A Chill Rain in January

by LR Wright

  The woman went away then. The boy said, “She’s gonna come back! Let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here!” Ramona didn’t want to move. Her heart was all panicky and no wonder either, and her legs were too shaky to stand on. She told him to go without her, to pull out the pieces of broken glass and climb out the window and run and run and run, but he said he wasn’t going without her. He was crying a lot, and Ramona felt very sorry for him.

  “Oh please, please,” he said, “let’s go, please!”

  Ramona was dizzy, and she hurt in a lot of places, she couldn’t figure out just where, or why; she thought she could smell gasoline; she could see some blood, and realized that she must have fallen down in the broken glass, or maybe been hit by it when it fell into the house; but the worst thing was the hurricane that was going on inside her. It was a hurricane of confusion, of profound disorder; it bordered on anarchy, maybe even derangement. She wanted to know where Anton was when she needed him, and how Horace had ever grown up to be such an unpleasant person, and why she had ever agreed to that third operation—she oughtn’t ever to have done that; it was the third operation that had caused all her troubles, she knew it…

  Ramona became aware of smoke, and heat, and the boy screaming.

  “Where the hell have I gotten myself to?” she said. “Where on earth did this fire come from?”

  She struggled to her feet and tottered into the bedroom. She flung open the cedar chest and hauled out a blanket.

  The boy was screaming louder, and there were flames in the cottage as well as smoke, and the noise of fire was deafening. Ramona thought about the chicken noodle soup she’d made, and she couldn’t remember if she’d turned off the stove; and she began to sob.

  She dragged the blanket into the bathroom. “Here, come in here with me,” she called, and Kenny ran after her.

  “What are we gonna do! We’re gonna burn to death!” he said.

  “No,” said Ramona, “no.” She turned on the water taps full blast and dumped the blanket into the tub. “Wait,” she said, grabbing at his sleeve. “Don’t go out there.”

  “The window’s too small!” he yelled, staring up at the bathroom window.

  “Yes, yes,” said Ramona.

  She dragged the blanket from the tub and wrapped it around him. She pushed him out of the bathroom and through the cottage. Her eyes and throat stung from the smoke. She heard the fire crackling and thought about fat melting, flesh melting; she felt the fire on her skin, but it didn’t hurt.

  “Go!” she said, and shoved the boy through the flames, through the broken kitchen window. She was going to go back and get another blanket but it was too hot, too smoky. I wonder if I’m going to get rescued? she thought, sinking onto the kitchen floor.

  Chapter 51

  PEOPLE ran up from the houses along the beach to watch, to help if they could. The first of them to arrive saw Kenny stumbling along the driveway, half caught in a sodden blanket, his hair singed, his face smudged with smoke. The man from the house down the beach caught the boy in his arms and said, “It’s all right, you’re safe now. The fire engines are coming—can you hear them?”

  Kenny gestured frantically at the burning cottage. “She’s still in there!” he said, and then the fire engine arrived and the man told the firefighters, “This boy was in the fire. I’m taking him to my place. But he says there’s somebody else in there; a woman.”

  “Is it Miss Strachan?” the fireman asked Kenny.

  “No no, it’s an old lady, an old lady!” said the boy, and the fireman said they’d try to get her out, and the man, a big strong man with gray hair, carried Kenny off along the driveway and down to the beach and over the sand to the house where he lived with his wife.

  The cottage fell in on itself, all fire and noise, and nobody could go in there to get the old lady out.

  Alberg arrived, with Frieda Listad and Sid Sokolowski. The firefighters were shouting at one another as they hosed down the fir trees surrounding the burning building. Alberg asked one of them if anyone had been inside.

  And the firefighter replied, “Yeah. A kid. Said his name’s Kenny. He’s okay. Brian Forbes took him to his place. The kid said there was a woman, too.” He shook his head. He was smoke-smeared, already exhausted. “But there was nothing we could do.”

  “I’ll see to the boy,” said Frieda Listad. “I know where Brian Forbes lives.”

  “Good,” said Sid Sokolowski. “Give us a call later, okay?”

  When she’d gone, Alberg said, “It’s Ramona.” He was staring at the fire. “Ramona’s in there.” He glanced across the circle of spectators and saw Zoe Strachan standing motionless, apart from the others. “Come on,” he said to Sokolowski. He started walking toward her. She saw him and turned away, heading for the house.

  They followed her. Zoe Strachan walked not slowly, not quickly, and they kept pace behind her, three pairs of feet scrunching on the gravel. Alberg, uneasy in the fog, was anxious not to lose sight of her, yet it seemed he couldn’t hurry. It was a dreamlike experience, following her up the gravel driveway as if he’d been summoned. The shouts of the firefighters grew fainter. The fog seemed to grow thicker. The sea talked to the night, to the fog, in a restless, broody mutter. Alberg walked, and Sid trailed quietly in his wake, and Alberg watched Zoe Strachan’s arms swinging, her hips swaying, and he remembered having had all those lustful thoughts about her, and he realized that he had them still.

  As they approached her house he saw her car parked askew in the driveway, the driver’s door open. She reached the doorstep and turned to face them.

