by Sarah Hall
‘Think back,’ one of them said to us. He had a yellow notepad and a digital recorder. Maddy and I were sitting around our kitchen table and both kids were upstairs and asleep. Later, they took us to the police station and we made separate statements in separate rooms.
‘I want you to put yourself back there on May the thirty-first and I want you to visualise exactly what you were doing and exactly what was happening around you. Tell us everything you saw, everything you can remember. The smallest detail may turn out to be important.’
He rolled his pencil between his thumb and his middle finger. The red light on the recorder stayed solid.
‘Just look at it again,’ he asked. ‘The thing we need may not have been something you noticed the first time around.’
*
The weather records backed up our statements. May 31st was unseasonably warm, ten degrees hotter than the day before and well above thirty by the late afternoon. Our errands with the car had gone poorly – we couldn’t find anything on the first try – and Lila had been straining in the back seat, sweating and complaining for hours. We needed supplies and a break so it was decided that I would drop the girls off at the room and then run to the grocery store. It was four o’clock when we pulled into the motel parking lot and a wave of heavy boiling air rolled out and washed over us when we opened the door.
‘Great,’ Maddy said. Her face was pale and I could see a thin purple vein throbbing at her temple. Her hair was matted on the back of her neck.
‘Too hot,’ Lila declared. ‘Too too hot.’
There was no air conditioning, but we flipped on the overhead fan and opened the back windows and popped the screen on the door to create some feeling of circulation. After five minutes, the air was moving, but the stored heat still radiated off the floor and the walls and the beds.
‘Let me run and get the stuff,’ I said. ‘At least some drinks and a bag of ice and some fruit. And if it doesn’t get better in the next hour, we’ll find somewhere else for tonight.’
‘Okay,’ Maddy said, ‘but be quick.’
It took forty-five minutes in the end, maybe almost an hour, but by the time I got back, everything had changed. When I came through the door – the handles of five plastic bags digging into my fingers – I found the murderer sitting on our bed and only Lila left in the room. She was still wet, hair swooped back with leave-in conditioner, and she was bouncing up and down on the other bed in just her underwear. The murderer watched her calmly and I did not think – I still don’t think – there was anything out of the ordinary in the way he looked at her. Lila was chanting, ‘Up-and-down-and-up-and-down-and-up-and-down.’
She had a jumbo Mr Freeze in her hand, a thick blue tube of softening ice, and the murderer was sucking on an orange one, holding it at the bottom with one hand and sliding the cold syrup up to his mouth. The melting dye leaked out of Lila’s face and dribbled down her chin, her neck and her stomach. It ran in two parallel rivulets that seemed to come together and pool in her belly button. She saw me and smiled and her teeth were almost purple. The murderer waved his finger at me, his only acknowledgement.
‘Hello?’ I said, and then I called out, ‘Anybody else home around here?’ louder than it needed to be.
The bathroom door opened and Maddy came out, wearing one of my old T-shirts with just a towel wrapped around her waist. The slit came almost all the way to the top and her belly pushed against the yellow fabric of the shirt, her cold erect nipples showed through. Her hair was slicked back like Lila’s and her face was bright and beautiful, recovered and cool and happy again. She had her own half-eaten Mr Freeze, a red one, and her mouth was dark at the corners too.
She pointed at the murderer.
‘Thank God for this guy,’ she said and then she rushed through her story.
‘So we come in here after you left and I’m thinking, “Maybe a shower, a cool shower, to blow the stink off.” But then, of course, the taps aren’t working right and all we have is hot, scalding hot, like it’s pouring right out of the kettle – there’s no cold anywhere.’
She shook her head and waved her hand back into the flawed bathroom.
‘So I go to the desk, but there’s only a kid there and he doesn’t know anything and he says he has to call the manager and that we will probably have to wait till tomorrow. So I’m completely losing it now and I’m walking back to this freaking hole and I can’t believe this is happening and then I turn and I see the truck parked right there and I think, “What the hell?” So I knock on the door and this is Mark and I tell him our situation and he says, “No problem at all.” Out he comes and he’s got all the right tools in the truck and he opens that little hatch under the taps and two seconds later the hot is off and we have complete cold and it’s perfect. So, so perfect, not glacier cold, just cold enough. So I give Lila a quick little hair wash and a cool-down rinse and when I come out Mark is back at the door, but he’s gone across the street to the store to get everybody Mr Freezes. I ask him if he’ll watch Lila just for a second so that I can get my turn in the shower and he says no problem again and now you’re back and that’s it. Here we all are.’
Lila kept bouncing up and down through all this, nodding her head, and the murderer did the same.
I thanked him.
‘What do we owe you?’ I said. ‘For the rush job, you know. These kinds of things, last-minute rescues, don’t normally come cheap.’
‘No,’ he said and he waved me away. ‘Come on. It was nothing. Took less than two minutes.’
He leaned back on the bed, resting on his elbows, and he looked up at the ceiling fan, watching the blades make their whirling cuts through the air. There was a little bit of a breeze coming down now and I could see his hair rustling where it stuck out from beneath his cap.
