Transgression (25 page)

Alex moved up the wedding arrangements by a week. They only had to wait two days. The army tent was baking in the sun. The air was close and sweltering. Alex had a soldier friend stand up with him. The soldier’s girlfriend was standing to Adele’s right. Other soldiers were standing at the back. Alex had given Adele a small bouquet of flowers. She could feel them trembling in her hands. After an agony of twenty minutes, the chaplain pronounced them man and wife. And then she had to sign some papers. They’d gone through a civil ceremony earlier that same day with the same best man and bridesmaid in Le Havre’s town hall. Adele felt exhausted.

The chaplain shook Alex’s hand and turned to Adele, took her hand in his and called her Mrs. Alexander Wells. She was now the responsibility of the Canadian government, “until we deliver you safely to Alex in Canada.”

Alex whispered in her ear, “The army won’t let you out of their sight. You’re like a handle-with-special-care package, this-side-up.”

Adele smiled, assuming that whatever he’d said was intended to be amusing. When the wedding party came out of the tent, more of Alex’s friends set up a great cheer and threw their caps in the air. It took four of them to lift Alex off the ground and bounce him up and down. They clustered around Adele and kissed her on her cheeks. After that everyone piled into three jeeps and headed toward Le Havre.

Along the way the soldiers began to tease Adele about how she came by her split lip. Alex translated. Adele smiled and shook her head as if to say that it was a funny accident but that it was a secret.

Alex said, “It wasn’t me.”

Adele held on tightly to Alex’s arm.

More girlfriends joined them for their wedding supper in a waterfront café. The Canadians made speeches that none of the Le Havre girls could understand, and the Le Havre girls made ribald comments that the soldiers couldn’t understand. She and Alex held hands under the table. Most everyone got drunk.

Alex, gently weaving from one wall to the other, carried Adele up the stairs. In a room overlooking the sea, lost in the sounds of the rolling surf, they officially consummated their marriage and fell asleep.

The next morning they had breakfast in bed and went for a walk along the sea wall. The wind was up. Soon their faces were wet with spray.

Green waves rose and fell, rose and fell. Adele stared down into them. Alex took her in his arms as if he were afraid she might fall. He kissed her. His lips felt soft and warm and salty.

“Thank you,” Adele said.

“For what?” His face was soaked and gleaming.

For this last chance, she thought to herself.

Adele touched his lips with her tongue. “Salt.”

Alex did the same to her lips. They braced themselves against the wind.

This is what I can do, Adele thought, I will make you happy.

Three days later Alex left Le Havre, shuffling up a gangplank with the rest of his regiment. They were to be shipped across the channel to
Southampton and from there they’d sail to Canada.

Alex had been right, the Canadian government or at least the army did treat her like a package. Two weeks later, she was shipped to Southampton where she joined a hundred English war brides, some with babies, and put on a train to London. Once there she had to fill in copious forms at the Canadian Wives’ Bureau. Finally they were all put on another train and transported north through rain and fog to Glasgow.

Adele wrote to Alex, and some weeks later she received a three page reply that took her half a morning to translate. It was mostly about how much he loved her. He said that he was busy trying to find just the right house to rent. He said that his family could hardly wait to meet her.

On the fourteenth of February, the SS
Sharpe,
a coastal steamer refitted to accommodate eight hundred women and several hundred children, nosed carefully out into the cold spray off the Firth of Clyde. The brides slept in swinging hammocks, a hundred and fifty to a room, ate at long, rolling tables, and got sick together in the heads, two aft and three forward. It took the
Sharpe
only twelve days to sail into Halifax harbour though it seemed much longer. Most of the women had been getting ready to disembark for the last three days but a few were homesick and refused to get out of their hammocks. By the time the city, clinging to a series of high, snowy hills, slowly appeared, almost eight hundred women and all the children had pulled on their heavy winter wear, some of it bought for them courtesy of the Government of Canada, and had assembled on the decks.

Adele could see a large crowd on shore. They were frantically waving flags. The women began to wave back. Adele found herself waving, too, though she knew Alex wouldn’t be there. She’d received a wire on board ship:

She’d taken the wire back to her hammock and read it over and over. She’d concentrated on the words DEAREST and
LOOKING FORWARD
and
LOVE
.

