Blue Vengeance (23 page)

 

The next day Morven walked over to Danny in the schoolyard before the bell rang.

“Miss Hartley's sister died,” she said.

“What?”

“Miss Hartley's sister died.”

For a second Danny believed in another sister — one that wasn't a twin — who was much older than Miss Hartley and Mrs. Flood.

“Her twin,” said Morven.

She started to walk away when Danny was unable to summon up any words. His head was very crowded.

“Wait. Morven.” He ran to catch up. “Do you know what she died from?”

“A heart attack.”

“Whoa.” He touched the sleeve of her jacket when she started walking again, and she pulled it away.

“Sorry,” said Danny. “Wasn't she too young to die from a heart attack?”

“Oh,” said Morven. “I don't know about that part.”

“Where did she die?”

“In the St. Boniface Hospital. That's what they say.”

Thoughts shifted inside Danny's head, searching for a sequence that made sense.

“She had episodes forever,” said Morven, back into it.

“Episodes?”

“Yeah, episodes to do with her heart. They say serious episodes.”

Morven's answers were slow coming, but Danny didn't want them to come any faster.

“Thanks, Morven,” he said.

“Welcome.”

They both began to walk towards the school.

“Mr. Potter found her,” she said.

He stopped, so she did too. The bell rang, and they both ignored it.

“Mr. Potter found her?”

“Yes. He found her on the ground in the parking lot and called for an ambulance. Birchdale Betty helped. He went inside her house to use her phone. It was closer than walking all the way to the other end of the school to where the office is. Plus, she offered. She was out there. Mr. Potter has been inside Birchdale Betty's house.”

She seemed amazed by this last piece of information, and rightly so. No one, to anyone's knowledge, had ever been inside Birchdale Betty's house, and it was a matter of speculation by everyone in the neighbourhood, adults and kids alike. Was it insanely decorated, like her yard? Did she have old ladies tied up in the cellar? Did she keep her husband on a leash? Were there pickled toes in her pantry?

“You'd better get goin', Morven,” said Danny. “You don't wanna be late on my account.”

She headed towards the school, and Danny went home for his bike. He didn't hurry. He didn't care if he ever made it back to school.

Cars honked as he rode through traffic on his way over to rue Valade. He parked his bike by the spruce tree.

What he saw didn't come as a surprise; he had developed a theory on the ride over. Side by side, in the small parking area behind the house, were two Volkswagen Beetles: one blue, one green. Mrs. Flood had bought herself a car. It was the high-heeled twin sister who had crumpled to the ground in the parking lot. The deepening dusk had darkened the colour of her hair. Where had Miss Hartley been? It didn't matter.

Danny pedalled back to the school and knocked on the door of room 11-26. A familiar girl answered his knock. He had expected a stranger, someone from the other side of St. Mary's Road, one of the girls that should befriend Janine despite her poorness and self-cut hair. Before he said a word this girl turned to the class and said, “Janine. Your little boyfriend's here.”

Amid tittering, Janine made her way to the door. She slammed it shut behind her.

“
Calice
, Danny, what are you doing? Trying to ruin my life?”

He told her what Morven had said, and what he had seen. As he told it, he noticed that she was wearing pale pink lipstick, almost white, and she had made an effort to curl her hair. He had never seen either of those things before. Also, there was something about her eyebrows. They were lesser somehow.

She was quiet as he spoke, and his words slowed as he took in her new look. He didn't like it. It went a ways towards taking her away from him.

The teacher opened the door. It was a man teacher.

Another thing Danny hadn't expected.

“Is this important?” he said, speaking to Janine.

“Yes.”

She said it at the same time as Danny did, but for a different reason, he knew. She wanted everyone to think something serious, perhaps family related, had happened, and that was the reason a kid had come to call.

Two Volkswagens — one blue, one green; two teachers — one dead, one alive and not even injured — weren't important to anyone but a no-account kid who'd lost his sheen now that summer was gone, and lipstick and hair curlers had usurped him.

“Do you need to go home, Janine?” the teacher said.

“Yes, please.”

