Strangers Among Us Read online

  A few minutes later, he went quickly into his bedroom and started to pack a bag.

  Chapter 5

  Saturday, November 19

  VERNA GARDENER’S BROTHER AND sister-in-law were staying in a Sechelt motel while they waited for Rosie to recover: they were going to take her back to Nova Scotia with them.

  “They say it’ll be another week or two,” said Frances Regan. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh the poor wee thing, it’s terrible, just terrible, what this has done to her.”

  “She’s starting to come out of it, though, Frannie,” said her husband, Sandy, who was sitting next to her on the motel room sofa. He turned to Alberg. “At least now when we talk to her, she looks like she knows who we are.” He fumbled for his wife’s hand, and patted it. “She’s going to come through it, Frannie, oh yes she is, with our help and the Lord’s.”

  Sandy Regan was a slight man in his fifties, with coal black hair and small dark eyes, wearing a wool plaid shirt and khaki-colored denim pants. His wife was plump, with soft, creamy skin and slightly protuberant green eyes. She looked at her watch now, and said to Sandy, “It’s time we got over to the hospital.” She turned to Alberg. “We visit her twice a day. They let us stay as long as we want.”

  “I won’t keep you,” said Alberg, who was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair that was crammed between the television set and one of the bedside tables. “I just want to tell you how sorry I am. I liked Verna very much.”

  Sandy Regan squinted at him. “Do you know what happened? Do you know why he did it?”

  Alberg shook his head, his eyes on the floor, which was covered in rugged wall-to-wall carpeting, beige, that needed cleaning.

  “No. I didn’t think so.” Regan squeezed his wife’s hands and let them go.

  “What can you tell me about him?” said Alberg.

  “He was a perfectly ordinary lad,” said Eliot’s uncle. “Sullen. I admit that. But I always thought of him as a well-meaning boy.”

  “Very fond of the wee one, he was,” said Frances. “It doesn’t make any sense, you see. I mean, I can understand a boy his age having trouble with his dad. With his mom, even. But he doted on wee Rosie. Wouldn’t harm her. Never. That’s what I would’ve said.” Her large green eyes gazed intently at Alberg. “He was vulnerable to Satan. And Satan embraced him. And so an evil happened. A wickedness descended.”

  Sandy Regan looked at his shoes, nodding gravely.

  “Do you know if he ever got in trouble with the law?” said Alberg. “Back home?”

  They told him no, and Sandy looked at his wristwatch. “We better be on our way,” he said.

  “Are you going to see Eliot while you’re here?” said Alberg.

  “No,” said Frances firmly, picking up the raincoat she’d draped over the end of the bed.

  “Maybe you’ll want to talk to the psychiatrists,” said Alberg, with some desperation, “once they’ve spent some time with him.”

  Sandy shrugged into his jacket and opened the door.

  Frances Regan put the raincoat over her arm and stroked it. “The boy’s lost,” she declared with conviction. “He is lost to us forever.”

  “He’s only a kid,” Bernie had said to him months ago, on a hot, dusty day in August, while vigorously polishing Alberg’s sink. “It’s real important, the things that happen to him now. The people he meets.”

  Alberg, leaning against the kitchen wall, rolled the beer can in his hand along his forehead in an effort to cool himself. On the stove, a pot of stew was simmering. He didn’t think he could handle stew today. He didn’t think Cassandra could, either. But he hadn’t told Bernie this. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Three times a week Bernie came to clean and start dinner and three times a week she prepared something hot and substantial, “something that’ll stick to your ribs,” she’d say, with a satisfied flourish.

  “Why?” said Alberg. “What’s his problem?”

  “He was dragged outa house and home,” said Bernie, turning to face him. “All the way across the country. Verna, she was sure he was gonna run away. He didn’t, though. And now he probably wishes he had. It’s not like he can go back for a weekend—he’s stuck here. The boy’s stuck here, until he’s old enough to fend for himself, and that’s not gonna be for years yet. And meanwhile he gets himself into trouble, because he’s miserable. And bored silly, too, because there’s no school yet and he doesn’t know anybody and he’s got nothing to do.”

