Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  This sounds even stupider: it was hard to believe how terrible I felt about the fact I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. That I didn’t ever know that the last night I’d watched her really was the last night.

  Twenty-twenty hindsight is everything, but when I went back up Signal Hill after finding that note and saw the new curtains and the way her bedroom looked like it had sunk into a kind of shapeless fog, I wished I’d had one last look at the familiar slope of her naked shoulders — just so that I could have carefully saved that image, locked the necessity of it into my head.

  I wish I’d had that instead of trying hopelessly to imagine it weeks later while I was standing under the searing heat of the shower, the water on full, the tap on hot as much as I could stand, a hard-on out in front of me in the sluicing water, and me trying anything, anything at all to gather up a clear, sharp memory of her face, of her arms lifted above her head, elbows out, turning away from me and toward her bedroom door.

  I couldn’t make it slide back into my head.

  I remember almost every part of her house perfectly. I remember every time I glanced through her front windows: the plants, the white mantel, the sharp order of it. The mirror I used to picture her in. Except now, I could only picture it empty.

  She flits away, indistinct, like someone I was introduced to once at a party and then never got to see again. Losing the thing that was at the centre of your attention, in the middle of your vision, seems particularly unfair. Like that eye disease — macular degeneration. The things that you’re looking straight at vanish into a morass of grey, because of something to do with your rods and cones or something. At the edges of your vision, you still can see things — can even make your way around, accommodate that overworked, dead spot that’s there in the middle. And what a joke that is: in order to look at something, you have to also look away.

  It’s a lifetime of rules changing.

  To be honest, I know things in the world are always going to change, and there’s nothing you can do about that. There are other places, with other curtains. And in those places, other issues to occupy myself with.

  Like a place on the Little Barachois with its own sets of curtains, as ratty as they were.

  There had been, I don’t know, four or five women who had gone missing in the province over the years. I knew about them, knew about them in the kind of way you’d know if you followed the newspapers sporadically, but no one would imagine that any of them had found their way into a cabin on the Little Barachois.

  It could have been someone who had found the place and passed away in their sleep or something — someone no one would miss, and that no one really needed to be told about.

  But I still didn’t want to go to the police — I wasn’t sure what I would say to them, or even if I wanted them to know that I’d found her. Because people who are different at all, who respond to things differently, they get misunderstood. You keep to yourself and the police kind of target you, just because you’re not like everyone else — that’s happened before in this country, to people who might seem a lot less peculiar than me.

  You hear about that all the time, how the police find the best suspect they can right away, and then pick the evidence that makes them suspect, and just wash the rest away. They don’t even really do it deliberately: they are just looking for the best and quickest solution they can find.

  I could honestly say I wouldn’t want to find myself standing there.

  But there was more to it than that.

  To me, a big part was that I didn’t feel they belonged in that cabin, as if they’d descend with all their equipment and cameras, wearing the white spacesuits you see the forensic guys wearing on television, and everything I knew would change immediately. As if the order that had been there so long would simply crumble.

  You always, always make exceptions for yourself when you’re judging what’s right or wrong. You fudge the lines because you believe you’re different, when really, you’re not.

  Chapter 37

  June 5 — “I wish you weren’t going. Mexico is too dangerous” is what my mother said. “I’d feel better about it if Daniel was going with you again” is what my dad came up with, even though I’d already told them that Daniel and I were done. And I told them that Mexico wasn’t going to be any more dangerous than anywhere else — I didn’t say that at least in Mexico I wouldn’t feel like there’s always someone following me around, that Mexico might well be safer than here. I’ve already found a job with a private school looking for someone to teach English, and they even have a place lined up for me to live. I didn’t tell them about how someone had been in my house, about the police not finding anything, about all of that — because that was a big part of the decision, too. Being away was such a relief — not being dogged by someone I could never really see clearly, but someone I’m sure is there, and that I know is watching.

  Chapter 38

  Garbage bags

  Paper towels

  Barbecue starter

  They burn illegal cabins.

  Burning cabins doesn’t sound anything like conservation, but that’s what they call it.

  That’s what the wildlife department calls it, anyway.

  A lot of the province is Crown land, and you need permits for wilderness cabins. You need to be registered for land title and you need to build a proper septic field and a real road and if the property’s on a lease, you’ve got to make annual lease payments, too. It’s a lot of rules and a fair bit of money, just for the privilege of staying on the right side of the law.

  But because the province is so goddamned huge and empty, there’s a lot of ground out there that no one’s really keeping much of an eye on, and there are a lot of places where someone can haul in materials and put a cabin, so, if you do it right, you can go unnoticed for a heck of a long time.

