A Chill Rain in January Read online

  “I can take your diary to the police. It’s the RCMP, in Sechelt, isn’t it? I’ll take it to the Mounties.”

  Zoe whirled on him, and he flinched. She became still then, trying to control herself. “It is not a diary.” She was still angry; she could hear it in her voice. She longed to change her clothes and go for a run in the rain. She took a deep breath and squeezed her left hand with her right, five times. “They wouldn’t do anything with it,” she went on, more calmly. “They would simply think you were mad, trying to peddle such a thing.”

  “Not peddling it,” he said. “I’d be giving it to them.”

  “They’d be awfully curious to know why you’d decided to take this action now,” said Zoe, “after hanging on to the silly thing for so many years.” She squeezed her right hand with her left, five times.

  “I’ll tell them I just found it,” he said. “In a trunk in the basement. While clearing away some old stuff.”

  “They’d think you were disgusting to want to humiliate your own sister.” Zoe turned her back on him and looked out the window. “I was a mere child when it happened, for God’s sake.”

  “Zoe. You wouldn’t just be humiliated. You’d be prosecuted. They’d send you to jail.”

  “Oh, prosecuted—are you mad?” The wind was blowing harder now. Arbutus leaves clattered across the patio in a frenzy, chased by rain and seaspray. “I was a child,” said Zoe. She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. “Prosecuted. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Benjamin got out of the chair and stood next to her. “Zoe. They’ll check what you wrote in your diary—”

  Zoe turned around. “I told you,” she said coldly. “It is not a diary. I have never in my life kept a diary. Keeping a diary is a weak and feeble enterprise.”

  Benjamin stepped back. But he went on talking. “Believe me, Zoe. It’s very serious,” he said, stammering a little, as Zoe continued to stare at him. “You know it is. If I go to the police…” He took another step backward. “They’ll investigate, all right. They will.”

  I could move, thought Zoe, staring at him. Just pick up and move.

  But she had thoroughly enjoyed living here, these seven years. She had had every intention of remaining here for the rest of her life.

  Things simply cannot go on like this, she thought, with this idiot brother crawling out of the woodwork every time he goes broke or loses a spouse.

  “I need some time,” she said. “I have to think about it.”

  “There’s really nothing to think about, though, Zoe, is there?” he said.

  He was hanging on to the back of that damn chair, she noticed, for dear life. Did he think she was going to go berserk and attack him with her fingernails, for heaven’s sake?

  “Benjamin,” she said firmly, “you’ve had my scribblers for—what, twenty years? More. You’ve had more than twenty years to read them, pore over them, think about what’s in them. Figure out how to use them.”

  She walked out of the living room and waited for him in the foyer.

  “I need some time,” she said, “to get used to this.” She opened the front door. “Get out of here. Come back in two days. And not a moment sooner.”

  Chapter 13

  LATE the following morning Cassandra Mitchell heard a loud knocking on her front door. She was immediately awake. As she hurried to the door, tying her robe, she told herself that it couldn’t be somebody from the hospital; they would phone if they needed to get in touch with her. But well-meaning people sometimes insisted on delivering bad news face to face, instead of impersonally over a telephone line, and when she pulled open the door she was praying that it wouldn’t be Alex Gillingham standing there.

  “Thank God,” she said, when it turned out to be Karl Alberg.

  “I heard about your mother. How bad is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I never know.”

  “May I come in?”

  She stood back, and when he’d stepped across the threshold she closed the door and leaned against it.

  “I woke you up. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Cassandra combed her hair back from her forehead with her fingers. She couldn’t remember if she’d taken off her mascara before going to bed. Oh God there’s probably mascara all over my face, she thought, and then she remembered that of course she hadn’t put any on, not to rush off to the hospital in the dead of night.

  “How about if I make you some coffee,” said Alberg, taking off his jacket.

  “I’d like that,” said Cassandra, feeling slightly cheered. Alberg took her by the elbow and led her into the living room.

  “That smells nice,” she said, sniffing the air. “What is it?”

  “Oh, it’s something one of my kids gave me. Aftershave lotion or something. I don’t know what the hell it is. You’re probably allergic to it.” He sat her down on the white leather sofa.

  “I’m not allergic to a single solitary thing,” said Cassandra. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

  “Hey, did I tell you they’re graduating? Next week. In Calgary. Mortarboards and everything. Shit, I can’t believe it,” he said, smiling broadly. He glanced toward the end of the room, where sliding glass doors led to the patio. “Are those locked? I noticed your front door wasn’t,” he said disapprovingly.

  “Oh God, Karl,” she said. She wanted to laugh but felt too tired.

  “Okay, okay. I hope you’ve got one of those drip things,” he said, going to the kitchen. “That’s the only kind of coffeepot I know how to use.”

  “Didn’t Mountie school teach you anything, for heaven’s sake? I thought for sure you’d have learned how to ride a horse. Skin a caribou. Trap a beaver. And make boiled coffee. Even I know how to make boiled coffee.”

  He looked at her reproachfully through the doorway to the kitchen. “Of course I learned how to ride a horse. I got my training in the old days.” He disappeared again, and Cassandra heard him opening cupboards.

