Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (30 page)

“It didn’t seem…no, no, not like that at all. It…not at all.”

Harrington was writing on a pad. No one said anything until he stopped his pen.

“Mrs. MacTavish, do you have family or friends you might stay with for the night? You might be more comfortable.”

“I’m not sure it matters that much,” she said. “I’ll be taking it all with me wherever I go.”

“We have some work to do here. We don’t know yet just what’s happened,” Harrington said.

“Come to our place, Tena,” Lauchlin said. “My mother will be glad to have you.”

“No, no. I don’t want to track this thing into your mother’s house. No, please. I don’t want to stay
with
anyone.”

“We don’t know just what we’re dealing with, Mrs. MacTavish. You have no family hereabouts?”

“I have a sister on the mainland, hours away. Annapolis Valley. Anyway, she…”

“Tena, you’ll be fine with my mother and me. Stay with us.”

“For the night, Mrs. MacTavish,” Harrington said. “We’ll see what breaks tomorrow, and what forensics comes up with. It’ll take them a while to get here.”

“All right. I couldn’t lie up there and sleep anyway.”

Lauchlin waited at the bottom of the stairs while she gathered her things. He could hear her crying in her bedroom and then she suddenly stopped. He tried to find words that might help her, might save what he’d had with her. He needed to say he was deeply sorry, not just about her terror and her fear for Clement’s life, but because he had seen something strange on the road the night before and that it might have something to do with this strange night as well. But
when he saw her coming down the steps toward him, her eyes straight ahead, her fingers lightly tracing the banister, an overnight bag in the other hand, her face calm, hair pulled back neatly and tied, he only said, “Tena, let me carry that bag for you. Please.”

After he had seated her in the cruiser, Harrington took him aside.

“There’s another officer on his way, should be here soon. Give me your phone number in case anything comes up she needs to know.”

“Are you looking for Cooper tonight?”

“He hasn’t been home for a couple days, so his neighbours say. Look, keep this under your hat, would you, Lauchlin, until we can get on top of it.”

“The blood, you mean?” Lauchlin glanced across the fields to the Mathesons’ where lights burned upstairs and down. “Yes, but it will get around somehow.”

“I know. Sometimes it’s unbelievable.”

Lauchlin returned to the kitchen to call his mother, letting it ring while she made her way to the upstairs phone. She paused when he told her Tena was coming for the night, that blood had been found. He needn’t have told her that but he wanted to. Oh, my Lord, she said, Yes, yes, I was worried, you went off so fast, of course I’ll look after her here, of course I will.

Harrington and Lauchlin pulled their vehicles down the driveway a short distance, then the constable got out and strung police tape from a big poplar to the front porch railing, the house lights still loud in the windows. Lauchlin followed him out the driveway, his headlights catching the shine of her hair through the rear window, Harrington turning his head to speak to her. What was he telling her, asking her? She would soon be a guest in the house. Amazing, sad, a prospect that once would have cheered him. Lauchlin could see the ugly bloodied grass so clearly, a staining on the white blossoms of wildflowers too, what were they, asters? And the night before, the
bicycle, the man pumping past him, the sound of his own startled voice hailing him, the man’s laboured breathing, as if he were hauling a tremendous weight. Had he failed so badly to see what needed to be seen? Had he willed himself blind, stupid? He focused on the taillights of the cruiser until it turned up his driveway, and with a glance at the dimly lit interior of the store, cool and still, he followed it up.

