by Ingrid Betz
He scraped back his chair and wandered over to the window. He was alone in the lab; Hussein had finished up twenty minutes ago. The coffee shop next door looked deserted. It was that dead time of day between the afternoon coffee-break crowd and the supper hour regulars. He himself was in no hurry to go home. Darlene was later and later these days. He’d smelled alcohol on her more than once, alcohol and other things. Other men. This morning she’d made sure he knew in advance that she wouldn’t be back till all hours.
“The travel agency’s holding an orientation party. For people planning on going on a Caribbean cruise this fall?”
Watching in the bedroom mirror, he pretended not to notice the new tunic top Darlene was pulling over her head. A glittery affair in fuschia with metallic threads running through the weave, it was deep-cut to show off the swell of her small breasts. Underneath she wore what looked to him like skinny black leggings. As though she were twelve years old and had forgotten her skirt; he had to admit it turned him on and he hated to think it did the same for other men.
“They’ll be showing slides of the ship, and the various shore excursions you can sign up for. There’ll be refreshments, natch. Wine and canapés and stuff.”
“I suppose those excursions all cost extra?”
She’d fired a look of exasperation at him from the mirror. “Where’ve you been living, Peter? On the moon? If you can’t afford the cruise, just say so. Gary offered again. He’d even spring for an upgraded cabin. He sold a Hummer last week.”
At least he’d managed to avoid the ultimate humiliation, that of seeing his wife go off on a cruise with another man. Thanks to his retainer from the company. No sense going home to an empty house, he decided. He’d go to the hospital instead and grab soup and a sandwich at the cafeteria before taking the elevator up to the fourth floor. Marigold was always happy to see him. As happy as she ever was nowadays.
After two days the doctors in Huntsville had done all they could for her, and she’d been airlifted to the University Hospital in London. She had come around by then and lay pale and uncomplaining in Intensive Care, her hair neatly brushed.
The Huntsville nurses had remembered her from the incident in the park a month earlier and made a fuss. Peter meantime cashed in the return portion of her airline ticket and rented a room in the Rainbow Motel. Sitting on the edge of the sagging mattress, he’d called Hussein and given him instructions for the next day. He wasn’t sure he’d told Hussein everything he had needed to say, but he couldn’t worry about that; he’d have to be some kind of unfeeling jerk to leave Marigold on her own.
When he got hold of Darlene at the salon and told her there’d been an accident and he’d be delayed, her first question was, “Overnight, you mean?” She pretended a frosty annoyance that didn’t fool him for a minute. He hung up quickly and tried not to think of where she might spend the night in his absence. On the last day in Huntsville, the doctors had picked a time when he was with Marigold—which was pretty well from mid-morning till they kicked him out at nine in the evenings—to break the news to her that she would probably never walk again.
“Of course there’s always a chance.”
They’d tried to light a candle-flame in the dark. The usual blather about great strides being made when it came to the treatment of spinal injuries, plus the ever popular, “The human body has remarkable powers of healing.”
Marigold didn’t seem particularly interested in what they were telling her. She stared out of her gold-flecked eyes at things the rest of them couldn’t see. Later, in the corridor, the doctors expressed their concern to Peter over the way she’d taken the news.
“It won’t have sunk in yet,” he said. “She hasn’t let it.” Had he, really?
“That’ll make it all the harder for her to deal with later on.”
Peter thought he knew some of the things that were going through her mind. He girded himself for the question she was sure to ask—what had happened to the cubs she’d rescued? But the days passed and she never did. Did she guess? Peter couldn’t bring himself to broach the subject. There was another question Marigold hadn’t asked yet which he dreaded even more. Was Cormier Lab still going ahead with the work he’d contracted to do for the Chinese company? Perhaps she knew the answer to that, too.