  Doing it that way, you don’t need lease fees or septic plans — just a bit of hard work and a lot of nerve. And unlike the legal cabins, the illegals aren’t on a square of land with all the trees cut down and grass planted — the illegals are built in tight under the tree cover, with as much of the bottom branches of a big tree out over the roof as you can manage, just so that the square of its shape doesn’t jump out at you like you’re looking down from the sky at a big floor tile tossed onto the beach and left there.

  The illegal cabins lurk invisible in the landscape.

  One of my uncles, Pete, had a place like that, out on the very edge of the Salmonier wilderness area. Not much more than four walls, a roof, one window, and a door — but big enough for three of those old cot beds and a stove and stovepipe. A way station when you were going in deep fishing, just one kerosene lamp for light. My uncle spent years — years — making every bit of his place just right. Hauling in one of those old cast-iron stoves with the grates showing like teeth against the flames on the front, bringing in windows, digging a well and pouring concrete footings, and then, for no reason at all, a random helicopter drifts overhead, someone on their foolish way to somewhere else, and all at once it changes.

  He’d brought in sand — bags and bags of washed-white sandbox sand — to make a little arc of beach out there on the side of a pond next to his cabin, walking back and forth over and over again, up to his knees in the cold water with each plastic sandbag on his shoulders, letting the sand trickle out of the bags and sink down to the peaty gravel on the bottom. And the very next summer, maybe it was exactly that little fingernail of white along the side of the pond that caught the wildlife department’s attention and the whole darned thing was gone.

  My uncle and my father and one of my brothers, we hiked in one summer, knapsacks heavy. We were just waiting to put them down, and when we got there, we found nothing but char.

  My uncle sat right down on the ground. I think he was crying. We didn’t even have a tent, so it was a long hike back out again.

  He never for
got.

  I imagine the helicopters going overhead like something out of a Vietnam movie, everybody on the ground inside their places hunkered down and holding absolutely still until the whump-whump of the blades fades away over the nearest hill. And those cabins, the well-hidden ones, can be there for years, passed down from parents to children, and they can be in such regular use that there are ATV trails ground into the barrens right up to the front doors.

  But you’ve got to be careful about that, too.

  Sometimes, the wildlife guys find illegal cabins from something as simple as being on a helicopter trip, angling overhead on the way to a caribou count, a simple straight line from there to somewhere else when they happen to beeline straight over you and notice something that shouldn’t be there.

  When that happens, they usually land nearby, the officers zipping up their brown nylon wildlife-and-conservation jackets to the top before formally filling out and posting a notice on your front door that you’ve got exactly sixty days to clear your stuff out. They take another copy with them, and the countdown starts.

  Doesn’t matter that it might be weeks before you turn up there again and actually find the notice.

  Sixty days from when they tack it on the door — that’s what you get.

  Your personal stuff — tables and chairs, maybe dishes. Clothes and fishing rods and pots and pans. Windows, if you want to keep ’em. Even though you may have been humping bits and pieces in there for the last twenty years by snowmobile or all-terrain vehicle, even though you hammered every single nail into place.

  You move it all out, cutlery and gas cans, outboard motor and even the pillows, or up it all goes. Fast.

  And it can break your heart.

  All at once, there’s nothing left.

  That’s the way it was on the Little Barachois.

  A fire is pretty complete, especially when it’s done and cold and there’s nothing left but wet ashes and cold metal.

  After the fires?

  When a wilderness cabin burns, there’s a postage stamp of charcoal that never, ever seems to change, year after year after year, not even when the fireweed and raspberries cluster in close by the sides, running riot, lipping in over and at least softening the edges. Burnt cabins aren’t rebuilt — they’re just left, and what they become is absolutely permanent messages, an absence.

  My river cabin was no different.

  I was free.

  There was nothing left of her beyond my memory — and absolutely nothing left that I would have to explain to anyone, even if there had been cops sitting in a black Dodge Charger tucked back into the trees not too many days before.

  It was a long walk back up to the car, my legs making heavy, dragging strides the way they do when your muscles know it’s the last time you’ll ever go that way, when they’re setting into their own particular groove of a time that’s now clearly past.

  The car was where the car always sat, tucked into a slightly wider part of the shoulder where a highway sign gave the river’s name, as familiar to me as if it had been a numbered parking spot.

  Just the way I had left it.

  If I held my eyes just right, it was like I could just choose to believe that nothing had changed at all. Like the car, my clapped-out white Toyota with the rust climbing in from all the edges at once, four worn tires and the windows rolled up tight. Like the sky, still holding blue with just a few tendrils of high, fingering cloud stretching in from the west. Like lungs and legs and heart, still breathing, walking, beating.

  Every plant and tree and river rock still in exactly the same place, nothing moved or altered or in any way different.

  By the next morning, when the rain had come in heavy overnight from the west (and it would have rained even more down on the southern end of the peninsula, down there where the land sticks out into the water like a crippled fist, all knots and angles), every trace of me would be washed away. From the river, from the roadside.

