Except he had no viewers. Only Troy, the little blond boy with the goggle-like eyeglasses who lived down the street. Troy had taken to crawling through Stefano’s window now and then to visit. He would look at the paintings and sometimes comment. He said they were “neat.”
Stefano wanted real feedback, from grown-ups. His parents knew a lot about art and creativity, but they hadn’t even tried to see the paintings he showed them. Showing them had been a mistake.
But worse was the time he had hauled his best pieces into the little gallery on Lonsdale. The gallery lady had gone out of her way to give him what she must have considered to be constructive criticism, but she didn’t know a thing about him or what he was trying to say. And she needn’t have bothered, because her first reaction said it all, that fleeting look of dismay, then pity. She may as well have stabbed him in the heart.
Now he showed no one, never, no more.
The restaurant had peaked at around nine and was quieter now. The wait staff and dishwashers were taking short breaks, flirting by the refrigerator, goofing around. They ignored Stefano, and he knew why. He scared them all with his physical presence — or maybe lack of it. At twenty-two, he stood taller than the crowd. He was a looming invisibility. His body had grown long and concave from years of fussy, almost food-phobic eating. His hair was black and wiry, and his lashes were long. His beard had come in as wispy as the patch of hair on his chest. He would have liked a wild and messy beard, but people in the food industry should be well groomed, as Chef Jordan had told him, and he did everything he could to please Chef.
She talked about it sometimes on their shared commute, complimenting his haircut or his new shoes, whatever efforts he made to look nice. She said nothing, though, whenever a horrible, sleepless night had left him bristly or unkempt, like today.
He hadn’t shaved today because of his parents’ Scarlatti. It had kept him awake, that damned harpsichord tinkling through the floorboards — along with the endless groan of Anastasia’s CPAP machine — down into his lair, glassy notes dripping on his head till he ducked under the blankets with a snarl. Head covered, he had stayed in bed till past noon and risen too late to get properly ready in time for pickup by Chef in her Rabbit.
What Stefano desperately needed was a place of his own, but the dream was fading, and worse than hopelessness is hopelessness that follows hope. Two years ago he had secured this job at the Taverna. After saving up for over a year, and after an excited month hunting for his own apartment — that was back in June — he understood that he could fill out rental applications till his fingers rotted off, and still nobody would accept him. He was too different. Anyway, he couldn’t afford to move out, not on his wages. He was stuck in his parents’ home with no escape.
Something had to give. And what would give, if not him?
Not them, Paul and Colette. They were dried out and timeless. They would live forever, and he would live below them for just as long. He was their burden, their disappointment, the boy who had destroyed the family, and as punishment they would play the cursed CD. Scarlatti in the morning, Scarlatti at night. Sometimes — just sometimes — they would break it up with Schubert.
A waitress shrieked a laugh, and a busboy shushed her, the two of them skidding like drunks on a dancefloor. Stefano squeezed his eyes shut. The din never stopped in the Greek Taverna. Chatter from the dining room, the whisking rush of the waitresses’ nyloned legs, the banging from the dish pit. Chef and sous-chef were arguing about eggplant, and as always, the radio buzzed on its shelf, CKLG-FM, volume down so low that the DJs sounded like mosquito people.
He glanced at the clock and clamped his jaw. Almost quitting time. The tightness and tingling coursed down from rump to Achilles tendon. At just past 11:00 p.m. he heard the last diner belch his satisfaction, pay his bill, and go. Instantly the staff dropped their manners and became their normal vulgar selves. Hyenas.
Stefano cleaned his work surfaces and packed vegetables, scowling as he thought about Anastasia. The piercing shriek of that waitress had done it. Shrieking girls always took him back to his sister’s last laugh. Chairs were being pulled aside now, and the dishes were loaded into the bins. The staff moved down the narrow corridor past Stefano to the back exit, not looking at him. They filed out into the night, and the door eased shut with a thump. A hush fell over this steamy, smelly dungeon — except for the yapping radio.
