The Icing on the Corpse

by Mary Jane Maffini

  “Wait a minute.”

  “No more wait a minutes. That's it. And, Camilla.”

  “Yes?”

  “Daddy's coming with Conn to keep him company.”

  “The roads are bad. Maybe they should forget about it today.”

  “He wants to drop in and say hello to Mrs. What's-her-name. Don't be difficult about that either.”

  As Mrs. P. would say, sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

  Except for that one night when she didn't answer, I couldn't remember ringing Mrs. Parnell's doorbell. She's always parked in the open door with the tip of her cigarette glowing in the dim light. Now when I needed to warn her about my father and Conn's visit and to recommend discretion, meaning not to mention she'd been checking on Randy Cousins, she didn't answer.

  This time I had to ring. After ringing, I tried knocking. Then I switched to banging. Then I switched to thinking.

  What was going on? It was just past five o'clock. Mrs. P. had planned to be home by four to wait for her new speakers to be delivered. Had they been delivered and then she'd headed out again? I knew her, she'd have hooked them up and would be happily blasting out some Russian symphonic piece loud enough to get the neighbours banging the walls.

  I put my ear to the door. Except for a peevish squawk, nothing. A note was partly stuck under the door. I bent and picked it up. No answer Feb. 10, 4:30 pm. Pls. call to arrange new delivery time. Extra fee will apply. The signature was illegible.

  Had Mrs. P. been particularly unsteady in recent weeks? What if, after her bit of sleuthing, she came home exhausted and slipped in the shower? What if she'd passed out, and her cigarette lay smouldering in the depths of the leather sofa as I paced in the hallway? What then?

  The doors in our apartment building are not the type the average person can open with a strong kick. Not that it hasn't happened. I did the next best thing. I ran for Doug, the super. Five minutes later, the master key turned in Mrs. Parnell's lock.

  “Golly, Miss, I sure do hope Violet's all right,” Doug said. “What would we do without her keeping an eye on things, eh?” I pushed past him and into Mrs. Parnell's totally empty apartment. Nothing in the living room. Ditto the kitchen. The bedroom door was open. Empty. I banged on the bathroom door. No answer.

  What if?

  I held my breath, opened the door and found nothing. Exhale. At least she wasn't dead in the bathtub. I was rattled enough to check the closets and under the bed but she wasn't there either.

  Back in the living room, Lester and Pierre shrieked from their swing. A strand of millet, picked clean, lay in the bottom of their cage.

  Twenty-Eight

  Okay, where could she be? “She must be visiting friends.” A shadow of doubt settled on Doug's little moon face.

  Sure, and what friends would they be?

  “It's funny though, because she called this morning to let me know the speakers were being delivered and to buzz the guys in if I saw them.”

  “And you buzzed them in?”

  “Yep. It's real weird, isn't it? She's been real keen about those speakers. Not like Violet to forget the time.”

  “What about her family?”

  “I never seen anyone visiting her except you.”

  “She must have dropped off to see someone. I'm sure she's fine.” It was more to convince myself than him.

  The shadows deepened on the moon. “She's an old lady with a walker. She could have taken a tumble easy. I'm going to check down in the storage area and recycle section and the mail room and everything, just to be sure.”

  “Maybe she went out,” I said. “Shopping. To get cigarettes or sherry or something.”

  “She uses the tuck shop in the building for her smokes. I pick up her Harvey's for her. The cupboard's full.”

  A quick check in the liquor cabinet confirmed sherry supplies were well stockpiled.

  “Maybe someone asked her to go somewhere. Maybe do a favour or something.”

  Doug puffed himself up. “I sure hope not. Don't make sense for her to drive in the freezing rain. Maybe we should call the police.”

  “Maybe we should. But first, you check the building, and I'll drive around a few places she might be, and then if she doesn't show up, you call me and I'll call them.” I wrote out my cellphone number for him.

  “Okey dokey.” He hustled his round little body out of the apartment and to the elevator. Remarkably speedy.

  I called after him, “Maybe you can get into the office and check the files. Maybe she has a relative listed there.”

  “Nope. No relatives, for sure. Had to check this fall for our files. She wrote ‘no one’ under next of kin, and for emergency contact, she put your name, Miss.”

  “Oh.” Great.

  I reached Alvin on the phone. “You heard from Mrs. Parnell?”

  “No,” he said, “why?”

  “She seems to be missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Look, I sent her on a mission, and she's not back and I'm worried. I was hoping she had just dropped in to see a friend or relative, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I need to have you help me find her. I don't need you to tell me it was a bad idea to send a wobbly old lady outside in this weather to do a bit of surveillance. I'm already telling myself that. I'll go and check out the area she was in, while Doug checks the apartment. You call the hospitals. In case.”

  “In case of what?” The voice came from behind me.

  I whirled. “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  How could I find her in the dark?

  I made sure I wasn't distracted by the fact everyone in my family had something new to be cheesed off about. But guilt has a nasty way of preying on your concentration. I was sure guilty of letting Mrs. Parnell get into trouble. Alvin was in better emotional shape, being innocent, but he hadn't had any luck either.

