The Girl in the Wall (13 page)

“Yes, and you'd be able to, too, if you'd go and have your eyes checked and get some glasses that actually work.”

“Let's see.”

Frank reached for the photograph and Sadie pulled it back and turned it over.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“The little girl in this picture?”

“Yes?”

“I think she's dead.”

You couldn't get much past Sadie Foote.

After they had tidied up the kitchen, Frank and Sadie walked over to the house on Lloyd. The Silk house. At the corner of Taché and Coniston a young woman in a minivan came close to clipping Frank as she careened through a stop sign. He saw her eyes. They were focused on the thing she was going to be doing after the thing she was going to do next once she got to where she was heading.

Why did everyone have to own such big vehicles? he wondered. Why did young women have to drive trucks and talk on the phone and drink coffee and apply makeup and smoke as they drunkenly sped through the daytime streets? They were the worst. Oblivious. Or oblivio, as Garth liked to say. Garth was Frank's middle child and he had taken lately to leaving the esses off the ends of words. Sometimes even off the middles of words, in which case Frank would lose track of what his son was talking about. But he figured if it was important enough Garth would add the esses for his father's benefit.

Police vehicles were still parked in front of the house. Only Chas and Brad were visible beyond the group of gawkers and the yellow tape. The investigators were inside. The two patrolmen ignored Frank and his daughter except to glance surreptitiously at Sadie.

Frank loved that she was beautiful and he wouldn't change a thing except maybe the size of her breasts. He couldn't bear it when he saw men and boys staring at her chest. Girls, too. Didn't their parents teach them anything anymore? No staring. That was a big one. He could remember his dad's voice, clear as anything: Don't stare, Frankie. It makes people uncomfortable.

He remembered then the strange staring girl from his youth: George's sister. But she had been a little off-kilter; it hadn't been her fault that she stared. He recalled her being quite a handful for George, who had to look after her all the time. He wondered briefly what had happened to her. The family had lived on Monck Avenue just a few streets over from Lloyd and a couple of blocks toward the flood bowl. George had died; he knew that much.

Frank remembered something else then and it shook him. He pictured the staring girl with a camera around her neck. This was later, when they were out of their teens. Everyone knew about her strange occupation.

It was a hot day, the sky a pale blue. Frank gazed south towards the river. A tiny figure emerged from the thin light of the late afternoon. It was the old woman, Mrs. Beresford. The bulldog with the high ears wasn't with her. She approached them — bent, stinking of unwashed clothes.

“Anything yet?” she croaked.

Frank remembered that voice now from when he was a boy and she used to shout at them for crossing her lawn. Even as a relatively young woman she'd croaked. Had she sounded like that this morning? He didn't think so. Plus, hadn't she worn clean clothes this morning? He would have sworn it.

“Sadie, this is Mrs. Beresford. She lives down the block. This is my daughter, Sadie.”

“Hi, Mrs. Beresford.”

“Anything yet?” the old woman asked again.

She was obviously aware that something was wrong in the house. It wasn't hard to deduce that with the police milling about, but still, she had a proprietary air about her that irritated him. It reminded him of an old
Rockford Files
episode where a woman named Leanne, a regular citizen, interfered with police business to such an extent in a misguided effort to help that she caused mayhem, including death. And she called Jim Rockford “Jimbo,” which infuriated him.

Frank disliked Mrs. Beresford. She had ignored Sadie. He decided not to answer her. He put his arm around his daughter and moved away, closer to the yellow tape.

“Dad, aren't you being kind of discourteous?” asked Sadie.

“Yes, I am.”

Sadie stood on tiptoes and whispered in his ear.

“I thought Old Lady Beresford was dead.”

“Don't call her that.”

Sadie smiled at her dad and he smiled too.

She took his arm. “I don't like it when you're rude, Dad. It sets a bad example for me.”

“Sorry.”

“You're too old to be rude.”

“I know.”

“Was there ever a Mr. Beresford?” Sadie asked.

“I don't know,” said Frank. “I don't remember one. And I don't recall her having any kids, either. It's funny. She seemed like a much nicer person when I spoke to her this morning.”

