Scare the Light Away (31 page)

Chapter 50

The Diary of Janet McKenzie. July 19, 1990

Reverend and Mrs. Wyatt invited me for tea today. She’s a bit of a stuck-up old cow, but he’s a perfect dear.

While Mrs. Wyatt was refreshing the teapot, her husband asked me oh so casually if I had heard of Al Anon. I have heard, of course, about AA —Alcoholics Anonymous. But I didn’t know that there is a support group for the families of alcoholics. I took the little card with the phone number out of his hand and slipped it into the pocket of my cardigan as Mrs. Wyatt bustled back into the room with another plate of her perfectly dreadful fruitcake.

October 4, 1990

I have been attending Al Anon for several months now. Somehow, without even asking if I needed help in getting there, Reverend Wyatt arrived at the front door that first night to pick me up. He sits in the back of the hall while I attend the meeting and then drops me back at home. On the Tuesday nights that he can’t make it, Mrs. Wyatt has taken to coming to collect me. She sits beside me at the meeting. She doesn’t seem like such a cow any more.

Tonight, I had gathered my coat and handbag, and I was sitting in the living room, watching for the lights of their car turning into the road. Bob walked in, his hands in his pockets. “Going out?” he asked. All of a sudden I was feeling so bold. After all these years, what did I have to lose? “I am going to a meeting with Reverend Wyatt,” I said. “A meeting of a group called Al-Anon. Have you heard of them?”

He shook his head.

“They’re a support group to help people who are dealing with alcoholism in their family,” I said, holding my breath.

Car lights turned into our driveway and flashed once. Mr. Wyatt always comes to the door, but Mrs. Wyatt remains in the car and flicks the lights to tell me she is here.

“I don’t have anything much to do tonight,” Bob said, “Can I come with you, Janet?”

I held out my hand and my husband lifted me off the sofa.

Chapter 51

I went down to the cellar and checked the seals on the tea chests. All nice and secure. Earlier I had fastened the crates and prepared big labels with my name and address and flight information. Satisfied, I returned to my room, took off my Armani funeral suit and packed it into my suitcase. I slipped on the pair of worn jeans and an old sweater that I planned to wear on the plane. The only things remaining to be packed were my pajamas and toiletry bag. It would be nice to be home, to see the mountains and smell the sea and sleep in my own bed once again. And it would be wonderful to be back at work.

From what I had heard, my secretary, Jenny, was having the time of her young life, dining out all over town on the thrilling story of her quick-witted rescue of her endangered boss. I planned to give her a big hug, a sincere thanks, and then order her back to work.

When she’d called my cell phone to hook me into the conference call and heard the confusing and inappropriate response from Kyle, Jenny immediately called back. That I failed to answer worried her, so she phoned Dad at the house. He’d been napping but recovered consciousness enough to tell her that I was at the big house. Jenny’s nerves screamed that something was wrong. She knew that I would never give my cell phone to someone else, nor disconnect it after asking her to call me for something as important as a call from my boss. She made Dad get up from his nap and insisted that he call the police and ask them to drop by. Which, of course, they did.

If Rigoloni and LeBlanc hadn’t given me the chance to alert them as to what was going on, I have no doubt that Aileen and I, along with Jason and Sampson, would be resting in the churchyard beside poor Kimmy. Kyle’s hysteria had been mounting. Fast. Nothing would have brought it back down.

But what do I know? I’m an investment banker, not a psychiatrist. And it was long past time I got back to banking.

Jimmy was sitting on the rocks looking out over the water when I arrived. Sampson found him first, of course, and rushed to his side to offer herself up for a tummy scratch.

“Don’t worry about your dog, Becky. Dad will look after her, and Aileen and I’ll pop in regularly.”

“To check on Dad or Sampson?”

“Both.”

He shifted to one side to make a place for me on the rock. The good solid rock of the Pre-Cambrian Canadian Shield. Almost as tough as some of the families living up here in the Near-North. We sat in silence for a long while. It was a clear night with a big, round, full moon. The moon cast a luminous streak of white light to run across the dark lake waters up to our rock. The promised stars were largely invisible under the searchlight strength of the moon. The air lay still and quiet, the wonderful silence broken only by the sounds made by Sampson as she scrambled up the rocks to dig at something rustling in the undergrowth.

“Do you remember the time you went for a swim in April?”

“Oh, yes,” Jimmy groaned. “God, that was so awful.”

