A Chill Rain in January (12 page)

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.

B
Y 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 with 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.

R
AMONA
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.

Cautiously, she moved from the shelter of the trees onto the driveway, and headed toward the house.

She was very nervous as she crept along. It was possible that she was wrong. The Strachan woman might be perfectly healthy, and inhabiting her house as usual. If that was the case, she was apt to appear right in front of Ramona at any second, out for another jog, or ready to drive into town for groceries or whatever. Well if that happened Ramona would pretend to be lost, that's all.

She shifted the shopping bag from her right hand to her left and pushed her hair away from her forehead; her hair was a mess, far too long, and sloppy-looking, with the perm clinging just to the ends of it. She knew she looked a sight. She had been scrupulous about rinsing out her underwear and her knee-highs every night, so what she wore next to her skin was always clean. But her dress was grimy, and her socks, and the sweaters she'd borrowed from Marcia, they were all badly in need of a wash.

The shopping bag was getting heavy.

She crunched reluctantly along the gravel, wishing that the sun were shining. It wasn't the friendliest place around, this promontory, sticking out into the sea like a great rude thumb. She could do with a bit of bright sunshine to perk up her spirits, give her some courage.

The ocean was doing a lot of crashing around, out behind the house; there would be rocks there, then, instead of sand.

Ramona ambled along more and more slowly, but she was only putting off the inevitable; unless she started walking backward, she was going to get there sooner or later.

And then there she was, standing right beside the house, looking at the door.

The ocean was making a whole lot of noise, and the arbutus trees that were clustered around the house scrabbled at the roof like fingernails against a blackboard.

As she lifted her hand she had a sense that she hadn't thought this through…she wasn't altogether sure what she was doing there…why she was feeling so nervous?…but she rang the bell.

Who lived here, anyway? thought Ramona, her heart starting to pound.

Nobody. Or else they were out.

The Strachan woman, that's who lived here.

In a rush, clarity returned: Thank you, God, thought Ramona; but she kept on being frightened, feeling threatened.

I'll pretend to be lost, she thought, if she comes to the door. There's absolutely nothing to be nervous about, nothing at all, she told herself, but her heart was going a mile a minute, which she knew wasn't good for it, and there was a shaking in her knees that was making it harder and harder for her to stand up.

She realized that nobody was responding to the bell. With somewhat more boldness, she rang it again. And again.

Nobody home. Definitely.

Hopefully, she tried the door. But it was locked.

She decided to go around the house and see if she could get in through a window.

But first she had a look in the garage…and the garage was empty.

Ramona realized there was no point in trying to get into the house, because if the Strachan woman was out somewhere in her car, then she certainly wasn't laid up in the hospital.

And she was liable to come driving up her driveway here any minute now.

Ramona scurried away from the house, the shopping bag banging against her ankle.

She was about halfway to the road when she heard the sound of whistling and saw a figure turn into the driveway. She straightaway flung herself into the brush and hid behind a tree and watched as Sandy McAllister traipsed past, his mailbag slung over his shoulder. She had to clamp her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from calling out to him; she'd been on his route, when she lived in her house, and he'd often had coffee with her on cold winter mornings. She watched while he delivered the mail, passed her again, and disappeared around the corner where the driveway met the road.