  The kid had been picked up the previous night, tearing up the highway in Fred Mahoney’s Mazda Miata, which he’d hot-wired in Fred’s driveway, watched by an interested neighbor.

  “Why me, though?” said Alberg. And flinched. The phrase had a sinister resonance.

  She fixed her small black eyes on him, and all of the tiny wrinkles in her face quivered. “Why not?” she snapped.

  Alberg was already nodding. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll talk to him.”

  He remembered this now, getting into the Oldsmobile, looking out through the windshield at gray sky meeting gray water.

  From the beginning, there was something about Eliot that got Alberg’s attention.

  He had gone to the house and introduced himself to Verna—Ralph wasn’t home that day. And Verna had called upstairs, where muffled music was playing. The boy either couldn’t hear his mother or had decided to ignore her: with a flushed face she finally went upstairs and got him.

  He was almost as tall as Alberg, but thin like a reed.

  “Hi,” said Alberg, holding out his hand.

  Eliot took it, with obvious reluctance, and shook it, but didn’t say anything.

  “Are you looking for work?”

  Eliot gave him a look of disbelief. “No,” he said, making two syllables out of it.

  “You sure? Life’s a lot easier when you’ve got money in your pocket.”

  “My life’s fine like it is.” He dropped onto a kitchen chair, knees together, sneakers splayed apart. His voice had changed but he hadn’t yet gotten used to the size of his feet.

  “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  The boy shrugged, looking bored.

  Alberg fished a card out of his shirt pocket and put it on the kitchen table. He had looked down at the top of Eliot’s head, and the nape of his neck.

  That’s what he remembered now, driving in the rain, driving away from the motel recently vacated by Sandy and Frances Regan: the smooth, innocent, vulnerable nape of Eliot Gardener’s neck.

  Horace Thibideau was a small, thin man wearing a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, jeans, a wide leather belt with a silver buckle, and western boots with two-inch heels. He was leaning on the counter, chin in hand, gazing dreamily out at the falling snow, when a brown Chevy Silverado pulled up in front of his diner.

  He straightened, stretched, and poured a coffee.

  “Hiya, guy,” he said as Jack Coutts came inside, making the bell on the door jingle, stamping his feet to get the snow off his boots. “Long time no see,” said Horace, putting the coffee down on a nearby table.

  “Yeah, it’s been a while,” said Jack. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “It’s quiet in here, eh?” he said, looking around. “How’s business, generally speaking?”

  “Hell, Jack,” said Horace, “generally speaking business sucks. Ever since the Coquihalla opened.”

  The Coquihalla was a four-lane highway that had opened several years earlier. It cut the driving time between Kamloops and Vancouver from six hours to four. It also bypassed the town in which Horace’s diner was located.

  “You want something to eat?” Horace asked.

  “I’ll take a sandwich to go. Ham and cheese.”

  “It’s okay, though,” said Horace, going back behind the counter. “I’m scrapin’ by.” He got out sandwich ingredients. “My wants are few.” He glanced over at Jack. “You on your way to the coast?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Business? Nah,” Horace answered himself. �
�You haven’t been on the road in years.”

  “Right,” said Jack.

  Horace had a lot of curiosity about Jack. Horace was pretty good at sussing people out—it was the Indian blood in him, he often thought, usually while admiring himself in the mirror (he had a face like an eagle, a woman had told him once and Horace had never forgotten that). Hell, a guy’d walk through the door of the diner, Horace’d look him up and down, right away he’d have him, have the type. A boaster. A worrier. A ladies’ man. Whatever. But Jack was a true challenge, he acknowledged as he fixed the sandwich. He glanced over at him sitting there looking out the window, no paper to read, just sitting there.

  Butter, mayo, mustard, ham—Horace peeled off a couple of pieces of cheese and added them, and a big old lettuce leaf, slapped on the second piece of bread and cut the sandwich in two, diagonally.

