Prized Possessions

by L. R. Wright

  “How do I know why? They’re dead, that’s all I know. Shot to death. Two of them. What a mess. You never saw anything like it.” He drank almost his entire cup of coffee in one gulp. “The other one’s in the hospital. Shock. Jesus. No wonder.”

  “Who did it?” said the proprietor.

  “Jesus, Earl, I don’t know who did it. The cops don’t know who did it—how the hell would I know who did it? Gimme an order of whole wheat toast too, will you?”

  “Eddie!” breathed Gardiner.

  Eddie forked pancakes and maple syrup into his mouth.

  “And you know,” Bentley went on, “this is weird, but it turns out they used to live with Melanie Franklin. Now, is that weird, or is that weird?”

  “Eddie, we gotta get going,” said Gardiner, who was sweating even more now and wiping his face with napkins from the metal container on the table.

  I could pretend I worked in the hospital, thought Eddie, trying to plan. A janitor. Or I could pretend to be her brother or something.

  “Eddie!” said Gardiner, more loudly. But nobody else heard him. Everybody in the café was listening, transfixed, to Bentley, the ambulance driver.

  “Her folks moved up to Lund, I think,” said Earl, setting a plate of whole wheat toast on the counter in front of the ambulance driver. “Last summer.”

  Eddie pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. It was thin, because there was hardly anything in it, and curved, because he sat on it so much. He pulled out a five. Earl spotted this and came over to the table with a coffeepot. “Just the bill,” said Eddie.

  Gardiner was wiping the palms of his hands on his knees. He was pale and continued to sweat, watching Earl write out their bill.

  Eddie knew from movies that that was what he ought to do, all right. Sneak into the hospital in disguise and—and what? Do what? He slapped the five down on top of the bill. “Come on,” he said to Gardiner, and plodded from the restaurant, Gardiner skittering in his wake.

  48

  “WE’RE TRYING TO see if there’s a connection,” said Alberg gently, “between what happened to Melanie and what happened here last night.”

  Norah Gibbons sat in a chair next to Kathy Schofield’s bed, taking notes. But Sanducci, standing at the foot, was taking notes too. Constable Gibbons was mostly keeping an eye on Kathy.

  “Yes,” said Kathy. “I see.”

  Sanducci thought she had shrunk since he’d first seen her, in the gray Reliant with her roommates and the skunk cabbages. And every bit of color had been bleached from her face. Her eyes were unnaturally round—sometimes he could see an edging of white all the way around the pupil. Only her hair looked as he’d remembered it, thick and dark, cut away behind one ear, falling softly across the opposite cheek. He chastised himself, halfheartedly, for having lustful thoughts about a person still suffering a severe case of shock.

  “Well, actually,” said Kathy, “no, I don’t see.”

  She was in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown. When he stopped the patrol car for her, she’d had on a pair of women’s cotton Jockey shorts and a sleeveless cotton undershirt. She was scratched, scraped, dirty, and hysterical.

  “I mean, if you’re saying maybe Melanie was…that it wasn’t really an accident… The police came, you know. And talked to us.” She began nodding her head, her conviction growing. “It was definitely an accident. Definitely.”

  “I think we have to consider the alternative, though. Even if it’s just to be thorough.”

  Sanducci actually saw her heartbeat accelerate. He happened to be looking at her throat, a small, pale hollow at the base of her elegant neck, and he saw the beating of her heart cause the skin there to shudder and vibrate. He looked quickly at Alberg, who was leaning forward, his hands clasped lightly between his knees; he looked completely relaxed, as if he had all the time in the world and absolutely nothing on his mind but Kathy.

  From the other side of the bed, Norah Gibbons said firmly, “It’s all right, Kathy. You’re perfectly safe. Your parents are on their way. And we’ll be with you every minute, until they get here.” She reached to touch the back of Kathy’s hand. Kathy squeezed her eyes tightly closed and grabbed Norah’s hand in both of hers, holding it so tightly that Sanducci saw it whiten in Kathy’s grip. Norah Gibbons and Alberg exchanged a glance. Alberg gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Kathy had begun to weep. Tears washed down her cheeks and flooded the tiny lines on either side of her mouth and splashed from the edge of her jaw. Alberg got a handful of tissues from a box on the table next to the bed and tucked it into the clasping of Kathy’s hands with Norah’s.

