In the First Early Days of My Death (9 page)

The beauty of the
Book of Changes
was that Felix could never understand it. The verses were all about crossing the great water and foxes getting their tails wet, and who could make any sense of that? Every once in a while, he'd have a glimmer of comprehension, like the day he tossed a hexagram that warned him to pay attention to small, seemingly insignificant details. As a detective, he understood that. But mostly, Felix considered the tossing of the coins a kind of telling of the weather. It wasn't a guide. It was more like a barometer.

A very stoned girl in a cotton dress had given Felix the
Book of Changes
at the first Winnipeg Folk Festival — the free one, back in the seventies. Felix was taking an Eastern philosophy course then, and he was interested in the book's introduction. But he hadn't been tempted to toss the coins to read the hexagrams. His mother used to perform a similar rite in times of crisis or indecision, using the New Testament and a bobby pin. When Felix was in college, he'd considered that to be primitive nonsense. He believed in logic and relied on his reason to guide him. When he decided to join the police force, he welcomed the chance to put those beliefs into practice. But once he got out on the streets, once he'd been spat on and sworn at and punched and finally shot in the chest, he asked his mother to pray for him once in a while. It couldn't hurt. And now and then he tossed the coins, just to give himself something to meditate on for the day. The process had come to interest him more and more. For one thing, he'd never, in all the years he'd been reading the book, thrown the same hexagram twice. This was mathematically impossible, he knew. Yet it was true. Because every time Felix threw the coins, the wind was blowing from a different direction, the sun was shining from a different angle, and Felix was a different man.

He threw the coins six times and recorded the lines. They led him to “Innocence,” which sounded good. But when he turned to the verse, the first words he saw were “Undeserved Misfortune. Misfortune from within and without.” Shit. There was no mistaking the meaning of that.

He stood up, leaving the book on the table, and listened. Where was his wife? She'd promised to join him for dinner tonight, but he didn't believe her. She'd worked straight through dinner every night this week. He walked down the hallway, listening harder. Yes. Typing again.

Evelyn's heart had hammered in her chest when that detective gave her the news, and it was still beating faster than normal. A coma! Dear God, what had she done? Would she be arrested? She sat at her kitchen table, chain-smoking, and tried to decide what to do.

Her first instinct had been to get out of town immediately, to get away from the detective's questions and his prying eyes. But she feared that would only draw more suspicion on herself. And she had no confidence in her ability to escape. She'd tried to run away before, and she had failed.

When she was sixteen, two days before she was supposed to start classes at St. Bernadette's, Evelyn had made the first impulsive move of her short life. She stole ninety dollars from her mother's purse, packed a few things in a cardboard suitcase, went downtown and boarded a bus to Vancouver. Right up until the moment the bus pulled away from the terminal, she wasn't sure if she was really going to do it. She was nervous, worried that someone might think she was too young to be going all the way to Vancouver by herself. But nobody questioned her. Her invisibility had settled over her completely now, and no one noticed her at all. Even the driver forgot to take her ticket as she boarded the bus, and she had to thrust it at him twice before he saw it. The bus headed west down Portage Avenue, all the way to the Perimeter Highway, the farthest west she'd ever been, and just kept right on going.

Evelyn got off the bus at Brandon and then got on again, because everybody else did. All the way across the country, everybody got off every two hours to smoke or buy potato chips and stale sandwiches wrapped in plastic — even in the middle of the night. She learned to stay close to the coach and keep her eye on the driver while he drank his coffee, so she wouldn't get left behind. Sometimes she dreamed about exploring the little towns they passed through. But all she ever saw of Regina and Moose Jaw and Swift Current and Medicine Hat were the bus depots.

The bus arrived in Golden, BC, just as the sun was climbing over the horizon. Evelyn had never seen a place so cool and clean before. She'd never seen snow so white, water so clear. When she stepped off the bus she felt as if she were ascending into the blue air and the white clouds, because the sky was everywhere around her; she was inside it.

