by Mark Lisac
“What do you know about this?” Asher said. “Anything to start with?”
Ryan eased himself away from the fireplace. He held out a file card with a name and address.
“Here’s what we have. Apson was acting more and more erratically in the last several weeks before he died. Secretive, too. His wife had left him but as far as we know she hadn’t started a formal separation or divorce. She’s still living in Barnsdale. You can find her here, at this address.”
He handed the card to Asher and went on: “She wasn’t just fed up with him. It was more than that. A friend of hers in the local office says she was looking on edge. For about the last month before he was killed. The accident calmed her down. Her husband died and she felt better. That tells you everything you need to know about her and about their marriage. Now she’s apparently looking nervous again. Maybe it’s occurred to her that other people can get hit by trucks.”
Asher looked up from the file card. “Turlock was acting on his own. People don’t pull an idiot stunt like that if they’re part of a conspiracy.”
“It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. It could be different people after the same thing for their own ends. That leads to the same result for us.”
Karamanlis said, “What about it, Harry? You almost dug up some grade-A museum pieces for me. You willing to dig up whatever or whoever sent Turlock over the edge? Or is the prospect of maybe dealing with a real live person too scary?”
“Save the jokes, Jimmy. They don’t bother me. And save the amateur psychology for the voters. Live people aren’t any more scary than dead ones. They’re just more unpredictable. I like certainty.”
“Nothing much certain in life, Harry.”
“Then I’ll take good odds.”
Asher walked out of the building through the main rotunda, listening to the silence echoing off the marble walls. He breathed in the earth smell of the turned-over garden plots as he strode toward his car.
Everything was quiet. He liked it that way. He wondered why that was never enough.
3
THE TOWN LAY TWO AND A HALF HOURS SOUTH OF THE capital. Asher had taken the distance at just over the speed limit, knowing the cops’ interest in any vehicles that looked like their owners had delusions of being hot drivers.
The sun was low enough at this time of year that he had to pull down the visor and wear his dark driving glasses. He had driven without them for a few minutes to enjoy the full effect of the pre-winter light.
The sun was a welder’s-arc white. It looked like a superheated hole in the sky. It bored through the mist and scattered clouds that tempered the white heat and created an effect like a frosted window. Asher enjoyed that condition of light. It looked like a painting in the sky. He preferred his art there, not on the walls of his condo.
He turned onto the exit ramp and drove west another two minutes across a nearly bare landscape. The wheat and barley had been cut to dull brown stubble. The farm fields extended to the first fences at the edge of town. Every row of seed the farmers could plant each spring was money.
Some businesses and a school had sprung up on the east side of the rail tracks, but most of the town remained on the west. A steady bustle of half- and three-quarter-ton trucks mingled with the occasional large sedan on Railway Avenue.
Asher watched the busy commercial life slide past his window. The parking lots at the fast-food places were full. There was still a Chinese restaurant near where the old grain elevators had stood. They had been torn down and replaced years ago by the terminal back up the highway. He heard the whine and pop of a machine taking a summer tire off a rim at the Finley Tire and Alignment shop, saw the mechanic wielding a long iron bar.
The nut store, florist shop, and “natural healing” centre all had vehicles parked in front of them. He wondered if the ceaseless small commerce merely filled obscure wants or if it offered more. Maybe all the specialized stores, each with an owner or hired clerk on hand and willing to talk, provided human contact that balanced the vastness of the surrounding sky and earth.
There was a cappuccino shop too. They had started appearing in all these towns. They looked incongruous amid the older businesses. They reflected both the urge to look current and the tastes of the nearby acreage owners who drove an hour or more back and forth to the oil and gas company office towers every weekday.
The sign over the door read The Happy Grind. Asher thought it could as easily have been named the Last Chance Café. He knew the railway track was a boundary. Anyone going west out of town would not see a single reflection of urban life. The land would become increasingly wooded and hilly. Gas wells would dot the fields in regular patterns. The trucks would look more weather-beaten — or, if newer, more splattered with mud. The ditch perimeter by the highway would be creased by all-terrain vehicle tracks. The resort-like log homes and acreages with horse corrals would give way to faded old farmsteads. Some of those would house old folks resisting the pull of the local seniors’ homes for as long as they could get by. Others were occupied by men with scraggly beards and blank faces. Some of those men ran cleverly hidden marijuana grow-ops. Some also had toolsheds where vehicles were unaccountably transformed or broken down into parts. It was a country of beauty and lawlessness.
Asher stayed in the town’s cocoon of simulated civilization. He parked on Railway Avenue to avoid making an unpredictable impression with his Jaguar when he got to the house. He passed a hairdresser’s shop and rounded the corner onto 4th Street.
