Forty Words for Sorrow (15 page)

20

E
RIC
F
RASER OPENED THE SIDE
of his brand new hot-off-the-truck Sony video camera. He put in a tape, fresh from a shrink-wrapped pack of three—courtesy of the Future Shop’s five-finger discount—and slapped the side of the camera closed. He told Edie to just act natural, to pretend he wasn’t there, but it seemed to make her all the more nervous.

“Why do you want a tape of me doing dishes?” she whined. “Can’t you wait till I’m doing something more interesting?” She was scrubbing vigorously at the bottom of a saucepan. “I haven’t even brushed my hair.”

As if brushing her hair would make some incredible difference. He wanted to test the camera before putting it to use in the field. On location, so to speak. The last tape had been very poor quality—the lousy camera he’d used had pretty much ruined it.

He opened the lens to its widest angle, taking in Edie, the cupboards, even the back door with its cracked window, its view of the scraggly, snowy tree. Can’t beat the Japanese when it comes to cameras; the lens was first-class. Sound was supposed to be good too. Eric had read up on the specs.

Edie was plunging the dish mop in and out of a glass so that it made exaggerated sucking noises. It made Eric want to hit her. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother, he said to himself, I swear I don’t. This was the running commentary Eric Fraser carried on with himself all the time. Yet it was hard to resist Edie’s sheer worship of him; he had never experienced anything like it. And if she didn’t look the way he wanted her to look, well, he told himself, maybe I shouldn’t even think of her as a woman. I should think of her as a pet, some kind of reptile.

“Eric, we already talked about this when we taped … you know. When we taped …”

“Todd Curry getting his brains beat out. It’s just words, Edie. You can say them.” He hated it when she went all mealy-mouthed.

“We can’t be making movies of this stuff.”

“Stuff
. What
stuff?
Say the words, Edie. Say the words.”

“I thought we agreed it’s a surefire way to get caught. We talked about it. I thought we agreed.”

“What
stuff
, Edie? If you can do it, you can say it. What
stuff?
Say the words. I’ll quit talking altogether, if you’re going to get all mealy-mouthed.”

“Stuff like Todd Curry getting his brains bashed out. Stuff like Katie Pine getting suffocated. Like Billy LaBelle. There. Are you satisfied?”

“We didn’t tape Billy LaBelle. Thanks to you letting him choke on his fucking gag.”

“I don’t see why that’s my fault. You’re the one who tied him up.”

Eric didn’t push it. Edie’s face, that patchy hide, had gone tomato red. Such a turn-on to hear her say the words.
Suffocated. Bashed
. Eric basked in the sounds for a few moments before speaking again. “People want to see violence, Edie. They have a
need
to see violence. They’ve always had a need to see violence. Just like they’ve always had a need to inflict it.”
Inflict
. He turned the lovely liquid sound over in his mind.
Inflict
.

“We can’t keep going on camera, Eric. And you certainly can’t show the film to anyone. It’s insane.”

Inflict. Inflict
. So lovely and liquid on the tongue, Eric couldn’t stop repeating it to himself.

“How long can we keep films of this stuff—these parties? It’s just so risky.”

Eric was opening the camera now, extracting the videotape. There was an input for a stereo microphone, and his thoughts turned toward music. What would be the proper accompaniment? Heavy metal? Something electronic?

Edie’s voice yanked him out of reverie. “There was a cop outside today. A female cop.”

Eric looked up. He told himself there was no need for panic, it was probably nothing.

“She was parked across the street. Said there’d been a bunch of burglaries.”

Probabilities flickered through Eric’s mind: had they made any terrible errors? Could the cops know anything about them? No. There was no reason for the cops to suspect them of anything. He relayed this to Edie in his calmest, most rational voice. Algonquin Bay—how smart can the cops be in a snowbound dump like Algonquin Bay?

“It scared me, Eric. I don’t want to go to prison.”

“You won’t.”

Eric was not in the mood to talk, but he didn’t want Edie backing out on him, and he could see she needed reassurance. That was easy enough. Edie was like a telephone menu: you just had to push the right button.
For soothed nerves, push 1
. “If the cops were really watching us,” he said reasonably, “there’s no way she would have spoken to you. Obviously, Edie, if the woman suspected you of anything, the last thing she’s going to do is let you know it. The most logical explanation is she was checking out burglaries, just like she said. Nothing to worry about.” It was the most Eric had said to Edie in three weeks.

She was already responding. She was still standing at the sink and her back was to him, but he could see her shoulders relaxing. “Really, Eric?” she said. “Do you really think that?”

