Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  But people don’t listen: that’s the fact of it, people don’t listen at all. Never have. They go around in a fog all the time. Maybe they are worried about typing their credit card numbers into their computers — maybe they are — but they’re just downright sloppy about everything else.

  I’ve got grocery lists that people have written on the backs of cancelled checks, the other side listing everything from their home address to their bank account number. Several times, lists jotted down on bank statements, and you can find out everything from how much the electric bill was to what the bank was pulling out for the mortgage. Doesn’t matter what it’s on — you’re at the cash and you’re thinking about paying for your groceries and whether to put them all into the cart or whether they’re light enough that you can carry them, and you’re dropping that list right there in the handy wastepaper basket that’s right by the cashier, the one with the brand new black plastic bag lining the bottom. Or else you’re leaving it in the cart. And out the door without as much as another thought. That garbage bag I just emptied, and that I’m about to empty again.

  I try to read between the lines on a list, and sometimes I just want to go and see how close I am to actually getting it right — I mean, I draw them up in my head right down to the colour of their hair, their size, their shape, their mannerisms. What they like to wear. How many people live in the house. It’s half game, half hobby. Maybe even a little bit of compulsion. But you’d be surprised how often it turns out that I’ve gotten it almost exactly right — a few little things off, maybe, but all the broad strokes in the right places.

  In summer, you can just follow someone out the door on your break, find out where they call home, come back later. Real simple, just foot leather and patience. But that’s not the easiest way to do it: if someone’s going to just offer you up an address, you can head out any time.

  First time I did that, Mary was safely off with her friends at a downtown darts tournament, and I took the list written on the parliamentary mailer.

  On the front, her name and an east-end address up on Signal Hill Road.

  In a little row of houses, it was the yellow one, the number on the front in enamelled tiles. I’ve just got brass numbers from the hardware store screwed tight onto the front of the house, and that’s certainly fancy enough for the mailman to find you.

  I remember that night was a crisp one in February, bitter cold, the stars you could see against the flat glow of the streetlights as hard and bright as bits of glass. I was bundled up good, insulated boots and a heavy coat, watch cap pulled right down over my ears. It was solidly on the freeze side of the freeze-and-thaw cycle; the snow had been knocked back a few days earlier, but what was left was all frozen over, so that everything had its own new and imposed topography. Hard-ridged plains, rises and falls of white ice, the snow that remained as patterned and hard as the meringues you can buy already made in the baking aisle and fill with your own fruit.

  I walked fast, my breath shooting out ahead of me in clouds, my chin tucked down and in away from the cold. I didn’t have to bring the envelope, because I had the name and address memorized. I could already picture the neighbourhood. Three streets up from McKay, seven blocks in total, a turn to the left and up the hill, right side of the street, counting up the odd numbers as I went.

  I walked right past it the first time on purpose, a steady pace like there was somewhere up the hill that I was supposed to be, trying to mimic the quick sideways glance of the only-slightly-interested as I hurried past her house, trying to hold what I saw on the inside, trying to make it appear like an image rising up on photographic paper.

  You could see into the little living room through the front windows, and it was one of those busy little rooms; it looked like she fretted over it a lot — plants on the mantel, a couple of small lamps. A big spider fern in the corner, up on a high table, spilling out all over and about to be large enough to be called messy, a few spider strands already shooting out and away like lifeboats leaving an obviously sinking ship. A square mirror right up over the mantel. I could picture it catching her eye every time she went into the room, her right hand coming up to fix her hair. Curly hair, and that means there’s always something, a stray curl or two, to push back in place. That’s what I mean: I didn’t have anything more than the envelope then, and I already was sure she had curly hair, like that information was hidden in the curve and bend of her script. The whole room full and fussy, but also neat, like every complex place where something sat was both important to her and carefully planned out. All the lights on, like she might be expecting someone. Everything in place. Waiting.

  Then I was walking past the glass front door, glimpsing the long hallway heading back to the kitchen, the stairs on the left-hand side, right up against the side wall. Black banister, white balusters, no stair runner, white stair fronts with black tops. Lights on in the hallway, hardwood floor.

  I didn’t see her from the front of the house at all.

  Only one name on the envelope, and the thing about those MP mail-outs is that they fire them like a shotgun — they like to get every single voter, and the NDP always save paper and put all of the names in the household on the same envelope. It’s so environmentally conscious that it almost hurts. And whoever gets to the mailbox first gets to be the one who opens it and lets all that righteous intensity pour out on the floor — because “look, it’s addressed to me.”

  I get them now, still addressed to me and to Mary Carter. I burn them.

  The fact is that you can only walk by a place a couple of times before you start looking obvious, the neighbours fretting with their curtains at just the right time and deciding that you’re looking for a place to rob or something.

  People can go from completely oblivious to neighbourhood sentries in the blink of an eye — that’s what it is to be in a city with a healthy dose of small town still right there at the core. So I went up the hill and then down again, and then up the hill toward the big hotel. Really works your legs; you can feel the heat in the fronts of your thighs growing with every step.