A band played the women off the ship to the tune of
Here Comes the Bride
. A few of the pregnant ones became hysterical with laughter. In a flurry of hugs and tears the women and children rejoined their husbands and met their husbands’ families. Adele pushed through the crowd and made her way up a long flight of stairs to the Immigration Building.

She was put up in a rooming house close to the railroad station. Though the radiator made a sound like a gun going off from time to time and was as hot as a stove, there was a deep frost on her window. She put her hand on it. Eventually it melted away. She could still feel the gentle roll of the ship in her body. Outside, billows of smoke rose from a ragged line of houses overlooking the harbour. Adele put her face against the window. Canada seemed more like a dream than a place.

The next morning, while Adele was trying to deal with a meal of bacon and eggs, her Red Cross worker appeared in the dining room. With a cheerful “Good morning” and a beaming smile, the young woman handed Adele another telegram.

All the world was white. Adele had never seen so much snow in all her life. The occasional farmhouse peeked out from the endless drifts like a small boat swamped in a storm, and when the train glided through deep forests trees passed her by like clouds.

She wasn’t travelling alone. The train was full of brides, a few she recognized, most she didn’t. Whenever the train stopped, and it seemed to stop at every hamlet, some nervous woman got off and all the other women rushed to the windows to see what kind of reception she’d receive.

Sometimes a crowd of people were waiting and there were hugs and kisses all around. At other stops, the brides anxiously watching from the train sensed a skepticism, even a stony hostility in the waiting family. Sometimes the greeting between wife and husband was only cordial or painfully awkward. At one stop, just a wind-blown crossroads, there was only a horse and a cutter and a lone husband standing there.

Returning soldiers haunted the train, moving restlessly up and down the aisles. A few of them swayed wildly as they passed by, struggling with a
missing leg or a missing arm. When Adele first saw them she was struck with the unreasonable fear that if they’d only glance her way they’d know what she’d done, particularly the badly wounded ones. She avoided their eyes.

At five o’clock in the afternoon on the second day, the train crossed a long iron bridge and swung into the heart of Quebec City. Some of the women were staying on until Montreal. It was Adele’s turn to descend the steps under their watchful, hopeful, critical eyes.

Trying to control her nerves, she picked up her suitcase and climbed down from the train. As soon as her foot landed on the station’s platform she could see Alex. He was pushing through the crowd, running through the billows of steam. He swept her up in his arms. She almost disappeared inside his open overcoat. She knew this must look very funny from the train windows but she didn’t care. He was covering her face with kisses. She kissed his face back.

Most of the women had been complaining on first seeing their husbands that they looked two sizes smaller out of uniform. Alex didn’t. He looked even bigger, his suit jacket unbuttoned under his overcoat, a broad expanse of white dress shirt showing.

“I missed you so much,” Alex was saying.

“I missed you,” Adele replied, “I missed you.”

They made love in the front seat of his father’s car-they didn’t even get out of the parking lot. It didn’t really matter because the windows steamed up fast enough and soon they were hidden inside their own private cocoon. He had some kind of funny-smelling cologne on. He had a wide blue tie with yellow diagonal stripes on. It ended up flung over his shoulder.

Afterwards, puffing happily, Alex said, “I guess we still work.”

Everything had taken Adele by surprise. Her infinite delight in seeing him. Her immediate comfort in being in his arms. Her electric response to his first intimate touch.

Adele rested her face against his face.

“Welcome to Canada,” Alex said.

T
he Ontario Provincial Police notes were delivered to Jack by two o’clock that afternoon. Harold Miles’s detective partner dropped them off in a burgundy cardboard file secured with a red cord and a tassel.

Jack nodded a curt thank you and ignored the file until Constable White showed up for work at four o’clock, at which time he buckled his gun back on, pulled on his jacket and his cap, tucked the file under his arm and drove up the hill to his house.

He set the file down on the kitchen table. He knew what those notes represented. Just enough rope to hang himself.

