Sex and Death (27 page)

This happened not far from where we are now. The Bide-a-While is still there, but when the whole story came out – or at least most of it – they had to change the name. The place closed down for a couple of months before they staged a grand reopening as part of the larger Sleep Station chain. Now the sign is blue instead of faded orange and there are stars and moons around the words, but from the outside it looks like business is about the same. Long-haul truckers and highway work crews, salespeople with samples in their trunks, contractors on short-term jobs that have to be done right here and right now. All the in-betweeners: they still need beds. They still need places to rest when they are away from home, and this building, with its single storey of a dozen rooms in a line, can still do the job. Sheets and towels are changed and there is a person who will pluck unsightly dark hairs from the white porcelain sinks. Lipstick smudges and grey fingerprints are wiped away and all the glasses are rinsed and rewrapped in a special kind of paper that promises sterilising power. Waste baskets emptied, carpets vacuumed, tiny soaps and shampoos restocked. The stubborn red circle of rust around the bathtub drain is scrubbed and scrubbed again. The last guest leaves just before the next guest arrives and different credit cards are swiped. A rotating privacy is what they sell and we were part of the cycle for a little while. In and then out.

We only stayed because it was cheap – half the cost of the Super 8 or the Quality Suites down the street – and because it was exactly
where we needed it to be: two blocks away from the house we had just bought, the permanent home we moved into two days later. This was back at the very start of everything for us, when this was a new city and we'd just got the new jobs and almost a new set of lives or at least a new strategy for the way things were going to be. Our daughter, Lila, was four years old and Maddy was seven months along and nearly ready to go with Jack. Between these two pregnancies we'd been through one very sad, very late miscarriage and we were trying to be extra careful this time. No sudden swervings, no need to strain unnecessarily. We made a detailed but not very ambitious plan for our move and the Bide-a-While was part of it. Two double beds, a mini-fridge and a coffee maker for $63 a night. After the Montreal apartment had been cleared, we were going to drive to Halifax and stay in the motel for a couple of days while we waited for the movers to arrive. Our closing date, the moment of the official transfer, had been locked in for months and June 1st was stamped on all our documents, but before the house came to us, we were going to pause and reset. We wanted to be ready for the change.

I think everyone has spent at least one night in a place like the Bide-a-While. When we were kids, my parents used to search for exactly this kind of no-nonsense motel, a bargain option with drive-up parking where they might let us swim in an unsupervised, unheated outdoor pool, twenty feet away from the trucks and the steady stream of highway traffic. There were five children in our family and whenever they could find them, my parents would ask for adjoining rooms. The owner would hand over this strange extra key – usually chained to an oversized block of wood or a thick piece of plastic – and we'd get to turn the secret silver doorknobs and then run back and forth through that opening in the wall that normally stays sealed to most people.

The paired rooms were identical but opposite, mirrored images,
with four beds pushed against the two outside walls. We'd burn off whatever energy we had left jumping across the chasm from one bed to the next and our parents would let us stay up late to watch strange TV in one room while they went across to the other side together. They might bring along a six-pack or a bottle of wine and maybe a bag of chips or some leftover pizza. After half an hour, one of them would get up and quietly close the door on us. I remember the click. We'd be alone, together with just ourselves but separated from them, for maybe an hour before they'd come back and we'd split up again along different lines. A couple of the children would sleep on one side with Mom and a couple of others in the next room with Dad.

When the news story came out, pictures of the motel were everywhere. Police cars and flashing lights, caution tape and pylons, men in hazmat suits entering and leaving the mobile forensic unit. It was what you'd expect, the rerun of a show you have already seen. Half a dozen satellite trucks pulled into the parking lot for that first week and a line of people of different races, all with perfect hair, reported live for the national shows. It ran in the papers for months, almost a full year. For a little while, it felt like the whole world was paying attention – nothing animates us more than a dramatic loss of life – but for Maddy and me, there was always something extra in it. The story held us differently and claimed us as characters though we didn't want those roles; it saved room in its plot for our lives. Like walking through a thick fog at street level, the story surrounded us completely and we had to breathe it in. At breakfast, over cereal and orange juice, we'd watch the shows and read, consuming something much higher than the recommended daily allowance of photographs of the victims, accounts of their sad backgrounds, editorials, in-depth analyses, searches for explanation.

*

The murderer, as everybody now knows, ran a plumbing business. His truck was already there, parked in front of room 107, when we pulled in the first time. On the driver's side door, he had a rectangular magnetic sign that could be slapped on or peeled off as the truck moved back and forth between its work life and its other life. There was a basic clip-art icon of a bucket catching five separate drops and underneath it said, ‘Want it done right? Call 902-454-7111'.

We didn't see him at all that evening as we unloaded our bags and our toaster and kettle, our box of road food. Juice and bananas and bread and marble cheese and crackers. This was the night of May 30th. It is important to keep the dates right and put everything in proper order. The next day was the 31st. At about eight thirty in the morning we left our rooms at the same time: Maddy and Lila and the murderer and me. We closed our side-by-side doors and entered the outside world at exactly the same moment.

We had errands to run and forms that needed to be filled out. Insurance, and a trip to the lawyer's office and then back to the realtor again and the utilities and the phone. The list was complicated and disjointed – more work than we had expected – but every separate task needed a separate line put through it.

Maddy was hustling Lila towards the back seat on the passenger side. I can see it exactly: her perfect four-year-old summer clothes, the dress and the sandals and the floppy hat. There were yellow straps tied in bows over Lila's shoulders and a little puff, an extra floof of air in the skirt that made it stick out away from her legs. The shoes had red flowers on the toes and her skin was still shining and greasy from the heavy dose of spray-on sunscreen we had just applied.

