The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “Someone must do some maintenance for them,” Wiseman said. “I don’t imagine Ruth or her sisters are the handy types. Mrs. Zed told you he sneaks into the house at night? What sort of maintenance is he doing then?”

  “Maybe he’s handy with more than just his hands,” Maureen said.

  “And Dougie’s always got his tool with him,” Rachel said, with a straight face.

  “Rachel,” Maureen admonished. “You should be ashamed.”

  “Anyway,” Rachel said, “Mrs. Zaminski said she only thinks it’s Dougie who visits the house at night. It could be anyone.”

  After dinner, they all went across the road to the park for the homecoming gala concert in the big tent shelter. Claudia Hahn was there, looking cool and composed despite her ordeal in the Dells that morning.

  “When I said you looked as though you’d led an interesting life,” she said to Shoe, “I didn’t really expect to become part of it.”

  Rachel and Maureen excused themselves to help backstage, leaving Shoe with his parents, who sat close together in lawn chairs, enjoying the show, and Claudia Hahn and Harvey Wiseman, who seemed to instantly hit it off. Shoe, the odd man out, excused himself and went for a walk.

  He missed Muriel. Nevertheless, he realized with a twinge of guilt, he hadn’t called her since he’d arrived. It was not quite eight o’clock, five o’clock in Vancouver. Muriel would be at the office. Shoe went to his parents’ house to use the phone.

  After the concert, Maureen asked Shoe if he wouldn’t mind driving her home.

  “You’re welcome to stay over,” Rachel said.

  “Thanks,” Maureen replied. “But I should go. Hal might come home.” Her smile was weak and tentative, wavering. “Shoe, if it’s not too much trouble … ”

  “No trouble at all,” Shoe said.

  In the car, after a long silence, Maureen said, “I’m sorry to put you out like this. I should’ve brought Hal’s car, but he doesn’t like me driving it.”

  She fell silent again and Shoe concentrated on driving, the nighttime expressway traffic heavier and faster than he was accustomed. Vancouver proper did not have expressways and those in the surrounding municipalities were mostly only four lanes wide. The 401 at some points was sixteen lanes wide. Muriel would have hated it. She disliked driving on anything wider than Marine Drive.

  Muriel had been happy to hear from him, but harried. “I’m beginning to appreciate why Bill was so grouchy all the time.” After Shoe quickly brought her up to speed on the last two days, she said, “And you thought your visit would be dull.” They chatted for a minute or two, then duty called and she had to say goodbye. “Come home soon,” she’d said. “I miss you.” Then she’d hung up. He wondered if they should try living together again.

  “Would you like to come in?” Maureen asked as Shoe turned the Taurus into the driveway of Hal and Maureen’s house in Oakville, a mostly residential community — ignoring the great sprawl of the Ford assembly plant — some fifty kilometres west of Toronto.

  He levered the transmission into park and turned off the engine. The house was dark but for the yellow bug light over the front door and a faint glow from the upstairs hall window. “A few minutes,” he said, the need in her voice outweighing his reservations.

  Maureen unlocked the front door. “Hal,” she called as she opened it. “Are you home?” There was no answer. Shoe was relieved that he would not have to deal with his brother quite yet, and felt guilty that he did so.

  Maureen looked around the living room, as if to check that everything was in order. It was a comfortable room, if somewhat over furnished for Shoe’s liking. “I’m going to have some wine,” Maureen said. “Will you have some? Or I can make you some tea, if you like.”

  “Please don’t go to any trouble,” Shoe said.

  He followed Maureen into the gleaming white kitchen, where she got a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, deftly opened it with a lever-action corkscrew, and poured a large glass.

  “Better times,” she said and drank half the glass.

  “I should be heading back.”

  Her face fell. “Must you? Won’t you stay a little longer? Please.”

  “I’ll keep you company for a while.”

  “There’s some Scotch. I don’t know if it is the kind you like. It was a gift.”

