Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  It’s Dorian’s first day off from filming, a grey Saturday morning in early June, punctuated by half-hearted spurts of rain that make dust craters on the sidewalk next to the real estate agent’s on Centre Street and dance on the baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.

  He doesn’t remove his sunglasses to read the for-sale notices in the window, though he’d have an easier job reading the print if he did. He’s more recognizable in this town now, what with Morningstar Cove having run a course on TV. Every once in a while—in San Francisco, in Vancouver, in an airport, in a restaurant—indifferent eyes will pass over his and brighten in vague recognition. He doesn’t not take pleasure in such encounters. He isn’t oblivious to his own narcissism. But for once in his acting career he actively seeks the anonymity of dark dead glass barricading the windows of his soul. He thinks about Dirt Guy and Elvis, who crossed their path at Eadon Lodge all those years ago and now, more urgently than last summer, he wonders—paranoid as it is—if they’re still around town, able to see the boy in the man if they glimpse him, and connect him to the past.

  He lights a cigarette, cupping his hand against the splats of rain, and looks from one notice to another, anxious to find, dreading to find, the one that will advertise the former Eadon Lodge property’s availability. He will buy it. He will remortgage his half of his Toronto house. This he has agreed with Lydia. Then, at his leisure, by stealth—somehow—he will do what he was prepared to do last summer in haste and madness—excavate the property and remove all evidence—then put it back on the market.

  But these notices don’t, any more than the Internet listings, declare Eadon Lodge for sale. His focus shifts to his own reflection in the tinted window glass. He sees his mouth a thin thing, turned down in a Beaker frown, and runs his hand involuntarily along an incipient crease running from nostril to jaw. The bottom half of his face looks haggard. He affects a smile and peers through the glass. He notes people in the office, though the tinting obscures their features. He hesitates. He has the rest of his cigarette to decide. Carol Guttormson will surely recognize him, sunglasses or no. He doesn’t want to deal with her. What if the property isn’t on the market? Will she store his query in her mind like a squirrel with a nut? But as he waits a middle-aged woman pushes out through the door. Glimpsing past her, he sees inside a lone male in a yellow polo shirt, young, buzz-cut, barely more than a boy. He flicks the butt to the sidewalk and steps in. He keeps his sunglasses on. He is, he says casually, interested in properties north of Loney Beach.

  The boy smiles with practised delight and trips off a few listings.

  “I heard there might be one where there’d been a fire or something last fall.”

  He’s met with an accordion forehead, quickly smoothed by enlightenment. “Oh, I know—where they found the body.”

  “Body?” Dorian goes cold.

  “Some guy from way back.”

  Way back? To someone this child’s age Princess Diana’s wedding is way back, Watergate is way back, the moon landing is way back.

  “When did they find this body?” Dorian’s grateful for the sunglasses, grateful for his training in voice control.

  “Last fall.”

  That body. Christ, Dorian thinks, I need a drink.

  That body isn’t important. Lydia has heard no more from investigators about that body, though he knows, for she’s told him, that that body feels like a straw and her back the camel’s. He’s worried about her. She sounds awful on the phone.

  “A fire and a body,” Dorian says wishing, for Lydia’s sake, he could pursue local gossip. “That’s something. It must be going cheap, then.”

  “No one’s made a listing with us.”

  “Someone else?”

  “We’re really the only game in town.” His fingers fly around his keyboard. “And it’s not on multiple listings.”

  “Just a whim.”

  “I can ask my colleague when she comes in, Mr. …?”

  “Really, it’s nothing.” A peek over this sunglasses, a smile, and he’s gone.

