In the First Early Days of My Death

by Catherine Hunter

  Louise had even helped to facilitate the deal. When All-Am first proposed the development, City Council had hesitated. It was Louise who carefully researched the corporation’s history and reported that they were reputable. It was Louise who discovered the loophole in the Historical Preservation Act that would allow them to demolish the Walker Theatre. And it was Louise, or rather, Louise’s friendship with the newspaper’s chief editor, that was responsible for the positive press the project was receiving now. The mayor’s councillors were all — or almost all — convinced that the public wanted the casino, and a good majority of them had voted to provide All-Am with the forgivable loans and tax relief they needed to complete the project. The mayor hoped Louise could persuade her editor friend to give them even better press now. Their PR had to get better, if the mayor was going to beat that ragtag band of protesters with their rhetoric about history and their damned injunction against the demolition. Somehow, he had to get that order rescinded. That was the only thing All-Am was waiting for now. As soon as the judge lifted the injunction, All-Am would light the fuse, detonate the dirty old Walker, and history would be history.

  The mayor strode across the reception area, entered the empty boardroom on the east side of the building, and surveyed the Forks, where the rivers met. He had heard this land was once an Aboriginal graveyard, but he didn’t believe it. In any case, it was a shopping mall now, with a blue steel tower. It reminded the mayor of the plastic turrets of the toy castle that had been his childhood favourite. He had long wanted to expand this mall, but the area had unfortunate limitations. It was bounded on two sides by important downtown businesses, and on the other two sides by the banks of the Red and the Assiniboine. The mayor sighed. If only it were feasible to reroute the rivers.

  As the paramedics continued to work over the body of Wendy Li, Felix tried to interview her family. Alika sat slumped in a kitchen chair, elbows on his knees and head in his hands, silent. His sister, the young woman Felix had met yesterday in the garden, was hovering over her brother, caressing his bent shoulders and cooing phrases that sounded like French to Felix.

  Felix began with preliminaries, their names and addresses, dates of birth. Each time he posed a question, Noni answered for them both.

  “And you were born — where?”

  “Lahaina.”

  “China?”

  “Hawaii. We’re Canadian citizens now.”

  “I see,” said Felix. “And, ah, your occupation?”

  “I have my own business — I’m a seamstress,” Noni said. “Alika’s a photographer.”

  Felix pointed at Alika. “Doesn’t he speak English?”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “But you were speaking to him just now in — what?”

  “French,” Noni said softly.

  “I see,” said Felix, again. He didn’t. But in light of Noni’s confrontational stare, he thought he’d steer away from the subject of their origins. “So, ah, you came here this morning because your brother called you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly did he tell you on the phone?”

  “He said he worked all night and when he came home, Wendy was lying at the bottom of the stairs. He couldn’t rouse her, so he called me for help. I told him to phone an ambulance.”

  “He called you before he called 911?”

  “Well, yes,” said Noni. “He was distraught.”

  Felix found this suspicious. “Why didn’t you call an ambulance immediately, Mr. Li?”

  Alika merely moaned.

  There was an ominous silence in the front hall. Felix rose to investigate. He saw the paramedics still crouched low beside Wendy. They had placed an oxygen mask over her face and were lifting her onto a stretcher.

  “What’s happening?” Felix asked.

  “We’ve got a pulse,” the medic said. “We’re taking her in.” She closed the parka over Wendy’s naked breasts. She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, and Felix remembered how Wendy had made this gesture herself, just yesterday, smearing a streak of grey mud across her hairline, into her eyebrows.

  Finally, Evelyn gave up on sleep. She slid from her bed and performed her morning rituals, showering quickly and blow-drying her hair. Then she sat at the chair in front of her dresser and looked at the framed photograph she kept beside her bed while she brushed her hair. She was disciplined in her rituals, one hundred strokes every morning and the repetition of the spell.

