The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  Denise suggested stopping for groceries on our way to her place. “After all, if we’re under siege, we don’t want to be running out of muesli.” Maybe it was a reaction to the stress we were under, or just the word “muesli,” but I got a fit of the giggles as we entered the grocery store’s gaping doors. I was dabbing at my eyes with a fuzzy tissue from my pocket and walked right into someone coming out the other way.

  “Excuse me.” I heard exasperation and annoyance in the voice. “Randy?” I cleared my eyes and looked directly into the face of Taryn Creighton.

  “Taryn! I am so sorry. I really need to look where I’m going, because I’m not that coordinated even when I am operating on all cylinders. Are you okay?”

  “No worries. I wasn’t watching oncoming traffic either. Hello.” She spoke with her head cocked to one side and I recalled my manners.

  “Taryn, this is Denise. Denise Wolff, Taryn Creighton. Taryn and I met in a research methodologies class back in our first year of grad studies.”

  Denise smiled and gave a small salute, since Taryn’s hands full of bags meant shaking hands was a no go. “I recall that class as being the only thing that got me through my bibliography.”

  “Yes, it was good for that,” Taryn nodded. “And you’re the Shakespeare specialist now, correct?”

  Denise nodded and I jumped in. “Taryn is the artistic director of Black Box, and teaches scene work over at Grant MacEwan, too.”

  “Right. I have seen your work and really enjoyed it,” Denise chimed in.

  Taryn smiled awkwardly, the way you do when you have a hard time receiving compliments. “Well, there’s ice cream at the bottom of one of these, so I should be going. Nice to see you, Randy, and to meet you, Denise.”

  We waved as she left, and Denise said, “We should have mentioned my application to her, too.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, but how do you just fit that into a conversation without being too obvious?”

  Denise was putting apples into a plastic bag after examining each one to be sure it would be a perfect prop for a remake of Snow White. “I know.”

  “Oh well, she’s bound to hear about it pretty quickly, as networked into the theatre scene as she is. She already knew who you were.”

  “This is a small town posing as a big city. Everyone has heard of everyone.”

  “Ha, even the city is an actor. I wonder if Edmonton would like to direct someday.”

  We tried to stave off the tension by shopping as if we were planning an extended slumber party, which I guess we were. Over a base of good-for-you stuff, like apples, bananas, grapes, a large yam, and a bag of broccoli went a tray of croissants, a bag of cheese pretzels, two tubes of liverwurst, three bags of rice cakes, a block of cheddar and a small wheel of brie, a carton of orange juice, a dozen eggs, two tubs of greek yoghurt with honey, a frozen lasagna and, indeed, a box of muesli.

  “That should do us for a bit.” Denise smiled at our purchases piled on the conveyor belt. I offered to help pay, but she refused to let me on the grounds that as it stood, she was the more likely to have steady work in the fall. That sort of hurt. After all, for all we knew, she was going to be locked away wearing an orange jumpsuit this fall, and she still had better likelihood of employment. I really had to get cracking on finding a full-time gig, preferably one with benefits and a pension.

  At any rate, I could help schlep things to the car, so I loaded up with bags on the end of either arm, leaving Denise just the bag with eggs and pastries. We drove west out of the parking lot towards Belgravia, the genteel neighbourhood in which Denise had purchased a condo on the day she received tenure.

  Belgravia was just south of the university’s west end, and as such, it was filled with overflow professors who couldn’t find a house in Windsor Park. It bordered the river valley on one end and the LRT on the other, and ended at the erstwhile University Farm, which was now turning into South Campus. The folks of Belgravia had attempted to prevent the LRT from coming so close to their neighbourhood, either because it would bring riff-raff to their streets or lure their children downtown to dens of iniquity, but instead it just increased the value of their properties, which was just as well, because it became very inconvenient for them to enter or exit their neighbourhood. Still, with a mix of single properties, high-level condos, one elementary school, and a church tucked in among mature trees and landscaped gardens, it seemed like a very restful place to come home to.

  Denise’s condo was along a curvy road that wound its way through the north part of the neighbourhood. While it looked like a classy four-storey walk up from the front, it was actually a series of fourplexes with underground parking. Each unit was made up of two storeys with a central staircase and an elevator from the parkade. Denise had the top two floors on the west end of the line, giving her kitchen a tree-house effect from its window. From her bedroom on the upper floor she could see over the treetops all the way to the river valley, which curved south at that point before heading west again past Fort Edmonton and further toward Devon, and southwesterly on towards Abraham Lake and its source.

  I sat at her breakfast bar while she unpacked our siege supplies, twirling lazily between her southern view from the living room, all dappled sunlight through leaves mixed with a prism or two she had hung in the window, and her kitchen view to the west.

  “This really is a lovely home you have made here.”

  “Thank you, Randy. I know it’s not as funky bohemian as yours, but I find it so peaceful. ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,’ as Willie would say. Even in the winter, it feels like a bower in here, because those spruce trees across the way are so rich and green against all the white.”

  “And I like the fact that you’re up off the main floor. We can sit here safely and not be surprised by whoever comes looking for you.”