  Dorian lights another cigarette and strolls down past the old hotel to Tergesen’s. He can’t think where he might glean some information about the fate of the Eadon Lodge property. The bakery? The hotel? The library? The museum? He can’t go to the RCMP, of course. A bell tinkles above his head like a zazen announcement as he pushes through the door into the store redolent of cloth and leather and old wood—but with none of the crowd present when he and Mark visited last year. The jammed racks of summer clothes hold no interest for him. He heads to the book annex at the back. There you can loiter, strike up a conversation. And Dorian does, though he has to lift his sunglasses and reveals himself. His interlocutor is an older woman, round of frame, round of face, whose welcoming smile from behind the sales desk doesn’t quite reach her eyes, which are discerning, a merchant’s. He affects interest in some local titles on a nearby table. The Beauty and Treachery of Lake Winnipeg is the subtitle of one of them.

  “I hear you had some treachery here last fall,” he says, turning the cover to the woman.

  She lowers her glasses, glances past the rims, one eyebrow rises. “The publisher’ll need to do an update.”

  “That bad?”

  “Pretty bad. A lot of damage, a lot of trees down, roofs gone, boats sunk.”

  “And some deaths, I understand.”

  “Three.”

  “Terrible. I think I heard one of them was a tree falling on a cottage and killing the owner.”

  The woman nods, bends her head to a pile of books on her desk that need new pricing labels affixed. She finds the customer insincere, and she knows who he is, one of the Morningstar Cove actors; her granddaughter is devoted to the series. “He’d only just bought the place, too.”

  “What a shame. But there was something about another body…”

  “You mean the former mayor. Her car crashed into—”

  “No, I meant a body, long buried, uncovered—”

  “Yes, yes.” She has much to do and is feeling impatient, finding the customer curiously pointed in his questions. “Found on the same property where the tree killed the young man. It’s a bit of a mystery, really.”

  “They don’t know who it is?”

  “Not that I know of. It’s seventy years ago or more, the burial. There’s not many left around here who can remember those days—at least clearly.”

  “The investigation’s ongoing…”

  “I suppose,” the woman says noncommittally. Yes, it is ongoing. She was talking with Sergeant Sinclair only the other day, telling her about her father-in-law, who lives down the street at the Betel home and has, at age ninety-one, a mind as clear as the bell over the store’s front door. Baldur says there was always something queer about the Eadon family that owned the property for years and years. The old man had two sons—Baldur used to knock around with them a bit when they were boys. One of the sons was þroskaheftan, could be violent and got hard to handle when he got older. And then, one summer before the war, there was only one son, the smart one, what was his name? Malcolm. “Bibs,” they called him.

  “Odd, the two deaths,” Dorian remarks.

  “Well, seventy years apart.”

  Dorian flips through book, affects nonchalance. “The property must be haunted. I wonder who will buy it?

  “The old Eadon property? I don’t know.”

  “Not for sale?”

  “I haven’t heard.” She has too heard. It’s not for sale. It’s sold. Or, rather, the owner, the heir of that young University of Manitoba lecturer who died, has made some private arrangement with her own family disposing of the property, with some redevelopment plans already approved by the rural municipal council. The woman behind the desk is amused to thwart her interrogator. Like many townsfolk, she endures the presence of tourists for the sake of commerce. “If you’re interested in it,
you might check with the real estate office down the street.”

  Dorian give his head a sharp shake to the negative. “This book looks interesting. I think I’ll get it.”

  The woman’s smile snaps to the midpoint of her face. “I hope you enjoy it. The cash desk is in the next room.”

  Dorian retraces his route down the June-green tunnel through Loney Beach that he travelled with Mark the year before, the route he travelled with Paul forty years before, in that rattle-trap Volkswagen, stripped to the waist, stubble on their chins, Paul’s dope in his backpack, Dey’s gin in his, Top 40 on the tinny radio, looking for adventure. His rental car, a boring Chrysler that smells of new fake leather, purrs along in air-conditioned splendour, though the temperature doesn’t warrant it. The Sirius satellite radio, which, irritatingly, he can’t figure out how to adjust, plays a tune faintly recognizable—what is it?—a baroque instrumental of something Beatle-y. The words trickle into his head: There are places I remember all my life, da da da da … some are dead and some are living… No thanks. No fucking soundtrack, please. Thank god the radio’s on/off button holds no mysteries.

