by Ingrid Betz
“Me?” squeaked Marigold. “Why would I do that?” The bag dangling from her hand felt suddenly heavier than before. She turned the key in the lock of her door. “I have to start supper. I’m going out tonight.”
“To see your boyfriend?”
“No. To work.”
Mrs. Patel grunted and picked up the garden hose. “Pity. Soon it’s too late,” she declared. Marigold flushed and let herself into the flat. They’d had variations of this conversation before.
Inside the door, she dropped her bag with a feeling of relief. Home safe.
Peter was right. The flat hadn’t had much going for it, aside from a relatively low rent, when she’d first answered the ad in the London Free Press. Two sunless rooms, an out-of-date bathroom in need of a good scrub, and a kitchen consisting of a counter along one wall, with windows overlooking the backyard on one side and a neighbour’s garage on the other. But Marigold had never lived in a place of her own before and the privacy alone was a luxury. As quickly as her paychecks came in, she’d spent them transforming the flat into her idea of a home: some overstuffed second-hand furniture, lots of low-light plants, colourful animal prints on the walls, a curio cabinet to house her collection of china cats. Even Lynn, who’d owned a townhouse in one of the newer subdivisions, had liked dropping over.
They’d settle themselves on the sofa amid the puffy velour cushions that Lynn, laughing in her agreeable low voice, said were straight out of a Spanish bordello—not that she’d ever been in one. Their faces glowing in the warm light of the low-hanging lamp with a tasseled shade that Marigold had picked up at a garage sale, they’d drink herbal tea and watch wildlife documentaries, in between debating the chances of the latest Humane Society drop-off to snag an owner.
All things they’d never be doing anymore.
Marigold slid the pizza into the microwave, and poured herself a glass of iced tea. Her small round table stood ready, with cutlery and a plate laid out on the pink, orange, and green flowered mat that matched her curtains. She’d gotten into the habit of setting it in the mornings before she left for work, because it made the flat look cheerful and inviting when she got home. She didn’t care what Peter said about her figure, food was the life-raft that kept her from sinking in the waves of loneliness that sometimes washed over her.
Faintly through the wall separating their two kitchens, Marigold heard the clang of a saucepan lid and then the familiar fanfare announcing the news on CBC radio. It was Mrs. Patel’s unbreakable habit to listen to The World at Six while she prepared supper. This was Marigold’s signal to raise the window sash.
Seafood Feast today, she decided, and pulled open the tab.
She wondered if the man at the store had bought a tin for his cat, and what kind of cat it was, if indeed he had one. If she hadn’t been so scared silly, she could at least have tried to be helpful, she thought, spooning catfood onto a saucer and placing it on the sill.
She was almost through her own meal when Red Tom appeared. Silent and urgent, the way only a cat could be, he elongated his furry self and slid under the sash, his eyes greedy for the waiting food. Marigold watched him eat, forgetting the pizza in her pleasure.
Sometimes he stayed on after he had eaten. Dropping soft-footed to the floor, he’d talk to her in companionable tones. On cold winter nights he could even be coaxed to join her on the sofa cushions and allow himself to be petted. Other times he was in a hurry to leave, intent on reclaiming his place in the outside world. Today he sat on the sill and, moistening his paw, gave his face a wash, paying particular attention to the whiskers that bristled from his full round cheeks. All at once he stopped. He gave Marigold a brilliant green stare over his upraised paw, as though he’d only just become aware of her.
“Oh Tom,” she whispered. “If you knew… ”
She stood up, careful to keep her movements calm and unthreatening. Leaning across the counter, she buried her face in his furry flank. Orange-red fur that was only a shade lighter than her own hair. Thank God, she thought, for animals. They’d be waiting for her at the shelter, the ones which hadn’t yet found homes and perhaps never would, happy to see her back. All she had to do was love them. There was nothing easier, nothing in life she wanted to do more than that.
12.
“TALKED TO ASHER YET?”
