The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  A strange and wandering thought struck him: Can you really tell anything from tail lights? Could you look at them and get some kind of idea of at least the model of the car that was driving away from you? In a moment of stress, could you even remember what those two small red lights looked like?

  Kevin sat down heavily on the couch in the living room, wearing a bathrobe over a T-shirt and his underwear. Occasionally a car would whisk by outside, and the headlights would sweep across the ceiling above the level of the curtains. The room would light up for a moment, and then it would be even darker than it had been before.

  There was, he noticed, a fraction of a second as a car was passing when you could watch the shadows of individual pieces of furniture move across the wall, as if the furniture had decided to rise on its heels and creep across the room, tugging at the curtains for a quick look outside.

  He waited, wondering just where the girls were.

  There was no way to reach them, and no real way to explain why he was even worried. No one to consult, no one to ask, no one to call.

  And later, there’d be no way to explain to Cathy, either. He was pretty sure that the girls took advantage when she was away, that perhaps Heather realized how they could make him melt by just reminding him of those few short years when she had been a toddler. He would flash back to that if she gave him just the right hint of a familiar smile. He wasn’t sure that she knew she was doing it, but he suspected. “Can I take the car?” sounding no more significant coming from her than “Can I have another cookie?” and really, he’d think, why not? Why not, when her eyes were so simple and innocent, her skin perfectly smooth and magically soft, without even a single scar?

  The “why not” wouldn’t sink in until much later, when all of a sudden he’d feel both ashamed and angry, sullenly wondering whether he’d just been played by a calculating, sharp-eyed stranger hiding inside the girl he once thought he’d always know.

  With that, he got up and pulled the curtain open, looking outside to see if the car was there, and of course, it wasn’t.

  It wasn’t, and the space where he had parked it earlier that evening looked as naked as if whoever had driven away had peeled up a patch of asphalt and taken it with them in the trunk as well.

  There were moths circling in the glow of the street lights, hapless and confused, an amateur Aeroflot always on the near edge of a midair collision. And he was caught again on the knife-edge of trust and terror. Heather would be furious if she knew his fears, if she guessed that he was questioning whether she knew how to take care of herself. And yet, if something was wrong, he’d be losing valuable, irreplaceable time.

  Heather with a rectangle of silver duct tape across her mouth, her arms pinned behind her back, caught between two faceless men on the bench seat of a speeding pickup truck.

  Heather and Claire being thrown around in the pitch black of the trunk of a car, the trunk lid closing over their struggling bodies.

  He heard a car stereo, loud enough that the Doppler of its bass shook warnings in the window glass of houses it hadn’t even gotten to yet.

  And then Kevin woke up, still on the couch, and it was daylight.

  Outside, he could hear people shouting—two voices measured, the third high and frightened. He went outside without even stopping to put on his shoes, realizing it only when he felt the rough prickle of the concrete on the bottoms of his feet.

  Mrs. Purchase was half in and half out of a small Toyota, the car muscled in tight to the curb, close enough that he noticed that the side walls of its tires were scuffed black from contact with the cement. Both her hands were still outside the car, turned backwards and with the fingers splayed flat against the roof so the couple holding her couldn’t close the back door of the car without closing it on her hands.

  “Come on, Mom,” the woman was saying. “Come on. We’re just going to look. You don’t have to stay—we just want to see if you’ll like the place. They have gardens, too. You’ll see.”

  Mrs. Purchase batted ineffectually at the woman’s hands with one of her own, not relinquishing her grip with the other hand, and Kevin thought of the powdery wings of a moth batting uselessly at the hot glass of the street light.

  The woman who was holding Mrs. Purchase’s wrists was someone whom Kevin could not remember having seen before.

  “I don’t know you,” Mrs. Purchase was saying quietly, urgently. “I don’t know you.”

  She looked up as Kevin let the screen door slam behind him, walking towards the trio. Mrs. Purchase’s pupils pulled into sharp focus as she recognized him.

  “I told you,” Mrs. Purchase hissed plaintively at Kevin, her eyes wide. “I told you what can happen. You just don’t know. I saw her in the front seat. I did. I told them. I told them years and years ago. And I never saw her again.”

  104

  McKay Street

  ALBERT CARTER

  NOVEMBER 15, 2002

  THE LETTER was on the kitchen table, the envelope beside it. Three and a half years before Mrs. Purchase told Kevin about the girl, Albert Carter had already written it all down. But what he’d seen was buried, lost, mixed in with everything else. Carter picked the letter up, meaning to fold it and seal it in the envelope. He picked it up over and over again, but always put it back down on the table again, the pages still smooth, the typed letters sharply black against the white paper.

  He had crossed out some words, filled in others, but he tried to keep it as neat as he could, the changes between the lines in fine, careful script, black ink, the letters in each word looping up so that every letter was at exactly the same height, as if they’d been written between two ruled lines. The Jesuits, Albert thought grimly, they’d done their job with him. They’d been perfectionists about everything. Disciplined—severe even—not like the way things were now.