  “It’s the one to the left of the sink,” she told him.

  Her feet were getting cold, so she got up from the sofa to fetch slippers from her bedroom. While she was in there she opened the curtains. She brushed her hair in front of the mirror, tied her robe more tightly around her, and turned to leave the room. Then she looked down at the unmade bed. Sheets, blankets, pillows, and bedspread sprawled there invitingly, warm and wanton. It was a queen-sized bed, which was good, she thought, because he was a big man. She flushed, staring at the bed.

  “Have you got a tray somewhere?” he called out.

  Quickly she left the bedroom, closing the door behind her. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

  A few minutes later they sat side by side on the sofa, drinking coffee. “Have you found Ramona yet?” said Cassandra.

  Alberg shook his head.

  “Karl,” she said, turning to him. “My God. I was sure she’d have turned up by now. It’s been a day and a night.”

  “We’ve checked with everybody we can think of. Everybody Gillingham can think of. Everybody Isabella can think of. There’s not a sign of her.”

  “Well, but… What do you think?”

  Alberg shrugged. “She could have wandered off into the bush, I guess. Or maybe she found a place to hole up. It depends on how alert she is.”

  “She kind of drifts in and out, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s not in her house? I heard the tenants—”

  “Yeah. Hawaii. No, we got a key and checked the place out, Sid Sokolowski did; nobody inside. So Christ knows where she is.”

  “What do you do now?”

  He put down his coffee cup and stretched his arm along the back of the sofa. “We do a full-scale search. And we’ve got a description out up and down the Coast. Eventually somebody will spot her. It’s all we can do.”

  She reached over to squeeze his hand. “This is good coffee.”

  “Naturally it’s good coffee.”

  “Do you cook anything
?”

  “Of course I cook. How do you think I eat?”

  “In restaurants.”

  “Of course I cook. I’ve got some specialties that would make you drool.”

  “Name one.”

  “Meat loaf.”

  “Meat loaf. Hmm. Do you want an ashtray?”

  He gave her an injured look. “Don’t you remember? I quit. Before you went away.”

  “I remember. But I thought you might have started again.”

  “Not this fella. Six months, it’s been.”

  “Good for you, Karl.”

  “Now,” he said softly. “Tell me about your mother.”

  Cassandra put down her cup. “She called me at two in the morning. She thought she was having a heart attack. I phoned for an ambulance, and it got to her house before I did. I followed them to the hospital and waited for a couple of hours. When they finally let me in to see her she was asleep.”

  “Was it a heart attack?”

  “Alex Gillingham says no.” She glanced up at Alberg. “It’s happened before, Karl. But he says there’s nothing actually wrong with her.”

  “But every time it happens, you think this time it’ll be different, it’ll be serious.”

  “Right,” said Cassandra. “Exactly. I go through the same crap, every time. I’m out of my mind with worry and at the same time I’m angry with her. I phone my brother in Edmonton and he says ‘Should I come out?’ and I really want to say ‘Yes, yes, for God’s sake,’ but I don’t, I say, ‘Let’s wait and see,’ and the next day or the day after that she’s fine again and I call him and say ‘Stay home.’” There were tears in her eyes; she flicked them from her face. “I do love her, but she drives me crazy. I’m always gritting my teeth when I’m with her, and then something like this happens…”

  Alberg pulled her close to him. “It’s all right,” he said, and rocked her in his arms.

  She felt comforted, and eventually she became drowsy. She thought she might fall asleep right there, cuddled against his chest.

  But then a change occurred. There was an imperceptible alteration in the situation. And Cassandra was wide awake again, all five senses on the alert. She thought about her unmade bed. Maybe it still smelled of the honeysuckle bath powder she’d used before going to bed last night.

  His hand moved inside her robe; his face was extremely near; his lips opened before he kissed her; and then the telephone rang.

  “Shit,” said Alberg, and then, “Sorry,” because after all it could have been the hospital.

  But it was Isabella.

  “I just got back here from lunch,” she said. “There’s still no news about Ramona. And then I find out you’re late.”

  “Late? What the hell am I late for?”

  “For Bernie Peters. Do you want to find yourself a cleaning lady or don’t you? She’s here right now. Waiting. Been waiting for twenty minutes, she tells me. And she’s got somebody to do for at eleven-thirty. Did anybody check with the liquor store?”

  Alberg closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. “About what, Isabella?”

  “About Ramona. She’d want to get herself some gin. I told you about Ramona and her gin.”

  Alberg’s eyes opened. “That’s a very good idea, Isabella. I’ll check it out.”

  “But first you’ll be getting yourself back here toot sweet, won’t you.”

  “I confess that I forgot about Bernie Peters, Isabella,” he said bleakly. “Do I really have to see her now?”

  “She’s a woman much in demand,” said Isabella.

  “Fuck it,” said Alberg.

  “I beg your pardon, Staff Sergeant?” said Isabella. “I can’t believe that I heard you say that.”

  “I’m coming,” he said grimly, and hung up.

  Cassandra handed him his jacket. She touched the slight cleft in his chin. “Thank you, Karl,” she said.

  When he got back to the detachment, Bernie Peters had left.

