The Friends of Meager Fortune (27 page)

Crossman let the man out. Brower bought him a suit. Glidden came to the house. He and Camellia sat together, and Glidden came back, and again came. Within a month everyone considered them betrothed. For certain, Brower did.

Camellia’s kindness had done her in.

Mary Jameson then hired her—because she was betrothed to Reggie.

“I have a job,” Camellia said, “can you imagine? I finally can earn some money—and won’t be such a bother anymore!”

“You see how everything works out?” Lula smiled.

Secretly Camellia knew they wanted her gone. Her beauty too stark a reminder.

She went to her wedding night—a white dress second-hand, and a small complement of people she hardly knew. Brower giving her away with the stiff formality of a preacher.

A rainstorm came and made the ground murky. The reception was held in a little hall Mary Jameson had rented for them, where the lights over the center table had been burnt
out. Reggie got drunk and was too frightened to make a speech. When he fell down, people started to titter.

“Off on the right foot!” someone yelled.

“Now she’s settled,” one of the Steadfast Few said to Lula, squeezing her hand in sudden conspiracy. “Thank God for that.”

This idea that Camellia was at risk with men was an easy one to maintain. Think of her mother.

The one thing Lula and her father were silent about was the fact that they had heard from the colonel who wasn’t in the field that heroic day that Owen Jameson was coming home. They heard it two weeks before the marriage.

Crossman remembered Camellia’s white blouse with the small cross on her neck, three days before her marriage. Seeing this same blouse and cross tonight, he knew they all had betrayed her.

But that did not stop him from believing she was guilty.

TWO

Owen looked tragically small in the cell—his broad forehead, his head prematurely balding. He was like the high school student she once remembered, the outcast, all over again. He had returned to his former place without even much of a whimper. Bail had been refused because of the train ticket they had found him with.

It would seem that those schoolmarms who had so refuted the books he once read had been proven right. All that
mocking of those diligent teachers proved to them their own worth now.

As always, you learn more about the subject you have killed within the hours following his death. Buckler had told him all he had found out: Solomon had been preparing to buy the barbershop and propose to Lula, who lived in a reclusive shell at the back of the house. Each week with his pay in a brown envelope he would head to the bank and meticulously make out his deposit slip in the pedestrian certainty of a happy life. But her father had put an end to that as soon as they heard Owen might be coming home.

“My daughter is not marrying a barber—I’ll stake my life on that,” he said.

Another fact was that Solomon Hickey had had an abscessed tooth since Christmas, and his pain may have propelled him to stick the comb in Owen.

Owen was sorry, said he would never have opened the barbershop door if he had known, but there was little or nothing he could do now.

It was already growing dark, and the streetlights made the snow glitter—like a frozen engine, the outside had ground to a halt.

Owen was happy to see Camellia, of course. But she had come to tell him something. Something else had just happened today, the seventy-seventh of the haul. This is why the crowd had gathered outside.

“What more could?” he smiled. “The main camp has been burned and four teamsters have run away—only Buckler’s old standbys remain.”

So she told him.

They needed her help in identifying a body that had been found by Matheson the day before.

“Where was it found?” Owen asked.

“A mile or two down from the cave, washed up on shore,” she said. “By Mr. Matheson—but I guess it is all wrecked and they need someone to say who it is.”

“It cannot be Reg,” Owen said whispering, almost in horror. “It could be anyone—maybe a logger caught up in last years run—or— Who knows, Camellia—but it has to be someone else—”

“I don’t know—” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

“Why can’t they tell? It’s all for show!” he said, suddenly enraged at how everything was turning.

“I don’t know—I have to go down to the morgue—where is it?”

“In—the hospital somewhere, I think.”

“Everything is spiraling out of control—why is that?” she asked with sudden calmness. “Even your mother thinks I’m a bad woman now. I married Reggie because he was Will’s best friend—and now—they are the first to accuse me of not loving him!”

He thought of what she had just said and realized what an outcast she must have been.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Her small dark hat pressed down on her head, a show of that compulsion to understand through ornament something about our own relationship with the deadly world, and inspired him to reach through the bars and lightly touch her cheek.

Yet given any other circumstance he might think just like the town. This puzzled and frightened him.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

They were silent.

“Then take this back,” she said, handing him Saint Jude’s medal.

“Why, for Christ’s sake?” he whispered in the dim, small corridor, so the sound seemed to echo off the chipped paint and exposed cement. “I’m not a religious man, and I certainly am not a Catholic.”

