A Chill Rain in January Read online

  “I’m afraid Benjamin is dead,” she told Cherniak the lawyer, and waited while he gasped and murmured. “It was an accident. He was drunk, and he fell down my basement stairs.” She waited again, through the lawyer’s expressions of shock and sorrow. She noticed that several of the teenagers slumped around the vicinity of the telephone wore sharp-toed black boots that looked to be at least three feet long.

  “Where’s the boy?” said Edward Cherniak. “How is he?”

  “He’s with me. Has Benjamin got a burial plot?”

  Cherniak said, “Yes. Right next to Lorraine.”

  “Good. I’ll let you know as soon as they release the body, so you can make the arrangements.”

  The lawyer began to protest.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Edward, surely it’s one of the things a lawyer does. I have absolutely no wish to get involved in it myself.”

  A lot of the teenagers, even the boys, had two, three, or more rings in their ears. Zoe thought they looked like people who had been purchased. She shivered with disgust.

  “Have you got his will?” she said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Zoe. I can’t remember anyway. Except that he wanted Peter and Flora Quenneville to have custody of the boy.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said Zoe. “I’ve got another question for you, Edward.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did Benjamin ever leave anything with you? A package? Something he wanted you to keep for him?” Portions of the teenagers’ heads were shaven, and the hair that remained was dyed bizarre colors, like fuchsia, and lime green, and lifeless black.

  “A package,” said the lawyer. “No. I don’t think so. No, I’m sure of it. Why?”

  “Has he got a safe-deposit box somewhere?”

  “I have no idea, Zoe. Why?”

  “He had something of mine. I want it back.”

  She’d hung up, then, and placed another call, this time to Benjamin’s West Vancouver bank, where her brother had a safe-deposit box, all right. But there was no way they were going to let her see what was in it.

  Furious, she’d crashed the receiver down onto the hook and whirled away from the phone.

  “Hey, lady,” said a lethargic young male person wearing faded jeans stuffed into black boots, and a worn black leather jacket over a black T-shirt with lettering on it, Zoe could read only two words: “suck blood.” She stopped and stared at him. “Hey, can you give me some money?”

  Zoe gazed at him, incredulous. “Are you out of your mind?” she said. “Get out of my way, or I’ll have you arrested.”

  “For what?” he said, plaintively, to her retreating back.

  Now, the next day, she ran, and ran, in the hope that physical activity would wear off some of her frustration and prevent anger from happening.

  She had built herself a refuge. It had been her father’s idea.

  Zoe ran easily, her legs pumping, her heart beating fast. It was gratifying to have confidence in your body, she thought.

  She liked the Douglas fir trees that clustered around the guest cottage and lined the edge of her property, because they protected her privacy. She liked the arbutus because the bark peeled away to reveal shiny red skin, and their leaves didn’t fall, even though they looked like the leaves of deciduous trees.

  She liked it that her living room and study faced west, onto the patio. She enjoyed the fact that the other side of the house had no windows. She took great pleasure in the large amount of storage space in the basement, and often in her head ticked off the things she had packed away down there: case lots of canned foods and paper products, kerosene lamps and plenty of fuel, boxes of candles and matches, dozens of large plastic bottles of spring water.

  It was comforting to have plenty of money.

  Yes, she thought; running toward the Sitka spruce that loomed ahead, at the halfway point in her run, all in all it was very satisfying indeed to have achieved so perfect a life.

  She couldn’t have done it without her father.

  She reached the spruce tree, pressed the palm of her right hand against its trunk, then pressed the palm of her left hand there, and then she turned around and ran back toward her house.

  Her father was a geologist and had made some shrewd mining investments. But the thing that brought him real wealth was his own mine, Great North, which he bought and developed over more than ten years with his two brothers, who were also geologists. By the time she graduated from high school, Zoe knew that her financial future was secured; her father had made it a point to assure her of this. And later, she realized why, and understood that she had been fortunate in her parentage.

  She was indisputably intelligent, and capable of working hard. But she was also quickly bored, and when she was bored, hard work was impossible. She entered university but dropped out before Christmas in her first year. She then had a succession of jobs but couldn’t keep any of them—didn’t want to keep any of them. Her parents, especially her mother, complained about this but continued to support her. They refused to support her in her own apartment, however, until she became twenty-one.

  Zoe knew that if she hadn’t been able to depend on her father for money, she would have had to figure some way to steal. This would have made for a turbulent and disorderly life. She was glad that it hadn’t been necessary.

  It was hardly raining at all now, she noticed as she neared the turnoff to her driveway. She left the highway and slowed to a walk, cooling down.

  She had gone from job to job, and apartment to apartment, during the years that her parents remained alive, and gradually learned what things gave her pleasure, what circumstances repressed her anger, what activities were capable of absorbing her attention.

  Her father watched her learn these things, and it was he who spoke to her about constructing for herself a sanctuary. Zoe had liked this notion very much.

  When they died, first her father, then her mother, she quit her current job, invested her inheritance shrewdly, and retired eventually to the Sunshine Coast.

