“Just a minute. I can’t quite get it.”
He tore away some more of the outer wall, reached in and brought out what looked to be a photograph. He took off his mask and blew on the item and then wished he hadn’t as he coughed away the dust and sneezed four times.
“What are you up to over there?” Jane asked. “Do I need to call an ambulance?”
Frank sneezed one last time.
“I’ve found something interesting.”
He took a clean white handkerchief out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the picture. It was in faded colour, unframed and curled at the edges. It was bigger than an ordinary snapshot, perhaps five by seven.
“What is it, Frank?”
“It’s a photograph.”
“Let’s see.”
Jane took off her gloves and whapped them on the side of her leg.
“Hmm. It looks kind of sixtyish,” she said.
There was a man, two women, a boy, and a girl. And they did look like their time was the sixties or early seventies, with their tie-dyed T-shirts and long flowing hair, even on the man. The women and girl sat on straight-backed chairs, the man behind them, standing. The boy stood beside the girl with his hand gripping her shoulder.
“Are they wearing costumes, do you think?” asked Jane. “Or…”
“It looks like a pose for an album cover,” Frank interrupted. “For a group with a girl singer or two.”
Jane put her gloves back on.
“I’ll leave you to it. I want to get this part over with today.”
She went back to her job and Frank continued staring at the photograph.
“Could you please turn the music down, Jane?”
Frank’s head was starting to hurt and he no longer liked the songs. There was too much death in the lyrics.
Jane turned it off.
“Are you all right, Frank?”
“I don’t know. There’s something weird going on in this picture.”
“What kind of weird?”
“The little girl might not be alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think she was dead when this was taken.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Jane set down her crowbar and walked over to where Frank was sitting on a crate with the photograph held gently in his hands. She peered over his shoulder.
“Look at her eyes,” Frank said.
“Odd.”
“Very.”
Jane pulled up another crate and sat down beside him, taking a closer look.
“I think everyone else is alive,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s her eyes that give her away, but I’d like to see this in a better light.”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other for a moment and then back at the picture. Frank turned it over. There was writing on the back, too faded to read. It looked like it had been written in pencil. A capital L for sure, and maybe a capital D, and 19 something, a date perhaps.
“I can probably get someone at work to figure out what this says.”
“You’re retired, Frank. You don’t go to work anymore.”
“I still have people there.”
His words sounded petulant to his own ears.
Jane stood up.
“Okay. You try to figure out what it says. And I’ll go to the library and find out who all has lived here.”
Frank suspected that she was humouring him, that she had no intention of going to the library, but he decided to try to take her words at face value and dismiss his mistrustful feelings.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, as he set the picture down carefully in a safe spot away from their activity. “Featherstone probably already knows who all lived here. We could just ask him before you go trudging off to the library. I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up today while we’re still here.”
They went back to work.
“Garth has a powerful magnifying glass at home,” Frank said, mostly to himself. “Maybe it will do the job of deciphering the words.”
“Maybe,” said Jane.
With a creaking rip Frank tore down the last of the drywall on the north-facing side of the house.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he whispered when he saw what was stashed behind it.
25
Norm Featherstone didn’t want to phone the police.
“It’ll hold everything up, Frank. They’ll probably want to turn this place into a crime scene or something and the house won’t get fixed for months, years even.”
“We have to call them in, Norm, for Christ’s sake,” Frank said. “For all intents and purposes they’re already here inasmuch as I’m one of them.”
“You’re retired,” Norm whined.
“So everyone keeps reminding me.”
Frank looked at Jane, who sat on a crate staring straight ahead.
She pulled out her phone.
“What’s the non-emergency police number, Frank?” Her voice quavered a little.
“Here, I’ll call.”
He took the tiny instrument from her hand.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t even see it, let alone punch in the correct numbers.”
Jane took the phone back and Frank recited the number. She then handed it over so he could do the talking.
Featherstone had arrived to see how the work was going just moments after Frank had made his second discovery. He was wearing a brown suit and he kept brushing at his clothes to keep from getting dusty.
“Let’s go outside and wait there,” Frank said after he made the call. “Somebody will be here shortly. We shouldn’t touch anything else till they’ve had a look.”
“See?” Norm said. “Already the work has stopped. This is going to turn into a renovation nightmare.”
Frank pointed Norm in the direction of the stairs.
“Careful there,” he said. “The railing’s a bit wobbly.”
Featherstone was a huge lumbering man, too big for the space he occupied. His harrumphing sounds made him seem even larger.
“A renovation nightmare,” he repeated to himself.
Frank and Jane sat on the grass in the shade of a Manitoba maple that had seen better days. The trunk was divided in two and one half of the tree leaned dangerously over the front street.
Norm wouldn’t sit. He hovered and fussed.
“I should get back to the office,” he said.
“Go then, Norm,” said Frank. “Jane and I will stay and deal with the police.”
