A Chill Rain in January Read online

  Her parents were upset and worried by her conduct, but they didn’t even consider changing their minds. When she realized that no matter what she did, it wasn’t even going to occur to them not to do this awful thing, she stopped crying and screaming and banging her heels.

  She was sullen and resentful for a long time. They kept trying to coax her out of it. For months before the move they talked to her enthusiastically about their new house, which was in West Vancouver, next to the ocean. They even drove her there, but she stayed in the car, staring out the window at the street. She wouldn’t even look at the new house.

  She had nightmares about dying, about having no breath, about people coming after her, brandishing knives.

  Her father drew careful diagrams of the rooms in the new house and asked her opinion about what furniture should go where. But Zoe refused to participate. Her father said she was to get first choice among the bedrooms; in the old house Benjamin had had first choice, because he’d been born first. But Zoe didn’t care which bedroom she got. Her father said he’d take her to the two high schools that served the area where they were going to live, so that she could decide which she liked better. But Zoe wouldn’t go with him.

  Sometimes she made an effort to imagine living in a different house. But she was alarmed at the way that felt: it made her have more nightmares.

  She was furious not to be able to make up her own mind about such an important thing as where she was to live.

  The months passed, and eventually the school year was over and it was time to move. At first Zoe refused to pack her own belongings, but her mother got sharp with her and said that unless she did it herself, Benjamin would be dispatched to do it for her. So she packed up the things in her bedroom while Benjamin watched her, snickering, from the hallway, until Zoe finally slammed the door on him.

  On the day of the move, Zoe left the house early in the morning and stayed away all day.

  When she returned, the movers had come and gone. Benjamin and her parents were eating sandwiches at the picnic table in the backyard; the new house didn’t have a backyard, so they were leaving the picnic table behind. Her father pushed the plate of sandwiches across the table to Zoe.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  Her father rubbed the side of his head; he had quite a lot of gray in his hair now.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “Then let’s go.”

  And they got in the car and drove to West Vancouver, about fifty miles away.

  They stayed in a hotel that night.

  The next morning they met the movers at the new house. Late that day they discovered that three boxes were missing, two boxes of Zoe’s parents’ books and one box of Zoe’s things. Her father asked her to make a list of what she thought was in it, for insurance or something, but Zoe didn’t know what was in it. She’d just tossed things in until a box was full, closed it, taped it, opened another box, tossed things in until it was full, and on and on.

  She left most of her unpacking for weeks and weeks, until the end of the summer approached, and Benjamin got back from working at the Great North mine, and Zoe had to get ready to go to a new school. When everything was finally hauled out of boxes and put away, she realized that some of her old scribblers had been in the box of stuff that got lost.

  It was time she got rid of them anyway, she thought, and she tore up the rest of them and burned them in the fireplace.

  Chapter 23

  ON SATURDAY morning in Alberg’s office, Sokolowski reported gloomily, “Her kids are on the phone to me half a dozen times a day.”

  “Why aren’t they here helping us look for her, that’s what I’d like to know,” said Isabella. She was leaning against the wall, with her arms crossed.

  “The son, Horatio, or whatever his name is…” The sergeant began thumbing through his notebook.

  “Horace,” said Isabella.

  “Yeah, Horace. He wants to know how long does she have to be missing before she’s legally dead.”

  “Christ,” said Alberg.

  “Yeah.” Sokolowski turned to Isabella “She’s Spanish, right?”

  “Who? Ramona? Spanish?”

  “Yeah. Ramona. That’s a Spanish name.”

  Isabella was shaking her head. “She’s not Spanish.”

  “Yeah?” Sokolowski looked exceedingly disappointed. “You sure?”

  “She’s not Spanish.”

  “So we’ve got nothing but dead ends, right?” said Alberg.

  “Right, Staff. It wasn’t her on the bus to Powell River. It wasn’t her hitchhiking out by Porpoise Bay. It wasn’t her on the ferry. She hasn’t showed up at the liquor store. She’s disappeared into thin air.” He uttered the phrase as though it were newly minted.