“His mobile is still switched off.” Borrowman sounded tired. “Where are you?”
“At the farm. Maybe he’s afraid of getting calls from Elaine.”
“The two of them aren’t speaking. I suppose you’re out with the Henry.”
“Thought I’d get in some target practise. Just in case,” Verena said. “Call me when you hear.”
She disconnected before he could trot out his usual comments that there was no “just in case” about it, he was not sending her up to Algonquin Park with a rifle and for God’s sake to be careful no-one saw her with it. She sat behind the wheel for a moment thinking of Asher. She could have told Borrowman he’d be next to impossible to get hold of. Asher Curran was a man who worked for himself. He only did things for others when it was his own idea.
She pocketed her cellphone and put the VW back in motion.
The For Sale sign by the side of the road had tilted over and come to rest in the embrace of a sprawling blackberry bush. Kasza & Fortune, Specializing in Farm Properties, read the faded black letters on the white background. The name and telephone number of the agent below was obscured by the thorny clutch of branches. Verena made a point of varying the places where she practised: an unused railway siding next to an abandoned brick factory, scrub fields along the Thames before it flowed under the Kilworth bridge. All were isolated and within a ten-minute driving distance of London proper; but the Kasza & Fortune site was her favourite.
She drove past the entrance where a double row of aging spruce trees led to a yellow brick farmhouse. Its windows were boarded up and the surrounding fields, once lush with corn, had reverted to weedy scrubland. Chances were that no one would notice or care if she drove up the lane and parked next to the empty house, but she preferred to continue along the road until it dipped out of sight. Here she turned onto a rough dirt track running parallel to a split-rail fence that delineated the eastern boundary of the property.
The VW jolted over the ruts left by a recent shower, scaring up a toad. He was large, a hand’s span across with pitted skin intricately patterned in ochre and tan and brown. Verena braked and watched him launch himself forward, awkward as a blown leaf, then pause to gather himself for the next leap. Her face under the watch cap as she waited for him to move wore an expression that few people ever got to see. Only Borrowman would have recognized it as tenderness and not been wholly surprised.
The track petered out and Verena brought the car to a stop behind a thicket of thorn trees where it wouldn’t be visible from the road. Asher was still on her mind.
“Duck and weave, chickie. Duck and weave,” he was fond of intoning, in the joking way he had that put some people off but suited her childlike sense of humour. “In this game it’s the hunter, not the quarry who covers his tracks,” he’d explained the time they were on a stakeout together, huddling soaked to the skin in a drainage ditch. “Write it in there so you can’t forget,” he added, drawing his thumb across her forehead in a leisurely fashion that still made her shiver to recall. He didn’t touch her often, he was aware of the conflicting feelings it aroused in her.
“Give it time, chickie,” he said, catching the mute craving in her eyes even while she flinched away from his hand. “Our day will come.”
She nodded. In that moment she had felt capable of submitting to anything he did out of sheer gratitude.
Verena hoisted her backpack from behind the seat. An unseen crow sounded a warning, and the air carried a smell of damp. She swung the pack over her shoulder, conscious of the reassuring weight of the rifle inside, and started across the field. L
ow clouds threatened more rain. A cool breeze sprang down the slope, bending the saucer-shaped heads of Queen Anne’s Lace, and she put up her collar. She was glad of the climb; the hard pumping action of her legs warmed her and made the blood sing in her veins.
The house from the back looked smaller every time she saw it, crowded by lilac bushes growing unchecked. She’d crept onto the porch one time and peered through cobwebbed window panes at the rooms inside. Broken bits of furniture lurked in the gloom, reminders of the people who’d lived there. Outside in what remained of a vegetable garden, dill had seeded itself, waving feathery stalks above an invading army of weeds.
Half hidden by black walnut trees loomed the grey hulk of a barn. During a thunderstorm once, Verena had taken shelter inside and discovered a warren of stalls under a loft stacked with musty bales of hay. The site offered interesting possibilities of concealment, information she filed away in case the need should ever arise. In March, she’d sometimes stay late to listen to the wild, exultant music of spring peepers in a nearby creek, and in July she liked to watch the fireflies that darted like sparks through the darkening space under the trees.
