The Dead Letter

by Finley Martin

  “Why hasn’t he killed us already then?”

  “Every detail has to match his story. He planned it for tomorrow morning. If he kills us tonight…”

  “…the time of death wouldn’t make sense,” said Anne.

  “That’s all I know.”

  “So that’s why you made that dumb attempt to kill me when he dumped me out of that bag?”

  “Takin’ you out would screw things up for him…buy me a little time maybe.”

  “Perhaps I can pay you back sometime.”

  “You’ll need a plan first.”

  “I’ve got a plan,” she said. Anne spoke with an air of confidence that surprised Cutter. His surprise drifted into scepticism. Then he laughed at her.

  Anne pulled the bobby pins from her hair. She pushed the fingers of her free hand through her long hair as if she were modelling and shook it out. “Much better,” she said and smiled.

  68.

  “You’ve had a very busy week.”

  “The worst one ever. Madame Desjardins is going to kill me when she finds out.”

  “As far as we can determine, you weren’t at fault. You did what you could under the circumstances. It’ll all be in my report,” said Constable Foley.

  “There’s going to be a report?” Jacqui was surprised. “Ohmygod, is it going to be in the papers?”

  “That’s unlikely to happen.” Constable Foley spoke with an officious certainty, but Jacqui wasn’t convinced.

  Constable Wilkins, his partner, returned from a walk-through of the house and property and stood next to Foley and Jacqui.

  “No drunks left inside or out,” said Wilkins, “and there’s more mess than damage. You’re a lucky lady,” he said. He sounded very satisfied with himself.

  “Yeah…lucky,” she echoed. The faces of her disappointed mother and a dismayed art teacher haunted her imagination, and Rada’s humiliation and her father’s frustration intertwined with them until the unmusical tinkle of glass coaxed her attention back to reality.

  Bobby Fogarty swept the fragments into a dustpan. The glass in his framed present had shattered, but the picture was not damaged. He picked it from the floor and examined it carefully.

  “I can fix that,” said Jacqui. “Don’t worry.”

  “The birthday boy?” asked Wilkins. Bobby nodded. “Right then. I guess we’re done here. If any latecomers show up, call.”

  “Thank you.”

  Constables Foley and Wilkins headed for the door. Foley turned and started to speak, but stopped. He nodded encouragingly toward Jacqui. Jacqui waved a goodbye.

  The door closed behind them, and Jacqui looked at her watch.

  “I have an hour, maybe a bit more, before she arrives.”

  Jacqui surveyed the living room. Disgust with the look of the place and discouragement with the task ahead overwhelmed her. Tears dampened her eyes. She blinked repeatedly to clear her vision and dispel any evidence of what she was feeling.

  “Why don’t you head home? It’s getting late, and I’ve got some work to do around here,” she said purposefully to Bobby. She turned away, bent down, and scrubbed at a spot on the floor with her fingernail. She wet it and wiped it. The mark left by the cigarette butt disappeared. Only a small smudge remained.

  “Can I help?” said Bobby.

  “If you want?” Her words were hesitant, but her heart brightened. She waited a second or two for some qualifier from Bobby, but none came. “Okay then. Open all the windows. Let’s get some fresh air in here. Then gather up the bottles and garbage. I’ll grab the mop and pail.”

  Jacob Dawson hunched over his workstation in the periodical section of the Robertson Library at the University. Two open books spread across his desk. The storage ledge above his carrel held three bound volumes: Youth and Society, Symbolic Interaction, and Discourse and Society. The library would close in an hour, and he rushed to add notes onto a lined pad and highlight passages in a stack of photocopies.

  “You still on?” she asked. Sami Smith’s perfume somehow had swept ahead of her person. It quickened Jacob’s attention before she spoke. Jacob seemed startled by her sudden interest but quite pleased with her intervention. She was very attractive and smart. She was also charming. And her eyes burned with a hint of mischievousness, a trait accented by the bright pink streak in a forelock of her blonde hair. Her avant-garde airs fascinated him.