  It was all gone. Like it had never really been there, even though there must have been some way to prove it had. Forensics, or something like that. Men sifting away at shovelfuls of ground until they found something they could hold up and shout, “bone fragment,” the words somehow muffled and indistinct through their masks.

  There’s a spot in the bog just before that river where someone shot a moose, or else clipped it with their car or something, and the animal just staggered in, toppled over, and was left. Maybe someone took the quarters, I don’t know. Maybe poachers panicked, seeing headlights. I first saw the carcass a year in, and the brown camouflage of the hide had slipped away off the rib cage, leaving a row of bright ribs against the surface of the bog, a perfect little cathedral of bone.

  It stood that way for another year, an even row of white bones sharp against the ground, but by the next year it was gone, and at the end of the summer, I crossed over the bog where I remembered it being and found an unexpected mound of sedge grass, right there in the middle of the bog where, by rights, that kind of grass shouldn’t have been. When I kicked away down into the roots, the moose’s spine was right there, the zippered column of bone yellowing away in the peaty brown water of the bog.

  It’s not a matter of whether there are traces left — it’s really more a matter of getting enough information to know just exactly where to look.

  Or maybe something even more complex: how to find the right way to arrange the information that you already have.

  And how to know that, once it is properly arranged, it’s as fixed as time itself.

  Chapter 39

  June 30 — The police told me they have wrapped up their “investigation.” Said there was no evidence of anything. No evidence of anyone ever having been in my house, no evidence that anyone has been following me. Nothing. I think they have me down as some kind of chronic complainer now. As if I’ve got nothing better to do but to call them and have them come over — like I’m looking for attention or something. I know they went to talk to Daniel about whether he had another key — I also know that the officer handling the complaint, Constable Peddle, was different after he came back from talking to Daniel. Different, like distant. Standoffish. Makes me wonder what Daniel said to him, but there’s no way I’m going to try to find out. I don’t imagine he would tell me anything anyway. You know how it is when every single thing you do just seems to solidify someone’s opinion about you, even when they’re wrong? That’s where I am now. I mean, I know what Daniel thought when I first wondered if I was being followed. Well, that’s the feeling that Constable Rick Peddle is giving off now. Early on, he gave me his card, wrote a cell number on the back, and told me I could call any time I needed anything, told me I could just call him Rick. I bet he’s regretting that now, regretting giving another crazy, panicky twenty-five-year-old the least little bit of extra conviction. Bet he’s already trying to figure out how to respond if I do call some night — and wondering if there’s a chance that when I convince him to come over because of the mystery man, he’ll show up and I’ll be standing there at my front door in a bathrobe with nothing on underneath, all part of my evil-lonely-needy-girl plan all along. But I know I’m right about this: someone is watching me and someone has been in my house. It makes me furious that the cops are brushing me off. I mean, this is why people buy guns, right?

  Chapter 40

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is seeking the assistance of the general public with an investigation into a fire in the general area of Route 100 between the communities of North Harbour and Branch in the days surrounding July 15. The RNC is seeking information from anyone who may have observed the make and model of vehicles left on the roadside, particularly in the area of the bridge at Little Barachois River during that time.

  If anyone has any information pertaining to this investigation, they are asked to contact the RNC at 729-8000 or anonymously at Crime Stoppers at 1-800-22
2-TIPS (8477).

  Dean couldn’t help but notice how much bigger the windows were on the fourth floor, where the chief’s office was — heck, Dean couldn’t help but notice that there were windows.

  The chief was sitting behind his desk, chair pushed all the way back, and he wasn’t talking. Dean looked out the window, watching the seagulls coiling against the sky. Scoville was next to him, motionless in his chair.

  Dean knew that if the chief had anything nice to say, he’d start by offering them coffee from the machine at the back of the room. Chief Adams loved that coffee machine, loved being able to make different kinds of coffee by the cup. He seemed delighted every time by the gurgle and hiss, by the immediate appearance of the hot liquid. Other officers joked he knew more about the coffee machine than he did about most of the cases in active investigation.

  He wasn’t offering, though, and Dean knew that meant it was not a pleasure call. Chief Adams didn’t know it, but the trick of withholding coffee was recognized all over the building. “If he’s not handing out hot coffee, then he’s handing out hot water.” Dean had heard that too many times to count, especially from the lifers in patrol, the old-school guys who still hadn’t figured out the world could change whether they wanted it to or not, guys who had been hauled up to try to explain the latest George Street nose they had flattened to make a particular point.

  The chief was looking out the window as well. Dean had known the chief when Adams had been an inspector, a hard-headed cop from off the beat who would never have dreamed of being chief — a solid third choice who had wound up with the job in his lap when two more-senior police officers had flamed out spectacularly after a spate of wrongful convictions, all thanks to a Criminal Investigation Division given too much opportunity to make their own decisions on charges.