Today she continued on across the field until she reached a rise some thirty yards away from the woodlot that constituted the back half of the farm. From here, she had an unobstructed view of the trunk of a dead ash looming just ahead of the main body of trees.
Her sense of anticipation never seemed to lessen, no matter how often she experienced it. Opening her backpack, she drew out the carrying case that held the disassembled parts of her rifle.
Stowed inside the hollow stock were the components. Thirty seconds was all it took her to attach the receiver to the stock, insert the barrel, and screw the nut tight, another five to fit on the scope if she wanted it. She’d learned to complete the operation in the dark, working by touch alone. The Henry AR-7, a later incarnation of the Armelite, was a gift from her father, the last thing he’d ever given her. Volker Vitek had been working for a security company in Toronto at the time and he’d done the owner a favour—he wouldn’t say what, and from that she deduced it was something illegal—and he’d taken his under-the-table bonus straight to a gun shop. The rifle was to make up for the one sacrificed to the fruit stand in Belgrade. He wouldn’t always be with her, he said, and this was the one way he knew to ensure that she’d be able to look after herself.
Borrowman rolled his eyes when she explained this to him some months after she joined the Cell. ‘War-zone thinking,’ he muttered, and a few other things beside. “Didn’t your mother object?”
“She was in the hospital by then. Cancer.” Verena tried to make him smile. “She’d only have spent the money on chairs.”
His expression was nowhere near smiling. “Promise me one thing. Remember you’re in Canada now. Not Serbia,” he said.
She loved the Henry with a passion, just as she’d loved the Armelite. She loved the handsome lightweight stock with its camouflage pattern of leaves, and the heft of it when she lifted it to her shoulder as she was doing now. She loved the feel of the stock against her cheek, the satiny wood, and the sense of power that sighting along the barrel gave her. Best of all she loved the sensation of her finger squeezing softly, softly, the trigger.
The first bullet struck the tree with a thump. Two centimeters too high; she’d missed the round bole that was her habitual target.
Verena lowered the rifle and forced herself to relax; she was too eager. The magazine held eight rounds of high-velocity .22 caliber ammunition. She made it a habit to practice until she hit the centre of the bole half a dozen times in succession.
Raising the rifle again, she lined up the sights. Foliage trembled in the periphery of her vision and the boy stepped out from behind an elderberry bush in the exact same instant that she pulled the trigger. One second there was nothing, no-one, only the bole of the ash tree and the next there he was, a slight figure flinging his arms up and crumpling to the ground.
A dog bounded out from behind him and started barking in sharp staccato bursts.
Verena lowered the rifle in disbelief. She’s missed the target and hit a child. What was a child doing in the woods? She waded through the grass to where the dog, a black-and-white terrier, barked and danced. Shooing him aside, she bent down. The boy couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, one blue-jeaned leg twisted awkwardly beneath him, and his face upturned and white. Blood oozed through the sleeve of his T-shirt just below the left shoulder. He had to have come with somebody, that age, she thought, he couldn’t be here alone.
Cries drifted shrilly across the field, and she spun around to look.
“Davy? Where are you, Davy?”
A woman stood in front of the open back door of the house. At the sound of her voice, the dog erupted in a renewed frenzy of barks and the woman hurried down the steps. A man in a baseball cap emerged from the barn and together the two of them advanced into the field, shouting the boy’s name.
Verena forced herself to move. She ran to her backpack and stuffed the rifle inside. Shouts assailed her.
“Who are you? What are you doing? Where’s Davy?”
The man was in the lead, his big stride parting the grass, close enough now that she could make out his red face under the visor of the cap. She caught the change in his expression as he came over the rise and spotted the figure of the boy on the ground.
“What the hell have you done?” he yelled.
