Acts of Murder

by L. R. Wright

  “Why don’t I come over on the weekend,” suggested Frank, “and help you draw up a list of priorities.”

  “Oh, Dad. Not another damn list. Please.” She wiped her face again and tossed the towel on the bed. She was panting now. Good. Maybe she’d be able to get to sleep tonight after all.

  “First you get everything unpacked and put away. Then we look around, decide what’s got to be done to the place, and in what order.”

  “Yeah, sure, fine.” Eddie looked around the bedroom, squinting, forcing herself to actually see the bare walls, the dusty floor, the boxes stacked haphazardly. She noticed that a large box at the bottom of one pile had started to cave in. It was probably full of bedding, she thought, and the smaller ones on top were where the books were. I’d better do something about that, she thought, because maybe there was a lamp wrapped in the bedding, or a mirror.

  “Inside isn’t bad, as I recall,” Frank was saying. “Maybe you should do some painting, though.”

  “What are you talking about, do some painting? Who’s got time to paint? Who’s got time to empty all these damn boxes?” She stopped, expelling her breath in a whoosh. “I’ve got to get curtains or blinds or something on all these windows. Oh, for pete’s sake.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said her father, sounding worried himself now.

  Eddie got off the treadmill and slung the towel around her neck. Her heartbeat was faster than it ought to be: she’d overdone it again. “I don’t want to think about this crap. When you get an apartment, you get all that stuff with it. Paint. Curtains.”

  “So don’t think about it, that’s what I’m telling you. It’ll get done.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She took another swig of mineral water.

  “Hey, Eddie?”

  “What.”

  “I’ll come over on Saturday. We’ll do the boxes. Get some curtains.”

  Eddie sighed. She didn’t want to encourage him. But she’d be working all weekend, anyway, if she had anything to say about it. He could do it on his own: unpack her boxes, make up the list of priorities. Her absence would exasperate him, would remind him of all the things he didn’t like about his daughter’s chosen career, and he’d go home in a huff and maybe not bother her again for a while. “Yeah, okay, Dad,” she said. “Thanks.” Eddie started unbraiding her hair, the phone clutched between chin and shoulder.

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your mother would have been so proud of you.”

  Eddie looked at her reflection in the mirror propped on top of her dressing table. Her T-shirt was blotched with sweat. Her damp face glowed. She saw herself, plainly—yet she didn’t. It was her mother’s face that looked back at her.

  Eddie shook her head, hard, and looked again. She focused on her hair, long and thick. She watched it ripple through the air and sprawl upon her shoulders.

  “Yeah, Dad,” she said politely into the phone. “I know.”

  After she hung up, she checked her messages.

  Three calls. Three hang-ups.

  June 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  MRS. O’HARA’S PHYSICAL injuries were healing. She had learned how to wrap a scarf around her head to hide the shorn hair that surrounded her stitched-up gash. Her elbow, although still swollen, was hurting much less—she was off the painkillers. She was back at work, and life was back to normal. Except that it wasn’t, of course.

  Not a word had she heard from Tom. He had sneaked into the house while she was working and removed his belongings. He’d taken some of her belongings, too. She was still noticing things that were gone—incongruous things like a cheese grater, a potato peeler, a toilet brush. He had come into the house more than once and had never left his key behind, so finally Mrs. O’Hara had had the locks changed.

  She knew she ought to see a lawyer and start divorce proceedings, but she didn’t have the heart. It had never been one of Mrs. O’Hara’s ambitions to become a divorced woman and she was still reluctant to do this even though god knew she had no wish to live with Tom again and in fact wouldn’t have taken him back if he’d asked her, which he hadn’t. Yet she had an urgent, aching need to put some kind of finishing mark upon her relationship with Tom. Her mind kept returning to divorce as the obvious way to achieve this, but divorce felt unemotional and impersonal, and far removed from the real-life situation. Divorce would certainly cause Tom no pain, or even any inconvenience. Divorce must be what he wanted, since without it he could hardly marry somebody else.

