Prized Possessions

by L. R. Wright

  He’d also opened cardboard boxes in the basement, which turned out to be full of books.

  “Charlie was going to build floor-to-ceiling shelves,” Emma explained. “In the upstairs bedroom. But he never got around to it.”

  And there was a trunk too. Emma found the key in a bureau drawer. “This is where he kept things from his childhood,” she said, unlocking it, “and from his years at university.”

  Textbooks. Notebooks. Term papers. Yearbooks. Alberg went through them all.

  He was convinced, sitting at his dining room table, drinking lukewarm coffee, that Charlie had been working on this plan for a long time. He’d taken great care to leave absolutely nothing behind that was personal; to remove everything from which any useful inferences might be drawn. And he’d done it slowly and cautiously, over time, so as not to attract Emma’s attention.

  Alberg consulted the list she’d given him. Today he would cover Charlie’s partner, and his lawyer, and if there was enough time, he’d try to see the person Emma said had introduced her to Charlie, at university.

  Alberg put his reading glasses back in their case. The sun slanted through the wide windows of the sun porch and fell upon the kitchen floor, and was inching tentatively into the dining room. Alberg, enjoying the quiet, found himself rubbing the surface of the table with the flat of his hand. He was very fond of this table. He’d spotted it at a used-furniture place in Sechelt shortly after he moved to the Sunshine Coast—a big, round, sturdy pedestal table that looked like a table he remembered from his childhood. A single thick piece of oak formed its top, and there were slats beneath, for additional support. His father would have liked it.

  He drank more coffee, pleased with himself because he hadn’t had breakfast but already planning the big lunch he could have as a reward. He looked out the living room window into the sunny morning and knew his grass was growing, stealthily, and so were the hydrangea bushes and the roses, furtive and shifty, getting bigger and taller while he wasn’t looking. But it was on his list—on one of his lists—to find somebody else to take care of all that, so he could spend his free time sailing.

  He’d narrowed down his choice of boats to three.

  “Why don’t you just go out and do it, for pete’s sake,” Cassandra had said to him. She’d sounded unreasonably exasperated—it wasn’t going to be her boat, after all. “I’m so tired of hearing you talk about it,” she’d exclaimed. “When did you get so damn cautious?”

  Alberg had been mulling that over ever since. He didn’t like to think of himself as cautious. He liked to believe he had a wide streak of recklessness in him and he had to keep a wary eye on it, lest it get him in trouble again.

  He stood up and went to the window, taking his coffee along. Then he went outside and stood on the wobbly porch, looking at the fence, virtually collapsed, smothered by the hydrangeas. The air was fresh and fragrant, and after a while he wandered out of his yard and looked down at Gibsons, lying like a toy village at the bottom of the hill. He found this panorama of town, water, and distant mountains soothing to his soul.

  He heard the phone ringing, and even as he considered not answering it, he was on his way back into the house.

  “Alberg,” he said.

  “Martin,” said his mother.

  “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  Alberg sat down on the kitchen stool.

  “I’ve had an idea,” said his mother, “and I wanted to discuss it with you.”

  “Okay. Fine. What?”

  “I’ve been thinking of opening up a bed and breakfast place.”

  “What, in your house?” He was incredulous.

  “Of course in the house, Martin, where else?” There was a pause. “You don’t like the idea.”

  “No, I don’t like the idea. Right, I don’t. Why? You aren’t going to be short of money, are you?”

  “No, I’m fine for money. It’s just… I want to be doing something, Martin.”

  “Well, but what about—I don’t know—volunteer work. Listen, we’ve got a group here, mostly volunteers, who work with victims of crime. There must be something like it in London. I could phone around for you… ”

  “Martin, for goodness’ sake. I’ve been running my own life for a lot of years now. I don’t need any help from you.”

  Alberg sat back, leaning against the kitchen wall. “You’re right.” Something cool and metallic, like water from melting snow, began trickling through him; he didn’t know its source, but he knew it was something not new; it was something returning. “What do you need from me, Mother?”

