by L. R. Wright
“And that’s another thing that bothers me,” said Alberg.
“It bothers me too,” said George, wiping at his forehead.
“Why were you so sure he’d been bashed on the head?”
George looked at him. “Well, he sure as hell didn’t have a heart attack.”
“It could have been an accident, though, couldn’t it?” Alberg was watching George curiously. “He could have stumbled, fallen, hit his head. Homicide,” he said gently, “isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind, when someone’s found dead.”
George shook his bead stubbornly. “There wasn’t anything near enough for him to have landed on. There wasn’t anything knocked over, as though he’d fallen on it. And there wasn’t any blood, anywhere, except on him, and that rug.” He was pale and agitated.
“You’re very observant, Mr. Wilcox,” said Alberg.
“A thing like that, finding a thing like that…it gets burned into your brain,” said George to the gravel on the path. “I’d like to go home now.”
“Sure,” said Alberg. “Thanks for your cooperation. Constable Gainer will give you a lift. We’ll want to talk to you again, though.”
George squinted up at him. “I don’t know any more than I already told you.”
“We’ll be asking you about Mr. Burke. Who his other friends were—things like that.”
George looked at him for a moment, then turned without a word and plodded up the path.
Gainer followed him, shoving his notebook and pen back in his pocket, freeing his hands so he could move the ribbon from across the gate and let the old man out.
6
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Cassandra Mitchell sat in her car outside the Pacific Press building in Vancouver. There was a bundle of letters in her lap. She dug her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on; then she picked up the topmost envelope. BOX 294, THE VANCOUVER SUN, it said, in block letters written with a blue ballpoint pen. She couldn’t tell much from that.
She ripped it open and pulled out a small folded piece of notepaper, and as she did so, something else fell out of the envelope. She picked it up and saw that it was a photograph. She stared at it. It was a waist-up picture of a hairy, muscly man in his early thirties, apparently wearing nothing but his self-satisfied grin. Cassandra felt herself flush. She put down the photograph with care on the seat next to her, wondering if she really wanted to read the accompanying message. “Be brave,” she mumbled to herself.
Dear Box 294. I have never answered an add in the paper before, but I knew as soon as I read yours that your the one for me. I’m younger than you said but not much and believe me it wont matter. Let me know your number and I’ll phone you so we can meet and get together and get to know each other. You wont regret it and I know I wont either. Love, Brett.
“‘Love, Brett,’” said Cassandra. She scrunched up the letter, tossed the rest of the pile on top of the photograph, and started up the car with a roar.
The Hornet churned across the Granville Street bridge, and the breeze from the open window blew Cassandra’s dark hair around her head. A total of fifteen letters she’d had, counting today’s four, from two advertisements. It had cost her a packet and she hadn’t even wanted to meet most of the men who had written to her.
She inched her way through the rush-hour traffic wondering why on earth she had done such a thing: advertised in the paper, for God’s sake, for a man.
Yet she had. She had delivered the advertisement to the newspaper in person, as was required. She had slunk in and out of the building, hidden behind her sunglasses and a guilty slouch. In due course she returned, to pick up the replies. While waiting for her turn at the counter she watched a man walk away with a pile of letters almost high enough to make him stagger. Eagerly she gave her box number to the woman behind the counter, who disappeared briefly and returned with six envelopes. Cassandra looked at them incredulously, then at the middle-aged woman with ferociously yellow hair who had given them to her. “I know, dearie,” the woman had said, “it’s the men get all the answers.” The next time, there were only five letters; and this time, four.
Phyllis Dempter, small, blond, and restless, married to a preoccupied Gibsons dentist, had encouraged her in this madness. In fact, Cassandra reminded herself, amid bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Lions Gate bridge, the whole thing had been her friend’s idea.
“You’re giving up too soon,” Phyllis had said calmly when Cassandra flapped before her eyes the dispiriting replies to the first ad. “These things take time. You’ve got to go through a lot of chaff before you get to the wheat.”
“Chaff,” muttered Cassandra, turning off the bridge onto Marine Drive, the road still bottlenecked. “Wheat.”
She had made several self-conscious forays into Vancouver for encounters set up in awkward telephone conversations during which she strained (with notable lack of success) to put appropriate faces to unfamiliar male voices. So far she had met and conversed reasonably politely with a chartered accountant who had never been out of British Columbia, a fact he stated with bewildering pride; a sixty-five-year-old businessman who had felt it fitting not to have previously revealed the disparity in their ages because he was “young at heart”; and a teacher who told her immediately that he was married but enjoyed a “nonthreatening” relationship with his wife.
None of them had stirred her blood.
She had seen none of them twice.
She was on the Upper Levels highway now, heading through much lighter traffic for Horseshoe Bay and the ferry that would take her across the sound. Far below to her left lay the blue-silver sea.
