by Lou Allin
“I don’t know,” Chipper said, as he turned to leave, hand hovering above the doorknob. “Her father will be with her since she’s underage. They’ll have the best-paid legal advice in Canada. Count on it. She’ll be lying to him, and he’ll coach her on what to say. They’ll probably practise until it’s down cold. Maybe even with a lie detector. This doesn’t sound good.”
“That’s stuff from the movies. Listen to Ann. We’ll be thinking of you. Call us as soon as you can tomorrow,” Holly said.
“I will.” He gave them an okay sign. “And thanks, guys.”
Though he’d only had it a month, Chipper took no pleasure in driving home in his brand new Atomic Tangerine Mustang. He felt anaesthetised. Tigerstyle was on the CD, its strong drums and wild riffs an invitation to the dance, but he turned it off, trying to concentrate. Tears did not come from the men in his family, though the women did their share. His chest constricted around his heart like a steel band and his breath came in shallow draughts. An overloaded Brick furniture van swept around a corner two feet over the line and he steered onto the berm, sending up a cloud of dust. In a waking coma, he had driven ten kilometres.
At Muir Creek, he pulled off into a parking area and tried deep breathing. He laid his head on the top of the steering wheel. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have seen it coming. He’d had teenagers as argumentative as that before, though never with a hair-trigger temper. Maybe he shouldn’t have searched the car. On the other hand, Ann might be right that Samantha was afraid of her old man, and given that course, was protecting herself the only way she could even if it meant taking an innocent officer down. He almost felt sorry for her. But he was damned if he was going to give up without a fight. How did life get so complicated? Yesterday he was going to ask Mindy to have dinner at the Canoe Brewpub in Victoria and then go clubbing. Now he had no idea when he might talk to her again. Certainly his dating career was off the rails now.
Walking to the beach, paying out time like a rope, he climbed onto some driftwood and sat, looking out over the grey and choppy strait. Churned up with a cloud bank approaching from the south, it cast a malevolent eye at him, but mirrored his feelings. A group came up from behind him; three children and their parents. He’d seen them in the lot in their van with an Iowa licence. A place not unlike the fields of Saskatchewan. Tons of corn, but warmer. A long way from home, and even on this bleak day, they were awed to silence by the massive power of the strait. He nodded and attempted a smile.
The man came over to him and bent down. “Would you mind if we took a picture of you with our kids, officer? It would mean a lot.”
His solid Midwest accent spoke honesty and sincerity. Chipper rallied for a moment. The kids looked up in awe at his blue turban. Probably not too many Sikhs in the cornfields. Maybe he’d be transferred to some remote place with snow seven months a year.
“Sure thing.” He posed for several pictures, standing straight as if he heard the national anthem and forcing a smile. Was this his last hurrah as an officer? Would he have to find some other profession? Ever since he’d been ten, when an RCMP corporal came to his fourth grade class, he’d wanted to be a Mountie. The other kids laughed, but the man gave him a card and told him to get in touch when he finished school and turned twenty one. He still carried the piece of ragged cardboard in his wallet. For luck. That was a laugh.
He returned to his car and pumped the gas pedal out of frustration, revving the motor in a silly gesture. In half an hour, he’d be home. He thought about what Ann had said. Trust that the force will come through for you. You’re innocent. At this he shook his head. She was only a corporal like Holly, but with her age, she would side more with the older, more conservative and perhaps naive members of the RCMP. For the first time in his life, he appreciated the feeling of being an innocent person heading for a trial and perhaps an unwarranted conviction. Would they throw him under the bus to make the force look better, even if the charges were a lie?
