Crazy Lady (20 page)

Clive Sampson, septuagenarian widower, a man trapped inside his front door since the death of his wife five years ago, has forced himself out and anxiously paces the arrivals concourse of Vancouver airport the following afternoon. “I'm so sorry, Trina,” he cries, rushing up to the homecare nurse as she emerges with Daphne in tow. “He just broke down the door and grabbed her.”

“Oh look at your poor face,” says Trina as she puts an arm around the distraught man's shoulders, but Sampson isn't bothered about the scars on his nose or his black eye.

“They took her, Trina.”

“I know.”

“But I love her.”

“I didn't know that,” she admits as she uses a Kleenex to gently wipe his swollen eyes. “Never mind,” she adds. “I've got contacts. I'll get her back for you.”

“I want her back, Trina,” he snivels and Daphne steps up to sandwich him.

“Don't worry, Clive,” the visitor says kindly. “Trina knows what to do.”

Trina has no idea where Janet is or how to release her. Neither has Mike Phillips an hour later when he pays an official visit.

“I'm very cross with you,” says the RCMP inspector, putting on his police voice and a stern face as he corners Trina in her kitchen. “You were hiding her.”

“Mike,” coos Trina with a warm smile as she straightens his tie. “Remember when everyone thought your wife had murdered her first husband?”

“Of course.”

“Who believed in her? Who said she didn't do it?”

“You did.”

“Right. So if I say Janet didn't kill your cop friend —”

“I know,” he butts in. “We don't think she did either.”

“Good,” says Trina. “Although,” she adds
sotto voce
, “she might have killed her kids.”

Janet Thurgood accepts that she killed her children; accepts the forty-year sentence her husband imposed on her; accepts that she is an evil woman who deserves the punishment meted out to her; accepts that, even now, after a lifetime of prayer and supplication, she may still fry in the fires of hell. And she lies quietly on the dirty mattress in the back of the old truck reliving the time before her transgressions.

Amelia Sawbridge, as the curmudgeonly magistrate was in those far-off days before she latched onto Cecil Drinkwater, occupied a private family box at the front of the nave in St. Stephen's in the Vale, while Janet and her relatives were forced to shoulder their way into the hard wooden pews with everyone else. Joseph Creston in his choirboy's cassock and surplice, an angelic figure with straight white teeth and soft blonde curls, looked over Amelia's head to find the one he truly lusted after. Amelia spun around to glower. Money might land you a front row seat in life but sometimes the view is better from the back, Janet recalls thinking as she relives the scene and smiles discreetly at her young admirer.

And afterwards, amongst the bluebells in the churchyard, Amelia in her Sunday best satin draped herself over
Joseph while all the time his eyes never left the one he really wanted beside him.

Amelia's parents — financially and socially secure, although nowhere near the same stratum as the Crestons — attempted to catapult themselves into the aristocracy on their daughter's back. “Our Amelia's pretty soft on your boy, J.C.,” her father said as he offered a Churchillian-sized cigar from a monogrammed silver case, but Joseph Creston Sr. shrugged it off.

“They're only children. Joseph needs a few years in the city before he's ready for that.”

But Joseph Creston Jr. was ready “for that,” though Amelia wasn't. “It's a sin. We'll both die,” she insisted when he finally got down to her underwear on the back seat of one of his father's Jaguars after a church youth group meeting.

Janet was more accommodating — much more accommodating. “I love you,” she whispered in his ear the very first time they consummated their relationship, and he loved her back instantly. But he already knew he loved her. He knew he loved her the very first time their eyes met, and he continued loving her despite the knowledge that another man's fetus was growing inside her.

Janet wasn't the only one escaping when she eloped with Joseph; she wasn't the only one rebelling against an overpowering and over-religious father. But once the knot was tied over the Bible, neither they nor their families were willing to risk the vengeance of God by untying it.

“Janet,” a voice calls softly as the back door of the old van creaks open. Inwardly, she wants to yell, “It's Daena XV,” but knows that time has passed; she has finally moved on.

