Fall from Grace

by L. R. Wright

  “Usually it’s worse,” said Alberg. “If a guy plans it out, he leaves a trail. But on the other hand, when it’s spontaneous—”

  “A crime of passion, like,” said Sokolowski, helpfully.

  “—maybe he panics, does something stupid trying to cover it up.” Alberg shrugged. “Could go either way.”

  Isabella stuck her head around the door. “Dr. Gillingham’s here.”

  “In a minute,” said Alberg.

  “He flies off the edge of a cliff,” Sokolowski muttered, “lands in the middle of a bunch of women and children—” He shook his head in disgust, as if Steven Grayson had plummeted from the cliff top by choice.

  The boy had said, “Help me,” thought Alberg. Help me die. That’s what was in Steven Grayson’s mind in the last seconds of his life. Not how he had died, or why. Just the act of dying, and fear of it, and needing help. Alberg was glad Joseph Dunn had been there for him.

  He stood up and shuffled through the papers on his desk, searching. “I’ll do the victim,” he said. “Sid, you and Charlie do the islands again. And keep checking the marinas, in case the perp rented a boat.” He looked up at them. “That’s it.”

  Carrington left the office, taking his chair with him, but Sokolowski stayed behind.

  “Staff,” said the sergeant, “we can handle it all, you know. You got a lot to do here,” he said, looking pointedly at the stack of forms on Alberg’s desk.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Alberg. “It’s okay. I appreciate it, but—” He found the lens cap and held it up. “See this? I think the kid had a camera with him.”

  Sokolowski sighed. “You’re kinda behind with this shit, Karl,” he said, staring at Alberg’s desk. “Vancouver’s gonna be on your tail about it soon.”

  “They’re already on my tail,” said Alberg. “I’ll get it done. Don’t worry about it.” He slapped Sokolowski on the shoulder and steered him to the door. “Send Gillingham in, will you, Sid?”

  “His dad was killed,” said Alex Gillingham, “right after the kid graduated from high school. I remember because it happened about the same time Marjorie and I split up.” He gave Alberg a rueful look. “Marjorie’s moved away, Karl, did I tell you?”

  “Yeah, you told me, Alex.”

  “To Kelowna. She moved to Kelowna.”

  “Go on. Talk to me about Steven.”

  Gillingham lifted his right leg and rested the ankle on his left knee. He did this with some effort, since he had recently strained his back while helping a pregnant patient off the examining table. “I was their doctor. I mean the family’s, the three of them. Didn’t see much of Harry. A Workers’ Compensation Board injury once; I sent him to a physiotherapist. With Velma”—he waved his hand vaguely—“nothing serious, just the usual stuff. Steven—” He plucked at the crease in his trouser leg. “He was a healthy kid. A nice kid. I liked him.” He looked at Alberg, to make sure he was listening. Alberg nodded. “That summer,” Gillingham went on, “after Harry was killed, Velma came to me for sleeping pills. She was hurting real bad. And she was scared, too. She’d never been on her own before.”

  “Were there financial problems?”

  Gillingham shook his head. “Plenty of insurance. No financial problems. But Velma wanted to go back to work anyway. Steven would be gone, she had nobody to look after, and she wanted to keep busy. She hadn’t worked for twenty years. But I asked around, and eventually she got on at the bank.” He put his foot back on the floor, and Alberg saw him wince. The doctor looked exhausted.

  “There’s something going on between you and Velma Grayson, isn’t there, Alex.”

  Gillingham shifted in his chair, probably to ease the discomfort in his back. “Not any more.”

  Alberg tossed his notebook and pen down on his desk and stood up. He went over to the window and looked out at the parking lot, where a couple of patrol cars sat blinking in the sun. Beyond it, the road wandered off toward the village. “I’ve got a blank space in my head where that kid wants to be,” he said. He turned back to the doctor. “Help me out, Alex.”

  Gillingham hesitated, then looked up at Alberg. “I think he was gay.”

  Alberg turned this over in his mind.

  “I think he was,” said Gillingham. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “What about the girl in the photograph? Natalie?” Gillingham shrugged.

  Alberg sat down at his desk and opened his notebook.

  “I could be wrong,” said the doctor.

