The Girl in the Wall

by Alison Preston

  “He could have done it at the beginning of a winter and left the body to freeze inside that north wall,” said Jane.

  “It froze and thawed for a lot of years.”

  “He could have done it years before he moved away for all we know.”

  “One of the Coulthards.”

  “Yes. The father or the son. Mrs. Beresford said they were both odd ducks.”

  “Since when do we put any stock in Mrs. Beresford’s judgments?”

  “Since when don’t we? Do you know something about her that I don’t, Frank?”

  “No, it’s just... These are quite the assumptions, Jane.”

  “I’m just guessing, Frank, but they’re good guesses, if you ask me.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s all speculation. For one thing, we’ll have to see what they come up with in terms of how long the body has been deceased. And that may be hard to do with nothing but a skeleton and a nightgown gone to dust.”

  Jane was quiet and Frank felt unable to step up his enthusiasm. He waited for her to decide to hang up, but she didn’t.

  Something niggled: a hint of wrongdoing deep in his past.

  Jane started in on a different tack.

  “Maybe you don’t remember them because the kid went to a different school than you did. A Catholic school, say, like St. Thomas More or Holy Cross.”

  Frank wanted her to shut up.

  “I might remember something,” he said. “I need to think.”

  “Maybe the Coulthard boy went to Precious Blood.”

  “I’ll call you back, Jane. I need to go now.”

  Frank hung up while she was still talking.

  The Coulthard boy, the Coulthard man. The boy, for sure. But whatever it was, it was gone.

  The cat, Shadow, rolled over on his back and Frank rubbed his belly. He felt as if his brain was wrapped in gauze that smothered his thought processes. Information had to work too hard to enter the dim world inside and ideas were squelched before they could take on shapes and develop edges, let alone make their way out of the morass.

  He wondered what was happening to him. It couldn’t just be the result of early retirement. Maybe he’d had a stroke and hadn’t realized it. He knew that happened sometimes. People had little strokes, so small as to be unnoticeable, but they added up until you were a moron — a word from his youth and one that Garth had latched on to when he was a boy. Frank didn’t feel ready to be a moron just yet.

  When Shadow lost interest in him, he called Jane back.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked.

  “Just a sec, there’s someone at my door.”

  He waited while he heard voices talking quietly on the other end of the phone.

  “I have to go, Frank,” Jane said. “It’s one of the forensics people wanting to talk to me.”

  “Is it a woman?”

  “Yes. Judith Webster is what she calls herself.”

  “I’m coming over,” Frank said and hung up before Jane could respond.

  He walked over to where she lived in one of the Spanish Court bungalows. It wasn’t far. Walking briskly it took him nine minutes and that included brushing his teeth and putting on shoes.

  As he approached the pink stucco buildings he saw the van pull away. Jane wouldn’t have had any more to tell them than he had. She was just closing her door when she saw him headed her way.

  “Frank!”

  “Jane.”

  “Come in.”

  “You come out. It’s beautiful. We can walk down Lloyd to the river, see what’s going on over there.”

  Jane closed the door behind her. A tabby cat slipped out first, darted across Ferndale and almost to the top of an ornamental cherry tree.

  “Millie came out,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  “You let her out?”

  “Sometimes. Didn’t you used to let Hugh out?”

  “Not in later years,” said Frank. “Not since the bylaw. Aren’t you worried she’ll get hit by a car?”

  “Yeah. But she has so much fun outside. I let her escape from time to time.”

  They crossed Walmer and then walked down Ferndale to Highfield.

  Frank liked that Jane didn’t feel she had to do anything before closing the door behind her. She didn’t need to put on lipstick, comb her hair, or change her shoes. She didn’t even lock her door. Maybe she should have done that.

  “Do you miss Hugh?” asked Jane.

  “A lot,” said Frank.

  They turned up Highfield to Lloyd.

  “You should get a new cat,” Jane said.

  “Maybe.”

  The house seemed still compared to earlier in the day, but the yellow tape hadn’t been taken down and there was a lone patrolman sitting on the steps. A few kids hung about, shouting the odd question at him.

  “Was there really a skeleton like they said on the news?” asked one.

  “Did it come to life?” asked another.

  “What’s your name?” asked a little girl who couldn’t have been more than five.

  The patrolman walked around the side of the house into the backyard. They could hear quieter questions being tossed at him from the lane.

  “What did Judith Webster ask you?” Frank said.

  They kept on walking.

  “Nothing much. Just what all I touched and if I took anything from the scene away with me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I touched everything but the body itself and took nothing but a lot of dust.”

  “Did they ask you about me?”

  Jane stopped and stared at him.

  “Frank, I’m worried about you. Why on earth would they ask me about you? Do you not think it more likely that they’d ask you about you?”

  “I guess I’m feeling a little paranoid about having taken that picture.”

  “And well you should be.”

  “When I went back there with Sadie this afternoon they asked me the same questions they asked you.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “You lied?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe, I guess.”

