Acts of Murder

by L. R. Wright

  He rolled out of bed, almost falling upon the floor, and stood still, holding his breath, as Cassandra stirred and moaned—a sound that animated his erection still further. She settled back into sleep, then, and Alberg tiptoed out of the bedroom, watched by the cats curled up at the end of the bed, and closed the door quietly behind him.

  In the kitchen he made cheese omelettes, sliced mushrooms and fried them in butter, toasted whole wheat bread, made coffee, poured orange juice.

  Then he ventured into the backyard, still in his robe and slippers, looking for flowers. He eventually found a big red tulip, which he cut and placed in a small vase.

  When he had set the table, he went back into the bedroom to waken Cassandra.

  “Hey. Wife,” he said, kneeling next to the bed, wincing at the pain in his knees. He buried his face in her neck. “Time to get up.”

  But she wrapped her arms around him.

  Good thing I put the food in the oven, he thought, as she dragged him back into bed.

  “So what’s the occasion?” Cassandra said later, digging into her omelette. She ate the way she did most things, with relish, with expectation of enjoyment.

  “Something happened to me the other day,” said Alberg. “On Monday, it was.”

  She gave him a quick look. “Something bad?”

  “No. Something good. I think. But I didn’t tell you about it right away because—”

  “You hardly ever tell me things right away,” said Cassandra calmly.

  He was momentarily unnerved. “Really?”

  “Eat,” said Cassandra, waving her fork in the air. “This is very good. Extremely good. Mmmm. Karl. What a treat.”

  “Good. Thank you. Well, this time, then—this time, the reason I didn’t tell you right away was because at first I didn’t know what it was. But then I figured it out.” He leaned across the table toward her, knife in hand, the blade pointing at the ceiling. “I had an epiphany, Cassandra,” he said solemnly. “That’s what it was.”

  She lowered her coffee cup without drinking from it. “Really? What kind of an epiphany?”

  Alberg sat back. He took a bite of his omelette but found that despite its mouthwatering fragrance he wasn’t at all hungry. There was no room in him for hunger. He was too filled up with tidings, and the need to spread them.

  “This reporter came to see me,” he began...

  When he finished, Cassandra was motionless, her fork in her hand: she hadn’t taken a bite for at least ten minutes.

  Alberg’s omelette had congealed on his plate. “Huh,” he said in surprise, gazing at it.

  “So what you’re saying,” said Cassandra finally, picking through the words at her disposal as if through a patch of poison ivy, “—let me get this right, now—you want to quit the Force and become a private investigator. In Vancouver.”

  “Well, I don’t think there’d be enough work to keep both me and the detachment busy over here, Cassandra,” he said dryly.

  Alberg had initiated the conversation with trepidation. Now there was no hesitation in him at all. He felt enormously optimistic: strong, healthy, and confident that good things lay ahead for both of them. He reached across the table for Cassandra’s hand. She withdrew it, though—politely, but deliberately. Her mouth, he noticed, had lost its plump, kissable curve and set itself into a straight line. “Let me try to explain,” he said. She began to shake her head. “No,” he said sharply. “You’ve got to listen, Cassandra.”

  She lifted her eyes to his face. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  Alberg sat back in his chair. “When I was talking to this reporter, this young woman—I’ve given a hundred interviews, for Christ’s sake—do you think I was expecting anything like this? So listen. It was like—it was like I was painting a picture for her. Sitting there with a canvas on an easel and paint in one of those things artists hold in their hands—what the hell are they called?”

  “Palettes,” said Cassandra.

  “Right. A palette. And I was painting what I saw, dabbing paint on the canvas, feeling very cheerful about it: that’s the way I felt, talking to the reporter.

  “But I talked on and on,” he said, sounding astonished. “And the more I talked, the more—lightheaded—I got. I went through my whole bloody career, Cassandra. Well, not everything. But most things. I sure as hell hit all the highlights. I talked, and talked, and talked. And when I’d finished...