  He spread the letter out flat on the kitchen table, the morning light streaming in behind him from the small yard, and started to read it again.

  To the Right Honourable Prime Minister and to the Justice Minister of Canada:

  First of all, in this case I am not the Instigator. I am not the cause. That is for certain.

  As Prime Minister, and as Justice Minister, you should both know that. You should both understand that clearly. I am not to blame, I am just a citizen of this country like anyone else, and I have the right to have the quiet enjoyment of my property, even if lying, instigating Chris Wheeler doesn’t seem to think so.

  I should say first of all that I have lived at 104 McKay Street for 47 years now, and during that time I have been no trouble to anyone. There is not one living person who would have said that I was any problem at all, not even the least bit of a nuisance.

  Live and let live, that is my personal motto, and it always has been.

  At least, until lying Chris Wheeler moved here with his blue Nissan Sentra—Newfoundland and Labrador licence RPN 3L3—and his huge car stereo, on which he plays loud music at night, and since his lying, instigating friends started spending so much time here, disturbing the peace with their foul behaviour.

  McKay Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland, is a good street. It is a quiet street, not a street where you expect to hear loud music all the time. It is part of a neighbourhood that’s been full of families for years, a downtown neighbourhood that was busy when driving was a luxury. Most of us are older now, and if anyone is to blame, it should be the City, because they gave Peter Kavanaugh permission to subdivide his house into two apartments and then move, lock, stock and barrel, out of town, leaving his property in the hands of a succession of tenants, none of whom could really be trusted.

  Leaving all of his troubles behind for the rest of us.

  Leaving us with lying Chris Wheeler.

  Lying Chris Wheeler, he is the worst tenant Peter Kavanaugh has had yet, the worst, laziest, most deceitful tenant yet, and Chris Wheeler has told so many people lies about me now that I swear I cannot go anywhere without people staring at me, and Heaven only knows what
they are thinking.

  Even my friends look at me differently now, people who have known me for years and who should know better. People for whom I have never had a bad word, people I have gone out of my way to help. But instigator Chris Wheeler, he has dragged my name through the dirt, and I am sure he is the reason why everything has changed.

  I know there are those who will say that you shouldn’t listen to me, who will whisper, who will write their anonymous letters and say that you should ignore someone who has had a conviction registered against them already for disturbing the peace.

  Even the police might have something to say about me, might say “Listen, Prime Minister, we remember that man.” But they are not the only ones who remember things.

  Let me say that I remember them, Constable Peter Wright, badge number 432, and Constable Reg Dunne, badge number 881, and I remember that they didn’t even listen to my complaints, not even when my cat was killed and they wrote the things I said down in their black notebooks and then closed them up and forgot the whole thing.

  And later their fellow officers listened to the likes of lying Chris Wheeler and his lying skeet friends Roger McInnes and Rory Andrews and that quiet one, Alma Jones, the police listened to them when they said that they were just playing music and I came out for no reason, carrying a shovel and swearing and waving my fist, and that then I broke some of their beer bottles next to Wheeler’s precious car.

  The judge went further than the police, said it was “beyond a reasonable doubt” that I had struck lying Wheeler’s car with my shovel, because all three of his friends stuck to their made-up lying story, and the judge even ordered me—me—to pay Wheeler. Pay him for paint for his car—when I am the one whose rights were being abused, and are still abused on a regular basis.

  I thought the judge would have some sympathy for what was happening to me, because he looked as though he was just about my age—there on high and all fancy in his black robe, but able to understand the sorts of things people our age have to deal with, his face perched up above his robe like a shrivelled old angry apple, but I was wrong and he didn’t understand at all.

  He probably lives in a big house in the east end somewhere, with a huge garden where he can work way up in the back and never even hear the street noise, let alone have to deal with the likes of Wheeler. I imagine he never has to deal with neighbours at all, beyond a little chat if they meet putting the garbage out by the curb. And his neighbours are hardly likely to slink over to his fence and pitch their trash into his yard when he’s eating a fine dinner and listening to classical music.

  And I have a restraining order now, an order that says I can’t go near Chris Wheeler, but it certainly doesn’t mean he can’t come near me.

  I understand that justice isn’t perfect, and I understand that the police don’t care if someone climbs up over my fence or just throws their garbage into my yard from the laneway out back, and I understand that the police have better things to do than to come promptly when someone, some ordinary citizen like myself, makes a complaint about someone doing something as simple as vandalizing a flower garden.

  But I don’t break beer bottles or swear or shout people down, I don’t sneer and call anyone “old man” and tell them to “get away and stay on the other side of the street where you belong.” And I have certainly never called anyone a “fucking old busybody,” even though plenty of things like that have been said to me.

  I am much more reasonable than that because I understand the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because I have read it completely. And I understand the Bible and turning the other cheek, and believe me, I have done that a good few times as well.

  But the instigators know that it was four people saying one thing and me saying something else, even if my word is good and theirs are worthless, and that the courts understand four against one better than they understand the truth sometimes.

