Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  Prescient — whole bunches of things, expressions, body movements, and part of her brain would sort it all into an order, see things that the people doing it didn’t even realize. Sometimes, it was spectacular — we would come home from seeing friends and she would tell me that they were going to get divorced, and months later, they would.

  I’d ask her if someone had told her something, but it would always be something she had seen or a scrap that she had heard. It was the strangest of answers — “because her arm was hanging down beside the couch,” or “he was emptying her glass in the sink when she wasn’t looking.”

  I mean, it’s one thing if you hear that someone’s having an affair with someone at the office — it’s something else if you’re basing it on the way his arm looked over her shoulders when you were leaving.

  Mary had a touch for it, that’s for sure. If she said it was terminal, it was. It might not be today or tomorrow, but the die was cast. I remember thinking once, “I hope she doesn’t ever decide to look at us that way.”

  Eventually, I realized she must have done exactly that.

  I don’t believe that you can change someone else deliberately — you can’t take a person and make them into somebody else. They are who they are, and I sometimes think that who we are is more hard-wired than anyone imagines.

  What you can do, almost without thinking, almost without blaming yourself for anything, is to turn them toward the crash — turn them toward it, just the tiniest of turns, and let the inevitability of their momentum do the rest all by itself.

  Momentum is powerful and cruel, and there’s not one single thing that can change it.

  I dug a hole right there in front of her and waited for her to fall in. Waited, ready to cover her over completely.

  Chapter 45

  August 15

  Missing linked

  This weekend, the first installment in a three-part series examines missing women on the Northeast Avalon: who they were, where they went missing, and what the police are saying about the cases. And what they’re saying is very little.

  See Part One in the Saturday edition.

  “I don’t need this kind of heat,” the chief said. “So you don’t need this kind of heat either. And you two started it: you and your damned press release putting one and one together, and now they’ve started adding and they’ve got three or six or nine instead and they’re howling about it. And you can’t tell me that you didn’t give them the idea.”

  Dean was alone in the chief’s office because Scoville was on the road teaching an arson investigation course to volunteer firefighters. “The real basics,” Scoville had said when Dean asked him about it. “If you see an empty gas can in the snow outside a burning building, call the arson investigators. That kind of thing.” Dean had a feeling the other detective had been looking forward to the break — and he’d probably be enjoying himself even more if he knew what he was missing back at the station. Scoville read the paper every day, throwing it down and muttering sometimes, but buying it again the next day religiously. Dean wondered if he had seen the ads for the weekend series before he headed out.

  “So here’s what you’re going to do,” the chief said. “You’re going to find some new leads on something, on at least one of the cases they’re talking about, and Monday or Tuesday, whenever their series is done, we’ll put something out saying we’re making progress. And that will at least get the politicians away from my door.”

  “What if we don’t have anything? That’s only four days.”

  “If you don’t have anything, you’d better be planning to start making something up. Because if there isn’t anything new to put out there, it’ll be a slow roast for me, and that means it’ll be a slow roast for you and Scoville, too. Except I think that in the end, I’ll be better off than either of you. Catch my drift?”

  Alone in the office, Dean worked through the Mary Carter case yet again. Tried to find something clear to hang his convictions on. And no matter how often he thought about it, the thing that stuck with him the most was what Walt had done with the houseplants.

  When someone leaves, he thought, the first thing you do is try to keep everything the same, in case you can turn it all around.

  The second thing you do is try to erase them completely: when you’re sure they’re not coming back, you pack up their stuff, even if it’s pretty clear they don’t want it. Because you don’t want it there either, surrounding you every day and pointing out how things have gone wrong.

  Give the plants away?

  Sure.

  Dump them in the yard behind the house?

  No problem.

  But just stop watering them and leave them in their pots like gravestones?

  That’s not what you do when you hope someone might come back.

  That’s making the point that there’s no way they are coming back. And Dean was sure he knew what that meant.

  Waiting almost a week to call the police and say she’d left?

  He’d done that, too: Dean had looked back at all the case notes, and the police file hadn’t been opened until Mary had been gone for at least six days. Walt had had little to say about that beyond the basics: when she left, what she might have been wearing. Maybe that didn’t mean anything by itself, and, like Scoville had said, people are different. But if Julie had disappeared while he was at work and hadn’t told him she was going, well, Dean was pretty sure he wouldn’t have reacted the way Walt had.

  The problem was that it wasn’t like Julie, Dean thought. Walt had already know what Mary was going to do. He wasn’t expecting any sort of surprise. And that really could only mean one thing.

  Then Scoville came back, looking like Dean had never seen him looking before. Soaking wet from the knees down, hands covered with charcoal, a small silver digital camera in his hand. Smiling.

  “Bingo,” Scoville said.

  Chapter 46

  Elizabeth ?

