The Progress of Love (16 page)

Therefore we see that the importance of Prince Henry the Navigator was in the inspiration and encouragement of other explorers for Portugal, even though he did not go on voyages himself
.

He was moved by her earnest statements, her painfully careful small handwriting, and angry that she never got more than a B-plus for these papers she worked so hard at.

“I don’t do it for the marks,” Peg said. Her cheekbones reddened under the freckles, as if she was making some kind of personal confession. “I do it for the enjoyment.”

Robert was up before dawn on Monday morning, standing at the kitchen counter drinking his coffee, looking out at the fields covered
with snow. The sky was clear, and the temperatures had dropped. It was going to be one of the bright, cold, hard January days that come after weeks of west wind, of blowing and falling snow. Creeks, rivers, ponds frozen over. Lake Huron frozen over as far as you could see. Perhaps all the way this year. That had happened, though rarely.

He had to drive to Keneally, to the Kuiper store there. Ice on the roof was causing water underneath to back up and leak through the ceiling. He would have to chop up the ice and get the roof clear. It would take him at least half the day.

All the repair work and upkeep on the store and on this house is done by Robert himself. He has learned to do plumbing and wiring. He enjoys the feeling that he can manage it. He enjoys the difficulty, and the difficulty of winter, here. Not much more than a hundred miles from Toronto, it is a different country. The snow-belt. Coming up here to live was not unlike heading into the wilderness, after all. Blizzards still isolate the towns and villages. Winter comes down hard on the country, settles down just the way the two-mile-high ice did thousands of years ago. People live within the winter in a way outsiders do not understand. They are watchful, provident, fatigued, exhilarated.

A thing he likes about this house is the back view, over the open country. That makes up for the straggling dead-end street without trees or sidewalks. The street was opened up after the war, when it was taken for granted that everybody would be using cars, not walking anywhere. And so they did. The houses are fairly close to the street and to each other, and when everybody who lives in the houses is home, cars take up nearly all the space where sidewalks, boulevards, shade trees might have been.

Robert, of course, was willing to buy another house. He assumed they would do that. There were—there are—fine old houses for sale in Gilmore, at prices that are a joke, by city standards. Peg said she couldn’t see herself living in those places. He offered to build her a new house in the subdivision on the other side of town. She didn’t want that either. She wanted to stay in this house, which was the first house she and the boys had lived in on their own. So Robert bought it—she was only renting—and built on the master
bedroom and another bathroom, and made a television room in the basement. He got some help from Kevin, less from Clayton. The house still looked, from the street, like the house he had parked in front of the first time he drove Peg home from work. One and a half stories high, with a steep roof and a living-room window divided into square panes like the window on a Christmas card. White aluminum siding, narrow black shutters, black trim. Back in Toronto, he had thought of Peg living in this house. He had thought of her patterned, limited, serious, and desirable life.

He noticed the Weebles’ eggs sitting on the counter. He thought of taking them over. But it was too early. The door would be locked. He didn’t want to wake them. Peg could take the eggs when she left to open up the store. He took the Magic Marker that was sitting on the ledge under her reminder pad, and wrote on a paper towel,
Don’t forget eggs to W’s. Love, Robert
. These eggs were no cheaper than the ones you bought at the supermarket. It was just that Robert liked getting them from a farm. And they were brown. Peg said city people all had a thing about brown eggs—they thought brown eggs were more natural somehow, like brown sugar.

When he backed his car out, he saw that the Weebles’ car was in their carport. So they were home from wherever they had been last night. Then he saw that the snow thrown up across the front of their driveway by the town snowplow had not been cleared. The plow must have gone by during the night. But he himself hadn’t had to shovel any snow; there hadn’t been any fresh snow overnight and the plow hadn’t been out. The snow was from yesterday. They couldn’t have been out last night. Unless they were walking. The sidewalks were not cleared, except along the main street and the school streets, and it was difficult to walk along the narrowed streets with their banks of snow, but, being new to town, they might have set out not realizing that.

He didn’t look closely enough to see if there were footprints.

