by Alice Munro
(This, in fact, was Robert’s explanation to himself. She didn’t say all that, but he forgot she didn’t. She just said, “I thought I might as well take them up to the kitchen.”)
The kitchen had those same bamboo curtains over the sink window and over the breakfast-nook windows, which meant that though the room faced east, like the Kuipers’ kitchen, and though the sun was fully up by this time, not much light could get in. The day hadn’t begun here.
But the house was warm. Perhaps they’d got up a while ago and turned up the thermostat, then gone back to bed. Perhaps they left it up all night—though they had seemed to Peg to be thriftier than that. She set the eggs on the counter by the sink. The layout of the kitchen was almost exactly the same as her own. She noticed a few dishes stacked, rinsed, but not washed, as if they’d had something to eat before they went to bed.
She called again from the living-room doorway.
The living room was perfectly tidy. It looked to Peg somehow too perfectly tidy, but that—as she said to Robert—was probably the way the living room of a retired couple was bound to look to a woman used to having children around. Peg had never in her life had quite as much tidiness around her as she might have liked, having gone from a family home where there were six children to her in-laws’ crowded farmhouse, which she crowded further with her own babies. She had told Robert a story about once asking for a beautiful bar of soap for Christmas, pink soap with a raised design of roses on it. She got it, and she used to hide it after every use so that it wouldn’t get cracked and moldy in the cracks, the way soap always did in that house. She was grown up at that time, or thought she was.
She had stamped the snow off her boots in the utility room. Nevertheless she hesitated to walk across the clean, pale-beige living-room carpet. She called again. She used the Weebles’ first names, which she barely knew. Walter and Nora. They had moved in last April, and since then they had been away on two trips, so she didn’t feel she knew them at all well, but it seemed silly to be calling, “Mr. and Mrs. Weeble. Are you up yet, Mr. and Mrs. Weeble?”
No answer.
They had an open staircase going up from the living room, just as Peg and Robert did. Peg walked now across the clean, pale carpet to the foot of the stairs, which were carpeted in the same material. She started to climb. She did not call again.
She must have known then or she would have called. It would be the normal thing to do, to keep calling the closer you got to where people might be sleeping. To warn them. They might be deeply asleep. Drunk. That wasn’t the custom of the Weebles, so far as anybody knew, but nobody knew them that well. Retired people. Early retirement. He had been an accountant; she had been a teacher. They had lived in Hamilton. They had chosen Gilmore because Walter Weeble used to have an aunt and uncle here, whom he visited as a child. Both dead now, the aunt and uncle, but the place must have held pleasant memories for him. And it was cheap; this was surely a cheaper house than they could have afforded. They meant to spend their money travelling. No children.
She didn’t call; she didn’t halt again. She climbed the stairs and didn’t look around as she came up; she faced straight ahead. Ahead was the bathroom, with the door open. It was clean and empty.
She turned at the top of the stairs toward the Weebles’ bedroom. She had never been upstairs in this house before, but she knew where that would be. It would be the extended room at the front, with the wide window overlooking the street.
The door of that room was open.
Peg came downstairs and left the house by the kitchen, the utility room, the side door. Her footprints showed on the carpet and on the linoleum tiles, and outside on the snow. She closed the door after herself. Her car had been running all this time and was sitting in its own little cloud of steam. She got in and backed out and drove to the police station in the Town Hall.
“It’s a bitter cold morning, Peg,” the constable said.
“Yes, it is.”
“So what can I do for you?”
• • •
Robert got more, from Karen.
Karen Adams was the clerk in the Gilmore Arcade. She was a young married woman, solidly built, usually good-humored, alert without particularly seeming to be so, efficient without a lot of bustle. She got along well with the customers; she got along with Peg and Robert. She had known Peg longer, of course. She defended her against those people who said Peg had got her nose in the air since she married rich. Karen said Peg hadn’t changed from what she always was. But after today she said, “I always believed Peg and me to be friends, but now I’m not so sure.”
Karen started work at ten. She arrived a little before that and asked if there had been many customers in yet, and Peg said no, nobody.
“I don’t wonder,” Karen said. “It’s too cold. If there was any wind, it’d be murder.”
Peg had made coffee. They had a new coffee maker, Robert’s Christmas present to the store. They used to have to get take-outs from the bakery up the street.
“Isn’t this thing marvellous?” Karen said as she got her coffee.
Peg said yes. She was wiping up some marks on the floor.
“Oh-oh,” said Karen. “Was that me or you?”
“I think it was me,” Peg said.
“So I didn’t think anything of it,” Karen said later. “I thought she must’ve tracked in some mud. I didn’t stop to think, Where would you get down to mud with all this snow on the ground?”
After a while, a customer came in, and it was Celia Simms, and she had heard. Karen was at the cash, and Peg was at the back, checking some invoices. Celia told Karen. She didn’t know much; she didn’t know how it had been done or that Peg was involved.
Karen shouted to the back of the store. “Peg! Peg! Something terrible has happened, and it’s your next-door neighbors!”