  Kathy and Sam — salmon

  Diana — jewellery

  Helen — card

  Judy — $25 in gift cards

  Art — $25 in gift cards

  Some people plan out everything. That’s just part of a long Christmas note I found, small handwriting balancing out gifts for more than twenty people, including a parish priest. I don’t think I plan that well — I try, but somehow I can’t pull everything together, not when there are more than a few pieces involved.

  My last trip inside St. Clare’s was on a night when Mary was actually there. Because the fact is that you can suspect a lot of stuff, even imagine it vividly and run it through your head in full colour and everything, but it doesn’t count for anything unless you’ve got the good clear facts laying out right there in front of you.

  I figured I could take the hospital badge I’d swiped and just stay on the edges of everything, just to watch what was going on from a distance. Push a mop around the far end of an emergency room hallway for a while and keep my eyes open, that sort of thing. Do what I’d spent a lifetime doing: being invisible, in no way memorable, my ears and eyes open and taking everything in, marking it carefully in my memory.

  It worked out all right, at least in the beginning.

  I went in the front door, on the side away from Emergency where most of the traffic is families, and I went straight downstairs to see if the utility room was still unlocked.

  It was, but the lights were out and the cart was inside — the coat hook was empty, so I thought there was a pretty good chance the missing cart wouldn’t be noticed. I put soap and water in the bucket, and I rolled the whole thing out and shuffled it down the hall and onto the elevator. There’s a formal step to it, a pattern you have to use, a careful combination of bored and resigned and just plain looking at the wall. Think bovine or unfocused. I know that doesn’t sound very complimentary for whoever’s in the coveralls, but the truth is that n
o one’s thinking complimentary thoughts about us anyway.

  When the elevator door opened and I was getting ready to get off on the first floor, there were two nurses waiting to get on, just back from a smoke break from the smell, and they made me jump a little. One of them held the door back while I wrestled the cart over the elevator lip and out into the hall, but neither of them really looked at me, and I’m absolutely certain they forgot I was even there as soon as the elevator started up again.

  Some things just don’t change.

  I pushed the cart around the last corner, to a spot where I could look straight down the hall from one end of the emergency room to the other. I couldn’t see into the waiting room. It was on the right-hand side of the hall, the examining rooms on the left, but looking down the hall, I could spot any traffic going in or out. There was a gurney about halfway down, parts of a frail-looking guy poking out of the sheets and blankets on it — a foot at the bottom end, an elbow and the bald patch on his head up at the top. And you can’t help but wonder what the guy was seeing — what he’s thinking about. Whether he’s doing the math on precisely how many little teeny pinholes there are in every single ceiling tile, or whether he’s conducting some kind of whole-body inventory — thinking about what parts he can feel and what parts he can’t, what still works and what doesn’t. It’s worth being in the hospital for a minute or two just to think about that — to think about having two arms and two legs that still work, and how that makes so many other things seem a hell of a lot smaller.

  You get a good idea of how beat up the hospital is from that end of the hall: you can see the gouges that gurneys have knocked out of the walls, and where the screws that hold the bulletin boards up are pulling right out of the concrete, despite the plastic anchors. Because you can see the anchors, too. Bulletin boards with the same old public health messages: “Wash your hands”; “STDs are everywhere — cover up”; “Wash your hands again.” There are places in that hall where the linoleum is literally worn right down through the pattern on top, and it’s the thick institutional stuff, too. But it doesn’t seem like the place is neglected or anything — more like the kind of place where things just don’t stop, where the whole place gets ground down a little every single day and night and there’s never time for anything to breathe and recover.

  And I can tell you this from watching the health department come in and give the meat section at the store a good going over: there’s a level of wear and tear in hospitals that the inspectors would never put up with in the back room of the meat department. There are rules about how much things can be worn, because the grooves hold bacteria — and you’d think that if there was ever a place likely to have, grow, and shed bacteria like spores from a mushroom, it would be the emergency room in a hospital. But that doesn’t seem to matter: the government isn’t ever likely to call in its own inspectors on itself.

  I pushed the cart out around the corner, left it right in the hall so that I could use it to block me from view if I had to, and started industriously cleaning away at nothing in particular.

  That’s the great thing about cleaning — nobody really has any idea why or what you’re doing in any particular spot. How you picked it — whether you were told to go there, or whether there’s a chart somewhere that says “you’ve reached the end — time to go back to the beginning.” Fact is, if you hear a particularly interesting conversation, you can always push your mop and bucket over toward it, making it look as though that was the direction you’d always been intending to go. No one ever pays attention for long enough to see if there’s any method in what you’re doing. There is: you start at one end, finish at the other, but there’s no real reason that one aisle has to come precisely after the one before.

  All I really wanted to do was to keep working that far end of the hall — and maybe inch a little closer to the actual emergency room, hoping I could see Mary and the doctor together. Hoping that I could see if there was any clear connection between Mary and Patterson.

