Last of the Independents
Page 29
“Maybe it’ll come back,” I said. “If not, there’s a secretary’s position open at Hastings Street Investigations.”
Mrs. Loeb opened the door, arms laden with styrofoam containers and parcels. “Any news?” she asked me.
“None. Sorry.”
She nodded and focused her attention on Ben, wheeling over the meal tray. “Chicken soup with kreplach from Cantor’s,” she said. “There’s enough for three if you’re hungry, Michael.”
“I should leave you two alone,” I said, thinking of my bed and my dog, and a woman who wouldn’t be there.
Mrs. Loeb handed me one of the containers. “Have a couple of spoons just to be sociable. I can always get more. And I did want to talk with you about something concerning Cynthia.”
“You already asked him if there was news,” Ben said. “Can’t it wait?”
“Of course, but I don’t see why it should. If you’d rather not hear it, Mike and I can go down the hall.”
Ben flung the napkin she’d spread to the floor. “Mom, she’s not coming back. She’s dead or worse.”
His mother paused, the soup-lid half-removed.
“I understand you’re upset,” she said.
“I understand you want to believe Cynthia’s alive but she’s not, she’s not coming back, because some sick fucker picked her up and probably took her across the country and raped her and sodomized her and tortured her and kept her in a dog kennel, and once she was dead cut her into pieces and tossed them into a well or ate them. And probably you’ll never find out. And I know this and the cops know this and Mike here knows. The missing persons groups and those stupid support groups you go to, they all know it too. And you know it, Mom, don’t you? Deep down? So why don’t we cut out the lies and stop pretending she’s alive and well and just forgot to call these last years? Could we do that, put these illusions aside, at least for a while?”
Estelline Loeb put the soup down on the moveable tray. She set out plastic cutlery, including a superfluous knife and fork and individual packets of salt and pepper. She’d bought a box of crackers and pulled one of the packages out of the box and tore it open for Ben to help himself. She unfolded a fresh napkin and made to tie it around Ben’s neck, but he flinched and she smoothed it and set it on the tray next to the bowl.
When that was done, she said to me, “Let’s go outside and let him eat.”
I followed her to the end of the corridor, where a window looked down on Burrard Street.
“Ben said the file was destroyed by those hooligans,” she said. “Is that right?”
“I have a copy with my lawyer, but it’s about two months old. I have most of the rest on file. I’ll be able to put everything together as it was, minus my margin scrawls.”
“Forget it,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
“All right,” I said.
“Because, you see, a lot of the problem I think is that we’ve had the material but haven’t been able to look at it fresh, and evaluate the original evidence with everything that’s come to light. What we really have to do is start at the end and work back. I think that will help us see the original statements with new eyes, and maybe banish some of the fogginess that creeps in when we deal with so much information. Or, tell you what, you could start at the beginning and I’ll start with the most recent, and we can spend maybe an hour or two each week comparing and discussing what we’ve looked at, to see what connections can be made. Do you think there’s any sense in that, Michael?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” I said.
Epilogue
It struck her as sad how far the scope of her life had been reduced. She regretted never learning to drive. Before retirement she’d counted on the bus, and her husband, on his days off, had always been willing to drive her. One of his better qualities. Now two floors in one house contained her, aside from the occasional foray with her grandson or the ladies from Come Share. She found herself confined with the animal and noted its decline with much more scrutiny than her grandson did. Blindness from affection is still blindness.
In the morning she came downstairs and turned on the kettle and stared at the dead TV screen, knowing if she turned that on too, that was what she would do for the day. The house was too quiet so she turned on the radio and listened to one of the disk jockeys jabber about parliament while she had her porridge. She did the dishes humming to the songs on the oldies station.
At noon she let the dog out of the basement. It drank water and nuzzled her leg. It smelled rank. She let it into the yard and cleaned her silver while watching the dog from the window. The dog did nothing.
She vacuumed the carpets but the smell of sick dog was worked into the fibers now. The dog lay in the yard. Damn you, she thought. Leaving that thing for me to look after, unwilling to face what will happen regardless, and unwilling to make it as painless as it could be. Still a child in some respects. Too many.
Look at it, she thought. Even it knows it’s time.
He’d left his gun with her. He’d taught her how to use the big shotgun, but cautioned her that firing it would probably break her shoulder. No. Guns weren’t her business. Her husband’s, her grandson’s. Not hers.
He’d left his pain medication behind as well. She opened a can of Fancy Feast — the dog preferred cat food for some silly reason, and he’d indulged it — and ground three of the pills up and worked them into the food. She took the bowl out to it with one hand, her knife in the other. Placed the bowl on the grass. Watched it bow its head, sniff the bowl and begin to eat. When it had eaten its fill she slit its throat the way she’d done with pigs more than half a century ago on her father’s farm, a strong deep cut, the kind that would elicit a nod of approval from her father. All the gold stars and report cards never pleased that man as much as watching one of his daughters make a clean kill. When it was over she dug the grave, the shovel too long and heavy. Falling on her knees, she used the dog’s food dish and a rusty trowel. Her arms hurt and she had to break for food and to return circulation to her knees and elbows. By nightfall she still wasn’t done but she kept digging. By midnight, an hour that rarely saw her awake, she had lowered the body and the clumps of blood-stained grass that served as evidence into the ground. She packed the earth over the body and rolled a few stones onto the grave. She stood up and wiped her hands on her knees, then went back inside to sleep and eat and wait for his call.
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Copyright © Sam Wiebe, 2014
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wiebe, Sam, author
Last of the independents / Sam Wiebe.
(Vancouver noir)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0948-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-4597-0949-2 (pdf).--ISBN 978-1-4597-0950-8 (epub)
I. Title.
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