Among the Departed

by Vicki Delany

  “If you decide to show me.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m only here because I had to get out of the house and figured I’d walk into town. The police, meaning your husband, were at my mother’s.”

  “I don’t discuss my husband’s business.”

  “Chill, Mrs. Winters. I’m not asking you to. It wasn’t a pleasant scene, that’s all I mean. You know about my dad?”

  “I read the Gazette this morning.”

  “It wasn’t easy growing up with that hanging over my head, I can tell you. I was sixteen when he left, and Mom told me I had to be the man of the house.”

  “What do you think happened to your father?” It wasn’t any of Eliza’s business, but Kyle had brought the subject up and he did seem to want to talk. And she wasn’t exactly swamped with customers needing attention.

  “He ran off with some broad. Far as I’m concerned, there’s no doubt about it. How he ended up in the woods is the question. Maybe she realized he didn’t have any money and bumped him off.”

  “Do you know who this woman was?”

  He shrugged and picked up a small bronze sculpture off a display table. A boy, fishing rod over his shoulder, dog at his feet. Tourist stuff, but perfectly executed down to the folds in the boy’s pants and the notches in the dog’s collar. Kyle studied the piece for a long time. Itzhak Perlman continued to play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

  “Not a clue. My dad was a player, a real man-whore. You’d think in a town this size people would have been talking, but he was good at hiding it. There were a couple of women at church he was having it off with. Church ladies would have been good prospects. They wouldn’t blab to their friends, would they? They’d have had more to lose than he did if word got out. There are always some people who figure it’s okay for a man to screw around. Particularly if he’s married to a human statue like my mother. Mom, of course, was too stupid to know what was going on under her nose.”

  “You don’t like your mother very much.”

  “I don’t like her or not like her. She’s my mother. Losing Dad, the way it happened, was hard on her, I’ll admit that. The sneers of her friends as they handed out charity, being on welfare, police hanging around, asking questions, probing. That interfering priest, so solicitous while slyly suggesting that she should have been a better wife. She dropped all her friends, all her activities, stopped going to Mass. These days she barely leaves the house. Only the garden gets her outside. In the winter she doesn’t even make it that far. I was supposed to be the man of the house. Take care of her. What else could I do but stay and move into the basement? My sister had the good sense to leave town soon as she turned sixteen.”

  Eliza stood silently, listening. She could think of nothing to say. From what she’d seen of Kyle’s own living conditions, she didn’t think he was in much a better situation than his mother. Had he stayed to help her? Or did he stay because he also was afraid to leave the house? Notably he had a job that allowed him to remain in his room, huddled over his computer most of the time.

  “Do you blame your father?” she asked.

  “Every single day. He always was a selfish bastard. He wouldn’t let Mom have a job, even a part time job. Said it would be disruptive to the family schedule. He had to have his meals smack-dab on time, had to have his private hour in his den every night. He was a lousy father too, but Mom and Nicky have this saintly image of him. He had not the slightest interest in me or anything I was doing. He took Nicky to soccer games so he could flirt with the mothers. He’d drop Nicky, pick up one of the moms and they’d disappear for an hour and a half, getting back as the game finished. I told the police all this at the time, but they didn’t go anywhere with it.

  “We were never allowed into his den, you know. I figured he went there to look at porn and jack off. After he disappeared, the police went through it, and then Mom locked the door. About a year later, she let people from the second-hand store come and clear out his stuff. I bet they got an eyeful when they opened the desk drawers.”

  Eliza stole a longing look at her book. She sensed that Kyle had held this in all these years. Now he’d started talking, he simply couldn’t stop. Like other reticent people she’d met, he didn’t seem to know when too much became way too much.

