A Killing Spring (22 page)

“Wait,” I said. “When was the last time you were in here?”

“You know, that’s quite a mess in there,” she said innocently. “That rummy’s probably gonna want at least twenty bucks.”

I opened my wallet and pulled out my last twenty. Alma bagged it in a snap. “The last time I was in number six was the day she moved in, and that was January. As long as my tenants don’t bother me, I don’t bother them. We both like it like that.”

“But Kellee hadn’t paid her rent for April.”

“I figured I’d let her use up her damage deposit.” She smoothed her thin yellow hair. “I try to be decent. Now, unless you got the wherewithal to keep the meter running, get outa here. I got work to do.”

When she left, I stood for a moment in front of the locked door of number 6. I hadn’t had much time to look around, but even a quick glance had revealed there wasn’t much in the room that was personal. There were a few items of lingerie near the overturned bureau drawers and a flowery plastic toilet kit had been flung into the corner, but there didn’t seem to be nearly the quantity of personal effects you’d expect to find in a room someone actually lived in. It was apparent that Kellee had pretty well moved out by the time her intruder had trashed the room.

I walked back up the hall. Alma’s laminated sheet was a bright square against the faded wallpaper. It was headed “Rules of This House,” and a quick glance revealed that Alma had a an Old Testament gift for conjuring up activities that could be proscribed. Beside the list was the rack of mailboxes Julie had told me about. Sure enough, Kellee had placed a happy face sticker beside her name; I looked at her box more closely. There was no lock on it. I opened the lid and pulled out her mail. There wasn’t much: what appeared to be a statement from the Credit Union, the May issue of
Flare
magazine; a couple of envelopes addressed to “Occupant,” and the cardboard end flap from a cigarette package. On the flap, someone had pencilled a message. “I’ve moved. #3, 2245 Dahl. B.”

I stuck the cigarette flap in my bag. It was a slender thread, but it was all I had. I walked back to the Volvo, slid into the driver’s seat, and headed for Dahl Street.

As I walked up the front path of 2245 Dahl Street, the building cast a shadow that seemed to race towards me, and I knew I’d had enough of sinister rooming houses with their emanations of despair and of hard-lived lives. This place was even worse than Alma’s. The paint on the Scarth Street house might have been peeling and the porches might have been sagging, but it was still possible to spot vestiges of the building’s former elegance and coquettish charm. There were no suggestions of past glory here. The apartment on Dahl Street had been a squat eyesore the day it was built, and sixty years of neglect hadn’t improved it.

Someone had propped the front door open with a brick, and I thought I was in luck, but inside the vestibule there was a second door, and this one was locked tight. I pounded on the door, but when no one came I could feel the relief wash over me. I’d done my best, but my best hadn’t been good enough. I was off the hook. As I turned to leave, a tortoise-shell kitten darted in from the street and ran between my legs. It was wet and dirty, but when I reached down to reassure it, it shot back out the door. My fingers were damp from where I had
touched its fur and when I raised my hand to my nose, I could smell kerosene.

I hurried down the steps, eager to put some distance between me and this neighbourhood where horrors that should have been unimaginable were part of everyday life. I’d parked across the street, and before I opened the door of the Volvo, I took a last look at 2245 Dahl Street. The fire escape on the side of the building zigzagged up the wall like a scar. In case of fire, it would have been almost impossible to get down those metal steps. The life of the tenants had spilled out onto them, and the steps had become the final resting place of beer bottles, broken plant pots, and anything else small enough and useless enough to be abandoned. On the step outside number 3 someone had propped a statue of the Virgin Mary. According to the message on the cigarette flap, number 3 was B’s flat. It seemed that Kellee’s friend was a person with a faith life. I looked up the fire escape again. The door on the third floor was open a crack. It didn’t look inviting, but it did look accessible. My time off the hook was over.

Climbing the fire escape was a nightmare. Picking my way through the litter meant watching my feet, and that involved peering through the metal-runged steps at the ground below. The effect was vertiginous, and by the time I’d reached the landing outside the door to number 3, my head was reeling, and I had to hold onto the Virgin’s head to get my balance.