Johanna was at the back door, then quickly into the yard where she took Tena by the arm as she stepped out of the cruiser. She talked to Harrington for a few moments, then turned Tena toward the house. When Lauchlin reached the kitchen, his mother had sat her at the table, was welcoming her as if Lauchlin were not there, in that soothing, sympathetic, slightly querulous voice that came to life when she met others’ distress, he’d heard it since he was a boy, that take-charge, maternal sound of capable country women, accustomed from their youth to facing crises without help, without doctors, without phones, without passable roads, when the kitchen was an emergency ward, and any woman worth her salt brought her domestic medicines to bear in it, she was nurse, counsellor, comforter. And of course she was in the middle of things, excitement had come to Johanna’s sheltering house. She ordered Lauchlin upstairs to turn down the bed and he went without a word, took the steps slowly, his mother’s murmuring talk fading behind him, swaddling Tena, Tena admitting she was dog-tired but would, yes, love some tea, Mrs. MacLean, Oh call me Johanna. In his brother’s bedroom he switched on the bedside lamp, plumped the pillows, turned back the covers neatly. Frank’s bed was always made and ready, the linen fresh, it was something Johanna liked to do, smoothing the sheets under her hands, believing still that her older son might show up on short notice as he often had in university and before he married, late. There were four bedrooms in the house, their dad had thought he and Johanna would have several children, you didn’t have to be Catholic for that, but two boys seemed to absorb all the fathering and mothering they had in them. There was not much of Frank
left in the room, the posters and photos and knick-knacks that had defined him against Lauchlin he had repossessed for his own house after his marriage, save for the anatomy poster, a medical illustration of a male, in that odd, classical pose so favoured, hands imploring at his thighs, all his vessels, muscles, ducts, organs in glorious colours that made him look resplendently stripped. Lauchlin started to pry out the poster’s corner tacks, then stopped and thumbed them back in, he’d thought Tena might sense it, this hideous decoration, the garish body, but no, it was he himself. He would have to guide Tena to the tidiness of this room, to this bed where he had first made love with Morag while snow howled against the windowpane. He allowed himself a wild notion of what it might be like could he lay her down in his own room, close her in his arms, fend off the nightmares galloping toward her, toward him.
I’m up here in my snug dormer, Lauch, gazing out, late. A long hill across the road, the sea’s on the other side. A lone cow is moving lazily down the slope. A stack of hay looks like shorn hair in a field of buttercups. There’s a high bed behind me and a cold night wind and a feather comforter. One more drink might get me under it. Keeping my illusions within bounds, so far. Not sure sometimes what I hoped to find here. I thought I knew but now it’s more evasion than discovery. Still, this is better than the dailiness back home. Elaine is no part of this. No. She is, yes. I don’t like sleeping alone. Streetlights are on, misted, that odd greenish aura, it shivers me. A long way from darkness yet. Remember when lights came to our road? We were kids. That kind of night is gone. Had its mysteries though, didn’t it?

Back downstairs, he leaned in the doorway waiting while his mother and Tena talked. Not about Clement directly, not about what did happen or might have happened, nothing of possible horror, but around him, his habits, how he liked pickled herring and plaid wool shirts and his roast beef done as a burnt shoe, Wasn’t my own husband that way? Johanna said, A blush of pink he wouldn’t touch it.

Then his mother said, “It’s sleep you need, dear. The best thing for you now.”

“Thank you, I’d like to try,” Tena said.

Lauchlin, carrying her small suitcase, followed them upstairs, waited while his mother told her where things were, the bathroom, leaving Tena in Frank’s room. On her way down the hall she pulled Lauchlin aside. “What is this about blood?” she whispered, close to his face.

“I shouldn’t say.”

“Whose?”

“Clement’s or his partner’s. I don’t suppose it belongs to both of them. It’s not an animal’s, I wouldn’t need forensics for that.”

“Well, my God.” His mother looked back where light was in the bedroom door. “I don’t see how she can sleep, but maybe she will. I have to lie down myself.” She went into her own room, closing the door quietly. Tena was standing beside the bed, pale with fatigue. Here she was, and he didn’t know what to say to her. He set her case on a chair.

“I hope you like our little hotel,” he said. “I recommend the breakfast.”

She reached out to him and he took her hand, she held on as if they were saying farewell. “I’m afraid of what I’ll see,” she said, “when I close my eyes. It’s still like before, did you know that? When I close them? The same kind of curtain comes down, like it used to. I have to face that demon…”

“Demon…?”

“That creature. What has he
done?
”

“We don’t know yet, Tena. It might not be as bad as we think.”

