Unsolved I - Gone Missing - Nicole Louise Morin, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada; July 30, 1985

In my January 22 blog, I reviewed the book Unsolved: True Canadian Cold Cases by Robert J. Hoshowsky. At that time, I briefly recounted the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of eight-year-old Nicole Morin from an apartment building in Etobicoke, Ontario on July 30, 1985. If you know me or have read my novel Cat & Cat, then you're already familiar with my obsession for missing persons cases. Frankly, they haunt me. Always have, ever since I read my first collection of unsolved mysteries, C.B. Colby's Strangely Enough when I was, coincidentally, eight years old. (More on this very influential book in a later blog. Promise.)

Over the last thirty-odd years, I've made it more than a habit to follow every mysterious disappearance that crosses my path. Among the cases I follow - cold and hot - I read every update while continually theorizing about the whos, whats, whys and hows of every case. As such, I've always kind of regarded myself as an unofficial expert when it comes to souls who've gone missing. Imagine my surprise, then, when I cracked open Hoshowsky's book and found an undiscovered country of vanishings and unsolved mysteries I'd never encountered before. Of all these fascinating cases, the disappearance of Nicole Morin is the one that truly grabbed me by the short hairs.

For those of you with Scribd, I wholeheartedly encourage you to read Hoshowsky's entire account, which begins on page 187: https://www.scribd.com/read/230100891/Unsolved-True-Canadian-Cold-Cases . For those who haven't invested in Scribd, I'll do my best to recount the details below:

Tuesday July 30, 1985, is remembered as a hot, sticky, sunny day in an endless succession of hot, sticky, sunny days that hung over Ontario that summer.  Nicole Marin's family lived on the 20th floor penthouse of a condominium complex. Late that morning, Nicole prepared to go swimming with one of her friends, Jenny, in a pool located right by the complex. She wore an orange bathing suit and carried a peach towel along with a plastic bag containing her goggles, a white T-shirt, green, white shorts, a pink hairbrush, and a bottle of suntan lotion. Shortly before 11:00AM, Jenny buzzed the Marin's apartment via the downstairs intercom, spoke to Nicole and told her she was downstairs waiting. Nicole answered that she'd be right down. She said goodbye to her mother, exited the apartment and presumably walked down the hall towards the elevators. I say presumably because we really don't know what happened after she left the apartment.

What we do know is that Jenny waited approximately fifteen minutes for Nicole and buzzed the apartment again when Nicole didn't appear, Jenny spoke to  Jeanette Morin, Nicole's mother, and informed her that Nicole had never come down the elevator to meet her. Jeanette told Jenny not be concerned. that Nicole often liked to ride the elevators up and down and that she'd be there shortly. After waiting about another fifteen minutes - half an hour total - Jenny decided Nicole must have come down the back stairs and left for the pool without her. Jenny left the building, then, and headed to the pool alone. Jeanette,fully believing that Nicole was at the pool with Jenny, never grew concerned about Nicole's whereabouts until she never returned in the afternoon. Police were finally called around 3:00PM that afternoon, and thus began investigating one of the most confounding missing persons in Canadian (make that recent world) history.

Police determined that Nicole had made it down to the lobby. A witness who lived on the building's seventh floor placed her there. This witness was the last person to see Nicole. The only other person who may have seen Nicole was a mysterious and still unidentified woman spotted on the building's 20th floor, the same floor as the Morin's apartment, approximately forty-five minutes before Nicole went missing. Described as mid-thirties, Caucasian, pretty, thin, with dark brown hair parted on the left, this mystery woman wore a white or cream-colored blouse with a white and black skirt and light shoes. She was seen standing at the opposite end of the hallway from the Morin’s penthouse apartment and holding a notepad. And that's it. Literally.

Hoshowsky's detailed account tells about the numerous false leads and dead ends encountered by investigators. For the sake of brevity, however, I'll dispense with all this and refer you to his work for a clearer picture of the investigation's scope and history. For the remainder of this blog, I'm going to look at the facts as relayed above and posit some questions and theories that strike me after careful consideration.

1)  I find Jeanette Morin's reaction to Jenny's initial concern puzzling and troubling. A normal kid doesn't ride the elevators for fifteen minutes. If my mom thought I'd left a friend waiting in the lobby for fifteen minutes, she'd sure as hell track me down and find out why. That's odd.

