The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “What?” Hal stared down at him.

  “You’re my brother, whether I like it — or you — or not, and at the moment, I don’t. Whatever it is you’ve got yourself into, or whatever’s got into you, I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Hal said, voice dripping with false sincerity. “There is something you can do for me.”

  “Name it,” Shoe said, with a sinking feeling.

  “Get the fuck out of my house.” He turned his back and went up the stairs.

  Shoe let himself out.

  It was almost three o’clock by the time he got back to his parents’ house. Despite his fatigue, sleep eluded him. It was an hour before he finally fell asleep, only to awaken some time later from an explicitly carnal dream — of Muriel or Sara or some anonymous succubus conjured up by his imagination — achingly erect and on the brink of orgasm. He lay awake for another hour then, until finally sliding into sleep as the sky outside the high window began to lighten.

  He awakened again a few minutes before eight o’clock. The house was silent except for the quiet hum of the central air conditioning system. He lay in bed for another twenty minutes, drifting in and out of sleep, until he heard movement overhead, then got up, showered, dressed, and went upstairs. Rachel was in the kitchen, washing her breakfast dishes.

  “What time did you get in last night?” she asked.

  “Late,” he said, as he took the coffee out of the fridge.

  “Any sign of Hal?”

  “He got home about one-thirty.”

  “Where the hell was he?”

  “He didn’t say. He looked as though he’d been on a bender.” He started the coffee maker. “He accused Maureen and me of having an affair.”

  “Stupid bastard.”

  “We’re not.”

  “Of course you’re not. I meant him.”

  “I know you did.”

  He’d made enough coffee for both of them. He poured a cup and took a grateful slug, but it did little to revive him. His longing to go home to Vancouver and Muriel was an almost physical force. He wasn’t scheduled to return until Friday, but a telephone call was all it would take to change that. The urge to make that call was almost overwhelming.

  “You okay?” Rachel asked.

  “Just tired,” he replied. He drank more coffee. “What’s on your agenda today?”

  “There’s a children’s choir at ten and a kids’ Irish dance group at eleven, then we start wrapping things up. Thank god. How ’bout you?”

  “Not sure,” he said. Involuntarily, he wondered if he should try to talk to Hal, beat some sense into his thick head. The desire to pack up and head for the airport became even stronger. “I’ll lend a hand, if you like.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  “Okay, I guess.” She paused, staring at nothing for a moment, then said, “It’s weird. Yesterday, we were all but strangers. We’d seen nothing of each other in years and years, but all that changed the moment we started talking. I was looking forward to getting to know her again.” Her voice thickened. “Now there’s just this aching emptiness when I remember she’s dead and that will never happen.”

  Shoe knew how she felt. He’d felt the same way too many times in his life. He had no reason to believe he wouldn’t again.

  Down the hall, a door opened with a click and a soft creak of hinges, followed by shuffling footfalls. Shoe’s father came into the kitchen. He looked at Shoe and Rachel, a slightly puzzled expression on his face.

  “Mother said she thought she heard Hal’s voice,” he said. “Is he here?”

  “No, Dad,” Rachel said. “No one here but us chickens.”

  chapter forty-two

  Hal woke up in increments, as if his brain were coming online bit by bit, neuron by neuron. At some point in the process, he looked at the digital readout of the clock radio on the bedside table. It read 11:22, but it took an inordinately long time for him to comprehend the meaning of the symbols. He also slowly became aware that he was ravenous; he’d eaten hardly anything at all the day before, just a couple of Big Macs after leaving Gord Peters’s house with his overnight bag of money. Panic twisted in his guts when he couldn’t immediately recall what he’d done with it. Then, with a rush of relief, he remembered that it was locked in his big tool chest in his basement workshop.

  He heard voices from downstairs, muted and unintelligible. Who was Maureen talking to? he wondered with a flash of irritation. Had his brother stayed over? Had he and Maureen taken up where they’d left off when Hal had arrived home and interrupted them? He strained to make out the words, then realized it was just one of the inane talk radio shows to which Maureen was addicted.