While the driver unloaded luggage and freight, Evelyn walked to the edge of the parking lot and looked into the dense brush and trees of the wooded mountainside. High above, she could see a stream rushing at white speed down the mountain, spuming into a clean blue pool below. She was mesmerized by the morning light, its pale, porous quality, the way it seemed to slide up the mountain from below, until the snow was bright as fire. She stayed so long, just looking and breathing, that she nearly missed the bus.

In Vancouver, she called her father from the depot and he came to get her in his car. He seemed angry and uncertain and wouldn't look directly at her. At home, his new wife made up a bed for Evelyn in a spare room — they had a lot of spare rooms — while her father phoned her mother to say that Evelyn was all right. Long into the night she heard her father and his new wife discussing things in serious tones and sometimes they hissed at each other.

In the morning, after her father explained that she had to go home, Evelyn went for a long walk along the seawall. She considered jumping into the Pacific, but she didn't. She went back home and repacked her suitcase, and the next day she let her father give her a lot of money and drive her to the depot and put her on the bus. It was the same bus, with the same graffiti on the backs of the seats.

It was noon when she arrived in Golden again, and the light was more intense, more spectacular than it had been the day before. The driver opened the luggage compartment and took out two bags for the two people who had reached their destination. Then Evelyn performed the second impulsive act of her life. She asked for her own luggage. She pointed to her suitcase, and the driver leaned in and hauled it out.

“It's tagged for Winnipeg,” he said, but he gave it to her.

Evelyn walked across the parking lot, carrying the cardboard suitcase. It was light enough. There wasn't much in it besides a few clothes and the magic kit. And she was feeling strong, strong and light and happy to be living in the sky. She spent an hour traipsing the thin trails though the brush on the mountainside, inhaling the pure, blue air, exhilarated.

Nobody knew where she was. True, she had been alone for years, and no one had ever cared where she was, but at least this time she had chosen to be lost. Suspended high between the prairies and the ocean, between her mother and her father, she was severed at last, cut loose, unattached as her brother Mark. She was liberated.

She would stay here, she thought. Get a job, maybe at the bus depot coffee shop, or one of the stores in town, and live in the mountains, breathe this air for the rest of her life.

All afternoon she trudged through the streets of the town, asking for work. But she had no experience. She hadn't even finished high school. Nobody would hire her.

“What skills do you have?” the man at the lumberyard asked, and she couldn't even think of an answer. The afternoon wore on, the suitcase grew heavier, and she began to worry about the night. She must have been mad to get off the bus. As the sun sank lower in the sky, the mountain air grew cold. She headed back toward the depot.

The lady at the wicket told her there was an eastbound bus passing through in an hour. Evelyn sat down on the bench outside and waited. The sun was setting over the mountains. Orange flames licked the snow at the top of the peaks. She tried to tell herself she'd accomplished something unique, something valuable. She'd had nearly one whole day in Golden. She could hear the ticket agents talking in the booth behind her. One of them clucked her tongue in disgust and said, “Runaways!” in a bored, dismissive voice. And then Evelyn understood that she was not even original. She was a speck in a vast and nebulous galaxy of losers.

The Abysmal

Fate, I thought to myself. Was this my fate? To be floating around out here all alone while Evelyn perfected her designs on my husband? For I had no doubt that was her plan. Mrs. Kowalski would have said there's no such thing as fate, that you have to make your own destiny. Was she right about that? Should I have foreseen this crime? In retrospect, the signs were plain: the perennials, the monogrammed notebook, the stocking.

I wondered how long ago this chain of events had begun and whether it had been destined to unfold this way. Alika believed that our marriage was meant to be. But he'd also once believed he was meant to be with Evelyn. That was before he'd ever laid eyes on me, he said, so it didn't count. He had first met her at the corner convenience store — nothing especially preordained about that. But then he began to run into her everywhere. He bumped into her outside his gym. He saw her at the hardware store. She even came into the studio where he worked to have some photos retouched. There must have been a reason for all that coincidence, he thought. She seemed to turn up everywhere he went, as if by magic, as if by fate. And so Alika, son of Rosa, simply surrendered.