“That's odd,” said Sadie. “I've never known her to be nice.”

“Maybe I imagined it,” said Frank. “Have you had much in the way of dealings with her, Sadie?”

“No. Not really. Just when she used to holler at us for walking over the dirt patch that she calls a lawn. But I haven't been by that way in a while. I really didn't realize she still existed. Not that I've given her much thought,” she added.

Frank wondered if it was his own head twisting things this way, causing him to see things the way they weren't. He glanced sideways at the old woman and was far from sure now if her clothes were clean or dirty. And had she really been all that nice this morning? Had she actually not croaked earlier in the day?

Chas sauntered over, and unlike the old woman, couldn't take his eyes off Sadie.

Frank decided not to introduce him.

“Anything to report?” he asked.

“Not really,” Chas said to Sadie's chest.

Frank was sure he himself had known even at the age of ten to studiously ignore girls' breasts when speaking to them. Chas had bad manners.

“They're taking the building materials that surrounded the body, some wood and drywall, but other than that… I mean, what the hey, look at this place. It's practically a shell.”

“What about our tools?” said Frank.

“Yeah,” Chas said. “They took your tools.” He managed to tear his eyes away from Sadie.

“Is the body still inside?” Frank asked.

“No,” said Chas. “The investigator gave the go-ahead to have it transported to the morgue. He went along with it.”

Frank found he had to move again to get away from Mrs. Beresford, who had crept over and was hanging on their every word.

Chas disappeared inside the house, leaving Brad to manage control of the small crowd, which was mostly just teenage boys now, leaning on their bikes and guffawing when one of them said something particularly hilarious. The excitement would have dropped off once the body was removed. Frank recognized a few of the boys and suddenly missed Garth, who was at work at his summer job at Sport Chek, knowing nothing of the excitement in his own neighbourhood. He wished Garth were too young for a job like these boys were, like Sadie was. What had he been thinking, allowing her to work at the swimming pool? He hadn't been thinking, that was what. He hadn't given it one short thought other than that it seemed to make her happy. Now he wanted all his kids at home in the fenced backyard.

“Hi, Mr. Foote,” one of the boys shouted.

“Hey, Frank,” said another. “Hey, Sadie.”

He was a mister to some and Frank to others. He preferred just his plain first name.

They waved back at the boys.

“Time to go home, folks,” Brad called out. “There's nothing to see here.”

Frank slumped a little inside his clothes. Suddenly it seemed very important to sit down, to lie down, even. He was useless and old and had turned into an unwanted onlooker. All his years on the force had been for nothing but this — to lurch around a local crime scene and pant like a puppy to be involved on any level because of a pathetic need to never let it go.

Mrs. Beresford moved from one foot to another as though her weight was too much for either one or both together. She couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds.

“Why don't Sadie and I walk you home, Mrs. Beresford?” Frank said.

There had been no call for his brusque behaviour, he realized now, and he began to feel he had more in common with her than he would ever previously have imagined. And her clothes definitely looked clean again.

“No thanks,” she said.

At least the croak was still there.

A woman in protective clothing came outside and walked over to where the three of them stood in the heat.

“Mr. Foote?”

“Yes, Frank Foote.”

Again, he wanted very badly for her to know that he had been a highly respected cop, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself.

“I'm Judith Webster with the forensics unit. I'm told you found the body, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Did you touch anything?”

“Just the walls around it to free it up,” he said.

“That could have been a little hasty.”

“Well I didn't know it was there, did I? I was removing the wall as part of this renovation. I couldn't see through it. Can you see through walls, ma'am?”

He had learned over the years how much most women disliked being called ma'am. He hoped this one did, too.

Sadie took his arm again.

“No need to be snippy,” the investigator said.

“Indeed,” said Frank.

“Did you take anything from the scene, Mr. Foote?”

She was talking to him now like he was a criminal, which he was.

“No,” he lied, enjoying the rush that shot through him when he said it.

He said again it again, just for fun.

