The door hissed shut and the bus lurched ponderously away.
Robyn made sure her collar was all the way up and that her scarf was secure, snuggled a little deeper into her coat. Her legs below her hemline were numb. Her nose felt as if it was frozen stiff and would snap like an icicle if anyone happened to bump up against it.
She might as well have volunteered to stay late at the office. She’d have scored a few brownie points with Jerry and probably arrived home at about the same time anyway.
Another bus pulled up in front of her. It was empty but going in the wrong direction. The doors hissed open. A man in an ankle-length black leather coat broke free of the queue and stepped on board. He dropped his fare in the glass box and walked halfway down the bus and thumped down in a window seat. Robyn and everyone else in the queue watched him settle in, unbutton his coat and make himself comfortable.
The man looked out the window, surveying the frigid street. Robyn stared at him. He looked right at her, stared right through her. He seemed totally unaware that he was snug and secure on a nice warm bus, and she was freezing her ass off on a sidewalk cold and hard as a slab of ice. There was certainly no hint of compassion in the look he gave her. In fact, there was nothing at all in his eyes that she could see.
Robyn was beginning to think her parents had been right. It was a cold, uncaring world.
Three-quarters of an hour later she was standing in the corridor fumbling numb-fingered for her keys when the apartment door swung wide and Chris put his arms around her and, his eyes full of laughter, told her he thought he’d heard the rattle of chains. Then he kissed her cold mouth and shivered and kissed her again and told her how much he’d missed her, as he pulled her into the apartment and locked the door.
He’d showered recently. His hair was damp, and his body still carried the lingering scent of soap. He kept on kissing her as he led her towards the bedroom, helped her with the clothes. The smell of spaghetti sauce, thick with meat and spices, wafted in from the kitchen. She could hear the pot bubbling softly on the stove. There was a vase of flowers on the table by the bed. Winter roses…
*
It was past eight by the time they finished dinner. Chris had bought a bottle of Australian red, and after they’d stacked the dishes in the sink he emptied the rest of the wine into their glasses, blew out the candles and then they went into the living room to watch ‘Cheers’ on television.
During a commercial break, Chris snuggled closer and told Robyn about all the fun he’d had at his audition.
“He let you stand there for almost an hour, and then told you he thought you were a woman?”
“Yeah, right.”
She squeezed his thigh. “Somebody ought to point him in the direction of an optometrist.”
Chris chuckled. He was leading up to his trip to the aquarium and was feeling a little tense, but did it show? No way.
Robyn, playing straight man, said, “How was the rest of your day?”
Chris casually mentioned that he’d been back to the aquarium. He neglected to tell her how he’d crept around in the shrubbery while fantasizing that he was a hot-shot detective. Even so, Robyn was pretty upset.
She said, “His name was Gerard Roth. He drowned, and then the whales attacked him. They kept talking about it at work. Making sick jokes.”
Chris told her he believed he could identify the killer.
Robyn said, “What killer?”
Chris gave her a look. Incredulous.
Robyn said, “You don’t get it, do you? The man’s death was an accident. They said so on the radio. He was in the pool doing some kind of research and drowned. And that’s all there is to it.”
“I don’t think so,” said Chris firmly. He used the remote to flip through half a dozen channels and then turned the TV off. The light in the room changed. The walls suddenly turned into an animated quilt, abstract grey shadows creepy-crawling and slippy-sliding down rectangles of white. Spooky. A shiver of fear ran the length of his spine. Turning, he peered apprehensively behind him.
It was snowing.
Robyn, watching him and somehow knowing what was going on in his mind, said, “It’s the dope.”
“Huh?”
“We smoke too much.”
“You mean I smoke too much.”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what you said. You work your butt off all week while I lie around watching TV and smoking dope. You come home wet and cold, tired. I don’t give a shit. All I care about is me. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it. I’m cute, but useless.”
Robyn didn’t actually move away from him, but Chris felt her tighten up, withdraw into herself. It amounted to more or less the same thing. Rejection. He felt a quick surge of anger. He said, “What I saw — a woman shove Roth into the pool — was a hallucination, and I should forget about it. Is that what you’re saying?”
She nodded.
Chris was silent for a little while, looking over Robyn’s shoulder at the snow. He liked the fact that he’d noticed the amoeba-like shadows crawling down the walls and Robyn hadn’t. That he knew it was snowing and she didn’t. He played with her hair, twisted it in his fingers and made it curl in on her neck. A few minutes slipped past. Very quietly, he said, “I don’t want an argument…”
“Good.”
“But I know what I saw.”
Robyn gave him a withering look. The yellowish glare of the streetlight didn’t do a lot for her skin tone. She looked kind of microwaved.
He said, “I saw a woman with a dolly, remember? The body slid into the pool and I saw a blonde woman with a dolly turn and disappear into the snow.”
“How many times do I have to tell you — I don’t want to talk about it!”
“When I went back this afternoon, I looked down into the water and saw it lying on the bottom of the pool.”
Robyn’s eyes bugged out. Her jaw dropped. She’d have been laughed off the stage for overacting, but Chris believed her.
He said, “Not the woman — the dolly.”
