by L. R. Wright
“Hi,” said Alberg.
“Karl. What are you doing here?”
“What was that all about?”
Sid closed the gate, making sure the latch caught. “I gave her my specialty,” he said. “Tuna casserole.”
“You made it yourself?”
“Of course I made it myself.” He threw Alberg a bitter glance. “There’s nobody else gonna cook my meals that I know of. Not anymore.”
Alberg followed him up the walk and into his house, which smelled like furniture polish.
“They just moved in,” said Sokolowski, “those people next door.” Alberg steeled himself for the inevitable pronouncement on race and/or nationality. “Clean people, the Chinese,” said the sergeant, heading for his kitchen. “Quiet. Shrewd, though. Gotta watch them in business dealings. Not that I intend to have any business dealings with them.” He stood looking out the window at his backyard. “I wish they’d moved in on the other side of me, though. That same old guy is there, Karl. With the leaves all over his so-called lawn, and the old car just dumped there, and dandelions in the spring.” He sounded disproportionately distraught.
“You got any coffee?” said Alberg.
“Yeah.” Sid got mugs out of a cabinet. “I was just gonna have some.”
They took their coffee into the living room. Before he sat down, Sid stooped to pick something up from the carpet—a small dead leaf, Alberg thought it was.
“I wanted to talk to you about Maria Buscombe,” said Alberg.
“Shoot,” said Sokolowski. He was sitting on a big, deep recliner that faced a television set. Next to it was an end table on which he had placed his coffee mug. “Did you get anywhere with the guy in Saskatchewan?”
Alberg took his notebook from his pocket. “Yeah, I think so.” Referring to his notes, he told Sokolowski about Edward Dixon and Art Johnson and Maria Buscombe’s parents. “The mother died in the hospital about eighteen months after Maria went to see her there. I don’t know if the doctor’s still alive—or what he can tell us if he is. I’ll start tracking him down tomorrow.”
That picture materialized in his head again: a baby, screaming, clutching the rail of her crib, and across the hall in her brothers’ room, her mother, a shadow, stabbing. Alberg had learned early how to achieve distance from his work. He was able to maneuver himself through bad stuff while remaining untouched by it, deftly keeping his mind absorbed in the problems it had created while keeping himself free of it emotionally. But sometimes an image got burned into his mind and he couldn’t shake it loose.
“It’s hard to tell what all this has to do with the homicide, though,” said Sokolowski. There was no reproach in his voice, just a certain delicacy.
Alberg glanced at his notebook. He drank some coffee. “The woman takes off on her husband and daughter, Sid, leaving behind a note which says virtually nothing. If the husband can be believed. We know that she holed up in a basement apartment out in the Fraser Valley, for God’s sake. And now we also know that every year for seven years she deposits a bank draft for twenty thousand dollars. Those two things are connected: her leaving, and the money.”
“You don’t know that for sure, Karl,” Sokolowski said patiently.
“They are connected, Sid, by the photos in that album.” He occupied the recliner as if it were a throne, Alberg thought irritably. “Somebody provided her with pictures of her daughter, one a year. Why? To show her that the kid was okay. Who? It’s a fair guess that it’s whoever was paying her the twenty thousand a year.” He flipped the notebook closed. “Now we have to find out who benefited from her absence.”
“Twenty thousand a year, it’s not enough to desert your family for,” said Sokolowski fervently. Alberg suddenly wondered if Elsie was supporting herself in Vancouver or if Sid was providing her—reluctantly—with financial assistance that enabled her to live apart from him.
“It was enough to live on,” said Alberg.
“Well, be that as it may,” said Sid. He drained his coffee mug and put it on the table next to him. “I can see you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
“How about coming over for dinner tonight?” Alberg tucked his notebook back in his pocket and stood up. “Turkey, pumpkin pie, the works.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Karl.” The sergeant got up to walk Alberg to the door. “It’s a family-type thing, Thanksgiving.”