Jack crossed the room and looked out the window. He could see a car parked down the street but it was his neighbour’s car. And just beyond it three girls were skipping double-dutch despite the heat. There was no one else in sight, but that didn’t make him feel any calmer.

Jack sat down, unwrapped the cord from the file and spread the papers out.

He was still a suspect despite Miles’s talk about the soldiers in town. The kid’s face was so transparent he might as well have had it written across his forehead.
The chief of police is a suspect.

But what was his game? Set up some plausible piece of evidence in those notes that could only point to one person. And then what? Wait for the doddering old fool to try to hide or destroy it and by doing so incriminate himself.

Jesus Christ, Jack thought. He glanced toward the window again. He could feel sweat running down his sides. He didn’t used to sweat.

Jack got up and opened the door to the refrigerator to cool the room down. He took off his cap and his jacket and loosened his tie but he left his revolver on. He sat down again and stirred the papers around. Extensive search of the grave area. Upriver. Downriver. Even a little hand-drawn map. One thing you could say about the prick, he was thorough.

Location: undetermined where the fatal shot was fired.

Murder Weapon: not recovered, most probably a .38 calibre revolver, possibly a .45.

Jack touched the polished wooden butt of his own .45 to make sure it was still on his hip.

He read on.

Average depth to bottom of grave, two feet.

And a speculation.
Perhaps the victim had been buried to be found.

What the hell does that mean, Jack thought, that someone was trying to frame the Broomes? It seemed unlikely.

Jack turned to the lab report.

Subject: male between ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight. Five foot ten. Weight approximately one hundred and forty pounds. Two missing molars. Teeth generally uncared for. One gold filling. Details and impressions circulated to local dentists. To date, no matching file. White skin. Black hair. Black eyes.

And more drawings, but not by Miles this time. A precise measurement of the position of the head wounds, a relatively small entry point to the left side of the back of the head and a massive exit wound over the right eye.

Minute traces of lead on brain tissues and bone. Neither the spent bullet nor the empty cartridge, to date, have been found. Victim had been dead for approximately seventeen days and had been in the grave site for approximately the same length of time.

There it was then. Seventeen days.

Additional note: a dog or dogs unidentified tore into the body cavity approximately one week before the body was found causing some damage to the intestines. Believed to be incidental to and not connected to the murder. Fourth and fifth fingers on right hand missing, probably rodent depredation.

And a list of clothes, brown tweed jacket, plaid shirt and so on. Notes on the various soil types.

This was more interesting. Jack’s eyes sought out what he already knew would most likely be there.

Small quantity of fine-grained clay, blueish-grey, found against the heels of both shoes. This clay did not appear in the soil or in the subsoil of the gravesite, nor was it found in the immediate vicinity of the gravesite.

Nothing in Miles’s notes about conducting a search at the Devil’s Elbow, though.

Jack turned over another page. The analyses of the stomach contents. Apparently there hadn’t been much to analyze as there were just a couple of notations.

Small meat residue, most probably cured pork, ingested within twelve hours of death. Some fibre strings, non-citrus in nature, found in the stomach and the pylorus. Most probable identification: plums.

Jack got up. He closed the refrigerator door. He looked out the window again. His neighbour’s car was still there. The girls weren’t skipping any more, though.

Jack wasn’t seeing the street, anyway. He was staring at the hole in the ground, the mounds of dried grass, empty tin cans, soggy shirt, the plums sliding out of the jar.

A man the others wouldn’t lower themselves to touch living apart from the rest in a hole in the ground. Who the hell was he? The town wasn’t saying. And the problem was, the town didn’t seem to know.

Jack went back to the table and checked Miles’s note.

Perhaps the victim had been buried to be found.

That still felt all wrong. No, it was a shallow grave because it was a desperate grave. An unplanned-for grave.

But maybe not all that unplanned. Why would you bury the body near the site of the murder? Wouldn’t it be smarter to separate the two just in case the body was found? Why give the police anything more to work with than you had to?

Which probably meant there was more than one man involved. It would take two to carry a body.

So where was he murdered?

Jack moved to the cupboard and took down a bottle of rye. He unscrewed the cap. He needed a celebratory drink because it was obvious. The man had died at the last place he’d been standing.

The Devil’s Elbow.