http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050922.walicia0922/BNStory/National/
Markham, Ont. To borrow from the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, something was dead in each of them, and what was dead was hope.
It was dead in the three York Regional Police officers -- Chief Armand La Barge, Inspector Tom Carrique and Detective Constable Ian Hill -- who went knocking on the door of the pretty house on Bronte Road, and so was it dead for Sharon and Julius Fortis, and the great sprawling clan they built from the remnants of their two families, the instant that door was opened.
It was 8 o'clock yesterday morning, the 36th day since Alicia Ross was last seen alive, then bursting with excitement about the tomorrow that never came, when she was to have taken on new responsibilities -- and a protégé -- at Hewlett-Packard, the computer company where she worked and had found her feet.
"If God had said to me, 25 years ago, 'I have a baby for you, and you will love her and she will love you, for 25 years, but then you'll have to give her back,' knowing Alicia and what a beautiful woman she became, I would have said 'Yes,' " Mrs. Fortis wrote hours later in an e-mail.
"But God didn't give me the choice, and I wasn't prepared to give her back, not this way."
This way was the remains of her beloved daughter -- adopted as was Mrs. Fortis's 22-year-old son Jamie -- being found in two disparate places about 55 kilometres apart, the first south of the small Ontario town of Manilla, the second near Coboconk, cottage country, close to Four Mile Lake, where it turns out the brother of the man accused of killing Alicia has a place and is involved with the cottagers' association.
This way was a next-door neighbour, 31-year-old Daniel Sylvester from the house right beside the Fortis home, being charged with second-degree murder.
And this way was, as Mrs. Fortis said in her note yesterday, more than four weeks of subsisting on the gruel that is hope against hope: Who knew such thin offerings could feed so many?
"We suffered for so long and she lay there for so long," Mrs. Fortis wrote.
"If only he'd just left her there," she said, "so we'd find her in the morning and put her to rest properly."
Sources have told The Globe and Mail that when Mr. Sylvester showed up at York Regional Police district headquarters at 5 p.m. on Tuesday with his lawyer David Hobson, he allegedly told police he had first put the body of the girl next door at the Manilla location, this the very night she vanished into the darkness, and then, weeks later, returned to the site to retrieve the young woman's body and take it to Four Mile Lake.
Mr. Sylvester, Mr. Hobson said yesterday, voluntarily surrendered himself after struggling for "some long period of time" with overwhelming remorse.
"His conscience got the better of him," Mr. Hobson told reporters in a remarkably blunt interview. "He's feeling that the family next door needed closure. . . . He regretted deeply that he had been responsible for no closure on the part of the deceased's family. That weighed on his conscience terribly."
The young man, Mr. Hobson said, was also afraid "another person might have been unjustly prosecuted, and for other reasons which I can't explain at this time, but will become evident in the course of time, it was his firm instructions to me that he wished to get this matter over with."
This may have been a reference to Sean Hine, Ms. Ross's boyfriend of six weeks, who had reported her missing and who was from time to time over the course of the police probe described as "a person of interest."
Sources say that Mr. Sylvester, who lived with his widowed mother Olga -- his father, Grant, a financial planner who was also a popular author, died in 1999 -- remained at the police station for eight hours, and that at the end of a lengthy statement, in which he allegedly said he had quarrelled with Ms. Ross, took detectives to the two makeshift burial sites.
That there are two locations, and that Ms. Ross's body was at one or another for so long, will complicate the formal identification of her remains. Officials with the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario -- Dr. Barry McLellan and forensic anthropologist Kathy Gruspier -- were at the sites yesterday, but weren't sure that the postmortem could begin today.
That Mr. Sylvester, who looked yesterday at his brief court appearance as though he had walked out of a commercial for the Gap shirt he was wearing -- younger than his years and clean-cut handsome -- is charged with second-degree murder means police aren't alleging the slaying was either planned or deliberate, the requisite elements for first-degree homicide.
As a three-day-old infant, Alicia Ross's face was so perfectly round and fat, Mrs. Fortis actually wondered whether she had a chin, but she emerged at the end of what her mom once called, with a grin, an "interesting adolescence" as a slim, lovely, long-legged young woman who loved the warmth of the sun on her skin.
On a trip to Australia, where she was so desperate for work she handed out flyers on the beach, Ms. Ross learned stick-to-it-iveness, and but for a phone call home, which saw her mom wire money into her account so she "could have a good meal and go to sleep" and give her the advice that "tomorrow is another day," she stuck it out, found work on her own, and was all but adopted by her new Aussie friends.
She was a generous and loyal young woman, never forgetting the high-school sweetheart, Greg Rogers, who died in a car accident, and remembering to stay in touch with his shattered parents.
Over the early weeks after her disappearance, when police were conducting a massive search in her neighbourhood, the evidence of Ms. Ross's kind heart was there for all to see in the dozens and dozens of young people her age who faithfully turned up to help look for her, faces pale and weary beneath the golden tans of midsummer.
Three years ago, Ms. Ross was a tripper -- she was a child of the great outdoors, forever camping or hiking or canoeing -- at a camp called White Pine in Algonquin Park when a little boy was discovered to be missing.
On her own, with a sprained ankle, she tore seven kilometres back through the bush until she found him, off the path the campers had taken.
"She found him," Mrs. Fortis told me proudly weeks ago, when hope still filled her battered heart. "She brought him back."
I offered that perhaps this was synchronicity of some sort, and that it would mean Alicia would be found, too, and brought back, safe and alive. I was sorry as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
"I guess," she wrote yesterday, "Alicia wasn't the one girl, the one time, to come home."
