Grave Concern (32 page)

Kate got out, too, and went back to get the walker from the trunk. She placed it before Adele, then reached in the car for Adele's purse.

“I'm fine from here, dear,” said Adele, holding out a hand for the purse. “Just slide it up on my shoulder, there's a girl.”

Kate did as she was asked. “You sure you don't need any help?”

Adele shook her head. “You've done more than enough already. I've had a lovely time. And so good talking to Nathan. We must do this again, if it's not too much of an imposition.”

“No, not at all,” said Kate, suddenly desperate to leave. “Again. Yes. Soon.”

As she drove back down the driveway, Kate watched Adele in the rear-view mirror, making her slow way under the portico to the sartorian door of Morning Manor. Lift, place, step, step. Lift, place, step, step. The woman was an enigma. A dear little old lady, hiding something.

The sun's hot gaze was beginning to stray as Kate, her car windows rolled down, cruised home along the highway. Kate became aware of a smell. Musk — yeccch. Skunk. It wasn't long before she saw it, the source of the stink, by the side of the road. Not just it, but
them
. A mother skunk and three little ones. Creamed by a car or truck, guts everywhere. The fumes were suffocating. Several crows hopped among the carnage, pecking and pulling at the entrails. One, sitting high in a tree, shrieked its glee to the world. As she whizzed past, Kate saw a reddish streak at the edge of the woods. Red fur, low and lean. A fox, not quite rare, but uncommon in these parts, come to see what the commotion was about.

Bad smells aside, the day out had been satisfying, Kate thought, both for herself as contractor and Adele as client. Yes, satisfying. And yet … bittersweet. Kate couldn't help contemplating Adele's elisions. The further she drove, the more bitter the sweetness became.

Later, Kate sat in the screened porch at the back of the house with her feet up, enjoying a pre-dinner glass of Carmenère and watching the old black-and-white her dad had moved out here when they got the colour TV. It occurred to her that she should be Googling “Extraordinary Wayne” on her laptop at this very minute. But something held her back.

On TV, there was more trouble in Iran, this time to do with the so-called election. As always, Kate peered through the shouting crowds, looking for any sign of a woman. It was kind of a game she played, like in those
Where's Waldo?
books. Often she saw none, but tonight she caught sight of two females, covered head to toe in their compulsory black garb, scurrying off-screen together in the distance. As Kate sat sweating in her shorts in the summer heat, she wondered how these women coped in those tent-dresses in such a hot land, especially during menopause. Did they ever collapse during a hot flash? On the bright side, a black bag would cover a multitude of figure flaws.

When the news was over, Kate turned off the TV. Normally, she would have taken huge pleasure in the sudden silence, the fact that nothing stirred in the hot summer evening. But a restlessness she had been denying since the Canada Day outing was quickening her system like a drug. She felt animated, keen, her nervous system one with the pulse of the world.

Until she realized. Aaagh! A motorbike. That's all it was. The roar growing more insistent, setting her on edge. “What in God's name — ” Kate muttered darkly.

She stormed out the screen door and across the lawn. Reaching the driveway, what should she see, spluttering and idling to wake the dead, but the coveted prize Harley, bestraddled by a grinning, helmeted Leonard, wearing a worn, purple T-shirt that read,
I LISTEN TO BANDS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST YET
. Seeing Kate, Leonard turned off the Jurassic beast, and a palliative peace was restored at last.

“Don't you need a licence for that thing?” Kate fumed.

“Hi, Kate, I'm fine, thanks. It
has
been a while, hasn't it? And how are you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Kate. “Give me a break.”

“And you call
me
churlish.”

“I do?”

“Not in so many words. But I read your mind and got the major theme.”

“Listen, Buster,” said Kate. “You weren't so chipper when I dropped into Ho Lam's that time after the party. You barely spoke to me. In fact, let's see, uh,
churlish
is the very word I'd use.”

“What did you expect — a welcoming party? Kate, I was still recovering from a sucker punch to the gut, plus passing out,
plus
I'd just spent a good part of my precious Sunday off in the hospital, feeling like a used dishrag and standing guard while your ditzy friend fake-bled to death. If that doesn't make a guy churlish, I don't know what would.”

“Okay, okay. Truce. You want to come in and have some Carmenère?” Kate led him through the house to the back porch. “Nice T-shirt, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

Kate poured him a glass of wine.

“Not to disparage your impeccable taste, but is this all you drink?”

“Pretty much. Good bang for the buck. So, what's up? I guess you're pretty pleased with the machine.”

“Oooooh, baby! Don't tell Mary, but it's a real beaut.”

“I'm serious, though — don't you need a special licence?”

“I've had one for a while. Used to have a little Honda 150 cc. Gave it to my sister not long before I met you.”

“Sister! You have one of those? Where can I get one? No, wait, don't answer.”