  In the end, it didn’t take very long. I was maybe fifteen feet down the hallway with the mop, moving far slower than I usually would, when the two of them, Patterson first and Mary second, came down the hallway from the other end, about twenty seconds apart.

  They were walking with their heads down, a studious-looking distance apart, their faces set purposeful and serious before both of them turned right and headed into one of the examining rooms.

  They didn’t close the door or anything, just went in, each of them carrying a file folder. I was concentrating so hard on the doorway that I didn’t see the nurse come around the corner and head right for me — at least, I didn’t see her until she was right on top of me and saying, “Hey, we’ve been looking for you.”

  They had been calling me from down at the nursing station, actually waving their arms at me, and when I looked, I could see why: it looked like someone had been fighting with a chainsaw down there by the entry doors, and the floor was not just bloody, it was completely covered with blood, already darkening to rusty black blotches with long streaks in it where the doctors and nurses had been slipping around while they worked on someone.

  I was stuck: back away down the hall, especially now that they’d sent someone to come and get me, and that would get everybody’s full attention. Go and clean up, just do the job I do every single day, and I’d be taking the chance that Mary might walk right straight into me down there. As far as being inconspicuous was concerned, the plan was turning into a total bust.

  You weigh the odds and decide what’s the riskiest.

  So I tucked myself in behind the cart and headed for the nurses’ station and the blood, and hoped that Mary and the good doctor wouldn’t choose that moment to come back out of the examining room.

  But I also did it because I simply had to know.

  Just as I passed the examining room door, I took one quick sideways look inside, and I can tell you, if Mary had been in my shoes, she would have known everything instantly.

  Heck, even I knew it instantly, knew it absolutely for sure, and I’m not the most perceptive guy in the world.

  They were back on to me, not even touching. But too close — the kind of comfortable, familiar close that two people have when they might just as well be touching. When, recently, they have been touching, when they know precisely how far they are from each other — and how close they are together. There’s something about the way two people are when there’s more to it than just friendship: there’s a kind of joined air they seem to give off — and even with a quick glimpse, it was obvious that Mary and Dr. Patterson were living precisely in that space.

  Perhaps it wasn’t as obvious for other people, the people who had been working with Patterson and seeing Mary there week after week, month after month. Maybe, to them, the narrowing of distance between the two had been as unnoticeable as a glacial shift, a mile of ice that had spent months moving no more than a few inches.

  To me, there was nothing glacial about it.

  It was jarring, it was sudden, and it was absolute.

  When I got up to the counter, one of the nurses hissed at me that they’d been calling for hours for someone from Maintenance, that it was about time I got there, that there were bloody footprints “from here to Diagnostic Imaging and back.” I might be wrong, but I think it was the same nurse who’d checked me into the emergency room not that many weeks before. If it was, she clearly didn’t recognize me.

  I kept my head down, mopped and disinfected, almost forgot that my gloves and the cloth I used for the base of the walls had to go into a bag marked “biohazard,” and I carefully looked absolutely no one in the face. It’s funny where you go: I can start mopping and get lost in the whole darned thing — pushing the mop back and forth, watching the trails that each strand of mop leaves behind on the floor slowly dry up and disappear, seeing how every sweep back and forth leaves less on the linoleum and, at the same time, more i
n the bucket. There’s a perfection to it, back and forth like the sweep of notes on a piano — not even, not regular, but patterned in a way that makes them, well, right.

  Mary’s legs went by four times, twice in both directions.

  She gave no sign that she recognized me.

  She gave absolutely no sign that she even saw me at all.

  I didn’t look up at her, didn’t look at her face, but every time she passed I knew it was her. I suppose it’s telling that she didn’t realize, not even slightly, that it was me. I’m not sure if I was supposed to be angry about that, but I wasn’t. There’s a shuddering, definite fall to it, the loss of something you trust implicitly, as if you were an explorer and magnetic north had just decided to depart, heading west to spend a little time on the B.C. coast. The way you would feel as you watched your compass falling away to one side — the way you would know both that something was critically wrong and that it was absolutely beyond your ability to fix.

  What I was — inside — was strangely out of balance and, in some way, a distant kind of cold. Like I had managed to finally put a whole bunch of stuff together into a precise and obvious order, but the real weight of that order hadn’t sunk in yet.

  It’s strange, that hiatus between the blankness you feel and the knowledge you have that something much, much heavier is coming. Like seeing heavy clouds bellying up in the sky and knowing the storm will be powerful, long before the rain actually hits. And that there is no way of avoiding it.

  I took the cart back downstairs on the elevator.

  Pushed it back into the closet. Emptied all the water from the bucket into the big sink, and carefully wrung out the mop in the wringer. You’ve got to wring out your mop, no matter how tired and fed up you are. Mildew’s only a night away, always. Leave it once and, after that, the whole next day, you can smell it, like it’s trapped right there in your nose so you can’t ever escape.