Stone Mattress (19 page)

And suppose he asks Ned to rent a van from a different outfit and drive here, and suppose he waits until Ned arrives, standing outside the unit because he wouldn’t want anyone else messing around with this; suppose he stays right here, freezing in what will soon become the dark, and then suppose they load the whole wedding into the van and take it back to the shop – suppose all that, what then? They take the poor shrivelled-up sucker out to a field somewhere and bury him? Throw him into Lake Ontario, making their way over the shore ice, which won’t crack and sink them, fat chance? Even if they could manage that, he’d be sure to float.
Mummified groom mystifies crime unit. Suspicious circumstances surrounding freak member of the wedding. Nuptial shocker: she married a zombie
.

Failure to report a dead body: isn’t that a felony? Worse: the guy must have been murdered. You don’t find yourself encased in several layers of plastic with tape on the zippers, wearing formal wedding fancy dress, without getting murdered first.

As Sam’s reviewing his options, a tall woman rounds the corner. She’s wearing one of those sheepskin coats with the wool side in, its hood up over her blond hair. She’s almost running. Now she’s right up to him. She looks anxious, though trying to conceal it.

So, he thinks. The missing bride.

She touches his arm. “Excuse me,” she says. “Did you just buy the contents of this unit? At the auction?”

He smiles at her, opens wide his big blue eyes. Drops his gaze to her mouth, flicks it up again. She’s about his height. Strong
enough to have lugged the groom into the unit by herself, even if he wasn’t yet dried out. “That’s me,” he says. “I plead guilty.”

“But you haven’t unlocked it yet?”

Here’s the moment of decision. He could hand her the key, say,
I’ve seen the mess you made, clean it up yourself
. He could say,
Yes I have, and I’m calling the cops
. He could say,
I took a quick look, it seems to be a wedding. Yours?

“No,” he says. “Not yet. I bought a couple of other units too. I was just about to open up this one.”

“Whatever you paid, I’ll double it,” she says. “I didn’t want it sold, but there was a mistake, the cheque got lost in the mail, and I was away on business, I didn’t get the notification soon enough, and then I took the first plane I could, but then I was stuck in Chicago for six hours because of the storm. It was
so
snowed in! And then the traffic from the airport, it was terrible!” She ends with a nervous giggle. She must have rehearsed this: it comes out of her in one long phrase, like ticker tape.

“I heard about the storm,” he says. “In Chicago. That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear you were delayed.” He doesn’t respond to her financial offer. It hangs in the air between them, like their two breaths.

“That storm’s heading here next,” she says. “It’s a serious blizzard. They always travel east. If you don’t want to get stuck here, you should hit the road. I’ll speed this up for us – I’ll pay cash.”

“Thanks,” he says. “I’m considering. What’s in there, anyway? It must be something valuable, to be so important to you.” He’s curious to see what she’ll say.

“Just family things,” she says. “Things I inherited. You know, crystal, china, from my grandmother. A few pieces of costume jewellery. Sentimental value. You couldn’t sell them for much.”

“Family things?” he says. “Any furniture?”

“Only a little furniture,” she says. “Not good quality. Old furniture. Not anything anyone would want.”

“But that’s what I deal in,” he says. “Old furniture. I run an antiques store. Often people don’t know the value of what they have. Before accepting your offer, I’d like to take a look.” He glances down at her mouth again.

“I’ll triple it,” she says. Now she’s shivering. “It’s too cold for you to be going through that unit right now! Why don’t we get out of here before the storm hits? We could have a drink, and, I don’t know, dinner or something? We can talk it over.” She smiles at him, an insinuating smile. A strand of her hair has come down, it’s blowing across her mouth; she tucks it in behind her ear, slowly, then drops her eyes, gazing down in the direction of his belt. She’s upping the ante.

“Okay,” he says. “Sounds good. You can tell me more about the furniture. But suppose I accept your offer, that unit has to be cleared in twenty-four hours. Or else they’ll come in and do it themselves, and they’ll keep my cleaning deposit.”

