by Don Gillmor
The more Harry researched the world of water, the more frightening it became. It took hundreds of litres to irrigate enough cotton to make a single pair of blue jeans. The average North American woman over the age of seventeen owned nine pairs. On the conspiracy websites, where he wandered late at night, secret deals had already been made among various Knights of Malta to keep Opus Dei members in water. A cell within the American government had achieved secret control of the Great Lakes.
So Harry bought into a hedge fund called Spectre Island that was heavily weighted in water. It invested in a company that used Icelandic icebergs to make bottled water, then sent those bottles to Dubai, where drought was a fact of life. The company had a bottling plant in Maine and was poised to move, according to two analysts he semi-trusted. Spectre was the odds-on favourite to be named “Hedge Fund of the Year,” and that would attract more institutional money and the price would move up.
For Harry to thrive, the world had to fail. But it was already failing. He wasn’t contributing to its collapse, or even profiteering. He was seeing the world for what it was—a series of bad bets made by mankind.
TWELVE
HARRY WAS MEETING HIS SISTER for an early dinner at Umlaut. Erin arrived late, wearing boots that he guessed cost $800. The restaurant was done in a subdued grey palette and resembled a first-class airport lounge, a contrast to its heroin-addicted Belgian chef, who had recently died of a deliberate overdose. He’d been found in the kitchen, according to Harry’s morbidly informed sister, with a sheaf of recipes on precisely how to prepare his unappetizing, heroin-ravaged corpse. It was titled “The One-Metre Diet.”
After they ordered, Harry asked, “When did you know?”
“Know?” Erin repeated.
“Mom. Ebbetts. The house.”
“Oh. The house. Mom told me.” His sister had a gift for evasion.
“But, I mean … Christ. Ebbetts,” he said.
“I actually think she’s happier now, Harry. She’s been trying to kill that world for forty years, and now it’s finally dead and I think it’s brought her some peace.”
“I worry about her getting lonely. Maybe she’ll have lunch with Amy or Trish once in a while at least.”
“I don’t know. Dad had an affair with Trish. Like thirty years ago. Amy, too, for all I know. But Trish for sure.”
“You know this how?”
“I saw them,” she said. “I used to go into Mom and Dad’s closet with a book and read with a flashlight. It was my private retreat. I’d lie in that oversized laundry basket they had, the clothes smelling of Dad’s aftershave and Mom’s perfume. She changed about three times a day; nothing ever got dirty. I heard something and got up and looked through the wooden slats. Trish was bent over the dresser and he was fucking her and spanking her and Trish was reciting something. It was in Latin, Harry. A novena, I think. All the handy uses for Catholicism. After the initial shock, I thought, So that’s how it’s done.” Erin laughed her big laugh. “A formative moment, you might say.”
Harry sat, stunned by this news. Their dinner arrived and Erin pushed a piece of asparagus around her plate like a broom, then lifted it to her mouth.
“You watched this,” he finally said.
“Hmm, uhmmm.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, time, a little therapy …”
“You didn’t …”
“Tell Mom? Develop a taste for discipline?”
“Jesus, Erin.”
“Mom already knew, I’m guessing. Probably not the details, though don’t be too sure.”
Harry pondered the circle of expertly charred vegetables that surrounded the duck breast on his plate.
“Her new place, though,” he said.
“I think it’s cheery. It’s manageable, anyway. That house was a burden passed on from her father, really. Then it became a different kind of burden after she sold it to Dick. Sold it for dick. What did she get, $760,000? God. But the point is, she has a chance to be happy now. I don’t think she did in that house. I really don’t. Around those people.”
“She’s seventy-six,” Harry said. “She goes for a walk, shops for groceries, mixes a martini. Then two more. What’s she going to be like in January? What’s going to fill her days?” The winter darkness, the vengeful winds. His mother was almost incapable of watching television; after ten minutes, she began arguing with the people on the screen.
“We’ll have to spend more time with her, Harry. I’ve asked the girls to take her to New York. It would be nice. Just the three of them, without me. Take matricide out of the equation. She’ll relax.”
Erin’s daughters were self-absorbed beauties who had inherited a great deal from their grandmother. Maybe not the ideal travelling companions, though it could be fun.
“Isn’t there anyone she can salvage from the wreckage? There must be some friend she could still see.”
Behind Erin was an open kitchen with smoked glass dividers that allowed the seated diners to see the head and shoulders of the chefs. Flames leapt up every few minutes, like a crude effect in a school play that announced the arrival of the devil.
“She should play tennis again,” Harry said. “It would be good for her. She’d meet new people.”
“Since her hip operation, I don’t know. I mean, she can probably still play, she just can’t win. So …”
“What about moving in with you and Ty? The girls are gone—you’ve got room.”
“We’d kill each other, Harry. You know that.” Erin examined Harry’s plate. “I should have ordered the duck.”
“I hired a forensic accountant,” Harry said. He hoped that Erin would offer to chip in and pay half the fee. “Tommy Bladdock. A wizard, apparently.”