  “I need you to know this is what I want to do, and to understand why, and to accept it.” She hesitated. “I had a dream, you see.”

  “Well, then,” said Alberg softly. “Of course I understand.”

  ***

  A young woman sat at a desk in the middle of the reception area, behind a raised counter on which stood a small sign that read NOLA KING.

  Alberg, introducing himself, noticed a glass jar half filled with the gold dollar coins known as Loonies sitting on her desk.

  “It’s for the Christmas party,” said Nola King, smiling. She looked even younger than Alberg’s daughters, who were in their mid twenties. “Last year we collected five hundred dollars in that jar.”

  “And what about that?” said Alberg, reaching down across the counter to indicate the fishbowl sitting beside her computer screen. “Is that business cards in there?”

  She nodded. “I collect them. For my bathroom walls.”

  He was still marveling at this when Peter Carlson hurried into the reception area and escorted Alberg to his office.

  “This isn’t anything official,” Alberg began. “I’ve got some time on my hands, and I’ve agreed to try to get a little more information for Mrs. O’Brea.”

  “It’s very embarrassing,” said Carlson. “I had no idea he—well, all I knew was that he’d decided to leave the firm. I didn’t know he was going to… ”

  “I know, Mr. Carlson.”

  “It was… I wish I’d had something to tell Emma.”

  “Maybe something’s occurred to you since she was here?” said Alberg hopefully.

  Carlson shook his head. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a red-and-white-striped tie; his black shoes were highly polished. He looked genuinely distressed. “We weren’t close, Charlie and I. But the partnership worked very well. I had no reason to believe he was discontented.”

  “What did he tell you about why he was leaving?”

  “He said… I think he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. It dawned on me as he was talking that maybe he’d never been as enthusiastic about the work as I’d thought he was. Because he looked so completely different when he said he was leaving. Very…bright. Happy, I guess you’d say.”

  “But he didn’t tell you what he was going to do?”

  “No. I asked him, of course. He said he hadn’t decided yet.”

  “Did you believe that?”

  Carlson shook his head. “No. I think he knew, all right.”

  “He gave you a month’s notice, Emma says.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not much time to extricate yourself from a partnership.”

  “No. It put a strain on things. But he was very restless. Like he’d made up his mind suddenly, and now he just wanted to get it done. So I accommodated him.” He shrugged. “What else could I do?”

  “What did you notice during that last month?” said Alberg. “Was he on the phone a lot? Did he take time off? Get personal mail?”

  “No, he worked just like always. Did an exemplary job for us right up to the last day. The only thing was, he told me that he didn’t want a going-away party, or a gift, or even an after-work drink with the staff; he made that very plain.”

  “Probably because you would naturally have involved Emma in anything like that.”

  “I guess so,” said Ca
rlson.

  “Tell me what you know about his personal life. What did he like to do? What did he talk about, when you weren’t discussing work?”

  “Let’s see.” Carlson gazed through his office window, absentmindedly clicking the push button of the ballpoint pen he held in his right hand. “He liked music. He’d often stay in town overnight to go to a concert. Sometimes a play—he liked the theater too. Now, this isn’t lately—he hasn’t done it that much lately. But up to, oh, a few months ago, maybe a year, he’d do this a couple of times a month.”

  “With his wife?”

  “Usually, yes, Emma would meet him here.”

  “But not in the last year?”

  “Right. I think that’s right.”

  “Were there any other changes in the last year?”

  Carlson slowly nodded. “Yes. He was a little less talkative. A little less forthcoming. He did as much work as ever, but he took more time off too.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know. He never did talk much about his private life. And not at all, lately. We didn’t have a close personal relationship, although we liked each other.”

  Alberg looked down at his notebook, dissatisfied. “What did the guy do, Mr. Carlson, besides work and go to plays? Did he do sports? Did he read? Did he—I don’t know—collect things?”

