The Suspect (15 page)

George put his keys in his pocket, picked up the burlap bag, and adjusted it over his right shoulder. He walked down the  lawn to the beach and turned toward Carlyle's house.

The moon was full, and_it caused the rocks on the beach to cast large shadows, which George sometimes mistook for more rocks. He went slowly, frequently stopping to shift the bag to his other shoulder. He didn't bother to look up at the houses he passed, in some of which lights still bumed. If somebody opened a door and called out to him, "Hey, who are you? What are you doing out there?" he wouldn't stop but he'd say loudly, "It's George Wilcox, and I'm going to throw Carlyle Burke's shell casings into the drink." He didn't care. Christ. He just couldn't have them contaminating his garden. Enough was enough.

* * *

Alberg was in his living room. He had called the cat, and gotten no response, but had automatically put fresh milk in its bowl anyway. Now, restless and irritable, he was staring into the fireplace, in which there was no fire.

He was thinking about the unknown assailant who had killed Carlyle Burke, and about Cassandra, and about his daughters. He wondered whether Cassandra was in the habit of opening her door to strangers. He thought she probably was. She never locked her car, and he had noticed when he drove her home last night that she'd just opened her front door and walked right in. He couldn't believe it. Surely what happened to Burke should have taught her that even in Sechelt caution ought to be a way of life.

He got up to refill his glass. He'd been reading lately about attacks on young women at the University of British Columbia. There were special campus buses to take female students from the library to brightly lit city bus stops. But even that wasn't enough. Some "jerk shitrat," to quote Sokolowski, was attacking women in the library now, right in the stacks.

Alberg sat down heavily, worrying about his daughters. The campus at the University of Calgary was smaller; did that make it safer? He had drilled it into them for years: Keep your doors locked, always secure your car, carry your key ring with the keys sticking out from between your fingers, walk in light, lock all doors as soon as you're in your vehicle, run, scream .... Maybe they'd like to get jobs in Vancouver for the summer. He would suggest this. If they liked the idea, maybe he could help them find work. Maybe they could spend weekends with him, and he could teach them how to sail.

He wondered if they had boyfriends, serious ones, who might screw up his plans. Should he write the girls directly? Or should be contact their mother first, sound her out about their situations?

He pulled from his pocket a letter he'd received that day from his younger daughter, Diana, the one with long straight hair and a grin like a meteor. His daughters were taking intersessional courses; it worried him that they were trying to do too much, right after completing a full winter session.

Dear Pop
, he read.
Life is frantic there days, frantic, but I've only got one more exam and then it'll be all over until September. Geology. The worst of them all. I was really glad when I got my schedule that it came last. I'd have more time to study for it, right? But now here I am, I've got to write the damn thing tomorrow and of course I've put it off and tonight the only time I've got left. It's not as important to me as the other two so I studied like mad for them and now I'm not ready for I geology. It's not important to me hut I've got to have it, and I'll just DIE if I fail it, I'll he so FURIOUS if I have to take the damn stuff again next year. And now here I am writing to you instead qf using the last hours remaining to me. Sigh.

I with I could talk to you face to face, Pop. This letter-writing stuff is the shits. When are you coming out here??? Don't you bave some perpetrator to chase across tbe Rockies? Seriously, I hope you're happy and not bored in that place. I'm sure its very pretty, though,
it looks like it from tbe pictures you sent, and you must bave friends by now, right?

I love you and miss you. Wish me luck in geology. I know you would, if you were here, and you 'd give me a pep talk, too. I probably never told you, but I used to like your pep talks.
Loves
Diana

P.S. Janey's only taking two courses in intersession, and she sailed through her damn exams without a ripple og fear. She keeps trying to give me advice. She calls it sisterly love; I call it condescension.
P.P.S. Mom is fine. We saw her last month, on the long weekend.

He wished he could hug her, and smooth the hair away from her face, and study her face for signs of worry or weariness, and find none, and send her back to her books with a kiss on the cheek and words of faith and confidence—a "pep talk.” It was good to know she liked his pep talks, though he wouldn't have described them that way. The phrase implied a stalwart self-confidence he had never felt when trying to help his daughters.

