“Norman Brooks is your classic loose cannon,” Matthias said quietly. “His drinking cost him his job. He’s lucky it didn’t cost him his pension. He needs to get into a program.”
I looked over at Bobbi. Her eyes were open and she was watching us.
“Hi,” I said, getting up and going to the foot of the bed. She turned slowly and stiffly onto her back, watched me silently as I cranked up the head of the bed. “Would you like some water?”
She tried to speak, but her voice caught. She coughed, winced, and croaked, “Yes, please.” I held the cup and straw for her as she sipped. “Thanks,” she said. “Hi, Greg.”
“Hi, Bobbi,” he said.
“I heard you talking about my dad. He’s okay?”
“He’s fine,” Matthias said.
“How long have I been here?”
Matthias didn’t answer. I looked at him. He nodded.
“Almost a week,” I said.
“A week? What day is it?”
“It’s Monday.”
She absorbed the information slowly, expression incredulous. “What happened?”
I let Matthias take that one. “You were attacked,” he said.
Her eyes grew wide. “Attacked? Shit, you mean like — raped?”
“No, you weren’t raped. Last Tuesday night you were beaten up and thrown into False Creek under the Burrard Street Bridge. You’ve been in a coma since you were found by an off-duty paramedic.”
“Was I mugged?”
“No, we don’t believe it was a mugging. Do you remember anything at all?”
She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “No,” she said. “The last thing I remember, I think, was talking to Tom in the office about the move. God, if I’ve been here a week …” Her voice trailed off. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Anything else?” Matthias said.
She rolled her head again. “No, that’s … Wait. I remember a blonde woman. She was getting onto the elevator as I came into the studio. She wanted pictures of her boat, you told me. You thought she was cute.” She paused, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “I remember someone reading to me.”
“That was me,” Matthias said. “Earlier this evening, just before you woke up.” He held up the book. She smiled weakly.
“The doctor said you might be hungry when you woke up,” I said. “Are you?”
“Hungry? I dunno …” Her eyes widened. “Christ, yes. I could eat a goddamned rhino, horn and all.”
“Would you settle for chicken soup?” Dr. Sandra said from the door.
chapter fourteen
Bobbi managed to eat half a cup of chicken broth and a couple of spoons of green Jell-O before proclaiming, “I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought,” then closed her eyes and went to sleep again.
“I guess we aren’t very stimulating company,” Matthias said.
It was past nine. Dr. Sandra said Bobbi would most likely sleep through the night, so we left. There was a different cop on the door. Matthias told him to stay in the room with her and that if she woke up, to write down anything she said.
When I got home half an hour later, the message light on my phone was flashing. I logged into my voice mail. There was one message.
“Mr. McCall, it’s Anna Waverley. It’s seven o’clock Monday evening. Please, could you come to my home as soon as possible. There’s something I urgently need to tell you. Don’t worry about the time; I seldom go to bed before midnight.” She paused, then added, “I’ll be waiting.”
It was almost ten o’clock. I didn’t have her telephone number, nor did the phone’s call display show it, so I went back up to the parking lot, got into the Liberty, and drove to Anna Waverley’s house in Point Grey. The freakish weather had worsened. A cold, heavy fog had rolled in off Burrard Inlet and it was like driving through watery milk. Despite my eagerness to know what Anna Waverley had to tell me, I took it easy and was almost rear-ended twice by less cautious drivers. It was ten-thirty when I parked beside the Volvo in the wide driveway. The fog swirled around the coach lamps bracketing the front door as I rang the bell and waited for an answer that was not forthcoming. Except for a dim glow from within, visible though the etched-glass bricks on either side of the door, the coach lights were the only lights that appeared to be on. I peered up at the little video camera above the door, to see if the red light was on. It wasn’t. I rang again and waited some more. Still no answer.