“Right. And your family’s hither and yon, and so is mine.” He went out onto the front porch. “There’ll just be Cassandra, her mother, me, and you. Six o’clock.”
As he drove off he waved at Sokolowski, a big, brooding presence on the front step, and wondered if he’d ever again live close enough to his daughters to have Thanksgiving dinner with them every year. He also wondered, uneasily, what Janey’s laconic musician would contribute to family gatherings.
Chapter 24
“THERE’S A GENTLEMAN down the hall,” said Helen Mitchell from her easy chair, “who’s dying. He’s been at it for several days now,” she told Alberg, who had folded himself onto a chair that was too small for him. “Relations at his bedside and what have you,” Helen went on, looking out the bay window at the evening that surrounded Shady Acres. “Taking turns. Spelling each other off.” She adjusted the cushion that supported the small of her back. “The other day they brought a lunch with them.” She looked indignantly straight into Alberg’s face, her eyes flashing behind her glasses. “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
Alberg burst out laughing. He saw that this surprised her and was pleased when she decided to laugh with him.
“Thanks again for staying with Cassandra while I was away,” he said.
“Thank you for Thanksgiving dinner,” said Helen Mitchell. “And for bringing me home.” She hesitated. “I want to talk to you. Why don’t you get out of that chair and sit on the window seat.”
Alberg did so.
He had always been slightly uncomfortable in her presence, as if feeling criticized. Yet he thought she approved of him. He had finally decided that Helen Mitchell’s take on life itself was critical, and that this emanated from her continually, like a vapor. It was Alberg’s opinion that Cassandra, in overlong visits with her mother, inhaled too much of this censorious gas, which was why she sometimes came home suffering from depression and a headache.
“I don’t believe I’m being disloyal to my daughter by telling you this,” said Helen Mitchell.
Alberg remained politely attentive.
“Cassandra told me while you were gone that she recently decided to marry you. But that she couldn’t do it after all. Because of her fear of being alone.”
Alberg shook his head. “Yeah. Well.”
“I’m not asking you to discuss this with me,” she said. “I’m simply providing you with information.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Thanks.”
She was looking at him intently. “She’s never going to ‘get over’ this. Oh, she’ll put it behind her, and life will go on, and she will eventually be able to be alone again. But that dreadful experience will always be with her. You know that, don’t you?”
He tried never to think about it. He’d rather have the image of the screaming infant stuck in his head than Gordon Murphy, the preening, psychopathic son of a bitch who had kidnapped Cassandra. “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “I do.”
“So don’t wait,” she said, leaning toward him. “Don’t let her put you off.”
Alberg nodded. “Okay.” He smiled. “I’ll try.”
She sat back. “I could offer you a glass of wine.”
“Could you now?”
“Would you like one?”
“I would indeed.”
She got up and took a bottle of white wine from the small refrigerator in the corner of her room and two wineglasses from a cupboard above it. She filled the glasses, replaced the bottle, and handed Alberg his drink. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, touching her glass to his.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” said Alberg, and they drank.
She sat down and looked at him thoughtfully. “What was your punishment,” she asked, “for striking that lunatic?”
Alberg, in a flash, saw it again: Gordon Murphy, in his gym clothes, sweating. Grinning. And he felt it again: the splendid satisfaction when his fist hit that dazzling smirk and shattered it.
He raised his eyebrows. “Strike? Me? Oh no, Helen. He fell down.”
***
Cassandra was doing the dishes when Alberg got home. He joined her and picked up a dish towel and started drying. It felt very good, very companionable, she thought, to be working together. They talked casually about Sid, whose gloom had lifted only occasionally during dinner, and about whether Elsie was likely ever to return to him. Suddenly Cassandra heard herself saying, “Karl. Will you marry me?”
His mouth fell open. He was stupefied.
Cassandra began to laugh.
“What?” he said. “What?”
She laughed harder, flapping the dishcloth in the air, spattering him with soapy water.
