As he approached the door to his office, Sandra St. Johns, Patrick O’Neill’s former assistant, came out of her office.
“Oh,” she said, a look of surprise on her face. “I didn’t know there was anyone else here. What was that noise?”
“Nothing to concern yourself about,” he said. She was wearing a white blouse that looked like a man’s shirt, half the buttons open, and no bra, just some kind of undershirt thing. She was so flat, though, it made no difference. “Some binders fell off a shelf.”
She shook her head. “It sounded more like a shout.”
Tilley could feel his ears grow warm. “I didn’t hear anything like that,” he said. He turned his back to her and thumbed a five-digit code, which he changed weekly, into the security lock on his office door. “Good evening,” he said over his shoulder, opening the door and slipping into his office.
Through the gap in the door, he watched her turn and go back into her own office. The rear view was definitely more interesting than the front, he thought. Her legs were her best feature, long and strong, runner’s legs. He grinned tightly, remembering the sight of her with those legs clamped around Patrick O’Neill’s hips as they did it on the sofa in O’Neill’s office, hair in her eyes, making a weird sound in her throat.
He closed the door.
As attractive as Sandra St. Johns was, Tilley thought, how O’Neill could have cheated on Victoria with the likes of her was completely beyond his comprehension. Of course, none of that mattered now. Patrick O’Neill was dead. Yes, Tilley thought. Things were working out just fine.
Barbara was cashing out at the end of her shift when the assistant manager told her they wouldn’t need her any more after tonight. “Business has been slow,” he said by way of explanation, but she knew the real reason was that she’d refused to work another shift in the strip club next door to the lounge. One would have been enough, but she’d endured three, half-naked in a skirt that barely reached her crotch and the see-through top they’d insisted she wear. Her figure wasn’t bad, despite her age, but thank god they’d let her wear a sports bra under the top. The other girls wore nothing but skin. She was also pretty sure they were supposed to give her two weeks’ notice, but she was too tired to argue.
It was after one in the morning when she got home. She trudged up the four narrow flights to her apartment, undressed and took a bath to save time in the morning, then collapsed into bed with a cup of camomile tea. Despite her exhaustion and the soothing warmth of the tea, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Tiny rat’s teeth of anxiety gnawed at her insides. Not about losing her job; she’d been through that before, too many times. But she was sure that the big, beat-up looking man—she couldn’t remember his name—who’d spoken to her outside the dry cleaning store was a policeman. He’d said he wasn’t, but of course he would, wouldn’t he, if he were undercover?
There was only one reason she could think of that the police would be interested in her. Three weeks ago one of her regular customers at the dry cleaning store had asked her to do him a favour, to hold a package till a friend came to pick it up. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “It’s not drugs, and it’ll just be for a couple of hours. And my friend will give you something for your trouble.” He’d seemed nice, well dressed and polite, and he’d always had time to chat, so she’d agreed.
God, how could she have been so stupid? Of course it had been drugs. Or maybe child pornography. The man who’d come to pick it up later in the day, who had given her fifty dollars, had been sneaky-looking and very nervous. She hadn’t seen her customer since.
On the other hand, she thought hopefully, maybe the big man was exactly what he’d claimed to be, an old friend of her late husband’s. There had been something familiar about him, like she’d seen him somewhere before, but she wasn’t sure where or when. He wasn’t bad looking, either, and while he’d been dressed casually, his clothing had been good quality. Maybe too good for a policeman.
Tea finished, she closed her eyes and fantasized briefly about being whisked away on some fabulous adventure by a tall, dark stranger. She knew in her heart, though, that if he wasn’t a cop, he was probably just like most of the other men she’d known, after only one thing. And, sadly, she knew that if he asked nicely enough she’d give it to him.
chapter three
Tuesday, December 14
Shoe was awakened by the creak of floorboards in the hall outside his bedroom. The clock radio on the dresser read five-thirty. He started to get up to investigate, then remembered his houseguest. Rolling over, he went back to sleep. When he awakened again at seven-thirty, he got up, showered, and went downstairs. Jack had spread plastic drop cloths in the living room and was scouring loose paint from the window frames with a steel brush Shoe hadn’t known he’d owned.
