A Killing Spring (18 page)

Neil was watching me with interest. “I don’t like it here,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

Neil frowned. “It used to be nice.”

“Before the window was blocked off.”

He nodded. “I told her it wouldn’t look good. But she said that’s the way it had to be. So I put the furniture where she said.”

“When did you and Kellee change the room?”

“The weekend she wasn’t supposed to come home. That’s when she bought the curtains too.”

“To close out the light?”

“So nobody could see in.” His brow furrowed. “Who would want to see in?”

I looked over at the barricade, and I felt a sense of oppression so overwhelming, I could barely breathe. Suddenly, I wanted to get out of that room. I turned to Neil. “Let’s check Kellee’s bedroom.”

“For what?” Neil asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You might notice that something’s out of place.”

He looked puzzled. “How would I know? I never go in there.”

Neil stayed in the hall while I went into Kellee’s room. Everything seemed to be in order. A Care Bear and a Strawberry Shortcake doll rested side by side on a pink satin pillow at the head of the bed, and the girlish pink-and-white bedspread was smooth. A brush and comb were neatly aligned beside a wooden jewel box on the vanity. I opened the box. It was full of barrettes: butterflies, plastic ribbons, beaded sunbursts, feathery combs.

I closed the jewel box and turned back to Neil. “Did Kellee ever talk to you about friends she might want to visit?”

“I’m the only friend,” he said gently.

“What about family?”

“She has an aunt.”

“Here in town?”

“No, in B.C.” Suddenly he smiled. “She sent Kellee a box of apples and I got half.”

“Neil, do you think Kellee might have gone to visit her aunt?”

“She wouldn’t go away,” he said flatly.

I opened the closet door. Inside were clothes that I remembered Kellee wearing in class. Involuntarily, I stepped back.

Neil McCallum was watching my face. “You’re scared too,” he said.

“A little,” I agreed. “But let’s not panic. When I go back to Regina, I’ll try Kellee’s apartment again. I went there this morning, but she wasn’t home.”

“You should talk to Miss Stringer.”

The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Who’s Miss Stringer?” I asked.

“Kellee’s landlady.”

“Neil, it’s a brand-new apartment building. Those places don’t have landladies.”

Neil’s voice rose with frustration. “It’s not new. It’s a dump. Kellee said so. And Miss Stringer lives there.”

“On Gordon Road?” I said.

Neil shook his head impatiently. “You went to the wrong place,” he said. “Gordon Road is where she lived before.” He pulled a small black notebook from the pocket of his shirt, and thumbed through it. “This is where she lives now,” he said. “She wrote it in herself. So it’s right.”

I took the book from him and read:

For a moment, I didn’t grasp the significance of the address. When I did, my pulse began to race. It was the address of the house in which Reed Gallagher had died.

When I drove back to Regina, Kellee Savage’s graduation portrait was in a Safeway bag on the seat beside me. I knew the picture would be helpful if I was going to make inquiries about Kellee’s whereabouts, but Neil hadn’t wanted to part with it. He told me that Kellee didn’t like having her picture taken, and that he liked having a photograph of her where he could see it every day. I promised him that I would take good care of it, and he promised me that he wouldn’t let anybody else into Kellee’s house and that he’d be careful.

Neil and Chloe had walked out to the car with me. Before I left, Chloe gave me a final nuzzle, and Neil reached out as if to hug me, before he drew back and settled for a smile. “One more promise,” he said. “No stopping looking until we find her.”

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me intently. “You have to say it.”

“All right,” I said. “No stopping looking until we find her.”

It was a little before five when I pulled up in front of the house on Scarth Street, picked up the Safeway bag with Kellee’s photograph, and got out of the car. Alma Stringer was out on the porch, knocking down cobwebs with a broom. When Alex had interviewed her the day she found Reed Gallagher’s body, he had characterized Alma as a tough old bird. As I watched her darting at the cobwebs with her broom, her arms and legs winter-white and pencil-thin, her scalp pink through her sparse and fading yellow hair, I thought there was something chicken-like about her. When she saw me, she raised her broom aggressively. Alma, it seemed, was more banty rooster than mother hen.