  “I’d been planning to go to art college. My dream for a long time. While other boys grew up wanting to play in the NHL or be in a rock band, I always knew I wanted to make art. Then the dream ended. No college for me, no money, a whiny neurotic dependent mother. Do I blame Mom?” Eliza was the only other person in the room, but Kyle was not talking to her. To himself mostly, but also to the bronze boy in his hand. “It was Dad who ran away, but I guess part of me does blame Mom. She thought being a good wife meant cooking a roast for dinner on Sunday, making neatly-cut sandwiches for him to carry to work in a paper bag, and dressing the kids well to go to church. Better if she’d let him fuck her, but she didn’t like to mess the sheets.”

  He took a long look at the boy and his dog, heading off to the fishing hole. Then he put them down, very gently.

  He waved his hand in the air, taking in the room and everything in it. “You’re selling a fantasy here, Mrs. Winters. Pretty pictures, pretty statues, of a world that doesn’t exist. What do you think goes on behind the doors of those neat houses? Nothing good. My art, it tells the truth. That’s why people don’t like it.”

  ***

  The Hudson House Hotel was the best in Trafalgar, British Columbia. It had gone through many manifestations in its life, from working man’s hostel to backpacker’s lodge, ending up a luxury hotel. The bar was designed to resemble a gentleman’s club at the turn of the twentieth century. Wood paneling, red accents, leather elegance. A large painting hung behind the bar. A ruddy-faced, heavily whiskered man being choked by his stiffly-starched shirt collar glared down at the patrons. This was supposedly Hamilton Hudson himself, who’d found gold in the Klondike in 1897 and lost it all because for some unknown reason he’d been convinced there were diamonds to be found in the mountains outside of Trafalgar. Town gossips maintained that the only diamonds Hudson was after were those he could put around the neck of the wife of a certain Vancouver politician. Hudson died, alone and penniless, in 1905, probably from complications of syphilis.

  No one knew why the hotel had been named after him.

  Molly Smith saw herself reflected in the glass protecting Mr. Hudson’s visage. She’d gone to some trouble to look nice tonight, and had dressed in black slacks with a black and white blouse under a red leather jacket, cropped at the waist. Her necklace was a simple silver chain and her earrings were long strands of finely-worked silver Adam had given her for her last birthday. She wondered if she should get a haircut. She’d decided to grow it out—it was ridiculous to have a short croppy hair style when she had to wear a hat most of the day. But now it was at that awful growing-out stage when it was impossible to get it to do anything half-decent.

  She made a face at Hamilton Hudson.

  “Molly?” the bartender said. “You okay?” His name was Ryan, and she’d known him since grade school.

  “I was thinking of old Hamilton up there. I wonder what he’d think of this town now.”

  “I can guess what he’d think of seeing the likes of you leaning on the bar.”

  “You mean a woman?”

  “I mean not a professional woman.”

  “Probably that the end of the world was nigh.”

  “You still want to wait?” he asked. Smith had told him she wouldn’t order until her friend arrived. She nodded and sipped at her glass of ice water.

  At eight o’clock on a Friday night the hotel bar was packed. A group of men surrounded her, dressed in dirt-encrusted overalls with orange reflector stripes and steel-toed boots. A highway maintenance crew.

  They drank pints of
beer and laughed very loudly. One of the men had turned to her with a smile, all ready to offer to buy her a drink, but his colleague had given him a quick elbow in the ribs and a shake of the head and the offer had turned to a simple nod. Her reputation, as the saying went, had preceded her. The after-work crowd jostled and laughed and drank, and staff dodged patrons and each other while bearing trays piled high with food and drink. Smith had laid her bag on a stool next to her, reserving it for Nicky, but she was beginning to think she’d have to give the seat up. Nicky was almost half an hour late.

  “If it was anyone other than you, Molly, I’d tell you to order or leave,” Ryan said, with a grin to show he wasn’t serious. “But I’d be afraid next time we had a punch-up in here the police would be slow to react.”

  “Most amusing. I’ll give her another five and then I’m outa here.”

  At that moment Ryan’s eyes opened wide, and Smith heard one of the highway workers suck in a breath. All around her, conversation died.