“I don’t think it, I
know
it.” He could see her muscles loosen at the sound of his confidence. He
was
confident, wasn’t he? The appearance of a cop in the neighbourhood was—well, all right, maybe it was a little unnerving—but it would serve to make him more careful, more alert. Until the discovery of Katie Pine’s body, the police had remained abstract figures, the black shapes of nightmare. Then they had appeared on television, they had taken on human form. And with the finding of Todd Curry they had even become familiar, at least that one detective—the tall one with the sad face.

Television had made the Windigo Killer familiar too. Eric had almost come to believe in the mythical murderer. He had a vague idea of him as some middle-aged nonentity, a janitor, say, or a middle manager, who stalked the playgrounds and swept children away to their doom. He certainly didn’t think of himself as the Windigo Killer. That was just television chatter. News nerds telling ghost stories.

But the police had taken on flesh and bone. Flesh and bone waiting outside in the falling snow. Waiting for him. Let them. It would make him all the stronger.

“I’d rather die than go to prison,” Edie was saying. “I wouldn’t last a day in there.”

No one’s going to prison, Eric told her. This cop had no connection to them. He aimed the camera at Edie, sending the zoom out to its full length so that her nose and cheekbone filled his entire field of vision. Christ, what a beauty queen. But that’s my Edie’s hidden strength: she’s so disgusted by what she sees in the mirror that it makes her loyal. The complete control of another human being was not to be sneezed at, even if it was only Edie.
For cowed acquiescence, push 2
. “You’re not going to turn into a weakling,” he asked casually, “like all the nobodies out there? I thought you were different, Edie, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Eric. You know I’ll stick with you. I’ll stick with you no matter what.”

“I thought you had guts. Backbone. But I’m beginning to have doubts.”

“Please, Eric. Don’t lose faith in me. I’m
not
as strong as you.”

“You don’t act like you think I’m strong. You think just because I’m forced to live in a dump I’m not different? I am different, Edie. I’m fucking extraordinary. And you’d better be fucking extraordinary, too, frankly, because I don’t have time for nobodies.”

“I’ll be strong, I promise. It’s just sometimes I forget how—”

They both went still, listening. There was a thudding noise. The old biddy banging her cane.

Edie had gone pale. “I thought it was Keith,” she said. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to keep him here. It’s dangerous, don’t you think?”

“Don’t call him by name. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Our guest, then. Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

Eric was tired of reassuring her. He took his camera and went down the basement steps to a door beside the furnace. Taking a key out of his pocket, he snapped open the padlock and went into a small, dank bedroom where Keith London lay sleeping.

The room was perfectly square, built by a previous owner of the house who had rented it out to students at the teachers’ college nearby. Keith London was sprawled on his back, mouth open, one hand clutching a blanket to his chest, the other hanging over the edge of the bed, like someone dead in a bathtub. A tiny window high in the wall, which Eric had boarded over, admitted flat blades of light. The walls were cheap pine panelling.

Eric turned on the lights.

The figure in the bed did not stir. Eric checked the edges of the window, the door jamb, the possible routes of escape, even though it was evident his guest had never left the bed. Even without the party, this one had proved quite a haul. His wallet had contained over three hundred bucks, and they had helped him retrieve a very nice Ovation guitar from the train station.

Eric looked through the camera without running any tape. He slid the zoom out to full length, focusing on the adolescent face. The beginnings of a wispy beard bristled on the chin. A filling gleamed in the back of the open mouth, and under the lids the hidden eyes jerked back and forth in a dream.

Humming to himself, Eric reached down and tugged at the corner of blanket clutched in Keith’s hand. He pulled the blankets down to the knees and looked through the lens at the hairless chest, the pale, smooth belly, zooming in on the small, slack penis. When he heard Edie coming down the steps, he pulled the blankets back up to Keith’s chin.

“Still out cold,” Edie said. “That stuff is really strong.” She leaned over the bed. “Hey, genius! Up and at ’em! Rise and shine!”

Eric handed her the camera. Edie fiddled with the lens, focusing. “He looks so funny,” she said. “He looks so stupid.”

Later, Edie wrote in her diary:
I bet that’s how we look to angels and devils. They see everything bad we do, they see all our weaknesses. We lie there totally oblivious, dreaming our sweet dreams, and all the time these supernatural beings are hovering over the bed, laughing at us, waiting for just the right moment to prick our balloons. He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to see that boy bleed
.

