Scare the Light Away

by Vicki Delany

  “Please, Aileen,” Jimmy said, his eyes on his wife’s face. “Go with Rebecca up to the house. You haven’t finished discussing Dad.”

  I expected Aileen to stand her ground, but instead she sighed. “If you insist. But much more of this, Sergeant Reynolds, and you’ll be looking at a harassment suit.”

  She stomped off toward the house, as furiously as one can stomp in bare feet on spring grass. I followed her, and Sampson followed me. Aileen plunked down on the chair Jimmy had recently vacated, the one facing the road. The look on her face would freeze water.

  “Are you okay?” Stupid question. I sat down as well.

  “They won’t leave him alone. They keep coming around asking us the same questions. I do have a mind to call a lawyer, get some advice.”

  I looked toward the road. The men were still talking. Jimmy’s hands were clenched but hanging loose at his sides. They were too far away for us to hear what was being said. The lake shone behind them, dazzling in the sunlight. Small clusters of white clouds gathered together on the horizon, like old friends meeting for a tea party around a table draped in an antique cloth of heavenly blue.

  The tableau broke up without warning. The police climbed back into their car and disappeared down the hill. Jimmy didn’t stand watching them leave; he turned to us with a wave and a smile and climbed into his truck. The wheels kicked up a cloud of dust on the dry roadbed and he was gone, following in the dust the police had stirred up.

  “I’ll be on my way if you have to get to work.” I got to my feet. “I’m glad we had this talk. Call me when you have some time and we can decide on our plan of action. About the housekeeper, I mean.”

  “They think he’s responsible for Jennifer Taylor’s disappearance.” Aileen’s voice broke. “Half the people in town are ready to convict Jim, and Bob Reynolds is happy to go along with them. Saves any actual thinking on his part.”

  I sat down again. Sampson spied a squirrel crossing the lawn and set off in hot pursuit. She didn’t even come close, and the black squirrel sat at the top of a juvenile pine tree, laughing. “Small town people have long memories,” I said.

  She looked at me sharply. “Memories of what!” she snapped. “Jim wasn’t a saint.”

  To put it mildly.

  She read my mind. “I know he caused a lot of trouble. I know he spent some time in jail. I met him in prison. Did you know that? He has no secrets from me. But you tell me, did he ever have any trouble—legal trouble—with girls? Did he, ever?”

  “No.”

  “Right. So he spent time in jail for what, drunk driving and assaulting the arresting officer? I know that. Robbery? I know that, too. But some of the narrow-minded people in this town, Staff Sergeant Reynolds foremost amongst them, won’t forget for a second. As if a conviction for a fucked-up robbery attempt automatically makes a man a child-rapist and murderer. This is the very reason why a lot of men can’t go straight once they get out of prison, did you know that? The so-called law-abiding, tough-on-crime, hang-em-high crowd simply won’t let them.” She brought her hand down on the table with enough force to bounce the crockery and distract Sampson from the treed squirrel. She trotted back to sit under the table.

  “You said some pretty mean things yourself the other night, Rebecca. Can’t you believe that Jim has changed?”

  “I’m prepared to let go of the past. I told him so, while you were in the kitchen.”

  “I guess that’s all we can ask.” Her shoulders sank, and she rested one elbow on the table, closed her eyes, and rubbed at her forehead. Thick strands of black and gray hair escaped from the bun to fall in loose curls around her hand.

  “Look, I have to get to work. Why don’t you drop by again later, after dinner, and we can draw up a list of places to advertise and women who might be looking for that sort of work. And don’t worry about the money. Bob can afford to crack open that wallet of his. She tried to smile. “I’ll bet moths will fly out when he does. It’s not as if he needs to save any longer for his old age.” The smile faded, and her eyes welled up and threatened to overflow.

  She seemed like… she was… a nice woman. But she was Jimmy’s wife. I had always thought that tears went with the job description. There was little or no comfort I could offer her. I excused myself and called for Sampson, who had disappeared once again.