“Awful! It seemed to me that you positively loved it.”

“I loved the attention, sure. The adoring crowds and all that crap. But the swim itself? You can’t imagine, Becky, how much that water hurt. Like a thousand little knives digging into my skin. At the time I thought it was worth it. I would have done anything for Grandpa’s approval. Absolutely anything.”

“And now?”

“Now?”

“What would you do now?”

“I’d do anything for my wife, and almost anything for my father. I hated him when we were kids.”

Together we looked up at the heavens. In the sky far from the bright moonlight a tiny meteor crossed the horizon and disappeared in a heartbeat.

“Geez, did you see that? A shooting star.”

“Lovely.”

“I hated Dad. I considered him weak, spineless. Not a
real man.
” His voice filled with bitter echoes as his tongue spat out the final two words. “It took a lot of hard years and a bit of hard time. And most of all the proverbial love of a good woman to teach me that a man isn’t a man because he can fight all comers, terrify a child, and abuse a frightened woman.”

“Don’t blame yourself too much. Dad’s drinking didn’t help any of us respect him.”

“Yeah. But I know now that he wouldn’t have drunk so much if he had a bit of approval from his own father. And my contempt certainly didn’t help his self-respect any.”

A slash of yellow headlights broke into our perfect world. Sampson gave one sharp bark and then trotted off to greet the intruder. It was someone she knew.

“What on earth are you two doing sitting down there,” Shirley’s voice pierced the night. “I wouldn’t have even noticed you, if that dog hadn’t dashed out of nowhere.”

Pebbles scattered and twigs snapped as she clambered down the bank. “I remember that rock. Before we were married, Al and I would sit out here for hours, doing nothing but watching the water and the stars.”

We wiggled over and made room.

Shirley picked up a pebble, small, washed smooth, perfectly oval. “Do you know, I haven’t stepped foot on this beach since the day I found out I was expecting Jackie. I came down here and threw rocks into the water and wondered what on earth I was going to do. Grandpa found me. He asked if I was waiting for customers and told me to get back up to the house and pretend I was a decent girl. I didn’t even know what he meant.” She tossed the rock from one hand to the other.

“We were talking about Grandpa,” Jimmy said. “How many lives do you imagine he ruined?”

In the moonlight I could see surprise dart across my sister’s face. “I thought you liked Grandpa,” Shirley said.

“I worshiped the ground he walked on. When I was in jail for the first time, what kept me going was the knowledge that my grandpa would’ve taken care of any bastard who dared mess with him. So I looked after myself and I survived. That first time and all the others. But it would have been better if I hadn’t been in jail in the first place, wouldn’t it?”

Shirley and I mumbled our agreement, and then the three of us settled into the silence. In the city it is never silent. There’s always something going on in the background, the cacophony of what a neighbor’s teenage son calls music, police sirens, cars honking, a party breaking up, or a restaurant shutting down. But here, sitting by the lake in the soft moonlight, the silence was more than the absence of noise. It had a physical presence all its own that I could breathe in deeply and swirl around my tongue like fine brandy.

“What brings you out this late, Shirl?” Jimmy asked.

“Came to say bye to Rebecca. You’re off home tomorrow, right?”

“Yup.”

“I wanted to make sure that the arrangements are all set with Maggie.”

That could easily have been accomplished over the phone. I leaned over and hugged my sister’s bony frame. She stiffened slightly but made an effort to relax.

“Jackie told me that you invited Jason to go skiing next winter,” she said.

“Jessica and Melissa as well. They’re welcome anytime. I can take vacation when I like.”

“They’re rather a handful, at that age. Need watching every minute.”

Time I learned to be an aunt. “They can help me by looking out for each other. We’ve decided that Dad’s coming out in July for a month. It’s hard to believe that he’s never been on an airplane.”

“Neither have I,” Shirley said, her voice low, as if it were something to be ashamed of.

“Then you’ll have to come with him. Keep Dad company. Flying is a perfectly horrible experience, not in the least bit glamorous or adventurous, but you can endure it for Dad’s sake.”

“For Dad then.” We watched the stars, which were struggling to be visible against the all-powerful glare of the moon. The solitary cry of a loon echoed across the lake. Sampson plopped down at our feet and sighed deeply.

“I’ve been wondering about one thing,” Shirley said after the loon’s call died away.

“Yes?”