He switched it off. Chef Jordan was nowhere in sight. She had sung out good night to the girls, done what she had to do, then disappeared. She would be outside, rewarding herself with a short toke as she waited.
Stefano pictured her there in the dark, sucking her poison, tall and slim, as dark as the night around her. Her mother was black and her father white, and she looked exotic, with her umber skin, grey-blue eyes, and deep gold curls. He loved the slow, soft lilt of her voice. He loved everything about her.
He threw his apron in the hamper and pulled on his ski jacket. The back door that opened onto the parking lot was steel plated like it was meant to keep out tanks instead of the briny portside chill. There was a patter of light rain as he stepped out, and the sharp drift of burning weed located her to him in the darkness — there she stood, almost invisible by the blue dumpster, with her woolly coat wrapped close. She smiled and nodded at him, and together they headed toward her car. A crackling series of bangs sounded off in the distance. Halloween was around the corner, and even in the drizzle kids were out getting a head start on the fun.
Chef was stuffed into her driver’s seat now. Stefano took his place beside her. It was icy cold in here, and his fingers, linked on his lap, looked bony and blue. Chef twisted the key and started the car, her Rabbit, her Little Lemon, as she called it, and along with its uneven poop-poop, something in its workings chattered like windup teeth. Chef said, like she said so often, “Oh dear, there go the valves.”
What could he say to that? “Oh dear,” he murmured.
He knew she must wish him gone. She would prefer a small-talker like herself, what with all the hours they’d spent jammed together going to and fro since May, when she had moved in just down the block. How did it happen that he was so well read and not a bad writer, yet in her presence, the spoken word got stuck somewhere between his brain and his tongue?
His few attempts at rejoinder were always drowned out by something larger than himself. If it wasn’t the drone of a truck, it was a passing siren. If not a siren, it was her exclaiming about the funny bumper sticker ahead. There was always something.
The Rabbit idled on the white line. Chef looked westward for a break in traffic. “Problem is, you take her in for the valves, and they say, ‘Sorry, ma’am, looks like the whole tranny’s gotta go.’ You say, ‘Ouch, how much is that gonna set me back?’ They say, ‘Ooh, well, this one’s kind of a doozy.’ It’s always a doozy with cars, Stef. Trust me, you’re better off with public transit.”
He looked at her sidelong and bent his mouth into his sexiest practiced smile, but her eyes were on a passing bus. She pulled out so fast they nearly hit its rear end. Stefano seized the grab handle at his side. Chef was a menace on the road. It was a miracle they weren’t both dead, with all the miles they put in between the harbourfront, where they worked, and upper Lynn Valley, where they lived.
Lonsdale to Keith, Keith to Grand Boulevard — always the same roads. Chef was telling him about the threat of coyotes to small pets. She had a cat named Radar, as he well knew by now. He didn’t bother looking at her as she prattled on about cats and coyotes. His mind was on his own inner processes, his cold and airy nasal passages, the tightness of his face. His teeth ached, pushing against his jawbone. How odd that nobody noticed the changes coming over him. When would Chef look at him, finally, and gasp?
Someday, he would take her up into the wilds, where she would be the helpless one, and he would be in control. He smiled, and his mind went back to his next painting. It would be a self-p
ortrait in vermillion. He would bring his long face out from the trees for a change, into the foreground. It was time to show his teeth.
Three
THE GHOSTS OF SUBURBIA
Dave Leith sat alone in a haunted house. The house didn’t belong to him, but to the people upstairs. He had been on the North Shore since April and in this place since August, with his wife Alison and young daughter Izzy — they were away this week visiting Alison’s family in Parksville. He knew he was lucky to have landed the main floor of this sizeable home, even if the rent was hemorrhaging his bank account. He should be grateful.
Instead he was sulking. He sat on a dining room chair by the living room window, looking out at the rain splashing down on somebody else’s rising equity.
