The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Then she saw him turn his head northward. He was up on his knees and two hands like a four-footed animal staring toward the road, and although the shed was in her way, she was pretty sure what he was hearing. She let her foot off the accelerator and then she heard it, too. Sirens.

  Without turning off the vehicle, she opened the driver’s door very slowly, never taking her eyes off Tulk. The sirens were louder now, nearer. Tulk turned to stare at her and then rolled onto his back, beaten, and covered his face with both his hands. She stepped out of the truck and jumped down to the ground. She walked in a wide circle around him as the police cruisers arrived, two of them. He was crying — bawling like a baby. She watched him, his body heaving. And something broke in her. The very last shred holding back her own welter of pain and loss, and she started crying, too. She leaned her hands on her knees and cried for all that was wrong with the foolishly optimistic idea of being alive.

  Beatrice D’Amato Northway sat in the back of one of the police cruisers. New experience after new experience. Rory Tulk sat in the back of the other, the only difference being that he was handcuffed. She doubted that this was a new experience for him. An ambulance had been called. Inspector Callista Stills had been called. She was en route. No one was going anywhere until she got there.

  The cops had allowed Bee to use the washroom in the farmhouse. One of them, a woman, accompanied her and waited. “Tanis Cowan,” she said, sticking out a hand to shake. Bee took it, amazed at how little strength she had left. The greeting didn’t impress Rory Tulk, who banged on his car-door window until one of the cops gave him the stink eye. “If you’ve got something that’ll stick to Rory, this’ll all be worthwhile,” said Constable Cowan.

  Bee was picking her way carefully in her bare feet. “Does everybody know everybody out here?” she asked.

  Cowan grinned. “Couldn’t say but we tend to know the baddies.”

  There was a small washroom in the front hall. Bee splashed her face and brushed her hair and found a headband in the bottom of her THEATER IS MY BAG bag and came out of the little room feeling almost human, the wreckage at the base of the stairs notwithstanding.

  “My keys!” she said.

  Cowan grabbed her as she made to pick up her car keys from the debris. “We’ll have to get the inspector’s okay on that,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Bee, a bit weirded out. “Can I at least get my shoes? They’re up on the landing.” She was about to pick her way through the pine and ceramic carnage, but Cowan wouldn’t let her go. “Sorry again, miss. Can’t have you contaminating the crime scene,” she said. Then she pulled a pen out of the breast pocket of her flak jacket and strung it through the handle of the pitcher with which Bee had clocked Rory Tulk. She picked it up, still intact, not even a chip out of it. “Are your prints likely to be on this thing?” she asked. Bee made a face, nodded. “Good, then hold it for me, will you?” Bee took the pitcher and waited in the hallway as the policewoman made her way up the narrow staircase. She came down a moment later with Bee’s flats and handed them to her.

  “What do I do with the pitcher?” said Bee.

  “Ah, just put it down. I figured giving you a chore was easier than putting you in cuffs.”

  “Really?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” She looked around. “Heard a lot about this place. Looks like Jilly’s been doing a number on it,” said Cowan. “Used to be a regular stop-off on OPP rounds.”

  “Really?” Bee looked around at the staid wallpaper, the framed prints of flowers on the wall, the cotton print curtains, the polished front door. There was a drop cloth at the back end of the hall, and paint things. It was a work in progress.

  “Jilly’s brother, Mervin. Mixed with some pretty bad types.”

  Bee said, “So did Jilly.”

  And Constable Cowan said, “You got that right.”

  They walked through the kitchen and started back toward the cruiser.

  “Jilly Green made some mistakes, but she’s always been one of the good ones,” said Cowan.

  “Did Mervin reform?”

  The constable shook her head. “Died in a fire few years back. Gang-related stuff.”

  Bee looked around. “Here?”

  Cowan scratched her head. “Not sure. You could ask Harry Cameron over there. He’d know. Some kind of raid.”

