Blue Vengeance

by Alison Preston

  Two Volkswagens — one blue, one green; two teachers — one dead, one alive and not even injured — weren’t important to anyone but a no-account kid who’d lost his sheen now that summer was gone, and lipstick and hair curlers had usurped him.

  “Do you need to go home, Janine?” the teacher said.

  “Yes, please.”

  “All right. Well, come inside and get your things, and we’ll go down to the office and speak to Mr. Shearer.”

  “I don’t want to go back inside,” she said.

  To Danny’s amazement tears welled up in her eyes.

  The teacher bought it and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Okay,” he said. “You wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  He went into the classroom, and Janine grabbed Danny’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  They ran out the side entrance of the school and slowed down when they got to Lawndale.

  “My bike’s at the school,” said Danny.

  “Go back and get it. I’ll wait here.”

  He went back for his bike, willing the man teacher not to catch him and grill him and forever associate him with Janine.

  “What should we do?” she said, when he joined her again.

  For a second all the new things he would have wanted to tell her squeezed against each other inside his crowded head: that it was his fault that Cookie died — the person who loved her the most had hurt her the most — more than Miss Hartley, more than their mum, more than any laughing girls; that he had a twin brother named James who also died. But he couldn’t tell her these things because he couldn’t risk hearing that she didn’t understand how much it all mattered.

  He also wanted to tell her that he felt sad for Miss Hartley, evil witch though she was, because her twin sister was dead. But he kept quiet about that too, because he was afraid she would laugh at him with her new pink lipstick and hairdo. He was pretty sure she hadn’t laughed at him yet, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t now.

  Danny stared into her cool green eyes, and she stared back with that unwavering gaze of hers.

  “I told you Miss Hartley’s car was blue,” he said.

  “Who cares?”

  “Me.”

  He took off on his bike, left her where she stood.

  “The high heels should have been a dead giveaway,” he called over his shoulder. “Miss Hartley never wears high heels.”

  44

  Danny turned east at the first corner to put something between them other than the empty space of Lawndale Avenue. The cold northeast wind pushed against him and took his breath away. It lifted road grit and threw it at his face till it stung. So he turned around and headed home. The wind felt better at his back.

  When he got there he didn’t want to go in the house; he didn’t want to get warm. The Muskoka lawn chair still sat by the now empty pool. He sank into it and put aside thoughts of Janine.

  He wanted to think about not having done it, wanted to recapture the modest elation that had roused in him. A private elation, it had turned out, but one he wanted to savour. But there wasn’t going to be any elation, modest or otherwise. He had killed his own sister as surely as if he had taken a gun to her head.

  Some of the words Cookie had written came back to him. We were supposed to be in it together. Oh, Cookie, we were in it together. Please know that, wherever you are. He couldn’t bear to believe she was nowhere.

  It felt now like everything bad in the whole world was his fault.

  Mrs. Flood had died. Maybe the plink of the stone hitting the car had brought on the heart attack, but by the sounds of it, her days were numbered anyway, if Morven was to be believed: she’d had episodes forever, serious episodes. It might be his fault, but not completely.

  But that no longer mattered. Being responsible for Cookie’s death cancelled out everything.

  Killing was far too horrendously gigantic of a thing to do. Along with destroying a person, you erased a lifetime of thoughts — all the memories and wisdom that lived inside that person. It mattered hugely in the grand scheme of things. That sort of destruction should never be done deliberately. No one should die because a killer had been born.

  When he went in the house, the air felt cool. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a closed photo album in front of her. Danny had never seen it before. The window was open wide. A stream of cool air with an undercurrent of dust poured through.

  “It smells good in here,” said Danny.

  “I thought I’d open a few windows and air the place out.”

  He walked through the house room by room and saw that all the windows were open except the one in his bedroom. She hadn’t entered his room. He did so himself and lifted up that window too. The screens needed to be switched for the storm windows. He went back downstairs.

  “Thanks for not going in my room.”

  “You look cold, Danny. Maybe we should close things up for now.”

  “No. That’s okay. This is good.” He sat down across from her at the table.

  She was wearing plaid slacks, a white blouse, and a beige cardigan — clothes he remembered from before.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  It didn’t look as if she’d be opening the photo album any time soon, so Danny stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back hall, and went back outside. It was hard to know how to behave now that his mum was up and around every so often. The weight of new expectations pressed down on him. She didn’t seem to be wondering why he wasn’t at school, so he decided to take the rest of the day off.

  The sun had come out, and the wind had died down. Russell was resting in a sunbeam but stood up when Danny rounded the corner of the house.

  They crossed Lyndale and walked into the long grass that lay sideways now from all the tramping down and from the cold. It had lost the greenness of summer.

  Russell ran ahead, racing back from time to time to herd him.

