Scare the Light Away (20 page)

“It seems to me that my dog is doing a good deal of your work for you, Sergeant. Perhaps I should start billing you for her time.”

The constable grinned. Reynolds didn’t.

“A homicide inspector will be in town tomorrow, Ms. McKenzie. You can be sure that he will want to speak with you. Please don’t leave without informing us first.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I have a question for you, Ms. McKenzie,” the constable said. “How did you get that nasty bruise on your face?”

Instinctively my hand reached up and touched my cheek. “Tripped over the dog and fell into the edge of a door.”

“Is that right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“If you ever want to talk about it…”

“About tripping over my dog, I don’t think so. Goodbye.”

I stood at the window watching them go, the would-be police dog by my side.

For dinner I heated a can of soup and threw together cheese sandwiches. Neither of us ate much. From the kitchen window we caught the occasional glimpse of dark shapes moving through the woods. The rain started up again. The police were in for a miserable evening.

After we finished eating, Dad collapsed into his chair and switched on the TV to a black-and-white movie. I have no interest in old movies, but to keep him company I curled up on the couch with the intention of reading the last of the business press newspaper clippings that Jenny had thrown together for me. But the clippings were boring, and the movie soon caught my attention. It was
Casablanca
, which I had certainly caught bits and pieces of but had never seen in its entirety. Dad fell asleep about half way through, but I watched to the end, loving it.

When I get home, I might look up some more old movies. People in those days really could act.

“Wake up, Dad.” I shook my father’s shoulder. “Time to go to bed.”

He stumbled down the hall mumbling goodnights, and I returned to my papers.

Sampson, like Dad, was on the verge of collapse due to the excitement of the day. But that wretched nap had ruined my sleep pattern. I went into the kitchen to make more tea and peered out the back window. It was dark now, the activity in the woods had ceased, but the police would be back tomorrow. I gave a thought to poor Jennifer Taylor and particularly to her parents. I hadn’t known her, but I had seen her dead body, wet and muddy and so vulnerable. Those five little white toes. I shook my head in an effort to dispel the image.

I wondered if her father was the Dennis Taylor who had been in my class at school. Nasty boy, tiny eyes, too long limbs, greasy hair, acne-spotted face. I’d dated him a couple of times—yes, I was that desperate. One night when he had been walking me home from a dance at the school, he’d suddenly pulled me into the bushes at the side of the road and knocked me down. He fastened his greasy lips onto my mouth and stuck his tongue down my throat. Then he stuffed his hand up my skirt and sort of moved his fingers around over my panties. It was disgusting. I wanted to pee. Instead I yelled and gave a good solid push to get him off of me. I was no shrinking violet even then: I’d grown up fighting with a much older brother. Dennis rolled to one side and just sat there watching me scramble through the woods back to the road. He tried telling everyone that I had put out on the first date and been really hot for it. Fortunately for me, no one had believed him. He’d tried that story too many times before.

But regardless of how nasty a teenage boy he had been, Dennis Taylor didn’t deserve to live to see his daughter murdered.

As I returned to the living room with my tea, a set of headlights drove by, heading up the hill to Aileen and Jimmy’s house. They passed and all was calm and dark once again. For once my work held no interest for me. I hadn’t checked my e-mail all day, nor returned Jenny’s call. They could do without me for one day. I flicked through the TV magazine. I hadn’t watched TV in so long that none of the programs listed meant anything to me. And the paperback that I bought at the Vancouver airport was boring when I was high in the air and fresh for the journey. It would be excruciating with my mind as restless as it was. My thoughts full of dead bodies and feeding insects, I wasn’t in the mood to venture back into the cellar to get more of the diaries. I’d made sure to slip the volumes I’d brought upstairs back down as soon as I finished them, worried that Dad or someone else might find them.

The ringing phone pulled me out of my self-pitying funk.

“Rebecca? You have to come. Now. Please.”

“Aileen, what’s the matter? Are you okay?” A stupid question. The woman was obviously not okay.

“Please.” Her voice broke on the word, and she swallowed a sob. “They’ve taken Jim.”

The lights on the road. Jack and Pete. Aileen had a right to be terrified. “I’ll be there as fast as I can. I’ll bring Sampson. Have you called the police? They won’t get far.”

“The police took him, Rebecca. They’ve arrested him for killing Jennifer Taylor.”

Chapter 34

The Diary of Janet McKenzie. September 20, 1954

Today I did the most incredible thing. I actually yelled at Mr. M. Even as I was saying the words, and looking right into his hateful old face, I knew that I would run into the sewing room as soon as I could safely get away, and pull out my diary.