  There’s a street that goes right underneath the hotel, a street running out over and down from Signal Hill Road. I don’t even know its name, but it curves around for maybe two blocks and joins up with a road back down to the harbour. So short it’s hardly worth its own name, although I’m sure it has one.

  On the lower corner, anchoring the corner, really, is a big house. It’s one of those old St. John’s piles that was really nice once — when you had groundskeepers and a housemaid or two — but the kind of place that now always needs more work than the present owners can afford and that still has all the land it started with back when land was pretty much free for the taking.

  This one, the yard’s the thing they’ve been trying to save money on, so it’s not like the fence is in good shape or the lawn is the kind of manicured grass that stays all lit up with outside lights or anything. That meant a big dark patch of ground up over the back of the yellow house I was interested in, the ground tucked in under a grove of mature trees. And the good thing about that frozen hard ground? Even though it made a bit of noise if you stepped on the wrong place, you could pretty much make your way in under the trees without leaving a mark.

  I found a smooth grey maple right in there away from the road and just sort of settled back against it, still on my feet but with my legs folded under and my back square against the trunk, up high and looking down over the back of her house. In a lot of St. John’s houses, especially in the older row houses, the layout is exactly the same.

  Crouched down there in the snow, my ass inches from the frozen ground, I had an unimpeded view of the back of the house — an even better view of the neighbour’s, but I wasn’t interested in the neighbours. I’d find out later that the sightlines weren’t the same in summer. The branches that were up out of the way without leaves in February filled right in and dragged down into sight when
the maples came out in spring, and it was like a curtain dropped over the backs of the whole row of houses.

  Like me, she had the bedroom on the back for herself, maybe for the same reason as me: Signal Hill Road can be pretty busy, too, lots of traffic heading up the hill at all hours — everything from buses hauling daytime sightseers to late-night teenagers revving their way up the hill for impatient and cramped car sex — and the vehicles need the same kind of extra push to get up the incline that your legs do.

  I knew the rooms I was looking at right away: kitchen, bathroom, back bedroom. A lot of places in St. John’s, the bathroom’s out on the front, but for simplicity’s sake, it’s always on one of the corners. Cheaper to have all of your plumbing aligned vertically. Fewer pipes, fewer pipe chases. About seven o’clock at night, good and dark in February, and she was moving back and forth through the kitchen at first, that sort of distracted fridge-to-stove-to-sink thing that everyone does when they’re cooking half-heartedly and not really thinking about what they’re doing. Over to the fridge to get one thing, back to where the stove must be, back to the fridge for another. A lot of wasted movement, but a better chance for me to see what she looked like, to see how she moved.

  She was a small woman, almost thin, and with curly brown hair (I saw that and felt the way you do when you’re watching a game on TV and your hockey team scores a goal). I already knew her name was Joy, Joy Martin. Nicely built from what I could see — with the counter in the way and the height I was at, I could see her from just below the belt buckle up. Black pants that looked like jeans, and a loose sleeveless shirt, fancy for the kitchen unless she was expecting someone. Some people are just like that, expectant, always thinking that someone’s about to show up and they have to be ready, the house clean enough to at least be presentable. I wonder if those people go to bed every night disappointed when no one does show up, as if making all that effort was some kind of magic charm that would make people — the right people — just arrive. Whether it was also heartbreaking when they just . . . didn’t.

  She was pretty, but in a kind of a small-featured way: small nose, the St. John’s chin — round, with her jaw set back, almost stubborn-looking — the kind of face someone might draw if they didn’t have much room on the page. Elfin, maybe.

  The phone must have been ringing, because she walked out of the window frame and then back in again with a black cordless up against her ear, and my view was so good that I could see she’d taken off a big earring to answer the phone and was holding it in her left hand. So, really expectant, enough to get dolled up with jewellery. With her head tilted, you could see the lines on her neck where the skin folded and bunched — it made her look suddenly older. Made the expectant seem both urgent and forlorn.

  And no one came.

  She barely left the back of the house: ate in the kitchen — although I could only see her forearms and the plate, her hands carrying bites of food up and out of sight — and then up to the bathroom. Couldn’t see her directly in there at all, but mathematics are funny: angles and reflections and declinations. I got a mosaic-corner scrap of her reflection when she was taking off her shirt, just a fragment in the top edge of the bathroom mirror, the angle just right with the medicine cabinet door ajar, the kind of chance thing you see once because the stars literally align and that never repeats itself ever. An older woman, but that’s an observation, not a criticism: I’m an older man, and she was in good shape.

  That was more obvious when she turned the bathroom light off and the bedroom light on, sweeping in through the room in her underwear — black bra and panties — coming straight over and pulling the curtains closed all at once. Then, the room dark for a moment before it was lit by the flickering blue of the television set rippling through the narrow sliver of room that still showed. I imagined her in there, all wrapped up and warm under the sheets in her nightie or whatever it was she slept in, the television muttering away at her for company, that blind screen completely unaware of how white her skin had looked against the jet-black lace of her underwear.