  Danny stopped at the spot where Frank had pulled Cookie out of the river. It didn’t look any different from the rest of the riverbank, with its abrupt edge leading down to scrub and broken trees, to the branch that caught her. Except inside Danny’s head, and he supposed inside Frank’s. The ambulance workers probably hadn’t been back this way, and he didn’t know much about the inside of his mum’s head, but for him, this particular section of the riverbank would always be Cookie. He walked the several yards upstream to where she had gone in, the grassier spot where the cake plate was found, licked clean.

  He recalled someone in the death-by-misadventure camp mentioning that it was odd she had eaten the cake first, before the Klik and beans. As oddness went, Danny figured that was fairly low on the list. He supposed he was the only one on earth who knew that, if given the chance, Cookie had preferred to eat her dessert first. Her reasoning had been that anything could happen between the main course and dessert. The world could end, she could die, there could be an explosion that took out the whole kitchen. She didn’t want to chance missing out on the best part of the meal. Their mother and Aunt Dot hadn’t allowed it, of course, but if she and Danny were left to their own devices she, the long-ago Cookie, would talk him into doing it with her. He didn’t object; he could see her point.

  Danny’s knowledge of that quirk of Cookie’s would die when he did. It was in no one else’s consciousness. That thought felt like an additional loss.

  No one but he and his mother had seemed to suspect that Cookie’d had no intention of eating the canned goods. They were there inside her buttoned pockets to weigh her down. Danny knew his mother thought so too, from what she’d said that one and only day they’d talked about Cookie. We couldn’t have known.

  Something caught his eye. It glinted in a ray of the slanted sun. He slipped and slid down the riverbank on the damp dun grass. He pushed the scrub aside — young dogwoods with th
eir dazzling red leaves.

  There it was, the can opener: the one that Aunt Dot couldn’t find on the day after Cookie’s funeral. It was theirs, all right; there was the familiar blue plastic protecting the end of each handle. He picked it up, a rusty useless tool.

  “Russell.”

  She hurtled down towards him.

  “It was an accident.”

  Russell was soaking wet.

  “The cans weren’t in her pockets to weigh her down. She was gonna eat the Klik and the beans, Russ. She wasn’t here to die, she was just gonna keep on eating.”

  Russell shook herself out and plowed up to the top of the bank. Danny followed, clutching the can opener in his fist.

  “She slipped, Russ. She fell. It wasn’t on purpose.”

  He knew there was a chance she’d interrupted her eating plans midstride and changed course down the path to death. But in his mind the better chance was that she had not, and that was the one he chose to believe.

  It was, indeed, death by misadventure. He could live with that.

  When he got home his mum was still at the kitchen table, but now the photo album was open. She was looking at pictures of Cookie.

  It hadn’t occurred to Danny before to wonder about the lack of family pictures. In other people’s houses, Paul’s for instance, they were all over the place: on top of the television, on the walls, on the dining room buffet.

  He looked over his mum’s shoulder and saw his sister as a baby, as a one-year-old, at two.

  She turned a page and there were two snapshots of brand-new babies placed carefully side by side: Daniel Arthur and James Scirrow. Danny couldn’t see any difference between them. He turned back a page and saw Cookie as a newborn. She didn’t look much different from the boy babies.

  “I guess we all get born looking pretty much the same,” he said.

  “Hmh.”

  Danny didn’t know if it was a laugh or a cry. A tear landed on the page. He looked at her face and saw a trace of a smile, so he supposed her sound had been a little of each.

  She brushed away the tear.

  He set the can opener down on the table.

  “I found it,” he said. “Cookie had it.”

  She didn’t remember that it had been lost and hadn’t noticed that there was a new one in the drawer.

  “I guess there’s a lot I haven’t noticed,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Danny.”

  He wasn’t sure what to do with the apology, so he told her his new theory about Cookie’s death and left her to sit with it.

  45

  Little by little, details of the night of Mrs. Flood’s death were revealed and became part of a new stream of lore to meander through the streets of Norwood.

  The police were involved immediately because of the young age of the victim: she was just thirty-three. Too young to die.

  Danny and Janine were not part of the investigation. That’s how far out of anyone’s consciousness they were regarding the dead woman. Birchdale Betty told the police that she had heard someone running away that night, but she couldn’t get any more specific. The cops asked around to no avail.

  When they spoke to Miss Hartley she explained about her sister’s heart and other health problems, but they waited till they received the autopsy report before they closed the investigation. The final word was: heart failure stemming from a congenital heart defect; complications from diabetes.

  Danny didn’t even know about the police involvement till after it was over.

  So it seemed no one in the universe except Danny and Janine knew about the stone that hit the car.

  It was a little more difficult for Danny to find out what Mrs. Flood was doing in the school parking lot. No one seemed to be wondering about that but him. So he enlisted Morven again, and again she came through. She spoke to one of the girls on the basketball team and found out that Mrs. Flood was standing in as coach. Miss Hartley had left the school at 4:00 for a dental appointment that she had already postponed twice. It wasn’t an important game, as games go, so she’d asked her sister to cover for her.