  No, thought Mrs. O’Hara, almost reluctantly, divorce was out of the question. It would be immoral to reward Tom for his transgression. It was her responsibility to make sure he was justly punished: in fact, she owed him this.

  She lay awake brooding about precisely how to accomplish it, snuggled into the comfortable hollow in the middle of the bed that she and Tom had once shared. She thought about it while wielding a hammer on the rickety outside staircase. She mulled it over as she raked the patch of earth next to the house that served as a halfhearted lawn. She considered it while brandishing the vacuum cleaner, while wiping up slopped-over coffee at the restaurant where she worked, while having a bath, while doing the laundry.

  It wasn’t revenge that she wanted. She only sought a way to bring things to a satisfactory completion, to make things even again, to balance the scales, to expunge the offense that had occurred and mitigate its deleterious, rippling effects.

  One day on her break she found herself walking from the restaurant down to the end of the street, around the corner, up the hill, and across what used to be the highway to the diner, which was located near the police station. As she approached, she felt a number of eyes staring out at her, biting at her skin like gnats: this, she knew, was a product of her imagination, but it was no less painful for that. She eased up to the window and peered between the apostrophe and the “s” at the end of the word “Harvey’s” that had been painted on the inside of the glass. There were tables right below the window and two decades of idle-minded patrons had scratched at the lettering with dimes and pennies. There had once been three layers of paint outlining each of the letters in “Harvey’s Diner”—one red layer, one blue, one white. The white one, which was the bottom-most layer, was almost completely gone around its lower edges, scraped, scoured, and sniggered away over the years.

  Mrs. O’Hara peered between the letters through the glass into the diner, which was practically empty, and after a moment’s hesitation she went inside and sat down at a table at the far end. The metal chair made a harsh squealing sound as she dragged its legs across the floor.

  Mrs. O’Hara could see no sign of Raylene.

  She spread her hands out flat on the table but lifted them quickly because the surface was unpleasantly sticky.

  Soon a potbellied man with greasy hair and a sweaty face erupted from the kitchen. With a flourish, he picked up a coffee pot and sashayed through the diner, refilling cups and making loud, hearty comments to his customers: an elderly woman with a large, brown paper shopping bag between her feet, two teenage girls who ought to have been in school, and, at the opposite end of the diner, two policemen. When the proprietor spotted Mrs. O’Hara he hurried over to her, coffee pot in hand.

  “What can I get for you, ducks?” he asked, and Mrs. O’Hara told him that a coffee would do. The clock on the wall said it was almost three-thirty. She had to be back at work by three-forty-five.

  The coffee, when it arrived, was surprisingly good—plenty strong enough, which was more than Mrs. O’Hara could say about the stuff she served all day long.

  She had been sitting there, quietly, for only five minutes or so when Raylene came in.

  She slipped through the door shyly, slyly, like a living ghost, a smile on her pale face, her pale yellow hair rippling, falling in waves upon the shoulders of a man’s gray overcoat she had probably bought at the Sally Ann. She looked backward as she entered, her hand stretched out behind her. And then Mrs. O’Hara saw that she was hand in hand w
ith Tom.

  As Tom followed Raylene inside the diner, Mrs. O’Hara hardly dared to breathe. She had only a few seconds before they would spot her; only a few seconds in which to glimpse the world that was inhabited by her husband and this whore; only a few seconds to assess the situation truly, to see their authentic, guileless selves, undefended and vulnerable.

  ...In those seconds it was as if Raylene were clasping not Tom’s hand, but his penis, which in Mrs. O’Hara’s imagination, under her astonished scrutiny, grew longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s nose. Raylene disappeared into the kitchen but Tom, at the end of his lengthening member, remained by the door, staring after her, clothed only in a silly, mindless grin...

  They both turned at the same moment, saw Mrs. O’Hara, and became rigid. They looked to her like recalcitrant children. She felt as powerless before them as if they had been children, innocent, exempt from responsibility and blame.