  “I stood up and showed her out of the office, shut the door, and then I stood there alone in the middle of the room and I felt like—I don’t know, Cassandra—like a teenager. Happy. And I couldn’t figure out why. Didn’t figure out why until later.”

  He looked at her in wonder, his eyes so bright that Cassandra thought for one utterly confusing moment that he might be going to weep.

  Instead, he laughed. “Later, I realized what had happened.” He leaned toward her. “It was as if by talking to her I’d painted my whole damn career on that imaginary canvas, and put it in a big box, Cassandra, and then, still talking, I’d picked the box up in my two hands,” he said, miming this, “and just—just put it to one side. And suddenly—there was this huge gorgeously empty horizon. Where there didn’t used to be one.” He sat back again, apparently finished, and watched her intently.

  “But—” Cassandra pushed her plate away and crossed her legs. “It’s too—abrupt for me, Karl,” she said.

  Alberg nodded.

  “It’s happened too suddenly.”

  Alberg nodded again. “I understand that.”

  The mushrooms on her plate, limp and cold by now, looked like large dead insects. Moths, she thought. She moved her chair farther away from the table. “So. What now?”

  Alberg shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, but you’ve already been to see your friend the PI.”

  “Yeah.”

  Cassandra rubbed her palms together. “I have to tell you, Karl, I feel extremely resentful. I mean, we’re married, for god’s sake. And you go off and have your damn epiphany, and then you slink away and visit your damn PI friend—”

  “I didn’t slink, Cassandra,” he protested.

  “—without a damn word to me, and now you—you make love to me, and ply me with omelettes and tulips, and present me with a damn fait accompli.”

  “It isn’t a fait accompli,” said Alberg. “I’m discussing it with you, aren’t I? We’ll decide what to do together, like we always do.”

  “Bullshit,” she blurted.

  They stared at each other.

  “The epiphany,” she said. “That’s the fait accompli.”

  ***

  Mrs. O’Hara watched staff members arrive at the school, and then the students. She squirmed from time to time, sitting in the van, because the upholstery on the driver’s seat had a rent in it, and the fabric along the edges of the tear tended to curl up and poke her in the behind.

  She had drunk all the tea in her thermos.

  It wasn’t a large school. Bernie Peters, who was indeed an observant woman, had been able to provide a thumbnail sketch of every member of the staff. Mrs. O’Hara figured she knew which of them was Ivan Dyakowski’s whore. But she had to make sure.

  It was fitting, she thought, to conclude her ten-year project the way it had begun, with an unfaithful spouse. There were—god knew—all sorts of sins; all kinds of worthy transgressors. But there would be a pleasing symmetry in ending the thing the way it had begun.

  Mrs. O’Hara stirred behind the wheel, shifting position, seeking strength, seeking vitality: these weren’t immediately present.

  All the children were inside, now, and the schoolyard was empty.

  Suddenly, a blue car hurtled into the parking lot. Two people emerged and hurried toward the school. A loud buzzer sounded inside the building and they broke into a run: one of them was Ivan Dyakowski; the other, a dark-haired, athletic-looking woman who matched the description Bernie Peters had given her of a teacher named Susan Atkinson. Mrs. O�
�Hara watched them go inside.

  She put down the mug and lowered her head, pressing first one temple and then the other against the steering wheel, holding on to the wheel tightly with both hands. A chicken in a pot, she thought. That’s all he was. Only one more chicken in a pot.

  Mrs. O’Hara lifted her head, started the van, and drove slowly down the hill and along the main street. She had to be at her first house by ten. She wasn’t looking forward to working today.

  She didn’t want to admit it, but she was afraid that she might not be strong enough this time. Ivan would be rattled and wary, because of what Denise had tried to do to him. Mrs. O’Hara didn’t know whether she had the strength to physically overpower him.

  She thumbed through her memories and recalled Sinner Number Five, a woman she had met soon after moving to the Sunshine Coast, a woman Mrs. O’Hara had thought, cautiously, might even become a friend. But childbirth had transformed her into a maniac.