As Maddy and Lila passed by the murderer, he smiled and held out his right hand for a high five and Lila gave it to him hard.
He wore blue cargo pants with lots of pockets and a grey tucked-in shirt with more pockets on the chest. In his left hand, I remember, he was carrying some needle-nose pliers and he had a roll of duct tape hanging on his wrist like a bracelet. Again, this was the morning of the 31st. We've been over it. There was nothing strange about the way he walked out of that room, nothing strange about the way he handled these objects. He opened his door and threw the tools into the cab and when he turned around he saw Lila still standing there holding out her hand for the return high five. He gave it back right away.

‘Have a good one, Little Miss Lady,' he said. And he looked over the roof of the car and smiled at me and nodded his head. I unlocked my door and pushed the automatic button that opened up everything else. I watched him bring his right hand up to his nose and sniff. Then he made a big show of raising his eyebrows and shaking his loose fingers and pretending like the powerful tropical sunscreen smell burned his nostrils.

‘Hole-lee coconut!' he said, and he waved his palm in front of his face.

Lila laughed in that delighted way that only she could do. She had that laugh for only a couple of months, somewhere in between the middle part of three and the first part of four – I don't think anybody can hold it much longer than that – but it was there in that moment and she was giving it up for the murderer. A pure kind of wonder – straight-up happy surprise – untouched by anything else. I loved that laugh so much, loved that she could bring up that sound without any effort.

‘Sill-lee,' she decided.

Then, ‘Silly, silly, silly,' up and down, like a song. She pointed directly at him, then directly at me.

‘Silly man,' she told me.

‘Why thank you very much,' he said, and he gave her a little nod.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses off the visor and put them on. They had reflective lenses and when he looked at us again, I saw myself and Maddy and Lila held there on the surface of the glass.

‘Have a good one, buddy,' he said to me. ‘You sticking around for another night?'

I nodded my head and he gestured at our doors.

‘Maybe we'll see you later on.'

We got in and turned our keys. The engines started and I waved at him to go first. He gave me a thumbs-up, then quickly stuck his tongue out at Lila as he pulled away.

*

Before we found this house, Maddy and I used to stay up very late searching for it, a laptop computer balanced between us in bed. We'd scroll through the internet real-estate listings, dozens of them, maybe a hundred a night, and we got very good at moving the earth with our little gloved computer hand. Lila would go down around seven thirty and not long after that, we'd make a kind of nest of propped-up pillows and then take turns gently swirling our middle fingers on the mouse pad. The computer rested on both our inside legs, pressing down evenly, and I remember the heat of the battery and the buzz of the processor rubbing up against my cock. The machine kept kicking off this steady blue glow as the pictures flashed in front of us and sometimes, when the backgrounds changed from light to dark, I caught a glimpse of our faces pressed close together and staring back out of the screen. Our expressions were blank and our mouths hung a little bit open, but our eyes were sharp and intensely focused. We looked like different people, strangers lit up by this weird trancelike concentration, a couple who did not know they were being observed.

‘This one,' Maddy would say and she'd dart at it quickly and click and point and click and point again. The tip of her tongue
slid back and forth on her top lip as she thought through the possibilities and I could hear the fluctuations in her breathing, the catches and releases, surges and disappointments. Her hair was down and she was wearing her glasses and her pyjama bottoms and the tank top I liked.

‘Focus,' she said, and she tapped the screen.

It was always summer in the photographs – full trees and lush gardens – and there were never any people in the frame, even when we switched to the Google Earth street view. I think there must have been an algorithm, an elegant bit of code, that went into the images and automatically subtracted the pedestrians or the dogs or anything that might distract a buyer. We made our way, block by block, one house at a time, moving up and down the abandoned streets. Eventually, we got a feel for the market and a sense for the cost of things. The numbers we read seemed to make a pattern we thought we could understand and we started to see everything as a mathematical equation, a pure exchange. The places we didn't like were ugly or insanely overpriced – only a fool would live there – and all the places we wanted were special and unique, good long-term investments, and certainly worth the kind of debt we would have to take on to get started. We were looking for something on the edge, a hidden gem that did not announce itself in an obvious way, a house with a special potential that not everyone would be able to see.

*

When the detectives came to us the first time, they had all their facts in order. Credit card receipts and the motel's log and the one long-distance call we made to her parents, even the Interac transactions for the groceries and for the thirty dollars in gas I'd bought from the station down the road. This was incontrovertible evidence, rock-solid data drawn from the permanent digital record
of the world. The information plotted us into a single square on a tight piece of graph paper. Our location at that particular time and in that particular space could not be negotiated retroactively.

‘Think back,' one of them said to us. He had a yellow notepad and a digital recorder. Maddy and I were sitting around our kitchen table and both kids were upstairs and asleep. Later, they took us to the police station and we made separate statements in separate rooms.

‘I want you to put yourself back there on May the thirty-first and I want you to visualise exactly what you were doing and exactly what was happening around you. Tell us everything you saw, everything you can remember. The smallest detail may turn out to be important.'

He rolled his pencil between his thumb and his middle finger. The red light on the recorder stayed solid.

‘Just look at it again,' he asked. ‘The thing we need may not have been something you noticed the first time around.'

*

The weather records backed up our statements. May 31st was unseasonably warm, ten degrees hotter than the day before and well above thirty by the late afternoon. Our errands with the car had gone poorly – we couldn't find anything on the first try – and Lila had been straining in the back seat, sweating and complaining for hours. We needed supplies and a break so it was decided that I would drop the girls off at the room and then run to the grocery store. It was four o'clock when we pulled into the motel parking lot and a wave of heavy boiling air rolled out and washed over us when we opened the door.