Fall from Grace

by L. R. Wright

  Alberg stood up and put his mug down next to the coffeepot. “I’ve got a couple of people to talk to. I’ll check with you when I get back.”

  “Wow,” he said fifteen minutes later, looking out through the glass doors in the high school principal’s living room.

  “Sit down,” said the principal, whose name was Hugh McMurtry. “How about a cup of coffee? Or would you like something cold?”

  “Coffee’s fine,” said Alberg.

  The doors were open to a small brick patio, in the center of which was a plot of earth, home to two red rosebushes. A few steps led down from the patio to a walk that stretched along the beach. Beyond that, Trail Bay lay still and gleaming in the sun. Alberg heard sea gulls, and some children, laughing and shrieking. He stepped out onto the patio and saw them splashing in the shallow water near the shore, watched by two women in shorts and T-shirts who were sitting on beach towels nearby.

  “It’ll just be a second,” McMurtry called from his kitchen, which was separated from the large living room by a counter.

  “This is quite a view,” said Alberg, as McMurtry joined him on the patio.

  “It is, isn’t it,” the principal agreed.

  He was older than Alberg, probably almost retirement age. He wore light pants and a polo shirt. His hair was gray and thinning, and he was about fifteen pounds overweight. But he was tanned, which Alberg envied. People who tanned, he thought, always looked slimmer and healthier than people who didn’t.

  McMurtry gazed out at the ocean. “I look at that bay and I think of Hong Kong,” he said. “Look how empty it is. We’ve got so much space, in this country. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair.”

  Alberg in his mind’s eye saw Trail Bay thick with houseboats, and decided he’d like to put that off as long as possible.

  They moved inside, and McMurtry slid the door closed. “Do you want cream? Sugar?” he said, going to the kitchen.

  Alberg hesitated. “No, thanks. Black is fine.”

  The principal set the mugs on the coffee table. “I went to the office,” he said, “after you called, and looked up Steven’s file.” He looked unhappily at Alberg. “I still can’t believe you think he was murdered.”

  “We don’t think anything yet, Mr. McMurtry.” Alberg took out his notebook. “Do you remember him pretty well?”

  “I remember them all pretty well,” said McMurtry with a smile.

  “Was he a good student?”

  “Average, I’d say. Except for photography, of course.”

  “He was good with a camera, was he?”

  “Oh yes. He took all the pictures for the school newspaper, and for the yearbook, from grade ten on.”

  “What can you tell me about his friends?”

  “Well, everybody knew Steven, because of the photography. But I don’t remember him having any close friends. He always seemed to me to be pretty much on his own.”

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do you think he was homosexual?”

  The principal looked surprised. He shook his head. “No. Sometimes you have a hunch. But it’s seldom that kids that age are open about it. Most of the time they’re fighting it, if it’s there. It scares the hell out of them. They don’t want to be different. Not in a town this size.”

  “Probably not in any town,” said Alberg.

  “In some of the bigger schools there’s a constituency. So they can acknowledge each other. And that makes it easier.”

  “In Steven’s case, you didn’t even have a hunch?”

  “No.”

  “Did he do drugs?”

  “I never had any reason to think so.”

  Alberg closed his notebook. “Any of his photographs still lying around?”

  “As it happens,” said the principal, “we had a reunion in the spring. A ten-year reunion. So we pulled the yearbook, of course, and some of the newspapers from that year. And that was Steven’s year.”

  “Did he show up for the reunion?”

  McMurtry shook his head.

  “Can I have a look?”

  “Sure you can.” McMurtry stood up. “We can go over to the school now, if you like.”

  “Great.”

  McMurtry went down the hall into what Alberg assumed was a bedroom. Alberg heard murmurings; McMurtry’s wife, he’d been told, was an invalid.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said the principal, returning to the living room. Alberg thought he looked guilty; Alberg would have liked to meet his wife.

