It Isn't Cheating if He's Dead (7 page)

The one constant was the others. They still
spoke to him. Still guided his decisions. They stole him from her.

They weren’t voices in his head. That’s
what his doctor had told her after the first assessment. To him it was real.
Voices that spoke to him from the television, the walls, his computer, the
pencil in his hand. But most often they spoke from her grandmother’s ring that
she used to wear on her right ring finger.

A month before he disappeared, they were
curled up on the sofa together. It was a rare moment of doing nothing,
accomplishing nothing. Just being. While they watched a forgettable old movie,
he brought her hand up and held it next to his face. Displays of his love had
become rarer and rarer. He’d started his meds again a few days before, so she
attributed the sudden affection to antipsychotics getting his brain back to
normal, bringing her Gerald home.

He kissed her ring and hugged it to his
ear. When she realized he wasn’t kissing and cuddling, but whispering and listening,
she yanked her hand away and twisted in his arms to look at him.

“What are you doing?”

“Can I have your hand back? I have to
hear.” His eyes were wild and sweat beaded on his brow and his upper lip.

“You stopped your medication again, didn’t
you?”

He stared at her. His mouth moved but no
words formed.

She’d hid the ring at the bottom of her
underwear drawer. One less outlet from which the others could contact him. Weeks
after he disappeared she went to put the ring on again, but it had disappeared along
with him.

The doctor Finn spoke to in Montreal said
Gerald wore an antique ring. He often held it to his ear and whispered into the
pearl. The medical examiner found it lodged in his throat. The police surmised
that when he was robbed he tried to hide it, to protect it. But she knew it
wasn’t the ring he was protecting. It was the others.

She had always loved that ring, the one
reminder of a grandmother who’d died when Jem was too young to remember her
with clarity. But could she ever put it on her finger again? Would the others
try to speak to her? No, that was ridiculous. The voices may not have been inside
his head, but his head is where they were born. Not hers.

Gerald’s illness had robbed her of so much.
Time, happiness, peace of mind. She’d often questioned her own sanity.

She peeked at the clock. Four-forty-seven.
Her room was bathed in darkness, the sun still forty minutes from cresting the
horizon. She tossed the covers off and made her way downstairs.

She stared at the insurance form still Bucky-balled
to the refrigerator, drank a coffee, and sucked on a cigarette. Her new morning
ritual. And not a healthy or productive one either.

Time to shake things up.

She pulled the insurance certificate from
the fridge and opened her laptop. It wasn’t hard to find the forms she needed
to make the claim. One call to Finn to get the death certificate and another to
the office to make an appointment with a notary, and it was done. She would
cash in. That’s what he wanted. She would give him that.

mine are dead

She pulled into her usual spot in front of
the park. The residents came at her from all directions. She stepped out of the
van and slid the side door open.

“Morning everybody. What a reception.”

“Where ya been, Ruby? It’s gotta be after
ten.”

“Sorry Angus. Had something I had to take
care of. But I brought treats today to make up for it.”

She handed sandwiches and drinks to
everyone. And a brownie.

“What?” Jeremy squealed and clapped. “Oh
my, oh my. No fruit?”

“Fruit too.” She leaned into the van and
pulled out two reusable grocery bags. “You want to hand out the oranges for
me?”

“Can I have another brownie?”

“If there are enough, you can.”

“Deal.” He tucked his food into the side
pockets of his oversized jacket, gathered up the bags and traipsed through the
park distributing fruit to the other residents. He chatted with each of them, his
hands doing more talking than his mouth. He made a wide berth around Chief.

She pulled a smaller bag from behind the
now-empty box, closed the van and crossed the park. Chief sat at attention in
the shrub, his face an emotionless mask.

“Good morning. How are you doing today?”

He answered her the same way he did every
day. With silence.

