by David Hood
Baxter finished throwing off the blanket. He reached for his hat and shifted himself to the centre of the bench seat. The cab lurched on its springs. The horse came to life with a backward glance. Baxter snapped the reins and clicked his tongue. The cab rolled forward toward the circle of light from the streetlamp on the corner. In mid-turn the cab’s interior went bright. When Baxter was sure he had been recognized, he nodded to Wallace then showed him the back of the cab as he rode away.
Late as it was, supper waited. The table was pulled closer, the fire stoked. From the end chair back to the stove, there was the nourishment of heat and food. Baxter took both slowly. “What time do you think we should leave in the morning?” Jane had always wound the household clock. She knew pace and timing far better than her husband. There had to be some other reason for the caution in her voice.
She knew full well. He answered anyway, as it seemed to be required. “There will be seats reserved for city officials.”
“We should walk, the carriages will be lined up for a mile.”
“The weather has cleared, pray it stays that way.”
The wait had dried the meat. Jane refilled her water. “I sent Catherine a card. Have you spoken to her again?”
“No.” He imagined Catherine on the sofa fumbling with the letter opener. The floor a litter of torn envelopes and discarded notes, none of them the one she was looking for, the one from her husband telling her not to worry, this was all some outrageous mistake.
Grace had been quiet at the table, which was not like her at all. Nor was she one to pick at her food. She dug trench lines in her mashed potatoes. She spoke now as she laid her fork beside her plate. “Doctor David Drummond is giving a lecture tomorrow morning. It’s open to the public.”
“It may be cancelled.” Jane was looking toward the end of the table, not across it.
Lack of appetite hadn’t taken any strength from Grace’s voice and she looked in both directions as she spoke. “He’s visiting from Newcastle, England. He will be speaking on his work there at the Sick Children’s Hospital. He is an important man, it’s a rare opportunity.”
Her father’s response was equally strong and immediate. “You have a more important obligation.”
“It’s terrible what happened to Mr. Mosher. But he wasn’t a friend of our family.”
“He worked hard for this city. He deserves our respect, your respect.”
Jane could see the flush. It wasn’t heat from the stove. Grace’s eyes gave off sparks as her shoulders raised and her chest filled. Her lips pressed tight then opened. Jane spoke before her daughter could. “The lecture starts at nine. Perhaps you could come to the church afterward.”
They were words of peace, of compromise. Baxter winced as if struck by a poison dart. “You knew about this?”
Grace answered her mother to draw him off. “There will be questions and discussion and I’ll need to complete my notes while it’s all still fresh.”
Baxter stared at his daughter. At first she appeared as a picture of his wife in a larger frame, then small and far away at the wrong end of the looking glass. He could feel the arms of a ten-year-old round his neck. He glanced at the window, through its curtains out into a sunny backyard, and he could feel ten, now turned twenty, on his arm, dressed to give away. “Grace, you need to stop all this. You know it can’t possibly lead anywhere.”
“Why? Because I don’t wear pants?”
“Grace.”
“No, Mother. I want to hear him say it. I want to hear him say I can’t be what I choose, only what he chooses.”
Baxter struggled with the looking glass trying to find the image of the future he had always been able to see so clearly. “I want what is best for you.”
Grace hurled herself at her father like a rock toward a pane of glass. “You want me to walk down the aisle, then fill a house with babies. Stop feeling sorry for me because I was an only child.”
“Stop it, Grace. You’re being mean.”
To her mother she said, “The world is a mean place these days.”
Then she turned to father. “What did you do with it?”
Baxter stared at his plate. He rearranged the napkin in his lap. He picked up his fork, then laid it down. “What is she talking about?”
“Tell her.” There was such certainty in her voice Baxter wondered if his daughter was clairvoyant as well as unmanageable.
Jane watched her husband try to be invisible. Then her shoulders drooped and she shook her head at Grace. “I thought we agreed it was best that come through me.”
Baxter stepped out of his hiding place and looked defiantly and disbelievingly from one to the other. “So it’s a conspiracy.”