“Oh, I’ll make sure it’s cleared,” she says. She slips her hand through his arm. “But I’ll need the key.”

“No hurry,” says Sam. “We haven’t set the price.”

She looks at him, no longer smiling. She knows he knows.

He should quit fooling around. He should take the money and run. But he’s having too much fun. A real murderess, coming on to him! It’s edgy, it’s rash, it’s erotic. He hasn’t felt this alive for some time. Will she try to poison his drink? Get him in a dark corner, whip out a penknife, go for his jugular? Would he be fast enough to grab her hand? He wants to reveal his knowledge to her in a safe place surrounded by other people. He wants to watch her face as she realizes he’s got her by the neck, so to speak. He wants to hear the story she’ll tell. Or the stories: she must have more than one. He would.

“Out of here, turn right,” he says. “Next stoplight, go past it. There’s a motel – the Silver Knight.” He knows the motel bars near all the storage outfits where he bids at auctions. “I’ll meet you in the bar. Get a booth. I just need to check my other unit.” He almost says, “Book a room while you’re at it, because we both know what this is about,” but that would be rushing things.

“The Silver Knight,” she says. “Has it got a silver knight on the outside? Riding to the rescue?” She’s trying for a light touch. Again the laugh, a little breathless. Sam doesn’t play the move back. Instead he opts for a reprimanding frown.
Don’t think you can charm me out of it, lady. I’m here to collect
.

“You can’t miss it,” he says. Will she skip out on him? Leave him stuck with the fiasco? No one would know how to track her, unless she’d made the mistake of using her real name when she’d rented the unit. It’s a risk, letting her out of his sight, but a risk he needs to take. He’s 99 per cent certain she’ll be sitting in the bar of the Silver Knight when he gets there.

He texts Ned:
Traffic shit. Blizzard crap. We’ll PU AM. Nite
. He has a strong impulse to slip the
SIM
card out of his phone and tuck it into the dried groom’s breast pocket, but he resists it. He does go offline, however: not dark, but dark grey.

I dunno, officer
, Ned will say.
He texted me from the storage place. Maybe around four. He was fine then. He was supposed to come to the shop in the morning, then we were going to take the van and clear out the units. After that, nothing
.

What dried guy in a monkey suit? Really? No shit! Search me
.

One thing at a time. First, he opens up Unit 56. All is as it should be: several pieces of furniture, good-enough quality, the sort of thing they can resell in Metrazzle. Rocking chair, pine, Quebec. Two end tables, ’50s, mahogany looks like, spindly ebonized legs.
Among them, an Arts and Crafts desk. The sealed white baggies are in the three right-hand drawers.

It’s perfect, really. Maximum deniability. There’s no traceable line from them to him.
I have no idea how it got in there! I bought the unit at an auction, I won the bid, it could’ve been anyone. I’m as surprised as you are! No, I didn’t open the drawers before I brought it back to the shop, why would I? I sell antiques, not stuff in drawers
.

Then the end destination buys the desk, most likely on Monday, and that’s all there is to it. He’s just the drop box, he’s just the delivery boy.

Ned won’t open the drawers either. He has a finely developed sense of which drawers to leave closed.

Sam can leave the shipment safely where it is: no one’s going to bother this locked unit before noon the next day. Him and his van will be well on the way before then.

He checks his phone: one new message, from Gwyneth.
I was wrong, please come back, we can talk it through
. He has a tug of nostalgia: the familiar, the snug, the safe; the safe enough. Nice to know it’s waiting for him. But he doesn’t reply. He needs this oblong of freefall time he’s about to enter. Anything at all can happen within it.

When he walks into the bar at the Silver Knight, she’s there waiting. She even has a booth. He’s cheered by the instant acquiescence. She’s minus her coat now, wearing the sort of outfit a woman like her should wear: black, for widow, for spider. It goes well with her ash-blond hair. Her eyes are hazel, her eyelashes long.

