Acts of Murder

by L. R. Wright

  “You could’ve waited till I’d wiped up here,” said the waitress irritably, loading up her tray with cups and saucers, plates smeared with egg yolk and maple syrup.

  “Yeah, I guess I could have,” said Eddie, amused.

  Naomi held the tray on the palm of one hand while she swiped the tabletop with a cloth held in the other. “So what’re you gonna have?”

  “Two eggs over easy, hash browns, brown toast, and coffee, please. And a small tomato juice,” said Eddie, while Naomi looked out the window, feigning boredom.

  When she’d gone, Eddie pulled a notebook and a pen from her breast pocket and flipped it open to a blank page. “Re-interview Andrew Maine,” she wrote. And let her eyes wander around the cafe as she thought, What else? What else?

  A certain amount of forensic evidence had been collected—upholstery fibers had been found clinging to the victim’s coat, the mud on her sneakers didn’t correspond with the mud in the clearing, there were sweater fibers in her hair, but they hadn’t come from the sweater she was wearing—and these leads would be followed up.

  And they had received more information from the autopsy, as well, of course. It had confirmed that Janet Maine had been struck on the head, then strangled. The blow to the head hadn’t killed her, but had probably knocked her out. There were no indications that she had struggled with her assailant, or tried to get away. Her clothing wasn’t torn or disarranged. Nothing had been found under her fingernails. And there were no wounds anywhere on her body—however minor—except the bump on her head.

  Eddie rested her chin in her hand. How had the woman been persuaded to get into the vehicle? She must have known the guy, and trusted him. But then what? How had he managed to distract her long enough to smack her on the head? Did he do it in the car? Yeah, thought Eddie, he must have done it in the car. For surely she wouldn’t have driven off to the damn clearing with him—she was on her way home, for god’s sake.

  Unless, of course, it was Andrew who had picked her up. Andrew who had struck her, strangled her, then scooped out a shallow grave and dropped her into it.

  “What the hell are you staring at?” said Naomi, standing before her with a mug of coffee and a glass of tomato juice.

  “What?” asked Eddie, startled.

  “You’ve been staring at me,” said Naomi accusingly, setting down the dishes harder than was necessary. She planted her hands on her hips and stared coldly at Eddie.

  “Sorry,” said Eddie. “I didn’t realize.”

  Naomi’s hair fell to her shoulders today. It was so black, Eddie marveled, that it didn’t reflect any light. Her ears were rather large, and protruded through the frizzy mass of her hair like things separate and alive; like tiny animals—gerbils, perhaps, or hamsters, Eddie thought, fascinated. Naomi’s ears were neither flat against her head nor still, like ears ought to be. They made compulsive twitching movements that disturbed the hair that was trying to conceal them. She wore no makeup. Her skin was fair, her eyes were brown, there was a dimple in her chin. She was also a very short person, which Eddie figured she probably found irritating.

  “Sorry,” Eddie said again, offering a smile.

  “Humph,” said Naomi, turning away.

  Eddie, taking a sip of black coffee, noticed a young woman getting up from a stool at the counter. But instead of heading for the washroom, or the front door, she made her way through the tables straight over to Eddie.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but do you mind if I introduce myself?”

  “Go ahead,” said Eddie.

  “My name’s Cindi Webster. I’m a reporter. With the local paper.”

  “Hi,” said Eddie, extending her hand. “Edwina Henderson.”

  They shook hands, and Cindi asked, “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Eddie, who did, smiled at the reporter and closed her notebook. “No. Sit. Sure.”

  “I’m doing this series,” said Cindi, pulling out the other chair. She settled herself in it while she talked, parking an oversize shoulder bag on the floor. “Feature stories about people and their jobs. And I was wondering if I could talk to you. About being a police officer.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and looked earnestly at Eddie. “You’re new here—it’d be a good way to introduce yourself to the community, maybe. What do you think?”

