by Sky Curtis
Mrs. Gibson, Sandra, strode toward us on long strong legs, head held high, a brave chin jutting forward, her arms held out, ready for an embrace. She was wearing capris and sandals, not one to waste a day of elusive warm weather. Blackflies hovered around her short-cropped hairstyle, an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut that only tall and beautiful women can pull off with aplomb. I could tell this woman was usually very well put together, right down to matching lipstick and nails. But not today. There were signs. Today, her jersey knit T-shirt was inside out. Price tags at her wrist were flapping morosely as she walked. There was a small stain on her capris. Butter. Believe me, I knew. I had experience with this kind of oily blotch. These two things, plus a tissue crumpled tightly in her hand, a corner escaping from her clenched fist, were indications that something very bad had happened in her world.
Cindy whispered, not moving her lips, “She’s not waving the blackflies away.”
Four small signs.
“You grab the lasagna and give it to her while I give her a hug. Looks like she’s gunning for one.”
Cindy wasn’t the hugging type. At all. “Roger that.”
We shouldered the car doors open and went about our jobs. I was bashed by Sandra in mid-stride. She stopped walking only when she clanged into me, her arms flinging around me like loose strands of rope. I had to reach up, being only five-foot-two to her almost six feet, to hug her in return. “I’m so sorry about Darlene,” I muttered into her chest. “What a terrible loss.”
Sandra’s arms clutched me harder, trapping me in a viselike grip. I didn’t like it, not one bit. This was not your usual hug between two strangers who only knew each other through a third party. Where was the peck on the cheek? She was grasping onto me like a cobra. Bending over, even her head was trapping mine. Panic surged up from my belly. I had to get away from this woman.
Cindy must have sensed my discomfort and knocked Sandra’s rib cage from the side with the lasagna. “Oops. Sorry. My mistake. We are so sorry for your loss. Where should we put this?” She bumped her again and Sandra looked at the lasagna with surprised eyes.
She suddenly released me and air sucked into my lungs. What was wrong with this woman? She turned her back to me and took a step over to Cindy, arms open. Cindy took a step back. She held the lasagna in front of her like kryptonite. As Sandra took another step forward, missing her cue, Cindy used the lasagna like a battering ram, pushing it into the air between them. She simply would not be hugged by a stranger.
Sensing that she had lost this battle, Sandra held out her hands, palms up. “Thank you so much. Harry loves this lasagna. It’s from that gourmet place on the highway, right?” She reluctantly took the gift, as if to touch it would harm her.
Cindy gave me a quick glance with slightly widened eyes, a glance that only a good friend could interpret. Harry liked it, but not her? But she said, “You’re welcome. It was the least we could do. What happened was awful.” Cindy was trying to figure out this mother. Something was not right. For a second, her eyes turned into slits as she watched her.
“Yes, it was.” Sandra said it like she was asking someone to pass her the salt. Maybe she was drugged.
Off in the distance, I could see a man working at the side of a wooden boat with a paint scraper. Harry. Sandra followed my gaze. “That’s Darlene’s father. He’s hardly spoken a word since she went missing over about a month ago. And now, this news.” She unravelled her tissue and dabbed at her eyes. I wanted to tell her to stop, don’t touch your eyes with a snotty tissue, you’ll get a sty. Guaranteed.
Her shoulders sagged as she abruptly turned on her heel and strode back to her butter-coloured house. I followed, well back, with Cindy a few steps behind me. I had so badly wanted to like this woman who was grieving in her peculiar way for her dead daughter, or maybe it was for something else. But I did not. There was a weird air of something floating under her grief, an unleashed emotion that I couldn’t put my finger on. A little of it had seeped upwards through her sadness in that hug. I could smell it wafting on the air. My old familiar snake friend that slithered through my veins was rattling away, its tongue shooting in and out, tasting the vibrations in Sandra’s wake.
Cindy caught up and nudged me with her elbow, whispering under her breath, “There is something weird going on here. That woman is weird. I mean, really weird.”