  Annabelle wandered, restless, through her house, aware of its emptiness and quiet. In the room with the window wall the heat was overpowering; she’d had to move some of the tenderer plants out of there, and now her family complained about the four-foot hibiscus taking up space in the living room, and the seven-foot weeping fig that was crammed into the girls’ bedroom, and the five azaleas in the kitchen. And Herman hated the miniature rose in their bedroom; he said it stuck him with its thorns whenever he had to get up in the night.

  Herman got up a lot in the night. He had taken to prowling around the yard every hour or so, checking on the animals in their cages. Protecting his investment, he said. Since the cops wouldn’t do their job.

  The phone rang.

  “Where the hell were you last night?”

  “Oh Bobby, I’m sorry.” Annabelle twisted the telephone cord around her hand. “I couldn’t come. I had an accident.”

  “Did you get hurt?”

  “No no. Oh no. Only my dress. I’m fine.”

  She almost smiled, to hear him thinking so busily.

  “What kind of an accident was it?”

  “Oh heavens.” Annabelle’s laugh sounded artificial, even to her. “I told you, it was nothing.” She pretended that she saw her children running toward the house. “Oh Bobby, I have to go. I’ll see you—oh, tomorrow, okay? Okay? Bye.” Annabelle hung up, trembling, before he could protest.

  She went outside, and the screen door banged behind her, bouncing in its frame. She walked quickly past the animal cages, averting her eyes, and kept on going until she got to the edge of the gravel road, where a big fir tree grew. She sat on the carpet of needles and leaned against the trunk.

  There flashed into her mind a picture of Steven Grayson falling from the cliff. Had it felt like flying, for a moment? Or had he known, all the way down, that flying was impossible?

  Annabelle rested, in the dry heat of the day.

  Percy Grayson put a sign in the window announcing that his shop was closed. “What’s this all about, then?”

  “We’re investigating the circumstances of your nephew’s death,” said Alberg, “because it wasn’t a natural death.”

  Percy rubbed vigorously at the top of his head, which was bald. “It surely wasn’t. What a god-awful thing.”

  Alberg figured Steven’s uncle was pretty close to sixty. He was a big man, six feet tall, tanned and fit. He was wearing dark brown slacks and a short-sleeved tan shirt with thin dark brown stripes.

  “Just a hell of a thing.”

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me,” said Alberg, opening his notebook. Percy adjusted a discreet SALE sign that hung on the wall above a rack of summer clothing. “I used to be a fisherman,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Alberg shook his head.

  “Well I did. Then six years ago this summer we had the best sockeye run in seventy-five years. I made myself a packet. So the wife says, let’s do this or let’s do that, and so on and so forth. But I knew exactly what I was gonna do.” He gestured proudly. “Get myself a store. Sell men’s clothes. And that’s what I did.”

  “It’s a very nice store,” said Alberg.

  “Come on, sit down, we might as well be comfortable.”

  They were in an area at the rear of the shop, near the four changing rooms. There was a grouping of chairs and a sofa, and a big wooden coffee table bearing a selection of magazines. Most were news magazines, but Alberg saw a copy of Vogu
e, too, and realized that most of the people who sat there waiting were probably women.

  “I’m not gonna be much help to you,” said Percy. “See, in the last ten years we hardly saw Stevie at all.”

  “We think the reason he died has to do with his life here,” said Alberg, “before he went away. That’s what I want you to talk about.”

  Percy looked doubtful.

  “Tell me about his parents. Was he close to them?”

  “My brother Harry,” said Percy, after a pause, “he was gone a lot. Out in the woods. He could be in a logging camp for weeks, even months at a time. That job’s even worse than fishing, if you ask me. And then when he did get home he’d lay down the law.” He shook his head in disgust. “Stevie got along good with his mom, though.”

  “What can you tell me about his friends?”

  “Nothing. All I remember is, he was always taking pictures.”

  “He was a good photographer, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Damned annoying, though. Never asked your permission, always snapping away. Sometimes it was just because he was nervous, I think.” Percy shook his head. “Mustn’t speak ill of the dead,” he said tiredly. “He was a good boy, Stevie was.”

  “Did you see him when he came home this summer?”

  “We did, yes. The wife and me, we had the two of them to supper right after he arrived.”