  His stomach rumbled and, with a grunt, he passed wind loudly into the bedcovers. So much for the myth that the noisy ones didn’t stink, he thought, as he threw back the covers and got out of bed. Too tired to shower, he dressed in the clothes he’d purchased the day before and went downstairs. Maureen was in the all-white, blindingly bright kitchen, sitting at the table, doing some kind of paperwork. Her face tightened as he entered the room, but she otherwise ignored him.

  He went to the refrigerator and yanked the door open. The jars and bottles rattled. He stared at the contents of the shelves, for the most part completely mysterious, no idea what to do next. With the exception of the barbecue, he didn’t cook. He didn’t have a clue how to turn on the oven, let alone operate the microwave. He could barely manage the toaster.

  With a sigh, Maureen stood up. “I’ll fix you something. What do you want?”

  The martyred tone in her voice raised his hackles. “Forget it,” he said. “I’ll just have toast.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. She sat down again and resumed her paperwork.

  He found the bread. It was that nasty, brown seedy stuff Maureen preferred, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her if there was any white bread. He put two slices in the toaster and depressed the lever. There were four margarine tubs in the fridge. The first one he opened contained something brown and lumpy. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t margarine. He put it back and opened another. Potato salad. He put that back.

  “The butter is in the compartment on the door marked butter,” Maureen said dryly, without looking up from her paperwork.

  “I thought we used margarine.”

  “You haven’t eaten margarine in years.”

  “Where’d all the margarine containers come from, then?” he asked, taking a stick of butter from the door compartment.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Hal,” she said, slapping the file folder closed. “Where do you think? You’re not the only person who lives in this house.”

  Maureen stood, collected her paperwork, and started to leave the room, just as smoke began to rise from the toaster. Gripped by a sudden, uncontrollable rage, Hal grabbed the toaster. Yanking the cord from the wall outlet, he flung the appliance across the kitchen. It glanced off the edge of the doorway to the dining room and ricocheted onto the dining room table, tumbling and scattering crumbs and pieces of blackened toast across the polished surface. It fell onto the parquet floor and broke in half. Maureen stared at him in astonishment. Hal, his hands smarting, scorched by the hot metal of the toaster, turned on the cold water and thrust his hands into the soothing flow.

  “That’s just perfect, Hal,” Maureen said.

  “Why are you still here?” he growled, hunched over the sink. His hands were beginning to ache from the cold, but the sting had gone out of the burns.

  “Pardon me?” Maureen said.

  “Why are you still here? Why didn’t you leave with my brother? It’s obvious you’d rather be with him. Frankly, I’m in awe of your uncanny ability to land on your feet while spreading your legs.” He knew he’d struck a nerve when the colour rose in her face.

  “Give me a single good reason why I shouldn’t rather be with someone else,” she snapped.


  He dried his hands with a dish towel. “Would it make any difference?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “Where did you go the other night? Where have you been?”

  He looked at her and wondered what it was that made him want to hurt her, to punish her. “You don’t really want to know,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” she replied.

  “All right,” he said. “If you really must know, after I left my parents’ house, I met Dougie Hallam at his bar, where we had a drink or two. Then we went to another bar, where we had more drinks. At some point during the course of the evening, Dougie rounded up a couple of women and we went to a motel somewhere out near the airport. I had sex with one of them, or perhaps both, I don’t really remember.”

  Maureen’s face was stony. Red and white blotches mottled her cheeks.

  “I woke up yesterday morning,” Hal went on, “alone in the motel room. I slept till about noon, bought some clean clothes at a Wal-Mart, dropped by a friend’s place, then spent the rest of the day and evening just driving around. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to coming home.”

  “No fucking shit,” Maureen said, through clenched teeth.

  “See, I told you, you didn’t want to know.”

  “You’re lying. You’re saying those things just to hurt me, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe so,” he agreed with a shrug. “But I’m not lying.”