  We left Aileen gathering up the remains of breakfast with one hand, while trying to wipe away the tears with the other.

  Instead of taking the straight way back and walking down the dirt road, we cut through the woods. Aileen’s words echoed through my head and I paid scant attention to the trilliums, the new grass underfoot, or the budding leaves on the old trees.

  You tell me, did he ever have any trouble—legal trouble—with girls? Did he, ever?

  Legal trouble, no. Jimmy had never needed to force any girl, and he had a sufficient sense of self-preservation to stay away from the too-young ones. But trouble. Yes, there was always lots of trouble.

  ***

  I was seventeen years old in 1972, when Jimmy came back to Hope River. I don’t remember if it had been when his first marriage broke up, or the time he lost his job in North Bay for punching his supervisor, or if he was just out of jail. He was 25 and my mom had been pleased, although she tried to hide it, that he hadn’t wanted to move back into our house. Instead, like a rat returning to the nest, he settled in with Grandpa and Grandma. By this time my mother hardly ever walked up the dirt road to the big house. Thanksgiving and Christmas Day she would make the effort, but that was about all. She cooked sometimes, when Grandma felt under the weather, but Shirley, now married with two children, or I was called upon to carry the heavy dishes up the hill. We were always told to return immediately, not to dawdle. Like we would want to. And Dad had fallen so far into the bottle that he was just about useless.

  My best friend had been a girl named Linda Richards. I didn’t have many friends; I guess Linda was my only friend. She and her family had arrived in Hope River less than a year before, straight from England. My mother absolutely adored her. Linda’s father was a doctor, and she was a real beauty with masses of red hair and the most amazing green eyes. Like the very fields and hedgerows of Surrey, my mother exclaimed in one of her rare flights of imagination. I was surprised that our friendship lasted more than a few weeks. With a doctor for a father, an exotic accent, and being a beauty, the in crowd tried to swallow Linda up. But she liked me, and I liked her: She was a genuinely wonderful person.

  The day after Jimmy moved into the big house, Linda and I were in the kitchen eating thin sandwiches and cookies—biscuits as Linda and Mom corrected me, collapsing together into giggles—and drinking tea out of the best china cups.

  Jimmy walked into the kitchen as if he’d never been away, pecked Mom on the cheek, patted me on the head as he would the family dog, and turned the force of his full-watt smile onto Linda.

  Walking through the spring forest these many years later, I wondered if I had imagined it. Did she really fall head over heels at that instant? Did I actually feel my world grind to a halt beneath me? Or do I remember it that way only in retrospect, when we see everything so much more clearly?

  Regardless, nothing would ever be the same again. Linda still came over, but her green eyes darted around the house like a bee in search of pollen, across the yard, up the dirt road to the big house. She had no further interest in breathless discussions about the boys at school, or about whether we still liked John Lennon, or in exchanging the latest thrilling gossip about girls from town. For a while, Jimmy would be at our house when I got home from school, and Linda walked with me every day. But I knew it wasn’t because she wanted my friendship. Mom, who never appeared to have had any illusions about her son, seemed to have gone blind and happily set a place for him at tea.

  Of course, Linda was seventeen years old, and as unable to keep a secret about herself as to stop dreaming of romance. One day after lunch when we were in the girls’ washroom she confessed to me br
eathlessly that she was “madly in love” with Jimmy. News flash! Like it wasn’t written all over her lovely, open face.

  I told her all about him, in the utilitarian girls’ bathroom, at the district high school. The white tiles on the walls had been scrubbed until they gleamed, and the smell of disinfectant hung heavy in the air. I watched her reflection in the large mirrors, all red hair and innocent green eyes. And I told her about the other girls. About the phone calls that disturbed our house until my dad shouted at the poor girl on the other end, about the irate fathers banging at our door. I told her about the failed marriage and the stint in jail resulting from a bust-up in a bar that put the bouncer in the hospital.

  She brushed her red hair until it shone, called me a fat, jealous bitch, and walked out the door.