Jane was standing now, straight and square, arms pressed at her sides. The first order was given to her husband “Don’t you dare give me that look. She is my daughter too.”
Now Grace got up on the other side of the table, moving as if pulled by wires. As she spoke, her hands and arms flapped and flopped and pointed off in all directions. “He’s just trying to dodge the question. It’s ok, Father, you don’t have to answer. I’m going to that lecture tomorrow and I’m going to medical school, one way or another. I’ll sell myself if I have to.”
“Grace Baxter.” Jane’s second order would have sent Grace to her room. It wasn’t necessary. The wires had already launched her daughter into a wild waving stomp down the hall and up the stairs.
Baxter watched his daughter disappear. “This is your fault.”
The words demeaned them both. Neither could look at the other. A door slammed overhead. The wood Jane had brought in before supper had been wet from rain. The fire hissed and popped. The meal went on drying up and going to waste. Finally Jane broke the spell. “I admire her gumption…Guilty as charged…Shall I put up my hands, Chief Inspector?” She let the silence back in for a moment, daring him to answer. Her voice was flat. “This isn’t some case, Cully, this is your family. I know this case is important and…But so…” Jane drew a deep breath, and shook her head as if she were silently dismissing options on what to say next. After a moment she continued. “Grace went to see Peter…well, all the troops off this morning. She hasn’t said, she didn’t have to. I just thought you should know.” Jane turned away slowly, her heels were quiet and exact down the hall.
Baxter sat for some time, listening to the stove and the ticking of a clock. Eventually he pushed the table back in place. He salvaged what he could, and gave the rest to the slop bucket. He made it seem important to avoid thoughts of tomorrow’s service, or the look Wallace had given him an hour before. It was the same superiority and smugness he’d seen on the wall at King’s Collegiate. A gentle reminder not to waste his time. There was water on the stove. Doing the dishes brought back the comfort of distraction until it came time to dry his hands. As he worked the dishtowel he began to see the hands of midwives glistening with blood and mucus. He saw Dr. Trenaman’s hands as cold and white as his lab coat. All Grace had seen was pictures in a book.
Jane pulled herself farther to her side of the bed as he lifted the covers. In the darkness he couldn’t tell if she was awake or if her body took it upon itself to continue his punishment while her mind rested. He lay there in exile until rescued by exhaustion.
He may have been in reprieve minutes or hours. There was no way to tell. He knew only that the house was cold and the draft on his feet from under the front door made it worse. He had managed to stop the horrible ringing. He had also dropped the receiver. He could hear it speaking to him as he groped blindly. “Chief Inspector…are you there?”
“Yes…Just a minute…Yes?”
There was a long pause. Maybe he had drifted off or this was just a bad joke. Then the thing in his hand spoke again. “It’s Mackay. I found Sarah Riley.”
Thursday
His steps were quick. Not because he was in any hurry to
see what waited. The images from the little room in Dr. Trenaman’s basement were still vivid and raw in his memory. Standing over Victor’s naked corpse with its missing eye and small mouth carved into its side, Baxter had felt his insides chill. Normally such feelings could be overcome with thoughts of grandchildren or a swing in the backyard. Now such thoughts left him colder still. He pulled his shoulders closer to his ears as he turned the corner onto Brunswick Street. The morgue was at the end of the next block. The street was quiet and empty. The whirl and fuss of amassing troops and sending them off had died down. Unlike his own, the shoulders of the city sagged in a great exhale. The empire had been serviced once again and another long winter was on its way. In days to come he would have time to ponder the grander scale of things. In this moment his mind was on the conduct of genteel young women. They should be concerned with the designs of a proper courtship and homemaking and motherhood. Grace had no business in rooms decorated with specimen jars and smelling of iodine. These facts were indisputable. Yet here he was, alone on the tundra, rejected and unpardoned. His quick pace was an effort to get warm. Truth always has a temperature. In the city of Halifax, during the wee hours of this particular Thursday morning, it was cold.
