
The Girl in the Wall
Alison Preston
© 2011, Alison Preston
Print Edition ISBN 978-1-897109-56-4
Ebook Edition, 2011
ISBN 978-1897109-61-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Doowah Design.
Photo of Alison Preston by Tracey L. Sneesby.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Preston, Alison, 1949-
The girl in the wall / Alison Preston.
I. Title.
PS8581.R44G57 2011 C813'.54 C2011-905928-2
Signature Editions
P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7
www.signature-editions.com
Contents
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART 2
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART 3
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
About the Author
Also by Alison Preston
1
Morven Rankin was born dead.
It ran in her family. Her mother, Frances, had been born dead twenty-one years earlier --- Frances's mother twenty-four years before that. In the grandmother's case, an astute nurse banged the baby into shape before there was a serious lack of oxygen to the brain.
Frances wasn't so lucky. She went through her life with the label given to her as a young girl: not quite right in the head. Her parents didn't know what to do with her. When Mr. Rankin came into her life, she was just twenty years old. They gave him their blessings when he asked if he could marry her. They couldn't believe their luck; Frances didn't know what to believe.
You'd have thought by the time they got to Morven they would have been on the alert for the birthing emergency, considering the family history. After all, it was 1949; the bikini had been invented. But no one, least of all Frances, thought to mention it. Perhaps the grandmother didn't think it was the type of thing that ran in families, or maybe she just didn't think.
When Morven looked as though she'd be taking her time coming, the doctor stepped out for a smoke. Then out she slid with the umbilical cord wrapped around her tiny neck; she was blue from head to toe. The attending nurses were as quick as their predecessors had been in 1904 dealing with the grandmother's difficulties. One nurse snipped the cord, another pumped oxygen into the baby's lungs and brought her to life, and a third ran for the doctor.
"Good work, girls," he said as he entered the room.
Mr. Rankin had had another family before he started his new one with Frances. It had consisted of a wife named Bess and a boy named George. Bess died soon after her son turned two. She choked on one of the peppermints that she kept at her bedside for her middle-of-the-night cravings.
Her husband had gone to use the bathroom and then continued on downstairs for a glass of water. He paused to look out the front window at the snow falling in big soft flakes --- the first big snow of the winter of 1947. He thought about the new life growing inside his wife and he smiled to himself. It would be about the size of her fist at this point. That's what the doctor had said at the last appointment. Not too small to love: that's what he himself had said.
When he came back to the bedroom Bess was dead. He knew as soon as he saw her that it was too late for anything but a phone call.
He had thought highly of his wife but it was the fist-sized being that he mourned the most. In his heart he knew it was another boy. He buried his wife in Brookside Cemetery with the unborn child inside her. No one else except Bess's doctor knew that she had been pregnant. It had been too early to tell folk. So he didn't have to deal with that part of it, what to him was the biggest part, outside of his own head.
George was too young to understand, barely two years old. His mother was simply gone when he woke up on that blanketed December morning; he had slept through the whole thing.
He stood stunned at the graveside of his first mother.
"Mummy?" he asked in the weeks and months to come.
He asked it, not just of his father, but of anyone who came by.
Before long his only recollection of her was a vague sense of having once been held close --- close enough that there was safety inside the memory, a solid core of protection.
Friends and neighbours were attentive to the little family after the death. They invited George and his father over for meals and dropped stews and baked goods off at their front door. It was at one of those neighbours' homes that Mr. Rankin got to know Frances, the woman who would become Morven's mother. He'd seen her, of course. She lived just two streets over on Ferndale, but he hadn't spoken to her except for the odd hello. He'd known her parents for years in the way neighbours do: nice day, good job on the garden, how's the world treating you?
Frances was twenty at the time of Bess's death and she was still living with her parents. She didn't have a job or any real interests outside of her home. Her folks got into the habit of inviting George and his father for Sunday dinner. Frances did the cooking and that impressed Mr. Rankin even though it was the same thing every week: tomato juice to start, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes, gravy. The only thing that varied was the vegetable. She rotated peas, corn, and carrots, which were Mr. Rankin's three favourites. He didn't even have to tell her that. For dessert they had chocolate pudding.
Mr. Rankin looked forward to Sundays and the regular roasts and the clear eyes of Frances Dobbs. Her eyes seemed to hold no secrets and he liked that about her. He began to love that about her.
They were married the following December, one day after the anniversary of his first wife's death.
George was almost four when his stepsister arrived.
It wasn't until a couple of years after she was born that anyone spoke out loud about Morven being a little odd in some of her reactions or, to be more precise, her non-reactions. For instance, she hadn't smiled yet, not that anyone had seen. And she rarely cried. When she did, it was more of a lowing sound, like a calf that needed something, but not very badly. She shed no tears.
Those were just two of the things that made her different from other toddlers.
George was the first to notice because he spent so much time with her, more than either of his parents. He didn't talk about it though. He would wait for the grown-ups to do the talking.
When she got a little older, when walking was no longer a major production for her, he took her on what he liked to call field trips around their neighbourhood, the Norwood Flats. They lived in a grand old house on Monck Avenue and they set out from there to take in the sights.
"Look at that, Mor!" he said, pointing to a dog rassling with an old shoe.
"Smell this!" he cried out, thrusting a sprig from a lilac bush under her nose.
But she did not react. She stared --- not at the dog or the shoe or the lilacs --- but at the people they passed. And that got both her and her stepbrother into trouble.
"Teach your sister some manners," said Mrs. Willard, the woman from across the street and two doors down.
"Tell her that staring isn't polite," said Mr. Charlie Tompkins, the grumpy man from Crawford Avenue. They were walking by his pristine front lawn and George was trying to interest his sister in the lushness of the grass.
It was the people that seemed to interest her --- their faces --- even when they were twisted with distaste and pointed directly at her.
"Stare, stare, like a bear. I can see your underwear," sang the local children.
"Take a picture; it might last longer," they heard more than once on their travels around the neighbourhood.
No matter how hard George tried with her, she would not learn to keep her stares to herself.
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to look at people," he said. "You're not doing anything bad."
He worked hard at keeping any nuance of criticism out of his voice.
"It's just that it makes people uncomfortable," he said. "If you could just look at them for shorter periods of time, maybe, and sometimes say something pleasant while you look, like 'hello' or 'how are you?'"
George had difficulty coming up with the right words to explain the difference between casual looks and stares.
"I don't get what you're talking about, Georgie," Morven said when he tried to explain.
He sighed and grew quiet, even at the age of eight sensing the long road ahead. His half sister, among other things, couldn't or wouldn't understand the difference between looks and stares. He hoped it was couldn't; he didn't want to blame her.
Their dad yelled sometimes, thinking that she chose not to grasp certain things, like the business of staring.
"I don't think she chooses it, Dad," George said when he was alone with his father. "I think she truly doesn't understand."
2
"Tell me the story, again, Georgie. Tell me about how I was born dead."
It was the summer of 1955. Morven would be six in October and George was a tall nine-and-a-half-year-old. They were sitting at the counter at Wades' drugstore drinking milkshakes: George had chocolate, his sister vanilla. She hadn't wanted one at all --- had asked for a glass of water --- but George wouldn't have it. It seemed far too bleak to him for her to want only water when she had a quarter in her pocket and supper was the length of a baseball game away.
He glanced over both his shoulders. He didn't want anyone to hear this kind of talk from his sister.
"No," George whispered. "I wish I had never told you in the first place."
People had enough crazy ideas about her already with her quiet ways and blank stares. He was sure the ears of the boy behind the counter, the one who made their milkshakes, twitched towards them when he heard what she said.
"Why are you whispering, Georgie?"
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are."
He didn't want to argue about anything, least of all whether or not he had been whispering.
"Please, Georgie. Please tell me again."
George finally obliged, but only against his will and better judgment and only when they were on their way home so no one else could hear their conversation.
After he had wrapped up the tale this time, she said, "I wish I was still dead."
"No, you don't," he said.
"Yes, I do."
He was afraid to let her out of his sight.
George had heard of grown-ups who wished they were dead, but not kids who had yet to reach their sixth birthdays. A man on Lloyd Avenue, Mr. Silk, had killed himself on purpose. He went into his garage in the middle of the night and closed the door behind him. He fastened one end of a rubber tube to the exhaust pipe of his brand new Meteor and stuck the other end through the small triangular window on the driver's side. He cranked the window as closed as he could get it without squashing the tube. Then he got inside the car, turned it on, and waited for exhaust fumes to fill up the small space. He waited to die.
Mrs. Silk found him the next morning and went screaming down the street toward the river.
They said there was an empty bottle of rye whiskey on the car seat beside him. They said he left no note but it was suspected that the Second World War had something to do with it. He was German, after all.
The details of the death spread through the neighbourhood and took on a life of their own. At first there were gross exaggerations of nakedness and murder and missing limbs, but as time went by and the excitement settled down, the basic facts took their grim place in the history of the community and when people told the story they began to leave out the parts that they knew deep down weren't true.
Mrs. Silk moved away and a new family moved in. They heard what had happened, of course, so the father tore down the garage where the desperate deed had taken place. He announced that they were going to "start from square one." People whispered for all of a summer and part of a fall about his proclamation and what it might mean and then they seldom spoke of it at all. Other stories came along with greater immediacy and Mr. Silk was all but forgotten. The only substantial things that remained of the event were the expression "pulling a Silk" which meant killing yourself by means of carbon monoxide poisoning and a new two-car garage, the first in the neighbourhood. It was almost as big as the house.
The family that was starting from square one didn't last long --- two years at most --- and then someone else moved in. They still lived there as far as George was aware but there was no good reason for his awareness to take in the little house on Lloyd.
He knew that Morven wouldn't have the wherewithal at her age to pull off a Silk or anything that complicated, but he worried nonetheless. He pictured her doing dangerous things, like jumping off the Norwood Bridge or cutting into herself with sharp knives.
The knife thing wasn't so far-fetched. Recently they had been making tomato sandwiches --- squidgy sandwiches they called them because they got soggy from the juicy tomatoes on the soft white bread pre-sliced from the bread man --- and Morven had taken a butter knife and run it across the palm of her right hand. She drew a thin broken line of blood.
"What are you doing?" George asked, his soft voice raised a notch or two.
"I just wanted to see," she said. "They seem like such dull knives. I just wanted to see."
That wouldn't have been so odd in itself, but she did it again a few days later.
"The knife looks so smooth and fat," she said this time. "I couldn't believe it would actually cut me."
She stared at the row of tiny red dots, on her left hand this time.
"But...but you've done it before!"
George's voice was a quiet wail, as if a stuffed animal were trying to scream. He was always conscious, no matter what, of disturbing his mother.
"Yeah," she said, "but still."
"Still what?"
George snatched the knife from his sister and rinsed it in the sink.
"I don't know, Georgie. Still nothing, I guess."
When they got home from the drugstore on the day of the milkshakes Morven said, "Let's play toss the ball," and she offered the slightest smile imaginable. It was as big as her smiles got.
"Okay, let's," George said.
He went off to get his softball. It was never far away. He threw a gentle underhand to his sister. She was very small. He would rather have lost the fingers on his throwing hand than hurt her in any way.
3
There was an unspoken rule in the house: don't bother the mother. Even Morven, who didn't get a lot of things, got that. There were no unspoken rules about the dad. He was approachable enough when he was around, but that wasn't something that could be counted on with any sort of regularity, like Walt Disney Presents on Sunday nights. Some days they barely saw him.
George and Morven grew up asking nothing of the mum and very little of the dad: money for a new baseball glove, say, or a signature on a report card. Sometimes George did that last one himself. Morven's reports were less than stellar and he saw no reason to bother their dad with them.
Help in the big house came in the form of Mrs. Campbell, who got off the Coniston bus on Highfield Street five days a week at 7:45 to aid in the running of the household. She left late in the afternoon after getting supper ready for the family. When the children were very young she usually stayed with them till their father got home, but as George grew older she took to leaving a little earlier. She had her own family's supper to put on the table.
There wasn't much in the way of rules in the Rankin house aside from the unspoken one about not bothering their mother. That one, however, covered a lot of territory: don't raise your voice, don't clomp up or down the stairs, don't slam doors, if you listen to the radio do so quietly, don't watch the television unless you're prepared to leap up and turn down the volume on the commercials. Most of the wide reach of the unspoken rule had to do with their mother's ears.
Morven thought it would be good if her mother went deaf. Good for everyone. She spent a month or so trying to figure out ways she could make this happen, with thoughts of sharp pencils and other pointed objects, but she couldn't come up with anything that wouldn't cause pain and get her into trouble.
Finally she mentioned it to George.
"No, God, no. You can't be thinking those kinds of thoughts," he yelled.
They were at the river, so he could shout. Not loudly --- George was never loud --- quietly, as though that same stuffed animal was having a small amount of success with making itself heard.
He could see that he had alarmed her with the ferocity of his reaction.
It was late spring, nearly three years after the knife incident. George was twelve; his sister was eight, in grade two. She had failed grade one, couldn't get the hang of things. Mostly she gazed out the window or stared at her classmates and teacher. She didn't manage much better the second time around but it was decided that she should move ahead anyway. They couldn't keep her in grade one forever.
"I hate myself, Georgie," Morven said now on the bank of the river.
"No, you don't."
"Yes, I do."
"It's not good to say that even if you think it," said George.
"Why not?"
"It's a sin."
"What's a sin?"
"Something that's wrong."
"Who says what's wrong?"
"God, mostly."
"It doesn't count then. God's dumb."
"Don't say that, Mor."
"What can I say? All the things I want to say you tell me not to. What am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to think? Everything I think is wrong too."
George stood up and retrieved his glove and baseball from where he had left them in the sparse shade of a young oak tree.
"Let's play some more catch."
"Can I tell you something?" said Morven. "Please?"
"Is it about hating yourself or deafening our mother or something equally as horrible?"
"No."
"Okay, then. I guess so."
George sat down again on the long grass beneath the tree.
"Come into the shade," he said. "Your face is getting baked."
Morven plunked herself down and put her hands to her sunburned cheeks.
"A girl at school invited me to play," she said.
"Yeah?"
"I told her no. I said, 'I've already played.'"
"That was a stupid thing to say."
"I thought so."
George took his baseball out of the glove by his side and examined it.
"What's her name?"
"Gloria."
"Let's go and call on her and ask her to come out and play with us now."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't know where she lives."
"She lives up on Coniston in one of the poor people houses."
"I don't want to."
"Maybe if we called on her and asked her to play with us you wouldn't hate yourself so much."
"No, I hate myself more than that. Calling on Gloria won't help."
"It might."
"No. It won't."
She stood up and walked toward the edge of the riverbank. She walked so close that George hurried to join her.
"Her face turned sad when I said it," said Morven. "It looked like it might start to cry."
He wanted to tell her that Gloria's face was a she and not an it. But he bit his tongue to keep from speaking.
They sat with their legs hanging over the abrupt edge where a chunk of earth had broken away from the bank.
"I hate my face," she said. "I hate my whole head, really, except for my eyes."
"Well, at least you don't hate your eyes," George said. "That's good, I guess."
"Yeah. I hate my glasses but I don't hate my eyes. Without them, I wouldn't be able to look at people.
"No."
George kept a firm hold on his tongue. He wanted to remind her again not to look at people so closely and he wanted to do a better job of explaining that if she wanted to feel better about Gloria she would have to do something more than just tell him about it, but he didn't think now was the time for another of his stern reminders. It was hard for him to know where to take things from there. He no longer felt like tossing the ball around; Morven wasn't the best of catchers or throwers. So he steered her home and settled her in the yard with her family of dolls.
They were a strange group. The dad was a kewpie doll that George had won at the Red River Exhibition. His name was Air. The mum was a soft rabbit with no face. It used to have one but Morven had removed the sewn-on features one rainy day last summer. George watched her do it but was too tired to stop her or even ask about it. The rabbit had no name. The brother in the family was a boy doll dressed like a prince; he even had a crown. His name was George. The little sister was a troll --- a scary monster named Muck.
Morven didn't play with the dolls; she just stared at them.
George wondered if she would play with them if she had someone to play with --- Gloria, say. He wouldn't play with dolls himself; he drew the line at dolls.
4
Lush hot summers passed into cool grey autumns, frozen winters into watery springs. Morven tried her hand at skating and swimming and tap dancing lessons at the Norwood Community Club --- activities that had no teams or partners. But it never worked out. It wasn't that she was so bad at these occupations as much as just uninterested. She didn't know why she was putting herself through it except that other people like George and Mrs. Campbell thought she should.
She said as much to George.
"Why do people skate?" she asked.
"Well," said George, "when skating was first invented I imagine it was to get from one place to another more quickly than walking during the winter months when you had a river you could skate on. You know, in the olden days, when there weren't cars and you might have been too poor to have horses."
"Yeah? And how about now? Why do people skate now?"
"Because it's fun," said George and he left the room.
"I don't think it's fun. It makes my ankles tired."
He heard her but he didn't respond. He kept on walking right out the back door, grabbing his parka from its hook in the hall and not even bothering with his galoshes.
Morven drifted from one grade to the next, failing again, this time grade five. But holding her back didn't seem to alter anything for the better, so the schools, first Nordale and then Nelson McIntyre, decided just to shift her along. The sooner she was shifted the sooner they would be rid of her.
George was six years ahead of her in school now because of her failures. He would be out of Nelson Mac before she set foot in the place and he was grateful for that though he didn't say so out loud.
She continued to upset her brother with her quiet announcements.
"Don't care if I die," she sang so low he barely heard her.
"Jesus, Mor, don't say that."
"I wasn't saying it; I was singing it."
"What?"
"It's a song, Georgie, about fly balls and flipping around and dying too. Listen."
Sure enough, from the kitchen radio came the tinny sound of Jerry Lee Lewis or someone belting it out: "Flip, Flop, and Fly."
George chuckled. "I don't think he's singing about fly balls."
"What then, Georgie?"
"I don't know for sure."
"It's fly balls, like you hit when you're playing Work Your Way Up."
"Okay. Fly balls. Sure, fly balls."
At least she was singing, even if it was about dying. George turned up the sound on the radio and opened the fridge to see about an after-school snack.
"Let's do that thing," said Morven, "where you take deep breaths and then squeeze each other's chests till you pass out."
"No! Don't you know that's dangerous? Jesus, you could not wake up from doing that. I heard about that happening to a kid somewhere. He died from doing it with his friends."
"Where?" she asked. "Where did that kid live?"
She wanted to play with people who weren't afraid of dying. But maybe when she met them they would disappoint her and be just like other kids and not want to have anything to do with her but poke fun.
"I don't know where the kid lived. Omaha? I just heard some teachers talking about it once."
"Are you scared of dying, Georgie? I'm not. I wonder if Gloria is afraid of dying."
George closed the fridge.
"Maybe if you played with her you could ask her and find out," he muttered.
He walked out the front door to the street. He was so tired of getting caught up in her questions.
During the school year he took himself away as best he could into basketball and curling and the United Nations Club. He looked after Morven; no one could say he didn't, but there were other things that he insisted on doing to keep himself from going off his rocker, as he put it.
Summers were long for George. The family didn't take holidays away from home like most others in the area. Their dad didn't take time off work the way most dads did, and their mother continued on in her usual way. There had been a time not so long ago when Mrs. Rankin still went for the occasional outing, always in the passenger seat of the car, never getting out of it, just going for a ride, as she called it, and insisting that the whole family come along. But no more, and George was just as glad. He hated the outings. They were tense and they smelled bad, like his mother's bedroom did when Mrs. Campbell had days off and wasn't there to help.
The streets were quiet and lazy in the summer and it was difficult to think up ways to pass the time. He found the odd game of Work Your Way Up in the flood bowl or in the school grounds, and there was always the riverbank to explore. It would have been different if he were a boy on his own. He could have scouted out the other boys who came and went from their holidays with their families and tagged along with his homemade slingshot and his baseball glove.
But he always had Morven with him and he knew better than to inflict her on the neighbourhood boys and vice versa. They made fun of her in the way that young boys do, and who knew how bad it could get if he wasn't there to shield her from their taunts? All the boys weren't like that: there were one or two that were nice to her, Frank Foote, for example, who usually made a point of saying hello. George liked Frank Foote, but he was quite a bit younger and it wouldn't do to cultivate a friendship with a little kid.
The length of the days didn't seem to trouble Morven. She found enough to do. She didn't need a lot, it seemed, and that was good as far as George could tell. It would be worse if she needed him to come up with ideas for her. She didn't have many of her own, but those she had took up a lot of her time, as she was opposed to hurrying. He got so he could trust her to do certain things by herself for limited periods, as long as she told him what and where and for how long.
Sometimes her ideas were a little off base, but she came to no real harm.
Morven turned twelve in early October of 1961. She wanted to bake a cake for her mum. Twelve years ago on this day her mother had given her death, which was quickly followed by birth because of the quick-acting nurses. It was the death part that interested Morven and that was why she wanted to bake the cake.
She planned to write "Happy Deathday" on it in green peppermint icing and puncture it with twelve candles. She wanted to march it in to her mother's bedroom while she and George sang "Happy Deathday" as quietly as possible.
But George walked in on her preparations and put the kibosh on them.
"Firstly, someone should be baking a cake for you, not for her," he said.
"But she's the one it's about. She's the one who would remember the day it happened better than anybody."
George took the flour sifter from one of her hands and a wooden spoon from the other.
"Where's Mrs. Campbell?" he asked.
"Gone home."
"She shouldn't have. Sit down at the table. I'm going to finish this up."
"But..."
"No ifs, ands, or buts."
George got to work. It was going to be a chocolate cake. The recipe was out on the counter.
"What's secondly?" she asked.
"What?"
"You said, firstly someone should be baking a cake for me. What's secondly?"
"Oh. I guess there is no secondly."
"That's disappointing," she said.
"What flavour of icing do you want?" he asked.
"Seven minute and then green peppermint for the writing," she said.
She told him about her plans for the wording of the message and for the song they would sing.
"We can't write that or sing that," said George. "It's your cake now, not Mum's and we're not going to sing to her."
His temples began to throb.
Their dad walked in just as he slid the cake into the oven.
When Morven left the room George confided in his dad --- told him what she had said about "Happy Deathday."
All the dad said was, "Imagine being the type of person who would think that was a good idea."
5
It was the summer of 1962, the year that Morven would turn thirteen.
On this particular day, the heat was fierce, the sun blinding. She wished she had worn her sunglasses, the ones she had bought at Wades' drugstore. Sunglasses were one of those things that she thought were too good to be true until she owned them and found out they were like most everything else: ordinary and forgettable. Like toenail polish that looked shabby after one day and like the plastic high-heeled sandals that she sent away for with George's help and a coupon from the back page of a Katy Keene comic book. They were run through with sparkles, even in the heels, but were impossible to walk in, so what was the point?
Her sunglasses at least had a use even if they no longer held the magic for her that they had before she owned them, when they had twinkled out at her in their pink frames from their display case in the pharmacy. She pictured them on her bedroom floor now gathering dust, perhaps being batted under the bed by Pookie, where they would be further forgotten till Mrs. Campbell found them and spoke to her sternly about taking better care of her things.
Sweat ran down her sides as she walked slowly along Lloyd Avenue; she didn't like sweat. Lloyd was out of her way, but it was her favourite street in The Flats and she regularly walked this way. It was different from the other streets in the area. The houses were a manageable size and she imagined the people inside them to be easygoing and kind. If they met her they wouldn't judge her like the people in the big houses on Monck and Claremont and Ferndale. So far no one had paid any attention to her as she ambled down the street, and she liked it that way, but she wasn't overly worried about encountering someone.
She was going to Norwood United Church, where she sometimes went to sit on hot afternoons. The church was open all the time and she liked the cool pews of blond wood and the way there was seldom anyone around.
Once a woman who could have been a secretary had asked her in an English accent if there was something she could help her with and Morven said, "No thank you. I just like to sit."
The woman had smiled at her and said, "Go ahead, love. Sit away."
Now Morven had a favourite grown-up. Her name was Miss Morton. Four of the letters in their names were the same and that was important to Morven. Miss Morton had her own office with her name on the door. That's where she sat most days, but often she was visible in other areas of the church. She was no bother. Her calm presence didn't interfere with sitting; in a way it made it better.
As Morven walked up Lloyd now she suddenly felt a pocket of cool air and stopped. The hedge that cooled her was tall and lush, but dusty. It needed a good rain to clean it up and make it shine.
She peered into the person-sized opening that led into the yard. It was so dark in there that she couldn't see into the corners. It seemed to be the only place in Norwood that wasn't suffering from the heat.
But there was something else behind the hedge besides a change in temperature. She stepped into the yard. It was a different day in here, a different season: a cool dark season with a secret. The cool felt refreshing, the dark unnerving. She was pretty sure if there was a secret she didn't want in on it. Not now, anyway. Maybe in some far-off brave future where she always knew exactly what to do and had the gumption to do it.
If there was good to be felt in this yard she couldn't get a hold of it. She was pretty sure there was bad, but that too was beyond her. Maybe it hadn't happened yet.
The small house appeared to be set back further from the street than the others on the block. All the blinds were closed. There were no sounds, but yet it felt like someone was inside, perhaps even looking out at her.
The temptation to lie down in this cool and different season was almost overpowering but she resisted. The ground was dirt. No sun broke through the tall hedge to nurture grass like in the other yards in the neighbourhood.
She found herself back out on the sidewalk and felt like Alice might have, coming through the looking glass, back through, that is, to regular life. She squinted and her sweat started up again. She glanced behind her through the narrow opening and wondered why she had never noticed this place before.
Not for the first time in her life she felt like she was remembering something before it took place. She wondered if there was a word for it. She didn't suppose so.
A woman walked toward her from the direction of the river. Morven waited for her without wondering why.
"Are you all right, dear?" the woman asked. "You look a little pale."
She couldn't answer but the woman didn't seem to mind.
"I'm Mrs. Beresford," she said. "I live in the corner house."
She pointed, but Morven didn't look.
"You've had a scare, haven't you? It's this old house. It has a ghost."
"Who lives here?"
"It's not who lives here now that matters," said Mrs. Beresford, "but who used to live here. It was a man who died by his own hand."
Morven pictured a giant hand with a mind of its own attached to a normal-sized wrist, wielding itself back on its owner and causing his death by crushing him to a pulp.
"That's the secret then," she said. "I knew there was a secret."
"Do you like secrets, dear?" Mrs. Beresford asked.
Morven didn't like the question so didn't answer it.
Again Mrs. Beresford didn't seem to mind.
"This house doesn't have a hope," she said.
"What do you mean?" said Morven.
"Sometimes a house can't get out from under. It can't escape what it's become through no fault of its own. It's doomed, I guess you could say."
Morven began to run and changed her mind about going to the church. She needed to get home to George. Mrs. Beresford hadn't been mean to her but there was something about her that she didn't like. Morven was almost certain she would never walk down Lloyd Avenue again.
George wasn't home, but it was after supper so she went straight to bed and hoped for sleep. She wanted badly to be free of this day.
"Georgie?" she said when she got up late the next morning.
He sighed. It was the voice his sister used when she was going to say something bad enough to wreck his day.
"Yes?"
"I hate waking up in the morning."
George continued to spread butter on four slices of white bread. He was making brown sugar sandwiches.
"Even during the summer holidays?" he said. "What's to hate?"
"Everything?" she said in her small wreck-the-day voice.
"Do you hate brown sugar sandwiches with lots of butter?" he asked.
He put them on bread and butter plates and sliced them in half. He handed her one and they headed outside to the patio, where they sat on lawn chairs in the shade of the elm tree.
"No. But...."
"Hot summer days?" he asked. "Do you hate those?"
It had rained early that morning and the soaring heat had pushed the temperature up into the eighties already. It was headed for the nineties.
"A little bit," she said. "I sure don't like it when I sweat."
From far off they could hear the shouts of kids at the wading pool, kids with the sense to involve cool water in their day.
George knew he was asking the wrong questions but he didn't know what the right ones were.
"What about me, Mor?" he said. "Do you hate me?"
Morven started to shake when he said that. She shook so much she dropped her still unbitten sandwich onto the ground.
George picked it up for her and carefully removed the particles of patio dirt.
6
"I don't want to live," said Morven.
She said this on a sunny Friday afternoon, the day after she turned thirteen. It was the fall after the summer when she had passed through the looking glass into the cool season on Lloyd Avenue. She was in grade six at Nordale and George was in his final year at Nelson Mac.
"Don't say that."
George's response was automatic, without thought. When he did stop to think about it he understood how it could be true of his little sister.
"Why not?" she asked. "Why the heck shouldn't I say that?"
"Because it's wrong to think it, let alone say it."
And spoil the day for those around you, he thought, but he didn't say that part out loud, not wanting to further lessen her desire to live.
"How can it be wrong if it's true?"
"Wrong things are often true," said George, thinking of the neighbourhood kids and the way they taunted her. "People think things that are wrong all the time."
"This isn't just a thought, Georgie. I'm not just thinking it. It's a feeling, a 'motion. I'm expressing it."
By this time Morven had been to doctors who had talked about emotions and how she didn't seem able to express them. It was all because she had been born dead; something had gone wrong on the right side of her brain.
"I'm expressing a 'motion," she said again, a little louder this time. "Those doctors are full of pork and beans. I can do it."
"An emotion you mean," George said.
It was all he could think of to say.
"Emotion then," she said. I'm having one."
George was scared, but he didn't know what to do. He figured he should talk to a grown-up, but he didn't know which one. None of the grown-ups in their lives seemed very useful or even available.
Their mother spent most of her time in bed and when she did get up she seldom dressed in more than her faded chenille housecoat. She had a closet full of clothes that had been there for as long as either kid could remember, but she didn't wear them. They hung there on hangers like in a department store, unused, unfamiliar --- many inside plastic for safekeeping or sporting tags that proved they had never been worn. She was a limp container of aches and pains. Her good days were those when she made it as far as the lounging chair by her bedroom window. There would never be a day good enough for the conversation George had in mind.
And their father was rarely home. He worked all day at the stockyards, sometimes into the evening. He was a big shot there: something to do with the business aspect of cattle. George wasn't interested in knowing about his dad's job; in fact, the less he knew, the better. There was another kid in the neighbourhood whose dad worked at the yards in a more hands-on capacity --- on the killing floor, as the kid said with a swagger in his voice. That dad came home from work stinking to high heaven. George's dad would sometimes stink too, but not as bad. He was protected some by the walls of his office.
From time to time, he brought men home, with their big cigars and perspiring bodies. They'd sit around the dining-room table talking about cattle and other farm animals, drinking whiskey from small glasses. George and Morven would be in their beds before the men left. Sometimes there would be explosions of laughter that were too loud for the unspoken rule of the house and both kids would cringe as they imagined their mother with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling of her bedroom.
Most nights their dad went to meetings; that's what he said. He usually came home first to bathe and change his clothes. That was when George managed to catch him for a few minutes on the day Morven said that she didn't want to live.
"Dad?"
"Yes, George, what is it? Where's Morven?"
"She's upstairs in her room right now. I'd like to talk to you about her if you've got some time."
"What about, George? I'm in a bit of a hurry. I suppose you can talk to me while I'm in the tub. Just give me a few minutes to get settled."
"Okay."
The house was big enough that the dad and mum could have separate bedrooms. The dad disappeared into his. George left, came back in a few minutes, and knocked on the bathroom door.
"Come in, George."
His dad was in the tub with the shower curtain pulled across.
"It's just something she told me today that has me a little worried," George said.
"Just a second. I want to add a little hot water here. I wanted lukewarm but not quite this luke." A chuckle escaped from behind the curtain.
The dad had a jovial way of talking. It meant that people liked him right off the bat. It made him seem approachable.
Water came thundering out of the tap and then stopped.
"Okay now, George. Who said what? Hand me a washrag, will you?"
George opened the linen closet and took a clean cloth from the neat pile left there by Mrs. Campbell. He reached around the shower curtain to hand it to his dad.
"Dad?'
There was no answer for a moment and then with a noisy swoosh his dad broke the surface of the bath water. The sound reminded George of a turtle he had seen down at the river. It was about the size of a manhole cover. It slipped into the brown water from its resting place at the river's edge and made barely a ripple --- unlike his dad.
"Ah, that feels good after...oh thanks, George. Since I've got you here, how about scrubbing the old man's back for him?"
George didn't want to scrub his father's back. He didn't want to see him naked even if water and bubbles covered most of his body. There was always a chance that his dick would poke its ugly head up through the suds. He left the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind him.
"George?"
He heard his dad calling out to him as he walked down the stairs.
To George's way of thinking his dad counted on him way too much for the running of the household. His life was unlike that of any other kid he knew. Oh sure, there was Mrs. Campbell. She came in five times a week to clean and launder and cook some. She even saw to the mum in a no-nonsense kind of way. And if her grocery lists weren't followed to the letter she took a strip off one side of his dad and down the other. But even so. There was people stuff to be taken care of, like the problem of his little sister wanting to die.
"It's too much for me," he said aloud.
He wondered if he should mention it to Mrs. Campbell. She was due to come in a couple of days. He didn't want to. She was so matter-of-fact and she tended to talk about things being out of her jurisdiction, like if there was no laundry soap for instance.
"It was on the list. I wrote it myself," she had said when this happened. "There's no excuse for there not being any. How am I supposed to do the wash today? Tell me that. Shopping for detergent is way out of my jurisdiction. Way out."
George felt sure that she would think preventing his sister's impending suicide was even farther out of her jurisdiction than buying soap.
There was one teacher at the elementary school, Miss Rainbird, who was nice, but he hadn't spoken to her since he was in grade two. He didn't even know if she was still there, still alive even. It seemed to him that most of the other teachers were strict, verging on mean. He knew they yelled at Morven sometimes. She had told him that Mrs. McFee yelled at her so loud once that her neck went stringy and two of the other girls in the class started to cry.
Or else the teachers' heads were in the clouds, pondering their own troubles, he supposed, and they just ignored her because she was hard to understand and they felt she disrupted their plans. Their plans didn't include a strange little person whose stares had developed such an intensity that they frightened people; they had lost their former blankness.
So George went to the guidance counsellor at his own school. He made an appointment on Monday morning as soon as he arrived and then almost ran off later that same day as he waited on the uncomfortable wooden chair outside Mr. Cantwell's office. He wondered if the chair was uncomfortable on purpose, some former principal's idea of one more way to torture the students.
A secretary finally guided him in and sat him on another wooden chair. It was equally uncomfortable and George blamed Mr. Cantwell for this one.
"What seems to be the problem, George?"
The question came from across a wide expanse of desk. He hadn't realized before that Mr. Cantwell talked in such a high-pitched voice. His head didn't feel calm enough at the moment to hold that voice, to interpret it. It was an insect voice, one to be avoided.
George's eyes wandered around the room and landed on a framed photograph on the desk. It faced outwards toward George as though Mr. Cantwell didn't want to look at it anymore and thought he'd give his visitors a turn with it.
It was a picture of a not very pretty woman with a downright homely toddler seated on her lap. Neither of them was smiling.
"George?"
"My sister said that she doesn't want to live." He blurted it out.
Full minutes seemed to go by and he wondered if it was possible that he hadn't spoken yet. He also wondered if it would be possible for him to slip out without being stopped --- if Mr. Cantwell would play along with pretending that none of this had happened. It didn't seem too far-fetched.
He shifted in his chair with this thought at the forefront of his mind.
