A Chill Rain in January (7 page)

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.”

Z
OE
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.

R
AMONA
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.

She took only what she needed, promising herself that she'd make things right with them later. She took one apple, one orange, and one banana. She took a can of apple juice. She took a four-roll package of toilet paper and a large box of Kleenex.

And she took a bottle of gin.

She loaded her booty into a brown paper bag and lugged it back to her house.

In the afternoon, sitting in her chair, looking out the window at the sea, Ramona began wondering exactly how she was going to make things right with the Ferrises. She'd stolen from them, after all. She was horrified. However could she make it up to them? She began to feel panicky, just thinking about it…then she couldn't remember what day it was… Thursday, she thought finally, relieved, and then—oh my goodness I have to get moving…

Ramona got a little stiffly to her feet and looked around, bewildered. She spotted a heavy coat; but surely she wouldn't need that. She carried it outside with her, though, and it was a good thing she did, too, it was nippy out there—nippy, nothing; it was positively cold. Aghast, Ramona looked up at the bleak sky—a winter sky. How had it gotten to be winter? She was on her way to meet Rosie, but it was winter… She stopped and pressed the palm of her hand against her forehead and squeezed her eyes tight shut for a few seconds. Then she continued making her way along the beach, the sand sucking at her shoes, past three houses—she knew them, recognized them…but where was Rosie? She reached the place where the shore curved inward to form a shallow bay and the bush came right down to the sand; this piece of land was owned by the government—or was it the Indians? She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember very much of anything. There was a lot of clamoring going on in her brain. She tried to be calm and let her brain work things out on its own, but she was very very tired.

Ramona tottered up the slight rise from the beach and slumped against the trunk of a colossal Douglas fir. She leaned there, panting, for a minute. Then she sat down on the ground, on a carpet of needles, her back against the treetrunk. The tree felt very…authentic, very substantial; she could almost feel its ancient heart beating, slow and steady. She was aware of the fragrance of the fir trees, and the sound of the ocean lapping at the sand below her, and the rain-moisture in the air… Then there was a swooshing inside her, and with a certainty that was dizzying, almost nauseating, she knew her world once more.

She wept for a while. From relief, or from fear; she wasn't sure which. But then she told herself that she had to be staunch. No matter what.

She saw that she was on the Strachan woman's property, at the beginning of the promontory, not far from the highway.

Ramona wasn't about to walk along that beach again. She'd return to her house via the road and take her chances on being spotted.

A few minutes later she clambered to her feet and aimed herself down the Strachan woman's driveway toward the highway, where she stopped again, to rest for a moment against another tree.

She'd be grateful to be back in her own house, that was for sure.

Even though it wasn't really her own house at the moment, not with other people's belongings scattered here and there.

Just as Ramona pushed herself away from the tree, a person shot out of the driveway at a gallop. Ramona shrank back, both hands clutching at her chest. But it turned out not to be a gallop, exactly, more like a lope, and it was the Strachan woman herself doing it. Ramona didn't think she'd even seen her. Dressed in blue denim and sneakers she ran, jogged, out of her driveway and made a sharp left, and off she went up the highway, her black hair bouncing on her shoulders, and before Ramona even came to her senses about it she was staring at the woman's retreating back.

Enough's enough for one damn day, she thought firmly, and set off in a crablike scurry, because her thighs ached and her knees hurt, down the road toward her house.

When she got there she was breathless and sore, and chilly despite the vigorous exercise she'd undergone. She decided to make herself some instant coffee.

While she was waiting for the kettle to boil she noticed the spider plant hanging by the kitchen window.

There were a couple of ferns in the bedroom, too, she remembered.

And a cluster of African violets on a table in the living room. She started to wonder where the policeman had gotten the key to let himself in.

Ramona sank into a chair at the kitchen table. Her knees were trembling, and there was a great echo inside her head. Her house wasn't a haven at all. She was going to have to find another place to hide.

Z
OE
ran almost every day.

This Thursday afternoon, as she ran along the shoulder of the highway, she wondered for a moment about the stress of running, wondered how her joints were holding up. Sometimes her right knee gave her trouble.

There was moisture in the air, although it wasn't exactly raining, and it felt cool and refreshing against her face. She took off her earmuffs and gloves and stuffed them into the big pocket in the front of her sweatshirt.

It was unlikely that she'd be able to find out where Benjamin had hidden her scribblers. Even if she got him thoroughly drunk, he'd probably manage to lie.

It was good to be thinking about this while running, she thought. The frustration it produced got turned into physical energy that was immediately consumed.

He was so stupid to have believed that she would let him get away with this.

She had reached the place where the highway took a curve to accommodate an enormous Sitka spruce; this was the one-mile mark. She approached the tree and pressed the palm of her right hand against its trunk, then pressed the palm of her left hand there. Then she turned and headed back toward her house.

She had planned and worked too hard for peace, seclusion—a life that was precisely the life she wanted. All put at risk, now, by this ineffectual, nonproductive man who wasn't worth the powder it would cost to blow him up.

She couldn't see blowing him up. She didn't know enough about explosives. And although she could learn, death by explosion was certain to alarm the authorities.

She could poison him, she thought, and considered this for a while, as she ran.

But she didn't know anything about poisons, either, and unless she could manage to get hold of some that was absolutely undetectable, she oughtn't to consider it. Death by poison, too, would cause a lot of consternation.

At least he didn't have a wife or a family to ask questions afterward.

She swiped at her forehead with her sleeve. Too bad he doesn't jog, she thought, panting. She could have challenged him to a race and tried to induce a heart attack.

It will have to be an accident, she decided, turning off the highway. She slowed to a trot, then a walk, for the last quarter mile across the promontory to her house.

If not a car accident, then something else.