The Girl in the Wall (11 page)

Mrs. Buckingham meant to kill her. Literally kill her. She was pushing Jim Coulthard to do it for her. What did they intend? Another pillow over yet another face? The gash wanted to shut her up permanently like the bad guys did on
Mannix
.

How had these two found each other? How had they hooked up? Maybe evilness sought evilness without even trying and made itself stronger. It met its match and merged and grew.

What was she supposed to do with this? A regular person would go inside the hospital now and tell somebody something, but she couldn't. She could not. All she wanted was out.

Mrs. Mortimer missed the taxi driver with the deep voice. He was a thin frayed thread back to where she had been before seeing Regina and she wanted at the very least to go back there.

She needed to talk to someone. She needed to talk to George. Anger welled up inside of her. Why did the disease have to land on him? Why not her? Useless muck-filled her. She would have welcomed it. Maybe George welcomed it too, she thought, but he would never admit to it, not in a million years.

There was a bus ticket in her pocket. She wished for tears as she stepped up onto the first bus that came along. It wended its way down Westminster Avenue to Osborne Street, where she transferred to a bus that would take her to George. There was no point in going to her own neighbourhood; there was nothing there.

Could it be that she'd made it up? Maybe nothing had really happened. She liked that idea, that version of things: an imaginary crime. She needed to lay eyes on her brother.

She got off the bus in front of the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.

George was asleep.

She stood by the side of his bed and put her hand underneath his, which lay on top of the covers. It was warm.

“He sleeps most of the time now,” said a voice behind her.

She couldn't be bothered to turn around. It was one of the starchy nurses that came and went. They were all the same to Mrs. Mortimer.

“Georgie?” she said.

“Best let him be,” said the nurse.

Mrs. Mortimer was still until the nurse went away.

“Georgie?” she said again.

He didn't open his eyes at first, but then he did.

There was a flash of recognition and a smile too weak to last more than a moment or two. His eyes closed.

She knew better than to bother him with words. Right now she wasn't sure she knew any.

“Go home, Mrs. Mortimer,” he whispered.

His voice was nearly gone.

“I am home, Georgie,” she said. “You're my only home.”

2006

“This is a sad house,” said Frank Foote, pausing in his work.

They were gutting a place on Lloyd Avenue in the Norwood Flats. It was small, just a storey and a half, built over a hundred years ago. The new owner's name was Norm Featherstone and he had hired Frank and Jane to make the old house new again as a wedding present for his daughter and her husband-in-waiting.

The job at hand was tearing down the walls of the half-storey. Featherstone wanted to create an open space on this floor — to rid it of the warren of musty rooms and give it an airier feel.

“How do you mean?” asked Jane in response to Frank's statement.

She stopped what she was doing, which was attaching a speaker bar to her iPod so she didn't have to wear headphones to listen to her music. Frank had told her it was too dangerous. Really, he just didn't want to have to visually get her attention every time he spoke to her; it was tiring. Plus, he thought listening devices were anti-social in company.

“This wallpaper, for instance,” he said. “Faded songbirds. It's been here forever.”

He ran his hand over the wall and then cut into it to see what the next layer showed.

“Who lived here last?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” said Jane, “but Norm would know. I think it might have been an old woman on her own who couldn't manage anymore.”

“See, that's sad.”

“Yup. Sad, but inevitable.”

The music started.

“Is Patti Smith okay?” Jane asked. “The
Horses
album?”

“Sure,” said Frank. “I like Patti Smith.”

And he did, too. He was grateful that Jane stuck to older music when she was with him. It showed a certain considerateness on her part. He suspected when he wasn't around she listened to some of the stuff Garth and Sadie were into, groups with names that he couldn't pronounce. Sometimes the names didn't even seem to be made up entirely of letters. He knew of one that had a dollar sign in it. He didn't like that, didn't know if it was a man or a woman and didn't care to know. It pissed him off.

“Gloria” was playing now and that was just fine with him. He liked Patti Smith's rendition.
G-L-O-R-I-A
.

“I don't remember who lived here when I was a kid,” Frank said when the song ended. “I could tell you who lived in some of these houses, but this one doesn't ring any bells. It's so small and camouflaged by all the hedges and trees. I wonder if anyone ever kept it nice in the olden days.”

“Probably,” said Jane. “Probably somewhere along the way people loved this house and loved each other in it.”

She turned back to her own wall. Frank watched a splotch of red appear on the back of her neck. Jane was fair-skinned and she blushed easily, usually on account of her own words.

“I hope so,” said Frank.

“Didn't you know everyone?” said Jane. “Everyone and their pets through the years? It seems like you did. How come you don't know who lived in this house?”