Her ad had made it clear that she lived, inconveniently, on the Sunshine Coast. Three of her replies had been from men who also lived there, which for some reason she hadn’t expected. Cassandra had responded to only one of these, a man whose letter had piqued her curiosity because it revealed nothing about him but his first name. I enjoyed your ad and would like to meet you, he had written, and he’d put his telephone number below his signature. She had eventually called him and they arranged to meet in Sechelt for lunch, but he had canceled their appointment twice, and if he didn’t show up the next time, on Friday, she was going to tell him to forget it. It was probably a lousy idea anyway, she thought. Too close to home. Every time a male person of the right age came into the library she blanched a little, wondering if he was the one and hoping he was not.
She remembered the three unopened letters on the seat beside her and permitted herself a small surge of hope.
She waited patiently in line for the ferry and, when she had driven aboard, sat in the car until everybody else had scurried off to find the cafeteria or the sun deck, and then she opened the rest of the letters.
There was one from an X-ray technician who enjoyed walking in the woods and listening to hard rock; one from an insurance salesman who liked women and cats but expressed disapproval, entirely unsolicited, of children and dogs; and one from a tuna fisherman whose wife had left him and who was too shy to try to find a prostitute. Cassandra, disheartened, tore them up, decided not to show Phyllis the picture of the naked hairy man after all, and tore that up too.
She passed up the cafeteria and stood out on the sun deck, wrapped in a sweater against the wind, during the half-hour trip to Langdale. She watched a tugboat hauling an enormous log boom, and sailboats dipping in the wind, and the mountainous coastline pressing at the sea.
It would soon be nine years since she’d moved to Sechelt. Although she enjoyed the village, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life there. This had proved enormously complicating to her sex life. Nine years ago she was thirty-two and considered still of marriageable age by the few men there over thirty and unattached. They were surprised—even shocked—to discover that she had no interest in marrying one of them and settling down for good in a small town on the Sunshine Coast. It was impossible to explain why. “I’m just waiting for my mother to die,” she could have said, cheerfully, “and then I’ll
be off.” Impossible. Eventually all the men had drifted away and gotten married to women younger and less disconcerting than she.
Cassandra turned her back on the water and stretched her arms along the railing of the sun deck, surveying the other people there, checking them out from behind her sunglasses. A few she recognized: an elderly couple who lived in the same senior citizens’ complex as her mother; a lanky, black-haired woman who lived alone above the Sechelt hardware store and whose balcony was crammed with potted flowers from March until November; the cheerful, overweight, perpetually perspiring man who operated the service station across from the hospital. There were some children running up and down the deck, too—it was a wonder dozens of them didn’t catapult themselves overboard every year, especially in the tourist season.
Cassandra sighed and faced the sea again, letting the wind whip her hair back, instead of forward around her face. She began to think about the men she had loved, even merely enjoyed the company of, during the course of her life; but soon gave this up, because she believed in looking firmly ahead, preferably with an optimistic heart.
They were passing Keats Island, now. Only a few more minutes.
Traveling down the three escalators that led to the car deck, Cassandra decided that it might be worth one more try. She would get Phyllis to help her rewrite the ad. Maybe she had made too modest a self-presentation. God knew, she didn’t mind admitting it, she would dearly love to meet an agreeable male person. It had been far, far too long.
At seven that evening she was in the library, and at seven thirty George Wilcox came in, a bunch of irises in his hand.
“Cassandra,” he said, presenting her with the flowers. “I like saying your name. Never known another girl with that name.”
“I’m not fond of it, actually,” she said, smiling at him. “I’d have preferred being called something more ordinary.”
“It’s got a nice lilt to it,” said George, “you’ve got to admit that. How would you like to have a name like mine, now? George. In your case it would be Georgina, or Georgette, or some damn thing. It sounds like your mouth’s full of porridge, George does.”
“But it’s what it means that’s important,” said Cassandra. “Not what it sounds like.” She put down the irises and whisked a dictionary out from under the counter. “Mine means the unheeded bearer of bad tidings, that’s what it comes down to. But yours—” She looked it up. “Earthworker,” she announced, triumphantly.
“Farmer,” said George.
“Or gardener,” said Cassandra. She closed the dictionary with a snap and stuffed it back under the counter. “It suits you.”
“Maybe,” said George, grudgingly, and he wandered off among the books.
When the library had moved two years ago from its old, cramped, musty quarters in the basement of a church to the new building, Cassandra, eyeing the six wide floor-to-ceiling windows, had gone off immediately to buy several large plants. Included in the order were three Ficus benjamina, five or six feet tall, shivery and graceful. Two days after they were set in place, they let loose a shower of leaves. George Wilcox was waiting at the front door when she arrived to open the library that day and was witness to her dismay.
“They don’t like being moved, that’s all,” he told her. “Just leave them alone. Mist them a lot—squirt them with water. They’ll be all right.”
And they were. Cassandra took to consulting him whenever she had worries about the plants, which she considered a far weightier responsibility than the books, since she knew nothing about them.
George Wilcox was one of her more regular customers. His preference among books was biographies, while hers was novels. Eventually, casual conversation as he checked out his books led to her reading some that he recommended and to his trying an occasional work of fiction.
