Grave Concern (35 page)

“Oh my God, Link! Much as I hate to say it, you'd better come in.”

Nicholas walked by her and straight to the kitchen sink, where he puked. What was this, high school?

“Okay, Nicholas. I'm ready for my explanation now.”

Nicholas washed off his face, lowered his mouth to the tap, and took a long drink. Kate held out a hand towel that was ready for the wash. No way was he getting a clean one.

“Where were you earlier?” Nicholas demanded.

“Why the hell should I tell you?” Kate shot back.

“I came by and you weren't here.” Was Link actually
whining
?

“Well, I'm here now. And you've just puked in my sink.”

“That thing outside your door. Where'd you get it?”

“What thing? If you mean the doorbell, it's been there about fifty years and hasn't moved. Sometime, when you're feeling better, I'll show you how to use it.”

Nicholas moved to the kitchen nook and slid in. “Would you mind getting me a drink of water?”

“Yes. But I will anyway.”

Kate filled the biggest glass she could find, an old beer stein of her father's. Nicholas knocked the water back in one long, Adam's apple-bobbing draught. “I came by and you weren't here and I saw it and ended up in the bar and drank too much and came back and you were here.”

“I see,” said Kate, who didn't.

“I'll tell you what it is, if you like.”

“Sure,” Kate replied, wondering if she'd somehow wandered into some old Monty Python skit.

“It's the door of a coal chute.”

“What is?”

“The thing outside your door.”

Kate thought about this for a while. Oh! She'd completely forgotten — the thing from the old King's site that they'd brought home in Mary's truck. It still sat where they'd dropped it — by the side of Kate's front steps.

“Ah!” said Kate, puzzled by Link's interest in a rusty old artifact. To change the subject she said, “I don't want to sound like your mother, but I hope you weren't driving in this condition.”

“You see a truck out there?” Nicholas said.

Kate walked to the front door and looked out. “No. No truck.”

“Good,” said Nicholas. “I left it at the bar. I think.” Suddenly, Nicholas grew contrite, pounding his forehead with his fist. “Oh, Kate. I'm so sorry about your sink. I'm a terrible guest. How can I ever repay you?”

“You could clean it up, for a start. It's stinking up the place.”

Nicholas went to get up. Kate waved him down. “Later, later. So tell me, what's on what's left of your mind?” As she said this, Kate discreetly ran some water in the sink herself. The drain had never been good, and the mess just rose up in a pillow of liquid and floated around.

“So I came around to tell you about the cougar.”

“Yes?”

“And you weren't around.”

“We've established that.”

“And saw the coal chute.”

“Uh huh … ”

“And then I went to the bar.”

“LINK! You have precisely
one second
! My irritation levels are rising to unprecedented hormonal heights.”

“The last time I saw that coal door, I went through it.”

“Oh?”

“Foxy's brilliant plan. Stole some booze for the last Chemistry Study Group. Remember, around grad — the shit hit the fan?”

Kate did remember. The parents arrived home unexpectedly. She had been lucky; sitting by a window at Foxy's, she had seen the car pull in. With a shout of warning to the others, she'd taken off out the back door running and reached home without incident. “And may I ask what relevance to anything all this has?”

“Kate. Sit down. I think I'm going to spill.”

“You did that already.”

“That was nothing. Shut up and listen.”

Kate sat as far away from the sink as she could without leaving the kitchen.

“The night of the fire, I was there.”

“You mean King's?”

“Yes, I mean King's. For Chrissakes, Kate, stand down and let me talk.”

Now Kate was contrite. She placed her hands like those “speak no evil” monkeys you saw in dollar shops.

“You've heard that the Angels were there, supposedly to quote-unquote
warn
J.P. You know there was basically a campaign around then, eh? The Angels trying to move in, establish control right up the valley. Didn't like independent operators. Guys like J.P. just selling some smack or whatever to the local kids. The Angels wanted the business, right? Not to cut the indie-guys out completely, mind you. Just wanted a cut of the profits.

