everyone we meet in real life and that’s okay. But I hope they will give her a chance, see that she is struggling to be a better person, and that, over time, she might even gain a little wisdom!

I’ve always felt that old houses give off emotions, and I’ve been especially aware of it when house-hunting. I know that sounds like basic psychological projecting, but I like to call it intuition.

I think emotions can linger in the air and penetrate walls like cigarette smoke. Most of the time I feel nothing in particular, or nothing that I can name, but every once in a while, there’s a sadness or fear or anger or happiness. Then there’s the whole issue of ghosts. I don’t normally worry about whether the house actually has a ghost, at least not during daylight hours.

There’s a beautiful old property with boarded up windows and a real estate ‘for sale’ sign only about 5 minutes away from our farmhouse in Grey County. I’ve been inside a few times, because it used to be a restaurant. In fact, it used to be three or four different restaurants over the last dozen years alone. None survived for very long.

I don’t think the problem was ever the food or service. At least, that’s not what one of the servers in the second last restaurant establishment told us as she waited on our table. She said that everyone who worked there knew that the house is haunted. Specifically, there is a young phantom child, a girl, who hangs around on the second floor. Numerous patrons had seen her over the years. She told us of a number of strange goings-on in the kitchen too. She even invited us to go take a wander in the empty rooms upstairs before we left, and we did. We didn’t actually see anybody up there but, well, I did have a funny feeling.

I wrote about this place in APPARITION. Morris Dyson tells Amelia about the house’s remarkable and rich history, including its time as a safe house on the Underground Railway for Africans escaping from slavery in the southern United States, and later, as a brothel serving the sailors passing through Owen Sound, a bustling port on the Great Lakes at the turn of the century.

The server also mentioned that the haunted history of the house was included in the legal description when the property last changed hands. Mark Weisleder is a Toronto real estate lawyer who writes a column in Toronto Star, and he had this to say about selling a haunted house: “My advice is that if you know about psychological defects in a property, disclose them and avoid unnecessary proceedings later. If as a buyer you are concerned, include a clause in your contract that the seller has no knowledge that the property is haunted and that no murders or suicides ever occurred on the property.” And if you buy a house that you later discover was known to be haunted, you can always sue. You might win your case.

So, will this house ever be a happy home again? With the big box stores moving ever further east along this stretch of highway leading out of Owen Sound, its future is more likely demolition for some big American store chain’s parking lot. A sad end, when maybe all that ghost girl needs is a little human kindness.

I’ve dedicated my novel Apparition to my dearly departed friend, Fran Hunnicutt.

About four years ago, I called Fran on the phone, feeling particularly demoralized about my career. She’d heard it all before, but this time, she thought for a moment, then said, “Gail, I think you are at a crossroads, and crossroads don’t last forever.” She told me I should “follow my bliss”.

I don’t know why, but something about her mixed metaphor struck me. I got an image in my head of standing at a crossroads, not one I’d come across, but one that had come across me. Like an act of grace. Would I just stand there, and let that crossroads fly on past? A few weeks later, I started moonlighting, writing a novel. It was something I’d been thinking about doing all my life. I’d just never been able to start before.

When Fran and I met about 25 years ago, we were both in bad shape. She had been forced to give up a career that had been her life for many years. I had just left a marriage. We were both racked with loss and regret and failure. She was a generation older, but we felt like sisters. We shed tears together, exchanged fears, and gave each other moral support. Our friendship grew.

I’d never met anyone with more generosity of spirit, and more steadfast faith in her friends and family than Fran. But she had constant health problems, mysterious ailments and symptoms without known causes. She was like a modern version of Job, harassed by God in some perverse test of her faith. She persevered, never losing her spirit of enthusiasm for life or her dogged belief in family and friends, in culture and the arts, and in simple human kindness.

When Fran eventually moved from Toronto to the West Coast to be closer to her two daughters and her grandson, I was heartbroken. I missed her horribly and mourned her absence for many months, until we fell into a regular rhythm of phone calls, and my annual week-long visits. She was a perfect fit for Victoria, settling into the coffeehouse culture, joining a book club filled with other exceptional older women, delighting in her garden, fawning on her family.

