Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  I should have brought the police, I thought. But then again, the official police stance was that there wasn’t a serial killer on the loose, a contention bolstered by the fact that they had just arrested someone in connection with two of the murders. I had an inkling that Detective Whitford suspected there was a serial killer even though officially he said there wasn’t. It was one way to explain why he had let me into the tent and why he had been so helpful when he was officially ordered not to give me information. But I knew there was no way he would accept my new theory on who the killer was.

  Even though instinct and hunches play a key role in a police investigation, he would need more real evidence before he would agree to come along with me to confront the person I now thought was responsible for the death of a good number of native women.

  In fact, he would have tried to convince me not to take that step, that it was better if I left things alone. He would have heard me out, though. He was that kind of guy. But in the end he would have sadly shaken his head, urged me to drop this obsession and seek professional help. He would have been right, of course—throughout the drive to the auto shop, I kept telling myself that I was wrong, that it was the chemical imbalance in my brain sending me on a false path.

  At the same time there was another voice in my head, and it was louder and stronger, telling me that I couldn’t ignore the connection between his name and that of the first victim. I couldn’t ignore it, and even if I came out of this looking like an idiot, that would be better than not pursuing the lead. If I let this one slide, it would hang over me forever, forcing me to second-guess myself.

  I was spotted a few seconds after entering the auto shop and he smiled a great smile at me. “Hey, Leo,” he said brightly. “What a surprise. What the heck are you doing here?”

  That smile and the bright tone of his voice made me cringe—did he use that smile and voice to lure his victims? Did he use his position of authority to convince them that climbing into his truck was safe?—and I hoped he didn’t see it. By this time I realized that confronting him publicly would not be wise. I would do it privately, and maybe the element of surprise would minimize any physical reaction. Even so, I figured I could handle him, considering that he was more comfortable killing people who were weaker than him. “I need to talk to you,” I said, as calmly as I could. “And in private ’cause it’s important, Francis.”

  He blinked twice. I don’t know if that meant he was surprised by the request and he should be suspicious or that he was pleased I was coming to him in a time of need.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sure. No problem. Can you give me a sec, I got to finish with Brian here and then we can talk.” He pointed to an office across from the entrance area of the shop. “Grab a seat in my office and I’ll be there in a jif.”

  I paused, wondering if that was his way of putting me aside, because he knew that I knew, and the first chance he got, he would run. But I dismissed those thoughts because there was no way he could know I was there to accuse him of being a serial murderer. He probably thought I was there to interview him for a story or because I needed his advice as a native elder on something related to my Aboriginal background.

  “Sure, no problem,” I said, trying to put an easygoing tone in my voice. “Take your time.” I turned and went to his office and stood by the door. I figured that sitting down would only give him more power when he came into the room. I wanted him to find me standing and hoped that would throw off his equilibrium.

  I ignored his office, ignored the native paintings, the dreamcatchers, the certificates and photos of him with various native dignitaries and politicians, and I simply waited. I had no plan, no real idea what to say, except to ask a single question, and if the answer was the one I wanted, then I would take it from there.

  In an interview between a journalist and a subject, there are usually only one or two questions that the journalist really wants an answer to. Of course, there will be a lot of Q and A in the interview, but the fate of the interview and the story usually rest on one or two questions. And it was not considered proper or smart to ask those important questions at the start. The key was to ask a good number of background questions first, establish a rapport with your subject. Then you built a momentum with the questions, each subsequent one bringing you closer to what you wanted to know, keeping in mind that you had to listen for anything that could lead to follow-up questions. When you believed the time was right, you asked the question that was key to the entire story.

  But when Francis came into the room and asked me, in all sincerity, if everything was okay, I didn’t wait for the right time. I had only one question to ask him.

  “Who is Lydia Alexandra?”

  “Who? What?” he stammered. At first he was confused, probably because I didn’t begin with polite niceties such as, Hey, how ya doing? Weird weather, isn’t it? Or, Man, can you believe the Oilers this year? And he probably wasn’t expecting someone to confront him with the name of the person who in all probability had been his first victim. He may have even forgotten the name since he had first killed her. “What the hell are you talking about, Leo?”

  “Lydia Alexandra. She was a native woman, more like a girl ’cause she was barely nineteen years old when police found her body in a field in 1988.” I slapped down an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy of the news story, one that I had downloaded from Infomart and printed off. “She was strangled and then dumped off, like a bag of garbage. But it didn’t end there. There were many others, but Lydia just happened to be the first one.”

  I slapped down another story, the one that Brent Anderson wrote, the side piece to my story that broke the idea that a serial killer might be on the loose in Edmonton, the story listing all the women who may have been victims. Lydia Alexandra’s photo was the first one, at the top of the page. “She had the same last name as you, and even though I’m not that knowledgeable about native culture, I know that Alexandra isn’t that common a name.”