  “He played chess.” Carlson looked surprised. “I forgot all about that. I think he belonged to a chess club. And sometimes he’d go over to Park Royal at lunchtime and get involved in a game there.”

  “How come you forgot about it? Was this another thing he’d stopped doing?”

  “Yes,” said Carlson, nodding.

  Alberg sighed. “Okay.” He closed his notebook and stood up. “Thanks for your time. I’ll see myself out.”

  In the reception area, he stopped and gazed thoughtfully at the fishbowl. He waited while the receptionist dealt with an incoming call. Then he said, “Tell me again what you do with those business cards, Miss King.”

  “Well, when the bowl gets full,” she said, scribbling on a phone message slip, “I take it home, and I take all the old cards off my bathroom walls, and I put the new ones up.” She placed the message into a cubbyhole beneath the counter. “It’s a very small bathroom, and two whole walls are covered in tile, so it’s only two walls, really.”

  “And where do they come from? Where do you get them?”

  “Well, everybody contributes. It’s amazing how many people have business cards. And they’re always handing them out. So I asked the people in the office if they’d give me the ones they don’t want. So they all drop cards in here. Mr. Carlson, and Jennie, the secretary, Mr. O’Brea—”

  “When did you empty it last?”

  “I don’t know; let me think. Three, four months ago?”

  Alberg looked into the bowl. There had to be a hundred damn cards in there, he thought. “Miss King, would it be all right if I borrowed this fishbowl? Just for a few days?”

  ***

  Alberg had lunch at a restaurant in Park Royal and made some inquiries around the chessboard on the second level, but nobody was there who remembered Charlie O’Brea.

  O’Brea’s lawyer had an office on Marine Drive in Dundarave, a few miles west of Park Royal. Alberg saw her at four o’clock.

  As soon as he got out of her office, he phoned Emma and arranged to see her when he got back to Sechelt.

  ***

  She made tea, and they took their cups outside and sat at the picnic table on the patio. Alberg reported what he’d learned from the lawyer: Charlie had removed his wife as beneficiary from his insurance policies and removed her from his will. But he’d left a document with the lawyer that turned over the house, the contents of the house, and the contents of the joint bank accounts to Emma. The lawyer had been instructed to inform Emma of these matters on Friday, May 8; Alberg had persuaded her to release the information, under the circumstances, four days early.

  Emma received the news in silence. Her gaze was fixed on the enormous cedar tree that stood in the back corner of the yard. “Pretty soon I’ll have to get a job,” she said after a while. She glanced at Alberg. “But that won’t be a bad thing.”

  He thought she looked more melancholy than anguished; more thoughtful than outraged. “Peter Carlson says Charlie changed, about a year ago,” he said. “Stopped going to plays and things. Had less to say. Started taking some time off. Have you any idea why?”

  Emma looked at him for a long time but said nothing.

  “What happened a year ago?”

  “It was…inconsequential,” she said at last.

  “You better tell me, anyway.”

  “Charlie became very upset.”

  Alberg waited, but she apparently had nothing more to say. “Why?”

  “He was having—he got to a crisis point, you might say, in his life.”

  “A crisis point.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Uh huh. What precipitated this crisis?”

  “Well, I don’t know, do I? It wasn’t my crisis, it was Charlie’s.”

  “How did he behave; what were his…symptoms?”

  Emma stood up and brushed energetically at her plaid skirt. She wore a red sweater with it, and loafers, and navy blue tights. She pushed her hair away from her face. “He got very irritable, extremely irritable. I couldn’t do anything right; everything I did was wrong—” She sat down again.

  “And?”

  “What do you mean, ‘and’?”

  “You were going to say something else.”

  “No I wasn’t. That’s it.” She poured herself more tea.

  Alberg doodled in his notebook. He drew a tree, and made it into something resembling an arbutus, and added a rocky beach, and the sea.