Recovering fast, Robyn said, “Bullshit.”
“No, it’s true.”
“You said before that this person you saw with the dolly dragged it away from the pool.”
“She must’ve come back later, after we’d left.”
Robyn took a deep breath, held it for a moment. She said, “Okay, let’s say Dr Roth was murdered and you play detective and actually identify the killer. Then what?”
Chris had been thinking about it. He had his answer down pat. “A certain unemployed but extremely talented actor becomes internationally famous overnight. His ruggedly handsome face is seen on every television screen on the continent. He’s offered more work than he could handle in a lifetime.” Chris hesitated and then added, “And he and his sweetheart live happily ever after.”
“What about the police?”
“They’re envious, but mature. Professionals. I’m sure they’ll get over their embarrassment.”
“No, Chris. What the police are going to do is ask us questions. Lots of really difficult questions. For starters, I’m sure they’ll be curious about why I was trespassing at the aquarium after hours with my deadbeat boyfriend, the so-called actor with a criminal record for assault and battery.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It was last summer, Chris. And have you given even a moment’s thought to the more than three hundred dollars you owe for unpaid speeding and parking tickets?”
Chris said, “Jeez, Robyn. You make me seem like such a jerk.” Robyn moved in on him, gave him a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “I’m trying to show you their point of view, that’s all. And another thing, Chris. Jerry’s going to ask me exactly the same questions as the police, and he won’t like the answers any more than they do.”
“We don’t have to tell the cops we were smoking dope.”
“Yes, we do. If Roth was murdered we have to tell the police everything. Everything, Chr
is.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll find out anyway, believe me. And then Jerry’d find out, and he’d fire me.”
“For smoking a couple of joints?”
“Listen, there’s nothing more tight-assed than an accountant. When Jerry farts, he squeals like a goddamn smoke alarm.” Chris stared at her. Sometimes Robyn came home feeling a little low. But he’d never before heard her speak negatively about her job, the people she worked with.
Robyn said, “Yeah, he’d fire me. The bastard would fire me like a match. Then where would we be?”
“Still with each other, I hope.”
She smiled for the first time since he ‘dturned off the television. “You’re a sweet guy, Chris.”
He said, “But kind of dumb?”
“Naïve, maybe.”
Chris thought, “Unlike you”. But all he said was, “It’s snowing again.”
Surprised, Robyn turned and looked out the window. Chris showed her the snowflake shadows drifting down the walls. He asked her if she’d like to catch a breath of fresh air, take a stroll. Robyn thought that was a wonderful idea.
They bundled up in their warmest clothes, took the elevator down to street level, hurried through the tiny mirrored lobby and then the wide glass doors into clean-smelling air and a blizzard of white.
Chris said, “You’d think God was shaking the spots off every Dalmatian in the world.”
Robyn laughed. “Dalmatians are white with black spots, not the other way around.”
He scooped up a double handful of snow, packed it into a ball, went into a major league wind-up and threw it at a nearby stop sign and missed by a mile.
Robyn said, “Watch and learn.” She made a snowball the size of a grapefruit, turned her body at right angles to the stop sign, went into a complicated wind-up and side-armed a sly shot that exploded against Chris’s head.
Then, with her out-of-work, assault-and-battery boyfriend in hot pursuit, she ran laughing and screaming down the pure white, sparkling city street.
*
By the time they arrived back at the apartment they were cold and shivering. There was a brief but spirited argument over first use of the shower, that was settled when Robyn suggested they wash together. Afterwards, she crawled straight into bed and waited impatiently as Chris opened a bottle of Chilean red. They made love with the curtains pulled and the snow drifting silently down the white-painted walls. When they were finished, Chris lay on his back with Robyn nestled in the crook of his arm. The snow had continued to fall. He stared out the window and dreamed lazily of fame.
Robyn said, “Chris?”
“Yeah?”
She rolled on top of him. “You awake?”
“Getting there.”
“Do you really think you could identify the person you saw last night?”
Chris nodded. He put his arms around her and slid his hands down the sweet curve of her back and over the sweeter curves that followed.
Robyn said, “Instead of telling the police what we know, why don’t we tell the killer?”
He buried his head between her breasts.
“Chris?”
He moved his hands lightly over her body, lingering here and there, pleasuring in the slow tingle of renewed desire.
Robyn said, “Blackmail — doesn’t that sound like a good idea to you? We could give the money to an animal rights group, then turn the killer over to the police.”
Chris pulled his head back. He said, “That sounds risky as hell to me. A lot riskier than just turning her over to the cops.” His fingers grazed on her as if all the sustenance he needed was to be found right there on the smooth pale surface of her flesh. “You’re certain it was a woman?”
“Yeah. The more I think about it, the surer I am.”
“Well then, it wouldn’t be as dangerous, would it?”
Chris cupped her breast in his hand. He kissed her gently and then took her nipple into his mouth.
Robyn arched her back. Her cry of pleasure was soft and fragile as the sound of a snowflake falling to earth.
Chris was a very good lover. He knew when to be gentle, and when to be cruel.
His only problem was, sometimes he didn’t know when to stop.