  “Oh, Frank.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  They walked toward the river, past Mrs. Beresford’s place, across Lyndale Drive to the park: Dog Poo Park, as it was known to some. They found a bench and sat. Some rowers glided by. Their trainer hollered at them from another boat. It was jarring, but there were already lawn mowers ruining the quiet all over the neighbourhood. It was not a peaceful evening.

  “So, was it the Silk house like Mrs. Beresford said?” asked Frank.

  “Yes, it was,” said Jane. “The Silks lived there from 1946 to 1953 and then someone named McMicken who didn’t last long, just till ’56, when the Coulthards moved in. Before the Silks it was the Parsons and it looks like they were the original owners.

  “Okay, so it was the Parsons, the Silks, the McMickens, the Coulthards, and then who?”

  “Schmitke,” said Jane. “Someone named Schmitke. He must have been the owner during all those rental years that Mrs. Beresford talked about. Then it was Turner. She’s the old woman who moved out just recently.”

  “Okay. And now Featherstone.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frank chuckled.

  “He’s really hating this. That’s the one part of it I’m enjoying.”

  “What’s up with you, Frank?”

  “Nothing. I’ve just decided to start expressing myself more honestly.”

  He didn’t know if this was true.

  “She was so tiny,” said Jane. “The girl in the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t imagine that her disappearance caused much of a stir.”

  “Because she was tiny?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You’ve never heard of her or any curious disappearances around h
ere and you’ve lived here forever.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve heard of her. We still don’t know who she is. And it was long ago, Jane. Maybe it was a big deal at the time.”

  “No. You’d have heard the stories.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You heard the Silk story when you were barely born and that doesn’t hold a candle to this in terms of weirdness. And the stranger the story, the more likely it is to get out and find its place in the world.”

  “Another of your theories?”

  “Well, I think that’s more like a fact, actually.”

  A young couple walked by with a tiny dog on the end of a leash. The woman was hugely pregnant. She smiled at them, apologetically, it seemed to Frank, as though she were saying, “Sorry about my girth; sorry our dog resembles a rat.”

  Frank smiled back at her, wanting to let her know it was okay. Both things were okay.

  “Much as I don’t like the idea,” he said, “I think we should talk to Mrs. Beresford again. She must have lived here when it happened.”

  “Or at least we should mention her to the cops as someone they should talk to,” said Jane. “I don’t know how involved we should get, especially since you stole the photograph.”

  “I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”

  “Yes, you have. You’ve stolen a photograph from a crime scene.”

  Frank stood up.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Beresford told us everything she knew about the Coulthards,” said Jane. “She didn’t give a satisfactory answer as to why they were odd ducks.”

  “What would have been satisfactory?” asked Frank.

  “I’m not sure, but something more than keeping to themselves and then disappearing.”

  “Are you going to pass those speculations on to the police when you mention her to them?”

  “Oh, Frank. You know I’ll do neither.”

  “Let’s walk some more,” he said.

  They headed in the direction of the rowing club and passed many more dogs and their walkers.

  “I knew a boy who died,” Frank said. “Actually he was a young man by the time he died. I didn’t know him well, he was four years older than me, but I know he had a little sister who was very odd.”

  Again with the niggling feeling in where his memories were stored. There was something just out of reach in there behind his eyes, and then it was gone. He wished he could point his eyes inward, have a look around.

  “The sister was about my age but I didn’t really know her. She failed a couple of times and was never in my class, unless maybe in grade one, but I don’t remember. There were so many of us then: two thirty-kid classes in each grade, sometimes more. Not like now when they can’t even cobble together a baseball team from the whole neighbourhood.

  “Anyway, she took pictures of dead people,” Frank went on. “That was her job.”

  “What?” said Jane. “What the hell kind of a job is that?”

  “There seemed to have been a call for it back then, for a while, anyway. I don’t know if it still happens. Maybe people just do it themselves now, since everyone except me carries a camera as a matter of course.”

  “I don’t,” said Jane.

  “There’s not a camera attached to that thing in your pocket?”

  “I don’t have anything in my pocket.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t. Well, I have a lozenge.”

  Clouds had moved in. Frank hoped for rain. Maybe it would drive some of the leaf-blowing fiends indoors.

  “Are you thinking of her in relation to the photograph?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Frank. “It reminded me of her.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Jane said. “Dressing people up after they’re dead and taking pictures. I was under the impression it was a southern thing. You know, maybe a New Orleansy sort of thing.”

  “Well, in the late sixties, for this particular girl, it was a Winnipeg thing. Maybe not the dressing-up part, but taking pictures at the request of families.”

  “What became of her?”

  “I don’t know. I do know that she went on living with her parents after George died. That was her brother’s name: George. She was young, just twenty or so; she wouldn’t have had much choice. But as I remember it she was very dependent on him, so it must have been really hard for her. I don’t know if she kept up with the picture taking after that or not. As I recall, the parents were fairly useless in one way or another.”