Perhaps she’d had a few too many glasses of wine waiting for me and had fallen asleep. Foregoing the bell, I rapped on the door. I could hear music through the mail slot. Classical piano. Bach, I thought, mainly because Bach was the only classical composer whose music I could recognize — sometimes — just as chardonnay was the only wine I could identify by taste — sometimes. I knocked again, harder, but still she did not answer.
Whatever she had to tell me would have to keep, I thought, as I turned and started to walk to my car. Then, on some unfathomable impulse, I went back to the door and tried the handle. The polished brass lever was cool and slick with condensation. Unexpectedly, it turned. Why was the door unlocked? I wondered, as I pushed it open. Feathery fingers brushed the back of my neck as the cool night air wafted into the house.
“Mrs. Waverley?” I called, leaning through the doorway. “It’s Tom McCall. Hello?”
No answer. In retrospect, I should have closed the door, driven to the nearest phone, and called the police, but I stepped into the dark vestibule and closed the door behind me.
“Mrs. Waverley,” I called again. “Anna? Are you decent? It’s Tom McCall.”
Inside the house, the music was louder, but not so loud that she shouldn’t have been able to hear me, unless she was wearing headphones or had taken a sleeping pill, both of which seemed unlikely if she was waiting for a visitor. The music, as well as the only apparent light in the house, was coming from the short hallway to my left that led to the day room we’d talked in on Saturday, before moving to the immaculate, under-utilized kitchen.
My footfalls made almost no sound on the thick Oriental carpets as I moved along the hallway toward the source of the music and the light. If she couldn’t hear me, I didn’t want to sneak up on her, startle her.
“Anna? Mrs. Waverley? Are you here? It’s Tom McCall. Hello?”
I hadn’t noticed it on my previous visit, because it had been open, but the day room had a sliding wood panel door, which was now mostly closed. Dim yellow light leaked through the gap.
I knocked on the door. “Mrs. Waverley?” I said through the gap. “It’s Tom McCall. Are you there?”
No answer. I slid the door open an inch or two more. “Mrs. Waverley?”
She still didn’t answer. I slid the door fully open.
In the muted glow of a small halogen lamp on the ornate Victoria dining table, I could see her standing motionless in the middle of the room.
“Mrs. Waverley?” I said, as I stepped closer.
Was she standing on a chair or the coffee table? I wondered, because she seemed to be a good eighteen inches above the floor. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts that looked like men’s boxers, facing away from me, her head oddly cocked.
“Anna?”
Slowly, she turned toward me, her face coming into the light. I took another step toward her, wondering stupidly what was wrong with her face. It was a strange colour, her mouth was partly open, and her tongue protruded slightly between her teeth. Then the realization struck me like a massive blow from a gigantic fist.
She wasn’t standing on anything at all.
I leaped forward, wrapped my right arm around her bare thighs and lifted her, at the same reaching up with my left hand and trying to loosen the noose around her neck. The flesh of her neck was stiff and cool where the heavy-duty orange extension cord had bitten deep. The other end of the cord was looped around a thick cedar beam. Supporting her weight, I clawed at the noose, fingernails gouging her flesh, unt
il I finally managed to loosen it and slip it over her head, all the while remotely aware of the fact that while her body was still warm, it wasn’t quite as warm as it should have been.
Lowering her to the floor, I tilted her head back, and blew into her mouth, but her tongue was stiff and distended, blocking her airway. I pulled her jaw down and out, pressed her tongue to the base of her mouth with my finger, and tried again. Her chest expanded. Kneeling over her, I clasped my hands together and pressed the heels hard on her breast bone, once, twice, three times. At the count of ten, I leaned over and blew into her mouth again. I repeated the cycle, then repeated it again. I knew it was too late, though; she was dead and had been for some time. Nevertheless, I continued to try to revive her until I was bathed in sweat and dizzy from hyperventilation.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet, pushing off on a fallen chair, until I realized that it must have been the chair she’d been standing on. I jerked my hand away. Too late, of course. I’d surely left fingerprints, contaminating the crime scene. Was suicide still considered a crime? I wondered dimly. Probably not, at least according to civil law. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to contaminate the scene more than I had already. Not that I was planning on going anywhere.
