“YOURS!” Bobbi, Wayne, and I shouted in unison.
“Why the hell didn’t you try to talk me out of it?”
“We did,” I said. Wayne handed out cans of Coke.
“You should’ve tried harder,” Mary-Alice said, nodding thanks. “You could have at least told me how much rubbish you had hidden away.”
“I didn’t realize myself how much there was,” I said.
“I hope everything f-fits in the n-new place,” Wayne said.
We put in another couple of hours, then ordered pizza, courtesy of Ms. Anna Waverley. Mary-Alice had given me a hard time about accepting a cash client, but I told her we did a fair amount of cash business and, yes, we declared it. I wasn’t sure she believed me. Any more than she believed me when I told her I would try my best to talk Jeanie Stone out of doing a pin-up calendar. Mary-Alice subscribed to the philosophy that the customer — or the boss — was never right.
Bobbi hung around the studio with me for a while after Mary-Alice and Wayne left. The place looked as though a herd of hyperactive rhinos had stampeded through it — and back again. Bodger wouldn’t come out from under the sofa, even for Bobbi.
“You still think this was a good idea?” I asked her.
“I’ll miss this place,” she said. “But, yeah, I think the move is a good thing. We were getting in a rut.”
“I liked my rut,” I said. “It was familiar, comfortable. It took me a long time to break it in.” Truth be told, though, I had been feeling a vague sense of discontent of late, as if things weren’t turning out quite the way I’d expected them to when I’d started the business. Nothing I could put my finger on, just a nebulous feeling that a change was in order — just not this one.
“What’s the news from Hilly?” Bobbi asked.
“I got a postcard yesterday,” I said. Hilly — short for Hillary — was my soon-to-turn fifteen-year-old daughter. She’d been in Australia since the fall, with her mother and her stepfather Jack, the Fat Food King of Southern Ontario. She liked it Down Under well enough, but was eager to get back home to Toronto and her friends. “She says hi.”
“Say hi back.”
“Will do,” I said.
After a short silence, she said, “How’s Reeny doing?”
“All right,” I replied. “I guess.”
“She’s still in France, then?”
“Germany,” I said.
Irene “Reeny” Lindsey was an actress I’d been seeing since the previous September. Except that I hadn’t been seeing much of her in recent months. Reeny was the co-star of Star Crossed, a syndicated sword-and-sex sci-fi series in which she played Virgin, a time-travelling bounty hunter who’d come to present-day Earth with her companion and senior bounty hunter, Star, to track down evil shape-shifting alien outlaws and bring them to justice, generally shedding most of their clothing along the way. It was almost painfully cheesy, but it had earned Reeny and her co-star Richenda “Ricky” Rice a huge cult following, not to mention quite a few dollars. The third season was being shot in Germany.
“Uh, look at the time,” I said. “You’d better saddle up.”
“Right,” Bobbi said.
I helped her lug her gear down to the van, although she didn’t really need my help, then went back upstairs, got a Granville Island Lager out of the film fridge, another thing digital photography had made more or less obsolete, and put my feet up to await the arrival of Jeanie Stone. I hoped she wouldn’t be too put off by the mess — and that she brought more beer.
chapter two
I was dreaming of Reeny when the telephone rang. In that weird way of dreams, the ringing was integrated into my dream, interrupting our lovemaking on the roof deck of my house, which became Pendragon, the old sailboat Reeny had lived on until it had burned to the waterline the year before. Linda, my former spouse, said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?” as she sat naked on the ironing board in the kitchen of our first apartment, clipping her toenails. “No,” I replied, bailing the water from the bilge of my house with a cowboy hat. The ringing continued, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled down the hall into my home office to answer it.
“H’lo,” I mumbled.
“Tom? It’s Greg Matthias.”
“Greg?” I peered at the clock radio on the bookcase under the window. It read 1:53 a.m. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Bobbi,” he said. “She’s in Vancouver General emergency.”
A jolt of adrenalin seared away the cobwebs. “What happened? Is she all right?”
“She was found floating just offshore under the Burrard Street Bridge,” he said. “We’re not sure what happened, but it looks like she was attacked. She hasn’t regained consciousness.”
The Burrard Street Bridge spanned False Creek about a quarter kilometre west of Granville Island, a little more than a stone’s throw from the marina where she’d gone to photograph Anna Waverley’s boat.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said.
Twenty-three minutes later I was standing with Greg Matthias beside Bobbi’s bed in the emergency ward of the Vancouver General Hospital. She lay on her side, a tube down her throat, connected to an oxygen feed, and an IV in her arm, connected to an IV pump and a bag of clear fluid. Her face was a mass of raw, red abrasions, purpling bruises, and deep lacerations, some of which were closed with butterfly bandages, some with stitches. There was a strip of tape across the bridge of her nose and dried blood at the rims of her nostrils. Her eyes were swollen shut and beginning to blacken, and her left eyebrow was shaved partly away so a cut could be stitched. I could see the ends of black threads protruding like tiny worms from between her cruelly distended and discoloured lips and dried blood caked the corners of her mouth. A big gauze bandage bulged behind her right ear. A bundle of coloured wires snaked from the loose neck of her hospital gown, attached to electrodes glued to her chest. More electrodes were affixed to her head. A sensor was clipped to the tip of the first finger of her left hand. All were linked to machines that beeped softly and displayed her vital signs on colourful LCD screens that looked more like video games than medical monitors. I wanted to take her hand, but the knuckles of both hands were like raw hamburger and two fingers of her right hand were splinted.
“It was touch and go for a while,” Matthias said. “She’s stable now.”
My gut was twisted in knots and my eyes burned. “When do they think she’ll wake up?”
“They say it could be minutes, hours, or days. She’s taken a terrible beating, Tom. There’s no indication of major internal trauma, but they’re worried about intra-cranial swelling. And there’s no way of knowing how long she was in the water or how long her brain may have been deprived of oxygen. She’s fortunate that it was an off-duty paramedic who found her. He was able to give her CPR right away and undoubtedly saved her life.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” a woman said behind us. Matthias and I turned to see a tiny Asian nurse who looked like a teenager but whose no-nonsense manner left no doubt about who was in charge. “Would you go back to the waiting room, please? The doctor would like to examine the patient. We’ll let you know if there’s any change.”
“Have you called her father?” I asked, as we walked to the waiting room. Matthias was out of uniform, in jeans rather than his usual suit and tie.
“I tried,” he said. “There was no answer. We asked the Richmond RCMP to send a car around to his home, but I haven’t