Mother Love

by L. R. Wright

  “No,” said Richard. “She hadn’t. Not once, since the day she left.”

  “Where has she been for the last seven years?”

  “How the hell should I know?” He was sitting literally on the edge of the sofa. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. She told me she didn’t know where she was going.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She didn’t tell you before you went to work, or you wouldn’t have gone. Right? And she’d left by the time you got home. So when did she tell you she was going, but didn’t know where?”

  Richard rubbed his face with his hand. There was a rasping sound—he hadn’t shaved. Alberg looked at him more closely and saw a gray stubble. “She left a note,” said Richard. “It really didn’t explain anything at all.” He gave Alberg a weary glance. “She’d gone in search of herself that summer. What she found hadn’t pleased her.”

  Alberg felt his patience, what there was of it, ebbing away. “I don’t follow you.”

  “She’d found out that she was adopted. And she became obsessed with finding her natural parents. That’s all. That’s what I meant.”

  “And? Did she?”

  Buscombe reddened. “This is going to be a very difficult situation for my daughter and me.”

  Alberg’s eyes stung, his body ached, and now his head had started to throb. “Believe me, Mr. Buscombe,” he said softly, “it was a hell of a lot more difficult for your wife.” He leaned toward him. “What can you tell me that might help with my investigation?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know anything about her life these last seven years.”

  “What about before that?” said Alberg. “What happened when she went off looking for her family?”

  “She found them,” said Buscombe stiffly. “Her parents. But that’s all she told me.” He sat erect on the edge of the sofa, looking at Alberg with an unaccountable belligerence.

  Chapter 17

  “YOU’VE LOST WEIGHT, I think,” said Cassandra to her mother at lunchtime that day.

  Helen Mitchell lifted a hand toward her face as if to shield herself. The hand stayed there in midair for a moment, then moved to finger the gray bangs that covered her forehead.

  “Mother? Are you all right?” Cassandra reached across the restaurant table, but her mother shook her head and put both hands in her lap.

  “Of course I’m all right,” she said. “No wonder I’ve lost weight. The food in that place is dreadful.” Her face had achieved a sculpted look, cheekbones and jaw revealed in increasing severity by the diminishment of excess flesh. Yet she was as upright as ever and seemed as strong, and her head-hugging bob gleamed silver in the sunlight. Behind her eyeglasses she assembled an expression of bitterness. “I don’t want to talk about me. It’s too depressing. You haven’t told me about your trip. How is your brother?”

  “Fine. He wants you to go to Edmonton for Christmas.”

  Helen busied herself with the small stainless-steel teapot that sat next to her cup and saucer. She removed the lid, pressed the teabag with the back of a spoon, put the lid back on, poured more tea into her cup.

  “What do you think, Mom? Do you want to go?” Helen stared at the plate that sat in front of her, which held a tiny pool of melted butter and some crumbs. Cassandra watched her uneasily. “Mom?” She put her hand over her mother’s, on the tabletop.

  Helen looked up. “Would you come with me?”

  “I—I don’t know, Mom—”

  “Will you think about it?”

  No, said a loud voice in Cassandra’s head. But, astonished at herself, she said, “Yes, Mom. I’ll think about it.”

  Her mother’s expression didn’t change. She continued to look at Cassandra steadily, she continued to allow Cassandra’s hand to cover her own. Cassandra wanted to hold her breath. She was aware of a tremendous sense of strain, of laboring to see, to perceive. She waited, intense, looking into her mother’s eyes with growing panic.

  Helen slipped her hand free and removed her bracelet, a wide, gold bracelet with her name and wedding date inscribed inside. “I want you to have this.”

  Cassandra recoiled, horrified. “No. Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. I want you to have it. Now.” She took Cassandra’s hand and slipped the bracelet on her wrist. “Please, Cassandra.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  Later, sitting in her car in front of the library, having delivered her mother back to Shady Acres, Cassandra took off the bracelet and looked at it closely. The intricate design etched into the surface had worn down in several places. It was old and seasoned, this bracelet, elegant and burnished. It didn’t look right on Cassandra’s wrist. But she was surprised to realize that she didn’t mind wearing it. She slipped it on and went back to work.