“I was going to start in the kitchen,” Shoe said.
“That paint you bought,” Jack said, gesturing with the brush toward the pails of paint by the entrance to the living room. “It’s no good for kitchens. Ain’t very washable.”
“Where’d you get the brush?” Shoe asked.
“Borrowed it from your neighbour,” Jack replied. Shoe hadn’t really got to know any of his neighbours, with the exception of a curmudgeonly old fellow who lived across the street and who hadn’t given Shoe the time of day since he’d asked him to please scoop after his dog pooped in Shoe’s yard. “Old guy lives across the road,” Jack said.
“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
He shrugged. “Painted a few houses.”
“What if I paid you?”
“Got nothin’ to do till my houseboat dries out,” Jack said. “I’ll do it for a coupla weeks’ room and board. How’s that?”
Deal struck, Jack returned to scraping and Shoe went into the kitchen. After his breakfast, he called the number on the card the police had left, quoted the case number handwritten on the back, and was put through to a Sergeant Matthias of the Vancouver Homicide Squad.
“I’ll be at home all morning,” he told Matthias.
“The investigators will be there within the hour,” Matthias said.
Come to us, they beckoned to her from the grave.
No, she silently cried. I can’t.
We love you.
Then why did you leave me? What did I do?
You didn’t love us enough.
I did. I did love you. I loved you. I love you.
Not enough.
How much is enough?
Come to us. We’ll show you.
No! No! You are liars.
She didn’t remember waking up. Nor going to sleep. She lay, fully clothed but for shoes, under a light blanket that bore the scent of cedar. It was morning, but the curtains were drawn and the bedroom was dark. The only sounds in the room were the soft whisper of air circulation fans and the gentle hiss of rain on the slope of the tile roof outside the window. For a brief moment she was suspended in a void between sleep and wakefulness, her mind calm and free of thought or memory or fear. It was what she imagined death to be like, a comforting stillness where there was neither past nor future, just a formless present. She wanted to stay there forever, but she was caught by a bitter current and flung toward the howling light of awareness. She had to muster every ounce of will to keep from screaming.
Patrick, too, had finally abandoned her.
Victoria was fourteen when her mother took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills and painkillers. She’d been suffering for a long time from a very painful form of inoperable cancer. Victoria’s father may have assisted, but the police hadn’t tried very hard to prove it.
After her mother’s death, Victoria made her father’s life a misery, seeking relief or oblivion or self-destruction in booze and drugs and promiscuity. When Frank McRae couldn’t take it any longer, he sent Victoria to a private girls’ school in Nanaimo. She hated the place and did everything she could to get thrown out. When she was caught giving oral sex to a boy in his car in the parking lot, th
e headmistress called her father and told him to come and get her. Frank McRae left Vancouver that same night, but as he drove onto the ferry at Horseshoe Bay, the boarding ramp somehow retracted too soon. His car plunged into the harbour and he drowned.
Victoria was sent to live with her aunt Jane, her mother’s older sister, and her husband. Childless academics, they hadn’t known much, if anything, about teenaged girls, outside of what they’d read in books. On her third day there, Victoria locked herself in the bathroom, filled the tub with water as hot as she could stand it, and got in with all her clothes on. She then slashed her wrists with a razor blade. She’d heard or read somewhere that hot water was supposed to dull the pain. It hadn’t. It had hurt like hell and she’d started yelling. Uncle Dick had broken the door down.
It was an effort to get out of bed. Her body felt leaden and sore. She dragged herself into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin was sallow and mottled and loose, and her eyes were underscored by dark smudges that looked like bruises. She could see every pore, every blemish, every wrinkle. Somehow, though, she found the energy to undress and get into the shower.