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  She picked up the bottle of wine and went into the living room. She set the bottle and her glass on the coffee table and sat on the sofa. Shoe sat in an easy chair by the fireplace. The grate was empty and the ashes had been swept.

  “It’s been an eventful weekend,” Maureen said, top-ping up her wineglass. “You’ll probably be glad to go home to some peace and quiet. I was sorry to hear about your friend. Patrick?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hal told me he’d been murdered and that you discovered who’d done it. You also caught the man who killed your employer.”

  “I had some help.”

  “And now two more murders. As Claudia said, you do live an interesting life.”

  “Unlucky, more like it,” he said. Particularly for others, he added to himself.

  The wine bottle was half empty and Maureen was slightly flushed. She got to her feet, a bit unsteadily. Shoe started to get up. She gestured for him to stay seated.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” she said. “I’ve got to visit the little girls’ room.”

  She went upstairs, although there was a bathroom off the kitchen. Shoe heard the hiss of water in the pipes, a door opening and closing, footsteps on the stairs. He looked up as Maureen came back into the living room. She’d changed into a dressing gown, burgundy satin, cinched tight around her waist and hanging to her ankles. She stood for a moment, looking at him.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said finally. “I changed into something more comfortable.”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  Sitting down, tucking her legs under her, she picked up her wine glass. “Tell me about your marina,” she said.

  chapter forty

  Dougie Hallam slammed the fridge door in Janey’s apartment; there was no more beer. And she hadn’t been lying when she’d told him that she didn’t keep her emergency money in a coffee can in the freezer anymore. “Stop that goddamned crying,” he snarled. He flicked the tips of his fingers across her face. His nails left a row of parallel welts on her cheek.

  “You bastard,” she sobbed. “I wish I really did have AIDS.”

  He laughed and raised his hand. She flinched and he laughed again.

  Still laughing, he went upstairs. He got a flashlight and left the house, descending into the ravine. The woods were dark, but he didn’t turn the flashlight on. He didn’t need it to find his way; the moon was almost full and there was plenty of light from the houses bordering the woods. Underfoot, rotting branches and twigs snapped and dead leaves crackled, until he came to the well-trodden main path. Then he moved in almost complete silence, a massive wraith in the moonlight.

  The footpath ran alongside the Braithwaites’ big backyard, emerging onto the turnaround at the end of Wood Lane. The single streetlight at the entrance to the footpath was burnt out; each time the city fixed it, Hallam would shoot it out with Freddy’s old air rifle. They’d eventually given up repairing it.

  Just before the turnaround, he clambered over the low stone wall into the overgrown yard and made his way to the side door, in the covered breezeway between the house and the garage. There was no light over the door — he’d removed the bulb himself — and the rotting wicker lawn furniture he’d stacked beside the door shielded him from view from the street, as well as from the prying eyes of that old busybody who lived up the road. He rapped on the door with the butt of the flashlight and in a matter of seconds, Ruth opened the door. Dim light spilled into the breezeway from the 25-watt bulb he’d installed in the small back foyer. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and twisted the dead-bolt. He left the key in t
he lock.

  Ruth peered silently up at him. In the poorly lit hall she looked almost like she had when he’d first started visiting her and her sisters more than twenty-five years ago. While the twins had turned fat, Ruth had somehow stayed slim and firm, god knows how. The only exercise she got was from housework, tending the crop, and sex. Not that he personally gave a damn what she looked like. His stepmother hadn’t been any great shakes in the looks department, either, but she’d more than made up for it in other ways. Nevertheless, that Ruth had retained her looks helped sales of their videos.

  He went into the living room. Ruth trailed obediently after him, slippers whispering on the threadbare carpets. In the brighter light of the living room, she looked pale and dry, but it must have been true, what they said about the sun damaging a woman’s complexion, because the skin of her face was smoother than that of a lot of younger women. She was wearing an old housecoat over a flannel nightgown that had once buttoned up the front, but it had lost its buttons and he could see her tits when she turned. Small and pink-tipped, they hardly sagged at all. Despite having just had sex with Janey, he felt himself swell and stiffen. It had been more than a month since they’d done a Little Ruthie Show. First things first, though.

