A Chill Rain in January (23 page)

“Yes, I did.” She looked off into space, figuring something. “I believe it was just one week ago,” she said.

“Are the people who're looking for you—are they mad at you?”

“I don't think so. I think they're probably just worried about me.”

Kenny nodded. “Yeah. My dad, he'd've worried, if I'd've run away.” He hugged the gym bag tight. “He died, though.”

“Who, your dad?”

Kenny nodded.

“That's terrible,” said the old lady.

Kenny heard in the distance a quick crunching noise. He looked into the fog, straining to see. Oh please God help me, he said inside his head, and he dropped the gym bag onto the ground and fumbled with the zipper. “Here,” he said to the old lady, thrusting the brown envelope toward her. “Oh please hide this. Please hide it.”

The old lady took the brown envelope from his outstretched hand. She looked puzzled, and started to say something, but then he could see in her face that she was hearing the crunching noise too, and she didn't speak, she listened, hard. The noise was getting a lot louder…and then suddenly his Aunt Zoe emerged out of the whiteness with fear on her face that turned to relief, and then anger, when she saw him.

“What do you think you're doing?” she said to him in a furious whisper, as though she didn't want to talk loudly in the fog.

He looked quickly at the old lady; but she wasn't there anymore.

“Where do you think you're going?” said his aunt, taking him by the arm.

He wondered if she'd been there at all.

His Aunt Zoe propelled him around and back up the driveway, towards the house. Kenny looked backward over his shoulder but he couldn't see the old lady, he couldn't see anything but the swirling fog.

A
LBERG
woke early Wednesday morning. He lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom. It was still dark outside, and he could see only dimly. The cats were sleeping at the end of his bed, entwined like lovers. Alberg lay quietly, shuffling his thoughts, trying to make sense of them.

“Sure,” Gillingham had said. “A wine bottle could've done it. Either one. The head wound. The bruise on the stomach. But so could a lot of other things, much as I hate to tell you this yet again. Including, as you yourself pointed out, falling down the damn stairs.”

It was pure bad luck that the fall had killed him, thought Alberg. He might easily have just broken a leg, or an arm—or nothing at all. As a method of committing murder, shoving somebody down the stairs left a great deal to be desired.

But if it was an accident, why had she lied about the wine bottle?

All right, he thought. Say she did it. How did she do it?

Her brother's standing at the top of the stairs. He's going to go down to get the wine. He says something, who knows what, that makes her mad; she loses her cool and heaves him down. Unluckily for her, he dies. She decides to pretend it was an accident. Which it almost was, thought Alberg, if in fact that's the way it happened.

Or: She planned it out. Lured him to her house, bopped him on the head with the wine bottle, then threw him down the stairs to make it look like an accident.

But why, for Christ's sake?

Alberg sat up in bed. He rubbed his scalp vigorously. No bloody way he could ever prove anything, if he hadn't decided what to believe himself.

And what's all this speculation got to do with the boy? With her anger toward the boy, and his apparent fear of her?

“I need more information,” he muttered. He peered at his bedside clock. Six-thirty. Eight-thirty in Winnipeg. He reached for the phone.

He'd tried several times the previous evening to call Kenny's grandparents, but the line was continually busy. This morning, though, he got through.

It turned out that they already knew about Benjamin Strachan's death. Strachan's lawyer, who'd gotten the news from Zoe, had called them Monday afternoon.

“He told us Kenny's with his aunt,” said Peter Quenneville. “Of course we want to talk to him. But the phone company keeps on telling me she doesn't have a phone, if you can believe that. I was just getting to my wits' end, here. I was just getting it in my head to call you people, as a matter of fact.”

“He's okay,” said Alberg. “But I know he'd like to talk to you. I'll tell Miss Strachan to get him to a phone this afternoon.”

“We're coming out there,” said Kenny's grandfather. “The wife won't fly. We'll get the train out of here tomorrow; it'll land us in Vancouver Saturday, supposedly at ten in the morning, but it's always late. So hold off on the funeral till then, will you? And listen,” he said, not waiting for a reply. “Tell Kenny not to worry, his granddad's on his way. Tell him that.”

