Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 02 - The Geranium Girls

by Alison Preston

  He was accusing her and she knew she deserved it. That was what she’d meant, but she’d thought she could bury it inside the word invisible.

  “Yeah, I guess that is what I mean.”

  “Say what you mean, Beryl.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What else?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The other huge differences between us, besides your disrespect for my ideas about connections. What are they?”

  “Uh-oh, I should never have started on this. It can’t lead to anything good,” Beryl said. “And disrespect isn’t right. I don’t disrespect anything about you.”

  “What else?” Dhani asked.

  “Well…” Beryl crossed her arms in front of her chest. She had thrown on a tee shirt. “I think you rifling through my kitchen drawers is kind of a big thing.”

  “I agree that I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’m ashamed of having done that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really. You say ‘really’ a lot. Do you know that about you?”

  “Dhani, if you realized you were wrong in looking through my drawers, why didn’t you apologize?”

  He picked up his coffee and took a sip.

  “Shame…pride…embarrassment…wanting to forget I ever did it. I don’t know. I’m sorry for having done that, Beryl, and I’m sorry I didn’t apologize right at the start.”

  “I totally forgive you,” Beryl said, and kissed Dhani’s brown shoulder. She loved the way her white skin looked against his darkness. For years she had tried to tan in the summer, but she burned so easily it wasn’t worth it.

  Dusty and Jude had moved halfway up the bed now and were nestled in between Beryl and Dhani’s legs. They still stared at Dhani but both cats were getting heavy-lidded and it wouldn’t be long till their heads started to nod and they dropped off to sleep.

  “This discussion is a pretty good idea, I think,” Beryl said.

  “Those are minuscule differences,” Dhani said. “Both of them.”

  Beryl turned to look at him. He meant it.

  “Do you really think so?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, give me an example of what you think a big one would be,” she said.

  “I don’t think we have any what you would label really big differences.”

  “Really?”

  “You make coffee too strong and you say ‘really’ too much.”

  “What word would you have me use instead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let me know if you think of it. I think that you make coffee too weak.”

  “You know what?” Dhani placed his drained cup back on the table and took hold of one of Beryl’s hands.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I can think of a difference between us that would be bigger than what we could handle,” he said. “Go ahead, say it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll think about it some more, but unless I find out you have bodies in the basement or something, or you find out I’m an impostor or something, which I’m not, by the way, I can’t imagine…”

  “If I hadn’t seen you before, I may well have thought you were an impostor the first day I met you, when you put my foot in your mouth. A layman impersonating a pharmacist.”

  Dhani laughed. “You had seen me before?”

  “Yup. I had seen you behind your counter. I hoped that you’d be the one to help me on the day I got stung.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. Really.”

  Beryl wasn’t entirely sure she agreed with Dhani about being able to handle their differences but she was very glad that he thought he could. He even thought that she could. She wondered if he would feel the same way if he knew the secret she was hiding from him: that both the murdered women, Beatrice Fontaine and Diane Caldwell, were customers of her good friend, Hermione — that she, and therefore he, had that added connection to the victims.

  “I love that you think we could handle all our differences,” she said out loud.

  She almost said, I love you. That was what she wanted to say. But she was glad she didn’t.

  Chapter 31

  After Dhani left, Beryl made a fresh pot of strong coffee and took the little newspaper Clive had given her out to the deck. What had happened in Pilot Mound, Manitoba in the summer of 1981? Behind the bold type, Pilot Mound Sentinel, was a drawing of a low mound of earth with a cheerful sun rising up behind it. A happy little town?

  She perused the news items on the front page: an introduction to the four new members of the “Division Board”; invitations to sign up for bridge and cribbage tournaments and curling leagues; news from villages in the area, she supposed, with names like Wood Bay and Marringhurst; an announcement about the number of babies born in the whole of Manitoba the previous year, and the number of weddings, and then comparisons to previous years.

  Beryl wanted to hop in a time machine and travel back to 1981, to the sunny little town of Pilot Mound, where she could take up with one of the Board Members, the one named Earl Addison, marry him and bear his children. She could join the United Church Women, perhaps be a Unit Leader and organize tea towel showers for the old age home and rummage sales in the church basement. She could bake buns and have a dog that ran free.

  Not that the world was innocent in the summer of 1981. Richard Speck and Charlie Manson were old news. Even Canada’s own Clifford Olson had done most of his bloody work by then. But still, maybe in a small prairie town, maybe in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, a person could have found a terror free life.

  Dark Night of the Scarecrow starring Charles Durning and Tonya Crowe had been playing at the Tivoli Theatre.

  The drugstore advertised perfumed talc “fresh from England” for only one dollar and thirty-nine cents.

  There were two obituaries — also on the front page. One for a man named Wilfred Simpson Harvey, who had lived his entire life in Pilot Mound. Practically a whole column rambled on about his war record and his willingness to lend a hand. His relatives were listed: siblings, wife, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Even one or two life-long friends. A well-loved man.