  But Cameron was on the radio again and Bee said it didn’t matter, so Cowan led her back to the cruiser. “Now that you’ve got your shoes, we can’t take any chances on you doing a runner,” said Cowan with a smirk. The flats were not the kind of thing you wore in any kind of footrace, but Bee wasn’t about to argue. Cowan apologized as she deposited her back in the police cruiser with doors you couldn’t open from the inside. A prison on wheels.

  “It’s okay,” said Bee. Truth was, she felt safe in the vehicle.

  Half an hour into the wait, Jilly arrived home with the baby. They wouldn’t let Bee out of the car to speak to her. Bee watched the woman, Cassie on her hip, fish her cell phone out of her handbag and phone someone. Rory started pounding on the back window of his cop car when he saw Jilly. She walked over to stare at him, her face filled with sadness, which only made him pound all the harder until Constable Cowan led Jilly away. Bee watched her say something to Cowan, who shook her head. Jilly turned to Bee and shrugged. Bee sat mutely, her hands in her lap, feeling guilty as hell for having brought such danger here. But Jilly’s eyes did not seem to judge her; they were filled with concern. Wait until she sees the wrecked antiques, thought Bee. Jilly waved with her fingertips as she left, and Cassie waved, too. Bee managed to wave back, although the energy it took to lift her arm surprised her. She watched them head toward the house and was rewarded with Jilly turning once again to blow her a kiss. Bee had so much to say to her, so much explaining and apologizing to do. And thanking. Meanwhile, Spinach leaped about his master and tried to tell her the brave part he had played in the adventure.

  It was three o’clock before a big brown unmarked car pulled into the yard, driven by Sergeant Bell with Inspector Stills riding shotgun. The ambulance had arrived and, under strict police guard, the attendants were dealing with the worst of Tulk’s injuries, which apparently included a broken arm that needed stabilizing. They bandaged up his face. There would be stitches needed.

  Bee wondered if Stills was making her wait. She had only glanced at Bee, her face expressionless, before speaking to the officers. At great length. Then she and Bell and Cowan and Cameron, who seemed to be the one in charge of the scene, headed toward the house. Bell glanced back and smiled at Bee, hunched his shoulders, his way of letting her know he was on her side, but what you gonna do, eh? At least that was what she hoped it meant. It might also have meant, Who knows how long it will be until we let you out? Maybe your time in the back of the cruiser could be time struck off your prison sentence for being an idiot.

  Finally, Stills came out of the house and headed toward Bee’s cruiser. One of the officers opened the door and the inspector stuck her head in. “If we let you out, are you going to take off?”

  Bee shook her head before realizing this was Stills’s idea of a joke. She climbed out and they walked across the yard away from the melee of vehicles parked every which way. A loud rumbling out in the field indicated a tractor heading home. That’s who Jilly must have phoned, Bee thought. She had never considered farmers with cell phones. Actually, she had never really thought about farmers at all — not since Old MacDonald in kindergarten. E-I-E-I-O.

  She was expecting a major dressing-down from Stills. She was expecting that somehow Stills would lay that obstruction-of-justice threat on her now, except it wouldn’t be a threat anymore, it would be a criminal charge. She wouldn’t argue. There had to be some price to pay for what she’d done today. She’d been lucky enough to avoid getting killed. Anything short of that seemed fair. She imagined finishing her last few months of high school in a cell. Well, at least she could study without distraction.

  But Stills didn�
��t waste time rebuking Bee. “We’ve got ourselves a serious problem,” she said. “There is all kinds of forensic evidence linking Kali O’Connor to Al McGeary’s apartment, but she lived there for a couple of years so that’s of no use to us in making a case. It remains to be seen, however, whether we’ve got even one tiny thread of evidence linking Tulk to the place. The apartment building has two CCTV cameras, one in the lobby, one in the back entrance. Neither of them is operational. Rolly Pouillard is not exactly the world’s best superintendent. So there’s no proof of Tulk entering the building at all.” She looked at Bee, her eyebrows raised. “You see where I’m going with this?” Bee nodded. “On top of that, the next-door neighbor who saw Donovan leave his dad’s apartment, not once but twice, did not see or hear anyone else enter or leave the apartment other than Rolly Pouillard.”

