Hunger's Brides (186 page)

So by now you, his public, will have heard the story. Maybe you've forgotten it already, moved on to sub-Saharan drought. But he has not forgotten.

And it is not because he is drunk. He no longer needs that excuse.

As he spills his guts the reporter sits quietly nodding each time a piece falls into place. Much she hadn't guessed, so much she'd almost known. Petra Stern, eyes a shade of granite, sandstone frown, censorious. The jutting chin a rock of righteousness.

At last she interrupts. “Wait, let's get this clear. Two blood types on the floor—now you mention these deep scratches in your arm. You're telling us the blood was yours?” Anger gutters in her granite eyes.

You are so ambitious Petra Stern. Once he was like you. “It seems your friends at the police haven't told you much.”

“Professor Gregory,
did you try to kill this girl—”

“
No
—”

“But you attacked her.”

“No it was—”
Convulsions
.

“
A
struggle, then. Maybe she provoked you.”

“My arm, she gripped—Stop. Turn it off.”

She watches him a moment through slitted eyes then turns off the machine. A moment of stillness. Neither of them speak.

“You had one chance, to let me tell it my way.”

“If you've hurt her—”

“Oh I hurt her. Just—”

“Why haven't they
arrested
you already? A second blood type on the floor, the walls? Curtis would never have missed this! A woman calls me, implicating a man in some kind of blood rite. Two hours later a man calls 911 and flees the scene. He removes evidence then withholds it for
almost three weeks
—who's protecting you, Professor Gregory? Why won't they act? I want—”

“I
know
what you want.”

“I want to see your wrists manacled.”

“I told you, there was broken glass all over the bathroom.”

“To see you leaving the courthouse in a van.”

“I cut myself.”

“You said you found her in the bedroom.”

“I did….”

“So you dragged her to the bathroom.”

“Yes.”

“With glass everywhere? Why? What would make you do that?”

“Now you'll never know.”

“You think you can hide the truth. For how long?”

The truth, the truth
.

“Show me your arm! We'll have your cuts tested—is that it, your sick game? Grandstanding with your lighter, telling me your story only now that your wounds are healed. Confessing only when the evidence fades—dramatic taped confession! But then when you're charged, you just say it was all a little fable, a bit of entertainment?”

We are all made part of the entertainment
.

“Say something!”

“Petra, I've never disputed the blood was mine.”

“All this sham self-pity and guilt's just part of the game, isn't it? For the man who holds all the evidence! Gloating.”

“No.”

“No
what?”

No more
.

“Interview over, Professor? All right then. You gave me lots here. More than you know,” she says, reaching into her briefcase, casually extracting a little dictaphone, still turning.

Angrily he asks if machine number three is a suppository.

“So …” she says, ignoring the question, “I'm going to give you a little something in return.”

“Tell me what she said to you.”

“That's a part of the story that goes unfiled. I want you to know your little fable will always be incomplete—”

“What about your public?”

“Understand, Professor, that someone out there will always know—”

“And your duty to expose the truth?”

“What you never will.”

“You've made this personal, Petra Stern, haven't you.”

“Personal, you bastard? I heard her
voice
. She spoke to me. I could have gotten her help! She wouldn't tell me your name. Only that her prof would have the story, she'd left him all the evidence. You'd be able to explain. Everything. If I could get you to. She wouldn't give your name. She was standing in a phone booth. I could hear the cars. She had to go home now….

“I could have helped her,” she says, eyes boring into his.“The police needed something to go on. A name, an address. In the newsroom we sat up through the night, listening to the scanners for word to come in. Three
A.M…
. You know what that was like? To catch up just as the ambulance pulls away? Do you know how
that felt?”
She stopped the dictaphone. “To have wondered all along if it was you, and denied it to myself—for the two hours that might have made a difference? You're so fascinated by my name. Stern, Petra. Familiar, no …?”

“I do know you, then.”
The penitent's mortification deepens
.

“Twice a week for a semester, Professor. Check your lists for the class of '83. Your first year teaching, wasn't it?”

“But how, I don't—”

“Recognize me? But then, how the fuck could you? So many faces. So many students to do. So little time.

“You gave me an A if that helps—
does
that help? And I was at a
cocktail party at your house five years ago. No? Don't remember that either. But you had so much on your mind back then. When she called, your face flashed through my mind.
That's crazy
—I told myself. Ten years ago
all
the profs were fucking their acolytes, it wasn't just you. Ridiculous to think. That you should cross my mind…. I could have phoned your house. I've met your wife. We might have found that girl. Found her before you. They say now she may have a damaged brain. How does that make you feel, Professor? This one really did go ga-ga over you.”

She tucks the dictaphone into her briefcase, leans back, crosses her legs.“Maybe I'll take that drink, now. We can chat about old times.”

“The bar is closed for the day.”

“Women are attracted to you, why deny it?”

“Call it a paradox.”

“No.
We like pricks
. Bigger they are, harder we fall.”

