Strangers Among Us Page 3

  In his peripheral vision he saw Norah shift her position slightly.

  Alberg got up and walked around the table to stand behind Eliot. He saw the kid’s shoulderblades beneath the sweatshirt, sharp like chicken wings, and wanted to tell him to straighten up.

  “Did he do something to piss you off?” he said.

  Eliot opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. He shook his head.

  Alberg put his hands in his pockets. “Well, what happened? You were whacking away at the bush and all of a sudden you turned around and—Is that it? Is that all there is to it?” He noticed that his voice was shaking just a little.

  Eliot, staring at the floor, said nothing.

  Alberg went back around the table and picked up his chair. He moved it next to Eliot and sat down. “Jesus Christ, Eliot. Do you know what you’ve done?”

  The kid’s eyes flickered up to his face. Alberg didn’t move. Eliot’s gaze locked onto him. He stared directly at him, into him—and Alberg didn’t allow himself to look away. He didn’t know why this was so difficult; he didn’t know if he was more afraid of what he would see, or what Eliot would see.

  Jack Coutts emerged from the elevator and made his way slowly down the hall to his Kamloops apartment, carrying a large paper bag. When he arrived at the apartment he didn’t go inside. He reached into his pocket and took out his keys, then raised his hand to rest it on the door frame, and leaned his forehead against the door. A few seconds later he pushed himself away and started walking back up the hall.

  He stopped before he got to the elevator, and stood motionless for several moments, holding the bag, holding his keys, looking at the floor. Then he returned to his apartment. This time he unlocked the door and entered.

  He emptied the paper bag onto his bed: a teddy bear with a ragged red ribbon around its neck; another stuffed animal, a donkey, patched with mismatched fabric; a tiny glass vase, painted in blues and pinks; a battered copy of The Wizard of Oz ; a doll, wearing overalls. Jack put these items on top of his bureau, one by one.

  Then he went to the recliner by the living room window and sat down.

  Across the street were a couple of apartment buildings much like his own; four stories high, modest, unpretentious. Trees had been planted in the strip of earth that lay between the street and the sidewalk, and some of the apartments had window boxes.

  There was snow on the ground, and more falling.

  Jack rubbed his face with both hands and looked at his watch. He got out of the recliner, pulling off his overcoat, and hung the coat in the closet. In the bedroom he toed his shoes off. They were wet from the snow—his socks, too. He put on slippers and took off his tie, loosening the top buttons of his shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the objects on the bureau.

  He lay down, after a while, with his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling.

  “There’s a theory,” Alberg said that evening to Cassandra, “that we’ve got built-in circuit breakers. So that when we’re pushed to the limit, something kicks in that keeps us from committing violence.”

  “You mean, an antiviolence gene?” said Cassandra.

  “It’s a species thing. Or so the theory goes.”

  They were sitting at the dining room table having dinner. Alberg hadn’t had much to say, but the silence, though not exactly companionable, because Alberg was too preoccupied, hadn’t been uncomfortable. His voice when he did speak was so unexpected that it caused Cassandra to jump. But she didn’t think he’d noticed that.

  “What do you think of this theory?” she said.

  He pushed his plate away. He’d eaten half of a whole wheat roll, two bites of chicken, and four green beans. “But some people don’t have them,” he said. “These—interceptors. Yeah. That’s what they are. Interceptors.” He looked at the food on his plate. “Huh. I keep this up, might lose the weight after all.”

  Chapter 4

  Friday, November 18

  ENID HARGREAVES TURNED OFF the vacuum cleaner, yanked its plug out of the wall, and watched with pleasure as it disappeared into the body of the appliance: this was why she’d bought that particular model. It was very satisfying not to have to deal with the damn cord.

  Slightly out of breath, she looked around the small living room and was pleased. It was easy to imagine somebody living here, being happy here, in this private, self-contained suite with its own ground-level entrance. The windows were big enough so that her tenant wouldn’t feel as if she was living in a basement. Enid imagined a kindergarten teacher occupying the place. Or maybe a nurse. She had provided only bare essentials in the way of furniture, because whoever rented the apartment would naturally want to put her own stamp on things. She had left the walls bare, too.

