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Driving back to the movie set I figured with the information Teddy would give me – which would be nothing – and a couple of talks with cops in Sudbury and maybe a couple of interviews with friends of Kevin Mercer it might be enough to be an investigation and then Barb Mercer could put it to rest and move on.
As soon as I thought that I caught myself. Lana was right, of course, there wouldn’t be any closure or any real moving on, Barb would live the rest of her days in the same way whether she believed her husband killed himself or that he just left.
Or maybe not, maybe if I tried hard enough I could convince myself that the rest of Barb’s life would be different if she knew one way or the other, it would be better somehow.
Why not, as a location scout I spend my life finding things that people believe are something else; a bar in Toronto is in New York, the front of a house propped up on an empty lot in Oshawa is a haunted house in Maine in 1955, half of downtown is the Suicide Squad’s Midway City.
As I was pulling into a spot on a side street we were using for crew parking my phone rang. It was Teddy.
He said, “I’ve got a question.”
“What is it?”
“Where was the last place this guy was seen?”
“I’m not sure, he drove up to about a hundred clicks north of Sudbury and walked into the woods.”
“That’s where they found his truck?”
“Right.”
“But when was the last time someone identified him?”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. “His wife saw him on the morning of the 8th and the police found his truck on the side of the road two days later.”
“And his credit card was used on the road, he stopped for gas and lunch on the way, right?”
“You’ve got the statements,” I said.
“Yeah, I was just wondering,” Teddy said, “the last time he used the card was at a gas station in Sudbury?”
“If you say so.”
“Then he drove about a hundred kilometers north, it’s just woods up there, it’s not even a highway it’s an old mining road.”
I said, “That’s right.”
“And he stopped in the middle of nowhere and walked into the woods, that’s the theory?”
“Yeah, that’s it. It all fits,” I said, feeling bad again, realizing that Barb would never get anything more because she already had everything and just didn’t want to believe it.
“He also used the card at an Esso station about a hundred clicks south of Sudbury, spent a hundred and eighty bucks.”
“Sounds like he filled it up,” I said.
“That’s what I thought,” Teddy said. “I imagine that’s what the cops thought, too. How far could he get with a full tank?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “five or six hundred kilometers.”
“So two or three times as far as he drove?”
“That’s right.”
And then Teddy said, “And he spent a hundred and ninety at a station in Parry Sound. So tell me, why do you think he spent another hundred and seventy-five dollars at a gas station in Sudbury?”
“I don’t know, he just wanted to be sure,” I said.
Teddy said, “That sound likely to you?”
And I had to admit, it did not.