He turns his head toward the wall of glass. The smoky light has fulfilled its promise. Violet clouds drift from the west, keeled in brass. Beneath, a dark blue shoal of hills. Lights flare on along the river. There, a phosphorescence. Another there.

“I think it's time you left.”

“Maybe she'll wake up soon. When you go to visit, she'll see you but won't remember who … or why. Follow you around like a dog, drooling and sighing. She'll take you for a friend—idiots always think you're their friend.” A voice quavering with rage.

She fumbles at the table in the half-dark of the room, then flicks on the lighter. The flame dances shadows across the planes of her face. “Or maybe not a dog. Vegetables have eyes too, don't they, Professor. Like potatoes.” Her smile is a grotesque gash in the flickering light.

“Get out. Don't make me tell you again.” He hears the words begin in threat and end in listlessness.

“Don't worry, I'm leaving.” She leans forward, nodding towards the dim stacks beside the fireplace, “But I just have to ask you once, face to face.
How can you?
Tell
her story?
You have no
right.”
Still she makes no move to leave. “But you know that.”

“It's why she picked me.”

“How convenient for you.” She uses the lighter now to locate her
pad and pens, the dictaphone. She glances down, her face in shadow, as she puts them back in the briefcase. “You'll change the names to protect the innocent I suppose.”

“The innocent have nothing to fear.”

“Should be very popular down in Kingston, your book. I hear the prison there has a close-knit writing community. Though small.” She waves the flame at the shadows surrounding him. “How many?”

“Many?”

“Copies. Of your book. How many will you pay them to print?”

He sits a while. After a moment, the flame goes out. She waits. He turns again to the soaring wall of windows.

He stirs finally. She thinks he will answer.

They sit another moment, together in the near dark. A moment more and she stands to leave, fumbling a little. She opens the door and pauses, silhouetted against the evening sky.

“These girls—women, young
women
—wanted so badly to give something of themselves. Back to you, Dr. Gregory. Our bodies were all we had. Or so we thought. Many of us were from towns out in the country. Small, prairie towns. Simple places. Plainspoken places. Not understanding any of it, you shared a gift most of us never even knew existed. It was never the beard, the blue eyes, the pipe. The
prestige
. You shared
a new world
with us. A passion—for ideas, for words—an enchanted space. A poetry. It was unlike everything we'd left behind.

“You were our guide. You had that once.”
So very long ago
. “We gave that,” she adds quietly, closing the door, “to
you.”

He had wanted to tell her the number.

The number of books was two.

But that seems just hours ago, not weeks. Now it is late. It is almost night. In the west just the palest glimmer remains above the chipped saw of peaks.

He sits out still on the curving porch as night draws on, the evening chill beckons from the grass, sound takes up the night's blind watch … A crow's hacking caw, a calf bawls in a pasture down the valley. A small plane makes for home. Its passage overhead bends from growl away to drone.

In the far distance a highway just within hearing. Endless exhalation,
a river of sound … cascade that undercuts the banks of night in a raw, scouring fall.

He is beside you as you follow her to the end. He is with you, not before, not behind. Beside, abreast, to where she waits he walks with you, across on the other side.

T
RUE
-C
RIME
S
TORIES
3
        

O
N
A
PRIL
13, 1995, Petra Stern captured Professor Donald Gregory's rambling half-confession on tape. Her next few days were full as she sought corroborating facts and quotes from the other principals. Her intention was to present all of her material to the police, but only after it had been filed with her producer.

Whatever elation she may initially have felt must have quickly faded. She would come to wonder if she had not been set up, fed just enough disinformation to be made a fool of. On April 14, she called the Limosneros family and persuaded them to listen to the tape. For a victim's family, they had been unusually close-mouthed. She hoped the recording would jar loose an accusation or some item of damaging information or, better yet, earn her a look at their daughter's papers, which had been tantalizingly withheld from her by Donald Gregory on the previous day.

When she arrived at the Limosneros residence in Mount Royal, she was met at the door by the family's attorney and turned away.

On April 15, Madeleine Gregory agreed to a meeting, off the record. Mrs. Gregory had no interest in the role of bitter and betrayed wife. Useful background did however emerge, none of it strictly incriminating. As she was taking her leave of Mrs. Gregory, promising to stay in touch, Petra Stern was stunned to learn that Donald had flown earlier that day to England, for a research trip of indeterminate length. It was now apparent that by the time her exposé aired, Donald Gregory might well be beyond the reach of Calgary police. An interesting twist to her story but with unpleasant implications for her relations with Detectives Curtis and Green.

She was now a little desperate. She wasted much of Sunday, using the tape as a pretext for attempting to re-interview the professor's colleagues and former students. Petra Stern decided that a hostile reaction from the perpetrator in London would make an effective follow up once the story ran. She was briefly pleased with herself for so quickly locating Donald Gregory at a three-star hotel near the British Museum. She placed her call to London on the morning of Monday, April 17. It was her intention to take her material to Detective Curtis immediately after the call, and to incorporate his reaction into the final edit.