Death Spiral (20 page)

He crossed through the kitchen and started down a hall, caught sight of a banister, touched it and knew that he either had to breathe and most likely pass out, or he had to turn around. He lurched back through the kitchen and now he could hear the stove hissing at him. He glanced at it. The oven door was gaping wide. He reached the small porch and half slid down the stairs again.

The woman hadn’t moved. Wilf sat on the ground and lifted her head into his lap. Her eyes were just as glassy and calm, her arm just as stiffly outstretched as when he’d let it go. Wilf’s eyes were running, glycerine-like water was streaming down his cheeks and everything around him looked elongated and smeared. The garage, the melting snow, the trees.

He looked into the backyard.

The boy in his striped uniform and the man with the rags on his feet were standing there.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Wilf held on to the woman he assumed was Sylvia Young and waited for someone to help him for what seemed a long time after the barefoot boy and the man had disappeared. He’d looked away, looked back and they were gone.

The first person Wilf saw who he knew for certain was not a mirage was the chubby kid peering around the back corner. A woman, looking distraught, came hurrying up behind him. “Is Sylvia all right?”

“No.”

“Don’t move,” the woman said to the boy. She came a step closer. She clasped her hand to her mouth. “Oh my god! Where’s Bradley?”

“Did you call the fire department?”

“Yes! Where’s Bradley?”

“I don’t know.”

The woman looked up toward a second-floor window. “Oh my god!”

“I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t get up the stairs,” Wilf said.

The woman turned, grabbed her boy’s hand and disappeared. After a while Wilf could hear a fire truck coming down the street and pulling up out in front. Two of the town’s volunteer firemen came rushing around the corner of the house wearing masks over their faces and tanks on their backs. They went in through the back door. The same woman, accompanied by another fireman, came up to Wilf. She was carrying some blankets in her arms. The fireman took one of them and began to cover Sylvia.

Wilf got up and, caneless, limped toward the front of the house. The windows, one after another, began to shatter and shower down. The firemen inside the house were breaking them. One of them with his mask dangling over his shoulder came hurrying up from behind. He was carrying a boy in his arms. He went rushing past, laid the body down beside the fire truck and began to press on its chest.

The police cruiser pulled up and Constable Ted Bolton got out. Wilf reached the cruiser, opened the back door and crawled inside.

It didn’t take long for a crowd of people to assemble, standing along the sidewalk and around the perimeter of the yard. Every once in a while someone would come over to the cruiser and peek in where Wilf was lying down. An ambulance arrived and took the boy away. Doc Robinson arrived. The ambulance came back and took Sylvia Young away.

After Wilf felt like sitting up he found that he couldn’t take his eyes off the house. It was gaping open now, curtains blowing out of broken windows in a freshening wind, the front door flung wide.

Bolton crossed the yard swinging Wilf’s cane around in his hand and got in the car. “I guess this is yours,” he said, handing it over the back of the seat. “This is a rough one. The mother’s dead. The kid’s dead, too.”

“Is he?” Wilf replied almost too softly for Bolton to hear.

“Why the hell would she do such a thing? I can see her taking her own life. I mean, I can’t see that either, but at least it’s her own decision. She’s a grownup, right? But to take her own kid’s life.”

Bolton turned to look at Wilf as if he might know the answer. Wilf thought the man seemed shaken by it all, his long horse-face the colour of ashes. “You were delivering legal papers to her. Is that right?”

“Who told you that?”

“Your secretary.” He nodded toward a knot of spectators.

Wilf could see Carole standing a little way down the street looking back at him. She’d forgotten to put her hat on; her hair was blowing around in the wind.

“According to Doc they’ve been dead for a while. Most of the night, anyway. There was nothing you could have done.”

Wilf opened the back door.

“Wilf. I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

“You’ll need a statement,” Wilf said.

He walked down the sidewalk toward Carole. People moved back a little, opening the way for him as if he might be carrying something contagious. He kept his eyes fixed on Carole’s face. When he came up to her, she leaned against him and put her face close to his.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Not for me.”