“Well, I’ve had better days.” She sat cross-legged
in front of him and rolled down the edges of the bag. “Tuna on rye today, and
an orange. I already cut it in wedges so you don’t have to peel it.” She set
those in front of him and unfolded the parchment to reveal his breakfast. She pulled
the straw from a drinking box of chocolate milk, released it from its
cellophane wrapper and poked it into the silver hole. She set that next to the
sandwich.

He eyed the food and glanced at her. He
inched one arm out from its protected spot under his armpit, picked up one half
of the tuna and took a small nibble. He chewed once, then followed right away
with a bigger bite.

Until now he would wait until she walked
away before he’d start eating. A sign of trust perhaps? Or was it only because
he was as hungry as the rest of them? At least the need for food, the will to
survive, outweighed his silent posturing. Definite progress.

She scanned the park while he chewed and
swallowed. Most every resident was fixated on the drama of her interactions
with Chief. He’d made quite the impression on all of them. Had they set aside
their wariness and become as concerned for him as they were for each other? She
had proven he was not a threat. But she still had no idea who he was or why he
was there. Or why he wouldn’t speak.

“Do you have family?”

He stopped sucking on the milk and turned
to stone.

“Mine are dead. All of them.”

His eyes went cold.

She should shut the hell up. Not press too
many buttons at once. But she needed to talk to someone. Her friends had all
but abandoned her in the past two years. She couldn’t talk to Althea about
anything. Cecilia just wanted to get her laid. There was Finn. But she didn’t
want to talk case files and fingerprints. She needed to just talk. To someone.
Anyone.

“Dad died when I was a kid. Eighteen. Okay,
maybe that’s not a kid, legally speaking. But I still needed my daddy, you
know?”

Sucking sounds filled her ears. Chief drained
his milk box, the wonderful noise of the last drops being pulled through the
straw like music in the air.

“Here, I brought you another.”

He took care in pulling the straw free of
its tether and poking it through the hole. Then he sucked on it until the same
end-of-milk sounds came.

Jem held out her hands and he placed both
cartons in her palms. She set them beside her. “Do you like brownies?” She
handed him a small parchment wrapped package.

He took a bite from the corner and glanced
at her. He didn’t smile. Didn’t speak. But there was silent appreciation.

“So, I was telling you about my dad. He had
a heart attack. At the kitchen table. Forty-two years old.” She stared past
Chief’s head at a lone blue blossom in the bush. “I was working at the time,
summer job before university. Mom found him. He was crumpled on the linoleum,
fried egg and bacon all over the table and floor. He’d pulled his breakfast
plate off when he keeled over. I always thought it was his way of saying, look,
the bacon did it. I was killed by bad breakfast choices.” She smirked and
looked at her hands. “He was you know. Bad food. Bad cholesterol. Clogged
arteries. Early death.” She wiped tears from her cheeks.

“They were high school sweethearts, Mom and
Dad. And happy all through their relationship. How rare is that? I mean they
fought and all, who doesn’t? But happy. So rare.” She resisted the urge to grab
the cigarettes from her van. She needed to quit again, before she suffered the
same fate as her father.

“Mom wasn’t herself after he died. Then I
moved away to go to university. Mom withdrew, couldn’t cope with being alone. I
like to think she died of a broken heart, but really, she killed herself.
Overdosed on sleeping pills.” She tugged one blade of grass from the ground and
pulled it between her thumb and index finger, then snapped it in half and
dropped it.

“It could have been an accident, right? She
took those pills every night after he died, sometimes two or three when one
wasn’t enough to dull the pain. Maybe she needed just a couple more.” She
huffed and shook her head. “But the cops said no. She took the whole damn
bottle, washed them down with a tumbler of scotch. Suicide.”

Jem leaned back and stretched her legs out
on the grass. She hadn’t told anyone but Gerald about that. “I’ve felt like an
orphan ever since. No parents, no brothers and sisters. That’s what I had in
common with Gerald. Dead dad and only child. But you have no clue who Gerald
is, so I’m going to leave you alone now.”