“I've brought you something to eat,” says Craddock as he carefully removes the tape.

“Thank you,” she mutters, though she is aware that the words are blurred by the numbness of her lips.

“Drink this,” he says, putting a straw into her mouth, and she does as she is commanded, as she has been programmed to do all her life.

Her only escape was with Joseph, but that was short-lived. Her baby got in the way. It wasn't his and he knew it, and when it died — and to him it was an “it” — he was happy enough to announce that the next one would be theirs.

Giuseppe Crispin Creston was his baby, just like he had been to his father, and he doted on the blue-eyed little boy who even had his blonde curls.

“It's chicken,” says Craddock, feeding Janet some pieces from a KFC carton.

“Thank you,” mumbles Janet, though her mind is still on the sickly baby who never went a night without a fit of coughing until, one night, he simply stopped.

“It wasn't your fault, Janet,” young Doctor Symmonds assured her as he certified the death. “It happens,” he said, as if it happened every day.

But the loss of a child, like the loss of a true love, leaves the heart irreparably torn, and Janet's third pregnancy brought more apprehension than joy.

“Bathroom,” pleads Janet as Craddock prepares to leave her, and he helps her out, half carrying her to a stinky toilet at the back of the garage. Janet doesn't retch at the ammoniacal smell. It's no more putrid than the ones at Beautiful. The only thing missing are the religious quotations reminding users that wherever they are, whatever they are doing, God is watching.

“Thank you,” she says again as Craddock helps her back into the van.

The PI shakes his head, laughing. “You sure are a crazy lady.”

“I know,” she says as he reties her wrists, reattaches the tape, and closes the door.

In the darkness, Janet returns to her thoughts of earlier times, when she and Joseph danced around each other at a
distance, kept apart by the pain of the death of her second child, their child — kept apart rather than drawn together by the loss. Then the third pregnancy, a pregnancy forced upon them by Creston Sr., who demanded that his son produce an heir.

“It'll help you get over the loss,” the vicar from St. Stephen's in the Vale counselled after he was brought in by the godfather of the family. But what did the bachelor cleric know of loss? His losses in life were usually other people's. He could always go back to the vicarage, take off his collar, and cheer himself with a few glasses of sacramental wine at the end of the day. He didn't have to live with the pain around the clock, as Janet did.

The third and final death — baby Johannes, nicknamed from birth as Joe-Joe — was the final straw, and Janet had no choice but to accept the blame. Joseph, her husband, was away in Zurich taking over some of the business reins, and Margaret, the nanny, was off for the weekend. Only Janet and the baby were at home in their modest thatched cottage in the grounds of Creston Hall.

A few days later, once Peter Symmonds straightened everything out, the executive jet that had rushed her husband back from Zurich slipped her across the Atlantic and on to Beautiful.

“You need treatment,” the doctor told her as he shot a sedative into her arm, and he flew with her all the way to an abandoned air strip carved out of the British Columbian forest.

Wayne Browning, barely thirty years old at the time, was a brash white Alabaman who used and abused his Bible with as much skill as he controlled the people who sought his ministry. He absorbed his biblical knowledge from his mother as other children absorb milk. His father was a broken-down alcoholic who could barely read and rarely worked, but his mother prayed loudly night and day that things might improve. They never did, and Charlotte
Browning often ended up flat on her back with a bar drunk to pay the rent. The abuse never stopped her praying or her belief that she was headed for a better world, but if she did end up in heaven it was on the end of a carving knife that Wayne's father plunged into her heart one night when he was too far gone to know or care.

Browning was sixteen and barely schooled when he packed his bag and headed north for a new life in a new country. But he knew all the best bits in the Bible: the really powerful bits, the bits that sensible theologians waltz around in chamois pumps. He knew Samuel: “Obedience is better than sacrifice; Defiance is a sin against God.” Leviticus: “Homosexuals shall be stoned to death.” Deuteronomy: “If a man's son is disobedient, the elders shall destroy him at the city gates.”