  Jacob leaned back in his seat and stretched. Three straight hours of study under his belt had wearied him, and the major group presentation tomorrow meant a long night ahead. Still there was much to do. Tonight’s study session weighed just as much on his mind as it did on Sami’s. Their group results would count significantly on mid-semester grades.

  “I’ll be there. The others on board, too?”

  Sami smiled brightly and shook her head in affirmation. Jacob secretly marvelled at the perfect cherubic shape of her lips and the stunning whiteness of her teeth.

  “You?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jacob returned to his studies and note-taking, but he was slowly losing his initiative and his will to continue in earnest. Part of the fault was his weariness; part was Sami.

  Sami was a delight. She brightened his otherwise solitary life. He was drawn to her, but she knew almost nothing of his past, and experience had convinced Jacob that her knowing about it would put an end to dreams he had envisioned with her. But the truth of his past was only one stumbling block, he thought. Real and present demons circled like birds of prey…and they were growing hungry and anxious and impatient to be satisfied.

  Jacob’s pencil point snapped. He stared into the imitation wood veneer of the carrel in front of him and saw his future and his past—a small box, a cage, a storage locker, a prison cell, but perhaps that small world was simply his fate, its tentacles reaching out from every corner. There was no escaping—fate, destiny—whatever one might call it. At one time he had accepted Christ and the hope of redemption, but he could not dispel his long-held disposition that all of time had already been written. The future had already been scripted. The play had begun. Everything else—plans, expectations, dreams—was sham and illusion. A cruel joke.

  Twenty minutes elapsed. His attention suspended. His mind drifted. He closed his books and gathered his notes. Then his cell phone buzzed. It was a text message: “need u now.”

  Anne rotated around to the foot of the bed. She still believed that Cutter would try to kill her, but she didn’t think his arms could stretch far enough to reach her where she was now. Nonetheless she preferred caution, and, from her new position, she could keep him in her line of sight. She could also prevent him from observing her too closely. She did have a plan, and it involved picking the lock on her cuffs.

  In theory it was simple; in practice, a little more challenging. She had done it before—a few times. But that was when Anne was fifteen. Her tutorial, though, had begun when she was eight or nine.

  At that time, her uncle, Billy Darby, was a cop with the Ottawa police. For a while he lived in the same house as Anne, her mother, and her father. Often, when Anne’s parents went out for an evening with friends, they enlisted Billy to babysit. Anne loved it when he watched over her. He played games and did card tricks. He even showed her how the tricks worked and, with his help, she would practise his sleights of hand to astonish her school chums.

  Sometimes after Uncle Billy arrived home, he would let her play with his night stick, a collapsible baton. There was something wondrous about the baton. A flick of the wrist would instantly deploy the telescoping parts from the length of a ruler to almost the length of a yard stick. She felt powerful with it and waved it about as if it were a Star Wars lightsaber. Then, after having vanquished a dark-side stormtrooper or two, she would tap the baton’s tip on the hardwood floor, and magically the whole thing would collapse into its short, stubby handle. Again and
again Anne did this, and again and again Uncle Bill would rock with laughter.

  His handcuffs had been among her temporary playthings at those times, too. But they had been more of an intellectual puzzle than an exciting implement of action. Of course, when Uncle Billy snapped that cuff around her wrist, she was so small at the time that she could slip right out no matter how tightly they encircled her hand, and she giggled with delight each time she set herself free. In turnabout, she handcuffed her uncle, and he made a show of struggling with them until he retrieved his spare key and made his escape.

  Something about the mechanics of the handcuffs had fascinated Anne. It rivalled some Lego sets in complexity with its keyed mechanisms, spring releases, and ratchets, the smoothness of its movements, and the decisive sounds of its engagement. It was shiny and solid and substantial and, because it was one of Uncle Billy’s tools, it seemed important and grown-up.