  “I have here two warrants,” said Alberg.

  Zoe looked behind him, at Sid Sokolowski. She seemed very calm.

  “One of them,” said Alberg, “permits me to retain possession of three exercise books apparently belonging to you, which were delivered anonymously to the Sechelt detachment, RCMP—”

  Zoe Strachan smiled, very faintly.

  “The other,” said Alberg, “is a warrant to seize known samples of your handwriting.”

  “Such a lot of fuss,” said Zoe Strachan. “What was the age,” she said carefully, “of the person who wrote in those scribblers?”

  “Twelve,” said Alberg.

  “Twelve,” said Zoe. She shook her head. “That’s very young.”

  “Yeah,” said Alberg. “But old enough to know what she was doing. And old enough to be charged for it.” He leaned slightly closer to her. “Have you been at it again, Ms. Strachan?”

  There was no response.

  “I think you have.”

  He heard through the drifting fog only the sound of the sea “We need the samples, now,” he said, holding out the warrant.

  She looked at it for a moment. Then she raised her eyes to Alberg’s face and gave him a smile of such warmth and charm that he was sure she must have misunderstood him. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll be happy to cooperate.”

  Chapter 52

  THE FOG was poking and prodding around the house, so as soon as the policemen left, Zoe locked all the doors and windows and turned the heat up high.

  It was such a relief, having her house all to herself again.

  Her shoulder was very sore, where it had been struck, so she ran a hot bath, poured in several handfuls of Yardley’s bath salts, undressed, and soaked for almost an hour, sipping white wine. She added more hot water whenever she began cooling off.

  Eventually the pain in her shoulder dulled, and she felt herself relaxing. She closed her eyes, enjoying the fragrance of the bath salts, running her hands slowly across her body, feeling sleepy and voluptuous.

  All a person needed, she thought, to ensure her physical and mental health, was solitude; seclusion.

  The rage was big and strong and getting all the time bigger and stronger. Zoe imagined anger taking up all the room in her body, growing and growing, pushing other stuff out. Her eyes would pop out of their sockets, her brain would squeeze itself out through her mouth, all the yuc
ky things inside her, intestines and stuff, would push out where she had BMs. It was very scary.

  She didn’t even need the old people’s trees anymore, because she’d found an even better private outdoor place. But that didn’t make any difference to the size of her anger.

  She found it down the road, past where the gravel began. She was going along the road one day, the dust from the gravel getting all over her feet in their brown sandals, turning her sandals gray just like her feet, and next to the road was a field that didn’t have anything in it except weeds. Beyond the field were some trees—not a whole bunch of them like a forest, just a few. She ran across the field and through the trees, looking carefully around for signs of people or wild animals, but she didn’t see anything. On the other side of the trees the land kind of dipped, and at the bottom of the dip was a big old barn. This became her private outdoor place.

  The front door of the barn was broken and hanging open. The first time she went inside she heard some rustling, and her skin got all cold and crawly; then she saw a cat looking at her from behind a big piece of rusty machinery. Zoe moved a little bit away from the door, and the cat ran to it and through it and far away.

  At the side of the barn was a ladder. She climbed it and found a bunch of hay up there, and a kind of window, without any glass in it. She liked to lie down in the hay and look over the edge to the big floor of the barn down below her. There was always a lot of dust, and when the sun shone the air was full of little bits of floating stuff.

  It smelled good in the barn. And maybe she was the only person in the world who knew it was there.

  She started going there almost every day, except when it rained, because then it was chilly and clammy in the hay. She was very glad she’d found it; it was much better than sitting up in a dumb apple tree.

  But she was still jam-packed with rage. She found things in the barn, tools made of metal all rough and flaky with rust, and she banged with them at the dirt floor and the hanging-down door, using all her strength, and this made her tired, but she was still just as angry as ever.

  One day when she’d done this she climbed up the ladder and lay down on the hay, and then all of a sudden there was a picture in her head, Zoe climbing the side fence into the old people’s yard and nobody seeing her because it was night.

  She wondered why she hadn’t thought of this before.

  Zoe began to feel drowsy in the bath; it was difficult to keep her eyes open, and her limbs felt flimsy, unsubstantial.

  She pulled the plug, set her wineglass on the floor, and got on her knees to wash her hair under the tap.

  When she was out of the tub and wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, she cleaned and dried the entire bathroom thoroughly.

  Then she used the hair dryer. Her hair was thick and glossy, and she had never minded the silver in it.

  It was very quiet in her bedroom when she turned off the dryer.

  Suddenly she was stricken by melancholy. She sat on the edge of her bed and doubted, for a few moments, the wisdom of every decision she had ever made.

  That night she didn’t go to sleep when she went to bed. She kept herself awake by planning. It seemed a very long time, though, before the rest of the people in her house were asleep. She kept on just about dozing off. Finally she got up and moved her desk chair underneath one of the windows, and opened the window. Then, she sat in the chair wearing only her nightgown, and the cool air coming in the window made her shiver and kept her awake.

