Rosie O'Dell (25 page)

“Outstanding. And what did you have in mind for yourself?”

“Oh, let me see now. How about a little of that cunnilingual interaction you
excel at?”

“A muff dive—check. Your wish is my command.” We sat in silence for a minute
watching the television screen. Then I asked what had been on my mind since my
talk with Brent’s father: “Rosie, where did you learn so much about sex at
fourteen?”

“I’ve had a good teacher.” She snuggled against me and kissed my ear.

“No, right at the beginning, looking back, you seemed to have everything down
pat.”

“I guess I’m just a natural. Everything I do with you just seems to come
natural.” When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “Also, I read a lot, and of
course girls talk a lot.”

“Suzy?”

“Partly, and others too. How about you? You’re no slouch
yourself.”

How would she know if I was a slouch or not? “The same, I guess. Boys bullshit
a lot about it in the locker room, and everywhere else, for that matter. I
didn’t realize that girls did that too.”

We sat silently again side by side. I could sense that she was thinking hard.
Then she put her hand on mine. “Tom, there was something else, too. I didn’t
want to tell you about it, but I will, now that you are wondering. I was
snooping around Mom’s and his bedroom when they were out one Saturday, as
thirteen-year-old girls do. Actually, I was trying to see what intimate undies a
grown-up woman might keep around. Instead, I found a film hidden away under
stuff on a shelf in their closet. I had my suspicions about it, so I put it on
the projector and had a look. Sure enough, it was a dirty movie, a hard-core
pornographic movie. It was grainy, and black and white, and absolutely
disgusting, I thought, what they were doing to each other, men and women.”

“You watched it right through?”

“Yes, I couldn’t help myself. I was fascinated and disgusted at the same time
by what was going on. But I must have picked up a few techniques by osmosis. And
they don’t seem bad with you, only good, very, very good.”

“How long was it?”

“I dunno, twenty minutes?”

“Where is it now? Can we watch it when we get the chance?”

“It’s gone. When I went to show it to Suzy a little later, it wasn’t there. He
must have suspected someone had found it.”

“Someone? Do you figure little Pagan might have discovered it and watched it,
too?”

“Jesus, I hope not. No, she couldn’t have. She wasn’t home by herself at all
during that time.”

“Pagan told me she is doing pretty well in cross-country at school. I didn’t
realize that, not until she beat me in the Tely Ten and won hands down in her
age group. Did you know?”

“That’s a drastic change of subject. Well, yes… I was aware of it. More or
less. But she’s been pretty nonchalant about it. It slipped my mind. I should
have told you.”

We sat in silence again. We had the television turned down low for security.
Off in the distance upstairs, I heard a telephone ringing barely audibly. There
was a telephone down here in the entertainment room, but it wasn’t ringing. The
one upstairs rang on and on. I’d never heard it before.
Rosie
and I must have talked over it in the past or were concentrating on each other
to the point where I hadn’t noticed it. “Is your mother going to answer that
telephone?” I asked.

“No, that’s his private line in his study. We’re not supposed to answer it. If
we do, we only get in a tangle with a patient at the other end who needs a
doctor, and we’re not equipped to deal with that. If it’s not answered, the
patients know they have to call elsewhere. He even had to get rid of his
answering machine because a patient left a message for him to call urgently, and
by the time he got back a day later, the patient was dead. It was an
awful…”

I tuned out. My mind had reverted back to the porno film. Rosie had watched a
guy’s big hard cock doing its damnedest for a half an hour. In my naïveté, I had
thought that mine was the only one she’d ever seen, let alone in action. In the
way that teenaged boys react to the realization that a girl may have had
intimate experience of other males, if only by sight, I felt extremely negative
sensations welling up—jealousy and insecurity— although over what, if a
psychiatrist had asked me, I would not have been able to say.

We looked at the television screen for fifteen minutes. We didn’t move towards
each other, but Rosie kept hold of my hand very tight. The telephone upstairs
gave a dozen rings and stopped, and then rang again ten times and stopped, over
and over incessantly while we sat there. “That’s really weird,” said Rosie.
“I’ve never heard his phone go on and on like that before.” Her voice sounded
strangely brittle.

“Maybe you should answer it and put the poor bastard out of his misery. Or her.
Whatever.”