“No.”

He wanted to shout it out in the white afternoon, but he held himself back.

Judith Webster turned away from them and went back inside the house.

“You're welcome, ma'am,” he said to her back.

She hesitated for a second, but didn't turn around.

“Dad, what are you doing?” asked Sadie. “Why are you acting like this?”

Frank had nothing in the way of an explanation to offer his daughter.

I retired too early; I made a mistake. He didn't say it. He didn't even know if it was true. And he couldn't say, “I'm no longer effective as a human being,” though that's very much how he felt.

He didn't want to scare her. So often he felt that due to his own fumblings as a parent he forced her into behaving more like a mother toward him than the child she still was.

“I don't like it,” she said. “It's not like you.”

Perhaps it's more like me than you think. Maybe this is who I really am and I can't hold it in anymore.

“Sorry, honey,” was all he said.

Jane phoned Frank in the evening.

“Guess what I did this afternoon,” she said.

“What?”

“Went downtown and had a look through some Henderson Directories.”

Frank took the phone outside and sat down on the front steps.

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“Kind of, I think. The name that old woman mentioned: Coulthard?”

“Yes?”

“They lived there from 1956 to 1971. Or at least they owned the house for that period. And then, get this, the house was vacant for the next three years. That could have been one of the periods Mrs. Beresford was talking about.”

“Hmm,” said Frank.

He was watching a neighbour's cat rolling around on a patch of dirt where city workers had cut down a tree on the boulevard and removed the stump. The dusty little cat came to see him when he was done.

“Frank?” Jane said.

“Yes?”

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“I don't think so.”

Frank scratched the black cat under his chin. He was grey with dirt and prickly with wood shavings. Plus, he had cobwebs caught up in his whiskers.

“The Coulthards, or one of them, could have boarded the girl up inside the wall anytime between 1956 and 1971. Then with the house vacant, she could have continued rotting away to her heart's content up until 1974 without anyone noticing and by then she was probably done being anything but bones.”

“Hmm.”

“Is that all you've got to say, Frank? Hmm? I think I'm on to something.”

Frank was thinking about the photograph and the date that Sadie's fourteen-year-old eyes had made out on the back of it and the staring girl from his youth who had taken pictures of the dead. He wouldn't speak now of any of those things. The information was too valuable to release over the phone. Also, the date on the photograph could mean absolutely nothing in terms of the skeleton. Unlikely as it seemed, it was possible that the two things weren't connected in any way except by their location. Frank didn't want Jane to get overexcited and go running off into the future and all over town with these new particulars. She wasn't like that, but he was afraid, anyway, of it getting away on him. He would tell her, but in his own good time.

“I think it's dangerous to jump to conclusions,” said Frank. “It's too soon to blame a particular person or people, especially if the house was vacant for three years.”

“Maybe, but maybe not. A member of the Coulthard family could have gotten away with it so easily. Picture it: first, the house is on a corner lot — no one lives on the one side; second, it's set back quite a ways from the street, more so than most of the other houses in the area; and third, it was a double lot back then. The address next door didn't show up till 1979. I checked.”

“A couple of the trees in that yard look like they've been there for two hundred years,” said Frank. “And the shrubbery may have been even more extensive then than it is now. The whole front of the yard next to the sidewalk used to be a hedge. You can see where it was chopped away.”

“Yeah?”

“I'm picturing it, is all,” said Frank. “Or trying to. The little house could indeed have been very well hidden from passersby.”

“What's the matter, Frank?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You sound kind of robotic and unusual.”

“I'm just tired, I think,” he said and produced a yawn.

“He could have done it at the beginning of a winter and left the body to freeze inside that north wall,” said Jane.

“It froze and thawed for a lot of years.”

“He could have done it years before he moved away for all we know.”

“One of the Coulthards.”

“Yes. The father or the son. Mrs. Beresford said they were both odd ducks.”

“Since when do we put any stock in Mrs. Beresford's judgments?”

“Since when don't we? Do you know something about her that I don't, Frank?”

“No, it's just... These are quite the assumptions, Jane.”