At least since he was still on duty, they weren’t going to stop his pay … for now. The Mustang was costing him five hundred a month since he’d taken only a three-year loan. His parents depended on his contribution to add a bit of indulgence to their ordinarily frugal life. They’d been able to buy a new car after fifteen years with the old one. They’d brought his grandmother over from Durgapur for a visit. He had saved up two thousand dollars to help them fly back to the old country this winter. That was to be their surprise anniversary present. “Yes, my only child, my most intelligent boy, is an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” he could hear his father Gopal telling the relatives in an official tone, standing up tall for his five foot six. Chipper got his height from his mother’s side. “He will be the commander of his own detachment any day now. You will see.”
Chipper barked out a laugh and pulled into traffic. A car came streaking down the hill, right up to his bumper. The guy hit the horn and gave him the finger. Chipper checked his speed. Eighty kph. Right on. Let the asshole pass if he dared. Fortunately the old truck pulled off at Anderson Road. For once in his life, Chipper was mad at the world.
Twenty-five minutes. Life as he knew it was ticking down. This would kill his parents. His mother was a born panicker. He could see her face now. She would dissolve in tears and sit wringing her hands like she had done when a downturn in the economy occurred just as they had expanded their convenience store into speciality Indian groceries. As for Gopal, nothing would faze the little man … on the outside. But his doctor had told him to slow down, that his heart was sending him signals of a blocked artery. With Gopal’s orphan background, there was no help from family history. So far the condition was being handled by medication, but down the line who could tell? His mother could never get the man to a doctor for monitoring. And he seemed to be nodding off earlier than usual lately. Sixteen-hour days were not good for old fellows even though his hair was black as ever. A bit of spring had vanished from his step, and he seemed to tire easily.
Chipper felt nauseous and doubted that he could eat. If he didn’t make a showing at dinner, that would send his mother over the top. Tonight she was making honeyed jalabis. But that brought up another subject. Timing. When should he break the news? Before dinner, during, or after? For once in his life, Chipper wished that his parents lived on another planet where this would all be over and done before they had to find out.
After the sweet, the bitter, then. That’s when it would be. He suspected that this would be the last meal he’d enjoy for a long long time.
CHAPTER TEN
“When shall we three meet again?” The ominous words of Macbeth’s witches kept running a Mobius strip through Holly’s mind despite her coolness to Shakespeare. At her Catholic school, the good sister had made them all memorize Marc Anthony’s oration over Caesar’s body. When Chipper had walked out the door, slowly, deliberately, the atmosphere had been funereal, much though the women had tried to assume brave faces. Still bowled over from the phone call from Island Division, Holly didn’t have much faith in the due process to come. Ann was trying to keep up their spirits with her take-charge attitude. If she had a totem, it would have been a cougar or bear.
In twenty minutes Holly reached home, charging up the hilly drive spewing grit from her tires and tearing up a piece of volunteer grass sprouting among the gravel. As she got out, Shogun started a howl of greeting inside.
Opening the new back door to the foyer and giving the dog a head rub, Holly straightened her drooping shoulders to dispel the gloom of the last two hours. It would feel good to have someone to talk to about this. Otherwise she’d sit and brood, helpless as Chipper made his way to the last ferry later tonight. With her foot, she pushed the door shut, a little too hard. “I’m home.”
She hung up her vest and jacket in the closet and shrugged off her hot boots, passing through the TV room. She’d painted the room a pale green and added handsome accordion blinds on the bay window. The forty-two inch plasma and oversize chairs made watching her fath
er’s classic films almost like a real theatre.
“Dinner in half an hour,” Norman said. “I just popped the cork on some primo pink Zinfandel. But what was with slamming that door? With that stained glass, it cost me nearly $1,400.”
“Sorry.” Holly leaned against the kitchen doorway.
“Is something wrong? Why that face? Don’t tell me that there’s been another attack out at Fossil Bay.” Having lived with two strong women, he knew better than to suggest that it was the time of the month.
“Tell you later. I have to unwind. And don’t worry. It’s not about me.” But it was about her, and Ann, and the force. If Chipper wasn’t exonerated she’d lose faith in the entire organization. Law and justice were not the same animal. She might even quit, and join a city-police team like Victoria’s or Vancouver’s. But surely it wouldn’t come to that. Was there some way to turn the case in Chipper’s favour? Using the end to justify the means she might even lie for him, and that frightened her.