He arrived home late from work for some unknown reason. (I am being sarcastic here —he smelt like a brewery.) The dinner stew was painfully thin tonight. Nothing like we had in the war, of course. How Aunt Betty could make an egg stretch! I never thought I would need to know all her tricks once I came to Canada! Bob is out of work again and meat is so expensive. I added lots of potatoes and vegetables but it was hardly enough. The children, particularly Jim, wanted more. So I gave them more. He wasn’t here to eat his share. Let the children have it. They need it.

Finally he came stumbling in and shouted for his dinner. Mrs. M. pulled the remains of the stew out of the oven—mostly gravy and potatoes and carrots and turnips—and put plenty of bread on the plate, but he started yelling to beat the band. “A man needs his meat,” he shouted at her. And he actually threw the plate full of food onto the floor. Bob and I were just getting into bed, but we could hear the crash from our room. Bob ran into the kitchen and for some crazy reason I followed. Well, there she was, down on her arthritic old knees, cleaning up the mess and him looming over her all red in the face and still yelling curse words and insults. Bob spoke all soft and comforting (like he always does) and offered to make some bacon and eggs for his dad.

After all these years, I finally had enough. I pushed (pushed!) Bob out of the way, and pulled Mrs. M. to her feet.

“Enough food has been wasted in this house tonight,” I said. I looked down at Mr. M. “Why don’t you just go to bed and sleep it off? You can have eggs for breakfast.”

He turned even redder, if that were possible. Then he slapped me across the face. It was a shock that. The pain seemed to radiate right down to my toes. Mrs. M., of course, started to cry and ran out of the room, a tea towel held to her face.

His face twisted with an expression I still can’t describe. Angry, yes. But something deeper. Even more frightening than his anger. I stepped back and felt behind me for the cutlery drawer.

Bob stepped forward and touched his father’s shoulder. “Time for bed, eh, Dad?” he said. “Little Jimmy’s asleep. Don’t want to wake him up.”

I pulled open the drawer and touched a knife. But, to my surprise, Mr. M. deflated right before my eyes. Instead of slapping his son’s hand from his shoulder and slurring something insulting, he simply walked away.

It’s late now.Mrs. M. crept out of her room to clean up the kitchen, but Bob and I had already done it. We looked at each other over the broken dish. I swear that my heart leapt and I had a flash of a vision of Bob at that dance so long ago, stepping forward ever so hesitantly, wanting to ask me for a dance, but afraid I would turn my nose up at a man shorter than me. Better I had, I reminded myself, as I scooped up a lone piece of potato and smiled back at my husband.

June 2, 1955

I will call her Rebecca. I loved the book Rebecca. I read it long into the night in my father’s house. I don’t remember if it was before the war, or during it. The book itself captivated me so, I was scarcely aware of what was happening in the world around, war or no war. Rebecca, of course, wasn’t a very nice person, not someone you would choose to name your child after. But I loved the name, if not the woman. Therefore I will name my daughter Rebecca. Mrs. M. doesn’t like it (so… Jewish, she says in her thin voice). Mr. M. doesn’t care. It isn’t a boy. And Bob wouldn’t voice an opinion to save his life.

So Rebecca it is. She is beautiful. Beyond beautiful. She will be tall, like me. The nurses measured her and weighed her and said that she was ‘long’. Tall, like me. But she will be strong, where I am not.

If I were strong I would be long gone from this place. Off to the city to make my fortune. But that’s a dream and nothing more. For what could I accomplish in any city with three children in tow? I dream sometimes that it is suddenly discovered that I am a great actress, or an opera singer of incredible power, and my children and I are whisked away to a life of luxury and favor.

But then Rebecca dirties her diaper, or Jim rips the head off Shirley’s best doll and I am brought back down to this dismal, hopeless earth.

May 8, 1956

A letter arrived this morning. From Anne Johannsen. A name I scarcely remember. It will be ten years in September since we all came across on the Queen Mary. Anne has this idea of everyone writing down everything that has happened to us since we parted and she will put together a collection to send to us all.

After I read the letter, I left the children with Mrs. M. and went for a long walk. To my surprise, I find that I have quite fallen in love with these woods. There is usually no one about and I can walk and think in peace. It is spring now, so around me everything is growing. The tiniest of buds are spreading on the waking trees; grass and the first few trilliums are poking their heads up from the forest floor. I can hear birds again, and it is wonderful. I hate this horrid place and long constantly for the tidy green fields of Surrey. But when I am in the woods, alone, I know that I am longing for my father’s home, and my Aunt Betty’s cooking, and the warmth of their fireplace, and their love. All that is gone now. And miles and miles of neat hedgerows, perfectly cultivated fields, and contented cows can’t bring it all back.