  Mrs. O’Hara took hold of her purse and stood up. It was only then that she became fully conscious of her rage. She couldn’t have spoken at that moment. She could not have said a single, solitary word. If she had blurted out even a syllable, she would have gone berserk.

  Carefully, she edged between the two rows of tables to the door, where Raylene and Tom still stood frozen, their mouths agape. Mrs. O’Hara paused for a moment to look at them, memorizing the sight of them. She saw that there was a sheen of moisture on Tom’s face and she thought that he was trembling slightly. Mrs. O’Hara felt extremely large and strong as she stood next to him, very close to him, looking down upon him, as usual. Then she swiveled her head to gaze upon Raylene. And her fast-beating heart achieved a sudden thunderous velocity, filling her ears with noise. She saw Raylene’s lips move, saw her mouth open, and realized that Raylene was speaking, but she heard nothing except the sound of her own heart. She did, however, see the sly triumph at the back of Raylene’s eyes and oh, that was a shame, such a shame. Before that moment Mrs. O’Hara had expected that Raylene would emerge from the whole thing relatively scot-free. But in that instant things changed.

  She turned to look at the police officers, who were oblivious, staring moodily out the window of the diner.

  And Mrs. O’Hara there and then made a slight change in her plans.

  Chapter 13 Wednesday, March 27

  SUSAN ATKINSON EMERGED from the elevator and traveled down the hallway to her apartment. The halls were outside galleries that ran along the back of the building, roofed but otherwise largely open to the elements, with waist-high concrete walls. Ivy covered the outside of the walls, frequently stretching green tentacles over the top, and clusters of large potted plants stood here and there. Susan ignored these as she passed them, door keys in her hand, carrying a Future Shop bag.

  Inside her apartment she stood still for a moment, and heard the beep of her answering machine, but delayed retrieving her messages until she had hung up her jacket and put the bag containing her new portable telephone down on the kitchen counter. The answering machine was hooked up to a cheap, plastic, turquoise telephone. She couldn’t remember where or when she had come into possession of this shockingly ugly thing, but when the portable had packed it in she had been glad to be able to rummage around in a trunk in the storeroom and come up with it as a temporary replacement. She could get rid of it now—but thought she’d better put it back in the trunk, just in case.

  Three messages. Susan dropped her purse onto the kitchen table and pushed the machine’s button.

  “Hi, dear, looking forward to seeing you on Sunday, and I just wondered—would you like to bring a friend? Rick and Barbara are coming, too. I thought I’d do a pot roast. Try to get over early so we can have a good visit. Bye, dear.”

  “Susan, it’s Marge at the bookstore. Your two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary’s in. Boy, it’s gonna set you back a pretty penny. You know that I guess, huh? Wow.”

  “Ms. Atkinson, it’s the Diabetes Association. We’ll be making a pickup in your area next Thursday. Please let us know if you’ll have anything to put out for us. Thanks.”

  Susan sat at the kitchen table and considered the extent of her disappointment.

  It was unusually quiet in her apartment. She had turned on neither radio nor television.

  She went out onto the balcony. Some kids were throwing a Frisbee on the beach, and there were several strollers on the walkway that followed the shoreline. The sun was shining almost directly upon Susan, who shaded her eyes, averting them from the water and looking across at the town, at the new-leafed trees, explosions of green, at cherry blossoms like great wafts of cotton candy. She listened to the water lapping at the stony shore, and the cry of a seagull, and the shouting children.

  Soon she went back inside, closed the balcony door, and sat on the sofa with her chin in her hand.

  Up to now, she hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that he wouldn’t call. She hadn’t heard from him the previous day, but she hadn’t expected to; he usually didn’t phone for a couple of days after they’d been together. She had always considered this a matter of delicacy. Of tact. But now she wondered if he, too, hadn’t been completely honest with himself about their relationship. She wondered if he felt guilty despite himself, after they had made love, and maybe for a day or so had been thinking about ending their affair.