"Have you spoken to your parents about this, George?"
"No."
"I think that's who you should be speaking to first. Maybe they could set up an appointment with your sister's pediatrician."
"She does have a doctor that she sees, but she doesn't like him very much."
"Does she go to this school, George?"
"No. She's still at Nordale. She's just in grade six."
"Ah, the little staring girl," said the high-pitched voice. "Is that who we're talking about?"
George was stunned into silence. Surely she wasn't that famous.
"Son?"
The voice didn't seem to notice that it had shocked the boy.
George nodded.
"Maybe you could speak to the school nurse at Nordale," squeaked the voice. "That might be helpful. But really, George, this is first and foremost for your parents' ears."
"The school nurse is only there once in a while," George said.
He remembered that from his elementary school days. He hadn't known her name then and he didn't know it now. It could be a totally different person.
"I suppose I could give that a try," he said. "My parents..."
He looked again at the hopelessly unattractive pair in the photograph on the desk and sighed.
"Your parents?"
George stood up.
"Thanks, Mr. Cantwell. I've got a class now."
He looked at the clock on the wall. He had thirty-five minutes to get to his class.
"Latin," he added uselessly.
When he thought about the conversation later all he could remember was the mention of his parents' ears. He saw his dad's sticking out like Alfred E. Neuman's and his mum's, tiny, too small for the size of her and pressed flat against her crazy head like they were sewn on. His parents' ears were too private to be talked about by Mr. Cantwell.
He let it go.
7
Morven wasn't stupid and she wasn't touched in the head, as some of the kids were fond of saying; she was just a little askew. In fact, when she took an IQ test in grade seven, she was near the top of the class. She knew this because certain of her classmates rifled through the results when Miss Horning was out of the room and then they sang about it: the ree-tard's not retarded, she's actually kind of sma-art.
She wondered then why children always sang their mean statements. They never just stated them outright; a little tune had to be devised to go with them. The tunes didn't vary much.
Miss Horning yelled at her about being smart.
"You'd think for someone with a half-decent IQ you'd be able to concentrate on your arithmetic problems long enough to solve at least one of them!"
Morven came to think of IQs as things that were overrated. A high IQ was just one more reason to get yelled at. She didn't even remember writing the test or what the questions had been about. And she didn't know why, if the results were supposed to be a secret, everyone was shouting about them.
She told George what Miss Horning had said.
They were sitting in the flood bowl after school had let out for the day. It was late September. George was in his first year at United College, taking a mishmash of arts courses: English, anthropology, political science, history, and psychology. He didn't know what he wanted to be. All he knew for sure was that the sciences didn't agree with him and he didn't want to work at the stockyards.
"I hate Miss Horning, I think," Morven said.
"Well," said George. "She certainly shouldn't have hollered at you but hate's a pretty strong word to use against her."
Hate made George uneasy. He couldn't have said where he picked up the notion, but he had come to believe that it was dangerous, even little sister-sized pockets of it floating about. It could escape very easily and come back and bite you in the rear end if you let it get away on you. He didn't want his sister being bitten any more frequently than was absolutely unavoidable.
"What would be the right word," she asked now, "if not hate?"
"You could be mad at her without hating her, I guess."
They were sitting behind one of the baseball diamonds watching a game of Work Your Way Up.
"Hey, George!" someone shouted. "We could use another player."
It was Frank Foote.
George had his glove with him. He still carried it everywhere except to university. Morven had hers too, but she wasn't asked to play. There were no other girls today. Sometimes there were and she still wasn't asked but she had no expectations.
"What's the diff?" she asked, still on the topic of hate.
George stood up. "You'll be okay here watching?"
"'Course."
"Just being mad at her might only last for a little while," George said, "and then go away."
He began to walk slowly backwards as he spoke, in the direction of outer field, but he stopped now.
"Hate seems more long-standing somehow, and deep, as though it would be bad to carry around inside of you." His thoughts on it turning around to bite you in the ass he kept to himself.
"Come on, George!" Frank shouted again.
She watched her brother take his place in the field. She wished she could be as clever as he was. Sometimes she felt she almost was, like she understood what he just said about hate and being mad and all. She just hadn't come up with it herself.
Her smartness seemed to come and go like wind or rain. She often forgot things that she had just recently learned even if they pelted her on the side of the head.
A few days later she and George were walking home from the bus stop. She had gone to meet him. Although it was late September, very few leaves had fallen. It felt like summer still but with an underlying cool. No one was fooled by the extension of warm weather.
"Do you think I'm stupid, Georgie?" Morven asked on the short trek home.
"No. I think you're smart. Do you think you're stupid?"
"I guess I think I'm medium."
"Did someone make you feel stupid?" George asked.
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Who?"
"Miss Horning."
"Oh. Her again."
"Yeah. I hate her."
"No, you don't!"
George stopped on the sidewalk to look at her.
"Oh, sorry. No. I mean I'm mad at her. I forgot."
She stamped her foot.
"I hate forgetting! No, I don't. I'm mad at forgetting. No. I'm mad at myself for forgetting. Oh, Georgie. Help me."
She sat down where they stood right in the middle of the sidewalk on the corner of Monck and Highfield and started to cry.
George had never seen her stamp her foot before and he didn't know if it was good or bad. The crying was good; he was pretty sure of that, just not here beside the Haywards' house. He sat down with her and put his arm around her.
"What did she say to you, Mor?" he asked.
"She said it in front of the whole class. In fact, she yelled it in front of the whole class."
"Yelled what?"
"'You stupid girl!'"
Morven shouted it out so loud that George jumped and Mr. Hayward peeked at them from behind the caragana hedge that he was trimming.
"Hello, Mr. Hayward," said George. "Sorry."
"Hi there, George. May I help in any way?"
"No, thanks, sir. We'll just be moving along."
He helped Morven to her feet and they stumbled off down Monck to the river, where they could sit in peace.
"Why did she say that?" George asked when her tears had dried in pale streaks down her face.
She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Neither of them had Kleenexes in their pockets.
"I asked what you should do with your eyeball if it were to pop out. I asked if you should save it or if it would be no good after becoming disattached from your head.
"First she said, 'I'm sure that will never happen,' and then I said, 'Yes, but what if it does?' and then she said, 'It won't,' and I said, 'But what if it does?' and then she screamed it. 'You stupid, stupid girl,' she said. 'Don't waste my time with this.' She said stupid twice in a row."
George stared at the slow-moving river.
"She shouldn't have said that."
He stood up and secured his books under his arm.
"I'm going to head over to the school and see if she's still there."
"Please don't."
"Why not? She's way too mean to you."
"I think she'll be even meaner to me if you go to see her."
"Why do you think that?"
"Because."
"Why because?"
"Because she's the type of person who would be, Georgie. She's very nasty. She made Grant Wilson's ear bleed when he wouldn't sing by himself."
"Jesus."
"Yeah."
"I think that's all the more reason to go and see her or maybe go and see the principal."
"What would you do?"
"If what?"
"If your eye popped out."
"Hold it gently up to the socket till you get to the hospital. If it comes completely detached, put it in a clean plastic bag and transport it carefully with you. First and foremost, get to the hospital."
"Thanks, Georgie."
"You're welcome, Mor."
As it turned out, George didn't go see either Miss Horning or Mr. Alley, the principal. His anger dissipated when he and his sister arrived home and out of the blue Lila Strathmore sauntered up and paused to visit with him in the yard. He couldn't think where she could be going to or coming from. She lived three streets over on Lawndale. Anything accessible from Monck was also accessible from her street. He chose to believe she had come just for him and it temporarily drove all thoughts of his sister's troubles from his mind.
George had been keen on Lila since she moved to the neighbourhood two years earlier from Lethbridge, Alberta. She was still at Nelson Mac, one or two years behind him. George had been in the "smart" room and Lila was in "commercial." That meant that George took Latin and Lila took things like typing, shorthand, and business machines.
Morven had gone into the house. George figured it was too much to hope for that Lila didn't know about her (and berated himself for the thought). But he didn't think it was unreasonable to assume that she was unaware that his sister ruled his life --- that every day was taken up with her, if not in practical ways like making her breakfast porridge and seeing that she got to school on time, then in his worried head. She couldn't know about all that.
"Hello, George," she said.
She stood at the end of the sidewalk. He realized that she was waiting for him to approach her. Without knowing how he managed it, he found himself standing next to her. A little waft of scent rose off her, like freshly ironed clothes.
"Hi, Lila," he said.
"Nice afternoon."
"Yeah, beautiful."
"Would you like to walk with me?" she asked. "I'm just on my way home."
George glanced at the house, feeling something like panic welling up inside of him. His sister and mother were in there. His dad was somewhere else.
"Uh..."
"It's okay if you don't want to."
"No. No, I want to. I want to a lot."
He ran to the front door and shouted, "I'm just going for a short walk. I won't be long."
Not waiting for an answer, he flew down the steps and joined Lila at the end of the walk.
He admired her in so many ways, many of them physical, but especially because she had been brave enough to ask him to accompany her.
They walked quickly; George set the pace. He was terrified that Morven would come wailing down the street after them and all his secrets would be laid out on the ground in front of beautiful, brave, good-smelling Lila Strathmore.
It was awkward trying to look at her as they walked side by side. It was well known that she had substantial breasts and George wanted to get an up-close glimpse of them without being obvious. She was wearing a sweater set, peach in colour. All he could get from his surreptitious glances was that, yes, they were big. But beneath her sweaters she wore a very sturdy brassiere that prevented him from getting any idea of their true shape. There was no give whatsoever.
George hadn't touched any breasts yet and worried about his lack of experience. He knew that you got started overtop a girl's clothes, but in this case there were so darned many layers to get through. He doubted his hands could penetrate the corsetry enough for any satisfaction on either side. Never mind when you had to get started on the gadgetry underneath.
That was the least of his worries at the moment, though, and he set it aside.
They made it to her house. It was large and newly painted with smooth green grass and low, evenly trimmed hedges. Maybe she's rich, he thought; maybe they have a gardener. Maybe I could marry her and move to California.
"Thanks for walking with me, George," Lila said.
A woman's face appeared at the living room window. George backed up.
"It was my pleasure, Lila. I'd like to do it again."
"I'd like that too." She smiled.
George gave a little wave, unsure whether to include the face at the window, and walked briskly off down the street. He was glad he was wearing a fairly clean shirt. He wondered if there was any chance that he ever smelled like newly ironed clothes and he doubted it very much. The best he could hope for, he supposed, was to smell like nothing.
I'd like that too, she had said.
"I'd like that too," George said out loud and then he broke into a run and shouted it. "I'd like that too!"
He slowed his pace as he turned onto Highfield.
"Like what too, Georgie?"
His heart stopped inside his chest. He knew it did.
She had crept up behind him from nowhere. She must have followed him all the way there and all this way back to turn up the way she did now, from behind. And she did it without being seen, under the cover of...what?
"Where did you come from?"
His voice quavered.
"Not telling," she said.
He wanted to scream at her; he wanted to shake her till her head flew off her neck; he wanted to run back to the tidy house and the woman behind the lace curtains with the beautiful daughter who would save him.
"I'm working at becoming invisible," Morven said.
She sounded so much like herself that George was quick to let go of his anger and his fear. For it had been fear that he felt in the presence of his sister, a two-pronged fear. One prong he was used to: it told him that she was his responsibility and would be for as long as they both were alive.
But the second prong held a fear he hadn't felt before in connection to her, one that lived in a shadowy place in his mind where he chose never to go, like the dank corner of the cellar past the furnace and the coal bin. He didn't know if this second prong of fear was for her or of her. He didn't want to go near it.
8
"What do you think about God?" Morven asked.
She and George were in the kitchen the following afternoon, waiting for the tea to steep. They were making iced tea and they liked it good and strong.
George had been thinking about Lila Strathmore and her bound breasts and was taken by surprise, as he so often was by his sister's words.
"Well, not much really," he said.
"You mean, not much in that you don't think very highly of Him or not much in that you don't think about Him much?"
Morven opened the teapot and peered inside. She picked up a spoon.
"Leave it alone," said George.
"God or the tea?" said Morven.
"The tea."
George took the lid from her hand and placed it back on the pot.
"As for God, I guess it's the latter, that I don't really think about Him much."
"Does He exist, do you think?"
"I don't know."
"Me either, but I kind of doubt it."
She poured a large amount of sugar into a fat pitcher for the tea.
"Easy there," said George. "We don't want to lose all our teeth."
"It occurred to me that I might give God a try," Morven said. "For a little while, at least, to see if I can come up with anything."
"How are you going to do that?" George asked.
He sliced the lemons now and set them aside.
"By praying," she said. "I think I had enough of Sunday school and church and that sort of thing when we were kids."
"Well, I can't see as praying would hurt anything," George said. "As long as you keep it a private thing."
She sighed. It was an exaggerated sigh.
"Oh, Georgie." she said. "Of course I'll keep it private."
George had known that this obvious piece of advice would get on her nerves but he felt he was well within his rights. He wasn't going to stop doling it out. She had made a spectacle of herself as recently as yesterday afternoon on the sidewalk by Mr. Hayward's house.
And Lila could have seen her creeping along after them. For all he knew she had seen Morven even though he hadn't. He felt himself flush at the thought. He wanted so badly to come across as normal to Lila: a typical boy from a typical family.
"You've turned red," said Morven. "What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing," said George and gave the tea bags a poke.
"You might get disappointed," he warned her now on the prospect of praying.
He was determined this would be the last advice he would give her on this particular subject, as he was almost totally unversed in it. Of course, there had been the usual prayers that any Scottish Canadian boy might toss off in his early years: please, God, may I hit a homer at baseball this evening; thank you, God, for the pleasant feeling that you have granted me when I touch my penis and also, if possible, don't smite me for making it happen so often; sorry, God, for the mean thoughts I have about my sister when she embarrasses me the way she does.
There were more prayers. They had to do with his lost mother, the one that he couldn't remember except for the held-close feeling. These were prayers that he felt impelled to pray; he was afraid to deny them for fear of being cut loose from the safe harbour where his first mother had moored him.
It didn't seem possible to explain any of these prayers to his sister.
"I'm prepared for disappointment," said Morven.
She removed the tea bags from the pot and poured the hot tea into the pitcher where it mixed with the sugar. George squeezed in a couple of lemons --- they both liked lemons --- and stirred till the sugar was dissolved. Then came the ice cubes and the glasses with straws and the floating lemon slices.
George put one of the glasses on a little tray and took it upstairs to his mother. He came right back down again and went to the liquor cabinet where he took out a big bottle of Captain Morgan's rum with only an inch or so left in the bottom.
"She thinks it's too lemony," he said. "She wants a little rum to soften it."
"Soften it, my eye," muttered Morven. "Soften her, more likely. Soften her in the head."
"Don't say nasty things about our mother," George said as he started back up the stairs.
"Sorry."
So Morven started to pray. She prayed whenever she got the chance, whenever there wasn't something else taking up her thoughts, like walking or eating or listening to people talk. She always prayed silently so she wouldn't embarrass George, except when she was alone in her bedroom or at the river. If people turned up at the river she would stop moving her lips and go quiet. But she wouldn't stop praying.
She kept it up for five weeks. At first it had felt good, like she had a friend she could talk to, and then it started to give her an uncomfortable sensation in her stomach and throat. When she tried to figure this out she couldn't, but she knew it had something to do with feeling as though she had to report everything --- every little thing. It became a strain. Nothing was real unless she related it to God in her prayers. By Thanksgiving she had to say it all out loud. If she was interrupted at the river, for instance, she had to remember that prayer till she was alone again so she could recite it out loud to make it valid.
Watch over George, watch over George, watch over George. She had to repeat it five times over five times a day or it wouldn't work. Her brother would die or worse, of his own accord, go away without her.
It was way too hard. It seemed to her that life shouldn't be this hard unless somebody else was organizing it to make it so, like maybe Adolf Hitler or Mussolini, the men she had learned about in history class who had ruined the lives of millions.
She figured she must be doing it wrong. This couldn't be what praying was. She had heard it was supposed to give comfort, not cause sleeplessness and an upset stomach and a tight feeling in her jaw and throat.
Morven gave up on prayer; she couldn't get the hang of it. The first snowfall and the cold winds of November, the way they came all at once, helped her push the idea clear out of her head.
9
"I hate the parts of me between my legs, Georgie."
She shouted it out.
They were hitting balls in the flood bowl. George was batting for now and Morven was catching some, running after others. It was early April of the year that the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show. There were still small piles of dirty snow here and there but not where they were playing.
"Shh!" said George as loudly as he could and ran toward her.
She bent over to pick up a missed grounder and was surprised to see her brother's face when she stood up. It had a complicated look on it that she couldn't figure out at first.
"You can't shout stuff like that," he said. "Especially not that loud and especially not to me. Not to anybody, really."
"Why not?"
George sat down on the little rise where the ball had landed. This was the most difficult conversation he had ever had to deal with, and he'd had his share. He couldn't imagine what his next sentences would be until he heard himself say them. And as soon as he did, he knew they made no sense, especially the second one.
"Maybe you could mention it quietly to a doctor, if you ever find one you like. Or if you ever have a girlfriend that you trust you could talk to her about it."
"That's not going to happen," she said.
"Maybe it will."
"Probably it won't."
"Maybe the school nurse," he added in vain. He felt like Mr. Cantwell.
"I don't like the school nurse."
George lay back on last year's damp brown grass and he looked up at the sky. It wasn't as blue as it had been earlier. The wind had picked up and it came at them from the northwest. The rain and cold were coming back, maybe even snow. You never knew at this time of year.
"I know you don't," he said.
"She's rough and she smells like medicine."
"Rough how?" he asked.
She sat down beside him.
"Just rough," she said. "Her hands feel like bark and I don't think she likes kids very much."
They were the only moving objects in the whole of the flood bowl besides the old leaves from last fall that skittered across the baseball diamonds.
"It's just," George said, giving it another go, "when it comes to private parts of the body, anybody's body, people don't really want to hear about it. Other than to tell you not to say it out loud, I can't talk to you about this, Mor. I just can't."
"It's okay, Georgie."
She sighed, the deepest sigh George had ever heard.
"Don't worry," she said. "I won't talk about it anymore."
Morven didn't quite get the whys of the situation, but she got the part about what she wasn't supposed to do. She knew from the way George was talking that this was way more important than not staring.
"Let's go to the Spanish Court and get a Popsicle," George said, standing up. "And then go home and play Clue."
"I'm getting lime," said Morven as they walked slowly toward the decrepit little store where they bought their candy. "I'm getting a lime Popsicle and a piece of Double Bubble to finish off with."
"Do you have six cents?" George asked.
"Yes, I do," she said.
They were quiet for the rest of the way and George worried that she was thinking terrible thoughts about her body. He wouldn't be able to help her with this.
"One of these days I'm going to buy a package of Juicy Fruit gum," she said. "It's my favourite next to Double Bubble. They're so different from each other it seems silly even to compare the two. Juicy Fruit's a good gum, isn't it, Georgie?"
She stopped in her tracks to ask the question.
"Yup." He nudged her along to keep her walking. "It's one of the best."
10
In 1965, in the summer of the year that she turned sixteen, two things of note happened to Morven Rankin. The first one was that George bought her a Kodak camera and showed her how to use it; it wasn't difficult.
Her stares became slightly more acceptable if she carried a camera.
George taught her to ask people politely if she could take pictures of them. If they said no, she was to accept it and discontinue staring at them. If they said yes, she could click away till she or her subject had enough. More often than not it was the subject.
Even for George, it worked out well. He and his sister were fixtures in the neighbourhood and had been for years. People scratched their heads over the girl and admired the boy for watching over her. Now that she had something of her own besides George, it freed him up a little.
It was too late for Lila Strathmore. She hadn't had the patience for a boy who couldn't devote himself entirely to her. And it had been too soon back then to leave his sister to her own devices for more than short spurts. But now George was beginning a life for himself, separate from her. He had a girlfriend named Dina. Morven had watched them kiss. He also had some male friends that he horsed around with. He didn't abandon his sister, not even close, but he increased the time he spent away from her and he encouraged her to venture out on her own.
She carried her camera everywhere, took a vast number of pictures and spent all of her sizeable allowance getting them developed. Her father coughed up the money with no argument. This new interest of hers was the best thing that had happened to any of them since she was born.
The photographs were mostly of people, with and without their permission. Oh, now and then she captured a rabbit or a dog caught very still and she practised on her own cat, Pookie, trying to catch him at the right time so there wouldn't be a blur, but it was the human faces that interested her --- their expressions: smiles, frowns, wrinkled foreheads, compressed lips, pouts, blank stares (like her own, she supposed) wide-open eyes, eyes like slits, all manner of countenances for her to figure out as best she could.
A druggist named Ross at Wades' Pharmacy sent her films away somewhere and magically they returned as pictures. She waited till she got home before opening up the packages and then she laid the photographs out on the dining-room table where she studied them. George said she had a knack, an eye, but she wasn't looking for the quality of the photography. It was the workings behind the people's faces that she was after. What went on in there that created particular expressions? If she could just get to the bottom of that, something --- she didn't know what exactly --- but surely something would be solved.
The second thing that happened to Morven that summer was a direct result of the first. Her dad gave up on the idea that doctors were of any use to them and he stopped organizing appointments. He announced to her and George that she seemed fine to him now and he didn't see the point in keeping it up.
Morven was glad and she knew that his decision was connected to her camera.
Doctors had told her over the years that she had trouble expressing emotions, maybe even feeling them in the first place, and she felt as though they didn't believe her when she said that she did feel things. She felt good, bad, and medium: bad when the other kids made fun of her; good when she saw her brother at the end of her school day; bad when Miss Horning and other teachers yelled at her. Actually, hate, but she wasn't supposed to feel that; George had told her so.
She didn't have a name for her biggest feeling, the one connected to her mother and her dad. It wasn't good, that's for sure. And it was worse than bad. But its not having a name didn't mean it wasn't there; it was there all right, inside of her. And she felt it.
During the in-between times she felt medium.
Her sense was that the doctors didn't know what to do with her, how to explain her staring and her unemotive behaviour, as one of them called it. She couldn't even find that word in the dictionary, figured he made it up. So they followed a script, like her teachers did at school when they referred to their notes and couldn't think up anything new to say without them. The doctors looked up "people who were born dead" in their medical textbooks and spouted what was printed there in point form. Then they went home and ate supper and watched television.
When she mentioned this theory to George, he said it was more likely that they looked up "babies who were born with a lack of oxygen to the brain" but he didn't deny that it might well be where they got their ideas about her "having trouble feeling and expressing emotions."
"They don't know me; they don't know anything about me," she said.
"No," said George.
"What was I supposed to do to convince them that I have feelings?" she said. "Punch one of them in the nose? I know better than to hit people; I've got some manners. Is that the same as not being able to express emotions?"
George chuckled. It was an uncertain sort of chuckle.
"And, anyway, what good would it do even if I could convince them? What would be the reward, the prize?"
"I doubt there is one," said George.
"You know what, Georgie? I'm glad to be done with the stupid doctors."
"I'm glad you're glad, Mor," he said.
George had more words than she did for feelings, way more than good, bad, medium, and hate. He mentioned anger, shame, excitement, satisfaction, peacefulness, fear, frustration, uneasiness, happiness, and joy as some examples. She wrote them down in her awkward left-handed scrawl. She intended to study these and whatever others she could come up with on the faces of her subjects.
Joy was an emotion that she was pretty sure she had never felt. The closest she had come so far was when she picked up her first batch of pictures from the drugstore. That had been a very good feeling.
But joy was just one emotion of many. Never having felt it didn't make her a freak. People, even those who hadn't been born dead, couldn't be expected to feel everything, could they? She had asked George that question, but it had been too much for him.
"How many feelings are there?" she asked next.
"That's too hard a question too," George said and then used words like nuance and degree and sliding scales as he slipped out the door to do one of the many things he did without her these days.
Sometimes he joined her at the dining-room table when she had a new packet of pictures laid out and she would ask him to write a word for each face, the word that he thought best described the look. Then, when she was alone she would find the words he had used in the big Webster dictionary and connect the meanings back to the faces. She took to keeping the dictionary right out on the table. No one seemed to mind, as most of the family meals were taken in the kitchen in a manner that verged on haphazard.
"Why does this man look irritated?" George asked once.
"I don't know."
"Is it because you were taking his picture without asking, without making sure it was okay?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Maybe, for sure, I expect," said George.
He reminded her again about the importance of being polite, of not encroaching on the private space around the other people in the world.
She kept on trying.
Sometimes with a favourite photograph she had an enlargement made. She went back to Ross at the drugstore and he sent the negative out to the same mysterious place that made the pictures in the first place. It took some time, but it was worth it. She would hold the photo up beside her own face in the hall mirror and try to recreate the look she had captured on the face of a stranger.
What she sought was a way to feel how that person must have felt with that particular look on his face so she could recreate it when she thought she felt that way and appear normal. She was quite certain she'd experienced many of the feelings that resulted in the expressions: she recognized distaste when thinking about parts of her own body, fear when she imagined a life without George, and sadness, for sure, when she woke up each morning and remembered that she had to get up.
At times she thought that her problem was simply an inability to create the correct expressions to accompany her feelings. At other times she thought that the mirror was the one with the problem. And at other times still, she felt as though there was no problem at all, at least not one that needed solving.
She didn't feel any different when she changed her face in the mirror. The conclusion that she came to from imitating her photographs was that she couldn't play-act an emotion; she couldn't feel on demand. She would have to try catching her own face in the mirror when she was genuinely experiencing something more than mild interest. Mild interest didn't look like much of anything.
11
One summer afternoon in 1967 Morven sat with her camera on her knee in the emergency department of St. Boniface Hospital. George was in seeing a doctor about a sliver in his foot that he couldn't get out. It was infected now and that made it worse.
An ambulance pulled up outside, siren wailing. The double doors of the waiting room opened and a stretcher barrelled through. It held a silent open-eyed boy covered in blood. Medical people busied themselves over him as he rolled by. The siren had stopped, but a small figure stumbled in, screaming like a kookaburra. Morven knew about kookaburras from a nature show she had seen on television about the wild birds of Australia.
The boy's mother, she thought.
"Please have a seat, ma'am," a crisp voice said. "We'll call you in a few minutes."
The wild-eyed stare and then the look of utter incomprehension struck a chord with Morven and she stood up. She moved toward the mother with her camera in her hands. It was still her original Kodak. She didn't take a picture; she knew better.
The boy had been taken now to a place in the back.
Morven sat down next to the woman and waited till the crisp voice left them. Then she stared into the tortured face and said, "Shh," in a gentle way.
The face grew quiet.
No one came for the woman. After a time Morven stood up and reached out her free hand to take hold of an icy damp one. She made a path for the two of them through to the back. Nobody noticed. They passed George lying down on a stretcher in one of the cubicles. He was staring at the ceiling. His foot was propped up on a pillow.
They found the bloodied boy and heard a man's voice say, "I'm afraid he's gone."
The wailing began again and no one tried to stop it this time.
Someone had closed the boy's eyes; maybe he did it himself. Despite the blood and death that covered him he looked to be at peace.
"Take a picture, dear."
The keening had stopped.
"Take a picture of my baby boy."
Morven did as she was told. She took more than one photograph and she worked from different angles to be sure she captured something that would please the crumpled face that called her "dear." She wished she could take one with the eyes open but didn't say so.
That was her first time. That was how Morven got her start taking pictures of the dead.
In bed that night she reviewed the scene in her head. She was pleased, very pleased, that she had known not to take a picture of the mother, though she had been itching to do so. She knew without the tiniest doubt that she had made a good decision and it made her feel very grown-up. The knowledge was a treasure and she kept it to herself, not even telling George.
Of course, she had told him about everything else; there seemed so much to tell.
"Somebody asked me, Georgie," she said. "She requested my services. It wasn't me begging for a chance to take a picture, like it usually is."
"I'm glad you were asked," said George. "It's just..."
"Just what?"
She watched him try to muster up some excitement for her.
"Is it the subject matter?" she asked. "Is that what's bothering you and making you not be happy for me?"
She knew she was right when she saw his face shift a little.
"It's good," said George. "Very good that you were asked."
"Yes, Georgie," she said. "It's very, very good."
12
Morven needed new equipment. The Kodak wasn't good enough anymore. George took her downtown to Sam the Camera Man. They zeroed in on a Nikon camera with a motor drive, a real beauty.
She put her old Kodak on a shelf in her bedroom. It was the only item on the elaborate set of shelves that covered part of one wall.
By now George had switched to business-related subjects at the University of Manitoba. He still had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do and going to school didn't disagree with him. His father assumed that one day George would follow him over to the stockyards but he didn't mind when, as long as his son was furthering his education. Learning never hurt anyone, he was fond of saying, no matter what the subject.
George had a new girlfriend; Dina had fallen for someone else. The new girl's name was Pam and she was a fine arts student majoring in sculpture. She tried to talk to Morven about her photographs but she was usually rebuffed. Morven didn't trust her. She figured Pam was only being nice to her to impress George.
After a family meeting, minus the mother, George signed Morven up for the photographic technician program being offered at the new Manitoba Institute of Applied Arts. It was the fall of 1968, the year she turned nineteen and the year John and Yoko were photographed naked. Over a year had passed since she took her picture of the dead boy.
It was a ten-month program all about photo processing and printing, which was exactly what she needed.
The drugstore had balked at Morven's pictures of the dead boy. She wasn't sure if it was Ross, the druggist, doing the balking or the processors of the film, but she had never been back. Since that uncomfortable day she had taken her film downtown to Sam's.
In spring of the following year, with George's help and the new knowledge she had acquired at MIAA, she set up a darkroom in the cellar. The four walls already existed; it was the old coal room. It just needed some fierce cleaning, some modest modifications and, of course, equipment, which her dad paid for.
Now she was all set. For what, she wasn't entirely sure, but she knew it had everything to do with that summer day in the emergency department.
She took to hanging around the hospitals with her camera at the ready. She practised a positive look in the mirror each time before she set out, not quite a smile --- that felt dishonest --- but an approachable look. No words were spoken about her idea: she didn't want to ruin anything by trying to explain it in its first vague form.
Part of her plan was to take buses to different hospitals to avoid being noticed as a familiar fixture in any one place. She longed to be a magical being that could move in and out of invisibility as needed. She'd heard about a book called The Invisible Man by someone named H. G. Wells, so she borrowed it from the Norwood Library and read it to see if it had any practical tips. But it was beyond her with all its scientific terms.
The General Hospital, the Grace, and the Victoria all became part of her regular route, but the St. Boniface was her favourite. It was close to home, it was where she got her start, and it was near the Red Top, where she always stopped in for a jam buster on her way home and watched the teenagers act out their lives.
And sure enough, the St. B. was also where her second opportunity presented itself. It was early on a July morning. As she prepared to leave the house that day Morven heard on the radio that Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had been found dead in his own swimming pool. That's what she was thinking about as she sat in the front lobby. She wished that she could take a picture of him; he was so beautiful. She imagined him to be even more so in death.
"Could you...?" It was a girl who spoke. She was young, younger than Morven, who rose immediately to her feet and followed along with the family. The mother looked less sure of the idea, but didn't protest.
"He died just a few minutes ago," said the girl. "He almost isn't even dead yet."
This time the eyes were open and Morven felt a fluttering in her chest, as though a tiny bird were passing through. She moved softly and quietly around the hospital bed, touching nothing but her camera, getting in no one's way. It was as though her dream of becoming invisible had almost come true.
13
Morven, in the widest imaginings of her future, hadn't pictured that there would be a call for such a thing. Her imaginings hadn't reached very far, but even so.
It was hard work. There was usually somebody weeping: a wife, an aunt, a son, a father. There was every combination of grievers imaginable, hovering. Morven would have liked to ask them to leave while she did her job, but she sensed early on that it would be perceived as unacceptable. She could tell that even the people who sought her out thought her to be strange somehow on the inside and they wouldn't have trusted her alone with their dead ones.
She didn't blame them. Also, she wasn't sure if it was true. Intuition was something that George had spoken about. She was interested in it as an idea, but she didn't trust it if it belonged to her. Sometimes her inner voice was wrong. Often it was wrong. Her brother had helped her with it over the years and her big mistakes were getting fewer and farther between. But even so. If she understood it correctly, it shouldn't have to be a learned thing like the date that Christopher Columbus sailed over the ocean blue or what crops grew in Argentina and Brazil. You were supposed to be born with it; it was supposed to be effortless.
Her powers of concentration became finely honed as time went by. To do her job properly she needed to ignore the hoverers as best she could, to feel that she was alone with the deceased, one on one.
It was near the beginning of this new life that Morven changed her name to Mrs. Mortimer. She hated her first name, her so-called Christian name. It seemed to her that most Christians she had met were mean: like her Sunday school teacher who kicked her out of class for staring; and the minister, Mr. Rutnick, who clenched his teeth when he smiled and scared the wits out of her with talk of going to hell for the slightest indiscretion; and the hordes of nasty kids who walked home from Sunday school behind her and told Little Moron jokes really loud. She knew the jokes were about her. Why did the Little Moron walk home from Sunday school all by herself? Because no one liked her. Why did the Little Moron stare at people? Because she was a little moron.
The church secretary, Miss Morton, was an adult whom Morven had never forgotten. She had been so kind to her during the days when she liked to sit by herself in the pews. Plus she had worn high heels in different colours and her summer shoes often had open toes. So Morven took Mrs. Morton's name and changed it a little; she didn't want to be a copycat or worse, a thief.
Her new name, Mrs. Mortimer, freed her somehow from the old jokes and the kids who told them and from a whole lot of other bad memories as well. It turned her into more than just a peculiar person with a camera slung around her neck. And the Mrs. part of it gave her a legitimate air. She felt it immediately, the change. It didn't give her a new personality, but it buffed up the one she had, lent it a finer edge.
Mrs. Mortimer didn't want to get into trouble. She'd had too many years of getting into trouble, never having much of an idea why till George would explain it to her every time. There was little doubt in her mind that this new thing she was doing wouldn't be acceptable to people at large: teachers and neighbours and church ladies and doctors. She didn't even tell George, at first, the extent of her new activities.
She wasn't much for hurrying --- didn't do a lot of it --- so she was in no rush to build her business. It grew on its own at an agreeable rate. There was no need to advertise; word of mouth was enough. All she asked for in the way of payment was enough to cover her costs. Usually people added a bonus, an honorarium, as she liked to think of it, as a thank you to her for performing this unusual service. She accepted as graciously as she could.
What she was doing wasn't against the law. It just wasn't done, was all, and she found she could manage that. Some of the people out there needed what she had to offer. All she had to do was concentrate on the job at hand and ignore the judgments and criticisms that were bound to come her way. She could handle it. She was Mrs. Mortimer.
14
One wintry day in early November of 1969 she had her first experience with being called in before life had entirely left a body. The wife feared that her husband would be whisked away before Mrs. Mortimer had time to get there and render her services so she called her at five o'clock in the morning and asked her to please come. Mrs. Mortimer dabbed on a little of her mother's lavender perfume before she left the house.
Again, it was St. Boniface Hospital. She trudged through the slushy streets, careful to keep her camera safe and dry as the wet snow fell around her.
She met the wife in the husband's room. It was silent there, except for the laboured breaths of the man. A nurse had said that he was breathing like someone at the end of his life.
His eyes were closed and his mouth turned slightly downward as though with just a whit of disapproval. His nose was aquiline on a face smooth now that death was near.