I didn’t want Sandra to hear us talking about her, literally behind her back, and shook my head, not even daring to whisper, “Shush.” I made a circle with a forefinger around my ear and pointed at Sandra, eyebrows raised. Crazy? Cindy nodded in agreement while pushing my hand down, and admonishing my grade-school gesture. “Be compassionate” she whispered. “She might have a mental illness.”
We would need to be on our toes and find out what was going on in this house. As we got closer, Harry, who was off to the side of the garage, looked up and gave us a defeated wave. I wondered briefly if he’d seen my sign language. From his blank stare, it didn’t look like it. He slowly rubbed his hands down the front of his plaid shirt, knocking off curling bits of wood shavings and lumbered over to us, stooped and broken, his feet scuffing the ground.
“Hi, I’m Harry. You must be Robin,” he said to me. “You look like your brother.” Harry didn’t hold out his hand for us to shake. He realized his social gaffe, and apologized, looking at his grubby nails. “Dirty.” He slid his hands down the sides of his pants, wiping them off. “Sorry about that. Andrew is a great guy.” Harry’s voice was flat and guarded. “He’s really helped us with our investments. We should be able to survive on what we have for the rest of our lives.”
Harry didn’t look pleased about this, in fact, he sounded like Andrew had given him a death sentence. I pretended not to notice. I also pretended to like my brother. He was, after all, our ticket to be here. “Yes, he’s good at his job and I’m glad he’s made you feel secure about your future.” Did I say the right thing? Harry was looking at the ducks swimming on the lake like he wanted to murder them.
Sandra opened the screen door and ushered us inside. “Come in, come in. We can have some lemonade.”
Said the spider to the fly.
I took in my surroundings. Rusty-brown shag carpet. Flowered wallpaper on one wall, plastic wood panelling on the others. Fake velvet, patterned upholstery, stiffened with age, on a couch with wooden arms. Blue mountain china. A cabinet full of teacups with gold rims. Molded globes of green glass for ashtrays on water-marked side tables. A painted rocking chair. I was in a Salvation Army Thrift Store. I sensed rather than saw Sandra watching me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Definitely bad energy.
“This was my mother’s house,” she said by way of an explanation, sweeping her long arm around the decrepit living room. “She loved it and hated change. Unfortunately, she died late this winter of a heart attack. Overweight,” she said, eying me up and down. Warning given and received. “She left it to Harry and me. We talked to Andrew about the best thing to do. We are both sixty, Harry and me, and want to retire. I worked in retail, women’s clothing, and Harry was in a bank. What with everything going on and Darlene moving in, we just haven’t had the time to renovate. We sold our Toronto house and moved here. Andrew told us it was the wisest thing to do.”
Was I being blamed for the loss of their Toronto house? Was that what the odd vibe was about? I took in the warped wood panelling and the aluminum windowsills, spotted with grey. The worn linoleum on the kitchen floor. “I understand.”
“Have a seat.” Harry gestured at the couch while Sandra went out to get a pitcher of lemonade. He leaned over to me, a glint in his eye. Predatory? “And how’s Duncan’s little girl?”
Fuck off. I was fifty-six. This couple was giving me the creeps. I couldn’t get a read on them. What the hell was going on? “Did you know my father well?”
“Ever since I was a boy. We had a cottage on Peninsula Lake near yours and your Dad and I u
sed to build forts by the rock face when we were kids.”
“So that’s how you knew Andrew?”
“Your father’s pride and joy.”
Didn’t I know it.
Sandra came in bearing a heavy tray laden with an enormous glass pitcher covered in drops of water and four large tumblers. No cookies. Cindy jumped up and took it from her, laying it on the coffee table in front of the couch, murmuring her appreciation. I politely took a glass and a small sip. The lemonade had way too much sugar in it and my fillings sang an opera. I was convinced something was really off about these people. I wanted to find out more. I wanted to search their house. But how could I do that without actually doing it? How could I manoeuvre these two weirdos into showing me around? My job! I could say I was an interior design reporter and was interested in antiques.
“I’m working for a paper now, The Toronto Express,” I said, feeling coy.