  Three months passed before she next came to my house. It was late at night and her frantic pounding at the kitchen door dragged us all out of bed. That time she wasn’t so pretty. Her eyes were as red as her hair and snot flowed freely from her swollen nose. She begged my mom to tell her where Jimmy had gone. As if Mom would have the slightest idea. Mom gathered Linda into the kitchen and made tea—the solution to every crisis—but they didn’t laugh over the cookies. I stood in the shadows and watched.

  She had been to the big house, she told us, trying to find Jimmy. She hadn’t seen him for almost a month. He’d said he’d call, but he hadn’t. Grandpa laughed at her and told her to stop bothering them and shut the door in her face. Grandma crept out the back door and stopped her in the road. She told Linda that Jimmy left for Toronto, where a friend had found him a job. Grandma told her to forget Jimmy. But Linda swore at the old woman and called her a liar and ran down the dirt road to our house. To Jimmy’s mother.

  Mom and Dad insisted that they didn’t have an address for Jimmy, that they didn’t know where he’d gone, but if they heard from him they would let him know that Linda was looking for him.

  She screamed at them. As in a fairytale, but not the part she had dreamed of living, Linda truly turned ugly before my eyes. Understandably she thought they were lying to her: A family in which parents didn’t know where their son lived was well outside the experience of her tidy world. But they were telling the truth. Even before he turned sixteen, Jimmy would disappear for months at a time and then walk through the door one day expecting that a place would be set for him at supper.

  Dad offered to drive her home, but she shoved him aside and bolted into the night.

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said.

  Linda hung around school for another couple of months, her previously shiny hair, the envy of us all, hanging lank about her shoulders, her eyes heavy and swollen with tears. And that wasn’t all that was swollen. The girls began nudging each other and giggling when she passed, wrapped in a heavy sweater although it was warm for May that year.

  At least once a week, usually more, she would stop me in the hall and ask if I’d heard from Jimmy. My own pain at her quick abandonment of our friendship was as sharp as that of any woman rejected by her lover. The last time she asked, I laughed in her face and aimed to wound. “Like he would ever call me. He didn’t even tell my parents when he got married. I’m sure he’s found a new girlfriend by now and they are very happy together.” It gave me a perfectly wonderful glow of well-deserved revenge to say the words, and I laughed at the look on her face, but the laughter died soon enough, leaving nothing but an empty hole in my belly as I watched Linda flee down the hall, drowning in her own sobs as everyone stood aside to watch her go.

  She stopped coming to school and missed the last few weeks before the end of the year. The girls whispered behind their hands and nodded to each other in wide-eyed satisfaction.

  On the last day of school, a day that should have been full of the promise of long, hot, free summer days to come, we heard that she was dead.

  Sampson ran up to show me a branch she found. She dropped it at my feet and danced in excitement, every muscle in her big body trembling with anticipation as she waited for me to pick it up and throw it.

  I stopped walking.

  Nothing official was ever said, of course. But one of the girls in my class, whose sister was a friend of Linda’s sister, made sure that the news that Linda had killed herself got around. She had swallowed a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills and a good portion of her father’s liquor cabinet before going for a midnight swim in the lake.

  Mom and I went to the funeral. It was a huge affair; most of the town attended, the deeply grieving as well as the mildly curious. Dr. and Mrs. Richards were pale and shocked. But not too shocked to cut us dead as we approached them after the service, Mom’s hand held out to offer her condolences. Mom retreated, the weight of her shame dragging her head low. A few of her friends from the quilting society gathered closely around her as if she needed as much support as the grieving parents.

  As perhaps she did.

  The Richards family moved back to England before the summer ended.

  The image of Linda’s wild auburn hair, red eyes, dripping nose, and swollen belly as she sped down the crowded school hallway, trying to escape from the echo of my taunting laughter, still haunts me in that out-of-consciousness space that lies between wakefulness and dreams.