Mrs. Mortimer wanted very badly to kiss the pale, pale forehead of the husband. She stepped aside and the wife did just that.
As they both looked on he opened his eyes wide, as wide as eyes go and the woman said, "Dan?"
And then she said, "Danny?"
Mrs. Mortimer recognized an excitement in the woman. Perhaps he hadn't opened his eyes in some time.
But then there was a gurgling sound in his throat, the sound that everyone has heard about and the wife squeaked like a newborn pig.
She choked out, "Nurse," and ran from the room.
Mrs. Mortimer was left alone with the man.
She stared into his eyes. They were the same blue as his hospital gown, the same blue as the eyes of Pookie, her white-furred cat. Leaning over with her arms across her stomach, she didn't look away, not for an instant. She stared into his eyes until she was almost sure there was nothing there. A curious warmth filled her torso. The eyelids closed and began to open again. Mrs. Mortimer stood up and after a quick glance over her shoulder she gently kissed them shut, first one, then the other. Then she stepped back. They stayed closed this time. He was gone.
The nurse came and did what she had to do, with her pulse searching and chart keeping. No one asked if he had closed his eyes on his own. The wife tried to use the phone. It wasn't working for her --- her fingers couldn't manage the numbers --- so finally she just sat and watched while Mrs. Mortimer took pictures. The nurse left them to it.
"I thought for a second there that he'd come back to me."
It took her a moment to realize that the wife was talking to her.
"When he opened his eyes so wide, I mean. They were so clear and normal looking. Why did I run away?" she asked. "Why didn't I stay?"
"I don't know."
"I should have stayed."
Mrs. Mortimer clicked and clicked.
"Oh God, if only I could turn back the clock and do it over again."
"No. No," said Mrs. Mortimer. "You didn't do anything wrong."
She was done with her pictures but she couldn't take her eyes off the husband yet.
"What did I miss?" said the wife. "I would give both my legs to go back ten minutes in time. I'd give my face away."
"No, no. Please."
"Did you see him die?"
"I think so."
"What...what...?"
"I think, that is, I don't think..."
She pulled her gaze away from the husband and looked at the wife.
"I don't think he was seeing his actual surroundings when he opened his eyes for that last time."
The wife hung on her words.
"I think he was already far, far away," said Mrs. Mortimer.
"So he didn't miss me."
"Not then, no. I'm quite sure of that."
"And he didn't know that I ran."
"No. I'm quite sure he didn't know that you ran."
"Quite sure?"
The woman wanted too much from her and she felt the strain.
This time she didn't answer; she didn't know what more to say.
The wife fussed a bit: kissed the husband's temple, smoothed his forehead, lifted the covers to look at his feet.
"Bye, feet," she said.
Mrs. Mortimer put the lens cap on her camera and fit it into its leather case.
"Will he forgive me for running away?" asked the wife.
"Of course he will."
She reached out and touched the woman's hand.
"I'm sure he didn't know and even if he did, he has already forgiven you. He is goodness itself now."
She didn't know where those words had come from but they sounded apt to her. She felt right inside, not wrong as she so often did. It was time to leave this woman alone with her man so she could kiss his face and speak to his feet without an audience.
The sun was up when Mrs. Mortimer walked through the soaked streets. The winter squall had moved off and she faced a warm wind as she walked down Taché toward home.
She felt like a brand new train car firmly fastened to a shiny set of rails, heading out on a clear fresh morning. Heading out to find...
What she was searching for she didn't know. She hadn't even known that she was searching for something, but she was aware that today was the nearest she had come to finding it. Would she ever get any closer? She had no way of knowing, and at the moment she didn't care.
A memory came to her as she turned into the crooked lane that led to Monck Avenue. It was of something that had happened on the first day of her second year in grade one. A boy called Philip was sitting at the desk next to hers; she'd heard the teacher say his name. She stared at him. Philip was shivering. For a few more moments she continued to stare. Then she leaned over close to him so that no one else would hear her words.
"Don't be scared," she said. "I was here last year. It's easy."
The boy had managed a small smile for her and it was that smile she remembered now. It fit in with this new experience somehow.
She wondered what Philip was doing today. She didn't even remember if he had survived grade one. Most people did, she supposed.
15
By the time she opened the heavy wooden door leading to the front hall the warm feeling inside her had faded but was not forgotten. Maybe it lives there now, she thought, and smiled, imagining it safe inside the many layers that made up her small body. Then she felt confused. There was her idea of getting smaller to ease her movements around the families of the dead --- what she recognized as her desire to be invisible --- but now that the warm feeling had come, she had an enormous longing to protect it with extra layers of her self. She didn't want it seeping out, going anywhere.
Maybe she would mention it to George. He had thought she was totally out to lunch with her getting-smaller idea.
"You're little enough as you are," he had said one afternoon when she broached it with him. "You don't want to get any smaller; you'd be invisible."
"That's the idea, Georgie."
"You're nuts," he said and flushed a splotchy red.
She went on as if he hadn't said it.
"It would make my work much simpler."
"You've got your health to think about, Mrs. Mortimer."
She had insisted by now that George call her by her chosen name.
"My health is just fine, thank you very much."
"But it won't be if you steadfastly try to grow smaller. There is even a name for behaviour like that. It's an illness, Mrs. Mortimer. You don't want to make yourself ill."
How the heck do you know what I want to make myself? she thought. But she didn't want George to be mad at her or to worry about her, so she let it go.
No, George probably wouldn't think getting bigger made any more sense than getting smaller. But she liked to talk her ideas over with him anyway. She wondered if he would understand about the warm feeling and her need to protect it.
She knew she could try out either idea, getting smaller or getting bigger, without George's blessing, but she did like to have him on her side.
Mrs. Mortimer was just five feet, one inch tall. She had a matronly appearance at a very young age --- no waist, a kind of straight-up-and-down look. People often took her to be older than she was, even with her childlike ways. She stooped slightly and had worn glasses since the age of eight. On this day, the day of her curious warm feeling, she was a fairly elderly-looking twenty. Her age didn't often come up. There was no reason it would. She was just an odd little woman who took photographs.
"Let's take our hot chocolate outside," she said.
It was after supper on that same November day. All the new snow had melted and there was no wind to speak of.
She and George set themselves up on the dusty porch furniture in their winter coats and gloves.
"I heard geese today," said Mrs. Mortimer. "And last night I dreamed a robin."
"It's a long time till spring," said George.
It was nearly pitch dark already with only the dim glow from the street lights casting shadows.
She told him about the warm feeling and her hope to keep it safe.
"I get it about the warm feeling," George said, "and I'm happy you've had it, but I know, I don't just think, I know, that you can't protect it by embiggening your body, as you say. It's something you can protect in other ways."
"How, Georgie?"
She blew on her hot chocolate and took a tentative sip.
"Well, with your mind, for instance."
"How?"
She was beginning to wish she hadn't mentioned it. George was about to explain something to her that she wasn't going to get.
"Well, let's see," he said. "It may even be that the mind is called what it is because it minds things, like the feelings inside you. It looks after them if you let it, kind of like a babysitter minds kids, looks after them."
"How do I let it?" she asked.
The sound of bicycle tires through a puddle broke the silence around them. A young man loomed out of the dark, leaving a small wake behind him as he passed. He waved and George waved back.
"That's Frank Foote," he said. "Why didn't you wave?"
"I was thinking about what you said."
Mrs. Mortimer waved now, but it was too late. The young man had already turned a corner.
"If someone is nice to you, you should be sure to be nice back," George said.
"I know that by now, I think."
"You should have waved at Frank. He's a good guy."
"I was busy thinking about what you said. And I'm drinking hot chocolate. How many things do you expect me to do at once? Sheesh!"
George sighed and went inside. Mrs. Mortimer followed him.
"How do I let it?" she asked again.
"Let what?"
She couldn't remember what she was asking about. The conversation disappeared into the nowhere land that she imagined she would go to one day to find out all the things she couldn't understand or whose meanings she couldn't hang on to.
"Nothing," she said.
She felt terrible about not waving to Frank in time. She should have known to do so. George said.
When she went to bed that night she relived the hospital scene as best she could in an effort to bring back the warm feeling.
It worked.
16
Mrs. Mortimer began to feel that her lucky days were those when she was summoned before life was entirely gone from a body. Families worried that their dead would get rolled away before they had their chance to get their pictures. They felt helpless up against hospital efficiencies. This happy situation didn't occur very often and it was under these circumstances that there were usually the most people hovering. They were desperate to be there in the last moments. If they stepped out briefly and missed that last good-for-nothing breath, they never forgave themselves. Mrs. Mortimer worked around them, inside them, through them.
She always felt a little disappointed when she heard, "She died just a few minutes ago." Like her customers, she wanted to "be there for it."
Families called her to wards at the hospitals: the St. Boniface, the Grace, the Victoria, the Misericordia, the General, the Children's, the Women's Pavilion. They called her to emergency rooms and intensive care units and to the Princess Elizabeth long-term care facility. They called her to their own homes and to funeral parlours, to lakeside cottages, farmers' fields, city parks and community centres --- wherever the dead landed. And they landed everywhere.
Mrs. Mortimer didn't own a car, so someone would usually come and pick her up. She would be at the curb, at a moment's notice, with her camera in hand. She didn't pay a lot of attention to getting ready like some women do, just a dab of lavender behind each ear.
It was a mystery to her at first why so many people had a need to capture their loved ones in this way, but she didn't argue with their desires. What she did do was save up her earnings. Some people paid her handsomely and she never argued with that. She saved with an eye to purchasing the only thing she ever wanted: a long, low, ranch-style house on Wellington Crescent.
When she was a very young child, when her mother was still operating at partial capacity, her parents had made a yearly production of taking a drive to see the Christmas lights along the crescent. Her mother oohed and aahed and breathed out her fiery fumes. Her father pointed and exclaimed and organized his neck inside his tight white collar. George made snide comments and said "phony" a lot.
Mrs. Mortimer stayed quiet on the drives, as was her way. No one knew what she was thinking; they never did back then. But she was thinking something. It wasn't the festive Christmas decorations she saw on those long ago winter nights, but the light inside the houses, that ran sideways on and on, room after room, the impossible length of the homes.
Sometimes she saw a movement within the light and she imagined that it was a lady wearing high heels and lipstick and oven mitts. She pictured herself floating next to the woman, toward the bright kitchen with its fancy oven that warmed a chicken pot pie from Eaton's third floor. Mrs. Mortimer was sure that the glow in those long low homes differed from the colourless air at her own house. It was made from different stuff and existed only for the likes of the high-heeled lady and her lively friends and relatives. She would find her way inside that light one day. For now, she kept it in the back of her mind.
She didn't mention her dream-house plan to anyone, not even George. It would be discouraged, she knew, like most things were. The sheen would be removed from it if she put it out there to be batted around like an old softball. It would fall apart at the seams and its insides would tumble out and litter the hard earth, be ground to dust under mean feet. No. It was best to keep this dream inside.
As time passed and she had more and more photographs under her belt, she came to understand the need some people had to capture their loved ones in death. The need was the mystery itself: the mystery of death. Death as a lifeless face was something to peer into, to study and try to understand: to solve.
To herself, Mrs. Mortimer called her little operation "Capturing Death," but only to herself. She had run it by George and he'd said no, it was no good.
Actually, he'd said, "Aye yi yi, Mrs. Mortimer. You can't call it that. You'll frighten away all your prospective customers."
So she didn't call it anything.
17
Even before it happened, in April 1970, Mrs. Mortimer didn't like the words "Women's Pavilion." They had a stink to them of blood and screams and sweat: the sweat of fat women and frightened men who hurried down the halls to get away from them. She didn't think there should be a pavilion just for women; there wasn't one for men. And it took away from the beautiful building in City Park that was also called a pavilion --- actually it was called The Pavilion --- where you could buy all-day suckers or "alldy" suckers, as the woman behind the counter called them. Sometimes the suckers tasted like blood to Mrs. Mortimer if she couldn't manage to keep thoughts of the other pavilion away.
She had scared George one day long before the bad thing happened.
"My sucker tastes like blood today," she had said matter-of-factly and tossed it away.
"What?"
"It tastes like blood," she said. "Like in the Women's Pavilion."
"Jesus," George said. "Maybe you shouldn't take pictures in that place if it's going to ruin our visits to the park."
"I have to," she said.
"Why?"
Sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Mortimer as if he hated the whole business, her whole business.
"Sorry, Georgie. I shouldn't have said anything. Coming to the park is good. I don't want to not come to the park, please."
They walked toward the zoo.
"Babies are my favourites and that's mostly where I see them," she said in answer to his question of why.
George looked sick. He also threw his sucker away but he waited till he found a garbage can.
"Dead babies," he said.
"You shouldn't call them that."
"Why on earth not? It's what they are, isn't it?"
"I guess so. But it sounds so harsh and even kind of untrue."
Mrs. Mortimer bounced her plastic bag of breadcrumbs against her knee as she walked. She planned on feeding something in the zoo, whatever seemed hungry.
"Saying 'babies who have died' sounds better to me," she said. "It sounds as though they've done one thing --- died --- and they're on their way to do another thing. I don't know yet what that other thing is."
There must have been a small hole in the breadcrumb bag because she was leaving a sporadic trail behind them.
"Whereas dead...dead shouldn't even be a word. There's no such thing as dead."
"Surely there is," said George.
"No."
They walked in silence as they milled their way around a group of young children and their minders.
"Why are they your favourites, anyway, the babies?" George asked. "I can't imagine there being anything pleasant about taking pictures of tiny creatures that had no chance at life."
"That's not the way I see it."
"How do you see it?"
"I don't know if I know the words to explain it but I'll try to figure it out. Is it okay if I get back to you on that, Georgie?"
"Of course it is." George put his arm around his sister and they walked like that for a while.
"It has something to do with the babies not really being here yet, not being totally disattached from the place they came from. Sometimes I imagine that they even have a choice and they say, 'Nope, this ain't for me. I like that other place where it's warm and soft. I'm headin' back.'"
"That's a good explanation, Mrs. Mortimer," George said. "Stop bouncing the breadcrumbs. You're losing them."
"Maybe the babies like being with the people at the other end of life, the old ones in the place I almost glimpsed when that first man died in my presence. Remember him? Last November? His wife was worried that she wasn't there for his last breath and I knew he was already gone to the past-it place that's no longer here, but isn't elsewhere. It's a fine floating field of light breezes and soft tall grass; that's how I picture it."
George let go of his sister and smiled at her as though there was a chance he liked what she said or at least didn't disagree with it vehemently as he so often did.
So she went on.
"Besides, they remind me of me."
"Who?"
"The babies that have died."
"How?"
"You know, Georgie."
And he did, of course. She knew he was hoping upon hope that she wouldn't ask him to tell her again the story of how she had been born as a baby who died. She hadn't asked him for a couple of years and she wouldn't now. The story was down pat inside her.
"Do you think that you decided to stay on this earth," he asked, "and not head back to where it was soft and warm? Was that your decision, Mrs. Mortimer?"
"No. In my case I had nothing to do with it."
"How do you rationalize that?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why are you different from the other babies that died?"
"Good question."
"What's the answer to it?"
"I'm not sure yet, but it has something to do with penance."
"What does that mean?"
"My life on this earth is a penance for something and somebody else is seeing to it that I pay. It's not my choice."
"Who is this somebody else?" he asked and took the breadcrumbs away from her. "I thought you'd given up on God."
"I have. No, this is something different. I haven't quite figured it out yet."
"Mrs. Mortimer?"
"Yes, Georgie."
"You haven't done anything bad. You don't have anything to pay for."
"Then why do I feel the way I do?"
"I don't know. And I don't want to tell you that you're wrong about something --- I've done enough of that over the years --- but I know you're wrong about this."
Mrs. Mortimer looked at her brother with a new expression on her face. She hoped it resembled a wry smile; she'd been practising it.
"What's with the weird new smile?" George asked.
"Let's look at the bears first," said Mrs. Mortimer, "and save the monkeys till last."
They entered the gate to the zoo.
18
When business was slow Mrs. Mortimer still travelled to the hospitals to see what she could scout out. One sunny April Sunday, she took a bus to the General Hospital on William Avenue. She had no luck there, but instead of going home she found herself sauntering over to the Women's Pavilion on Notre Dame. There were babies on her mind. She wasn't necessarily looking for work, but she had her camera around her neck and the air of professionalism that it gave her. She wandered the halls and tried not to stare.
Every now and then, she poked her head around a door as though she were looking for someone --- her mother, perhaps, or an aunt suffering from something terrible that involved the sickening area between women's legs that George wouldn't let her talk about.
Today she feared what she might see behind those doors. She wondered why she was here. It didn't feel like a day for working. It felt more like a day for hanging around with George, who hadn't been feeling so good lately. She supposed he was with Pam right now, but maybe she could go home and insinuate herself into their activities if they weren't kissing.
The hallways were subdued, with only a skeleton staff working on a Sunday. She headed down a wing of mostly private rooms. There was a red exit light at the end of it; she could head out that way, down the stairs and away from here.
It was from one of those rooms that she heard the strange quiet sounds --- something between squeaks and peeps. She opened the door to the room and saw something that she knew was bad. She also knew that she wasn't supposed to be seeing it. Nothing so far in her life had prepared her for such a moment and she wasn't sure how to react, so she did the only thing she could think of to do: she took a photograph, and then another, and another.
What Mrs. Mortimer saw was taking place on a single bed. There seemed to be an awful lot going on at once and it appeared to her as though in slow motion.
For one thing there was a girl in the bed with an odd look to her, like she wasn't quite right in her body, in her general appearance. The covers were pulled back to reveal her short limbs. Her tongue seemed bigger than normal tongues and it lolled out of her mouth. She gazed out the window through her upslanting eyes as though she were disconnected from the rest of it. Some of the squeaks came from her.
Next to the bed there was a thin woman in white pressing down on something with both hands. She appeared to be applying artificial respiration. Mrs. Mortimer had seen a film in health class many years ago that was supposed to teach her what to do if someone stopped breathing and she was left in charge. She had prayed to the god of grade sixers that she would never be the boss of such a situation because she knew with absolute certainty that she would not be able to pull it off.
Now she realized that she was watching the woman press down on a pillow. It was positioned beside the girl, at chest level, but the woman's movements didn't fit with helping someone to breathe. This was no nurse; she was wearing red pumps and her short white coat did a feeble job of covering up street clothes. And her pressing down actions, Mrs. Mortimer realized, were not on the up and up. They were nowhere near the up and up.
She heard one last peep escape from under the pillow. It was like the sound baby chicks made at Aunt Sally's Farm at the park. The squeaks and the peeps reminded her of the time Pookie had held a baby rabbit in his jaws. The bunny squeaked and Mrs. Mortimer had darted towards them with some thought of saving it if it hadn't already been wrecked. But Pookie wouldn't let her catch them; it was a game to him. There were squeaks and then there weren't. Mrs. Mortimer had quit the chase and gone inside the house.
This was a game for no one.
The skinny woman lifted up the pillow to check on what was underneath. It wasn't till after she'd done that that she noticed the whirs and clicks from the camera and turned toward the door. Her face was older than what her form and shoes had led Mrs. Mortimer to believe. Her horrible face had a red gash for a mouth and it shrieked at her.
"Who are you?"
"No one. I'm no one," said Mrs. Mortimer.
"Get out! You saw nothing! Get out right now or I'll have you arrested! You stink! What's that ghastly smell?"
Mrs. Mortimer took one last picture, this one of the red gash and then she ran, holding tight to her camera, until she was out on the bright sidewalk in front of the hospital. Her thoughts chased each other inside her head till she shooed them away with exhaustion. Later, she thought. I'll visit them later when I'm at home making the pictures.
She tried for a few moments to wait for a bus but was unable to stand still. There was a man across the street on the steps of the Women's Pavilion. It seemed like he was watching her, but maybe not.
All she could think about on the long road home was that she wouldn't be able to tell George. He would encourage her, perhaps force her, to "do the right thing" and tell someone official about what she had seen. She couldn't face that. No one would believe her version of events and she would be the one to go jail or the mental hospital. She wasn't the perpetrator of the deed but everyone would think she was.
There was something about her. There was no fighting it; it was in her blood, in her bones: guilty.
She wondered why she hadn't darted forward like she had when the rabbit had been in danger. The only thing that made sense to her was that the woman in white had been a more formidable foe than Pookie.
What ghastly smell? she wondered. Her mother's lavender perfume, she supposed. Perhaps it wasn't to everyone's taste.
She didn't develop the film, but she couldn't throw it away. It lived at the back of a drawer in her dark room: a sleeping thing, a bad thing.
19
Mrs. Mortimer screamed in the night. She remembered the difficulty inside her dream of releasing the scream but she finally succeeded and then woke herself up with it.
George came running and she heard her mother's voice.
"Are you seeing to it, George?"
"Yeah, go back to sleep, Mum."
George sat on the edge of her bed and she realized she was covered in sweat. Even her legs were damp. It was good that her mum wasn't there to see. She wouldn't have liked it; she found bodily fluids repugnant unless they were her own.
"Did you have a bad dream?" George asked.
"Yeah, I guess, but I don't remember it."
"Don't even try then."
He went to the bathroom, ran cool water over a washrag and gave it a squeeze. He took it in to his sister.
"Thanks, Georgie." She ran the cool cloth over her face. "Don't tell Mum."
"Don't tell her what?"
"I don't know."
"Where's Pookie?" George asked.
Mrs. Mortimer turned on her bedside lamp. They looked around and saw the little white cat peering out from behind the closet door.
"I guess I scared him."
"Here, Pooks," George said.
Pookie didn't move.
"I think maybe I screamed because of what I saw in the Women's Pavilion," Mrs. Mortimer said.
"What was that?"
"Something horrible."
"Are you going to tell me about it? Do you want to go outside?"
"Yeah, let's."
They put on their housecoats, crept down the back stairs and slipped out the side door to the porch, where they sat on the creaky old swing. Pookie came with them.
George lit a cigarette.
"May I have one of those, Georgie?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Why?"
"I don't want to be responsible for you starting to smoke."
"Why not?"
"Because it's bad for you."
He held his stomach as he said this.
"Does your stomach hurt, Georgie?" Mrs. Mortimer asked.
"A little bit," he said.
They sat very still on the swing so they wouldn't wake their parents with the back and forth of it.
Pookie leapt up and sat on George's lap. He never sat on Mrs. Mortimer. He slept at the end of her bed but he never snuggled with her.
"Next to you I think I love Pookie best," she said. "I won't be able to stand it if he dies."
"Don't worry," said George. "He's not going to die for a long time yet."
"When he does, I want to die too, at the very same moment, so I won't know that I'll never hear his little sounds again. I love the way he places his feet in front of him and the way his weight makes the floorboards creak. Mum wants me to clip his toenails. He won't let me and I don't blame him. He doesn't like Mum. Have you noticed that, Georgie?"
"Yes."
"Actually, I don't think he likes me much either. He doesn't look at me very often and I know he doesn't like me touching him."
Pookie purred up a storm on George's lap.
"May I please have a cigarette, Georgie?"
He sighed, handed her a Belvedere and took another one out for himself.
That was the night in 1970 when Mrs. Mortimer started to smoke. She never looked back, never quit, never took a break. She learned how to French inhale, how to blow smoke rings, how to smoke with no hands, never once taking the cigarette from her mouth. She became a professional.
"So what happened at the Women's Pavilion?" George asked.
"Nothing," said Mrs. Mortimer.
She couldn't tell it to George. He was too good for it.
Although she tried to let it go in the coming weeks, it was too big to let go of her. She was stuck with it, she supposed, forever, both in her night dreams and during her waking hours. It waited, as a kind of entity unto itself, biding its time until it was ready. She couldn't imagine what it had planned for her, what it would do to her, but there would be something. She saw it as a kind of sharp edge to her life that would cut her and cause her to bleed out into the future.
20
One day in late April, not long after the bad thing happened, Mrs. Mortimer was sitting with an elderly man moments after she had completed taking pictures of his wife. She felt quite comfortable with him, so was brave enough to ask if he would be framing a photo and placing it on view in his home.
"Oh no," he said. "This is just for me, not for anyone else."
He smoothed the pure white hair back from his dead wife's forehead.
"I may buy a little frame, I suppose," he said. "A do-it-yourselfer frame. But this picture is only for me."
She imagined the man gazing at the picture for varying periods of time, sometimes with another photo next to it, of his wife when she was alive, but most times on its own. She wondered how much satisfaction it would bring him, if any.
And that led her to her next idea.
It was the third day of May. She gauged the air in the room. It was shared by a dying middle-aged man, a young man who identified himself as the son, and her. It was the son who had called.
Gauging air wasn't Mrs. Mortimer's strong point, but she was pretty sure she didn't feel anything disagreeable coming from either man. So far she had never felt a bad emanation from a dying person, only from someone close by who didn't agree with her being there.
There was something about the young man, but it was more interesting than bad. He didn't blink much, but that was okay; it was better than blinking too much. And he didn't look to be sweating or shaking: two things that made Mrs. Mortimer nervous. When she was doing either of them herself she knew things were far from being all right, unless, of course, the sweat was caused by the weather.
She asked the son to step out into the hall with her; she didn't want to speak in front of the dad even if he was past listening. Then she dove in and broached her idea of a series of pictures, beginning just before the subject died. She had become quite good at judging when the very last moments of life were slipping away and that was when she hoped to step in and start clicking. If there were minute changes on the face she would catch them --- missing almost nothing, just the tiny moments between clicks. It would be an honest-to-goodness study of life passing into death, something she felt might give her customers more satisfaction than what she had provided them till now.
It was her hope that she had picked the right person to begin with. At the very first it seemed so. But a feeling of unease took her over as soon as she had spoken, a feeling that told her she might have said or done something wrong or, at the least, inappropriate. It was because of the way the man behaved. Of course, she didn't know his usual way of being; this was the first time they had met as far as she knew, although there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was so quiet after she spoke, so very quiet. There was something coming from inside of him that she couldn't recognize.
"I like your idea," he said at last.
She realized then that he wasn't much older than she was, early twenties at most.
He watched her work.
She could feel his eyes upon her instead of on the wasted father who was dead now, from a rare form of lymphoma, the man said. His stare frightened her a little and she had a glimpse of what it might have been like for the people she had stared at for so many years. Surely she hadn't emitted this level of intensity. She couldn't imagine what types of thoughts were behind the stare, where they stemmed from or where they were headed. It felt like they were just for her, barely connected to the man in the bed.
The boyish man nearly blinded her with the power of his gaze and Mrs. Mortimer prayed to Mama Right, her latest version of God, that the photographs would turn out well and she could be done with him.
A night nurse poked her head in and just as quickly withdrew, as though she had witnessed something so private she should be punished for intruding.
Mrs. Mortimer walked home through the night streets.
She regretted sharing her idea more than she could recall regretting anything else in her entire life. It was something she could have prevented, not like the situation she had fallen into at the Women's Pavilion. It was totally on her. All she would have had to do was keep her huge mouth shut. Her past had been chock-full of regret, she mused, sometimes for no good reason.
Where did it all stem from? Were her mother's regrets passed down to her and her grandmother's through her mother and her great-grandmother's, too? If so, it wasn't fair. She hadn't inherited their collective happinesses, if there were any. Maybe there weren't any.
Her irritation grew as she thought about being cursed with added-up remorse if not with added-up happiness. That would be wrong and she clung to an idea that there was a right and a wrong that came into play in people's lives --- from somewhere outside. It was a vague idea that sometimes slipped away and she had to work at getting it back. That was where Mama Right came in.
Things only got worse on the walk home. By the time she climbed the steps to the front porch she was bent in two with wishing she could turn back the clock. The regret made her want to die. She hadn't felt that way since before George had bought her her first camera.
She recalled a feeling she'd once had that she was remembering something before it happened with no idea what it was. That feeling came back to her now, free floating, attached to nothing she could name.
Mrs. Mortimer sat on her bed and stared into space till the sun came up.
Then she went to her darkroom in the cellar and worked on the pictures of the man with lymphoma and saw that they were good.
"Thanks, Mama Right," she said.
But the regretful feeling didn't leave her.
The call came in the afternoon to arrange for a pickup time.
"The photographs turned out well," she said.
"I knew they would," he said. "I knew you would do a good job."
Her bad feeling vanished for a moment or two. Maybe it was wrong; maybe she didn't need to want to die.
"Say, there's something I'd like to talk to you about," he said. "I thought maybe we could go somewheres for coffee when I come to get the pictures."
The clock on the wall in the house on Monck Avenue ticked off thirty seconds.
"Mrs. Mortimer?" he asked.
"Yes. I'm here," she said.
He had said "somewheres." That meant that he came from a poor part of town where they didn't talk right.
"What do you think?" he asked.
She didn't want him to come to her house and she didn't want to go somewheres for coffee but she knew that at least one of those things had to happen. She wished George were home. No one had ever made a suggestion like this to her before and she didn't know what to do with it. She didn't know where it belonged, if anywhere.
"I forget your name," she said.
"It's Jim. Jim Coulthard."
The clock ticked off twenty more seconds. It was louder than usual.
"Well? What do you think?" he asked. "Alls I wanna do is talk."
He said "alls." Alls and somewheres. She'd never known anyone up close who'd used those words, just heard them on the local news sometimes when a reporter interviewed a person something terrible had happened to. And once she'd heard a woman reporter say "liberry" instead of "library." She had thought that was kind of funny. Alls and somewheres weren't funny.
His voice was young. And he sounded as though he liked her. She wasn't used to feeling as though someone liked her. For sure it was a trap.
She was aware that people appreciated her skills as a photographer and her punctuality and her no-nonsense attitude toward death, but liking had nothing to do with it.
There were also those who thought that what she did was wrong, who stood outside homes and hospital rooms saying things like "The very idea!" and "Who does she think she is!", in an effort to override the wishes of the person who had called her, the person who was one notch closer to the deceased in terms of being the boss of the situation.
One woman even called the police, figuring that what she was doing must be against a law written somewhere, a law belonging to God if need be. The police came, but they were nice to Mrs. Mortimer and told the troublemaker to back off. It was a sister-in-law and she finally did back down, but not before causing many tears. Mrs. Mortimer had sat quietly and waited for the trouble to pass so she could get back to work.
People appreciated her calm manner when she was on the job, but again, liking had nothing to do with it.
This felt different from appreciation and it scared her more than a little. It was possible that the sense of liking she received over the telephone wasn't a trap. Another possibility was that it was all in her imagination; she didn't know whether to believe in it. If it was real, was it directed to her specifically or did this man like in general? She had seen people who were friendly to everybody; no one could escape their backslapping ways. But he didn't seem like one of those.
Also, what if the liking was there one minute and gone the next? When quietness had taken him over at the hospital she had worried that it'd had something to do with her. She knew now that it had, but it had been a thinking quietness and maybe it was okay; maybe it was safe. But then the hot staring had taken over and that hadn't been okay. It hadn't been safe. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. For the first time she doubted the new name she had given herself.
Her head ached. She gave it a shake and it hurt even more, as though something was trying to escape from behind her eyeballs. Maybe one of them would pop out and she could go back and present it to Miss Horning.
"Yes," she said.
Jim Coulthard laughed.
Mrs. Mortimer didn't know what kind of a laugh it was. She didn't do much laughing. She had smiled at the word "liberry" but not laughed out loud.
"Coffee would be fine," she said. "We could go to the Red Top."
She had to give him the pictures, and better at the Red Top than here at the house.
They made a date and Mrs. Mortimer hung up the phone. She needed to sit down and do some thinking on the verandah with her cigarettes and maybe a glass of her dad's whiskey. That's what he did when he announced that he wanted to have a good think and would like to be left alone.
She set herself up with her drink and her Belvederes. Her mum was in bed, her dad was at work, and George was at the university. It was her first taste of whiskey: she added a little water like she had watched her dad do and swirled it around in the glass. She was careful with her first sip. It tasted like nothing she had ever experienced before: not good like chocolate cake or fried chicken, but not bad like Brussel sprouts. It was in a class by itself. She drank slowly and it lasted a good long time.
Mrs. Mortimer realized that she wanted someone to like her. The feeling of thinking that it might happen was a good one. No one had liked her so far: she knew that and didn't question it. No one but George, that is, and he was her brother. It was his job to like her, but she believed he truly did. That kept her alive: that, taking pictures of the dead, and daydreams of her long low home. Sometimes night dreams could be good, too, but she didn't add that to the list of things that kept her alive. A good sleep wasn't a good enough reason to live.
In one of her recurring night dreams there was a rumpus room done up in blues and greens: ocean colours. Fish swam amongst wavy vines inside an aquarium. Even the fish were vibrant blues and greens inside their bubbly water world.
There was a small pool with a fountain creating water sounds behind soft music piped in from a hidden source. "White Silver Sands" was the song.
Under the water were secret caverns and smooth rocks for mermaids to lounge on and comb their hair. The mermaids never came, but they could have if they'd wanted.
Ladies in high-heeled shoes danced with men in suits and smoked cigarettes at the same time. Sometimes they drank cocktails from delicate glasses tinted greenish-blue.
Two young, well-scrubbed children, a boy and a girl, sat at the top of the basement stairs watching. They wore sleepers, those pajamas with feet. If the adults saw them, they didn't let on.
Mrs. Mortimer pondered her night dream and didn't let her thoughts go back to the Jim person and his interest in her. It was easier to stay away.
Again she thought about ruing so many of the actions she had and had not taken in her life and she was suddenly certain that she would never have any children. It had to do with her new idea of regret piling up through the generations. She couldn't bear the idea of her son --- she pictured a little boy with a pointed chin --- crippled under the weight of things he had or hadn't done. In her mind he wore a heavy cloth coat that dragged him down and down further, to the ground, where he began to crawl and then finally stopped to lay his head down in the dirt. No. There would be no children for Mrs. Mortimer.
21
By the time George came home, she had started peeling potatoes for supper. He joined her in the kitchen.
"I want people to like me, Georgie," she said.
"Uh oh," said George.
"What do you mean, uh oh?"
"Sorry. I didn't mean to say that out loud. I just mean I'm pretty sure I won't have any very good answers for you if you're going to ask me some difficult questions."
He sat down at the kitchen table.
"Plus, you smell like Dad's whiskey."
"Yes, I had some."
George's full lips turned tight and straight, almost disappearing inside his face.
"He won't like that," he said.
Mrs. Mortimer knew from George's look that he didn't like it either.
"I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would," she said.
She told him about the man named Jim Coulthard.
"Hmm," said George. "Do you want me to come with you when you go see him?"
"I don't think so."
She covered the potatoes with cold water and set them on the stove.
"There are some Coulthards on Lloyd," George said. "I wonder if he's one of them."
"There are?"
"Yeah. They live in the Silk house. It's sort of a creepy place set back a ways from the street. I don't really know them, but I think there's a son. He's maybe between you and me in age."
"What's a Silk house?"
"It's a house where a family named Silk used to live. Mr. Silk killed himself a long time ago and the rest of the family moved away."
Mrs. Mortimer thought about the cool hedge yard, the one from a different season and time. She hadn't been back there and hadn't even thought about it again till now. It seemed like a long time ago. Everything before her picture taking seemed like a long time ago.
"Does it have a hedge?" she asked.
"Yeah, I think so."
"Is that what makes it creepy?"
"Hmm, maybe. Or it might just be that Mr. Silk died there."
