A Chill Rain in January (28 page)

Zoe looked into the mirror and smoothed the palms of her hands over her face. She slowly ran her fingers through her hair, first one hand, then the other, five times each. She looked at herself critically and saw a serious face, with steady eyes. She watched herself, looking for signs of anger, or of fear, but there were none.

She went into the kitchen for two dishpans and a paring knife.

In the living room she put on the tape of Pachelbel's “Canon.” She turned the sound up, switched off the lights, and returned to her bedroom.

She left the door open wide, to let the music in.

She lay in the middle of her bed, positioned the dishpans on either side of her, and cut her wrists with the paring knife.

When they found her the next day, practically all of the blood had fallen into the dishpans.

A
WATCH
was kept all night on Zoe Strachan's driveway.

The next afternoon, headquarters faxed to Alberg the report from the lab. It said that the scribblers appeared to have been written by Zoe Strachan.

He also received word from the fire inspector that arson was suspected in the blaze that had destroyed her cottage.

He told Sokolowski to follow in a patrol car, and he set off for Zoe Strachan's house.

By the time he got there, she had been dead for eighteen hours.

When he finally returned to the detachment at six o'clock, Isabella was still at her desk.

“Isabella. I told you to go home hours ago.”

“I know,” she said, cranking paper into her typewriter. “It's better that I keep busy.”

He sat on the edge of her desk. “I'm sorry about Ramona.”

“I know you are,” she said. “You did all you could. She just didn't want us to find her.”

“She saved the kid's life, you know.”

“That's what I heard.” She looked up at him. “You look awful. If you don't mind my saying so.”

“I don't mind.” He went down the hall to his office, pulling off his jacket. He sat behind his desk and rubbed his face with both hands. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he muttered.

There was a knock at the door. “What is it?”

She opened the door. “Bernie Peters is here to see you. Right here behind me,” she added quickly.

“No, Isabella,” he said wearily. “Please. Send her away.” Isabella vanished, and a small, nut-brown person materialized in his doorway.

“Howdyedo,” she said, sticking out her hand.

Her face looked like crunched-up tissue paper. He'd never seen so many lines and creases.

He floundered to his feet and shook her hand. “Karl Alberg.”

“She says you're wanting somebody to do for you.”

He was pretty sure her hair was dyed. It was an unnaturally brilliant shade of brown. She wore it in tiny curls, covered by a hairnet.

“Well, I was, yes…”

She wore a white uniform under a waist-length brown jacket. On her feet were white shoes, the kind worn by nurses and waitresses. From her bony wrist dangled a pea-green purse.

“Well, are you? Or ain't you?” She peered at him with bright eyes, small and black.

Alberg studied her for a moment, then sat down behind his desk. “I have to ask you some questions.”

“Shoot.”

“Have you got anything against unmarried men?”

“Nope.”

“Or cats?”

“Nope.”

“How about police officers?”

“Police officers saved my bacon more times than I can count.”

“Really?” he said hopefully. “Sit down, sit down, Ms. Peters.”

“I don't mind if I do.”

“Good. Now. Go on.”

“I was a married woman for a period of time.”

“Uh huh.”

“But I picked myself a bad apple.” Alberg gave a sympathetic cluck. “He used to wallop me.”

“Was this here? In Sechelt?”

“Nowhere else.”

“Huh. How long did you stick it out?”

“Seventeen lickings he gave me, before we finally got him put away.”

“Jesus.”

“I don't hold with blasphemy.”

“Sorry. Where is he now?”

“Nineteen seventy-five it was. He's out by now, of course. But he dispatched himself well away from here, you can bet your boots on that.”

She sat with her back straight, her feet together, her green purse upright on her lap. He had absolutely no idea how old she was.

“Well. I do need some help, all right.”

“I could come Wednesday afternoons or Monday mornings.”

“How about Wednesday afternoons.”

She stood up. “Done,” she said. “I'll be there one o'clock on the dot through till five. She'll tell me how to get to your place, the typer out there.” Again, she stuck out her hand. “I'm pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

A
T THE END
of the day Alberg went home, and as he drove he thought about Kenny, now safely delivered to the house of his friend Roddy, to await the arrival of his grandparents. And he thought about Ramona, too.

And about Zoe Strachan, twice an arsonist. Responsible for three deaths. Probably four, if she'd shoved her brother down the stairs.

A late-winter rain had arrived during the afternoon, and it continued to fall, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, as Alberg drove. The wind had picked up, too, and he made his way more slowly than usual along the highway between Sechelt and Gibsons, watching for tree branches on the road. There was very little traffic on the highway.

It was dark when he got home. He'd forgotten to leave a light on in his house, and it looked dead, he thought, sitting there on the side of the hill: bleak, inert, unoccupied, and dead, a corpse of a house.

But it wasn't unoccupied, he reminded himself. And therefore it certainly wasn't dead.

He pulled up next to the somewhat rickety fence, upon which great masses of hydrangea bushes leaned, their uncut blooms now a brown-gold color, as though winter had rusted them. He walked up the cracked sidewalk to the front door, considering again whether he ought to try to purchase his house instead of continuing to rent it; or maybe he should start looking for something else to buy. This damn place was old and badly cared for; it was probably falling apart around him.