As she was dressing, there was a gentle knock on the bedroom door.
“Come in,” she called.
Kit opened the door. “I heard you moving about,” she said. She sounded like she had a sore throat. “Did you get some sleep?”
“Yes, thanks,” Victoria said.
“Do you want some breakfast?” Kit asked.
“God, no,” Victoria answered automatically, but then realized she was hungry. “Maybe some tea and an English muffin.”
“You got it,” Kit said.
She followed Kit downstairs to the kitchen. Kit filled the kettle, put it on the gas range, and turned on the jet. The flame hissed and fluttered.
“Did I hear the phone ring?” Victoria asked.
“Yeah,” Kit replied as she split an English muffin. “Joe Shoe called to see how you were doing.” She put the halves of the muffin in the toaster oven and turned it on.
“Does he want me to call him back?”
“He said he’d call later,” Kit said. The kettle began to whistle. Kit turned off the flame. She dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured water over it. She placed the mug and a teaspoon in front of Victoria. “You and Shoe,” she said. “Were you lovers too, before you met Patrick?”
The question caught Victoria off guard. “God, no,” she said.
“Why do you say it like that?” Kit said. “He’s not exactly my type, but he’s not that bad, either, if you like them big and battered. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” Victoria said. “Nothing’s wrong with him.” She scooped the tea bag out of the mug.
“But there’s something between you, isn’t there?”
Victoria looked at Kit and held her eyes for a moment. They were the same blue-green colour as the glacier lakes Victoria had seen when she and Patrick had flown over the Rockies on the way back from Montreal. Kit’s eyes weren’t cold, though, as Victoria imagined a glacier lake to be, and the longer she looked into them, the warmer they seemed to become. She looked away, breaking the connection, looking down at the mug of tea on the countertop.
“I told you how Shoe saved Bill Hammond’s life.”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
“Well, he may have saved my life, too.”
“What do you mean, ‘may have’?”
Victoria took an unsteady breath.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Kit said.
“I do want to tell you,” Victoria replied. “I’m just not sure you’re going to like what you hear.” Kit didn’t say anything. Victoria took another breath.
“I’d been sleeping with Bill for three or four months, almost from the day I started working for him. It wasn’t what you’d call a healthy relationship. He was, well, sexually repressed, I guess. I was pretty messed up too. I’d never really gotten over my parents’ deaths, despite years of having my head shrunk. Anyway, whenever Bill’s wife was away, which was quite often—she was in and out of rehab for almost their entire marriage—I would stay at his house. One night, when I just couldn’t take it any more, I took off.”
Not before stealing a half-dozen pieces of antique gold jewellery that belonged to Bill’s wife, she recalled, as well as $150 in cash Bill had left on the kitchen table for the housekeeper. But she didn’t tell Kit that.
“I didn’t know where I was going,” she said. “All I knew was that I couldn’t stay there any longer and I didn’t want to go back to the company condo I was staying in. I was pretty stoned, on vodka and some hash I’d scored, but somehow, I don’t remember how, or why, I ended up at the marina near Granville Island where Shoe lived on this ratty old boat. It was around two in the morning.”
“I don’t suppose he was pleased to see you,” Kit said.
“No, he wasn’t, especially when I puked all over the deck and passed out.”
She paused as she recalled coming to in a bathroom not much larger than a closet, slumped on a stainless steel toilet seat in her bra and panties, the stink of vomit clogging her sinuses. Shoe was adjusting the spray in the tiny shower stall.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked thickly.
“I threw them overboard,” Shoe said. He had, too, but he’d tied a line to them. “You were sick,” he said. “It’s in your hair.” He helped her to her feet and steered her toward the shower stall. “In you go.”