Suddenly she remembered the woman, Mrs. Beresford, even her turn of phrase: "a man who died by his own hand."
"Maybe it's a combination of the two," she said.
"Possibly."
"I don't think this guy lives there. I don't think he's from around here."
"When are you meeting him?"
"After supper. At the Red Top."
"I could drop by after you've been there a while and see how it's going, pretend like I just happened by."
"Yeah. That might be good."
"Don't drink any more whiskey, Mrs. Mortimer," said George. "It's what happened to our mum."
"'Kay, Georgie. I won't."
A profound sense of dread accompanied Mrs. Mortimer to the restaurant.
Jim Coulthard was there already, sitting in the second booth. She slid in across from him and they both ordered coffee. Mrs. Mortimer also ordered a jam buster, just from habit; she wasn't at all hungry. Jim paid for both of them up front.
"Where do you live?" she asked.
"On Lloyd Avenue."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-two."
She was going to ask him next if he lived in the hedge house but she held back; she already knew the answer. A chill ran up her spine.
A young waitress whose name tag read "Colleen" was watching them. Mrs. Mortimer saw her watching and didn't mind. Colleen was always nice to her.
"I want to be your assistant," Jim Coulthard said.
A buzzing started up in Mrs. Mortimer's temples and she couldn't tell if it was a sound or just a sensation. She wondered if anyone else could hear it --- if the slippery-looking man could hear it.
"I...I work alone," she said.
She forgot his name again.
"Yeah, yeah, I know, but I had this idea that maybe I could help. The work you do...it interests me and I'd like to join up with you in some way."
"Don't you have a job?" she asked.
"Yeah, I do. I'm a yard man, but I thought maybe I could take this on as...well, part-time at first, while I learn from you, and then..." He spread his arms wide and knocked over his coffee.
Colleen scooted over with a wet rag.
"Everything okay over here?" she asked.
"Yeah, thanks," said the man. "Sorry about the...the spillage."
Mrs. Mortimer stared down at her unbitten jam buster. It was over. There might be a winding down of sorts, maybe a last simple job or two but the end was dead ahead. She had no fight in her --- never had. It was over.
Colleen wiped things up, went behind the counter, rinsed her rag, came back, and wiped up some more.
"Are you all right, honey?" she asked.
Mrs. Mortimer stared downwards. She couldn't respond; her throat had closed up to such an extent that she could barely swallow, let alone talk.
"Colleen! Your order's up!" shouted one of the short order cooks.
"My dad has a movie camera, a Bell and Howell Zoomatic," said the man.
Mrs. Mortimer began to shake.
"Okay, mister." The waitress spoke quietly. "I think it's time for you to leave."
She had a way about her and a good size to go with it, though she couldn't have been more than nineteen.
Jim Coulthard's face tightened along the jaw line.
"Gus!" she called, not taking her eyes off him.
Gus was one of the owners.
The place grew quiet and the man stood up quickly. He put his hand on Mrs. Mortimer's and whispered hot air into her ear.
"Who knows? Maybe in time we could be partners."
The waitress shoved him toward the door and he was outside before Gus made an appearance.
"Colleen! Order up!"
The shout broke the silence and people's words slowly began to fill the small restaurant again.
"I'll be right back, honey," Colleen said.
All Mrs. Mortimer knew was that she had to get out of there before the waitress came back and hopefully after the life-wrecker had left the parking lot. She needed to get some air into her lungs. She stood up on wobbly legs, not forgetting the envelope of photographs that had been left behind, the pictures of the dead dad.
As she fumbled with the door George opened it from the other side.
"Georgie," she croaked.
He sat her down on a little patch of dusty grass and loosely put his arm around her.
"Is that him?" George asked. He lifted his chin towards the man who stood twenty yards away at the curb under the giant mug of root beer that advertised the restaurant.
Mrs. Mortimer looked up and wished that the root beer could come to life, tip over, and drown him.
"Yes, that's him."
"What did he want?"
"My life," she said. "He wants my life."
Colleen came out with a greasy little brown bag containing two jam busters. She placed them on the ground next to Mrs. Mortimer.
"Hi, George," she said. "Just a little treat for your sister."
"Hi, Colleen. Thanks."
She started back inside.
"Colleen?" he said and she stopped mid-stride.
Mrs. Mortimer tensed up beside him and a small sound escaped her throat.
"Nothing," George said. "Thanks, is all. Thanks for your kindness."
Colleen slipped back inside.
Jim Coulthard walked away. He had a slight limp. As she watched him walk, Mrs. Mortimer remembered a long-ago day in Coronation Park when the boy named Frank Foote had saved her. The person who hurt her that day had the same broken walk as the one turning the corner now onto Highfield Street.
"The waitress scared him," Mrs. Mortimer said.
"I guess so." George smiled.
Her breaths were shallow for a while. When her breathing returned to normal, the two of them headed home to the house on Monck.
"He does live on Lloyd," she said. "I thought for sure he was from somewhere else."
They settled at the kitchen table.
"I guess he lives in that house you mentioned where the man died."
"The Silk house."
"Yes. I don't like that house," said Mrs. Mortimer. "I've seen it."
George began choosing lemons from the fruit bowl and setting them aside.
"What's a yard man?" she asked. "He said his job is being a yard man."
"Someone who does yard work for people, I guess, kind of like a gardener. It's mostly rich people that have gardeners. People that live on Wellington Crescent and places like that."
"Oh. That makes sense. I can picture him doing yard work.'
She envied him the access he would have to the grounds of those beautiful long low houses.
"He wasn't mean this time," she went on. "It could be that he's not bad. It's just...he wants too much. He doesn't know what type of person I am. He talked about a movie camera that belonged to his dad. I don't want to make movies, Georgie, and he wants to make death movies with me."
"What do you mean this time?" asked George. "When you said, 'he wasn't mean this time.'"
"Nothing."
George left it and she was grateful to him. She didn't want to go back there to the park and the gravelly hands and the broken glasses.
She slumped in her chair.
"There's no way you have to do anything you don't want to," George said. "No way. You don't need to have any involvment with this Jim character. You never have to see him again."
"I don't know if I'll be able not to. I've still got the pictures of his dad."
George picked up the envelope from the kitchen table and propped it against the doorjamb that led to the back landing.
"I'll deliver them for you. I know where his house is."
"He's ruined everything," she said, "with wanting to be my assistant and with his stupid moving picture ideas. I'm pretty sure this is the end of my life."
"Don't say that."
George began squeezing lemons for lemonade.
"Why do you always tell me not to say things?"
He continued squeezing.
"I guess it's because I don't want to hear them," he said. "To be honest, sometimes the things you say scare me."
"Sorry."
"No. Don't be sorry. You are who you are, Mrs. Mortimer."
"The waitress was nice," she said.
"Yeah. Colleen's great."
The kitchen radio was on and tuned in to CKRC. The newsreader announced that the Ohio National Guard had opened fire that day on students at Kent State University. Four were dead. The students had been protesting the American escalation in the war in Vietnam.
George sat down and grew quiet.
Mrs. Mortimer wondered what kinds of expressions the dead students had on their faces as they were shot down.
Then she returned to thoughts of the waitress who had shown her real kindness, genuine, not the sort that wanted more than you had to give --- certainly not the sort that wanted to be your assistant and end your life.
George took the photographs with him the next day, saying he would drop them off at the Coulthard house on his way to the university. When he returned home after his classes were over he gave a full report to his sister at her request.
"I didn't want to knock on the door," he said, "so I folded them ever-so-slightly and slid them through the mail slot."
"You didn't wreck them, did you?" she asked.
"No, of course not. They were only bent for a second. The Coulthards have a good-sized slot."
"So you didn't see him?"
"No. I didn't see him. An older man came around the side of the house as I was leaving the yard but for sure it wasn't him."
"Who was it?"
"I don't know. If you hadn't told me that his dad was dead I would have thought it was his dad."
"Did you talk to him?"
"No. We nodded at each other. I kept on walking. I wanted to get out of there without running into Jim or having to talk about anything."
"An uncle maybe?"
"Maybe. It doesn't matter. The pictures are delivered and hopefully that can be an end to it."
"Thanks for doing that, Georgie. Thanks for making it so I didn't have to go to that house."
"My pleasure, Mrs. Mortimer."
22
After her meeting with Jim Coulthard she didn't sleep well anymore. She slept for precisely three hours and then woke up. Lying in her bed till morning was too difficult. She wanted to bang her head against the wall till she knocked herself out, but that would wake everyone up.
So in the wee hours of the morning she got up and dressed and walked the streets till the first inklings of light showed in the east. Pookie followed her sometimes, but always stopped when they got to the first cross street. Then he sat down and watched her. She turned around every few steps to look at him till he disappeared into the darkness.
Usually she was the only person out, but sometimes through a window she glimpsed someone reading by the light of a lamp or she smelled the delicious smoke from someone's cigarette. Often she took her Belvederes with her and smoked while she wandered.
One night, a week or so after George shoved the pictures through the mail slot, she walked far enough and late enough to see the lights go on in the bakery on Taché Avenue. She smelled the bread baking and as she got closer she heard quiet murmurs and the odd outburst of laughter. She imagined the faces of the laughing people inside.
When she tried to imitate the laughter, she scared herself and began to shake.
Pointing herself in the direction of home she walked on.
Maybe her life didn't have to be over; maybe she could survive this.
She breathed in the air, didn't want to let it go. Her body needed it; her head especially needed it, her limbs. So she held on and didn't breathe out even though she knew that she had to in order to get more. It didn't take long for her to lose consciousness.
A few minutes later she woke up on the damp grass of Coronation Park. There were no witnesses to her faint. It might never have happened.
When Mrs. Mortimer arrived home, the sun wasn't quite up but the whole eastern sky was pink. The birds were chirping and the day looked to her as though it might just turn out okay. So what if she wasn't any good at laughing and her career was over?
She found George doubled up and on his knees in the kitchen. Her first inclination was to run like the woman who ran from her dying husband that day but she forced herself not to. She didn't want another regret to add to all her smashed-down layers.
"Georgie?"
He didn't answer her and she knelt down beside him, trying to get a look at his face. It was unrecognizable and drenched in sweat.
Then she did run. Upstairs to the dad's bedroom. They all three went to the hospital.
It wasn't kidney stones and it wasn't appendicitis. It wasn't any number of things. They sent him home with painkillers and the advice to not make a mountain out of a molehill.
Two days later it happened in the night and the dad took George to the hospital again. This time he refused to take him home until they made a definite diagnosis. That meant an operation.
"You know that scrub brush that Mrs. Campbell uses to clean our toilet?" George said to Mrs. Mortimer. "The one with the long handle?"
He was settled back in his hospital room with enough drugs inside him to finally make a dent in the pain.
"Yeah?"
"It felt like someone took hold of one of those and was scrubbing hard on the inside of me."
George had pancreatic cancer.
It was a painful type, as cancers go, and one they could do nothing about but try to manage the suffering. A poor job was done of that until his dad raised the roof in his anger and frustration and threatened to call in the troops, whoever they were.
No one told Mrs. Mortimer that George was going to die. They thought they were protecting her, she supposed. Her dad and Mrs. Campbell talked in lighthearted voices about when George would come home from the hospital. You just had to look at him to know it wasn't true.
She was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to get along without him. Why couldn't it be her mother or her father or Mrs. Campbell or herself who got the disease? She could handle any one of those people dying with George along to show her the way.
When she imagined his death and its aftermath she didn't get very far. It looked like black sometimes and other times it looked like white. There were no forms or even shadows.
There was nothing to do but wait out his death and then she would see how things stood, see if she could manage. If she couldn't...well, there were ways. For one, she could pull a Silk.
23
Jim Coulthard didn't give up easily and each time he got in touch with her she lost a little more steam. He got nowhere with her and ended up setting himself up in competition. He called his business "Living with our Dead." Mrs. Mortimer heard that his photographs were brash and brassy, his business phony, fancy, unreal. She visualized Las Vegas, pictures she'd seen in her dad's Life magazine of that pretend city in the desert.
There were those who thought she should have competed, but she didn't have it in her. She let it all go.
When the call came through, she hadn't taken a photograph in over five months. She felt a childlike excitement when she heard the address recited over the phone. It was on Wellington Crescent.
"I'll need a lift," she said and recited her own address back to the caller.
"Please let it be one of the long low ones," she said out loud after she had hung up. "Let it be a ranch house."
She loaded her camera and waited for her ride.
It was a damp morning in November. The fog was so heavy it was like moving through a rain cloud. Mrs. Mortimer liked it this way. When she was younger and woke up to days like this she hurried to get outdoors, to be inside of it. But she never felt that the mist truly surrounded her. It always seemed to be a short distance away. If only she could watch herself from down the street, see her body looming out of the grey, then she would know it was real.
A Moores taxi came to get her. She climbed into the back seat because she knew that was where she was supposed to sit. It always felt odd to her, sitting in the back, purposefully unfriendly, but it did make not talking easier.
The driver made no attempt at conversation, so she settled back to enjoy the ride. She would be silent unless he asked her a particular question, which it turned out he didn't. In addition to not wanting to talk she didn't want to interfere with his driving skills; he didn't seem to have many and there wasn't much in the way of visibility beyond the windshield. He peered over the steering wheel, slowly making his way. He didn't look old enough or big enough to drive but she supposed he must be qualified.
Being inside a car in this weather wasn't nearly as interesting as being on foot.
Finally, in her excitement, she asked, "Do you know the house?"
She thought he looked over his shoulder at her as though it was a stupid question and she supposed it was.
"No," he said. "I don't know the house."
It was such a deep voice that Mrs. Mortimer wondered for a moment where it came from. Surely not from the sideways chubby face resting on top of the barely visible shoulder.
He slowed down and made a right turn off the crescent onto a circular driveway. It was late enough for the sun to be up somewhere behind the clouds but you'd never know it in the dimness. The house stood behind a solid wall of fog. Mrs. Mortimer squinted as they crept closer and saw that yes, it was what she had hoped for. Her heartbeat quickened when she saw the house stretching away into the mist in both directions.
She paid the driver, including a good tip. Surely the woman who phoned would reimburse her.
"Would you like me to wait for you?" said that same deep voice.
The idea of a driver waiting had never occurred to her before and she was both suspicious of it and grateful just in case he was being kind.
"No," she said. "But thanks."
He drove slowly away and she turned toward the house. As she moved closer she was disappointed to see there were no lights on. The air inside the windows looked no different from the air inside the house on Monck Avenue. It was the colour of nothing. With every step her feelings turned a little further aslant from where they had been when she first heard the address.
The porch light went on and she forgot all about the colour of the air. The figure of a woman was framed in the open doorway. It was her woman, the one of her daydreams. Her hair was in a pageboy, just so. It was all there: she was sleek of form, wearing high heels. Mrs. Mortimer was still too far away to see lipstick but she knew it was there. Only the oven mitts were missing. But that was okay; she could live without the oven mitts. She couldn't expect the woman to be baking peanut butter cookies under the circumstances, whatever they might be. It was the vaguest phone call she'd ever received. The address had kept her from asking her usual questions. The address was her dream.
Each step closer took her further into a quagmire of confusion. The porch light was a single dim bulb; there was no tasteful fixture to soften the entranceway. And the paint on the doorframe was peeling badly. One section of the frame had pulled away from the house altogether. Mrs. Mortimer worried that no one was caring for this home.
She looked again at the woman. The hair was black, too sleek. The print dress hung on pointy bones and made a mockery of Mrs. Mortimer's imaginings. There were no curves, there was no comfy roundness. It was like a mean joke --- the way this person looked.
The whole package was wrong. The woman was smoking a filterless cigarette and she blew the smoke sideways out of the corner of her mouth. When Mrs. Mortimer came nearer she could see that the dark hair was greasy, filthy.
On someone else the high-heeled shoes would have been beautiful. They had open toes and were made from a soft velvety material, but they revealed stockingless talons that looked as though they were fighting for air. And the feet reeked: there was no mistaking the odour that wafted up and spoiled the air in the clean misty morning. Mrs. Mortimer had noticed it often enough on her visits to deathbeds. She frequently wondered why people didn't pay more attention to the feet of their loved ones. She would bathe George's feet this very afternoon and every afternoon till he died unless he told her not to. And if she ever had another loved one in her unlikely future, she would tend to his feet too, and keep them clean.
There were sores on the woman's face. She was wearing lipstick all right, bright red and caked on her lips, like it was added to every morning without taking the old layer off. Deep cracks ran in all directions away from her mouth and the lipstick travelled those cracks, perhaps searching for somewhere else to be, in one instance settling in a scab to the left of the woman's mouth.
"Mrs. Mortimer, is it?"
The oily chin wagged and quivered. The voice was ruined from the filterless cigarettes.
"Yes."
She had to swallow and say it again, as no sound came out the first time.
"Yes."
"I'm Mrs. Buckingham. Please come in."
"Thank you."
To Mrs. Mortimer's relief, no hand was offered.
There was something familiar...
The gash.
When the lips were pulled back they revealed small, yellow teeth.
"You're wearing lavender," said the gash. "I wish you weren't."
Sometimes Mrs. Mortimer felt as though there were perhaps only five hundred or so people in the whole world and she kept seeing them over and over again in different situations, playing different roles.
"My Regina is dead," said the gash. "My daughter."
"Sorry."
"Yes, well. Come along in spite of yourself and we'll have a look."
The air in the house was as cold as outdoors. There were no furnace sounds. At a first glance there seemed to be very little furniture, nowhere to sit while tying up your shoes. There was no deep carpet to sink your toes into and nothing on the walls but pale shapes where paintings used to hang.
Mrs. Mortimer followed the woman down a long hallway to the right of the large foyer. It was a hallway of closed doors. Mrs. Buckingham opened the last one on the left.
Through the open door Mrs. Mortimer saw a window looking out on to a yard that must have led to the river, but in the mist the river was invisible. The interior pane was pushed up and in the frame of the storm window there were three open holes the size of silver dollars. They let in the cold but they didn't let anything out.
The next thing she saw was a sea-green wall. It reminded her for a second of her good night dream, the one with the aquarium and the chance of mermaids. But then she saw it wasn't a wall at all --- just a screen in front of more peeling paint and torn and faded wallpaper. On either side of the bed were plastic palm trees. It was a unconvincing attempt at an exotic ocean locale.
Finally, Mrs. Mortimer's eyes sought the bed. Against her will, it seemed. There was a sheet covering the daughter in her entirety. It was the first time that she felt afraid when approaching death, unwilling to see what lay before her. She was familiar with the smell of dying; it was often present in the rooms she visited. But this wasn't like that: this was simply the smell of excrement and she objected to having to experience it. The three small holes in the storm window didn't stand a chance.
She hung back; she wanted to run.
The woman grasped her elbow with rough fingers, urging her forward. She pulled back the sheet.
"This is my Regina," said the gash.
At first she didn't let herself look. But then her eyes got away on her and lit on the bed. They saw the bruises on the arms and on the nose of all places. They saw the tongue: she'd know that tongue anywhere.
"Hello, Mrs. Mortimer."
The familiar voice came from behind her.
She spun around to see Jim Coulthard standing by the door with a smirk pasted to his face.
"You," she said. "What are you...? What am I doing here?"
The two people she feared most in the world spoke at once.
"You're here to take pictures," said Jim.
"You're here to say goodbye," said the gash, the same one that had screamed at her the day of the bad thing at the Women's Pavilion.
They looked at each other then and began bickering. They sounded like the grackles that squawked outside Mrs. Mortimer's bedroom window early some mornings. But they made less sense than the grackles.
She focused her eyes on the wooden frame of the window and the three holes that led to the mist. If she could make herself small for a second or two, she could slip through one of those holes and get away faster than if she went back through the front door. Get to George. She worried for a second that her camera wouldn't be able to fit through the hole with her. Outside she could inhale all the clean oxygen in the world. She could go back to before all of it: before George's sickness, before the bad thing and Jim Coulthard, before the tongue in the bed, mostly before George's sickness. But no, there was too much to climb over. She would never get back far enough for anything at all to be okay again.
She turned back to the bed.
"You killed her, too," she said.
That silenced them.
Mrs. Mortimer replaced the sheet. Two looks at the dead girl were way too many.
"Why?" she asked.
"She got too big for me," the gash said.
"Ssh!" said Jim. It was a very loud sound.
"I couldn't hide her anymore. Especially with all the trouble she was getting into."
She looked at Jim then, accused him with her look.
Suddenly Mrs. Mortimer knew where the smothered baby had come from.
"Why did you have to hide her?" she asked.
Mrs. Buckingham sank into the only chair in the room. It was a lawn chair. She put her face in her hands and began to sob.
"Why...why, I was ashamed. I couldn't do anything right, could I? Not even have a proper baby."
Her skinny shoulders shook and when she looked up her mouth was a lopsided smear.
"We had to keep her a secret. Don't you see?"
"No. Not really," said Mrs. Mortimer.
"I couldn't take it anymore." The blubbing continued. "What was I supposed to do? It all got away on me after my husband died. He ruined my daddy's business, saddled me with Regina, and then he up and died on me. I can't be blamed."
Mrs. Mortimer didn't like hearing the word "daddy" from a grown woman of Mrs. Buckingham's age. And she still didn't know why she was there. They'd had vastly different answers to that question and she was unclear as to who was the boss of the situation.
"Mrs. Buckingham is very particular," Jim broke in suddenly. "And you're a better picture taker than me, Mrs. Mortimer. We want to create a family scene of some kind."
"You're not here to take pictures," said the gash, getting her sobs under control.
"But I've set up," Jim said, meaning the palm trees and backdrop, Mrs. Mortimer supposed.
"Shut up, you fool," said the gash. She held her forearm to her forehead and gaped at the ceiling.
"Let's phone someone," Mrs. Mortimer said, but she said it with no heart.
Mrs. Buckingham stood up. She nudged Jim hard as though to get him moving.
"It's not me you want," Mrs. Mortimer said as she backed out of the room. "It can't possibly be me that you want for any of your reasons."
"I can't let you live," spat the gash. "Not after what you've seen. You should never have come snooping around."
Jim reached out to stop Mrs. Mortimer and she pushed him away from her with all her strength. Mrs. Buckingham shoved him back at her like he was a puppet made from socks.
As she stumbled down the hall she heard the hissing of the gash.
"Don't let her go," it said. "It's on you if she makes that phone call, Jim. You idiot!"
The front door had been left ajar.
Why hadn't she taken the taxi driver up on his offer to wait? Clinging tightly to her camera, she ran, staying close to the houses to stay out of sight. There were no fences. She ran without looking back, grateful for the mist. There were some hedges and she fought her way through them and over them. She would not allow him to catch her.
Of all the streets, of all the houses...
She ran till she came to Academy Road, where she crossed the Maryland Bridge to the Misericordia Hospital and a familiar bus stop.
Mrs. Buckingham meant to kill her. Literally kill her. She was pushing Jim Coulthard to do it for her. What did they intend? Another pillow over yet another face? The gash wanted to shut her up permanently like the bad guys did on Mannix.
How had these two found each other? How had they hooked up? Maybe evilness sought evilness without even trying and made itself stronger. It met its match and merged and grew.
What was she supposed to do with this? A regular person would go inside the hospital now and tell somebody something, but she couldn't. She could not. All she wanted was out.
Mrs. Mortimer missed the taxi driver with the deep voice. He was a thin frayed thread back to where she had been before seeing Regina and she wanted at the very least to go back there.
She needed to talk to someone. She needed to talk to George. Anger welled up inside of her. Why did the disease have to land on him? Why not her? Useless muck-filled her. She would have welcomed it. Maybe George welcomed it too, she thought, but he would never admit to it, not in a million years.
There was a bus ticket in her pocket. She wished for tears as she stepped up onto the first bus that came along. It wended its way down Westminster Avenue to Osborne Street, where she transferred to a bus that would take her to George. There was no point in going to her own neighbourhood; there was nothing there.
Could it be that she'd made it up? Maybe nothing had really happened. She liked that idea, that version of things: an imaginary crime. She needed to lay eyes on her brother.
She got off the bus in front of the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.
George was asleep.
She stood by the side of his bed and put her hand underneath his, which lay on top of the covers. It was warm.
"He sleeps most of the time now," said a voice behind her.
She couldn't be bothered to turn around. It was one of the starchy nurses that came and went. They were all the same to Mrs. Mortimer.
"Georgie?" she said.
"Best let him be," said the nurse.
Mrs. Mortimer was still until the nurse went away.
"Georgie?" she said again.
He didn't open his eyes at first, but then he did.
There was a flash of recognition and a smile too weak to last more than a moment or two. His eyes closed.
She knew better than to bother him with words. Right now she wasn't sure she knew any.
"Go home, Mrs. Mortimer," he whispered.
His voice was nearly gone.
"I am home, Georgie," she said. "You're my only home."
24
"This is a sad house," said Frank Foote, pausing in his work.
They were gutting a place on Lloyd Avenue in the Norwood Flats. It was small, just a storey and a half, built over a hundred years ago. The new owner's name was Norm Featherstone and he had hired Frank and Jane to make the old house new again as a wedding present for his daughter and her husband-in-waiting.
The job at hand was tearing down the walls of the half-storey. Featherstone wanted to create an open space on this floor --- to rid it of the warren of musty rooms and give it an airier feel.
"How do you mean?" asked Jane in response to Frank's statement.
She stopped what she was doing, which was attaching a speaker bar to her iPod so she didn't have to wear headphones to listen to her music. Frank had told her it was too dangerous. Really, he just didn't want to have to visually get her attention every time he spoke to her; it was tiring. Plus, he thought listening devices were anti-social in company.
"This wallpaper, for instance," he said. "Faded songbirds. It's been here forever."
He ran his hand over the wall and then cut into it to see what the next layer showed.
"Who lived here last?" he asked.
"I'm not sure," said Jane, "but Norm would know. I think it might have been an old woman on her own who couldn't manage anymore."
"See, that's sad."
"Yup. Sad, but inevitable."
The music started.
"Is Patti Smith okay?" Jane asked. "The Horses album?"
"Sure," said Frank. "I like Patti Smith."
And he did, too. He was grateful that Jane stuck to older music when she was with him. It showed a certain considerateness on her part. He suspected when he wasn't around she listened to some of the stuff Garth and Sadie were into, groups with names that he couldn't pronounce. Sometimes the names didn't even seem to be made up entirely of letters. He knew of one that had a dollar sign in it. He didn't like that, didn't know if it was a man or a woman and didn't care to know. It pissed him off.
"Gloria" was playing now and that was just fine with him. He liked Patti Smith's rendition. G-L-O-R-I-A.
"I don't remember who lived here when I was a kid," Frank said when the song ended. "I could tell you who lived in some of these houses, but this one doesn't ring any bells. It's so small and camouflaged by all the hedges and trees. I wonder if anyone ever kept it nice in the olden days."
"Probably," said Jane. "Probably somewhere along the way people loved this house and loved each other in it."
She turned back to her own wall. Frank watched a splotch of red appear on the back of her neck. Jane was fair-skinned and she blushed easily, usually on account of her own words.
"I hope so," said Frank.
"Didn't you know everyone?" said Jane. "Everyone and their pets through the years? It seems like you did. How come you don't know who lived in this house?"
"Well, Lloyd Avenue was a little different from the other streets over here. It's just one away from St. Mary's Road and it was almost as if it belonged somewhere else with its tiny old houses built so close together. It was separate somehow. I knew one or two kids who lived on Lloyd, but that's it. People were more likely to come and go here and to rent rather than own. The houses on this street existed long before most of the others to the west of here."
They worked away without speaking for a while: prying, banging, ripping, sawing, heaving debris down the stairs and out the open window. "Redondo Beach" played on the iPod --- Patti Smith's song about "sweet suicide."
"I wonder if this could have been the Silks' house," Frank said.
"Who were the Silks?"
"They were a family who lived on Lloyd. There was a suicide when I was really young, too young to remember, really. I've just heard the stories. The dad, I believe it was --- a man, anyway --- killed himself in the basement or no, the garage. It was all kept very quiet in a loud sort of way. None of the mums and dads wanted the kids to know about it so they whispered and we listened as best we could. My mum was a really loud whisperer because my dad was a little bit deaf. I was only a toddler when it happened."
Jane smiled.
"I wish I had known you when you were a toddler."
She blushed again and Frank wondered if she was falling in love with him. He hoped not for at least two reasons: one, she was almost twenty years younger than he was and that would worry his daughters; and two, it would wreck their working relationship if she couldn't manage to keep it under wraps. There was a third reason. He wasn't falling in love with her. He could imagine growing very fond of her; he already was, but not in a blushing kind of way. There was no electricity. He worried that his electric days were over.
"How did he kill himself?" asked Jane.
"I'm not sure. I always pictured it as a hanging from a beam in the basement but I think I may have made that up. More likely it was carbon monoxide in the garage."
"That always struck me as the easiest way," said Jane. "If you own a garage, that is. And if someone doesn't find you after you've permanently damaged your brain but before you've died."
"You sound like you've given it some thought," said Frank.
"I have," Jane said. "Not in an I'm-going-to-do-it sort of way, just in a what-if-I-have-a-no-hoper-disease kind of way."
"Hmm," said Frank. "I see."
"Do you think houses hang on to their stories, Frank? Do you think thoughts and acts and feelings seep into the walls and stay there?"
"Maybe."
"What about when the walls are torn down, like now? Do they escape then and dissipate into the atmosphere once and for all? Or do they stay, hovering, waiting for new walls to go up so they can reenter and make themselves at home again?"
"I don't know, Jane. These sound like the kinds of questions Sadie's always asking me. I find myself saying 'I don't know' to her an awful lot."
"Or if no new walls are built, then what?"
Frank took a long drink from his litre jug of water and went back to work. He figured he could get away without responding to that last question.
Behind the drywall were layers of mortar and cracked plaster covering wood lath. In some spots the lath had pulled away from the framing behind it. Someone had tried to repair it.
"I like this ripping-down phase," said Frank.
"Not me," said Jane. "It's my least favourite part. I like getting to the stage when we start building new stuff."
"Hey, wait a sec," Frank said. "What's this?"
His arm was out of sight up to his shoulder in a hollow space behind a destroyed sheet of dry wall.
"Just a minute. I can't quite get it."
He tore away some more of the outer wall, reached in and brought out what looked to be a photograph. He took off his mask and blew on the item and then wished he hadn't as he coughed away the dust and sneezed four times.
"What are you up to over there?" Jane asked. "Do I need to call an ambulance?"
Frank sneezed one last time.
"I've found something interesting."
He took a clean white handkerchief out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the picture. It was in faded colour, unframed and curled at the edges. It was bigger than an ordinary snapshot, perhaps five by seven.
"What is it, Frank?"
"It's a photograph."
"Let's see."
Jane took off her gloves and whapped them on the side of her leg.
"Hmm. It looks kind of sixtyish," she said.
There was a man, two women, a boy, and a girl. And they did look like their time was the sixties or early seventies, with their tie-dyed T-shirts and long flowing hair, even on the man. The women and girl sat on straight-backed chairs, the man behind them, standing. The boy stood beside the girl with his hand gripping her shoulder.
"Are they wearing costumes, do you think?" asked Jane. "Or..."
"It looks like a pose for an album cover," Frank interrupted. "For a group with a girl singer or two."
Jane put her gloves back on.
"I'll leave you to it. I want to get this part over with today."
She went back to her job and Frank continued staring at the photograph.
"Could you please turn the music down, Jane?"
Frank's head was starting to hurt and he no longer liked the songs. There was too much death in the lyrics.
Jane turned it off.
"Are you all right, Frank?"
"I don't know. There's something weird going on in this picture."
"What kind of weird?"
"The little girl might not be alive."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I think she was dead when this was taken."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
Jane set down her crowbar and walked over to where Frank was sitting on a crate with the photograph held gently in his hands. She peered over his shoulder.
"Look at her eyes," Frank said.
"Odd."
"Very."
Jane pulled up another crate and sat down beside him, taking a closer look.
"I think everyone else is alive," she said.
"Yes."
"It's her eyes that give her away, but I'd like to see this in a better light."
"Yes."
They looked at each other for a moment and then back at the picture. Frank turned it over. There was writing on the back, too faded to read. It looked like it had been written in pencil. A capital L for sure, and maybe a capital D, and 19 something, a date perhaps.
"I can probably get someone at work to figure out what this says."
"You're retired, Frank. You don't go to work anymore."
"I still have people there."
His words sounded petulant to his own ears.
Jane stood up.
"Okay. You try to figure out what it says. And I'll go to the library and find out who all has lived here."
Frank suspected that she was humouring him, that she had no intention of going to the library, but he decided to try to take her words at face value and dismiss his mistrustful feelings.
"It's no big deal," he said, as he set the picture down carefully in a safe spot away from their activity. "Featherstone probably already knows who all lived here. We could just ask him before you go trudging off to the library. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned up today while we're still here."
They went back to work.
"Garth has a powerful magnifying glass at home," Frank said, mostly to himself. "Maybe it will do the job of deciphering the words."
"Maybe," said Jane.
With a creaking rip Frank tore down the last of the drywall on the north-facing side of the house.
"Jesus Christ Almighty," he whispered when he saw what was stashed behind it.
25
Norm Featherstone didn't want to phone the police.
"It'll hold everything up, Frank. They'll probably want to turn this place into a crime scene or something and the house won't get fixed for months, years even."
"We have to call them in, Norm, for Christ's sake," Frank said. "For all intents and purposes they're already here inasmuch as I'm one of them."
"You're retired," Norm whined.
"So everyone keeps reminding me."
Frank looked at Jane, who sat on a crate staring straight ahead.
She pulled out her phone.
"What's the non-emergency police number, Frank?" Her voice quavered a little.
"Here, I'll call."
He took the tiny instrument from her hand.
"Jesus Christ, I can't even see it, let alone punch in the correct numbers."
Jane took the phone back and Frank recited the number. She then handed it over so he could do the talking.
Featherstone had arrived to see how the work was going just moments after Frank had made his second discovery. He was wearing a brown suit and he kept brushing at his clothes to keep from getting dusty.
"Let's go outside and wait there," Frank said after he made the call. "Somebody will be here shortly. We shouldn't touch anything else till they've had a look."
"See?" Norm said. "Already the work has stopped. This is going to turn into a renovation nightmare."
Frank pointed Norm in the direction of the stairs.
"Careful there," he said. "The railing's a bit wobbly."
Featherstone was a huge lumbering man, too big for the space he occupied. His harrumphing sounds made him seem even larger.
"A renovation nightmare," he repeated to himself.
Frank and Jane sat on the grass in the shade of a Manitoba maple that had seen better days. The trunk was divided in two and one half of the tree leaned dangerously over the front street.
Norm wouldn't sit. He hovered and fussed.
"I should get back to the office," he said.
"Go then, Norm," said Frank. "Jane and I will stay and deal with the police."
"I can't just leave you to it," said Norm. "I have to be here to let them know that I don't want them making a big production out of this."
"They'll do what they have to do," said Frank. "Whether you're here or not."
They were quiet after Norm left, with their own musings on what they had seen upstairs.
There wasn't a trace of flesh or skin on the skeleton; it was that old. But for Frank, the dusty faded nightgown and wisps of colourless hair turned her into someone who had been a living breathing being sometime in the last century. The hair wasn't attached to anything; there was nothing left to hold it.
"I wonder how long she's been there," he said.
