The Kissing Fence

by B. A. Thomas-Peter

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Canada, British Columbia, the RCMP, English Canadians. It went further than that. He was scarred by everything, even the stories from Russia. Every hardship done to our people he carried as if he were, I don’t know, responsible for making it good.”

  “Is that why he …” William hesitated.

  “Hanged himself?” Nina said matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to be gentle with such things. I’ve seen too much to be coy about it. The hospital told me it was his mental illness, the depression, they said, but it was nothing of the sort, to my mind.”

  “What was it?”

  “Maybe you heard something about this on the news, but there was a time when there was again talk of an apology happening and some compensation had been worked out. Our people couldn’t agree on the details and it didn’t happen. It was the last straw.

  “Your father used to say, ‘They can’t take everything from you,’ and ‘Don’t give them everything.’ I just thought he meant outsiders would take everything if they could and you had to hold something back—keep something for yourself. It’s not like Doukhobors to think that, but that’s how it became. I never understood, really, but he wasn’t talking about things or even secrets. He was talking about what made him Pavel Korenov, a man, a human, a Doukhobor. I think, after all that went on, and then the apology didn’t happen, the only thing he had left was himself. Everything else had been worn away, and then he was in hospital. The doctors with their shocks and drugs were taking away what he had kept for himself. He took his life, the core that made him, before they did.”

  They sat there quietly. William recalled his anger and disappointment at this man, Pavel Korenov. How unjust it seemed now. He had resented and then disregarded his mother as being the only other person able to remedy his anger but failing him, and this too was unfair. The blue eyes that scrutinized him without judgment, and with compassion, could have helped him understand all this, if only he had stayed and been open to it.

  “Would you like more coffee?” she said. “I’ll make some fresh. There’s more to talk about.”

  * * *

  Less than two hours’ drive west of Grand Forks, William pulled the Mercedes to the edge of the Crowsnest Highway at Anarchist Mountain Lookout, just east of Osoyoos. He stopped the engine and stepped into the near-frozen air. The light had just started to fade, darkening the blue of a clear sky. Wisps of long white clouds drew the eye north along Osoyoos Lake to the rich farmland snuggled between barren white hills. He sucked the cold air in through his nostrils and made his eyes water. Cold tears trembled at the corners of his eyes. The rattle of new information settling in his mind had eased. Pushing aside the old bricks on which he allowed his presumptions to rest had been exhausting. Room had been made for all he had learned, and for now the turmoil of that effort was gone. The unfolding labyrinth of memory and emotion would be calm until he encountered another jarring inconsistency within him that could not be ignored.

  He had thought that since his operation he had been losing his mind, but now it seemed he had only just found it after all this time. His life had been madness from the time he left for Vancouver years ago, and only by returning to Grand Forks had he found the prospect of sanity within his grasp.

  There was also succour in knowing his father’s final act was one of his own volition. For William, it had always been understood that his father had a weakness. He had abandoned his family, wasted his life in futile obligation and finally ended it, because he didn’t have the strength of character to do otherwise. It was this he had railed against. For the hospital staff it was an act borne of a diseased brain, for which they had little responsibility save for spells of being watchful, or negligent; it had seemed not to matter which. So easy had it been to point a finger at hospital staff.

  For his father, William now understood, it was an act of defiance in which he deprived his tormentors of the satisfaction of finally snuffing him out. His chest expanded with pride on behalf of his defeated father. He had never before felt pride in the recollection of his father or allowed the memory to force tears out, but his mind lay unprotected by the anger needed to shut out all he did not normally allow. Tears crumpled him. Squeaking sounds of a child escaped him and were whipped away by the wind. There was no strength to interrupt the flow or prevent hot tears welding his father’s life and death to all he had become. He was his father’s legacy, and all he had to show was his misunderstanding of everything.

  The chill finally overcame the emotion. His wind-raw cheeks registered the cold and his body shivered. William returned to the car and started the engine. It was still four hours’ drive to Vancouver, and it reminded him that there would be people there worried about his absence. He reached for his phone and saw it was dead. Scrabbling in the armrest, he found the charging cable and plugged it in. William lifted his chest and pushed out all his air. He pulled onto the highway to begin the final swooping turns into Osoyoos. As he passed over the lake bridge from east to west, the iPhone sprang to life, dinging over and over. He turned into AG Foods car park and inspected the screen. There were twenty-one messages, an emoji from Uri and thirty-four missed calls. He would have some explaining to do.

  William decided to make one call to his home and let Julie know where he was. He pressed the screen several times with his thumb and the call connected. The voice-mail message replied.

  When it was done, he said, “Hi Julie. Sorry for causing you some worry and borrowing your car. I’ve been in Grand Forks visiting my mother and I’m heading home now. There’s lots to talk about. Again, sorry, I’ll explain when I get home.” He looked at the Omega on his wrist. “I should be there before eight. Please let Kelly know everything is fine.”