Peter returned to his chair and picked up the pen. Instead of finishing his ad he found himself doodling changes to the lab interior, figuring out ways to set things up so that a technician could work from a wheelchair. Maybe he could talk Marigold into coming back. In which case advertising for new help before he’d even asked whether she’d consider it was jumping the gun. Look at it this way: offering her a chance at her old job back was a courtesy he owed her. On the other hand if she did agree to return, would the company still want her, now that they knew the type of sabotage of which she was capable?
Angry suddenly with fate that always seemed to sneak up and blindside him just when things looked promising, he slashed a big question mark across the paper and slid it into a drawer. Before he headed for the door, he took a final look around the lab and checked that everything was properly put away. Last week Hussein had forgotten to refrigerate a whole tray of urine samples. He’d promised Marigold to go by her flat and pick up a few things to take back to the hospital.
“It’s a waste.” Water gushed from the tap as Mrs. Patel filled a watering can at the kitchen sink.
“Waste?” In the bedroom, Peter stopped his inspection of the dresser drawer. He’d informed Marigold’s landlady of her accident as soon as they got back to London. He wasn’t sure what kind of tabs the woman kept on her tenant but he didn’t want her phoning police when Marigold failed to show up several nights running.
“Of beautiful hair. A woman with such hair can get any man she chooses. But only if she has the use of her legs.”
“Ah.” Peter selected one of Marigold’s nightgowns and held it up. Long shapeless flannel with an allover pattern of tiny blue forget-me-nots—pretty well what he’d expected. The right thing, as it happened, to hide wasted limbs. He knew exactly what Mrs. Patel meant.
He refolded the nightgown and reached for the carryall bag he’d seen at the back of the closet. Straightening up, his head brushed against a couple of blouses and he caught the faint violet scent he had come to associate with Marigold. So few clothes, he thought, comparing them to the lavish selection that crowded Darlene’s closet. Everything was exactly where she’d told him it would be. Slippers, bathrobe, a toiletries kit in the spotless tiny bathroom. On the night table were the Harlequin she’d asked him to bring and a framed photograph of Lynn and herself. It pictured them with arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing and with windswept hair—Marigold’s rippling like flame, Lynn’s black and spiky and boyish. He looked at the bed, with its colourful spread drawn smooth in spite of the ungodly hour at which she’d left on that last morning. Propped against the pillow was the little stuffed moose the nurses had given her after she’d been rescued from the portage. He dropped that into the bag as well.
“This should do it,” he said, and carried the bag through to the other room, where Mrs. Patel was stumping around on swollen ankles, watering Marigold’s plants. Ivy on a bookshelf, a spider plant hanging by an ornamental chain from the ceiling, a yellow kalenchoe blooming in a pot on the kitchen table. For the first time Peter noticed the single place setting laid ready on a flowered mat, and the sight pricked him in the heart. It was so … so typically Marigold. Movement outside the kitchen window caught his eye.
Staring at him through the pane with a belligerent expression was a cat with chewed-up ears. Peter stared back. It had to be the animal Marigold was always talking about, the one she called Big Red that Mrs. Patel threatened to dispatch. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if she noticed.
She rolled her eyes. “She tells me, she doesn’t feed him. But I know. I’m not blind.”
A couple of t
ins of cat food—the small expensive kind—stood on the counter. Next to them was a saucer that looked recently used. This reminded him, there’d be food spoiling in the refrigerator. He looked inside and saw a carton of chocolate milk, some left-over pizza, one of those mixed salads in a plastic clamshell, and a couple of boxes of microwave dinners.
“Please, take anything you can use and throw out the rest,” he said.
“Will she be a long time in the hospital?”
“Depends on how well the rehab goes.”
Mrs. Patel looked at him shrewdly. “If she wants to break the lease, I can find a new tenant, no problem. It’s a good flat.”
Not that good, thought Peter, frowning at the too-small cupboards with their ill-fitting doors, and knowing the way the rooms looked dark even on sunny days. Any attractions it possessed lay in what Marigold had done to it. His glance roamed the warm print curtains, the tasseled puffy sofa cushions, and the animal posters splashing life and colour over the walls, and he became aware of the oddest sensation. As though he wanted to cry.