"A long, long time," said Jane.
An elderly woman walking her French bulldog stopped to stare at the house. The dog stared too and began to bark.
"Quiet!" the woman said in a stern loud voice.
The dog obeyed her and sat down, adjusting itself on its haunches.
"It's good to see some care going into the old place," said the woman.
"Yes, ma'am."
Frank stood up and bent over to hold out his hand to the little dog.
"Have you been acquainted with the people who lived here over the years?" he asked.
The bulldog licked the offered hand tentatively and then stationed itself next to Frank. Its ears were very tall.
"Some, yes," said the woman. "Not recently, mind you. And never well. I don't pay much attention anymore. The last family I can recall was the Coulthards, way back when. A father and son, odd ducks, the two of them. And of course there were the Silks, but you probably know all about that."
Something cold and amphibious touched the back of Frank's neck. A toad's nose. He and Jane looked at each other.
"After the Coulthards, people came and went. Renters. I don't know who owned it. The place was even left vacant for years at a time. Till old Mrs. Turner, that is."
"Mrs. Turner was the most recent occupant?" asked Frank.
The dog stared up at him and gently placed a paw on one of his feet.
"Yes. I guess it finally got too much for her," the woman said and nodded toward the house. Sad."
"I was just saying to my partner here that it seems a sad house," Frank said.
He got out a little notebook that he carried in the back pocket of his jeans and a pen that he carried in the front pocket of his work shirt.
"Coulthard, you said?"
He tried not to sound like a policeman.
"Yes, that's right."
"Is that C-O-U-L-T-H-A-R-D?"
In one of the recesses of his brain a faraway bell rang with the merest hint of wrongdoing attached to it.
"That's right. Are you doing some checking into the history of the place?"
"Yes, something like that. I'm Frank Foote, by the way, and this is my work partner, Jane Haughtry."
Jane stood up to shake the woman's hand.
"I'm Ann Beresford and I know who you are, Frank. I knew your parents quite well."
"Mrs. Beresford! I'm sorry, it's been such a long time."
"Yes, well...for goodness sake, Tina, get off the man's foot," the woman said to the dog.
"It's okay," said Frank. "Mrs. Beresford, what was it about the Coulthards that made them odd ducks, as you called them?"
The old woman was quiet for a moment. Her eyes darted about, wouldn't settle. "They kept to themselves was all, nothing all that odd in that, is there? The same could be said of me these days."
Frank doubted that. Old Lady Beresford, as they used to call her, had always been known as a talker. A trait such as that wasn't likely to lessen over the years.
"They kept to themselves," she said again, "and then they disappeared without so much as a how-do-you-do."
"When was that?" asked Frank.
"Oh, I don't know," she said. "A long time ago. Trudeau was our prime minister. Nixon was their president. Those days. Why all the questions?'
"Just wondering, Mrs. Beresford," he said. "Just wondering."
He wanted their conversation to be over. He knew where she lived if he wanted to speak to her again and he didn't want to confide in her at this point.
The dog leapt up when Frank gently shifted his foot.
"Hold your horses, Tina," Mrs. Beresford said.
She wasn't ready to go anywhere, but the dog strained heavily against her leash.
"I guess she's found something more interesting to poke around at," Frank said. "It was nice to see you, Mrs. Beresford."
"And to meet you," said Jane.
The old woman shuffled off without any parting words --- something you could get away with when you got to be her age, Frank thought. But it irritated him, nonetheless. He couldn't picture ever being so old that he wouldn't have the manners to say goodbye in response to two well-meaning grown-ups.
"Did you see her hands, Frank?" Jane said when Mrs. Beresford was beyond hearing distance.
"Pardon?"
"The hands on the girl upstairs," Jane said. "They looked like claws."
"Oh gosh, I thought you were talking about Mrs. Beresford."
"No. The girl upstairs."
They both sat down again beneath the branches of the maple. There were overgrown hedges along two sides of the yard and at the front a scruffy mess where someone had done a poor job of chopping down another one.
"I was thinking of her as a woman, not a girl," said Frank.
"Oh. I don't know," said Jane. "She's just so small, I guess. I thought girl."
"Her nightie looks older than girl age."
"No, it doesn't," said Jane. "Anyway, her hands look kind of claw-like."
"Well, they would, wouldn't they, being reduced to bare bones?"
Jane shivered. "They were curled inward as though they had actually been doing some clawing."
"Maybe that's just the way they went after all these years. I know burn victims' hands are known to do that. Hell, I've seen it."
"I think that girl was buried alive behind the wall and spent her last hours or even days trying to claw her way out."
"Oh, God, Jane."
"Well, what do you think, Frank?"
He pictured the brittle bones inside the rags that were once a nightgown. He preferred to think of the naked teeth as a smile --- the smile of someone who was buried behind a wall, sure, but not before she had died a peaceful death in her bed. Couldn't a mother or brother have gently placed her there, someone who couldn't bear to have her taken away and buried in the cold ground? Granted, the person who put her there would have had to be insane, but in a cloudy, innocent way.
"Frank?"
"I don't know, Jane. I just don't know. We'll have to wait and see what they come up with."
Frank shuddered as he caught a glimpse of what Jane had described. He wanted to know that it wasn't true, but it could be. Far worse than that could be.
26
Two policemen drove up at no miles per hour and sat for a few minutes before they slowly got out of the car.
"Finally," Jane said. "What the hell were they waiting for? A song on the radio to be over?"
"Well, it's not what you'd call an emergency, is it?"
Frank found himself getting annoyed with Jane. He couldn't help feeling defensive when anyone criticized the Winnipeg Police Department, even though he had retired nearly four years earlier and had never personally received a complaint from the public in his thirty-year career.
Also, he hated her buried-alive theory.
"Maybe you should just call it a day," he said. "I can stick around here and answer any questions that come up."
"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss one second of this for all the chocolate in Manitoba."
"Hey, Frank," said the older of the two cops. "Having a little trouble hanging up the holster?"
"Hi, Chas." Frank sighed and a small mallet, the type doctors use to check knee reflexes, began to tap away at his left temple.
He introduced Jane to Patrol Sergeant Chas Sampson and he, in turn, introduced his partner, Brad May, before they all headed inside the house and up the stairs.
All four of them gazed down at the creature in the dusty nightgown.
"Holy o liftin' Jesus," said Brad.
"He's from the east coast," Chas explained. "He talks funny."
It was true what Jane had said about the claw-like appearance of the hands, but the body looked to be at rest, no sign of frenzy. She was placed here after death. Frank was sure of it.
Chas was on the phone, contacting the necessary others.
"This body has been here a very long time," Brad said. "Decades, I'd guess.
"Do you own the place?" he asked, taking in both Frank and Jane with his question.
"No," they said in unison.
Frank explained about Norm Featherstone and gave Brad his contact information.
"He's going to flip out if the work has to be held up for any length of time," Jane said.
Frank wished she hadn't said that.
"Well, too bad for Norm Featherstone," said Brad.
And Frank wished Brad hadn't said that. It was the type of statement that made the public angry with the police --- just a few careless words. He looked at Jane but read nothing in her face. She was a real cool customer, as his daughter Sadie was fond of saying. She thought a lot of people were real cool customers.
Chas was off the phone now and crouched down beside the skeleton.
"This is a fairly tight burial spot," he said. "I'm surprised there isn't more of a mummification thing going on."
When Frank crouched beside him his knees cracked loudly and he grunted involuntarily.
"You sound like you could use a little WD-40 on those joints," said Chas.
"I guess with it being the north wall and no insulation to speak of," Frank said, "she didn't have a heck of a lot of protection from the elements."
"A cold burial site," said Jane. She held tightly to her arms, hugging them against her body.
"Okay," said Chas, "I think we should back off now till the forensics people get here."
He stood up.
Frank peered in closely at the little being. He wanted to touch her softly, maybe on her forehead, but he knew he couldn't do that.
"Okay, Frank," said Chas. "We're going outside now to wait." He wrote furiously in his notebook and then herded the others downstairs.
Frank didn't want to leave, but was in no position to argue.
"Shouldn't somebody guard her?" he asked.
Chas smirked. "We can guard her from outside."
Frank wanted to drill the smirk through Chas's head to the other side.
They stood around, not speaking, waiting for the others to show up. With a suspicious death such as this obviously was, it was necessary to call in a staff sergeant, which is what Frank had been during the most interesting years of his career, before he was promoted to inspector.
"Who did you say the owner is, Frank?" Chas asked.
"Norm Featherstone. I've given Brad his particulars."
Brad was leaning against an ash tree on the boulevard, staring at the house.
"What do you know about him, Frank?" said Chas. "How long has he owned the place?"
"Not long. He just bought it this last winter to fix up for his daughter."
"Does he know about this?" Chas nodded toward the house.
"Yeah, he dropped in a couple of minutes after we found her but he had to get back to the office."
"Odd," said Brad, who had sauntered over to join them.
"What?" said Chas.
"Finding a skeleton in your house and then scurrying off back to the office."
It had seemed odd to Frank too, but so many things did these days that he didn't over-analyze it like he might have once, not so long ago. And he had been so glad to see the back of Norm that he hadn't argued; he'd even encouraged him to be gone. Maybe Norm Featherstone was just the kind of guy who ran from skeletons or perhaps he was immune to them unless they interfered with the clockwork running of his days. Most likely, though, he just thought he had something important to do.
"You shouldn't have let him leave, Frank," said Chas.
Frank glared at him.
"I'm not in the job anymore, Chas."
He wanted to tell him to go fuck himself long, hard, and sideways, but he kept that to himself.
"Both of you are going to have to stick around for a while," said Chas.
He was busy writing again.
A small crowd was beginning to gather on the boulevard. Brad was speaking to them, encouraging them to go home, but they weren't budging. It was early July. The kids were just off school and looking for something good to occupy their time.
Someone from the medical examiner's office and a staff sergeant arrived at the same time, followed quickly by two crime scene investigators, one armed with cameras, the other with a bag that Frank knew contained equipment for collecting any trace evidence there was to be found. Not one of these people was familiar to Frank.
The yard was quickly cordoned off.
Chas introduced Staff Sergeant Ames to Frank and Jane and left them there to answer her questions.
Frank recited the story and forced himself not to tell Ames that he was a retired policeman. He was almost positive she wouldn't want to hear it.
Jane spoke little, only when spoken to, and it was over in a few minutes.
"So, shall we just run along, then?" Frank asked.
"Yes, Mr. Foote. I'll tell Sergeant Sampson to let you know when you can get back to work here. It shouldn't be more than a few days."
"You'll be letting Featherstone know then? The owner?"
"Yes, we'll be in touch with Mr. Featherstone."
"Okay, good."
"Uh... our tools are in there," Jane said. "And my iPod."
"They'll have to stay, I'm afraid, ma'am, till the investigators are done. But they'll be safe. I guarantee it. We'll have the house guarded when no one is working inside."
Frank thought she was a little cavalier in guaranteeing that their tools wouldn't be stolen or wrecked, but he bit his tongue. He and Jane climbed into Frank's truck. They both lived in the area but drove to the job site because of their equipment and the need to haul stuff away.
"I don't want to leave," said Jane.
"We don't want to be known as gawkers," said Frank. "We don't want to add to the confusion. People will ask us what we know. Do you really feel like answering all their questions?"
"No, I guess not."
As they drove away a CTV news van pulled up to the house.
"Oh great," said Frank. "The circus has come to town."
The crowd grew.
They bumped along Lloyd till they came to Coniston and then turned right.
"What's that in your lap, Frank?" Jane asked.
"This? It's just that picture I found inside the wall."
Jane snorted quietly. It was a disbelieving kind of sound that caused Frank to look at her.
"What?"
"Do you not think you should have given it to that Ames woman?"
"Not necessarily."
"Wouldn't this be considered interfering with a police investigation or something like that?"
"No. Not if you choose not to think of it that way. I'll hand it over if I think I should; I just want to study it for a while first. It might be important. I don't want it to get lost in the shuffle."
"The fact that it might be important is exactly why you should have handed it over."
He wasn't listening.
"If need be, I could pretend I found it before, last week even, when we were first introduced to the place."
"Frank?"
"Yes?"
"Your investigating days are over."
Frank pulled up in front of Jane's small bungalow on the corner of Walmer and Ferndale and turned off the ignition.
"Officially, maybe."
"Uh-oh."
"It doesn't mean that my unofficial investigating days are over."
"No, of course not. You can investigate all manner of things till the cows come home, but Frank, not stuff that you've secretly taken from what is probably a crime scene or at best a scene of tremendous weirdness. The police will need all the help they can get to figure this out, especially with Chas and Brad at the helm."
"Why do you care?"
"You're withholding evidence. If you go to jail I won't have a partner anymore. That's one of the reasons I care."
Frank sighed.
"I won't be going anywhere, especially not to jail."
"Plus, the sooner they figure it all out, the sooner we get back to work."
She fidgeted in her seat.
"Also, the nightgown she was wearing reminded me of something, or someone. I don't know, maybe my own nightgowns when I was a kid. Maybe she reminded me of me. She needs someone to find out what happened to her."
She opened the door and started to get out.
"Jane?"
"Yes?"
"What if I promise you that I won't in any way thwart what the police are doing?"
"I don't want you to promise me anything."
Jane looked steadily into Frank's eyes.
He wasn't able to hold her gaze and he didn't know why. Her eyes were a deep green, the same colour as her T-shirt. Laugh lines surrounded them even when she wasn't laughing. He liked that.
"It won't be Chas and Brad at the helm," he said. "Staff Sergeant Ames will be the boss of it and she'll have to report to even higher-ups."
"Don't get into trouble, okay, Frank?"
"When have you ever known me to get into trouble?"
"Never, I guess. But I haven't known you very long."
"I'm not the type of person that gets into trouble."
"Well, good then."
She got out of the truck, closed the door and stuck her head in the open window.
"I don't like not having my tools," she said.
"No," said Frank. "It's a bummer, I know."
"Or my iPod."
"I guess we could get started on Mrs. Frobisher's hallway if we're going to be off this job for a while."
"What about our tools?" Jane asked.
"I've got a basement full of tools. I'll talk to someone and let you know later what we can expect."
"Okay, Frank. I'll wait for your call."
He started his truck.
"I'm not looking forward to hearing what Featherstone has to say."
"If he gives you any trouble tell him to call me." Jane smiled.
Frank winked as he slowly pulled away. It was something he couldn't remember doing in his entire life before and he shook his head slowly, thinking of the things you could suddenly spring upon yourself. Granted, it wasn't a big thing, but even so.
27
Sadie was surprised to see him. It was barely two o'clock.
"What's up, Dad?"
"You won't believe what's up, Sadie, darlin'."
He told his daughter all about it, including the discovery of the photograph, since she relieved him of it as soon as he walked through the door.
"Who could the skeleton be?" she asked, as she looked closely at the picture.
"I haven't got a clue."
"Do you think it's one of these people?"
"I have no way of knowing that."
Frank didn't mention the part about the little girl in the photograph being dead. He didn't want to scare his daughter.
"Why do you have this picture?" she asked. "Why didn't you give it to the cops?"
"Good question. Jane asked me that too."
"Well?"
"I don't know."
Frank reached out for it, but Sadie snatched it back from his outstretched hand.
"Is she young, old, or medium?"
"Who?"
Sadie rolled her eyes.
"Oh," said Frank. "I don't know. She's small, that's for sure."
"How could no one have known she was there?"
"Someone knew. Someone had to have known."
Sadie stared at the picture.
"This little girl has a freaky look to her."
Frank washed his hands at the kitchen sink.
"Wouldn't the body have stunk up the place for a while when she was first placed there?" Sadie asked. "As she rotted away?"
"Yes, I'm sure she would have. My guess is that while she was stinking the place up the only person around was the person who put her there. Or maybe the house was vacant during that time and no one noticed."
"It could have been a she," Sadie said. "The person who hid the body, I mean."
"Yes," said Frank. "It certainly could have. We're going to try and figure out who all lived there throughout the years."
"Who's we?"
"Jane and I."
"Cool."
Frank dried his hands on a dish towel.
"Maybe the police too," he said. "How much time they'll put in on figuring this out is anyone's guess. It'll depend on manpower and priorities and things like that. I can picture it being shelved pretty quickly."
He realized he was feeling a possessiveness toward the girl in the wall; he was hoping the cops would treat the situation as old and unimportant so that he could have it for his own.
"The palm trees in the background look fake," Sadie said.
"Yes," said Frank. "It looks like it could almost be a studio shot with the props and all. But yet somehow it doesn't look all that professional."
"Do you want something to eat?" Sadie asked.
Frank managed successfully with one more try to get the photograph out of her hands.
"Yes. I'd love something to eat. What did you have in mind?"
Sadie's head was inside the fridge.
"Hey, wait a minute," Frank said. "Why aren't you at the swimming pool?"
She mumbled something.
"Pardon?" said Frank.
"I quit my job."
She took a bowl of egg salad out of the fridge and placed it on the counter.
"Sadie, what happened?"
Tears welled up in her eyes.
"I really loved that job, Dad."
Sadie had been teaching swimming for less than a week at the swimming pool in the flood bowl. She was only fourteen, but that hadn't mattered to the lifeguards who hired her. Someone quit unexpectedly and Sadie talked them into giving her the job. She passed her lifesaving course at the Y in the spring and had won every race she'd ever entered.
In the summers during the two short months that the pool was open she spent every afternoon and most evenings at the pool with her friends. Even when the weather was cool or rainy and the pool was closed they stood outside the fence and shouted at the lifeguards to open up, darn it, and let them in.
Frank went to his daughter and put his arms around her. She cried quietly into his shirt.
"What happened, sweetheart? Come and sit down."
They sat at the kitchen table.
Sadie sniffed a few times and wiped her nose on her long-sleeved T-shirt.
Frank bit his tongue.
The shirt had a picture of Coldplay on it --- Sadie's most recent favourite band.
"Actually, I didn't quit," she said. "I was fired."
The tears started up again, shot out in little spurts.
Frank stood up.
"How could anyone fire you? What in the..."
"Sit down, Dad."
He sat.
"It's that I'm not old enough. You have to be sixteen. Apparently Dustin and Leah shouldn't have hired me in the first place. They got yelled at more than I did, actually."
"Someone yelled at you?"
"Yeah, the manager guy that came from the City. Well, he didn't really yell, I guess, but he wasn't nice. He said we should all have known better, even me. H-he..."
"What, Sadie?"
"He asked me if I had lied about my age."
Frank was on his feet again.
"He called you a liar? Who the heck does he think he is talking to you that way?"
"I didn't lie. I didn't mean anything bad by taking that job."
Tears ran down her smooth plump cheeks.
"Sadie, my darling girl, my beautiful, perfect, honest girl."
Frank's arms were around her again.
"I know you didn't mean anything bad by anything and you didn't lie and whoever thinks you did should be drawn and quartered."
"What's drawn and quartered?"
Sadie snuffled against his chest.
"It's nothing. I'm going down there now."
"No, Dad. Please don't. He won't even be there anymore and Dustin and Leah are real nice. They feel bad enough already."
"How did you leave it with them?"
"Well, I asked the City man if I could finish today's class and he said no."
"What the heck kind of..."
"So then I just said I was sorry to Dustin and Leah and they said no, no, they were the ones who were sorry and we kind of hugged and I explained it as best I could to my class. I didn't have to say much. The whole thing happened right there in front of them. A couple of them started to cry. They're just beginners; they're very small."
Sadie took the plastic wrap off the egg salad.
"I made a point of not saying I was sorry to the City man."
"Good," said Frank.
"And then I just grabbed my flip-flops and towel and came home."
She sniffed loudly and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"That's about it, I guess."
"What's the manager's name?" asked Frank.
"He turned a horrible colour of red during it. Oh. And he said I was taking the job away from someone who really needed it."
"Why that....What's his name?"
"I suddenly feel quite a lot better," said Sadie. "I don't want to tell you his name, Dad. I don't want you hunting him down and doing that thing to him that you said."
"Drawing and quartering."
"Yeah, that. His name's Josh."
"Josh! What kind of name is that for anyone in charge of anything? How old is he?"
"Da-aad."
Frank sat down again.
"You'll need to get paid for the work you did so far."
"Yeah, they're going to mail me a cheque. Let's not talk about it anymore. Let's make you a sandwich."
"I'd still like to have a word with this Josh character," Frank said.
"Please, can we just let it go? Rye or whole wheat?"
"Rye, please. What's his last name?"
"He doesn't have one. Butter, mayo, or both?"
"Both, please. What's his last name, Sadie?"
"I'm not going to tell you. You're going to cause a ruckus and I don't want a ruckus. Besides, I actually don't know his last name. It's something long and European and unpronounceable."
Sadie scooped a generous dollop of egg salad onto one slice of bread, covered it with the other, sliced it in two, and presented it to her father.
"Pickles or olives?" she asked.
"No thanks, honey. This is great. Aren't you having one?"
"I can't eat right now."
Frank knew what that was like, so he didn't push her.
"Josh is Lacey Featherstone's boyfriend," Sadie said as she watched her father chew.
Frank stopped eating and stared at her.
"As in Norm Featherstone's daughter?"
"Yup."
"Those freakin' Featherstones!"
"Yeah."
"Wasn't she a friend of Emma's at one time?"
Emma was Frank's oldest daughter. She had completed a nursing degree at the University of Manitoba and leapt at a chance to take her skills to Hawaii. It was an easy thing to do if you were a well-qualified nurse from Canada --- take your degree elsewhere and earn piles of money while enjoying the experience of a whole new world.
Frank had objected when she first made her decision, but he didn't have much ammunition. He would miss her more than he would miss half of his own body, but that was no argument for keeping your kids close to home in their adventure years. She had to go her own way and she did.
"Yeah, a kind of friend, I guess," said Sadie. "I think she was Emma's least favourite friend."
"How's that? This is an excellent sandwich, by the way."
Frank would have thought it was excellent if she'd slapped a few night crawlers in between two thin pieces of cardboard.
"Thanks, Dad. Well, she was one of those friends you have fights with. You know the kind. One day you're hanging around together doing fun stuff and the next day, for no reason you know about, the friend is with somebody else, whispering about you and hiding from you when you knock on her door."
"I don't think I had any friends like that when I was a kid," said Frank. "Not that I remember, anyway."
"Maybe it's more of a girl thing," said Sadie. She took a couple of bites of the egg salad with a spoon.
"Do you have any friends like that?" Frank asked. "You sound kind of well-versed in the phenomenon."
"Not really, I guess. I have had, though. I found it easier to not be friends with her anymore."
"Who?"
Frank worried that whole worlds of anguish and horror swirled around in the minds of his children --- all three of them --- and he was never there to help. It wasn't true, of course. He was always there for them, even for Emma, who lived on the other side of the planet. But there was the simple division between one body and another. He could not get close enough to save them. He could not get inside their skins and protect them from the Lacey Featherstones and the European Joshes of the world or attach himself to them like a Siamese twin to ward off drunk drivers or, in Emma's case, tsunamis.
"I'm not telling you, Dad," Sadie said, "who that non-friend was. You'd probably go marching over to her house and give her what-for and it all happened a really long time ago. Jenna Penner is the least of my worries now. Oops!"
"Jenna Penner, eh?"
Sadie wasn't very good at keeping secrets for more than a few minutes.
"Is that Jack Penner's daughter?"
"Maybe not."
Frank worked on the last of his sandwich.
"Don't worry, honey. I'm more concerned with your recent troubles with this European character."
"Oh God, Dad, he's not European. His last name has an eastern European ring to it. That's all."
The phone rang. It was Norm Featherstone. Frank had to hold the receiver away from his ear as Norm talked in his grating show-off voice, so he missed a lot of what he was saying, but caught the gist of it, which was when the deuce could he and Jane get back to work.
Frank wanted to talk to him about his daughter Lacey's boyfriend and how he was going to track him down and tear him limb from limb if only his own daughter, Sadie, would allow him to do so.
But what he said was, "What's the name of the boy your daughter is going to marry?"
"Josh," said Norm. "Josh Wynkowski. Why? What's that got to do with anything?"
"Josh, eh?"
Sadie stood in front of her dad with her hands on her hips and stared fiercely into his eyes. Then she held up the index finger of her left hand and waggled it back and forth close to his face.
"What, Frank?" Norm said. "What? Do you know something about him? Tell me. What do you know?"
Sadie touched her dad's forehead with her finger.
"Nothing," said Frank. "Nothing. I was just wondering who I'm doing this work for. That's all."
"Me," said Norm. "You're doing the work for me."
This man is an asshole, Frank thought. He felt very much like washing his hands of the whole business. But there was Jane. And there was the little house on Lloyd that he had begun to grow attached to. And most of all there was the tiny skeleton in the wall. He couldn't leave her to the likes of Norm Featherstone.
"Frank?"
"Yes, Normy?"
Frank couldn't resist. It had been Norm's moniker as a boy and he'd always hated it, thought it made him sound less of a man, Frank guessed. He very much wanted to make Norm Featherstone feel less of a man right now.
"Let me know immediately if you hear from the cops," said Norm. "And I'll do the same."
"Righto, Normy."
Normy hung up.
"Dad?"
"Yes?"
Sadie was sitting at the kitchen table staring at the photograph.
"There's writing on the back of this picture."
"Yes, I know. I'm going to grab Garth's magnifying glass and see if I can figure out what it says."
"It says, 'Living with our Dead' and then '1970.'"
"You can see that with your bare eyes?" asked Frank.
"Yes, and you'd be able to, too, if you'd go and have your eyes checked and get some glasses that actually work."
"Let's see."
Frank reached for the photograph and Sadie pulled it back and turned it over.
"Dad?"
"Yes?"
"The little girl in this picture?"
"Yes?"
"I think she's dead."
You couldn't get much past Sadie Foote.
28
After they had tidied up the kitchen, Frank and Sadie walked over to the house on Lloyd. The Silk house. At the corner of Taché and Coniston a young woman in a minivan came close to clipping Frank as she careened through a stop sign. He saw her eyes. They were focused on the thing she was going to be doing after the thing she was going to do next once she got to where she was heading.
Why did everyone have to own such big vehicles? he wondered. Why did young women have to drive trucks and talk on the phone and drink coffee and apply makeup and smoke as they drunkenly sped through the daytime streets? They were the worst. Oblivious. Or oblivio, as Garth liked to say. Garth was Frank's middle child and he had taken lately to leaving the esses off the ends of words. Sometimes even off the middles of words, in which case Frank would lose track of what his son was talking about. But he figured if it was important enough Garth would add the esses for his father's benefit.
Police vehicles were still parked in front of the house. Only Chas and Brad were visible beyond the group of gawkers and the yellow tape. The investigators were inside. The two patrolmen ignored Frank and his daughter except to glance surreptitiously at Sadie.
Frank loved that she was beautiful and he wouldn't change a thing except maybe the size of her breasts. He couldn't bear it when he saw men and boys staring at her chest. Girls, too. Didn't their parents teach them anything anymore? No staring. That was a big one. He could remember his dad's voice, clear as anything: Don't stare, Frankie. It makes people uncomfortable.
He remembered then the strange staring girl from his youth: George's sister. But she had been a little off-kilter; it hadn't been her fault that she stared. He recalled her being quite a handful for George, who had to look after her all the time. He wondered briefly what had happened to her. The family had lived on Monck Avenue just a few streets over from Lloyd and a couple of blocks toward the flood bowl. George had died; he knew that much.
Frank remembered something else then and it shook him. He pictured the staring girl with a camera around her neck. This was later, when they were out of their teens. Everyone knew about her strange occupation.
It was a hot day, the sky a pale blue. Frank gazed south towards the river. A tiny figure emerged from the thin light of the late afternoon. It was the old woman, Mrs. Beresford. The bulldog with the high ears wasn't with her. She approached them --- bent, stinking of unwashed clothes.
"Anything yet?" she croaked.
Frank remembered that voice now from when he was a boy and she used to shout at them for crossing her lawn. Even as a relatively young woman she'd croaked. Had she sounded like that this morning? He didn't think so. Plus, hadn't she worn clean clothes this morning? He would have sworn it.
"Sadie, this is Mrs. Beresford. She lives down the block. This is my daughter, Sadie."
"Hi, Mrs. Beresford."
"Anything yet?" the old woman asked again.
She was obviously aware that something was wrong in the house. It wasn't hard to deduce that with the police milling about, but still, she had a proprietary air about her that irritated him. It reminded him of an old Rockford Files episode where a woman named Leanne, a regular citizen, interfered with police business to such an extent in a misguided effort to help that she caused mayhem, including death. And she called Jim Rockford "Jimbo," which infuriated him.
Frank disliked Mrs. Beresford. She had ignored Sadie. He decided not to answer her. He put his arm around his daughter and moved away, closer to the yellow tape.
"Dad, aren't you being kind of discourteous?" asked Sadie.
"Yes, I am."
Sadie stood on tiptoes and whispered in his ear.
"I thought Old Lady Beresford was dead."
"Don't call her that."
Sadie smiled at her dad and he smiled too.
She took his arm. "I don't like it when you're rude, Dad. It sets a bad example for me."
"Sorry."
"You're too old to be rude."
"I know."
"Was there ever a Mr. Beresford?" Sadie asked.
"I don't know," said Frank. "I don't remember one. And I don't recall her having any kids, either. It's funny. She seemed like a much nicer person when I spoke to her this morning."
"That's odd," said Sadie. "I've never known her to be nice."
"Maybe I imagined it," said Frank. "Have you had much in the way of dealings with her, Sadie?"
"No. Not really. Just when she used to holler at us for walking over the dirt patch that she calls a lawn. But I haven't been by that way in a while. I really didn't realize she still existed. Not that I've given her much thought," she added.
Frank wondered if it was his own head twisting things this way, causing him to see things the way they weren't. He glanced sideways at the old woman and was far from sure now if her clothes were clean or dirty. And had she really been all that nice this morning? Had she actually not croaked earlier in the day?
Chas sauntered over, and unlike the old woman, couldn't take his eyes off Sadie.
Frank decided not to introduce him.
"Anything to report?" he asked.
"Not really," Chas said to Sadie's chest.
Frank was sure he himself had known even at the age of ten to studiously ignore girls' breasts when speaking to them. Chas had bad manners.
"They're taking the building materials that surrounded the body, some wood and drywall, but other than that... I mean, what the hey, look at this place. It's practically a shell."
"What about our tools?" said Frank.
"Yeah," Chas said. "They took your tools." He managed to tear his eyes away from Sadie.
"Is the body still inside?" Frank asked.
"No," said Chas. "The investigator gave the go-ahead to have it transported to the morgue. He went along with it."
Frank found he had to move again to get away from Mrs. Beresford, who had crept over and was hanging on their every word.
Chas disappeared inside the house, leaving Brad to manage control of the small crowd, which was mostly just teenage boys now, leaning on their bikes and guffawing when one of them said something particularly hilarious. The excitement would have dropped off once the body was removed. Frank recognized a few of the boys and suddenly missed Garth, who was at work at his summer job at Sport Chek, knowing nothing of the excitement in his own neighbourhood. He wished Garth were too young for a job like these boys were, like Sadie was. What had he been thinking, allowing her to work at the swimming pool? He hadn't been thinking, that was what. He hadn't given it one short thought other than that it seemed to make her happy. Now he wanted all his kids at home in the fenced backyard.
"Hi, Mr. Foote," one of the boys shouted.
"Hey, Frank," said another. "Hey, Sadie."
He was a mister to some and Frank to others. He preferred just his plain first name.
They waved back at the boys.
"Time to go home, folks," Brad called out. "There's nothing to see here."
Frank slumped a little inside his clothes. Suddenly it seemed very important to sit down, to lie down, even. He was useless and old and had turned into an unwanted onlooker. All his years on the force had been for nothing but this --- to lurch around a local crime scene and pant like a puppy to be involved on any level because of a pathetic need to never let it go.
Mrs. Beresford moved from one foot to another as though her weight was too much for either one or both together. She couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds.
"Why don't Sadie and I walk you home, Mrs. Beresford?" Frank said.
There had been no call for his brusque behaviour, he realized now, and he began to feel he had more in common with her than he would ever previously have imagined. And her clothes definitely looked clean again.
"No thanks," she said.
At least the croak was still there.
A woman in protective clothing came outside and walked over to where the three of them stood in the heat.
"Mr. Foote?"
"Yes, Frank Foote."
Again, he wanted very badly for her to know that he had been a highly respected cop, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself.
"I'm Judith Webster with the forensics unit. I'm told you found the body, sir."
"Yes."
"Did you touch anything?"
"Just the walls around it to free it up," he said.
"That could have been a little hasty."
"Well I didn't know it was there, did I? I was removing the wall as part of this renovation. I couldn't see through it. Can you see through walls, ma'am?"
He had learned over the years how much most women disliked being called ma'am. He hoped this one did, too.
Sadie took his arm again.
"No need to be snippy," the investigator said.
"Indeed," said Frank.
"Did you take anything from the scene, Mr. Foote?"
She was talking to him now like he was a criminal, which he was.
"No," he lied, enjoying the rush that shot through him when he said it.
He said again it again, just for fun.
"No."
He wanted to shout it out in the white afternoon, but he held himself back.
Judith Webster turned away from them and went back inside the house.
"You're welcome, ma'am," he said to her back.
She hesitated for a second, but didn't turn around.
"Dad, what are you doing?" asked Sadie. "Why are you acting like this?"
Frank had nothing in the way of an explanation to offer his daughter.
I retired too early; I made a mistake. He didn't say it. He didn't even know if it was true. And he couldn't say, "I'm no longer effective as a human being," though that's very much how he felt.
He didn't want to scare her. So often he felt that due to his own fumblings as a parent he forced her into behaving more like a mother toward him than the child she still was.
"I don't like it," she said. "It's not like you."
Perhaps it's more like me than you think. Maybe this is who I really am and I can't hold it in anymore.
"Sorry, honey," was all he said.
29
Jane phoned Frank in the evening.
"Guess what I did this afternoon," she said.
"What?"
"Went downtown and had a look through some Henderson Directories."
Frank took the phone outside and sat down on the front steps.
"Did you find anything interesting?"
"Kind of, I think. The name that old woman mentioned: Coulthard?"
"Yes?"
"They lived there from 1956 to 1971. Or at least they owned the house for that period. And then, get this, the house was vacant for the next three years. That could have been one of the periods Mrs. Beresford was talking about."
"Hmm," said Frank.
He was watching a neighbour's cat rolling around on a patch of dirt where city workers had cut down a tree on the boulevard and removed the stump. The dusty little cat came to see him when he was done.
"Frank?" Jane said.
"Yes?"
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"I don't think so."
Frank scratched the black cat under his chin. He was grey with dirt and prickly with wood shavings. Plus, he had cobwebs caught up in his whiskers.
"The Coulthards, or one of them, could have boarded the girl up inside the wall anytime between 1956 and 1971. Then with the house vacant, she could have continued rotting away to her heart's content up until 1974 without anyone noticing and by then she was probably done being anything but bones."
"Hmm."
"Is that all you've got to say, Frank? Hmm? I think I'm on to something."
Frank was thinking about the photograph and the date that Sadie's fourteen-year-old eyes had made out on the back of it and the staring girl from his youth who had taken pictures of the dead. He wouldn't speak now of any of those things. The information was too valuable to release over the phone. Also, the date on the photograph could mean absolutely nothing in terms of the skeleton. Unlikely as it seemed, it was possible that the two things weren't connected in any way except by their location. Frank didn't want Jane to get overexcited and go running off into the future and all over town with these new particulars. She wasn't like that, but he was afraid, anyway, of it getting away on him. He would tell her, but in his own good time.