  “The neighbor was doing his laundry, wasn’t he?”

  “He was. But that doesn’t help us, right? A good lawyer could poke holes in any charge we might try to bring against O’Connor and Tulk.”

  “What about the paint chip?”

  Stills turned to Bell, who shook his head. “There wasn’t enough of it for the CSI wonks to determine the make.”

  “But the color —”

  “The chip had to be used up — emulsified — in order to do the chemical analysis, but we have accurate color photos of it that oughta give us something like a match.”

  Bee nodded. “Could you look at the truck’s bumper? See where the paint chip came from?” Bell’s look of incredulity was almost comical. His gaze wandered over to the vehicle in question and, following his gaze, Bee saw what a wreck the bumper was, mud stained and cracked in so many places. “Oh,” she said. Then she looked at Stills, examining her eyes, looking for a bright side to any of this.

  Stills seemed to read her mind. “We’ve sent officers to pick up Kali for questioning. Our one big hope is that, faced with all of what’s gone down today, she’ll crack. A confession would make things a lot easier.”

  Bee nodded. She thought of the woman she’d fought with earlier. How she had wrestled like a crazed dragon lady one moment and entreated Bee so pathetically the next. And there was that final vision of her when Bee stopped the car at the crossroad and looked back down the lane to Francesca’s End to see Kali sitting on the ground, beaten and hapless. A horrible thought occurred to her.

  “I hope she’s still alive when they get there,” she said.

  Stills looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

  Bee shook her head. “I don’t know what a person looks like before they try to off themselves, but when I last saw her . . .”

  Stills looked at Bell, who immediately got on his cell phone. He walked away from them, left them in an uneasy silence.

  “Hey,” said Stills. Her hand gently touched Bee’s arm. Bee looked at her. “You still think this is the line of work you want to get into?”

  Bee saw a glint in the detective’s eye. It was as much of a smile as she was going to get.

  Kali was alive when they found her. She was packing. She threw open the cottage door when she heard the cruiser arrive, expecting to see Tulk in his big red Sierra. That’s what Bee heard from the cops later. Apparently, Kali stared and stared at the police, hardly able to take in what the arresting officer was saying to her. She just dropped her suitcase and stood there on the threshold of the cottage.

  “What about Mrs. Billy?” Bee had asked.

  “Her alibi, you mean?” Stills had said. “Apparently, Kali shuffled her off to respite care at a local nursing home as soon as her usefulness was over.”

  That was the report Bee got from Stills, who had become a little friendlier of late. If her manner had hovered around freezing before, she was a few degrees warmer than that. But you’d still want to wear a muffler and gloves in her presence.

  On Monday, April the twenty-fifth, ten days after the tragic events at Allen Ian McGeary’s apartment and on Wilton Crescent, Kali broke. There had been long sessions with Stills. Stills sensed that Kali wanted to talk and only needed enough encouragement. Kali kept saying it wasn’t her fault, and Stills kept saying tell us your story, until finally she was ready to let it all out.

  Monday was also the first day Bee ventured back to school since that terrible rainy weekend. She thought she was ready for the kind of reception she was going to receive. There had been news over the weekend that the police had made arrests in the murder of both Donovan and his father. Names were named, so Bee thought she wasn’t going to have to suffer the stares and whisperings behind hands of those who assumed she had been dating a murderer/suicide victim. That’s what she thought anyway. She did get some of that; folks who didn’t keep up with the news or chose to ignore it because their own version of what happened was more interesting. She got the girl who burst into tears the moment she saw her, her sympathy like a tidal wave of emotion that threatened to submerge Bee. She got the classmates whose eyes she felt watching her, waiting for her to break down. She even saw one girl in English who had her cell phone in her palm the whole length of the class, ready to catch every tear when Bee did finally break. There was even one ghoul who came up to her at her locker and asked her if she’d seen Donovan’s body after the accident.