21

P
ERHAPS BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN
raised a Catholic, the idea of having an address on Madonna Road had always appealed to Cardinal. The word held rich associations of mercy, purity and love. The madonna was the mother who had survived the sorrow of her son’s murder, the woman who had been received physically into heaven, the saint who interceded for sinners with a God who could be, let’s face it, something of a hard-ass.

The associations were muddied now—a pop star had come along and replaced mercy with commerce, purity with camp, and love with lust—but Madonna Road was still a peaceful address, a curved, narrow lane along the western edge of Trout Lake, where the birches creaked in the cold, and the snow slipped from their branches in silent clumps.

Cardinal had long ago stopped going to Mass, but the habit of continual self-examination and self-blame stayed with him. He was also honest enough to admit that most days these habits served only to make him neurotic, not good. He had reason to be thinking this way at the moment: his tiny house on Madonna Road, far from being a comfort, was freezing. “Winterized lakefront cottage,” the ad had said. But when the temperature dropped out of sight, the only way to keep the place warm enough was to get both the fireplace and the wood stove going full blast. Cardinal was wearing lined corduroys and a flannel work shirt over long underwear. Still cold, he had wrapped himself in a terry cloth bathrobe. He was sipping from a steaming cup of coffee, but his hands were frigid. It had taken ten minutes to fill the kettle from his frozen pipes. On this less than merciful stretch of Madonna Road, the wind whipped off the lake and pressed right through his windows, with their very expensive and completely futile triple glazing.

The surface of the lake was so white it made Cardinal’s eyes water to look at it. He drew the curtains closed in an attempt at insulation. Somewhere out there, across the frozen lake, somewhere in the middle of town perhaps, the killer was going about his normal day. He too might be enjoying a cup of coffee, while Katie Pine lay dead and her mother sat grieving, while Billy LaBelle lay buried God knows where and Todd Curry was on a coroner’s slab in Toronto. The killer might be listening to records—Anne Murray, anyone?—or hiking through the dazzling snow with his camera slung over his shoulder. Cardinal made a mental note to check the local camera club, if there was one. If the killer took pictures of Katie Pine, he could hardly risk taking them to the drugstore; he would have to develop them himself. Such a person might belong to a camera club.

Thinking of cameras made him think of Catherine. One of the worst things about her illness was how it robbed her of all creative energy. When she was well, the house was always full of photographs in various stages of completion. She would be in and out, cameras hanging from both shoulders, excited about some project or other. Then the illness came and the cameras were the first thing to go, jettisoned like dead weight from a sinking ship. He had called her before breakfast, and she had sounded pretty good. He even allowed himself to think she might be home sometime soon.

But now the telephone waited for him with the implacable silence of an executioner. Cardinal had resolved after a long, sleepless night that he would call Kelly this morning and tell her she would have to find another, cheaper grad school next term; her Yale days were over. She’d done her BFA at York; no reason she couldn’t go back. From the moment he took that money, guilt had begun to drip inside him. It was not just the prospect of being exposed by Delorme—there was not much chance of that. But month by month, year by year, the acid of guilt had eaten through the layers of denial, and he couldn’t stand it any more.

The worst thing was knowing that he was not the husband that Catherine loved, the father that Kelly loved. They both had this misconception about him: they thought he was good. Although his crime might be victimless—who was going to care in the long scheme of things whether Cardinal in a moment of weakness had relieved a criminal of a large sum of money?—for years now he had been an unknown quantity to the people he loved, an utter stranger. Kelly respected the father and cop he
used
to be. The loneliness of being unknowable was becoming unbearable.

And so he had resolved to call her and explain what he had done and that he could not afford to keep her at Yale. Christ, the girl has an IQ of 140, can’t she figure it out? How does a small-town Canadian cop send his kid to Yale? Did she really buy the story about the money coming from the long-ago sale of his grandparents’ house? Did Catherine? Self-delusion must run in the family. All right, he would tell her, let her complete the semester, and then, having wrapped up the little matter of nailing the killer of Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle and Todd Curry, he would confess to Dyson and the chief. He would lose his job, but jail time would be unlikely.

He picked up the phone and dialed Kelly’s number in the States. One of her roommates answered—Cleo? Barbara? he couldn’t tell them apart—and shouted for Kelly to pick up.

“Hi, Daddy.” When did she start calling me that again? Cardinal wondered. They had gone through a brief “Pop” phase, which Cardinal had barely tolerated, then back to the usual “Dad,” but lately it was “Daddy.” It must be an American thing, he decided, like saying “real good” for “really good” and pronouncing “probably” with the accent on the last syllable. But this was one American mannerism he enjoyed.