“No, no. Ms. Green will keep the flat.” All it required was a ramp over the threshold to make it wheelchair-accessible. He could get the man Darlene had hired to renovate their kitchen last year to do it.
Mrs. Patel refilled the watering can and placed it on the counter. She fixed her black gimlet gaze on him. “Rent is due first of the month. You’ll pay?”
“Yes. I’ll pay.”
She nodded, turned off the light and followed him out the door. He watched while she produced a key from the folds of her sari and locked up. He was reluctant to leave, he realized. This was Marigold’s home, where she had lived, the original good-hearted and decent Marigold. Before he’d wrecked her life by getting her involved in an unsavoury deal with people bent on harming what she loved and valued most.
24.
THE PLANE FROM SARNIA TOUCHED DOWN in London at eight ten in the evening. Dusk shrouded the surrounding farmlands with a velvet haze as the Dash 8 swung down to land. The terminal was brilliantly lit and once inside Verena suppressed an urge to shield her eyes as she emerged from the winding corridor into the arrivals area. As usual after time spent in the bush, so much lighting struck her as garish and unnecessary. Easily a dozen people were on hand to greet the passengers, but Borrowman was not one of them.
Even if he had been at the airport to meet the early afternoon flight on which she was originally scheduled, he wouldn’t have waited around this long. She’d called his number from the Bracebridge airport, then again from Toronto and finally from Sarnia, but his cellphone remained inexplicably turned off. Nevertheless she scanned the waiting faces and was aware of a hollow sense of disappointment as she continued on to the exit without him.
She’d switched flights at the last minute. Intuition, as much as an accumulation of small observations, had made her uneasy about one of the passengers who’d boarded the plane with her in Bracebridge. A man in his mid-thirties travelling alone, his small, pointed black beard and high Slavic cheekbones reminded her of someone from the past. Eventually it came to her. Comrade Lenin, she thought, on the dock of the shipbuilders’ yard in Murmansk, about to unleash the Russian Revolution on an unsuspecting world. The picture hung in the auditorium of her school in Belgrade, inspiring reverence and loathing in equal parts among the students. In the Toronto departure lounge he turned up again, booked on her flight to London. She noticed that he never looked at her directly, unlike the other men who stared openly at her long blonde plait and her dancers’ legs under the short schoolgirl skirt.
He’d seated himself two rows behind her, unfolded a Globe and Mail and was submerged from sight. Ten minutes into her wait, she went out into the aisle to try Borrowman, and when she returned she purposely chose a seat out of his line of vision. After a few minutes he too moved, again to a position from which he could see her but she could not see him without turning her head. It might have been coincidence but then again it might not. She shivered as the old Eastern Europe of mistrust, fear, and betrayal closed in on her. She couldn’t shake a sense of what if. What if the police had put public transportation under surveillance as soon as they’d been informed of the murder?
When the call came for boarding, she timed her approach to the gate so that she’d be the last passenger through. Comrade Lenin, it appeared, had similar plans. With a show of politeness, he stepped back and motioned her to precede him. She started forward and the attendant held out her hand.
“Boarding pass, please.”
Verena stopped and gave a little sound of annoyance. “My book! I forgot my book,” she exclaimed, and went to retrieve Sleep Is for the Rich from the seat where she had purposely left it. She took her time stowing the book in the outside pocket of her backpack, obliging Lenin to make his way through the gate ahead of her.
“Miss?” called the attendant. “If you’re ready?”
“Thanks. I’ve changed my mind,” Swinging her backpack over her shoulder, Verena walked swiftly out of the lounge.
One hour later, Air Canada Jazz found her a seat on the plane to Sarnia. But from Sarnia to London, all the flights were booked. The best they could do was put her on standby. She’d ordered coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich at the fast food counter and five hours later there’d been a no-show on the supper-hour plane.
