Crimes Against My Brother (26 page)

Ian was suddenly filled with a sick feeling in his stomach; then rage overpowered him, and he walked to the front of his store, and in front of two customers flung the cash register down. It fell into the same arc of light where Annette had stood that night, years ago. He remembered her touching his arm—the touch that became the betrayal. He
felt trapped in some monstrous treachery. He went home and stared at his wife as if he didn’t know who she was. His heart was pounding. No, he did not know her at all—so why in God’s name would he think that he did. The child was not his. It couldn’t be.

Now he saw himself as others saw him, and hated what he saw; and he remembered the surprised and angry look on the faces of certain men when they saw Annette and him together—a look that said they didn’t even know she was married.

The tanning beds—no, he had heard nothing about them. Yet one day the next week, Annette was waiting for him when he came home. It was in the late afternoon, and the sound of traffic had died. She wore a green dress with a small necklace that had belonged to his mother—one of the few things he’d given her that did belong to his family. She asked how his day was, if his back was hurting—had he taken his medication? She told him what Patsy Mittens was ordering for her upstairs office, and how she wished she could have an upstairs office too. She said she wanted to be a businesswoman.

“Yes, yes,” he said.

Then she tried to tell a joke—but for the life of her she could not tell it.

He said nothing.

Then, just as he was going to leave the room, she asked him for money: eight thousand dollars for second-hand tanning beds. She asked for it in an offhanded way, just as she had asked for things before. He stared at her a long moment as she began to explain all the benefits of opening a salon now.

For a long time he said nothing. He tried to think, and he tried to speak. Finally he refused. It was the first time, in fact, he had ever refused her anything—and he was as surprised as she was. He looked guilty. “No,” he said. “I mean, I cannot—”

“But it’s the new thing—tanning beds!” she said. “It keeps us girls nice and brown for the summer. Dickie will be a partner—he knows the man who wants to rent the building.”

“Tell Dickie to go to hell!” Ian said. “He and Ripp have already gone through my money as if it was water.”

She looked at him, confused. “Ripp and Dickie—they never went through any money! When?”

He did not look at her now. She stood there for a long time, waiting for him to look at her, but he could not. Going out of the living room, she slammed the big French doors.

They did not speak for days. In fact, he stayed at the store late, trying to decide what he should do.

But suddenly Lonnie came to see him. This happened three or four times in a row. They would go out beyond the garden to talk as Lonnie smoked a cigar.

“You know that little girl has no one but you, Ian—she relies on you now. You knocked her up some good, and she was alone. She is worried you are up to your old tricks.” He clutched Ian’s arm.

“What old tricks?”

“Maybe you found someone. You stay down at the store—she worries.”

“That’s nonsense.”

Lonnie only shrugged. He would look at Ian in perturbed silence, then flicking the ash of his cigar, he would say, “She is not eating right, she is not taking care of herself—Ripp told me yesterday. I was your best man. I feel bad.”

“I know,” Ian would say, “but there is something I want to ask you. I mean, a question I have.”

“Ask whatever you want,” Lonnie said with a big generous smile.

But Ian hesitated, then said maybe some other time. He thought about how Ripp had taken money by moving into the cottage, using the phone and electric heat and sending Ian the bill.

“I sometimes feel like a sucker,” he confided, like a strong man who does not want to admit weakness.

Lonnie looked at him. “What?”

“You know—something makes me think I am a sucker.”

“A sucker! With the big store and most beautiful girl? A sucker—you!” Lonnie said he could not believe his ears. “No,” Lonnie said, “you made everyone else the sucker!”

If Annette could have said “I do not love you” then, perhaps afterwards everything would have been fine.

From the very night Lonnie had acted as Ian’s best man, and put his arm about Ian in solidarity, the white carnation already faded on his sports jacket and his inside jacket pocket torn because he had placed there too many racing forms, he believed he had a proprietary right over this couple. They were his because he had brought them together. Not that he wanted anything. Initially he thought he did not. They were a treasure, those two—best people in the world.

But then after a few months he felt Annette did owe him something; so he took a few hundred dollars here and there.

But then, some years after they were married, something terrible happened to Lonnie Sullivan out of the blue, as changes in life often do.

Someone reported that Lonnie had not filed his tax returns.

People—a small man and a woman who looked at him as if he was nothing—came into his office, and sifted through his private papers in a way that infuriated him, seeing his racing forms, his bets, the pictures of naked women he kept in the third drawer. He could have broken the man’s skull with one hand. But he had to be obsequious and say he wanted to help. The two of them looked at him as if he was nothing—and Lonnie could not stand that.

There was an audit and he had to pay fifteen thousand dollars in fines, along with the fifty-three hundred he owed. A lien was put on his house until he did so. Though the total was just over twenty thousand dollars and would not break him, he was furious—and determined to get vengeance. He paid it all off with funds he was going to use for something else. Something he was privately hoping for.

Then he sat alone, took no calls, said nothing for weeks.

When he did speak, he told people he had forgotten all about the
fine. It was his own fault, he said, laughing, and he should have been more careful. This is what he told everyone: “They are only doing their job—it’s a hard job they have too. I know that!”

Still, what he told Rueben Sores in private was this: He wanted all of his money back. Someone had told on him, and he wanted to know who. So the same machinations as he had used during the time of Hank Robb were the ones he used now. He sent young Rueben Sores to discover who might have spoken to the tax department.