  ***

  Alberg talked to Maria Buscombe’s daughter, Belinda, at her home. She was a tall, athletic young woman with long dark hair and blue eyes that were warmer than her father’s. She didn’t look much like her mother, he thought. Yet it was always difficult to find resemblances between a dead person and anyone living. Alberg remembered the incredulity with which he’d observed his own father lying dead in his coffin: he hadn’t even looked like himself.

  “It’s kinda like a double whammy for her, see?” Belinda’s husband, Raymond, was explaining. He was a tall, good-looking kid wearing jeans and a dark red pullover. “I mean, first of all, there she is, suddenly, her mother that Belinda thought was gone forever. And Belinda’s mixed up about this, see? Happy and upset at the same time. And before she can get used to the idea that her mother’s alive and well and apparently wants to see her, she turns around and the woman’s gone again, and this time it really is forever.”

  “He always talks a lot when he’s nervous,” said Belinda. Raymond was sitting next to her, with an arm around her, resting on the top of the sofa. The skin beneath her eyes looked transparent, revealing a layer of darkness.

  “What are you nervous about, Raymond?” said Alberg.

  “He’s nervous because you’re a policeman, and you’re in his house talking to his wife about the murder of her mother,” said Belinda sharply. “It may be an ordinary day for you, Sergeant, but it sure isn’t ordinary times for me and Raymond.” She got up and walked into the kitchen.

  Raymond watched her go and for a while watched the doorway through which he expected her to reappear. Then he turned to Alberg, his forehead wrinkled in distress. “What do you think happened?”

  Alberg shook his head. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Belinda came back into the room, slowly, sipping from a glass of water. She sat on a chair adjacent to Alberg’s, leaving Raymond in sole possession of the sofa.

  Alberg, referring to his notebook, said, “Let’s see what I’ve got here. You hadn’t heard from your mother during the years she’d been gone. Then yesterday afternoon—Sunday—she appeared on the road when you were walking home from your father’s house. You ran away, changed your mind, ran back to where you’d seen her, and she wasn’t there.” He looked up over his half glasses at her. “Is that about it?”

  “It sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?” She drained the glass and put it down on a coffee table

  Alberg took off his glasses and tucked them into a shirt pocket. “Did you look for her?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you think about looking for her?”

  Belinda pulled her hair to one side of her head and took hold of it in both hands, absently. “Yes. I probably would have looked for her. She had a lot to answer for.”

  “You were pretty angry with her.”

  She raised her head, and for the first time she looked at him directly. Her eyes caught his and held them. He experienced this as teetering on the edge of a fathomless depth of blue. It startled him, and he thought of her age, twenty-one—could she really be only twenty-one?

  “I was extremely
angry with her,” said Belinda softly. “She deserted us. She deserted me.” She stood up, quickly, and so did Raymond. “Excuse me, please,” she said, and hurried from the room.

  Raymond turned to Alberg. “She doesn’t want you to see her cry.”

  ***

  That day the library was open until nine, so it was almost ten o’clock when Cassandra got home. Alberg was already there, which wasn’t always the case on the days she worked late. He opened the door before she was out of the car and stood waiting for her, a tall stocky silhouette against the light pouring through the doorway. Then he turned on the porch light, and she saw his face.

  I make him happy, thought Cassandra in wonderment, approaching him.

  “Jesus, I’m tired,” he said, embracing her. “Sid’s here,” he said, close to her ear. “Just arrived. I have to talk to him, so I invited him for dinner. Is that okay?”

  “As long as I don’t have to cook it,” said Cassandra. She pulled away, smiling at him. “Hi, Sid,” she called over Alberg’s shoulder.

  “It’s all done,” said Alberg. He’d cooked a meat loaf from the freezer, mashed some potatoes and opened a couple of cans of peas.

