by Lou Allin
“So can you come through for me?”
“I’ll need to call the listing realtor at ReMax and get the key. Let’s say tomorrow morning. Ten sharp. Suit you?”
“Meet you at the Stick.”
*
Chipper took his cap from the closet as Holly came in the next morning. “Gotta head out to Bletcher Road. Grass fire started when some idiot tossed a cigarette. The roadside’s like tinder now.”
“What about the Fire Department?”
“Already there, but they need traffic control. Just pray the wind turns, or those new houses might go up. They’re just shells with heaps of scrap lumber around.”
“Jesus. When are people going to learn?” As he turned to go, Holly added, “Take that face mask in the closet. Smoke’s no fun, especially from toxic building materials.”
He put on his duty belt and snagged the Impala keys from the hook. “I remember when a barn of pot went up near Prince Albert. It was like one big doobie. I didn’t come down for a week.”
“One of our perks.”
Chipper examined the mask like a fashion accessory. “This won’t do much good except keep off sparks.”
“That baby face will thank me. And be careful.” She gave his shoulder a friendly prod.
*
At ten over in Sooke at the Stick, Valerie was sharp as ever in a tailored butter-leather jacket over beige slacks, a silk blouse and lizard print low-heeled boots. Her hair had left the bottle for a softer ash brown, a natural improvement. The curly tangles were corralled in a scrunchy.
After munching a warm brie-on-brioche, Valerie led the way to a flashy Lexus SUV. She patted the hood, planting an air kiss on it with her plump pink lips. “It’s a hybrid, so don’t sneer. Last year I made a fortune. Now we’re eating homemade beans. And it’s leased anyway. Soon you might see me driving an antique like yours.” She elbowed Holly in her usual madcap style.
“Hey, beans are back in style. Good carbs.” Holly hoped Val wouldn’t wallow on about the steep drop in house sales as the North American economy faltered. Government services would be next. Would they lose an officer or transfer Chipper? Suppose they shut down the detachment and sent her to Fort St. John just as she was starting to investigate her mother’s disappearance?
“Don’t cry for me, Capital Region. This will purge our ranks of part-timers who made bundles when ordinary houses hit the half-million mark. You’re looking at a survivor.” Valerie thrust out her ample chest. “Allow me,” she said, opening the door to a leather living room. A CD labelled Timeless Classical Melodies sat on the console. “Some Mozart? Sets a classy mood for the clients. Though, make no mistake, I’d sell a mobile home in a flash. Pardon me, I mean a manufactured home.”
“They’d probably prefer the Dixie Chicks. Victoria is too snooty for country.” Holly struck a society pose then buckled up.
They climbed the hill to the top of Booster Avenue and parked. After they got out, Valerie beeped the car, triggering a whirring answer from a raucous Stellar’s jay in the high branches of a huge maple. “Why exactly do you want to see this poor old white elephant? The truth, now,” she asked with a suspicious look.
“It’s a very interesting building,” Holly said, ignoring the frown. “I hear it’s been empty for years.”
Val nodded, giving a snap to her Juicy Fruit, and opening a notebook with pictures. Born to the profession and as tenacious as a pit bull, she maintained a thorough dossier on every place she showed. “Once it was a proud palace. Built at the turn of the century, not the last one either. By Henrick Mattoon, a brewery magnate from Rosedale. That’s in Toronto.”
“As ritzy as it sounds. I visited Toronto once and took a walking tour of the city.”
“But it’s a mixed-up baby.” She waved her arm at a turret. “One of our interns from head office had an architectural background. Told me most of these styles don’t fit. Hard to imagine the house in her prime, the white paint clean and sharp instead of that mould and moss. Columned porches, Pal…ladium or something windows, multiple gables, half-timbering. Crap, I’m no historian. That top floor with the tiny window would have been a servant’s quarters or perfect for a mad aunt in the attic.”
Holly looked up at three chimneys, crumbling as the Virginia creeper advanced on sticky pads. “Hell to heat, too, even with all the fir you want, or coal from when we still had mines up island. They must have spent all day hauling fuel to the top floors.” Missing shingles testified to water seepage from the roof, a sign of approaching life support.