We kept up with each other’s lives by phone. She was always full of anecdotes about her latest crazy adventure, kooky characters she’d met and everyday miracles she’d experienced. She was endlessly entertaining. She could also do tough love very well, with pointed questions and strong advice when she thought I needed it.

But her health deteriorated further, and there was finally a formal diagnosis. Fran had Amyloidosis, one of those rare terminal conditions you’d hear about on the TV show ‘House’, proteins produced in her bone marrow were slowly attacking and undermining her vital organs – heart, kidneys and lungs, but especially her heart and lungs. She saw specialists who offered no answers and little hope. She tried all kinds of medications. She came to depend on an oxygen tank, flying down the sidewalk in her motorized three-wheel scooter, tank in basket, heading for the coffee shop.

There were many bad patches. Several years ago she was given about three months to live. She defied the doctors and held on. She was always breathless, though, and the phone calls got shorter. I sometimes worried that I was being selfish, wanting to talk, wanting to listen, keeping her on the phone longer than I should. Her body seemed frailer by the week, but her grip on life remained sure.

One day I ventured to tell her that if my novel was ever published, I was going to dedicate it to her. For me, there had never been any doubt. Fran seemed pleased, but we both knew why I’d told her, and it cast a slight shadow over the moment. Because neither of us believed she’d live long enough to see the day.

Fran was kept alive by homecare workers and the heroic efforts of her daughters and sister, and her own stubborn love. Her life became a constant struggle just to breath. Every day, every hour, every breath could be her last. She suffered with courage. She talked with me about death, what she feared, what she didn’t fear.

The last time I got her on the phone, just before last Christmas, she could barely speak, but she asked me for a favour. I had just received a publishing contract. She wanted me to mail her a photocopy of the first page, so she could see the letterhead, my name and the book title, with her own eyes.

So many of us carry a personal dream through our lives, longing for it, lacking the faith and courage to make it happen. It’s so easy to spend our strongest years only ever on the verge, until we finally decide it’s too late. We’re too old. What confluence of circumstances makes the difference, creates the moment wherein we finally begin? I don’t know. I only know that Fran was standing close by when it happened to me.

In the days that followed, her daughter Kelly answered the phone when I called. She said her mother was too weak to talk to me, but she’d received my card and was so happy for me. About a week after Christmas, she was finally moved to a hospice, and with the family around her bed, the hospice doctor asking Fran if there was anything she needed. “Champagne?” she whispered.

She slipped gently into unconsciousness within a day or two and died. My novel was released about 9 months later. I like to imagine she’s reading it in a coffee shop in Victoria right now. I hope she likes it, and knows how grateful I am for her friendship.

During Word on the Street in Toronto last month, I took part in a panel discussion with two other YA authors entitled “Love in a Hopeless Place”. Just as we were running out of time, a gentleman in the audience asked an interesting question: whether a story about love must rely on a ‘love triangle’ to provide the plot with dramatic tension, or whether there are other ways to create tension in a ‘young romance’ novel without triangulating.

Well, my two fellow authors on the panel gave thoughtful responses, reassuring the young man that No, a YA novel does not have to rely on a love triangle for tension, and there are lots of other things that can threaten a relationship, thus driving up tension, stakes, and drama. But by the time it came round to me, having a clear ‘love triangle’ (Amelia, Matthew and Kip) in my book APPARITION, and feeling that we’d run out of time anyway, I responded rather glibly, just saying “Yes, definitely!” in a joking way.

Afterwards, I kind of regretted not taking the question more seriously, especially given the look of disappointment on the questioner’s face – making me think he’s spent a little time waiting for some gal to make up her mind himself. But then, who hasn’t? Who doesn’t know what that feels like?

So here’s my more considered response for YA writers out there:

Of course a YA novel, a romance, or a love story, doesn’t need a love triangle to make it work! A relationship, as we all know, can be threatened by many, many things, thus making for the kind of tension and drama that engages a reader. There are lots of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ style barriers to love, two people coming from worlds that are simply too different – with all kinds of external things working against them, or coming between them – class, race, ethnicity, timing, or lifestyle, not to mention prior commitments. There are countless internal things that can come between two people who love and desire one another. Different needs, dreams, even fears, that can threaten to tear a loving couple apart.