As I introduced myself, I tried to look pleasant and non-threatening. I must have succeeded, because before I had a chance to explain what I was doing on her grassless lawn, she had apparently made up her mind that I wasn’t worth her while and gone back to her cobwebs.

I climbed the stairs and stepped in front of her. “I won’t take much of your time,” I said.

She gave the underside of an eavestrough an expert flick. “You won’t take none of my time,” she said.

I took the photograph of Kellee out of the bag and held it out to her. “I’m looking for this young woman. She’s one of your tenants.”

She looked at the portrait without interest. “Number six on the main floor.”

“Is she there now?”

“No.”

“Do you remember when it was that you saw her last?”

“What’s it to you?”

“No one’s seen her around for a while. I’m worried.”

“You her mother?”

“Her teacher.”

“That’s a break for you. Popping a kid that ugly wouldn’t give a mother much to be proud of.” She chuckled at her witticism. Her laugh was a smoker’s laugh, and its husky roughness seemed to act as a spur. She reached into her back pocket, pulled out a pack of du Mauriers, and lit up. As the smoke hit her lungs, she closed her eyes in satisfaction. I tried to take advantage of the new and mellow mood.

“Could you just give me a moment of your time, please? If you can’t remember when you saw Kellee last, maybe you can remember a visitor she had. Anything, Miss Stringer. What you know may not seem important, but …”

She narrowed her eyes. “How did you know my name?”

“I’m a friend of one of the detectives who investigated the murder.”

She inhaled deeply, then pivoted on her heel so she could be sure that the smoke she blew out hit me full in the face. “Why don’t you get your friend, the detective, to answer your questions?”

“You’ve lived in the house all along. He doesn’t have the perspective you have.”

“Yeah, but he also don’t have my problem.” She looked at me expectantly.

“What is your problem?”

“My problem is that it’s almost the end of the month. For your friend on the police force, that’s not a problem. Cops can count on getting that monthly paycheque of theirs whether they’ve earned it or not. I can’t count on dick. All I’ve got is those rents.” Alma looked at me craftily. “Maybe you’d like to take care of number six’s rent for her.”

“No,” I said.

Alma took a last deep suck on her cigarette, then, in a movement so effortlessly perfect that I knew she must have done it a thousand times, she drew her arm back and pitched
her cigarette so that it sailed across her yard and hit the street beyond her property. “The next time you want to talk to me,” she said, “make sure you got a rent cheque in one hand and a damage deposit in the other.”

As I walked back to my car, I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I was tired and hungry and discouraged, but Neil McCallum had extracted a promise from me. Police headquarters were on Osler Street, less than ten minutes away from Alma’s; not far at all for a woman who had given her solemn word that there would be no stopping until she found Kellee Savage.

At the station, a downy-cheeked constable directed me to the office that dealt with reports of missing persons. As I turned down the corridor he’d indicated, I caught a glimpse of dark hair and a familiar grey jacket disappearing through an open door. It was Sunday night. Alex might have come back from Standing Buffalo early. Like an adolescent with a crush, I stood in the hallway, watching the door, knees weak with hope, while police and civilians walked by. Finally, the dark-haired man in the grey jacket emerged. I saw that he was a stranger, and I cursed Alex for not being there and myself for being so stupid that I believed he would be.

The name of the officer I talked to in Missing Persons was Kirszner. He was polite, but he pointed out the obvious: many people lived in the rooming house where Reed Gallagher had been found dead, and all of them were free to come and go as they wished. Then, echoing Alex, he suggested that the salient fact to consider about Kellee Savage was not that she lived on Scarth Street, but that she was a twenty-one-year-old student who was two weeks away from final exams.

As I walked along Osler Street to my parking place, I tried to buy the officer’s explanation. What he had said was both reasoned and reassuring, but he hadn’t felt the fear in that
barricaded room in Indian Head. I had, and I knew in my bones that his explanation was wrong.

When I got home, Leah and Angus were in the kitchen making a meal that seemed to involve every pot and utensil we owned, but I didn’t mind because I was ravenous and whatever they were making smelled terrific.

“What’s on the menu?” I asked.

“Pot roast,” Leah said. “And a salad and potato pudding and, for dessert, honey cake.”