“I'm just guessing, Frank, but they're good guesses, if you ask me.”

“Nonetheless, it's all speculation. For one thing, we'll have to see what they come up with in terms of how long the body has been deceased. And that may be hard to do with nothing but a skeleton and a nightgown gone to dust.”

Jane was quiet and Frank felt unable to step up his enthusiasm. He waited for her to decide to hang up, but she didn't.

Something niggled: a hint of wrongdoing deep in his past.

Jane started in on a different tack.

“Maybe you don't remember them because the kid went to a different school than you did. A Catholic school, say, like St. Thomas More or Holy Cross.”

Frank wanted her to shut up.

“I might remember something,” he said. “I need to think.”

“Maybe the Coulthard boy went to Precious Blood.”

“I'll call you back, Jane. I need to go now.”

Frank hung up while she was still talking.

The Coulthard boy, the Coulthard man. The boy, for sure. But whatever it was, it was gone.

The cat, Shadow, rolled over on his back and Frank rubbed his belly. He felt as if his brain was wrapped in gauze that smothered his thought processes. Information had to work too hard to enter the dim world inside and ideas were squelched before they could take on shapes and develop edges, let alone make their way out of the morass.

He wondered what was happening to him. It couldn't just be the result of early retirement. Maybe he'd had a stroke and hadn't realized it. He knew that happened sometimes. People had little strokes, so small as to be unnoticeable, but they added up until you were a moron — a word from his youth and one that Garth had latched on to when he was a boy. Frank didn't feel ready to be a moron just yet.

When Shadow lost interest in him, he called Jane back.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked.

“Just a sec, there's someone at my door.”

He waited while he heard voices talking quietly on the other end of the phone.

“I have to go, Frank,” Jane said. “It's one of the forensics people wanting to talk to me.”

“Is it a woman?”

“Yes. Judith Webster is what she calls herself.”

“I'm coming over,” Frank said and hung up before Jane could respond.

He walked over to where she lived in one of the Spanish Court bungalows. It wasn't far. Walking briskly it took him nine minutes and that included brushing his teeth and putting on shoes.

As he approached the pink stucco buildings he saw the van pull away. Jane wouldn't have had any more to tell them than he had. She was just closing her door when she saw him headed her way.

“Frank!”

“Jane.”

“Come in.”

“You come out. It's beautiful. We can walk down Lloyd to the river, see what's going on over there.”

Jane closed the door behind her. A tabby cat slipped out first, darted across Ferndale and almost to the top of an ornamental cherry tree.

“Millie came out,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“You let her out?”

“Sometimes. Didn't you used to let Hugh out?”

“Not in later years,” said Frank. “Not since the bylaw. Aren't you worried she'll get hit by a car?”

“Yeah. But she has so much fun outside. I let her escape from time to time.”

They crossed Walmer and then walked down Ferndale to Highfield.

Frank liked that Jane didn't feel she had to do anything before closing the door behind her. She didn't need to put on lipstick, comb her hair, or change her shoes. She didn't even lock her door. Maybe she should have done that.

“Do you miss Hugh?” asked Jane.

“A lot,” said Frank.

They turned up Highfield to Lloyd.

“You should get a new cat,” Jane said.

“Maybe.”

The house seemed still compared to earlier in the day, but the yellow tape hadn't been taken down and there was a lone patrolman sitting on the steps. A few kids hung about, shouting the odd question at him.

“Was there really a skeleton like they said on the news?” asked one.

“Did it come to life?” asked another.

“What's your name?” asked a little girl who couldn't have been more than five.

The patrolman walked around the side of the house into the backyard. They could hear quieter questions being tossed at him from the lane.

“What did Judith Webster ask you?” Frank said.

They kept on walking.

“Nothing much. Just what all I touched and if I took anything from the scene away with me.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I touched everything but the body itself and took nothing but a lot of dust.”

“Did they ask you about me?”

Jane stopped and stared at him.

“Frank, I'm worried about you. Why on earth would they ask me about you? Do you not think it more likely that they'd ask you about you?”

