Fifth Son by Barbara Fradkin

under. Shoplifting from a liquor store on Jarvis Street.
    Scanning to the bottom of the list, Green saw that his most recent incarceration had been only a month ago, for causing a disturbance. He’d been released the next morning. As if reading his mind, Gibbs pointed to the entry.
    â€œI’m trying to contact the officer who handled the case, sir, to see if he knows where Tom is living. He’s listed as no fixed address, but he probably has his unofficial place. The officer will call me when he gets on duty this evening.”
    Gibbs had thawed considerably as he related the fruits of his labour, and now Green smiled at him. “If and when the Toronto police find him, I want them to pick him up, and I want you to go down there to interview him.”
    â€œBy myself, sir?”
    Seeing a mixture of pleasure and apprehension on Gibbs’ face, Green shook his head. “If Toronto finds Tom before Brian heads back from Brockville tomorrow, I’ll send Brian on to meet you in Toronto. Always better to have two officers in on an interview.”
    Gibbs smiled like a puppy who’d been tossed a treat. Sometimes I handle things not too badly, Green thought, but we really must do something to toughen this boy up.
    * * *
    With both Gibbs and Sullivan dispatched, Green tried to settle back down to his paperwork, but the excitement of matching overtime requests with policy directives paled in comparison to the lure of missing Pettigrews. His thoughts returned to the strange tin can Isabelle Boisvert had unearthed in the thicket in her yard. Green recalled that the ground had been all dug up in patches over the interior of the thicket where the dead man had been seen, suggesting that he was searching for something. The tin can was caked with dirt and firmly rusted shut, as if it had been buried long ago.
    Assuming it was poor crazy Lawrence who had hidden the tin before he was sent to the psychiatric hospital, and assuming none of the other family members had known of its existence, it was almost certainly Lawrence who had been snooping in the yard and Lawrence who lay dead at the bottom of the church tower. The supervisor in Brockville had said he’d been missing for six weeks, and MacPhail had indicated that until recently the man had been well cared for. Which Lawrence certainly would have been, courtesy of Ontario’s health care system.
    Had Lawrence left Brockville and made his way by bus, thumb or foot all the way back to his childhood home? If so, why? What in that strange tin can collection had he been desperate to retrieve after all these years? Why had he fled to his old church? And most importantly, had he in his despair been driven to jump, or had someone pushed him?
    Green pondered the contents of the tin can. A feather, a half dozen caps, some condoms, an antique key, a note, and a fragment of a love letter to a girl called Sophia. The handwriting of the letter had an uneven, childish quality, with spelling mistakes galore. Perhaps Lawrence had written the letter when he was a young, bumbling teenager hopelessly in love with Sophia. And perhaps he had kept that love alive through twenty years, dreaming of the day he returned to find her waiting for him.
    Except she wouldn’t have been waiting, of course. While he languished in a psychiatric hospital, suspended forever in adolescent yearning, she had probably married, borne children, and become deeply immersed in a rich, demanding family life.
    Green’s instincts quickened. It was a long shot, perhaps, but it made sense. What else but a woman could draw a man back to his despised and long-abandoned roots, and what else but a woman could plunge him into suicidal despair?
    He glanced at his watch, which registered nearly one o’clock. A lunch break was in order, combined with an impromptu visit to the troops still conducting interviews in Ashford Landing. And perhaps a short side trip of his own to find out the identity of