A Year Less a Day

by James Hawkins

“I’m going to talk to him tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think you can,” says Jordan. “I don’t think they’re allowed to discuss my case with anyone else.”

  “They can if you give me permission,” she says, then grumbles, “I always feel like such an idiot at the support group when I don’t even know the type of cancer, or what you’re taking. I am going to see Dr. Benson tomorrow to get some answers. And I’ll find out more about Los Angeles while I’m at it, all right?”

  Jordan starts, “I’m not sure ...” but she shushes him.

  “No arguments, Jordan. I’ll reconnect your computer, but first I want your signed consent ... Deal?”

  Ruth’s plans start unravelling in the early hours of the morning when Jordan begins a prolonged bout of sickness. “I must be getting worse,” he explains weakly, his voice hoarse from retching. “Will you stay with me, Ruth? I’m frightened,” he adds, and she spends most of the night sitting at his bedside listening to the reassuring sound of his snores. She creeps away before dawn and has most of the lunch menu prepared before Cindy and the new girl, Marilyn, arrive at seven.

  Jordan wakes early, and his thumps on the floor above the kitchen send Ruth scurrying upstairs.

  “Don’t leave me, Ruth. I’m really scared.”

  “You’d better come with me back to the hospital,” she suggests, but he shakes his head. “I’ll be OK in a day or so. It might be the chemo.”

  With her mission on hold, Ruth has the coffees made by seven when the staff and Mike Phillips arrive. Ruth smiles as Tom U-turns on the threshold and heads to Donut Delight with his head down.

  “Thought I’d pick up a coffee on my way to the city,” Phillips tells Ruth. “But I’m not in a rush.”

  “I was going this morning, but Jordan’s not well,” says Ruth as Trina turns up.

  “Pity. I could’ve given you a ride,” says Phillips.

  Trina catches on and quickly jumps in. “I’ll look after Jordan, Ruth. That’s my job. You go—everything will be fine” Then she drops her voice. “Another date already?”

  “Trina ...” warns Ruth with a trace of amusement.

  “I hope your husband doesn’t mind me taking you,” says Phillips as he opens the car door for Ruth.

  “Not at all,” she replies, failing to mention that Jordan doesn’t know. She would have told him, but feared he would freak out when he discovered that she’d taken Trina into her confidence. In any case, as she’d told Trina, he’ll probably sleep all day. “Just put your ear to the door every so often,” she had said. “Don’t go in unless he calls.”

  It’s more than an hour’s drive, and Ruth’s tenseness comes through as she fiddles with her purse and stares stolidly ahead.

  “You OK, Ruth?” Phillips asks. “You look as though you’re going to snap something.”

  “Going to the doctor,” she tells him truthfully, though he gets the wrong impression and looks concerned.

  “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

  “Oh, no,” she says, thinking that it will be if Dr. Benson insists Jordan should go to Los Angeles.

  “So what do you actually do, Mike?” she asks to change the subject.

  Phillips gives her a sideways glance. “You’re not in league with the Hell’s Angels are you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Just joking, Ruth,” he laughs. “I’m on the anti-gang squad: money laundering, drugs, pornography, gambling, prostitution—you name it.”

  It actually had taken them an hour-and-a-half, battling the morning traffic, but Mike Phillips had dropped Ruth at the front door of Vancouver General.

  “I’ll be fine,” she’d assured him when he’d wished her luck, but she had quickly found that she was in the wrong building. “The oncology department is way over on West 10th,” a helpful nurse had told her, and she ended up two blocks away after walking a maze of corridors with scary signs and frightening smells.

  An hour later, Ruth sits in the soothingly decorated waiting room of the Cancer Agency surrounded by a dozen equally anguished relatives and wipes tears from her eyes.

  “Mrs. Jackson ...” calls the receptionist, and Ruth leaps to her feet.

  “Yes?”

  “The administrator will see you now.”

  Martin Dingwall has had years of experience delivering devastating news and has switched off his computer, blocked incoming calls, and turned down his smile. “Come in, please,” he greets Ruth at the door, and solicitously guides her to a chair.

