by Vicki Grant
A different voice. “Oh, yeah. Ha-ha. I’m used to the mess. I just need a couple of documents to get the estate settled. I’ll find them.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then. I gotta check on a leak in 407. Back in a few minutes.”
The door closed. Whoever was left behind waited a few seconds before he swore, sighed, then started walking around the room.
It was a very small closet we were in. Raylene and I had to stand belly-to-belly just to fit. I could feel her boobs rise every time she breathed and her heart pound when the guy walked over to our side of the room and her whole body shake when it looked like he was going to open the closet door.
Then I heard his knees click and figured he was just looking at the files on the floor in front of the closet. Paper rustling, more swearing, more creaking bones. He seemed to move away.
I could feel Raylene relax. She didn’t actually change positions. She just, I don’t know, sort of changed states, like in chemistry or something. She went from solid to almost liquid. Sort of melted a bit. I felt the way the crispy biscuit in the middle of the Twix bar must feel when the delicious, chocolatey coating envelops it.
Then Raylene hooked her baby finger around mine.
I considered the possibility that this was a mistake. Maybe she had a weird twitch that I’d never noticed before. But then her next finger hooked around mine too.
And then it was like dominoes or a waterfall or maybe spiders mating or something because all our fingers started entwining until that hand was done and then the other side too and then we just stood like that with our hearts bouncing off each other like hundreds of deranged ping-pong balls.
Sometime thereafter, the door slammed closed and the guy must have left.
CHAPTER 32
“Whaddya mean you didn’t hear that? How could you not hear that?” Suraj stuck his fingers through the louvres on the closet door and wiggled them at us. “This is hardly what you’d call a soundproof booth.”
Raylene and I were standing in the living room, conspicuously ignoring each other.
Suraj looked back and forth between the two of us, then his eyebrows dropped and his lips went flat. He let us squirm a moment before going, “Tell me you’re not serious. We’ve broken into a dead person’s apartment. We could be caught and dragged off in shackles at any moment and you’re . . .”
“Shackles?” Raylene whispered. “You’re exaggerating.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Fine. If it’s so bad, maybe you should just tell us what we missed so we won’t let it happen again.” Raylene was unshakeable. Another thing I liked about her.
Suraj ran his hand over his face and shook his head. “You know who it was, don’t you?”
Raylene went, “Wade?”
Suraj motioned close.
I went, “The waiter?”
He nodded.
“How do you know?”
“Unlike some people, I was paying attention. And I peeked while he was on his phone.”
“He was on his phone?” we both whisper-gasped.
“Now you’re grossing me out. Yes, he was on his phone. He called someone when he found Schmidt’s file.”
“He found Schmidt’s file?” My voice was back up in the pre-puberty range.
“Found it and took it. And that’s not all. He knows you’ve been here, Raylene.”
“Me? How does he know that?”
Suraj flicked her dress up off the floor with his foot.
Raylene scrunched up her face like that’s ridiculous. “How do you know he saw it? And even if he did, who’s to say he knew it was mine?”
“Oh, I know he saw it because, one, how could you not see it? What do you call this colour anyway? My eyes hurt just looking at it. And, two, had you been listening, you would have heard him say—I quote—‘The girl’s been here.’ Dot. Dot. Dot. ‘Yes. That girl. From the church parking lot. She left her dress.’ And then—this was my favourite part—‘I know. We’ll have to do something about that.’ No bloodthirsty laughter, but it was clearly implied.”
“Then what happened?” Raylene had gravitated towards me. We weren’t quite touching but close.
“The other guy opened the door—the super or whoever—and the waiter hung up. He grabbed the file, they made small talk, then they left. I waited a few minutes for my bowels to firm up, then I came over to check how you were doing in the honeymoon suite. I was relieved to see you were no worse for wear.”
“Yet,” I said.
“Oh, get a room.” Suraj air-gagged.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Raylene went, “Then what did you mean?”
“You saw the video. Albertina seriously hated this guy. Makes me think he did something really bad. Maybe would do it again.”
Suraj went pale, at least by his standards. “We should call the police.”
I said, “No. No police,” because after the fit she took in the Lorenzo’s parking lot, I knew Raylene wouldn’t want police (and, also, because that’s what five minutes in a closet with her does to a person’s brain).
Suraj looked at me like I was nuts. This was clearly not the world-class chicken he’d come to know and love.
I said, “You want to go to jail? Think about it. How do we explain how we know all this stuff? We’re the ones trespassing. We’re the ones who stole her car.”
“Hey! I didn’t steal any car.”
“Oh, please, Suraj. You’ve seen Law & Order. Aiding and abetting. Accessory to the fact. Theft over five thousand . . .”
“That car’s not worth five thousand!”
“Doesn’t matter. Your fingerprints are all over it. And anyway, if Albertina thought the police could deal with this, don’t you think she’d have called them herself?”
The answer was no, but Suraj didn’t need to know that. The motion was defeated.
Raylene whispered, “We’ve got to find out what this Wade guy did, then figure out where to go from there. There must be a record of what he was up to somewhere.”