  And then there was Hortense Frouten. Hortense Frouten died, it read, and not much else: her dates, the fact that she spent her latter years in Winnipeg, and that was about it. A feeble effort by the writer to plump it out a little. It must have been done by either someone who didn’t know her at all or who didn’t like her one bit.

  That obituary was the only thing on page one that stood out for Beryl. Not what it said, but what it didn’t. The person who wrote this felt they had it right with just this terse announcement. There was nothing more to say.

  Hortense Frouten was not a loved woman. Not by the person who wrote her obituary, anyway. Beryl wondered if there might be a longer notice in the Winnipeg Free Press and decided to try to find out. Maybe this was just the condensed version for her hometown paper. After all, she had lived the final years of her life in Winnipeg.

  Beryl perused the rest of the newspaper: the Horticultural Report, Rebekah notes, CGIT notes, a column called Along the Farm Front. There was a classified ad for a well boring service, one for the sale of a cow (a heavy milker), and one with an offer of one hundred pounds of netted gem potatoes for $5.89.

  Nothing jumped out at her the way the death of Hortense Frouten did. That was it. The stark obituary was definitely it.

  But definitely what? She didn’t have a clue. Her gut told her it was something, though. I’ll let it sit, she thought, as she drank the last of her coffee. Something will come clear.

  Chapter 32

  On Sunday evening Beryl went for a long walk, all the way over to Old St. Boniface. On her way up Provencher Boulevard she saw Wally entering a fried chicken joint. She considered catching up with him and then thought better of it. So what if he was related to Stan and Raylene? She
didn’t like him and was pretty sure she never would. And anyway, she was trying to air out her head, get her thoughts in order, decide what to do next, if anything.

  She walked all the way to Whittier Park, the site of Diane Caldwell’s murder. Strangled with a scarf, so Frank told Hermione. Both of the women. The killer had left the scarf behind on Diane, still tied around her throat. He had left nothing with Beatrice, but Frank said it had been done the same way with the same type of scarf. An old-lady scarf he called it. So Hermione said. They could tell by the fibres left in her neck. Not on her neck. In it.

  Beryl shivered. What a horrible way to die. She wondered about the hooker from awhile back, whose murder was still unsolved, wondered if she, too, had been strangled with an old-lady scarf.

  Some men were playing baseball in the park. Older guys, some with stomachs sticking out over their waist bands. They wore uniforms — very official looking. She recognized two of the men on the home team: Mort Kruck-Boulbria and Frank Foote. She watched for a little while. Frank saw her and waved. Mort didn’t appear to notice her.

  As she walked back down Provencher she saw an ambulance outside the restaurant Wally had entered about an hour before. She’d heard the siren while she was watching the ball game. At least she assumed that was the siren she’d heard; lately there seemed to be sirens everywhere. The ambulance attendants weren’t hurrying. It must have been a false alarm, or maybe they were too late. They slammed the doors shut and drove off slowly, this time without the siren.

  Beryl walked by Cuts Only. Hermione must have gone to bed. The only lights were the tiny white ones lighting up the side stairs. It still looked nice, but kind of empty with no geraniums hanging there.

  The big clay pots were still out front. And the overflowing window boxes. It was quite dark, after ten by now, but Beryl was sure there was something not right about the plants. They had a wilted look to them. She felt the earth and it was fine; there was no way these plants were neglected. Maybe she was just imagining it. The flowers were still pretty, the leaves still a deep green, but no, they weren’t well. She knew it.

  Well, if Herm was sleeping, Beryl certainly wasn’t going to wake her up with more bad news. She considered standing sentry outside her friend’s shop, or sitting sentry, at least till the sky began to lighten in the east.

  But she had to be at work by six in the morning, just eight hours from now. And tomorrow was Monday, the worst. Her shoulders ached just thinking about it. She tried to cheer herself up with thoughts of her new double bag; it didn’t work.

  Chapter 33

  He won’t kiss her. He comes so close; his lips almost touch her. And then he pulls away.

  “Do you want me to?” he asks, dropping his cigarette butt into the empty wine bottle.

  “Yes, please.”

  He pushes her back onto the bed and works at her robe till she lies naked beneath him. His big hands move over her without touching.

  “Please,” she says again.

  He sinks his teeth into the soft skin of her throat.

  She understands the danger, but at least he’s deigned to touch her.

  Her hand finds his and he pulls away as if touched by a hot iron. Her blood is all he wants.

  She woke up. Jesus. She closed her eyes and tried to picture that same guy, whoever he was, kissing her this time, touching her face. But she couldn’t manage it. Who was he? Who are these people in my dreams that I don’t recognize? she wondered.

  Beryl groaned and tumbled off the couch. She had spent the night in the living room, after walking home from Hermione’s place.

  Maybe Herm’s geraniums were fine. Maybe she just imagined what she saw, put her own wilted thoughts onto the plants.

  She threw on her uniform and left the house walking, as usual, before the sun was up. That was the thing she hated the most about her job — getting up so painfully early, too early even for the bus. Even in summer the sun wasn’t up first for more than a few weeks. It couldn’t be healthy.