Both Lonnie and Rueben knew it had to be someone who worked either with someone or near someone in the tax department in town. Maybe someone in the same building. And there was only one person who knew Sullivan, who, young Rueben Sores felt, could have done this. This was a person Lonnie had helped many times in his life. “Not only helped him, but his daughter,” Rueben said bluntly.

This person worked in the Motor Vehicle Branch right beside Canada Revenue: Annette’s father—a short, chubby, balding man named Symion.

Lonnie gave Rueben his thanks and shrugged. “Nah—I don’t care.” He chuckled. “Serves me right.”

But he would not rest until he got the fifteen thousand back; and more than that, the fifty-three hundred as well. It did not matter that Annette’s father came to him, and smiled timidly, and said there was a lot of talk about what he had said to a certain person, but none of it was true. He was terrified as he spoke, and trembled. Lonnie could see his shirt sleeves shaking.

Lonnie said, “Oh my God, I never in my whole life listen to that nonsense,” and stared down at Symion with bright happy eyes.

That he said this did not matter at all.

Soon it became obvious to Annette that she couldn’t escape Lonnie—and the reason was that her mother and her father, both silly gossips, might find out what she had done in Truro, and how she had been so foolish as to think she could trap a millionaire. Lonnie, furious with her parents, with Symion’s timid smile, wanted to tell them what their
daughter had done. He wanted to post it in the paper, just for spite. So she had to beg him—actually beg him on her knees—not to.

He had a few people make phone calls to Ian. Then he waited and waited.

Annette was terrified. Her friends too would discover it all: Ian, of course; but it was Sara knowing she feared the most. She could not allow that Sara would ever know. The idea that Lonnie would tell Sara was all she thought about. So the sooner it was done, the better—she knew she must rob Ian’s store.

In fact, this is what Annette had hoped the tanning salon would allow her to do: she had planned in her own simple way to make her own money and to get the pregnancy test back. Ian did not know what his stubbornness had caused. That is, he did not know that she wanted to help him and earn her own money in order to free them both.

Many nights during those two months when Ian and Annette did not speak, Annette would sit in Lonnie’s car on one of the derelict side roads of Bonny Joyce, smoking one cigarette after the other, staring out at the bleak trees. Sometimes hunters would pass by, and she would duck down in the seat so as not to be seen. But of course she was seen many times by many people.

If everything Lonnie did was calculated, nothing he did was designed. That is, he’d had no idea when he’d picked her up hitchhiking long ago that this would be the result—and yet now it seemed as if all of it had been planned.

She would stare out the side window of his car saying nothing as he spoke to her about these horrid things. She hated him more than anyone in the world.

“I told you—I told you not to go to Truro. I begged you, and told you what people might think of you. Did I or not?” he would ask.

But Annette would not answer. She was only waiting to hear how much money he wanted.

“Fifteen thousand,” Lonnie told her a few weeks later. “I need it—I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t. And the way it will work is you will probably
get it all back. Ian won’t even miss it. I am asking for a favour, really.”

“And the test will be destroyed? So Ian will not be put to shame?”

“Absolutely!” And Lonnie blessed himself.

So Annette began to plan the robbery of her own husband’s store for Christmastime. That was when the store would be locked and closed. Annette also planned to leave Ian before then. She felt that to be magnanimous and fair, she had to.

She decided on two occasions to go to the police and admit what she was planning. But for some reason, she could not. She was weak, and in her weakness she had to go along with the plan—and there was at least one point every day where she thought: Yes, it is getting closer. And she would feel as desperate as a person might who is about to be executed.

This was the state of things that day in December when Evan Young passed Ian’s large white three-storey house. It was the only time he had ever passed the house. Annette’s friends were over, and he could hear Annette laughing almost crazily beyond the decorative lights inside.

As Young walked, he thought: What if Joyce Fitzroy’s money had come to him—what then might he have been? His child would still be alive! His wife, whom he loved, would still be with him! And all of this death and sadness had happened and would continue to happen because he had broken no law, he had taken no money, he had betrayed no promise. Nor had his wife, nor had his son. But in reality he was angry because the treasure his wife had built up for him was gone. And what was that treasure? Well, it was a smile, two dresses and a new pair of sneakers she had bought on her last trip to town.

Alongside all of these thoughts was something else. It is what he had learned by accident just the week before, when he had gone unto a side road up near Bonny Joyce to check a coyote snare, and saw a surveyor taking a long-distance scope from a brown bag and looking at him, Evan, as if he was a local yokel.

“Oh,” the man said when Evan asked him, “all this will be gone in a few years if my company has their way. Oh, you didn’t know? Well, I’d line up for a job if I were you.”

That is, as with every other mill in any depressed country, ownership was always changing hands. Here our large pulp mill at the fork of two great tributaries had gone through three ownerships in the last twenty years, and as always, the government was trying to impress new owners by accommodating them.

Now there was to be a fourth owner.

So Helinkiscor, a Finnish-Dutch company, had sent agents from their company to look at the wood, the size of the mill, and to see what the mill would require in upgrades, and to ask the provincial government to vouchsafe their requirements. The one thing this company wanted in the agreement was allowance to cut Bonny Joyce. In fact, this had to be the very first principle in the agreement—and nothing else would suffice. So the government went back on its promise never to cut out this land. That is why the surveyor was there, and that is why Evan had met him that day.

So the very land Evan had wanted for his little sawmill would be given in a deal to this pulp and paper company called Helinkiscor, along with hundreds of thousands of other acres to be plowed under all the way to Good Friday Mountain, with a guarantee that they would keep the region at work for twenty years.