  “Oh, it’s a very secure building. I do feel very safe here.”

  “Good. Because we’ve already started the ball rolling. If we’re correct, a murderer is going to come looking for you.”

  “What if we’re wrong, though? Won’t my declaring I want the job of artistic director suddenly give the police the motive they were missing for all the crimes they are considering me for?”

  I stopped and looked at her. “Oh god. You think? No, they wouldn’t think that because you will have me to tell them it was my idea.”

  “And you think they’ll believe you all of a sudden about that when they haven’t given your other testimonials as to my character all that much credence? I don’t know, Randy,” Denise leaned her face on her hands, looking pensive and tense, “this may have not been such a good idea.”

  “Okay, you tell me what to do and I will do it. Either we continue as we’ve been going, and I send out a couple of emails about how you’ve applied for this job, and isn’t it exciting, or we send a couple of quickie emails to people like Louise to say that it was all a joke or performance art or something, and you didn’t mean it, and we sit here and eat all the croissants.”

  “Oh, I think we should have a girls’ night anyhow, and what the heck. Let’s leave what we’ve done so far and not push it any further. I’ve put in the application, we’ve told a couple of people; let’s see how efficient the machine really is. I should get a few phone calls in the next day or so to confirm the rumours. We can take it from there. God knows nothing else is happening to get me off the hook.”

  I got out my laptop and sent a quick email to Steve, giving him the gist of what we were doing, just to avoid the scenario that Denise had painted of adding grist to the police theories that she was their culprit. I then posted a couple of messages into the social networking ether, saying how proud I was of my friend Denise and her decision to tackle new challenges. We figured that coy messages like that would add fuel to whatever curiosity there might be out there, and that gossip from Louise would likely end up with more traction as a result.

  It wasn’t as if I had all that many followers, but most of the folks from
the summer’s adventure in Shakespeare were on my list, as well as a select few from academe with crossovers. Linda from the Black Widows must have been online simultaneously to my post, because she obligingly retweeted it to her thousand-plus followers with a YGG, meaning, I hoped, You Go, Girl, not the airport code for an aerodrome on Saltspring Island.

  So it was out there, the rumour. And we were in here. And now all we needed to do was wait.

  38.

  Although the sun set earlier every day in August, in Edmonton that still factored out to being light out until around 9:45 p.m., and the long exposure of sunshine seemed to make the day stretch out very long and languorous. Denise and I busied ourselves cutting up the fruit we’d bought into bite-sized pieces and creating a fabulous salad onto which we dolloped Greek yoghurt. Eating out of serving bowls, we sat on her expansive leather sofa and watched several episodes of Gilmore Girls, Denise’s secret vice. I had never seen the program, so while the loquacious single mother and her precocious daughter drank coffee and nattered sixteen to the dozen, Denise was keeping up a running commentary about who was in love with whom, why Rory’s friend couldn’t tell her mother she was playing in a band, the original pact of Friday night dinners Lorelei had agreed to in order to have her snarky parents pay for her daughter’s education, and that Kurt was really quite a comic genius.

  I was meanwhile falling in love with the magical town the show was set in and wishing for a world where everyone could find a job that would keep them in glorious veranda-clad Victorian houses and surrounded by eccentric but loyal friends. It seemed like a dream come true, and I could understand why Denise would be so taken with it. All of the mother’s former loves still seemed to be pleasant and friendly, which was how Denise’s world worked, too. It made me wonder what Denise’s relationship with her family was like.

  Since it seemed to take her mind off being the focus of both a police investigation and a murderer’s target, I let her play video historian, showing me one or two episodes of each season, explaining jumps in the situation for the two lead characters, which seemed to change only in terms of Rory’s school levels. We opened a bottle of wine, pulled out the cheese and rice cakes, and were well into season four by the time we noticed the sun had set. We had nothing to do the next day except watch more television, so we decided to call it a night.

  Denise cleared away the evidence of our feasting and I helped her load her dishwasher. By eleven, we were both brushed and flossed and tucked in bed. Somehow, it seemed safer not to close the bedroom doors. Even though I couldn’t see Denise from my vantage in her guest bedroom, I could hear her clearly as she called “Good night, Randy.”

  I was pretty sure that even by Edmonton rumour-mill standards, one day was too short a time for anything much to get going, so I was pretty easy about going to sleep. That thought, along with the amazingly comfortable pillows Denise had invested in for her guests, put me out pretty quickly. Or maybe it was the wine. Anyhow, I didn’t recall tossing about much before I didn’t recall anything.

  When the noise came, it took me a minute or two to get my bearings.

  The alarm clock wasn’t in the right place for my instinctive check, and as I searched the room for a digitized light, I realized I wasn’t at home in my bed. The cylinders spun into place; at the same moment I figured out I was in Denise’s guest room, I read on the bedside clock that it was 3:04 a.m.

  The lump in my stomach made me certain that whatever sound had woken me was real. I slid out of bed as noiselessly as possible, thanking Denise’s keen foresight to have thick carpeting on the second floor of her condo.