Ramona Orlitzki had been a hero; Alberg wondered if she'd known that, before she died.

Inside, he called for the gray cat and heard a squeaky meow in response. He turned on the hall light and saw her get up from the sofa in the living room, slowly, stretching first her front legs and then her back legs, yawning. He'd been very pleased when she and her kitten, who was now an adult cat, had first begun sleeping in the house instead of in the cardboard box in the sunporch. It was good to have other creatures living in the house with him. Neither of them had names; he called the older one Cat and the younger one Number Two. She was black, with white front paws and white on her chest and smeared across her mouth. She was curled up on a chair in his bedroom.

He fed the cats, talking to them as he did so, and he wondered if Zoe Strachan had liked animals. He looked into the blunt, triangular faces of his cats and thought that these creatures were more present, more substantive, than Zoe Strachan had been.

No of course she hadn't liked animals. She hadn't liked people, either. He wondered what she had liked; there must have been something…

He felt like calling his daughters. But today he didn't want to be distracted; he wanted to be understood.

He thought about calling Maura. But she was probably out with her damned accountant.

He turned off the lights and sat in his living room for a while, in the wingback chair by the window, with his feet up on the hassock. He left the curtains open and sat there quietly, watching the rain falling, and the wind shaking the hydrangea bushes.

Soon he didn't want to share his cheerless state with anyone, after all. It seemed appropriate to overload for a while on melancholy.

He heard a car, and Cassandra's Hornet appeared, and pulled up behind his Oldsmobile. Alberg swore softly under his breath. He watched, feeling surly, as she got out of her car and looked from his white Oldsmobile to the darkened house. He could tell that she wasn't sure what she should do. He began to feel guilty. But he didn't move to turn on a light. She hesitated beside her car, the driver's door still open. Then she slammed it shut and walked swiftly toward the house.

Alberg got out of his chair.

“Hi,” he said, when he'd opened the door. Her hair had rain-sparkles all over it. Her cheeks were flushed.

“I've just taken my mother home,” said Cassandra. “Bag and baggage. I've come to take you to Victoria.”

Alberg felt a sudden prickling at the backs of his eyes. He shut them tight, and reached for her, and wrapped his arms around her. “What a hell of a good idea,” he said.

Read on for the first chapter of the next “Karl Alberg” mystery,
Fall from Grace.
For more on
L.R. Wright
and other
“Foreign”
mysteries from Felony & Mayhem Press, please visit our website:
FelonyAndMayhem.com

O
N THE SUNSHINE
Coast that year, summertime was long and hot and dusty, and the world smelled of raspberries and roses.

For weeks the sky remained utterly clear, and the air was hot and still.

The waters that lapped at the western shoreline were such a deep blue they looked as if they might stain the skin. The nearer islands in the Strait of Georgia were etched fine and clear, every tree and every rock sharp-edged; the islands somewhat farther away were soft dark shapes against the sky; the most distant islands were purple shadows in the far-reaching sea.

Old-timers said they'd never seen a summer like it. The trees by the roadside were heavy with dust thrown up from the gravel shoulders. Garden-watering was limited to every second day, and people weren't wasting it on their lawns, which were rapidly becoming brown.

Roses thrived in the heat. So did marigolds. All sorts of flowers thrived in it. Some people did, too.

That summer was an aberration. Impatiens, fuchsia, begonias both fibrous and tuberous—all were wilted, weakened, disabled by the relentless heat of the astonishingly tropical sun.

Some people were, too.

On a Monday in early July, Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg pulled his white Oldsmobile into the fenced lot behind the Sechelt Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment. He left the windows open when he climbed out of the car. He moved slowly and cautiously, but the heat pounced on him anyway, and swept over his body in a suffocating wave. As he plodded across the gravel and around to the front of the building he felt like he was wearing entirely too many clothes. A pair of pants, a shirt, underwear, socks and shoes: it didn't sound like much. The pants were made of cotton. The saleswoman had told him they'd be cool because cotton was a fabric that breathed. Alberg had never conceived of clothes as breathing.

The pants might be cool but they wrinkled awfully fast. The shirt was cotton, too; everything he had on today was breathing. If he listened carefully he could probably hear it. The shirt he wore had long sleeves. Alberg hated short-sleeved shirts, except for T-shirts. There was something unseemly about the way the sleeves flapped around. He didn't mind T-shirts because their sleeves gripped his biceps firmly. But T-shirts weren't appropriate for work, he felt. So he wore long-sleeved shirts to work, and rolled up the cuffs a couple of times, casually.

Isabella had found a fan somewhere, the kind that rotates, and Alberg got a whoosh of cool air in his face as he opened the door. The fan sat on the counter in front of Isabella's desk.

“Good morning to you,” she sang.

Isabella Harbud, the detachment's middle-aged receptionist and secretary, was the only person Alberg knew who was actually relishing the weather. For once she was coming to work wearing only one layer of clothing. Her mane of graying auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her face glowed with goodwill.