Victoria Falls

by James Hornor

  Charlie could tell that the abduction theory was gaining credibility with James, and that he would defend him from any misguided conclusions from the RMCP. As they sat down to dinner he reached across the table and held Charlie’s hand.

  “Father, for this food, for our family, and especially for your protection for Jenny, we pray now together in Christ’s name. Amen.”

  Charlie couldn’t remember the last time he had said grace before a meal, but in this context it seemed completely reasonable that they would offer a prayer for Jenny’s safety. After grace, the two men sat across from one another and silently enjoyed their chicken. Charlie sensed that the ritual of the evening meal was causing James to miss Jenny, and he decided to break the silence.

  “Tell me about Victoria House.”

  “French toast and clean sheets.”

  “Sounds ideal.”

  “Everyone gets clean sheets on their first night, and every morning we serve French toast.”

  “How many can you accommodate?”

  “Normally thirty, but when it gets below freezing we’ve had over fifty.”

  Charlie could see that James started to relax when he talked about his work, so he kept going. “How does someone find out you’re there?”

  “The police know about us, but mostly it’s word-of-mouth. We get people from all over—every life circumstance. What they have in common is that they are out of money and in need of a place to stay and something to eat. We try to give preference to single moms, especially ones with little kids, but our policy is that no one stays beyond a week. We’re in a network of halfway houses throughout western Canada. If people request it, we help them find a place for longer term. Rob Curtin and I run the day-to-day operations, but there are also volunteers who do everything from helping to cook breakfast to spending hours in the laundry. Clean sheets are a big deal to someone who has been sleeping in a worn-out blanket or in the back of a car.”

  Having his father sitting across from him made Charlie want to be completely honest, and he thought about telling him about the bathtub moments with Jenny. It seemed a little incongruent with the rest of his story, and he wasn’t sure how James might react to the image of him in the bathroom with Jenny naked in the tub. He didn’t want to compromise James’s pristine image of Jenny, so he concluded that leaving out this insignificant detail would be the prudent course of action.

  “Did you finish your report?” James began to clear the table and to put the dishes in the sink.

  “Let me do the dishes. Sounds like you do your own share of dishes in Vancouver.” Charlie wanted to do something for his dad, and since he arrived, James had been doing all the work. “I’ll finish the report in the morning. While I do the dishes, why don’t you get some rest?”

  “Are you sleeping in Jenny’s room?”

  Charlie had not even considered where he would sleep once James arrived, but it was either Jenny’s room or the sofa.

  “I guess I am. Is that OK?”

  “She’s the only one who has slept in that bed, but at least you two are related.”

  With that James walked over, gave Charlie a hug and headed up to bed. As he climbed the stairs, Charlie could barely hear his father’s parting goodbye.

  “Jenny and I are glad you’re here. Get a good night’s sleep.”

  Charlie finished the dishes, replenished the fire, and headed up to Jenny’s room. As he entered it was completely dark, and Charlie felt around for a switch to the overhead light. As he flipped the switch he realized that there was not an overhead, but the switch controlled a standing lamp in the corner. Jenny’s bed was unmade and her Chinese robe was draped over a chair. The entire room smelled like her; the same sweet perfume smell that still filled the bathroom. On her night table was a picture of James and her on skis with the Canadian Rockies in the background.

  Charlie slid into Jenny’s bed and pulled the sheet and coverlet up around him. The pillowcase smelled of her perfume, as did the entire bed. Before he turned out the light, he took her Chinese robe from the chair and carefully placed it next to his pillow. He knew that sleeping with her robe was a little odd, but he wanted the room to be filled with her presence. As he drifted off to sleep, he remembered kneeling next to her on the bathroom floor, and the way that her hair had cascaded down when she released it from the porcelain clip. Despite the fact that nothing had actually happened, it was an intimate moment, and he thought about how intimacy is enhanced by spontaneity. Intimacy with Heather had its moments of creativity, but as in many marriages, it had also become an exercise in reverting to the familiar for reasons of utility or convenience.

  Despite their half sibling bond and their brief acquaintance, Jenny remained for him an exotic woman, perhaps even more so since her disappearance. Even sleeping without her in her bed provided a level of excitement that he was not able to fully comprehend or explain.

  Three hours later, Charlie was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of Jenny screaming. It was exactly the same scream he had heard on mile four of the trail, only this time it was closer and louder. He even got up and went to the window, thinking that she was in the driveway. He stood there for a minute gazing down at her car, which looked abandoned in the light snowfall.

  Realizing that the scream was only in his imagination, he crawled back into bed, wrapping Jenny’s robe around his neck and shoulders, and he drifted back to sleep. What happened next must have been a dream, but it was so real that Charlie thought Jenny was there with him in her bedroom.

