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Authors: Katherine Holubitsky

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BOOK: Hippie House
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Carl himself could only deny his involvement. He insisted that he had not even talked to Katie Russell since the first grade, when she was moved ahead and he had to repeat the year. It scared him that so many people were trying to pin the murder on him, and without changing a word of his story, he repeated that on November 9 he had been with Ross and Lyle in the Dairy Bar until about seven o'clock. He had then driven Uncle Pat's pickup truck home. He had remained in the farmhouse all evening and was not even near the Hippie House at any time.

Ross and Lyle began to harass Carl publicly, denying that he had been with them at all. Carl had no one to back him up. Not Katie, who, according to Carl, had been the only other customer in the Dairy Bar while on her dinner break from the nursing home that night. Mr. Gillespie tried hard to remember—yes, he remembered Katie, he knew her routine—but the three boys were in and out so often that he could not be certain that they were there together.

One evening, Ross Nash took a swing at Carl on the sidewalk outside Maury's clothing store. Perhaps he felt that with the sense of uneasiness all around he was more likely to be applauded than condemned for doing it, and so he did not choose a more secluded spot. Lyle was quick to help Ross out, landing a few punches of his own.

Eric was talking with Jimmy and Maury in his store when it happened. He told me what was said. Carl was in rough shape—doubled over from the few punches he had already taken in the stomach and sporting a split lip—before they heard the noise outside the store and broke it up.

Aiming a platform shoe, Maury caught Ross across the left side of the head. “Get lost, you goons!” He must have caught him quite hard, because for a week following the hit, his left ear glowed as he drove past us down the street.

“Let's have a look.” Maury bent down on the sidewalk.

Maury and Eric helped Carl up from where he squatted close to the concrete, clutching his stomach. Eric sidestepped the blood dripping from Carl's nose. Studying Carl's face in the lamplight, Maury could see that his nose was quickly inflating. He sent Jimmy to the gas station down the street for a bag of ice. With Eric's help, he then steered Carl into the store, where they sat him on a chair.

“You ought to pick yourself some nicer friends,” Maury suggested. Pulling a rag from behind the counter, he pinched Carl's nose so hard that he began to squirm in the chair. “Those guys—they're a couple of losers. They've got nothing better to do than drive up and down the street and pollute the air. When was the last time either of them had a job?”

Carl attempted to shrug, but he was prevented from doing so by Maury's firm grip.

“You've got a job. A good job. All you've got to do is hang on to it and you'll make something out of yourself. Not like them. Driving up and down looking for fights. They're going to still be doing that twenty years from now except they'll be gray and not even the kindergarten kids will be afraid of them. You get what I'm saying?”

Jimmy returned with the bag of ice. After slamming it hard against the counter, Maury removed a handful, which he wrapped in another rag and held to Carl's nose.

“Hold this.”

Carl took the ice and tentatively applied it to his nose.

“Now I want you to listen to me. You should stick with what you're doing. One day Old Man Dikkers will retire and they'll
be looking for someone to take over his job at the arena. You'll already know what you're doing and you can apply. Trust me, if you play your cards right, one of these days, you'll wind up as boss of that place.”

A smile crept over Carl's disfigured face. Eric said he guessed it was the suggestion that Carl could actually be the boss of something—the idea, the possibility had never occurred to him before. In Carl's experience, if things were going well for him, it generally only meant he wouldn't fail.

Maury dabbed at Carl's split lip. He then gave him something for the pain so that Carl was grinning widely by the time Eric dropped him off at Uncle Pat's farm.

5

D
URING THE FIRST WEEK
of January, unseasonably warm temperatures turned the whole world into a sloppy mess. Tires threw soft pancakes of slush onto windshields so it was necessary for drivers to use their wipers despite the fact that not a snowflake fell from the sky. Water ran in the gutters beneath slumping snowbanks, and for days the sun remained hidden behind layers of cloud. Daylight seemed to shift only between shades of ash and slate.

Megan and I walked down the hill into town after school. Slush squirted from beneath the boots we had ordered from Eatons at the end of the summer, and the suede jacket I had longed for flapped open in the warm wind. It was missing two buttons, which I had not bothered to replace. With the flower sellers' costumes and Nancy's dress, I'd had greater things to sew. There was no great sense of accomplishment in simply sewing a button on where one had once been.

The road turned ahead of us before sloping down to the arena, where Carl scraped snow from the parking lot. The sound of metal against concrete could be heard long before we made the turn.

“I refuse to die like Katie,” Megan told me as we shuffled down the hill.

We had not been talking about Katie, yet the statement didn't surprise me. The topic of Katie's murder was never far from our thoughts, and despite what we were talking about at any given moment, it was never out of context. For three weeks it had slipped in and out of our conversations as easily as the time of day.

“Well, I'm sure Katie would have refused to die like that too if she were given the choice.”

“No, that's not what I mean. I mean I refuse to die having never done anything. Having experienced nothing. Don't you see, Emma? That's the real tragedy of dying so young. Katie never got to move away from here and have a good time.”

I had not yet thought of it as philosophically as Megan obviously had. Until that moment I had thought only of the horrific act itself and the violent moment of her death. I'd thought it sad and frightening that a person could just cease to exist. I'd wondered what her family would do with her abandoned room, her closet full of clothes, the pictures and all that Katie treasured in her life.

But I had not once considered her death and attempted to relate it to my own life. At least no more than the fact that I had become afraid to walk alone at night.