  “Time to pay some bills,” he said. Ruth silently watched as he opened the rolltop desk and took a cheque-book from one of the interior drawers. From his pocket, he took the invoices he’d prepared earlier, for services rendered, plus materials. He put them on the desk beside the chequebook, then pulled a chair over. Ruth sat down.

  He watched over her shoulder as she took a fountain pen and marked each bill paid, then wrote a separate cheque for each invoice. She wrote slowly and carefully, forming each letter perfectly. Even her signature — Ruth A. Braithwaite — looked like a handwriting example from a schoolbook. When she’d finished writing the cheques, she capped the pen, rose, and waited for instruction.

  “Go to the bedroom,” he told her.

  She left the room. Hallam folded the cheques, totalling slightly more than $10,000, and put them into his shirt pocket. He added the invoices to others in a folder labelled “Expenses,” then put the chequebook back into the drawer, and closed the desk. On his way to the bedroom, he went into the kitchen and took a couple of bottles of beer from a refrigerator that was at least as old as he was. He also grabbed a bottle of Canadian Club from the cupboard. Although Ruth didn’t normally drink, she usually needed a couple of shots before she could perform. More than that and she got sick.

  She was waiting for him on the bed in the bedroom at the end of the hall, naked, surrounded by the sex toys he’d purchased on the Internet, and getting herself ready with lubricating jelly. She’d brushed her hair and made up her eyes and mouth and looked years younger. He checked the positioning of the video cameras mounted on tripods around the bed and that the DVD recorders were loaded and ready to go. He made her take a couple of slugs from the bottle of Canadian Club. He drank a beer as he undressed. Then he set the timer for half an hour, started the recorders, put on his Lone Ranger mask, and got onto the bed with her. He had an erection like a steel pole and, thanks to the lessons his stepmother had taught him, he could stay that way for pretty much as long as he wanted. It was Ruth’s job to do whatever she could to make him come before the timer went off. She’d become pretty good at her job, too, because she knew he’d beat the crap out of her if she didn’t succeed. Sometimes he beat that crap out of her anyway.

  He let her succeed, but just barely. Afterward, when he came out of the shower, she was standing outside the bathroom wearing the same tattered nightgown, house-coat, and slippers. She hadn’t cleaned herself up and there was drying semen on her face and in her hair. Her lips were bruised and swollen. There was fresh blood on the front of her nightgown; she’d needed motivating.

  “That girl was here.” she said, speaking for the first time since he’d arrived.

  “Eh? What girl?”

  “Her brother tried to talk to me in the woods, but I ran away. Father — ”

  “What did she want?” Hallam snapped, cutting her off.

  Ruth shook her head, would not speak.

  Hallam grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against the wall. She clung to his massive wrist with both hands, but otherwise did not struggle. “Did she come into the house?”

  “No, no. Father would have been angry. He doesn’t let us have visitors.”

  “Tell me what she said,” Hallam demanded.

  “Please. I won’t go into the woods again. I promise.”

  With a growl, he threw her aside. She fell to the floor and lay quivering and sobbing. He knew it was useless to try to make sense of anything she said. Ruth’s mind was mush. Whatever marbles she had left were cracked and broken.

  “She said his name was Joe,” she whimpered.

  “Whose name was Joe?” When she didn’t answer, he reached down and pulled her to her feet as easily as if she were made of straw. He slapped her. Sometimes, when she was having trouble writing the cheques, slapping her helped focus her attention, but not always. “The girl’s brother,” he said. “His name was Joe?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “He talked to me in the woods. Father was very angry at me for going into the woods.”

  “When was she here?”

  “Before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before. Before.”

  Hallam slapped her again. Her eyes went out of focus and she would have fallen had he not been holding her up.