  “Did he ever talk to you about it?”

  “No no,” said Gillingham, shaking his head. “It was just—I don’t know. It was just a feeling.” He rubbed vigorously at his hair.

  “What else can you tell me about him?”

  Gillingham looked uneasily at Alberg’s notebook. “You’ve got to understand, I wasn’t close to the kid. He was always polite, respectful; always had a job, once he got past childhood. But he didn’t volunteer much about his private life.”

  “Was there anybody he might have confided in? How about his uncle?”

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t close to Percy, either.” He lifted his hands. “Karl, I just don’t know any more to tell you.”

  “Okay.” Alberg closed his notebook. “Thanks, Alex.”

  “Karl.” The doctor leaned forward. “Velma and I—there hasn’t been anything between us for a couple of years now.”

  Alberg nodded.

  “I—she would have married me. But at first I didn’t want that. You remember; I was into sports.”

  Alberg remembered, all right. He’d feared for Gillingham’s life, during that period.

  “And then, a little bit later, why, I wanted it, but she didn’t. So now we’re just good friends, Velma and I.”

  Alberg thought about his ex-wife, Maura, and her upcoming wedding. She’d sent him an invitation. Because they were good friends, too, she and Alberg. The thought of this was suddenly unbearably depressing.

  Gillingham gave his thighs a light slap and stood up. At the doorway he stopped and turned back to Alberg. “I can’t figure it out, Karl.”

  “Me neither, Alex,” said Alberg.

  When the doctor had left, Alberg placed a call to Natalie Walenchuk, whose phone numbers were in Steven Grayson’s address book. He reached her at work, and told her about Steven’s death.

  “I’d like to come over and talk to you,” he said.

  “Oh God. I can’t believe this.”

  “Is this afternoon okay?”

  “I can’t believe this. Steven? Oh my God.”

  Chapter 26

  THAT AFTERNOON ANNABELLE filled the bathtub with tepid water, undressed, and pinned her hair on top of her head. She climbed into the bath and lay there with her eyes closed, languidly scooping water across her breasts. She’d make a salmon loaf for dinner, she thought. She lifted her hands to stroke the back of her neck, to put cool bathwater on the nape of her neck. She opened her eyes and looked down at her body, almost submerged, and was not pleased to notice a certain droopiness here and there. She poked her belly and watched the shudder of her plumpness, and felt regretful. But oh well, she thought; she was strong, and philosophical. Her body continued to serve her reasonably well. It remained healthy, and able. And she didn’t think that a body, or even a body and a face, created seductiveness. It was something inside people, a hunger that looked out through their eyes.

  I’m going up to Erna’s, she’d say to Herman. We might take in a movie.

  Last night she’d had a dream. She was in a room with Bobby and a bunch of other people. She and Bobby had happened to glance at each other. And this glance had created such a sudden, driving need in them that Bobby got up from the table around which they were all sitting, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer (she thought this was odd, because she neither smoked nor drank), and he pulled her into the bedroom and onto a big square bed, warm and rumpled. He stripped off her clothes, and his, and knelt over her, and she lifted her hips and took him inside her—
and then she noticed for the first time that there were two other people in the bed, two men, one on either side of them. The man on her right was Steven Grayson; he was trying to read a magazine. The man on her left was Lionel, her ex-husband; he was on his side, his head propped up on his hand, and he watched, with a smile, as Annabelle and Bobby had urgent, frantic sex. And when they had finished Bobby collapsed at the end of the bed and Lionel said to Annabelle, “Hey, wow, that was beautiful.”

  She shifted in the bathwater. It had made her uneasy, Bobby and Lionel and Steven Grayson all together in one of her dreams. Not while she was dreaming it, for dreams have a logic of their own. But when she awakened; she was uneasy then.

  Annabelle got out of the tub and dried herself while the water gurgled down the drain. She put on clean underwear and her yellow dress. She dried the tub with the bath towel and draped the bathmat over the edge of the tub. She opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the hall, carrying her laundry, which she dumped into a hamper that stood in the kitchen, next to the washing machine.