  “I travel beneath the earth to the pool where desire boils in the deep waters,” she whispered. “I dip my cup and let him drink.” She paused for a minute, as the brush became caught in her hair, and untangled the knot with her fingers. Then she continued. “Without me, he cannot eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor breathe.”

  She reached out to caress the picture of Alika gently with her thumb. “May desire flow through his veins and seep into his bones until he thirsts for me.”

  Evelyn knew the words by heart. They had become automatic, like the Bible verses she’d had to memorize at St. Bernadette’s School for Girls, verses she could recite without the slightest understanding of their meaning. Today, though, she thought carefully about the words, considered their significance as she spoke, enunciated clearly.

  Evelyn had found the boiling desire spell where she found all her spells and potions, on the Internet at the library. She first came across them while she was surfing the Net, seeking advice about how to manage the problem of her spectral brother. She’d been surprised to find so many sites devoted to the supernatural. There were thousands of pages offering magic spells, especially love spells, and Evelyn had been practising them diligently ever since Alika met Wendy last summer. None of them had ever worked, though. The Internet sites all promised surefire results, and many featured true-life testimonials from women who were now happily married. But in Evelyn’s case, the spells seemed to have the opposite effect. The harder she tried to control the course of events, the worse things got. Last August, when she tried out the love spell with the vial of onyx oil that cost her thirty-two dollars, Alika bought Wendy a diamond ring. In October, when Evelyn pricked her finger and used her own blood in a potion, Wendy married him. All winter long, just before every full moon, Evelyn had attempted a different ritual, hoping to perfect her technique, but when spring came, there was Wendy, still living in the house that should have belonged to Evelyn, planting a garden that must have been bewitched. Evelyn would crouch in that garden some evenings, watching Alika and Wendy through the kitchen window. After they ate their dinner and cleared the table, they’d play cards or, worse, the two of them would simply sit and talk together, and Evelyn could hear them laughing. She suspected they were laughing about her.

  This morning, however, Evelyn’s spell would be infused with new power. After last night, her chances had surely increased. She felt a sharp spurt of exultation in her heart.

  Noni wanted to pray, if only she could remember how. Was Alika praying? He sat in the waiting room with his head bent low, but he didn’t say a word.

  When Noni and Alika were children, they had rarely prayed. Their dad had been raised by Hawaiian parents, who practised an extremely relaxed form of Buddhism, and Rosa had been raised by a Catholic French-Canadian mother and an Italian socialist father who was a staunch atheist, so their religious education, though never dull, had been confusing. Noni snorted involuntarily when she recalled Detective Felix Delano and his desire to discover their ethnic identity. When you find out, she thought, let me know. As for Wendy, it was anybody’s guess. Whoever Wendy’s parents were, they hadn’t bothered to pass along that information.

  Nor had they passed along any medical information, which was what Noni told the surgeon who wanted her history. Was there any diabetes in the family, heart disease, epilepsy? No one knew. Whatever had caused Wendy’s fall remained a mystery.

  Wendy was in surgery now, and Noni tried not to think about what was happening to her. All she knew was that Wendy had a serious head wound. She wanted
to wait for a progress report before she called her mother, but by noon there was still no news, and she couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “I’m going to call Mum,” she told her brother. He nodded — the first sign that he’d heard anything she’d said all day.

  Rosa took the news calmly. “Don’t worry,” she told her daughter on the phone. “Everything is going to be all right. I’ll come down right away. I’ll bring some — what do you need?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Have you eaten yet? You haven’t had breakfast, have you?”

  “Not yet, we — ”

  “Go to the cafeteria. Get yourself something nourishing. Then go straight to the hospital chapel. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Noni hung up. Her stomach growled. Rosa was right. She had to eat if she was going to get through this — whatever this turned out to be. Coffee and Aspirins would not sustain her. She needed food, something full of sugar.