  “It’s an interesting idea,” said Eddie cautiously. The relationships she’d had with the press so far had been tolerable—her attitude toward reporters was wary, but neither positive nor negative. And Eddie had resolved to construct for herself here in Sechelt a social life that would for once include people who were not police officers. She was bloody determined to do this. And the reporter looked friendly enough, leaning forward, awaiting Eddie’s decision. Eager. Guileless.

  On the other hand, Cindi Webster was probably every bit as ambitious in her field as Eddie was in hers.

  But then, was this a bad thing? A reason to mistrust her?

  Maybe she ought to do it, Eddie thought.

  She did, after all, have a few good stories to tell...

  But how could she talk about her career without talking about Alan?

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, with at least a small amount of real regret.

  “Oh dear,” said Cindi with a sigh. “How come?”

  Eddie laughed. “Maybe I’ll tell you, someday.”

  “I think I understand, though,” said the reporter, gathering up her bag. “It’s hard to know what’s professional and what’s personal. When you’re female, anyway.”

  “Uh huh,” said Eddie.

  Cindi plopped the bag into her lap and sat back. “At least, that’s been my experience.” She was smiling a little, eyes narrowed politely, to diminish the curiosity that gleamed there.

  Eddie laughed out loud.

  “You want to go for a beer sometime?” said Cindi.

  “Sure,” said Eddie. “Why not? And meanwhile, for your feature—have you asked Staff Sergeant Alberg?”

  ***

  The forensic evidence wasn’t going to get them anywhere, thought Alberg, paging through Janet Maine’s file, unless and until they had a suspect.

  Interviews with friends and family had produced absolutely nothing. The woman’s husband was the obvious suspect, of course. But his grief seemed genuine and nothing had been unearthed—so far, at least—to indicate any marital difficulties. Besides which...

  ***

  Alberg tossed the file aside and sank back in his chair. Besides which, whoever killed Janet Maine had killed Rebecca Granger as well, and Andrew had been vacationing in Hawaii with his wife when the teenager disappeared.

  His phone rang.

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “There’s somebody out here wants to see you,” said Isabella.

  Alberg took off his reading glasses and dropped them on the desk. He sat up straight and stretched his shoulders, wincing. “Who? What’s it about?”

  “It’s an attractive young woman,” said Isabella. “I don’t know what it’s about. She wants to tell you herself.”

  Alberg aimed a cautious glance at his IN basket and was gratified to see that it had shrunk considerably. If he kept pounding away at it all day long he could shrivel the damn thing into nothing. “I need a break anyway,” he said. “Send her in.”

  He gazed expectantly at the door and soon heard a soft knocking. “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened and Cindi Webster poked her head around it. “Hi,” she said. “We’ve met. Do you remember me?”

  “Sure,” said Alberg, getting to his feet. “Cindi, isn’t it? Come in. Sit down.”

  “I’m doing this series,” Cindi began, advancing across the room. She looked at the leather chair.

  “Go ahead. Sit down,” said Alberg again, and she did.

  “It’s a series of feature stories,” said the reporter, “about people and their work.”

  “Uh huh,” said Alberg.

  “I was wondering if I could t
alk to you,” said Cindi, “that is, if you’d be one of the people in the series. It isn’t a personal kind of a thing,” she said hastily. “I mean, it’s about your work, you know? Not your personal life.”

  “You’d better tell me more,” said Alberg, the office chair squeaking as he sat down. He had lost some of his mistrust of reporters since his younger daughter Diana had joined their ranks. But he remained healthily leery of those whose work he didn’t know. And he couldn’t remember reading anything written by the young woman sitting across from him.

  “So far,” she told him, “I’ve interviewed a vet, a lawyer, a waitress, a logger, a fisherman, a teacher, a painter—the artist kind. And I just talk to them about their work, or I mean they talk to me about their work. Why they decided to do this kind of work, and what they like about it, and what they don’t like about it.” She looked at him expectantly. “So what do you think?”