Valerie shrugged. “After the owners died in the Forties, the place passed to relatives in California. They arranged for rentals, but it got shabbier and shabbier. Finally it was condemned after a kid broke his leg climbing in a window.”
“Why wasn’t it torn down?”
“Guess they were sitting on it waiting for the migrations of retirees who couldn’t afford Victoria. After that accident, the owners boarded it up and waited for urban sprawl to do the job.”
“Maybe the time is now.” In addition to the homes at Sun River, the arrival of sewers had spurred development. Even sidewalks were arriving.
“This parcel of three acres could be zoned for a dozen micro lots. Look out your back door to twenty other identical yards with barking dogs. No challenge to selling that shit.”
“Ouch. We’re crowded enough on one-third acre.”
“Let’s go inside. Sooner or later, you’re gonna come clean with me about your interest. So tell.” They climbed to the generous gap-toothed porch, behind them the strait view obscured by bigleaf maples and alders with a century head start.
“Never could keep anything from you.” Holly locked eyes with Valerie as the woman’s French-tipped fingers fiddled with the keys. “Someone…died here.”
A small smile flitted on Valerie’s expressive lips, but her sangfroid hadn’t mellowed. “Baloney. Enough years, and every house has a ghost. People have to die somewhere. But maybe you’re not talking about natural causes.”
They entered the foyer, and a dusty crystal chandelier tinkled in the stagnant air currents. Surprisingly intact, it was inaccessible without a twenty-foot ladder. Several crystals were missing, and one lay smashed on the scuffed hardwood floor. To one side was a parlour, as Val called it, and on the other a dining room. No furniture remained, and someone had used the fireplace for a urinal. Empty beer cans lay in a pile along with fast food wrappers. “A real firetrap. And catch that reek,” Holly said.
“Exactly. That’s why it’s boarded up.”
A tour of the upstairs led to four bedrooms and only one bathroom with the black-and-white octagonal tile of bygone years. The tub was lion’s claw, the enamel chipped and the brass fittings worn. A portable rubber hose was affixed to the tap, the kind used to rinse hair before showers were invented. Valerie lifted the toilet seat.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a habit.” The bowl looked as if a bloody massacre had occurred. “See this rust? It’s from their drilled well. One hell of an iron problem, and in the old days, they didn’t have expensive filters. I always check the toilets and take a drink from the sink of every place I list.”
“You must have one hell of an immune system.”
Dust motes rising in the air made them sneeze. Valerie asked, fanning the air, “So what else did you want to see?” Her diamond eyes slitted in suspicion.
As they descended to the main floor, Holly looked at the scratched fir boards, trying to imagine the honeyed tones from a weekly waxing. “The person who died here fell down the stairs.”
Valerie looked at the steep banister, ending in a pineapple-shaped newel post designed to bruise a coccyx. “Here?” She jumped back and hugged herself.
“No, the cellar stairs. That’s what I want to look at.” She tried to imagine Marilyn and Joel as teenagers in the Seventies, the tie-dyed era. Their father’s sudden death. The proposed move to Ontario. Then the place Aunt Dee rented and this house left behind with such
violent memories.
Valerie kept peering around as if spirits might pop out of the wall. “You always were a weird one. Helping banana slugs cross the road. Making goddamn leaf collections. My lord, girl. Didn’t you ever have a Barbie doll?”
“You drew a tattoo on the chest of your GI Joe.” Holly gave her an even look. “Dollies weren’t my thing, either.”
They passed through the kitchen, a giant area with pale-green, glass-paned cupboards. Judging from the ugly orange fake-brick linoleum, it had been updated by a colour-blind designer. Valerie considered several doors, opening a pantry. “Handy,” she said. “Wonder why they’re so rare now?”
“Except for my father, nobody cooks any more. The TV room’s the centre of the house.”
Another small closet held brooms, a bucket and cleaning supplies. Both of them froze at the scurry of tiny feet then laughed to see a robin scuttling on the windowsill. “That must be the basement.”