  Most people don’t believe in ghosts. I found that out the hard way. When I sat down beside Noni in the hospital cafeteria, she looked right at me, but when I reached out to touch her, she shied away. She turned red, as if ashamed to be seen with me, and hurried away without finishing her pudding. It looked like very good pudding, too, chocolate, with whipped cream on top, and I realized I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten a thing since yesterday. I followed Noni down the hall to the waiting room, trying to tell her what had happened to me, but she wouldn’t listen. She put her hands up over her ears, to blot out my voice, and started to cry, so I left her alone.

  I had figured out what had happened, though. I’d been confused at first, but now it was all starting to make sense. While I was lying there on that stretcher, staring at the ceiling of the ambulance, I remembered everything. Well, almost everything — it was impossible to concentrate. The ambulance was speeding and the sirens were blaring, a hideous noise. Then the emergency ward, alarm and dismay and shouting and terrible mess all around me. I put up with it for a while, but when they laid me out on that operating table, I knew I’d reached my limit. I never could stand the sight of blood.

  So I’d come out into the corridors, looking for my family.

  “Get anything else out of the husband?” Paul asked Felix. The detectives were standing at the top of Wendy’s stairs, examining the scene, trying to concoct a theory of how she had fallen.

  “Nothing,” Felix said. “What do you make of him?”

  Paul shrugged. “In shock, I guess.” He ran his hand over the carpet, checking for a lump, a loose thread, anything that might have caused her to trip. “Think he pushed her?”

  “I don’t know.” Felix looked into the open door of the hall closet. He saw shoes and boots, a broken kite, camping equipment. Winter clothing hung from hooks along the inner wall. “This is where she got the parka,” he said. “Look.”

  Down below, they heard a pounding on the door.

  “Maybe someone knocked on the door?” Paul suggested. “She was in the nude — sleeping, or in the shower, and she grabbed the parka.”

  “But it was so hot last night — even with the rain,” Felix said. “Why a parka? There’s plenty of summer clothing in her room. If she was trying to cover up, she was in a big hurry.” He headed down the stairs to answer the door. On his way, he tested the railing. Solid.

  “Larry’s Locks,” said the man at the door. “Sorry I’m late.” He was wearing a blue uniform and carried a toolbox. “You had a break-in, right?”

  “Come in,” Felix said. He pulled the man gently by his sleeve. “We need to talk.” He glanced outside. A couple of nosy neighbours still remained on the street, reporting the news to those who had missed the excitement. He could never get used to the way people gathered and gawked at the scenes of accidents or crimes. He was always disgusted by these hangers-on, these ungrateful fools. It was almost as if they were hoping for some kind of tragedy to make their day. A movement in the lilacs beside the house caught Felix’s eye. Jesus. One of them was right in the yard. Felix decided to throw a scare into him. “Wait here a minute,” he said to the locksmith.

  He walked down the path. “Who’s there?”

  A short, slim man, about twenty-two years old, emerged from behind the bush.

  “What are you doing there?” Felix demanded.

  “Just, um, curious. I saw the ambulance and all and —”

  “You live around here?” Felix asked him.

  “Just passing through. On my way to the swimming pool, you know, to — ”

  Felix looked at him sternly. “Yeah, well, what’s your name?”

  “Marty Smith.”

  “You got any identification on you?”

  “Sure.” Marty Smith fumbled with his wallet and produced a birth certificate and social insurance card. Felix took note of them and told the man to be on his way.

  “Is she all right?” Marty called, as Felix returned to the house.

  Felix wheeled around. “Who?”

  “The — the girl. You know. I saw them take her away in the ambulance. Is she all right?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Felix said. He slammed the door on his way in.

  When Noni returned to the waiting room, she saw a doctor in a green gown speaking to her brother. She couldn’t see the doctor’s face. He was sitting beside Alika, leaning forward earnestly, with his hand on Alika’s arm. It was bad, then. Noni slowed her footsteps. She wasn’t ready. A line from the Bible ran through her head. I will fear no evil. But she did fear it.

  “Tell me,” she said, as she approached the two men.