  Annabelle looked outside and saw that Rose-Iris was taking the washing from the line, dropping the clothespins into a canvas bag that Herman had fitted to a coat hanger, putting the clean clothes into a basket. I just did the ironing, thought Annabelle, and here comes more of it.

  She got out the ingredients and began making a salmon loaf. She looked in the fridge for salad things and saw lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, green onions. There was fruit, too; maybe she’d make a fruit salad for dessert. She turned on the oven and got a loaf pan from the cupboard.

  Rose-Iris came in lugging the laundry basket, which she put on top of the washing machine.

  “Where’s your sister?” said Annabelle, as Rose-Iris began folding clothes.

  “Out playing with the dog.”

  It’s better than climbing trees, thought Annabelle, as she began mixing up the salmon loaf. Or cliffs.

  “Ma, I want to be a secretary when I grow up.”

  Annabelle could see it, too. She saw Rose-Iris teetering on high heels, wearing a skirt and a sweater and makeup on her face, her hair combed back. She saw her sitting, knees together, holding a notepad and a pen, scribbling quickly and confidently, taking down the words of her boss. Annabelle couldn’t see the boss, she could only hear him, droning, and she watched proudly as Rose-Iris wrote shorthand.

  “Good,” said Annabelle, approving. Being a secretary was a real career. It had some substance to it. Unlike waitressing, which was the only job Annabelle had ever had.

  “In junior high I can take typing,” said Rose-Iris. “And shorthand.”

  Rose-Iris was going to be ambitious, Annabelle realized; that was good. She’d been ambitious herself—not to have a career, though. Annabelle’s ambitions had been for motherhood.

  “I took typing in school,” she told her daughter. “And shorthand, too.”

  Rose-Iris looked dubious.

  “I wasn’t very good at shorthand,” Annabelle confessed. “But I was pretty good at typing.” She put down the spoon and typed in the air, very fast. “We could probably get you one, at a garage sale or something. A typewriter. So you could practice at home.”

  “And then I could get jobs in the summertime.”

  Annabelle nodded, looking at Rose-Iris proudly. She wondered, if she hadn’t had that abortion, would she have had an ambition? To be a secretary? Or a teacher, maybe?

  Just then Camellia erupted into the kitchen. She was carrying a plastic bucket that had once held ice cream. She held it out to Annabelle, clutching it by the handle so that it dangled in the air. “Look!” she said. “Blackberries!” Her legs were scratched and her hair had debris in it, bits of moss and tree bark and forest dust.

  “Dessert!” Annabelle crowed, taking the bucket. She put it on the counter and hugged Camellia, who smelt hot and sweaty. “Someday,” she crooned, smoothing Camellia’s disheveled hair, “we’ll have so many things.”

  “What?” said Camellia, smiling.

  Annabelle leaned against the counter, her arm around Camellia, and looked across the room at Rose-Iris, who was folding the last towel in the basket. “We’ll have a dryer. And a freezer, full of food. We’ll have a bathtub with a shower.”

  “We’ll have our own dog,” said Camellia.

  “We’ll have a typewriter,” said Rose-Iris, grinning.

  “And a VCR,” said Camellia.

  “We’ll have silverware,” said Annabelle.

  “And a CD player,” said Rose-Iris.

  “We’ll go on a trip,” said Annabelle.

  “We’ll have a house on the beach,” said Camellia.

  “And relatives,” said Rose-Iris. “More than just Uncle Warren.”

  Annabelle frowned at her, and was going to speak, but then somebody knocked on the door. She moved across the room so that she could look through the screen, and saw the young woman from the newspaper standing there.

  “Herman isn’t here,” said Annabelle.

  “Well actually, it’s you I’d like to talk to, if you have a couple of minutes.”

  Annabelle stared at her. What was it about this girl that was upsetting her?

  The girl had seen her in the restaurant with Bobby, Annabelle remembered.

  She thought about Herman finding out about Bobby. Warren was right. She had to be much much more careful.

  She shivered, and watched her hand reach out and push the door open. She stepped outside. “I’m going to my garden,” she said. “You can come, if you like.”

  In the garden Annabelle said, “What’s your name?”

  “Diana.”

  “Diana.” Annabelle looked her over. “If I were your mother, I would have named you—well, maybe Dianthus. But probably Rose.” She turned. “I have six rosebushes.” Her hand, indicating the roses, rippled slowly through the hot languid breath of her garden.