"I think it's dangerous to jump to conclusions," said Frank. "It's too soon to blame a particular person or people, especially if the house was vacant for three years."
"Maybe, but maybe not. A member of the Coulthard family could have gotten away with it so easily. Picture it: first, the house is on a corner lot --- no one lives on the one side; second, it's set back quite a ways from the street, more so than most of the other houses in the area; and third, it was a double lot back then. The address next door didn't show up till 1979. I checked."
"A couple of the trees in that yard look like they've been there for two hundred years," said Frank. "And the shrubbery may have been even more extensive then than it is now. The whole front of the yard next to the sidewalk used to be a hedge. You can see where it was chopped away."
"Yeah?"
"I'm picturing it, is all," said Frank. "Or trying to. The little house could indeed have been very well hidden from passersby."
"What's the matter, Frank?"
"Nothing. Why?"
"You sound kind of robotic and unusual."
"I'm just tired, I think," he said and produced a yawn.
"He could have done it at the beginning of a winter and left the body to freeze inside that north wall," said Jane.
"It froze and thawed for a lot of years."
"He could have done it years before he moved away for all we know."
"One of the Coulthards."
"Yes. The father or the son. Mrs. Beresford said they were both odd ducks."
"Since when do we put any stock in Mrs. Beresford's judgments?"
"Since when don't we? Do you know something about her that I don't, Frank?"
"No, it's just... These are quite the assumptions, Jane."
"I'm just guessing, Frank, but they're good guesses, if you ask me."
"Nonetheless, it's all speculation. For one thing, we'll have to see what they come up with in terms of how long the body has been deceased. And that may be hard to do with nothing but a skeleton and a nightgown gone to dust."
Jane was quiet and Frank felt unable to step up his enthusiasm. He waited for her to decide to hang up, but she didn't.
Something niggled: a hint of wrongdoing deep in his past.
Jane started in on a different tack.
"Maybe you don't remember them because the kid went to a different school than you did. A Catholic school, say, like St. Thomas More or Holy Cross."
Frank wanted her to shut up.
"I might remember something," he said. "I need to think."
"Maybe the Coulthard boy went to Precious Blood."
"I'll call you back, Jane. I need to go now."
Frank hung up while she was still talking.
The Coulthard boy, the Coulthard man. The boy, for sure. But whatever it was, it was gone.
The cat, Shadow, rolled over on his back and Frank rubbed his belly. He felt as if his brain was wrapped in gauze that smothered his thought processes. Information had to work too hard to enter the dim world inside and ideas were squelched before they could take on shapes and develop edges, let alone make their way out of the morass.
He wondered what was happening to him. It couldn't just be the result of early retirement. Maybe he'd had a stroke and hadn't realized it. He knew that happened sometimes. People had little strokes, so small as to be unnoticeable, but they added up until you were a moron --- a word from his youth and one that Garth had latched on to when he was a boy. Frank didn't feel ready to be a moron just yet.
When Shadow lost interest in him, he called Jane back.
"Do you want to go for a walk?" he asked.
"Just a sec, there's someone at my door."
He waited while he heard voices talking quietly on the other end of the phone.
"I have to go, Frank," Jane said. "It's one of the forensics people wanting to talk to me."
"Is it a woman?"
"Yes. Judith Webster is what she calls herself."
"I'm coming over," Frank said and hung up before Jane could respond.
He walked over to where she lived in one of the Spanish Court bungalows. It wasn't far. Walking briskly it took him nine minutes and that included brushing his teeth and putting on shoes.
As he approached the pink stucco buildings he saw the van pull away. Jane wouldn't have had any more to tell them than he had. She was just closing her door when she saw him headed her way.
"Frank!"
"Jane."
"Come in."
"You come out. It's beautiful. We can walk down Lloyd to the river, see what's going on over there."
Jane closed the door behind her. A tabby cat slipped out first, darted across Ferndale and almost to the top of an ornamental cherry tree.
"Millie came out," Frank said.
"Yes."
"You let her out?"
"Sometimes. Didn't you used to let Hugh out?"
"Not in later years," said Frank. "Not since the bylaw. Aren't you worried she'll get hit by a car?"
"Yeah. But she has so much fun outside. I let her escape from time to time."
They crossed Walmer and then walked down Ferndale to Highfield.
Frank liked that Jane didn't feel she had to do anything before closing the door behind her. She didn't need to put on lipstick, comb her hair, or change her shoes. She didn't even lock her door. Maybe she should have done that.
"Do you miss Hugh?" asked Jane.
"A lot," said Frank.
They turned up Highfield to Lloyd.
"You should get a new cat," Jane said.
"Maybe."
The house seemed still compared to earlier in the day, but the yellow tape hadn't been taken down and there was a lone patrolman sitting on the steps. A few kids hung about, shouting the odd question at him.
"Was there really a skeleton like they said on the news?" asked one.
"Did it come to life?" asked another.
"What's your name?" asked a little girl who couldn't have been more than five.
The patrolman walked around the side of the house into the backyard. They could hear quieter questions being tossed at him from the lane.
"What did Judith Webster ask you?" Frank said.
They kept on walking.
"Nothing much. Just what all I touched and if I took anything from the scene away with me."
"What did you say?"
"I said I touched everything but the body itself and took nothing but a lot of dust."
"Did they ask you about me?"
Jane stopped and stared at him.
"Frank, I'm worried about you. Why on earth would they ask me about you? Do you not think it more likely that they'd ask you about you?"
"I guess I'm feeling a little paranoid about having taken that picture."
"And well you should be."
"When I went back there with Sadie this afternoon they asked me the same questions they asked you."
"And?"
"I didn't tell them."
"You lied?"
"No."
"Yes."
"Maybe, I guess."
"Oh, Frank."
"Yeah, I know."
They walked toward the river, past Mrs. Beresford's place, across Lyndale Drive to the park: Dog Poo Park, as it was known to some. They found a bench and sat. Some rowers glided by. Their trainer hollered at them from another boat. It was jarring, but there were already lawn mowers ruining the quiet all over the neighbourhood. It was not a peaceful evening.
"So, was it the Silk house like Mrs. Beresford said?" asked Frank.
"Yes, it was," said Jane. "The Silks lived there from 1946 to 1953 and then someone named McMicken who didn't last long, just till '56, when the Coulthards moved in. Before the Silks it was the Parsons and it looks like they were the original owners.
"Okay, so it was the Parsons, the Silks, the McMickens, the Coulthards, and then who?"
"Schmitke," said Jane. "Someone named Schmitke. He must have been the owner during all those rental years that Mrs. Beresford talked about. Then it was Turner. She's the old woman who moved out just recently."
"Okay. And now Featherstone."
"Yeah."
Frank chuckled.
"He's really hating this. That's the one part of it I'm enjoying."
"What's up with you, Frank?"
"Nothing. I've just decided to start expressing myself more honestly."
He didn't know if this was true.
"She was so tiny," said Jane. "The girl in the wall."
"Yes."
"I can't imagine that her disappearance caused much of a stir."
"Because she was tiny?"
"No, of course not."
"Why, then?"
"Well, I don't know. You've never heard of her or any curious disappearances around here and you've lived here forever."
"I don't know if I've heard of her. We still don't know who she is. And it was long ago, Jane. Maybe it was a big deal at the time."
"No. You'd have heard the stories."
"Not necessarily."
"You heard the Silk story when you were barely born and that doesn't hold a candle to this in terms of weirdness. And the stranger the story, the more likely it is to get out and find its place in the world."
"Another of your theories?"
"Well, I think that's more like a fact, actually."
A young couple walked by with a tiny dog on the end of a leash. The woman was hugely pregnant. She smiled at them, apologetically, it seemed to Frank, as though she were saying, "Sorry about my girth; sorry our dog resembles a rat."
Frank smiled back at her, wanting to let her know it was okay. Both things were okay.
"Much as I don't like the idea," he said, "I think we should talk to Mrs. Beresford again. She must have lived here when it happened."
"Or at least we should mention her to the cops as someone they should talk to," said Jane. "I don't know how involved we should get, especially since you stole the photograph."
"I've never stolen anything in my life."
"Yes, you have. You've stolen a photograph from a crime scene."
Frank stood up.
"I don't think Mrs. Beresford told us everything she knew about the Coulthards," said Jane. "She didn't give a satisfactory answer as to why they were odd ducks."
"What would have been satisfactory?" asked Frank.
"I'm not sure, but something more than keeping to themselves and then disappearing."
"Are you going to pass those speculations on to the police when you mention her to them?"
"Oh, Frank. You know I'll do neither."
"Let's walk some more," he said.
They headed in the direction of the rowing club and passed many more dogs and their walkers.
"I knew a boy who died," Frank said. "Actually he was a young man by the time he died. I didn't know him well, he was four years older than me, but I know he had a little sister who was very odd."
Again with the niggling feeling in where his memories were stored. There was something just out of reach in there behind his eyes, and then it was gone. He wished he could point his eyes inward, have a look around.
"The sister was about my age but I didn't really know her. She failed a couple of times and was never in my class, unless maybe in grade one, but I don't remember. There were so many of us then: two thirty-kid classes in each grade, sometimes more. Not like now when they can't even cobble together a baseball team from the whole neighbourhood.
"Anyway, she took pictures of dead people," Frank went on. "That was her job."
"What?" said Jane. "What the hell kind of a job is that?"
"There seemed to have been a call for it back then, for a while, anyway. I don't know if it still happens. Maybe people just do it themselves now, since everyone except me carries a camera as a matter of course."
"I don't," said Jane.
"There's not a camera attached to that thing in your pocket?"
"I don't have anything in my pocket."
"Yes, you do."
"No, I don't. Well, I have a lozenge."
Clouds had moved in. Frank hoped for rain. Maybe it would drive some of the leaf-blowing fiends indoors.
"Are you thinking of her in relation to the photograph?" Jane asked.
"I don't know," said Frank. "It reminded me of her."
"I've heard of it," Jane said. "Dressing people up after they're dead and taking pictures. I was under the impression it was a southern thing. You know, maybe a New Orleansy sort of thing."
"Well, in the late sixties, for this particular girl, it was a Winnipeg thing. Maybe not the dressing-up part, but taking pictures at the request of families."
"What became of her?"
"I don't know. I do know that she went on living with her parents after George died. That was her brother's name: George. She was young, just twenty or so; she wouldn't have had much choice. But as I remember it she was very dependent on him, so it must have been really hard for her. I don't know if she kept up with the picture taking after that or not. As I recall, the parents were fairly useless in one way or another."
"Useless how?"
"Well, the dad was pretty removed, I think, and old for a dad, and the mum was one of those types that didn't leave the house. No one ever saw her."
"Probably a drunk."
"Possibly, but I think there was more to it than that."
"Poor kid."
"Yes. I know there were grandparents on the mother's side who were around when the kids were very young. They lived a couple of streets over from George and Morven, on Ferndale near the river."
"Morven?"
"Yeah, I know. It was a terrible name to be saddled with."
"That poor, poor kid."
"Yes. Anyway the grandparents moved away early on, retired out west or down south or somewhere."
"What the hell kind of name is Morven?" asked Jane.
"It's a Scottish name," said Frank. "I've got one in my past somewhere. A great-great-great Aunt Morven. Maybe not even that many greats."
He thought about the photograph. It didn't fit the scenario he had been forming in his mind --- that it had something to do with the odd girl from his youth, Morven Rankin. The picture wasn't the type of thing she did, as far as he knew, but he'd be the first to admit he didn't know much --- only what he had gathered in bits and pieces from George and one or two others in the neighbourhood.
It couldn't be a coincidence that the picture was behind the same wall in the same house where he found the skeleton. There had to be a connection between the two.
"How the heck many people go around taking pictures of the dead, especially the dressed-up dead propped in sitting or standing positions?" Frank asked.
"Not very many, I'd venture," said Jane. "Let's sit again."
They'd come to another bench, this one recently installed in memory of a man and his dog who used to walk there. Frank recognized their names.
He wished that Jane didn't know about the photograph, but it was too late to do anything about it. Plus, he wanted to discuss it with her, the date on it, how he was having trouble reconciling the posing with George's sister. The way he remembered it, she went to hospitals at the request of families to capture one last likeness for them. It wasn't Frank's notion of a good idea, but he could almost understand it.
This posing thing wasn't her style. Somehow, he was sure of it. Someone else must have taken the photograph. Perhaps there was more than one person taking pictures of people after death, with two entirely different approaches.
Frank glanced at Jane. He figured she was thinking about turning him in for what she considered theft from a crime scene. That would be what she was pondering right now in her silence and her need to sit. Maybe he could return the picture to the site after all the commotion died down, hide it somewhere the police could conceivably have neglected to look and then rediscover it. But how could he be sure of a place where they hadn't looked? Maybe he could dig a hole in the yard or find a narrow opening in one of the grand old trees that could have protected it through the decades. He knew immediately that neither of those plans would work for practical reasons. And most policemen weren't idiots. But there was always his idea of having found the picture on another day last week. He could still be held accountable but not as seriously so.
"I'm becoming less and less surprised that no one found her," Jane said, "with the house being vacant for years and a fair distance away from its neighbours."
Frank was so pleasantly surprised at her chosen topic that he was at a loss for words for a moment or two. She hadn't been lost in thoughts of reporting him. Or maybe she had been and was now covering it up. His own mistrustful thoughts twisted his guts into tight knots. If this was the way it was going to go, if this was the way he was going to be, he wanted no part of his own future.
"Frank?"
He looked at her sideways to see what her face looked like. It was open and fresh and questioning. There was nothing sinister about it.
"You'd be amazed," Frank said, taking as deep a breath as he could manage, "how much of a stink a small being can produce."
He hated to remember the times he had experienced it first-hand.
"But still," said Jane, "it wouldn't be as bad as if it had been a tall, hulking, morbidly obese man."
"No," Frank said. "Not that bad."
"Let's walk," said Jane.
The river was busy. The hollering rowing boss went by again.
"Why do rowers have to yell?" said Frank. "It should be a peaceful activity."
He wished that the head rower would have a massive heart attack and die in mid-shout.
"What do you think of that custom, Frank? Taking pictures of the dead, I mean."
"Well, I can't imagine personally wanting such a thing, a photograph of someone who I loved that died. I'd end up looking at it so much I'd go crazy with it or not enough so that when I did see it, it would scare the bejesus out of me. It's sure not for me, but I can see a different type of person thinking it's a good idea. Maybe a mother from Victorian England who lost her only child at a young age and had no other pictures of her. I mean, in the olden days there weren't a lot of photographs, were there? If it wound up being the only chance a family had to have a picture of their baby, I can almost see it. It definitely seems eerier to me, though, when the person is posed alongside live people."
"Yeah. I don't like it," Jane said. "May I see it again?"
"You can see it if you stop thinking of it as stolen and promise me that you're not going to report it or me to the police."
"I can't help the way I think, but I won't report you or it."
"This is no idle promise," said Frank.
"I know."
Jane put her hand on her heart and said, "Hope to die."
"Okay, good," Frank said.
He stopped abruptly and turned toward the river, where one rowboat and a smaller motorboat were skimming down the river. The man in the motorboat was guiding the rowers and all of them were bellowing: one, two, three, four!
"Shut the hell up!" Frank shouted as loudly as he could, which wasn't very loud. He didn't do a lot of shouting. He cleared his throat afterwards and continued walking.
Jane stared at him.
"What's gotten into you, Frank?"
"I don't know. Nothing much, just a little irritability."
They headed up to Lyndale Drive.
"Stop looking at me like that," Frank said.
"Let's go to your house now and look at the picture," said Jane.
"If either kid is around we can't do it now. I don't want them dwelling on it and possibly thinking I'm a thief."
"Okay."
"Sadie saw the photograph at lunchtime but maybe she'll just forget about it if it's not mentioned again."
"I doubt it."
"Yeah, I do too. She got that the little girl was dead. She'll tell Garth for sure and he'll tell everyone he sees. Garth's a blabbermouth. I'm going to have to speak to them seriously about this. Jesus. If I were still on the force, none of this would be an issue."
Jane stopped walking.
"Do you wish you were still a cop, Frank?"
"No. I don't know. Maybe. Please don't stop in your tracks like I just said something important. It can't happen, and regret is the cancer of life, as some clever dead person once said."
"Why can't it happen?"
"Well, for one thing, I'm a criminal now."
"Don't be silly. You could make that disappear with no trouble at all. Burn it, for Christ's sake."
"I don't think I can. Not yet, anyway. God, I wish my kids didn't know about it. I may have to lie to them."
They started walking again.
"I don't feel in my heart that I stole it. If anything, it feels like the opposite of that."
"What's the opposite of stealing?" asked Jane.
"I don't know," Frank said, "but it's a positive thing."
It felt like it had something to do with protecting someone or something, maybe the little person in the wall, but it was so vague it was almost not there. There was nothing so concrete that he had words to describe it. And he didn't always trust his feelings either; there was that.
He was often way off, even in his staff sergeant days when he had been reasonably sharp with his theories. And now he was a plodder, unable to manoeuvre around corners to find the shady paths that led to the heart of the matter.
Jane picked up two thick blue elastics that a letter carrier had dropped on the sidewalk and put them in the pocket of her capris. She saved them.
"How did he die," she asked, "the boy who became a man?"
"George. Cancer, I think. Some really bad type of cancer, bone maybe. Don't quote me on any of this. I got it all fourth-or fifth-hand."
"Sad."
"Yes. Cancer in a young person wasn't all that common in those days. Not every second person had it, like now."
They walked up Highfield and down Claremont Avenue to Frank's house. Three separate people greeted them on the way. All three had an Are you two a couple now? look on their faces. At least Frank thought so. He didn't know what Jane thought and he wasn't going to ask. Sometimes he wished he lived in New York City or London, England, maybe, where he could be anonymous for a portion of his life.
"No we're not. We're just business partners," he said out loud as they passed Claudia Bendall in her front yard.
"Pardon?" Claudia Bendall and Jane said in unison.
"Nothing," said Frank. "Just talking to myself."
Claudia went on squirting dandelions with poison and Jane looked confused.
They turned into Frank's place. The air was full with the scent of gasoline, poison, and new-mown grass.
30
No one was home. There was a note from Sadie saying she was over at her friend Kendell's and would be back at nine. Kendell lived just three streets over on Birchdale Avenue, so Frank was good with that. He could even pop over in a little while and accompany his daughter home, or maybe not. He didn't want to act too protective and cause her to roll her eyes.
Garth was nowhere to be seen. No note. No message. He was eighteen and heading to the University of North Dakota on a baseball scholarship in the fall so Frank was trying hard not to monitor his every move. He was preparing himself to let another one go.
Up in his bedroom he retrieved the photograph from its hiding place under the mattress.
"Would you like a drink?" he said to Jane when he came back down.
"Yes, I would."
"Red, white, or beer?"
"Red, please."
"Good choice."
Frank poured two generous glasses of red from the box of Shiraz on the counter. They went outside to the porch and settled themselves in to stare at the unusual photograph. Frank placed it carefully on the table in front of them. It was fragile, so old and fragile.
"I guess, technically, it belongs to Norm Featherstone," he said.
"Oh my God," said Jane quietly.
"What?"
"The eyes," she said. "What's the deal with the eyes? I know they look dead but there's more to it than that."
Frank took a long drink of his wine.
"I'm not sure," he said, "but my best guess is that they were fastened shut somehow and new ones were drawn on with something. Paint, maybe, or some sort of makeup?"
"This is too bizarre for words."
"Yes."
"How would they have fastened them shut?" Jane asked.
"I don't know. Krazy Glue? Needle and thread?"
"Ouch," said Jane.
A couple walked by with two dogs on leashes. They nodded hello. Frank turned the photograph over and set a stone on top of it. They sat back and sipped their wine till the couple was well past.
"It's got to be connected to Morven," Jane said. "Taking photographs of dead people was her business."
"But yet, I can't see it," said Frank. "It wasn't her thing, as far as I know, to pose people in this way. She could have branched out, I guess, to do scenes like this; it's possible George didn't know. Or maybe it was after he died. She could have turned even stranger after he was no longer around to keep an eye on her. But then, the date..."
"What date?"
Frank moved the stone aside.
"Sadie was able to read the writing on the back," he said. "It says: Living with our Dead 1970."
"1970."
"Yes."
"The Coulthards lived in the house in 1970."
"Yes."
"Why did you wait till now to tell me this?"
"Because you were too excited, and I'm not sure what it means."
"It means the Coulthards are involved in this."
"Not necessarily. You see, I don't want there to be any jumping to conclusions. Someone else could have put both the picture and the girl there. It could have been shortly after the Coulthards moved or even while they were still there without their knowledge."
"How could someone have done it without their knowledge?"
"I don't know. Maybe they were away on holidays. Jane, please don't run with this. I won't be able to take it if you run with this."
Jane leaned back in her chair and gazed skyward.
Shadow leapt up onto the flat wooden railing and stared at them, first at Jane, then at Frank.
"Hi, Shadow," said Frank.
Jane continued to look up at the sky.
"I don't run with things," she said.
Frank scratched the cat under his chin.
"She called herself Mrs. Mortimer," he said.
"Who did?" said Jane.
"Morven Rankin."
"Was she married to a man named Mr. Mortimer?"
"No. That's just what she called herself. It started early on, in her teen years. I don't know if she ever married; somehow I doubt it."
"Why, I wonder?" said Jane. "The name change, I mean."
"I don't know. Maybe it had to do with her hating her real name or maybe she wanted to reinvent herself. Maybe she loved someone named Mortimer; maybe it was the only thing she could think of to do to make her life more bearable."
"Odd."
"Yes. Unusual, anyway."
Frank gently flipped the photograph over.
"Are we sure everyone but the girl is alive?" Jane asked.
"Yes, look. This guy is blurred, and this young one is positively terrified, and look at this one's eyes: they're definitely not painted on."
"I see."
"It's twisted," said Frank. "This scared one couldn't have been more than eleven. Can you imagine how freaked out he must have been? His hand isn't resting on the girl's shoulder. It's there to help prop her up."
"Dear God," said Jane.
Rage simmered in Frank's gut as he stared at the young boy who had been forced to take part. He was younger than Sadie.
"I hope it wasn't Mrs. Mortimer who took the picture," he said.
"Why?"
"Because it's a desecration. Because it's a wrong thing to have done to this little girl and to this frightened little boy who was probably her brother. I don't want Mrs. Mortimer to have been involved with this. George was a good person and he was very protective of her. She wasn't quite right in the head, like her mother. I never ever saw the mother."
"Wasn't the mother just a boozehound?" asked Jane.
"No, that was an assumption of yours. There was more to it than that."
"We should find out what became of her," said Jane. "Mrs. Mortimer, I mean."
"They lived on Monck back then," Frank said. "I think I'd know if any of them were still there, but maybe not. You lose touch, don't you? For instance, I didn't know that Mrs. Beresford was still around."
"Did you visit George in the hospital?"
"No! As I said, I didn't know him well. He was four years older than me and that's a lot when you're young. I guess I could have visited him, but shoot, there was no real connection between us."
"Relax, Frank. It's okay that you didn't go and visit him."
"Jesus! I know it's okay. And why are you telling me to relax? What kind of thing is that to be telling me? Honest to God, Jane!"
Shadow leapt off the railing and disappeared into the cotoneasters.
"Why are you talking so loud?"
"I don't know," said Frank, trying not to sound so cross.
He stood up and went inside for the wine. When he came back he refilled both their glasses.
"Mrs. Mortimer would have been left with a mother who was nuts," Jane said, "and a father who...what was the story with the father again?"
Frank sighed.
"I'm going to go and see Mrs. Beresford again. Her dog seems nice. I thought when dogs were nice it meant their masters were too."
"Maybe she's good to the dog but not to people," Jane said. "That's totally understandable. She wasn't that bad, was she? Just kind of nosy?"
"I don't like her."
"Oh, Frank."
Jane touched his forearm ever so briefly.
Frank pretended not to notice.
"If you go, I'm going with you," she said.
They drank their wine as evening deepened and grew quiet.
"I know nothing of any substance about the father," Frank said. "He just wasn't a dad that was around much, at the community club or anywhere. He didn't do kid-related stuff. I'm pretty sure George and his sister had different mothers. The first one died or ran off."
Frank held on to the photograph with both hands.
"Mrs. Mortimer did not take this picture," he went on. "It wasn't her style."
"How do you know what her style was?" asked Jane.
"Well, from what I remember it was all above board in hospitals and homes, fulfilling a need that some folks seemed to have. This picture has a carnival feel to it. A 'step right up folks, get your death pictures taken here,' feel to it. A 'bring your live children and we'll scare them witless' feel to it. Very below board. I'm sure it wasn't her."
Frank walked Jane home and then went over to Kendell's house to fetch Sadie. The heck with appearing overprotective. It was after nine and that's when she said she'd be home.
"Dad, have you been drinking?" she asked.
"Yes, I have," he said. "Jane was over and we had a glass or two of wine from the box."
"One or two?"
"Two."
"I don't like the box," said Sadie.
Frank had decided to experiment with keeping a box of red wine on the kitchen counter. Most of the people he knew who dropped in were partial to red wine or beer and at first it had made sense to him. But he wasn't much of a drinker as a rule and this box, the first, had been there for some time. Not many people had stopped by. He had been relieved to find that it still tasted okay when he squirted out a glass for Jane.
"I'm thinking of doing away with it as an idea, Sadie. It hasn't worked out that well."
"It reminds me of Mum," Sadie said. "It worries me."
"Oh, honey," Frank said. "Consider it gone."
Denise, Frank's wife, had been a serious drinker. She'd died four years earlier in a single-vehicle accident on Bishop Grandin Boulevard. She had been six days out of rehab and her blood was so loaded with alcohol there was speculation as to how she could have managed to drag herself into a car and fire up the ignition. Frank tried to keep the details from his kids, but it was huge news in the neighbourhood and even further afield, so his success was limited. "Wife of WPD Inspector Frank Foote Killed in Grisly Single-Vehicle Crash" was the headline on the front page of one of the city papers.
It was then that Frank retired from the police force. He needed to be home. And he didn't think he could willingly be a witness to any more wreckage.
The sensational story buzzed through the Norwood Flats loudly and for so long that Frank thought he would have to uproot his family and start again elsewhere. The kids had lived their three short lives in fear of something like this happening and their worst imaginings became reality. But they wouldn't move. They put their collective feet down and Frank was relieved. He couldn't picture living anywhere else, not really, even though the four of them now had to live with the noisy absence of Denise, who also had grown up in the neighbourhood.
Sadie allowed Frank to put his arm around her now for a short distance, but then shrugged him off by pretending she saw a nickel on the sidewalk.
When they got home, he removed the wine from the counter and took it out to the garage. He couldn't throw it away; that went against his nature. And Sadie was going to have to get used to his having the odd glass. But it was stupid of him to have had it out on the counter, especially as he seldom used it. He may as well have Scotch-taped a picture of Denise's mangled body to it for Sadie to study every morning when she got up to face the day.
31
More clouds drifted in overnight. They held no serious threat of rain but covered the sky so thickly it was hard to see the sun. Frank sat on the porch with the newspaper and a cup of coffee. The big headline on page one said, "Skeleton Discovered in Wall of Norwood Home; Police Without a Clue."
The phone rang from inside the house at the same time his new neighbour --- the one who lived where Gus was supposed to be --- fired up his lawn mower, so he went back inside and closed the door behind him.
Chas was calling, to say that the police would be finished up at the house by the time the weekend was over, maybe even later today. They had taken everything that could possibly be of any help to them in the investigation. There wasn't much.
"The house is dead," Chas said. "We're going to have to get what we can from the body."
Frank suddenly knew with certainty that he had the best clue of all upstairs under his mattress. Oh, they might figure out who the little woman was, but not who killed her.
That would be up to him. He would solve this thing, with the photograph as his guide. No one would have to know how he did it. He could explain his way around the picture when the time came.
A deep sadness entered him and took his breath away. He recognized his superhero thoughts as immature and totally irresponsible, but they wouldn't shift. He didn't want the world the way it was and he could feel it pulling away from him. One day soon he would be perched on its very edge staring out into the void. Are these kinds of feelings just entry into the last third of life? he wondered. Is this what every person who turns fifty-six faces but keeps to himself? What lies do they tell themselves each morning to trick themselves into crawling out of bed one more time?
"There's been some interest from television and the newspapers," Chas said. "So be prepared to be hounded some when you get back to the site. You and your girlfriend can most likely go back to work on Monday morning."
"Jane's not my girlfriend, Chas. Please don't say things like that to me."
He hung up without saying a proper goodbye.
What Frank needed now was to talk to Gus, but he no longer lived next door. It had been two years now since his old friend had died but Frank still found himself heading toward the door in the hopes of finding him out in his yard. All he would find today would be the slick new gunk-haired bachelor who more often than not "worked from home" and talked loudly into one of his hand-held devices. One of the things that annoyed Frank the most about him was that when he talked to Frank he talked so softly that it was necessary to say, "Pardon?" after most things he said. Why couldn't he --- his name was Tad --- speak quietly like that to his machines or at least find a happy medium and stick to it, both for human and electronic contact? Frank wondered if it would be all right to mention it to him.
His missing Gus was less complicated than his longing for Denise, but his body told him that it ran nearly as deep. It had a hard ache to it and very little in the way of regret. Maybe just that he hadn't been with him as he took his last breaths, but he couldn't be blamed for that. A man needed to sleep. He still talked to Gus sometimes to get his thoughts in order and imagine what his friend would have said in response. The loss of his daily presence, with his insights and gentle advice, left a giant chasm in Frank's life. He doubted he would ever have another such friend.
"Good morning, Daddy."
Sadie kissed him on the cheek on her way to the kitchen.
He loved that she sometimes still called him Daddy even though she was fourteen years old. He was going to have to pull himself together, get his irritability and sadness under control for her sake and for the sake of Garth --- Emma too, on the far side of the world. It was his good self that they counted on, not this new man that shouted at the river and wanted to squeeze the neck of young Tad next door.
That was another thing about Tad. He had the oddest-looking neck Frank had ever seen on a man. It was like the neck of a beautiful woman. Maybe he was a woman! Frank decided he would look keenly for an Adam's apple next time he encountered him. He found that he felt more kindly towards Tad hollering into a phone when he thought of him as a woman dressed up as a man.
Frank believed he was having an epiphany --- one that would help him deal with the ogre he was becoming. He made a hasty promise to himself that when someone was driving him berserk, he would picture that person as a frightened member of the sex opposite to what he was, trying to make his way in a hostile world where he was living a lonely lie. Usually it was men that made him crazy but sometimes it was women: women drivers, for instance.
He followed Sadie into the kitchen.
"Is your brother stirring?" he asked.
Sadie was at the sink. She turned on the water and didn't answer.
"Sadie?"
"Uh, I think he might have gone out really early," she said.
The blood vanished from Frank's head.
"On a Saturday? There's no such thing as Garth going out early on his day off," he said as he raced up the stairs.
Frank remembered last night. He had fallen asleep before he heard the familiar clumsiness of his boy coming up the stairs.
Sure enough, the unmade bed was empty. It was the emptiest bed Frank had ever seen. He rummaged in the covers as though there were a chance his son had made himself small in the night and was there someplace inside the teenage-boy sheets.
He ran down the stairs and into the kitchen.
"Sadie, do you know anything about this?" he asked.
She was sitting at the table staring straight ahead.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, Dad. Jeez."
"I should never have allowed myself to go to sleep before I heard him come in," Frank said, and put his hand on Sadie's shoulder. "I'm sorry, honey, I'm just upset with myself. And Garth, of course."
His knees began to shake and he sat down. His throat was parched and his chest felt heavy, achy even. Maybe he was having a heart attack.
"I'm sorry, Sadie," he said again.
"You look kind of grey," she said.
"Sorry."
The phone rang and they both lunged for it where it sat on the kitchen counter. Sadie got there first but she handed it to her dad.
"Hello?" said Frank.
It was Garth. He was calling from his friend Ian's house where he had spent the night. Ian lived a one-minute walk away.
"Come home right now," said Frank.
He listened for a moment.
"Come home right now," he said again and hung up.
Garth was in the kitchen in a little over one minute.
"I didn't want to wake you up by phoning."
"Don't ever do that again," Frank said.
"I'm eighteen," said Garth. "I'm going to be living away from home in the fall."
"You hope," said Frank.
"Da-ad!"
"I think you better go to your room now before this gets any worse. We'll talk later."
Garth trudged upstairs and Sadie busied herself with flour and eggs and other ingredients.
The heavy feeling in Frank's chest had grown and sunk to include his stomach. It felt as though he had eaten a woollen blanket. He hated fighting with Garth. He was a good boy, an excellent boy, who had worked hard at both his schoolwork and baseball to earn a scholarship to the University of North Dakota in the fall. When Frank recalled the things he himself had been doing at Garth's age, he cringed. He'd been having sex off and on for three years by then and was smoking, of course, drinking, staying out all night with no consequences at home. He was even dabbling in dope at eighteen. The only reason he hadn't started in on that sooner was that it wasn't around yet, not in his circles, anyway. As soon as it was, he'd leapt right in.
Things were different then; the world was different then. But that wasn't an argument he could give his son. He had tried it before. It wasn't a good argument.
Frank feared for the life of his children every time they left his sight. Again, he wished he could speak to Gus. He would set him straight on this, tell him to ease up. Still, it was wrong of Garth not to have called last night, even if he was eighteen. It was 2006, not 1968. Much as it wasn't a good argument, it held water as far as Frank was concerned. If no one had answered the phone, Garth could have left a message for Frank to find first thing in the morning or as he roamed through the house at night as he often did.
He tried picturing his son as a girl dressed up as a boy to try out his new idea. It didn't work. If Garth had been a girl and stayed out all night Frank would have stopped breathing and died. So much for the effectiveness of his epiphany.
In spite of his anxious thoughts and the heavy feeling in his torso he hoped that Sadie was making a cake.
"What are you doing, Sadie?"
"Making a carrot cake. That's okay, isn't it?"
"Of course it's okay. It's great. Be sure to take a piece up to Garth when it's done."
"I will, Dad." She smiled.
Frank got himself together, phoned Jane, and headed off to the house on Lloyd. It seemed a good idea to keep in touch with the situation.
When he got there, a young constable he hadn't met before was removing the yellow tape surrounding the yard and a forensic photographer was packing up her cameras. After doing so, she stood and stared at the house for a long time. Frank stood back and stared too. He didn't want to be in her way. There were other people out on their sidewalks, watching the house, but it was obvious by now there was nothing much to see. And they would have learned that their questions would mostly go unanswered.
Jane had said she'd meet him there. She was walking towards him now and he felt his interior woolly blanket begin to evaporate ever so slightly. He liked the way she walked, a bit like the tomboy she said she had been as a kid. Frank hadn't known her then, though she, too, had lived in the neighbourhood for the whole of her life. Her parents moved to their home on Pinedale in 1967, one year before she was born. Both sets of Frank's grandparents had settled in the area in the 1920's. His parents had never left and neither had Frank. He didn't suppose anyone would describe him as an adventuresome man.
He went to meet Jane.
"When can we pick up our tools?" she asked.