There was a cordless telephone on the dining table, next to her laptop, atop its stack of books. I started to reach for the phone, but decided I would call 911 from another one. There was one in the kitchen, I recalled.
The Bach was coming from the mismatched stereo system in the entertainment unit. As I stood looking at my reflection in the dark glass of the sliding doors to the patio, Anna Waverley’s body at my feet, the CD ended and the room was plunged into sudden, deathly silence. I staggered as my vision blurred. I braced myself against the big Victorian dining table, sucking in lungful after lungful of air through my mouth. Some hero, I thought, and I took myself away from her and went to the kitchen to call 911.
When I hung up the telephone, my hand was shaking and the edges of my vision flickered with random flashes of light and darkness, like movement in my peripheral vision. I found a bottle of Scotch in a sideboard, poured myself a stiff jolt, and sat down to wait for the police, trying not to think about Anna Waverley’s cooling body in the day room, how beautiful she was, even in death, and the sad, lonely manner in which she had died.
It was almost one in the morning when the police were finally finished with me. I was exhausted and sick from telling my story a half a dozen times, to the first cops on the scene, the medical examiner, to Constable Henshaw, to a woman from the coroner’s office, and twice to Sergeant Kovacs, who hadn’t been the least bit pleased to see me.
“Goddamn it to bloody hell,” he’d said tiredly. “What the fuck did you think you were doing? I should bust your meddlesome ass for obstruction or interfering with a police investigation.” He took a breath. “What the hell were you doing here, anyway?”
“She called me at seven,” I’d told him. “She left a message on my voice mail. She said she had something to tell me.”
“Any idea what?”
“No.”
“You came to see her on Saturday night. Why? You told me you didn’t know her.”
“I didn’t. I came to see if she could tell me anything about what happened to Bobbi and we spent most of the evening together.” His expression soured. “Just talking. She was a very lonely lady.”
“Okay,” he’d said then. “Go home. Stay there. We’ll be in touch.”
The wind came up as I drove home, shredding the fog to thread-like tendrils that whipped and undulated through the tunnel of light ahead of the Liberty. I felt empty and cold, as if my insides had been scooped out and replaced with dry ice. I could still feel the waxy coolness of her lips against mine, the staleness of the air expelled from her lungs as I’d pressed on her chest. My thoughts seemed to come from a great distance, thin and hollow, spoken by a ghost. Anna Waverley’s lonely death saddened me and angered me and left me feeling as though I’d failed her somehow. I didn’t like the feeling at all and wished it would go away. It didn’t.
I lay awake in my bed for a long time, despite my exhaustion, and when I finally did sleep, I was awakened by dreams I’d rather I didn’t remember, but did. Early in the morning I awoke from a particularly disturbing one, sweating, heart pounding, and mouth dry. I’d been making love with Anna Waverley on her big Victorian dining table, when she’d fallen overboard and slowly sank out of sight into the cold and dark water.
It was 4:30 by the clock on the dresser. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep without dreaming, so I got up, got dressed, and went downstairs. The house was cool and quiet, which wasn’t unusual, but it was unusual for me to be aware of it. I was also aware of the almost imperceptible motion as the house rocked gently on the tide and in the wake of passing boats. I turned on the radio in the kitchen to catch the news, but immediately turned it off again, afraid of what I’d hear. I started coffee, and fixed a bowl of cereal, ate two mouthfuls before scraping the rest into the garbage disposal. When the coffee was ready, I poured a cup, put on a jacket, and went up to the roof deck and sat under the awning to wait for the sun to rise over the coastal mountains, even though it likely wouldn’t be visible through the cloud cover and fog, anyway.