The house was a 1950s bungalow sided half with stucco and half with wood that needed scraping and repainting. He rang the doorbell and a woman in a yellow cardigan opened it.
“Mrs. Apson?” Asher said.
“Yes. Are you Harry Asher?”
“Yes. May I come in?”
She appeared to consider a last-minute change of mind but invited him to step inside. He followed her into the living room. She motioned him to an old floral couch and paused for another couple of seconds before sitting down in the matching chair that faced it. She didn’t offer a drink. Nor had she asked him to use her first name.
Asher looked at her face and slightly tousled hair, mouse-brown with light streaks worked into it. She was wearing just enough makeup to keep up the professional appearance expected of a teacher. Two lines furrowed down the middle of her forehead to the top of her glasses but she maintained a self-possessed posture, back straight. The sweater was tight around her waist. Her waist was no longer youthfully narrow; but it was not spreading out as if to say she no longer cared what it looked like.
Asher did not see any striking lines in her face, or anything he would immediately think of if he had to describe her to someone. Her colour had a slightly washed-out paleness. Her lips may once have looked fuller. Their effect was starting to be cancelled by the lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked uncannily attractive one moment and plain the next. She had an impassive gaze rather than a searching one, her eyes empty but not entirely dead, not entirely without a flicker of curiosity and warmth.
Asher felt he had difficulty grasping her presence. She could almost be whatever he wanted to see in her. Yet he saw enough to suspect she had been the steadying support in the marriage. When she left him, Apson would have started wobbling even more than he already had. The instability he had already shown would have been one of the things that had driven her away.
“As I told you on the phone, Mrs. Apson, I’m investigating what led to your husband’s murder. The police did their job. The court did its job. Turlock will be put away with a sentence that, at his age, will amount to life. That’s the extent of their interest. The premier wants to understand everything that happened. We think there must be more informatio
n that hasn’t come out.”
“There’s always more,” she said. “Whether it’s relevant is another question. Why would I help a politician whose motives aren’t clear to me? Why would I put myself in jeopardy to satisfy someone else’s curiosity?”
“Why do you say jeopardy? Victor Turlock killed your husband. He’s in prison and he’s going to stay there.”
“Do you understand why he killed my husband? I don’t. I know only what John let slip in the months before we separated. It had nothing to do with Turlock personally. And if it involved more people, people I don’t even know about, then there’s danger.”
“What sort of people?”
“I just told you. I don’t know. But I do know John became more and more obsessive about tracking down whatever he was chasing. And towards the end, he became more and more worried. He was always a worrier — prone to getting simple things tangled in details that were extraneous or even the products of his imagination. This time he may have had legitimate cause.”
“Why don’t we start from the beginning? What’s the first thing you can remember about this whole business?”
She took another moment to consider. She looked him square in the eyes, then plunged ahead looking down at his chest, as if she wanted to talk to herself and not be distracted by Asher.
“I couldn’t put a date on it. He may have been working on something for months. Sometime in the summer of last year, or early last fall, he began spending many evenings away from home. Sometimes in his office, sometimes somewhere else. He wouldn’t tell me where.”
She looked out the window as if trying to find where her husband had gone. She turned back to face Asher, her eyes flickering over his face and chest and hands as if she were trying to measure his character.
“When I finally got him to talk about what he was doing — to the extent he would talk — he said I’d be better off not knowing. He said he thought he had seen a car following him. I told him he was imagining things even more than usual. It became a huge strain. He accused me of never believing in him. I suppose that was partially true. It’s difficult to believe in someone’s neuroses.”
“Did he mention anything about the car, or the driver?”
“I remember he made a point of it looking neutral. A small SUV. Silver coloured, with two men inside. Never close enough to be obviously following him, but appearing out of nowhere in town and on highways.”
“And he never talked to the police about this?”
Her voice became more definite. “Certainly not. John was an accountant. He used to say life was like accounting. Books should never be presented until they were complete.”
“Did he say why he thought someone would be following him?”
“He never offered a theory about who it might be. But he did say once it was politics, not business. And twice he used a strange phrase — ‘Mary’s little lamb.’ ”
“Mary’s little lamb? Like the children’s rhyme, or fairytale?”
She looked straight at his face again. “Children’s rhyme would be the accurate description, Mr. Asher. I don’t care for the insinuation.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Apson. I’m trying to understand.”
“So am I, Mr. Asher. Children’s rhymes and fairytales are not innocuous. Neither of them. They are blood-and-guts affairs. Nightmares, some of them.”
“Understood. Was there anything else? Anything else at all?”