  Mrs. O’Hara had been present when the woman shrieked at her infant son, threw him into his crib so hard that he bounced, and rushed out of the house in a frenzy, leaving the child behind her in hysterics: Mrs. O’Hara had picked him up and tried to soothe him, with little success. The father, fortunately, had soon arrived. He was alarmed by his wife’s continuing inability to adjust to motherhood, but clearly was not prepared to do anything about it. But Mrs. O’Hara was.

  One day when she knew the woman’s husband would be in Vancouver, she took a seafood casserole to her house. When the woman died of food poisoning, the authorities assumed she had been the cause of her own demise.

  The husband was remarried within months, to a young woman much better equipped for bringing up children.

  Mrs. O’Hara propelled the van through town, past the hospital and down the hill to Trail Bay, where she pulled off the road, facing the sea. Yes. Poison would indeed be so much simpler...

  Rebecca Granger had been a strong girl, but so completely self-absorbed that distracting her had been easy. The woman who had aborted her child was a slightly built thing and not a problem. And of course neither of them had had the slightest inkling that Mrs. O’Hara the cleaning lady was a source of danger. The waitress, too: unprepared; entirely unprepared. The astonishment on their faces...astonishment...and then a fear so gigantic that even to witness it had, the first time, caused Mrs. O’Hara’s bowels to move...

  She hadn’t seen the fear of the others. Those who had died—she hadn’t seen their faces as they died. And Tom, and the hardware store man, she hadn’t been present when they had realized what had happened to them, what she had done to them.

  A terrible thought crept into Mrs. O’Hara’s head—although it felt as if it had entered her body through her heart. She thought of the orange and white snake in her dream. Perhaps it hadn’t been tender and compassionate after all, for this ghastly thought eased its way through her with the suppleness and the cunning of a serpent. And the thought was this: what if she had changed her modus operandi because she had wanted to see their faces as they died?

  What if this had been the reason?

  Out on the water, a tugboat traversed the bay, and Mrs. O’Hara for the first time after all these years wanted to be gone from this place, wanted to see the village of Sechelt receding forever behind her.

  ***

  She found him sitting on the steps in front of the detachment, hands resting on his knees, wearing sunglasses. “Staff?” she said uncertainly.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” he responded, without turning to look at her.

  “I think we’re going to have to go back to the clearing again. Dig it up again.”

  She was standing with her feet slightly apart and her hands behind her, holding on to her notebook. The silence lengthened and Eddie waited, counseling herself to be patient. But as it continued to lengthen she felt an unexpected rush of mirth. She looked away from him, across the street into the woods, because she thought it was the sight of Alberg in street clothes, looking not only like a civilian but like a tourist, in those sunglasses, that was making her want to laugh. That and nervousness.

  Alberg took off the sunglasses and swiveled his head around to look at her. Her heart sank—his eyes were so cold and unreadable. “Sit down, Sergeant.”

  Eddie sat next to him.

  “Well?”

  “The waitress’s name was, or is, Rochelle Williamson. And it looks as if she disappeared, all right.”

  “Go on.”

  “She’d rented a room—a bachelor suite—in an apartment building behind the hospital. Nobody even noticed that she wasn’t living there until she was two months behind in her rent.”

  “Did she leave any personal belongings behind?”

  Eddie nodded, referring to her notes. “Yeah. The guy let me take a look at them. Clothes, a few books, some—mementos, I guess you’d call them—in an empty chocolate box.”

  Alberg stretched his legs out in front of him. “What kind of mementos?”

  “Some family photographs—snapshots. A couple of Christmas cards.”

  “Wallet? Money? Identification?”

  “No. But if she was abducted, she would have had that with her, right?”

  “Abducted. Huh,” he said contemptuously.

  Eddie gritted her teeth and kept her mouth shut.

  “When was the last time anybody saw her?”

  “Earl and Naomi, when they closed the cafe on Friday night,” said Eddie. “That was September 15th. She had the weekend off, but she didn’t show up on Monday morning.”