He pictured what happened. First from the constable’s report, then from Peg’s.

Peg came out of the house at about twenty after eight. Clayton
had already gone off to school, and Kevin, getting over an ear infection, was down in the basement room playing a Billy Idol tape and watching a game show on television. Peg had not forgotten the eggs. She got into her car and turned on the engine to warm it up, then walked out to the street, stepped over the Weebles’ uncleared snow, and went up their driveway to the side door. She was wearing her white knitted scarf and tarn and her lilac-colored, down-filled coat. Those coats made most of the women in Gilmore look like barrels, but Peg looked all right, being so slender.

The houses on the street were originally of only three designs. But by now most of them had been so altered, with new windows, porches, wings, and decks, that it was hard to find true mates anymore. The Weebles’ house had been built as a mirror image of the Kuipers’, but the front window had been changed, its Christmas-card panes taken out, and the roof had been lifted, so that there was a large upstairs window overlooking the street. The siding was pale green and the trim white, and there were no shutters.

The side door opened into a utility room, just as Peg’s door did at home. She knocked lightly at first, thinking that they would be in the kitchen, which was only a few steps up from the utility room. She had noticed the car, of course, and wondered if they had got home late and were sleeping in. (She hadn’t thought yet about the snow’s not having been shovelled, and the fact that the plow hadn’t been past in the night. That was something that occurred to her later on when she got into her own car and backed it out.) She knocked louder and louder. Her face was stinging already in the bright cold. She tried the door and found that it wasn’t locked. She opened it and stepped into shelter and called.

The little room was dark. There was no light to speak of coming down from the kitchen, and there was a bamboo curtain over the side door. She set the eggs on the clothes dryer, and was going to leave them there. Then she thought she had better take them up into the kitchen, in case the Weebles wanted eggs for breakfast and had run out. They wouldn’t think of looking in the utility room.

(This, in fact, was Robert’s explanation to himself. She didn’t
say all that, but he forgot she didn’t. She just said, “I thought I might as well take them up to the kitchen.”)

The kitchen had those same bamboo curtains over the sink window and over the breakfast-nook windows, which meant that though the room faced east, like the Kuipers’ kitchen, and though the sun was fully up by this time, not much light could get in. The day hadn’t begun here.

But the house was warm. Perhaps they’d got up a while ago and turned up the thermostat, then gone back to bed. Perhaps they left it up all night—though they had seemed to Peg to be thriftier than that. She set the eggs on the counter by the sink. The layout of the kitchen was almost exactly the same as her own. She noticed a few dishes stacked, rinsed, but not washed, as if they’d had something to eat before they went to bed.

She called again from the living-room doorway.

The living room was perfectly tidy. It looked to Peg somehow too perfectly tidy, but that—as she said to Robert—was probably the way the living room of a retired couple was bound to look to a woman used to having children around. Peg had never in her life had quite as much tidiness around her as she might have liked, having gone from a family home where there were six children to her in-laws’ crowded farmhouse, which she crowded further with her own babies. She had told Robert a story about once asking for a beautiful bar of soap for Christmas, pink soap with a raised design of roses on it. She got it, and she used to hide it after every use so that it wouldn’t get cracked and moldy in the cracks, the way soap always did in that house. She was grown up at that time, or thought she was.

She had stamped the snow off her boots in the utility room. Nevertheless she hesitated to walk across the clean, pale-beige living-room carpet. She called again. She used the Weebles’ first names, which she barely knew. Walter and Nora. They had moved in last April, and since then they had been away on two trips, so she didn’t feel she knew them at all well, but it seemed silly to be calling, “Mr. and Mrs. Weeble. Are you up yet, Mr. and Mrs. Weeble?”

No answer.

They had an open staircase going up from the living room, just as Peg and Robert did. Peg walked now across the clean, pale carpet to the foot of the stairs, which were carpeted in the same material. She started to climb. She did not call again.

