Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  I got out of the car and looked down the long clear-cut into the valley. It’s strange — we spend so much of our time around people that it’s almost impossible for our heads to take in a big long sweep of trees and stumps and slash where there’s absolutely no people at all. No one in sight. No one who would hear anything. Some old, flattened cardboard beer boxes on the forest road, soaked through and coming apart — so there had been people recently, but not now. The air full of that smell of wet you get after rain, the tinny sharp smell that makes you say, “yeah, I remember that,” just before you go ahead and forget about it all over again.

  I remember hitching my pants up over my ass. I’m always hitching up my pants, like I’m an old tomcat, the back side of me just melting away. My pants are always heading somewhere south, almost like they have a mind of their own, and they’d like to be somewhere warmer. Like Cuba. But I remember that time, that hitch, like it was some kind of punctuation, as if it meant something particular, as if it were a step forward in the way a gear turns — always forward, never back.

  Always done — never undone.

  I went around to Lisa’s side of the car and looked in through the glass. It struck me that she was a far prettier girl in repose — that talking, or at least talking when she was drunk, made her face move in almost unattractive ways. And I thought that, lying there asleep in the soft light coming down through the mist, she was possibly as pretty as she would ever be in her entire life.

  I opened her door. She snored a little, but she didn’t move, and I lifted her legs out through the door, her head sliding back against the side of my seat. She shifted a bit, but her eyes didn’t open. Her mouth went slack, though, loose almost, and that was jarring.

  I was picturing her just like that, exactly in that position, leaning back against the seat — but I was picturing her after I’d taken her pants off, naked from the waist down and her legs spread and her feet hanging out through the door, the balls touching the ground.

  Somehow, all at once — even imagining it, even fantasizing — it wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It was like a crime scene photo. In my head, it was like someone had switched a light on for a moment, and just as quickly switched it off again.

  I don’t like to think about that. I still don’t like thinking about that. Amazing the emotions that churns up — how fast you rush from embarrassed to furious. Like water rushing in and back out again.

  I left her, wide-eyed and alone, looking for all the world like she was ten years old or something. The rain had stopped completely, and she was pretty much dry again anyway.

  I may have said something about keeping an eye open for her on the way back from the river, and that if I saw her, I’d pick her up. I did keep my eyes open, as much as you can when you’re driving and trying not to go off the road, but I didn’t see her.

  She was gone.

  Chapter 22

  ear plugs

  travel pillow

  ipod + recharge cord

  camera + battery charger

  toileterres — razor/shave cream/tooth brush face wash

  Hair Dryer

  slippers?

  That one with the Facebook, the one with banans and all that. The one with the long legs.

  Halfway through March, when it’s dirty weather here and the sleet’s always waiting and about to come slashing down, she’d put up on her site under one of those daily photographs that she and the Daniel guy were going to Mexico, and that day the picture was her in a bikini, and underneath, she said, “What do you think of this one?” And it all makes her seem disappointingly shallow.

  It’s not that hard to figure out when a house is going to be empty, not when someone has told you that they’re going to be going away already. In March, by the time I’m off work it’s closing in on dark, even on the day shift, so I walked over to her neighbourhood like I was doing her a favour, just to make sure the place was locked up tight.

  Nothing more in mind than that, just to go and see whether everything was okay at her place. I didn’t ever worry that someone would see me, that they would ask questions. Not even once. After a while, you’re so used to not being seen that you can slip that over you like clothing.

  I was absolutely certain she had already left. You spend enough time reading about someone’s movements, watching them closely when you see them, and it’s really like you know them, even if some part of you, some grounded, hidden part, warns you constantly that you really don’t.

  I knew her street and I knew her house, and there were a couple of lights on inside but not on the porch, and it was a squat square little two-storey, detached on both sides with the kind of porch you can walk right up onto, roofed over so you can put down the groceries and get out your keys while you’re safely out of the rain.

  So I walked straight up the walk and onto the porch and tried the knob, gave it a good twist, shook the door, and waited: there was no sound at all from the other side. And the door was locked, all right, but right near the stairs at the front there was a flowerpot that had been moved, just enough off-centre so that you could see where it had been before, a little dirty fingernail of washed down soil left behind, and I thought, “Wouldn’t that be a stupid place to leave a key?”

  Sure enough, there was a single key under there, flat and gold-coloured and the same make as the front door lock.

  I tried it and it was the door key, all right, so I just kind of inched inside sideways and closed the door behind me, wondering if there was someone coming to check on the place or water the plants or feed the cat or whatever it is you do when someone has gone to the trouble to leave a key out for you.

  The house was empty — I took a quick look right through all of it, peering into the rooms where the lights were on and making my way slowly through the dark ones without flipping on any other switches. The cat fled up the stairs in front of me, orange and white, and it made no noise at all with its paws on the carpeted steps, stopping at the top to give me a quick look. I stayed downstairs, went through the room off the living room where she had the computer, the kitchen — a lot brighter and shinier than mine — and then went up to the bedrooms.