“Yes, I have a sister. You probably never saw her. She never worked in the shop, the little shit.” Leonard grinned. “She moved down to the city about the same time I moved back here.”

“So you mean you weren't here all along?”

“Sorry to disappoint. Just came back three years ago. Why, you thought I was a boy-next-door type?”

Actually she had. But now she saw the error of her ways. Trying not to sound sour grapes, Kate said, “Just thought you'd stuck around.”

“No — I, too, went out into the wide world. Montreal. Melbourne, Australia. Toronto. Indianapolis, believe it or not. The usual bouncing around, looking for the perfect job.”

“Which was?”

“Promise not to laugh.”

“I promise.”

“Manager of a racetrack.”

Kate burst out laughing. “I never took you for the horsey type.”

“No, Kate, not horses, cars.
You know,
vroom vroom
. ”

“Oh! Need for speed, that it?”

“Yeah, I raced for a while. But I saw a couple bad accidents. That's when I came up with the track manager idea. That way I could get out for a spin now and then, get it out of my system, come back intact.”

“You have way too much sense. Well, except for the noise of that thing.” Kate nodded toward the Harley. “Can't they do something about that?”

Leonard bobbed his head, noncommittal. “They already did.”

“Come again?”

“Installed one of those aftermarket exhaust systems. Make it louder. The Big Growler, it's called.”

“Can it be
de
-installed?” Kate asked.

Leonard laughed, “I guess.”

“Good,” said Kate. “Don't get me wrong, Leonard. I love motorbikes
in theory
. But a sleek instrument such as that — ” she nodded at the bike, “ — should purr, not roar. Bring it back when it's housetrained.”

Leonard looked surprised.

But Kate had already moved on in her mind. So he'd gone to university. How had that led to the racetrack? “So I'm guessing racetrack management wasn't on your university application. What did you study, anyway?”

“Biochemistry.”

“You're kidding me.”

“Nope. But my heart wasn't really in it. It was okay, but mostly I just followed the marks. You know, please the parents. Asian, what can I say?”

What
could
you say? Kate just stared at him. Biochemistry major, film buff, electronics whiz, businessman, race car driver, motorbike licence holder — and what else? There was a whole lot more to Leonard than met the eye.

“So I spent a few years around the tracks. Then one morning — this was in Toronto — I woke up to a smog alert. It was pretty bad. All that day, for some reason, I kept hearing the phrase, ‘smoke and mirrors,' playing in my head like a tape on a loop. ‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors,' all day long. You know, like a song you can't shake. I was even using it in conversation, shoehorning it in at the slightest excuse. By evening, driving home, I knew why. The racetrack thing had lost its magic, its appeal. It had gone stale, and this phrase was a sort of subconscious radio alarm. Wake up, Len, wake up! Move on! Anyway, also right around that time, my dad wrote me a letter on the QT, not telling Mom. He was worried about the business here. Customers weren't coming in for videos as often, DVDs were getting more popular.
And
available at the grocery checkout. The latest electronics and all the digital stuff were getting way ahead of him. Not in so many words, but he was more or less begging me to come back and dig him out.”

“So you did.”

“How could I not? They slaved their whole lives for us. Risked everything to get us out of the old country on a ridiculous boat that could just as well have sunk.”

“Do you remember much of it?”

“Enough. I was five.”

“How did you end up here in Pine Rapids?”

“We started out in Montreal. We weren't there very long and then moved to Toronto on the advice of some people we met on the boat. Deep down, though, my parents were country people, both brought to Saigon in their teens. You know, families looking for a better life. They got married, had us, decided they couldn't stand the regime anymore. Got on the boat. Anyway, after getting a bit of stability in Toronto, they decided to try getting back to their rural roots. But when it came down to it, neither knew much about farming. So they settled for a small town. I remember my dad always hanging over the counter, scanning the classifieds. And then one day he saw this tiny, one-line ad in the
Globe
business section. They decided to ditch the Big Smoke. People warned them they'd be miserable. No Vietnamese community. No decent food. But they persisted. And here we are.”

“Wow. Must have been a shock, coming up here.”

Leonard didn't respond to this directly. “Hey, I just had a brainwave,” he said. “How 'bout you come and meet them?”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah, come to dinner sometime. My mom will cook up her famous fish and chilis and force you to eat all kinds of weird stuff, and my dad, whenever my name comes up, will just say over and over, ‘Lenart never marry, never marry. Guht, guht boy.' It'll be a hoot.”

“What, they're trying to marry you off?”

“Are you kidding? Thirty-six-year-old still living in the basement?”

“I see your point. However, I'm not agreeing to anything beyond dinner, and that most definitely includes marriage!”

Leonard laughed. “No, no. But come and meet them. Please. No obrigation. Moneybackguarantee.”