“No. Not for you.” She put her arm through his good arm and held him. The woman who’d brought the blankets was standing a short distance away staring at the pillaged house with the same dread and fascination Wilf had felt. Or so he thought. “I tried to get to the boy, but I just couldn’t breathe,” he said in her direction. He felt as if he had to apologize.

The woman looked his way, her eyes teary. “Oh god, why didn’t I say yes?”

“To what?”

“To Sylvia! She asked me if Bradley could stay overnight with Tommy, but Marsha had just gotten over the measles and I didn’t think it was such a good idea. And I was tired. And so I said no!” Her hand went back to her mouth and stayed there trembling.

“You couldn’t have guessed what she was going to do,” Carole said. “You couldn’t have known.”

“She didn’t look like she had a care in the world. She just said, ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’ That’s all she said. And she walked away!”

“That’s what I mean,” Carole said.

“But I could tell she’d been drinking!”

Wilf turned away and walked down the sidewalk. He crossed back over the bridge. It seemed to him that he had to lean hard into the wind just to reach the other side. The office door was locked. By the time he’d found his key and had unlocked it, Carole was standing there behind him. Sylvia Young’s file was still open on his desk. He walked over and sat down. “What’s happening?”

Carole remained by the door. Her hair looked hopelessly tangled. “What do you mean, what’s happening?”

Wilf began to look aimlessly through the file. “They experimented with various gases at the beginning, you know. On selected inmates. Of course they did.”

“Stop it,” Carole said, “or I’ll leave right now.”

“But don’t you see the pattern? Don’t you know what it means? She was murdered. Not by some mad scientist and not by some copycat, I’m not saying that. But by someone.”

Carole turned and went back out. She closed the door.

Wilf continued to look through the file.

She’d had on what looked like a party dress. A pretty dress, anyway. Earrings. Nylons. More proof, not that he needed it. Who would get dressed up to commit suicide?

He could hear Carole now. Her lovely, slightly adenoidal voice. “Because when she was found, she’d want to look nice.”

He smiled to himself. He missed her already.

Wilf manned the office until five o’clock, locked up and drove his father’s car up the hill to the house. He went into the study only long enough to raid his father’s liquor cabinet. He didn’t bother to look through the Nuremberg papers. He didn’t have to anymore.

With a bottle of rye tucked under his arm, he climbed the stairs, went into the bathroom and opened his bottle of sleeping pills. He wondered if he should call Carole and apologize. But for what?

The weather pattern was changing. Carole was gone. He studied himself in the mirror. What was the forecast? A drizzle of hopelessness followed by gusts of despair.

A great, raging, spiralling hole.

* * *

Duncan looked out the window. He thought he might recognize something but all he could see was an alley right below him and a windowless brick wall on the other side. He thought he might see the market square. He and his mother had taken the bus to Brantford when he was young to go shopping in the farmers’ market there. That was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to him. Until now.

That was a long time ago though.

Duncan wrapped his meaty hands around the bars and thought about Babe and Dandy. They were his biggest concerns, had been since that first morning out in the frosty, freezing bush when he’d been hunted down. Who was going to look after them? Feed them? Get them out into the air? Run them? Who was going to rub them down?

Duncan sat down on the cot to calm himself and looked around. At least this place was quieter. The jail in Hamilton had been much larger, a clanging and raucous place crowded with a wild gang of men. The first day he’d been put in there they started calling him Jumbo. The slick young man he had to share a cell with came up with that name right away and it spread down the range of cells and flew from table to table in the mess hall and ricocheted around the walls in the exercise yard. Jumbo.

One of the men leaning up against the wall in the yard where it was warm in the sunshine told him that it was an elephant’s name. A famous elephant that had worked in the circus and had got itself killed crossing a railway track.