She pulled the second sandwich from the bag
and tucked it inside Chief’s jacket. “For later,” she whispered. “You like the brownies?
I made them yesterday. I saved two more for you.” She placed them at his feet.

She gathered the trash into her lap and
hesitated. “I’d like to know your name. Can you tell me that?”

Nothing.

“Okay. Maybe another day.” She looked over
her shoulder across the park. “They call you Chief. Did you know that? I hope
it doesn’t bother you. They mean it with a modicum of respect.”

Nothing.

She stood and patted him on the shoulder.
“See you tomorrow, Chief. Thanks for listening.”

what about
love?

Jem ran down the stairs zipping up the side
of her summer dress. She swung the door open the second the bell chimed for the
third time. “You’re late.”

Finn stood on her doorstep. The evening sun
bathed him in orange light. All buttoned up again.

“Sorry. Is it too late? We could reschedule.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m only teasing.”

They sat at the table in the same seats
they always chose. It had become a ritual, this weekly meeting. Part of the
fabric of her life. Like a really lame recurring date with no romance, no
touching. No sex. Except the stuff she made up in her head.

What would she do every Saturday if
Gerald’s murder got solved?

Finn rubbed a palm over his long crew cut.
He needed a trim. It was on the verge of falling out of line, not standing at
attention. A vision of a long-haired Finn flashed through her mind. She covered
her smile with one hand. He’d be even hotter with long hair.

“I don’t have much news tonight. I can’t
tell you everything, being a murder investigation and all.”

“I understand. Not sure I could handle
everything.”

“I bet you can handle more than you think.”
He pulled out a notebook and pencil. He tap-tap-tapped the eraser end against
the paper. “What was Gerald like?”

“What do you mean?

“At home. Everyday Gerald. Who was he?”

“Why does that matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m no profiler, but maybe
his everyday habits, the person he was at home when he’s most vulnerable, not
the public guy all his colleagues know, will tell us something about why he
left. About where he went. Maybe point to why he went there. If we knew that,
it might lead to the killer.”

Jem nodded slowly and looked past Finn’s
head at the wall. Gerald’s write-on wipe-off calendar still hung there, frozen
in time, four years ago this June. His neat black Xs through the first to the
fourth, obsessively marking the passage of time. Commemorating his successful
completion of each listed task. Then on the fifth, the X was not so neat. An
arrow of red marker shoved an incomplete task into the box for the sixth. The X
through the sixth was only a slash, not confined to the square allocated for
that twenty-four hour period, but invading the territory of the twelfth. Two
tasks were circled and moved from the seventh all the way to the fifteenth.
Messy, crooked slashes marked the seventh to the tenth. The eleventh was a dark
square, obliterated by black Sharpie. And then nothing. He didn’t come home on
the twelfth.

Maybe the slash from the sixth pushed him
over the edge. How could he face his precious calendar after the sixth declared
war on his mind?

“He was obsessed with order. Numerical,
alphabetical, chronological. But he never ironed his clothes and rarely brushed
out his hair.” She shifted her gaze to Finn’s angular face. “He was obsessed
with health food.  No meat, no eggs, no cheese. Nothing that caused any animal
any discomfort. But he refused to get a pet. Wouldn’t go near the SPCA. He was
obsessed with finding a cure for all cancers, a magic bullet if you will. But
he refused to take any medication if he got a cold or the flu. And of course,
he went off his meds. You know, the antipsychotics.”

“He was a walking contradiction.”

Could he read her mind? “Yes, that’s what I
always told him. He was brilliant, a genius. But he didn’t understand the
simplest, most obvious humour. A complete social nerdlinger.” She huffed. “That
sounds like such a stereotype. He wasn’t completely awkward. I mean he never had
trouble finding a girlfriend. And I know he loved me. But he didn’t believe in
public displays of affection.” No, he kept those very private. And then even
the private ones became rare.