She sat for a moment, not making any motion, looking as if someone had failed her. Seeing this, he put his hands through the bar and took the medal and chain from her hands.

“There—so what do I pray for now?”

“Pray it is not Reggie—as impossible as it seems, pray that Reggie is still alive.”

For an hour after she left he had the Saint Jude medal in his hand. When Monroe came back in, he told him of the body. It was amazing that Matheson had found what he had in that current.

“Its like God wanted it so,” Monroe said, sniffing as if he suddenly had an open line to God, and sniffed in his likeness.

Owen looked at him without comment but Monroe smiled as he walked quickly by, staring in as he went, his hands lightly touching the bars and speaking more rapidly than he had ever done with almost a wild grin on his face. He was exuberant, carefree, and pent-up emotion now spilled out: “We got old footprints and fingerprints and hair samples, and everything. You should see what we gone and got, Owen. Well—there you have it. You betrayed your family name and killed two men. After the whole town took you in their arms. All this,” he said, as he moved rapidly away, “for a piece of French twat—a common cunt from the gutter is all she is.”

And then he disappeared and the light went out.

The trouble with having the overhead light out is that in this darkness, three or four rats made their way into his cell each night.

THREE

There is a picture of Camellia Dupuis on the arm of officer-in-training Constable Monroe that same evening. The constable is slightly ahead of her, impeccably groomed, his free arm bent at the elbow to keep the curious back, and she is looking at the camera, wearing that black coat with the fur collar turned up. Though a torn, old coat, it looks new in the picture. That is, the picture makes her look like someone she never was, nor ever attempted to be.

Her dark hair is wavy, her eyes are cast up toward us. The closest you might come to it is the picture of the Black Dahlia—the woman in Los Angeles murdered about the same time. Both are striking women, both have a look of seductive charm, both are walking into a dark they cannot comprehend. This was the picture, then, that would be published alongside the seventeen-year-old picture of herself as a child, during the story of her father. The articles would state—from the Canadian wire service to the BBC—the strange coincidences, and how her adoptive father, who had once thought of becoming a minister, would now have to prosecute her. And because he was a religious man, he did not hesitate or fear the death penalty.

The story was heightened by acknowledging that Owen had been Lula’s sweetheart before the war.

GOOD SAMARITAN VICTIM OF LOVE TRIANGLE?
the question posed now.

Constable Monroe knew the seriousness of these allegations—that is, that Owen and she had somehow committed a perfect crime, a theory promoted for over a month by Reggie’s cousin, who had been added to the list of prosecution witnesses and had come to town on government expense to view the body as well. Monk’s theory was the one to take hold—Reggie would be the last person to commit suicide. He must have been lured to his death by Camellia. He had come home to protect her, and had fallen victim to her snare. There was the idea that they had tried to put him in a trunk, and finally threw him into the water alone and still alive.

“Yes, that’s it,” people said, as if suddenly becoming wise. “Yessir, I can see it now.”

The provincial paper ran the picture of Camellia on Monroe’s arm and the headline stated:
CAMELLIA ON WAY TO VIEW HUSBAND’S BODY—HAVING LEFT THE CELL OF ACCUSED MURDERER OWEN JAMESON
.

She had become a single name to the province, and Owen’s lover. The headline already indicting both.

This had become a thriller of the town’s own making, each person playing a prescribed part. To continue to the end the thriller could not end. It had to continue in its relentless gravity. Monroe kept this picture and showed it around for the rest of his life.

“I’m still your friend,” one young woman she knew as a convent girl shouted, and waved slightly her thin hand into the vacant lot, while her boyfriend told her to shut her mouth.

FOUR

The morgue was a room beneath the hospital where the coroner and medical examiner had small glass-partitioned rooms with typewriters and charts and blotters. They were used to it, but it was all new and dreadful to Camellia Dupuis.

There was water on the cement hallway floor, collecting about a plugged drain. Overhead light bulbs were incased in wire mesh. The morgue proper was off to the left, through a heavy leaded door with a huge latch.

Despite steeling herself for this, Camellia needed to be held up by Monroe. The body was on the table in this small cement room that smelled of blood and antiseptic. A sheet covered it. The coroner—Mackey, a transparent and fussy man with fuzzy blond hair and weakened milky eyes—stood beside it, looking at her. Behind him was a large white basin. To one side of that a calendar from May 1939, the month Will Jameson had died. There were other deaths, of course—but the two recent ones were the first murders in town since Mrs. Dupuis.