Frank spoke to the constable who told him to phone downtown when the weekend was over.
Jane started to protest and Frank put his hand on her arm.
She shrugged him off.
"I hate that they've got our tools," she said. "What if they wreck something?"
"There's nothing we can do and it has nothing to do with this officer."
Frank felt pleased that someone was more upset about something than he was. It made a change.
"If we had our tools we could have gone back to work today," said Jane.
"We've never worked weekends," Frank said. "Why start now?"
"To make up for losing yesterday."
"You're starting to sound like Featherstone."
The photographer and constable finally drove away in their separate vehicles.
"Let's see how much of our work they've done for us," Frank said.
Sure enough, the upper level had been stripped pretty well bare and all the materials removed. There was no evidence of any interior walls at all except for a few support beams --- nothing left but the memory of a tiny woman sealed behind drywall and the little ghosts of their missing tools.
They were exiting the house just as Norm Featherstone drove up in his brand new unattractive Cadillac.
"Great," Frank muttered.
"Where are you two going?" he asked.
"Good morning, Norm," said Frank.
"Are you getting back to work today?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You know we don't work weekends."
"But so much time has been wasted already."
Frank looked at Jane and smiled.
"Half a day, Norm," he said. "Plus, they finished gutting the upstairs, which is all we would have ended up doing yesterday anyway."
"Anyhow, they took our..." Jane began.
Frank nudged her perhaps a little too hard and she stopped talking. He didn't want to give Featherstone anything, let alone a good reason for their stopping work.
Norm looked around him.
"Where are the new materials?"
Jane looked at Frank.
He realized in the emptiness of the yard that he hadn't placed an order yet with McDiarmid Lumber. If they had wanted to work today, if they'd had their tools, they would have had no materials, no lumber, no anything to work with. He wondered if it had occurred to Jane. Maybe he should hand over all the thinking aspects of the job to her. He could become the grunt man, follow her orders and work only with his aching back and stiff hands.
"I called and told them to hold off till Monday," he said. "They couldn't have dropped anything off past the yellow tape with the police milling around."
Now that was quick thinking, thought Frank. If I had placed the order I would have had to do exactly what I just lied about doing. I've had a brief moment of quick thought.
He was certain his brain was shrinking and changing. The parts that he'd used as a detective --- the keen, intuitive, deductive parts --- were no longer being exercised to their full capacity. He needed to whip them back into shape. He pictured an amorphous blob inside of his head flopping about, interfering in ways that were ever-growing and ever-changing.
The blob --- it was mauve --- also affected what he thought of as the other part of his brain, the part that was turning him into a man who raged and blamed and behaved badly in front of his kids and friends like Jane.
Norm Featherstone jingled the change in his pocket. He was wearing the same horrid brown suit he had worn the day before. The jingling sound made Frank want to turn Norm upside down, empty his pockets onto the ground and light the contents on fire, melt down the coins and pour them into Norm's ears.
"So, young Josh Werbanski works for the city," he said.
"Why all the interest in Josh all of a sudden?" asked Norm.
"Just curious, is all, about who we're fixing up the house for."
"He's majoring in city planning," said Featherstone, "and his grades are so good the city hired him on for the summer."
"How nice for everyone," said Frank.
Jane and Norm both looked at him and Frank knew he had begun something unpleasant that he wouldn't be able to stop himself from pursuing.
"Are you being sarcastic?" Norm asked.
"Yes, I am," said Frank.
"Why?"
"Because he was rude and he raised his voice to my daughter who was working at the swimming pool in the flood bowl till yesterday morning."
"Well, she must have done something to deserve it," said Norm.
Frank pictured Sadie and her tears and her goodness and her cake that would now be sitting fragrantly on the kitchen counter.
"Your son-in-law is a prick," said Frank. "The only things my daughter deserves are excellent things, precious, holy things, that you and your twisted son know nothing about."
"He's not twisted. And he's certainly not my son." The colour was rising in Norm's face. His bluster and self-importance seemed to be seeping slowly out of him. He looked anxiously at the gutted house.
Jane said, "Let's go, Frank."
"Look, whatever happened, I'm sure we can get to the bottom of it," Norm said. "We could get both sides of the story. I'll speak to Josh. Why don't I bring him over to your house later to see your daughter and the four of us will fix it?"
"I'm not interested in his side of the story, Norm. And if I see him anywhere near my house I'll come after him with an axe. That axe right there."
Frank gestured to an old wooden-handled hatchet resting against the maple tree and realized it was his. Shoddy police work.
Norm started walking toward his car.
"We'll talk later when you've had a chance to simmer down," he said.
Frank struggled to catch his breath and he sat down where he stood on the sidewalk leading to the house.
"What the fuck, Frank?" said Jane and sat down beside him.
"Jane?"
"Yes?"
"Jane, I'm falling to pieces."
32
Sometimes Frank's worries got so far away on him that they took place years, even decades into the future. Later that same Saturday, as he worked on an empty flower bed with the edging tool his kids had given him for his birthday, he found himself fretting about Sadie's impending divorce. He wanted to pound into the ground the faceless head of the man she had married. Tears came to his eyes and he had to wipe them away with his sleeve as his daughter approached.
"I'm going over to Shayla's house, Daddy," Sadie said. "We're going to practise on our unicycles."
Both girls had talked their parents into getting them unicycles a couple of Christmases ago and they'd finally gotten around to trying them out.
"Okay, honey. Just be sure to stick to the sidewalks. Promise me you won't go on the road."
She didn't answer at first and it made Frank think that she was planning a wild ride down Portage Avenue, weaving in and out of the cars, practising for the Sunday night cruise.
"Sadie?"
"Yes?"
"Promise me you'll stay on the sidewalks."
"Of course, Dad. What do you think? We don't have death wishes."
"Be home by 9:30, okay?"
"Sure. I'll probably be home before that, actually. I'm kind of tired."
Off she went, walking her unicycle across the scruffy grass of the backyard. At least now Frank could worry about the very real possibility of minor physical injuries rather than future divorces. She was so good. What did he or Denise ever do to make her so damn good?
Why was Sadie tired? Frank tried to remember if he had ever been tired at the age of fourteen. It seemed so unlikely, but he couldn't think why. He must have been tired from time to time and who knows? maybe he even announced it to his parents. They were both long dead, so he'd never be able to ask them.
A line from a Jackson Browne song floated into his yard from a passing car driving too fast down the lane. Something about running into the sun, but running behind. Sadness pierced his heart again and he felt a sudden brief panic at the despair he glimpsed when he realized that the line he had heard hundreds of times before had never made him sad till now. What if the bleakness came to stay? It lasted just a second, but it took in the whole world, both space-wise and time-wise.
Jane walked into the yard from around the side of the house.
"Whatcha doin'?" she said.
"Edging," said Frank. "Trying out my new tool."
"These flower beds could use a flower or two."
"Yes. They used to have flowers, but I've kind of let it go."
"How are you, Frank? Are you feeling any better?"
"Much better, thanks."
"Liar," said Jane.
"Let's do something productive," she went on. "Let's go and talk to Mrs. Beresford. We can make a list first of questions we want to ask her."
Frank leaned his edger against the side of the garage.
"Good idea."
He made tea in individual cups and decided as he was doing it that he would buy a teapot next time he saw a nice one somewhere.
They sat on the porch and he brought out his small notebook and a couple of sharp pencils.
He felt a hint of pleasure, as though someone might have told him something good in the last few minutes.
"I like sharp pencils," he said.
They removed their tea bags and added milk and sugar to their cups.
"Mmm," said Frank. "I don't know why I don't drink tea more often."
Jane didn't say anything and Frank realized he didn't even know if she liked tea. She took a sip.
"Okay," she said. "What do we want to ask her?"
Frank licked the end of the pencil for no good reason and wrote a one with a period after it.
"What does she remember about the Coulthards?" he said. "What did the father do? What did the son do? Is there anything more she can tell us about their departure?"
He was writing as he talked.
"'Kay. You better make some subdivisions in these questions," Jane said. "That's way more than one right there."
"We'll revise and neaten it up when we've finished coming up with everything we want to ask."
"Is she not telling us something about why she thinks they were odd ducks?" said Jane. "Is she holding out on us?"
"We'll have to word that better," said Frank. "We don't want to piss her off or we'll get nowhere."
"Mrs. Mortimer," said Jane.
"Yes," said Frank.
"Did she and Jim Coulthard know each other?"
"But we can't mention the photograph, even though that's why we're asking the question. She can't know why we're wondering."
"No."
That was as far as they got with their list.
Frank washed up at the kitchen sink and they walked over to Mrs. Beresford's house.
Jane wondered about phoning first, but Frank said, no, it would be better to give her no warning.
"Why?" asked Jane.
"So she won't have time to hide anything."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Memories, theories. We don't want anything getting in the way of stuff she might blurt out. Anticipation can ruin the truth sometimes, nudge it a little to one side or cloud it over so it's hard to get at. People tend to want to come off in a certain way and that can influence what they say."
"It seems unlikely to me that Mrs. Beresford cares very much about how she comes off," said Jane.
"You'd be surprised," said Frank.
They found her standing in her front yard, watching her bulldog scratch in the dirt.
"Hello, Mrs. Beresford," said Frank.
"Hey, Mrs. Beresford," said Jane.
"Oh, it's you two again."
Tina scrabbled over to Frank and looked up at him longingly. He offered his hand and the dog licked it politely, not too much slobber or enthusiasm.
"Your ears look to have grown since yesterday," Frank said to the dog.
"So is this about the skeleton?" Mrs. Beresford asked.
"Yes, I guess it is," said Frank.
"I don't know who it is, if that's what you think."
"No. We don't think that. I guess what we're hoping is that you might remember something that might help us to figure out what happened, point us in the right direction. Maybe not even something that you consciously remember."
"So what are you going to do, hypnotize me?"
"No," said Frank. "We thought we might just ask you a question or two to see if something might jog your memory."
"Why do you want to know these things, anyhow?" she asked. "Word is you're not even a policeman anymore. You're a builder now, aren't you?"
"Yes, that's true, Mrs. Beresford. I'm not a policeman anymore, but I thought it couldn't hurt if I asked a few questions on my own, since I know a few people in the neighbourhood."
"I suppose you think you know me," she said.
"Well, no. I don't presume to know you, but you seem to have some knowledge of the house where this thing happened. I thought you might be able to help. I didn't think it was so far-fetched that you might even want to help."
"Ask away, then. We've got nothing better to do."
Tina gave her body a shake, raising a little cloud of dust.
Mrs. Beresford didn't invite them in or offer a seat or a cup of anything. Frank wouldn't have accepted any refreshment, but he wanted to sit down. The only spot available was her crumbling front steps, unless he wanted to sit in the dirt. It had been a long time since any grass had grown in this yard. He and Tina walked over to the steps and sat down. Jane and Mrs. Beresford remained standing, but moved over to join them.
"Primarily it's the Coulthards we're wondering about," said Frank.
"The father always seemed to be sick," Mrs. Beresford said with no preamble. "I don't think there was a female member in the household for as long as they lived there. The boy took care of his dad, I'll give him that. But I didn't like him. I didn't trust him. He had a delinquent look to him, as though he was trolling for trouble, as if the only things in life that would satisfy him contained no good whatsoever."
It was impossible to judge how much of what she was saying was based on fact or just the facts as she had seen them. They would need someone else from those days with an alternate view. Frank wondered if such a person still lived in the neighbourhood.
"Did the boy work?" asked Frank.
He scratched Tina behind one of her tall pointed ears and she made appreciative sounds in her throat.
Mrs. Beresford dragged one of her sandalled feet back and forth in the dirt. Her feet were not a pleasing sight and Frank determined that he wouldn't allow himself another look. Could it be there was webbing between the toes? He wouldn't look.
"The boy did yard work, on the rich side of town, over Crescentwood way mostly. I think the old man worked for the railroad before he took sick."
Frank stayed quiet and waited. Tina rested her chin on his thigh. Jane stayed on the periphery. Frank liked her style and reminded himself to tell her so later, after they had squeezed what they could out of this web-footed woman with the lovable dog.
Back and forth, sandal on dirt.
Frank forced himself to focus his eyes on the trees on the other side of the river. He couldn't see the water from where he sat.
"A year or two before they disappeared, the boy got a spring in his step. It was the year of Apollo 13. Don't ask me how I remember that. He started up a business. I don't know how official it was or even legal but it was all about taking pictures of dead folk."
Frank and Tina stood up. Frank glanced at Jane. She looked as though she was working very hard at maintaining a neutral expression.
"Pictures of dead folk?" said Frank.
"That's what I said, isn't it?"
"Yes, Mrs. Beresford, it is."
"With eyes like his I don't know how he managed to focus on anything. They seemed to shoot off in different directions, like errant yo-yos. I can't imagine that his photographs were any good. I certainly never saw one of them.
"The way I heard it, he did whatever anyone wanted," she went on, "however outlandish. Word was he even dressed them up in costumes, posed them with family members. He could have staged Wild West scenes for all I know."
So it wasn't Mrs. Mortimer. It was Jim Coulthard who had taken the picture. Frank sat down again. His relief gave way to an urge to whoop with joy. He wanted so badly for this whole situation to be unconnected to George's sister. He wanted her completely free of it and the sinister Jim Coulthard.
For the first time, he wondered if the woman in the wall might actually be Mrs. Mortimer and he found that thought hard to bear. He felt chilly inside, like he needed a hot bath. What if the cockeyed fellow had wanted her business and could think of no other way to horn in on it?
He wanted to ask Mrs. Beresford if there had been a connection between Coulthard and Mrs. Mortimer, but he didn't want to let her name loose just yet. He might not be able to get it back. She was somehow precious to him and he feared what the web-footed woman might have to say.
Worried that Jane might mention her, he tried to speak to her with his eyes.
Maybe tomorrow he would ask about Mrs. Mortimer, but not today.
Jane spoke and Frank held his breath.
"What became of the Coulthards, Mrs. Beresford?" she asked.
Frank breathed out.
"Well, as I already told you they disappeared, just up and vanished. There was no one to care."
"Sad," said Jane.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Beresford. "But you make your own bed, don't you?"
Frank wondered if she thought there would be standing room only at her own funeral.
"I don't think anyone even noticed that they were gone for the longest time. It may have been winter when they left. An unshovelled sidewalk on Lloyd Avenue didn't draw much attention in those days. They could have been away on holiday for the old man's health or just dang well holing up like people do in winter."
"They never came back," Frank said.
"No. That's what vanished means, doesn't it? When spring came, one or two people may have begun to wonder about them, but not seriously. They were away and then they were missing and then they were just gone."
"Sad," Jane said again.
"For the woman boarded up in the wall, yes," said Mrs. Beresford. "It was him, wasn't it, who did that terrible thing?"
"I don't know, said Frank. "I just don't know."
He said goodbye to Tina and herded Jane out of the dirt yard as fast he felt he could without seeming rude or suspicious.
"Is that it, then?" yelled Mrs. Beresford.
"That's it for now," Frank called back. "We'll keep you posted, man."
"Did you just call her man?" whispered Jane.
"Yes, I guess I did," said Frank. "I just want to get out of here."
"It's Mrs. Mortimer, isn't it?" said Jane. "You were afraid I was going to mention her and you're not ready to put her out there."
"I guess so."
"It's like with you not wanting to tell me about the date on the photograph," she said. "You worry that things might spin out of control. I can understand that, Frank."
They walked down Lyndale to Chandos and turned right, then up the two blocks to Highfield, past the three-storey walk-ups.
"I wonder why you didn't know about Jim Coulthard's business," Jane said, "but yet you knew all about Mrs. Mortimer's."
"Well, for one thing, I didn't know all about Mrs. Mortimer's business. I just barely knew about it. And for another, I was what, twenty? I was probably busy fucking chicks."
"It kind of blows my theory about the weirder the story, the more likely it is to get out there and live," said Jane. "Or whatever it was I said."
"Yes," said Frank. "It blows it clear out of the water."
He walked her to her door and then backtracked to his own home a couple of blocks away.
When he got there the phone was ringing. It was Emma calling and she sounded happy. She was working on the geriatric ward of a big hospital in Honolulu and enjoying it. She loved the old folks, she said. And Frank loved her so very much for loving the old folks.
33
Saturday night lasted forever.
Frank went to bed early and the first time he woke up the sheets were damp with his sweat. He was freezing cold so he threw off the blankets and put on a pair of pajamas. It was a dream that had woken him --- had scared him awake. He couldn't remember it now, but it had left him with a new dread, something huge. It was bigger than the fear that it was Mrs. Mortimer in the wall, bigger than missing the job, bigger even than living without Denise and Gus. It was as monumental as the fears for his kids, but different, more personal, if that was possible.
Much later that night, when Garth and Sadie were snug in their beds and sound asleep, Frank got up, changed into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went for a walk around the neighbourhood. Anything was better than lying in bed worrying that Garth would marry a hoarder and that his own unborn grandchildren would suffer at her hands, be smothered along with Garth under a houseful of junk.
Where the hell had that come from? Maybe it was the way Garth talked with admiration about his friend Ansel's collection of stuff. Ansel had every electronic gadget known to mankind and Garth knew what they all were and how to work them and he went on about them to Frank.
Frank felt as though he didn't know the names of things anymore. And for sure he didn't know what all the abbreviations meant. He heard the letters NGO on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) probably twenty times till finally, a kindly guest who may have been as bothered by abbreviations as Frank was, said: You mean by NGO a non-governmental organization? And the host said: yes, I'm sorry.
Thank Christ she was at least sorry, Frank had thought then and remembered now as he walked down the lane toward the bakery on Taché Avenue.
It was late enough or early enough that he knew the bakers would be there already, working away. He loved seeing the light coming through the windows of the tiny operation and hearing the voices of the wielders of the dough. Now and then when he strolled by, someone would be smoking at the open back door, often alone, sometimes with a co-worker, talking quietly. Their conversations were always punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter. Not uproarious, just medium and good. Average laughter.
Frank couldn't remember the last time he'd enjoyed an average laugh, let alone a hearty one.
Maybe I'm just growing old, he thought. But fifty-six wasn't supposed to be old these days. Wasn't it the new eighteen or something? He was sure he'd read something like that in a women's magazine in a waiting room. Frank liked women's magazines, but he felt he had to read them in secret. It was harder now that Denise was gone. She had been a big subscriber but now her Chatelaine and her Homemaker and her Canadian Living had run out. He supposed he could renew them but he didn't want to upset the kids by having mail come in her name and he didn't feel comfortable putting them in his own name. He already subscribed to a knitting magazine and imagined that he was the butt of letter carriers' jokes: that peculiar knitting-man who lives on Claremont.
Why do I care about such things? Frank wondered. How old do I have to be before I arrive at that place I've heard about where you do what you choose and don't worry about the opinions of others, where you say what's on your mind and feel comfortable with the words you speak?
Maybe I need to have sex, he thought, have someone fuck me till I go blind. There had been no one since Denise and no one other than her since they got married, unless you counted that long-ago misstep with Audrey. He wondered about her now. He knew she still lived in the neighbourhood but he hadn't seen her in years. Maybe he should knock on her door. They could have sex without thinking too much about it, wild demented sex, and then let each other go.
Frank realized there were tears running down his face. That was happening far too often lately. He knew he wouldn't knock on Audrey's door or anyone else's. He didn't have that sort of appetite right now; he was just plain miserable. It was a foolish idea, that's all.
He decided to sit on a bench in Coronation Park for a while and pull himself together before the walk home. The bench was facing in a westward direction near the path. He had sat there before, he realized, and a scene from the past played itself out before his eyes, as clear as a blue morning from 1962.
He was young, maybe not even a teenager yet and he had been sitting with a friend, Ricky Ormiston, deciding what to do with the cigarettes they had stolen from Ricky's mum.
The staring girl walked past, George's little sister. She walked stiffly, like her knees didn't bend as easily as the knees of other girls. They stopped their discussion to watch. Neither of them knew her well enough to speak to her.
Soon after she went by an older boy ran past them in the direction of the girl. When he drew alongside her he stuck out his right foot and caused her to tumble to the ground. He kept on running.
Frank stood up. Ricky too.
"She took quite a fall," Frank said. "I think we should go and see if she's all right."
"You go," said Ricky. "I'll stay here and guard the smokes."
Frank approached cautiously. He'd heard his share of stories about the girl and he wasn't sure what he was getting himself into. He knew her brother, George, though, and knew him to be a good sort. It was somehow important to Frank now to do his very best, whatever that might entail.
The girl was sitting up with a neutral look on her face. She wasn't crying and didn't seem to be upset.
"Are you okay?" Frank asked.
He knew her name was Morven but he didn't want to say it.
"We saw what happened," he said.
"My glasses are broken."
She handed them up to Frank.
"Thanks," he said. He was grateful for her trust.
As he took them from her he noticed that both her hands were badly scraped on the palms. There would be little bits of gravel from the path lodged under her skin, he was sure of it, but he didn't want to risk touching her.
Her trust scared him a little, on her behalf.
"Is everything else okay?" he asked. "Do you think you can stand up?"
She stood and shook herself down.
"I can't see without my glasses," she said.
Frank held the two separate pieces in his hands.
"Let me walk you home," he said. "We'll tape them together to tide you over till you get new ones."
Frank turned around to wave at Ricky and make a few explanatory gestures with his arms. He didn't want to shout and he didn't want to leave her.
They started walking, with Frank as the guardian of the glasses. She told him the number of the house on Monck where she lived. He hadn't known the number but he did know the house.
"Do you know who that boy was that knocked you down?" Frank asked.
"No."
"Will George be at home, do you think?"
"I hope so. He'll help me get my glasses fixed."
The next bit was hazy in Frank's memory, but he was sure George must have been home and put an end to his involvement. Surely he would remember if he'd been inside the house.
What he did remember now were the words exchanged between Ricky and him when he got back to the park to continue with their plans for the cigarettes.
"Who was that guy?" asked Frank. "Do you know him?'
"Jimmy Coulthard," said Ricky. "He's a creepy kid."
Frank hadn't heard of him then and didn't hear of him again till July of 2006.
The rain started up as Frank sat on the bench in the park. He didn't notice at first and it was coming down hard by the time he stood up and started a slow lope home. It didn't seem important to stay dry.
For what remained of the night he lay in bed worrying about his eaves. He had meant to clean them before it rained but he hadn't gotten around to it. They were packed with willow and Chinese elm seeds. The rain continued to come down hard. He wondered if he should go out and do it now in the early morning light in the rain. The light didn't amount to much with the heavy cloud cover but he didn't like the picture he had in his mind of the water running down his house into the cracks in the foundation.
Instead he turned on the reading lamp, opened up his Michael Connelly book, and managed to lose himself in the story. Connelly's main character, Harry Bosch, was a policeman. He retired and then returned to the job. Frank wondered if he could do that. If they would have him. As morning arrived, the rain began to let up, and Frank nodded off over his book.
34
There wasn't a cloud in the sky when Frank woke up, and the air was cool and fresh. The basement was dry and he berated himself for fretting. He took his coffee out to the porch, where the wind was high, getting a good start on drying things up. The wet leaves of the cotoneasters shone in the sunlight. Both kids were in their beds --- he had checked --- and Emma was fine as of yesterday evening.
Except for the Featherstone fiasco, making an idiot of himself in front of Jane continually, and his anxiety about Mrs. Mortimer, all seemed right with the world for the first twenty minutes or so of the new day. He was almost certain he could iron out the Featherstone mess with a little fake tact and diplomacy, less sure that Jane would ever see him again in the same light after the past couple of days. But somehow that was okay: if you couldn't lose your marbles in front of your closest friend, who could you lose them in front of? He was mildly surprised when he realized that he thought of Jane as his closest friend. She was gently moving in to fill the canyon left by Gus's absence. He wouldn't mention it to her ever, not even on his deathbed. He didn't want to scare her any more than he already had.
And if it was, indeed, Mrs. Mortimer inside the wall, there was nothing he could do to save her.
His pilfering of the photograph no longer even registered on his personal graph of things that mattered.
The phone rang and Frank went inside to answer it. It was Norm Featherstone, ending his working relationship with Frank and Jane.
"Fine, Norm," said Frank.
He couldn't muster up anything more.
Norm hung up first.
Frank felt relief until he remembered that he'd have to tell Jane. He began to sweat and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror he was alarmed by what he saw: a vaguely familiar man without a trace of colour in his face, who appeared to have aged a decade since the last time he had noticed him. Maybe he was coming down with something --- the flu or a summer cold. He supposed this would be as good a time as any, seeing as he had no big jobs on the horizon. The Featherstone thing was going to be his summer. There was Mrs. Frobisher's hallway, but that was two days at most.
He decided to postpone calling Jane till later in the day when his breaths were coming more easily. Hell, he'd leave it till morning --- let her get through her Sunday without knowing.
It was his plan to go and see Mrs. Beresford again, on his own this time, but he got to feeling worse. The beginning of the blanket feeling returned to his chest. It started out small, thin even, like a summer sheet, but as the day wore on it changed into something heavier, a cotton blanket, perhaps, and ended up as a woolly rug covering his heart and other vital organs. In the evening the woolly rug was damp and almost beyond carrying.
At nine o'clock Frank placed a large pail containing two inches or so of water beside his bed. He was certain that he was going to puke and he was beginning to feel dizzy. He couldn't bear the idea of throwing up onto something other than a receptacle prepared for that purpose.
When he crawled into bed and lay on his back the woolly blanket dissolved and he thought before he drifted off briefly that maybe all he needed was good night's sleep.
35
On Monday morning when Frank opened his eyes he looked directly into the face of a rosy-cheeked nurse, who greeted him cheerfully.
"Good morning, Mr. Foote," she said. "You're in the hospital. You've had a heart attack, but you're doing fine."
"What time is it?" he asked.
She looked at her watch.
"Seven fourteen."
"I need to phone my kids."
"Your kids are here, Mr. Foote. Would you like to see them now?"
"Yes, please."
Tears were streaming down Sadie's face --- it seemed like she was always crying, just like her dad, Frank thought --- and Garth looked as though he were propping up a heavy slab of marble on his young baseball-playing shoulders.
"Oh, Dad," said Sadie.
She hugged him carefully, avoiding the delicate tubes entering and exiting his body.
Frank couldn't speak and he struggled without success to stop his own tears from falling.
"You're not going to die," said Garth. "The doctor told us that. You're going to be as good as new."
"It's true," said Sadie. "I asked him if it was mild, medium, big, or massive and he said mild."
"Well, good then," said Frank.
He gave Garth Jane's phone number and asked him to put her in the picture. He also asked him to mention to her that the job was off. In other words, he asked his boy to do his dirty work for him, but he had no choice.
Something stirred in Frank's brain: a vague recollection of himself stumbling down the stairs in the night to phone 911. He remembered opening the front door so that no one would break it down in an effort to get to him. He hadn't wanted to wake his kids, which he had realized was insane when he heard the distant sound of a siren coming for him as the world turned to black.
"Emma's coming," said Garth.
"Oh, no. There was no need to tell Emma," said Frank.
"Yes, there was," said Sadie. "She'll be here later today or tomorrow."
"No need," said Frank again and closed his eyes.
"Need," said Garth.
Frank drifted off to sleep.
Jane came to see him later in the day with the news that she had picked up their tools. She also brought peas from St. Leon Gardens.
"It's almost the last of them," she said. "But they're still good."
She knew how he felt about fresh peas.
"Everything seems to be intact, tool-wise," she said. "I can't vouch for your stuff, but mine is all good."
"Thanks, Jane. I hope they were nice to you down there."
"Yeah, they were fine."
She didn't seem able to look him in the eye.
"What's up?" he asked.
"I'm so sorry, Frank. About all this."
She gestured to take in their surroundings and Frank realized that it was his heart attack that was causing her discomfort. Was she embarrassed by his feebleness, his oldness? Or maybe she was one of those people that couldn't abide hospitals. There were a lot of those.
"I'm sorry too, Jane, especially about the Featherstone thing."
"Don't worry about that, Frank. Please don't worry about that. He's a dick and we're well rid of him. I can concentrate on Mrs. Frobisher's hallway until you're better and then we'll see what's what."
Sadie walked in.
"Here's my beautiful girl," said Frank.
"Hi, Sadie," said Jane.
"Hey, Jane. Hey, Dad. Garth went to work this aft but he's going to come by on his way home."
"Good. I'll need to speak to him about holding the fort."
"Emma's going to be here by tomorrow afternoon. The fort will be well held by the three of us."
Frank reached out for his daughter's hand.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
"I'm doing well. I'm scheduled for an angioplasty tomorrow morning and then I should be out of here in no time."
The colour drained from Sadie's face.
"What's an angioplasty?"
"It's when they clear your arteries by placing tiny balloons inside them and then blowing them up into slightly bigger balloons."
"An operation," Sadie said.
"Yes, but just a minor one. The balloons are stuck in with a catheter."
"What's a catheter?" Sadie's eyes welled up.
"I don't know, but it means that the operation doesn't amount to much," Frank said. "It's not hugely invasive."
Jane put her arm around Sadie and gave her a squeeze.
"My Aunt Leslie had an angioplasty last year," she said. "It was a piece of cake."
"Speaking of cake," Sadie said, pulling herself together, "I brought some carrot cake. There's enough for you to have some too, Jane."
"Mmm," said Jane. "I love carrot cake."
"Sadie's is the best in the world," said Frank.
"I didn't think to bring accoutrements," Sadie said. "I'm going to head down to the cafeteria for forks and napkins and stuff."
Her brief appearance seemed to have increased Jane's comfort level somewhat.
"I ran into Chas Sampson at the Public Safety Building," she said when Sadie had gone.
She spoke quietly, as there were many people milling about. Frank was still in the ICU awaiting a bed on a medical ward.
"The autopsy has been completed."
"Man, that was fast. Did he tell you anything?"
"Yes, he certainly did. He couldn't wait. I think Chas is pretty excited about the whole thing."
Frank smiled. "More likely he's excited about you."
Jane blushed, as he knew she would.
"Anyway, the cause of death was inconclusive and an identification has yet to be made but there are some interesting facts that came out of it."
"Go on."
"The girl, and she is indeed a girl, was about fifteen years old and she had Down Syndrome, something they figured out from the shape of her skull. Also, because her pelvis was intact, they were able to deduce that she had given birth.
Frank gave a low whistle.
"A fifteen-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who'd had a baby. That's no good at all. This girl was in trouble long before she was boarded up in a wall."
"Yeah."
Frank knew that Mrs. Mortimer was a little off kilter, but he also knew what Down Syndrome looked like. The girl in the wall was someone else.
"They're going to do further tests to try to find out the cause of death," said Jane.
"I wonder what became of the baby," Frank said.
"Who knows?"
"I wonder if Jim Coulthard was the father of the baby."
"Who knows?"
"Have they confirmed how long she had been there," Frank asked, "how long she's been dead?"
"No. Again, they're going to run more tests. And concentrate some on the nightgown --- its origin and so on.
"With nothing to compare her DNA to it'll be hard to figure out who she is," Jane went on.
"Unless we find the baby."
"That would be very hard to do, even if we knew when it was born."
"I'm thinking 1970," said Frank. "'69 or '70. It could have been even earlier, I guess. The girl had probably been of child-bearing age for at least a couple of years."
"You're assuming the photograph is pointing the way."
"Yes, I am. I don't know who those people are in the photo, if they're connected in any way to our girl, but it tells us who put her in the wall and when. It's possible that Jim Coulthard had a need to leave a clue. He disappeared to avoid trouble, but he was unable to leave it totally hanging. He wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, as my mum used to say, and he was probably in a hurry, but he left us a clue. He was a show-off. He wanted credit."
"Hmm," said Jane.
"Pea?" She held out the plastic bag.
Frank took one and ate it like someone who ate peas professionally. One swift movement of his thumb and the pod was empty, the peas inside his mouth and gone.
"You're right," he said. "They are still good."
He ate another and then another.
"The baby would be easier to find if it was dead," said Jane.
Frank's forehead crinkled.
"I don't want it to be dead, Frank. I'm just saying. Death records for most likely a two-year or less period would be easier to peruse than the whole world in search of a thirty-six-year-old."
"If it lived, chances are good it was given away."
"Or worse, when you consider what happened to its mother," said Jane.
"Whose mother?" It was Sadie back with supplies.
"No one's," said Frank.
They all ate cake.
Sadie and Jane departed together with promises of returning soon. He asked to speak to each of them individually before they left. With Garth being at work, he wanted to make sure that Sadie would be okay on her own during the day till Emma arrived.
"Of course I will," said Sadie. "Tomorrow is very soon, Dad."
Tomorrow! Emma was coming tomorrow!
With Jane he had one request: please wait for me before you go to see Mrs. Beresford again.
"Of course, Frank! What do you think?"
"Thanks, Jane."
"Sadie and I are going to the Red Top for a bite to eat."
"That's fantastic," Frank said and his eyes closed. He was very, very tired.
36
"The nightie that the girl was wearing was from Eaton's," said Jane.
"Great," said Frank. "I'm sure that will help us immeasurably."
They were in Frank's living room. He was home from the hospital, propped up on the couch with pillows behind him. Jane was in an easy chair. They were drinking tea that Emma had prepared for them.
All three kids were in the kitchen making preparations for a welcome home barbecue for their dad. Even though Emma had been home for a few days, Garth and Sadie were still grilling her about her life in Hawaii.
"Have you gone surfing yet? Are you going to?"
"Do people live on the beaches?"
"Have you seen anyone famous?"
"Is it as beautiful as it looks in pictures?"
"Do girl sunbathe with no top on?" That last question from Garth.
"What?" asked Emma.
"Garth often leaves the esses off the ends of his words," Sadie explained. "Are you going to live there forever? Can I come and visit you?"
"Of course you can," said Emma.
Frank was beaming.
Jane smiled back at him.
"It must be good to have her home," she said.
"Yes," Frank said, wishing he could keep all three of them in the kitchen forever.
"Anyway," Jane said, "other than the nightie, they're no further along. I spoke to Chas this morning."
Frank wanted to ask Jane who called whom, but he held back.
"Let's give her a name," he said. "I don't like calling her the girl in the wall and other things like that."
"Rilla," said Jane.
"Rilla?"
"Yeah. She's one of Anne of Green Gables' kids, her youngest daughter. That's what I've been calling her to myself all along."
"Rilla of Ingleside," Emma called out from the kitchen.
"That's her!" said Jane.
"I like it," Frank said. "Rilla."
"Why do they have to call unidentified females Jane Doe?" Jane asked.
"I'm not sure. I guess someone just came up with a fairly simple name without too many syllables."
"I have a simple name that is the same as countless sad cases all over the English-speaking world who have no one to claim them. You'd think my parents could have tried a little harder."
"They probably just liked the name Jane and didn't think too much past that."
"One of my grandmas was called Jane."
"Well, there you are then."
"They should have thought it through better."
"Well, I guess you could take it up with them now if you think it would help."
"I just might."
They drank their tea and munched on Emma's chocolate chip cookies. She was almost as good a baker as Sadie.
"How would you feel about going and visiting Mrs. Beresford again?" Frank said.
"I thought you'd never ask," said Jane. "I'll drive. I brought my car."
"We can walk," Frank said. "I'm up to it, if that's what you're thinking."
"I'm sure you are, Frank, but it might be hard work talking to her and you'll need all your strength for that."