  The path we were taking ran jaggedly from the back of the big house east through the woods and abandoned farmland to turn south again and run parallel to the main road, part of a patch of land owned by the government. Speculation was ripe that the government-owned property—a good deal of it lake front, with a gentle west-facing slope, close to road and power lines—would be soon be divided into lots and put up for sale. The boon to this area would be enormous. But it would open up the land north of the big house, and Jimmy and Aileen wouldn’t be too happy about that.

  The demand for cottages, anything on water and the more open the lake the better, to the north of Toronto was spreading like a modern version of the black plague. Anything reasonably close to the city had long ago been priced well out of the range of the middle class; some undeveloped properties on the more desirable areas went for a million dollars or more. And so it spread out, further and further from the populated centers, the endless search for a perfect bit of woodland paradise.

  Reaching a fork in the path, Sampson and I turned south, to where there was nothing at all desirable about the land. No one would be so desperate as to develop anything between my family property and the highway. The ground here lay low and flat and was thoroughly saturated with spring rains and the remains of snowmelt. To the west of me, toward my parents’ house, it became a near-swamp. Unpleasant for people, perhaps, but greatly beloved of dogs. Better not to think of the grooming job awaiting me when I got Sampson home.

  These woods were pleasant, waking up to the warmth of spring after a long, severe winter. Handfuls of dirty, wet snow still hid in the bottoms of the darker crevices of the wood and in the shadows of the larger trees, trying to escape the warming reach of the sun for as long as possible. The forest floor was coming to life with bright green shoots and wildflowers popping up out of the thick mud. Most of these plants were grasping at the only bit of sun they would get all year; the forest canopy would soon grow thick and dense. The woods were lovely, quiet, peaceful, but in some indefinable way too civilized. Nothing like the thick, overgrown, ropy forests of B.C., where the trees grow so tall you can’t see the top, even with your head thrown right back and your mouth hanging open. Where moss and vines fill every space with every imaginable shade of green. The rain forest: I hate rain, but I love the rain forest.

  I couldn’t hear Sampson breaking small branches and crushing the decaying piles of leaves underfoot. “Sampson, come here. Come here! There’s a good dog,” I called and called, my voice rising with every plea. I stepped off the higher ground and my running shoes sank into the mud.

  Her whine came from my left, low and serious. “I’m coming,” I cried, wading deeper into the muck.

  She burst from the swamp with a flurry of stinking
water and even stinkier mud.

  “Oh, for heavens’ sake,” I shrieked. “You’re a bad dog as well as a completely disgusting mess of one!”

  Not chastised in the least, she merely shook herself off, sending a good deal of swamp water flying in all directions, before proudly dropping her discovery. A scarf, long and thick, good wool by the look of it, thoroughly soaked in mud and swamp water, despite which the cheerful colors of blue and gold managed to shine through.

  “Ugh. I suppose you think this is a lovely present for me.” She wagged her heavy tail in agreement. “Fool dog.” I pushed the dripping mess with my foot. “Nice scarf. Someone will be missing it. But I don’t need a scarf and I don’t want to carry this wet horror all the way home. Thanks anyway, girl.” No need to worry about Sampson’s feelings being hurt at the rejection of her gift. I hadn’t finished talking before she bounded off in search of fresh adventures.

  I left the scarf where it lay and walked on. A chipmunk broke cover and dashed across the path. Something unpleasant scratched at the back of my mind. The newspaper article discussing the disappearance of young Jennifer Taylor had described the clothes she was wearing when last seen walking away from her friend’s house. A blue wool coat with matching cap and scarf.

  Chapter 26

  The Diary of Janet McKenzie. July 12, 1947

  I have the house to myself. And the quiet is wonderful. Bob has taken his mother and Shirley to the potluck supper at the church. I complained all day of a headache in order to get out of it. Bob was quite concerned; before they left he made sure that I was comfortably settled in front of the wireless, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of tea at hand. Once they had gone, I threw off the suffocating covering and headed straight for the bedroom and my beloved diary.

  I have a plan. I will give my father one year to settle into his new marriage, Aunt Betty one year to set up her holiday home. And my husband one year to find us a new house. Or in July of 1948, Shirley and I will be on a ship back to England.