“All right. Well, come inside and get your things, and we'll go down to the office and speak to Mr. Shearer.”

“I don't want to go back inside,” she said.

To Danny's amazement tears welled up in her eyes.

The teacher bought it and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Okay,” he said. “You wait here. I'll be right back.”

He went into the classroom, and Janine grabbed Danny's arm. “Let's go.”

They ran out the side entrance of the school and slowed down when they got to Lawndale.

“My bike's at the school,” said Danny.

“Go back and get it. I'll wait here.”

He went back for his bike, willing the man teacher not to catch him and grill him and forever associate him with Janine.

“What should we do?” she said, when he joined her again.

For a second all the new things he would have wanted to tell her squeezed against each other inside his crowded head: that it was his fault that Cookie died — the person who loved her the most had hurt her the most — more than Miss Hartley, more than their mum, more than any laughing girls; that he had a twin brother named James who also died. But he couldn't tell her these things because he couldn't risk hearing that she didn't understand how much it all mattered.

He also wanted to tell her that he felt sad for Miss Hartley, evil witch though she was, because her twin sister was dead. But he kept quiet about that too, because he was afraid she would laugh at him with her new pink lipstick and hairdo. He was pretty sure she hadn't laughed at him yet, but that didn't mean she wouldn't now.

Danny stared into her cool green eyes, and she stared back with that unwavering gaze of hers.

“I told you Miss Hartley's car was blue,” he said.

“Who cares?”

“Me.”

He took off on his bike, left her where she stood.

“The high heels should have been a dead giveaway,” he called over his shoulder. “Miss Hartley never wears high heels.”

 

Danny turned east at the first corner to put something between them other than the empty space of Lawndale Avenue. The cold northeast wind pushed against him and took his breath away. It lifted road grit and threw it at his face till it stung. So he turned around and headed home. The wind felt better at his back.

When he got there he didn't want to go in the house; he didn't want to get warm. The Muskoka lawn chair still sat by the now empty pool. He sank into it and put aside thoughts of Janine.

He wanted to think about not having done it, wanted to recapture the modest elation that had roused in him. A private elation, it had turned out, but one he wanted to savour. But there wasn't going to be any elation, modest or otherwise. He had killed his own sister as surely as if he had taken a gun to her head.

Some of the words Cookie had written came back to him.
We were supposed to be in it together.
Oh, Cookie, we were in it together. Please know that, wherever you are. He couldn't bear to believe she was nowhere.

It felt now like everything bad in the whole world was his fault.

Mrs. Flood had died. Maybe the plink of the stone hitting the car had brought on the heart attack, but by the sounds of it, her days were numbered anyway, if Morven was to be believed: she'd had
episodes forever, serious
episodes
. It might be his fault, but not completely.

But that no longer mattered. Being responsible for Cookie's death cancelled out everything.

Killing was far too horrendously gigantic of a thing to do. Along with destroying a person, you erased a lifetime of thoughts — all the memories and wisdom that lived inside that person. It mattered hugely in the grand scheme of things. That sort of destruction should never be done deliberately. No one should die because a killer had been born.

When he went in the house, the air felt cool. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a closed photo album in front of her. Danny had never seen it before. The window was open wide. A stream of cool air with an undercurrent of dust poured through.

“It smells good in here,” said Danny.

“I thought I'd open a few windows and air the place out.”

He walked through the house room by room and saw that all the windows were open except the one in his bedroom. She hadn't entered his room. He did so himself and lifted up that window too. The screens needed to be switched for the storm windows. He went back downstairs.

“Thanks for not going in my room.”

“You look cold, Danny. Maybe we should close things up for now.”

“No. That's okay. This is good.” He sat down across from her at the table.

She was wearing plaid slacks, a white blouse, and a beige cardigan — clothes he remembered from before.

“What's wrong?” she said.

“Nothing.”

It didn't look as if she'd be opening the photo album any time soon, so Danny stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back hall, and went back outside. It was hard to know how to behave now that his mum was up and around every so often. The weight of new expectations pressed down on him. She didn't seem to be wondering why he wasn't at school, so he decided to take the rest of the day off.