  “There is no profit in this kind of speculation,” said Susan, out loud. She would go out again, she would buy some groceries.

  Before she left, she unplugged the answering machine.

  ***

  Later, she sat at her tiny desk with the new portable phone and went through her list of things to do, methodically: she called the nursery, the cleaner, the dentist. And her mother. Yes, she too was looking forward to Sunday. No, she wouldn’t be bringing a friend. But thanks for asking.

  Wednesday. Four more days off, and they were looming large and empty. She felt helpless to fill them.

  But fill them she must. She would go swimming, for one thing, every day except Sunday—Sunday would take care of itself: she would turn her mind to work that day, preparing to go back to school; and then there would be dinner at her mother’s.

  So that left only three days, really. She could spend one of them in Vancouver, shopping for spring clothes. After all, she wouldn’t get another chance to shop on a weekday for months. She would do that tomorrow, Thursday.

  And today she would go through the trunk and the boxes in the storeroom, selecting things to be given away to the Diabetes Association. She would be hot and dusty and cranky by the time that was done, so she’d have a bath and then take herself out to eat. Maybe she would call somebody, see if Frances or Hedy wanted to join her.

  That left only Friday and Saturday.

  If she hadn’t heard from him by Friday, she would call him. They were, after all, colleagues.

  What was going on, though? she wondered, in the elevator, on her way to the storeroom. Could something be wrong?

  ***

  “No, I’m sorry,” Denise told Ivan’s mechanic on the phone, “he’s out of town, he must have forgotten.” She watched through the window an enormous throng of birds sweep in unison from one treetop to another, describing an exaggerated many-winged arc against the blue spring sky. “I—yes, of course, I’ll tell him.”

  She had decided to take the whole week off. It wasn’t only teachers who deserved a break now and again. Two weeks’ holiday in a year simply wasn’t sufficient. And so the flu she had invented on Monday was going to last the entire week.

  She had been letting the machine take her calls. Those who had been told she was ill would probably think she was in bed. And friends, of course, believed her to be at work. Denise was glad she worked in Gibsons instead of here in Sechelt. Now she needn’t feel furtive when she left the house to do errands or go for a walk on the beach.

  She had answered the phone just now, however, because for an instant she had been certain it was Ivan calling. Now she hung up the receiver feeling disappointed, but surp
rised to discover that she was also relieved. Why had she been relieved? It must mean that she didn’t want to speak to him, at least not at this particular moment. She thought about that—or rather, played with the thought, skittered around the edges of it—and decided that yes, it was true, she didn’t want to talk to Ivan.

  There was an enormous restlessness within her body, a sensation far too large and powerful to be contained. She needed to dig a huge hole in the garden, or go for a run. But she didn’t want to do either of these things: she wanted, suddenly, to cry. She had had this experience several times in the last few days. A terrible need to weep.

  “What can I do?” she said out loud.

  And knew the answer. She could, and must, clean the house. She had been putting it off, inventing other tasks, other urgencies: stocking the cupboards, doing the laundry, ironing things that didn’t need to be ironed—sheets, for example, and the new towels. And she had spent hours at the little desk that was crowded into a corner of the bedroom, paying bills, getting the accounts in order. She had even made a start on a Christmas list.

  But now there was nothing left to do, except clean. Denise couldn’t think of a single thing—except working in the garden. But, doing what? she wondered, looking out the window. She didn’t know one plant from another.

  Besides, the outdoors didn’t threaten her. And the indoors did.

  She turned from the window. The branches she had torn from the underbrush were dropping tiny pink petals onto the bookcase, and the water in the vase had become clouded and brackish. Denise went to the kitchen to get a black garbage bag, bending to take it from a bottom drawer, and standing so swiftly that she made herself dizzy for a moment and had to clutch the edge of the counter. In the living room she wrapped her fingers firmly around the branches and dumped them into the bag. She opened her stinging hand and saw new scratches on its palm.

  “I must clean this house,” said Denise.