  “I think—can I tell you what I think?” said Isabella to Alberg.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I think you should have another look in her house.”

  “She isn’t there, Isabella,” said Sokolowski. “I assure you.”

  “Maybe she was hiding under the bed.”

  “Oh, sure, a seventy-five-year-old lady, she’s gonna hide herself underneath a bed.”

  “Maybe not under the bed, okay,” said Isabella. “But if she was there in the house, she sure wouldn’t want you to find her. So she’d be hiding, all right.”

  Today Isabella was wearing over a white shirt and a brown T-shirt a brown-and-white sweater that looked to Alberg vaguely Icelandic in design. He wondered if she’d knitted it herself. It was awfully big. But Isabella liked her sweaters big.

  “You could go take another look, Sid,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Yeah,” said Sokolowski reluctantly.

  “She can’t get at any money, the lawyer says,” said Alberg.

  “So how’s she eating?”

  “She might be staying with someone,” said Isabella hopefully. “You know. A friend.”

  Alberg gazed at her. “If she’d gone to you, Isabella, and said she didn’t want anybody to know where she was, would you have taken her in and looked after her and kept it a secret?”

  “I couldn’t have,” said Isabella sorrowfully. “Not with my hubby and my Jimmy around.”

  “If you were on your own, though.”

  Isabella tilted her head and looked thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “I would have,” she said after a minute.

  “Great,” said Sokolowski. “Terrific.” He lumbered out of the chair. “I’ll phone Reba McLean.” He sighed. “I hate this kind of thing.”

  “She’s going to turn up,” said Isabella firmly.

  Sokolowski left the room, shaking his head.

  “So tell me,” said Isabella to Alberg, “is she as dishy as they say?”

  “Who?” said Alberg, pretending to glance at his watch.

  “The Strachan woman. Whose brother got drunk and fell down her basement stairs, thereby killing himself.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Alberg, nettled.

  “Sanducci told me. He’s going around looking like somebody hit him on the head with a hammer. So tell me,” she said. “She’s a real knockout, eh?”

  “Sanducci. Christ. She’s old enough to be his mother.”

  Isabella frowned, uncertain.

  “His aunt, then. Haven’t you got things to do?”

  “I knew it,” said Isabella with satisfaction. “Somebody told me she used to be an actress.”

  “I’ve got to be out of here in less than an hour,” said Alberg. “Go away.”

  “Or maybe it was a model.”

  “Isabella. Beat it.”

  “Probably no truth to it, though. People can be gorgeous, after all, and not be models. What do you think she does for a living?”

  Alberg got up and held open his office door. “Goodbye, Isabella.”

  His phone rang. It was Alex Gillingham.

  “Alex. So what’s the word?”

  “Pain,” said Gillingham, and broke into a cackle.

 
; Alex Gillingham was always in a state of injury. The knee that had been bothering him at Zoe Strachan’s house was just the most recent in a continuous stream of complaints, some more serious than others.

  He had become addicted to sport. Sometimes he limped, with a wonky ankle. Sometimes his shoulder bothered him. And sometimes his distress was more generalized. “Ah, the old bones hurt,” he would confide to Alberg. “Been overdoing it again, I guess.” He’d say this with satisfaction. His aim, apparently, was to relentlessly batter his body into a dazed insensitivity to pain—and therefore, maybe, to disease, as well.

  “Strachan,” said Alberg patiently. “What’s the word on Benjamin Strachan.”

  “Died of a broken neck. Bet you didn’t even need me to tell you that, did you? But I’m not done with him yet. There’s a couple of things that are kinda funny.”

  “Oh yeah? Funny how?”

  Gillingham had been on call to the RCMP for about a year. Sometimes he feigned exasperation about being called away from whatever he was doing to attend the scene of a death, but Alberg knew this for the sham it was. The doctor hardly ever left the peninsula, because he was afraid he might miss something. Alberg was convinced that if Gillingham were dealing with a patient in extremis and suddenly got summoned by the RCMP, the patient would be shit out of luck.