  She swung on her stool to see Nicky picking her way through the crowd. She looked amazing, simply dressed in a short white skirt sprinkled with pink flowers. The skirt, light and summer-flirty, swirled around her legs as she walked. The matching pink T-shirt was cinched with a wide green belt, and a large necklace of green stones plunged into her cleavage. Her thin strappy high-heeled sandals showed perfect tiny feet and blood-red nails. Long black hair swung around her shoulders, so shiny it reflected light. Every man in the room watched as Nicky glided across the floor. Smith had invited Adam to join them later. That, she thought, might have been a mistake.

  The construction workers’ faces split into huge smiles the moment they realized Nicky was heading their way.

  “I am so sorry I’m late,” she said, giving Smith a peck on the cheek. Her perfume was musky and fragrant. “Is this chair for me?” She smiled at the men. Their heads nodded like a row of Pez dispensers. Nicky slid onto the stool, wiggling her bottom to make herself comfortable. Her breasts, clearly outlined under the shirt, moved. The men swallowed.

  “Buy you a drink?” one of them asked. He was young and good-looking with nice eyes and a lock of brown hair falling over his forehead. His shirt was streaked with dirt but his hands and fingernails were clean.

  “Another evening perhaps,” Nicky’s voice was more of a breath. “My poor friend here must have been waiting for positively ages.”

  She swung her stool around and smiled at Smith. “Thanks for waiting.” Nicky changed in matter of seconds; her smile was smaller but friendlier and less brittle. Her body seemed to almost pull into itself and she became smaller. The center of the room no longer, just a pretty woman sitting on a bar stool on a busy Friday night. The men went back to their drinks and grumbling about their job.

  “Not a problem,” Smith said. “I’m going to have a glass of Pinot Grigio.”

  “That sounds perfect. Me too,” Nicky told Ryan.

  “You got it.”

  “Tell me you were playing dress-up at my mom’s,” Nicky said. “You are not a cop.”

  “Yup.”

  “The terror of drunks and miscreants everywhere.” The bartender placed cocktail napkins on the bar, and served glasses of pale yellow wine. He gave Nicky a grin and went to serve a group of new arrivals.

  “That is so cool,” Nicky said.

  “You know what I’ve been doing. What about you?”

  Nicky’s shoulders shifted and she sipped at her drink. Her lipstick was a deep red, the exact color of the nails on her fingers and toes. “I live in Vancouver. I own a small interior decorating business.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “It pays the bills.” Nicky drank more wine. “Not married. No boyfriend at the moment.”

  “Speaking of boyfriends, I’ve invited mine, Adam, to come by later. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, no. I’d love to meet him.”

  They chatted about people they’d known in school: who had moved away and who had stayed, who was married for the second time, and who wasn’t married but had three kids already. Nicky drank two glasses of wine for every one of Smith’s, but Smith reminded herself that her friend’s alcohol consumption was none of her business. As long as she wasn’t driving.

  Smith asked about the interior decorating business, how she’d gotten started in that, but Nicky’s answers were vague and Smith suspected she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Which was fine, as Smith didn’t want to talk about her job either.

  It was nearing ten o’clock, the highway workers had long left after a couple of attempts to barge into the women’s conversation, which Nicky had politely, but firmly, rebuffed. The crowd was thinning out, and Nicky had consumed about six glasses of wine. She could really hold her drink, Smith thought. She was on her third and feeling a warm buzz in her head. Nicky finally bought up the subject that had been hanging over them all evening. “Do you know any more about my dad than what you told us officially, Moonlight?”

  “Nicky, can you call me Molly, please.”

  “Whatever. Tell me what you know.”

  “We’re not holding anything back, if that’s what you’re asking. The early dental identification looks like a match, but it’s not positive yet. They’ll be doing a detailed examination early next week.”

  “The chances of some other guy with almost the same dental work as my dad having died about the right time and place are pretty slim, eh?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Your sergeant, what’s his name?”