  Five years later, Anne’s adventures with batons and handcuffs were remembered only as a bit of childhood fun and distraction. Play-acting the Jedi knight had lost its zest, but Anne still treasured the spirit that had empowered her. As a teenager, Anne played that spirit out more practically on the high school soccer field. So, one evening when Uncle Billy snapped handcuffs on himself in her living room after dinner, handed her the key, and asked her what would Princess Leia do if she were in this predicament, she was divided between laughing him off for his presumption that she was still a little kid or accepting his foolish challenge simply to humour him. Anne chose the latter, but she couldn’t determine whether she had done so because of kindness or a habitual respect for her seniors.

  Anne played along, but she did so reluctantly. After all, Uncle Billy was getting old, she thought. His hair was greying on the sides and thinning like a parched field on top. He must be at least forty, forty-five, she guessed. So she made an effort to be kind. She suggested three or four thoughtful answers—a few of them quite inspired, she believed. Then she became tired of the game and proffered half a dozen wild guesses, none of which satisfied Uncle Billy’s quest for… For what? she wondered. It was all becoming rather silly and tedious.

  “What’s the trick?” she asked.

  “The trick is the key,” he answered in his best Alec Guinness voice. Anne’s failure to guess right, as well as Uncle Billy’s faux mystique and, in her mind, unrelenting reply, frustrated Anne, and she threw up her hands.

  “The trick is that you can’t get out of a cop’s handcuffs,” she said. “That’s no trick. That’s just common sense.”

  “You must use the Force, Luke,” said Billy continuing his Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonation and pointing his forefinger toward the side of his head. Uncle Billy wasn’t suppressing a laugh as he sometimes did before he delivered the punchline to a joke, and fifteen-year-old Anne staunched the impulse to call his bluff a second time. Perhaps his clue is a real clue, she thought.

  “Reproduce the key?” she said, half-expecting his great guffaw to upstage her. Instead, he smiled. But it wasn’t amusement. It was satisfaction.

  “Might make a cop out of you yet…if you don’t make the cut for the World Cup team.”

  “And the answer is…?” Anne’s short reply was a confusion of frustration, sarcasm, and ill-defined pleasure.

  “Let me show you,” he said. “Give me one of your bobby pins.”

  Billy took the key from his pocket. He put the bobby pin next to it on the table top. You turn this pin into this key,” he said. “You need to recreate the tip, the shank and the pick lever to do it.”

  “Don’t you need tools?”

  “They’re all in your hand…and head. You know what the key looks like. You make the tip first.” Billy stuck the end of the bobby pin into the keyway of the handcuff and bent it back. He withdrew it and showed Anne an eighth-inch crook in it. Billy wiggled it back into the keyway at an angle and bent a second short crook in the opposite direction. He withdrew it and showed Anne.

  “The rest of the bobby pin is a lever,” he said and inserted the homemade lock pick into the keyway. “Be careful to turn it slowly but firmly. You’ll feel pressure coming off the ratchets. There. See?” he said, and the handcuff opened and fell from his wrist.

  Anne had never forgotten Uncle Billy’s lesson, and, in the flutter of kerosene-fuelled light in her cabin prison, she worked her bobby pin into the keyway of her handcuff, hoping that it was stiff enough to take the load of releasing the spring.

  It was.

  69.

  It had begun to rain, not a heavy driving rain, more of a thick mist, which obscured vision, fogged the glass, and made it difficult to judge distance. Fenton Peale turned on the wipers and redirected the warm airflow to the windshield.

  He drove past MacFarlane’s house and continued slowly along Bunbury Road. He wasn’t absent-minded. He hadn’t been distracted. He was preoccupied. His well-planned life was unravelling, and he was losing control. He could feel it. He could see it in his own reflection. In his rear-view mirror, a worn, aging man stared back at him. He had a deeply receding hairline, prominent wrinkles, and lacklustre eyes and, more troubling, a complexion drained to a paleness so haunting that he conceived of himself as slowly disappearing, fading imperceptibly into oblivion. And it all seemed to happen in just days.

  His personal habits had been neglected, too. He smelled of sweat and the stink of whisky. He was dishevelled and untidy as an old bachelor. His suit jacket and trousers were wrinkled. He had clawed his necktie away from his collar. The knot was misshapen, the collar unbuttoned, and wiry chest hairs sprouted in the breach.

