Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 02 - The Geranium Girls

by Alison Preston

  He rested his arms on his knees and his head on his arms.

  “I think I may have jumped the gun,” he said. His voice had gone wobbly. “I don’t want to have done it today. Next week or next month, maybe, even tomorrow. Just not today.”

  “I’m sure you did the right thing. I know you did.” Beryl moved away a little, wondering for a second if this was an act on his part.

  How cynical is that, she thought.

  The young cop, the one who called the girl “it,” drove Beryl home. There was a general agreement that she shouldn’t ride her bike. He settled it in the back of his van and drove her right to the door.

  They didn’t talk together at all. He tried a bit, words about the dampness and the mosquitoes, but he was too loud and Beryl couldn’t answer. She didn’t like his way of doing things.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she managed. And the mushroom face flashed behind her eyes.

  Chapter 3

  The next day Beryl rode her bike to the St. Boniface police station to give a statement. Joe had offered to drive her but she needed to go alone. She wanted things to settle inside her and arrange themselves in ways she could see clearly. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to see Joe again. How could she ever see him in any normal, undeathly sort of way?

  Plus, he had been too insistent about giving her a ride. As though she couldn’t possibly mean it when she said no thanks. She hadn’t liked that. If there was anyone she would have wanted to accompany her today, it would be her dad, but he had been dead for fourteen years. She could have used his quiet strength now and she tried to feel it herself, as she waited for someone to come for her. But she couldn’t manage it.

  Yesterday’s policeman, Sergeant Christie, called Beryl’s name and guided her through a maze of cubicles. A picture of the mushroom girl was tacked to a bulletin board behind his desk — a picture of her face with her mouth open wide. Screaming wide. The photo was one of many items on the board, but it was the only one that Beryl saw.

  She had been hoping for a different cop today. Sergeant Christie was civil enough to Beryl, but she didn’t like him much. His pale eyes bored into hers and made her uncomfortable. She wondered if they taught that at policeman school.

  He left her alone to write what she had seen on a pad of lined yellow paper. As soon as he was gone she slipped behind his desk and removed the photograph of the girl. She placed it in her backpack, careful to lay it flat, so it wouldn’t get scrunched up amongst her other stuff.

  An old banana rested at the bottom of her bag. She took it out and dropped it with a thud into Sergeant Christie’s waste basket. It was the only piece of garbage in the metal container and in its advanced state it split open. Beryl dug deep into a side pocket and found an unopened packet of Kleenex, which she cracked.

  She laid four tissues over the dead banana and said, “That’ll have to do.”

  “What’s that, Ms. Kyte?” It was the cop, Christie, back with coffee. “What’ll have to do?”

  Beryl hovered over the waste basket. She stood first on one foot and then the other. The empty pad of yellow paper glared up at them from the desk.

  “I made a little mess in your garbage can. I haven’t gotten started on my statement yet.”

  “What kind of a mess?” Christie’s jaw tightened.

  “Don’t worry.” Beryl suspected he thought she had vomited.

  “It’s just a banana,” she said. “An oldish one, I’m afraid.”

  “I see.”

  He disapproves of me, Beryl thought, and wondered why. Maybe he disapproved of a lot of things. Or maybe just her.

  If only she had been assigned a nicer policeman, like the one who apologized to her in the park, the familiar one. Perhaps he was a boss and didn’t have to work very hard.

  The photograph in her rucksack was making her nervous. Maybe taking it had been a bad idea. She wished the cop would leave so she could think clearly and get on with her statement.

  “I brought coffee,” he said. “I was thinking you’d be almost done by now.”

  He placed the tray with its packets of sugar and non-dairy whitener on his desk beside the empty pad.

  “Do you think you could get started on this, Ms. Kyte?”

  If her dad were here, the sergeant wouldn’t have such an attitude. Her dad had commanded respect without even trying. How had he done that?