  “And I’d be your police officer,” said Alberg dryly.

  “Yeah.”

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “You’d have to let me read some of your stuff first,” he said.

  She nodded vigorously. “I’ve got some clippings with me.”

  She waited, trying to look patient, but he thought she was nervous. Her hair was light brown and her eyes were green. She wore jeans, a collarless blouse, and a dark pink cardigan. She was slightly overweight, which Alberg found attractive. “How old are you?” he asked suddenly.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  Christ. She was two years younger than Diana. Alberg gave an involuntary sigh. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, smiling broadly. “When?”

  “Hand over your clippings,” said Alberg. “Go get a coffee. Come back in twenty minutes.”

  ***

  “I don’t know where the hell he is, Susan,” said the principal, a short, rotund man with almost no hair. “I’ve been calling his house all day. There’s no answer. I haven’t got a bloody clue where the man is.”

  “Well, aren’t you worried?” Susan resisted an urge to grab him by his narrow shoulders. “Shouldn’t you be calling—I don’t know—the hospitals or something?”

  He screwed up his forehead and placed his fists on his hips. She thought for a moment that he was going to break into some kind of obscure folk dance, despite the obvious strain on his jacket buttons—this was mostly because the heels of his small shiny shoes were fitted tightly, neatly together, and the toes were splayed apart, reminding her of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, except that the principal’s shoes were black, instead of ruby red.

  “For god’s sake Susan, have you no sense of propriety?”

  She leaned forward slightly, as if to hear him better.

  He lowered his voice. “I know what you’re up to, the two of you,” he said, wagging a finger in her face. “It’s none of my business, but my god, don’t you think if anybody starts calling the hospitals it ought to be the man’s wife?” The last word—wife—shot from his mouth in a sudden volley of spittle from which Susan quickly withdrew.

  She watched him hurry away, plump arms pumping, head tucked into his shoulders, and realized for the first time how intensely she disliked him.

  She had gotten to school early that morning, long before most of the staff. The gravel parking lot contained large puddles and only two other cars when she arrived—neither of the cars was Ivan’s.

  But she hadn’t expected to see his car there. Ivan was never early. In fact, he was seldom even on time. He attempted to make up for this by staying later than almost everyone else.

  Susan wasn’t sure how good a teacher Ivan was, or how much he liked his job—it was possible that he didn’t like teaching at all: there was an ambiguous, noncommittal element to their conversation when they talked about work that Susan found disturbing.

  She had rushed across the parking lot, hunched over inside her coat, holding her briefcase awkwardly above her head to keep as much rain as possible out of her hair. Inside, the halls echoed and the ceilings seemed higher than she remembered—it felt as if she had been away a lot longer than a week.

  In her classroom, Susan opened both doors, turned on the lights, and sat at her desk. And as she looked out over the several clusters of small desks awaiting her five-year-olds, and smiled at the colored chalk drawings of spring flowers that filled the corners of the blackboards, she gradually became calm. She took from her briefcase a thick folder containing eight-by-ten paintings done by her students just before the break—they loved it when she took their work home in a briefcase—and tacked them up on the walls. She became absorbed in this task and soon found herself humming under her breath.

  He wasn’t there at recess.

  He hadn’t arrived by noon.

  Ivan never did come to school that day.

  Now, as Susan watched the principal disappear down the hall, the air seemed to shudder and shimmer as if the hallway were a mirage and the principal a figment of her imagination.

  She drove slowly home through the rain, certain now that something was wrong. Even if he had decided to unceremoniously dump her, which she was reluctant to believe but had to confess was possible, if only because anything was theoretically possible, his unexplained absence from school was a clear, unequivocal indication that something was very, very wrong.

  The principal was right, of course. It wasn’t Susan’s place to go looking for him.

  But she had to.

  She would have to call his wife again.