  Sanducci was acutely aware of himself. It was cruelly difficult to stand here doing nothing. He was at his best when he was physically active. He felt confident then, and purposeful. He hated standing still. He hated taking notes.

  He looked through the small window in the top of the door and saw a figure hurrying past along the corridor, a female figure wearing a white hat; and he could hear brief, muted messages being relayed over an intercom system. But it seemed to him that the world out there was ephemeral; that the only reality was here; that it was a false and treacherous reality that could be blown apart in an instant with a single shotgun blast; and that there ought to be something he could do to prevent this.

  Kathy let go of Norah’s hand and rubbed at her face with the tissues. She blew her nose and opened her eyes, blinking furiously, gazing straight into Sanducci’s face. He felt his heart soar into his throat.

  “Yeah. But it’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around. That somebody—” She turned to look at Alberg. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to think hard and make a list of anybody you can think of who might have had a grudge against Melanie, or Sandy, or Caroline, or… ”

  “Or me.”

  Alberg nodded. “Or you.”

  She was already shaking her head. “There’s nobody, I’m telling you. There isn’t anybody.”

  “We’re looking for anything—anything at all,” said Alberg. “Somebody one of you stood up. Jilted. Wronged in some way. Or who could have thought he’d been wronged.”

  “ ‘He,’ ” said Kathy.

  “Yeah. Definitely a he.” Alberg stood up. “Rack your brains, okay, Kathy? Constable Gibbons and Corporal Sanducci will help you.”

  49

  EMMA FELT THE need to seek advice—but from whom would she seek it? She sat in her living room and looked around her and wondered at the smallness of the world she’d made for herself. There were really only two people in it: herself and Charlie.

  She went outdoors and observed the cedar trees and the hanging baskets and the lush green lawn and the tulips, a splash of red against the house—but she wasn’t touched by these things, not the way she’d been touched when she was seeing for Charlie. There’d been a sweetness to the surface of her then, which she’d reveled in. And everything that came bubbling out through that surface was also sweet—had a sweet taste to it—and she’d given it to Charlie lovingly, unstintingly. And now it was gone, that layer of sweetness. She was like a face stripped bare of makeup. And beneath it Emma found herself raw and unpredictable.

  She went back inside, thinking that there was nothing to give shape to her days now. No responsibilities. No obligations. No assignment, anymore, to see the world for Charlie, to be a wife for Charlie. She had given herself to him as a gift, and it had never occurred to her that this was a gift he might have grown not to want.

  “My mother was right. There’s something unnatural about me,” she said to herself, regarding her face in the bathroom mirror. Yet she didn’t look particularly unusual.

  “I’m at the very beginning of my life,” she said to herself. But this was only theoretically true.

  She banged around inside her house for a while, feeling like somebody’s caged-up budgie.

  And then Emma went into the bedroom and took the gun from the drawer, which opened soun
dlessly, and once more she acknowledged that this was the only truly personal thing he had left behind, and that he’d placed it where she could be sure to find it. So, she thought, removing the oily cloth in which it was wrapped, it shouldn’t surprise him that she’d adopted it as her own.

  She put the revolver on the bed and took out the box of cartridges. She selected six and loaded the cylinder. She put the cloth and the box back in the drawer and closed it.

  Emma put the opera glasses in her left-hand jacket pocket and the revolver in her right-hand jacket pocket, picked up her handbag, left the house, got in her car, and headed north, back toward Ruby Lake.

  50

  “LOOK, MAN,” said Gardiner, “I’m pleading with you, I’m begging you, we gotta get outa here now, right now, Eddie. Eddie. Eddie! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, man?”

  “I hear you, Gardiner,” said Eddie, who was buried in a highway map of the Sunshine Coast. “We’re gonna get outa here, all right. We’re just going to go the long way.”

  Gardiner, clutching the top of the steering wheel, let his face fall forward. Eddie thought he might be bawling.