  For the third time, I circled the townhouse complex where Randy Cousins lived. Mrs. P's LTD was parked on the street, covered in ice, its blue and white handicapped sticker dimly visible in the front window. No sign of her.

  Not for the first time, I asked myself if I should have fibbed to McCracken and Daddy. Lights from the windows shone out on the street. Was Mrs. Parnell warm and dry in one of those kitchens, sipping sherry with some software engineer who had just arrived home from a hard day?

  Time to start knocking on doors. Alvin took one side, I took the other. It was straightforward. A row of townhouses, middling upscale, indistinguishable. Didn't matter which end. Randy's unit was in the middle. Something bothered me. This was the kind of neighbourhood where people would not be home in the day. But judging from the thickness of the ice on the car, Mrs. Parnell had been parked since early afternoon. My teeth chattered. The temperature hovered just below zero, making the sidewalks even more slippery.

  By the third door, it was confirmed.

  “This afternoon? No one here would have seen her,” said the young woman who opened the door. “Everyone works. If you want to find out what's going on in the day, you'd have to talk to someone in the apartment building.” She pointed across the street.

  I changed tactics. “I have a friend who moved to this development. Randy Cousins. Do you know her? Number 36.”

  “No. We're new. We haven't met anybody.” The door closed.

  The apartment stood in the middle of two batches of linked units. It was on Alvin's route, but I headed over anyway. It had seen better days. I bet it got under the skin of the townhouse people. Lowered the tone.

  I was prepared to like everybody in it. “Yes, she was in the neighbourhood,” said the washed-out woman with the three clinging kids at the second door. “This afternoon. I came home at maybe three. She was ringing doorbells across the street.”

  As she spoke, the familiar aroma of Kraft Dinner drifted into the hallway. I liked it better than the whiff of diapers.

  “Three? And which doorbells?”

  “Didn't pay much attention. I figured she'd end up here sooner or late
r. Collecting for something. Had my toonie ready.”

  “And did she show up?”

  “No. But you should be talking to Andrew. He's the one. Apartment 10. He'll be glad to talk.”

  Glad to talk was an understatement. I soon figured Andrew had been waiting for this particular opportunity to knock. All the bad weather must have ratcheted up the boredom factor for him. “Chronic fatigue syndrome,” he told me. “Most unutterably boring thing on earth, next to being buried alive.”

  He'd already poured me a cup of tea when I cut in to ask him if he'd seen Mrs. Parnell.

  “Yes, I saw her,” Andrew said. “Across the way. Middle of the afternoon. Ringing doorbells. Alone. Didn't look like a crusading evangelical type to me. I figured collecting for something, Heart Fund maybe or Cancer Society. I would have told her to save her breath in the new houses. She'd be far more likely to get something here, even if we are all on disability or welfare.”

  “Did you see which units she tried?” That would be too good to be true.

  “Looked like she tried all of them, except maybe not the one in the middle. Nobody answered any of them. She should have started here instead. Get a better response. A cup of tea, a sympathetic ear.”

  “Did she come over?”

  “Never got to my place. I was waiting for her. She crossed the road and headed this way. She walked slowly because of the cane.”

  The cane! She didn't even have her walker.

  Andrew continued. “The front door's out of my sight, so it's difficult to say. Never returned to her car though.”

  “It looks like she never reached the building. No one before you saw her.”

  “Three o'clock, would have been kids getting home. You might ask around, see if anyone saw her in the parking lot. There are always kids around the building smoking. Worth a query.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Yes. I did see another woman. First I thought they were together, but then they never seemed to connect. The other woman went the other way. Moving fast, almost jogging.”

  “One of your neighbours?”

  “No. I'd never seen her before. They didn't speak, the old lady and this woman. Could have been a neighbour. Some of them you never see, they leave from their garage, they go home from their garage, never set foot outside, summer, winter, never. At any rate, I didn't recognize her.”

  “Do you know the woman at Number 36?”

  “The police officer?”

  “Yes. Could it have been her?”

  “Don't see her often, usually in uniform. I thought she was taller, but I could be wrong.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Just a young man with a Mickey Mouse scarf. Not someone from our neighbourhood.”

  “He's with me. Wait a minute. How could you see the mice on the scarf?”

  Andrew pointed with pride to a new-looking pair of Bushnell's binoculars. “Wouldn't want to miss a sighting of Mickey.”

  “I'll check the parking lot.” I made my way across the treacherous surface toward the back of the building, hoping to find some furtive smokers. But not a soul was stupid enough to be standing puffing in the drizzle.

  Maybe they scattered when Mrs. Parnell came into view? Intimidated by a gray-haired woman with a cane? Nah, that wouldn't happen. First of all, Mrs. P. probably had her own cigarette smouldering at all times during her exploration. Second, kids aren't intimidated by authority figures any more. Third, if they are, elderly women don't represent authority. Too bad when you think about it.

  But why would Mrs. P. have come over to the parking lot in the first place? I figured it out when I turned around. You had a clear view of Randy Cousins's front door from the side lot and yet, if you stood next to the big dumpster, you wouldn't be visible in turn.