Verena swung the pack over her shoulder and turned to run. The woman wailed. “Davy! Oh my God, Jim. He’s hurt.”
“Wait! Stop!” Verena heard the man’s rasping breath; he was coming after her. The dog snapped at her heels.
“Jim,” the woman screamed. “There’s no time! We need to get to a hospital.”
The pounding steps behind her slowed.
About to plunge down the final slope, Verena glanced over her shoulder and saw the man turn back to where the woman was on her knees beside the boy. The dog continued to chase her a while longer, until the man called him, his voice harsh with fear.
Verena tossed her pack into the car, scrambled behind the wheel and threw the engine in reverse. She backed and turned all in one motion, hoping the wheels wouldn’t get stuck in the ruts. The toad, she thought, and looked to make sure it hadn’t hopped back on the track.
Elaine, perched on a stool next to the counter, laid down her pen. Her father had come into the kitchen to make himself a cup of the herbal tea he always drank. Chamomile, vile-tasting stuff. Narrowing her eyes behind her glasses, she watched him reach across the counter to replace the orange canister. Was it her imagination or had he lost weight? His corduroys hung on him more loosely than ever. She’d noticed him picking at his food lately. Whatever Alex Wong was prescribing for his ulcer, it didn’t seem to be helping. He paused in front of the fridge door to read a taped printout. Donny trolled the internet daily for a new pun to post.
“They say time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. ‘Get it, Dad? Fruit flies?’” Donny had added in his rudimentary scribble. Acting smart, Elaine called it. Borrowman only smiled.
“Boys not home yet from school?”
“Raymond’s got band practice. Donny’s at a friend’s. Doing homework, he says. Checking out adult sites on the computer, more like. You didn’t tell me you were going out last night,” she said.
“I gave Verena a lift home from the studio.”
“She couldn’t take the bus?”
“I needed to speak to her. Getting low on tea.”
“Oh?” ‘Dad’s tea,’ she wrote on her grocery list. She tapped the pen on the notepad while the kettle hummed. “Something important?”
He poured boiling water into his mug. “The usual. A mining company wants to run a road through old-growth forest.”
He was lying, Elaine could tell from his tone. Something big was in the works, she was
sure of it. He’d been shut up in his study half the week. Getting an early start on his lectures for the fall semester, so he said, but she’d heard his murmured voice on the phone late into the night. He was smoking more than usual, too. Thinking she wouldn’t notice, when she could smell him clear into the kitchen.
“Grown woman with nothing better to do than hug trees. Why doesn’t she work for a living like the rest of us?”
“She does. Verena’s an aerobics instructor.”
Elaine gave him a look. “Part-time. When she feels like it. When she’s not gallivanting around the country on assignments for you.”
Her father was as bad as Asher. Bastard that he was—more interested in saving owls and trashing pipelines than he was in saving his marriage. Pretending he wasn’t hot for other women when she’d seen the looks he exchanged with Verena. Neither man giving her credit for having eyes in her head, or a brain to figure things out with.
“You were gone half the evening. How long does it take to discuss a few trees?”
“One hour. Jealousy won’t help, Elaine. If you want to go after Asher, just do it. Take a break from teaching and go spend some time with him out west. Make it a holiday—you’ve earned one. I’ll even pay for the flight if you like.”
“Chase after him, you mean? No thanks. I have my pride.” She smoothed down the front of her new leopard-print blouse; she knew animal prints disturbed her father, but too bad, they were the fashion this year. Wednesday was her day for teaching at the London School of Music. The staff usually got together for lunch at a bistro downtown and she liked to look smart.
“Besides, you and the boys could never cope. You’d live on pizza. You wouldn’t have a clean shirt to your names.”
“We’d manage.”
She saw the tiredness in his eyes and bit back a comment. Then he said, “I know you’re hurting, Elaine. But it’s no use blaming Verena for Asher leaving. She had nothing to do with his decision,” and the bitterness welled up in her again.