“Hi, Kelly. How’s school going?” So plain, so flat. Why can’t I call her Princess or Sweetheart, the way fathers do on TV? Why can’t I say the place is colder without you? Without Catherine? Why not tell her this tiny house is suddenly the size of an airport?

“I’m working on a humongous project for my painting class, Daddy. Dale’s taught me that I work best on a monumental scale, not on the crabbed little canvases I always stuck with before. It’s like being set free. I can’t tell you how good it feels. My work is a hundred times better.”

“Sounds good, Kelly. Sounds like you’re enjoying it.” That’s what he said. What he thought was: God, it moves me so to hear you’re happy, to hear that you’re growing, that your life is full and good.

Kelly chattered on about learning at last how to wield paint, and normally Cardinal would have basked in her enthusiasm. In the course of his sleepless night he had stood in the doorway of her bedroom and stared at the narrow bed she had slept in for a week, picked up the paperback she had been reading, just to touch something his daughter had touched.

He stood in the doorway now, the cordless phone tucked under his chin. The room was a pretty pale yellow, with a wide window looking out on birch trees, but it had never really been Kelly’s room. Cardinal and Catherine had moved to Madonna Road after Kelly had gone to university, and the room was just a place she inhabited when she visited. A TV father would tell her how he had touched her book just to touch something she had touched, but Cardinal could never say such a thing.

“One thing, though, Daddy. A bunch of us are planning a trip to New York next week. It’s the last week of the Francis Bacon exhibition and it’s really something I should see. But you know I didn’t budget for any trips, and this would cost about two hundred dollars by the time you factor in meals and gas and everything.”

“Two hundred American?”

“Um, yeah. Two hundred American. It’s too much, isn’t it.”

“Well, I don’t know. How important is this, Kelly?”

“I won’t do it if you think it’s too much. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No, no. That’s okay. If it’s important.”

“I know I’m costing you a fortune. I do try to save money wherever I can, Daddy. I mean, you wouldn’t believe all the things I
don’t
do.”

“I know. It’s okay. I’ll wire the money to your account this afternoon.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“It’s fine. But next year will have to be different, Kelly.”

“Oh, next year will be real different. I mean, I’ll be done with all my classes—I’ll just have my final project: two or three canvases for the group show, depending how much Dale thinks I should do. I’ll be able to take a part-time job next year. I’m sorry everything’s so expensive, Daddy. Sometimes I wonder how you manage. I hope you know how grateful I am.”

“Don’t you worry about it.”

“I hope one day I make a ton of money off my painting so I can pay some of it back.”

“Really, Kelly, don’t you even think about that.” The phone was slick with sweat in Cardinal’s hand, and his heart flapped at his rib cage. Kelly’s gratitude had unmanned him. In the core of his being a door clicked shut, a bolt shot home, and a sign long out of use was hung over the window:
Closed Until Further Notice
.

“You sound a little tense, Daddy. Work driving you crazy?”

“Well, the press is yelling at us. I get the feeling they won’t be happy till we bring in the Air Force. I’m not making the progress I should.”

“You will.”

They closed with an exchange on their separate weathers: hers sunny and warm and measured in Fahrenheit; his bright and cold and measured in Centigrade degrees below zero. Cardinal tossed the phone onto the sofa. He stood dead still in the centre of the living room like a man who has just received terrible news. There was a noise from outside and it took him a few moments to realize what it was. Then he rushed through the kitchen and threw open the side door, yelling, “Go on, beat it, you little rodent!”

He saw the raccoon’s fat hindquarters wriggle under the house. Normally, a raccoon would be hibernating this time of year, but the floor of Cardinal’s house was leaking heat—enough heat to confuse this raccoon into thinking there was no winter. The first time Cardinal had caught sight of the masked face, the raccoon had been examining half an apple in its precise black paws. Now it emerged two or three times a week to topple the garbage cans in his garage and root through the mess for edible scraps.

Shivering furiously, Cardinal scrambled after the bits of plastic wrap, the empty donut container, the gnawed chicken bone strewn across the garage floor. He went back inside just in time to hear the phone ringing.

It took him three rings to remember where he had tossed the handset. He snatched it up from among the sofa cushions just as Delorme was about to ring off.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought you must be already on your way in.”

“I was just leaving. What’s up?”

“We got the tape back from the CBC guy. Also of course he sent the digital version? The enhanced version?” Delorme’s French Canadian interrogatives had never sounded so welcome.

“Did you listen to it yet? Did you play it?”

“No. It just arrive this second.”

“I’ll be right there.”