Evelyn peeked out the curtains, scanning the street below for signs of a police car. She couldn't see one. Nevertheless, she was convinced she was under surveillance. And she could feel someone watching her, even when she was alone in her apartment, which was pretty much all the time, lately. It was that wistful, anaemic presence she'd first sensed outside her window a couple of weeks ago. It seemed to have invaded her apartment now, and she encountered its cold hostility and melancholic longing frequently, as she turned a corner or stepped from one room into another. It might be an evil spirit, or a wounded one. It might be somebody Evelyn once knew, somebody with something to tell her. She considered trying to exorcise it. There were plenty of chants for this purpose on the Internet. But she was wary of addressing this thing, whatever it was. She just might bond it to her by mistake. It wouldn't be the first time.

Evelyn's troubles with ghosts could be traced back about six years, to St. Bernadette's School. When she'd returned from her aborted escape to BC, nearly a week late for the beginning of term, Sister Theresa had marched her straight to her room and helped her unpack, sifting carefully through her things with disapproval. As soon as she saw the magic kit, she marched Evelyn straight downstairs again, all the way to the cellar, where she made Evelyn hold the kit open while she threw its contents, item by item, into the incinerator. When the box was empty, she burned it, too, saying there was no place here for such things, and then she sent Evelyn to confession, forgetting that Evelyn wasn't even Catholic.

The three other girls in Evelyn's dorm at St. Bernadette's were Catholics. They all professed to believe in angels and purgatory and the Resurrection. They went to confession and repeated Hail Marys for infractions such as putting chalk dust on Sister Theresa's chair. They repeated the things the priest said about hell and the punishment that awaited the wicked. But at the same time, Evelyn could tell they didn't really believe these things. If they had, they would never have behaved the way they did.

All the nuns said that fortune telling was the work of the Devil. Yet despite these warnings, the girls were fascinated by tarot cards and tea leaves and magic eight balls. During an unsupervised outing downtown, two of the more daring girls bought a Ouija board at a department store and smuggled it up to their room. Soon, even the most devout of Evelyn's dorm mates joined the group around the candle after lights-out to consult the Ouija about exam results and future husbands.

All the girls thought it was very romantic that Evelyn had a dead brother, especially a dead twin, and one night they convinced her to try contacting him through the Ouija board.

The boldest girl, whose name was Jo, placed her fingers lightly on one edge of the little planchette and persuaded Evelyn to place her own fingers on the other. Then Jo posed a question.

“Mark James, can you hear us?”

At first, nothing happened.

Jo tried again. “Mark James, can you hear us?”

Still nothing happened. Jo kept repeating the question, in a dreadful monotone, until Evelyn begged her to stop. But then the planchette gave a little jerk and began to glide toward the word
yes
. Evelyn emitted a yelp and the candle blew out. In the darkness, the other girls grabbed onto one another, terrified and thrilled. Jo struck a match and relit the wick. They stared at each other in the dim light of the candle flame.

“Try again!” Betty cried.

“No,” said Evelyn.

But there was no stopping them now. They insisted. Evelyn reluctantly placed her trembling fingers back on the planchette.

“Can you hear us, Mark James?” Jo asked. “Do you have a message for your sister?”

The pointer began to move again, spelling out letters, now. Each time it spelled a word, Jo would pronounce it aloud. “
E
,
V
,” she said. “He's spelling your name! Evelyn, look!”

Evelyn was looking. She was watching Jo very closely, to see if she was cheating. She could feel the planchette being tugged along beneath her fingers, but of course it was impossible to tell, or to prove, who might be moving it. It spelled out Evelyn's name, then paused, then headed for the
W
.

“Where!” cried Jo. “Is! My! Where is my.” The pointer stopped.

“Where is my what?” asked Betty.

Evelyn had turned pale, but nobody noticed. They were caught up in deciphering the message. The pointer moved to
M
.

