Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 01 - The Rain Barrel Baby

by Alison Preston

  She pictured him beneath the ground, gone to dust. His grave was in the children’s section. She watched a young couple in their good clothes putting flowers on a grave a few rows over. They huddled together for comfort. Their child. Ivy’s eyes met those of the mother and the woman smiled sadly, willing to share her pain with a stranger who she probably thought mourned her own baby.

  Ivy did that once, but it was a very long time ago.

  She turned away and stared at the ground. She had a picture of Ray in her head. It didn’t look anything like the photograph behind plastic in her wallet. She took it out and looked at it. He was fourteen years old in the photo. It was a school picture. His hair was slicked back with Wild Root Cream Oil. Ivy remembered the smell.

  Ray wasn’t smiling in the photograph, so he looked better in her mind’s eye. There he always had a smile. She had a sense of him now and then — a morning feeling that came over her in the summer sometimes, when she glimpsed a section of unpaved road or a patch of grass long enough to bend in the wind.

  And she had his face in her mind’s eye.

  When Ivy looked up again she saw the geezer from last night. Frank’s next-door neighbour. He leaned over what looked to be a new grave and placed a handful of crocuses on it.

  This isn’t a good sign, thought Ivy, not a good sign at all.

  It was important that the old crow not see her, but it was too late. He looked at her and recognition flickered across his weathered face. He glanced at her Lincoln parked on the road in front of his old Buick. And then back at her.

  Ivy waved and he nodded his head in acknowledgement. He didn’t want to; worry creased his face, like ruts in a dirt road.

  Rightly so, thought Ivy. Rightly so.

  She envied the dead children in the graveyard. How easy it was for them! To be loved and treasured so, before they were old enough to start messing up and doing all the things that would make people hate them and run from them. Like the old man wanted to run from her now. The love for the dead children would never waver. It had nothing to do with the people they would have become.

  Families of geese scratched about on the banks of the creek that ran through the graveyard. Mothers fussed over their young ones in an annoyingly human way as Ivy approached. Counting the geese was hard because new ones kept swimming out of the reeds or waddling over from further down the creek. And then she wouldn’t know if the ones she had already counted were the same ones or entirely new. It reminded her of something and she felt a roiling in her guts.

  She took out her notebook to record the number of birds. One tear splatted onto the page and smudged the marks she had made there. For a terrible moment the uselessness of her act slipped through her line of vision, like a quick view of a squashed movie title that occupied only the central portion of the screen. Then it was gone.

  She sat with the geese until a maintenance truck parked too close. Three men got out and began the noisy job of trimming trees, keeping things nice and neat for the dead.

  As Ivy walked back to her car she thought about Frank’s daughter, Emma. She’d heard the geezer call the girl by name. She’s a pretty thing, Ivy thought, tiny, waif-like. Ivy didn’t like that Frank had a photograph of his kids on his desk. And she hated that he had picked it up and held it to his chest as though he had to protect it from her. Frank had good instincts. He just wasn’t too bright and had a lot on his mind.

  The old man’s Buick was gone. Good.

  Ivy was confused. She knew she was going to have to get her thoughts in some kind of order. Gruck had vanished without a trace, abandoned ship, left her in the lurch. Between no G and the voice called Reuben and the muddled Squeaks, she felt as though everything she was working towards might fall to pieces around her.

  Her project had become complicated. It had different fields now, when before it had only the one, to do with the men. The edges of the fields were fluid. They flowed into one another and blurred, like water colours applied too soon, and she had difficulty keeping them separate.

  There was Emma, for instance. Her pixie face loomed just outside Ivy’s peripheral vision, day and night. She lived inside Ivy’s right temple, larger than life or death. The Emma task had grown bigger than the man task and Ivy didn’t know how that had happened. She suspected it was connected to the Squeaks.