Her letter had been mailed the day of her exam; it was over, now. He would call her tonight, to see how she'd done.

He tried to remember what he'd been doing while she was writing it, hunched over her paper in the University of Calgary gym. She had probably marched in there wearing an old pair of sweats, he thought, smiling, no makeup, her hair tied back in a careless ponytail, nails bitten to the quick, head swimming, filled with irrelevancies. She would sit down, drop her huge denim bag on the floor, and clutch her forehead. It would take several seconds for her eyes to actually focus on the first question.

If she'd written it Friday moming—he got up and went tothe kitchen to freshen his drink—that would have been, let's see. . . He thought about it idly as he dropped ice cubes into his glass. He was at the office on Friday, going through the paperwork on the Burke homicide. There hadn't been much there, just the autopsy report. Then he'd had lunch with Cassandra.

If Diana had written the exam in the afternoon, he thought, adding a small amount of scotch to the ice in his glass, then he had been at the funeral, or maybe in the library....

He went back into the living room and stood looking out the window. It was dark, now, except for the splash of light near his front gate, from the streetlamp.

Cassandra. She made him feel good. And she tasted wonderful. He smiled, thinking about her ....

And after the library, he'd gone to George Wilcox's house. That was late afternoon, but Diana could have been writing her exam then, too, while he was in Wilcox's house ....

Alberg stood very still.

He thought about going through the door and looking around the living room, automatically filing things away. He did it all the time, everywhere he went; it was instinct, by now; he imagined his brain filled with little slots, each crammed with observations, some useful, some not.

He fixed his concentration, his drink forgotten.

And he remembered.

He had stood in the doorway again just last night and had looked around, puzzled. And now he knew why. Now he knew what had been different about George Wilcox's· living room. He put his glass down carefully on the table next to the wingback chair. He struggled hard against leaping to conclusions.

But he got his jacket from the hall closet, pulled the living room curtains closed, turned on the porch light, and left the house.
 

CHAPTER 18

George was spooked by the place.

He felt when he arrived at Carlyle's beach as though he'd skulked his way there, although he hadn't. He had walked upright—as upright as the weight over hisshoulder would permit—and hadn't tried to crunch quietly across the rocks, and hadn't hastened crablike and stealthy when he'd had to walk past a lighted·up house. But now, arriving on Carlyle's quiet silver beach, he felt furtive, all right. His heart thumped in his chest, irregular beats of alarm. He had to stop to rest. He sat on Carlyle's silver lawn with his back against a tree, the burlap bag beside him. He felt rough bark against his shoulders and the back of his head. In a circle beneath the tree a permanent layer of needles had killed the grass. It was a thin cushion for him to sit upon. From the branches above came the scent of pine.

He stayed there for several minutes, looking across the lawn at the high laurel hedge that grew all the way down to the beach, taking occasional uneasy peeks at the house. It was out of range of the moonlight but it had a slight glow anyway, it seemed to George, but he knew that was just the whiteness of its paint against the blackness which surrounded it. He waited until he felt somewhat restored, then got up and carried the burlap bag over to the rowboat. He dragged it off its four-inch wooden blocks without great difficulty. The oars which were stored beneath the seats clanked,  and clanked again when he tipped the boat over.

The tide was high, but there were some sharp-looking rocks on the strip of sand between the lawn and the water's edge. George cleared these away, put the burlap bag in the bottom of the boat, and set to work dragging it, bow first, down the gentle slope of lawn and into the water. He took it slowly, sometimes no more than a few inches at a time. He was making some noise, all right, but he didn't think it was enough to be heard by anyone living in the houses above the beach. Of course, somebody could be standing at an upstairs window this very minute, gazing out at the moonlit sea before closing his bedroom curtains and climbing into bed. It it happens, it happens, thought George; but he couldn't prevent himself from glancing up. And of course it was Carlyle's house which looked back at him, still and curious; he tried not to imagine malevolence.