  Mrs. Parnell would have liked that tactic. There were plenty of butts around the dumpster, but then it was the preferred spot for junior smokers. I checked for signs of Benson and Hedges, but Mrs. P. wasn't the type who thought the world was her ashtray.

  Of course, she could have stayed in her car and watched and waited. That idea hit me like a bag of wet cement. I slithered halfway down the block to the parked LTD. Of course, the doors were locked. The covering of ice was thick enough to obscure the inside. I chipped at the layer by the window with my keys and peered inside. At least she wasn't slumped over, asphyxiated.

  A couple of kids in unzipped ski jackets came around the corner as I stood trying to decide what to do next.

  “Hey guys,” I said, “I'm looking for a gray-haired woman with a cane. Did either of you see her?”

  They exchanged glances.

  “I'm supposed to take her to an appointment,” I said.

  “Real tall lady?” a boy with bleached hair asked. “Old like?”

  “That's her.”

  “Yeah, she was here.”

  Good. “Where?”

  He pointed toward the parking lot of the apartment building. “There by the side.”

  “When?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. It was still light.”

  “Maybe three-thirty, four,” said the other one.

  “What was she doing?”

  They exchanged glances. I could see they had me pegged as someone trying to hassle a little old lady.

  “I mean was she heading somewhere else? Not the right kind of day for her to be out. She could get hurt.”

  “You're not trying to lock her up or anything?”

  “Lock her up?”

  “Saying it's for her own good, like she can't take care of herself any more.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I heard about that on the radio. Like taking their house and their money and locking them in the nut farm and saying it's for their own good.”

  Great, I was the bad guy again. “No, it's nothing like that. My friend has definitely not lost it. She's pretty smart. I wouldn't want to be the person who tried to lock her up.”

  “Okay.” I must have passed some kind of test.

  “So you did see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she went somewhere?”

  “Nah, she stayed over by the wall and had a cigarette. She gave us a couple and we talked. She sure knows a lot about explosives.”

  Don't go there, I thought. “And then?”

  “And then we left.”

  “And she waited here?”

  Again with the looks.

  “It's okay, guys. She was helping me with something. She's a lot tougher than she looks. So, tell me, did she ask you any questions?”

  They both started to talk at once. The small, smarter one took over. “She had a picture of the lady cop across the street and she had a picture of this guy. She wanted to know did we ever see that guy bothering her.”

  “And had you?”

  “No.”

  “We've seen her but we never saw him,” the kid with the bleached hair said.

  “And when you left where was my friend?”

  They gestured to the dumpster near the side of the building. The three of us strolled toward it.

  “I need to talk to anyone else who might have seen her. I'm worried. The police won't start looking until it's too late.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any other people around here I could talk to?”

  “People kind of come and go, if you wait a bit.”

  “Did you see another woman approach her?”

  They shook their heads like they shared a brain stem. Their joint interest appeared to have been exhausted and they headed off, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets.

  I found myself pacing. The parking lot resembled one big puddle by this time and if Mrs. P. had been talking to someone else and had left with them, there'd be no footprints to show their path. To be on the safe side, I checked out the perimeter of the yard. Maybe I'd see something. Anything.

  By the back fence a large wooden box stored salt for the parking lot. Just to rule out everything, I headed for it. She wouldn
't have snooped over there. It would have meant heading across a wide, slippery expanse and for what?

  I turned. You couldn't see Randy Cousins's place from there. The dumpster and cars blocked the view. I looked up. The windows and balconies of the apartments faced the other way.

  No one had a clear view of that spot.

  I lifted the lid. Nothing but salt inside, nearly up to the lid.

  Sometimes I get wild ideas, perhaps because bad things happen to people I know. But where was she?

  Alvin loped into view. He shook his head. Another strikeout.

  “She's gotta be here somewhere. People up the road saw her heading back this way a couple of hours ago.”

  “A guy in the apartment building spotted her around here. Couple of kids confirmed. I've hit a wall with it. We have to call the police. First, let's check the side yards of the end-units in case she slipped. She didn't have her walker, just her cane.”

  “Vanity, thy name is Violet,” Alvin said. “You think you're in shit with the world now, Camilla. Wait until cops find out why she was in the neighbourhood.”

  “Doesn't matter. We have to call the police.”

  “Will they do a house-to-house search?”

  “They'll have to. Seventy-eight-year-old woman missing? Bad weather? We'll go to the media otherwise.”

  “You mean P.J.?”

  I nodded. “I've looked everywhere. Some kids saw her here around three. She was staking out Randy Cousins's place. And a guy saw her near a tall woman earlier. Might have been Cousins.”

  Alvin's teeth were rattling, but at least the Mickey Mouse scarf absorbed some of rain. I didn't want to face the spectre of his mother flying in from Sydney to preside over his deathbed.

  “Everywhere?” he said.

  We both stared at the dumpster by the side of the building.

  Since my Sorels were a lot more reliable than Alvin's pointy leather boots, I was elected to check, even though we couldn't imagine any way for her to get in there. It took a couple of minutes of slipping and clawing, but I managed to hoist myself up enough to check the inside. It had been recently emptied.