“He said not to, under any circumstances. We’d only do more damage than good in
an emergency.”

“Does that make any sense to you? I mean, in a case like this, where it won’t
stop?”

“He’s the fucking doctor.” Her voice was so harsh, I looked at her. But she was
staring at the TV screen.

We sat quietly again for five minutes. The telephone started up once
more—fifteen rings and then a long, eerie silence. It did not ring again. I put
my arm around Rosie and kissed her. She seemed rigid.

“I don’t think I feel very well tonight,” I said.

“Me neither,” said Rosie.

“I think I’ll go home and go to bed.” I stood up.

Rosie followed me up the stairs. “I don’t guess you want a bite
to eat before you go?”

I shook my head. At the door, I put both arms around her and she did the same
to me. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I should be feeling better by tomorrow
night.”

Rosie squeezed me with all her might and murmured, “I-love-you.” I went home
and straight to my room.

After a restless, broken night, pitching about in my bed, I dropped off around
seven o’clock and slept till mid-morning. I thought I should call Rosie, but
there was a message by the phone in the kitchen that Brent had called me last
night, so I was happy to phone him back instead. We had a good gab, exchanging
news on hockey and swimming, and Brent reported with enthusiasm that the girl at
school he’d had his eye on was responding favourably. He wondered how Rosie and
I were getting on.

“Swimmingly,” I said with a laugh.

“You sounded just like that Dr. Rothesay, then,” said Brent.

When we said goodbye and hung up, the telephone rang immediately. It was Suzy.
Rosie had tried to get me, she said, but my line was busy. Now she and her
mother were trying to keep their line free for calls from Ontario. “Pagan seems
to be missing,” said Suzy. “She left her school yesterday afternoon by taxi,
saying she was meeting with her mother and stepfather in Toronto for some
shopping and dinner, but she didn’t come back last night. The school called her
home number here, only to find that her mother wasn’t in Toronto at all. Nina
called Rothesay in Ottawa, and he was still at his hotel there waiting to get
his flight back home today. He knew nothing about meeting Pagan in
Toronto.”

“The school let a thirteen-year-old girl get aboard a taxi to Toronto on her
say-so that she was meeting her mother and stepfather?”

“Yeah. That sounded weird. But when Rosie pinned them down on it, they said
that that’s what often happened. Sometimes her mother and stepfather would pick
her up. More often Dr. Rothesay would get her, or if he was too busy to come,
she would leave in a taxi to meet them. He had authorized the school to let
Pagan do that and he would meet her at the other end. It’s a sixty-dollar taxi
ride to downtown Toronto, and the doctor told them he had an arrangement with
the taxi company to pay for the trips and for Pagan’s safety. This was the first
time Rosie has heard of any such arrangements, and Nina wasn’t sure what
arrangements they had made with any of them up there.”

“So what does everyone figure is going on? That Pagan used the
arrangement for cover to sneak off to meet a secret boyfriend or something? She
was kind of moony here last summer over someone, I thought.”

There was a long silence at the other end. Then Suzy said, “Nobody knows what
to think. And Rosie says she’s almost afraid to think. She has a very bad
feeling about all this, Tom. Maybe you should go over.”

“Oh, absolutely. I will. But what’s she so upset about? I’m sure Pagan will
turn up safe and sound and embarrassed over some foolishness she’s been up
to.”

“I hope you’re right. See you at Rosie’s.”

I was in the shower wondering why Rosie and Suzy seemed so pessimistic, alarmed
even, about Pagan’s girlish misbehaviour, when the phone rang again. I jumped
out wet, grabbed a towel, and answered it. And again it was Suzy: “I’m at
Rosie’s. I’m on the doctor’s line. Rosie is waiting for calls from Ontario by
the other phone. She wants to make sure
she
takes them rather than Nina,
if you get my drift. They just got a call from the school. Her roommate found a
note under Pagan’s pillow. It says: ‘Goodbye everyone. I love you all, but not
everyone loves me. Pagan.’ The school has already called the police.”

“Jesus. What do they figure the note means?”

“Nobody knows what to make of it. She’s being bullied? She’s running away?
She’s going to attempt suicide?”