  She peeked into each room one last time. The four-piece bathroom was immaculate. The stainless-steel sink in the kitchen gleamed. The double bed in the tiny bedroom was covered with a handmade quilt Enid had inherited years ago from an aunt. There was a pine bureau in there, too, and a white bedside table with a small lamp, and a high-backed chair. The living room had a love seat, a basket chair with a corduroy cover, a standing lamp, a coffee table, and a bookcase. Enid had had wall-to-wall carpet laid in the bedroom and living room. The tile in the kitchen and the bathroom was patterned in large green-and-white checks.

  The suite still smelled of paint. Enid decided to leave the door open, to air it out.

  She expected to start getting calls any time now: her ad was to appear in today’s paper. It would be nice to have somebody else living in the house, she thought, as she hauled the vacuum cleaner back upstairs. Enid didn’t know why she hadn’t had a suite made down there years ago.

  She checked the time and decided she had half an hour to spend in her garden, so she put on a jacket over her sweats and went outside.

  From a shed in the backyard she got gardening gloves and a wheelbarrow, which she trundled around to the front.

  Enid was not fond of flowers, except for the artificial kind, but she enjoyed growing vegetables. She had earlier harvested enough potatoes from her front garden to fill three cardboard cartons, and her two zucchini plants had produced into October. But it was now time to get rid of them. She parked the wheelbarrow and started heaving at the first plant, grabbing hold of its huge, spiny leaves with both of her gloved hands. She suddenly got a mental glimpse of herself doing this, as if she were watching herself from over there by the fence, a fifty-nine-year-old female in a life and death struggle with a zucchini plant. Not a pretty sight, with her face squishing up and getting red from the effort. It actually gave up after only a token struggle, the zucchini did, and she thrust it at the wheelbarrow, cracking its bulbous leaf stems so as to fold it in on itself. Then she turned to the other one.

  In her backyard she had grown, this year, peas and beans and tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots. She gave away a lot of her produce, but kept potatoes and carrots in her basement all winter. She also froze some vegetables, made relishes with others, and could usually pick brussels sprouts from her own garden for Christmas dinner. She particularly liked the relishes and chutneys she put up each year, though, because the jars were so bright and colorful, lined up on top of her kitchen cupboards.

  She’d wrestled the second zucchini plant into the wheelbarrow, and now she dumped the two of them in the compost pile, to be broken down later. Then she parked the wheelbarrow, dropped her gloves on the counter in the shed, and closed and locked the outside door to the suite.

  Half an hour later she had showered, and was selecting clothes to wear to the funeral. A dark brown suit. A silk blouse, ivory-colored. A hat with silk roses in a shade of mocha.

  Enid had a large collection of hats, mostly straw hats with rolled brims and hatbands of ribbon with artificial flowers tucked in there—lily of the valley, for instance, or small roses, or violets. She used to make the flowers herself, fashioning them out of silk, but her eyesight wasn’t good enough anymore.

  She dressed carefully,
watching in her mirror, absorbed in herself. She had only recently stopped having her hair colored and perhaps it was vanity, perhaps her eyesight again, but she believed that her face looked younger by contrast. The salt-and-pepper hair had more substance than her black hair had had, too; this was one good thing about aging. There weren’t many.

  Enid got herself to the funeral home by walking there. She had a car but walked a lot, to keep herself trim.

  She had been a widow for seven years. She had enjoyed her husband’s funeral so much that she had gone to every funeral in town since. Except when she was away, of course. Funerals, she had discovered, were an excellent way to meet new people, or to establish new relationships with people she already knew.

  She and Arch had had two children. Gloria was a lawyer married to a lawyer; they lived in Vancouver. But Enid saw her son, Reggie, almost more often than she saw Gloria. This was because he lived in California. Enid loved California.