  This shouldn’t be difficult, she told herself, swinging into the parking lot underneath her apartment building. She would say she was a colleague, which of course she was. She would say that they were supposed to work on a report together, she and Ivan, and were to have had their first meeting at noon today, and she was wondering, she would tell Ivan’s wife, had he fallen ill? And was she, his wife, so worried about him that she had forgotten to notify the school?

  Susan got out of the car and locked it, remembering that the principal had been phoning Ivan’s house all day and getting no reply. Well fine. Susan would go there in person, if necessary, pretending to be angry with Ivan, exasperated with his irresponsibility.

  And if his wife refused to come to the door, thought Susan, getting into the elevator, she would wait for—well, for what felt like an appropriate amount of time.

  The elevator door opened and she started down the outside hallway. What would be an appropriate amount of time? she wondered. She might have to wait all night, she thought, inserting the key in her apartment door. Fine. She would sit out there in her car all night long, if necessary. As soon as a light went on in Ivan’s house she’d be back at the door, pounding.

  She stood motionless in her apartment. Listening. But heard no beeping from her answering machine.

  Susan dropped her briefcase and rested her forehead against the wall. Her whole body ached. She hadn’t realized how much she had been hoping to hear that dreadful beeping.

  Slowly, she took off her jacket and hung it in the closet. Yes, she would do that, she would sit in front of his house all night, and if no light ever came on inside, in the morning she would damn well go to the cops.

  “Susan.”

  She froze, then turned so quickly she banged her head against the edge of the closet door.

  “Susan.”

  Ivan stood in the entrance to the living room, silhouetted against the late afternoon light, a gray figure outlined in darker gray, wearing a large white bandage on his head.

  Susan cried out, and flung herself down the hall and into his arms.

  ***

  Cassandra would be astonished when he told her. Alberg was pretty astonished himself. Two whole hours that reporter had been there. He’d talked about himself to a total stranger for two entire hours.

  He squirmed on the cushion, getting comfortable, rubbing his spine against the large rock that was serving as his backrest. There was a swell of excitement in him that threatened to disturb his digestive
system. And he had come here to this quiet place to try to figure out what it was. To confront it, really, this inexplicable eagerness. He was reminded of children at Christmas. He felt somewhat like that, as if he were anticipating something splendid but didn’t know—or couldn’t remember—what it was going to be.

  He sat quietly now, his knees raised, poking at the earth between his feet with a stick he had picked up as he made his way through the woods from the road. The sea was a congregation of shades of silver, moving restlessly, talking to itself in a low, seductive murmur.

  Alberg had gone through almost his entire working life for Cindi Webster. He had told her about his personal experience with “scarlet fever,” the infatuation of some young women for RCMP officers. He’d told her about his first arrest, his first car chase, the first time he’d had to draw his weapon. He had described for her riots, break-ins, domestic disturbances, homicides... Alberg shook his head, marveling.

  “Have you ever shot anybody?” It was a question he’d been waiting for, because it was a question every civilian wanted to ask. And Alberg had opened his mouth to evade the issue, smoothly, as it had become easy for him to do, over the years: there were plenty of dodges available to him, plenty of platitudes, equivocations, dissemblings at his fingertips, on the tip of his tongue.

  “Once,” he had said, instead.

  And when she began to make the obvious follow-up query, he had interrupted her. “He died,” he had told her flatly.

  She had looked at him intently for several seconds and apparently had realized that he wasn’t going to talk about it, for she had moved then to another subject.

  He’d left out a lot, of course, but still, he had told Cindi Webster more about his life as a cop in those two hours than he’d ever told either Cassandra or his ex-wife.

  And there it was again—a sudden churning in his stomach that he knew was a precursor to something important.

  Alberg leaned back against the rock, resting his head, looking up. The sky was silver, too, but the trees crowding the fringes of his vision were brilliantly green. It’s spring, he thought. The mysterious commotion inside him moved into his throat—and to his astonishment, he was suddenly blinking tears from his eyes.