“Suicide. Is that possible? She’s only thirteen.”

“Highly unlikely. Most suicide attempts by girls are at age fifteen and older,
but some do happen younger.” Suzy cited a ream of statistics of girls’ attempts
at suicide by age. Where did she get all that stuff, out of the blue like this?
She went on: “Rosie was saying that Pagan was very moody and temperamental last
summer, maybe depressed. I mentioned to her that you thought she was mooning
over someone, and Rosie was wondering if she said anything that might help lead
to where she went.”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll see if I can remember something. I’ll be there in
ten minutes.”

ROSIE MET ME AT
her door. She looked worried. She
embraced me briefly, asking, “What did she say to you this summer?”

“It was at one of your tennis tournaments. She was going on about love,
speaking loud, too loud, and she said something like she’d rather die than lose
the love of someone she loved.”

“Who was she talking about? Did she say?”

“No. I just took it—”

“Who was there? Was that the day Mom and he were there with you in the
stands?”

“Dr. Rothesay? Yes.”

“Did he hear her?”

“Yes, everyone in the section we were in heard her. It was—”

“What did he say or do? Anything?”

“No, he just looked down. He looked embarrassed, same as me.”

I’d never seen Rosie go very scared like that before. I was going to ask her
what she was afraid of when the phone rang. She strode over and answered it,
listened, and said, “Can you hold for a second? I’ll make sure.” Then she called
out, “Mom, do you ever stay in another hotel besides the Park Plaza when you and
he go to Toronto?”

From the living room, Nina answered, “The ah… the ah… Four Seasons if it’s my
birthday or our anniversary. Why?”

Rosie repeated the names of the hotels into the telephone and said she’d wait
to hear back. She turned to Suzy and me and reported loud enough for Nina to
hear: “A girl at the school heard Pagan on the phone in their hall
making what sounded like a hotel reservation in Dr. Rothesay’s
name and using an American Express credit card number.”

“Yes,” said Nina, “Heathcliff told me he put Pagan’s name on his credit card
in case she had an emergency. Maybe she had to get away from abuse or something
like that at the school.”

“Well, why hasn’t she called us by now?” said Rosie, walking to the door to the
living room. “I didn’t know she had her own credit card. How long has she had
that?”

“Ever since she’s been up there,” said Nina. “She was told not to tell anyone
for fear someone might try to steal it. She’s only young, you know.”

Rosie looked at Suzy for ten seconds. “Mother, where’s the number to that hotel
he’s staying in in Ottawa?”

“By his phone. Why?”

Without answering, Rosie went into the den and dialled. She entered into a
tense palaver with someone and came back: “He’s already checked out. First they
weren’t going to give me any other information, but when I told them it was a
life-and-death family matter and we had to reach him, they said he originally
had a late checkout because his flight was not until this evening, but then he
checked out even before the regular checkout time, so maybe, they said, he
already knows of the emergency.”

We all slumped down in the living room to wait for another phone call from
someone. Rosie’s and Suzy’s eyes were seldom off each other’s. Nina stared
ahead, immobile. I tried to carry on a cheery, uplifting conversation, but
lapsed, unable to continue my monologue. Then the doorbell rang. Three of us got
up in unison and went out. Nina didn’t move.

Two young police officers in smart-looking uniforms were at the door, a male
and a female, in their twenties. “Good morning,” said the female officer. She
looked at her watch. “Correction, good afternoon. Is this the residence of Mrs.
Nina Rothesay?” When Rosie nodded, the officer introduced herself and her
partner and inquired, “And you three would be?” The male officer wrote down our
names as we gave them.

“And your relationship to Mrs. Rothesay is?”

Rosie responded. Her voice sounded very tense.

“Daughter and friends of daughter,” the female officer dictated to the male
officer and turned back to us. “May we come in and speak to Mrs.
Rothesay?”

Rosie led them down the hall and into the living room. Nina’s eyes flew open
when she saw them and she pushed and pulled herself to her
feet.
“Madam, are you Mrs. Rothesay?” A silent nod from Nina. “Subject signified
affirmative,” the female officer reported to the male. “Mrs. Rothesay, I
request you to please resume your seat. Thank you. Mrs. Rothesay, is one Pagan
O’Dell your daughter? Subject signified affirmative.” She took a deep breath and
read from her notebook: “Mrs. Rothesay, it is our duty to inform you that we
have been advised by the Toronto Police Department that at approximately 11:
03 a.m. today, eastern standard time, in a room of a Toronto hotel, that is to
say, the Victoria and Elizabeth Arms, the said Pagan O’Dell’s body was found
deceased. No other details are known to us at this time.”