  “They’re beautiful,” said Diana.

  “They’re grouped together like this, as you see,” said Annabelle, “in the middle, here, so that they can get full sun.”

  “It’s a beautiful garden,” said Diana. She turned, slowly, surveying it. “Those hollyhocks are wonderful.”

  But she wasn’t really looking. Annabelle could tell. It was disappointing. Some little thing to share, some tiny thing in common—that’s what people needed before they could talk to each other. But this silly girl was going to blunder on and talk anyhow; Annabelle could see it in her face, which was turned, distraught, to the hollyhocks. Annabelle drew herself up, pulling in her stomach, smoothing her hands over the roundness of her belly, noticing the flat front of Diana’s khaki shorts.

  “Wonderful,” the girl repeated, looking into the curvaceous heart of a hollyhock blossom, her uplifted face gathering earnestness like dust.

  “Truly, I do not understand what you’re doing here,” said Annabelle. The girl’s presence no longer made her tense and uneasy. She felt safe in her sunny, fragrant garden…as though confident she could, if necessary, summon things to rid herself of intruders. Summon a slow-moving battalion of slugs, for instance. This girl with the taffy-colored hair, she’d run fast enough from a bunch of slugs. Except it was too hot for slugs. Summon quick-slithering garter snakes, then—she glanced at the edges of her garden, where the forest snuffled, curious, but saw no garter snakes; they’d be curled somewhere in the heat; swirled; arranged; concentric. The girl with the flat stomach and the strong legs, pale legs, creamy as Annabelle’s own, she’d flee the garden in a panic should Annabelle summon a few garter snakes to speed her on her way.

  “You’re going to write an article about Herman’s mini-zoo. But the mini-zoo’s got nothing to do with me,” she said, lifting the lolling head of a dahlia, letting its huge red flower rest for a moment on the palm of her hand. “Nothing at all to do with me.” She moved along to a small bed of snapdragons. “These are called ‘Rockets,’ ” she said. She reached to press a pink satiny jaw, and smiled when it opened, promptly, obediently. “See?” sh
e said to Diana. “Did you see?” Diana leaned near, and Annabelle did it again.

  “I don’t think I’m going to do a story on it after all,” said the girl, holding hands with herself in an intense manner.

  “Well then,” said Annabelle. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I—you see,” said Diana; she put her fists in the pockets of her shorts; “I don’t approve of the mini-zoo.”

  Annabelle let her eyes grow wide.

  Diana flushed. “I don’t think animals ought to be in cages.”

  Annabelle had a quick picture in her mind of the monkeys scampering along the streets of Sechelt, chased by Erna’s dog. She must have smiled, because Diana took a step toward her and added, “Or at least set the raccoons free, and the foxes, and give the monkeys to the zoo.”

  “Bigger cages,” said Annabelle absently.

  Diana flushed redder. “People assume,” she said, speaking quietly—which meant she was trying to control something, indignation or condemnation or something; into Annabelle’s chest came a flash of anger—“people assume,” Diana went on, “that because we seem to be smarter than animals, that makes us better than animals. More worthwhile.”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake,” said Annabelle.

  The girl opened her mouth to speak again—and then suddenly her face got heavy, and young as it was, it sagged a little, revealing the strain that lay behind it. “I feel so stupid,” she said, looking around the garden, dazed and unhappy. “I don’t know what I expected to accomplish.”

  Annabelle, generous in relief, was about to offer the girl a bouquet of sweet peas when Diana said, abruptly, “Did you know that the president of the Law Reform Commission says the Criminal Code should be revised to give rights to animals?”

  Annabelle, vexed, snapped her mouth shut and crossed her arms in front of her so that they were snuggled firmly under her breasts. She made her stare a steely one.

  “He said they should have a status sort of like slaves,” said Diana. “It’s not much, is it? But it would give them rights to decent shelter, and enough food, and it would mean that people couldn’t abuse them.” She jerked her head toward the trees. “Those animals, they’re being abused, Mrs. Ferguson. Those cages are far too small, for one thing. My God, they’re going to go crazy with boredom in there.”