by Sam Wiebe
“Terry told me it was anything I wanted,” he said.
“You meet him at one of your father’s parties? He approach you about other girls?”
Nick shook his head. “She was the first and only.”
“Terry handle the cleanup?”
“Personally.”
“And where’s the body?”
“He disposed of it. Told me not to worry about it.”
“Could it be up by the cabins?”
“No,” Nick said. “Terry said he had a friend who’d make sure nothing was ever found.”
I thought of what Ed Leary Nichulls had said. Real bad people.
“And in return?” I said.
“I’ve helped him with some investments.”
He wasn’t looking at me anymore. I waited for some sort of explanation, a list of mitigating factors. I was young/I was scared/she was robbing me/she was laughing at me/it was the drugs/I didn’t mean to/things just got out of hand.
I stood up. “Do you know why you did it?”
He looked up at me and said matter-of-factly, “Why do you think?”
“I thought I knew,” I said. “She was with your father for a long time. You might have seen them together. You might have only realized who she was after you slept with her, and been driven over the edge by some sort of Oedipal thing. Or maybe you planned it out as revenge, protect the family name. Those would’ve been my best guesses, but now I don’t buy them.”
“I didn’t know about Pop and her until I caught him crying one day over her Missing poster.” Nick rocked his chair and knocked over his drink. We watched the gin soak into the carpet.
“I don’t know why I do things,” he said.
“Don’t equivocate. Tell me why.”
Without looking up from the stain on the carpet he told me. His answer seemed to surprise him. His voice was even-toned, lips suppressing a smile.
He said, “I just wanted to fuck something and kill it.”
Then Nick shifted his face into a sneer. It was the kind of overdrawn expression that would keep other more genuine emotions from declaring themselves. Masks within masks. How tiresome.
“What’s your amount?” he asked.
“What’s your offer?”
“Two,” he said, very serious. “Paid out over four years. Plus benefits and pension. You’d be head of security. How does that sound?”
“Tedious,” I said.
“Think of what you could do with the money. What you could buy. Or how much you could help other people.” He held out his palm. “You name a number.”
“Twenty-four.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Chelsea Loam was that age when she disappeared. When you killed her. What’s the value of a dead young woman?”
“Prostitute, let’s be clear here.”
I put my drink down on his glass coffee table. “I don’t think we can come to terms,” I said. “I’m going to walk out of here and have a cigarette and forget as much of this nastiness as I possibly can.”
Nick popped out of his chair. Before I could move he had his pistol pointed at me. “Sit down,” he said.
I bent and picked up my half-finished drink. “Think I’ll need this after all.”
“I wasn’t asking,” he said. “Sit the fuck down while I make a call.”
I didn’t move.
He lowered the barrel until it was pointed at my leg, the one Nia had shot, the one I’d favoured when I’d walked into the Overman house for the first time. He pulled the trigger.
Or tried to. It made a feeble metallic clicking sound.
“You did this?” he said.
“With help. You share the same cleaning service as the victim’s family. Would you have talked to me straight if you didn’t think you had a weapon a foot from your hand?”
He lurched forward and fell on his knees as if struck by divine revelation. His hands spasmed, his neck muscles clenched. He didn’t drop the pistol.
Behind him, standing in the kitchen, Dolores Gunn carefully jerked the wires of her stun weapon, removing the spurs from the small of Nick’s back. She nodded to me and looked down at the immobilized wretch writhing on the wet carpet.
“You should get out and go find an alibi,” she said.
I watched her pull Nick Overman to a sitting position and bind his hands so he was sitting on them. I watched her slide his trousers down, a move which was oddly sexual and oddly motherly. I watched her slip off one of his socks and gag him with it.
I moved to the fireplace and picked up a long-stemmed match. I broke it, struck it, and lit the last cigarette of the summer.
When I left Dolores was sawing through his genitals with a kitchen blade.
40
IT WAS A DAY LATER and Nick Overman still wasn’t missing. He would be, though. In time he’d become the city’s least invisible dead person. A three-province, two-state search would be conducted. Hundreds of interviews, a tip line. Posters would festoon the city’s telephone poles for years.
I was sitting on a bench by the Bloedel Observatory at the top of Little Mountain, the highest elevation within the city proper. I could see into Nat Bailey Stadium below, and all the way to the water and the monolithic cranes by the bay. Mountains, Grouse and the Sisters, loomed beyond that.
I’d hoped Wayne Loam would make it. But it was a work day. Tourists and families congregated outside the observatory. Picnics were being conducted on the sunburnt grass. I watched her approach, puffing up the hill from the bus stop. She was wearing a dark green ball cap and orange-rimmed drugstore shades. A white leather bag was slung over one shoulder. I felt a pang watching her.
Shay smiled as we drew near. She held me tight and kissed my neck and side of my face.
“Glad you’re not dead,” she said.