She smiles as he slides in opposite her, but she doesn’t smile too much: a faint, melancholy smile. In front of her is a glass
of white, barely touched. He orders the same. There’s a pause. Who’ll go first? All the hairs on the back of Sam’s neck are alert. On the flat screen over on the wall behind her head, the blizzard is rolling mutely towards them like a huge wave of confetti.

“I think we might be stuck here,” she says.

“Let’s drink to that,” says Sam, opening his big blue eyes. He does the direct gaze, raises his glass. What can she do but raise hers?

Yeah, that’s him all right, no question. I was tending bar that night, the night of the blizzard. He was with a sizzling blond in a black dress, they seemed on very friendly terms, if you know what I mean. Didn’t see them leave. You want to bet they’ll find her in a snowbank when it all melts?

“So, you looked inside,” she says.

“Yeah, I did,” says Sam. “Who was he? What happened?” He hopes she doesn’t descend into tears: that would disappoint him. But no, she limits herself to a quivering chin, a biting of the lip.

“It was terrible,” she says. “It was a mistake. He wasn’t supposed to die.”

“But he did,” says Sam in a kindly voice. “These things happen.”

“Oh yes. They do. I don’t know how to say this, it sounds so …”

“Trust me,” says Sam. She doesn’t, but she’ll pretend.

“He liked to be … Clyde liked to be strangled. It wasn’t as if I enjoyed it. But I loved him, I was in love with him, so I wanted to do what he wanted.”

“Of course,” says Sam. He wishes she hadn’t given the mummified groom a name:
Clyde
is dorky. He’d have preferred him anonymous. That she’s lying is evident to him, but how much is she lying? For his own lies, he likes to stay somewhere within shooting distance of the truth, if at all possible – it means
less to fabricate, less to work at remembering – so maybe some of this is true.

“And,” she says, “then he was.”

“Then he was what?” says Sam.

“Then he was dead. With the spasms, I thought he was just having, you know … the way he usually did. But it went too far. Then I didn’t know what to do. It was the day before our wedding, I’d been planning the whole thing for months! I told everyone he’d left me a note, he’d vanished, he’d run out on me, he’d jilted me. I was so upset! It was all being delivered, the dress, the cake, all of that, and I, well, this sounds weird, but I dressed him up, with the carnation in the buttonhole and everything, he looked so handsome. And then I packed the whole thing into the storage unit. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d been so looking forward to the wedding; keeping all the parts of it together was sort of like having it anyway.”

“You put him in there yourself? With the cake and everything?”

“Yes,” she says. “It wasn’t that hard. I used a dolly. You know, for moving heavy boxes, and furniture and things.”

“That was resourceful,” says Sam. “You’re a smart girl.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“That’s some story,” says Sam. “Not many people would believe it.”

She looks down at the table. “I know,” she says in a small voice. Then she looks up. “But you believe it, don’t you?”

“I’m not good at believing stories,” says Sam. “Though let’s say I believe this one, for now.” Maybe he’ll get the truth out of her later. Or maybe not.

“Thank you,” she says again. “You won’t tell?” The tremulous smile, the bitten lip. She’s laying it on thick. What did she really
do? Whack him over the head with a champagne bottle? Shoot an overdose into him? How much money was involved, and in what form? It had to be money. Was she skimming the poor guy’s bank account, did he find out?

“Let’s go,” says Sam. “The elevator’s to the left.”

The room’s dark, except for the faint light coming in off the street. The traffic’s muffled, what there is of it. The snow has arrived in earnest; it’s spattering softly against the window like an army of tiny kamikaze mice throwing themselves at the glass, trying to force a way in.

Holding her in his arms – no, holding her down with his arms – is the most electric thing he’s ever done. She hums with danger, like a high-tension wire; she’s a raw socket; she’s the sum of his own ignorance, of everything he doesn’t understand and never will. The minute he releases one of her hands, he might be dead. The minute he turns his back. Is he running for his life, right now? Her harsh breath chasing him?

“We should be together,” she’s saying. “We should always be together.” Is that what she said to the other one? To his sad, mummified double? He grips her hair, bites down on her mouth. He’s still ahead, he’s gaining on her. Faster!

Nobody knows where he is.