“Where is my mother?” Betty suggested. But the pointer moved next to
A
.

Only Evelyn knew what was coming. She watched with dread as the pointer moved from letter to letter, and then finally sat still.

“Where is my magic kit?” Jo was puzzled. “What's he talking about?”

Evelyn made no answer. She was staring at the candle, remembering the green flames that shot out of the incinerator when Sister Theresa fed it the last coloured scarf in the magic kit. It had seemed to her then a kind of cremation, a farewell. But now Mark had emerged from his long silence on the other side. How was she ever going to get him to go back?

Felix opened the paper and thumbed through the pages, reading about the planned expansion of the floodway, the larviciding of the ditches. He checked out his horoscope…not that Felix believed in astrology. He'd once had a few drinks with a copyreader at the
Star
, a terrible skeptic who admitted to switching the horoscopes around before they went to press, so that Cancers were reading the advice for Virgos, and Virgos were reading Scorpio. “Nothing happened,” he told Felix. “Things went on as usual.”

The letters on the editorial page were full of complaints about the new casino, but Felix knew this was only a ploy on the part of the newspaper. Tomorrow, the letters would be full of praise for All-Am Development and the economic boom that was sure to follow the casino opening. Felix was so bored by the new casino he couldn't read another sentence. He looked out the window for Alice's car, although he knew she wouldn't be home for another hour or so.

Alice had gone out to meet with her editor, who was getting nervous about the book deadline. The date for delivery of the manuscript had passed two months ago, and Alice was still writing. Yesterday, Felix came right out and asked her if she wanted his help, but Alice had smiled as usual and changed the subject. Now Felix got up and entered Alice's study. The manuscript was stacked neatly beside the keyboard, weighed down with the stone Buddha he'd given her on their anniversary.

It wouldn't hurt, would it? Just to take a peek?

If Louise didn't win today, she was in trouble. She sat at the bar, nursing her glass of ginger ale, watching the backs of all the people at the
VLT
s. Every single machine was taken, and Louise was keeping her eye on a skinny old man in a yellow sweater who was also waiting for a turn. Louise was five feet closer to the machines than he was, and if she kept a sharp lookout, she'd beat him to it as soon as somebody quit. She was hoping for the machine second from the left, being played by a woman in a halter top and short shorts — probably a prostitute. Louise hoped she'd get a trick and quit soon. That machine hadn't paid out for at least an hour, and if Louise was lucky, she'd be the one to collect when it did. It was all a matter of timing.

She tried not to think about Bradley Byrnes and what he wanted her to do. She'd been running all over town for him this past winter, doing little favours to pay off her debts to him, and now she wanted out. If she could just get on top of this money thing — earn enough off the
VLT
s to place a solid bet on the horses — maybe even get to Vegas — she could come out so far ahead she'd never have to worry again. She could pay off Byrnes and never have to speak to him again. Her relationship with him was spiralling out of control, making her sick with anxiety.

It started off innocently enough, a couple of years ago. When she'd needed help to pay back some unfortunate loans, she'd offered Byrnes a little inside information, before the casino project was public knowledge. She told him about the proposal, making it sound like a done deal, and Byrnes had been pleased. He'd paid off her loans and then got to work buying up properties in the condemned zone. He purchased eight abandoned, dilapidated buildings from grateful owners who were glad to get rid of them at last.

But it hadn't ended there. Byrnes could have sold the buildings to All-Am for cash and walked away with a handsome profit. How Louise wished he had! Instead, he'd sold them for shares in the casino. He was a partner in it now — a silent partner, to keep attention off the speedy flip of his properties — and he was committed to the project, determined to see it succeed.

For this, he seemed to need Louise at every turn. First, there had been the trouble about the bidding — with All-Am nearly losing the contract to another company. Then City Council had hesitated on the tax breaks. Then that Historical Preservation business. Now this hassle over the injunction. And Byrnes expected Louise to take care of it all.