  The doctor looked up. “Wendy sustained a fracture to her skull,” he said. “An injury we might have been able to treat, if we had seen her sooner. But now — we’re just doing what we can, trying to relieve the pressure, reduce the swelling.”

  “Can we talk to her?”

  He shook his head. “She’s still unconscious.”

  “Is it — how bad is it?” Noni asked.

  “It’s not good,” the doctor said. “I can’t promise you anything.”

  Alika stood up then and walked away from them.

  “We’re doing all we can,” the doctor said quietly. He stood up, too, and Noni could see how weary he was.

  “I know you are,” she said.

  I watched over my grieving husband, wanting to comfort him, but we were on two different planes. I could only follow him as he paced the tiled floors, silent and expressionless. He walked down one corridor and up another, turning corners or retracing his steps only when he met an obstacle. He was restless, the way he always was when I was late and he didn’t know what to do without me. Left on his own, he was helpless. I wasn’t sure how much he understood about what was going on. I tried to explain to him what had happened, to describe the way things were now, but it was an impossible task. Alika just kept striding through the halls, as if he believed he could walk his way back to me. He couldn’t hear me. Unlike Noni, he didn’t seem to be aware of me at all. He paused at the fourth-floor window and looked out across the river. What was he thinking? He was as unreadable, as deliciously dense and closed to me as ever.

  Whenever the mayor’s wife went downtown to play the video lottery terminals at Casey’s bar, she wore a disguise. In the ordinary course of any day, all she had to do was take off her hat in order to disguise herself, because everyone recognized the mayor’s wife by her hats. In summer, she wore a floppy straw affair, with a wide brim that concealed her face. Always. With a matching bag. Without the straw hat, nobody ever recognized her. She strolled the streets downtown, shopped and ate in restaurants alone, completely incognito. Nobody knew what she really looked like. Nobody had ever bothered to take note.

  But when she went to Casey’s, Louise took extra care to change her appearance. She tied her hair back tight, placed a brown wig on her head, and covered it up with a baseball cap. Then she dug in her gym bag for something casual. Sweats, maybe. Something baggy. She painted her face, heavy on the eyeliner and mascara. She
placed a cigarette behind her ear, kicked on some beat-up runners. Then she raided the joint savings account or sometimes, when she’d run that into the ground, the retirement bonds.

  She went alone, on a bus, so that nobody would notice her. None of the people who really knew Louise would be caught dead on a transit bus. And there were few enough who really knew her, anyway. Aside from the society functions she was forced to attend, she kept to herself. She often repeated that. “I wouldn’t know,” she’d say, when pressed for gossip. “I keep to myself.”

  One of Louise’s favourite ways of keeping to herself was to fake a migraine. In fact, she was faking one this afternoon. She was, at this very moment, as she placed another load of coins into the slot, supposed to be lying down in her dark, locked bedroom with a cold cloth across her brow.

  This morning, when she’d said she was jogging around Assiniboine Park, Louise had been lying in Mr. Bradley Byrnes’s bed, with Mr. Bradley Byrnes. She had let him seduce her one night in the back seat of a limousine after a charity ball. That was three long years ago, and she’d been sleeping with him ever since. At first, she’d been thrilled by his attentions. She admired his impeccable taste in clothing and fine wine, revelled in his generosity. He was always willing to help out with a loan when she was short. He was a prominent citizen with his own consulting firm, so she’d been flattered when he asked for her advice on business matters or her opinion on municipal affairs. Lately, however, she was growing uneasy about Bradley Byrnes. His constant questions about City Hall bored her, and his increasing demands alarmed her. Yet she was unable to refuse him. After three years, she owed him a lot of money.

  So much money that she could never hope to pay him back. At least not in cash.

  Unless she got lucky. Extraordinarily lucky. And she knew that wasn’t going to happen on these crummy little machines. All she was hoping for today was to win enough to replenish the household account before her husband decided he needed another summer suit. He’d been complaining lately that his green linen was getting worn. And last month, he’d started in about a new car. A convertible he wanted! Did he think he was twenty years old again?