This put me in a state of paralyzing shock. I could only watch as Rosie folded
her forearms tight across her solar plexus and bent forward and crouched until
her face was nearly touching her knees. Then I heard one unearthly shriek that
sounded so dramatically authentic I thought it must be coming from a television
set until I realized it was Nina’s.

Suzy was already at Rosie’s side and I joined her there. The male police
officer stood rooted to the floor, gazing out the window. The female officer
went to Nina and stooped down by her and put her hand on her arm. Nina now
started keening like a banshee in a voice pitched very high, like an
over-affected, untalented soprano trying to impress listeners with her singing,
but which was only shrill wailing and shouting. The female officer stood and
backed away in fright, but stopped herself and went back to Nina. She kneeled on
the floor and took her hands.

I put my arms around Rosie’s shoulders while Suzy encircled her waist, and we
gently raised her. She rested most of her weight against me, motionless, no
sobs, no tears even. Then she breathed in deeply and murmured to Suzy, “The
worst of it is I knew in my heart something was going to happen.” She stood
there, eyes closed, silent except for her slow breathing for a minute. Then she
took the tissue Suzy was offering, and turned to Nina, now whimpering with every
breath in and moaning with every breath out. The female police officer looked up
at us and asked if there was something she could get her.

“Mother,” said Rosie, almost harshly, “where’s your tranks?”

“In my purse,” she groaned. Her purse was beside her, at the ready.

“Tom, would you mind getting a glass of water,” said Suzy. I bolted out to the
kitchen. At the sink, with the water running, I had to lean on my forearms on
the counter and close my eyes to fend off vertigo. Pagan dead in a hotel room,
Rosie saying she knew in her heart… I could not comprehend in the slightest what
was happening.

As I came back in the living room, Suzy asked the police
officer, “Do they know who found her?”

“We’re not sure yet,” she replied, standing. “We think it may have been a
family member.”

“What?” said Suzy, as she and Rosie lurched towards the officer. “Who?”

The officer backed away until she bumped her partner. There, she said, “We’ll
inform you as soon as we ascertain that. Please do not hesitate to get in touch
if we can be of further assistance. The Toronto police will be calling you to
obtain additional information.” She took down Nina’s telephone number and,
following a poke from her, the male officer turned and they both marched
resolutely out of the living room single file, down the hall, and out the front
door. In a few minutes, a call came on Nina’s line and Suzy answered. It was the
female officer to say that “the body of the deceased was discovered by one Dr.
H. Rothesay.”

We were sitting there, dazed by this news, when the phone rang again. Suzy
picked up the receiver. “It’s him,” she said to us. “He wants to talk to his
wife.” As Nina struggled to rise, Rosie lunged from her chair and strode to the
phone. With tears of grief and pain flowing from her eyes, a most incongruous
conversation ensued. She immediately launched into a ferocious attack on
Rothesay at the other end. We could only hear her side of the conversation, and
she filled in Rothesay’s responses for us afterwards.

Without a greeting, Rosie had demanded what he was doing in Toronto and how he
knew that Pagan was at that hotel. He replied that it was the inexpensive hotel
he often stayed at when he was in Toronto by himself in order to save money.
Pagan was familiar with it because, sometimes when he was there, if it was a
weekend, he might have her out of school for lunch or an afternoon at museums or
art galleries, before bringing her back to her residence for the night. His
flying to Toronto from Ottawa to see if Pagan was there was purely a gut
reaction after Nina had called him this morning. Rosie demanded to know how come
no one but he and Pagan knew anything about this secret Toronto hotel, and he
replied that she should ask her mother, since Nina knew all about the hotel and
the visits and was delighted he was taking the time to invite Pagan out of the
school for a little break. There and then, Rosie called out to her mother and
asked if she knew anything about this Toronto hotel and Rothesay’s visits to
Pagan. Nina answered that she thought so, she couldn’t rightly remember, her
mind was gone blank, but she certainly thought so, yes. At which point, Rosie
started screeching into the phone at Rothesay. Why hadn’t he
called the hotel from Ottawa? Why didn’t he call us or the school or the
police and give his suspicions about where Pagan might be? Because, he answered,
it was pure speculation on his part—he didn’t want to alarm anyone. But, Rosie
roared, you could have saved her life; she might still be alive if you had told
someone. He replied very calmly that preliminary reports from the coroner
indicated Pagan had died during the night, hours before Rothesay had even
learned she was missing.