“Anyway, that day, I was there. Just before they came in. I'd had some work up north and stopped in to say hi to J.P. on my way back down. We sat in lawn chairs he had 'round back of the storage shed. Talked and had a smoke of some good stuff he had.”

“What did he seem like, then?”

“I dunno. Like J.P., I guess. Older. Missing a couple of teeth. Something about a fight way back when.”

“I mean, did he seem happy?”

Nicholas looked confused. “How would I know?”

Men
, thought Kate.
Dense. Maybe the Bible was right; they
were
made of clay
.

“So,” she tried. “What did you talk about?”

“I dunno. All kinds of stuff.”

Kate ventured, “Such as?” She was thinking
women
.

“Can't remember, really. Just stuff, you know. Old teachers and parties. A bit about our families, what they were up to. The playoffs. They were just over, I remember. We got talking about Montreal, how it wasn't the same as when we were kids. That year those jokers were
blanked
by Boston in the quarter finals.” Nicholas screwed up his mouth. “Yup. Everyone thought they'd go on like the seventies forever. Turned out that was the beginning of the end.”

Kate rolled her eyes, which had glazed over at the word “playoffs.” Nicholas, picking at an old nick in the wooden table with his fingernail, never noticed. Still, as painful as it was, Kate kept mum. She sensed this was one of those conversational moments akin to using her parents' recalcitrant washing machine: Once onto a certain spin, all you could do was hang on and pray the thing would click over to the next cycle.

“Anyway,” Nicholas continued, “eventually I had to get going. Had an all-nighter ahead, driving back down to T.O. He stuffed some good dope in my jacket pocket, we said goodbye, and I got into my truck. Just as I pulled out,
they
came in. Five or six, I guess, on those great bloody machines. The hair, the leather, the works. So I drove on down the road a bit and turned around, pulled in at LaDouceur's cottage road there. Stashed the truck and walked a few metres through the bush and watched. I just had a feeling whatever was going down wasn't going to be good.

“My instincts were right. Thing is, I didn't realize what they were doing till the smoke was already pretty heavy coming up from the shed. Which, by the way, was on the far side of the hotel from where I was, so I couldn't see. Anyways, I'm just about to run out of the bush, when I see J.P. running away from the shed area and
back into the hotel
. So, I thought, he's safe. He's just running in to phone the police or something. He knows what he's doing. I won't get involved. Might just bum things up. Besides, he may need a witness. I'll be here to help, I told myself. I'll keep an eye out and help J.P. out if the cops decide to take their sweet time. J.P. wasn't exactly a favourite of theirs, as you may know.

“So that's what I did. Waited and watched. Next thing I know the whole bloody thing's going up. It had started at the side you see, the side closest to the shed, away from me. It wasn't until way later I realized the hotel was already on fire when J.P. ran back in. By the time the front wall was aflame and I finally twigged, J.P. was trapped. I heard him yelling for help and ran over. By this time the Angels had roared off. I answered him, told him it was me, Link, I was going to get him out. I
think
he heard.

“The front door and porch was a complete writeoff. There was no way to get in there. I ran around the side. Forget it — wall of flame. But here's the thing, Kate. Here's what keeps me awake at night.
I forgot about the back, the cement foundation. The coal chute, Kate. That door you've somehow got your hands on.
Even though I'd spent a good part of an evening getting to know it intimately.
J.P. would never have thought of it himself. He probably didn't even know it was there; he wasn't a guy for details. But I was, Kate.
I could have got in. I know I could
. I could've somehow helped him out of there. Or got some rope from my truck and pulled him out.
Something
.”

Nicholas brought his fist down on the table, and Kate flinched. “But it completely went out of my head. Kate, you've never seen anything like that whole bloody thing up in flames. Like a friggin' bonfire from hell.”

Someone might as well have taken a two-by-four to Kate's head. Apparently that was not enough, however, for Nicholas went on.