Alberg imagined him tall and sturdy, with a straight back and a lot of thick white hair. “I'll tell him, Mr. Quenneville. By the way. Have you ever met Zoe Strachan?”

“Never,” said Peter Quenneville. “Never met her. Why? What's she like?”

Alberg hesitated. “Cold,” he said finally. “She's…cold.”

“It figures. It figures. Goddammit. Isn't there somebody else Kenny can stay with? Until we get there?”

“Maybe,” said Alberg, reaching for his notepad and pen, which were on his night table. “I'll see what I can do. Meanwhile, can you give me the name of the lawyer who called you? And his number?”

Kenny's grandfather did so.

“Thanks,” said Alberg. “What can you tell me about the boy's aunt, Mr. Quenneville? Did Benjamin ever talk about her?” He started drawing a picture of a train in his notebook.

“Not much, Mr. Alberg.” He sighed, and Alberg heard a squeaking sound, probably as Peter Quenneville sat down. Alberg figured he was talking from the kitchen of his house. His wife would be nearby, listening worriedly. “I liked Benjamin, you know. But he was woolly-headed, a bit of a dreamer; he had a hard time holding a job. Lorraine came into some money when her grandfather died—oh, it must be twenty years ago or more. And she handled it well, made it last. But after she died—well, he just pissed it all away,” he said heavily.

Alberg drew smoke coming from the engine, even though that didn't happen anymore.

“He'd talk about his people now and then,” Quenneville went on, “his mom and dad, that is. Warmly. Good memories. But I only heard him mention that sister of his a couple of times, and it was plain as the nose on your face: he was scared of her.”

Alberg paused in his sketching. “Why?”

“I don't know why, man—how would I know? But he sure was. Turned twitchy just saying her name. Never said it, unless he was boozing. Just a minute. Hold on.” He talked with his wife. “Flora and I, we'll be bringing him home with us. She wants you to tell him that. The lawyer, he says it's in the will.”

“I'll tell him, Mr. Quenneville.”

“And see if you can get him on a phone to us.”

“I will,” said Alberg. His train now had an engine and eight cars.

Next, he called Edward Cherniak, Benjamin Strachan's lawyer, at the home number he'd gotten from Peter Quenneville.

He talked, and listened, and nodded, and added a caboose to his train, and listened some more, and drew a railway-crossing sign in front of the engine. “Did she say what would have been in this package?” he asked the lawyer.

“No,” said Cherniak. “Just that it was something that was hers. She sounded angry that I didn't know where it might be.”

Alberg asked a couple more questions, thanked the lawyer, and hung up.

His cats were demanding to be fed, so he got up and did that, and had breakfast himself, and showered and shaved. He was moving faster now. Beginning to feel excited. He noticed that fog clung to the hillside. He couldn't see the harbor; he could barely see the road in front of his house.

As soon as the banks opened, he sat down to make another phone call.

“Ms. Hawke? My name is Alberg. I'm with the RCMP in Sechelt. You're the manager, right? I need some information, and I wonder if you can help me…”

A few minutes later he had arranged to meet Harriet Hawke at her bank in West Vancouver.

He peered once more out his front window and noticed, with relief, shimmerings of sunshine amid the fog.

He could be back at Zoe Strachan's house before dinnertime, he figured.

T
HERE WAS
a lawnchair set up in the yard behind her house, between the house and the sea, and there Ramona found herself about halfway through Wednesday morning, sitting tense and upright, clutching a big brown envelope. She turned to look behind her, at the house: what was she doing back at her old house? She looked in front of her, where the ocean should have been, but she couldn't see it because of the fog, she could only hear it. She knew it was morning, but she didn't know how she knew that, and she knew that she had something important to do, but she couldn't remember what.

She looked down at the brown envelope. She turned it over and over in her hands. The writing on it made no sense to her. Finally she opened it and peered inside and saw three exercise books and a note written in pencil on ruled paper. And then memory returned, and she almost wished it hadn't.