“Such as?” Suraj said.
“I have no idea.”
But I did. Or at least I knew someone who might.
CHAPTER 33
On the plus side, Suraj had to work the next day and Dad was busy interviewing gay uncles for an upcoming bridal shower. It would be just the two of us.
On the minus side, Dalton couldn’t get his limo driver at such short notice. We’d have to find our own way.
On the life-flashing-before-your-eyes side, Raylene had that all figured out. We’d take Albertina’s car.
It was terrifying, although I have to admit, she was getting better. (Given that terrifying was an improvement, you can appreciate how badly she drove before.) She’d eased up a little on the brake and finally clued in to what rear-view mirrors were for.
“In my defence,” she pointed out, “you rarely have to change lanes on a tractor.”
I wanted to ask her about tractors and how she knew how to drive one and see what that would tell me about her life, but I’d promised I wouldn’t. The night before, we’d collected a bunch more random files from Albertina’s apartment, then walked Suraj home. We talked him into storing them at his place for safekeeping—not easy to do given his fondness for conspiracy theories—then found ourselves alone again. I let her lead the way, and pretty soon we were in front of my apartment building.
“I’m new to this,” I said, “but isn’t the guy supposed to walk the girl home?”
“What century are you from?” she said.
“I’d like to walk you home. I’d like to know where home is for you.”
“Yeah, well, too bad. A girl has to have her secrets.”
“What century are you from?”
“Seriously,” she said. “Would you quit bugging me about that?”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, I’m leaving. Like, for good. If you do, I’ll stay and maybe we can get to the bottom of this Schmidt thing together.
Deal?”
What was I going to say? “Deal.”
“Shake?” She held out her hand.
“No.” It was like a giant leaf blower had cleared out my insides and I was totally hollow. “Kiss?”
“Deal,” she said, although it didn’t actually happen. I’d just figured out what to do with my arms when she went, “That car.”
“What car?”
“That one.” She pointed at a black sedan with tinted windows suddenly speeding up past us. “It’s following us.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I saw it at the funeral. It’s Schmidt’s.”
“Sure?”
“Would you quit saying that? Like I have to be one-hundred-percent positive about everything? Go with your gut. That’s what Albertina would do. And my gut is telling me that was Schmidt, or at least one of his henchmonkeys. I think I should take a cab.”
“I think you should too,” I said, figuring we had that settled and we could get back to the business at hand, i.e., the kiss, but just then, out of nowhere, a stupid cab appeared and Raylene threw out her arm and it stopped and she hopped in, and the only kiss I got—if you could even call it that—was a little brush on the cheek before she slammed the door and zoomed away. I get more action from the old ladies at baptisms.
I wasn’t going to blow my chances of collecting on that kiss by bringing up her family now.
Instead, I told her what I’d found out after she’d left that night and I’d googled Schmidt.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Like, nothing?!”
I had to physically turn her head back towards the road.
“Well, not totally nothing. But not much more than we got from that file. He grew up here. Got an MBA from University of New Hampton. Married. Divorced. Started a bunch of businesses. Sold some. I checked out their websites too. They all looked, I don’t know, normal, least to me. I couldn’t find anything bad about him anywhere.”
“Well, Albertina must have. Someone’s got to know something.”
“Which is exactly why I’m risking my life right now by letting you drive me to Dalton’s.”
Raylene laughed. We both did.
There aren’t many times in life when you’re simultaneously ecstatic and absolutely convinced you’re going to die, but this was one of them. We were careening up the highway towards the prison. I was giving Raylene directions and watching for oncoming traffic and feeding her little bits of granola bar in the hopes that she’d keep both hands on the wheel.
She pulled up at the end of the prison gates. She fixed my tie and promised to drive safely—“or at least safely-ish”—then headed off to the Chow Hound Café in town. She’d wait there while I grilled Dalton, then come back for me in about an hour.
The guards were surprised to see me without Dad. I had to fabricate an excuse on the spot to explain, a) why he wasn’t there, and b) why he couldn’t know I was. I was proud of myself. Papa D and I were apparently planning a surprise forty-fourth birthday party for him. McInerney and Whitton didn’t even seem to question the fact that Dalton wouldn’t be able to join the festivities until Dad was well into his fifties.
I told Dalton the whole sad dead-Albertina-sleazy-Schmidt story. (The great thing about having a convict for a “grandfather” is that you can’t shock him. I could have confessed I’d just held up a preschool fudge sale with a flame-thrower and he wouldn’t have batted an eye.) He leaned back in his chair with his hands cradling his basketball-belly and listened quietly until I was done.
“You’re in trouble,” he said.
“You know Schmidt?”
“No, not personally, but I remember the case. Vaguely anyway. Late seventies maybe, early eighties. Some sort of investment scam. He’d talk some poor sucker into investing with him, then get that sucker to talk his friends into investing, who’d talk their friends into investing, et cetera, et cetera. Only problem was the company they thought they were buying into didn’t actually exist. People lost their life’s savings. They took Schmidt to court, but, as I recall, he got off on some type of loophole. Just a young whippersnapper at the time but a clever guy. I shouldn’t say this—I gotta at least try to look remorseful if I ever want to get out of here—but I kind of admired him.”