  Sergeant Christie joined her beside the waste basket and looked into it with her. The banana had soaked through the Kleenexes and permeated the room with its scent. He picked up the container and left the cubicle.

  Beryl struggled over whether or not to talk about the mushrooms in her statement and decided against it. It seemed too private, no one’s business but the girl’s. And the killer’s, of course. Definitely his business. She wondered if he had filled her mouth with dirt when he killed her; it seemed unlikely that it had happened on its own.

  Suddenly she was alarmed at having taken the picture and wondered if she could fasten it back onto the bulletin board without getting caught.

  Christie returned with the empty basket and sat down behind his desk.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Yes?”

  “How did the woman die?”

  “We’re suspecting foul play at this time.”

  “Yes, I guess I kind of assumed that.”

  Beryl drew a little picture of a mouse next to her words on the page in front of her.

  “I was just wondering,” she said, “if you could tell me how it came about.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Beryl sketched in some long whiskers. “Does that mean you don’t know, or that you just aren’t going to tell the likes of me?”

  Sergeant Christie smiled, but didn’t speak. At least, Beryl assumed it was a smile; it wasn’t a very good one, just a pursing of the lips. She decided she wouldn’t want to kiss this policeman, under any circumstances. Not that it would ever come up. She suspected that he wouldn’t want to kiss her, either. He probably thought she wasn’t pretty enough to kiss.

  “I see,” she said. “I just have to wait and find out from the newspaper like everybody else? No special treatment for the finders of dead people?”

  “No.” His pinched smile was gone.

  She finished her statement and signed it, scribbling out the little mouse before pushing the paper across the desk. She hadn’t meant to draw it.

  The photo was hers to keep. It reminded her of another photograph. When she had lived in Vancouver in the late eighties, the North Shore News had run a picture of a young native girl. Dead. It was an attempt to identify her, but it seemed wrong to Beryl. She had never seen such a thing before and she wondered at the legalities of it. If it was legal, why didn’t it happen all the time? Maybe because it was wrong, even if it wasn’t against the law.

  No one had come forward to claim that girl. Not as far as Beryl knew anyway. She had cut that picture out and stared at it. The way she was going to stare at this one. The Vancouver girl’s eyes and mouth had been closed at least, and she’d looked pretty in death.

  Beryl didn’t want to die in a way that would mean people snapping pictures of her and posting them on bulletin boards. She didn’t feel as though photographs did her much credit when she was alive. It was doubtful she’d look any better dead. She supposed it was necessary, all this splattering about of dead faces, but it didn’t sit well with her.

  When she got home, Beryl gently removed the photo from her backpack and placed it in a drawer in her kitchen desk. She didn’t feel up to looking at it again today.

  She shook the rest of the contents of her bag out onto the kitchen table. There was a small stuffed animal, a chicken. Beryl had bought it for a guy at work whose wife had had a baby. But then she struggled with whether or not to give it to him. Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was too little. And then time went by and it was definitely too late. So now it belonged to her: a small peach-coloured stuffed chicken. She placed it in one pile.

  Many t
iny pieces of paper with names and phone numbers and e-mail addresses began another one. Joe Paine and Sergeant Christie were in that pile. She removed the policeman’s card and formed another pile for recycling. If she ever had to talk to another cop, she didn’t want it to be him.

  A package of Player’s King Size Extra Light. Beryl tried to smoke on social occasions only — dangerous behaviour; she could make a social occasion out of practically anything. The smokes formed a fourth pile.

  The phone rang. It was Joe. She didn’t want to talk to him, so she let the message run: “Hello, Beryl. Joe Paine here. I was just wondering how you got along at the police station. Call me.”

  He left a number, the same one that was on the little piece of paper. His home number; it was Sunday.

  Joe seemed okay; he wasn’t unattractive, if a bit skinny. His blue eyes were prettier than Sergeant Christie’s, that’s for sure. But they seemed naked somehow. Maybe his eyelashes were blond or missing or something. If she ever saw him again she would make a point of checking that out.

