“Not really, I guess. I have had, though. I found it easier to not be friends with her anymore.”
“Who?”
Frank worried that whole worlds of anguish and horror swirled around in the minds of his children — all three of them — and he was never there to help. It wasn’t true, of course. He was always there for them, even for Emma, who lived on the other side of the planet. But there was the simple division between one body and another. He could not get close enough to save them. He could not get inside their skins and protect them from the Lacey Featherstones and the European Joshes of the world or attach himself to them like a Siamese twin to ward off drunk drivers or, in Emma’s case, tsunamis.
“I’m not telling you, Dad,” Sadie said, “who that non-friend was. You’d probably go marching over to her house and give her what-for and it all happened a really long time ago. Jenna Penner is the least of my worries now. Oops!”
“Jenna Penner, eh?”
Sadie wasn’t very good at keeping secrets for more than a few minutes.
“Is that Jack Penner’s daughter?”
“Maybe not.”
Frank worked on the last of his sandwich.
“Don’t worry, honey. I’m more concerned with your recent troubles with this European character.”
“Oh God, Dad, he’s not European. His last name has an eastern European ring to it. That’s all.”
The phone rang. It was Norm Featherstone. Frank had to hold the receiver away from his ear as Norm talked in his grating show-off voice, so he missed a lot of what he was saying, but caught the gist of it, which was when the deuce could he and Jane get back to work.
Frank wanted to talk to him about his daughter Lacey’s boyfriend and how he was going to track him down and tear him limb from limb if only his own daughter, Sadie, would allow him to do so.
But what he said was, “What’s the name of the boy your daughter is going to marry?”
“Josh,” said Norm. “Josh Wynkowski. Why? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Josh, eh?”
Sadie stood in front of her dad with her hands on her hips and stared fiercely into his eyes. Then she held up the index finger of her left hand and waggled it back and forth close to his face.
“What, Frank?” Norm said. “What? Do you know something about him? Tell me. What do you know?”
Sadie touched her dad’s forehead with her finger.
“Nothing,” said Frank. “Nothing. I was just wondering who I’m doing this work for. That’s all.”
“Me,” said Norm. “You’re doing the work for me.”
This man is an asshole, Frank thought. He felt very much like washing his hands of the whole business. But there was Jane. And there was the little house on Lloyd that he had begun to grow attached to. And most of all there was the tiny skeleton in the wall. He couldn’t leave her to the likes of Norm Featherstone.
“Frank?”
“Yes, Normy?”
Frank couldn’t resist. It had been Norm’s moniker as a boy and he’d always hated it, thought it made him sound less of a man, Frank guessed. He very much wanted to make Norm Featherstone feel less of a man right now.
“Let me know immediately if you hear from the cops,” said Norm. “And I’ll do the same.”
“Righto, Normy.”
Normy hung up.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
Sadie was sitting at the kitchen table staring at the photograph.
“There’s writing on the back of this picture.”
“Yes, I know. I’m going to grab Garth’s magnifying glass and see if I can figure out what it says.”
“It says, ‘Living with our Dead’ and then ‘1970.’”
“You can see that with your bare eyes?” asked Frank.
“Yes, and you’d be able to, too, if you’d go and have your eyes checked and get some glasses that actually work.”
“Let’s see.”
Frank reached for the photograph and Sadie pulled it back and turned it over.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“The little girl in this picture?”
“Yes?”
“I think she’s dead.”
You couldn’t get much past Sadie Foote.
28
After they had tidied up the kitchen, Frank and Sadie walked over to the house on Lloyd. The Silk house. At the corner of Taché and Coniston a young woman in a minivan came close to clipping Frank as she careened through a stop sign. He saw her eyes. They were focused on the thing she was going to be doing after the thing she was going to do next once she got to where she was heading.
Why did everyone have to own such big vehicles? he wondered. Why did young women have to drive trucks and talk on the phone and drink coffee and apply makeup and smoke as they drunkenly sped through the daytime streets? They were the worst. Oblivious. Or oblivio, as Garth liked to say. Garth was Frank’s middle child and he had taken lately to leaving the esses off the ends of words. Sometimes even off the middles of words, in which case Frank would lose track of what his son was talking about. But he figured if it was important enough Garth would add the esses for his father’s benefit.
Police vehicles were still parked in front of the house. Only Chas and Brad were visible beyond the group of gawkers and the yellow tape. The investigators were inside. The two patrolmen ignored Frank and his daughter except to glance surreptitiously at Sadie.
Frank loved that she was beautiful and he wouldn’t change a thing except maybe the size of her breasts. He couldn’t bear it when he saw men and boys staring at her chest. Girls, too. Didn’t their parents teach them anything anymore? No staring. That was a big one. He could remember his dad’s voice, clear as anything: Don’t stare, Frankie. It makes people uncomfortable.