  One of them obviously hers — well, theirs, because inside the dresser there were men’s clothes, too, though not many — and she was not the neatest, because there were clothes all over the bed, shirts and pants and skirts that looked like they’d been selected for the trip and then rejected, left lying where they fell. Like there was going to be absolutely no need to deal with them — to even think about them — until she got back. I had an almost irresistible urge to pick them up, to feel the fabric between my fingertips, maybe even to fold them and try to find where they were supposed to be put away. But I managed not to.

  The mess of the bedroom seemed odd, because the kitchen was so clean — knives lined up in the block like they were all in the same order they’d been in coming out of the package, the counters all wiped down. White-framed glass cupboard doors, every door closed, and behind them, dishes and plates all piled neatly. Nothing in the dish rack, nothing in the sinks, even the two baskets down in the drains clean. The cat’s dish was off to one side, and it was piled high with food. The cat was still hiding somewhere upstairs, under a bed or in a closet, but that was all right, because I don’t really like cats all that much.

  There were plants in the house, but not too many. Not like the indoor jungles some people make, where there’s stuff hanging down all over so you kind of expect spiders or bats or huge bugs or something to be hiding out in there among the big wet-looking leaves. I put my index finger in the dirt in each one, and they were still damp, damp enough that they wouldn’t need watering for at least a few days.

  I didn’t take anything — I didn’t really touch anything besides the soil in the flowerpots and a doorknob or two, but I did look around and save it all up in my head.

  I think I was there
long enough to get a feel for the place, for where things were, for what was important. Then I put her in the house, too — coming down the stairs in sweatpants, cooking in a T-shirt and jeans in that glossy kitchen, her lips pursed as she tried to make out the ingredients in a recipe. I could see her so clearly I could imagine how she was holding her face slightly pinched around the corners of her eyes, like I was making her nearsighted on purpose. Trying to imagine the sound of her feet when she walked, the pattern of sound under her bare feet. That she was moving around leaving closet doors open, her clothes half out of the hamper, completely comfortable in her own space.

  I was careful to lock the door when I left — I even pulled it hard shut and then gave it a little tug, a shake back and forth, to make sure the lock was really locked and that the latch to the doorknob was properly seated, too. We have strong winds in March, and even a small draft can just plain pull the money out of your wallet, just over a day or two, the furnace down there alone in the basement, working hard and trying to keep up.

  I imagined that it wouldn’t be too long after I closed the door before the cat would come out from wherever it was hiding and make its way back to the endless and moving view out the front window. Cats are cagey things; it would probably be there soon enough to see my back, departing down the sidewalk.

  I’ll try to remember to look for it, if I come back.

  When I come back.

  Know what? There are a lot of places that copy a key in an hour.

  Know what else?

  You can hold a key in your hand until it’s as warm as your skin and still have it back in its hiding place before anyone even knows it’s gone missing.

  Chapter 23

  January 12

  Sexual assault arrest made

  (St. John’s, NL) — Police say they have solved the case of a trio of year-old metro-area sexual assaults, following analysis of the cases by the department’s new cold case squad.

  The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) announced the arrest of forty-seven-year-old Francis Kevin Beaton for three downtown assaults at a press conference Monday, saying the charges were the result of a re-analysis of case files using new investigative techniques.

  “The RNC is always at the forefront of new methods and technology,” RNC Chief Winston Adams said. “We take the investigative process seriously. It may not always move as quickly as we would like, but it never stops. Not while I’m chief.”

  Asked about the investigation, lead investigator Inspector Dean Hill said that he and his partner had used new interrogation methods to help identify Beaton as the alleged assailant, but refused to elaborate.

  Beaton is already in custody on other charges. His next court date will be March 15.

  “We are surely going to be buried in leftovers now.”

  That was Scoville, in the passenger seat with the folded newspaper in front of him, talking slowly as the tires hissed on the wet pavement and Dean drove.

  It had been a week since Dean had signed out a car from the pool and, on his way out the door, unexpectedly found Scoville waiting for him.

  “Heading out?” Scoville said. “I guess I’ll come too.”

  He didn’t ask, merely said he was coming and then climbed in the car.

  Dean was afraid that Scoville was going to give him some kind of lecture. Or worse, that he was going to ask if Dean wanted to talk about it — and if there was one thing Dean didn’t want to do, it was to talk about it. Any of it. Not about work, not about home. The driving wasn’t meant to stir things up — it was to tamp them down. To shift things into order. From the station to the east end. Out the big looping ring road, in on the downtown arterial, around the harbour apron, and then back to the station. Backing into the parking spot, leaving the car nose out, ready to go.

  But Scoville didn’t want to talk about anything either. He just sat in the front seat, staring out the windshield, chewing on a plastic coffee stir stick. They drove, Dean setting the direction, making his usual cycle through the city he knew well. After that, Scoville rode with Dean every time, regardless of where Dean took them. Scoville didn’t say anything about the route, didn’t ask.