  They sat down and served themselves, then began to eat. The light from the fixture that hung low over the dining room table flashed from the gold bracelet on Cassandra’s wrist. Alberg reached over and touched it, and looked at her quizzically.

  “It’s my mother’s,” said Cassandra. “She gave it to me.”

  He shook HP sauce onto his meat loaf. “An early birthday present?”

  “No. I don’t know why she gave it to me. She just did.” She glanced across at Sokolowski. “What do you hear from Elsie, Sid?”

  “She’s doing fine,” said Sid. He looked up from his food. “Got herself an apartment. She says it’s pretty nice. So I guess it is.”

  He looked, to Cassandra, less burly than usual, less substantial. It might be that he’d lost weight. But perhaps it was the look of perpetual bewilderment he now wore that made him appear to have shrunk just slightly.

  “She’s not definite about anything yet,” he told her. “I take that as a good sign.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Cassandra encouragingly.

  They ate in silence for a while. Then Alberg said, “Do you mind if we talk some shop at the dinner table?” She started to answer and he added, quickly, “It can wait, if you like.”

  “No, of course I don’t mind.”

  “It’s the Buscombe thing,” he said to Sokolowski.

  “Okay,” said Sid agreeably, sliding his fork under a chunk of meat loaf.

  Alberg pushed his plate slightly away from him, so he could rest his forearms on the table. “Seven years ago this woman left her husband and daughter to go live in a basement apartment in Abbotsford. They don’t hear one word from her in all that time. She moved out of there and into the place in Sechelt last Friday. Sunday afternoon she’s on the road leading to her husband’s place when suddenly there’s her daughter, and they scare the hell out of each other and both of them run away. Anyway, she obviously came here because of them. It occurred to me—maybe somebody didn’t want her to see them.”

  “I don’t know, Karl,” said Sokolowski politely, loading his fork with mashed potatoes. “I tend to go with the obvious. Some cokehead, probably from the mainland, broke into her apartment, and she woke up, and he let her have it with a hammer she’d been using to hang up pictures.”

  Alberg looked at the sergeant irritably.

  “Well, it’s possible,” said Sokolowski. “More than possible. Likely.”

  “And then there’s the photo album,” said Alberg stubbornly. “Either she took those pictures herself—and I don’t see how she could have, without being seen at least once—or somebody took them for her. Who? Did somebody help her run away?” He poured more wine into each of their glasses. “I better not have any more of this, or I’m going to fall asleep.”

  “Eat,” said Cassandra. “It’s good.”

  “A few months before she took off,” said Alberg, pulling his plate closer to him again, “Maria Buscombe found out that she’d been adopted.” He got up and fetched a file folder from the coffee table in the living room. He pulled out a copy of the letter Agatha had left behind for Maria and handed it to Sid. “She decided she wanted information about her real family.” Sid took his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. “So she quit her job and went off to do some research. The husband called it ‘going in search of herself,’ ” he said to Cassandra. “I get the impression he was pissed off about it. Thought she’d be wasting her time.” He started eating.

  “Huh,” said Sokolowski, observing him over his half glasses. “Oh no, she wouldn’t be. I mean, how would you feel if you grew up thinking you were—Polish, say. And then years later somebody tells you no, that’s wrong. You’d want to find out what the hell you really were, right? And what if it turned out that all along you’d been—English?” He paused to imagine this and shuddered.

  “Mmmmm,” said Alberg.

  “Or you thought you were totally healthy,” said Sokolowski, “and it turned out both your parents died in their forties of—I don’t know, something genetic that you never even heard of.”

  “Right,” said Alberg, with a glance at Cassandra.

  “Or,” said Sid, “you thought—”

  “Okay,” said Alberg, “I get it.”

  “What did she find out?” said Cassandra.

  Sokolowski took off the glasses and put them away, then leaned over to drop the letter into the file folder.

