As Hélène dialled numbers, a box of Kleenex at her side, with no more words for sorrow, Ed passed Belle a Tupperware package of cabbage rolls and a hunk of warm rye bread. She drove slowly down the long dark road, determined to use her friendship with Steve to provide her friends with answers to this tragedy. First thing in the morning, he’d find her message on his answering machine at the department.
SIX
Lunch day with Father found Belle at Bobby’s Place, a Garson institution, which changed names as each brave owner tried to scratch a living from a limited custom in the tiny suburb. Their hot-beef-sandwich platters gave the waitresses chronic lumbago, and they made a tasty back-bacon sandwich on a ciabatta bun laced with honey mustard. Since his near-death choking experience, George Palmer was limited to a special order of minced chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy and peas. “No charge this time,” said the young owner, a muscular blond with a huge, gleaming set of teeth as pearly as his apron. “I like the way you take care of your dad.” She had a hard time believing the local gossip that Bobby had a rape charge pending, except that his front window kept getting smashed. Bobby was the nicest guy, and not all women were trustworthy. Perhaps some spurned girlfriend had decided to take revenge.
After picking up the meal, she drove the few blocks to Rainbow Country Nursing Home, its former bachelor apartments converted for an aging population. Class-conscious perfectionists found it worn at the edges, but unlike the institutional high rises that catered to townfolk warehousing Oma and Opa, the compact facility had only sixty seniors and matchless personal care. Along with most developed countries, Canada faced a geriatric crisis in the next few decades. With perfect timing, she’d whisked him back from his retirement home in Florida when his cognitive abilities failed a few years ago. He was cruising into his late eighties with the gusto that had served his long-lived ancestors. Cherie greeted her at the nurses’ station. Belle knew every staff member, from the kitchen team to the laundry workers and handymen. “Six pieces of toast for him today. Extra marmalade. What an eating machine.”
“Every meal my mother ever served him was the ‘best ever.’ ” She presented a box of Laura Secord miniatures to the smiling nurse. Their daily acts of kindness to her father were beyond price.
With a quick stop in the kitchen for bib, serviettes and cutlery, balancing her boxes down the long hall, railings on each side, Belle entered her father’s private room, his door decorated with craftwork using gold-painted pasta pieces. She nearly tripped as a plump bichon frisé wove through her legs on his way out. Puffball, the activity director’s dog, an irresistible food hound who knew the best places to panhandle.
The new paint and easy-care linoleum provided some cheer, along with the Blue Jays curtains she’d bought. He sat fixated on the blaring television, hands clasped on the lap table of his gerry chair. Up until his breakdown, he’d been a great walker. Three miles with their dachshund Lucky every glorious Florida morning. At Rainbow Country, he’d fallen a few times, the dizziness of age, not Alzheimer’s, a future dread. Since seniors ran a risk of broken bones, his chair had become his jailer.
She put down the boxes and turned the TV to normal. “Hello, old man,” she said with a grin. “Your usual plus apple pie.”
“No cherry like your mother’s?”
The man knew what he liked and liked what he knew. “The Berlin air lift was fogged in. Next week for sure.”
His broad mouth wreathed a smile. Clean-shaven, baby-pink cheeks, but perhaps not always by noon, though the staff worked like carthorses. As in all health-care areas, the sad truth was that a person needed an advocate who visited regularly. “A la mode?”
“A la everything. Your French is très bon!” The first word he’d learned in his new home was “sables” from the box of shortbread. They’d shopped for snacks each week when he could still walk, and he picked out apples, bananas and Mars bars, seven of each.
“Your mother was half-French. Remember what my family said when I told them we were getting married?”
She nodded, attaching his bib and opening the boxes. “Everything was hunky-dory because she was Anglican.” Toronto, Belle’s birthplace, had never been a French enclave. On the other hand, Francophones made the largest ethnic group in Sudbury, the generic “English” in second place, followed by Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Scandinavians, native peoples and a sprinkling of latecomers from the Middle East, Far East and Africa. No melting pot, but a multicultural mosaic.
The news was broadcasting an update on the murders. A pizza delivery man had been brought in for questioning. As earnest civic faces filled the screen with promises to make the city safe for women, she nibbled at her tender sandwich, taking an occasional swig of chocolate milk. Her father ate at a rapid rate, and she gave him verbal prods to stop and drink water. That choking incident had left him an inch short of joining her mother’s ashes in the closet.
“Hey, what’s going on here? Another woman dead? I left my sanctuary in Port Charlotte for this and blizzards, too?” His voice rose, but the twinkle in his cornflower blue eyes spelled humour.
With an assurance that any crime perked up his brain cells, she said, “She was my client in a house sale. I found her . . . body.”
He gave his leonine head a shake, the thick white hair parted neatly. “Houses. Harold’s business. But didn’t you also . . .” Then he stopped, unsure of his memory. Sometimes D-Day was fresher to him than the morning’s menu.
“It’s possible that the same person killed all three women.”
“A serial killer? Surely not in Canada.”
“We’re catching up fast. Bernardo and Homolka, now the pig farmer in B.C.” As many as seventy prostitutes who had vanished from the Vancouver netherworld over the last twenty years had found ugly graves. Bereaved families were outraged that reports of their missing loved ones had gone into File Zed, merely because they had been street people and not debutantes. She got up to mash the pie and ice cream into mush.
Her father followed her motions and began tapping his watch, his woolly eyebrows contracting, as if he could will the hands to move faster. “Where’s that dessert?”
She put the box on the lap table. “It’s very sad. A lovely woman. She looked like Marie Dressler in the Sennett comedies.” From the time she’d been able to toddle around Toronto, she and her father had spent two evenings a week in a private screening room at Odeon Pictures. As a booker, it was his job to slot each film according to the local preference. The boondocks of Owen Sound didn’t have the same tastes as Rosedale.
“What a puss on that one. Last in the Canadian Three-Peat for the Oscar. 1931.” He smacked his lips as he savaged the pie.
She sorted her mental files. So many rainy days in her youth she’d sat on the sofa and paged through Daniel Blum’s pictorial histories of films. “Marie won for Min and Bill with Wallace Beery.”
“Mary Pickford was first in 1929 for Coquette. Canada’s sweetheart. Played a teenager at thirty-seven. She was born where the Hospital for Sick Kids stands. Then Norma Shearer, a Westmount beauty. Your mother always said she had a cast in her eye, whatever that meant.”
Belle rocked and rolled into their repartee, striking a vamp pose. “Divorcee. Very risqué, since she was trying to hide her pregnancy.”
Of the three women, Belle had a special fondness for gruff old Marie with the bulldog face and a body like a bag of fighting Dinky toys. One of the greatest directors of women, George Cukor capitalized on the beauty-and-beast theme in Dinner at Eight. Blonde bombshell Jean Harlow was talking about reading “a nutty kind of a book,” adding with wide eyes and raised, pencil-thin brows, “The guy said that machines are going to take the place of every profession.” Doing a stage-trouper double