  The list of missed calls was long—some from work, some from Julie and others he did not know—and he decided not to bother replying. Tomorrow would be just as good.

  * * *

  William noticed the house was in darkness except for the one light they left on to deter burglars. The outside security lights detected his arrival and flooded the surrounds with flat light. The garage door opened. The Tesla was not there. It was eerily quiet as he stepped out of the Mercedes next to the rack of bicycles all in a row.

  “Mr. Koren.” A voice spoke from the garage door.

  William turned to see Constable McKinnon and two uniformed men.

  “What do you want? Sorry, you made me jump.”

  “You weren’t answering your phone, so we had to come over. We tried many times to reach you.”

  “Sorry, I went to visit my mother in Grand Forks, my phone ran out of juice and I didn’t notice. What do you want?”

  “We’d like you to come down to the station with us.”

  “Look, I only just got home and I’ve given you a statement already.”

  “I know, but you know how these things go. There are always details to sort out.”

  “I’m very tired. Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Mr. Koren. It can’t.”

  “Can I just tell my wife what’s going on?”

  “She’s not at home, Mr. Koren. We were here earlier and she told us what time you would be arriving, but she didn’t want your daughter to be alarmed.”

  “Why would she be alarmed?”

  “RCMP at the door, I guess.”

  William looked at the faces of the three men opposite him and understood. “I don’t have a choice here, do I?”

  “Well, we are asking you to accompany us to the station voluntarily. Let’s just say that, without getting more complicated.”

  15

  Vancouver, January 10, 2018

  This time McKinnon sat opposite William in the barren room.

  “May I call you William?” he asked.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Remember that this interview is being recorded. Now, I want to go ov
er some of the things you said last time you were here. You described your relationship with your long-standing employee Cathy. Is there anything you omitted to tell us or would like to add to your statement now?”

  It was obvious in the question that they knew something, but what exactly Cathy had said was not clear. In the hanging pause inviting him to reply, William thought it was not likely Cathy would say anything about Uri or the shipments. She was likely to say something about her relationship with him. It was pointless denying it.

  William said, “Years ago we had an affair. It was when the business was starting and for most of the time it was just me and her. It was an exciting time, full of energy.” He felt his face redden, conscious of how lame this must be sounding. “It was a mistake and I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  “How long did it go on?”

  “Hard to say exactly, but more than a year. Something like that. Less than two.”

  McKinnon said, “Would you like to say why you didn’t tell us about this the last time we spoke?”

  “You didn’t ask me about it, and I’m not very proud of it. An affair with your secretary is a bit of a cliché, isn’t it? But mostly I didn’t want my wife to find out. I thought if I mentioned it, she would find out.”

  “You don’t think she would be very forgiving?”

  “She’s put up with a lot, but I don’t really know. It’s just, we’ve been distant for a very long time, and only recently we turned a corner.”

  “You stopped seeing Cathy romantically but kept working together. Is that not unusual?”

  “I can’t understand why she stayed. Maybe she needed the money. I would have understood had she left, but that’s for her to say. I was grateful that she did stay. The business benefited. I benefited.”

  “So you have some affection for her.”

  “Yes, of course. The business is tough, and she stuck in there when it was very difficult. I value that.”

  “Is that why you arranged for a lawyer to represent her?”

  “What? I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You didn’t instruct a lawyer to represent Cathy?”

  “No.”

  “You did ask about her having a lawyer last time you were here.”

  “Because I wanted to make sure she had good advice, but I didn’t do anything about it. If a lawyer showed up, it wasn’t me.”

  “Okay, let’s leave that. So we have established you had an affair, lasting more than a year, but continued working together.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you feel about the affair Cathy was having with Dennis?”

  Suddenly the danger was clear to William. “I thought it was a bad idea, and I asked Dennis to end it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “It was a distraction to them both and to the business. I didn’t know what was going on, but one morning I suspected them of getting together at the warehouse, just before I came in. They were flushed and, I don’t know how to put it, ruffled. Anyway, it was enough to convince me of what was happening. Not good for business, but also I thought Cathy was going through a difficult time in her marriage. She seemed unhappy much of the time and I thought she was vulnerable.”

  “You told two of our officers that you were looking after the workplace, being a responsible employer, making it safe, so you went to Dennis’s house on a Saturday, the afternoon of the fire, to get his agreement to end the relationship, or you were going to let him go. Is that right?”

  “Yes, pretty much.”

  “Wasn’t Cathy married when you had an affair with her?”

  “Yes.” William squirmed.

  “Was that different? If having sex with Dennis makes it an unsafe workplace, it was pretty unsafe when you were doing it.”

  William squared up to the challenge. “That’s fair. It’s not really different, but I did see the mistake and stopped it, eventually.”

  McKinnon nodded. A long silence held them fast in the moment. “The problem is,” he said, “the affection and the sexual relationship between you and Cathy had not really come to an end, had it?”