“Well, Lloyd Avenue was a little different from the other streets over here. It's just one away from St. Mary's Road and it was almost as if it belonged somewhere else with its tiny old houses built so close together. It was separate somehow. I knew one or two kids who lived on Lloyd, but that's it. People were more likely to come and go here and to rent rather than own. The houses on this street existed long before most of the others to the west of here.”

They worked away without speaking for a while: prying, banging, ripping, sawing, heaving debris down the stairs and out the open window. “Redondo Beach” played on the iPod — Patti Smith's song about “sweet suicide.”

“I wonder if this could have been the Silks' house,” Frank said.

“Who were the Silks?”

“They were a family who lived on Lloyd. There was a suicide when I was really young, too young to remember, really. I've just heard the stories. The dad, I believe it was — a man, anyway — killed himself in the basement or no, the garage. It was all kept very quiet in a loud sort of way. None of the mums and dads wanted the kids to know about it so they whispered and we listened as best we could. My mum was a really loud whisperer because my dad was a little bit deaf. I was only a toddler when it happened.”

Jane smiled.

“I wish I had known you when you were a toddler.”

She blushed again and Frank wondered if she was falling in love with him. He hoped not for at least two reasons: one, she was almost twenty years younger than he was and that would worry his daughters; and two, it would wreck their working relationship if she couldn't manage to keep it under wraps. There was a third reason. He wasn't falling in love with her. He could imagine growing very fond of her; he already was, but not in a blushing kind of way. There was no electricity. He worried that his electric days were over.

“How did he kill himself?” asked Jane.

“I'm not sure. I always pictured it as a hanging from a beam in the basement but I think I may have made that up. More likely it was carbon monoxide in the garage.”

“That always struck me as the easiest way,” said Jane. “If you own a garage, that is. And if someone doesn't find you after you've permanently damaged your brain but before you've died.”

“You sound like you've given it some thought,” said Frank.

“I have,” Jane said. “Not in an I'm-going-to-do-it sort of way, just in a what-if-I-have-a-no-hoper-disease kind of way.”

“Hmm,” said Frank. “I see.”

“Do you think houses hang on to their stories, Frank? Do you think thoughts and acts and feelings seep into the walls and stay there?”

“Maybe.”

“What about when the walls are torn down, like now? Do they escape then and dissipate into the atmosphere once and for all? Or do they stay, hovering, waiting for new walls to go up so they can reenter and make themselves at home again?”

“I don't know, Jane. These sound like the kinds of questions Sadie's always asking me. I find myself saying ‘I don't know' to her an awful lot.”

“Or if no new walls are built, then what?”

Frank took a long drink from his litre jug of water and went back to work. He figured he could get away without responding to that last question.

Behind the drywall were layers of mortar and cracked plaster covering wood lath. In some spots the lath had pulled away from the framing behind it. Someone had tried to repair it.

“I like this ripping-down phase,” said Frank.

“Not me,” said Jane. “It's my least favourite part. I like getting to the stage when we start building new stuff.”

“Hey, wait a sec,” Frank said. “What's this?”

His arm was out of sight up to his shoulder in a hollow space behind a destroyed sheet of dry wall.

“Just a minute. I can't quite get it.”

He tore away some more of the outer wall, reached in and brought out what looked to be a photograph. He took off his mask and blew on the item and then wished he hadn't as he coughed away the dust and sneezed four times.

“What are you up to over there?” Jane asked. “Do I need to call an ambulance?”

Frank sneezed one last time.

“I've found something interesting.”

He took a clean white handkerchief out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the picture. It was in faded colour, unframed and curled at the edges. It was bigger than an ordinary snapshot, perhaps five by seven.

“What is it, Frank?”

“It's a photograph.”

“Let's see.”

Jane took off her gloves and whapped them on the side of her leg.

“Hmm. It looks kind of sixtyish,” she said.

There was a man, two women, a boy, and a girl. And they did look like their time was the sixties or early seventies, with their tie-dyed
T
-shirts and long flowing hair, even on the man. The women and girl sat on straight-backed chairs, the man behind them, standing. The boy stood beside the girl with his hand gripping her shoulder.

“Are they wearing costumes, do you think?” asked Jane. “Or…”

“It looks like a pose for an album cover,” Frank interrupted. “For a group with a girl singer or two.”

Jane put her gloves back on.

“I'll leave you to it. I want to get this part over with today.”

She went back to her job and Frank continued staring at the photograph.

“Could you please turn the music down, Jane?”

Frank's head was starting to hurt and he no longer liked the songs. There was too much death in the lyrics.

Jane turned it off.

“Are you all right, Frank?”