Peg called back, “I know.”
Celia lifted her eyebrows at Karen—she was one of those who didn’t like Peg’s attitude—and Karen loyally turned aside and waited till Celia went out of the store. Then she hurried to the back, making the hangers jingle on the racks.
“Both the Weebles are shot dead, Peg. Did you know that?”
Peg said, “Yes. I found them.”
“You did! When did you?”
“This morning, just before I came in to work.”
“They were murdered!”
“It was a murder-suicide,” Peg said. “He shot her and then he shot himself. That’s what happened.”
“When she told me that,” Karen said, “I started to shake. I shook all over and I couldn’t stop myself.” Telling Robert this, she shook again, to demonstrate, and pushed her hands up inside the sleeves of her blue plush jogging suit.
“So I said, ‘What did you do when you found them,’ and she said, ‘I went and told the police.’ I said, ‘Did you scream, or what?’ I said didn’t her legs buckle, because I know mine would’ve. I can’t imagine how I would’ve got myself out of there. She said she didn’t remember much about getting out, but she did remember closing the door, the outside door, and thinking, Make sure that’s closed in case some dog could get in. Isn’t that awful? She was right, but it’s awful to think of. Do you think she’s in shock?”
“No,” Robert said. “I think she’s all right.”
This conversation was taking place at the back of the store in the afternoon, when Peg had gone out to get a sandwich.
“She had not said one word to me. Nothing. I said, ‘How come you never said a word about this, Peg,’ and she said, ‘I knew you’d find out pretty soon.’ I said yes, but she could’ve told me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Just like she’s apologizing for some little thing like using my coffee mug. Only, Peg would never do that.”
Robert had finished what he was doing at the Keneally store around noon, and decided to drive back to Gilmore before getting anything to eat. There was a highway diner just outside of town, on the way in from Keneally, and he thought that he would stop there. A fe
w truckers and travellers were usually eating in the diner, but most of the trade was local—farmers on the way home, business and working men who had driven out from town. Robert liked this place, and he had entered it today with a feeling of buoyant expectation. He was hungry from his work in the cold air, and aware of the brilliance of the day, with the snow on the fields looking sculpted, dazzling, as permanent as marble. He had the sense he had fairly often in Gilmore, the sense of walking onto an informal stage, where a rambling, agreeable play was in progress. And he knew his lines—or knew, at least, that his improvisations would not fail. His whole life in Gilmore sometimes seemed to have this quality, but if he ever tried to describe it that way, it would sound as if it was an artificial life, something contrived, not entirely serious. And the very opposite was true. So when he met somebody from his old life, as he sometimes did when he went to Toronto, and was asked how he liked living in Gilmore, he would say, “I can’t tell you how much I like it!” which was exactly the truth.
“Why didn’t you get in touch with me?”
“You were up on the roof.”
“You could have called the store and told Ellie. She would have told me.”
“What good would that have done?”
“I could at least have come home.”
He had come straight from the diner to the store, without eating what he had ordered. He did not think he would find Peg in any state of collapse—he knew her well enough for that—but he did think she would want to go home, let him fix her a drink, spend some time telling him about it.
She didn’t want that. She wanted to go up the street to the bakery to get her usual lunch—a roll with ham and cheese.
“I let Karen go out to eat, but I haven’t had time. Should I bring one back for you? If you didn’t eat at the diner, I might as well.”
When she brought him the sandwich, he sat and ate it at the desk where she had been doing invoices. She put fresh coffee and water into the coffee maker.
“I can’t imagine how we got along without this thing.”
He looked at Peg’s lilac-colored coat hanging beside Karen’s red coat on the washroom door. On the lilac coat there was a long crusty smear of reddish-brown paint, down to the hemline.
Of course that wasn’t paint. But on her coat? How did she get blood on her coat? She must have brushed up against them in that room. She must have got close.
Then he remembered the talk in the diner, and realized she wouldn’t have needed to get that close. She could have got blood from the door frame. The constable had been in the diner, and he said there was blood everywhere, and not just blood.
“He shouldn’t ever have used a shotgun for that kind of business,” one of the men at the diner said.
Somebody else said, “Maybe a shotgun was all he had.”
It was busy in the store most of the afternoon. People on the street, in the bakery and the cafe and the bank and the post office, talking. People wanted to talk face to face. They had to get out and do it, in spite of the cold. Talking on the phone was not enough.
What had gone on at first, Robert gathered, was that people had got on the phone, just phoned anybody they could think of who might not have heard. Karen had phoned her friend Shirley, who was at home in bed with the flu, and her mother, who was in the hospital with a broken hip. It turned out her mother knew already—the whole hospital knew. And Shirley said, “My sister beat you to it.”
It was true that people valued and looked forward to the moment of breaking the news—Karen was annoyed at Shirley’s sister, who didn’t work and could get to the phone whenever she wanted to—but there was real kindness and consideration behind this impulse, as well. Robert thought so. “I knew she wouldn’t want not to know,” Karen said, and that was true. Nobody would want not to know. To go out into the street, not knowing. To go around doing all the usual daily things, not knowing. He himself felt troubled, even slightly humiliated, to think that he hadn’t known; Peg hadn’t let him know.