  “We’re gonna go up there to Lund,” Eddie said stubbornly, “because that’s where those boxes are. No question about it. They’re up there with her folks,” he told Gardiner with conviction. “No place else they could be.”

  “I want to go home, Eddie. Now.” Gardiner lifted up his head, and Eddie was relieved to see that he hadn’t been bawling after all.

  Reluctantly, Eddie shook his head. “I told you, I’m not driving this heap onto any ferry until I got those notes in my hand.”

  “Eddie, Eddie,” Gardiner pleaded, “the fuckin’ boxes were in one of the fuckin’ bedrooms. They had to be.”

  “No,” said Eddie, shaking his head. “They would’ve been out in the living room part, if they’d been there. Nobody’d keep a dead person’s stuff in the bedroom with them. I told you, it’s at her folks’ place. And that’s where we’re headed.”

  “Fuck you, Eddie.” Gardiner sounded like he was at the end of his rope. Eddie thought he might be near the end of his too.

  “Lund is a very small place,” said Eddie, studying the map. “No way there’s gonna be more than one Franklin family there. We wait till it’s dark, we break in, we find the boxes, I get my notes—and that’s it. We’re homeward bound.”

  “You wanna steal us a shotgun first?” said Gardiner bitterly. “Or a rifle, maybe? There ought to be some hunter types, living away to hell and gone out here. Then, if the dudes wake up while you’re rippin’ ’em off, you can just blow them away too.”

  Eddie sank back in his seat. He raised a hand and wiped his face with it, then gripped his forehead between his thumb and middle finger, rubbing his temples, pressing his forehead. He stared out the window, brooding. They were parked at a roadside rest stop, next to a big jeezly motor home with Minnesota plates. The people from the motor home had spread their lunch out on a nearby picnic table. Eddie looked through his window at their food and thought he might have to throw up before long. “It won’t be ripping them off,” he said. “I only want to get back what’s mine.”

  “But Jesus Christ, Eddie, is it worth going around wasting people for?”

  Eddie started folding up the map. “The cops don’t know nothin’ about us. There’s no way they can know we did it.”

  “ ‘We’? What the fuck’s this ‘we’?”

  Eddie stared out through the windshield. “You’re right,” he said painfully. “Me. They can’t know it was me who did it.”

  “Yeah, right. They’ll find the fucking shotgun, and it’s me they’ll come after.”

  Eddie turned to him. “They won’t find the shotgun. Why would they find the shotgun? But if by any chance they do, you just tell them you lent it to me.”

  Gardiner snatched a glance at him. “You bet I’ll do that, too,” he said in a mutter.

  “But they won’t find it. The only thing they could find that would be bad for us is those notes.”

  “Stupid weasel,” Gardiner grumbled. “I told you how dumb that was.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Eddie slapped the folded map on the dashboard. “Come on. Let’s get outa here. Let’s get it over with.”

  ***

  “She’s doing real well,” said Constable Gibbons with a smile as Alberg entered Kathy’s room.

  “It’s very depressing,” said Kathy, “to actually face the fact that there are definitely people in the world who don’t like you.”

  “Not many, I’ll bet,” said Alberg, looking over Sanducci’s shoulder at his notebook. “No. Not many at all. Don’t get up, Corporal.”

  “I remembered a couple of weird things that happened,” said Kathy, and she told him about the day somebody had taken their mail and then put it back. “And we found out later there was a letter missing—from the theater company that hired us.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That they hoped we wouldn’t change our minds about coming to Sechelt.”

  Alberg nodded. “What was the other thing?”

  “There’s a woman who lives across the street from us—” She broke off suddenly. “This doesn’t feel real. None of this feels real.”

  “Go on, Kathy,” said Norah Gibbons. “What about her? What’s her name?”

  “Her name…it’s Garber. Mrs. Garber.”

  “And what do you want to tell us about her?”

  Kathy was staring into Constable Gibbons’s face. “I’m the only one left.”

  “I know, Kathy. I know. Now tell us about Mrs. Garber.”

  “She…she came over. The night before we left. To tell us—”

  “What?” said Alberg gently.