“I don't know. There's something weird going on in this picture.”

“What kind of weird?”

“The little girl might not be alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think she was dead when this was taken.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Jane set down her crowbar and walked over to where Frank was sitting on a crate with the photograph held gently in his hands. She peered over his shoulder.

“Look at her eyes,” Frank said.

“Odd.”

“Very.”

Jane pulled up another crate and sat down beside him, taking a closer look.

“I think everyone else is alive,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It's her eyes that give her away, but I'd like to see this in a better light.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other for a moment and then back at the picture. Frank turned it over. There was writing on the back, too faded to read. It looked like it had been written in pencil. A capital L for sure, and maybe a capital D, and 19 something, a date perhaps.

“I can probably get someone at work to figure out what this says.”

“You're retired, Frank. You don't go to work anymore.”

“I still have people there.”

His words sounded petulant to his own ears.

Jane stood up.

“Okay. You try to figure out what it says. And I'll go to the library and find out who all has lived here.”

Frank suspected that she was humouring him, that she had no intention of going to the library, but he decided to try to take her words at face value and dismiss his mistrustful feelings.

“It's no big deal,” he said, as he set the picture down carefully in a safe spot away from their activity. “Featherstone probably already knows who all lived here. We could just ask him before you go trudging off to the library. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned up today while we're still here.”

They went back to work.

“Garth has a powerful magnifying glass at home,” Frank said, mostly to himself. “Maybe it will do the job of deciphering the words.”

“Maybe,” said Jane.

With a creaking rip Frank tore down the last of the drywall on the north-facing side of the house.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he whispered when he saw what was stashed behind it.

Norm Featherstone didn't want to phone the police.

“It'll hold everything up, Frank. They'll probably want to turn this place into a crime scene or something and the house won't get fixed for months, years even.”

“We have to call them in, Norm, for Christ's sake,” Frank said. “For all intents and purposes they're already here inasmuch as I'm one of them.”

“You're retired,” Norm whined.

“So everyone keeps reminding me.”

Frank looked at Jane, who sat on a crate staring straight ahead.

She pulled out her phone.

“What's the non-emergency police number, Frank?” Her voice quavered a little.

“Here, I'll call.”

He took the tiny instrument from her hand.

“Jesus Christ, I can't even see it, let alone punch in the correct numbers.”

Jane took the phone back and Frank recited the number. She then handed it over so he could do the talking.

Featherstone had arrived to see how the work was going just moments after Frank had made his second discovery. He was wearing a brown suit and he kept brushing at his clothes to keep from getting dusty.

“Let's go outside and wait there,” Frank said after he made the call. “Somebody will be here shortly. We shouldn't touch anything else till they've had a look.”

“See?” Norm said. “Already the work has stopped. This is going to turn into a renovation nightmare.”

Frank pointed Norm in the direction of the stairs.

“Careful there,” he said. “The railing's a bit wobbly.”

Featherstone was a huge lumbering man, too big for the space he occupied. His harrumphing sounds made him seem even larger.

“A renovation nightmare,” he repeated to himself.

Frank and Jane sat on the grass in the shade of a Manitoba maple that had seen better days. The trunk was divided in two and one half of the tree leaned dangerously over the front street.

Norm wouldn't sit. He hovered and fussed.

“I should get back to the office,” he said.

“Go then, Norm,” said Frank. “Jane and I will stay and deal with the police.”

“I can't just leave you to it,” said Norm. “I have to be here to let them know that I don't want them making a big production out of this.”

“They'll do what they have to do,” said Frank. “Whether you're here or not.”

They were quiet after Norm left, with their own musings on what they had seen upstairs.

There wasn't a trace of flesh or skin on the skeleton; it was that old. But for Frank, the dusty faded nightgown and wisps of colourless hair turned her into someone who had been a living breathing being sometime in the last century. The hair wasn't attached to anything; there was nothing left to hold it.

“I wonder how long she's been there,” he said.

“A long, long time,” said Jane.

An elderly woman walking her French bulldog stopped to stare at the house. The dog stared too and began to bark.

“Quiet!” the woman said in a stern loud voice.

The dog obeyed her and sat down, adjusting itself on its haunches.

“It's good to see some care going into the old place,” said the woman.

“Yes, ma'am.”

Frank stood up and bent over to hold out his hand to the little dog.

“Have you been acquainted with the people who lived here over the years?” he asked.

The bulldog licked the offered hand tentatively and then stationed itself next to Frank. Its ears were very tall.

“Some, yes,” said the woman. “Not recently, mind you. And never well. I don't pay much attention anymore. The last family I can recall was the Coulthards, way back when. A father and son, odd ducks, the two of them. And of course there were the Silks, but you probably know all about that.”