I imagined, as I walked, what I might say for the Queen Mary War Brides letter. “Things are better here since I held a kitchen knife to my father-in-law’s throat and told him to stay away from me. My husband has a job now; fortunately whenever he loses one job he finds another quickly, but he doesn’t make much money. I suspect that what little there is goes to help his mother with the housekeeping. He can be sober for weeks at a time, but then he falls off the wagon, and when he’s on the bottle he scarcely glances at our children. We still live with his parents, my husband and I and our three children. He has no ambition to leave this dead end of a town and better himself. But he doesn’t beat me, and I suppose that’s a blessing.”

I was composing the never-to-be-written letter in my head when a deer, a beautiful doe, stepped out of the woods directly into my path. She looked at me for a long time, studying me with her wonderful, expressive brown eyes. I looked back, struggling to communicate. But then we heard a truck, grinding its gears as it drove up the hill. She flicked her tiny white tail and with a flash of dotted rump disappeared.

I hate this place with all my might. But I love these woods. Is that possible?

Chapter 35

I flew into my bedroom for my car keys. Sampson yawned and lifted her head off the pillow, jumped off the bed, and stumbled after me.

I scribbled a note for Dad, in case he woke up, and put it on the kitchen table under the pepper shaker, half of a set of particularly unattractive ceramic pigs. They were so out of synch with my mother’s taste that they could only have been a gift from a friend, probably made by said friend.

“You stay and look after Dad,” I told Sampson. She yawned and didn’t look particularly disappointed at the command.

This wasn’t the first time the police had come in the night for my brother.

I ran out the door.

Aileen had left the house and walked down the road to meet me. She opened the door and clambered in before the SUV came to a full stop. She still wore her pajamas, cheerful, cuddly polar bear cubs skating and tobogganing and skiing across the white flannel. A colorful shawl had been tossed over her shoulders, and her long hair tumbled wildly around her head, half in and half out of its bun. Her eyes looked like those of a horse I’d seen once—rearing back in terror as a car rounded a corner in front of it. The driver saw the horse in time and pulled out of the way. I wasn’t so sure that disaster could be avoided this time.

I made a three-point turn and headed back down the road.

“Did they actually arrest him? Formally, I mean, with a legal warning and such?”

“No. They said they wanted him to come in and answer some questions. They’ve talked to him before, but this is the first time they’ve taken him to the station. That’s not good.”

I agreed. But what the heck did I know? My sole experience with criminal law could be found between the pages of a Peter Robinson mystery.

The sun had long ago taken its nightly bath in the smooth orange waters of the lake, and the stars hung like the most precious of diamonds over the black water. There was no moon.

There was also no traffic on the highway, and I pushed the car as fast as it could go. Dark, foreboding pine trees lined the roadway in a solemn, macabre honor guard.

“Thank you for coming, Rebecca,” Aileen said, the words muffled, her face turned to her window, to the forest lying beyond the reach of our lights. “Jim told me not to drive because I’m too upset. He told me to call you, said you’d help. He said I could count on it.”

“He did?” Imagine that.

“Your brother loves you very much indeed. I don’t know exactly what happened between you when you were kids, but I have a pretty good idea. He wants to make amends, if you’ll let him.”

“Let’s leave the past for another time.”

“You’re right, there are far more immediate matters to worry about. But you and he have to deal with your history someday.”

It seems to me that I have been dealing with my past with perfect success all these years—mainly by ignoring it. “Tell me what they have on him. Why did the cops take him in? They questioned me in my living room. It was all terribly civilized. Over tea and fruitcake, of all things. Perfectly Agatha Christie.”

A flash of light as we drove through Hope River, marking a tiny outpost of human habitation in the vastness of the wild. A Monday night in May, not much happening in town. Lights and canned music spilled from the bar, but there were only a handful of cars parked outside. We drove past the restaurant. Maggie Kzenic stood on the steps putting on her hat and mittens as inside someone extinguished the last light. She looked up, without much interest, to watch us go by.

“They said they found Jennifer’s body in the swamp.”

“Unfortunately I found her. Or rather Sampson.”

“You found her?”

“Yes. Buried in the muck.”

“How awful for you. Are you all right?”

“Thanks for asking, but we aren’t here to worry about me, are we?”