  Ruth sits with the anxiety of a convict waiting for the switch to be thrown as Dingwall deliberately settles himself behind his desk and picks up a single sheet.

  “I really don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Jackson,” he begins solemnly, looking deeply into her eyes. “We simply have no record of anybody named Jordan Jackson fitting your husband’s profile.”

  “I know that,” she cries. “The receptionist told me that ages ago. But there has to be a mistake. He’s been coming here for months.”

  “Not according to our records.”

  “But what about Dr. Benson? He’d know surely.”

  “Mrs. Jackson ... May I call you Ruth?”

  She nods.

  “Ruth. We have no Dr. Benson registered here.”

  “I might have got it wrong. Jenson—What about Jenson?”

  “Ruth. We’ve checked all of our records; we’ve even had someone phone all the other hospitals in the region. Nobody has any record of your husband whatsoever.”

  “Wait,” says Ruth, with an idea. “He’s probably using a different name. He didn‘t want anyone knowing he had cancer.”

  The administrator’s face lights up in hope. “OK. What name? We’ll check.”

  Ruth’s face falls. “I don’t know ...” Then she brightens, “But Dr. Benson will know.”

  “Ruth. There is no Dr. Benson,” says the administrator with more than a hint of exasperation.

  “I could give you a description of Jordan,” enthuses Ruth.

  “We have thousands of patients,” says Dingwall shaking his head. “Though a photograph might help,” he adds doubtfully.

  Ruth bites her lip and doesn’t bother to look in her purse. She has no photographs. The ones she had taken with the new camera had vanished into cyberspace.

  “Sorry Ruth. The computer crashed,” Jordan had sheepishly explained a few days after his birthday when she was anxious to view them. “It seems to have mucked up the camera as well,” he’d claimed, though insisted that he’d be able to fix it when he was better.

  “Do you have any other information?” continues the administrator. “What type of cancer? What treatment he was receiving? Are you sure he has cancer?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’ve been going to the support group. They would have known.”

  Dingwall shakes his head again as he puts down the single sheet bearing only Jordan’s name, address and date of birth. “I can only suggest that you go home and ask your husband,” he says with a tone of finality. “But I have to warn you, this isn’t the first case like this that I’ve dealt with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes people have delusions about illnesses, Ruth. They may even believe something is seriously wrong with them ...”

  Ruth’s mind has been racing out of control from the moment she arrived, but suddenly everything is clear. “I know what you’re doing. You’re lying to protect Jordan’s privacy, aren’t you?”

  “No ...” he tries, but Ruth angrily flourishes Jordan’s authority.

  “I’ve got permission ... Here—that’s his signature. You can check.”

  “I know. You’ve already shown it to me. Believe me, Ruth, that is not the problem. I’m trying to help. Even if I couldn’t give you specifics, I could certainly confirm that he was a patient. Why don’t you just phone him? You’re welcome to use my phone.”

  Ruth can’t explain her reluctance to phone Jordan, even to herself, but decides to take action. “I’m going t
o the other hospitals,” she declares. “Your computers must be wrong. I know he’s been treated somewhere. He had pills ...”

  “OK. What was the name of the drug?” asks Dingwall with a final ray of hope. “We might be able to track the prescription.”

  “Zofran,” says Ruth remembering the name Trina had found on the pack.

  Dingwall sits back, shaking his head again. “I was afraid of that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too common. Most of our cancer patients take it to quell nausea. We’d never trace an individual dose.”

  Three hours and nearly two hundred dollars in cab fares later, Ruth is back at Vancouver General, admitting defeat. There is no record of her husband, or a Dr. Benson, in any of the Vancouver area hospitals, and if Jordan has used an alias there is no way of tracing him. Bewildered, and destitute of ideas, she finally seeks a payphone.

  Trina picks up on the first ring, and sighs in relief. “Ruth. Thank God it’s you. Jordan’s gone missing—he’s not with you, is he?”

  “No, of course ... What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

  “I couldn’t hear anything from his room, so I had a quick look in to make sure he was all right ...”

  “I told you not to.”