  And there was a smell that came. It had to do with dying and something left alone too long. Ivy had known it in her youth and now it came again. It upset her and disturbed her sleep. The death smell wove itself into her dreams and lurched her awake till she lay slippery with fear in the darkness of her lonely room.

  The voice called Reuben had led her there and she felt betrayed. She had felt protected by the voice and now it led her where she least wanted to go. To Olive Srutwa, her mother.

  Ivy hadn’t thought of her in years and didn’t want to think of her now. Was she still alive? Somehow, Ivy knew that she was.

  She prayed for her plan to stop expanding. If she could just stay on one course long enough to complete one thing, she felt sure the other things would be easier. It was all getting so complicated.

  She turned to a clean page in her notebook and wrote: Task at Hand: Do the men.

  Then the Squeaks began.

  They made her drive to the community club, the one with the spire in the distance. She looked for something familiar. The building had been replaced but the grounds were pretty much the same. Except the pleasure rink had become a parking lot. The two hockey rinks were there with their spring grass and boards and penalty boxes. Still the same.

  Ivy walked over to one of the boxes and saw plywood on the floor, covered with a heavy black rubber mat. The dirt of her youth had been covered over. And the walls were new and painted white. No slivers here. No nails sticking out and digging in.

  When the Squeaks stopped, Ivy was behind the wheel of her Lincoln turning right off Main Street in the direction of The Forks. She looked at her watch. Noon. She was right on time for her meeting with Frank Foote.

  CHAPTER 36

  1966

  Ivy has never known such pain. Even when the boys raped her in the penalty box it didn’t hurt this much.

  Olive forces gin down her throat, but it doesn’t help. She is ruined.

  She loved the life inside her regardless of how it came to be. For as long as no one knew, it was her reason for being. It sustained her. He did. Ivy thinks of the baby as a he. A he to run away with and love. And then he would love her in return someday. But she didn’t run soon enough.

  Now he’s in a plastic bag within a paper bag. In her mother’s hands.

  “I’ll leave the gin here on your night stand,” Olive says. “Drink as much as you want. I’m going out for a few minutes.”

  Ivy doesn’t want to drink. She wants to feel the pain as long as she can. It’s her only connection.

  I should have run sooner, she thinks. If only I had run sooner.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Present

  The names of the boys who hurt Ivy were almost as deeply etched in Frank’s brain as they must be in hers. They resided there as clearly as his guilt at the front of his mind. He even knew what had become of all of them.

  “Wim Winston.” Frank read from the list of names Ivy had pushed across the table towards him. Her list was long, but that was the first name that jumped out at him.

  “Pardon?”

  “Wim Winston. “ Frank pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. He had started to sweat.

  “That’s a stupid name,” Ivy said.

  “Yeah it is, isn’t it?” Frank chuckled nervously. “I guess it’s short for something. Wimston, maybe. Wimston Winston.” Maybe she didn’t know that Wim had been one of the guys. Or didn’t remember? No. She was messing with his head.

  Ivy laughed. It sounded real. It was the first time Frank had heard this and it relaxed him a little. Maybe she wasn’t so completely weird if she could laugh.

  “Don’t worry about that name. I already fi
gured out where he is. He’s a doctor, I believe, here in Winnipeg?”

  “Yes.” Frank stared at Ivy’s eyes but there was nothing there for him to see.

  They were sitting at an outdoor bar at The Forks where the Assiniboine and Red rivers met. It was a wonderful place to be but it was ruined for Frank by the business at hand: this Nelson McIntyre high school reunion business.

  Ivy looked more like someone who was infiltrating a committee investigating the illegal activity of a government agency than a woman planning her high school reunion. Her high school days must have been a nightmare for her, judging from the little Frank knew of them. He wanted to say: What are you really up to? But he didn’t.

  He sipped a beer and perused the names. Ivy had compiled the list and written it out in her own hand. Some people Frank knew, some he knew of, some didn’t ring a bell at all. The boys were all there: Wim, Duane, Dwight, Fat Ronnie. Their names were interspersed with the others. What was this about?