  I wondered about that, all balled up at the base of the cold tree. Nights as cold as that in St. John’s, you sometimes hear the trees creaking and cracking, like the ice is working its way inch by inch into the centre of the wood and that it’s splitting somehow right into the core. The hairs in my nose all gone stiff, like the cold was busy working its way into me as well.

  I stayed even after it was only the light of the television behind the closed curtains, the night air all around me completely still the way only a winter high-pressure system can be, and while I sat there, I wondered about why it is people pick particular sets of clothes, especially when they seem chosen for other people but there aren’t any other people around.

  Whether it was quiet desperation, or whether it was some kind of transmission of unconscious need. Like those radio signals they used to flick out into space, transmissions that were supposed to tell other civilizations that we were peaceful or that we knew our periodic table or that Beethoven could put a few notes together, and, by the way, here’s a symphony or two — try that in your alien earholes, if you’ve got any. Then I thought about how, if I were in a television show, everything wouldn’t just peter out this way, that there would somehow be a much more definite end to the night.

  I mean, it’s not a sex thing.

  I didn’t pull it out up there and hold it in my hand when she was walking around her bedroom or anything. It would have frozen off.

  But really, I wouldn’t have anyway, cold or not: it’s nothing like that at all.

  I didn’t feel any different than I would watching a mystery show on television and seeing the pieces all fall into place, figuring it out in that last few seconds before they actually have to come right out and tell you because you’re stupid or something. Saying it’s intellectual curiosity is perhaps the wrong way to put it, but that’s sort of what I mean.

  Every single time, you learn something new.

  Keep going back right through the winter and on into summer, and I swear that you keep picking up things you either missed or that you didn’t realize were important the first time you saw them.

  If I got caught at it, I suppose they’d call me a voyeur.

  I don’t think of it that way, though: I think of it more like a hobby, like birdwatching. Me, the detached observer, watching the interesting habits of different kinds of people. And there are lots of different kinds of people, and lots of different kinds of habits.

  Getting up from there that first time — just standing up — was tough. My knees unbending like rusty stuck hinges, and the first few steps back up the hill to the road I was almost staggering, trying to get my joints to work. Trying not to make too much noise, looking around to see if anyone had noticed me once I started moving. And I was really cold. Out under the lights, the street was completely empty, and I was out and onto it, relieved and elated at the same time.

  Joy Martin of Signal Hill Road, I thought, I know you a lot better now.

  I knew I’d recognize her the next time she was in the store, even if her back was facing me and I could see only her height, her hair, and that simple sweet curve of her neck. And I knew that I’d keep learning more about her.

  Files? You don’t have to keep files. Not in any kind of detail, not more than a note or two — maybe just a list of your own — to jog your memory in the right direction. If you’ve got any smarts at all, you can keep it in your head for when you need it.

  And Mary at darts? Not one single bit the wiser.

  Chapter 15

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is seeking the assistance of the general public in locating missing person Mary CARTER.

  On Sunday, November 22, officers from RNC Patrol Services responded to the report of a missing person. CARTER was last seen in the area of McKay Street in St. John’s, NL, at approximately 1:00 p.m.

&n
bsp; CARTER is described as 5’ 7”, 125 lbs, with brown eyes, short black hair, light build. She was last seen wearing a bluish-grey T-shirt, black-and-red sneakers, blue jeans, and a black windbreaker with a reflective stripe.

  The RNC is continuing the search and is seeking the assistance of the general public.

  If anyone has any information pertaining to the whereabouts of Mary CARTER they are asked to contact the RNC at 729-8000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

  “Whose wife hasn’t done a runner? You’re an asshole or worse, she’s already getting her coat on, halfway out the door to her mother’s and she’s still shouting at you.”

  That was Scoville, looking down at his hands as always while he talked, worrying the tip of a pair of scissors in under one of his fingernails, his legs thrown out in front of him under the desk like he’d rather have them propped up on top. Then he looked up and across at Dean, eyes opening wider as he realized who he was talking to.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean anything by that,” Scoville backpedalled fast. “I guess buddy’s wife could just be staying low.”

  Dean shook his head. That year-old news release was the last activity the case had seen. The last activity in the file at all.

  “I don’t think so. Not for six months let alone for more than a year,” he said. “Not with no sign of her. Not using a credit card, no money out of the bank account, no one using her social insurance number. So she’s not spending or working, not unless she’s managed to get new ID.”

  Dean was holding a coffee and not drinking it, sitting at a desk straight across from Jim’s. Counting off the reasons on his fingers, one by one. “You’ve looked at the file, I’ve looked at the file. There’s not one single sign of her from anywhere — not family, not friends, from the very day she was reported missing.”

  “If she’s dead, best bet it’s going to be the husband,” Scoville said. “Who else?”