Chapter 15
Willows dropped Parker off at her apartment. As he drove away, leaving her standing at the curb, he tried not to think about the many things she could have said but didn’t, and the utterly direct way she’d looked at him as he’d grimly told her there was nothing he’d love more than to come in for a drink, but it was impossible because he had to drive straight out to the airport to pick up his kids.
“Wife and kids,” said Parker, and gave him another piercing look. For a long moment he thought she was going to say a great deal more, none of it very pleasant. But all she’d done was get out of the Ford and shut the door with exaggerated care, stand there looking down at him through the glass with her shoulders set a little too square.
Willows drove down to Southwest Marine Drive and made a left, followed miles of road past the towering cedar hedges and granite walls that separated the real world from the south side’s huge lots and multi-million dollar residences. What kind of people lived in those gigantic mock-Spanish and Tudor houses? Willows had no idea. No one had ever been murdered in any of them, yet.
Dual railway tracks marked an abrupt deterioration in the quality of the neighbourhood. Willows turned right past a cluster of California-style condominiums in pink stucco, then made another slow left, cruised through an area of light industry, and then on to the Arthur Laing Bridge and over the wide sweep of the Fraser River to the flatlands of Sea Island, the straight run to the airport.
There was a radar trap on Grant McConachie Way. Willows had been speeding since he’d dropped Parker off — he was late — but was saved from a ticket by the vagaries of the traffic flow.
He parked on the arrivals level, shuffled through his pockets and discovered he didn’t have change for the meter. He lowered the sun visor. Old man Sinclair had been quick to agree to ferry them back to the ‘mainland’, but slow to actually do it. He had a captive audience, and a disarming, oddly charming assumption that they’d be fascinated by a detailed verbal history of Eagle Island, cleverly and tantalizingly intertwined with every fat and juicy scrap of gossip he knew about Gerard and Iris Roth. The chance of a titbit of useful information kept Willows from cutting the old man short. As a result, he arrived at the airport almost twenty minutes late.
Fortunately, due to unexpected headwinds, Air Canada flight 857 was a full half-hour behind schedule.
Willows bought himself a foam container of airport coffee. He found the flight listing on a monitor and wandered over to the baggage carousel.
Now all he had to do was wait.
He’d just finished his coffee when the flight began blinking rapidly on the monitor, indicating that it had arrived. He began distractedly pinching small chunks of foam out of the cup and depositing the pieces inside it. Before long he had so thoroughly demolished it that there wasn’t enough of it left to hold the pieces. He tossed the whole mess in a waste container. He could feel the tension in the back of his neck, his shoulders.
He checked the monitor. No mistake. The flight had arrived safely. By now his family must have deplaned.
A trickle of rumpled-looking, slightly disoriented travellers began to enter the carousel area through the arrivals gate. The trickle became a flood. It looked as if Sheila’s plane, a 737, had been fully booked.
The first pieces of luggage slid down a metal chute on to the black rubber carousel.
Willows looked in vain for Sheila. He suddenly had a truly horrifying thought — what if he didn’t recognize her?
A burgundy-coloured leather suitcase that might’ve been Sheila’s drifted past. Willows snatched at it, and missed, watched it disappear from view.
Annie came through the gate. She craned her neck, seemed to peer right at him. Willows waved violently but she didn�
��t see him. A moment later she was swallowed by the crowd.
Sheila was close on her daughter’s heels. Sean, always the straggler, brought up the rear. Willows’ son had suddenly shot up — he’d grown taller than his mother.
Willows cursed under his breath as Sheila’s suitcase went by.
Had the carousel accelerated or had he suddenly slowed down? His family had vanished. Where was Annie? The air stank of jet fuel. He was sweating buckets. His heart pounded. He should’ve taken off his coat…
He caught a flicker of movement and turned just as Annie shouted, “Daddy!” and threw herself into his arms. He hugged her tightly. She was wearing a new coat, and a beret. Her hair was longer, down past her shoulders. She looked up at him, eyes sparkling. “I just knew you’d be here!” she said.
A fat man in a raccoon coat pounced on a suitcase that looked like an oversized turtle, grunted in triumph and lunged away. Willows tried to make eye contact with Sheila. Sean loitered at a distance.
Willows moved towards his wife. He was smiling but terrified. The turbulent mix of apprehension and rage that had bubbled just beneath the surface for years was in danger of suddenly erupting. He felt overwhelmingly fragile. Suddenly, Sheila thrust a hand towards him as if to ward him away. He stared at her, shocked. Then, divining her intention, took her hand and solemnly shook it. Sean continued to hang back. Willows had to skirt a baggage cart to get to him. He put his arms around his son and hugged him, without response.
Willows said, “It’s good to see you, son.”
Sean grunted noncommittally. All domestic flights were non-smoking, but even so, his breath smelt of stale tobacco. Willows relinquished his grip and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.
After greeting Willows, Sheila had gone directly to the carousel, where she had already retrieved several pieces of matching luggage in a coarse black fabric with a multitude of zippers. Willows asked her about the burgundy leather and she smiled for the first time, and told him, with obvious satisfaction, that it wasn’t hers. She snatched another bulky suitcase from the passing parade and told him that was it.
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