  Close-mouthed, that was Jack Coutts. Secretive, you might even call him. At first this had hurt Horace’s feelings somewhat. Hell, Jack had been coming in here since the early seventies, right from when Horace first opened The Eatery. Horace had come to think they were friends, of a sort. And so he’d resented it that Jack never confided in him, never told him personal stuff. After all, Horace had moaned and groaned to Jack when he got broken into that time. And when he had the gall bladder attack, and surgery from hell. And when Effie walked out on him. Yeah, but that was his nature, he reminded himself. He’d just naturally complain to anybody who’d listen when things went bad in his life. It was his way of being friendly.

  He slipped the sandwich into a plastic bag and filled up a take-away container with potato salad.

  Jack was just not much of a talker, not when it came to his personal life. Horace knew Jack had been married, and he thought he wasn’t married anymore, but he wasn’t sure about that. And he knew Jack had a kid. But there was some kind of bad stuff surrounding that situation. Horace used to ask about the kid but Jack not only wouldn’t answer, he’d pretend he hadn’t even heard the question, so, hell, Horace didn’t ask about her anymore.

  He slipped the sandwich and the salad and a plastic fork into a paper bag and left it on the counter. “Mind if I join you?” he asked Jack, and when Jack shook his head, Horace got himself a coffee and sat down with him. “What’re the roads like?”

  “Not bad,” said Jack. “They’re already plowed. Sanded. Visibility’s not great.” He was rubbing his face with his hands, as if it were numb and he was trying to rub feeling back into it.

  “Yeah,” said Horace, nodding. “The wind. Blows the stuff sideways across the windshield. I hate that,” he said cheerfully, polishing the toe of one of his cowboy boots with a paper napkin.

  “Good coffee,” said Jack. “I’ll take another one with me.”

  Horace, studying him, said, “You’re lookin’ kinda zwacked, if you don’t mind my sayin’ it.”

  Jack looked at him straight on, then, for the first time, and Horace felt a shiver of concern, it was such an empty look. “ ‘Zwacked’?” said Jack. “What’s ‘zwacked’?”

  “Tired,” said Horace quickly. “You know. Wiped.”

  “Wiped. Yeah,” said Jack, looking out the window. “Yeah, that’s what I am.” He checked his watch. “Gotta go.” He stood up and reached for his jacket.

  Horace went back behind the counter and poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, put on a lid, and tucked the coffee into the bag with the sandwich and the salad.

  “Stop in on your way back,” he said, handing the bag over to Jack, who paid with the exact change. And then he just stood there. Horace tilted his head at him, inquiringly.

  “I might not be coming back,” said Jack. He was looking at the floor, and frowning a little, like he was surprised at what he’d said.

  He could’ve meant that he might take the Coquihalla back, for once. He could’ve meant that he might decide to move to the coast. But Horace didn’t think he’d meant either of these things.

  “Hell, what’s wrong, Jack?” He peered into Jack’s face, looking in the eyes like he always did for clues to personality and state of mind, but not finding them in Jack’s.

  “But, yeah,” Jack said, as if Horace hadn’t spoken, “if I do, I’ll stop in.” He headed for the door.

  “Adios, partner,” Horace said, automatically, and Jack gave him a wave, without turning around.

  The bell jingled again, and he was gone.

  Horace watched him hurry through the snow, one hand clutching the paper bag with his lunch in it, the other pressing the remote that unlocked the pickup’s doors. He kept on watching until the Silverado pulled away.

  He looked around the empty diner. No traffic outside, no traffic inside. He suddenly didn’t feel like being there anymore. He suddenly felt depressed. Uneasy.

  Horace gazed out at the falling snow and wished he had somebody to go home to.

  The door opened and Betty could hardly believe it, but there he stood. “It’s me,” he called out. “I’m home.”

  She was amazed to see him, and told him so. “You said next week. I know you said next week. I made a note of it.”

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Heather was yelling, and Jack picked her up and gave her a hug. They were so thin, the two of them, compared with her.

  Heather wasn’t amazed to see him. Betty didn’t understand this; how Heather always got the day right and Betty always got it wrong.