A fifteen-minute kiwi-gel hot bath in the impossibly raspberry colour soaker tub didn’t soothe the knots in her neck. The builder had been so cheap, constructing the house of flimsy two-by-fours and picking up castoffs like the tub. The Chainsaw House, neighbours called it. Pretty Grecian-villa face, rough-cut plywood underneath. People could be the same.
From her window, the strait was painting one of a thousand pictures, a thin silver band underlining the shore on the other side while the gradations of mountains behind purpled the palette. Little Egypt’s pyramid poked between two snow-capped giants in the Olympics. Against the patio door, a crane fly tried to batter its way in. The ephemeral creatures were often found desiccated in house corners, seeking refuge only to die. Nature made up in fecundity what it failed to supply in brute power. She felt a strange kinship with its struggles and felt her throat constrict against a sob.
Dinner brought little appetite. And thinking about her father’s latest vat of homemade wine left her less than enthusiastic. His sweeter varietals were so cloying. She changed into yoga pants and a T-shirt, then joined him in the kitchen.
He passed her a full glass. “My new batch,” he said, swirling the wine to admire the pale-pink lemonade colour, unique for the worst of reasons. His rotgut Merlot was probably the most drinkable of all his two-buck bottles. “So lay it on your old man. I’m here to listen. That’s my job, the best one on the planet.”
His gangster slang mixed with a classic television commercial made her smile against her will. She took a sip and tried to sluice it past the tongue. His beer was worse. One batch blew up in the crawlspace. It still smelled of malt fifteen years later.
Jiggs and Maggie night. The thirties. Every semester Norman taught a different era, and he adjusted his clothes, cooking, reading, and entertainment. No television in this decade. Perhaps he’d play a tape of Amos ’n’ Andy, two white comics who had listeners thinking that they were black. A screwball comedy might help. Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. That scene where Hepburn ripped her dress and they walked out in tandem always made Holly laugh.
Chipper must be home. Had he told his parents? And tomorrow on the mainland as he saw the full weight of the conspiracy against him, how would that feel? Rewarded for years of hard work against all the odds by a bogus accusation by a spoiled twit. At least she had her father as a sounding board. Not that he had any political pull, but he must know someone at UVic who could help.
Norman returned from the laundry room bin with a smelly bowl of salmon-based dog chow. Shogun had followed him, licking his black velvet lips. As a rescue dog, he’d had two other names in his checkered history: Hogan and Logan. Called to dinner, Shogun would answer to any name. The plumy white tail looping over his back was the “lantern” to see the shepherd home.
Finishing her first glass of wine before her father returned and pouring another for maximum numbness, Holly took a chair at the simple pine table in the kitchen. Like all the front rooms, it overlooked the shimmering strait. In the choppy Prussian-blue waters far across, a freighter labelled Hanjin headed for China. From down below in the high-ceilinged solarium, a CD player sent Kate Smith’s upbeat “Sioux City Sue” from her early days. Trained as a toddler, Holly had become such a connoisseur that she could tell the thirty-year-old from the seventy-year-old by the tone. The voice grew richer with time.
“I’ll rope her and I’ll brand her, and I’ll use my old lasso. Gonna put my brand on my sweet Sioux City Sue,” the song continued. Today purists might say that the lyrics were an attack on women. Sometimes Holly yearned for the innocence of the past her father revered, but how innocent had it been? Modern laws skewed statistics. What was now rape once had been a time-honoured marital prerogative, one step up from being allowed to beat a wife with any stick smaller than a thumb. Better record keeping and a different protocol had also brought more charges and assured that cases went to trial even if the battered woman objected.