2)  Jenny says she waited half an hour down in the lobby. And she only called up to the apartment once? Really? Kids aren't that patient. Especially eight-year-olds. That's definitely out of character.

3)  A witness saw Nicole in the lobby. So where was Jenny? She waited there half an hour. If Nicole was in the lobby, as the witness states, then Jenny wasn't.

To my eyes, the whole timetable is off. Reconsidering all the "facts," I find myself questioning whether Jenny was even in the lobby when Nicole headed downstairs. It's more logical to presume that Jenny buzzed Nicole, was told she'd be right down, waited one or two minutes, and then headed to the pool herself without Nicole. Nicole, delayed and dawdling the way kids do, didn't leave the apartment for another five to ten minutes (probably closer to ten). This is when she said goodbye to her mother. She then came downstairs and was seen by the witness. Not finding Jenny in the lobby, Nicole left the building herself to go to the pool. This is when she was abducted.

After fifteen or so minutes at the pool, Jenny grew concerned when Nicole didn't arrive, and that's when she went back to the apartment, buzzed again and spoke to Nicole's mother. Being a kid, Jenny didn't want to say she'd gone off to the pool without Nicole, so she told Jeanette she'd been waiting the whole time. Jeannette wasn't concerned, however, because dawdling Nicole had just said goodbye and left a minute or two earlier - not fifteen minutes. Not seeing her friend now, Jenny probably did wait a few minutes for Nicole, but then just presumed Nicole had left the building some time before Jenny returned to the condominium building and was already at the pool waiting for her. That's when Jenny went back to the pool. As Jenny had just spoken to Nicole's mom about Nicole's habit of riding the elevators, it's not a stretch to think that Jenny believed Jeannette caught Nicole goofing around the complex and brought her back to the apartment for punishment. All this explains the inconsistencies in the timetable.

As for the mystery woman on the 20th floor, if she does exist then I think it's safe to presume she's involved somehow in the disappearance, either as a perpetrator or a witness. The fact that she never came forward after all the publicity is odd unless she has something to hide. Perhaps, she was scouting the building for kids, maybe writing down apartment numbers in the building with kids. Then she went outside in the parking lot in the interim when Jenny went to the pool and Nicole hadn't come downstairs yet. When Nicole did come down, the woman and maybe an accomplice took her on the way to the pool. They were gone, then, by the time Jenny returned looking for her friend.

The above conjectures are based upon the details as I know them. I tried my hardest not to take any kind of poetic license with my theory, like I would if I were writing a story. The reality of crimes are rarely as sensational when the unknowns become known. I'd like to know if any flaws can be found in my reasoning or if I missed anything crucial in my analysis. I not only invite criticism in this case, I welcome it.

Dennis Lehane's The Drop - the evolutionary process of a great novel

Art doesn't originate and emerge fully-formed from a vacuum. Novels, symphonies, films, plays, poems - they're all as much about imitation and amalgamation as perspiration and inspiration. Those of us who strive creatively lift elements from our self-appointed mentors often and with no apologies. Van Gogh worked closely with Gaugin. Beethoven regularly paid homage to Haydn & Mozart. Faulkner looked to Sherwood Anderson.  Lew Tabackin draws from Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas and Charlie Ventura. I could go on, but that's really not the point of this post.

One lesson repeated ad nauseam in many creative workshops is to work a piece until it's done, and then set it free into the world to live on its own. I know why teachers impart this wisdom. The urge to continually revise, redirect and redact our "babies" can stultify and eventually extinguish our purest conceptions. On the other hand, slavishly adhering to this principal can also severely limit our creative output. If Beethoven had stuck to this rule, portions of his Creatures of Prometheus never would have found new life in his Third Symphony. Similarly, Dvorak's Slavonic Dances would have remained piano etudes and never realized their full potential as orchestral masterpieces. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa would have come down to us as a great portrait instead of an icon. Billy Bob Thorton's Sling Blade would have always been just an odd short film.

Sometimes a piece isn't finished the first time around. Sometimes we "steal" as much from our earlier efforts as we do from the masters. Dennis Lehane's tale of a seedy Boston bar and an abused puppy bears testimony to this simple fact of substantial art. Originally entitled "Animal Rescue," Lehane's first go around at the characters and incidents appeared in the anthology Boston Noir ( https://www.scribd.com/read/247764287/Boston-Noir ). The story is haunting and captivating, so much so that Hollywood wisely optioned it as a screenplay. Forced to revisit his source material in more depth, Lehane not only fleshed out the tale's main characters, he also fully explored tangential plot points only alluded to in the original story.