Trenaman had left the front door to the city morgue unlocked behind him. It did nothing to make the place more welcoming. The coat was crisp and white. It moved about the slab in a slow circle. Now and then there was a pause and a deep bend to peer over his small glasses. On the way back up, a pencil played a short concerto against a clipboard, its notes echoing off the drab green walls. It was all familiar, much as it had been a few nights before, and not the same at all. It was the difference that left Baxter not just cold but weak.
Baxter tried to keep his eye on the doctor and avoid looking at his “patient.” Much as he tried, he couldn’t help see her, couldn’t help imagining a young woman who walked and talked and who had colour in her cheeks. Even now, lying breathless on a cold metal table with a stained sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders, Sarah Riley was angelic.
“If this continues, tongues will wag.” The voice came from afar.
“Excuse me?”
Trenaman checked him with a glance then went back to his notes. “These late night meetings.”
As much as he was glad to be pulled away from his thoughts, the doctor’s attempt at humour, if that’s what it was, struck him as annoying. “Let’s do without the theatre, shall we, Doctor?”
Equally unamused by the chief inspector’s air, Trenaman replied, “That would be nice.” He looked up from the clipboard. “Sergeant Mackay tells me her name is…was, Sarah Riley.”
“Where is the sergeant?”
The doctor’s eyes squinted in an effort to remember. “He mentioned some names, Martha, I think, and…”
“Annie.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.” With an expression that seemed relieved, or perhaps impressed with his recall of the unimportant, the doctor looked back to his clipboard, following his last note with the tip of his pencil.
Baxter moved nearer to the foot of the slab where the doctor was now standing, glad no longer to be caught in the vacant stare. “Did she drown?”
“No stab wounds this time.”
“Any other signs of foul play?”
Trenaman slipped his pencil into the breast pocket of the lab coat. He drew a breath as he folded his arms, the clipboard now against his chest. “Nothing obvious, no bruising or broken bones. She may have been poisoned, I suppose. I could do some tests.”
Baxter wasn’t sure if the doctor was being thorough or was again practicing his humour. “And if she wasn’t poisoned?”
“Preliminary?”
“Your professional opinion.”
Trenaman pursed his lips and drew another deep breath that he let out slowly. When he was ready, he spoke with certainty. “She went into the water sometime in the last thirty-six hours.”
The doctor had already said there were no signs of foul play. Baxter asked the question anyway, just to be sure. “With or without help?”
This time the doctor’s answer came behind a doubtful look over the rim of his spectacles. “You’ll need a witness for that.”
“Or a confession.” Baxter wasn’t expecting one and his face said so.
“There is one other thing.” The doctor had pushed his glasses back up and was following the lines on the floor.
“Well.”
“She did not go in alone…” The clinical manner had given way to something more personal and sad. The doctor’s eyes moved quickly. Baxter did not miss were they went.
He heard a sadness come into his own voice as he spoke the words Trenaman had avoided. “She was with child.”
“Two, maybe three months. I’ll have a report by the end of the day.”
Again the doctor’s voice came from far away. The recovery he had managed relapsed into a greater weakness. Suddenly Baxter was acutely aware of his surroundings, the metal trays and odd shaped bowls that didn’t stain and the long sharp blades with heavy handles that didn’t need to be delicate. This was not a place of healing. And that smell of a swamp in the heat admixing with dark blood and bile and disinfectant. What had kept him from gagging, from seeing this chamber of horrors? He closed his eyes in search of an escape. He saw rooms in his house that went from being empty to being filled with consolation. He saw the upstairs rooms at Clarke’s place with their revolving doors. He saw more rooms in country houses where things were just as they had been left and would remain that way until those who remembered were all gone. Baxter’s eyes snapped open, now searching for the way out. He managed a hasty instruction in his rush to fresh air. “This needs to be kept quiet, Doctor, not a word about this to anyone.”