“I could hear the sirens coming down the highway. Could be J.P. called them, or could just as well have been someone else. Someone driving by on the highway maybe stopped in at the dairy, used their phone. Whatever. I was just about to try around front again when cops and fire trucks all came blaring in. I pointed out where I thought he was inside the building. And that was all the help I could give. In court, there was some misunderstanding, and the record ended up saying I witnessed the fire while driving by on the highway and got there the same time as the police. I guess you wouldn't remember, but 911 was pretty new here then. You didn't just call up the local station anymore. It had to be relayed all over the goddamned county, maybe even the province. There was a big stink in the media about slow response 'cause now an ambulance had to come all the way up from Valleyview. I think the cops were happy to let the record stand as it was. Made it look like they got there sooner than they did.”

Link let his gaze, which had never, through the telling of the story, touched Kate, venture somewhere near the side of her face. She met and pulled it in, and each stared into the other's empty pupils. Despair, Kate realized, like those stars collapsed into black holes, sucked everything in, let nothing escape.

“Mary says people get killed all the time running into fires.”

“Is that meant to be a comfort?” said Link.

“I meant
you
, not J.P. You don't
know
you could have got him out. You might have got trapped in there with him and we wouldn't be talking now.”

“I know I know. But how can you not
try
, Kate? I'll never forgive myself. Never. Something I never told you. J.P. saved my life.”

Okay, thought Kate. Nicholas really must be drunk to be hallucinating a past that had never occurred. “Sure, Nicholas,” she said.

“He did so,” Nicholas said like a petulant child, and out slid the sailing story he'd sworn never to tell her.

When that was over Kate had pretty much had all she could take. “And that's why you're drunk,” she said, not as kindly as she might.

“Pretty much. I've done well until today. Been on the wagon for years. Drunk a small African nation's worth of coffee.” He glanced at the sink. “Sorry. Guess I've lost the old iron gut.”

“Listen, Nick. It's going to take me a while to digest this, pardon the visuals. I can't talk about it now. I just can't. Sorry to change the subject, but what was it you wanted to tell me, when you came by in the first place?”

Link looked thoughtful. After a long silence he spoke. “What I wanted to tell you. Okay. We found a definite print way out Ottonawa Road, you know, that goes into the park the back way.”

The provincial park, he meant, fifty klicks to the southwest. “Wow, that fella gets around,” Kate said.

A semblance of a smile crossed Nicholas's sorrow-wracked face. “That
gal
gets around. It's a female, Kate. Possibly with cub. Or cubs. There were other small prints, unidentifiable for certain, but likely little ones.”

Kate was tempted to ask the sixty-four million dollar question:
Did MNR, as rumour had it, really themselves reintroduce the big cats?
But when she looked into Nicholas's face, and saw the pain still having its way with him, she couldn't bring herself to say anything.

And no, no she wouldn't bring up the subject of Extraordinary Wayne. All through their talk, Kate had been turning and turning it over in her mind. Should she? Shouldn't she? But finally she had to demur. To raise Link's hopes, out of what might well be some crazy misfiring of her own neural circuits, could be far more than a misstep. It could be downright cruel, and Lord knows, she didn't want to nudge Nicholas any further down that alcohol-slick road.

Despite malignant masculinity, Nicholas seemed to sense the moment. In complete silence, he got up and walked over to the sink. Without ado, he plunged his hand in the mucky mess. After a minute or so, Kate heard a loud sucking sound and a long gurgle. The sink, apparently, had as little taste as they for what it was forced to swallow. But swallow it did. Nicholas stayed there, mucking around, running the water on and off, pouring in detergent, rubbing and wiping, until the thing was spic and span. Kate knew it was spic and span because he motioned her over to look in. She nodded her approval.

Still wordless, Nicholas went to the front door, opened it and walked out. He closed it gently behind him. Kate noticed, however, some hesitation at this point. Link hovered on her step, apparently reluctant to leave. And now, indeed, he turned around.

“You asked me what I wanted to tell you. About the cougar.”