  She was standing in a small yard at a house next to a lake, and she kept pointing at two figures inside the house and covering her mouth. One side of the house had been completely torn away, so it was like a child’s dollhouse with the rooms completely exposed.

  One of the downstairs rooms was a kitchen, and next to it was a bathroom with a large tub. A heavyset man was in the kitchen, and at the kitchen table were two place settings. As the man prepared dinner, a figure appeared from the back of the house who also looked like Jenny wearing a Chinese robe. She spent several minutes in the bathroom filling the running bath water with oils and perfume. At intervals the man in the kitchen would open the door separating the two rooms and say something to the Jenny who was now in the bathtub. Whatever he said, the response from the Jenny in the tub was to shake her head vigorously left and right as if to give an emphatic “no.”

  The Jenny in the yard was covering her eyes and also shaking her head back and forth out of disgust and fear. The man in the kitchen methodically began to turn out the lights in the kitchen and the other downstairs rooms. Only the bathroom light was left on and from the outside, the bathroom appeared as a small theatre, so that the ensuing action was more focused and intensified. As the man entered the bathroom from the door to the kitchen, the Jenny in the bathtub began to scream and her screams were identical to the screaming that Charlie had heard on the trail and earlier that evening. As the screaming continued, the man moved to the far end of the tub and began to vigorously wash Jenny’s hair.

  At first she resisted, but as he persisted for several long minutes, she became tired and listless. Instead of stopping, he rinsed and washed it several more times, so that now she was almost unable to hold up her head. What should have been a sensual moment became a demonstration of his inability to approximate intimacy with a woman. Jenny was completely helpless as he erroneously assumed that her silence was an indication of pleasure. Her hair also now looked exhausted, and it hung over to one side in a lifeless swirl. In frustration the man gathered her up in her robe and a few towels and carried her to the kitchen. As he placed her in front of one of the place settings, the only available light was streaming into the kitchen from the bathroom. Jenny was barely able to sit up, and eventually the man used a high-back chair to prop her up on one side. He then sat across from her and began to eat his meal as he continued to stare directly at her. He was like a man who had spent his life savings on a purchase that failed to operate as he had expected. Charl
ie wondered if this was a nightly occurrence, a repeated action that always produced the same result. He also noticed the Jenny in the front yard, who was huddled in a ball and crying. She seemed to be the one who was allowed to express her emotions, but was trapped as the helpless observer. The Jenny in the kitchen was like a lifeless doll. The light in the bathroom suddenly went dark, and Charlie woke up clasping Jenny’s Chinese robe. He was disoriented and feverish as he attempted to reassure himself that what had just occurred was a dream.

  The next morning James fixed French toast for both of them, and Charlie finished his report. He wanted to share his dream with his father, but he feared that his close association with the events of last night’s dream would raise additional questions. His credibility was already tenuous, and he wanted to preserve the relative normalcy that had settled in since his father had returned home.

  Welcoming an RCMP detective at 9:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning seemed a strange way to begin the week, but James reasoned that if it could help to find Jenny, it was worth any inconvenience. Both James and Charlie were expecting one man to arrive, so they were both surprised when an RCMP sedan came up the driveway and two officers emerged from the car. One of them was in full uniform and the other was in a dark business suit.

  James opened the front door and immediately shook their hands with Charlie just one step behind.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. I’m James Monroe, and this is my son, Charlie Benjamin.”

  The man in the business suit spoke first.

  “Good morning Mr. Monroe, Mr. Benjamin. I’m Inspector Macpherson and this is Sergeant Hardy. We understand there is a missing person.”

  As James invited them in, Charlie noticed that the sergeant immediately began looking around and taking brief notes on his smartphone. He also had a small pack attached to his belt with an RCMP insignia imprinted on the outside. Charlie guessed that the two of them had worked together on missing person cases in the past.

  “Why don’t we have the one most familiar with what actually happened give us a brief summary.”

  Charlie was aware that for this initial segment, they would both just listen, and he wanted his verbal report to be consistent with what he had said in writing. The sergeant in particular might notice any inconsistencies, but he noticed that the inspector pulled out a small voice recorder as he began to speak. Aside from a few interruptions when the two of them asked clarifying details, they allowed Charlie to tell his story from the time he knocked on the door just three days ago until the arrival of James late yesterday morning.

  When he came to the part about Jenny going up to wash her hair, he simply said that he had done the dishes while she had bathed and later the two of them had talked by the fire. He played down the part about her negative reaction to the news that they shared the same father, and he didn’t mention that she had initially asked him to leave on Friday morning. When he finished, the inspector played with his voice recorder for a few minutes, and the sergeant continued to take notes on his phone. Neither of them said a word. Finally the inspector looked up and addressed Charlie.

  “Mr. Benjamin, is it possible that you’ve left out some important detail, some small occurrence that could also be helpful as we investigate?”