The doctor had gone back to his pencil. “The people I see are not very chatty,” he replied with a matter-of-factness that was lost in the heavy steps fleeing down the hall toward the front door.
The room seemed smaller than it was in the dim light of daybreak. Baxter fumbled with the curtains while shapes in the room remained vague, with no edges, like a mossy forest floor. What he took for a narrow bed was in the darkest corner. There appeared to be a lump in its centre. He listened but could hear nothing past his own breathing. He must have run all the way from the morgue, he couldn’t remember. He bent over slowly, reaching out. His hand came to something that felt round and woolly, a shoulder maybe. “Mr. Squire…MR. SQUIRE…”
The lump did not move but two specks appeared and began to flicker like bits of quartz in a piece of granite. Then the rock spoke. “Chief Inspector? Is that you? What are you doing here?”
Baxter spoke quickly in between deep breaths. “Get up, you have a train to catch.”
There was some movement now from the corner. “How did you get in here?”
“The hostess let me in.” He was not trying to be sarcastic. It was all he could think to say. Who had let him in? He looked back through the open door. He remembered being in the hallway. A man, no, a woman. Did he get her name? She had gone back to her room. Baxter stared at the wall over the bed. Johanna? Josephine?
Squire had managed to get his feet on the floor. He sat hunched over, rubbing his face. “Did you say train?”
“Sarah Riley’s been found.”
“Where is she?”
There was a pause. Had there been enough light, Squire would not have had to wait. He could have seen the horror Baxter was still wearing like a sickness. “In the morgue. A watchman spotted her bobbing on the tide. Looks like she drowned.”
There was a second pause then simply, “Oh.”
Baxter had felt his way back to the door jamb. He turned and spoke to the silhouette on the edge of the bed, the chin still resting on one hand. “Make yourself presentable. Is there someplace downstairs I can wait?”
“There’s a kitchen.”
Baxter laid
his hat and coat on one chair and sat in another, one elbow leaning on the small table. As the light outside grew and pushed in through the window the room slowly came awake. The white enamel of the oven door took on a good-morning smile. The ice box looked anxious to be opened. A small pantry promised to lend a hand with any effort. The pots were round and made of iron. There was nothing to remind him of the dead. Traces of food, and shoe polish and cigarette smoke lingered in the air. Simple signs of life that in this moment were remarkable and restorative. For the first time since Mackay’s telephone call had pulled him out of bed he did not feel a chill. Over his head Baxter heard footsteps back and forth, water moving though pipes in walls, doors opening and closing, and whispered conversations. After a while there was a creaking of stairs and then a fresh-faced uniformed Squire with boots in hand stood at the kitchen doorway.
“I never met her.” Squire had set his boots in the hall and was getting some water on to boil.
Once again Baxter was grateful for the young man’s intuition, that he would not have to explain the mission. “You’re not writing her obituary, you’re just letting the family know she’s gone.”
“Sure, that’s all.” Squire gave a dismissive wave as he set the kettle on the stove.
“This is the job,” Baxter replied, ignoring the wave and its incriminations. It was the job and Baxter had been doing it a long time, too long to be as bothered as he was by this case and its players. He had no connection to Sarah Riley either. In general he believed that brothel inmates were deserving of no sympathy. Bad apples fallen from poisonous trees so far as he was concerned. So why all this care for her or the family? Perhaps he was mourning the loss of something different? So long as Miss Riley was alive there was some hope, hope she might be believed and a killer brought to justice. His feelings for the unborn who would never grow into the futures imagined for them was an old and familiar sadness. That it should extend even to this poor bastard was of some surprise. He could hear Mackay barking in his ear, “Telegrams are a goddamn crime.” It was true. They were not foreigners. They were not ministers out of some war office in Ottawa or London. They were policemen in Halifax not a hundred miles away. There was no excuse. Of course sending Mackay would be no comfort. The family’s worst imaginings were carved into his face. In Squire they might see the daughter they remembered. Baxter could say none of this. He would have to rely on his own face, for Squire to see it there.