“Wait,” she said. She reached behind her back with both hands and unhooked her bra, letting it slip down her arms and fall to the floor. Holding his arm, she stepped out of her panties. If Shoe was discomfited by her nudity, he didn’t show it, which pissed her off for some reason. She got into the shower, gasped as the water hit her, and slumped to the floor of the stall. Shoe closed the clear plastic curtain, then collected her underwear and left her there, huddled in the warm spray.
How long she stayed that way she wasn’t sure. At some point, though, when the water started to cool off, she struggled to her feet, found a bar of soap and a cloth, and scrubbed herself from scalp to toes. There was a bottle of dandruff shampoo, and although she’d always hated the nasty stuff, she used it. As she was rinsing, Shoe knocked on the door.
“Everything all right?”
She didn’t answer.
The door opened. She stood, arms braced against the wall, head bowed in the spray, water coursing down the length of her body.
“Getting a good look?” she said, without opening her eyes.
The door closed...
“Vic?” Kit said.
“Sorry,” Victoria said, returning to the present. “Anyway, Shoe cleaned me up and gave me one of his sweatshirts to wear—it hung to my knees—and put me to bed to sleep it off. I didn’t sleep, though. I could hear him moving around in the deckhouse, making up his berth. Then the phone rang. ‘Yes, she’s here,’ I heard him say. A second or two later he said, ‘Pardon me for saying so, but you should have thought of that before you started sleeping with her.’”
She paused and drank some of her cooling tea. Despite the passage of time, her recollection of what happened next was mercilessly clear and it made her squirm with shame and embarrassment to recall it. She wasn’t sure she could get it out, but she owed it to Kit—and herself—to try.
“I went up to the deckhouse and asked him if it had been Bill on the phone. He said it was, that he’d called to make sure I was all right. ‘I bet,’ I said. Then I pointed to the berth he was making up and told him it looked awfully small, that he could sleep down below with me if he wanted. He said he’d be fine and I told him I wasn’t asking him to have sex with me. But I was, of course.
“‘I’ll sleep here,’ he said.
“‘Have it your way,’ I told him. ‘There won’t be another offer.’ I started to go below, then turned back to him and said, ‘What the fuck’s your problem anyway?’
“‘I’m not
sure I understand the question,’ he said.
“‘I just offered you a free piece of ass,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m not at my best right now, but men aren’t supposed to be that picky. I know you’re not queer, so what’s the problem?’
“He said, ‘I make it a rule to never sleep with the boss’s girlfriends. Or take advantage of a lady when she’s had too much to drink.’
“‘I do some of my best work when I’ve had a few too many,’ I said to him and tried to undo the string of his sweatpants.
“He grabbed my wrists and told me to go below and sleep it off. I twisted away and swore at him and told him I’d cut his fucking balls off if he tried anything. Then I fell down the companionway steps.
“He came down and tried to help me, but I hit him and screamed at him not to touch me. I pulled off the sweatshirt he’d given me to wear and threw it at him. I remembered I’d had a backpack when I’d left Bill’s. ‘Where is my backpack?’ I shouted. ‘Where are my clothes? I’m getting out of here.’
“He told me I’d left it on deck. When he went up to get it, I went into the head and locked the door. I found a bottle of acetaminophen tablets in the medicine cabinet. The bottle had a childproof cap, and I when opened it, the top popped off and half the tablets fell onto the floor. I poured the rest into my mouth, washing them down with handfuls of water from the faucet, then got down on my hands and knees and began picking tablets off the floor and popping them into my mouth. Shoe knocked on the door and asked me if I was all right. I didn’t answer. I just kept popping tablets into my mouth and crunching them between my teeth. They tasted awful. He told me to unlock the door. I told him to fuck off, to leave me alone, so he broke it down.
“Christ, I must’ve been a sight, naked on my hands and knees gobbling pills off the bathroom floor. He picked me up and hauled me out into the cabin. I fought, clawing at him, raking his arms and face with my nails, gouging his flesh, but he held me in his arms, restraining me the way my father used to when I was a child and had thrown a tantrum. I screamed at him to leave me alone, that I wanted to die.
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