  It occurred to Charlie that the two of them were very astute, and they were used to hearing explanations where the narrator left out incriminating information. In other words, their question was possibly standard for this type of investigation.

  “That’s really all that happened. I wish there were some additional details that would help solve the case, but I’ve told you all I know.”

  The sergeant gave Charlie a quick look that said, “I know you’re lying.” But then Charlie thought he had just imagined the sergeant’s quick judgment.

  “By the way, I ran the WL license letters through the codex system at our K Division. There are thirty-six vehicles with Alberta plates that have WL as the first two letters, but only four trucks, and one of them belongs to an RCMP Superintendent, so that leaves three. I have a person in Banff tracking down the owners.”

  It was a random comment by the inspector, but Charlie reasoned it might have been a canard thrown into the discussion to relieve further tension about possible missing details. He was beginning to think that everything the two of them said was carefully orchestrated, and that they coordinated all of their questioning to produce the desired result.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to look around the house. You’re welcome to guide us through, but our preference would be to wander freely.”

  “Of course, Inspector. Charlie and I will do breakfast dishes while the two of you poke around.”

  James made it sound like the rules of a parlor game, but as the sergeant headed up the stairs, Charlie noticed that he was removing surgical gloves from his belt pack, which could only mean the pack contained fingerprinting materials that he was about to use upstairs. Charlie watched him disappear into the bathroom and close the door.

  He started into the kitchen to help with the dishes, but he had a sudden flashback to kneeling next to the tub when his father had arrived yesterday morning. He was going to wipe down around the base, but with his father’s arrival, he hadn’t quite finished the job. He didn’t know the sergeant well, but he knew that he would be thorough in collecting fingerprints.

  The two of them were in the house for another hour, taking photos with their phones, looking around the woodpile, and checking Jenny’s car for fingerprints. At one point, the sergeant spent at least fifteen minutes in the front seat of his car, talking to someone on the radio, and Charlie suspected that he was doing a background check on the Illinois plates on his own car. The inspector eventually joined the sergeant, and the two of them sat in the driveway talking for another fifteen minutes before coming back inside.

  With all four men now standing in the front hallway, the inspector was the first to speak, and he directed his question at James.

  “Could you give us an article of Jenny’s clothing that would be sure to have her scent? We often use trained dogs in these investigations, and we need something that she often wears.”

  “That would be her Chinese robe. She wears it all the time. Let me run up and find it.”

  As James headed up the stairs, all of the blood drained out of Charlie’s face. He was grasping for what to say and what he said sounded completely ridiculous.

  “I’ve heard that socks or stockings are the best clothing to hold a scent.”

  The inspector and the sergeant stood in silence, not even favoring Charlie’s assertion with a reply, so that the three of them stood together without saying a word.

  James walked down the stairs. He had placed the robe in a large plastic bag, and he handed it to the inspector.

  “The sergeant and I were also hoping to see your driver’s licenses and to take your fingerprints. The fingerprint part will save us quite a bit of time as we won’t have to first figure out your prints before distinguishing them from a stranger’s prints. We also need a piece of your clothing for the same reason.”

  Charlie had a vague recollection that you would have to be arrested before fingerprints could be legally taken, but his father was already nodding a “yes” that a license check and fingerprints would be fine. Charlie knew that to give any pushback while his father was being so compliant would look suspicious, so he handed the sergeant his license and the same winter scarf he had worn on the trail while the inspector prepared to get their prints.

  While the fingerprinting was going on, the sergeant returned to the sedan with their licenses and again spent another fifteen minutes on the radio. Charlie felt like he had been caught in a speed trap, and all of this personal history was being fed to the sergeant by a computer in Edmonton.

  They had barely asked about the man in the truck, and Charlie began to feel like they had a hunch that he had something to do with Jenny’s disappearance. Just as it seemed that they had completed this phase of the investigation, the sergea
nt returned from the sedan and asked for a few minutes alone with the inspector.

  When they returned to the front hallway, the sergeant cleared his throat and looked at Charlie.

  “May I ask you one more rather personal question?”

  Charlie’s mind raced ahead, trying to imagine what was coming. The sergeant didn’t wait for Charlie’s reply.

  “Since your arrival on Thursday, have you only taken showers or have you also had a bath?”

  “I actually took a bath yesterday morning.” Charlie was making it up as he went along. “Normally I take showers, but I was trying to get myself settled down after the trauma of Jenny’s disappearance. Also it reminded me of her.”

  As soon as Charlie said “reminded me of her,” he regretted it.

  “How was a bath a reminder of her?”

  The sergeant’s quick response came as he was still taking notes on his phone.

  “I just meant that I knew she liked to take baths.” Now it was becoming a cross-examination.

  “But you had only known her for less than a day.”

  At that the inspector decided to interrupt the sergeant, as he sensed that they were pursuing only a speculative line of questioning.