Holly opened the door as an eerie wave of cold filtered up as if from a tomb, and they stared down a steep stairway. Stone walls framed each side, and a handrail was broken. The wooden steps looked firm enough, but the light was bad. Flicking switches at the top did no good. The power was off. Holly took out her Maglite.
“Careful,” Valerie said. “The firm’s liable for your injuries. In fact, do you have to go down there? It stinks. Maybe there are rats. And snakes to eat them.”
“Haven’t changed at all, have you? Harmless garter snakes are the only variety on the island, and they wouldn’t be down there anyway. They’re looking for frogs.”
“Spiders, then. A pal of mine got a wicked infection from a brown recluse bite. Came off some bananas from Honduras.”
Holly continued, stepping carefully and reaching the bottom with a relieved sigh. The basement floor was poured concrete, cracked and patched from the shift of the land in occasional earthquakes undersea. Long before cozy basement rec rooms and pink styrofoam, here was mere space for sagging clotheslines to hang dank washing during the rainy winters or cold storage for root vegetables. Cupboards held rows of empty, dusty bottles, both for canning and wine. This must have been where Clare kept her supply. A naked bulb dangled from the rafters, and a mouse scuttled somewhere. Not a rat, Holly thought, training her beam like an impotent laser light.
With every corner covered, Holly turned to go. What had she expected to find other than a steep staircase where a fall could have caused death five ways?
“Come on, you’re creeping me out,” Valerie called. Her cell phone twittered with the theme from Batman. “Yes, I’m in the friggin’ bowels of some goddamned house my nutbar friend wanted to see. Catch you at Wink’s in ten minutes. Order me a Potholes Poutine, double gravy. No onions.” She looked down the stairs with a plea in her whisky-tenor voice. “We are leaving now, right?”
Holly came up each wooden stair, inspecting them from side to side. Dee had said that Clare had hit her head. Surely not merely on the wooden stairs, which she might have survived. Yet falling head first didn’t jibe with an ordinary drunk, who might land on her bum.
Valerie was tapping her foot. “Let’s go. You promised.”
Then at the top of the stairs, Holly thought she saw something. “Wait a minute.”
“What now?”
Holly knelt and rubbed her fingers over the darkened wood. On one side, then another. There was the slightest colour difference. Like a small round hole had been drilled or punched by a nail on each side, then filled in and sanded smooth. “Very interesting.”
“What? I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.” Holly took a penknife from her pocket and began chipping, placing the sample in a paper envelope.
Valerie looked on. “What the hell? Are you digging for gold?”
Holly said, “You said the place is headed for demolition. I need to take a sample of this. And don’t you have a camera in your car? Can you get it? Please?”
“Bossy. What did your last servant die of? You owe me.” She gave Holly a mock salute and turned on her heel.
Holly called to her disappearing back, “Dinner at the Nut Pop Thai.”
While she waited, the radio on Holly’s shoulder crackled. Ann’s voice was tense. “Chipper’s been taken to the General.”
SEVENTEEN
Police work not glamorous enough for you?” Holly sat by Chipper’s bed at the hospital. They were keeping him for observation and oxygen therapy combined with prophylactic antibiotics for his lungs. Many people became hypersensitive after a smoke event. He’d been lucky to have received only minor burns on his forehead and hands. No scarring was expected.
He looked pale, and his face was slick with ointment, but his coughing spasms had slowed. “Maybe if I smoked, I’d have some resistance,” he said, his face contorted behind the tubing which ran up his small nose. With his height, his toes were dangling off the bed. Her red and white carnations in a vase on the table warred with the smell of disinfectant.
“Tell you what,” she said, touching his shoulder under the thin gown, the cotton equalizer which made everyone a mooner in hospital. “Enjoy your time off, though it’s a tough way to get a vacation.”
He pointed to the mask on a table along with his wallet and some magazines. “Better take that back. Looked stupid as hell, but they say it saved my life. Do you know how fast a brush fire can move with a forty klick wind? It shifted directions in a second.”