  She looked at him as though he were something green and slimy she’d found in the back of the refrigerator. “Was Marty Elias one of the women you had sex with?” she asked, voice barely audible.

  “What?” he said, not quite certain he’d heard her correctly.

  “You heard me,” she said. “Was she?”

  He closed his eyes. He tried to visualize the faces of the women with whom he and Hallam had partied, but they were a featureless blur. One had had dark hair, he remembered, and a tattoo at the base of her spine, but it hadn’t been Marty Elias. Had it? No, he was sure of it.

  “Well,” Maureen said.

  “No,” he said. “Of course she wasn’t. Why would you ask that?”

  “She was murdered on Saturday night,” Maureen said. “Shoe and Claudia Hahn found her body in the Dells yesterday morning.”

  Panic seized his heart and squeezed. He couldn’t get his breath. He dropped onto a kitchen chair. “Jesus Christ, Maureen,” he gasped. “You — you don’t think I killed her, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said. Tears streaked her cheeks. “Goddamnit, Hal.”

  She stalked from the kitchen, slamming open the sliding door to the back garden, slamming it shut again. Hal watched her depart with what he could only describe as a feeling of total indifference.

  chapter forty-three

  Shoe tossed the green trash bag into the cargo area of Patty Dutton’s white Lincoln Navigator, on top of a stack of folding chairs.

  “Thanks,” Patty said, smiling at him as he closed the rear door of the Navigator. Her smile was a bit strained, he thought. She turned to Rachel. “Rae, next time I try to talk you into organizing something like this, just shoot me, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  The small park was almost empty, almost back to normal. All that remained, besides a few overflowing trash barrels and recycling bins, was the big rented tent shelter. The rental company would be coming later to dismantle it and cart it away.

  “You okay?” Rachel asked Patty.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Patty said, voice flat.

  Earlier that morning, while Shoe had been helping Rachel and Patty strike the kitchen shelter, Tim Dutton had come by the park to pick up his solar power gear. The tension between Dutton and his wife had been so intense it all but hummed, like an electric motor on overload.

  “Goddamned cops,” Dutton had complained. “You’d think they’d have better things to do than hassle me about Marty. No wonder there are so many unsolved murders in this city.” He turned on Patty. “What the fuck did you tell them, anyway?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tim,” Patty snapped, cheeks flaming. “Your fucking girlfriend was murdered. You seriously think the police are going to accept what your wife tells them without checking? And don’t give me that wide-eyed innocent look, you two-timing son of a bitch. You’ve been screwing her practically since she started working for you.”

  Muttering under his breath, Dutton had thrown the solar gear in the trunk of his Audi and driven away. Patty’s relief had been almost orgasmic.

  Patty climbed up into the driver’s seat of the Navigator. “See you later,” she said, and drove off. Shoe picked up the rolled-up kitchen tent and he and Rachel headed toward the park exit. Harvey Wiseman and Claudia Hahn, walking side by side across the grass, a few feet apart, each carrying a trash bag and wearing gardening gloves, were making one last round of the park, collecting trash. Rachel watched them, a wistful expression on her face.

  “Something wrong?” Shoe asked.

  She smiled. “No.” She shrugged. “I dunno,” she amended. “I feel, well, I’m not quite sure what I feel. It’s not jealousy, precisely, although maybe there’s a touch of envy. Maybe it’s regret, opportunities lost, chances not taken. Not that I blame Doc. Claudia is very beautiful. I wish them well.”

  “But … ”

  “Notwithstanding that both my marriages were complete disasters, a state of affairs for which I’m not entirely blameless — I can be a prickly bitch sometimes, as you well know — I like waking up with a warm body beside me.” She laughed. “Maybe I’ll get a dog.” She waved at Wiseman and Claudia, who both waved back. “Consider yourself lucky, Doc,” she said, half to herself. “In more ways than one.”

  As Shoe was closing the garage door after returning the bulky roll of the kitchen tent to the rafters, Harvey Wiseman and Claudia Hahn walked up the driveway. They stood very close together, not quite holding hands.