  Not that she’d have known if the sun was up on this day. It was solid grey without a dint in the clouds to remind you that things could be different.

  She stopped for coffee at Robin’s Donuts, where the only other customer was a dishevelled-looking man in blue clothes. A blue-collar worker stopping in on his way to the job. Just like her. Or maybe he was still on his way home from yesterday. Beryl felt afraid when she saw him out of the corner of her eye and sat as far away as possible at the other end of the shop.

  The chair was cold and sticky against her thighs where her shorts ended. The morning was muggy but the coffee shop was icy cold. She faced the window and gazed out at the garbage and the empty sidewalk. The sky was pink in the east; the clouds had loosened up a little.

  When the blue-clad man stood up to leave, Beryl turned and saw with a shock that it was Ed, her supervisor. He nodded at her as he walked by, but she couldn’t manage a response till after he had passed.

  “Good morning,” she whispered, too late. He was gone.

  How could I have not known that it was him? Beryl wondered, as she dug in her new bag for her glasses. This isn’t good at all. I should have sat with him even if neither of us wanted me to.

  She found her glasses in one of the compartments in her bag. She was still getting used to it with all its Velcro and buckles. It was too shallow; things fell out all the time. She’d lost her newspaper twice so far and once she hadn’t found it again. It was just a matter of time before she lost someone’s mail and then she would be in trouble.

  Ed had asked Beryl to make a short report on her new bag: its pros and cons, her general thoughts on it. She happily did so, mostly singing its praises, but mentioning the shallowness of its pouches as a definite drawback.

  She sighed and got up to leave, wondering how she could have been so blind. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen him. She had seen him, and thought he was a sinister labourer on his way to another place, or on his way home from another day.

  She didn’t like the sense she’d had of him when she first walked into the coffee shop.

  “It probably had more to do with me than him,” she said out loud as she cut through an empty parking lot and continued on to the post office. So much spooky stuff has been going on lately.

  She decided to try to remember to put her glasses on in the morning before there was any chance of running into anyone. Wearing glasses was still quite new for her and she didn’t like it, didn’t like the feel of the hardware on her face.

  Maybe I’ll treat myself this morning, she thought, stop at the cafeteria and grab myself a cinnamon bun. That was one thing that could be said for the post office: its cafeteria staff baked darn good sweet treats.

  Chapter 34

  Boyo fancies himself an exceptional follower of people; they never seem to notice him. Sometimes he feels invisible. Maybe I’ll go to private detective school, he thinks, and hang out a shingle.

  Following people gives him something to do that he really likes, a purpose. Imagine earning a living doing something so agreeable! It takes careful planning and he’s so good at that sort of thing. Boyo flushes with pleasure.

  He follows Beryl Kyte all the time — ever since she found the woman in St. Vital Park — and she doesn’t have a clue. He’s taken an interest in her, but wonders if she’s simple. Like the cops. More likely, she’s just oblivious to what’s going on around her, like so many other people. Thinking girly thoughts, no doubt, about her hair and skin and weight.

  Her skin and hair are distasteful: too white, too pale. She reminds him of something clammy that he can’t quite grasp, doesn’t want to grasp. She interests him, but he wouldn’t want to touch her.

  It’s like with the hookers.

  He used them to satisfy his needs. Sometimes he even fucked them. But he didn’t touch them with his fingers if he could manage it.

  He hasn’t been to the Low Track for eighteen months. Nor has he used an escort service. For a long time he did one or the other at l
east six times a year.

  Then three years ago he had a close call. They were in the back of his truck in a vacant lot off Higgins. The whore was new to him. She took the scarves in stride and said, “Whatever. I’m used to freaks.”

  He didn’t liked that. He sat on her chest and felt her struggle, watched the terror in her eyes while he tightened the scarf around her neck.

  “I should slice your head right off,” he whispered between his clenched teeth.

  When her eyelids closed he panicked. He scrambled into the front seat of the truck and tore through the streets to the emergency room at the Health Sciences Centre. He carried her inside the main doors and dumped her. It was a Saturday night and the place was a madhouse; no one in authority even saw him. He took off home and locked his truck in the garage where he left it for a very long time. It wasn’t something he used often anyway.

  The whore didn’t die. At least, he supposed she didn’t. It wasn’t in the paper. And no one ever came looking for him. That was another good thing about whores. They were a tight-lipped bunch.

  But it scared him enough that he didn’t go back till eighteen months ago. When it all fell to pieces. Charise and her shaved cunt. Why’d she have to do it?

  When Boyo sees Mail Girl Kyte pass through the employee entrance to the post office he eases himself off the little wall next to the library. Enough sitting around; he has places to be.

  Chapter 35

  Beryl approached Ed’s desk after stopping by the cafeteria for a bun. He was just sliding into his chair.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly.

  “Hey, Beryl,” Ed said, glancing up from the mess of paper on his desk. He looked, not at her, but at the gooey bun clutched in her fist.