  Francis gingerly picked up that copy, holding it like it was the most valuable thing in the world and stared at it. He muttered something I couldn’t make out, blinked tears from his eyes, and slumped back into his chair like a boxer collapsing onto his stool after the round in which he knows he had lost the fight.

  A wave of triumph surged through me—I was right, goddamn it, I was right!—but it lasted only a second. A rush of disappointment and dismay roared through after that, so I fell into a chair, also defeated and destroyed, almost physically sick, by the knowledge that this man, this Aboriginal elder, had killed a good number of women, many of them members of his own community. Talk about sacred wound.

  “Lydia,” he muttered. “Damn you, Lydia.”

  I had the answer to one question; he knew Lydia. But the first question still hung in the air. “Who is Lydia Alexandria?”

  It was like he had forgotten that I was there. He heard my voice and looked at me, a gaze of blank confusion for several seconds as he came back from wherever he had gone—the farmer’s field in which he’d dumped her body, or the yellow pickup truck in which he’d squeezed the life out of her—and returned to the present, only to be confronted by this strange and obviously crazy journalist that he had thought he had befriended but in the end turned out to be the Wendigo, a Cree monster that was once a normal human being but now ate human flesh, either literally or metaphorically.

  “Ly—” He started to say something but the words got caught in his throat. He eyes appealed to me for help, to ground him so he could get the words out, but he got no help from me. I remained silent; if he wanted to fill that silence and tell me the story, then he would have to do it on his own. If he didn’t, I would go to Detective Whitford and tell him what I knew. I would go to Whitford even if he did tell me.

  “Lydia,” he started again, this time completing the name, but the effort seemed to drain him. Several seconds passed before he finished the thought. “Was my niece.”

  Whitford was right about the connection between a serial kille
r and his first victim. But the knowledge that my hunch had turned out to be correct wasn’t gratifying. This was even worse than I had thought; she was not only a vulnerable member of his native community, she was a member of his family. The power of that information did not give me any pleasure. “So,”—I stumbled over the words—“you killed her.”

  “Yes,” he croaked, followed by a short nod. I wanted nothing more than to jump across the desk, bash the back of his head against the wall behind him, and strangle this piece of shit until every bit of his bodily fluids came pouring out of him in the agony of his death throes.

  A second later he shook his head, reading the anger in my expression. “But not in the way you are thinking,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who actually killed Lydia, but I was the one who put her in that person’s path. I was the one who could have helped her, who had the chance to help her but in the end didn’t. I dismissed her as a stupid native girl who was throwing her life, her family, and her culture away with drinking, drugs, prostitution. I condemned her as someone who was giving natives a bad name with her actions, and I thought that if she had a sense of what a good native person was, she could rise above it all. I could have helped her but instead I judged her, and because of that, she was killed.”

  I didn’t know which feeling was the strongest; the relief that Francis wasn’t the killer I was looking for, or the disappointment that Francis wasn’t the killer, and I had to keep on looking. But first I needed more information from Francis, I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I could turn this into a story about Lydia, about how a member of her family, an elder in her community, dismissed her as just another drunk native who needed to be judged and put away, dismissed and ignored, the way all of us in this country did. “So did she come to you for help and you told her to fuck off, or what?”

  He looked at me again, a long, vacant look that said that while all Aboriginal people may have that sacred wound he had talked about, for some this wound was deeper and fresher. He shook his head. “No, she didn’t come to me, per se. Her mother, my sister, God rest her soul, asked me to talk to her. Lydia had been on the streets for a few months, hooked on drugs, boozing it up, and the only way she could keep up with her addiction was to sell her body to the lowest bidder.

  “One day she ended up in the hospital and they talked about getting her clean, and since I was the wise uncle who was connected to the old Aboriginal ways, it was decided that I should talk to her and appeal to her as someone from her family but without the baggage that her mother, father, and other siblings carried. So in keeping with my image of the wise and helpful elder, I said yes and visited her at the hospital.”

  “Why was she in the hospital? Had she overdosed or something like that?”

  “If she had overdosed, then we could have done something to help her, we would have had evidence of a serious drug problem and could have had her committed in some way so she could have gotten the help she needed,” he said with a sigh. “But such was not the case. She had been in a traffic accident, hurt pretty bad with some broken bones and some internal injuries. Some john who had picked her up was drunk and ran his truck into a pole. Despite her injuries, she had been lucky because he had been killed.

  “She was in the hospital for about six weeks, and every few days I went to see her, tried to convince her to get the help she needed, but she refused. She had friends from the street smuggle in booze and drinks for her, and one day I came to see her, she had been vomiting up blood, and while it wasn’t life threatening the doctors and the nurses were still concerned. But when I talked to her about it, she laughed and said she was sick because she had had too much to drink. Even then she was laughing about it because she was drunk.