  Frank had no recollection of about half the people on the list. He helped her as best he could with those he knew were still around. He talked about others who were dead and some who had moved away. Frank had heard a terrible story about Ronnie Fowler, so he figured he may as well share it with Ivy.

  “Ron is the eighteenth fattest man in the world,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I ran into his sister a couple of years ago. Ron lives in Mississauga with his mother now, has for some years. She tried to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records, but of course, at eighteenth, he didn’t qualify.”

  Ivy stared at Frank.

  “I don’t think he’s going to be coming to any reunions,” Frank said. “They can’t even get him out of the house.”

  “Sad,” said Ivy.

  “Yes,” said Frank.

  He went through the list in order, told her the fate of the Simkin brothers, and watched as she entered the information in her notebook. She printed in an awkward backhand, her tongue curled out the side of her mouth. Like Frank’s son, Garth, who was left-handed. But Ivy wasn’t left-handed — she just wrote oddly. She pressed so lightly with her pencil that the words were barely discernible from Frank’s side of the table. He wondered why she used a pencil and why she wrote so feebly.

  But there wasn’t much about this woman that didn’t baffle him. He didn’t want to have to try to figure her out. Maybe she would disappear as suddenly as she came. He doubted it.

  “So they don’t live here anymore,” Ivy said. “The Simkin boys.”

  “No.”

  She was connected to the rain barrel baby. He was sure of it. But how? And why on earth would she present herself to him in this way, knowing he was a cop?

  When he got to the particulars of it, his mind clouded over. He was too far inside it, too far inside the past. He needed to talk to someone who could help him see more clearly, see things as they really were.

  Who could he tell, without bringing up what happened to Ivy in the penalty box all those years ago? This was turning into a nightmare. How could he have thought it wouldn’t eventually catch up to him? He hadn’t thought that, he realized now. He had always known it would.

  Frank didn’t know what Ivy’s plan was. But he did know he had to go along with the high school reunion charade until he figured out what to do. He couldn’t let her get away, much as he would love to never lay eyes on her again.

  Frank gave his head a shake. He tried to picture this woman dropping a dead baby into a rain barrel. He couldn’t. And what would she be doing with a baby anyway? Beautiful though she was, she was a little long in the tooth for a newborn baby. Still, it wasn’t impossible.

  If placing the baby in the rain barrel was revenge it was a particularly evil one. Sick. Worse than a horse’s head in the bed. Especially when it was only poor Greta who lived in the Simkin house now. Her brothers weren’t even there to receive it. It was a roundabout revenge. Limp, but ghastly.

  Maybe Ivy had nothing to do with the baby at all. It had just been so fresh in his mind when she appeared on the scene that he had leapt to an unlikely conclusion.

  Like Fred said, she seemed nice. Somewhat odd, but nice. And she didn’t strike him as the type that would want to make a big deal out of things. There was a stillness about her.

  Maybe she just wanted to confront her past in some way. She had heard about the reunion and figured that might be a good starting point. Maybe she had joined a twelve-step group and was at the confronting stage. Denise had gone through that during one of the times she had joined AA. She had gone around apologizing to people for things that they didn’t remember that she had said or done. It made her feel better for a few minutes. Maybe it was something like that, but the opposite. Maybe Ivy was looking for apologies or explanations. Or blood.

  Frank thought again about the tiny creature found in Greta’s backyard. He couldn’t very well say: “So, had any babies lately?” He could ask: “Do you have any children, Ivy?” And he did.

  “No,” was all she said.

  A warm breeze threatened to blow away their cocktail napkins and Frank anchored them with their drinks. Ivy’s was a Perrier, which didn’t surprise him. He had taken her for a mineral water type, one who would want to keep her wits about her at all times.

  “How old are your children, Frank?” Ivy asked.

  “Thirteen, eight and six.” He didn’t want to tell her about his kids. He wished he had lied about their ages.