  “I’m sorry,” she whimpered in a small voice. “I won’t ever do it again, Poppa, I promise. Please, don’t punish me.” Suddenly, she began to thrash wildly in Hallam’s grasp. “Go away,” she shrieked. “Go away. He’ll be angry if he catches you here. Father made Marvin go away because he liked my drawings and told me I was pretty.”

  Hallam slapped her again, harder. Her head rocked and her eyes rolled up until all he could see were the whites. Then they closed.

  “Fuck,” he said, releasing her. She collapsed in a heap at his feet.

  After a quick check of the basement and the security cameras, he collected his flashlight and left the house, using his own key to lock the side door behind him. He was halfway home when he realized he’d left the DVD discs on the table in the living room. Hell with them, he thought. He’d pick them up later. He had other things on his mind. What was Schumacher’s sister doing nosing around? And when, exactly? Ruth’s sense of time was crap. Mostly, when she talked at all, it was about things that had happened twenty or thirty years ago or within the last few hours. Everything in between was scrambled like the pieces of a jigsaw in a box, and too many of them were missing. Rachel Schumacher might have come round thirty years ago or just that afternoon. Hallam was pretty sure it had been the latter.

  He had a good thing going with Ruth. Between the fake invoices, the crop in the basement, and selling videos of his games with her on the Internet, he was making a small fortune. He was goddamned if he was going to let some do-gooder dyke bitch screw things up. He was going to have to keep an eye on her.

  chapter forty-one

  Monday, August 7

  Shoe looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock. The wine bottle on the coffee table was empty and Maureen had fallen asleep on the sofa. One minute, they’d been talking about his plans for his motel and marina, and her hopes for her own landscaping business, then she’d put her head back, closed her eyes, and started snoring softly. He was spreading an afghan over her when the headlights of a car turning into the drive lit up the drapes drawn over the living room window. A moment later a key grated in the lock.

  “Well, isn’t this cosy,” Hal said when he saw Maureen on the sofa and Shoe standing in the living room.

  Maureen’s eyes fluttered open and she sat up. “Hal.” She scrubbed her face with the palms of her hands. “You’re home?” She stood, clutching the front of her dressing gown.

  “And just in time, too,” he said. “Or am I too late?” H
e was wearing what appeared to be new clothes, tan trousers and a polo shirt with the hang tag still attached to the back of the collar. He was carrying a small overnight bag.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Maureen demanded. “You’ve had us all worried sick. Isn’t that right, Shoe?”

  “Not so worried that it prevented you two from having a little fun, I see. Is my wife as good a shag as Marty, Joe? I wouldn’t know. It’s been so long since she bestowed her favours on me, I’ve forgotten.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Hal,” Maureen snapped. “Shoe has been a perfect gentleman.”

  “And gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, do they? Well, don’t let me interrupt. I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Hal,” Maureen said. “I’ve got a splitting headache and I’m not in the mood for your foolishness. Nothing happened.”

  “Fine, nothing happened. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.” However, instead of going upstairs, he went into the kitchen and down the basement stairs.

  Maureen slumped onto the sofa and put her face in her hands. “Christ, what am I going to do?”

  “Get some rest,” Shoe said. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

  She raised her head. “Are you leaving? Please don’t. It’s late. You can sleep on the Hide-A-Bed downstairs. I — I don’t want to be alone with him in the morning.”

  Shoe was also uncomfortable at the thought of being in the house when Hal woke up in the morning. He considered suggesting that if Maureen didn’t want to be there when Hal woke up, she could come back to his parents’ house with him, but all he said was, “I should go.”

  “Fine,” Maureen replied coldly, and stamped petulantly from the room and up the stairs.

  Shoe turned to leave as Hal came into the living room. “Where’s Maureen?” he said.

  “Upstairs,” Shoe said.

  “Well, you can let yourself out,” Hal said. He started up the stairs.

  “Hal,” Shoe said.