  She glanced at the guesthouse as she passed it, and wondered when she’d need it again. It had been six months since the last time.

  But what with one thing and another, she thought, panting, striding toward her house, it was liable to be quite a while before she felt hungry for sex again.

  Inside, she stripped and showered and put on her black skirt and green sweater again.

  Then she went to the spare room.

  “Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I want to talk to you while I make lunch.”

  “I could stay with Roddy,” he said in the kitchen.

  Zoe opened a can of chicken noodle soup, added a can of water, and set it on the stove to warm. “We have to have a funeral for your father.”

  He slid down the wall until he was squatting.

  “I didn’t find what I was looking for in your house,” said Zoe, getting a loaf of bread out of the cupboard. She fetched tomatoes and lettuce from the fridge and began making sandwiches. “Where else should I look?” He didn’t answer. She looked at him and saw that he’d hunched up his shoulders so that he looked as if he had no neck.

  “I live here,” he’d said, after nearly scaring the wits out of her. And it had turned out to be true.

  She’d sat him in a chair where she could keep an eye on him and told him to stay put. Then she locked the door, pocketed the key, and set about searching Benjamin’s study. She searched the desk, the filing cabinets, the bookshelves. Her hands became grimy and sticky. She searched for an hour; two hours; three. The back of her neck was sweaty under her hair. She felt as if she were smothering under the weight of somebody else’s life—and she found not a trace of her scribblers.

  She learned that since the death of Benjamin’s wife the house had been mortgaged and mortgaged and mortgaged again. That stocks had been sold, bonds had been sold, retirement savings plans given up for cash.
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  And she learned that seven years earlier, Benjamin and Lorraine had adopted a two-year-old child.

  There were also files filled with spotty correspondence with employers and potential employers. Benjamin had been working for the same firm for four years when the adoption was approved, and remained with the company until a year after Lorraine’s death, when he’d been “regretfully” dismissed because of chronic absenteeism. Since then he’d had several jobs and lost them all. The most recent letter in the file, though, was only a few months old. It welcomed Benjamin to a firm of chartered accountants located in an address at the corner of Burrard and Hastings.

  “Your father had a new job,” Zoe had said to the boy sitting in the chair.

  He nodded.

  She’d stood up then, stretching, and looked at her watch. She had to leave right away to catch the last ferry.

  She stared at the boy, thinking. “You’d better come with me,” she said abruptly.

  “I could stay with Roddy,” he’d said.

  And now he was saying it again.

  “I told you,” said Zoe, slapping the tomato-and-lettuce sandwiches together. “We have to have a funeral for your father.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  She poured herself some coffee, put the plate of sandwiches on the table, and ladled chicken soup into bowls. “Sit down,” she said. “Eat lunch.”

  Kenny sat down. He cringed when she set the bowl of soup in front of him. “For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Did Benjamin beat you or something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then stop that damned flinching. Eat.” Zoe picked up a sandwich. “I was looking for something very important,” she said to the boy.

  He had pale-brown hair and large hazel eyes, and he was thin; a homely child, she thought. She didn’t like the way he kept looking at her, hardly blinking, as if any second she might pounce on him.

  “It’s something that belongs to me,” said Zoe. She took a bite of the sandwich. “Your father borrowed it,” she said, her mouth full of white bread, margarine, mayonnaise, tomato. “I went to get it back.” She dabbed at the edges of her mouth with a paper napkin. “Eat,” she said to the boy, who hadn’t moved.

  She waited until his hand crept across the table and took hold of a soup spoon. Then she waited some more, until he’d eaten several spoonfuls. She nodded, relieved. She couldn’t have him starve to death, after all, right here in her house.

  “Scribblers,” she said. “That’s what I was looking for.”

  Kenny bent his head and continued spooning the soup into his mouth.

  “Don’t slurp,” said Zoe. “It’s very rude.”

  He ate, rapidly, shoulders hunched.

  Zoe watched him, thinking.

  She reached out and grabbed his shoulder. “Look at me.”

  Kenny shoveled more soup into his mouth. The spoon scraped against the bottom of the bowl. Zoe shook him, and he dropped the spoon. “Look at me.” He looked at her, not into her eyes but at her mouth. “You know about them.”

  He shook his head, staring at her mouth.

  “You do,” said Zoe softly. “You do.”

  Both of them heard the sound of automobile tires crunching the gravel outside Zoe’s front door.

  Chapter 37

  THE DOOR was flung open wide, and Zoe Strachan stood there glaring at him.

  “Hey,” said Alberg. He lifted his hands, palms out. “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.”

  She made an effort to relax. “Hello again, Staff Sergeant,” she said.

  “I’ve spoken to Dr. Gillingham.”

  “Good.”

  “But he can’t release the body just yet. I’m sorry.”

  She looked at him steadily, and her cheeks flushed the palest pink imaginable; it was almost imperceptible. But he thought he could feel the surge in her blood pressure.

  “May I come in?” said Alberg. “I’ll try to explain.” Yeah, right, he thought. It had been dawning on him for some time that he had not sufficiently prepared himself for this conversation.