The London air enveloped her with its familiar hint of damp as she stepped out of the revolving door. Squaring her shoulders, she headed for the taxi stand. She’d called Borrowman at intervals all afternoon, finally switching from his mobile to the house landline. Normally one of the boys picked up. Or Elaine herself would snap an irritable “Yes,” resentful because she was cooking supper. Instead, the answering machine took her call and Verena hung up without leaving a message.
The last time Borrowman had failed to meet a flight on her return was at Christmas. Raymond had been playing a horn solo in the school concert and on that occasion he’d called ahead to let her know. She sank onto the back seat of a taxi, hauling her pack after her.
“Springbank Road,” she told the driver. “I’ll tell you where to let me off.”
“You have good flight?” asked the man politely. He had a Middle Eastern accent, like so many of the drivers nowadays.
“Long,” she said in a non-committal tone that discouraged further conversation.
Everything combined to make her apprehensive and unsure: Lenin and her circuitous route home with no Borrowman at the end of it, his phone switched off and no-one answering at the house. A variety of scenarios played themselves out in her head. The Cell uncovered and Borrowman taken in for questioning. Although that wouldn’t explain the absence of Elaine and the boys. If they were absent. She wouldn’t put it past Elaine to be at home, checking the call display and opting not to answer.
Verena made her way around to the rear of the apartment building, something she did when she was feeling more than normally paranoid, and let herself in the back entrance.
An oblong rectangle of light inside indicated that the door to the superintendent’s ground floor apartment was standing ajar. The usual smells of stale cooking and cats prevailed, but something was missing—the sound of television. Mrs. Ivanovich appeared in the doorway in her rusty black skirt and a man’s white shirt. In her arms she cradled an enormous bewhiskered cat the colour of November fog, while two smaller cats wreathed themselves around her legs.
“Ah, Verena. I thought it must be you.”
“Hello, Mrs. Ivan.”
“Before you go up, it’s better you know. You had a visitor.”
“Now?”
“Three, four hours ago. She’s gone now. I made sure.” She tipped the cat onto the tiles and shooed them all back into her apartment the way she might have shooed chickens into a henhouse.
“Come.” She gestured. “Let us go up together. It will be shock for you.”
“Shock?”
“You will see. Come,” and she chivied Verena up the stairs.
“The police?” Verena asked and her heart began to pound. Thank God the Henry was still up north with St. Denis.
“No. Not the police.” For all her bulk Mrs. Ivanovich moved surprisingly quickly. They reached the first landing, strewn as usual with litter and loud with television gunshots from behind the door of number five, and started up the last flight of stairs. “A woman. She didn’t tell me her name. She said you would know.” She nudged a fast food carton aside with her man-sized Nikes as they approached Verena’s apartment. “Pigs. You want me to use the pass-key?”
But Verena was already turning her own key in the lock. When the door swung open she thought she might be hallucinating.
Everything looked familiar and yet jarringly strange, as though the apartment had been transported back to the past. Her few pieces of furniture lay overturned, closets and cupboards gaped open with their contents pulled out and scattered across the floor. She eased the backpack from her shoulders.
“A woman did this?”
“Tall. Skinny, wearing a nice suit. She talked like a schoolteacher.”
Elaine, she thought. It must be. But why? They might not be friends, but they weren’t enemies. Unless…. She frowned. Unless in the meantime she’d heard about Asher wanting a divorce and decided it was Verena’s fault. She couldn’t know that their relationship was mostly confined to Verena’s head. A fact Verena admitted to herself only in moments of abject honesty.
She would almost have preferred a visit from the police. At least that would have been something she deserved.
“She wore glasses?” she asked, just to make sure.
“Small, like half-moons.” Mrs. Ivanovich sent her an oblique look. “Do you know this woman?”
“Yes.” She picked up her good winter coat but with nowhere to put it, she let it drop. Even the hangers had been tossed from the closet. Shards of china and glass winked from the kitchen floor. Mrs. Ivanovich indicated the broom leaning against an overturned chair.