“God bless our Kate,” Norman said, wedded to Yankee culture. “A big girl with a big voice. An American institution until the day she died. Re-invented herself decades later to sing the anthem at Phillies hockey games. Do you know she had a monopoly on that song? That was one smart businesswoman.” Norman squeezed a loonie until it yodelled. He picked up the bottle to top his glass and gave an odd double take at the lowered level. “You must really like this batch. Don’t drink it too fast, though, or you won’t appreciate the cherry nose and deep tannins.”
His deep blue eyes, crinkled with age at the corners, focused on hers, but Holly turned away to swallow another sugar surfeit of wine. Not even eight years on the job and she was folding like a cliché. Her father had skirted depression several times after his wife had vanished. Maybe the same trait was finding its way home to her. She wanted to forget what had happened, but she wanted for it to be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until Chipper returned to work. The three of them were more than the sum of their parts and less than two-thirds without him. She wanted their lives back.
Norman took salad makings from the fridge and assembled the promised slaw. Holly picked up the paper and read the headline of the Times Colonist. “Morale remains high in E Division.” What kind of propaganda was that? As if you said something enough, people would believe it. Public relations was smoke and mirrors.
Norman’s long nose wrinkled as they heard a sizzle from the stove. “Can you flip the hash? You like it nice and browned.”
She replied with a barely audible mmmmm. Even after being stuck in the Colwood crawl, Chipper would be sitting down to dinner now. His mother would have ready his favourite curry, steaming parathas, homemade lime pickle, and his hard-working father would be dozing in his chair. Then he’d have to tell them the bad news. She’d bet that he got right to it. Short and straight. Nothing sugar-coated. His mother might dab her eyes. His father would clear his throat. To them he was still a boy. Chipper loved his parents with unshakable devotion, but he would stand or fall on his own. Only children had to be tougher. She was one, too, and Ann. What were the odds of that?
Accustomed to lecturing, Norman was never one to let silence fill the room. “Did I tell you that I had Shogun in for his shots? The new vet had someone working for him that we knew years ago. Barry Metz. Remember when he took care of our shepherds? Never had his own practice. He preferred working all over the island as a locum.”
Holly shook herself back to the moment. She remembered Metz. An opinionated loner, but a wizard with animals. “Right. He could clean dog teeth without the expense and risk of putting them under. That was a gift all right.”
“Saved us hundreds on the anesthesia. Didn’t have the same success with women, though. His wife left him about ten years ago. Since then he’s been in Port McNeil, your old detachment. Then Comox, Parksville, the rounds. We ought to have him over for dinner some time. I think the guy’s lonely. Still couldn’t keep talking about her even after all this time. Broke his heart. Wouldn’t hurt to get a free opinion of that dandruff Shogie gets, too
.”
Holly sipped quietly. Her father loved free professional advice. But Metz was on the obnoxious side. Why, she couldn’t say. Female instinct maybe. Norman could have him over for “old times” talk some night that she was away. Their neighbour’s diesel Dodge chugged up the drive and stopped the conversation for a minute.
“Helllooo, daughter of mine,” Norman said, chucking her under the chin in a gesture that melted her heart. “You’re in a trance after only one … make that two, glasses of wine. It’s not that strong, is it? What’s on that legal-beagle mind of yours?” He flipped the hash himself and added a dash of paprika.
Holly pulled herself back to attention, banging the heel of her palm on her head. “Sorry. Bad day.” What was taking her so long to get to the point about Chipper? Because if she didn’t speak, it seemed less real?
“We all have those. Did I ever tell you about the time at the Faculty Club that the chairman went to toast the dear old queen and said the queer old …”
“Yes, several times. And you said it happened during Victoria’s Jubilee.” Then back into action with an economy of words, she related what had happened as she heated two plates in the microwave, eased the hash onto them and placed them on the table with ketchup. As an afterthought, she grabbed two paper serviettes from the shelf and sailed them onto the table. Instead of digging in, she parked her fork and stared out the window. Then, almost as if in a haze, she told him about Chipper.