  “And one day we had a big fight,” she said. “And then we talked for a long time and each of us agreed to do certain things and we did them.” She raised her hands. “And—and things were fine again. Better than fine. They were very good. Wonderful.”

  “So wonderful that he’s run away from you.”

  Her face flushed. “Right. That’s right. Obviously, something was going on that I wasn’t aware of.” She was so rigid she was almost trembling.

  “Emma—I have to ask you this.”

  “You want to know if there was somebody else,” she said quickly. She shook her head. “No.”

  “You sound very sure of that.”

  “I am. Very sure.”

  She wouldn’t keep anything from him, no matter how small, no matter how disgraceful, if it might help him find Charlie. But she certainly had no intention of telling him embarrassing things that couldn’t possibly be relevant, no desire whatsoever to wave her dirty laundry around in front of his eyes.

  She smiled at him. “More tea, Mr. Alberg?”

  31

  KARL ALBERG GOT in touch with Emma again late Tuesday afternoon. She had remembered to tell him about Charlie’s retirement savings plan and the Canada Savings Bonds, and he’d been to see the O’Breas’ bank manager again. Now he told Emma that Charlie had cashed in the RSP, which was worth seventy-five thousand dollars; and instead of rolling over the bonds, which had matured in March, Charlie had cashed them too. For a total of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.

  When Emma got off the phone she went into the bathroom and turned on the taps in the tub. She undressed and got clean nightclothes. It was only five o’clock, but she was ending her day.

  Half an hour later she lay in her bath, immersed in bubbles, breathing fragrant steam. Someday she would have a big bathroom, a huge bathroom. There would be a large window made of glass blocks, and beneath it she’d have a long, narrow, marble-topped table with several plants on it. There would be a chaise longue too. And the tub would be placed diagonally within an enormous square of porcelain, providing a wide ledge for Emma’s wineglass and whatever book she might be reading. She would place white pottery candelabra, each holding three white candles, in two cor
ners of the square, and maybe another plant or two in another one, beneath a second, smaller, glass-block window.

  It would have a separate shower stall, too, and a towel cupboard, and two dressing tables that would take up almost a whole wall.

  No, not two dressing tables. One.

  Wherever Charlie was, he had one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars with him. Emma figured he could live for quite a while on that, without having to get a job, without having to lift a finger.

  It was a relief, she thought, soaping her arms, to have Karl Alberg looking for Charlie. Emma had to admit that her chances of finding him were not good without the help of somebody who knew something about this kind of thing.

  After a while Emma stood up, reached for the folded towel she’d left on the toilet seat, and dried herself, while the water slurped away down the drain. Then she tossed the towel aside and studied herself in the mirror behind the sink. She moved this way and that. She struck poses. Finally she gathered her hair on top of her head with both hands. She acknowledged the loveliness of her uplifted arms, the swell of her breasts, the flatness of her stomach, the sweet surge of her hips. It is not because of my body, she thought, that he left me.

  She held out her hands and looked at them. Charlie had always admired her hands. He’d said she had a nurse’s fingernails.

  She always put a few drops of her favorite perfume in the steam iron before she pressed her sweaters.

  She always made sure to apply lotion to the back of her neck, as well as her face and throat.

  She always dried herself carefully, after a bath or a shower, holding the towel by its opposite corners and pulling it back and forth from left shoulder to right buttock, and then switching to the other side, right shoulder to left buttock, and she creamed where her skin was rough, and powdered where it was smooth, and shaved her legs and her underarms regularly, and washed her hair every day, and used the most expensive shampoo and conditioner, and at least twice a week she gave her nurse’s fingernails a manicure.

  Well, no more. No more.

  She got out of the tub and put her robe on, thinking. She spent a lot of time thinking now. She didn’t know what she’d done with her days before Charlie disappeared and she’d started thinking again. Absorbing herself in speculation. In study, in scrutiny. Investigation. Calculation. Analysis.