“No. That was the psychologist in me, always struggling to rise to the surface. The police found something on her. A necklace. Like one Jim has.”

“Is there something special about this necklace, Aileen?”

“Yes.” She choked on the word. We had passed Hope River; the OPP detachment wasn’t in town, but a good bit further north, the other side of North Ridge. There were no other cars on the road. My headlights carved a path out of the darkness, illuminating the thin white line leading to the vast, empty North. Beyond the confines of this rented monstrosity of a vehicle lay nothing but the gloom of the primitive forest. By the lakes there would be a few summer cottages, owned by people who didn’t mind the distance from Toronto, and some homes like ours, built in the days when lakefront property didn’t cost too much more than anything else. But inland there wasn’t much at all: a scattering of farmhouses on the rare bits of land suitable for agriculture, the homes of people who liked their privacy.

“What’s special about it?”

“It’s one of a kind. I can testify to that. Because I made it myself, in honor of our first anniversary. Two broken hearts linked by a thin chain. At the time I thought I was being so clever.”

“Can’t you tell them it isn’t Jimmy’s?”

“The cops came directly out and asked him if he had one like it. They described it, all the details perfectly. Obviously they knew it was his, lots of people have seen him wearing it. So, yes, he said he owned a necklace like that, no point in denying it. And when they asked him to show it to them, he had to confess that it had been lost.”

“Did you know he’d lost it?”

She hesitated before answering. “No.”

“Did they tell you where they found this necklace?”

“No, but we were certainly given to understand that it had something to do with the finding of Jennifer’s body.”

A flash of light shattered the black night as we rounded a corner. The OPP station. Aileen was out of the car and running for the door the moment the car edged into the driveway, before I had even started to look for a parking spot.

By the time I parked and made it into the building, she was standing in front of the desk, tapping her toes, bare and wrapped in open sandals.

“He said I have to wait here.”

“Did you talk to someone already?”

“They were waiting for me. He told me to wait.”

“So we’ll wait.” I took her arm and guided her to a row of institutional chairs lining one wall.

And there we waited, as instructed.

Aileen pulled at the loose threads on her shawl as if she could unravel it all and knit herself a perfect world in which murder never reared its ugly head and love lasted forever and the police sat around all day playing cards and eating doughnuts because they had nothing else to do.

I touched the back of her constantly moving hand, and she gripped me with a ferocity of which I wouldn’t have believed her capable.

“Let’s go, babe.”

We looked up and Aileen released my hand. She rose to her feet in her characteristic gentle, flowing movement and studied her husband’s face. “Are you okay?”

“Perfectly. Let’s go home.”

I’d fallen asleep in the rock-hard chair, clutching my sister-in-law’s hand in mine. For the second time that day my head felt as thick as the mud in the swamp. Thicker.

Sergeant Reynolds stood in the background watching the touching little family tableau. No emotion cracked the lines on his face. “The inspector will be here tomorrow. He’ll want a few words with you, McKenzie.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Consider it a friendly reminder. Don’t leave town.”

“I have no reason to.” Jim shifted his grip to his wife’s waist. She melted into his arms and he half carried her out the door.

“Ta ta for now, Sergeant Reynolds,” I said in a failed attempt at frivolity.

“Always a pleasure, Ms. McKenzie, always a pleasure.” He sounded as sincere as I did.

We drove home in silence. Jimmy and Aileen sat close together in the back, not saying a word. We passed through Hope River, the town dark and silent except for the bright lights spilling from the bar. There were a handful more trucks and cars in the parking lot than when we had last passed. Even on a Monday night in May in northern Ontario, there are bound to be some people out in search of a good time.

We were minutes the other side of town when a deer leapt across the road in front of the car. A gleam of immense brown eyes reflecting the harsh light of headlight beams, a clean movement as liquid as a fish floating under the surface of a lake tinged red by a new dawn, a flash of brown and white rump, and she was gone.

“Come in, please, Rebecca,” Jimmy said as I pulled up to their house. “We won’t be going to sleep anytime soon.”

He led the way through to the living room and immediately set about preparing a fire in the enormous stone fireplace. I hadn’t been in this room since my childhood, and if I’d stopped to think about it I probably would have refused to step foot over the threshold. And that would have been a mistake. Even before the fire flared to life, the room was seductive and inviting. Tapestries and woolen wall hangings in autumn shades of rust, gold, and all the colors of green imaginable warmed what once had been cold, beige walls. The old shag carpet was gone, replaced by good hardwood flooring and a scattering of colorful area rugs.