“You don’t mean it,” he said. “You’re playing a cruel joke.”
She dropped the dishcloth and wrapped her arms around herself, still laughing.
“Cassandra?”
She shook her head, helpless. “I do. I do mean it.” Her laughter vanished, leaving brown mascara tears in its wake. Alberg wiped them away with the towel he’d been using to dry the dishes.
“Say it again,” he said.
She was unexpectedly aroused and consequently flustered. She wanted to look away, but she didn’t. “Will you marry me?” she said, watching him smile.
And he said that he would.
1987
Chapter 25
MARIA ENTERED HIS NAME in her address book, printing it carefully, Alan with one “l,” Stewart with a “ew,” not a “u.” Her mother watched her do this. Maria wondered if she was imagining the two of them meeting, the adult daughter and her elderly father. But Nadine’s eyes were so distant that she might just as well have had dinner on her mind.
Maria thought about Agatha, who had made her Hallowe’en costumes and helped her learn to read, put up with her adolescent shenanigans and seen her through accidents and illnesses, while her real mother languished behind bars.
“What do you do here?” she asked Nadine, who suddenly looked tired. “How do you spend your days?”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll think of you, from now on, and I’d like to be able to imagine what you’re doing.”
“Look.” Nadine leaned forward slightly. “I’ve been in this place for forty-eight years. There’s no room in your life for me, and no room in mine for you.”
Maria, chastened, felt herself flush and looked down. The counter was made of wood that had been painted the dingy green that somebody once decided would be a good color for institutions. On Maria’s side of it there was a cigarette burn from when smoking in public was allowed, and some of the paint had been chipped away by people waiting, nervously, as she had waited, and somebody had printed his name there—“Reggie” was printed there on the edge of the counter, and Maria wondered if Reggie had been the person who waited or the person who was waited for.
She lifted her head and looked hard at her mother, seeking signs of madness. But it had been a fleeting thing, Nadine’s madness, or so Maria had been led to believe: a thing brought on by childbirth, a thing for which Maria herself was therefore partially responsible.
She didn’t know what to say next. She chipped away at the paint with her thumbnails, clearing a small area around the word Reggie, saying nothing. Her mother was silent, too, apparently uninterested in Maria. But then, why not? If she’d been interested in her, she probably wouldn’t have wanted her dead.
“Tell me about my grandparents,” she said. “Your parents.”
Her mother glanced behind her again, as if hoping the attendant would tell her it was time to go. “Why?”
“Did they—did they have a lot of kids? Or just you? Or what?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Nadine, exasperated. She lifted her clawlike hands. “I’m not going to sit here and—”
“Have you got anything to give me? Letters? Photographs? Anything?”
“Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”
“What I—did they beat you?” said Maria. “Did they hurt you? Were they violent? Did your mother—was she crazy, too?” There were tears in her eyes, and she was gripping the edge of the counter. “You would’ve killed me, too, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”
Nadine looked at Maria, and through her, for a long moment. Then she placed her hands on the counter and slowly, painfully, pushed herself upright. The attendant behind her stood up, too.
“Maria. I don’t remember that day. Maria. Go home.” She turned and walked slowly away, and the attendant followed.
***
The next morning Maria went back to see Edward Dixon.
Then she drove out of Saskatoon, heading northwest.
It took her only a couple of hours to get there. It would have been a much longer drive, all those decades ago, when the roads were narrow and made of gravel.
The town appeared rather suddenly, as Maria came to the crest of a rise. It had spread comfortably across its piece of the plains, dominated by the ubiquitous prairie grain elevator: a calm and quiet place. Maria drove through slowly. She saw stands of lilac bushes. A steady breeze was blowing. Maria looked with a stranger’s eyes at cars parked in the heat—a cat curled up beneath a porch—a boy riding a bike—a man coming out of the drugstore, dressed in a suit, carrying a samples case. It took less than two minutes to drive into the town, along the main street and out the other side.