It was about ten feet long, Carlyle's aluminum rowboat, and looked to be in good shape even though it must have been a couple of years since George had seen him use it. Carlyle used to go out fishing in it. Sometimes while George was in his garden he'd see him rowing away out there. Sometimes he'd plant himself in the sea right off George's garden and sit there, puffing on his goddamn pipe, wearing a big straw hat, holding that stupid fishing line over the edge of his boat.

George stopped and leaned against the rowboat, mopping his forehead with his big handkerchief. He took off his pea jacket and tossed it into the boat and rested for a minute. Then he began again, pushing at the stern, then trudging around to pull for a while at the rope attached to the bow. Eventually he felt hard wet sand beneath his feet and looked over his shoulder to see the ocean reaching for his shoes. He went back around to the stern and pushed hard three times, stopping to rest between pushes, and felt the bow become suddenly weightless.

He got hold of the rope, threw it inside, and cautiously gave two more pushes. Then he clambered in from the stem and sat on one of the rowboat's two seats. He fumbled for an oar, stood up and pushed himself off, then sat down quickly and got the other oar, fixed them both in the locks, and began to row.

* * *

Alberg sat at his desk with the Burke file in front of him, absorbed in the autopsy report. He wanted to be absolutely sure—and he couldn't be, of course, until he got the shell casing and turned it over to the pathologist. "Well, what do you think, doc?" he'd say. "Is this it? Is this the thing came crashing down on old Carlyle's skull and put out all his lights?"

He couldn't understand why the old man hadn't gotten rid of them earlier. Maybe, not so deep down, he wanted to be caught.

Alberg's sense of exuberance was very strong. He was trying to dampen it—let's have the Nordic caution, here, he told himself—but it was the other part of him that wanted to handle this. His Irish mother's genes were screaming, "Get moving, you cold-headed bastard; prudence never got you anything but another night in the same room." He marveled at it. He could actually hear her.

He put everything neatly back in the folder and put the folder neatly in the filing cabinet in exactly the right alphabetical slot. He read a cryptic note from Isabella: Vet says don't worry, a parrots not a bat. He turned out his desk lamp, put on his jacket, and left his office. He even stopped to have a few words with the constable on night duty. He was absolutely under control.

But as he unlocked his car he was hot in the cool of the evening, and felt light on his feet, as if he'd lost twenty pounds, and he did not for some reason dare to take a deep breath. Nowhere in his mind was there room for George's roses, or George's unsteady old hands pouring three glasses of lemonade from a crystal pitcher.
 

CHAPTER 19

George rowed in a southwesterly direction out into the bay, at an angle from Carlyle's house, which had not been his intention. He had originally decided to paddle straight out from the beach almost due west, drop the bag when he'd gone about three hundred yards, then row straight back. But on second thought he hadn't liked the idea of Carlyle's house watching him as he carried out his task, as if some part of it—the drainpipes, for instance—might raise themselves from the ground and commence to point, accusingly. A man can't always control his imagination, he thought, especially when he's physically weary and somewhat distraught. He thought it not a good idea in this case to try. So he rowed southwest, and Carlyle's house was soon out of sight behind the black mass of the laurel hedge.

It was extremely quiet out on the water. George could see no other boats. Every once in a while he raised the oars and drifted for a few seconds, listening. He was almost out of earshot of the sea's insistent caressing of the shore, and the only other noises were those of an occasional bird and, from far away, a large vehicle gearing down for one of the highway hills. Soon even these sounds were 'so smudged as to be indecipherable, and all he heard was his oars dipping, pulling, rising through the black water, and, when he paused now and then to rest, the dreamy sensuous lapping of the sea at his little boat.

He was rowing straight out from shore, now. The land receded, slowly, and the light from the stars and the moon intensified. He looked left and saw that he'd gone only about half the distance he needed to go; he wanted to row out until he was even with the end of the spit which formed the northem edge of the bay. He figured that was about three hundred yards, and at that point the water ought to be deep enough to gulp down the shell casings and swallow them whole. He had to get out there as quickly as possible, before the tide turned; he wasn't sure there was enough strength in his arms to try to row against it.