‘Whenever you need the hot back, just give me a shout, and I’ll crank her back open.’
He jutted his chin to the inside wall that separated our rooms and he laughed.
‘If we could open that door there, I wouldn’t even need to go outside. Could slip in here and get it done while you were sleeping.’
I hadn’t noticed it before – probably because I had not been looking for it – but it was there, painted the same colour as the wall to make it blend in. I doubted it had been touched in years. Families were smaller now and people did not travel in large groups any more. Maybe for baseball tournaments, I thought. A baseball team might need to open that door.
‘Just give me the signal and I’ll leap into action,’ he said. ‘On call twenty-four-seven for all your emergency needs.’
This was the evening of May 31st. If what they say in the papers and on the news shows is true – and there is nothing, nothing anywhere, to suggest the reports aren’t completely accurate – then he killed the second person, the woman, that night. Probably just a few hours after his time with us and maybe ten inches away. He went from our taps and our Mr Freezes, our bed and our fan, and he walked out of our room and on to his next task. The young man had been days earlier, before we arrived, but there is a chance – more than a chance – that the woman was already there with us, waiting on the other side while he sipped from a cold tube of sugar water wilting in his hands.
Of course, none of this was known and none of it mattered to us at the time. We had other things, our own things, to worry about, more lists to go through. It took more than a year, almost two, before we started to understand what had happened.
*
The first time we saw this house, we recognised it. It felt like the place was sending out a signal that only we could pick up. Maddy wrote an email at 1.27 am and we called first thing the next day to set up the viewing and the inspection. The realtor picked us up at the airport in a silver SUV and it took her maybe thirty seconds to figure us out. She took one look at our shoes and our sunglasses and our haircuts.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This should work out well. This is exactly the kind of place that people like you like.’
Hig
h ceilings, chunky mouldings, heavy iron grates and radiators, plaster and lath, all of it left alone and original. An old fireplace, untouched for a hundred years but still working, grandfathered in before the rules and the building code changed. We liked that there were no renovations and nobody had messed with anything or tried to put in a propane insert.
‘These old character places are great,’ the realtor said, ‘as long as you’re okay with the problems.’
The inspector showed us cracks in the foundation and pointed out actual sea shells that were decomposing in the sandy cement of the basement walls. The roof was definitely going to need money some time in the next five years, and the chimney was going to be trouble of course, but we blurred through all that and worked it out. We had the higher numbers from Toronto and Vancouver and Ottawa popping in our heads and we allowed ourselves to use the word ‘bargain’ before we sank ourselves in completely.
‘I’m going to put my chair right here,’ Maddy said, and she pointed to the tight corner, the nook she still loves. ‘And my lamp will fit there and this will be my spot to read. Close enough to the fire, but not too close. I can rest a cup of tea on this ledge.’
I put my palm flat against the old wall like I could send and receive messages that way.
‘Does this mean it’s done?’ I asked. ‘We’re done?’
Maddy looked at me and her eyes were wide and she was smiling hard.
‘Yes,’ she said and she gave three quick crisp claps. ‘Yes, for sure, for sure. This is exactly who I want us to be.’
The job and the new city and one little girl and a lost baby, but another on the way. Now the house. Forces were working on us and there were chain reactions that couldn’t be controlled. Our bodies were a mess of tissue and bone and nerve endings, primal synapses and firing receptors. Sporadic electrical currents surged in our brains and all the signals were confusing. They say there is a name for this experience, a raw nesting instinct that hits during pregnancy and drives us forward to prepare for a new life. Maybe that explains it or at least provides a little cover. Maybe we were in a phase, a period of extreme change like puberty or menopause, and maybe hormones and chemistry did have something to do with it, but I’m not sure. I don’t think it was limited to the female body because I felt it just as hard as Maddy and I was caught up in the same way. I wanted this house, this particular house, and I wanted to put it in order. Long before we actually owned the place, when it was still the property of other people, I used to dream of what I would do to it. Rip out the hedge in the front and tear off the rotting back deck. Then gut both the bathrooms and take them all the way back to the studs before repainting every single surface on the inside.
*
In those first days, the murderer was the only person we knew in the whole city, our only connection. When we saw his face on the news, almost two years later, it felt, at first, like he was one of our old friends, someone we’d lost touch with.
‘Is that Mark?’ I asked Maddy, and I pointed at the TV. The famous mug shot was there filling the screen, the one where his lips are slightly parted and his eyebrows are pushed down low and there’s a little V in his forehead that gives him the look of a person who is thinking very hard about something.
‘The plumber from the motel, you remember? The guy who fixed the taps. Is that our Mark?’
It turned out that Mark actually was his real name and that he was a kind of missing piece, the essential link no one had noticed before. Like a constellation or one of those tricky 3-D optical illusions that slowly emerge from the background only after you learn how to look, Mark was a pattern, a set of connections that had always been there but could only be seen once they were pointed out. The distances he had travelled seemed too far and there was no consistency in the people or the places or the timing or the way things unfolded.