  Danny thought it odd that a history teacher would fill in as a basketball coach and said as much to Morven. It didn’t matter; it just seemed odd. So Morven sought out the girl again and discovered that Mrs. Flood had once been a physical education teacher before her health took a turn for the worse. That was when she switched to history. Apparently she knew her stuff when it came to basketball. That’s the way Morven put it.

  She seemed so happy to be doing Danny’s bidding (he hadn’t even specifically asked for this last piece of information) that he wished he had further assignments for her.

  He wondered if Mrs. Flood had known she was going to die soon, and that that was at least part of the reason she had carried on with an eighteen-year-old greaser. Maybe she felt she had no reason to be cautious anymore, no reason not to act on every whim.

  And he wondered what Miss Hartley thought of the affair — if it grossed her out, if she tried to talk her sister out of it. Maybe she hadn’t even known.

  When Danny got home from school on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, a little over a week after Mrs. Flood’s death, his mother was standing in the living room staring at the couch. It was cloth-upholstered and it used to be decent enough with its quiet earth tones, but she had ruined it with her constant dead weight and with spillage and with tearing at errant threads till they came loose and started a process of unravelling. He saw spots that were almost bare.

  “It’s a mess,” she said.

  “Yup.” There was no getting around it.

  When he got home from school on Thursday all the removable cushions were in the front yard. Inside he found his mother trying to drag the couch out from the wall.

  “We’re getting rid of it,” she said. “There’s a new one coming from Eaton’s. I ordered it from the catalogue.”

  “Won’t the Eaton’s guys move it?”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  “Here, let me give you a hand then.”

  He had his doubts about managing it, but then the doorbell rang, and two men from Eaton’s announced themselves.

  “I think out the front way would be best,” said Barbara. “Fewer twists and turns.”

  They struggled in the doorway, cheerfully chipping paint here and there.

  “Right to the curb, please.” There was a lilt in her voice. “Fix the cushions on it, will you, Danny? I’ve phoned the Goodwill. It’s a good solid couch for someone.”

  The men settled the new one, drank a glass of water apiece, and drove away.

  “Do we have a tarpaulin?” Barbara glanced at the sky. “It looks like rain.”

  All Danny saw was blue sky, except for a narrow line of cloud in the southwest, across the river.

  “Those clouds are coming this way,” said his mum.

  How did she know that? Couldn’t they just as easily have moved off in the other direction? Plus there was no wind. She had always been good at weather.

  As he went to fetch a tarp from the shed, his mother called after him, “Oh, Danny, I meant to tell you, a man was here from Children’s Aid.”

  His stomach disappeared. “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to know if someone named Janine Sénécal was staying here.”

  “Who?”

  “Janine Sénécal.”

  He still hadn’t gotten around to figuring out her last name after realizing it was too late to ask her without sounding like an idiot.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I didn’t know anyone by that name.”

  It was true.

  She left it at that. There were some good things about his mother.

  He didn’t want to think about Janine so he hopped on his bike and pedalled over to Wade’s for a chocolate milkshake. As he poured th
e last bit from the silver container into his glass his eyes drifted over to a display of cards at the end of the counter. He picked one that said With Sympathy on the front and paid for it along with his milkshake.

  When he got home he sat down for supper with his mum. She had made Scotch broth soup and toast, and he couldn’t disappoint her by telling her he was full.

  Afterwards he went up to his room and sat with the card a while before writing Please accept my condolences on the inside with his name underneath. He slipped it into its envelope, rode over to rue Valade, and put it in Miss Hartley’s mailbox, not caring if she saw him. If she felt anything like the way he had felt in the weeks after Cookie’s death she was sitting in a chair staring out a window at nothing.

  He went to the parking area by the back lane and looked at the green Beetle up close. Sure enough, where the roof curved to meet the driver’s door there was a tiny chip of paint missing.

  46

  On a sunny day in mid-November, after the first snowfall that stayed, Danny walked down the lane to Janine’s house. He squinted against the blinding white of the snow, and Russell frolicked as if she were still a pup. She never remembered from one winter to the next how great it was.

  He heard the scrape of a shovel. Before he even saw the boy he knew that they were gone. He hadn’t seen her at school, and neither of them had sought the other out.

  The youngster was pushing snow off the stoop where the two of them used to sit. Danny had never seen it in winter before. A woman opened the back door.

  “Good job, Billy.”

  Danny started to move on and then changed his mind.

  “Can I help you?” said the woman.

  “No,” he said. “It’s all right. I knew the people who used to live here. I thought they might still be around.”

  “Nope,” said the boy.

  “They’re not long gone,” said the woman. “We’ve been here less than a month.”

  “Do you know where they went?”