What had she so urgently wanted to tell me? It must have had something to do with Bobbi’s attack — what else could it have been? Surely she hadn’t been involved, but perhaps she had witnessed it? Or perhaps, when she’d been at the marina, she’d seen someone else on the boat besides Bobbi. Or perhaps, more circumstantially, she knew who’d posed as her to hire us to photograph the boat. There were any number of possibilities.
None of which explained why she’d killed herself.
I played back her phone message in my head, which was the only place I could play it back, since I’d erased it from my voice mail, to Sergeant Kovacs’s chagrin. Her voice had sounded urgent, but not desperate. For a moment I couldn’t recall if she’d said that there was something she’d urgently needed to tell me or if she’d said she urgently needed to speak with me. If the latter, perhaps it had had nothing at all to do with Bobbi’s attack and everything to do with her suicide. I was fairly sure, though, that she’d said she had something she needed to tell me. Which brought me full circle back to where I’d started, wondering what she’d wanted to tell me. I would likely never know.
“You must think I’m a very foolish woman,” she’d said to me as we sat in her kitchen and drank tea after she’d almost single-handedly polished off two bottles of wine. “You’d be right,” she’d added before I could reply that I didn’t think she was foolish at all. “Foolish and useless. I’m not stupid, if I do say so myself — I have degrees in art history and English — but what do I do with my time? I mope around this damned warehouse all day feeling sorry for myself, drinking too much, and doing endless research for a book I’ll never write, about a subject no one cares about, which even if I did publish, no one would read, anyway.”
“Maybe you just need to get out more,” I said.
A smile flickered at the edges of her mouth, but she raised her teacup, almost as if it embarrassed her to smile, that she needed to hide it. “What an unusual man you are, Mr. McCall.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound flippant.”
“Oh, don’t apologize,” she said, almost snappishly. “You were simply being honest. And you’re right. I do need to get out more. Do you sail?”
“A little,” I replied.
“I love sailing, but my husband, well, he’s never been an especially competent man, physically, that is. I’m the one who insisted on having a sailboat. He wanted a motor yacht. They are less demanding and require somewhat less skill to operate than a sailboat. You live at Granville Island. Do you live on a boat? No, you said you owned a house.”
“I live in a floating home,” I said. “Which requires no skill at all to operate.”
She smiled. It was a distant, fleeting smile, but a smile noneth
eless. “It’s been ages since I’ve enjoyed the company of a man without sex being involved,” she said. She looked at me, her cheeks flushed. “That didn’t come out quite the way I meant it to.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”
“I used to enjoy the company of my husband,” she said. “Quite a lot. And I think he once enjoyed mine. Now he prefers the company of the limber and long-legged Doris.” She shook her head, mouth pinched. “She’s very sweet. And quite bright. As I said, I’ve no idea what she sees in Sam. I hope she enjoys his company. I never really enjoyed the company of many of my lovers. Most of them tried too hard to impress me. You don’t know how refreshing it is to be with someone who doesn’t feel the need to impress.”
“You mean me?” I’d replied, with mock astonishment. “Right now, if I thought it would impress you, I’d stand on my hands and recite love poems from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. That is, if I could stand on my hands or knew any of the love poems from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”
She’d laughed then. “I’ve got a copy around here someplace.”
“Shit,” I said, sitting in my chair on the roof deck of my house, as the rain began to fall.
chapter fifteen
At nine the following morning I left Mary-Alice and Wayne to mind the store and drove to the hospital. I hadn’t told Mary-Alice or Wayne about Anna Waverley’s death. It wouldn’t mean anything to them, anyway. Naturally, they were pleased to hear that Bobbi was awake, and asked me to give her their regards, tell her that they’d come visit soon.
“The move went all right, then,” Bobbi said, after I passed on the well wishes from Mary-Alice and Wayne.
“It went fine,” I said. It was the third time she’d asked. She was still having trouble with short-term memory, which the doctor had told me was to be expected.
“Ask them to bring me a pizza when they come,” she said. Her appetite had returned, but hospital food left something to be desired, to say the least.
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