  It had turned into a very warm day, Eddie realized. She was becoming uncomfortable, sitting in the sun in her uniform.

  “They must have called her, didn’t they?” said Alberg irritably. “To find out where the hell she was?” He was scratching on the concrete step with a rock he’d picked up from the lawn next to them.

  “She hadn’t gotten around to arranging for a phone yet,” said Eddie. “But they knew where she lived, of course. Naomi went over there sometime during the day, and again after work, and banged on the door. But nobody answered. And she did this for a couple more days. Then they decided she’d just skipped out.”

  “Didn’t it occur to them to ask questions in the apartment building?” Alberg’s voice was full of frustration.

  “Yeah, Naomi did that, Staff. But Rochelle had only been there a few days. Nobody knew anything about her. And two months later, when she hadn’t paid the rent—the building manager didn’t know where she’d been working, and he had no idea where she might have come from. So he just packed up her stuff in case she came back for it someday.”

  “And it didn’t occur to any of these people to report her missing,” said Alberg flatly.

  Eddie didn’t reply.

  “Did any mail come for her?”

  “Yeah. A couple of letters from a nursing home in Surrey. So I called them. Her father lives there.”

  “Has he heard from her?”

  “He’s got Alzheimer’s. But the director of the place says Rochelle hasn’t been in touch with him, and she hasn’t replied to their letters.”

  She waited, glad she’d worn a cotton vest under her shirt, imagining it blotting up all the sweat her body was enthusiastically producing.

  “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions,” he asked finally, “wanting to go digging in the goddamn clearing again?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “I mean—Jesus.” Alberg threw the stone. It bounced in the middle of the road and skittered off into the ditch on the other side. “How could we have missed another body, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Well, see, she disappeared between the other two, Staff. Rebecca’s body was there for six months—it was a lot more carefully buried than Janet’s. So I figure maybe this poor broad got a deeper grave than Janet. Maybe each one of them got buried a little less deeply than the one before.”

  Alberg looked at her disapprovingly. “You’ve got a hell of an imagination, Sergeant.” He started pullin
g grass up by the roots, brooding. “Okay. Go do it. But for Christ’s sake be discreet. And I want to know immediately, when you either find a goddamn body, or you know for sure that there isn’t one.”

  Eddie was already on her feet, brushing at her pants. She grinned at him, and he responded with a baleful stare before clapping the sunglasses back onto his face.

  ***

  “We could go somewhere, Mom, if you like.”

  “I don’t really feel like going anywhere, Cassandra.”

  Helen was wearing white slacks with narrow legs and a long pink blouse that fell to her thighs. Her hair was completely white now, and she had recently had it cut short and permed. Cassandra thought she looked like an elderly angel.

  “In a little while they’ll be serving tea in the dining room,” said Helen. “Can you stay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  They were sitting on a weathered bench in one of the gardens that surrounded Shady Acres, a bench situated almost directly beneath a flowering cherry tree. A dark-haired, middle-aged man in overalls was digging fertilizer into the ground under some nearby rosebushes, whistling as he toiled.

  “That should have been done a month ago,” said Helen Mitchell, indicating the gardener disapprovingly. “Still, now’s better than not at all.” She folded her hands in her lap. “And how’s Karl?” she asked politely.

  “It’s Karl I want to talk to you about.” Cassandra stood up suddenly, then just as suddenly sat down again. She felt possessed. A quick, ruthless energy rippled through her, blanking out her day’s agenda, generating both bewilderment and euphoria. She bent close to her mother. “He wants to quit.”

  “Wants to quit what?”

  “The Force. He wants to take early retirement.”

  Helen Mitchell considered this for a moment. “I can’t say I’m surprised, really.”

  “I am,” said Cassandra vehemently. “I’m surprised. Definitely.”

  “Have you bought the bookstore yet?”

  “No. I decided against it.”

  “What about that filthy cafe?”

  “No, Mother. I decided against Earl’s, too.”

  “Well, then.”

  Cassandra looked at her in exasperation. “And what does that mean, Mother? Well, what?”