Darlene’s father raised his eyebrows. “Oh, that’s what you ended up doing?” He made it sound like I was mucking out manure. “Spying on people and digging up crap?”
Oh dear. “Oh no, not at all. It’s a great job,” I said, undampened by his insinuations. “I work in the Home and Garden section. Interior decoration. Flowers. Antiques. Cooking. Domestic stuff.” Domestic murder. Domestic abuse. Cooked-up stories.
“That sounds very interesting,” said Sandra. “Maybe you’d like to look around a bit here? My mother had lots of antiques. There’s an old Singer sewing machine on the landing upstairs. A treadmill.”
Upstairs. Fantastic. “If it’s not too much trouble.” I stood up and hoped she wouldn’t follow me. She did. Shit.
We climbed the thin staircase one after another. When we reached the top, Sandra said, “Three bedrooms up here. It was hard for Mom to deal with the stairs, but she managed.” Sandra paused outside a door in the hallway. “This was Darlene’s room.”
I looked around her through the door and saw a sea of pink. What? It was a kid’s room?
“When we moved here, Darlene had already moved out from our Toronto home into an apartment. But we wanted her to live with us after … well, you know. Harry and I thought it best to unpack her old bedroom into this room. We thought she would find it consoling being surrounded by her childhood memories while she stayed with us, given what had happened with that man. Sparling.”
Not likely, I thought. She probably found it creepy. I danced around Sandra, oohing away, pretending to be interested in a faded print in a cracked frame on the opposite wall. “Oh look, this might be valuable. Do you ever think about selling some of the antiques?” I turned around and looked at her innocently, meanwhile scanning the room for anything at all that might be revealing. What, I didn’t know. It was a typical little girl’s bedroom with a chest of drawers, a desk with a chair, all painted white. In the top right corner of the desk, Darlene had scratched her name, “Darlene Olive Gibson.” I ran my finger over it, feeling the bumps of the chipped paint. Darlene had been determined to carve her name, that was for sure. It seemed there were no clues here to help me figure out what made this family tick.
Sandra sat down on the desk chair and looked sadly around her. “I couldn’t bear to change a thing while she was missing. What if she came home?” This seemed practiced somehow. Rehearsed. The widened eyes and frowning eyebrows looked pasted on. “The police looked in here for any clues about where she might have gone. I told them she wouldn’t have taken off. That something had happened to her. They didn’t seem to believe me.”
“The police can be very persistent sometimes in their beliefs, right or wrong. Where did they look? Did they take her computer?” I was going to look where they hadn’t.
“It was awful. They pawed through her desk. I watched them. And they started fingering her clothes in the closet. I was furious. My little girl was missing and they were fondling her clothes. They didn’t find her computer. And her personal phone was never found. Neither was her work phone. She had two, you know. Work and personal. It’s probably in the woods somewhere. I told them to leave and get on with their job.” She was sitting up very straight, remembering, anger flitting across her face.
Not a thorough search then. And what an odd adjective to use, describing the way a police officer checked clothing for clues. “Fondling.” The police were probably checking the seams for hidden bits of paper or an object of some kind. I sat down on the twin bed covered neatly with a satiny duvet, pink with lace around the edges. A little girl’s room. On the pillow was a stuffed bear, one eye dangling from a black thread.
“Spooky.”
“Pardon?”
“The bear. She named him Spooky. She kept special objects inside him, in that little pouch on his seat. She thought if she named him after a ghost he would be able to scare away all the other nighttime ghosts. She’d had him all her life.”
I could tell. His fur was rubbed off in spots, leaving behind worn, beige fabric. I gave him a squeeze to see if he squeaked. Nope. But I felt something hard. I made sure my face gave nothing away as I squeezed some more. There was definitely something hard inside the bear. Sandra stood up and walked around the room, touching things and giving me a history lesson. Her china horse collection. A ukulele. A jewellery box with a dancing ballerina that spun to music when you lifted the lid.
I slowly slipped my hand into the slit in the bottom of the little bear and fished around. At the very end of the pouch my fingers bumped against something hard, flat, and plastic. I was betting it was a phone. My heart raced. From the size of it, it felt like an iPhone 6. Maybe a 5. Before the phones got really big. But a new, flat screen one, not a flip-top phone.