  She took herself quickly in hand, though, and scurried around the kitchen making dinner. She found a can of stew in the cupboard, and a can of peaches, and there was a loaf of bread, of course, as well. And she made a pot of tea. Jack cleaned his plate and seemed quite content.

  After dinner Heather went outside to play, and Jack opened up the newspaper.

  “Shall we talk, now?” said Betty, patting her frizzy hair. “How was your trip? How long will you be home this time?” She could see from the impatient way he turned the page of the newspaper that he didn’t want to talk. But it was important that a husband and wife talk to each other. So she kept on asking questions, even though she knew he was becoming more and more annoyed; they just popped out of her mouth, like bubbles of spit.

  Finally, he threw down the paper and said to her, “Have you been to the school yet, Betty? To talk to Heather’s teacher?” Then he asked about her pills. “Have you been taking your pills, Betty?” And this was a personal matter. So she stood, and hurried upstairs.

  But he followed her. He looked into every room up there, swearing, cursing the dirt he said he saw. Except in his own room, of course; except in his den, which he cleaned himself. Betty wasn’t allowed in his den but she often looked in through the doorway, admiring its white walls.

  Soon he stormed downstairs, and outside. After a while, Betty followed. She looked through the glass door in the kitchen and saw him out there watering the lawn. Heather was leaning on the fence, and the two of them were talking and laughing together in low voices.

  Betty threw open the door. “Heather! Come in here at once! Come in here and help me clean this kitchen!”

  Heather’s smile went away. “No,” she said. “I helped with dinner. I practically made the whole dinner. It’s not fair.” She glanced at her father and then back at Betty, and, “Do it yourself,” she said.

  “Jack! Don’t let her speak to me like that!” Betty felt tears come into her eyes and blinked fast, trying to make them go away. “I’m her mother, she must treat me with respect!”

  Jack’s face turned dark red. “You can’t do anything, can you,” he hissed at her. “You can’t—you can’t wash a dish or sweep a floor or do a goddamn thing.” Betty tried to interrupt him but he kept on, getting more and more angry, shouting now. “That house is a pigsty, every time I come home it’s a pigsty. You can’t even tell what color the floor in that kitchen is supposed to be; you couldn’t get all the filth off those counters now if you tried. You want help? I’ll give you help.” He came toward her—and pointed the hose inside the kitchen.

  Betty heard Heather shriek and
start to cry.

  Jack went on yelling as the harsh spray struck pots and pans and dishes piled in the sink, bounced off the toaster, zinged against cupboards and stove, splatted against the walls. Betty watched, fascinated, and hardly felt the cold water that flew sideways from the nozzle of the hose, drenching her.

  After a while Jack threw down the hose and turned off the water. He went quickly around the side of the house and Betty heard his car start up. Heather had disappeared.

  Betty squished up to the door and peered into the kitchen. She shook her head sadly. She walked around to the front door and went upstairs. I really must do something, she thought, and soon, so that eventually when he arrives I can be prepared.

  A little later she heard Heather come home.

  Much later she heard Jack arrive. He was downstairs a long time, and Betty heard muffled bangings and sloshings. Then he came up and went into his den.

  A long long time later Betty tiptoed downstairs, avoiding the steps that squeaked. She went into the kitchen and turned on the light. She smiled with pleasure. The whole room was very clean. The whole room was fresh and gleaming.

  Chapter 6

  Monday, November 21

  “IMEAN, WHAT DOES A PERSON do all day, when he’s retired?” said Isabella Harbud, leaning against the door frame of Alberg’s office. Isabella, the detachment’s secretary-receptionist, was referring to her chiropractor husband, who had lately begun to muse aloud about giving up his practice.

  “I don’t know, Isabella. How the hell would I know?”

  “Well you’ve been thinking about retiring yourself, haven’t you? So you must have some opinions on the subject. What would you do, retired?”

  He was astounded. “Where did you get the idea I’m thinking of retiring?”

  “You mutter it under your breath every time you get fed up with something. Or somebody,” she said, going to the window and peering out.

  “You’ve been imagining things,” said Alberg, flustered.