He remembered then the strange staring girl from his youth: George’s sister. But she had been a little off-kilter; it hadn’t been her fault that she stared. He recalled her being quite a handful for George, who had to look after her all the time. He wondered briefly what had happened to her. The family had lived on Monck Avenue just a few streets over from Lloyd and a couple of blocks toward the flood bowl. George had died; he knew that much.
Frank remembered something else then and it shook him. He pictured the staring girl with a camera around her neck. This was later, when they were out of their teens. Everyone knew about her strange occupation.
It was a hot day, the sky a pale blue. Frank gazed south towards the river. A tiny figure emerged from the thin light of the late afternoon. It was the old woman, Mrs. Beresford. The bulldog with the high ears wasn’t with her. She approached them — bent, stinking of unwashed clothes.
“Anything yet?” she croaked.
Frank remembered that voice now from when he was a boy and she used to shout at them for crossing her lawn. Even as a relatively young woman she’d croaked. Had she sounded like that this morning? He didn’t think so. Plus, hadn’t she worn clean clothes this morning? He would have sworn it.
“Sadie, this is Mrs. Beresford. She lives down the block. This is my daughter, Sadie.”
“Hi, Mrs. Beresford.”
“Anything yet?” the old woman asked again.
She was obviously aware that something was wrong in the house. It wasn’t hard to deduce that with the police milling about, but still, she had a proprietary air about her that irritated him. It reminded him of an old Rockford Files episode where a woman named Leanne, a regular citizen, interfered with police business to such an extent in a misguided effort to help that she caused mayhem, including death. And she called Jim Rockford “Jimbo,” which infuriated him.
Frank disliked Mrs. Beresford. She had ignored Sadie. He decided not to answer her. He put his arm around his daughter and moved away, closer to the yellow tape.
“Dad, aren’t you being kind of discourteous?” asked Sadie.
“Yes, I am.”
Sadie stood on tiptoes and whispered in his ear.
“I thought Old Lady Beresford was dead.”
“Don’t call her that.”
Sadie smiled at her dad and he smiled too.
She took his arm. “I don’t like it when you’re rude, Dad. It sets a bad example for me.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re too old to be rude.”
“I know.”
“Was there ever a Mr. Beresford?” Sadie asked.
“I don’t know,” said Frank. “I don’t remember one. And I don’t recall her having any kids, either. It’s funny. She seemed like a much nicer person when I spoke to her this morning.”
“That’s odd,” said Sadie. “I’ve never known her to be nice.”
“Maybe I imagined it,” said Frank. “Have you had much in the way of dealings with her, Sadie?”
“No. Not really. Just when she used to holler at us for walking over the dirt patch that she calls a lawn. But I haven’t been by that way in a while. I really didn’t realize she still existed. Not that I’ve given her much thought,” she added.
Frank wondered if it was his own head twisting things this way, causing him to see things the way they weren’t. He glanced sideways at the old woman and was far from sure now if her clothes were clean or dirty. And had she really been all that nice this morning? Had she actually not croaked earlier in the day?
Chas sauntered over, and unlike the old woman, couldn’t take his eyes off Sadie.
Frank decided not to introduce him.
“Anything to report?” he asked.
“Not really,” Chas said to Sadie’s chest.
Frank was sure he himself had known even at the age of ten to studiously ignore girls’ breasts when speaking to them. Chas had bad manners.
“They’re taking the building materials that surrounded the body, some wood and drywall, but other than that… I mean, what the hey, look at this place. It’s practically a shell.”
“What about our tools?” said Frank.
“Yeah,” Chas said. “They took your tools.” He managed to tear his eyes away from Sadie.
“Is the body still inside?” Frank asked.
“No,” said Chas. “The investigator gave the go-ahead to have it transported to the morgue. He went along with it.”
Frank found he had to move again to get away from Mrs. Beresford, who had crept over and was hanging on their every word.
Chas disappeared inside the house, leaving Brad to manage control of the small crowd, which was mostly just teenage boys now, leaning on their bikes and guffawing when one of them said something particularly hilarious. The excitement would have dropped off once the body was removed. Frank recognized a few of the boys and suddenly missed Garth, who was at work at his summer job at Sport Chek, knowing nothing of the excitement in his own neighbourhood. He wished Garth were too young for a job like these boys were, like Sadie was. What had he been thinking, allowing her to work at the swimming pool? He hadn’t been thinking, that was what. He hadn’t given it one short thought other than that it seemed to make her happy. Now he wanted all his kids at home in the fenced backyard.
“Hi, Mr. Foote,” one of the boys shouted.
“Hey, Frank,” said another. “Hey, Sadie.”
He was a mister to some and Frank to others. He preferred just his plain first name.
They waved back at the boys.
“Time to go home, folks,” Brad called out. “There’s nothing to see here.”
Frank slumped a little inside his clothes. Suddenly it seemed very important to sit down, to lie down, even. He was useless and old and had turned into an unwanted onlooker. All his years on the force had been for nothing but this — to lurch around a local crime scene and pant like a puppy to be involved on any level because of a pathetic need to never let it go.