  “Useless how?”

  “Well, the dad was pretty removed, I think, and old for a dad, and the mum was one of those types that didn’t leave the house. No one ever saw her.”

  “Probably a drunk.”

  “Possibly, but I think there was more to it than that.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “Yes. I know there were grandparents on the mother’s side who were around when the kids were very young. They lived a couple of streets over from George and Morven, on Ferndale near the river.”

  “Morven?”

  “Yeah, I know. It was a terrible name to be saddled with.”

  “That poor, poor kid.”

  “Yes. Anyway the grandparents moved away early on, retired out west or down south or somewhere.”

  “What the hell kind of name is Morven?” asked Jane.

  “It’s a Scottish name,” said Frank. “I’ve got one in my past somewhere. A great-great-great Aunt Morven. Maybe not even that many greats.”

  He thought about the photograph. It didn’t fit the scenario he had been forming in his mind — that it had something to do with the odd girl from his youth, Morven Rankin. The picture wasn’t the type of thing she did, as far as he knew, but he’d be the first to admit he didn’t know much — only what he had gathered in bits and pieces from George and one or two others in the neighbourhood.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that the picture was behind the same wall in the same house where he found the skeleton. There had to be a connection between the two.

  “How the heck many people go around taking pictures of the dead, especially the dressed-up dead propped in sitting or standing positions?” Frank asked.

  “Not very many, I’d venture,” said Jane. “Let’s sit again.”

  They’d come to another bench, this one recently installed in memory of a man and his dog who used to walk there. Frank recognized their names.

  He wished that Jane didn’t know about the photograph, but it was too late to do anything about it. Plus, he wanted to discuss it with her, the date on it, how he was having trouble reconciling the posing with George’s sister. The way he remembered it, she went to hospitals at the request of families to capture one last likeness for them. It wasn’t Frank’s notion of a good idea, but he could almost understand it.

  This posing thing wasn’t her style. Somehow, he was sure of it. Someone else must have taken the photograph. Perhaps there was more than one person taking pictures of people after death, with two entirely different approaches.

  Frank glanced at Jane. He figured she was thinking about turning him in for what she considered theft from a crime scene. That would be what she was pondering right now in her silence and her need to sit. Maybe he could return the picture to the site after all the commotion died down, hide it somewhere the police could conceivably have neglected to look and then rediscover it. But how could he be sure of a place where they hadn’t looked? Maybe he could dig a hole in the yard or find a narrow opening in one of the grand old trees that could have protected it through the decades. He knew immediately that neither of those plans would work for practical reasons. And most policemen weren’t idiots. But there was always his idea of having found the picture on another day last week. He could still be held accountable but not as seriously so.

  “I’m becoming less and less surprised that no one found her,” Jane said, “with the house being vacant for years and a fair distance away from its neighbours.”

  Frank was
so pleasantly surprised at her chosen topic that he was at a loss for words for a moment or two. She hadn’t been lost in thoughts of reporting him. Or maybe she had been and was now covering it up. His own mistrustful thoughts twisted his guts into tight knots. If this was the way it was going to go, if this was the way he was going to be, he wanted no part of his own future.

  “Frank?”

  He looked at her sideways to see what her face looked like. It was open and fresh and questioning. There was nothing sinister about it.

  “You’d be amazed,” Frank said, taking as deep a breath as he could manage, “how much of a stink a small being can produce.”

  He hated to remember the times he had experienced it first-hand.

  “But still,” said Jane, “it wouldn’t be as bad as if it had been a tall, hulking, morbidly obese man.”

  “No,” Frank said. “Not that bad.”

  “Let’s walk,” said Jane.

  The river was busy. The hollering rowing boss went by again.

  “Why do rowers have to yell?” said Frank. “It should be a peaceful activity.”

  He wished that the head rower would have a massive heart attack and die in mid-shout.

  “What do you think of that custom, Frank? Taking pictures of the dead, I mean.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine personally wanting such a thing, a photograph of someone who I loved that died. I’d end up looking at it so much I’d go crazy with it or not enough so that when I did see it, it would scare the bejesus out of me. It’s sure not for me, but I can see a different type of person thinking it’s a good idea. Maybe a mother from Victorian England who lost her only child at a young age and had no other pictures of her. I mean, in the olden days there weren’t a lot of photographs, were there? If it wound up being the only chance a family had to have a picture of their baby, I can almost see it. It definitely seems eerier to me, though, when the person is posed alongside live people.”

  “Yeah. I don’t like it,” Jane said. “May I see it again?”

  “You can see it if you stop thinking of it as stolen and promise me that you’re not going to report it or me to the police.”

  “I can’t help the way I think, but I won’t report you or it.”

  “This is no idle promise,” said Frank.

  “I know.”

  Jane put her hand on her heart and said, “Hope to die.”