“I can’t just leave you to it,” said Norm. “I have to be here to let them know that I don’t want them making a big production out of this.”
“They’ll do what they have to do,” said Frank. “Whether you’re here or not.”
They were quiet after Norm left, with their own musings on what they had seen upstairs.
There wasn’t a trace of flesh or skin on the skeleton; it was that old. But for Frank, the dusty faded nightgown and wisps of colourless hair turned her into someone who had been a living breathing being sometime in the last century. The hair wasn’t attached to anything; there was nothing left to hold it.
“I wonder how long she’s been there,” he said.
“A long, long time,” said Jane.
An elderly woman walking her French bulldog stopped to stare at the house. The dog stared too and began to bark.
“Quiet!” the woman said in a stern loud voice.
The dog obeyed her and sat down, adjusting itself on its haunches.
“It’s good to see some care going into the old place,” said the woman.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Frank stood up and bent over to hold out his hand to the little dog.
“Have you been acquainted with the people who lived here over the years?” he asked.
The bulldog licked the offered hand tentatively and then stationed itself next to Frank. Its ears were very tall.
“Some, yes,”
said the woman. “Not recently, mind you. And never well. I don’t pay much attention anymore. The last family I can recall was the Coulthards, way back when. A father and son, odd ducks, the two of them. And of course there were the Silks, but you probably know all about that.”
Something cold and amphibious touched the back of Frank’s neck. A toad’s nose. He and Jane looked at each other.
“After the Coulthards, people came and went. Renters. I don’t know who owned it. The place was even left vacant for years at a time. Till old Mrs. Turner, that is.”
“Mrs. Turner was the most recent occupant?” asked Frank.
The dog stared up at him and gently placed a paw on one of his feet.
“Yes. I guess it finally got too much for her,” the woman said and nodded toward the house. Sad.”
“I was just saying to my partner here that it seems a sad house,” Frank said.
He got out a little notebook that he carried in the back pocket of his jeans and a pen that he carried in the front pocket of his work shirt.
“Coulthard, you said?”
He tried not to sound like a policeman.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Is that C-O-U-L-T-H-A-R-D?”
In one of the recesses of his brain a faraway bell rang with the merest hint of wrongdoing attached to it.
“That’s right. Are you doing some checking into the history of the place?”
“Yes, something like that. I’m Frank Foote, by the way, and this is my work partner, Jane Haughtry.”
Jane stood up to shake the woman’s hand.
“I’m Ann Beresford and I know who you are, Frank. I knew your parents quite well.”
“Mrs. Beresford! I’m sorry, it’s been such a long time.”
“Yes, well…for goodness sake, Tina, get off the man’s foot,” the woman said to the dog.
“It’s okay,” said Frank. “Mrs. Beresford, what was it about the Coulthards that made them odd ducks, as you called them?”
The old woman was quiet for a moment. Her eyes darted about, wouldn’t settle. “They kept to themselves was all, nothing all that odd in that, is there? The same could be said of me these days.”
Frank doubted that. Old Lady Beresford, as they used to call her, had always been known as a talker. A trait such as that wasn’t likely to lessen over the years.
“They kept to themselves,” she said again, “and then they disappeared without so much as a how-do-you-do.”
“When was that?” asked Frank.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “A long time ago. Trudeau was our prime minister. Nixon was their president. Those days. Why all the questions?’
“Just wondering, Mrs. Beresford,” he said. “Just wondering.”
He wanted their conversation to be over. He knew where she lived if he wanted to speak to her again and he didn’t want to confide in her at this point.
The dog leapt up when Frank gently shifted his foot.
“Hold your horses, Tina,” Mrs. Beresford said.
She wasn’t ready to go anywhere, but the dog strained heavily against her leash.
“I guess she’s found something more interesting to poke around at,” Frank said. “It was nice to see you, Mrs. Beresford.”
“And to meet you,” said Jane.
The old woman shuffled off without any parting words — something you could get away with when you got to be her age, Frank thought. But it irritated him, nonetheless. He couldn’t picture ever being so old that he wouldn’t have the manners to say goodbye in response to two well-meaning grown-ups.
“Did you see her hands, Frank?” Jane said when Mrs. Beresford was beyond hearing distance.
“Pardon?”
“The hands on the girl upstairs,” Jane said. “They looked like claws.”
“Oh gosh, I thought you were talking about Mrs. Beresford.”
“No. The girl upstairs.”
They both sat down again beneath the branches of the maple. There were overgrown hedges along two sides of the yard and at the front a scruffy mess where someone had done a poor job of chopping down another one.
“I was thinking of her as a woman, not a girl,” said Frank.
“Oh. I don’t know,” said Jane. “She’s just so small, I guess. I thought girl.”
“Her nightie looks older than girl age.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Jane. “Anyway, her hands look kind of claw-like.”