  As I reached the door of my bedroom, so did Denise. I could see her clearly, thanks to the nightlight plugged into a low outlet in the hall. Looking willowy and anachronistically Victorian in a long, white cotton nightgown, she had a finger to her lips and was pointing downstairs. She had her cellphone in the other hand, clicking it to silent. She handed it to me, and mouthed “Steve.” I nodded, input his number into her contacts, and began to text him, letting him know the basics, that we were in Denise’s condo and had heard a noise downstairs, and the address.

  Craning for another sound, we stood at the top of the stairs, as I shielded the gleam of the cellphone’s face so as not to give away our presence. Steve texted back almost immediately, making me thankful for the first time that my boyfriend was such a light sleeper.

  “Lock yourselves in Denise’s ensuite NOW.” I showed her the text, and she nodded and led me back across the hall and into the bathroom that lay beyond her walk-through closet. She closed and locked the door as quietly as possible and then, for good measure, reached over to pull a towel off the rack and place it at the bottom of the door before turning on the light.

  I texted Steve back. “We are in the bathroom. Now what?”

  “Now you wait till we get there.”

  I held the phone for Denise to read and she nodded. We didn’t talk; we barely moved. I looked around surreptitiously for anything we could use as a weapon against an attack, but aside from a decorative plunger and a metal rod that held back-up toilet rolls, there wasn’t much. I pointed at them both, and Denise grimly smiled as she removed the rolls and stacked them on the toilet tank. She handed me the plunger, which was chrome-handled and looked as if it had never been used for the purpose for which it had been bought. She gripped the toilet roll holder, and the two of us stood there in silence, wondering what sort of person was creeping about on the floor below, whether they’d managed to climb the stairs without our hearing, and whether even now they were on the other side of the door to our crowded little sanctuary.

  Denise’s phone lit up again. Steve was texting to find out if there was a silent way to get into the condo. His universal fob could get him into the front door or the car park, apparently.

  Denise quickly texted him back with the information that a spare key to the condo was in a magnetized box under the back bumper of her little cream Volkswagen Bug. Somehow, just knowing Steve was in the building made us feel better. Even though we stood there gripping hands and listening quietly, neither of us seemed quite as tense as we had been just moments earlier.

  All of a sudden, a great many noises seemed to happen at once, so that it was hard later to figure out what had happened first and what next. We heard sirens coming down the street, a strange popping noise, and then a knock on the bathroom door followed by Steve’s voice saying, “Randy? Denise? You can unlock the door, it’s me, Steve.”

  We opened the door to find him standing there in his leather jacket with a pyjama top tucked into his jeans. The lights were on in Denise’s bedroom and in the hall beyond. What was most odd was that the drapes along one side of the bedroom window seemed to have been sucked out through the open hole, and the screen was leaning against the wall below. We were four floors up. Surely no one had left through that window.

  Most frightening was that whether or not he had left that way, someone had disarranged Denise’s window treatment, meaning whoever had been in the condo had indeed been right outside the bathroom door. If they hadn’t disturbed our sleep with the original noise, they’d have made it right up to her bedside undetected.

  That thought must have occurred to Denise at the same moment, because she sank on to the cedar chest at the end of her bed, still clutching the toilet roll holder. The sirens had stopped, though flashing red and blue and white lights were coming in the window.

  Jennifer Gladue entered the bedroom. Idly, I wondered how many people were in Denise’s condo at the moment. Steve left my side, after squeezing my shoulders, to confer with her. I edged over to sit with Denise.

  After several minutes, both of them came to talk to us. Diplomatically, they crouched down to speak at our level. One good thing had come from this scare, I thought. The police were treating Denise as a victim rather than a suspect now.

  “There is a bit of a mess downstairs, but nothing that can’t be put right. Thing is, we’d like the scene of crime folks to come and g
ive it a lookover, and they’re on their way. I know it’s late, but how would you like to get dressed and come down to let them know what is the same and what looks different to you?” Steve sounded as gentle as if he was speaking to a child, and I wondered just how spooked we appeared.

  Denise nodded, and while I went with Steve to the guest room, Jennifer Gladue offered to stand guard while Denise changed, because no one could touch a doorknob to close the doors till the fingerprint guys came with their messy powder.

  Pretty soon we were all downstairs and Denise was making coffee for a collection of people, including two very taciturn scene-of-crime people who were most interested in the French doors to Denise’s balcony.

  “So we thought it would create enough flux to draw out the murderer if I announced I was in the running for the artistic directorship,” Denise explained to Jennifer Gladue, who was stirring sugar into her coffee at the breakfast bar next to Iain McCorquodale, who was drinking his black and disapprovingly. Steve was leaning against the stainless steel range, smiling slightly in the way he had when he was being particularly indulgent.

  “Let me guess, this was Randy’s idea, right?”

  I glowered at him. “Well, it seems to have worked, hasn’t it?”

  “It almost worked too well, don’t you think? You two came within a hair’s breath of being victims four and five.”

  “Or five and six,” I countered.

  “What?”

  “She thinks Oren Gentry, the former artistic director, was the first victim,” Jennifer Gladue offered. Steve’s head swivelled over to her.