“I’ve been going over and over it. Those are the only hard facts I can remember. The cars, the reference to the children’s rhyme. The rest was John’s behaviour. He had a nervous smile when he talked about things that bothered him. That habit often seemed like his main reaction to the world. It was definitely his main reaction whenever I tried to ask about what was bothering him last year. When he got that look on his face it was as if he was appealing to me to see what he saw, to share his view of the world. I could never do it.”
She paused for a moment.
“His nerves kept getting worse. He began worrying about the doors and windows. He put a more secure lock on our front door and did the same at his office. He would look up and down the street before he walked onto the sidewalk or pulled out of the driveway. Suppers became drenched in a silent tension. But as much as he tried to appeal to me with that nervous smile, he would never explain what it was I was supposed to understand. It came down to trust, I suppose. Eventually, I moved here to my brother’s house.”
“How did he react to that?”
“He became even more erratic. He telephoned a few times. It was very unpleasant. At times he bordered on being incomprehensible. He said he was alone in the world and needed support. Yet a few times he said it might be better for me to be away from him and not involved.”
“Involved? Did he say in what?”
“No. By that time, it was clear there was only one subject in his mind. He was trying to find out more about it and was sure someone was watching him. Seven weeks after I left, the police came to the door and told me he was dead. I didn’t blame myself. I did wonder if I could have helped somehow if I had stayed, perhaps prevented what happened.”
“You know there’s no telling.”
“No, there isn’t. Now I worry more that John’s death may not have been the end of it. Some people think husbands and wives share everything they know. John would never share until he was sure.”
“What was his relationship with Turlock?”
“Purely a formal one. I assume you know he was treasurer of Turlock’s constituency association for the last four years. He said he was happy enough handling money for the local party association, but couldn’t bring himself to be the chief financial officer in the last election campaign or even to be a fundraiser for it. He was there basically to keep an eye on Turlock and to help prepare the way for another candidate someday.”
“Could Turlock have thought your husband was trying to end his career? Either through a nomination challenge or by digging up some kind of dirt?”
She stiffened at that question. Her voice turned drier and harder for a moment.
“My husband did not dig up dirt, Mr. Asher. He was called a certified accountant, but he was really a clerk. He sorted and allocated facts. He never weighed the emotional significance of those facts. He simply put them on the books. If they were dangerous, he would not know that until he saw the reaction. That’s what got him killed.”
“And you don’t know what he was looking at? Who he was talking to?”
“There was one thing. I can’t speak to its significance. I suppose I can’t even assure you that I haven’t imagined it. He spent a couple of days at the library going through back files of the local weekly newspaper. I mean, back decades. Once we were visiting up north and he went to the library in the Legislature Building. He told me he wanted to check some archived files from another weekly. And I think last summer he drove over more than once to Rosemont, or the Rosemont area. I know he mentioned the Badlands and the birds nesting on the riverbank after one of those trips. He was gone about the right length of time for a ninety-minute drive.”
The front door latch clicked and the door swung open as she finished speaking. Asher looked over and saw blue overalls with the Finley Tire and Alignment logo on the left side of the chest. The face above the overalls was marked by a scar that started in the middle of the right cheek and extended to the ear. A small chunk of ear was missing. The owner didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about a stranger’s presence in the house either. He said nothing and looked straight at Asher, more amused than curious.
“Hello, Gordon,” Mrs. Apson said. “This is Mr. Asher, whom I
told you about. Mr. Asher, my brother Gordon. This is his house.”
Of course it is, thought Asher. That’s why John Apson is not here — not even a photograph to display the memory of his horn-rimmed glasses and crooked, perpetually worried grin.
“Mr. Finley. Your sister has been telling me she’s worried. Have you seen any reason to think there’s any sort of threat to her?”
“No.” He let the word hang for a second, then said, “Have you?” He walked into the room without offering to shake hands.
“No. I’d be recommending preventive measures if I thought that. But it would be a good idea if you or Mrs. Apson let me know about anything unusual happening here.”
“Unusual is pretty much stock in trade for small towns in the west country.”
“So I gather. I take it you’re not particularly worried about anything.”
“Not particularly. The tire business is steady. My lunch is in the fridge.”
Mrs. Apson spoke up again. “Gordon has always taken things in stride. He was a sniper in Afghanistan.” She said it flatly. Asher wasn’t sure whether he caught a hint of sibling pride or of faint distaste.
Asher and Finley kept looking at each other’s eyes. Asher said, “Do you have any weapons here?”
“You a government inspector as well as a lawyer?”
“Just trying to get a sense of the place. I like to know where things are.”