By the time he's finished, Lehane's reworking becomes a truly well-crafted film, The Drop. In the hands of gifted actors like Tom Hardy, Matthias Schoenaerts and James Gandolfini, the likes of Bob Saginowski, Cousin Marv and Eric Deeds truly benefit from an infusion of fully realized motivations. Even the abused dog evolves from the rather nondescript Cassius into the more engaging Rocco. Additionally, Lehane's creation of a brand new character, Detective Torres, rounds out his gritty tableau and introduces a real sense of urgent crisis into the life of stolid, taciturn Bob Saginowski. 

Fortunately for us, Lehane didn't end the creative process with his screenplay. Once more tackling the grimy backdrop of Cousin Marv's bar, Lehane transforms a great film script into an even more compelling novel. Pathos, poignancy, heroism - The Drop serves us five full courses of the human condition in sharp, often bitter, slices of life. The novel also demonstrates that sometimes it's not over when it's over. Sometimes the fat lady gets an encore or two, and when we finally leave our seats we're truly satisfied.

Writer's Block Isn't What You Think

When I was in college, I wrote a short story entitled Agoraphobia that recounted the aftermath of a teenage boy recovering from his first real heartbreak. In order to jolt him from his doldrums, the boy's father takes him to their family's summer cottage by Lake Erie and has him chop a few cords of wood. As the boy starts attacking his chore, he listens to nearby seagulls, starts thinking of his ex-girlfriend's laughter, which eventually transmutes into the laughter of every other girl in his future destined to break his heart. The more laughter he hears, the more ferociously he chops the wood. His interior monologue is filled with self-loathing, misogyny and paranoid delusions. When he's finished, his father walks up, satisfied that he's taught his son a valuable object lesson about using manual labor to mend a broken heart. The boy, exhausted and a bit crazed, looks out at the roiling lake and wind-swept acres of land and experiences an epiphany of apoplexy while he considers the vastness of life, heartbreak and pain awaiting him.

You know, the story doesn't sound half bad when I retell it now. Back when it was written, however, it was nothing more than a histrionic, not-so-subtle rip-off of James Joyce's Araby ( http://fiction.eserver.org/short/araby.html  ). My profs liked it, though, and it ended up included in my creative thesis years later. So why am I recalling this somewhat juvenile effort now? Because I'm in the middle of almost four months of writer's block, and whenever I'm creatively constipated I invariably remember the conclusion of that story: the final image of all that open space and the resulting terror of confronting life's countless succession of eventualities, permutations and failures.

Writer's block is often described as fear of the blank page. This may be the case for some writers. But for me, writer's block is creative catatonia brought on by the endless open vista of ideas whirling around inside my brain. My friend and long-time collaborator Tony Lewis jokingly refers to me as The House of Ideas because I have a tendency to call him whenever my brain conjures its latest Big Idea. He's seen me through the script of Worlds Apart and the completion and publication of Cat & Cat. He's read my early drafts of Stalking Mule, as well as some of the stories in White Picket Jungle and outlines for three upcoming Chris Telamon novels after Stalking Mule. He's also been my sounding board for countless other "projects" I've conceived over the years:

Mighty Men, a graphic novel set in the 1800s featuring Paul Bunyan, Davey Crockett and a host of other folklore heroes pitted against a villainous Count St. Germain.

Zeitgeist Protocol, a novel about a failed artist turned detective in 1880s Austria investigating a series of Jack the Ripper-style slayings.

Fuges, an alternative-history novel about modern-day fugitive recovery agents in a world where the Union did not win the American Civil War.

Most recently, I called him to brainstorm an idea for a novel featuring Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a Masonic secret agent caught up in the political intrigues of mid-late 18th century Europe.

Add all these creative germs to my unrealized movie scripts - a comedy about a guy who wins the Lottery and decides to have the best work week ever; a psychological thriller about a guy who ends up volunteering to search for a missing child; a comedy about a guy trapped in a weekend professional development seminar run by a New Age Cult ... honestly, the list goes on and on and on and ooooon. So, for me, writer's block isn't about fear of the blank page. It's about the knowledge that I'll never be able to cultivate all my potential novels, plays, screenplays and other high-minded concepts to fruition. Which puts me right where my teenage narrator was in Agoraphobia, frozen by the revelation that I am cursed with limitless possibilities in a very limited life.