The ghost in the walls groaned. He ignored it. This was a nearly new monster house in a nearly new neighbourhood, and as far as he knew, it had no gruesome history. He hadn’t believed the warnings of the landlord’s young daughter the day he and Alison moved in. The kid had watched as they carted things from the U-Haul down to the side entrance, and on one of his passes she had told him, “There are ghosts down there, you know.”
He had thought it was cute. He’d smiled at the little girl like the big, brave man he was. But he had since heard the proof, usually late at night: the sighs and thuds of what could only be the residual angst of those who had passed on.
Leith was itching to leave this house. Not because of the ghosts, which he could take or leave, but because he wanted a place of his own, a place with property pins, a lawn, a concrete pad for his barbecue. All his life he had been a freehold landowner. Then he’d moved to North Vancouver and found himself out of his depth. Getting a house here was out of the question. A condo, maybe. Renting was just plain brutal. This was his third move this year, always on the lookout for a better deal.
His work cell rang, and he hoped it was the office wanting him to come in and do something. Anything. Sitting alone and listening to weird noises wasn’t fun.
“Leith,” he said to his phone.
The caller was Corporal Michelin Montgomery — known to staff as Monty. He was a silver-haired newcomer to the North Vancouver detachment, even newer than Leith. Unlike Leith, he had already made a ton of friends.
“Dave, sorry to spring this on you,” Monty said. “Looks like we’ve got trouble in Lynn Valley. Up to you, really, but we’re going to be all over this tomorrow, and I thought you might want to have a first-hand look.”
Leith jotted down the address, agreed to be on scene in twenty minutes, and disconnected.
He was putting away his notebook when something moved along the floor toward him. He jumped to his feet, toppling his chair, and stared into the shadows of the haunted house.
He looked down. Nothing but a large house spider scuttling along the floorboards. The spider was as startled as Leith was and had frozen in its tracks, waiting for this hell to pass.
Leith killed the spider with the slap of a rolled-up Westworld magazine, knowing that for a big, brave man, he had leaped fairly high. Not a good start to a new homicide. He stuck the mess in the kitchen waste bin, then fetched his fleece-lined RCMP jacket off its hook and headed out the door.
* * *
The rain poured on Lynn Valley. On a little spur of road that jutted up into the trees, out of line with the well laid-out suburbs, stood the subject house — behind the high fence that hid it. The spur of road was named Greer. Lynn Valley Road, intersecting Greer, was jammed with police vehicles. A handful of concerned citizens were out in their raincoats, talking to RCMP members about what the heck was going on here.
Leith popped open his umbrella and made his way through an open gate and into a yard. The yard was big by North Vancouver standards, he saw. There were several ugly trees growing here, leafless and hairy, throwing spooky shadows. The branches seemed polka-dotted with withered apples hardly bigger than cherries. An old orchard, maybe, though North Van was anything but fruit-growing country.
Light dazzled his eyes. A heaved cement path led to a front porch, but the action seemed to be at the side of the house. He left the path and crossed a stretch of soggy turf to join Corporal Montgomery and others in their rain capes. JD Temple was present, he was glad to see. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head and framed her face so that her eyes seemed larger than usual.
LED torches cranked high and spiked into the turf directed splashy light onto the side of the house and all around, the beams fanning out to make rain and faces sparkle. The group was looking toward the house, not up at its boarded windows, but down at its foundations. Leith followed the general line of sight and saw that where concrete met dirt was a man-sized hole. It looked to him like a poorly installed access hatch had rotted out some years ago, allowing in the elements.
“Shabby,” he said. He’d been in the construction trade for a few years before joining the force, and he knew everything there was to know about foundations.
“Looks like the hole was covered with that bit of plywood, but it’s fallen down,” JD said. She pointed out the piece of wood half-buried in mud and a scattering of largish rocks that had maybe propped it up.
“Or dogs smelled something fishy and got at it,” Leith said. Dogs weren’t supposed to run off leash in the city, but sometimes they got away.