Inside, a television was playing; I could hear the strident accusing voices of people on one of the tabloid talk shows.

I leaned into the opening of the door. “Anybody home?” I asked.

There was no answer. I pushed, opening the door a little more. “Can you help me?” I called. “I’m looking for someone who lives here.”

On the television, a man was shouting, “you ruined my life … you ruined my life,” as the studio audience cheered.

Nobody home but Ricki Lake. I turned to go back down, but when looked at through three flights of metal staircase, the ground seemed a dizzying distance away. It didn’t take me long to decide that slipping into the house and leaving by the front door made more sense than plummeting to my death. I pushed the back door open and stepped inside. The kitchen was small and as clean as it would ever be. The linoleum had faded from red to brown, and it was curling in the area in front of the sink, but the floor was scrubbed, and the dishes on the drainboard were clean. The refrigerator door was covered with children’s drawings and an impressive collection of the cards of doctors at walk-in medical clinics.

The curtains in the living room were drawn; the only illumination in the room came from the flickering light of the television. Still, it was easy enough to pick out the front door, and that’s where I was headed when my toe caught on the edge of the carpet. As I stumbled, I caught hold of the back of the couch to break my fall. That’s when I saw the woman. She was lying on the couch, covered with a blanket, but when our eyes met, she made a mewling sound and tried to raise herself up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for someone.”

She stared at me without comprehension. She was a native woman, and she seemed to be in her thirties. It was hard to see her clearly in the shadowy room, but it wasn’t hard to hear her. As she grew more frantic, the sounds she made became high-pitched and ear-splittingly intense.

I tried to be reassuring. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m not going to hurt you.” I reached the door, but as my hand grasped the knob, the door opened from the outside.

The woman who exploded through the door was on the
shady side of forty, but she had apparently decided not to go gently into middle age. Her mane of shoulder-length blond hair was extravagantly teased, her mascara was black and thick, and her lipstick was a whiter shade of pale. She was wearing a fringed white leatherette jacket, a matching miniskirt, and the kind of boots Nancy Sinatra used to sing about.

She was not happy to see me. “Who the fuck are you?” she rasped. “And what the fuck are you doing in my living room?”

“My name’s Joanne Kilbourn, and I’m trying to find Kellee Savage.”

She reached beside her, flicked on the light switch and gave me the once-over. “Social worker or cop?” she asked.

“What?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I asked you if you were a social worker or a cop.”

“Neither. I’m Kellee’s teacher.”

“Well, Teacher, as the song says, ‘take the time to look around you.’ This isn’t a school. This is a private residence.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cigarette flap with the address. “I found this in Kellee’s mailbox. It has your address on it. Are you B?”

She took a step towards me. Her perfume was heavy, but not unpleasant. “Teacher,” she said, “let’s see how good you are at learning. Listen carefully. This is my home, and I want you out of it.”

“I just wanted to ask …”

She wagged her finger in my face. “You weren’t listening,” she said. She grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. As she propelled me through the door, she gave me a wicked smile and whispered, “Class dismissed.”

It was almost 5:00 when I got home. The dogs came to greet me, but the house was silent. The kids would be barrelling through the front door any minute, but for the time being I was alone. I was also miserable and hungry and tired. I decided I would meet my needs one at a time. I poured myself a drink, took it upstairs, ran a bath, dropped a cassette of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart’s “
Exsultate, jubilate”
into my cassette player, and shut out the world. By the time I got out of the tub and towelled off, I wasn’t quite ready to “rise up at last in gladness,” but I had improved my chances of getting through the evening. As I pulled on fresh sweats and a T-shirt, I sang along with Kiri, but even Mozart couldn’t block out the images of the kerosene-soaked kitten and the native woman’s terrified face. The memories of that afternoon were a fresh bruise, but I was no closer to Kellee Savage. It seemed that, like the Bourbons, my destiny was to forget nothing and learn nothing.

When I went downstairs to start dinner, I discovered the cupboard was bare. I thought about take-out, but I’d given Alma my last twenty dollars. What I had on hand was half an onion, a bowl of boiled potatoes, a pound of bacon, and eleven eggs. Wolfgang Puck could have whipped these homely staples into something transcendent, but Wolfgang had never paid a visit to Dahl Street. I pulled out the frying pan and started cracking.