“Ty told me. What do you think he’s going to find? People usually don’t recover anything from these things, do they? The money’s always gone.”
“You don’t think it would at least bring some peace of mind?”
Erin shrugged.
“I talked to Dixie the other day,” Harry said. “She’s hired a lawyer. She thinks there may be more.”
“And just how, I wonder,” Erin said pleasantly, “would Dixie know anything that didn’t have to do with rack rates at Mazatlan? I’d say she’s the prime suspect.”
“She says she’s going after two-thirds.”
“Two thirds of what?” Erin said. “I hope Dad spanked her. Though I can’t imagine he had the energy.”
Harry stared at his sister, who was busy quarantining carbohydrates, pushing them to one end of the white rectangular plate, near the lightly nibbled chicken. There was a very faint hint of grey at the roots of her part; otherwise, her hair was a rich, brownish black.
“Bladdock says there was about $3 million in Dad’s accounts three months before he died,” Harry said.
“Does he know where it went?”
“Not yet. He also thinks there may have been something going on at BRG.”
“Like what?”
“He doesn’t know. Apparently the Securities people are taking a look at them.”
“And Dixie the helpful travel agent wants $2 million of this,” Erin said caustically. “Because she was his soulmate.”
Harry heard a familiar voice he couldn’t place.
“Erin! Oh, Harry!”
He looked up to see Trish Halpern, the lucky bent-over recipient of his father’s affections so long ago. An unwanted image. Trish was wearing a red swing coat, which had probably looked festive in the store but in this light made her look like a sad child. Thin and sagging, no longer game for the surgeon’s knife. Her eyes, those final windows, still gleamed, though.
“I didn’t see you two. We were eating in the corner, a few of the girls.”
“How are you, Trish?” Harry said. If she’d come for a late lunch, she’d lingered over the wine for four hours. She weaved slightly.
“I’m well,” she trilled. “But we don’t see anything of poor Felicia. How on earth is she coping?”
<
br /> “Never better,” Erin said.
“I mean she simply disappeared.”
“I think she needs some time to herself,” Harry said. “A retreat.”
“But I mean, she must be desperate, all that time alone.”
Erin’s smile tightened.
“She’s left the club even. Posey Dault thought she’d died. She didn’t believe me when I told her.” Trish was swaying slightly now. Her face had the smudged look of afternoon drinking. “Amy thinks she’s simply trying to make a point. I don’t even have a phone number—it’s as if she joined a cult. If there’s something I should know … I was only her best friend for fifty years. I mean, everyone assumes—it’s obvious, isn’t it?—but to try and keep it from her friends? I’m certainly not going to judge, and we don’t even know which clinic, not that they’re allowed visitors or anything. I remember when Posey was drying out—”
Erin interrupted, “And here you are still drinking wine all afternoon with the girls, Trish. You naughty thing. Malus puella. It’s lucky no one’s left to give you a good hard spanking.”
Trish’s smudged face looked puzzled, as if she’d misplaced her keys and was mentally going through all the places she could have left them.
“It was lovely to see you, Trish,” Harry ventured gently. “I think the girls are waiting for you.”
Trish looked blankly at the three women standing by the door. One of them offered a Queen-like wave. “Yes,” Trish said. “Yes. It’s late.”
Harry and Erin sat in silence for a few minutes after Trish had limped off, concentrating on their dinner, the artful use of pomegranate in the quinoa, the splash of mint.
As a child Erin was precociously self-assured, Harry remembered, and that self-assurance, in its coolness, its surety, that sense of malign confidence coming out of that unblemished face, had looked, for all the world, like evil. It was precisely the quality that casting directors sought when they needed a child actor to play the devil. Innocence is much more chilling.
Once, Erin had disappeared. “In the ravine,” her breathless friend Dorothy said. “We were in the ravine.” And suddenly that extensive maze of forested troughs that had been gouged by glaciers was no longer a place of bike trails and leisure. It was a dark Grimm’s wood filled with bullies, gypsies, escaped convicts, coyotes and feral dogs, a place of unspeakable menace. They all went out looking, his mother biting her hand, saying, “Oh god, Dale,” his father calm but walking quickly, almost running, calling Erin’s name. A few neighbours helped. It was autumn and the trees were stunning, a few fiery maples amid the gentle yellow of the poplars. The leaves on the ground hadn’t dried yet and yielded underfoot with a spongy feel. They passed a mouldy plaid blanket on the ground. Two condoms and an empty package of Export As were beside it, and the fourteen-year-old Harry registered all these things, along with his mother’s ratcheted anxiety. It was cool in the trees as they scrambled along the uneven ground, careful not to articulate their thoughts. After two hours they found her in a small clearing, sitting on a fallen tree, looking like Alice in Wonderland. The tree was grey and smooth, and ten-year-old Erin was calmly observing the ants that moved along it in an undeviating twelve-foot line of black. When they walked home, they were a family, overjoyed to be intact.
“I think Press may have been involved,” Harry finally said.
“Press the idiot.”
“Ebbetts says Press is a fraud; he’s got one foot in the abyss.”
“So Press stole Dad’s money?”