“Even a racehorse couldn’t outrun it,” she said, tucking it away in her jacket pocket.
They both jumped when the phone rang. Holly picked up the receiver and handed it to him. “Oh, it’s you, Mindy,” he said. Standing in the doorway, Holly raised an assessing eyebrow and he blushed. “How did… Ann told you?”
He listened for a few minutes, saying only “yes” and “go on.”
Holly looked at her watch and made motions that she was leaving, but he shook his head and waved her back. “Thanks for calling. I really appreciate it. And I’ll…that sounds great.” He hung up, looking suspiciously like a guilty tomcat.
“New girlfriend?” she asked with merriment in her eyes.
The vet tech had called with more information, he said. “Remember that typhoon last year?” Thousands of fallen trees had crippled the area. Roads were closed. Power was off for a week or more.
“Sure.”
“Someone broke in and robbed the vet’s office. They smashed into the narcotics cabinet and took everything. Fentanyl was only one of the drugs. They got away with PCP, too. That’s an animal tranquilizer.”
So someone else in the community had the drug. Holly’s theories were shaken. “I hope they have a no-fail alarm system now.”
“Big bucks. With its own backup battery.”
“That was months before Joel came to town. But we haven’t heard anything about it.”
“Right, so now what are—”
A scurry in the hallway brought an older couple through the door. They hurried to the bedside with worried faces. The woman carried a package of food redolent of curry and coconut and wore a gold and emerald sari. “My baby boy! My angel! Are you all right? Have you eaten? You look pale as a ghost.” She threw her chubby arms around him and squeezed. Holly stood back and nodded to the father. From Chipper’s conversation, she felt as if they had already been introduced.
“Ma! Cut it out. This is Holly, my boss.” The cords in his neck strained in embarrassment at the embrace. “I’m going to smell like your perfume.” Clouds of jasmine warred with the flowers and disinfectant.
Hands were shaken all around, and Holly left Chipper smothered by maternal love. As he stood against the wall out of the way, Gopal gave her a nod.
*
The next morning over their toast, Norman turned to his daughter with a wan smile. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
He stuck out his lower lip in the way he always did when assigned a particularly noxious cleaning chore by her mother. “It’s time to clean out the rat traps before fall. That’
s when they nest.”
“Those chickens next door and their feed. That’s the attraction. So what’s the procedure?” She gave a shudder.
“Your mother got a bucket and filled it with hot water, dish soap and a half cup of bleach.”
Since he had done the shopping and cooking, she had handled the other chores. Letting the man even approach a lawnmower was a big mistake. He could break anything in a minute.
“Then use the rubber gloves and take the traps out of the pumphouse. Clean them in the solution, as hot as possible, mind, then leave them in the sun. Spring the traps first, of course.”
“I’m not stupid enough to pick up a set trap.” Norway rats were fond of maritime coasts. They drove any weaker rats away. One mating pair with a reliable food supply could produce six hundred and forty babies in one year, and calling them kittens didn’t make the idea any cozier.
Having gathered her gear, she went with trepidation to the small, vinyl-sided pumphouse, turned the nail which secured it, and as the creaky insulated door opened, nearly vomited. A giant female, gravid by the size of its belly, lay in the trap, its head smashed and blood leaking from its mouth. None too fresh either. “Can’t you stay in your house and out of mine? Can’t we all just get along?” she asked as she bagged the body and cleaned up. But it was just being a rat.
While she was there, she rapped on the large black water-storage tank. Instead of the crystal clear aquifer fare from their shallow well, recently there had been a brownish tint. The tank gave a hollow response. She got out the eight-foot ladder and climbed to the top, lifting the lid and peering. Nearly dry. The pipes were sucking mud from the well.
After finishing and washing her hands against bubonic plague, she said, “Call the water guy. We’re nearly out.”
Her father’s frugal nature sent a crease across his broad freckled brow. “That’s impossible. We’ve never run out yet. A timely rain always fills the tank.”
“This is the driest summer in decades. Anyway, I pay the utilities, so what’s the problem?” What was a hundred and ten bucks when you needed to flush and shower?