“Well, they would, wouldn’t they, being reduced to bare bones?”
Jane shivered. “They were curled inward as though they had actually been doing some clawing.”
“Maybe that’s just the way they went after all these years. I know burn victims’ hands are known to do that. Hell, I’ve seen it.”
“I think that girl was buried alive behind the wall and spent her last hours or even days trying to claw her way out.”
“Oh, God, Jane.”
“Well, what do you think, Frank?”
He pictured the brittle bones inside the rags that were once a nightgown. He preferred to think of the naked teeth as a smile — the smile of someone who was buried behind a wall, sure, but not before she had died a peaceful death in her bed. Couldn’t a mother or brother have gently placed her there, someone who couldn’t bear to have her taken away and buried in the cold ground? Granted, the person who put her there would have had to be insane, but in a cloudy, innocent way.
“Frank?”
“I don’t know, Jane. I just don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.”
Frank shuddered as he caught a glimpse of what Jane had described. He wanted to know that it wasn’t true, but it could be. Far worse than that could be.
26
Two policemen drove up at no miles per hour and sat for a few minutes before they slowly got out of the car.
“Finally,” Jane said. “What the hell were they waiting for? A song on the radio to be over?”
“Well, it’s not what you’d call an emergency, is it?”
Frank found himself getting annoyed with Jane. He couldn’t help feeling defensive when anyone criticized the Winnipeg Police Department, even though he had retired nearly four years earlier and had never personally received a complaint from the public in his thirty-year career.
Also, he hated her buried-alive theory.
“Maybe you should just call it a day,” he said. “I can stick around here and answer any questions that come up.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss one second of this for all the chocolate in Manitoba.”
“Hey, Frank,” said the older of the two cops. “Having a little trouble hanging up the holster?”
“Hi, Chas.” Frank sighed and a small mallet, the type doctors use to check knee reflexes, began to tap away at his left temple.
He introduced Jane to Patrol Sergeant Chas Sampson and he, in turn, introduced his partner, Brad May, before they all headed inside the house and up the stairs.
All four of them gazed down at the creature in the dusty nightgown.
“Holy o liftin’ Jesus,” said Brad.
“He’s from the east coast,” Chas explained. “He talks funny.”
It was true what Jane had said about the claw-like appearance of the hands, but the body looked to be at rest, no sign of frenzy. She was placed here after death. Frank was sure of it.
Chas was on the phone, contacting the necessary others.
“This body has been here a very long time,” Brad said. “Decades, I’d guess.
“Do you own the place?” he asked, taking in both Frank and Jane with his question.
“No,” they said in unison.
Frank explained about Norm Featherstone and gave Brad his contact information.
“He’s going to flip out if the work has to be held up for any length of time,” Jane said.
Frank wished she hadn’t said that.
“Well, too bad for Norm Featherstone,” said Brad.
And Frank wish
ed Brad hadn’t said that. It was the type of statement that made the public angry with the police — just a few careless words. He looked at Jane but read nothing in her face. She was a real cool customer, as his daughter Sadie was fond of saying. She thought a lot of people were real cool customers.
Chas was off the phone now and crouched down beside the skeleton.
“This is a fairly tight burial spot,” he said. “I’m surprised there isn’t more of a mummification thing going on.”
When Frank crouched beside him his knees cracked loudly and he grunted involuntarily.
“You sound like you could use a little WD-40 on those joints,” said Chas.
“I guess with it being the north wall and no insulation to speak of,” Frank said, “she didn’t have a heck of a lot of protection from the elements.”
“A cold burial site,” said Jane. She held tightly to her arms, hugging them against her body.
“Okay,” said Chas, “I think we should back off now till the forensics people get here.”
He stood up.
Frank peered in closely at the little being. He wanted to touch her softly, maybe on her forehead, but he knew he couldn’t do that.
“Okay, Frank,” said Chas. “We’re going outside now to wait.” He wrote furiously in his notebook and then herded the others downstairs.
Frank didn’t want to leave, but was in no position to argue.
“Shouldn’t somebody guard her?” he asked.
Chas smirked. “We can guard her from outside.”
Frank wanted to drill the smirk through Chas’s head to the other side.
They stood around, not speaking, waiting for the others to show up. With a suspicious death such as this obviously was, it was necessary to call in a staff sergeant, which is what Frank had been during the most interesting years of his career, before he was promoted to inspector.
“Who did you say the owner is, Frank?” Chas asked.
“Norm Featherstone. I’ve given Brad his particulars.”
Brad was leaning against an ash tree on the boulevard, staring at the house.
“What do you know about him, Frank?” said Chas. “How long has he owned the place?”
“Not long. He just bought it this last winter to fix up for his daughter.”
“Does he know about this?” Chas nodded toward the house.
The Girl in the Wall Page 11