She drove on for twenty minutes and turned west, then north, then west again.
“It’s probably not even there anymore,” Edward Dixon had protested. But she had ignored this, holding out paper and pen. “It’s near to fifty years ago now,” he had pleaded. “It’s sure to be gone.”
“Please,” Maria had said. And finally he had drawn the map.
She drove along the road toward what had once been her mother’s house, hot and sweating because she had rolled up all the car windows. She had locked the doors, too. Yet she found herself glancing involuntarily into the backseat from time to time, perhaps expecting to see her mother there, if not charging the car from the roadside. That arthritic crone, thought Maria, fighting her fear. I could knock her flat with a backhand; she couldn’t even carry a knife in those crippled hands now, let alone stab anybody with it, she thought as she inched along the road, gravel crunching under the tires—sometimes there was no gravel left on the road at all; it was just bare, dry ruts.
Much more quickly than she had expected, she was there.
Several tall trees huddled together next to the road. Would they have been there forty-eight years ago? Maria didn’t know how long it would take trees to grow that tall or what kind they were. She stopped the car opposite the trees and turned off the motor. She sat still for a moment, sweating, looking straight ahead at the road, which continued on and on until it was swallowed into its vanishing point.
She glanced quickly to her left and saw buildings and looked quickly away. Once a woman had come to their door in Vancouver and asked to see the room where years ago she had grown up, which had become Belinda’s room. But what could Maria possibly say to the occupants of this house?
She flung open the driver’s door and got out, and looked more carefully into the yard of the farmhouse. It took her a few seconds to realize that the place was deserted.
Maria had not considered this possibility. Either the house would be gone, she had thought, or it would be occupied.
She closed the car door and walked up the driveway. The farmyard was littered with rusted pieces of machinery that Maria couldn’t identify. The trees growing next to the road sheltered an old barn whose roof had fallen in. There were two more small structures on the property besides the house, that Maria could see, all gra
y and weathered by wind and snow and rainfall and time.
The prairie wind chuckled in the treetops, and rummaged harshly in the litter of rusting farm equipment, and blew hollow through the collapsed barn.
Maria turned and faced the house.
It seemed to loom toward her and away again.
It was a nondescript two-story wooden house, faded and gray like the fallen-in barn, a perfectly ordinary place. Yet its presence struck Maria with the force of a blow: it seemed to be breathing. For the first time, staring at this house, she thought of the brothers she hadn’t known she’d ever had. Of Thaddeus, who would have been Edward Dixon’s age. Of Geoffrey, the middle child.
She must have heard it. She must have heard it. She shook her head violently, as if to dislodge a memory. But there were no memories.
She stood here now, of course, on a day in August. On her way Maria had passed lush fields of grain, and the trees behind her were luxuriant with leaves. The hot sun was molten gold, bleaching the sky of its blueness.
The day it had happened, all those years ago, was a day in December.
Maria, rigid, looked up at the house and saw Nadine young, strong in body, if not in mind. She saw her looking out into the cold, bleak vastness of a snow-covered world, saw her turning back to the house.
There must be memories, Maria thought. Stored somewhere in my brain. And I won’t let myself have them.
It was very quiet in the deserted farmyard. Maria heard only the breeze causing the trees to murmur, and she felt it on her cheek, brushing.
And I won’t let myself have them.
Chapter 26
(...HER HANDS ON BELINDA’S shoulders, pressing—why? She didn’t remember why, just remembered those bony shoulders beneath her hands and Belinda whimpering, “I’m sorry, Mommy, I didn’t mean it...”)
Maria wakened abruptly and swung her legs over the bed. In the bathroom, in the dark, she splashed cold water on her face, in the dark, yes, it was dark outside, no sounds, maybe a car now and then. Maria wrapped her robe around her and opened the motel room door. She looked out at a parking lot, a phone booth, and the street, with big trees lining it on the opposite side, trees shaking in the wind. She held her face into that wind: it would scour her mind clean of dark dreams.