  Now, with the newspaper in his lap, Scoville was quiet but obviously seething, sharp little sentences leaking out every mile or two, his face flicking through angry little tics.

  “Squad room calls us the recycling team now. It’s all a big joke,” Scoville said. “Bursey came down and dropped a file on my desk and said, ‘Another load ready for pickup.’”

  A few minutes later — “Then the shithead walked backwards out the door, beeping like he was a garbage truck in reverse.”

  Another handful of miles went by.

  “We solve one simple thing and we get every little trespassing file and mischief complaint they couldn’t bother to deal with in the last couple of weeks.”

  At Cape Broyle, the waves came in slow and even, the edge taken off their anger by the disinterest of the long, flat bay. Dean had turned off the ring road in an unexpected direction, making Scoville lurch up in his seat for a moment. They wound up parked right by the water. The bay there was a long funnel, closing in, and the ocean swell had been ordered and knocked down. By the time the waves neared the end of the bay, they were little more than a lop on the shore, less a slap than a backhand, their curl a simple echo of the real sea.

  They toppled onto the beach resignedly, flatly, limply, with almost a ruled edge of regularity.

  Dean saw the black sole of a boot at the tide line, along with one bulb from a string of Christmas lights. The bulb was green, and there was a hint of verdigris on its shiny brass base. Gathering it all up, helpless to do anything but that. While he watched, the waves slowed — so much that they might almost have stopped. He knew they were too far out of town — out there on a shift when they should have been setting up interviews, shifting paper. He hadn’t meant to drag Scoville into it, he thought, into this near-circling of the drain.

  He didn’t say anything to Scoville, and Scoville just sat in the car, somehow managing to look satisfied without ever changing his expression.

  Just up the road, there was a “for sale” sign in front of a light blue mobile home, right below a street sign for Kent’s Lane.

  The trailer had burned — pretty much last night, Dean thought, looking at the wreckage — and its blackened rafters were holding up only the blue sky. Parts of the building looked as if nothing had changed, while others screamed silent catastrophe.

  The windows were all broken and blown out — burned, tufted furniture was scattered around the snow-filled yard. There was no sign of where the people who used to live there had gone, or whether they were even there when it had started to burn. A police car sat at the end of the driveway; Dean recognized the officer in the front seat and waved.

  “There’s something we’re missing about Mary Carter,” Dean told Scoville. “There’s a pattern here we’re not seeing yet.”

  “Arson’s easier,” Scoville said. “If you find proof it was burned, you run through the easy suspects — business owner who can’t pay the bills, overdue mortgage — or if it’s an arsonist who isn’t connected to the place, you look for opportunity and other fires. They follow a line. Almost always men, and they work their way up from something small. A shed, a car. Later, abandoned buildings — eventually, places with people in them. They move up every time the thrill slips, every time something becomes routine. The more they do, the easier it gets.”

  Dean realized that Scoville had said something important. Like a coin falling into the right slot, like a mechanism grinding suddenly into motion. New patterns emerging, keys into locks.

  “That Walt guy. It still bothers me,” Dean said. “It doesn’t matter what he says about what happened. There’s just not enough going on with him.

  “We go and tear his place up and he’s never curious about any of it. Just h
eads out the door, doesn’t even bother to get pissed off. Never calls us to ask if there’s anything new about Mary. There’s just not enough, not enough feeling with him. Nothing coming off him at all. Like nothing has changed.”

  “Yeah, except his missus.”

  Dean didn’t laugh.

  “People are different,” Scoville said with a shrug, looking across at Dean. “And you know that’s not how we’re supposed to do it. We’re not supposed to pick the guy and look for the evidence. We’re supposed to let the evidence do all the talking.”

  “I know it’s him,” Dean said, even though he hadn’t completely figured out why he knew it. “And the more I kick it around, the more I don’t think it’s just Mary, either. If we start broadening this out, he might fit in other places, too.”

  “That’s actually good enough for me,” Scoville said. He was looking straight out the windshield. “Fact is, I don’t give a fuck either way. Let’s just put him in the sights and get him then.”

  Chapter 24

  Mar. 28 — I got an email from Erin — she’s one of the last of my university friends who hasn’t moved away. She’s taking care of Bo, and she was supposed to be staying at the house. Now she says she’s making sure he’s fine, food and water and cuddles, but she’s not staying over. She says she’s uncomfortable, can’t put her finger on why — except she says she was following the note I’d left on the counter to the letter, and the plants were already watered, so she wondered why I even asked her to do it if they were already fine. I’m a bit pissed off with her not staying there — I don’t like the thought of Bo lonely and wandering around in there by himself. But there’s part of me saying, “Yes! I’m not imagining it.” At the same time, I don’t like the idea of her being so afraid she’s not staying.

  Chapter 25

  Jackie

  Needs choc milk