The Girl in the Wall

by Alison Preston

  “Maybe for some people it is,” said Frank.

  “Hmm,” said Mrs. Mortimer.

  He smiled at her. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I’m not sure what I believe about anyone else,” she said. “I only know about me. When I followed my instincts that day at the Women’s Pavilion and took those pictures, it worked out very badly for me.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t an instinct so much as just a reaction,” said Frank.

  He stood up.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked.

  “Let me walk you to where you were going,” he said.

  She supposed he didn’t know what the difference was.

  “I’m not sure where that was going to be,” she said.

  “Well, let’s go to the river then.”

  Frank paid for their drinks and they headed across St. Mary’s Road at the lights.

  Mrs. Mortimer kept expecting Frank to ask her why she hadn’t come forward, but he didn’t. As they headed down Coniston, she stopped and turned towards him.

  “Do you want me to come forward to help put a name to the girl?”

  Frank touched her arm and they continued walking.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I have to ponder it, but I’m quite sure it won’t help anyone.”

  “If you want me to, I will. It’s the going-to-jail part that scares me. That’s what’s kept me from coming forward. I don’t think I’d be very good at jail. I can picture people not being very nice to me there, not liking me much.”

  “You won’t be going anywhere,” Frank said. “That’s a promise.”

  Mrs. Mortimer realized that it no longer mattered if she was sent to jail because she wouldn’t have to go. She had other plans.

  They walked the rest of the way to the river in silence and found a bench to sit on. A wind had come up and the river had lost some of its usual calm.

  “You said you work at the hospital,” Frank said. “What do you do there, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I work mostly on the palliative care ward sitting with loved ones where needed, usually when the loved one is alone except for the dying person. That’s what I do.”

  “That sounds like a good job,” said Frank. “An important job.”

  “Yes. I can usually tell whether I’m wanted, not always, mind you. That’s the tricky part. It keeps me on my toes.”

  A hint of a smile softened Mrs. Mortimer’s already smooth face.

  “Sometimes I wash their feet. The patients’, I mean, not the loved ones’.”

  “What about photography?” asked Frank. “Do you still keep a hand in there?”

  “I haven’t taken a picture since 1970,” she said. “The year that Georgie died, the year that I was summoned to the house on Wellington Crescent.”

  “That’s too bad,” Frank said.

  They talked till long past the chill came off the day and the wind left the river to ease its way back to a surface stillness. It was never quiet underneath.

  “Jim’s interest in my work seemed genuine enough,” Mrs. Mortimer said at one point. “That’s another example of a time my instincts were off. I blurted out ideas for my business and then he stole me away.”

  “Stole you away?”

  “Yes. I had an occupation and he stole me away from it. I wasn’t able to get back to the life that I had built, even after he disappeared and I should have been free to do so.”

  “He set a trap for you that day, Mrs. Mortimer.”

  “Yes. I shouldn’t have trusted him.”

  “There was no way for you to know.”

  “Perhaps if I had better instincts.”

  She wouldn’t budge on her lack of good judgment on that day long ago when she first met Jim Coulthard.

  “My photography business had a very brief heyday,” she said. “But my hospital work came along and it has suited me very well.”

  She cleared her throat.

  “Excuse me. I don’t usually talk this much all at once.”

  “Take your time,” Frank said. “There’s no hurry. None at all.”

  Her voice was fading.

  “I saw him once more after that day on the crescent and then I never saw him again. He turned up at Georgie’s funeral. That was when he told me about Mrs. Buckingham’s schemes and all the rest of it. She had waited too long to have a baby, he said. She was in her mid-forties by the time she got pregnant that one and only time. He figured that was the root of all her problems. I figure there were way more roots than that.”

  “Where was her husband?” asked Frank.

  “Dead,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “‘He up and died on me’ was the way she put it. It was like she was mad at him for dying. I can almost understand that, but not the rest of it.

  “I’m surprised I’m still alive,” she went on. “I thought for the longest time that one of them would come to kill me. But it didn’t happen. I guess she stopped worrying about me. I guess they figured hiding Regina in the wall was the end of it. And so it was, till now.”

  “He shouldn’t have gone to George’s funeral,” Frank said.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “My dad thanked him for coming. He didn’t know who he was, just figured he was a friend of Georgie’s. He even came to the house after and ate fancy sandwiches and dainties.”

  “Do you know where he went when he disappeared?” Frank asked.

  “No. I just pray that it’s forever.”

  He surprised her with his next question.

  “Who do you pray to, Mrs. Mortimer?”

  “Georgie,” she said. “How about you? Who do you pray to?”

  “No one,” Frank said. “Maybe I should give George a try. Would you mind if I did? Do you think he’d mind?”

  “I’d like it if you did,” she said. “I’m sure he would too.”

  “Unless both of our instincts are a little to the left of centre on this one,” said Frank.

  He smiled and stood up and she stood too, offering another version of a softening of her face. It had little to do with her mouth, more a whole shifting of the understructure.