  She swung along the street this Friday afternoon holding her dark brown leather purse in one hand, carrying a rolled-up umbrella in the other, and she knew she cut an attractive figure, clothed in silk and gabardine, with a charming little hat nestled in her curls.

  A small crowd had gathered in front of the funeral home by the time she got there, which pleased Enid, who had been to several funerals where there had been a shockingly poor turnout. She took her place in the lineup that had formed in front of the door and before it had moved much farther she saw Bernie Peters hurrying along the street. Bernie was wearing her cherry red jacket over good black pants and a black sweater. She had on a black tam instead of her usual hairnet, and tight curls, bright brown, formed a rim around the edges of the tam. Enid waved and Bernie, spotting her, joined her in the lineup as if they’d decided all along to meet there and Enid was holding her a place as they’d agreed.

  “What are you doing here?” said Enid.

  Bernie’s small black eyes were blinking rapidly. Her face was deeply lined, with hundreds of tiny grooves crisscrossing one another. “She was a friend of mine, Verna,” she said.

  Surprised, Enid said, “I didn’t know that.” She felt vaguely resentful.

  Bernie was standing very close to her, as if taking physical comfort from her presence, and she was holding on to her big black handbag with both hands. “I always thought it was a stupid idea, you going to everybody’s funeral,” said Bernie. “But today when I woke up it was the one good thing I could think of.”

  “I don’t always stay for the food,” said Enid.

  “Well, you better today,” said Bernie, “because I have to, and I ain’t gonna do it alone.”

  They had shuffled their way almost to the door by now. Enid had had a good look at the people behind and in front of them and there weren’t many faces she knew. “What a dreadful thing,” she said in a low voice to Bernie, who shook her head and dragged a Kleenex out of her jacket pocket. Enid restrained herself from asking Bernie what she knew.

  They stepped inside, where people had remained clustered around the doorway instead of spreading out across the room. Enid took Bernie by the elbow and propelled her firmly through the crowd toward the memorial chapel.

  “Hold it,” said Bernie, digging in her heels. “I’m not gonna be the first one in there. I want a smoke so bad,” she said, looking futilely around for an ashtray. “There’s no place in the world a person is allowed to smoke anymore except in her own home.”

  “You can smoke in Italy,” said Enid, who had traveled to Europe again last year. She gazed approvingly at the vases of dried flowers flanking a long sofa that sat along the wall. Above it hung a painting of a mountain scene.

  “Why is everything pink?” said Bernie irritably. “Lookit. The walls are pink. The sofa’s pink. The damn mountain is pink.”

  “It’s been scientifically proven that pink is a restful color,” Enid explained. “Soothing. Come on, now. It’s almost one o’clock.” She led Bernie to the door of the chapel, where a tall young man in a black suit greeted them and indicated a stand on which he’d put a guest book.

  “Would you be kind enough to sign, please? It’s a memento for the family.”

  Bernie looked at him in horror. “What family?” she snapped. “You mean that poor child in the hospital? Is that the family you mean?”

  She marched into the chapel, Enid at her heels.

  Alberg got there when the service was about to begin. He heard soft organ music as soon as he entered the building, and slipped into the chapel just before the young man in the black suit swung the doors closed. Alberg ignored the beckoning arm of an usher and slid into a pew near the back.

  He couldn’t see an organ, and decided it was probably behind and above him, but he didn’t bother looking.

  There were perhaps twenty rows of pews, divided by an aisle. At the front of the room a low table held photographs of Verna, and Ralph, and several vases full of flowers.

  Alberg recognized Bernie, a few rows ahead of him, sitting next to a woman who was wearing a straw hat. It seemed to be the only hat in the place, and he wondered when women had stopped wearing hats to funerals, and whether they still wore them to weddings.

  There were maybe fifty people in the chapel. The Gardeners were relative newcomers to Sechelt: their families lived in Nova Scotia. The bodies of Ralph and Verna Gardener were being taken home for burial by Verna’s brother and his wife. But the neighbors—the Wilsons—had insisted on a memorial service. They had been walking on the beach when Rosie, screaming, bleeding, had run to them for help, and then collapsed.