He could see water pooling in the dirt around the hole, building up and spilling into the crawl space. From the blackness within, a vague light shifted and flickered.
“The cause of all this fuss is in a duffel bag,” Monty said. “Ident’s in there, just checking if it’s human. In which case we got a problem, ’cause Dad sure isn’t going to fit through that hole.”
Dad, Leith interpreted — as he’d had to time and again since his arrival in North Vancouver — was Jack Dadd, the overweight coroner. Gauging the hole in the foundations now, he could see the problem. The wind shifted, and he could smell death.
“Freaky place,” JD said. She was looking up into the stark branches of the trees, the unappetizing fruit that hung there. “What can you grow in this part of the world? Crab apples?”
Monty looked around, too, but with something like admiration. “One week to Halloween, what a setting for a zombie bash. Great whadyacallit, ambience. Which reminds me —”
A grunt from the base of the house interrupted whatever Monty was reminded of, and Leith watched a white-suited Ident tech squirm from the hole — like a weird birthing — and into the hard beam of the floodlight. The tech made it to his feet and approached the detectives, removing his mask and spitting into the grasses.
“Yeah, well,” he said to Monty, “it’s a body, all right. Been there a while. Lying in a puddle. We got some pictures, but didn’t want to mess around too much. What d’you want us to do? Leave it as is, or haul it out?”
“How fragile is it?” asked JD. “Are we going to rearrange the anatomy if we move it?”
“I think we’ll get it out pretty clean.” The tech looked back at the foundations with a tradesman’s squint. “Shift it onto a tarp, pull it out slow. We got a clear path, no obstacles. I don’t see a problem.”
“It’s either that or a Jack-hammer,” Monty said.
Both he and the tech chuckled. JD appeared to get the joke, but didn’t seem to find it funny. A moment later, Leith got it, too. Jack Dadd. He obliged with a grin, briefly. Across the lawn the constables were toiling like concert roadies, setting up the polypropylene tent that would protect exhibits and equipment. Leith recognized one of them, a man who should be here next to him, in plainclothes, being a detective.
“So what do we know about who owns this place?” he asked Monty.
“JD’s given me a little history on that,” Monty said. “Eccentric dude named Harmon is on title, now living in Florida. We’re trying to contact him. He built it in the sixties, but not to code, and a few years ago it was declared unlivable and closed up. But he
refuses to sell or upgrade. As a result, he’s blessed Lynn Valley with its first derelict mansion.”
“Wow.” Leith looked up at the house with interest. It was hardly a mansion, just a regular two-storey home, squat and graceless with a peculiar hip-roof construction and an odd wannabe-tower structure stuck at one corner. The roof was clad in dark metal, the siding in black-brown clapboards clustered with moss. In a neighbourhood of beautiful, bright homes, this one tucked back in the trees had the quality of a mould blemish.
Monty turned to the Ident tech. “Do we preserve the body in situ or do we preserve the hole? I guess we could rip up floorboards, approach it that way, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
Leith asked the tech how the ground in there was for prints.
“Lousy,” the tech replied. “All grit. We stayed off the drag path as best as possible and got a bunch of shots of scuff marks that aren’t going to tell us anything. Ripping up the floorboards will just drop a bunch of crap down, contaminate it all to hell unless we lay down some serious plastic. Again, not worth it. If there’s anything in there, it’s lost in the sand. We’re going to have to sift it all out one way or another.”
“Let’s haul it out. What d’you think, get some good video footage as we go?” Leith asked Monty.
Monty agreed. “Let’s do that.” And to the tech, “Bag got a zip, or what?”
“Drawstring at the top. Knotted, like, a million times. We had to cut a flap in the fabric to see in. Could see the top of somebody’s head and looked like part of a hand. I mean, if we cut the bag wide open, it’ll be that much harder to get it out clean. Best just to bring it out in one piece, bag and all, extra careful.”
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