He had started bringing her things a year ago: flowers from his garden, interesting shells from his beach, sometimes small potted plants which he told her sternly were for her house, not the library. When his wife became ill in November, Cassandra helped him choose books for her. And when she died, in March, Cassandra appeared at his door with a chicken casserole, feeling stupid and helpless, and in his kitchen she wept with him, and he patted her shoulder and made her coffee.
She wondered now, putting the irises in water, what he would think if he knew about her ad in the paper. They had had few personal conversations—although he had once told her, uneasy but determined to speak his mind, that he was sure her mother would survive quite happily in Sechelt without her. Cassandra, shocked to find he had read her situation so accurately, didn’t reply, and he hadn’t mentioned it since.
She put the vase of flowers on the counter and went to hunt up three romance novels for Mrs. Wainwright, whose husband would stop by later to pick them up for her. Mrs. Wainwright, a bustling, large-boned woman of fifty, was a practical nurse whose hours seldom allowed her to visit the library in person.
Cassandra found George Wilcox scanning the shelves of mysteries and was surprised.
“It’s that business with Carlyle,” he said, by way of explanation. “It’s turned my mind to crime.” He jabbed his finger toward the shelves. “Who’s good, here?”
She picked out a book by Julian Symons and another by Ruth Rendell and handed them to him.
“They’re both English,” he said, studying the jackets. “Doesn’t surprise me. All those bizarre murders they get over there. Ever noticed that? You see a headline in the paper ‘Eviscerated corpse found in bog,’ say—and you know right away they’re talking about England.”
She walked with him back to the checkout counter. “I heard about Mr. Burke. It’s terrible. So much more awful than if he’d died of an illness.”
“Quicker, though,” said George, getting his library card from his wallet. “He probably never knew what hit him.”
“Do the police know yet?” said Cassandra. “What hit him, I mean?”
“Who knows? It only happened yesterday. And they’re going to be vague about it, even if they do know something. A secretive bunch, those Mounties.”
She pushed the books across the counter to him. “He must have surprised a robber, or something.”
He loaded the books, the two mysteries and a biography of Mozart, into a crumpled plastic grocery bag which he’d pulled from his pocket. “He wasn’t robbed. That’s what they say.” He shrugged. “Somebody must have had it in for the old bugger. That’s all I can figure.” He grinned at Cassandra. “You didn’t notice. I haven’t brought my last ones back.”
“That’s all right. You’ve only had them for a couple of days.”
He leaned over the counter. “The police have them now. They’re scene-of-the-crime evidence, your books.”
“Good heavens,” said Cassandra, mildly.
“I dropped them.” He pointed to the floor. “Right next to the body, I was.”
“Good heavens,” said Cassandra, weakly.
“Not to worry,” said George. “They flang themselves in the other direction.”
Cassandra saw that there was sweat on his forehead. She thought his eyes looked feverish. Only his white hair, sweeping in flamboyant waves out from the sides of his head, appeared unaffected by his experience. His neck suddenly looked too thin and scrawny to hold his large, well-shaped head erect. He had to look up at her; Cassandra wondered if, in the physical prime of his life, he had been taller. “It must have been dreadful for you,” she said softly, “finding him like that.”
He looked out the window. “It wasn’t so bad. No more than I deserve.” He turned back to her. “And don’t waste your sympathy on him, either. He was one first-class Grade A son-of-a-bitch, was Carlyle. He got exactly what was coming to him.” He started for the door, his back straight, his legs in baggy trousers slightly bowed.
Cassandra was astounded. “You don’t mean that,” she said. “You can’t mean that.”
He turned back, hesitated, seemed about to go on, but when he spoke he said only, “It’
s time you had another look at my garden. The roses are grand this year, just grand. Stop by. I’ll give you some lemonade.” He waved at her and was gone.
7
IF HE HAD BEEN THE FIRST of the men she’d met through her ad he would have been a disappointment. But her standards had plummeted, or at least her expectations had.
She was relieved that he was neither too young nor too old, and not ugly, either. He wasn’t what she would call extremely attractive, but at least he was tall enough, and big, though not overweight.
His taste in clothes wasn’t anything to lift the spirits. He wore a suit, which in Sechelt was unusual to the point of being extraordinary—a dark gray one, with a plain white shirt and a maroon tie that was much too wide.
Cassandra approached him, walking briskly, holding out her hand and grinning at him. He seemed astonished, possibly by the wideness of her smile, but rallied enough to smile back as he rose from the table to greet her.
“The more nervous I am,” she said to him, “the bigger I grin.”
“You must be Cassandra.” He shook her hand, then pulled out a chair for her. “I’m Karl.”
“With a K,” said Cassandra, sitting down.
“With a K,” he agreed.
He had white-gold hair, not a sign of a wave in it, and pale blue eyes, and his face was a collection of planes. She wondered if she would feel any physical attraction for him by the time lunch was over.
“You do have an Aryan look about you,” she said.
They were almost alone in the restaurant, which was a place with overgrown ferns hanging from the ceiling and a view over the water.
The waitress approached, a petite, curvaceous young woman with a tumble of wavy auburn hair. “Hi, Cassandra,” she said with a grin. “How’s your life?” Her eyes skittered to Alberg.