  “I don’t know,” said Alberg. “The husband says she didn’t tell him anything when she got back, except that she’d found her parents. I don’t know if I believe him, though.”

  “Got back from where?” said Cassandra.

  “Saskatchewan.” Alberg got up again, this time for his notebook, and thumbed through it as he walked back to the table. “The husband gave me the name of the guy she went out there to see. I called him this afternoon.”

  Sokolowski stared at him. “You’re not gonna go out there, are you?”

  “Are you?” said Cassandra, like an echo. In an instant she relived the moment only months ago when she’d gone to the door, opened it...and Gordon Murphy was standing there, brandishing his white teeth, his white shirt so bright it hurt her eyes, his arm slamming the door open, then closed...

  “Can you come with me, Cassandra?”

  She returned to the present and found both men staring at her uneasily.

  “He doesn’t have to go,” said Sokolowski. “He can get somebody out there to look into it, whatever it is.”

  “No, I can’t come with you, Karl.” She looked down at her plate. She’d eaten most of her dinner. Good. She wouldn’t have to put any more food in her mouth. “How long will you be gone?”

  “A couple of days, that’s all. Are you sure you couldn’t get away, just for a day or two?”

  Cassandra shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll make some arrangements.”

  Chapter 18

  THREE DAYS LATER Alberg was sitting in a living room in a house in Saskatoon. A fire burned in the fireplace, and rugs were placed here and there on the polished hardwood floor. It was the home of Edward Dixon, a man nearing seventy who occupied a worn brown leather chair, its back to corner windows through which Alberg, dismayed, observed that it had begun to snow.

  “I’ve had heart surgery,” said Dixon. “I keep myself fit. Golf in the summer. Exercise bike in the winter.”

  He wore a cardigan sweater, jade green, over a white shirt. His face was remarkably unlined, although he had practically no hair left and what was there was white. His gaze was candid and curious.

  “You look after yourself,” he continued, “when you’ve been through a thing like that. You have a lot more respect for your body. You know why?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “Because it’s only when you’ve gotta think about dying that it hits ho
me—doesn’t seem right or fair, but there you are—that when the body craps out, there goes the whole of you.”

  He was a medium-size man. His wife, who returned to the living room now with a tray, was an uncommonly large person: tall, big-boned, a woman who moved with awkward diffidence. Alberg stood to take the tray from her and set it on the coffee table.

  “You gotta have one of her butter tarts,” said Edward Dixon, watching, his hazel eyes magnified by his glasses. “Go on, go on,” he said, waving an impatient hand in Alberg’s direction. He grinned as Alberg took a bite. “Good, eh?”

  Alberg turned to Mrs. Dixon, whose first name he had forgotten. He widened his eyes, his mouth full, and shook his head in wonderment.

  Edward Dixon chuckled from his easy chair. “People always take one just to be polite. But I’ve never yet seen anybody remain unamazed. That’s absolutely the best butter tart you’ve ever tasted, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely,” said Alberg with reverence, eyeing the plate.

  “Have another,” said Dixon expansively while his wife poured coffee. When she had filled two cups she started to leave the room. “Mavis. Don’t go,” said Edward Dixon. He had stretched a hand out toward her. She put a finger across her lips and turned again to leave.

  “Stay, if you like, Mrs. Dixon,” said Alberg.

  “I’ll just get myself a cup, then,” she said.

  For the minute or so it took her to fetch a cup and saucer from the kitchen, Edward Dixon stared into the fire, and Alberg brushed crumbs from his fingers; they had apparently decided that their conversation could not commence until Mavis Dixon had rejoined them.

  When she had settled on the sofa, Dixon said, looking at Alberg, “This is a police matter. You’re a police officer, you said.” He peered at the badge Alberg took from an inside jacket pocket. “RCMP. I got mixed feelings about the Mounties.” Next to his chair was a tobacco stand from whose small cupboard he now pulled a white pipe. “We got a big native population on the prairies,” he said, talking around the pipe stem.