  There were those people, yes, and then there were the ones who nodded at her as they passed and said with their eyes that they were thinking of her but expected nothing from her. And there were friends who ran interference for her, a girl she hardly knew from her geography class who had copied out everything she’d missed and only wanted to give it to her, no strings, no gossip. It was a long day, but she managed to get through it, exhausted but relatively unscathed.

  And there were Daisy and Max and Jen, the best friends a girl ever had. And there were her parents. It would be all right. And it would never be right.

  So it was a surprise to answer the doorbell not half an hour after getting home that first Monday back at school and find Inspector Stills standing there.

  “She talked.” That was all Stills had to say for Bee to open the door wide and invite her in. They sat in the kitchen, where Bee had just made herself some cinnamon toast. Stills passed on the cinnamon toast but accepted the offer of a coffee. “Do you want anyone to be here?” she asked. “Your mom or dad?” Bee sat across from her and shook her head, wondering if Stills was about to read her her rights.

  “What happened?”

  Stills began.

  Kali had phoned Al to let him know she was coming sometime early in the evening of April fifteenth to pick up the last of her things. She’d hinted it would be best if he were out; she promised to leave her key. It was worth a try, but she wasn’t surprised to find him there. She was, however, surprised to see him sitting in the middle of what looked like a minor explosion. He was well into a bottle of Jim Beam, but not so much that he couldn’t recount with some amusement the scene that had produced the broken glass and pottery and popcorn that surrounded his corner of the homely apartment.

  “What’d you say to him?” Kali had asked when he told her about Donovan going off like that with a baseball bat. “Now why would you think I had to say anything to set him off?” Al had asked. And she said, “Because it’s what you do, Al. It’s all that’s left of the famous wit with which you used to write newspaper columns. This is you at your wit’s end.”

  Bee started. “Kali said that?”

  “Pretty well word for word,” Stills said. “Seems that one of the things that drew her to McGeary in the first place was that she had dreams of becoming a writer herself. Anyway, he tried to get her going, but she was not interested. She was beyond caring is how she put it.

  “She hadn’t left much behind in the place, but there was one big item, a flat-screen TV in the master bedroom, that was hers. She undid the connections and then phoned down to Rory on her cell. He was waiting in the driveway out front of the apartment building. She warned him, ‘Don’t get into it with him, okay? Don’t let him rag you.’ Rory said
he was good. He just wanted out of there. But I guess as soon as he arrived, Al started in.

  “‘If it isn’t the old cuckold himself,’ Al said the minute Rory came through the door. Kali figured Rory had no idea what a cuckold was, but he didn’t like the sound of it and he recognized the tone well enough. But he was as good as his word. He sloughed it off and went to get the TV. Al kept up the verbal hounding the whole time. Just sitting there in his chair, ‘like an invalid king’— that’s what she called him. But I guess Al saved the best for when Rory came out of the bedroom laden down with the television.

  “‘Well, off you two lovebirds go,’ Al said. ‘And Kali, I truly hope you have better luck with him than Jilly did. Major problems in the sack, is what she told me.’ Kali had her hand on Rory’s arm. ‘Don’t listen,’ she told him. ‘He’s a drunken bum. He’s nobody.’ She tried to hustle Rory out the door, which she said wasn’t easy when he was carrying a flat screen. And then Al says, ‘My oh my, Jilly, she had some great stories to tell about your sexual impotence, Rory Tulk.’ Kali said Rory’s face was getting redder and she could feel the anger just buzzing in his body, but she almost had him out the door when Al delivered the coup de grâce: ‘Which is why Jilly was so amazed to find herself pregnant.’”

  “What?” said Bee.

  Stills nodded. “That’s what he said, according to Kali.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Was what true — Kali’s statement, or that Jilly was impregnated by Rory Tulk?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Bee that Kali might have made up her story. “The getting-pregnant part.”