  “Did he tell you why he’d come back?”

  “Just said he’d come for a visit. That’s all.”

  Alberg sat back. “What kind of a man was your nephew turning out to be, Mr. Grayson?”

  Percy pondered the question, staring at his shoes, which were brown, highly polished loafers. Finally, “I don’t have any idea, really. You couldn’t get real close to Stevie,” he said heavily. “At least, I couldn’t.”

  Annabelle, who had fallen asleep under the tree, awoke gradually, feeling a sweet burgeoning inside her. For a moment she thought that when she opened her eyes Bobby would be there, smiling down at her. But it wasn’t Bobby, it was Camellia. She was sitting cross-legged, looking intently at Annabelle. And Annabelle turned her head slowly to the left and saw that Erna Remple’s mangy dog was there, too, and that he had fallen asleep in the heat with his muzzle in her hand, in Annabelle’s hand; she felt his warm anxious breath on her palm.

  The sweetness inside her began to ache.

  “Don’t be mad, Ma,” said Camellia—softly, so as not to waken the dog.

  Annabelle, gazing at Camellia, thought: Bobby Ransome was my childhood sweetheart. She liked the words: “childhood sweetheart.”

  She heard a whirring sound, and looked up and saw a flock of medium-sized brown birds swoop down to occupy the branches of a tree across the road; their flight had been so single-minded that she thought the tree might be magnetized in some way, and the birds powerless to bypass it once they were within its range.

  She looked down at the dog, who was twitching in his sleep. “I’m not mad,” she said to Camellia.

  Camellia stood up, and the dog awakened, and lifted his head. He looked at Annabelle, whose hand still rested, palm up, on the ground beside her. Then he moved close to Camellia and swiped at her grimy knee with his tongue, and trotted off up the gravel road, toward home.

  “Can I help you make supper?” said Camellia.

  “When it’s time, you surely may.” Annabelle got to her feet and wiped her hands on her dress. She began to follow Camellia across the yard. Then she stopped, and walked to the edge of the road, where Herman had hammered a sign into a hole in the dirt.

  “Mini-Zoo,” it read. “Adults $2, Kids $1.”

  “Camellia,” said Annabelle. She held out her hand, and Camellia took hold of it with both of hers.

  “Swing me around, Ma,” said Camellia.

  “Tomorrow,” said Annabelle, “we’re going to start doing something. You and I and Rose-Iris.”

  “What? What’re we going to do?”

  “See this sign here?”

  “I see it.”

  “Starting tomorrow, we’re going to take this sign down every morning. And put it up again every afternoon. And we’re not going to tell your dad.”

  Camellia frowned at the sign. “Why’re we going to do that?”

  “Because the mini-zoo is, in my opinion, a silly idea.” Annabelle swooped down and picked up Camellia and headed for the house. Camellia’s legs circled Annabelle’s waist, and her arms were around Annabelle’s neck. Camellia threw back her head and laughed at the bright summer sky.

  Back at the detachment, Alberg sat in his office with the door closed and the window open wide. On his desk lay a large brown envelope stuffed with yearbooks and copies of the school newspaper from 1978 to the graduation ceremonies in 1980; he’d found nothing useful there. He was flipping through his notebook, jotting down on a pad of lined yellow paper what he’d found out about Steven Grayson’s last weeks:

  Up to June 17, the kid had lived his life as usual.

  June 17: he calls his mother and tells her he wants to come home for a while.

  June 18–28: he finishes several assignments, and gets extensions on several others.

  June 29: he takes the ferry to the Sunshine Coast; according to Velma Grayson he intends to spend two or three weeks.

  July 3: he calls Natalie; the guy he wants to see won’t see him. She tells him to persevere.

  July 19: he goes to the Bank of Montreal in Sechelt, where he runs into Keith Nugent and arranges to borrow his boat on Saturday, the 21st. Then he tries to withdraw most of the contents of his savings account. But the bank won’t let him, because it isn’t his branch. He takes the ferry to Vancouver and gets it from his own bank. He phones Natalie and tells her everything’s going to be okay.