Aileen moved around the room, lighting candles in wall sconces and on the mantle, which was of stone so carefully laid that it might have risen directly from the solid rocks of the Canadian Shield lying beneath the foundations of the house. She selected a CD from a full rack and popped it into the player. Muddy Waters. I love the blues.

I sank into a leather chair the color of caramel and the consistency of butter; Aileen took a wooden rocking chair opposite. Once the fire was blazing, Jimmy slipped out of the room and returned with a bottle of excellent brandy and three crystal balloon glasses. He poured with a generous hand and handed the drinks around before collapsing on the floor to sit at Aileen’s feet. She stroked his hair.

“This is wonderful. All of it. What you’ve done with this room. I remember it as being the most perfectly awful place. And it was always so cold. The grandparents never wasted any money on heat.”

“See that piece over there?” Jimmy pointed to a small china figurine of a shepherdess guarding one sheep. The top of her staff had broken off, and a poorly glued crack ran up the other arm. “Recognize it?”

“No.”

“One of Grandma’s pieces. Most of it was hideous stuff, but we saved a few things to remember her by. I think of her as that shepherdess. Trying to do some good for her sheep, but her crook is broken and her spirit as badly patched together as that statue.”

I swallowed my brandy.

“I think of her a lot these days,” he said. “She was a good woman, Grandma. She wanted to do good, but she was, sadly, simply too timid.”

I studied the frail shepherdess with the concentration I normally give to a company prospectus or my own investment portfolio. That was a startling statement, coming from Jimmy. To me, Grandma had been just plain weak. As weak as a single drop of water taken from the lake outside. Nothing else. A woman I’d wanted to get as far away from as I could. I hadn’t even cared enough to come home for her funeral.

Jimmy smiled at his wife over the rim of his brandy glass. The smile was strained. He tried hard to make the effort: to smooth over her worries. She rubbed one finger across his hand, lightly. Aileen asked him if he was warm enough, or if she could bring him a sweater. He replied that he was fine.

Of all the people who made up my family, I was the last living soul who knew the story of Jimmy’s parentage. Not for the first time, I wondered if I should tell him what I had discovered in the diaries. My answer always came back the same: Leave well enough alone. But if I was comfortable with the answer, why did I keep asking the question? Should I burn the diaries before I left? Take my mother’s secret to my own grave? The ultimate question again: Why had she left them to be found?

“Rebecca?”

I looked up.

“How’s the brandy?”

“Wonderful, thank you. Sorry, I was thinking about what a wonderful job you’ve done with this room. You’ve managed to chase all my ghosts away.”

Aileen smiled at me, a tiny smile, just the edges of her mouth curling up. Her face was brittle with fear, but she enjoyed the compliment.

I sipped again. “This is good stuff.”

“Aileen has taught me to appreciate some of the finer things in life,” Jimmy said.

She burst into tears like a dam breaking open under an earthquake. “Please, please,” she sobbed, “we have to talk about it.”

Jimmy looked stricken. He lifted himself to his knees and gathered his sobbing wife into his arms. “I’m so sorry, dear heart. That’s the McKenzie way of dealing with a problem.”

“Ignore it and it’ll go away,” I said.

“But not this time, unfortunately. You both deserve to know what happened tonight.” He released Aileen and resumed his place at her feet. He looked deep into his brandy glass and swirled the golden liquid around and around. “They found Jennifer Taylor’s body in the swamp behind Dad’s place earlier today. That bit of news is no surprise to you, Rebecca. I guessed that it was your dog that came across her. When they inventoried the items on the body they found a necklace, identified instantly by Constable Rosemary Rigoloni as similar to one owned by me.”

Aileen sobbed, quietly but steadily. Jimmy patted her knee. “Rosemary is a friend of Aileen’s,” he explained. “She’s been here several times as part of Aileen’s book club. I wear the necklace my dearest wife gave me every day, proudly. In the summer it’s more visible under T-shirts. If not Rosemary, anyone else in town could have told them that it belonged to me.”

“The curse of a small town. No wonder I hate this place.”

Jimmy grinned, his familiar disarming grin. “Today I agree with you, little sister. But if it wasn’t for this town, I sometimes wonder if I would be doing real hard time.”

Aileen sobbed again. Jimmy slipped out of the room and returned with a box of tissues.

I indicated that perhaps it was time for me to go. He signaled to me to stay. “Aileen has to hear this, Rebecca. And I’d like you to hear it as well. More cognac?”

I held out my glass. In the fireplace a log broke in half and collapsed in a shower of yellow sparks.