  I have paid my taxes my entire life, and I have a copy of each of my tax returns to prove it, and they are stored upstairs, chronologically and in brown envelopes, should anyone doubt my word and want to come see them.

  I have paid my taxes completely and in a timely fashion, and I should remind you, with all due respect, that you both work for me just as much as you work for instigating Chris Wheeler, even if his lying words seem to mean more than my honest ones.

  I may have talked to him with the shovel in my hand, certainly I may have done that, but I don’t remember doing it. It certainly would have been a mistake in judgment to cross the street with a shovel, but they are young and strong, and an old man can be frightened too.

  Because they have tormented me for years, carefully and deliberately, and anyone can lose their temper once in a while.

  Everyone should have the ability to enjoy some quality of life in their home, a home they have bought and paid for with sweat and hard labour.

  Since the police seem unwilling to investigate, I can tell you that I have watched lying Chris Wheeler and his friends from my upstairs windows, and I have kept careful track of their movements, both in the night and the day. I have thorough records, thorough and diligent and timely and exact.

  My watch no longer keeps the best time, but every afternoon I listen to your National Research Council time signal, and I reset my watch even if it is only a few seconds out. Not much escapes me when I am on watch: I write down anything unusual and it stays with me for years—for example, I can remember all the way back to when I saw Keith O’Reilly driving Glenn Coughlin’s green truck with a strange girl sitting next to him, both of them lit up under the street light like that. I didn’t see the licence plate to be absolutely certain, but I don’t think there’s another truck like that one. It was years and years ago, but I don’t forget.

  Things like that stay in my mind, when things show up where they shouldn’t be, things that don’t fit. And if I wanted to, I could go back and find the exact day, even the time. I am sure it is in one of the notebooks. I recognized her—that girl who went missing. She had been ringing doorbells, probably begging for change. As if people on this street were made of money or something. I looked down at her from the window upstairs, but I didn’t open the door.

  And I kept a record. I am thorough about things like that.

  But I am especially thorough about Wheeler and his friends. I have notebooks full of their hours and their activities, and if they claim to be looking for work, their unemployment insurance should be cut off immediately, because they are never doing anything for the summer months except sitting on lying Wheeler’s steps, staring at the young girls in the neighbourhood and drinking beer.

  Dominion beer, in red and yellow cases, and they just twist the caps off and throw them out on the street. And twelve beer rarely lasts for more than an afternoon, and at least once a week they have enough empties to put them in the trunk of Wheeler’s car and cash them in for more. When I can sneak the window open, I can sometimes catch a few words of them speaking, and I record those too, in case they might turn out to have some value.

  “Chris, you bastard, I can’t believe you took the last one, when I bought it, too.”

  “The skank you were with last night was the ugliest one I’ve ever seen you with.”

  “Roger, you said you cracked Alma, but you never.”

  (I think they were talking about giving Alma Jones drugs then—she is only tiny and young, just a stick of a thing, and I’m sure as impressionable as anyone else that age, willing to do whatever it takes to be accepted.)

  I should mention that they appear to be using drugs, and they are probably selling them too. To the young ones, to teens like Ronnie Collins, to the Haydens and Chaulks who buzz around there like anxious busy little flies.

  I am not sure, but it seems to me that lying Chris Wheeler has far too many visitors, and I am sure that there is some kind of exchange that takes place there, hand to hand, and there would be proof of it in my notebooks, careful records, if only my eyes were better and I could make out what they were
doing when they got in close.

  I have seen him talking to children, children who could hardly be more than eight or nine years old, children who are just bicycling by those steps, and who knows what sorts of crimes Wheeler is doing with such innocents, and what kind of behaviour he and his slovenly friends are inciting.

  When I am at the grocery store or if I have to go to the pharmacy, I know that Wheeler or one of his cronies is likely to come into the yard behind my house, walking down the laneway and coming through my gate as easily as if they actually owned the place.

  I know that they saw the sunflowers back there on one of their thieving explorations, probably coming into the yard to peer into the two windows in the kitchen to see if there was anything inside worth stealing. A waste of time, that errand, because I am on a pension and have little that would interest them.

  But I did have sunflowers.

  I had sunflowers all along the back fence, such beautiful sunflowers, and the spring is so cold here that when they were just seedlings, a single strand of green growing up with two unformed and hesitant-looking leaves on the top, I would go out on the cool spring evenings and put styrofoam coffee cups over each one, an individual insulating cover to protect them from the frost, and every morning I would go out again and lift those small shelters so the sun could reach them.

  The sunflowers that escaped the slugs grew taller and taller, and when their big green buds finally opened and turned upwards, I could look down from my bedroom on the back of the house and see those cheerful nodding faces up against the sun, and they were the kind of thing that can lift your heart when everything else conspires against you.

  I had such dreams for those flowers, that in the fall when their flower heads browned and tilted down, the city chickadees would come and hang upside-down from them and pluck out the seeds, one by one. The chickadees don’t eat them all at once—when I’ve left seeds out for the birds, I’ve found them tucked away in torn-up spider’s nests under the lip of the clapboard along the back of the house, carefully saved for winter.