He could recite every damnation and every self-serving text, but whether he understood was another thing, and it didn't matter to him or his flock. His words alone would control as he played good cop/bad cop with the religious texts. And women — usually with low self-esteem — were always anxious to please, anxious to do his bidding, anxious to be branded by him, anxious to go to heaven.

Janet had, in her mind, many sins to atone for, and, like a prison lifer, she quickly learned that obedience was all that was required to survive and prayer was all that necessary for her salvation; prayer, and the pleasuring of God's representative on earth, Wayne Browning.

It has been three days since Janet's disappearance, but this time the police have pulled out all the stops. Forcible abduction from a house in the ritzier end of town is less easy to ignore than a crazy woman who wanders away from a commune, even if she is witness to a fellow officer's death. In any case, with Daphne and Trina both putting the
bite on him, Inspector Mike Phillips wants her found. The press have been pulled in and Craddock is getting worried.

“I gotta get her outta here,” the private eye tells Creston once he's scanned the headlines in the Vancouver dailies, but he assumed that he would eventually take Janet back to Browning's commune and now has no plan since Beautiful is out of the question. According to the
Vancouver Sun
an entire police division is camped out near the community.

“You should have made better arrangements,” fumes Creston, although he's convinced in the back of his mind that Janet poses no real threat. “Is she still mentally disturbed?” he asks.

“A real fruitcake,” says Craddock. “No one would believe a word she says.”

Creston wavers. “I don't know.”

“Well, I can't keep her forever,” protests Craddock.

“I'm aware of that,” shouts Creston, slamming down the phone.

David Bliss is someone else whose ordeal is far from over. The writing is progressing, but after an initial burst in which he managed to keep Yolanda in the back of his mind for a couple of days, he's come unglued again.

“Why did she do it, Sam?” he wants to know, calling his daughter for support.

“Just keep writing your script, Dad.”

“You're humouring me.”

“Someone has to. But like I said, if she doesn't come back you'll have a mega-bestseller on your hands.”

“Really.”

“Of course. Everyone loves a great romance, and yours rivals
Romeo and Juliet
. You could be the next Shakespeare.”

“Now you are joking. Anyway, I wonder if it isn't more like
Taming of the Shrew
, with me as the shrew.”

“Stop worrying. I can just imagine you on the radio,” she says, primping up her voice to sound like a BBC announcer. “So — just how far would you go to get back the love of your life? A few soppy poems, a couple of dozen roses perhaps. Well, that might be enough for some women, but on today's show we have a lovestruck man who wrote, and got published, an entire novel. Please welcome… Yeah!”

“I'd rather be with Yolanda, thank you,” Bliss moans dryly.

“Then do it properly. Have faith.”

Trina's son, Rob, wakes Daphne when he barges into the basement suite at seven in the morning looking for his skates.

“Mum,” he protests, when he tracks her down in the kitchen. “This place is like a friggin' hotel when you're here.”

“I know,” says Trina, mixing banana pancakes. “And I'm thinking of letting out your room as well.”

“Very funny.”

“It's only Daphne from England,” she explains. “You remember her?”

“Is she the old lady you nearly killed last year?”

“It was an accident.”

“Yeah right. I remember, anyone can get lost in the Cascade Mountains in a bathtub.”

Daphne pops her head around the door looking for a cup of tea. “Good morning.”

“Hi, Daphne,” chorus the family.

“According to Amelia Drinkwater the kids were murdered,” Daphne succinctly sums up over the breakfast table as soon as Trina's husband and children have left. “Doc Symmonds is covering for someone, the police files have been dumped, and Janet is round the bend. I'm not sure what we're trying to prove.”

“Think about it,” says Trina excitedly. “What if we cracked three forty-year-old murder cases?”

“And what if we discover that Janet really did kill all her kids?”

“She didn't. She's too religious,” suggests Trina.

“Oh, come on,” protests Daphne. “Half the murders in the world are committed by religious zealots.”

Trina is stumped for a second. “All right, let's say she did; then we can switch sides, put on blinders, and prove she didn't. Lawyers do that all the time.”