  “Shoe,” Claudia said. “I spoke to Jake Gibson this morning. He’d said be happy to speak to you about Marvin, but it will have to be today. He’s taking the train home to Winnipeg this evening. Shall I call him?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Claudia took out her cellphone and made the call. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, she said, “Jake, I’m with Joseph Schumacher now. He’d still like to talk to you about Marvin Cartwright.” She paused momentarily, then said, “Hold on.” She lowered the phone and said to Shoe, “Would now be all right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Claudia raised the phone. “Jake. We’ll see you in about half an hour then.” She closed her phone. “My car is on the other side of the park.”

  “We’ll take my father’s,” Shoe said.

  Rachel said, “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Not at all,” Claudia said.

  Rachel turned to Doc. “I hope you don’t mind if we borrow Claudia for a while.”

  “What?” Wiseman harrumphed self-consciously. “No, of course not.”

  Rachel popped onto her toes and kissed his bristly cheek.

  Jake Gibson was staying with his daughter and sonin-law in a small, over-furnished townhouse in Etobicoke, just off Islington Avenue, within spitting distance of the ten-lane concrete slash of Highway 401. It had a narrow, walled patio with a retractable awning to provide some protection from the August sun. No breeze reached the patio, however, and in less than two minutes, Shoe’s shirt was sticking to the plastic lawn chair.

  Jake Gibson’s daughter had made a big pitcher of iced tea for them. Emily St. Onge was a wiry, energetic woman in her early fifties, with bright blue eyes and a quick, infectious smile. Her husband, Len St. Onge, was a short, elfin-looking man of about sixty.

  “You’re Mr. Blizzard!” Rachel piped, when he smiled as he shook her hand.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, blushing slightly, smile widening. “How kind of you to remember.”

  “I loved your show,” Rachel said. “I watched it every
day after school till I was thirteen or fourteen.” To a puzzled Claudia Hahn, she explained, “Mr. Blizzard was an old man who lived in a castle of ice at the North Pole with Wally the Walrus and Percy the Penguin, both hand puppets. Marvin Cartwright told us that Percy must have been lost, since penguins were indigenous to the Antarctic, not the Arctic.” She turned back to Mr. St. Onge. “Pardon me, but you must be a hundred years old.”

  “Not quite,” Len St. Onge said with a laugh. “They made me up to look older when I was doing the program. You’re not the first one to notice that the makeup artist was amazingly prescient. It frightens me sometimes.”

  Emily and Len St. Onge excused themselves.

  “They’ll be happy to see the back of me,” Jake Gibson said. He was burly and grey, with a ruddy complexion.

  “I’m sure they won’t,” Claudia said with a warm smile. “What time is your train?”

  “Six o’clock. Damned nuisance, not being able to drive, but I enjoy travelling by train, especially first class. I can drink all the wine I want.”

  “Do you need a drive to Union Station?”

  “Thank you, but Em and Len are taking me.” He looked at Shoe. His eyes were a soft, mossy green. “So, how can I help you, Mr. Schumacher? It’s been thirty-five years since I lost touch with Marvin and my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Anything you could tell us about him would be a help,” Shoe said.

  “That wouldn’t be much, I’m afraid, even if my memories of him were clearer.”

  “Did he ever mention a woman named Ruth Braithwaite?” Shoe asked.

  “Ruth Braithwaite,” he said, as if trying the name on for size, seeing how it felt in his mouth. “Let me see. Hmm. No, not that I can recall. Which isn’t to say, however, that he never did. Of course, he was an extremely private man. Not easy to get to know. Not easy at all. The only reason we were friends, and I use that term loosely, is that we shared an interest in birds. I was — still am, when I can get out — an enthusiastic birder and Marvin was an expert on the migratory, as well as nonmigratory, birds of eastern Canada and the United States. He wrote a number of books on the subject that were required reading. He was less of a birder per se than a scientist, but still a good man to spend time with in the field. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to spend as much time as he would have liked in the field, what with having to look after his mother.”