He hadn't told her not to read them, but let's face it, said Ramona to herself, shivering in the fog, it wouldn't have mattered if he had; she would have read them anyway. She wasn't about to accept a package from a scared-to-death little boy without looking inside it, and having identified the contents as reading material, she wasn't about to not read them.

So she'd read them. Right away, she'd read them. And afterward she got up from the kitchen table, where she'd been sitting as she read, and she felt sick with fear.

She tried to distract herself with a huge breakfast. She opened cans of flaked ham, sardines, oysters, and corned beef. She helped herself to Melba Toast and Wheat Thins and some Swedish flatbread. She drank some orange Australian stuff and ate an entire can of peaches. At the conclusion of her feast she'd felt bloated, dissatisfied, and more fearful and worried than ever. She finally admitted to herself that the police had to have these exercise books. And they had to be told about the boy. It took her a while to figure out how she was going to accomplish these things and hang on to her freedom, too.

Ramona struggled out of the lawn chair and made her way around to the front of the house. How much time had she lost? Too much? Too much? Had she come too late?

She held the brown envelope tight to her chest and tried to think. The fog hadn't lifted yet. So surely it had to be morning, still. Surely she hadn't missed him.

She squatted down and leaned against the fence and squinted into the fog and waited.

She waited for what seemed like a very long time. She stood up, now and then, to ease the cramp in her thighs. Sometimes she sat upon the ground with her legs stretched out straight in front of her, until she felt too damp and cold. She hummed to herself, and refused to accept the possibility that she might have missed Sandy McAllister. She just kept on waiting, grateful to the fog, which was keeping people indoors. And finally, finally, she heard him whistling, and just as he emerged out of the fog, she stepped into his path.

Sandy McAllister screamed.

“It's me,” said Ramona. “Sandy, it's me, Ramona.”

“The whole town,” Sandy gasped, “is looking for you. The whole town, Ramona. The police. Everybody. Everybody is looking for you. Oh, I've found you. Oh. Oh.”

“No, Sandy,” said Ramona sternly. “You have not found me. I have found you.” She held out the brown envelope. “You see this?” Sandy looked at it. “You see what it says on the front of it?”

“‘Head of Detachment, Sechelt RCMP,'” Sandy read aloud. “You look a sight, Ramona. You really do.”

“I want you to deliver this,” said Ramona. She thrust it at him, and Sandy backed away, clutching at his mailbag.

“I can't deliver it,” he said. “You deliver it. Come on,” he said excitedly. “I'll go with you. Come on, Ramona.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” said Ramona. “Take it,” she said, poking him in the stomach with the brown envelope.

Sandy McAllister raised both hands in the air. “I won't,” he said.

Ramona, furious, smacked him on the shoulder. “Take it! Deliver it! What kind of a mailman are you, anyway!”

“I can't, Ramona,” he pleaded “They're looking all over the place for you. They'll be some mad if I waltz in there with a package from you that's got no stamps on it. ‘Where'd you get this?' they'll say to me. And what'll I tell them? I found it on the street or something? No, I'll say, ‘Oh, Ramona gave it to me,' and they'll say, ‘So where is she?' and then I'll say, ‘Oh, she's in the bush next to the highway,' and then they'll say, ‘So don't you know the whole town's looking for her?' and they'll probably throw me in the slammer for obstruction of justice.” He stopped, breathless. “See?”

Ramona stared at him. She pretended to sigh. “Let me think for a minute,” she said.

Sandy McAllister watched, eagerly, as she thought.

Finally, “All right,” she said. “I give up.”

“Good,” he said. He was beside himself with excitement. “Oh, good, Ramona.”

“But right now I'm too tired to move, Sandy,” she said, leaning upon him heavily. “You deliver this envelope to the Mounties.” She handed it to him, and this time he took it. “Make sure it gets to the head man there, mind you. Then you can tell them where I am. They can come and get me.”

He looked at her, uncertain.

“I'll be fine, Sandy,” she said. “I'll go on back into my house there and wait for them.”

He took a reluctant step away from her.

“Oh go on, go on,” she said, exasperated, flapping her hand at him.