  Late at night she heard her parents come upstairs. She heard their voices for a while, although she couldn’t tell what they were saying; then she heard their bedroom door close, and everything was quiet.

  She knew that Benjamin wasn’t in bed yet. He probably wasn’t even home yet, from wherever he’d gone with his friends. Zoe was starting to get cold, and she was impatient, too. Either she had to go right away or she’d have to wait for Benjamin, and she didn’t know how long he’d be, he might be hours, and even when he got home he might not go right to sleep. After thinking about it for a few minutes she put on her bathrobe and her slippers, opened her bedroom door very carefully, listened but heard nothing, and made her way slowly, on tiptoe, down the stairs.

  Without turning on any lights, she found the big bowl full of books of matches that her mother kept in the kitchen. In the living room she emptied the basket that held wood for the fireplace and put back into it a few little pieces and two big ones and the newspaper that was lying on the coffee table.

  She hurried across the lawn, the basket hitting against the side of her leg, and climbed awkwardly over the fence. She squatted down and waited for a minute, almost expecting to hear her mother yelling from an upstairs window, or the old people pushing open their squeaky screen door; but she didn’t hear anything at all except a little bit of wind pushing through the vegetable garden in front of her.

  She got up on her knees and looked over the vegetables to the old people’s house. It was dark and quiet. Zoe’s heart was hammering away in her chest. After a while she got up and began to sneak toward the house. The grass was damp, and so were the bottoms of her slippers. Her bathrobe got caught on a rosebush for a minute; she had to put down the basket and use both hands to pull herself free.

  When she was near the house she squatted down again and listened some more, but still she heard nothing, and no light came on.

  She scooted underneath the back porch and waited for a minute, listening as hard as she could, before getting out the newspaper, to be really sure nobody was awake in that house.

  Then she made a fire.

  After a while Zoe rallied.

  She went to her closet and thought about what to wear.

  She flipped through her bar clothes, smiling. Dresses with no back, dresses with very little front, dresses with huge full skirts and tiny waists; slinky things, sexy things, little-girl things; a cowgirl’s outfit, something that looked like a nurse’s uniform… She began to feel melancholy again and turned to the other closet, where her ordinary clothes hung.

  She chose a sweater in almost exactly the same shade of blue as her eyes, and a flowered skirt that had some of the same color blue in it.

  She put on the skirt and sweater and slipped her feet into a pair of dark-blue flat-heeled shoes. She wore no underwear, and no jewelry.

  Zoe scrunched up newspaper and laid kindling and then the two big pieces of wood on top. She got the matchbook out of her bathrobe pocket and lit the paper in three places. Then she scrabbled out from under the porch and ran.

  She was halfway to the fence when she remembered the basket. She thought about leaving it there to burn up with the porch, but she knew her mother would miss it, so she turned around and ran back and grabbed it—just in time, too: it was warm, almost hot, when she touched it; the fire was already burning hard and making crackling noises.

  Zoe sprinted across the old people’s yard and threw herself over the fence and bolted for the back door of her house. Inside, she refilled the basket, put it back next to the fireplace and ran as quietly as she could upstairs to her room.

  She sat looking out of her window while she caught her breath.

  She watched as the old people’s porch set fire to their house. It was a much bigger fire than she’d expected. She could smell the smoke and feel the heat from it all the way over here in her own yard, her own house, her own room.

  She heard Benjamin come crashing up the stairs, yelling at the top of his lungs, and then her mother and father got up in a big hurry, shouting and banging doors.

  Zoe got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  The fire burned up the porch and the whole house and the old people, too, and Zoe’s anger got burned up with them.

  Zoe looked into the mirror and smoothed the palms of her hands over her face. She slowly ran her fingers through her hair, first one hand, then the other, five times each. She looked at herself critically and saw a serious face, with steady eyes. She watched herself, looking for signs of
anger, or of fear, but there were none.

  She went into the kitchen for two dishpans and a paring knife.

  In the living room she put on the tape of Pachelbel’s “Canon.” She turned the sound up, switched off the lights, and returned to her bedroom.

  She left the door open wide, to let the music in.

  She lay in the middle of her bed, positioned the dishpans on either side of her, and cut her wrists with the paring knife.

  When they found her the next day, practically all of the blood had fallen into the dishpans.

  Chapter 53

  AWATCH was kept all night on Zoe Strachan’s driveway.

  The next afternoon, headquarters faxed to Alberg the report from the lab. It said that the scribblers appeared to have been written by Zoe Strachan.

  He also received word from the fire inspector that arson was suspected in the blaze that had destroyed her cottage.

  He told Sokolowski to follow in a patrol car, and he set off for Zoe Strachan’s house.

  By the time he got there, she had been dead for eighteen hours.

  When he finally returned to the detachment at six o’clock, Isabella was still at her desk.

  “Isabella. I told you to go home hours ago.”

  “I know,” she said, cranking paper into her typewriter. “It’s better that I keep busy.”

  He sat on the edge of her desk. “I’m sorry about Ramona.”

  “I know you are,” she said. “You did all you could. She just didn’t want us to find her.”