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said.

She raised a double-pierced eyebrow. “Actually, what you’re getting tonight is my entire repertoire. My grandmother says every woman should know how to cook one meal that will knock people’s socks off. This is the one she guarantees.”

“Does your grandmother live close by?”

“As close as you can get. She lives with us. So does my great-aunt Slava.”

“Slava,” Taylor said, rolling the word appreciatively on her tongue. “That’s a nice name.”

Leah wrinkled her nose. “I think it sounds kind of indentured myself, but the Russian meaning is nice – ‘glory.’ Slava’s my grandmother’s sister. Anyway, we all live together. It’s like something out of Tolstoy.”

“You’re lucky,” I said.

Leah looked thoughtful. “Most of the time, I guess I am.”

We made an early evening of it. Leah’s grandmother was obviously no slouch; the pot roast knocked our socks off. After we’d cleared away the dishes, Angus walked Leah home, and Taylor and Benny went to the family room to watch television. I poured myself a glass of Beaujolais, sat down at the kitchen table, and thought about the day.

I was deep in the puzzle of the barricaded room in Indian
Head when Julie called. She asked about my family, her house, and her mail. Her questions were perfunctory, and her voice was flat and spiritless. Her lack of interest in my family didn’t come as a surprise, but her listlessness about her own affairs was disturbing. Come rain or come shine, the one subject that had always engaged Julie’s complete and fervent interest was Julie.

She seemed anxious to get off the phone, but I cut short her goodbyes. “Wait,” I said. “There’s something I need to know. Did Reed ever mention a student named Kellee Savage to you?”

Suddenly, the torpor was gone, and Julie was hissing, “You mean she was a student?”

I was taken aback. “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, she’s in one of my classes. Then Reed did mention her.”

“No,” she said, and her voice was low with fury. “He didn’t mention her, but I found out about her.”

“What did you find out?”

“For God’s sake, Joanne. I thought you were supposed to be so sensitive. You know the answers to these questions or you wouldn’t be asking them. My husband was having an affair with that … 
student.”

“With Kellee? What on earth made you think that?”

“The usual. We hadn’t been married two weeks before he started going out nights – no explanations, of course, except when I pressed him, then my very original new husband gave me every cliché in the adulterer’s handbook: he had to ‘go back to the office’ or he had ‘a downtown appointment.’ The Tuesday before he died, Reed’s ‘downtown appointment’ called our home. We were having dinner, and I answered the phone in the kitchen. He ran down to our bedroom to take the call, but when he picked up the receiver, I didn’t hang up. Joanne, I heard that woman telling my husband that she had to see him that night. And I heard him call her ‘Kellee.’
When he left the house, I followed him. Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Married three weeks and following my husband down back alleys, like some slut from a trailer court trying to get the goods on her lover. But I’m glad I did it. I needed to know the truth. I saw him go into that place on Scarth Street. After that, it was easy enough. I just checked the room numbers on the mailboxes in the front hall. The occupant of room six was ‘Kellee Savage.’ Isn’t that just the dearest little name?” Julie’s composure broke. “Kellee Savage,” she sobbed. “She’d even stuck a goddamned happy-face sticker on her mailbox.”

“Julie, listen to me. Please. I just can’t believe Reed would have been having an affair with Kellee Savage.”

Her voice was sulky. “Why not?”

“Because Kellee has … she has these physical problems. I think something must have happened before she was born. Whatever it was, she’s terribly misshapen, and her face is … it’s painful to look at.”

“And you don’t think Reed could have …?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. I don’t think Reed could have been involved with Kellee.”

“He kept saying he loved me,” she said weakly. “I just didn’t believe him.”

She sounded bewildered, as, of course, she had every right to. In six weeks, fate had cast her in the roles of proud bride, betrayed wife, and embittered widow. It was hardly surprising that she had lost her sense of self.

“Julie, maybe it’s time you thought about coming back here,” I said. “When Ian died, it helped a lot being in a place where we’d been happy together.”

My intention had been simply to give Julie an option, but she pounced on my suggestion. Five minutes later, it was all settled. Julie Evanson-Gallagher was coming home.