Two
Five days after my long journey from the airport, I began to believe that I would be safe in this place. I felt the anguish and upheaval of the past six months fade like the memory of a nightmare as I realized that the trial, the threats and the fear were now behind me.
They said it would be a small cottage beside the ocean in a rural fishing community on the remote Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, fully furnished and ready to move in. I looked around me. Indeed, the cottage was small, the ocean was at the back door, and the community of Cormorant Harbour was only a short walk away. I could not dispute the facts.
However, beyond the facts lay a modest little house stuffed with depressing furniture, sitting on an acre of scrubby spruce trees and alder bushes which served to hide the accumulated debris of years of habitation by people with no garbage service.
Standing on a patch of rough lawn at the side of the house, I felt well hidden from anyone’s curious eyes. Behind me, the wide Atlantic spread to the horizon, its expanse broken by several small, uninhabited islands. In front of me, only the shack across the road bore evidence of any other human activity in the area.
For the first time in twenty-five years, I was without the constraints of a job. At first, I’d enjoyed the sense of unstructured time, much like being on a holiday. But now I felt the first stirrings of a need to “do” something. I decided to ignore the overgrown yard which desperately cried for attention. It was time for me to step into my new vocation—writer.
Again, I’d fallen in with this suggestion, but with a great deal more alacrity than I had accepted their other ideas. I’d always harboured a deep secret desire to be a writer. Although life had taken me to the towers of commerce, where any creative spark was soon extinguished by dull routine, I realized that this was my opportunity to re-light the fires of my ambition.
A search of the decrepit woodshed behind the house turned up some sagging lawn chairs, which I set up on the beach-rock patio beside the kitchen doorstep. With a sense of anticipation, I carefully opened my new laptop. The cat leapt onto the other chair. She was a nondescript breed, black with just a touch of white under the chin, a large neutered older female which I suspected had been obtained from some animal shelter. She fixed me with an unwavering yellow stare.
I hadn’t planned on an animal. In fact, my former fiancée, Chloris, had always accused me of being indifferent to the point of dislike of her two Siamese cats. With some reluctance, I had agreed that I might benefit from the companionship and stress-relieving qualities of a pet. So far, Twinkles (the cat refused to answer to anything else) and I had yet to form the master-pet bond.
I tore my eyes away from the cat, ceding the staring match to her. Fingers poised over the keyboard, I searched for the perfect opening phrase that would capture the reader’s imagination while leading into the heart of the bestselling novel I knew lay within me.
“RICKY!” The voice reverberated around the bay, shrill enough to shatter glass at forty feet. “Ricky! You get your ass in here right now! I’m not telling you again.”
The cat leapt up in alarm and dashed into the bushes. My laptop fell to the ground with a thud. All the old terrors flooded my brain; my heart started to pound with a sickening force. I felt bile rise in my throat, and for a moment, the world swayed around me. I wondered if I could be having a heart attack. My rational mind realized that this voice had nothing to do with me or my past, but my tenuous sense of security shattered in an instant. Could they have found me already?
“RICKY! Get in here. I didn’t make this hot dog for nothing!” The voice, if anything, increased in volume. It came from the shack on the other side of the road, a rundown clapboard box with a junk-filled yard and an air of abandonment. Having seen no sign of life in the past few days, I had presumed it was vacant.
A small boy, about eight years old, clutching a fishing rod, scrambled up from my rocky beach, raced across my lawn, careened onto my patio, paused two feet from my chair and responded in an ear-splitting screech, “Chill out, Ma! I’m coming!” I had a brief impression—ragged shorts, oversized shirt and roughly-cut hair. He looked ready to go on stage as a street-urchin extra for a production of Oliver. Oblivious to my presence, he rocketed across the road and disappeared down the overgrown driveway, dodging around several dead cars, a rusting furnace, a pile of bedsprings and an ancient water heater.
I sat stunned. This was a development I had not foreseen. Neighbours. And a child! One who felt entitled to fish from my wharf. A horrible thought crossed my mind. Maybe there was more than one child. Even a dog. What could be worse? I closed my eyes, trying to regain my composure.
“Howdy, neighbour.”
A man stood in front of me, a large man. I had no idea where he’d come from. For all I knew, he was one of them. I half-rose from my chair, ready to flee, but his bulk blocked my escape.
“Care for a chug?” A huge hand wiped the neck of a brown bottle then proffered it to me. I fell back into my chair, speechless.
“I’m Kevin Jollimore. Folks call me ‘Kev’. Welcome to the neighbourhood. That’s Arleen over there, hollering for Ricky. He’s my boy. Woulda come over to say hello sooner, but took the wife over to her Ma’s for a few days. Old lady wasn’t too well, but didn’t look no less mean than usual to me.” He paused to take a healthy swallow from the bottle. “Didn’t get back until today and saw you was moved in.”
He pulled up the other lawn chair, lowering his thick body into it. My heart was still pounding, and I could feel the cold sweat drying on my forehead. I tried to reconcile Kevin’s intrusion into what I had thought to be my solitary sanctuary. He was not a reassuring sight. His filthy plaid shirt gaped open over an equally grubby, stained undershirt. Dirt-encrusted work pants hung under a bulging gut. I strove to hide a grimace of distaste when I saw the roll of pasty flesh between his undershirt and the straining waistband of his pants. Run-down boots with the tongues flapping over his bare ankles completed his ensemble.
“Are yous just visitin’ like, or are yous plannin’ to stay awhile? Arleen was wonderin’, see, ’cause she likes to use your clothes line when she’s done a big wash.”
I had a brief, nightmarish vision of Kevin’s underwear flapping over my front lawn.
With an effort, I pulled myself together. “I’m here for awhile,” I stammered. The words stuck in my throat so that I had to clear it several times. My brain spun, trying to marshal my thoughts in order to make some sort of coherent reply. I must appear normal, I reminded myself, but I felt anything but normal before this behemoth. “At least, I think so.” I realized I had little to say in the matter. I was here until they decided to move me out. “I’m Charles Trenchant,” I said, feeling a brief frisson as I used my new name. Just saying it again gave me a growing sense of control in the situation.
Giving up my real name had been more difficult than I had imagined, but even I realized that I could no longer be Eric Spratt, a name linked forever with the trial of Marcello Bacciaglia and his various hangers-on in the Toronto Mafia.
“Glad to meetcha, Charlie.” Kevin pumped my hand in enthusiastic greeting. His eyes lit on my fallen laptop. He picked it up, handling it with exaggerated care. “Computers, eh? You one of them techie people? You heard about that hacker kid in Montreal, pretty much shut down most of the country? Wisht I could do that. Think you could teach me?”
“Ummm, er . . .” I paused, gathering my wits about me. I raised my hand to adjust my glasses, only to remember that I no longer wore glasses, but the new contact lenses they had substituted. It was crunch time. I lined up the facts they had given me for my new persona. With a sense of desperation, I trotted them out. “I’m not a techie, per se . . .”
Kevin’s brow wrinkled. The foreign phrase stumped him. I guessed he wasn’t bilingual. He was barely unilingual. “I’m actually a writer,” I told him.
A writer. I straightened my