  “Somebody…she’d seen somebody…lurking, she said. Lurking around her house, but she said he seemed to be interested in our house.” She reached for Norah Gibbons’s hand. “I am really scared. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I know. But hang in there, Kathy. We need you. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll try.”

  “Tell me about this list of names,” said Alberg.

  “This first part,” said Sanducci, pointing. “These people date from before the four girls started sharing a house.”

  “Women,” said Kathy.

  Sanducci looked startled. Then, “Oh, sorry, women, the four women.”

  “Uh huh,” said Alberg. “Good. Okay, Kathy. Tell me about them. And let’s start with the most recent, and work our way back.”

  “The first one was—well, it was still going on when we came over here,” said Kathy. She reached for a glass of water. “It’s a guy Caroline was going out with. He gave her a bad time for a while.” She took a long drink.

  “What kind of a bad time?” said Constable Gibbons.

  “She told him she didn’t want to see him anymore, but he couldn’t take no for an answer, you know? At least at first. So he sent her these, like, voluminous letters. And later he’d send her taped ones. She played them for us. There was nothing really bad in them. They were just…vaguely threatening.”

  “Did she keep them?” said Alberg.

  Kathy shook her head. “She burned the letters and sent the tapes back to him.”

  “And he’s the first name here?”

  “Yeah. The next guy…this is reaching pretty far, I have to tell you. It’s somebody Melanie had some trouble with. I don’t know exactly what.”

  “ ‘Drugstore guy,’ ” said Alberg, reading from Sanducci’s list.

  “Yeah,” said Kathy. “I don’t know his name. She had some kind of a run-in with him.” She hesitated. “Melanie could be a little…haughty. You know? So sometimes she offended people. But this time, whatever it was, she was kinda shaken up.”

  “Okay. And the third one—Sam Peterson.”

  “Yeah,” said Kathy glumly. “He’s mine. You know, I really don’t like this. I feel like I’m slandering people.”

  “I know,” said Alberg, smiling at her.
>
  “Sam Peterson. It was last fall. He wanted me to be in a student film he was directing, and I said no. But I’d said yes first, so he got pretty mad. Really mad. Raged around throwing things and stuff.”

  “Have you heard from him since?”

  “He called me up when he’d finished his film and told me the actress who’d done it was a lot better than I’d ever be.” She shrugged. “That’s all.”

  “Okay. Sam. Who’s next?” said Alberg, glancing at his watch.

  ***

  Back at the detachment, he got a call from Vancouver about the hit-and-run. “Did you do a background check on the victim?” he asked.

  “We did the whole nine yards. Sure we did a background check.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Why are you interested, Staff Sergeant?”

  “She had three roommates.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They came up here for the summer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Two of them got blown away last night.”

  There was silence from Vancouver.

  “The third one would have got it too,” said Alberg, “except she dived out her bedroom window and got away.”

  He heard the shuffling of papers. Then, “Vehicle’s a ’78 Camaro, bronze over original red. We’re working on an area vehicle check through Motor Vehicles.”

  “Thanks,” said Alberg.

  51

  EDDIE WOULD HAVE laughed about it, except for the situation they were in. He ought to have known better than to go anywhere in a car belonging to Gardiner without checking the thing out himself. “I never heard of anybody,” he said heavily, gazing at the useless Oldsmobile, “who didn’t carry an extra fan belt with him.”

  “Well, you’ve heard of him now,” said Gardiner defensively. He kicked the right front tire, which to Eddie didn’t make much sense. “So what the fuck do we do now?”

  “It’s your car, Gardiner.”

  “And it’s your fucking neck, Ed,” Gardiner snapped.

  Eddie lumbered over to the edge of the gravel shoulder and leaned against a big tree. He was very tired. He thought about his apartment, his bedroom. It had a little window, high up in the wall, and there was a flower bed on the other side of it. In the summertime, the leaves of the dahlias were all that he could see. Eddie never bothered to close the curtains in the summertime, because the dahlias kept out the sun and nobody could see through them into his bedroom. They were up now, the dahlias. Summer had already started, really, even though the weather wasn’t good yet. There was lots of stuff growing and blooming.