  His heart is beating faster. He hates this, hates that his fear and trepidation intensify with every mile. How insane is it to return—this year—to the scene of the … of the … (he shuns the c-word) … anyway? This is insane. If there’s no indication of the Eadon property’s fate in town, why would there be here? Maybe a sign, a notice … a clue? He feels uncannily like he’s slipped into a dreamscape, a variation of the one that’s beset him for years, of travelling down this very road, more often—and inexplicably—in blinding winter white, toward a nameless, unpeopled doom—while wraithlike figures press against him. They are not—he knows this instinctively, the way you do in dreams—Lydia or Briony or Alanna or Alan, or even Paul. They are the bit players—Dirt Guy, Elvis, Band-Aid Girl—gathered like some malevolent bon voyage party.

  Dorian parks. The three-stone barrier is there, eternal. He gets out of the car. No notice, no sign. At least here. He hesitates. He should turn back. He can’t help himself: He finds himself drawn forward inexorably, much as he is in the dream. This is insane, insane. He walks the path, pushes past new-minted leaves, luminously green in the morning’s pearly light, conscious of his own quickening breath, his footfalls, his keys jangling. Already absence is presence: the view through the crosshatch of branches is of distant trees, not of white cottage wall. He slaps back a branch and, suddenly, he is on a blasted heath—of fire-blackened tree trunks, of fire-blackened grass, of fire-blackened waste. He pushes his sunglasses to his forehead. The magnitude of the destruction stuns him. Eadon Lodge itself has vanished, reduced to ash spilling over the scorched cement pad, only the stark outlines of old fridge and old cook stove—triumphant over all—suggesting the life once lived in this place. Utterly unnerving is the fallen fir, a brutal thing, slashing the open space as if an enraged giant had thrown down his stave. Its trunk is charred and pitted, a few branch stubs pierce the air like withered arms, a maze of exposed roots clings to a clot of soil ripped from the anchoring earth. It killed someone and, in way, resurrected someone else. A strip of blue and white ribbon droops off a root end in the motionless air, a relic of last fall’s police presence, Dorian realizes. Yes, the opened grave is here, at this southwest corner, not over there, at the northeast, past the shell of the Petit Trianon. This is only confirmation; it is no relief. His eyes linger on that distant corner. New grass pushes through fire-blackened patches, some trees are singed, but they are intact. Paul’s resting place is intact.

  He takes out another cigarette, lights it with a shaky hand (god, his nerves are taut) but doesn’t let go the match, though he might wish for another fire, an even fiercer conflagration this time, an explosion of flame that would turn six feet of earth to ash and blow it sky high. He wishes his mind wouldn’t travel back to that fateful night, but it does.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Dorian heard her. He can’t believe it. He stuffs his hands over his ears. He won’t hear it. He can’t stand up. He can’t sit. He wants only to lie down, curled next to Paul, next to the shrouded shape that is Paul … was Paul. “No,” he says, pauses to draw breath, draw out the word. “Noooo!”

  “Then we have to go to the police, Dorian. What else is there to do? We can’t leave him here.”

  Dorian looks wildly around the room. He can’t think. He can’t think. Lydia can think for him. But her tone is suddenly furious:

  “This is your fault. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “Oh, don’t.” Dorian whimpers. Her words sting. “Please don’t.” He looks at her. A world outside this nightmare intrudes. He gasps, “Briony! Where …?”

  “On the bus. She decided to take the bus.”

  “You weren’t supposed to come back until the morning.”

  Lydia flings her hair back over her shoulder. “Are you suggesting…?”

  “No … I don’t know. No.”