“Why not?”
“The problem, detective, is that stealing three million requires at least some financial wit. I don’t know that Press has that. Plus, it seems out of character. He’s an ass, not a thief.”
“Maybe he needed the money.”
Erin signalled for the check.
As Harry was driving home, a squirrel darted across the road in front of him, choosing just that moment to end its life. There was a sharp thump and Harry slowed and looked in his rear-view mirror. He had had one glass of wine too many and pulled over carefully. He got out and walked back. The squirrel was in the middle of the pavement, its guts coming out of its black fur like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. It was still alive.
Harry stared at the squirrel’s face. In its small eyes, he could see fear. It knew it was dying. There was nothing to be done. But he couldn’t just leave it there. It was suffering horribly, twitching, waiting for the comfort of death. What if the next car swerved, as it likely would? Was there something to kill the squirrel with?
The retaining wall of a nearby house had loose stones in it, built in the style of the rural Irish. From the wall, he pried off a stone, a jagged, uneven bowling ball, and walked to the squirrel, checking for cars. Harry briefly imagined joining the squirrel, his own guts leaking, the cars not stopping, the bank manager, Ms. Remnick, walking toward him with a rock. He knelt and lifted the stone higher than necessary and brought it down hard. Not a direct blow to the head as intended, but a glancing one as Harry instinctively turned away. He tried again, this time succeeded and slammed the rock down again before standing up. A woman on the other side of the street stared at him. Harry dropped the rock and walked back to his car.
It was nine p.m. when Harry got home. The house was dark. There was no sign of Gladys. Harry poured himself a glass of wine and drank most of it, then went into the family room. Ben and Sarah were there, curled up on the couch in the dark, watching TV without the sound on.
“I didn’t know you were home.”
“We’re just watching TV,” Ben said.
Sarah was wearing her trademark look of defiance.
Harry listed slightly, wishing he had stayed in the kitchen. On the screen a man pulled out a large automatic weapon. Die fucker, Harry thought reflexively. Payback time.
“Ben and I are getting married,” Sarah announced. Her tone made it sound like a taunt.
Harry was stunned at the news. Ben, he noticed, seemed a bit stunned himself. Marriage, Harry thought, how curiously old-fashioned. Sarah would certainly write the vows, a manifesto of some kind.
“We’re going to adopt,” she said, answering a question Harry hadn’t even thought to ask.
No reading to fetuses for Ben.
Who would pay for diapers, daycare, swimming lessons, the right jeans? Where would they live? What kind of messy parting awaited when Ben’s natural passivity finally incited her to murder, or Sarah’s doctrinaire rants showed no sign of flagging after four years of marginal employment and Ben decided he had had enough? And what of the child? Would Harry be left to care for this imported thing, a refugee from the Urals or a Chinese orphanage; would the infant, fleeing poverty, only re-embrace it with the grandfatherly Harry?
The man on the TV kicked in a door and moved his gun like a semaphore flag, looking for danger. He inched through the living room, then kicked open the bedroom door and silently emptied his clip.
“Congratulations,” Harry finally said.
Ben stared up at him with his expectant face, the face Harry remembered from the football field a decade earlier, that teary stoicism. Save me, it said, save me from all this.
THIRTEEN
THE AUTUMN MOOD HAD DIED. Dry leaves swirled in vicious eddies, the deadened trees against a grey sky. He and Gladys were already late for their dinner party but were still standing in the clever lighting of Je Ne Sais Quois, looking for a suitable appetizer. Harry checked his watch and saw 8:02. Gladys was asking about the wild boar pistachio terrine. Was the boar truly wild?
“Totally wild,” the girl behind the counter said. “Nuclear.” She might have been twenty, a small crucifix bolted through the flesh above her left eye.
“It’s just that what is sold as wild boar often isn’t.”
“As far as I know,” the girl said.
Gladys assessed this to be not very far and after another five minutes of browsing and questions, picked a duck, hazelnut and Calvados terrine that cost $26. She moved down the long,
gleaming glass case and examined an ash-covered monastery goat cheese. “And the ash is …” Gladys asked.
The girl hesitated. “Organic Japanese maple?” she offered.
Harry looked at the terrine and the cheese and calculated their cost as a percentage of his savings account; it amounted to almost forty percent. It was understood that this was an expensive and off-limits shop, but Gladys was using her own money in order to make the right kind of impact with the friend who was hosting the party.
Faced with the bleak economy that Felicia’s confession had reinforced, Harry had engaged in a flurry of cuts. He had cancelled the absurdly priced cable, gotten rid of their land line, vowed not to take taxis and avoided the organic butcher shop with the cheery map that showed the source of their meat, local farmers appearing in earnest headshots with their names inscribed in blue script beneath. He had tried every one of the wines listed in the wine columnist’s “Best Buys on a Budget” feature. He walked more, cancelled the newspaper and all magazines, renegotiated his cellphone plan with a chipper Bangalore resident. His monthly savings from all these measures, he figured, was somewhere in the $400 range. He was careful not to compare this modest gain with what he was paying Tommy Bladdock.