Duncan smiled when he knew that this is what the men had meant. He grinned at all the men and shook his mass of matted hair and laughed. He’d done this all his life. His mother had told him that that was the best way to stop people from teasing. Later that same day two of the guards led him to a room in the basement and shaved off all his hair.

This place in Brantford was a lot better. For one thing he had the cell all to himself. It wasn’t going to be for very long though. If he’d understood his lawyer correctly he’d be taken to a court in the morning for some kind of hearing and then he’d have to go back to Hamilton and then he’d come back to Brantford for his real trial later. Maybe not for months and months.

He’d get out for sure, he wasn’t worried, anyone would have done what he’d done, any man would, but it might take too long a time. And by then what would happen to Babe and Dandy?

He’d asked his lawyer that question but he didn’t seem to know.

“Maybe Wilf McLauchlin will help,” Duncan said.

His lawyer’s eyes went big. “Help what?”

“Help look after my horses. He’s my best friend, anyway.”

His lawyer looked disgusted then, not unlike his own father used to look just before spitting out a stream of tobacco and calling him one of his breath-stealing names.

“Jesus Christ, get this straight, will you?” his lawyer said. “It’s important. Wilf McLauchlin is not your friend. He’s your enemy. He just pretended to be your friend so he could trick you into telling him things you never should have said. Why did you say those things? Because you were trying to impress him. Because you didn’t know what you were saying. Because you’re slow. And when I get Mr. Hero into a court of law I’m going to make him look like the grandstanding, conniving, lying, low-life little bastard he is.”

“Yeah, okay. I get it,” Duncan said.

But he hadn’t really gotten it.

Wilf had told him that he was a soldier, too, and that sometimes soldiers had to do bad things to protect the world. He’d said they were just the same. He’d even said that he’d be his wing man.

He really wished he hadn’t told Wilf about Basil, though, lying down beside him on the bed. His eyes all glittery. Talking away. Couldn’t understand a word of it. And smiling. His head on the pillow, almost. His face right there. And he could see that Basil had put charcoal all around his eyes. And a frightening thing had begun to happen. He’d begun to feel the same rush of excitement that he’d always felt below Carole’s window.

“Go away. Go downstairs,” he’d said.

Basil had left for his cot in the kitchen and Duncan had lain there in a torrent of confusion. He’d had to touch himself just to calm himself down. And the worst thing of all, all the time he was touching himself, he’d wanted Basil to come back up the stairs.

Of course he hadn’t told Wilf all that.

His lawyer had been going on lately about Andy Creighton, too, but Duncan couldn’t remember exactly what that was all about, either. It was funny, though, when he thought about it, the way Andy had just appeared that night.

And Carole said to him, “Did you hurt that man in Cline’s bush?”

She was just trying to help him though. That’s what Wilf said, they were both just trying to help him, and in order to do that they needed to know the truth.

But what if Carole knew that Basil had come into his room and that he’d laid down on his bed? What if Wilf told her? What would she think now?

Duncan got back up and looked out the window again.

It was hard to keep everything straight. Andy standing in his kitchen that night like he’d just dropped out of the sky. Wilf telling him that he’d be his wing man. Carole asking him such a question. He used to be able to keep things straight.

And what if Wilf told her the biggest, scariest secret of all, that having to take Basil out to the woods, having to deal with him like that, having to teach him a lesson, was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him in his whole life? Better than going to the market. Better than watching Carole even.

Because it had been.

But what if Wilf told Carole that? What would she think of him now? She’d hate him now.

Duncan closed his eyes.

He could see Wilf lying on the ground, helpless as a baby. It was like seeing a picture in a newspaper. Or maybe he dreamt it once, it was so clear. His one arm limp and useless hanging out of its sling. The brave hero crying to be let back up. Just like Basil had. Tears and moans and screams.

Duncan was standing over him now.

* * *

At first Wilf thought his father had arrived home one day early. He heard the side door close. He heard footsteps coming along the hallway downstairs.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed having taken three sleeping pills but resisting for the moment the urge to take the top off the bottle of rye.