  Beryl thought about the way he moved to help her. The trouble was, he cried. She realized that the circumstances called for crying, called for wailing like a banshee, but still, she didn’t entirely trust Joe’s tears.

  She picked up the slip of paper with his number on it and put it in the recycling pile along with the sergeant’s card. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to dial that number.

  The phone rang again. This time it was someone named Gregor. Beryl couldn’t figure out who that was. He left a brisk message about calling him back and it wasn’t till he had hung up that she realized it was the sergeant. Gregor Christie, the sergeant, phoning about the photograph, of course, though he hadn’t mentioned it in his message. It hadn’t taken him long to notice that it was gone. Perhaps he gazed upon it in his spare time.

  Beryl placed her Bic lighter next to the pack of cigarettes, then picked them both up, went out to the front deck, and chose a shady spot for her chair.

  It definitely wasn’t a social occasion, but the circumstances were unusual and called out for a change in routine: just one smoke.

  Chapter 4

  Joe Paine was something of a celebrity, but Beryl didn’t know it until Stan told her. They were sitting outside at the Second Cup on Graham Avenue with their bulging mailbags next to them. Beryl Kyte and Stan Socz were letter carriers. This stop for coffee had become a ritual for them, as their routes began in the same section of downtown Winnipeg.

  According to Stan, Joe wrote a column in a magazine for animal lovers; the column was called Doggie Dog Days. Stan subscribed to the magazine and sang Joe’s praises.

  “He’s very well thought of in animal circles,” he said.

  “Don’t you mean animal lovers’ circles, Stan?”

  “Well, both then. I take my guys to see him and they love him. The only trouble is, he’s so busy because he’s so well liked. I doubt if he’s taking any new patients.”

  “We’re quite happy with Dr. Swirsky,” Beryl said. “Can we please not talk about Joe anymore? I’m trying to not think about Saturday.”

  The morning was hot and humid. Summer lay heavy on the downtown streets, its weight stilling the air. Sweat trickled down both their faces.

  “We’re going to perish out here today,” Beryl said. “It must be thirty degrees already.”

  “Maybe you should have stayed home for a while,” Stan said. “For today, at least; Mondays are so hard.”

  “And do what? I’d be sitting there alone, freaking my own self out in one way or another. Coming to work helps.”

  “Yeah, this job is a riot,” Stan said.

  “Well, once you get out of that hell-hole it’s not so bad.” Beryl nodded in the direction of the main post office. “And at least in there this morning I could forget about Saturday for a few minutes here and there. There’s so much other stupid stuff going on all the time.

  “I think too much on the street, though,” she went on, picking Stan’s cigarette up from the ashtray where it lay burning, setting it down again.

  It could be a lonely job, delivering mail. Once you hit the streets, it was just “good mornings,” maybe helping the odd tourist with directions, some small talk: “Cold enough for ya?” “Hot enough for ya?” “Got any cheques in there for me?”

  Stan knew all about Joe’s cat, Rollo.

  “Dr. Paine’s been writing about him for years,” he said. “He’s gotta be devastated by that cat’s death.”

  “Yeah, he is, actually. I probably should have been nicer to him, but I thought he might be inventing it.”

  “Jesus, Beryl.”

  A senior citizen who had bright orange hair and was wearing a great deal of makeup approached their table. “So this is why we get our mail so late in the day. You spend all your time drinking coffee with your cohort.”

  Beryl recognized the woman from a seniors’ residence on her route. She smiled. “Hi, Mrs. Wren. You caught me, I guess.” She thought the old woman was kidding.

  “I’m going to report what I’ve seen here today. Don’t doubt that for a minute. The very idea! Lounging about in a coffee shop while I’m waiting for my phone bill. Next you’ll all be going on strike again.” She shuffled off.