Mrs. Beresford moved from one foot to another as though her weight was too much for either one or both together. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.
“Why don’t Sadie and I walk you home, Mrs. Beresford?” Frank said.
There had been no call for his brusque behaviour, he realized now, and he began to feel he had more in common with her than he would ever previously have imagined. And her clothes definitely looked clean again.
“No thanks,” she said.
At least the croak was still there.
A woman in protective clothing came outside and walked over to where the three of them stood in the heat.
“Mr. Foote?”
“Yes, Frank Foote.”
Again, he wanted very badly for her to know that he had been a highly respected cop, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself.
“I’m Judith Webster with the forensics unit. I’m told you found the body, sir.”
“Yes.”
“Did you touch anything?”
“Just the walls around it to free it up,” he said.
“That could have been a little hasty.”
“Well I didn’t know it was there, did I? I was removing the wall as part of this renovation. I couldn’t see through it. Can you see through walls, ma’am?”
He had learned over the years how much most women disliked being called ma’am. He hoped this one did, too.
Sadie took his arm again.
“No need to be snippy,” the investigator said.
“Indeed,” said Frank.
“Did you take anything from the scene, Mr. Foote?”
She was talking to him now like he was a criminal, which he was.
“No,” he lied, enjoying the rush that shot through him when he said it.
He said again it again, just for fun.
“No.”
He wanted to shout it out in the white afternoon, but he held himself back.
Judith Webster turned away from them and went back inside the house.
“You’re welcome, ma’am,” he said to her back.
She hesitated for a second, but didn’t turn around.
“Dad, what are you doing?” asked Sadie. “Why are you acting like this?”
Frank had nothing in the way of an explanation to offer his daughter.
I retired too early; I made a mistake. He didn’t say it. He didn’t even know if it was true. And he couldn’t say, “I’m no longer effective as a human being,” though that’s very much how he felt.
He didn’t want to scare her. So often he felt that due to his own fumblings as a parent he forced her into behaving more like a mother toward him than the child she still was.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s not like you.”
Perhaps it’s more like me than you think. Maybe this is who I really am and I can’t hold it in anymore.
“Sorry, honey,” was all he said.
29
Jane phoned Frank in the evening.
“Guess what I did this afternoon,” she said.
“What?”
“Went downtown and had a look through some Henderson Directories.”
Frank took the phone outside and sat down on the front steps.
“Did you find anything interesting?”
“Kind of, I think. The name that old woman mentioned: Coulthard?”
“Yes?”
“They lived there from 1956 to 1971. Or at least they owned the house for that period. And then, get this, the house was vacant for the next three years. That could have been one of the periods Mrs. Beresford was talking about.”
“Hmm,” said Frank.
He was watching a neighbour’s cat rolling around on a patch of dirt where city workers had cut down a tree on the boulevard and removed the stump. The dusty little cat came to see him when he was done.
“Frank?” Jane said.
“Yes?”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t think so.”
Frank scratched the black cat under his chin. He was grey with dirt and prickly with wood shavings. Plus, he had cobwebs caught up in his whiskers.
“The Coulthards, or one of them,
could have boarded the girl up inside the wall anytime between 1956 and 1971. Then with the house vacant, she could have continued rotting away to her heart’s content up until 1974 without anyone noticing and by then she was probably done being anything but bones.”
“Hmm.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say, Frank? Hmm? I think I’m on to something.”
Frank was thinking about the photograph and the date that Sadie’s fourteen-year-old eyes had made out on the back of it and the staring girl from his youth who had taken pictures of the dead. He wouldn’t speak now of any of those things. The information was too valuable to release over the phone. Also, the date on the photograph could mean absolutely nothing in terms of the skeleton. Unlikely as it seemed, it was possible that the two things weren’t connected in any way except by their location. Frank didn’t want Jane to get overexcited and go running off into the future and all over town with these new particulars. She wasn’t like that, but he was afraid, anyway, of it getting away on him. He would tell her, but in his own good time.
“I think it’s dangerous to jump to conclusions,” said Frank. “It’s too soon to blame a particular person or people, especially if the house was vacant for three years.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. A member of the Coulthard family could have gotten away with it so easily. Picture it: first, the house is on a corner lot — no one lives on the one side; second, it’s set back quite a ways from the street, more so than most of the other houses in the area; and third, it was a double lot back then. The address next door didn’t show up till 1979. I checked.”
“A couple of the trees in that yard look like they’ve been there for two hundred years,” said Frank. “And the shrubbery may have been even more extensive then than it is now. The whole front of the yard next to the sidewalk used to be a hedge. You can see where it was chopped away.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m picturing it, is all,” said Frank. “Or trying to. The little house could indeed have been very well hidden from passersby.”
“What’s the matter, Frank?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“You sound kind of robotic and unusual.”
“I’m just tired, I think,” he said and produced a yawn.
The Girl in the Wall Page 13