The sun had come out, and the wind had died down. Russell was resting in a sunbeam but stood up when Danny rounded the corner of the house.

They crossed Lyndale and walked into the long grass that lay sideways now from all the tramping down and from the cold. It had lost the greenness of summer.

Russell ran ahead, racing back from time to time to herd him.

Danny stopped at the spot where Frank had pulled Cookie out of the river. It didn't look any different from the rest of the riverbank, with its abrupt edge leading down to scrub and broken trees, to the branch that caught her. Except inside Danny's head, and he supposed inside Frank's. The ambulance workers probably hadn't been back this way, and he didn't know much about the inside of his mum's head, but for him, this particular section of the riverbank would always be Cookie. He walked the several yards upstream to where she had gone in, the grassier spot where the cake plate was found, licked clean.

He recalled someone in the death-by-misadventure camp mentioning that it was odd she had eaten the cake first, before the Klik and beans. As oddness went, Danny figured that was fairly low on the list. He supposed he was the only one on earth who knew that, if given the chance, Cookie had preferred to eat her dessert first. Her reasoning had been that anything could happen between the main course and dessert. The world could end, she could die, there could be an explosion that took out the whole kitchen. She didn't want to chance missing out on the best part of the meal. Their mother and Aunt Dot hadn't allowed it, of course, but if she and Danny were left to their own devices she, the long-ago Cookie, would talk him into doing it with her. He didn't object; he could see her point.

Danny's knowledge of that quirk of Cookie's would die when he did. It was in no one else's consciousness. That thought felt like an additional loss.

No one but he and his mother had seemed to suspect that Cookie'd had no intention of eating the canned goods. They were there inside her buttoned pockets to weigh her down. Danny knew his mother thought so too, from what she'd said that one and only day they'd talked about Cookie.
We couldn't have known
.

Something caught his eye. It glinted in a ray of the slanted sun. He slipped and slid down the riverbank on the damp dun grass. He pushed the scrub aside — young dogwoods with their dazzling red leaves.

There it was, the can opener: the one that Aunt Dot couldn't find on the day after Cookie's funeral. It was theirs, all right; there was the familiar blue plastic protecting the end of each handle. He picked it up, a rusty useless tool.

“Russell.”

She hurtled down towards him.

“It was an accident.”

Russell was soaking wet.

“The cans weren't in her pockets to weigh her down. She was gonna eat the Klik and the beans, Russ. She wasn't here to die, she was just gonna keep on eating.”

Russell shook herself out and plowed up to the top of the bank. Danny followed, clutching the can opener in his fist.

“She slipped, Russ. She fell. It wasn't on purpose.”

He knew there was a chance she'd interrupted her eating plans midstride and changed course down the path to death. But in his mind the better chance was that she had not, and that was the one he chose to believe.

It was, indeed, death by misadventure. He could live with that.

 

When he got home his mum was still at the kitchen table, but now the photo album was open. She was looking at pictures of Cookie.

It hadn't occurred to Danny before to wonder about the lack of family pictures. In other people's houses, Paul's for instance, they were all over the place: on top of the television, on the walls, on the dining room buffet.

He looked over his mum's shoulder and saw his sister as a baby, as a one-year-old, at two.

She turned a page and there were two snapshots of brand-new babies placed carefully side by side: Daniel Arthur and James Scirrow. Danny couldn't see any difference between them. He turned back a page and saw Cookie as a newborn. She didn't look much different from the boy babies.

“I guess we all get born looking pretty much the same,” he said.

“Hmh.”

Danny didn't know if it was a laugh or a cry. A tear landed on the page. He looked at her face and saw a trace of a smile, so he supposed her sound had been a little of each.

She brushed away the tear.

He set the can opener down on the table.

“I found it,” he said. “Cookie had it.”

She didn't remember that it had been lost and hadn't noticed that there was a new one in the drawer.

“I guess there's a lot I haven't noticed,” she said. “I'm so sorry, Danny.”

He wasn't sure what to do with the apology, so he told her his new theory about Cookie's death and left her to sit with it.