  “And I won’t guarantee,” said Isabella, with massive disapproval, “that I’ll ever be able to get her back here, either.”

  Chapter 14

  ZOE Strachan had never been interested in music. Then one day she was walking along Robson Street in Vancouver and she heard something that reached out and seized her.

  It was being played by a man with a strange, many-stringed instrument. Zoe stopped, and listened. When it was over she asked the musician what he had played, and when she returned to Sechelt later that day she had bought a tape featuring Pachelbel’s “Canon.”

  When she got home she played it over and over again, listening with intense concentration.

  As she listened Zoe saw bars, close together like a fence. They reached higher than she could see, and lower than she could see. They were slim and silver and gleaming, and she knew that they were indestructible. And as she listened Zoe also saw, behind the bars, feathery flashes of fire that swept between them and entwined themselves around them. The fire, she saw, had freedom enough to flutter and sweep, but was imprisoned behind the bars. Yet as she continued to listen the bars became flame; and the plumes of fire became bars.

  She decided that the music was talking about a struggle resolved.

  So on the day that Benjamin announced his intention to blackmail her, Zoe had again put on Pachelbel’s “Canon,” and listened, and listened.

  It was fully dark outside when she turned off the tape player. For a while she sat in her living room without turning on the lights; deliberating.

  Most people made up their lives as they went along, but Zoe didn’t have that luxury. It was the only thing she envied about other people, the permission they held to improvise their days without fear of disaster. It was a gift of which they were apparently unaware. The gift of extemporaneous life.

  Zoe couldn’t afford to extemporize. She was extrinsic to the world in which she found herself, and there was great peril in this.

  Like the fire in the “Canon,” Zoe thought, I have erected bars to live behind, because they give to my life structure, and security.

  She was pleased with this image.

  She pulled the curtains, switched on the lights, and went into the kitchen.

  She would have something to eat, she thought, and watch the six o’clock news, while she tried to figure out how to kill her brother.

  Chapter 15

  RAMONA was lucky; he hadn’t even come into the house that first time. There she sat, her heart choked right up into her throat, holding that mug of instant coffee, and she waited, and she waited, but nothing happened. It was a long time before she heard the car door open and close and the engine start and the car drive off again. She couldn’t figure out what this person, whoever he was, had been up to all that time. Probably peering in the windows.

  When he left she scurried out and got her shopping bag.

  She still hadn’t felt safe, though. So she got some cheese and crackers and went back into the closet.

  Later in the day another car stopped on the gravel, or maybe it was the same one. This time the fellow came right inside, a big tall man by the sounds of him; he clunked through the house, and every so often he called out, “Anybody here? Mrs. Orlitzki? Are you here?” He identified himself, said he was from the RCMP. You could tell he felt foolish, talking to an empty house.

  He hadn’t even opened the closet door, as it turned out.

  That time when he went away Ramona did feel safe. She crept around the house, closing the curtains. Then she dragged her old rocking chair out of the bedroom where Marcia and Robbie had moved it and put it back in the living room, where it belonged.

  Ramona spent the rest of the day recovering from her exertions, which had been considerable. She dozed off for a while, in the rocking chair. When she woke up she made herself some tea and ate some more cheese and crackers and dozed off again. For dinner she opened a can of ravioli, which was pretty awful but filling.

  She kept peeking out the bedroom window at the house next door, but the Ferrises
stayed in all day, and all evening too.

  When she awakened on Thursday morning, at first she didn’t know where she was, but that soon passed, and then she felt belligerent and triumphant, and marveled at herself.

  After she’d had her wake-up coffee, she used the bathroom. She sat on the toilet for a long time, daydreaming. It was a luxury she was thoroughly appreciating, to be able to sit there until your bottom went numb if you liked, without some nurse coming knocking on the door to make sure you hadn’t fallen in and drowned. Eventually, though, she felt a craving for some TV soap opera. She stirred, fumbled for the toilet paper, and pulled off the last few inches of the roll. Awkwardly, she reached around and opened the cupboard under the sink. There was half a box of Kleenex there, thank goodness, but no toilet paper. Ramona used the Kleenex.

  Once out of the bathroom, she searched the house. There wasn’t another roll of toilet paper in the place. And no more Kleenex, either.

  Well that settled it. She could do without fruit, she could even do without gin, at least for a while. But she certainly couldn’t do without t.p.

  And luck was with her. Not more than half an hour later, she was sitting in front of the TV, watching “The Young and the Restless,” devoutly grateful that Marcia’s mother, Reba McLean, paid for the kids to have cable, when she heard some activity going on next door.

  She hustled into the bedroom and peered cautiously out between the curtain and the edge of the window. Sure enough, the Ferrises were getting set to go off somewhere. Harold helped his wife into their car, and placed the white dog on her lap, and made his way around to the driver’s door. Then the car pulled out onto the highway and lurched off toward Sechelt, and Ramona was out of her house like a shot.

  There wasn’t anybody on the beach.

  The couple who lived on the other side of her both worked; she’d heard them leaving their house early in the morning.

  Ramon sneaked over to the Ferrises’ back door and found it unlocked.