“It doesn’t make me an expert, but I read police novels all the time. Their search dogs are supposed to be good. How come they couldn’t find Jennifer’s body, but Sampson did?”

“Because she wasn’t there when they searched,” Jimmy said. “Kyle isn’t exactly a rocket scientist; he would have been caught pretty soon. Reading between the lines, and going by something Rosemary Rigoloni told me, Eriksson stepped out of the office for a bit just as the lab report came in. She came back to find the posse heading out to arrest me. They gave her a precis of the lab report and so she came along for the bust. The local cops—no names of course—got a mite excited at the idea of solving the murder all by themselves. I gather Eriksson just about hit the roof when she actually read the lab report: The evidence had obviously been planted. She was in the process of not-quite apologizing to me when they got the call about the hostage taking at the house. Anyway, Kyle originally stashed Jennifer’s body somewhere else. Then when the police searched the swamp after Sampson found the scarf, he got the bright idea of planting her nearer to me. So he waited until the cops finished the search and left and then he dumped her.”

“Idiot,” Shirley mumbled.

“Digging her up again must have been rather unsettling,” I said. “To say the least.”

“For sure,” Jimmy said. “Kyle isn’t exactly a hardened criminal. Not yet, anyway. That’s still to come.”

“The experience probably pushed him over the edge, made him take a chance on doing something so stupid as to march up to your house in broad daylight to plant evidence.”

“He just wanted it to be over,” Jimmy said, his voice soft in the velvet darkness. “But screw him, he’ll get nothing but what he deserves. I keep thinking of poor Jennifer. She was a great kid, full of dreams, full of life.” His voice broke. “She reminded me a lot of you, Becky, when you were that age. A single-minded determination to get away from the rotten family that fate had given her. Maybe that’s why I liked her so much.”

I slipped my arm around his waist, and pulled my brother close.

“Their poor mother.” With a heavy groan, Shirley pushed herself off the edge of the rock. “Daughter dead, son responsible, husband run off.

“I’ll pop up to the house and say ’night to Dad. Won’t see you tomorrow, Rebecca. Have a good flight.”

“Thanks. I’ll be back in a month for Sampson. And I expect to see you and Dad in July. The two of you on your own if you like or as many of those grandchildren as seems appropriate.”

“I’ve always wanted to see British Columbia. I’ve heard it’s nice. ’Night, Jimmy. ’Night, Rebecca.”

“Good night.” We listened as she clambered back over the rocks, huffing and puffing the entire way.

“How’s Aileen?” I asked.

“Good. Doing good. She’s back with her therapist and making progress.”

“I’m glad. She fought like a demon, you know. Against Kyle.”

The silence stretched on. The rock reached cold probing tentacles into my bottom. A wisp of cloud covered the moon.

“I’d better be going in. Long day tomorrow.” I struggled to my feet, trying not to groan as my sister had.

“He was my father, you know.”

I sat down with so much force the shock traveled up my spine into the back of my head.

“Who was what?”

“Grandpa. May he rot in hell. He was my biological father.”

“How do you know?”

“I note, sister dear, that you don’t clutch your hand to your maidenly heart and cry,
What nonsense is this
? No confusion, no misunderstanding. You know more than you’ve ever said.”

“I’ve never been cursed with a maidenly heart.”

“True. But that’s no answer.”

It was also no answer that he didn’t tell me how he knew. But I decided not to press it. “It’s late, Jimmy. I have a long day ahead of me. But I have something to give you. Come by tomorrow, after I’ve left, bring the truck. There are three old-fashioned wooden tea chests in the cellar. Take them home. Open them. Then read the contents.”

I stood up again. Sampson pulled herself awake, stretched luxuriously and scratched the hated plastic cone against the rock. Unfortunately, for her, it didn’t come off.

“I’ll be back in a month, to get Sampson. I’ve told Aileen that I don’t use my chalet in Whistler much; it’s empty most of the year. You open those crates, and then, if you want, we’ll talk.”

I followed my husband’s dog across the rocks, over the crumbling lip of the embankment, across the road, over the wild patch of half-cultivated lawn to my father’s house. The moon sulked behind its cloud, and the braver and brighter of the stars came out in the western sky, over the lake. Bright, shining stars, the reflection of life long past and of worlds so far away they lay beyond my imagination. Shirley’s car was gone and a single naked bulb shone over the doorway.

One light, guiding me home.