  And yet Lydia feels a sickening stab of culpability. If—always the ifs that will haunt her all her life—she had taken Briony to the city as she had said she would, as they thought she was going to, she would have been none the wiser. She would know nothing of this. Nothing as bizarre, as shameful, as shocking as this … this, whatever they were doing. And Paul would be alive. Of course, he would be alive.

  Silence imprisons them. A visitor, a ghost perhaps, would see two figures hunched, heads bowed, praying perhaps, though one is sobbing to sear the soul. A visitor would hear the dying fire crackle, gas lamps hissing, the old fridge rattle in the next room, a bird outside caw harshly. He would wonder at the mantled shape on the floor, clearly human. He might wait for one of them to speak, or he might not have the patience, as it’s a while before one of them does. It’s Dorian, his voice hoarse, breaking, beaten:

  “Where then?”

  “We have a place already. We don’t have to dig.”

  “I don’t under—?”

  “Where the outhouse was.”

  Dorian lifts feverish eyes to hers. “Oh, no. No!”

  “It has to be filled anyway. I promised my father it would be.”

  “I can’t do it. I can’t. It’s … unimaginable. It’s a … Lydia, it’s a … I can’t put him there. I can’t put someone … oh, god, someone I loved down there.” Fresh tears spill over Dorian’s lids. “I loved him, don’t you see?”

  Lydia stiffens. Moments ago Dorian and Paul were cousins, second cousins, blood. Moments ago she anticipated Paul being in bed with her. Moments ago, her world stood right-side up. “You’ve known him for all of ten days.

  “I don’t care. That doesn’t matter. How long should it take?”

  “That didn’t look like love to me.”

  “What would you know?”

  “What would I know? What would I know? More than you, you…”

  “You …? You what? Say it.”

  Lydia’s control breaks. Hot tears sting her eyes. She can’t stop them coursing down her face, can’t stop her strangled scream: “You pervert!”

  The word snaps the air between them, then rips through Dorian’s gut like a burning lance. Sticks and stones may break his bones, but words have never hurt him—because the words, those words, have never before been said to his face.

  “Oh, god, I can’t believe this,” Lydia puts her head in her hands, tries to gulp back tears. “I can’t believe what’s happened. I can’t believe I’m sitting here and … he’s there, d—.” She severs the word, lowers her hands. She wants to hurt Dorian, hurt him badly, with all the hurt and rage at her command. “Do you know how your father died? Do you have any idea?”

  “What …? My father? What’s that got—”

  “He hanged himself.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. He hanged himself.”

  “He died in a
car accident.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My father told me. People have been keeping the truth from you for twenty years!”

  “I don’t believe it. Why are you saying this? Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! Because you were doing this, playing this … game!” Lydia jerks her arm toward the ceiling.

  “Oh, god … why did—”

  “I don’t know why. I just know!”

  Dorian looks at Lydia through bleary eyes, her face a blotchy shapeless arrangement of pink and white. He’ll remember this day, this hour, these minutes as the very nadir of his existence, an expulsion from paradise, the end—cruelly, fantastically—of their long and safe and privileged childhood. Their lives have unravelled. He wipes the snot from his face, the wet from his eyes, Lydia’s features come into focus: the eyes staring wide, the mouth twisted, her whole face burning with what looks to him to be anger or terror.

  Silence descends between them once again. The wood in the stove crackles, but with less intensity; the cottage is cooling—both could feel it—the light from the west—both could see through the bedroom screen—almost vanished. The clock on the library table—Lydia, nearest, can hear it—ticks with relentless measure.

  “Not that hole.” Dorian’s words arrive as a tired sigh. “I can’t put him there.”

  “What do you think would happen if we dug a fresh grave?”

  “Don’t say ‘grave.’”

  “What would happen?”

  “I don’t know… someone would notice?”

  “Someone would see, Dorian. My father would. The broken grass, the mound of earth…”

  “They’ll come looking for him.”

  “Who?”

  “His parents, the police…”