  “I know, I know. But it was lunchtime, and I thought he might like some of my cauliflower–banana soup. Honest, Ruth, he’s not here.”

  “Banana soup?”

  “I ran out of cauliflower, but banana’s the same colour. Anyway, he’s not here, Ruth. We’ve looked everywhere. Cindy hasn’t seen him either. He’s gone.”

  “Stay there. I’m coming back.”

  “I gotta get the kids from school—the guinea pig’s having babies—but Jordan’s mother’s on her way over. I found her number ...”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Trina. Did you have to? Why couldn’t you just do what you’re asked for once?”

  chapter six

  For the second time in two days, Ruth Jackson finds herself crying as she undresses in front of strangers.

  “Everything?” she asks, trying to hang on to her panties.

  “Everything,” says the police matron as she holds out a one-piece prisoner’s suit. “Put this on, then sit over there and look straight into the camera.”

  “But I haven’t done anything,” blubbers Ruth, as another female officer sweeps up her clothes and carefully seals them in an evidence bag.

  “Tell the judge, dear, not me. Just hold that board up under your chin and give us a wide smile.”

  The camera’s flash makes Ruth blink, but at least the picture won’t end up as a centrefold in Bazoomerama.

  “What happens now?” she snivels.

  “More inquiries, Ruth,” says the officer with the bag. “But it’s not my case. You’ll have to ask the detectives in the morning.”

  “Do you mean I have to stay here all night?”

  “Yup.”

  “But what about my husband? I should be out looking for him. He’s dying. Why aren’t you looking for him?”

  “We are, Ruth. Believe me, we are.”

  The officer is wrong—no one is actively searching for Jordan. However, his description is circulating around the city’s press offices as the morning’s headlines are decided. “Dying man disappears,” gets the most votes at the Sun, while the Province goes with “Police baffled.”

  The Province, encompassing a more global view of law enforcers, has hit the nail on the head in this case, and a group of detectives sit around a table strewn with coffee cups, cellphones and dossiers, scratching their heads.

  Inspector Bob Wilson, Sergeant Dave Brougham, and Constable Gunn, known universally as BB, are trying to stay alert after ten hours on the case. They had started with Jordan’s mother on their backs, before Ruth had arrived home, but their investigations had stalled. With no sign of a struggle, and no scent of a body, there are few immediate leads.

  “Let’s see what we have, and we’ll make a fresh start in the morning,” says Wilson, seeing the clock nearing midnight. “Give us the basics, Dave.”

  “Jordan Artemus Jackson,” starts Brougham from his notes. “Male; forty years; five-eleven-and-a-half; owns a café in the ‘burbs with wife, Ruth, thirty-seven. She’s clean as far as we can see, though I ran her mother: string of petty thefts, drugs, soliciting—but absolutely nothing after 1980.”

  “Maybe she’s done her mother in as well,” says BB.

  “Doubt it ... She was only fifteen,” snaps back Brougham.

  “What about you, BB?” asks Wilson, “What did you get from the staff?”

  BB scans a statement on the table and paraphrases, “Cindy Cloud. Worked for them for a year or so. Here she says: ‘I haven’t seen Mr. Jackson for months. I thought he was upstairs in the apartment.’

  ‘What about her?’ I asked. ‘Any odd behaviour?’ Now this is interesting. She writes: ‘Back in September, Ruth suddenly said that all the food in the place was poisonous and she chucked it all away.’ ‘Was that before or after you last saw her husband,’ I asked. ‘Just after,’ she said, quite positively. Then she says, ‘Ruth told me Jordan was ill.’”

  BB looks up, making sure he has the floor, then continues, “I asked her if Mrs. Jackson had told her it was cancer, and she said, ‘No, Ruth never mentioned cancer. She said he had a cold at first. I thought it was just a bad bug.’”

  BB pauses while he skips ahead, then carries on. “This bit’s interesting as well. ‘Did they ever fight?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Yesterday morning there was a big commotion in the kitchen. I was busy and it stopped before I had a chance to investigate.’ ‘And that was Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, was it?’ I said. And she replied, ‘I suppose it was, although Ruth’s usually pretty soft, so I was surprised.’”