While Sandra gave me a tour of Darlene’s bedroom, yattering away, I tried to slide the phone out of the Spooky’s soft butt. She picked up some miniature glass figurines that Darlene had placed on a mirror, probably when she was ten, and stroked them lovingly. Meanwhile, I was making progress. The phone was descending down its furry birth canal, helped by my forcep-like fingers. I hadn’t yet figured out what I was going to do with it once I got it out. But then, the phone’s case snagged on a loose thread. Shit. I wiggled it around and tugged it, feeling the way a vet must feel when pulling a baby foal out of a mare. I hoped against hope that Sandra didn’t turn around, seeing me with my hand jammed up the bear’s ass.
But, of course, she did, looking right at me. I sat perfectly still on the bed, a smile frozen on my face. My hand trapped up the bear’s colon. I wasn’t going to let go of that phone for love nor money. No way on earth. I held the bear to my chest with my right hand up its bum and patted it gently on the head with my left, hoping that my right hand looked as if it were holding the bear and not creating hemorrhoids.
Sandra said, “Patting Spooky like that reminds me of how much Darlene loved that bear.” Sandra took a step toward me as if to take the bear and I thought I would be caught red-handed. Panic skittered through my veins. My vision vibrated. But no, she was on her way to the photographs stuck in the edge of the mirror over Darlene’s dressing table. As she talked about this one and that, who was related to whom, this dance, that boyfriend, I safely extricated the phone from the bear and stuffed it in my back pocket. For a horrible moment, I thought Sandra might have been able to see me reflected in the mirror, kidnapping the bear’s baby. I raised my eyes and looked at the mirror. No, I couldn’t see her, so she couldn’t see me, right? That’s what truck bumper signs said: “If you can’t see me in the mirror, I can’t see you.”
I stood up, the phone burning a hole in my back pocket, “Thank you so much for showing me Darlene’s room. I’m so sorry she’s gone.” I had to get out of there.
“Thank you. Let me show you her brother’s room.”
God. I followed meekly as Sandra led the way down the hall and flung open what was clearly a little boy’s room, all in blue with hockey equipment and footballs, trucks and insect jars containing a carcass or two. L
uckily, there were no antiques that I could pretend to be interested in and we could look at the room from the doorway. I had had enough of this weirdness, this Miss Havisham frozen-in-time concept. A time warp that was repellent and confusing at the same time. Who were these people? Sandra then marched determinedly past the third bedroom, which I presumed was hers and her husband’s, and thankfully headed down the stairs to the living room.
Cindy and Harry were talking about fabrics. Or rather, she was talking about fabrics, giving some bullshit about dying wool, and he was sitting there, face blank. I caught her eye and gestured madly at the door with my head. Time to go. I didn’t want to catch cooties from these strange people. Plus, guilt was probably written all over my face. I could feel my eyes bugging out and red blotches bursting all over my neck. I had stolen a phone. Evidence. Me: Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I felt like laughing my head off. What a find. A phone! Whole lives are stored on phones. And this one had been hidden. Who knew what was on it?
Cindy took one look at me and stood up immediately. She had a good nose for urgency, being a crime reporter who’d had to duck bullets. “Thank you so much for the lemonade, it’s been lovely meeting you.”
Harry stood up and shook her hand. “You too, and good luck with your wool dying and rug hooking.”
Geezus. Rug hooking? Couldn’t she have come up with something better than that? “Yes,” I said. “Cindy’s got a real talent for spinning her own yarn. And hooking.”
She shot me a look. We hugged Sandra goodbye and I tried not to dash out of the door.
I ran-walked to my car like a stiff-legged penguin, propelling Cindy forward by the elbow. “What’s the fucking hurry?” Cindy whispered, her mouth not moving.
When we were both in the car, I threw it into reverse and roared backwards up the lane. Cindy’s head kept jerking, getting out of the way of snapping branches, just like it had done on our way down the lane, only much faster. “Slow down, idiot. You’ll wreck your car.”