“Same.”
We drifted down through the picnic area, near the ponds. We found a place away from the children. I set down the battered steel ice bucket I’d been carrying, and the small bottle of butane.
“Do you have it?” I said.
She reached into her bag. “Guess I should give you these first. Probably gave you a heart attack, seeing them gone.”
She had my albums, some of them. The important ones.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” I said.
“I know. I feel shitty about the rest, believe me. The others split my share.”
“All of it?”
She smiled. “Some of it,” she said.
“And the other thing?”
She handed me the wrapped package. The corner flap had been teased up. Customs had stamped it. The diary was in fine condition.
I knew it had to be done to satisfy Terry Rhodes. His initials were in the book. He’d feel it was a point of pride. I’d given my word.
And still I hated to do it. She’d been honest in her writing, she’d told the truth, and that meant a part of her was that book. It was one of the last traces she’d existed. It was the testament, the will, the Gospel according to Chelsea Ann Loam. To lose it was to contribute to the lack of her in the world. I was a poor custodian if I’d taken it to preserve it, only to destroy it myself.
I pulled out Gains’s phone and dialed Terry Rhodes.
“We had a deal,” I said. “I’m holding to it.”
“Did you really do that to Charley?” Rhodes asked.
“That’s a separate matter,” I said. “I’m honouring our deal.”
“So honour it.”
I hung up. I handed the phone to Shay. I started to tell her how to work the camera, but she knew better than I did.
I held the diary up to the lens and flipped the pages, enough to authenticate it. I tore the book down its spine and pressed it into the bucket. I soaked it with butane and set it alight. I watched the pages darken and furl. I prodded it. I made sure there was nothing left but crumbling ash. I held up a handful for the camera.
When it was done I sent the pictures to Rhodes’s number and waited for confi
rmation. I waited seven minutes. He texted back to me with an empty message. I took that as a sign.
Shay and I walked up the hill a few paces and waited for a favourable breeze. When I felt the onset of one I tipped out the bucket. I watched the wind catch the fine ash and lift it up, dispersing it, like a toxic confetti, out over Cambie Street.
I sat down on the grass. I held Shay’s hand. We bore witness. We watched it all disappear.
EPILOGUE: CRAB PARK
TODAY IS A GOOD DAY. Today the rain falls cold and slick and frightens the tourists away. The parks and benches have all been abandoned. There is an open table in every restaurant. I can stand here by the surf and let the rain batter my fancy new trench coat and paste my hair to my forehead, knowing a hot cup of tea and my office chair are minutes away.
I don’t know why this city sees fit to kill its women. I know Yeats once said something suitably fine about the souls that perpetually haunt the streets of London. This place isn’t London and I have no idea what haunts us. Will haunt us.
I’ll be off this bench and back to the office in minutes. I’ll pass by her hotel and glance up at her window, and maybe see Shay, getting her load on, staring down at the scurrying fools below. And I’ll pass her library, where desperate people congregate, and her college where my sister will be studying, sitting in a carrel with a view of the street. And her bars. And my office.
At home, in Vancouver, in her lonely places.
AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It’s been more than three years since the Oppal Commission published its report on Vancouver’s murdered and missing women. I don’t know what changes are in the wind, if any. The Commission was dogged by controversy stemming from its sidelining of sex trade workers, First Nations groups, the victims’ families and loved ones. This marginalization is not new. This, unfortunately, is part of our way of life.
A novel isn’t reportage nor should it claim to be. Those wishing for a factual account of Vancouver’s troubled history could start with Stevie Cameron’s excellent and thorough On the Farm.
No one in this book is based on a real person. Any similarities are pure coincidence. All errors in procedure and fact are mine.
In addition to Ms. Cameron’s book I’d like to acknowledge Julian Sher and William Marsden’s Road to Hell and Leslie A. Robertson and Dara Culhane’s In Plain Sight for helping me see my city differently. I’ve benefitted from discussions with photographer and filmmaker Mel Yap, Alex Ferguson of Search and Rescue B.C., Barry Vanness at North Fraser Correctional Facility, my brother Josh for his knowledge of Winnipeg, and most importantly, sessions at CRAB Park with my friend, the great Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng. The good parts of this book are indebted to her insight and outrage, the bad parts being mine alone.
A further thanks to Chris Bucci at the McDermid Agency, for having faith in the book; my editor, Craig Pyette, for his painstaking work to get it right; copy editor Tilman Lewis and proofreader Michelle MacAleese; my students at Coquitlam College; my family; and my fellow Vancouver crime writers. I’m indebted to all of you.
S.W.
11/8/15, Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory
SAM WIEBE’s stand-alone debut novel, Last of the Independents, won an Arthur Ellis Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was nominated for a Shamus award. His stories have appeared in Thuglit, subTerrain and Spinetingler, among others. He lives in Vancouver.