  “Interesting,” says the Inspector, but Sergeant Brougham jumps in, “Mrs. Jackson told me about that. Says she had a run-in with a money man over a loan.”

  “OK,” says the inspector, “we’ll get forensics to do the kitchen for poison residues first thing, and if there was a fight we should find something. Do we know if the guy will corroborate?”

  “Working on that,” says Brougham.

  “That’s about all from the Cloud woman,” says BB, “She seems pretty straight—even remembered the last day she saw him for sure. She says here, ‘It was the day Ruth said he was going for a hospital check-up in September.’” BB looks up to add a final touch. “I told her I found it strange she hadn’t said anything to anyone about not seeing him around, but she said, ‘I just assumed he used the back door.’”

  “Thanks, BB,” says Inspector Wilson before turning to Brougham. “What did you get from his mother, Dave?”

  “An earful, sir,” he laughs. “God! Is she a strip of moose hide or what? I bet she would have lynched his wife if we hadn’t been there. ‘Arrest her—she’s a bloody murderer,’ she was screaming up and down the street.”

  “But what does she say in her statement, Dave? Stick to the facts.”

  “The facts, according to her, are that her daughter-in-law murdered her son and fed his body to the macerator. The problem is, there isn’t a macerator; I checked. She hasn’t seen him since September either, and she’s been there three times since.

  ‘First the fat bitch says he’s getting his hair done,’ Gwenda Jackson had bleated. ‘Then she told me he was at the wholesalers, and finally she tells me he’s gone fishing.’

  “The trouble is,” continues Brougham, “Ruth insists her husband was having treatment for his cancer and didn’t want to worry his mother, so she had lied about where he was.”

  “That would certainly make sense,” says Wilson, “If there was the slightest evidence that he had cancer.”

  “And even she admits that there isn’t,” pipes up BB.

  Brougham carries on where he left off. “Most of the time his mother ranted on about how it was a plot to steal her money, then she came up with something really interesting. The night before last she was visiting a frien
d not far from the café. ‘I was playing euchre with Mr. Ashbourne when he looked out the window,’” Brougham reads.

  “Isn’t that your Ruth?” Ashbourne had asked as he’d squinted into the shadows of the streetlights.

  “I don’t think so,” Gwenda had replied, not immediately recognizing the well-dressed woman.

  “She was sort of disguised, her hair was all different, and she had funny glasses on,” she had told Brougham. “She looked like a tart—all dolled up. And her weight! She was a bloody ton before—then in September it starts falling off her. She didn’t see me. She was getting into a cab, looking around, making sure no one saw her.”

  “Do you remember the cab company?” Brougham had asked.

  “We think we’ve traced the cab,” continues Brougham to his colleagues, “but the driver’s in Hawaii until after Christmas.”

  “I should be a cab driver,” mutters BB.

  “Anyway,” says Brougham, “Mrs. Jackson doesn’t deny getting a cab. She just won’t say where she was going. Said it was private.”

  Looking for more information, Brougham picks up Gwenda Jackson’s hefty statement and zips through it. ‘She wouldn’t let him phone me—too expensive ... she only married him for my money ... God knows what he saw in the fat bitch.’”

  “Who else have we got?” asks Wilson, shuffling through the growing file.

  “Erica, the cancer support woman,” says BB. “She didn’t buy Ruth’s story at all. Here she says, ‘I was suspicious because her husband didn’t seem to have symptoms consistent with most cancers. I could only go on what Mrs. Jackson told me.’”

  “The best we’ve got so far is the woman who discovered him missing,” says Brougham picking up Trina’s statement. “She’s a case. She thinks he’s just playing a joke on her. Mind you, she thinks everything’s a bit of a joke. When I said I was having a hard time swallowing Mrs. Jackson’s story, she offered to give me a laxative to clear out some room for it.”

  “Trina Button,” he carries on as the laughter dies. “She’s a home care nurse who was supposed to be looking after him, but it turns out she hasn’t seen him since September either.” Brougham stops to chuckle to himself at the memory of their meeting.