“But how do you know she never did anything? You didn't know her.”

“She still lived in Pike Creek, didn't she?”

“Yeah,” I had to admit.

“Besides, Hetty told me she'd never done anything. Tanya told her Katie was really straight. She didn't drink or smoke or go to parties. She didn't hang out with anyone cool. She mostly only worked. God, she was eighteen and she'd never even had a serious boyfriend.”

This depressed me quite a bit because I had never had a serious boyfriend. Come to think of it, Megan was older than me and she had never had a serious boyfriend. Not one that actually called you up and asked you for a date.

“Tanya said that Katie hardly ever went out because she was saving all her money to go to university. She was planning to go into nursing along with Tanya next year. So on Friday nights, if she wasn't working, she usually just sat at home and watched a movie on TV.”

Since the drop-in center had closed and winter had come, Megan and I usually sat at home on Friday nights and watched a movie on TV.

“And on Saturdays she always took her grandmother grocery shopping. The only time she splurged was once in a while when she bought a pizza for her and Tanya. Oh, she also sewed her own clothes. Pretty dull life, huh?”

This was becoming quite distressing. The more I learned about Katie, the more I realized that, although she was older than we were, our lives were very similar in many ways.

“I mean, don't you think that if we were living on our own we'd be partying it up every night?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

I continued to think about our conversation for the rest of the afternoon. I had just assumed there had to be something not quite on the up-and-up with Katie. Something a little kinky that must have gone wildly out of control. I had been certain that the detectives already had discovered what it was and that it was only a matter of time before it was made public. After all, a person was murdered for a reason. Were they not?

I phoned Megan to rule out the possibilities—absolutely. “So let me get this right, if Katie didn't drink, and she wasn't addicted to anything—if Katie didn't have any vices, she couldn't have been the victim of a drug deal gone bad.”

“Nope.” Megan popped the gum she was chewing in my ear.

“And you said she never had a serious boyfriend. Soo—it couldn't have happened that she was involved in some kind of love triangle or anything like that. I mean, like she was murdered by a boyfriend who found her in bed with another guy and flew into a jealous rage?”

“Not a chance.”

“And she didn't spend any money. So it couldn't have been some loan shark who was collecting on a debt.”

“See? That's what I've been saying. Dull as dishwater. And that's what we'll be like if we don't get out of this place.”

That night I sifted through the newspaper stories I had collected about Katie. Over the next few days I quizzed Hetty and spoke to Tanya myself. I tried to find the crack, even if it was only a hairline. Was it in her upbringing? Were there secrets in her family—her mother wasn't really her mother, but her grandmother, and she was really the daughter of her sister who'd given birth to her when she was only fourteen? Was there a time when she had disappeared for a month? Perhaps Mrs. Gillespie wasn't so far off—maybe Katie had escaped from a cult and now they were preventing their secrets from being told. Or had someone simply flattered her, and not being used to it, she had willingly climbed into the car and gone with him on November 9?

I turned up nothing of the sort.

Katie was born in Pike Creek on March 29, 1952. She was the second daughter of Marie and Earl Russell. Her parents were her real parents, and her father managed the Massey Ferguson dealership in town. Her mother worked at home, and her aunt ran the local craft store where Ruby sold her pottery and macramé. Katie had an older sister, Lorna, and a younger brother, Donny, who I'd already met as Bill Sikes.

Lorna was born with cerebral palsy, and although she required constant care, if anything, this seemed to have kept the family
close. Katie spent hours exercising her sister's limbs every day. People who knew her thought perhaps it was because of Lorna that she wanted to become a nurse.

The family was well-off, not rich by any means, but they did own two cars, which was not usual for families on their block. But neither Katie or her brother acted superior to their neighbors or friends in any way. In fact, Tanya told me, Katie was generous almost to a fault. Tanya was hesitant to admire even a sweater Katie might be wearing because she had been known to offer it to her right off her back. It was just the way she was.

Katie had been a Girl Guide and then a Ranger. She had belonged to the 4-H club and in her last two years of high school she'd had a part-time job at the seniors' home, where she started out by sweeping floors and wiping dinner trays. But after awhile she began staying past her shift to read aloud to residents who had lost their sight. Or hold the hand of someone who was in a lot of pain.

Katie's family sold their Pike Creek home and moved to her grandfather's farm outside Grand Valley after he passed away. That's when she had moved into the apartment with Tanya to be close to work. She was committed to earning enough money to add to what her parents had saved for her so she could go to university in Toronto the following year. It didn't matter, she told Tanya, if in the short term she had to deny herself a few things.

It was a sad fact that there were a hundred reasons why I should have been murdered before I could twist anything that I learned about Katie's life into something deserving of what happened to her. I did not turn up one person who had exchanged even a harsh word with Katie. From all appearances, she had no kinky, secret side.

IT IS A VERY DIFFICULT
thing to sort through the possessions of someone who has died. There is a feeling that you are
trespassing; not that you have any choice, but that is really what you are doing. Against your belief that privacy is a sacred thing and is to be respected, you are forced to intrude on the most intimate thoughts and behaviors of a life.

My mother told me this when I was ten years old. She had just returned from Toronto, where she'd helped my grandmother clean out my great-aunt's home following her death. Shortly after walking in the door, she'd collapsed into her brocade chair and begun to cry. It frightened me. Realizing this, in one of her infrequent shows of physical affection she'd had me sit next to her, held me close and explained.

BOOK: Hippie House
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