“I guess I'm feeling a little paranoid about having taken that picture.”

“And well you should be.”

“When I went back there with Sadie this afternoon they asked me the same questions they asked you.”

“And?”

“I didn't tell them.”

“You lied?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe, I guess.”

“Oh, Frank.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They walked toward the river, past Mrs. Beresford's place, across Lyndale Drive to the park: Dog Poo Park, as it was known to some. They found a bench and sat. Some rowers glided by. Their trainer hollered at them from another boat. It was jarring, but there were already lawn mowers ruining the quiet all over the neighbourhood. It was not a peaceful evening.

“So, was it the Silk house like Mrs. Beresford said?” asked Frank.

“Yes, it was,” said Jane. “The Silks lived there from 1946 to 1953 and then someone named McMicken who didn't last long, just till '56, when the Coulthards moved in. Before the Silks it was the Parsons and it looks like they were the original owners.

“Okay, so it was the Parsons, the Silks, the McMickens, the Coulthards, and then who?”

“Schmitke,” said Jane. “Someone named Schmitke. He must have been the owner during all those rental years that Mrs. Beresford talked about. Then it was Turner. She's the old woman who moved out just recently.”

“Okay. And now Featherstone.”

“Yeah.”

Frank chuckled.

“He's really hating this. That's the one part of it I'm enjoying.”

“What's up with you, Frank?”

“Nothing. I've just decided to start expressing myself more honestly.”

He didn't know if this was true.

“She was so tiny,” said Jane. “The girl in the wall.”

“Yes.”

“I can't imagine that her disappearance caused much of a stir.”

“Because she was tiny?”

“No, of course not.”

“Why, then?”

“Well, I don't know. You've never heard of her or any curious disappearances around here and you've lived here forever.”

“I don't know if I've heard of her. We still don't know who she is. And it was long ago, Jane. Maybe it was a big deal at the time.”

“No. You'd have heard the stories.”

“Not necessarily.”

“You heard the Silk story when you were barely born and that doesn't hold a candle to this in terms of weirdness. And the stranger the story, the more likely it is to get out and find its place in the world.”

“Another of your theories?”

“Well, I think that's more like a fact, actually.”

A young couple walked by with a tiny dog on the end of a leash. The woman was hugely pregnant. She smiled at them, apologetically, it seemed to Frank, as though she were saying, “Sorry about my girth; sorry our dog resembles a rat.”

Frank smiled back at her, wanting to let her know it was okay. Both things were okay.

“Much as I don't like the idea,” he said, “I think we should talk to Mrs. Beresford again. She must have lived here when it happened.”

“Or at least we should mention her to the cops as someone they should talk to,” said Jane. “I don't know how involved we should get, especially since you stole the photograph.”

“I've never stolen anything in my life.”

“Yes, you have. You've stolen a photograph from a crime scene.”

Frank stood up.

“I don't think Mrs. Beresford told us everything she knew about the Coulthards,” said Jane. “She didn't give a satisfactory answer as to why they were odd ducks.”

“What would have been satisfactory?” asked Frank.

“I'm not sure, but something more than keeping to themselves and then disappearing.”

“Are you going to pass those speculations on to the police when you mention her to them?”

“Oh, Frank. You know I'll do neither.”

“Let's walk some more,” he said.

They headed in the direction of the rowing club and passed many more dogs and their walkers.

“I knew a boy who died,” Frank said. “Actually he was a young man by the time he died. I didn't know him well, he was four years older than me, but I know he had a little sister who was very odd.”

Again with the niggling feeling in where his memories were stored. There was something just out of reach in there behind his eyes, and then it was gone. He wished he could point his eyes inward, have a look around.

“The sister was about my age but I didn't really know her. She failed a couple of times and was never in my class, unless maybe in grade one, but I don't remember. There were so many of us then: two thirty-kid classes in each grade, sometimes more. Not like now when they can't even cobble together a baseball team from the whole neighbourhood.

“Anyway, she took pictures of dead people,” Frank went on. “That was her job.”