  “Have you been sick, Frank Foote?” she asked as they walked toward her home.

  “Yes, I have. How did you know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m feeling quite a bit better now than I have been.”

  “Good.”

  He left her at the sidewalk leading to her apartment building. She had no intention of going inside.

  “Don’t die, Frank Foote,” she said.

  She had wanted to confide in him about her own lifelong desire to die, the way she so often had with George.

  38

  Frank and Jane talked at length and decided not to go to the police. With Mrs. Mortimer’s information Baby Buckingham could be traced and exhumed and compared to the mother’s DNA. But to what end? To give the mother a name? She didn’t need to be given a name. She already had three: Jane Doe, Regina Buckingham, and Rilla. The whole world didn’t have to know all of them. They agreed there was no good reason to exhume the tiny baby’s bones.

  The police were already onto Jim Coulthard as the only suspect. The estimation from the medical examiner’s office of the date of death had come back as between thirty and forty years. Nothing Mrs. Mortimer could tell them would make their search for him any easier. Frank’s fear that she might get into more trouble than she deserved or could manage guided them in their decision.

  If Coulthard was still alive and run to ground he should be held accountable and would be, but she didn’t need to help unless absolutely necessary if and when the time came.

  “Was he the father of Baby Buckingham?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Frank.

  “Did you ask Mrs. Mortimer?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Will you?”

  “If they find Coulthard, I will, because he should be punished for that too, but if they don’t turn him up I won�
�t. There’s no reason to bother her with it.”

  “You’ve developed quite a soft spot for Mrs. M.,” said Jane. She had yet to meet her.

  “Yes, I guess I have. She’s had a very heavy load and she’s had to carry it all alone. She’s like a little soldier. I quite like her.”

  Frank thought back to his and Jane’s first musings as to how Rilla got inside the wall: Jane with her ideas of her being buried alive, trying to claw her way out and him with his hopes of a gentle burial by a loved one. Neither of them was correct, but reality was heavily tilted toward Jane’s take on it, if Mrs. Mortimer was to be believed about the smothering, and she probably was. There was no gentleness and for sure no loved ones.

  “I burned the photograph,” he said.

  “Do your kids know?”

  “No.”

  “What if they ask?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I won’t lie.”

  There were certain things that couldn’t be known: the true inner workings of the brain of Mrs. Buckingham — what caused her revulsion to the scent of lavender, for instance? And what about Jim Coulthard’s brain? Odd duck didn’t begin to describe him. Some things die with the people they belong to — countless ideas and bits of personal knowledge. Perhaps they float about in the atmosphere for a spell and then dissipate to nothing; perhaps they enter somewhere else in a different form, not good or bad, just different; or maybe a new host creates something fresh from them, something unrecognizable, almost original.

  It’s a bit like Jane’s musings about houses hanging on to their stories, Frank thought. What happens to a person’s stories when death claims the body, the stories that he or she never shared?

  If the Coulthard dad had been a sick man in the sixties, chances were excellent that he was dead. There might still be a chance to get some answers from Jim Coulthard, but probably not. He was so long gone. Frank pictured him washed up on a rocky shore in some faraway land, his bones bare, without even a faded nightgown to protect them from the elements.

  There was something else Frank supposed he would never know the answer to, something more personal. And that was whether all his sadness and irrational rage over the past months, his feelings of uselessness and his difficulty with other human beings had been related to his mild heart attack, as Sadie insisted on calling it. A cloud had definitely lifted; his fears had eased. Could the seemingly simple operation involving small balloons have done all that?

  39

  Mrs. Buckingham is ninety-six years old and lives in the Riverview Health Centre. According to staff, no one has visited her in all the time she has been there, over twenty years.

  Frank and Jane go to see her. He wanted to go alone but Jane insisted on coming along. If the woman is lucid she has some questions for her.

  But Mrs. Buckingham has no awareness of them. She is tiny under her bedspread, almost flat.

  The room is very small, but there isn’t a lot of clutter: no photos or knickknacks or drawings of puppy dogs like in the rooms of those residents with children and grandchildren.

  Frank remembers what he imagined himself doing and flushes with shame. He lay in bed that morning and planned out an elaborate scenario, the purpose of which was to cause discomfort for the pitiful creature in the bed.

  “What is it, Frank? What’s wrong?” asks Jane.

  “Nothing,” he says and turns away from her. “It’s just so bare and lifeless here.”

  That morning he pictured driving out to Pier 1 Imports where he was quite sure he would be able to find a bottle of lavender scent — more than one — and those little diffuser sticks, lots of them — enough to do some serious diffusing. He would set them up on her bedside table, on top of her television, wherever he could find a clear flat spot, and he would leave them there. It would be her punishment.

  A hospital worker comes in.

  “Are you relatives of Mrs. Buckingham?” he asks.

  “No.” They answer together.

  “She doesn’t wake up very often anymore,” he says.

  Neither Frank nor Jane responds and he exits the room.

  Frank looks at Mrs. Buckingham now; her face is turned to the wall.