At that, as Rosie told us afterwards, “I lost it.” She screamed, “But you
didn’t know that, you fucking scumbag. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted her
to die. You probably sneaked up to the room to destroy any incriminating
evidence that was there. I’m going to make sure the police investigate all
this.”

“Jesus,” I said to Rosie, taken aback by her reaction, “what did he
say?”

“He said I was understandably upset and overreacting, and to rest assured that
the police were already, with his active encouragement and complete
co-operation, investigating everything, and an official autopsy was ongoing to
establish precise cause and time of death.”

Rothesay’s reply struck me as reasonable at the time, so I asked Rosie, “Are
you really going to contact the police?”

“Yes, I am. Here and in Toronto.”

“What will you ask them to investigate, exactly? What do think Rothesay was up
to?”

“I won’t tell them I think he was up to anything. I didn’t know. But I will
tell them the whole thing seems strange and mention the questions I have about
his actions.”

ROTHESAY STAYED IN TORONTO
until the autopsy on
Pagan was finished the next day, and then he flew home with her body and had it
brought to a funeral director. When I walked with Rosie into the room in the
funeral parlour where Pagan’s closed coffin was displayed, I noticed that, by
coincidence, it was the same room where a few years before their father Joyce
O’Dell had been waked. I glanced at Rosie. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

I stood beside Rosie for the one afternoon and evening that the visitation took
place, while Suzy was in and out with anything her friend wanted. Nina was in a
chair across the room with Rothesay standing beside her. It had been agreed
between Rothesay and Rosie, with me acting as intermediary between them, that
Nina wouldn’t be told until after the funeral
what had actually
killed Pagan, for fear the news would send her around the bend altogether. Rosie
sometimes went to Nina to exchange a word or see if she needed anything, but I
never saw her speak to Rothesay.

So many mourners came to the funeral home, there was always a lineup in the
corridor of people waiting to get in. Some were recognizable as former school
chums of Pagan’s and schoolmates of Rosie’s, and friends and colleagues of
Nina’s and Joyce’s, but most of the visitors I’d never laid eyes on before.
These, after their condolences to Nina and Rosie, lingered with Rothesay and
spoke with familiarity to him. Many turned out to be his patients and a few were
his medical colleagues. The charming immigrant Dr. Rothesay attracted more
people to the wake of his stepdaughter than did Pagan herself and the rest of
her family combined.

Brent came in with his father and they stopped by Rosie and me and gave her
their condolences. His father pretended to chat with me while sizing up Rosie. I
heard Brent say to Rosie, “I really liked little Pagan. I only had a chance to
talk to her a couple of times lately when she was home from school, but she was
great, so innocent and trusting, and now look. Jesus.” He put his head down and
actually began to weep. Rosie and Brent and I put our arms around each other.
Brent seemed to tower over us, and his body in girth felt twice as large as
Rosie’s. Tears from such a big male were very touching to us. I could see his
father looking with apparent disdain at his bawling super-jock son before he
walked over to Rothesay. Whatever he said caused both of them to begin a
chortle, which they quickly squelched. They were carrying on like familiars.
Brent had told me that his father and Rothesay often discussed
investments.

My mother and father came in looking uncomfortable, no doubt because of their
estrangement from Nina and Rothesay. They’d already talked to Rosie by
telephone, and again when I dropped in with her at our house during a long walk
last evening to get away from her own place. Now they went directly to Nina.
There, the two women embraced for a good minute, or rather Nina clung to Mom,
and when they parted I heard Nina groan, “I’ve really missed you, Gladys.” If
Mom responded with a similar sentiment, I didn’t hear it.