  July 20: he tells his mother he’s going to meet somebody the next day, Saturday, but that it won’t take long and he’ll be back in time for dinner with his aunt and uncle.

  July 21: he falls from the cliff top at Buccaneer Bay wearing a belt containing twenty-three thousand dollars.

  Sometime between July 3 and July 19, he must have persuaded this guy, whoever he was, to see him.

  Alberg made another list: what was it that he wanted to “put right”? why did he decide to do it now? what happened to the missing camera?

  Then he got a call from Natalie Walenchuk.

  “I have something here,” she said. “It’s some pictures. Some photographs. And negatives. I forgot all about them.”

  “What photographs?”

  “They’re Steven’s. He left them with me. He said he’d phone me from Sechelt when he’d finished whatever he was doing, and then I was supposed to burn them in my fireplace.”

  “Have you looked at them?”

  She hesitated. “Yeah, I did. They’re very ordinary. Mostly just pictures of people. I don’t know who they are. You’ll want to see them, right?”

  “Right,” said Alberg.

  “Well I’m coming over there in the morning,” said Natalie. “I want to meet his mother. Pay my respects. I could bring them.”

  Chapter 29

  “I THOUGHT YOU must have left town,” said Warren.

  He’d gone into the drugstore for some throat lozenges—Bobby was the furthest thing from his mind, for once—and there he was. Buying himself a hair dryer, for Pete’s sake. He looked jumpy, Bobby did; as if he’d been trying to steal the thing. But he was standing in the lineup so obviously he planned to pay for it.

  “Why’d you say that?” said Bobby, turning swiftly to Warren.

  “Haven’t seen you around,” said Warren. “That’s all I meant.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not gonna be around much longer,” said Bobby, getting out his wallet. He had a way of moving, Bobby did, that made a person cautious. Made you watch him very carefully. So you could get out of the way in a hurry.

  Warren was shifting from foot to foot, feeling awkward, wanting to break away and go find the throat lozenges. But being too nervous to do that, for s
ome reason.

  “Oh yeah?” said Warren.

  “Yeah. Gotta move on, you know?”

  “So is your stepdad better, then?”

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “Better enough.”

  Warren said, “Well I’m on my break, and it’s already used up.” Bobby was paying for the hair dryer now. Warren said, “Well, seeya,” and he backed off toward where he thought the throat lozenges might be.

  He didn’t like it at all that Bobby followed him over there, carrying the drugstore bag containing his new hair dryer.

  “Is he taking good care of her, Warren?” said Bobby softly.

  Warren didn’t have to ask who “her” was. “Her” was Annabelle. Warren was exceedingly alarmed, as he scanned the selection of lozenges. There was everything from cherry to eucalyptus looking him in the face. Bobby was waiting for him to answer, so he said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure of it, Bobby.” He picked up a package of mentholated cough drops, then put them down again.

  “She happy with him, is she?”

  “Yeah, I think so, Bob,” said Warren. Maybe cherry would be better, he thought.

  “I’m gonna replace my car,” Bobby said abruptly.

  “Oh yeah?” It’s damn hot in here, thought Warren, reaching for a package of black lozenges. I’ve gotta get out of here, he thought, before I drown in my own sweat.

  “Yeah,” said Bobby, picking up a box of Vicks. “Gonna be on the road. Gotta get a reliable set of wheels.”

  “You got the money for that?”

  “Why? Aren’t ex-cons supposed to have money, Warren?”

  “Oh, hey, sure, Bob, I’m sorry, I just thought—”

  “I don’t have it yet, as it happens,” said Bobby. “But I’m gettin’ it.”

  “Good, good,” said Warren.

  “So I thought maybe you could advise me,” said Bobby. He put the cough drops back. “You know. The make, the model, the year.”

  “Yeah, I could do that, Bob,” said Warren, easing past him in the narrow aisle.

  “Good,” said Bobby, following him to the cashier.

  Warren looked blindly into his wallet. He felt himself flushing, and fumbled in his pants pocket for change.