  “We can’t let this happen and then just pretend that it didn’t,” Muriel Wilson had said on the phone to Alberg. She was still having nightmares, she’d told him.

  A portly man with thinning hair wearing a dark suit, a modestly patterned tie, and eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames had materialized next to the table. He clasped his hands in front of him and studied the photographs, looking somber, before turning to the assemblage and beginning to speak.

  Alberg had to talk to the relatives. He wasn’t looking forward to this, but it was necessary. It was one of the loose ends that had to be tied up before he could complete the paperwork, before he could put this event, and Eliot, behind him.

  He noticed that the minister was wisely sticking close to the Bible, reading lengthy passages from the New Testament rather than floundering around in the here and now.

  Alberg saw young people in the crowd and tried to determine from their faces whether they were friends of Eliot, or at least acquaintances. But they looked, to him, expressionless, and he couldn’t even guess why they were there.

  The minister was talking about Verna’s gardening skills— at least he’d talked to somebody about her, then—and Ralph’s concern for his family: this latter made Alberg suddenly furious.

  “Let us pray,” said the minister. Alberg surveyed the bowed heads surrounding him and heard the minister rejoice for souls welcomed into the kingdom of heaven and he thought about Eliot, about the blood on him, the blood of his family on him. That’s all it is, then, he thought: blood on him; their blood on him.

  Enid was somewhat shaken by the time the service concluded. She had never before attended the funeral of somebody who’d been murdered. And now here she was mourning the deaths of two of them.

  Bernie was dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex and muttering under her breath. She pushed the tissue into her pocket and stood up. “Let’s get downstairs to the tearoom before everybody else does,” she said to Enid. “I’ve gotta say a word to the relatives.”

  She rushed away, and Enid followed, but outside the chapel Bernie stopped suddenly, then hurried up to a large man who was heading for the door. She put a hand on his arm and he turned around. He was younger than Bernie and Enid, with pale hair, light blue eyes, and a melancholy face.

  “Bernie,” he said. He gave her a hug.

  “I’m sorry I ever told you about him,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No. H
ey. Sometimes you can do good. Sometimes you can’t. And you never know until you try.”

  “This is Mr. Alberg,” Bernie said to Enid. “He’s a policeman. I do for him. And his missus.”

  “Enid Hargreaves,” said Enid, offering her hand. “How do you do.”

  He smiled, though she didn’t think his heart was in it, and shook her hand. “Pretty hat,” he said, and turned away and went out the door.

  Jack was sitting in the recliner again. Outside, the snow continued to fall.

  After a while he got up and went into the kitchen. He opened the fridge door and looked inside.

  There was a knock on his door, but Jack made no response. He continued to inspect the contents of the fridge.

  There was another knock, louder this time; a brisk, impatient sound. Jack opened one of the fridge drawers and took out a withered apple.

  A third and final knock. Jack tossed the apple into the garbage bag under the sink.

  He shut the refrigerator door and pulled open cupboards, one by one. Then he sat down again.

  Five minutes later he got up quickly, stumbling, grabbing hold of the back of the chair for support, and pulled his overcoat from its hanger in the closet. He was still putting it on when he opened the door.

  Sitting on the hall floor was a large basket of flowers. Jack stared at them. He looked up and down the hallway. There was a florist’s envelope with his name on it, attached to the handle of the basket. He finished putting on his coat, picked up the basket, and took it inside.

  Jack put the flowers on the coffee table in the living room and opened the envelope. It contained a card that had CONDOLENCES printed on the front in script and it was signed, “Maura Sullivan.” And then, in brackets, so he would be sure to know who she was, she had written “(Alberg).”

  He sat on the sofa and looked at the flowers, at the card in his hand, at the flowers again.

  Jack tossed the card on the coffee table and sat back.