  “And make it quick,” the staff sergeant added. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “He’s got a crack on the back of his head.”

  “Yeah, well, he fell down the stairs, didn’t he. I’m not surprised he hit his head.”

  “Hmm. Not the right kind of wound, though.”

  Two winters ago, Gillingham had taken up skiing. The following summer, windsurfing. And now it was hiking. Except that he called it mountain climbing. He had no patience for things like tennis, racquetball, or squash. They were competitive and therefore largely intellectual pursuits, he maintained. He preferred, as he put it, “to pit myself against nature herself.” But he hurled himself against her with such ardor, attacked her with such force, that Alberg thought it no wonder that nature perceived him as berserk and routinely punished him.

  He had not been like this when Alberg first met him. Only for the last two years or so; since he’d left his wife. He was the only man Alberg knew who left his marriage not for another woman but for an apocalyptic but fundamentally unsatisfying affair with Mother Nature.

  “What do you mean,” said Alberg, “it’s not the right kind of wound?”

  “Just what I said. And there’s a big jeezly bruise on his stomach, too.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I don’t know, Karl. Maybe nothing. But it feels kinda weird, you know what I mean?”

  “Alex,” said Alberg wearily. “The man fell down a flight of stairs, broke his neck, and died. Sign the form, will you?”

  “Granted, he went down the stairs,” said Gillingham, “and granted, his neck broke, and granted, he died. But there’s this crack on the head, too. And this bruise on the stomach. All conspiring to puzzle me some.”

  Alberg realized that he was feeling cold, and anxious, and he wondered if he was getting the flu. “I’m going to miss my plane,” he muttered, “if I’m not careful.”

  “I can’t say that he fell down those stairs,” said Gillingham. “How the hell do I know that he fell? I wasn’t there. Were you?”

  “It’s fair to make an assumption here, for God’s sake,” Alberg shouted into the phone. “The man is lying on a concrete floor at the bottom of the damn stairs; and he’s got a broken neck. It’s fair to assume, Alex, that the trip down the stairs is what caused the broken neck. Why do you have a problem with that? What the hell is your problem, anyway?” He was astonished by his anger.

  “Maybe he didn’t fall,” said Gillingham quietly. “That’s my problem. In a nutshell.”

  Alberg suddenly remembered the keys. Zoe Strachan had wanted her brother’s car removed from her driveway. Alberg offered to have it taken to the detachment parking lot. But he hadn’t been able to find any keys on Benjamin Strachan’s body. It turned out that Zoe had them.

  She’d explained that, of course. “I took them away from him,” she said, detaching the car keys from her brother’s key ring. “I didn’t want him to even think about driving when he was drunk.” She’d handed the car keys to Alberg, smiling, and put the key ring back in her purse.

  “Do your job, Alex,” said Alberg quietly. “Sign the damn form.” He hung up.

  Alberg sat still at his desk, thinking.

  She aroused in him a thrill of dread that he couldn’t explain, and had no wish to investigate.

  There was no reason she shouldn’t have had Benjamin Strachan’s keys.

  It was the wine bottle on the kitchen counter that suddenly bothered him.

  Chapter 24

  BY THE TIME Alberg and Gillingham had departed and Benjamin’s body had been removed, the last ferry had left Langdale for Horseshoe Bay. So Zoe had to wait until Saturday morning to set out for West Vancouver.

  In the cafeteria she recognized several faces: a woman who worked as a checkout cashier at the Super-Valu, another who performed the same function at London Drugs, the man who owned the hardware store.

  She didn’t notice Karl Alberg.

  Alberg was on the ship-to-shore phone when he saw her. He was talking with Cassandra. He saw Zoe Strachan, and the words in his mouth dissolved.

  “Karl. Karl?” said Cassandra.

