“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
He shrugged. “Painted a few houses.”
“What if I paid you?”
“Got nothin’ to do till my houseboat dries out,” Jack said. “I’ll do it for a coupla weeks’ room and board. How’s that?”
Deal struck, Jack returned to scraping and Shoe went into the kitchen. After his breakfast, he called the number on the card the police had left, quoted the case number handwritten on the back, and was put through to a Sergeant Matthias of the Vancouver Homicide Squad.
“I’ll be at home all morning,” he told Matthias.
“The investigators will be there within the hour,” Matthias said.
Come to us, they beckoned to her from the grave.
No, she silently cried. I can’t.
We love you.
Then why did you leave me? What did I do?
You didn’t love us enough.
I did. I did love you. I loved you. I love you.
Not enough.
How much is enough?
Come to us. We’ll show you.
No! No! You are liars.
She didn’t remember waking up. Nor going to sleep. She lay, fully clothed but for shoes, under a light blanket that bore the scent of cedar. It was morning, but the curtains were drawn and the bedroom was dark. The only sounds in the room were the soft whisper of air circulation fans and the gentle hiss of rain on the slope of the tile roof outside the window. For a brief moment she was suspended in a void between sleep and wakefulness, her mind calm and free of thought or memory or fear. It was what she imagined death to be like, a comforting stillness where there was neither past nor future, just a formless present. She wanted to stay there forever, but she was caught by a bitter current and flung toward the howling light of awareness. She had to muster every ounce of will to keep from screaming.
Patrick, too, had finally abandoned her.
Victoria was fourteen when her mother took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills and painkillers. She’d been suffering for a long time from a very painful form of inoperable cancer. Victoria’s father may have assisted, but the police hadn’t tried very hard to prove it.
After her mother’s death, Victoria made her father’s life a misery, seeking relief or oblivion or self-destruction in booze and drugs and promiscuity. When Frank McRae couldn’t take it any longer, he sent Victoria to a private girls’ school in Nanaimo. She hated the place and did everything she could to get thrown out. When she was caught giving oral sex to a boy in his car in the parking lot, the headmistress called her father and told him to come and get her. Frank McRae left Vancouver that same night, but as he drove onto the ferry at Horseshoe Bay, the boarding ramp somehow retracted too soon. His car plunged into the harbour and he drowned.
Victoria was sent to live with her aunt Jane, her mother’s older sister, and her husband. Childless academics, they hadn’t known much, if anything, about teenaged girls, outside of what they’d read in books. On her third day there, Victoria locked herself in the bathroom, filled the tub with water as hot as she could stand it, and got in with all her clothes on. She then slashed her wrists with a razor blade. She’d heard or read somewhere that hot water was supposed to dull the pain. It hadn’t. It had hurt like hell and she’d started yelling. Uncle Dick had broken the door down.
It was an effort to get out of bed. Her body felt leaden and sore. She dragged herself into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin was sallow and mottled and loose, and her eyes were underscored by dark smudges that looked like bruises. She could see every pore, every blemish, every wrinkle. Somehow, though, she found the energy to undress and get into the shower.
As she was dressing, there was a gentle knock on the bedroom door.
“Come in,” she called.
Kit opened the door. “I heard you moving about,” she said. She sounded like she had a sore throat. “Did you get some sleep?”
“Yes, thanks,” Victoria said.
“Do you want some breakfast?” Kit asked.
“God, no,” Victoria answered automatically, but then realized she was hungry. “Maybe some tea and an English muffin.”
“You got it,” Kit said.
She followed Kit downstairs to the kitchen. Kit filled the kettle, put it on the gas range, and turned on the jet. The flame hissed and fluttered.
“Did I hear the phone ring?” Victoria asked.
“Yeah,” Kit replied as she split an English muffin. “Joe Shoe called to see how you were doing.” She put the halves of the muffin in the toaster oven and turned it on.
“Does he want me to call him back?”
“He said he’d call later,” Kit said. The kettle began to whistle. Kit turned off the flame. She dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured water over it. She placed the mug and a teaspoon in front of Victoria. “You and Shoe,” she said. “Were you lovers too, before you met Patrick?”
The question caught Victoria off guard. “God, no,” she said.
“Why do you say it like that?” Kit said. “He’s not exactly my type, but he’s not that bad, either, if you like them big and battered. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” Victoria said. “Nothing’s wrong with him.” She scooped the tea bag out of the mug.
“But there’s something between you, isn’t there?”
Victoria looked at Kit and held her eyes for a moment. They were the same blue-green colour as the glacier lakes Victoria had seen when she and Patrick had flown over the Rockies on the way back from Montreal. Kit’s eyes weren’t cold, though, as Victoria imagined a glacier lake to be, and the longer she looked into them, the warmer they seemed to become. She looked away, breaking the connection, looking down at the mug of tea on the countertop.
“I told you how Shoe saved Bill Hammond’s life.”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
“Well, he may have saved my life, too.”
“What do you mean, ‘may have’?”
Victoria took an unsteady breath.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Kit said.
“I do want to tell you,” Victoria replied. “I’m just not sure you’re going to like what you hear.” Kit didn’t say anything. Victoria took another breath.
“I’d been sleeping with Bill for three or four months, almost from the day I started working for him. It wasn’t what you’d call a healthy relationship. He was, well, sexually repressed, I guess. I was pretty messed up too. I’d never really gotten over my parents’ deaths, despite years of having my head shrunk. Anyway, whenever Bill’s wife was away, which was quite often—she was in and out of rehab for almost their entire marriage—I would stay at his house. One night, when I just couldn’t take it any more, I took off.”
Not before stealing a half-dozen pieces of antique gold jewellery that belonged to Bill’s wife, she recalled, as well as $150 in cash Bill had left on the kitchen table for the housekeeper. But she didn’t tell Kit that.
“I didn’t know where I was going,” she said. “All I knew was that I