It was very important to Frank that Jane not think he wasn't up to anything that required physical stamina. But he let her have her way. He could walk tomorrow. He could walk all the way into next week once he got home from dealing with Mrs. Beresford again. He had to admit he felt a little weary just thinking about it.
"Thanks for the tea, Emma," he called out. "Jane and I are going out for a little while."
Emma came around the corner with a dish towel over her shoulder and two hands full of ground beef.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Out," Frank said, grinning from ear to ear.
"We're going for a little drive," said Jane. "I'll have him back within the hour, Emma. I promise."
Emma kissed her dad, dropping a lump of meat on the floor.
"Be careful," she said.
"You too," said Frank.
"Will you come back and have burgers with us, Jane?" Emma called after them.
"I'd love to, Emma. Thanks."
"We're having other stuff too, including cake."
"Great! I'll be here."
Jane drove her 1990 Honda down Lyndale Drive and parked at the end of Lloyd.
"Do we know what we're going to ask her about?" Jane said.
"Yes," said Frank.
Mrs. Beresford was in what seemed to be her usual position of standing in her dirt yard with Tina at her side, neither of them doing much of anything.
The dog ran to greet Frank and leaned into his leg so hard she would have fallen over if he'd moved it suddenly.
"Hi, Tall Ears," Frank said and reached down to scratch her under her chin.
"I hear you had a heart attack," said Mrs. Beresford.
"You don't miss much do you, Mrs. B.?"
"Beresford," she said. "My name is Mrs. Beresford."
Frank didn't blame her for saying it. There was no way he would allow anyone to call him Mr. F. He rubbed the tips of Tina's ears and enjoyed his new feeling of calm. He was absolutely certain that two weeks ago he would have felt like slapping Mrs. Beresford, and today she seemed comical to him. And totally harmless. Perhaps heart attacks were good things. Mild ones, anyway. Emma was home. Not for long, but even so. You couldn't beat that as a good thing.
"Mrs. Beresford, do you remember somebody named Mrs. Mortimer?" Frank asked. "She grew up on Monck, would be about my age."
"Certainly I remember Mrs. Mortimer," she said and dragged a sandal across the dirt. She was leaning on a cane today, supporting herself with both hands. "And there's no need to glance surreptitiously at one another."
Frank pressed on. "It's just that, well, we know that she also used to take pictures of dead people and we wondered if there could have been any connection between her and Jim Coulthard, since they were in the same line of work."
"They weren't in the same line of work." Mrs. Beresford jabbed her cane hard into the dirt. "Mrs. Mortimer had a respectable business that filled a need in the community at the time. Jim Coulthard was a carny, a scammer, on the wrong side of everything. I don't like to talk of them in the same breath. He ruined it for her, you know. She had a good little business going, finally found something to do with herself other than stare at people through those oversized glasses of hers. And he up and ruined it."
"How did he do that?" Jane asked.
"He aimed to railroad her into letting him into her business, with all his wild ideas and crazy schemes. He scared her, with his trying to muscle in. I heard him do it. I was sitting in the next booth at the Red Top eating my supper when he tried to coerce her. She stuck to her guns, though, wouldn't let him. She was very brave, Mrs. Mortimer.
"But it tainted the good thing she had going and it wore on her, especially after George got sick. She let the business go. Coulthard tried to take it over when she stepped back from it for good, but he couldn't pull it off. No normal family wanted that wicked man with his costumes and poses and wayward ideas coming anywhere near its loved ones. Oh, he continued to have customers. There's a market for everything, no matter how low it goes, but it dwindled, and fast. Far be it from me to know the ins and outs of what he was doing, but I know it dwindled.
"And now we know just how low he went with his carryings-on, don't we? Though the Lord only knows if we'll ever get to the bottom of it. Is there any progress being made, do you know?"
Mrs. Beresford had been speaking to the dirt up till now, but she looked at Frank when she asked this last question.
"I'm sure you know at least as much as I do, Mrs. Beresford," Frank said. "I'm not a policeman anymore."
"You sure don't act as though you aren't," she said.
He considered showing her the photograph, but knew it wasn't necessary. It was definitely Coulthard's work. He still had no idea how it related to young Rilla, but perhaps he never would. Maybe, as he previously thought, it was just the mad photographer's way of signing his work.
Frank smiled at her. He was feeling better than he had in months. He didn't even spend much time wondering why Mrs. Beresford hadn't suggested before that it might have been Coulthard who boarded up the girl in the wall. She just hadn't, that's all. She hadn't pulled any punches in stressing how evil she thought he was.
Cautious as he had been broaching the subject of Mrs. Mortimer, he didn't regret it now, as he'd thought he might. It was obvious that Mrs. Beresford, with all her unpleasant foibles, respected Mrs. Mortimer, even had a protective wing not unlike Frank's, ready to cover her gently if anyone was going to mess with her.
"All this talk about Mrs. Mortimer," said Mrs. Beresford. "Why on earth don't you just go and see her and speak to her yourselves?"
Frank felt like a moron. He looked at Jane. Her mouth hung open like he'd never seen it before. He felt a certain kinship with her then and he laughed out loud.
Jane didn't make a sound, just stood there with her mouth hanging open. Mrs. Beresford certainly didn't laugh, but Frank wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she never had.
"So Mrs. Mortimer is still alive then?" Frank asked. "And here in Winnipeg?"
"She is. She lives in one of those three-storey walk-ups on Chandos."
"Well, I'll be darned," said Frank.
Jane drove him home. He'd still be able to fit in a good nap before the barbeque.
Later that evening, when Frank saw Jane to her car, she said, "I think you should go alone to see Mrs. Mortimer. She doesn't know me."
"She likely won't know me either," said Frank, "But yes, I should go alone. I'll keep you posted."
37
Mrs. Mortimer awoke in a sunbeam that streamed through the bedroom window of her small apartment in the Chanta Lisa Plaza on Chandos Avenue. Her eyes didn't open as easily as they used to.
George had spoken to her only moments before. She went back to the dream. It was where she wanted to be.
Her transistor radio, the one George gave her, rings as though it were a telephone. Someone answers and she hears her brother on speakerphone saying, "Is Mrs. Mortimer there?"
She is on top of the radio in an instant, panic-stricken in case she can't make herself heard.
"Georgie? Georgie!"
"That's what they call me," he says.
His voice is tired and sad sounding.
And then he says, "I'm waiting for you to come home."
That's when she had woken up and struggled briefly with her eyes.
George had appeared to her in dreams before, but often in bad ways --- trying to be free of her, not loving her.
This one filled her with something that felt in a way like she used to feel when she took pictures of the dead: sure of herself and as though a clear path stretched out in front of her. She felt proactive. That was a word she had noticed lately on television and in the newspaper. Today she would apply it to herself.
The means wasn't yet clear to her. But there were trains out there, tall buildings, and sharp objects. She could do this thing that would take her to her brother.
It wasn't a working day for her. She tidied her apartment and dressed herself in loose clothes; she didn't want to sweat today.
A familiar-looking man walked toward her down the cracked sidewalk. As he came closer he peered into her face, a little too closely for comfort.
"Mrs. Mortimer?" he asked.
She was too stunned at first to answer him.
"I'm Frank Foote. You probably don't remember me."
And it came back to her: the day someone had tripped her, the day Jim Coulthard had tripped her and Frank had come to her rescue. He helped her with her glasses and cared about her scraped hands and delivered her safely to George. She remembered him from other times too, but none were as vivid as that day in the park.
"Frank Foote," she said now.
"Yes. I wonder if you'd like to come with me to the Red Top for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate."
She hesitated. This interfered with her plan, but she supposed it could wait an extra half hour or so. She had heard about the discovery on Lloyd and figured that must be what this was about. They would want to put her in jail now.
"Yes, all right, Frank Foote," she said. "A cup of hot chocolate would be nice. I'm not much of a one for coffee."
It was a cool morning. They made the short trek to the Red Top and settled in with their hot drinks. Mrs. Mortimer wanted a jam buster but they didn't have them anymore.
"Is this about that dead body they found on Lloyd Avenue?" she asked.
"Yes, it is."
"I think I know who it is."
The words had been perched on the inside of her lips for days, dying to escape. She just hadn't had the right person to say them to.
"They said in the paper that the girl had Down Syndrome," she said.
"Yes."
"I know what that is. I work at the hospital."
Frank hadn't sipped his hot chocolate yet. He held it with both hands and looked at her. She liked the way he didn't push her. He let her talk and wasn't afraid of the silences like so many people were.
"Where should I start?" she asked.
She had a chocolate moustache; she could feel it. She tried to capture it with her tongue.
"Wherever you're comfortable, Mrs. Mortimer," Frank said. "I'll try and save my questions till the end, as best I can."
"I met the Down Syndrome girl twice."
She told him about the bad thing at the Women's Pavilion. She had never told anyone before.
"My first instinct was to take pictures of what was going on and that turned out to be the worst mistake of my life."
She said it matter-of-factly, as though everyone has a worst mistake and that one just happened to be hers.
"What year was that, Mrs. Mortimer, that the baby was born and then died?"
"1970. April of 1970. As far as I know the baby's name was Buckingham and the Down Syndrome girl's name was too, because that was the name of the mother."
"The woman who smothered the baby," said Frank.
"Yes. She was the baby's grandmother. She had a gash for a mouth and she didn't like the smell of my perfume. It was lavender. I met her twice, same as the girl, and both times she told me she didn't like the smell of me. I was fond of the scent myself. Not anymore, though."
Mrs. Mortimer sipped her hot chocolate and Frank his. They were the only ones in the front booths. That was good. She didn't have to worry about someone else listening to her words.
"I didn't know that Mrs. Buckingham and Jim Coulthard knew each other, not till the day she called me to her house on Wellington Crescent. It turned out he was her yard man. I wasn't really working anymore by then, but I was lured there by the address."
She felt herself blushing.
"It used to be my favourite street," she said.
"It's a beautiful street," said Frank. "I'm not surprised it was your favourite."
"Not any more," she said.
She told him then about the second bad thing.
"Regina was cold when I got there. It was very cold in the house but I think her coldness was from death. I think she had died the night before and they waited till morning to call me."
"Her name was Regina," said Frank.
"Yes. Am I in trouble, Frank Foote?"
"No. You are definitely not in trouble. Please, just call me Frank."
"I'll try," she said. "They killed her. It was murder, just like with the grandbaby."
Mrs. Mortimer was positive that Frank wanted to ask her why she hadn't come forward then or now with her wealth of information. But he didn't. He reminded her of George in his way of not asking the hard questions.
"I saw bruises on Regina's nose and on her arms as though she had been fighting for her life. I think they smothered her just like the grandmother did the baby. But she was a lot bigger than that little baby, so one of them must have held her down while the other used a pillow on her. My guess is that Jim did the holding and Mrs. Buckingham did the pillow part. She had experience in that area.
"At first I couldn't figure out why I was there. He said they wanted photographs but that wasn't it. She said that she couldn't let me live. That was the real reason. She was worried because I knew about her killing ways.
"Even though I hadn't yet, she thought I was going to tell about the baby. I was too scared to, but she didn't know that. She couldn't believe I wouldn't tell. Jim said so later. He said he told her I didn't have it in me, but she wouldn't have it. She invited me to her house because she wanted Jim to kill me. I escaped, though. They didn't get me. I went to see Georgie in the hospital instead. It was the last time I saw him except laid out in his coffin."
Mrs. Mortimer's breaths were shallow for a bit, but gradually they deepened again and she resumed her story.
"After the first bad thing, Mrs. Buckingham made Jim fix it so he could meet me. He wasn't to mention the Women's Pavilion, though. It turned out he was there on the day she killed the baby. He accompanied her, but wouldn't go in to keep watch the way she wanted him to. Knowing her as well as he did, he knew she'd sell him up the river if anything went wrong. He told me that he'd seen me walk away that day and knew we'd meet again. When Mrs. Buckingham described me to him and ordered him to contact me, to assess me as he put it, he knew where to find me. He recognized me from the neighbourhood and knew about my business."
"Excuse me for interrupting," said Frank, "but how on earth did Mrs. Buckingham get away with killing the baby?"
"She was lucky," said Mrs. Mortimer. "It was a Sunday. There wasn't a lot of staff roaming around. I can vouch for that. The way Jim told it, an aide brought the baby in to be nursed and Mrs. Buckingham took charge, probably scared the aide half to death. When she was finished her evil task she rigged the baby up in Regina's arms, called for a nurse, and then pretended she was alarmed. There's often no outward evidence of smothering, as I'm sure you know, Frank Foote. She probably didn't have to press down hard enough to make bruises that time. It was just a little baby.
"Regina probably wouldn't have been in the Women's Pavilion at all if she hadn't gone into labour in the back seat of Mrs. Buckingham's car when Jim was driving. He said Mrs. Buckingham ordered him to drive them home but he disobeyed her and went to Emergency at the General. From there she was transferred to the Women's Pavilion."
"You've had a lot to carry all these years," said Frank.
"May I go on now?" Mrs. Mortimer said.
"Certainly, certainly. Please continue."
"Jim called me to come and take pictures of his dad on the day he died. Only, it turned out it wasn't his dad at all; it was just an old man near death who didn't have any family hovering."
"Jeez," said Frank. "That could very easily have blown up in his face."
"Yes. But it didn't."
They were quiet for a few minutes, sipping their chocolate that was no longer hot.
"When I saw Jim again I asked him if he would have killed me if he could have caught me that day. He said, of course not. I said, why did he let Mrs. Buckingham phone me and he said partly because she wouldn't shut up about me. She'd been nagging him for months. And partly because he thought it might be nice to talk to me again. That's when I realized I was speaking to a crazy person. Up until that moment in my life I actually thought I was the craziest person I was ever going to meet. I sure don't think so anymore."
"You're not crazy," said Frank. "Not even close."
"You know what, Frank Foote?"
"What, Mrs. Mortimer?"
"I think there was another reason I was there that day. At the house on Wellington Crescent, I mean."
She wanted to tell him everything.
"Jim wanted a thrill. I don't have a full understanding of thrills," she said. "I'm pretty sure I've never had one. But I've heard about them and read about them and I believe I know what they are."
Frank reached one of his hands halfway across the table.
"He wanted someone to witness his handiwork, and as far as he was concerned, I was a good safe prospect. He wasn't wrong."
She recited the address on Wellington Crescent and the date of her appointment there.
"You've got a good memory," said Frank.
"I don't choose to remember those things as well as I do. Also, I have a book at home of every appointment I ever made, whether I took pictures or not. It seemed important to keep a record.
"The lavender perfume I wore belonged to my mother. She kept it in the bathroom and I used it all the time without asking. I thought at first that I was being punished for stealing dabs of the scent but I'm pretty sure now that I was off base with that thought."
"You've done nothing wrong, Mrs. Mortimer," Frank said.
"That's what Georgie always used to say to me. I like hearing you say it, too."
"I knew your brother, George, a little," said Frank. "He was a fine person."
"Yes. I dreamed about him this morning.
"It wasn't just an aversion to the scent," she went on. "She out and out hated it; she was nasty about it both days."
They were finished their hot chocolate and Mrs. Mortimer wondered about having another one, but she hadn't brought any money with her and didn't know if it was acceptable to have two in a row when someone else was paying.
"Do you believe in trusting your instincts, Frank Foote?"
He got a funny look on his face, one that she couldn't decipher.
"Good question, Mrs. Mortimer," he said. "It's one I've struggled with. I don't know how many times I've told my kids to pay attention to the feelings they have inside, especially if something doesn't feel quite right. And then I follow my own advice and I end up inside out, upside down, and twisted sideways. In a word, wrong."
"Yes, I know what you mean. I've heard that same advice as though it was foolproof, but it's not. It's just not."
"Maybe for some people it is," said Frank.
"Hmm," said Mrs. Mortimer.
He smiled at her. "You don't believe that."
"I'm not sure what I believe about anyone else," she said. "I only know about me. When I followed my instincts that day at the Women's Pavilion and took those pictures, it worked out very badly for me."
"Maybe that wasn't an instinct so much as just a reaction," said Frank.
He stood up.
"What's the difference?" she asked.
"Let me walk you to where you were going," he said.
She supposed he didn't know what the difference was.
"I'm not sure where that was going to be," she said.
"Well, let's go to the river then."
Frank paid for their drinks and they headed across St. Mary's Road at the lights.
Mrs. Mortimer kept expecting Frank to ask her why she hadn't come forward, but he didn't. As they headed down Coniston, she stopped and turned towards him.
"Do you want me to come forward to help put a name to the girl?"
Frank touched her arm and they continued walking.
"I don't think so," he said. "I have to ponder it, but I'm quite sure it won't help anyone."
"If you want me to, I will. It's the going-to-jail part that scares me. That's what's kept me from coming forward. I don't think I'd be very good at jail. I can picture people not being very nice to me there, not liking me much."
"You won't be going anywhere," Frank said. "That's a promise."
Mrs. Mortimer realized that it no longer mattered if she was sent to jail because she wouldn't have to go. She had other plans.
They walked the rest of the way to the river in silence and found a bench to sit on. A wind had come up and the river had lost some of its usual calm.
"You said you work at the hospital," Frank said. "What do you do there, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I work mostly on the palliative care ward sitting with loved ones where needed, usually when the loved one is alone except for the dying person. That's what I do."
"That sounds like a good job," said Frank. "An important job."
"Yes. I can usually tell whether I'm wanted, not always, mind you. That's the tricky part. It keeps me on my toes."
A hint of a smile softened Mrs. Mortimer's already smooth face.
"Sometimes I wash their feet. The patients', I mean, not the loved ones'."
"What about photography?" asked Frank. "Do you still keep a hand in there?"
"I haven't taken a picture since 1970," she said. "The year that Georgie died, the year that I was summoned to the house on Wellington Crescent."
"That's too bad," Frank said.
They talked till long past the chill came off the day and the wind left the river to ease its way back to a surface stillness. It was never quiet underneath.
"Jim's interest in my work seemed genuine enough," Mrs. Mortimer said at one point. "That's another example of a time my instincts were off. I blurted out ideas for my business and then he stole me away."
"Stole you away?"
"Yes. I had an occupation and he stole me away from it. I wasn't able to get back to the life that I had built, even after he disappeared and I should have been free to do so."
"He set a trap for you that day, Mrs. Mortimer."
"Yes. I shouldn't have trusted him."
"There was no way for you to know."
"Perhaps if I had better instincts."
She wouldn't budge on her lack of good judgment on that day long ago when she first met Jim Coulthard.
"My photography business had a very brief heyday," she said. "But my hospital work came along and it has suited me very well."
She cleared her throat.
"Excuse me. I don't usually talk this much all at once."
"Take your time," Frank said. "There's no hurry. None at all."
Her voice was fading.
"I saw him once more after that day on the crescent and then I never saw him again. He turned up at Georgie's funeral. That was when he told me about Mrs. Buckingham's schemes and all the rest of it. She had waited too long to have a baby, he said. She was in her mid-forties by the time she got pregnant that one and only time. He figured that was the root of all her problems. I figure there were way more roots than that."
"Where was her husband?" asked Frank.
"Dead," said Mrs. Mortimer. "'He up and died on me' was the way she put it. It was like she was mad at him for dying. I can almost understand that, but not the rest of it.
"I'm surprised I'm still alive," she went on. "I thought for the longest time that one of them would come to kill me. But it didn't happen. I guess she stopped worrying about me. I guess they figured hiding Regina in the wall was the end of it. And so it was, till now."
"He shouldn't have gone to George's funeral," Frank said.
"I didn't think so," said Mrs. Mortimer. "My dad thanked him for coming. He didn't know who he was, just figured he was a friend of Georgie's. He even came to the house after and ate fancy sandwiches and dainties."
"Do you know where he went when he disappeared?" Frank asked.
"No. I just pray that it's forever."
He surprised her with his next question.
"Who do you pray to, Mrs. Mortimer?"
"Georgie," she said. "How about you? Who do you pray to?"
"No one," Frank said. "Maybe I should give George a try. Would you mind if I did? Do you think he'd mind?"
"I'd like it if you did," she said. "I'm sure he would too."
"Unless both of our instincts are a little to the left of centre on this one," said Frank.
He smiled and stood up and she stood too, offering another version of a softening of her face. It had little to do with her mouth, more a whole shifting of the understructure.
"Have you been sick, Frank Foote?" she asked as they walked toward her home.
"Yes, I have. How did you know?"
"I don't know."
"I'm feeling quite a bit better now than I have been."
"Good."
He left her at the sidewalk leading to her apartment building. She had no intention of going inside.
"Don't die, Frank Foote," she said.
She had wanted to confide in him about her own lifelong desire to die, the way she so often had with George.
38
Frank and Jane talked at length and decided not to go to the police. With Mrs. Mortimer's information Baby Buckingham could be traced and exhumed and compared to the mother's DNA. But to what end? To give the mother a name? She didn't need to be given a name. She already had three: Jane Doe, Regina Buckingham, and Rilla. The whole world didn't have to know all of them. They agreed there was no good reason to exhume the tiny baby's bones.
The police were already onto Jim Coulthard as the only suspect. The estimation from the medical examiner's office of the date of death had come back as between thirty and forty years. Nothing Mrs. Mortimer could tell them would make their search for him any easier. Frank's fear that she might get into more trouble than she deserved or could manage guided them in their decision.
If Coulthard was still alive and run to ground he should be held accountable and would be, but she didn't need to help unless absolutely necessary if and when the time came.
"Was he the father of Baby Buckingham?" Jane asked.
"I don't know," said Frank.
"Did you ask Mrs. Mortimer?"
"No, I did not."
"Will you?"
"If they find Coulthard, I will, because he should be punished for that too, but if they don't turn him up I won't. There's no reason to bother her with it."
"You've developed quite a soft spot for Mrs. M.," said Jane. She had yet to meet her.
"Yes, I guess I have. She's had a very heavy load and she's had to carry it all alone. She's like a little soldier. I quite like her."
Frank thought back to his and Jane's first musings as to how Rilla got inside the wall: Jane with her ideas of her being buried alive, trying to claw her way out and him with his hopes of a gentle burial by a loved one. Neither of them was correct, but reality was heavily tilted toward Jane's take on it, if Mrs. Mortimer was to be believed about the smothering, and she probably was. There was no gentleness and for sure no loved ones.
"I burned the photograph," he said.
"Do your kids know?"
"No."
"What if they ask?"
"I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I won't lie."
There were certain things that couldn't be known: the true inner workings of the brain of Mrs. Buckingham --- what caused her revulsion to the scent of lavender, for instance? And what about Jim Coulthard's brain? Odd duck didn't begin to describe him. Some things die with the people they belong to --- countless ideas and bits of personal knowledge. Perhaps they float about in the atmosphere for a spell and then dissipate to nothing; perhaps they enter somewhere else in a different form, not good or bad, just different; or maybe a new host creates something fresh from them, something unrecognizable, almost original.
It's a bit like Jane's musings about houses hanging on to their stories, Frank thought. What happens to a person's stories when death claims the body, the stories that he or she never shared?
If the Coulthard dad had been a sick man in the sixties, chances were excellent that he was dead. There might still be a chance to get some answers from Jim Coulthard, but probably not. He was so long gone. Frank pictured him washed up on a rocky shore in some faraway land, his bones bare, without even a faded nightgown to protect them from the elements.
There was something else Frank supposed he would never know the answer to, something more personal. And that was whether all his sadness and irrational rage over the past months, his feelings of uselessness and his difficulty with other human beings had been related to his mild heart attack, as Sadie insisted on calling it. A cloud had definitely lifted; his fears had eased. Could the seemingly simple operation involving small balloons have done all that?
39
Mrs. Buckingham is ninety-six years old and lives in the Riverview Health Centre. According to staff, no one has visited her in all the time she has been there, over twenty years.
Frank and Jane go to see her. He wanted to go alone but Jane insisted on coming along. If the woman is lucid she has some questions for her.
But Mrs. Buckingham has no awareness of them. She is tiny under her bedspread, almost flat.
The room is very small, but there isn't a lot of clutter: no photos or knickknacks or drawings of puppy dogs like in the rooms of those residents with children and grandchildren.
Frank remembers what he imagined himself doing and flushes with shame. He lay in bed that morning and planned out an elaborate scenario, the purpose of which was to cause discomfort for the pitiful creature in the bed.
"What is it, Frank? What's wrong?" asks Jane.
"Nothing," he says and turns away from her. "It's just so bare and lifeless here."
That morning he pictured driving out to Pier 1 Imports where he was quite sure he would be able to find a bottle of lavender scent --- more than one --- and those little diffuser sticks, lots of them --- enough to do some serious diffusing. He would set them up on her bedside table, on top of her television, wherever he could find a clear flat spot, and he would leave them there. It would be her punishment.
A hospital worker comes in.
"Are you relatives of Mrs. Buckingham?" he asks.
"No." They answer together.
"She doesn't wake up very often anymore," he says.
Neither Frank nor Jane responds and he exits the room.
Frank looks at Mrs. Buckingham now; her face is turned to the wall.
"I guess there's nothing to do here," says Jane.
Frank walks around to the other side of the bed.
"What are you doing?" Jane asks.
"I want to see her face," he says.
Jane touches his shoulder. "I'll wait for you in the hall."
The face is a grid of dried-out lines. Nothing special.
They walk in silence across the hospital grounds to Jane's car.
Frank still feels bad about the lavender thing, the thing he didn't do.
40
Early the next morning Jane dropped by Frank's house with several pieces of paper clutched in her hand.
Emma was back in Honolulu and Garth and Sadie were still asleep.
"I got Mrs. Buckingham's maiden name from the nurses at Riverview," she said by way of greeting. "It was Box, as in Box Insurance. Her first name is Willa. And her husband's name was Ira Buckingham. I did a little Googling yesterday after I dropped you off."
"You look like you've Googled up a storm," Frank said.
"Yes, I have." Jane smiled. "And I went through a million rolls of microfiche on the third floor of the library. Mostly old Free Presses and Tribunes. It was fun, but my neck hurts." She twisted her head from side to side.
Frank made a new pot of coffee and they headed out to the porch, where Jane spread her papers out on the dusty table. They were covered with her tidy, organized writing.
"Willa Box came from a wealthy family in small-town southern Ontario," Jane began. "Her dad was a big shot there, the owner of Box Insurance, a business that his grandfather began in the 1800's.
"She was an only child and there's no record of her doing anything but sitting daintily between her parents on social occasions till she married Ira Buckingham in 1948 when she was thirty-eight years old. It was a grand wedding in her hometown --- pictures in the local paper, a cake the size of a Volkswagen. Now I may be making this up, but I think the whole town gave a collective sigh of relief that Willa had finally snagged a man."
Frank chuckled. "The whole town?"
"Even if he was a ne'er-do-well from the prairies," Jane went on. "Albeit a handsome one."
"Wait. How do you know that?" asked Frank.
"Well, I know he was handsome from the pictures and I'm guessing that he was a ne'er-do-well. There was no mention of what he did before he married Willa. Immediately following their honeymoon in Lake of the Woods they moved to Winnipeg, where a western branch of the insurance company was set up, courtesy of Old Man Box. Ira was the manager. The house on Wellington Crescent was also a gift from Willa's parents. Her life was being engineered by her father to keep up appearances."
"You can't know this, Jane."
"Well, the outline is there. It can be filled in any way you like. But I think my theory has merit: a wealthy, snooty family from southern Ontario whose little princess has gradually turned into a brittle spinster and started causing them considerable embarrassment because of her extreme undesirability. They ship her off to the 'Peg with her handsome new husband and hope for the best."
"Brittle?"
"I admit, that's a guess," Jane said. "It might have taken more years and more disappointment for the brittleness to set it. Anyway, the best didn't happen. Far from it. Oh, for the first few years Willa and Ira were fairly active on the Winnipeg social scene. They'd turn up at fundraisers and golf tournaments and fancy society-type weddings.
"But then there were a few years in a row of bad hailstorms on the prairies. Ira pretty much ran the business into the ground with the huge insurance payouts and his poor management techniques. It was big news at the time. The Box Insurance we know today has no connection at all to the original family. Willa and Ira hung on for a while in the years when the business was going down the tubes, but then they fell completely out of the public eye.
"There was no mention anywhere of the birth of Regina. I wouldn't be surprised if she was a secret for her whole life, except for the few days she spent in the Women's Pavilion to give birth to Baby Buckingham."
"A secret life," said Frank. "What about when she was born?"
"I don't know," said Jane. "Maybe Willa had her at home. Maybe she knew what was coming and figured her own possible death was better than anyone knowing about her baby."
"Would they have had the wherewithal in those days to know about Down Syndrome before birth? What about her doctor? Would she not have had a doctor?"
"I don't know, Frank," Jane said firmly. "All I know is there was no record of the baby being born. I wouldn't be surprised if even Willa's parents never got wind of Regina. They both died in the mid-fifties within a year of each other.
"Willa was probably too ashamed of Regina to even consider placing her in an institution. She kept her at home and struggled. And then to top it off, Ira died. There was an announcement of his death in both papers. A heart attack was hinted at, but no mention of a funeral or memorial service of any kind. I think by then Mrs. Buckingham was pretty much fucked."
Frank looked over both shoulders to make sure neither of his kids were around to hear Jane say "fuck." They weren't.
"Sorry," said Jane.
They sipped their coffee and listened to shufflings inside the house as one or more of the kids tumbled out of bed.
"I guess the rest of her life has been financed by what her father would have left her," said Frank.
"Yup," said Jane. "I can't see how it does anyone any good to have their whole life financed. It would be too easy to do nothing, if you were a certain type of person. Like Willa was.
"She was very isolated," Jane went on. "Not only was she an only child, but both of her parents were too. No cousins or aunts or uncles to show an interest."
"That happens," Frank said, remembering Christmases when he and his mum and dad had been the only ones at their dinner table.
"Her whole life was about appearances," said Jane. "Nothing excuses what she did, of course, but it helps me, anyway, to understand a little bit about where she was coming from, the pressure she was under."
"Except that you're making a lot of it up," said Frank.
"Probably not," said Jane.
Sadie joined them on the porch and they set aside their speculations for the time being.
Within the month there was a brief notice in the Free Press about the death of Willa Buckingham, née Box. It was the shortest obituary Frank had ever seen.
41
No one claimed Rilla's body, so the Province of Manitoba managed the burial in May of the following year. Frank remembered another such funeral in Brookside Cemetery many years ago for a tiny baby found in a rain barrel. That baby had gone unclaimed as well.
For no clear reason, it also reminded him of the time he had found a cat on Young Street. The little fellow had been living outside and seemed at the end of his tether. Frank took him to a vet, where he was given the once-over. There wasn't much wrong with him that food, rest, and extensive dental work wouldn't cure. The vet needed to know who would be picking the cat up. Frank hadn't thought it through, so it was suddenly his, as there was no one else. That's how they'd come to have Hugh as a pet all those years, till he finally died of natural causes.
Rilla was cremated, and Frank and Jane and Garth and Sadie went to the graveside ceremony. Frank and Jane knew, of course, that her name was Regina, but neither of them liked it, so they stuck with Rilla. A few others turned out: province people, Frank guessed, and funeral junkies, who were mostly elderly women. He had invited Mrs. Mortimer to come with them, but she had declined.
Rilla was buried as Jane Doe.
With a little help from an old contact at Vital Statistics Frank had been able to track down Baby Boy Buckingham, who died in April of 1970. He, too, was buried at Brookside, not far from his mother, with a few other long-dead Buckinghams, including his grandfather and his grandmother in her recently dug grave. He and Jane had found him on a previous excursion.
Frank had a qualm or two about burying Rilla away from the others but didn't suppose it mattered in the grand scheme of things. He spoke to George about it and put his mind at rest.
There had been no need to involve Mrs. Mortimer. She owned no clues to the whereabouts of Jim Coulthard and that was the only knot left untied as far as Frank was concerned. As Mrs. Beresford had said, he was away and then he was missing and then he was just gone.
Mrs. Mortimer had carved out a life for herself that could carry her through, Frank hoped. Over the last months she had often talked to him of dying and he never felt as though he did a very good job on his side of those conversations. There were no words, he supposed, at least none that he knew, that could keep her here on earth if she truly wanted to die.
Unbeknownst to the others that day, Mrs. Mortimer was at the cemetery watching from a ways back behind an old oak tree.
"Thanks, Frank Foote," she said. "Thanks, Georgie."
It was impossible that he could have heard her, but at that moment Frank turned towards the giant oak and smiled, giving an almost imperceptible nod toward the small voice that rose up on the warm spring breeze.
"Don't die, Mrs. Mortimer," he whispered softly and turned back toward the others.
About the Author
Alison Preston was born and raised in Winnipeg. After trying on a number of other Canadian cities, she returned to her hometown, where she currently resides. All of her mysteries are set in the Norwood Flats area of Winnipeg, including The Rain Barrel Baby, The Geranium Girls, Cherry Bites, and Sunny Dreams.
A graduate of the University of Winnipeg, and a letter carrier for twenty-eight years, Alison has been twice nominated for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer, following the publications of The Rain Barrel Baby (Signature Editions) and her first novel A Blue and Golden Year (Turnstone Press). She was also shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for Cherry Bites and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher for Sunny Dreams.
Also by Alison Preston
Sunny Dreams
978-1897109-20-5
On a spring morning in 1925, Violet Palmer and her mother are choosing treats from the dessert display at Picardy's restaurant in downtown Winnipeg when baby Sunny is abducted from her pram mere feet away. As the first minutes turn to days, months, then years, the Palmer family collapses. Mrs. Palmer never recovers from her loss and succumbs to her grief, leaving Violet motherless. A decade later, the appearance of a couple of drifters looking for work finally sheds surprising light on the Palmer tragedy.
\* Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher Finalist
Cherry Bites
978-0921833-99-4
On a summer afternoon in 1954, a jealous four-year-old Cherry Ring bites her baby brother on the cheek, so hard that he needs a skin graft to repair the damage and will have a scar for the rest of his life. Cherry knows what's she's done is wrong, and she really is sorry. But sorry isn't good enough. The bite marks the beginning of a troubled relationship between the siblings that will last a lifetime. When disturbing incidents begin to occur around her house in the sultry summer of 1995, Cherry realizes she has never managed to escape her past --- or her brother.
\* Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award Finalist
\* McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award Finalist
The Geranium Girls
978-0921833-83-3
Beryl Kyte goes for a hike one beautiful spring Sunday in St. Vital Park and literally trips over a body, a dead woman with mushrooms sprouting in her mouth. A cellphone-toting passerby calls the police. Among the officers who arrive on the scene is that nice Inspector Frank Foote, whom Beryl has seen around her neighborhood. She is questioned and escorted home. It isn't long, however, before another body turns up and then another. As she follows the horrific discoveries in The Winnipeg Free Press, Beryl thinks she sees a pattern emerging.
The Rain Barrel Baby
978-0921833-73-4
Inspector Frank Foote's quiet Winnipeg neighbourhood is greening into summer when a dead baby is discovered in his neighbour's rain barrel. The tiny body has evidently been in the rain barrel for some time, and there are no obvious leads in the case. Frank is a cop, and he's seen a lot of crime scenes, but this one is a little too close to home. Frank is a good father, he tries to be a good husband, and he hopes he is a good cop. But, like all of us, Frank has a few old secrets that he is ashamed of. And when Ivy Grace suddenly resurfaces after a long absence, one thing is certain: before this summer ends, Frank will have to confront his past.