  Zoe was sitting by the window, sipping every so often from a Styrofoam cup.

  She found the view unutterably depressing. Gray skies and sullen seas didn’t usually bother her, but on this gloomy morning she found herself wishing for sunshine. The mainland seemed to loom threateningly against the horizon; the channel they were crossing felt to Zoe in a state of disorder—lumpy islands strewn sloppily about, no rhyme or reason to their disposition among the waters of Howe Sound; she could easily believe that they habitually changed their positions, just to be perverse.

  Alberg couldn’t imagine her pitching her brother down the stairs.

  “Karl, are you there or not?” said Cassandra.

  “Yeah, sorry, I’m here. Listen. I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back late Monday; I’ll call you then. Say hi to your mother for me.” He hung up and strolled casually over to the rack of tourism pamphlets near the entrance to the stairway that led down to the car decks.

  He wondered where she was going, and why. It must have something to do with making funeral arrangements. Maybe she was going to her brother’s place of work, he thought, to break the news of his death in person. But then he remembered it was Saturday. And besides, she’d said she didn’t know where he worked.

  Her black hair swung toward her face as she bent to take a sip of coffee. She looked up suddenly, and Alberg thought she had spotted him—it was ludicrous, he felt like a bloody idiot, but when she turned her face toward him his heart started to pound. Then she looked away, out the window again.

  Zoe watched various craft stitch their way across the water: a small tug towing a log boom, a fishing boat heading in to shore, a sailboat, motoring, with sails furled. They were close to Horseshoe Bay now. Another ferry passed; on its way to Nanaimo, and the Bowen Island ferry, too, much smaller; it looked as if it was chewing its way through the water, small and ferocious, spewing foam from the sides of its mouth.

  Alberg, ostensibly engrossed in some literature about Butchart Gardens, studied her intently. Surveillance, he told himself. But he didn’t feel like a police officer. He felt like a voyeur.

  Zoe was cautiously congratulating herself. She thought she had handled things rather well, under the circumstances. She’d forgotten about the damned wine bottle, sitting on the hall floor, but had managed to move it into the kitchen without the corporal noticing. And the other one, the staff sergeant, had been perfectly willing to accept that she had separated Benjamin from his keys because he’d been drunk.

  Zoe just wanted to get on wit
h it, to find the damn scribblers, burn them, and settle back into her life. They weren’t in his car, which meant they had to be in the house, or in his office, or in a safe-deposit box in a bank somewhere. But the house, she thought, the house was the most likely place.

  She looked up again, toward the bow, toward Alberg. “Jesus,” he muttered under his breach. Her skin, her hair, her eyes… He watched her stand up and sling her big leather bag over her shoulder, moving in jeans and boots and denim jacket with grace and sensuality.

  And then he looked again into her face.

  With a terrible coldness gathering in the center of him, he identified what made Zoe Strachan extraordinary. It was not the way she looked. It was not haughtiness, or remoteness, or unattentiveness. It was not the presence of anything; it was an absence.

  Something was missing from Zoe Strachan. He was extremely reluctant to consider what it might be.

  Chapter 25

  RAMONA clambered up the incline onto the Strachan woman’s property, hauling her shopping bag, and leaned once more upon the massive Douglas fir, to catch her breath and plan her strategy.

  Yes, she was certain of it, there was only one explanation for that ambulance showing up. The poor woman must have been taken ill—maybe it was appendicitis—and they’d whisked her off to the hospital.

  And she lived alone, the whole town knew that. Therefore her house would be vacant.

  This was so clear to Ramona that she had begun to think she actually recalled having a telephone conversation with Dr. Gillingham about it. The Strachan woman is worried about leaving her house empty, he might have said, and I’ve told her that you’re looking for a place to stay, temporarily, how would you feel about house-sitting for her?

  Ramona, resting against the fir tree, imagined herself as a professional house-sitter, moving from one place to another, tending people’s homes in exchange for food and lodging.