  “This has been a big help.” Ivy closed her notebook. “Can I leave the list with you just in case you come up with something else?”

  “Of course.”

  Frank knew he couldn’t help Ivy any more. She had everything she needed from him and they both knew it. All the boys were on her list and most of them were out of reach. He didn’t have to worry about Dwight: he was dead. Or Duane: he was safe in jail. And he was pretty sure he didn’t have to be concerned about Ronnie.

  But what about Wim? There was no love lost between Frank Foote and Wim Winston. But Frank wondered now if he should try to warn him in some way, much as he found the very idea of him distasteful. But warn him of what exactly? Ivy Srutwa’s in town. So what?

  On the path between the patio and the river a dog and his master stepped smartly. Frank recognized the pair Emma had introduced him to that morning, Easy and his master. He forgot the master’s name.

  The man saw Frank and waved. Then he saw Ivy and blanched. Ivy saw him and called, “Hello there.”

  “Do you know his name?” Frank asked. “I really should know his name.”

  “No,” Ivy said. “I never find out their names if I can help it.”

  A gust of wind rustled through the patio area. People jumped to rescue papers and to brush hair away from their faces. Ivy’s hair didn’t move. It was locked in place around her smooth tight lovely face.

  CHAPTER 38

  Gus sauntered down the street to see if his handiwork of the night before had met with success. It had. The bird seed was gone and the birds’ feet had left a dainty pattern in the hard new cement.

  Gus smiled and shouted, “Good afternoon!” to a man in a suit standing further on up the driveway.

  He recalled the footprints of seagulls in the sand at Gimli. There and gone, there and gone. Well, it would be some time before these particular footprints disappeared and Gus chuckled as he strolled back down the street toward home.

  He had worried at first that the birds would have problems with cement attaching itself to their feet. But they were almost weightless and even if a tiny bit did stick it would soon wear itself off. And he figured the amount of cement attached to a few seeds swallowed by one bird at one feed wouldn’t account for any digestive trouble. He sowed in a different spot each time so it was unlikely the same bird would ever feed twice. And he was sure they were no strangers to what was really just a bit of sand and gravel and water mixed up together, maybe a bit of clay and limestone thrown in. Hell, they probably ate that stuff all the tim
e, just not in these precise proportions.

  Yesterday morning Gus had overheard the caretaker at the community club talking about replacing the sidewalk between the two hockey rinks. Apparently it was going to happen some time this summer. He’d have to keep his eyes open for that.

  CHAPTER 39

  Frank sat at his desk and tried to concentrate on the reports in front of him. He was supposed to be filling out evaluations of two new patrol sergeants working under him but he didn’t know them well enough yet.

  His mind kept wandering back to Ivy Grace. He knew he had to act; it would be irresponsible not to.

  His hunch, that Ivy had put the baby in the barrel in Greta’s yard, was based on his intimate knowledge of the details of her rape thirty years ago. And on his knowledge that Greta was the stepsister of two of the boys who instigated and participated in that rape.

  Frank’s insides heaved when he pictured the wild-eyed brothers that he saw too much of for a while back then. Poor Greta’d had to share a house with them.

  The rape was never reported, never punished, never avenged. If Frank was to pursue his hunch he would have to admit out loud to someone, to Fred, to Superintendent Flagston, probably eventually to the newspaper and therefore his family, what he hadn’t been capable of stopping all those years ago. It was the greatest shame of his life.

  He didn’t want to share his past with Fred. Fred looked up to him and Frank didn’t want to watch that respect drain out of his sergeant’s face before his very eyes.

  Also Fred could be very gung-ho and Frank didn’t want this getting away on him.

  He had stopped stewing over whether it was Ivy’s own baby or someone else’s, whether she had killed it herself or found it dead.

  It was Ivy’s baby, her very own. Frank knew it. He had talked himself into it.

  He knew he had to discuss it with someone and the only person he could think of that made any sense at all was his boss, Ed Flagston.