She must have known then or she would have called. It would be the normal thing to do, to keep calling the closer you got to where people might be sleeping. To warn them. They might be deeply asleep. Drunk. That wasn’t the custom of the Weebles, so far as anybody knew, but nobody knew them that well. Retired people. Early retirement. He had been an accountant; she had been a teacher. They had lived in Hamilton. They had chosen Gilmore because Walter Weeble used to have an aunt and uncle here, whom he visited as a child. Both dead now, the aunt and uncle, but the place must have held pleasant memories for him. And it was cheap; this was surely a cheaper house than they could have afforded. They meant to spend their money travelling. No children.

She didn’t call; she didn’t halt again. She climbed the stairs and didn’t look around as she came up; she faced straight ahead. Ahead was the bathroom, with the door open. It was clean and empty.

She turned at the top of the stairs toward the Weebles’ bedroom. She had never been upstairs in this house before, but she knew where that would be. It would be the extended room at the front, with the wide window overlooking the street.

The door of that room was open.

Peg came downstairs and left the house by the kitchen, the utility room, the side door. Her footprints showed on the carpet and on the linoleum tiles, and outside on the snow. She closed the door after herself. Her car had been running all this time and was sitting in its own little cloud of steam. She got in and backed out and drove to the police station in the Town Hall.

“It’s a bitter cold morning, Peg,” the constable said.

“Yes, it is.”

“So what can I do for you?”

•   •   •

Robert got more, from Karen.

Karen Adams was the clerk in the Gilmore Arcade. She was a young married woman, solidly built, usually good-humored, alert without particularly seeming to be so, efficient without a lot of bustle. She got along well with the customers; she got along with Peg and Robert. She had known Peg longer, of course. She defended her against those people who said Peg had got her nose in the air since she married rich. Karen said Peg hadn’t changed from what she always was. But after today she said, “I always believed Peg and me to be friends, but now I’m not so sure.”

Karen started work at ten. She arrived a little before that and asked if there had been many customers in yet, and Peg said no, nobody.

“I don’t wonder,” Karen said. “It’s too cold. If there was any wind, it’d be murder.”

Peg had made coffee. They had a new coffee maker, Robert’s Christmas present to the store. They used to have to
get
take-outs from the bakery up the street.

“Isn’t this thing marvellous?” Karen said as she got her coffee.

Peg said yes. She was wiping up some marks on the floor.

“Oh-oh,” said Karen. “Was that me or you?”

“I think it was me,” Peg said.

“So I didn’t think anything of it,” Karen said later. “I thought she must’ve tracked in some mud. I didn’t stop to think, Where would you get down to mud with all this snow on the ground?”

After a while, a customer came in, and it was Celia Simms, and she had heard. Karen was at the cash, and Peg was at the back, checking some invoices. Celia told Karen. She didn’t know much; she didn’t know how it had been done or that Peg was involved.

Karen shouted to the back of the store. “Peg! Peg! Something terrible has happened, and it’s your next-door neighbors!”

Peg called back, “I know.”

Celia lifted her eyebrows at Karen—she was one of those who didn’t like Peg’s attitude—and Karen loyally turned aside and waited till Celia went out of the store. Then she hurried to the back, making the hangers jingle on the racks.

“Both the Weebles are shot dead, Peg. Did you know that?”

Peg said, “Yes. I found them.”

“You did! When did you?”

“This morning, just before I came in to work.”

“They were murdered!”

“It was a murder-suicide,” Peg said. “He shot her and then he shot himself. That’s what happened.”

“When she told me that,” Karen said, “I started to shake. I shook all over and I couldn’t stop myself.” Telling Robert this, she shook again, to demonstrate, and pushed her hands up inside the sleeves of her blue plush jogging suit.

“So I said, ‘What did you do when you found them,’ and she said, ‘I went and told the police.’ I said, ‘Did you scream, or what?’ I said didn’t her legs buckle, because I know mine would’ve. I can’t imagine how I would’ve got myself out of there. She said she didn’t remember much about getting out, but she did remember closing the door, the outside door, and thinking, Make sure that’s closed in case some dog could get in. Isn’t that awful? She was right, but it’s awful to think of. Do you think she’s in shock?”