Something cold and amphibious touched the back of Frank's neck. A toad's nose. He and Jane looked at each other.

“After the Coulthards, people came and went. Renters. I don't know who owned it. The place was even left vacant for years at a time. Till old Mrs. Turner, that is.”

“Mrs. Turner was the most recent occupant?” asked Frank.

The dog stared up at him and gently placed a paw on one of his feet.

“Yes. I guess it finally got too much for her,” the woman said and nodded toward the house. Sad.”

“I was just saying to my partner here that it seems a sad house,” Frank said.

He got out a little notebook that he carried in the back pocket of his jeans and a pen that he carried in the front pocket of his work shirt.

“Coulthard, you said?”

He tried not to sound like a policeman.

“Yes, that's right.”

“Is that
C-O-U-L-T-H-A-R-D
?”

In one of the recesses of his brain a faraway bell rang with the merest hint of wrongdoing attached to it.

“That's right. Are you doing some checking into the history of the place?”

“Yes, something like that. I'm Frank Foote, by the way, and this is my work partner, Jane Haughtry.”

Jane stood up to shake the woman's hand.

“I'm Ann Beresford and I know who you are, Frank. I knew your parents quite well.”

“Mrs. Beresford! I'm sorry, it's been such a long time.”

“Yes, well…for goodness sake, Tina, get off the man's foot,” the woman said to the dog.

“It's okay,” said Frank. “Mrs. Beresford, what was it about the Coulthards that made them odd ducks, as you called them?”

The old woman was quiet for a moment. Her eyes darted about, wouldn't settle. “They kept to themselves was all, nothing all that odd in that, is there? The same could be said of me these days.”

Frank doubted that. Old Lady Beresford, as they used to call her, had always been known as a talker. A trait such as that wasn't likely to lessen over the years.

“They kept to themselves,” she said again, “and then they disappeared without so much as a how-do-you-do.”

“When was that?” asked Frank.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said. “A long time ago. Trudeau was our prime minister. Nixon was their president. Those days. Why all the questions?'

“Just wondering, Mrs. Beresford,” he said. “Just wondering.”

He wanted their conversation to be over. He knew where she lived if he wanted to speak to her again and he didn't want to confide in her at this point.

The dog leapt up when Frank gently shifted his foot.

“Hold your horses, Tina,” Mrs. Beresford said.

She wasn't ready to go anywhere, but the dog strained heavily against her leash.

“I guess she's found something more interesting to poke around at,” Frank said. “It was nice to see you, Mrs. Beresford.”

“And to meet you,” said Jane.

The old woman shuffled off without any parting words — something you could get away with when you got to be her age, Frank thought. But it irritated him, nonetheless. He couldn't picture ever being so old that he wouldn't have the manners to say goodbye in response to two well-meaning grown-ups.

“Did you see her hands, Frank?” Jane said when Mrs. Beresford was beyond hearing distance.

“Pardon?”

“The hands on the girl upstairs,” Jane said. “They looked like claws.”

“Oh gosh, I thought you were talking about Mrs. Beresford.”

“No. The girl upstairs.”

They both sat down again beneath the branches of the maple. There were overgrown hedges along two sides of the yard and at the front a scruffy mess where someone had done a poor job of chopping down another one.

“I was thinking of her as a woman, not a girl,” said Frank.

“Oh. I don't know,” said Jane. “She's just so small, I guess. I thought girl.”

“Her nightie looks older than girl age.”

“No, it doesn't,” said Jane. “Anyway, her hands look kind of claw-like.”

“Well, they would, wouldn't they, being reduced to bare bones?”

Jane shivered. “They were curled inward as though they had actually been doing some clawing.”

“Maybe that's just the way they went after all these years. I know burn victims' hands are known to do that. Hell, I've seen it.”

“I think that girl was buried alive behind the wall and spent her last hours or even days trying to claw her way out.”

“Oh, God, Jane.”

“Well, what do you think, Frank?”

He pictured the brittle bones inside the rags that were once a nightgown. He preferred to think of the naked teeth as a smile — the smile of someone who was buried behind a wall, sure, but not before she had died a peaceful death in her bed. Couldn't a mother or brother have gently placed her there, someone who couldn't bear to have her taken away and buried in the cold ground? Granted, the person who put her there would have had to be insane, but in a cloudy, innocent way.

“Frank?”

“I don't know, Jane. I just don't know. We'll have to wait and see what they come up with.”

Frank shuddered as he caught a glimpse of what Jane had described. He wanted to know that it wasn't true, but it could be. Far worse than that could be.