  Peale winced at the tightness in his waist. He felt trapped. A whiff of fear and desperation swept over him in a flash of heat. He unbuttoned his jacket and rolled down the window halfway. The renewed air was cool and fresh. He breathed more freely. But the wind suddenly loosed a nasty gust. It blew the front of his suit jacket open. The oiled wooden handgrip of the Webley .455 revolver sticking from his waistband glinted in the light of a passing streetlamp.

  Peale had not travelled the upper Bunbury Road in eleven years. What he had done there had repelled him too much, and he had struggled to put the deed behind him. Out of sight, out of mind was a lie, as it turned out. But the passage of time helped blunt his conscience and deaden his memory and, for short periods, allowed him to rationalize his crime, but the ghost of it never departed. Its presence, in some form, was always there, and, like a boil beneath one’s skin, it wanted to work its way out.

  It had happened eleven years ago this month. On 19 October 2001. It had rained that night, too. He had not wanted to be there, but MacFarlane had him over a barrel. It had been foolish of him to agree, but he saw no other way out. So he borrowed a pickup truck, smeared mud over the rear plate, and waited in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant near her workplace. MacFarlane had provided him with Carolyn’s work schedule and a description of her car.

  Peale sipped coffee in the cab of the truck but tasted nothing. The coffee was hot, but he felt nothing. His nerves were ragged, his mind detached. Then he spotted her. Carolyn’s black Saturn coupe passed Peale’s position exactly three minutes after midnight, the scheduled end of her shift. He put the truck in gear and followed her down the street, past the intersection to the Hillsborough Bridge, and onto the Bunbury Road. A battered red Ford Ranger bolted from a side street and cut off his truck. It drove maddeningly slowly, and Carolyn’s Saturn disappeared around a bend in the road. He couldn’t pass. When the Ford finally turned off, Peale tromped on the gas to catch up. The speed limit changed to highway limits as the city houses began to diminish, and he hoped that she hadn’t made it too much farther.

  The highway glistened from the rain that had fallen earlier that evening, and the moon had not shown signs of rising. He increased his speed, and several minutes elapsed before he caught the glimpse of her tail lights.

  A good scare will do.

&nbs
p; Those were MacFarlane’s instructions.

  Run her off the road. She’ll get the picture.

  Peale felt the knot in his stomach as he approached the designated spot. A long stretch of road. No houses in sight. No traffic. No witnesses.

  Do it quick. Don’t give her a chance to think about braking.

  Peale quickly glanced ahead and behind for other vehicles. There wasn’t a glimmer of light. He turned on his truck’s high beams. Their brilliance framed her head in the rear window. He overtook her car, blasted his horn, and eased across the dividing line into her lane. He saw the fear in her eyes as the side of his cab loomed toward her, forcing her to the road’s edge. Suddenly her car jerked to the right. Her tires caught the shoulder, softened by the rain. The wheels dug in and dragged her toward the ditch. Her car fishtailed on the edge, straightened momentarily, then hurtled off the incline and into a culvert. The force of the impact crumpled the front end.

  Then don’t stop. Get the hell out of there. No witnesses, no problem.

  Peale noticed an orange glow from the wreckage. It was short-lived. Darkness followed quickly and completely. This wasn’t supposed to happen, he thought, and touched his brakes. What if she’s badly hurt?

  Peale saw a dim glow of car lights somewhere far behind him. It reignited his fear—fear that MacFarlane would reveal his affair with Simone, fear that Simone’s pregnancy would point to him as a suspect, and fear that he would lose his family, his reputation, and his business. He had too much to lose. Hairs bristled on his neck. His foot hit the gas pedal. His truck lurched forward and vanished beyond the thicket of trees lining the dark country road.

  Eleven years later, Peale’s neck hairs bristled again. Peale’s stomach convulsed, but there was nothing to toss up. It happened as his car passed the white cross that Edna Jollimore Hibley had erected and tended as a memorial to her sister Carolyn’s “accident.” The moment passed. Then his thoughts turned to the present, his rendezvous with MacFarlane.