A Chill Rain in January (11 page)

“Get a move on, will you? His sister wants to get the body out of here.”

“Yes. I do,” said Zoe from the top of the stairs.

The men looked up. She stood, motionless, with one hand on either side of the doorway, a little higher than her shoulders. One knee was flexed, the other straight. Her face was in shadow. She seemed to fill the doorway, although Alberg knew this was a trick of perspective.

He waited anxiously for her to speak again.

He wanted to move, to say something to encourage her, but he was transfixed.

“Well,” said the doctor. He nudged Alberg. “I can certainly understand that, ma'am. And you can be assured that I'm going to get this matter dealt with just as quickly as I can.” He nudged Alberg again. “Get up there, Staff Sergeant, and keep the lady amused.”

At the top of the stairs, Zoe laughed.

R
AMONA
had looked around her on Thursday afternoon and seen the plants and known that left alone for three weeks, some of them were going to die. She knew then that Marcia must have left her key with someone who'd agreed to come in and water them. That somebody was bound to be Marcia's mother, Reba McLean. Ramona figured that was how the policeman had gotten in; he'd borrowed the key from Reba McLean.

So she could expect Reba to come clattering up to the door any old time now, driving that beat-up white Beetle she tootled around in. Ramona knew she couldn't be here when that happened. Reba knew the house too well. She'd spot the slightest thing that looked different, out of place. And she'd poke around, too, making herself right at home, maybe even peering into the back of the closet.

Ramona tried and tried, that night and during the next day, to think of where she might go. She was very worried, very anxious.

And she didn't like to admit it to herself, but there wasn't any point in trying to deny it: sometime Friday afternoon she lost some more time. When she “came to,” she was huddled in the back of the bedroom closet again. That relieved her mind somewhat to know that she apparently had the wit, even while witless, to remember that she was in hiding.

She'd lost time while she was in the hospital, too; but it hadn't mattered so much there.

Now it was Saturday morning. Ramona once more checked the soil in the plant pots. None was completely dried out yet, but most of them were due for a watering, all right.

She wondered what Anton would have had to say about her predicament, and that brought a smile to her face, which made her feel a little better. She sat down at the rickety kitchen table with a pencil and a pad of lined yellow paper, and she started making lists.

First she put down the good things about her situation. Although her mind certainly did meander off somewhere periodically, she thought that when in attendance, it was brighter and brisker than it had been for some time. Physically, she was feeling a whole lot better than she had any right to feel.

But on the other side of the ledger, she had to leave her house, and that was a sorry blow. Today she had to do a reconnaissance, try to find a house farther along the beach that was unlocked and temporarily unoccupied.

Another minus—she had to admit it—she was going to get bored and restless, eventually. At the moment she was entirely enjoying the freedom to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to do it. But she knew that after a certain number of days—she had no idea how many—her craving for companionship would reassert itself. Would she have to go back to the hospital, then?

Ramona knew Dr. Gillingham hadn't persuaded her into that place because he wanted her to be miserable. He'd truly believed that she wasn't capable of looking after herself properly.

Maybe not permanently, she thought. But temporarily, at least, I can do it. Temporarily, at least, I want to be on my own again.

She wrote these things down, and studied them.

Well, her way was plainly laid out for her. She was going to enjoy every second of her freedom, however long it lasted.

She might have to confide in a friend, eventually. When she ran out of clothes, or of books to read, or got sick of her own company.

But she wasn't ready to do that yet.

First order of business—locate another burrow. And find another food supply.

She pushed her chair away from the table and got up, stiffly. She'd better decide what to take with her.

Into the shopping bag she loaded some extra pairs of socks, from Robbie's bureau drawer. A pair of Marcia's slacks. A roll of toilet paper. The bottle of gin. The pad of paper on which she'd made her lists. And the pencil.

That was about as much as she could comfortably lug around, she figured.

While she struggled to get the tweed coat on over her three sweaters, she recalled the commotion she'd observed the day before at the Strachan woman's place. Ramona had seen at least one police car head up the driveway, and then an ambulance had arrived. She wondered if the poor woman had been taken ill.

She'd just put her hand on the doorknob when she heard a car pull up on the gravel verge of the road, in front of the house.

She turned swiftly around and grabbed the shopping bag, to take it into the closet with her.

She heard a car door slam shut. Two people were coming. She heard them talking, she heard a woman talking to a man, and the man saying “Uh huh.”

Reba.

Ramona looked frantically around the house.

Then she opened the door and fled through a break in the hedge into the Ferrises' yard, and from there she hightailed it up to the road, and eventually down again, onto the beach. She lurched furtively along the beach, feeling like that convict—she couldn't remember his name—feeling like that convict in Great Expectations.

She'd forgotten to bring the tuque she'd been using.

She'd forgotten her gloves, too; and her scarf.

Ramona stumbled along the sand, dazed and anxious, clutching her shopping bag.

Z
OE
didn't want to move. She was vehement about this. But in the end she had no choice
.

She put up an awful fuss. She cried and screamed and banged her heels. She knew she was behaving like an infant, but she didn't know what else to do. She was horrified, full of dread; she could not believe that it was actually going to happen.

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.

O
N 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?”