  “I guess there’s nothing to do here,” says Jane.

  Frank walks around to the other side of the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Jane asks.

  “I want to see her face,” he says.

  Jane touches his shoulder. “I’ll wait for you in the hall.”

  The face is a grid of dried-out lines. Nothing special.

  They walk in silence across the hospital grounds to Jane’s car.

  Frank still feels bad about the lavender thing, the thing he didn’t do.

  40

  Early the next morning Jane dropped by Frank’s house with several pieces of paper clutched in her hand.

  Emma was back in Honolulu and Garth and Sadie were still asleep.

  “I got Mrs. Buckingham’s maiden name from the nurses at Riverview,” she said by way of greeting. “It was Box, as in Box Insurance. Her first name is Willa. And her husband’s name was Ira Buckingham. I did a little Googling yesterday after I dropped you off.”

  “You look like you’ve Googled up a storm,” Frank said.

  “Yes, I have.” Jane smiled. “And I went through a million rolls of microfiche on the third floor of the library. Mostly old Free Presses and Tribunes. It was fun, but my neck hurts.” She twisted her head from side to side.

  Frank made a new pot of coffee and they headed out to the porch, where Jane spread her papers out on the dusty table. They were covered with her tidy, organized writing.

  “Willa Box came from a wealthy family in small-town southern Ontario,” Jane began. “Her dad was a big shot there, the owner of Box Insurance, a business that his grandfather began in the 1800’s.

  “She was an only child and there’s no record of her doing anything but sitting daintily between her parents on social occasions till she married Ira Buckingham in 1948 when she was thirty-eight years old. It was a grand wedding in her hometown — pictures in the local paper, a cake the size of a Volkswagen. Now I may be making this up, but I think the whole town gave a collective sigh of relief that Willa had finally snagged a man.”

  Frank chuckled. “The whole town?”

  “Even if he was a ne’er-do-well from the prairies,” Jane went on. “Albeit a handsome one.”

  “Wait. How do you know that?” asked Frank.

  “Well, I know he was handsome from the pictures and I’m guessing that he was a ne’er-do-well. There was no mention of what he did before he married Willa. Immediately following their honeymoon in Lake of the Woods they moved to Winnipeg, where a western branch of the insurance company was set up, courtesy of Old Man Box. Ira was the manager. The house on Wellington Crescent was also a gift from Willa’s parents. Her life was being engineered by her father to keep up appearances.”

  “You can’t know this, Jane.”

  “Well, the outline is there. It can be filled in any way you like. But I think my theory has merit: a wealthy, snooty family from southern Ontario whose little princess has gradually turned into a brittle spinster and started causing them considerable embarrassment because of her extreme undesirability. They ship her off to the ’Peg with her handsome new husband and hope for the best.”

  “Brittle?”

  “I admit, that’s a guess,” Jane said. “It might have taken more years and more disappointment for the brittleness to set it. Anyway, the best didn’t happen. Far from it. Oh, for the first few years Willa and Ira were fairly active on the Winnipeg social scene. They’d turn up at fundraisers and golf tournaments and fancy society-type weddings.

  “But then there were a few years in a row of bad hailstorms on the prairies. Ira pretty much ran the business into the ground with the huge insurance payouts and his poor management techniques. It was big news at the time. The Box Insurance we know today has no connection at all to the original family. Willa a
nd Ira hung on for a while in the years when the business was going down the tubes, but then they fell completely out of the public eye.

  “There was no mention anywhere of the birth of Regina. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a secret for her whole life, except for the few days she spent in the Women’s Pavilion to give birth to Baby Buckingham.”

  “A secret life,” said Frank. “What about when she was born?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane. “Maybe Willa had her at home. Maybe she knew what was coming and figured her own possible death was better than anyone knowing about her baby.”

  “Would they have had the wherewithal in those days to know about Down Syndrome before birth? What about her doctor? Would she not have had a doctor?”

  “I don’t know, Frank,” Jane said firmly. “All I know is there was no record of the baby being born. I wouldn’t be surprised if even Willa’s parents never got wind of Regina. They both died in the mid-fifties within a year of each other.

  “Willa was probably too ashamed of Regina to even consider placing her in an institution. She kept her at home and struggled. And then to top it off, Ira died. There was an announcement of his death in both papers. A heart attack was hinted at, but no mention of a funeral or memorial service of any kind. I think by then Mrs. Buckingham was pretty much fucked.”

  Frank looked over both shoulders to make sure neither of his kids were around to hear Jane say “fuck.” They weren’t.

  “Sorry,” said Jane.

  They sipped their coffee and listened to shufflings inside the house as one or more of the kids tumbled out of bed.

  “I guess the rest of her life has been financed by what her father would have left her,” said Frank.

  “Yup,” said Jane. “I can’t see how it does anyone any good to have their whole life financed. It would be too easy to do nothing, if you were a certain type of person. Like Willa was.

  “She was very isolated,” Jane went on. “Not only was she an only child, but both of her parents were too. No cousins or aunts or uncles to show an interest.”