Angus had been outdoors all afternoon, and once again proving the adage that the best sauce is hunger, he inhaled everything I put in front of him. Taylor was finicky. Slava had spoiled her.

“She gave me tea with milk and sugar in a little cup that was so thin you could see through it, and cakes with pink icing, and we talked about art and her house when she was a little girl.”

“Would you like to invite Slava for tea some day?”

Taylor’s eyes lit up. “Do we have any of those little cups?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’ll take some digging to find them, but I distinctly remember getting some when I got married.”

“When you got married,” Taylor said dreamily. “Did you have a big dress?”

“The biggest,” I said.

“I’d like to see that dress,” Taylor said.

“I’m afraid the dress is long gone, T, but I do have some pictures. I’ll hunt them up for you when I’ve got a bit more time.”

“Good,” she said, “because I’d like to draw a picture of you dressed as a bride.”

Julie came just as I was clearing off the dishes. Before our sisterly reconciliation at Easter, I would have cringed if Julie had spotted yolk-smeared plates on our table at 6:00 p.m., but our relationship had entered a more equitable phase. I smiled at her. “One of those nights,” I said.

She shrugged. “I ate the first two things I found in the freezer: a Lean Cuisine that I think was a pasta entrée and a pint of strawberry Haagen Dazs.”

“Then we’re both ready for coffee,” I said. I poured, and Julie and I sat down at the kitchen table. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and, for the first time since I’d known her, no makeup. She asked about my kids and about Alex and then finally she began to talk about Reed. As she remembered their life together, her brown eyes danced, and she smiled often. I recognized the syndrome. I’d felt that warmth, too, when someone let me talk about Ian in the months after he’d died.

Finally, the memories grew thin, and Julie returned to the present. “I’ve got to know what happened the night he died,” she said simply. “When we were at the conference in Hilton Head, he gave the most wonderful speech, and he ended it
with a quotation. He said it was just an old chestnut, but I can’t get the words out of my mind. ‘The journalist’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ That’s what he said. Joanne, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that my husband’s death was connected to his work.”

“Do you mean at the university?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No, not there. Downtown. On Scarth Street. Joanne, I think Reed had discovered something in that house that someone didn’t want brought to light.”

“You think he was murdered?” I asked.

“It sounds so melodramatic when you say it out loud. But it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Joanne, Reed and I hadn’t been married long, but we’d been together since the first week he came here. I knew him. He was a healthy man. I don’t mean just physically, but psychologically. He didn’t have dark corners, and” – she smiled at the memory – “he was a very ordinary lover. Nothing kinky. Just lights-out, garden-variety sex. Don’t you think I would have known if he had those tendencies? There was nothing, nothing in the man I knew that would connect him to that …” Her voice was breaking, but she carried on. “To that nightmare I walked in on.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Not when he died. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was so humiliated. Seeing him like that. Try to put yourself in my place, Joanne. We’d been married five weeks. I loved him, and I thought he loved me. But after I followed him to Kellee Savage’s room, anything seemed possible. Now … Jo, so many things don’t add up, and I told the police that.”

“You’ve talked to them recently?”

“Yesterday. They say the case is closed. They were civil enough, but I know they were thinking I was just a neurotic
widow.” She laughed ruefully. “They don’t have your perspective, Joanne. If they did, they’d see that I’m less neurotic now than I’ve been in years. Not that that’s saying much.”

“You’re doing all right,” I said.

“Am I?” she asked, and her voice was thick with tears. “I can’t even remember the last time I slept for more than two hours. And when I’m awake, all I do is think about everything I’ve done wrong in my life. Joanne, I’ve made so many mistakes. I set up expectations for everyone I loved, and when they didn’t meet those expectations, I walked away. I’ve walked away from so many people: my first husband, my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren.” The tears were streaming down Julie’s face, but she didn’t seem to care. “And at the end, I walked away from Reed. But I’m not walking away any more. Reed was a good man, and I’m going to find out what happened to him.”