“Oh, it’s more than bad enough. I couldn’t move from the bed tonight. Paralyzed. I don’t know why exactly, maybe it was just too bizarre, and me blind. What on earth was Clement doing in the trees out there, in our little woods? I could hear branches cracking, I knew that sound, how steps crackle. I’ve heard deer in there at night, the cautious noise of them, but this was so clumsy. I tried in a few seconds to link it up—the whole day’s occurrences—with all I knew
about him, this man, my husband. I was never afraid in that bed, in that house, night or day. Even when my sight went, I blundered through it, it was ours, Clement’s and mine. I heard a door slam, the van’s, his. Wouldn’t it have to be
his
hand on the handle, I thought, whose otherwise? And then the engine starting up again, the sound so familiar my heart ached, that leaving sound. But why was he
leaving,
he had barely arrived, now in the night, so late, without coming into our house, telling me anything, anything, not even calling my name, and him missing since yesterday morning. The truck passed under my window, like it always did if I hadn’t got up yet in the morning. But this was
night,
and it stopped there below, idling. Not long. By the time I reached the window the van was down the driveway, and I yelled his name, Clement, Stop! I yelled, Please! But it faded off. I could hear the big watery sound of the poplars, in the wind. I let myself cry, I cried for what I could not for the Christ of me
see.
For being
blind,
Lauchlin. I missed something important and terrible, only eyes could understand it. My ears were not smart enough.”

“I’m not sure sight would have helped, Tena. I’d be as baffled as you were.”

“But you could’ve stopped him, anyone could have. So many
new
things now, to know. Sounds. That’s all I had. They fall into a pattern of something, maybe not the same something they would for you. Eyes do that in an instant.”

“Not always, Tena.”

“I have pieces scattered around, disturbed, I have to connect them together, somehow.”

He hugged her and she gave in to him, her cheek against his chest. She felt so limp he wondered if she even knew who he was. “Listen, I’m only across the hall. If you can’t sleep, you need anything, you want to talk, call me out. Please. Anything…”

She said she would not sleep much, but not to worry, and he said he would not sleep either, and he believed that, he was certain
as soon as he stretched out he would be blinded by the bright bits and pieces charging about his mind, refusing to coalesce, that alone would keep him blinking until daylight. But in fact he sank into exhaustion, palms up at his sides as if he had set down a heavy object and were recovering. His mouth went slack, a soft snore arose from him, as it had ever since his nose was broken, worse now that he was older, in the middle of the night Morag had sometimes left the bed for a couch. A dream took up where worrying awake left off, bicycles, he on one crazily, laughing, wobbling, then on foot, walking a road, murder doesn’t ride a bike, he was saying to someone he couldn’t see, not on this plain old worn road, he was jogging then, in his old cotton sweats, that nondescript grey no one wore anymore, his head hooded, a cyclist was up ahead of him, bent into the labour of pedalling, his rear rocking side to side, his legs churning, why was he wearing dirty coveralls? It seemed to Lauchlin urgent that he catch up with him, he had to overtake him, speak to him, something awful in that hunched back, in the terrible groaning that came in his wake, stop, stop, but Lauchlin’s legs were leaden, tenth-round legs, more motion than locomotion, he felt enormous, ghastly in his weight, huge, and the cyclist, pumping now with grotesque fury, grew smaller and smaller up ahead of him, his legs a blur of eagerness, of destination, leaving Lauchlin gasping in a field, there was dust in his mouth, medical, a powder tasting of the gym, murder was somewhere, he could feel it, killing, could a bike carry such a mission? No, no, the fluid motion seemed all wrong, even if you’re angry or crazy or drunk, the pedals turn, the wheels go round, there’s a smoothness to it, a calmness, A bicycle’s the best means of locomotion there is, someone was whispering sensibly at Lauchlin’s ear, in cool pedagogical tones, the cleanest, the purest transportation, but of course you have to oil it, someone like Malcolm said, if you don’t, it’s just another neglected piece of machinery grinding down the road, in the dark, clean enough, by itself, and the voice, someone’s, was flat and featureless, a surface
under which things darted and swam, that was the voice that woke him up, not, as he supposed, sitting up on his elbows in the dark, Tena’s, that shrill cry must have been dreamed because the house was silent now. Tena was safe, quiet, here, under his roof. He listened without moving for a long time, just as he had the night he saw the bicycle. Cooper, he said out loud, Cooper. How long had the word been there, poised on the back of his tongue? His heart rose, pained, he had to sit up. He got out of bed and slipped a pill in his mouth. He paced back and forth, whispering, punching his palms, until he collapsed slowly back on his bed.