  “Where’s the boy?” he said, as he followed her to the living room.

  “He’s in his room.” She sat in the black leather chair near the window. She didn’t look very hospitable. It would have been better, he thought, if she’d had a phone.

  “I wouldn’t want him to hear us,” said Alberg.

  “He won’t hear us. He’s watching television.”

  Alberg sat on the sofa. “There are some—the autopsy results are inconclusive,” he said. He was appalled to realize that the palms of his hands were sweating.

  “I find that extremely hard to believe,” said Zoe. She crossed her legs. “The man fell down the stairs. He struck his head on the concrete floor. He died. There was nothing inconclusive about it. I was there.”

  Alberg glanced into the hall, but he couldn’t see the door to Kenny’s room from where he sat.

  “The boy is very upset,” said Zoe Strachan. “And you’re not helping matters any. He can’t even begin to recover until there’s been a funeral.” Her cheeks had grown more pink, and her eyes were bright.

  “The problem is—he’s thinking about asking for an inquest,” Alberg said quickly, before he could change his mind. “Dr. Gillingham is.”

  She stared at him, astonished. “What on earth for?”

  “Well, he has some questions…” Alberg stood up, his mind racing in fruitless circles. “This is very difficult, Miss Strachan.”

  She watched him. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “The alcohol content in his blood was negligible,” said Alberg, blundering on. “That is to say, he wasn’t drunk.” His mind was hollering at him to get out of there fast, stop babbling and get the hell out.

  “Well, really,” said Zoe. She stood up. “Who’s in a better position to know whether he was drunk or not—some doctor who never met the man alive, or the person who was there when he died?”

  “I’d have to go with the doctor, ma’am,” said Alberg. He felt completely unnerved. It was humiliating.

  Hands on her hips, she gave him a hostile look. “What are you saying, Staff Sergeant? Do you suspect me of murdering my brother?”

  Alberg tried to think, distracted by her body, by her presence, by the sweat that was now breaking out under his arms. “What I’m saying, what the doctor suggests as a possibility—” He didn’t have the faintest idea what was going to come out of his mouth next. “—and it’s only a possibility, remember—” Frantically, he tried to recall whether Gillingham had in fact suggested anything useful at all. “—what the facts suggest, you see, is that since he wasn’t intoxicated, perhaps, then, he didn’t fall; perhaps, instead, he—he—”

  “Pitched himself down the stairs on purpose?” said Zoe, incredulous.

  “Well, now,” said Alberg, “not exactly, no.” Do something, for God’s sake, he told himself. Get on the offensive. “Probably not,” he said. “But after all, you didn’t actually see him fall,” he said.

  “I—what do you mean?”

  “You were here, weren’t you? In the living room.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And you heard a crash.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, he went downstairs for a bottle of wine, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  What the hell was he doing? This wouldn’t accomplish anything—it was too easy to explain away. Alberg, he thought, furious, you’re an idiot.

  “Did he fall on his way down?” he said.

  “He certainly didn’t fall up the stairs, Staff Sergeant.”

  “I mean,” said Alberg, “did he fall when he was going down, or when he was coming up?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Think about it,” he said. “How much time elapsed? He left the living room, you heard a yell; how much time passed in between?”

  She stalked over to the window and stood with her ba
ck to him, looking out at the gray, drizzly day. “I do not understand why you insist on making things difficult for me.”

  “There was a bottle of wine on your kitchen counter,” said Alberg.

  There. He’d said it.

  “Why was there a bottle of wine in your kitchen?” he said gently.

  She turned to face him, taking her time. She tilted her head and looked quizzical. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on in her head.

  “I don’t understand the question,” she said.

  “Your brother went down into the basement to get some wine.” He wasn’t going to get a damn thing from her. “But there was a bottle already up here, in your kitchen.”

  “Was there?” She walked past him, back to the black leather chair. She walked so close to him that he felt the air stir.

  He nodded. “Unless that was the bottle he went down to get.” He watched her thinking about this. He felt boundlessly patient. “But that wouldn’t make sense, would it?” She just looked at him, still thinking. “If he fell on his way down, he wouldn’t have had a bottle.” Zoe nodded, slowly. “If he fell on his way up, the bottle would surely have broken.” She nodded again. “So you see my problem.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s a problem, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “There’s a very simple explanation, actually.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “I forgot, that’s all. I forgot there was a bottle in the kitchen.” She pushed her hair away from her temples. “I am a forgetful person. From time to time.”

  Alberg looked into her face and saw blue eyes and pale smooth skin and a luscious mouth, and he knew that she was lying. He was filled with relief. He gave her a sunny smile. “I’d like to see Kenny now, please.”

  Zoe clasped her hands in front of her and called, loudly, “Kenny.” She watched Alberg closely, curiously, while they waited for the boy.

  He stood up when Kenny sidled into the room, and held out his hand. “Hi, Kenny,” he said. The child hesitated, then awkwardly shook hands. “Sit down.” The boy sat on the edge of the wing chair near the doorway to the hall. “Do you think we could have some coffee?” Alberg asked Zoe.