In split-screen TV interviews, expert criminologists tried to hide their admiration as they marvelled at the perfected randomness of his actions. They called his behaviour ‘highly irregular’ but I am not sure about that either. I think there was a system, a special way of looking that let him see something in his people, a common aloneness, or a sort of halo that glowed around them and guided him or pulled him forward to seek out others who moved through the world like he did. People connected by separation, people who did not have other people looking for them or asking questions about where they had gone. Every one of his files was considered cold before he reactivated them. A woman from northern New Brunswick, five years earlier, then later, a young man from around Kenora, Ontario. A slightly older lady from a completely francophone community in the Gaspésie.
The girl from Esquimalt, BC, practically downtown Victoria, was the first. I think of her often, stepping out of that place with all the gardens and the flowers and the trees that seem like they could hide dinosaurs. Nine victims in total, three on top of three on top of three. Everybody knows the grid of their stacked photographs. It was on all the front pages.
They stopped him in Saskatchewan. A female hitchhiker felt a current coming off of him and declined the ride, then wrote down his licence plate and called it in with a description of the truck and driver. The plate was stolen and the police immediately pinged the GPS in her cellphone – the chip inside a cellphone is what ended it all. They pulled him over, fifty clicks down the road, half an hour later. When he stepped out of the truck, he calmly told them everything: names and dates, specific sites where the remains would be found. He pulled the little lever and leaned the seat of the cab forward. He had an array of different licence plates and a set of different magnets for the truck all with the same slogan, the same bucket, the same drops, but different area codes. He could pass for local almost anywhere.
He told them about a motel in Nova Scotia where they still rented rooms by the week or the month. He’d been there almost two years ago at the end of May. There had been a man in his late twenties and then a woman in her early forties, eight days apart. They were the fourth and fifth. He was precise about his practice and spoke calmly about ether and duct tape and bungee cords and plastic. He told them what he knew about chemical solvents, and drain cleaners, and active bacteria. They passed a purple light over his tools and it all showed through. The police cars and the rolling lab pulled into the parking lot hours later. A team of expert dogs trained for exactly this task went into the woods outside of town and came back in twenty minutes. It was easy for them to follow the smell when they were pointed in the right direction. In the past, they’d found mass graves that were more than sixty years old. No amount of scrubbing or time could hide these facts from them. The satellite truck and the cameras appeared the next morning.
*
Right after this, just when the news broke and the crews were on the scene and the details were still unclear, a woman I barely recognised – somebody from way up the street – knocked on our door. It was in the evening and Jack and Lila were almost ready for bed. The woman had a tea light burning in a small mason jar and she held her hand over the top, gently, like the flickering glass held a butterfly she’d just caught and did not want to lose.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘My name is Candace,’ she announced, very formally, like a grade-school kid. ‘The people from the community are organising a little memorial and we thought you might want to know that, this evening, there will be a small candlelight vigil for that poor couple from the motel.’
It was clear she’d said these lines many times before, on all the other porches before this one.
‘Nothing too fancy, just some candles and flowers, I think. Some people are going to sing or play music, but you are welcome to just stand silently. We are going to start in about half an hour.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before and I don’t think the opportunity will come again. The invitation was made and there must have been a chance, a second when I could have accepted, when I could have been taken in and carried along, but I did n
ot go for it. A clinical part of my mind, something colder than it should be, kicked in and I spoke when it would have been better to stay quiet.
‘Oh, I didn’t think they were a couple,’ I told her. I can imagine my blank face staring into hers. ‘My wife and I, we heard, we thought it was two separate things, two separate incidents. We heard that the people didn’t know each other at all, maybe didn’t even see each other. We didn’t think there was any connection.’
An expression of deep confusion rose up in Candace’s eyes and flexed across her forehead, then switched to anger, almost disgust.
She said the word: ‘Incident?’ And then she snapped. ‘Well they are a couple to me. And lots of people around here like to think of them like that, together and not alone.’
She turned and stamped away from me. The candle almost went out.
*
This is the rest of it. This is what really happened, just to us, on May 31st, the night before our closing, the night before we moved into our home, the night he killed the woman and made her disappear.
On our side of the wall in the Bide-a-While motel, we had bought a big cheap bottle of sparkling wine – 1.5 litres of not champagne – and we put it in a waste-paper basket and poured half a bag of ice over it and let it stand for an hour. Then we packed up the rest of our loose stuff and we loaded the car. By eight o’clock we were set and everybody was in their sleeping gear and it was my turn to take the freezing shower. When the water first hit my chest, I gasped hard and I felt all the air leaving my lungs, but then I gradually got used to it and I relaxed a little and I was able to at least rub the small soap over my body and rinse. It took maybe five minutes and then I dried off and pulled on the last of my fresh underwear and my final clean T-shirt. I tussled my hair a bit and walked into the bedroom.