  “John Winters.”

  “Is he hot or what? Nice clothes too. Married?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “You’re not trying to get a little action on the side there, Moon, I mean Molly? I’d be tempted if it were me.” Nicky gave her a lewd wink.

  “No,” Smith said. “Absolutely not. Not only am I not interested in older men, but if I were I’d never even consider putting my career on the line. Anyway, if you get a look at his wife, you’ll know why he’s not the type to stray.”

  “They’re all the type.” Nicky swallowed the last of her wine, and held her glass toward the bartender. “Some just don’t have the guts.”

  Smith shook her head. “Mrs. Winters is a retired model. Really. Not only beautiful, but rich too.”

  Nicky’s right eyebrow rose. “The wife has the money in the family, eh? Do tell.”

  “Nothing to tell. Maybe we should go for something to eat. Adam’s running late, but he can call if he wants to find us.”

  The bartender placed a fresh glass in front of Nicky.

  “Once I’ve finished this,” she said. “Another?”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Come on. Don’t make me drink alone. Don’t be so prissy. Let your hair down sometimes, Molly.”

  “I don’t have much hair to let down. Okay, one more. I’m not working tomorrow.”

  “That was my mother’s problem, you know.”

  “What was?”

  “Prissy. Little Miss Perfect. The house is still as neat as a pin, as she used to say, although she looks like hell.”

  “She’s had a tough time.”

  “Nothing she didn’t deserve.”

  “Gee, Nicky, isn’t that a bit tough? After your dad left she still had to raise you and Kyle and that can’t have been easy.”

  “My dad didn’t leave, Moonlight. He was murdered.”

  “That hasn’t been proven.”

  “It doesn’t have to be proven. I know. He never would have left me behind. Never.” Nicky’s eyes blazed and her chin quivered. She lowered her voice. “Never. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he ran out on her though.”

  “Your parents didn’t have a good marriage?”

  “They had an awful marriage.
He couldn’t do anything right. She picked at him all the time. Nag, nag, nag. Everyone thought we were the perfect family. Yeah, perfectly boring.”

  “Take it from me who’s seen some things, Nicky, boring isn’t a bad place to be when you’re a kid.”

  “I’m not talking about me. I’ll admit I had an okay childhood. Nice house, friends at school, at church. I had sports and clubs and stuff. Until Dad died, and then it all went to hell mighty fast. But for him, trapped in that marriage? It must have been a nightmare. I’m surprised they had kids. They sure as hell weren’t doing anything that would make babies.”

  “Come on, Nicky, no kid wants to think their parents are having sex.”

  “But they didn’t, Moonlight. For as long as I could remember, they had separate bedrooms and there was certainly no tiptoeing around the house at night. Not that Dad would have been able to breech her defenses in any case. Those nightgowns she wore said back off as well as any shotgun kept by the bed.”

  “I bet lots of long-time married people aren’t doing it anymore.”

  Nicky laughed suddenly. It wasn’t a nice laugh, sharp and bitter. “You have no idea how right you are, kiddo. But it was more than just the sex. She crushed him. She crushed his sprit. He was a very unhappy man. Even as a kid I knew that. He sat at the breakfast table reading the newspaper in the morning, and at the dinner table at night, never talking while she blathered on spitefully about this person and that person. She told us gossip was a sin, but somehow that didn’t stop her running off at the mouth all the time. I think the only times my dad was ever happy was when it was just him and me. He’d take me to soccer or baseball games and always stayed to cheer me on. She never came to any of my games. The house needed to be cleaned.”

  “Lots of sad people in the world.”

  “I always thought my dad had more depth than he was allowed to show.” Nicky swirled the liquid in her glass. “If he’d left her, I wouldn’t have been surprised, as I said. But he wouldn’t have just walked out. As unhappy as he was, he knew he had responsibilities. He would have provided for her, and for us. Guaranteed.”