  William tried to hold his stand on shifting ground. McKinnon had prepared as thoughtfully for this conversation as William’s mother had prepared for his return. He had felt the same trepidation in front of her. McKinnon said, “On Monday, after you had been told by our officers that Dennis had died, you took her from work to her apartment and had sex with her. Is that right?”

  The reply stuck in William’s throat, and McKinnon continued. “Be careful how you answer, William. You will have guessed that we have Cathy’s statement. We’re waiting for DNA evidence confirming that statement and we’ll have to wait a few days to know for sure. But you already know what happened. You could tell us now. Did you have sex with her on that Monday?”

  “Yes. I should never have let it happen.”

  “Asserting your rightful place as a dominant male lion over his pride.” McKinnon’s mockery grated on William, as it was intended to do. “Is that a reasonable comparison? Kill off the rival and mate at the first opportunity.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  McKinnon opened a file on the table and pushed three photographs toward William. The bruising on Cathy’s breast was every colour of purple, green and yellow. “From where I’m sitting, you could be just another beast in the jungle. Or would you prefer me to say, a jealous lover wanting to get rid of a younger rival, and angry at his ‘unfaithful’ partner?”

  William inspected the pictures slowly and carefully, making time to order his thoughts. There was relief for him in the photographs. They would not have shown him these pictures if Cathy had told the police the truth of how she got the bruises. There would be no questions to discover what William knew about the incident or the men who did it. He thought it could only mean that McKinnon was trying to rattle him—an old-fashioned shakedown to test a theory that Cathy was protecting him by taking the blame for the murder they both committed. It hung on the presumption of their continuing relationship.

  He said, “Cathy showed me the bruises when we were together. They were old bruises then, and even older now. Anyone can see that. I thought her husband had mistreated her, or Dennis, but it doesn’t change what happened between us. We had sex. It was an emotional time and hard to explain. It shouldn’t have happened, but I let it happen.”

  “You let it happen? That suggests you were passive, perhaps a victim of some kind of ambush.”

  “Of course not, but I asked her to stop a dozen times. She was just very demanding, persuasive. I was weak.”

  “You asked her to stop?”

  “A number of times.”

  “I guess ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘No,’ even for women.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “She persisted and took advantage of your … vulnerability. Is that it?”

  “I wasn’t vulnerable. I was weak. It was pathetic of me not to walk away, but that’s how it happened.”

  “So, let’s just sum this up, to be clear. You want us to believe that Cathy is told, for the first time, that her lover has died in a fire, and within an hour or so she is insisting that you have sex with her in her apartment. Is that what you are saying?”

  The incredulity in McKinnon’s voice made preposterous all that William might say, but William felt confident that if McKinnon had anything of substance, mockery would not be needed.

  “It sounds strange, even to me, but it is true.” It was impossible to make ground with this man, he thought. “Look, there’s an explanation, but I don’t want it to sound like another excuse.” McKinnon waited. “I haven’t had sex in years, maybe ten or more, just haven’t been interested, but recently, with my wife and with Cathy, it’s started again.”

  “Explain. Why do you want me to know this?”

  “You want to know why I had sex with Cathy. Well, there’s a reason.”

  “Go on,” McKinnon said, his expression flat with skepticism.r />
  “Before Christmas I had an operation. You can see the scar here.” William traced the line of the scar under his eyebrow. “There’ll be hospital records. It was a tumour, and it was causing trouble with my … hormones and whatever. It took away my interest in sex completely. When they took it out, the hormones recovered. I’m not used to it. It was a surprise to me when things started happening again. It’s the only reason it happened with Cathy. In my mind it’s been over for a long time, but on that Monday, I realized it hasn’t really been over for Cathy. All these years I had no idea. I wanted to keep it that way. I know I should have walked away, but I didn’t.”

  McKinnon leaned back from the table. “It’s hard to believe, William, because you haven’t been candid with us. You didn’t tell us about the affair or that it ended, but now you want us to believe it ended. Then you say that Cathy drags you into her bed after hearing her lover died in a fire, and you let it happen, on this one occasion, because she still loves you and because of your hormones. It sounds like you’re making things up as you go along.”

  “It must sound that way to you, but it’s true.”

  “If you weren’t jealous of Dennis and Cathy getting together, what did he have on you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve gone out of your way to get rid of him, quickly and generously, as I understand it. Another way of looking at this is you were trying pretty hard to shuffle him off. If it wasn’t about Cathy, what was it about? What did Dennis know, William? Was he blackmailing you?”

  The word paralyzed William. If McKinnon knew of the shipments, he thought, all would be lost. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  McKinnon said, “If Dennis knew about your affair with Cathy, he might tell your wife and her husband.” William struggled to control a long exhale of relief. “Maybe you two achieved what you wanted to achieve and were pleased with yourselves. Maybe you were celebrating together, in bed, having dealt with the danger.”