The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe Page B

Usually he just ate bread.
    “So, what is happening in town?” asked Hazel’s grandmother. Hazel called her Nana. She was the one who asked questions of the town’s mayor with a slight catch in her voice, and that’s how Hazel knew she was being polite. “What is happening with that Chinese girl? Has she turned up?”
    Emily looked down the table at Hazel. “No,” she said. “The girl hasn’t been seen at all since last week. But we have a better idea of what might have happened. Hazel and Gloria Whitman went in to see Gord Drury.”
    “And?”
    “Gloria gave a description of a man she encountered coming out onto Grant Street that evening. They did a sketch of the man, didn’t they, sweetheart?”
    Hazel was caught off guard. This was the first she’d ever heard of Gloria’s encounter. “Um, I think so,” she said.
    “According to Gloria, the man was
also
Chinese,” Emily said. “Drury’s questions stirred her memory and she realized she’d seen a man at the end of the path that leads back into town behind Kilmartin Bluff Park.”
    Hazel’s father was cutting his meat. “That seems to fit with what I’ve heard Herbert Lim say. That she probably ran off. Problems at home, and the first fellow who cocks his hat is reason enough to throw in her lot with him.”
    “Today’s generation just wants to get everything done quick-quick,” said Grandpa Craig. “They want to grow up quick, make their money, buy their houses and cars. Hope they don’t want to live and die quick too.”
    “Well, I guess you just don’t know how things work in other people’s families, and certainly not among people like that.”
    “Evan,”
said Emily. “Like
what
?”
    “I mean folks who have no experience with the Canadian way. Maybe they did things differently at home.”
    “You mean chase their kids away because they didn’t approve of them?”
    “Shacking up at the age of seventeen?” Grandpa Craig hooted. “And where? In the Ward? Who would approve of that?”
    Nana hushed him. Hazel wasn’t sure what they were talking about now, but she was relieved to know that people who understood things better than she did were concluding that Carol was OK. If in a whole lot of hot water with her parents.
    “I see the Lims in the shop all the time,” her father continued. “Lovely people. But they don’t join in, do they? You can’t live in a place this small and keep to your ways. People talk.”
    “People talk anyway,” said Grandpa Craig. “It’s never any good being different.” Here he looked at Alan, and Alan looked back, and the two of them stuck their tongues out at each other and laughed. “Then again, sometimes a person can’t help it. Sometimes, if you arrive here from another planet, it’s hard to hide it, isn’t it?”
    Alan turned his mouth into what was supposed to be a threatening-looking sneer, but the only effect it had was to reduce the table to warm giggling. “I’m from Earf,” he said. “I eat all of you.”
    “Anyway,” said Emily, trying to bring one part of the conversation to a close, “Gord Drury is sure they’ll hearfrom her eventually. And there’s no sign that foul play was involved, so what can anyone do but wait? You know what they say about the course of true love.”
    Her father looked at her mother, and something passed between them, an adult thing that might otherwise be expressed in words.
    Once her grandparents had left and she had done her share of the cleaning up, Hazel rode her bicycle over to Gloria’s house. Dr. Whitman opened the door and gave her a warm smile. “Look who’s here,” he said. “Miss Micallef.” He shook her hand.
    “Hi Dr. Whitman.” He preferred to be called Dale, even by Gloria’s friends, but as Hazel could not bring herself to do so, he deferred to her preference and addressed her with a warm, but comical, formality. He was a tall man with a round, bald head and a salt-and-pepper moustache somewhat like Gord Drury’s, if not