“So why am I in trouble then?”
“Well, in my experience, there are two types of people who get into this line of business. Greedy idiots such as myself, who end up in jail. And greedy psychopathic idiots such as Mr. Schmidt, who end up rich. He’s not a nice man. Be careful. I wouldn’t want to have to hire myself a new grandson.”
“What about Albertina Legge? Did you know her?”
He polished his bald spot with his hand and thought about it. “Nope. Isn’t ringing a bell. And that’s a name I’d remember too. Look. I’ll check out the law books in the library here and see what I can come up with. I’ll even wave my standard prison wages of $6.90 a day, considering you’re family and all.”
“Email me when you find something?”
“Email you? What do you think this is, boy? The Google campus? High tech around here means an eversharp pencil. This’ll be coming to you old school. Watch your mail box.”
I thanked him.
“And your back. I repeat, Schmidt’s not the type of guy you want to mess with.”
CHAPTER 34
I told Raylene everything Dalton said. There was a little erratic driving until I managed to calm her down, but otherwise the ride back was relatively uneventful. Parking was a different matter. She mixed up the accelerator with the brake and rammed into a lamp pole at the far end of the supermarket parking lot. We lurched into reverse, then the engine coughed once and died.
“Oops,” Raylene said when she realized the car wasn’t going to start again. “Oh, well. Least you won’t have to worry about me driving anymore.”
Good thing. Only so much my nerves could take. I was freaked out enough with Dalton calling Schmidt a psycho.
“Hungry?” she said.
“Yeah, but I got to go. It’s pulled-pork poutine day.”
“A well-known national holiday.”
“No, Dad and I always go for poutine on Mondays.”
She leaned against the car door and looked at me funny. “Why do you always say it like that?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“‘Dad.’”
“That’s his name.”
“No. You always say it like . . . ‘Dad.’” She made air quotes.
“It’s that obvious?”
She did that duh thing with her face. I laughed.
“You know, weird, but I actually used to call him Will until I was about eight or something. Then my mother tried to get custody of me and we thought it would be a good idea if I called him Dad. Make him sound more legit. Impress the judge or something.”
“We?”
“What?”
“We thought it would be a good idea to call him Dad? What’s an eight-year-old doing making a decision like that?”
“Bingo! That’s why he’s Dad-In-Quotation-Marks. I love him and everything but. Well. If you knew him, you’d understand.”
“I’d like to.”
“What?”
“Get to know him.”
“Right.” I tossed a granola crumb at her. “I can’t even ask where you’re from, but you want to do the whole meet-the-parents thing with me? You got some nerve.”
“Yeah . . .” She tossed it back. “You’re right. That’s not fair. Even by my standards.”
I should have realized that had been too easy.
We arranged to meet the next day to figure out what was up with Janie and the daycare—we still hadn’t a clue why Albertina had called her “the big one”—then we got out of the car. I waited until absolutely everybody in the parking lot, on the road, or in the supermarket was looking the other way, then I took Raylene’s hand. She tilted her head and smiled at me. I figured that meant it was okay to kiss her.
Then my phone rang.
I tried to ignore it but 5:45? On a Monday? It would be Dad. If I turned the phone off, he’d go Code Red on me. If I didn’t answer and let it ring, there’s no way my lips would actually have puckered. Or maybe unpuckered. Whatever. (I figured for this to work, I needed them to do both.)
“Ah. Sorry.” I shrugged. “It’s DIQM.”
It took her a second to figure it out. She laughed but didn’t let go of my hand. “Go on. Take it.”
Dad said he was running about ten minutes behind. He made me promise to get to the restaurant on time or we wouldn’t get in. “I’m going,” I said.
“Don’t be late,” he said. Monday is coupon night. It’s busy. He gets nervous.
Raylene screamed, “Hi, Mr. Redden! Helloooo!” and I tried to shake her loose and walk away, but she really wasn’t letting go of my hand now.
Dad went, “Who’s that?” and I said, “Nobody,” which got a big guffaw out of both of them. “Just some person I met at—”
Raylene grabbed the phone and bolted. Before I could grab it back, she’d managed to introduce herself and wrangle an invitation to dinner at our place for the next night. She shouted, “I’ll bring dessert!”
“Soooo . . . now I know what you’ve been up to.” Dad sounded authentically fatherly for, like, the first time ever.
“Yeah. Whatever.” I hung up and tried my best to glare at Raylene.
“What?” she said. “It’ll be fun.”
“You can’t be trusted,” I said.
“You just figured that out?”
She laughed, so eventually I laughed too. She was holding my hand again and maybe even blushing a bit, and I seriously considered kissing her then, but there was an old couple right beside us now, putting groceries into their car at a speed of approximately one can of creamed corn per minute, and it would have been too embarrassing.
And anyway, Raylene still kind of scared me.
I gave her a little wave and I walked away.
CHAPTER 35