But what I think the questioner was really asking was Why are there so many goddam love triangles in YA novels? Ahh! Now, that’s a good question. I think it’s because the love triangle can capture something profoundly true and revealing about character and experience. Namely, that most thinking human beings, especially when they are young adults, but also at times throughout life, are complex, evolving, and wrestling with inner conflict. Which is why feelings about a person can be mixed, even when those feelings are extremely intense, and perhaps especially so.

Young people know something adults can sometimes forget – that life isn’t always straightforward and neither are our innermost desires. Which is why a decent love triangle story often rings painfully true. It’s rarely some crass comparison going on between two candidates for one’s affections, and more often two very different parts of oneself that respond separately to two distinct people. Can you love two people at once? Yes and no. You see? Nothing’s simple, for most of us. And if it does seem simple, well, count your blessings. You’re a rare bird.

If this weren’t the case, well the word commitment wouldn’t have to play such a vital part in our love lives. Because the point is, love is an experience that demands a choice, and a love triangle is a vivid way of driving home that we don’t choose our experience of love necessarily, but we do choose what we do about it. We just don’t get to choose what the other person does about it. Lucky people are the ones who wind up choosing each other, without regrets, despite the options.

This is my first Apparition Blog entry. It’s all about ghosts – and the mysterious images, strange noises, and spooky feelings that go with them. I’ve always been interested in ghosts. Do they exist, and if so, what exactly are they? What do they want? And if they don’t really exist, why are ghost stories such a universal part of human culture, all over the world and since the earliest of times?

I’ve been writing supernatural thriller/romance stories about a reluctant clairvoyant teenage girl named Amelia who sees and talks to and sometimes hangs out with ghosts. Amelia is ‘reluctant’ because she doesn’t really relish the fact that she sees dead people. It’s scary, and disturbing, and even frustrating. Because she often feels they need her help, but it’s hard to tell how or why. The first book, APPARITION, is out in September, 2013, and its sequel, ABSOLUTION, comes out next Fall.

All Amelia knows is that, wherever there’s a ghost, something’s wrong. Usually something she’s got to try to figure out and fix. That makes life complicated and often dangerous. To make matters worse, her heart is torn between two boys in her life: Kip and Matthew. One of them is alive and one of them is dead but still in the picture, if you know what I mean.

Do you believe in ghosts? I’m not so sure myself. At least not when I’m downtown, walking along a busy sidewalk on a sunny day.

But alone in the country after sundown, in a secluded 158 year old stone farmhouse in Grey County, Ontario, set back a quarter mile from the road and hidden behind towering black walnut trees, well, that’s a different story.

It’s bedtime, and I head up the dimly lit staircase. I turn a hard right into my bedroom, careful not to glance to the left down the long hall toward with dark doorways that open onto three other empty bedrooms, for fear of what I might see. Like, for instance, a moving shadow in the corner of my eye. Or a portal into some ghoulish abyss.

This is when I have the creeping feeling that ghosts really do exist. In fact, I sense them filling up my bedroom as soon as I flick off my light switch. The souls of the dead surge in from hallway and surround me, crowd all around my bed, float overhead and lurk in corners behind furniture. I know they’re here because I can feel them.

That’s the problem with ghosts. There’s not much hard proof, just a cold, creepy feeling. But where does that feeling come from? Why is it so strong? It’s not like I’m making it up.

I’ve always suspected that people tend to see what they want to see, and believe what they want to believe. It’s a bit cynical, I know. For instance, I fear that for many people, ‘heaven’ is a very appealing concept, a celestial paradise that’s comforting in the face of death, but maybe, just maybe, a bit of wishful thinking too.

Ghosts are different. They’re not exactly part of a heavenly choir, offering comfort to us anxious mortals. More like the opposite. I think ghosts serve as a nasty reminder of our mortality, not an escape from it. And belief in them often arises not from wishful thinking but from raw personal experience, whether we want to believe or not. Whether we are reluctant, like Amelia, or not. And what good comes from thinking about our mortality? Well, because it might encourage us to live mortal life, for as long as it lasts, more fully, more deeply.

What about you? Have you ever experienced a ghost? How did it make you feel? I hope you’ll check in on my blog, and share your thoughts and stories too.