Talk ran backward from the events of the morning. Where were the Weebles seen, and in what harmlessness and innocence, and how close to the moment when everything was changed?
She had stood in line at the Bank of Montreal on Friday afternoon.
He had got a haircut on Saturday morning.
They were together, buying groceries, in the I.G.A. on Friday evening at about eight o’clock.
What did they buy? A good supply? Specials, advertised bargains, more than enough to last for a couple of days?
More than enough. A bag of potatoes, for one thing.
Then reasons. The talk turned to reasons. Naturally. There had been no theories put forward in the diner. Nobody knew the reason, nobody could imagine. But by the end of the afternoon there were too many explanations to choose from.
Financial problems. He had been mixed up in some bad investment scheme in Hamilton. Some wild money-making deal that had fallen through. All their money was gone and they would have to live out the rest of their lives on the old-age pension.
They had owed money on their income taxes. Being an accountant, he thought he know how to fix things, but he had been found out. He would be exposed, perhaps charged, shamed publicly, left poor. Even if it was only cheating the government, it would still be a disgrace when that kind of thing came out.
Was it a lot of money?
Certainly. A lot.
It was not money at all. They were ill. One of them or both of them. Cancer. Crippling arthritis. Alzheimer’s disease. Recurrent mental problems. It was health, not money. It was suffering and helplessness they feared, not poverty.
A division of opinion became evident between men and women. It was nearly always the men who believed and insisted that the trouble had been money, and it was the women who talked of illness. Who would kill themselves just because they were poor, said some women scornfully. Or even because they might go to jail? It was always a woman, too, who suggested unhappiness in the marriage, who hinted at the drama of a discovered infidelity or the memory of an old one.
Robert listened to all these explanations but did not believe any of them. Loss of money, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. Equally plausible, these seemed to him, equally hollow and useless. What happened was that he believed each of them for about five minutes, no longer. If he could have believed one of them, hung on to it, it would have been as if something had taken its claws out of his chest and permitted him to breathe.
(“They weren’t Gilmore people, not really,” a woman said to him in the bank. Then she looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean like you.”)
Peg kept busy getting some children’s sweaters, mitts, snow-suits ready for the January sale. People came up to her when she was marking the tags, and she said, “Can I help you,” so that they were placed right away in the position of being customers, and had to say that there was something they were looking for. The Arcade carried ladies’ and children’s clothes, sheets, towels, knitting wool, kitchenware, bulk candy, magazines, mugs, artificial flowers, and plenty of other things besides, so it was not hard to think of something.
What was it they were really looking for? Surely not much in the way of details, description. Very few people actually want that, or will admit they do, in a greedy and straightforward way. They want it, they don’t want it. They start asking, they stop themselves. They listen and they back away. Perhaps they wanted from Peg just some kind of acknowledgment, some word or look that would send them away, saying, “Peg Kuiper is absolutely shattered.” “I saw Peg Kuiper. She didn’t say much but you could tell she was absolutely shattered.”
Some people tried to talk to her, anyway.
“Wasn’t that terrible what happened down by you?”
“Yes, it was.”
“You must have known them a little bit, living next door.”
“Not really. We hardly knew them at all.”
“You never noticed anything that would’ve led you to think this could’ve happened?”
“
We never noticed anything at all.”
Robert pictured the Weebles getting into and out of their car in the driveway. That was where he had most often seen them. He recalled their Boxing Day visit. Her gray legs made him think of a nun. Her mention of virginity had embarrassed Peg and the boys. She reminded Robert a little of the kind of women he used to know. Her husband was less talkative, though not shy. They talked about Mexican food, which it seemed the husband had not liked. He did not like eating in restaurants.
Peg had said, “Oh, men never do!”
That surprised Robert, who asked her afterward did that mean she wanted to eat out more often?
“I just said that to take her side. I thought he was glaring at her a bit.”
Was he glaring? Robert had not noticed. The man seemed too self-controlled to glare at his wife in public. Too well disposed, on the whole, perhaps in some way too indolent, to glare at anybody anywhere.
But it wasn’t like Peg to exaggerate.
Bits of information kept arriving. The maiden name of Nora Weeble. Driscoll. Nora Driscoll. Someone knew a woman who had taught at the same school with her in Hamilton. Well-liked as a teacher, a fashionable dresser, she had some trouble keeping order. She had taken a French Conversation course, and a course in French cooking.
Some women here had asked her if she’d be interested in starting a book club, and she had said yes.
He had been more of a joiner in Hamilton than he was here. The Rotary Club. The Lions Club. Perhaps it had been for business reasons.
They were not churchgoers, as far as anybody knew, not in either place.
(Robert was right about the reasons. In Gilmore everything becomes known, sooner or later. Secrecy and confidentiality are seen to be against the public interest. There is a network of people who are married to or related to the people who work in the offices where all the records are kept.