  “I’m entitled to a coffee break!” Beryl called after her. “Bitch,” she said quietly.

  “Ignore her,” Stan said. “She’s just jealous because she saw you sitting with such a handsome guy.”

  Beryl smiled. “It’s time I got going, Stan.” She began strapping herself into her bag. “I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ve seen parachutes fastened on people less securely,” Stan said.

  Straps criss-crossed over Beryl’s shoulders to even out the weight and another one secured the bag at her waist. She had a double bag on order, one with two pouches so she could divide her mail evenly on both sides of her body. She looked forward to its arrival.

  “My body thanks me for my efforts, Stan. You’ll be sorry one day you didn’t behave more like me.”

  “Heaven forbid,” Stan said, “that I should behave more like you.” He stood up and slung his thirty-five pound bag over one shoulder. And lit another cigarette.

  “Anyway, I’m not going to live long enough to be sorry.” He grinned.

  “Stan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wish I hadn’t given him my phone number. He called twice yesterday. I don’t want him to phone me anymore.”

  “Who?”

  “Joe!”

  Stan smiled. “Don’t worry, Beryl. He’s a veterinarian.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Beryl watched him lope off towards The Bay, noticing the stoop of his shoulders for the first time. She was sure he was smaller than he used to be and she worried that what he said might be true, about not living long enough to be sorry. Please don’t die, Stan. But she could imagine it happening; she could picture herself at his funeral.

  He turned around just then, as if he knew she was looking and gave a little one-finger wave. Beryl wanted to run after him, hug him to her chest. But they didn’t have a hugging-type relationship.

  So she began the walk down Edmonton Street, fixed tightly and sensibly into her bag, like a parachutist.

  Chapter 5

  Beryl was stung by a wasp on a Saturday in the middle of June, one week exactly after she tripped over the girl in St. Vital Park. The wasp bumbled its way between her sandal and her freshly bathed foot. A prick that could have been a pine needle or a tiny shard of glass, and then the long sting that could have been nothing else.

  “Fuck!” she cried. “What is it with me and my feet!”

  The last time she had been stung her foot had swelled up like a foot balloon. She had feared it would keep on till it exploded.

  Sitting down where she stood, in the middle of the sidewalk on Taché Avenue, she removed her sandal and the crippled wasp fumbled away to certain death. Three golden drops of poison balanced on the ten
der flesh of Beryl’s instep next to the white circle where the wasp had stuck the stinger in. He’d have been fighting for his life at that point, she knew. Or was it a she wasp? Was it only the females who stung, like mosquitoes? Beryl always felt slightly embarrassed when she heard scientific information like that, that cast the female of the species in an unpleasant light. As though she and female mosquitoes were part of a giant sisterhood whose sole purpose was to inflict discomfort. And pain, if wasps belonged.

  Beryl figured the sight of three tiny globules of liquid pain was a good sign. They weren’t inside her. She brushed them away and decided not to try to squeeze out the poison that had entered her foot. In the Free Press the other day there had been a wasp article that said that squeezing sometimes makes the sting worse.

  She put her shoe back on and continued her walk to the drugstore: a good destination under the circumstances. One of the pharmacists would be sure to give her some good advice. They were a lot more forthcoming than they used to be. Maybe the handsome one with skin the colour of creamy coffee would be there. Beryl had admired him from a distance since the first time she saw him there, several months ago.

  Her friend Hermione’s shop was just across the road and Beryl had planned to visit her today, but that would have to wait.

  The pain wavered a bit and after a few minutes settled a notch or two below the worst. Another good sign. Her foot was reddening for sure, but not growing bigger. She favoured it as she walked and worried about movement making it worse.

  It was the handsome pharmacist who served her.

  “I’ve been stung by a wasp,” she told him. “I’m a bit nervous because the last time it happened my foot swelled up to seven times its normal size.”

  The pharmacist left his perch behind the counter and hurried around to her side.

  “When were you stung?” he asked.