  “So I went off on her and told her she was just another drunk Indian who was ruining everything for the rest of us, and if she wasn’t going to listen to her family and her people, she didn’t deserve us. I told my sister that Lydia was too far gone, and the best thing for them to do was to cut their losses and focus on the children they had left.” He paused as the guilt settled onto him, loading him down with the weight of what he had done.

  He whispered the rest of the story. “Just over a month after she got out of the hospital, Lydia was dead, her body found in a field near Leduc. After her family buried her, I actually drove to that field, stared out at the openness of the space and the brightness of the night sky, the millions of stars blazing, something we never see in the city, and I thought it was a beautiful place to see when one was alive, but it was probably a very lonely place to die.”

  As I thought about the circumstances of how Lydia died and how she had gotten into the hospital in the first place, the chill that had appeared when I first found out about the number of dead women from the streets of Edmonton came back and clung to my bones.

  40

  I had to go into the hard copy section of the morgue but I found what I was looking for. I made two copies of the story, wrote a short note on each of them, explaining the connection between the story and some names involved in the story, and dropped it on my desk. If I didn’t come back, if they found me somewhere, they would find this on top of my desk and might make the same connection.

  Once I finished that piece of business, I signed out another car from the lot, gave a time a half hour later than the actual time, and drove out of downtown.

  I did a short drive by the house, checking to see if anybody was home, and on the off chance that I might spy a yellow pickup parked nearby. There was no pickup: I couldn’t expect such luck. But the house looked empty, the windows dark as the sun faded to the west. I made another tour, trying to pass myself off as someone lost.

  I parked around the corner half a block down, and pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and looked at it, but that was only for show. There was nothing on the paper but I was hoping to fool the neighbors. I slowly walked around the block until I got to the front of the house, saw there were no lights on so I was pretty sure that nobody was home.

  Should I get back into my car, go back to the paper, and leave things be? Or should I search the house for evidence that was probably not even there? Going back seemed to be the smart move, the one that made more sense, careerwise, lifewise. Walking away from this case and letting it die quietly would allow me to keep my job, allow me to continue in this life that I had created.

  But I couldn’t go back, and yet couldn’t walk away, either, even if doing so would have resulted in getting my family back and removing all the bad things that had happened in my life so far. I owed Grace that much. Her death had given me so much. Standing over her body in that field had put me on the path that resulted in some of the best stories I’d ever written, helping rebuild my career. And if I walked away from her and put that field behind me, she would never leave. She would sit at the back of my mind, calling to me, nagging at me, her face rising every time I wrote another story about a dead person. In fact, every time I wrote any kind of article, she would be there, reminding me that there was an unfinished piece back there, a story that I could have brought to an end but hadn’t. If I wanted to live my life in peace, I had to find some kind of peace for her.

  But the real reason I couldn’t go back to my new life was that the whole thing was a lie. I had not created anything new for myself. Sure, the places were different, I had a job, success, and money, but not much had truly changed. I had congratulated myself for beating the temptations of the casino, the cards, and the horses, but that didn’t mean I was no longer gambling. Every time I walked into a bank with my ball cap pulled low to hide my face, every time I scribbled the note on the back of a slip and politely handed it over to the teller, I was no different from when I sat down at a blackjack table or disappeared into the empty time of a VLT.

  I had gambled with money and lost my family and my career in the past, but I was still gambling. And I had played enough games to realize that the odds always favored the house. I had been on a winning streak for a while with the banks, but soon, today, tomor
row, next year, I would lose, and every incident that I thought was a win would actually become a loss as the authorities put two and two together and connected me with all the other similar robberies. And before that happened, I had to do something that meant something. If not to the world at large, then at least to me.

  There was no way I could turn my back on Grace, or Lydia, or any of the women who’d ended up in a farmer’s field.

  First, the garage. If there was an actual yellow pickup, if such a vehicle truly existed, then there was a good chance it was there. There was no window in the door so I entered the side yard, not checking to see if anybody was watching because that would look like I was worried about being seen. Instead I just walked in like I belonged, and if anybody saw, they would think that.

  Once inside the fenced area, I had plenty of cover from the thick pine trees surrounding the yard. The lawn, even at this time of year, was cleanly cut, no leaves or debris, just the brown grass ready and waiting for the first major snowfall of the year. There was also a deck that further wrapped around the house and it, too, was bare, the outdoor furniture probably stowed for the winter. I gave the house one quick look, waiting to see if I could spot any signs of life, but there was nothing. So I stepped up to the back garage door.

  I reached for the handle but then stopped. If it’s locked, I told myself, I will turn around and walk away. So far I was okay, no laws had been broken, but once I stepped into the garage of a private citizen, then all bets were off. Even if the door was unlocked, it was trespassing, more like breaking and entering, both criminal offenses.

  It was then that I realized that I had no plan of action, no idea what to do if I did find any evidence. Nothing I could find, save for a corpse or blood from the same, could be used in a court to convict anyone. Not even in something as simple as a newspaper article.