Death Spiral (25 page)

Oh god, Carole thought to herself. But it didn’t matter, she wanted to hear Wilf’s voice. And anyway it was only fair. Her parents knew what was going on between them. Her father wasn’t even talking to her.

“Hello,” Wilf said. He sounded a long way away.

“Hi.”

“Hi, you.”

“Nancy called. She told me what happened. The ambulance and the police and all that. And that you were there.”

“Did she tell you that he’s dead?”

“Yes. A suicide. He shot himself.”

“He was a client of ours.”

“I know.”

“At this rate my father won’t have any practice left.”

Carole wasn’t sure whether she’d heard Wilf laugh or not. Some kind of weird sound. Her chest felt as tight as if someone were squeezing it. “Are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m just trying to figure out things. I don’t know what to say.”

“No one knows what to say. Another suicide.”

“To add to Sylvia Young’s, you mean?”

“Yes. But that’s not why I’m calling. I just wanted to let you know that the house in the country, the stone cottage, it’s still empty. We could have it.”

“When?”

“Whenever we want. If we still want it.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars a month.” Carole waited for what seemed like an endlessly long time. “Maybe it’s too much money. Maybe it won’t work out. We could think about it, anyway. Or not.”

“This one was different,” Wilf said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because he wasn’t dead before I went over there. And if I hadn’t gone over there he’d still be alive.”

“You know something, I just want to see you. Can I see you?” Silence again. “Wilf?”

“Why don’t you call your friend back. Or whoever owns that cottage. And tell them we’ll take it.”

“From when?”

“From now. From right now. What do you think?”

“Well, I don’t know. Okay.”

“Why don’t you give me the rest of the day. I’ll talk to Dad. I’ll get my stuff organized. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I guess so. I guess that will be all right. If you’re sure about the cottage?”

“Thank you, Carole.”

“For what?”

Wilf had already hung up.

Carole sat down in her parents’ kitchen, the kitchen she’d grown up in, the kitchen she’d known all her life.

Soon she’d be sitting in her own kitchen.

What have I done, she thought to herself.

* * *

At six o’clock Mr. and Mrs. Wellesley from three doors over rapped on the McLauchlins’ side door. They’d brought over a hot chicken dinner complete with a tureen of soup and dinner rolls. They said how sorry they were to hear the news. Clarence thanked them and they went away.

“That was strange,” Clarence said. “You’d think we’d had a death in the family.”

“Nice of them, though.” Wilf eyed the steaming tomato soup his father had just placed on the table but avoided looking at all the rest.

They sat down and ate in silence.

Wilf sipped at a bowl of soup and poured himself another rye.

Clarence picked at the chicken. He didn’t seem particularly hungry either.

“Her name’s Catherine Shepherd,” Wilf finally said. “Cathy. If you want to know. She lives just down the street from where Sylvia Young lived. That’s the person who saw Scarfe in the middle of the night.” And to hell with her miserable-looking husband, Wilf thought to himself, circumstances have changed, his wife will have to get herself involved now.

Clarence nodded carefully.

Wilf thought about telling him that he’d be moving out of the house soon. Into the country. With his secretary.

He glanced across the table. His father looked reduced somehow, his shoulders more drooped, his face smaller, his hands veined and defenceless-looking.

I’m sucking the life out of him, Wilf thought to himself.

He decided to leave the conversation about Carole until later. Maybe Monday evening. By then, after a day of dealing with Doc Robinson and the police and all the possible implications and complications under the law it would seem like a trifling thing. It might even come as comic relief to his father. At least his son wouldn’t be living with him, he’d be out of his tortured sight.

After supper Clarence announced that he hadn’t seen Millie that afternoon when he’d gone over to the house. She’d been intercepted downtown and taken directly to her sister’s. God only knew when she might want to go back to her own house. Probably never. He said he’d like to go over to Millie’s sister’s place and see Millie for a little while. Would that be all right? He’d only be gone from the house for an hour or so.

Wilf was back in the front room still trying to read the paper. “What do you think I’m going to do? Of course you should go over there. Stay as long as you want.”

“I’ll only stay an hour. At the most.”

“As long as you want. And tell Millie...” Wilf couldn’t finish the sentence.

“I know. And I will,” Clarence said.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Wilf managed finally to blurt out.

“I know.”

Wilf continued to read. After a few moments he heard the side door close, the loose glass rattling in its frame. He listened to see if he could hear the car pulling out of the garage. He couldn’t. The walls of the house were three bricks thick.

Wilf looked around the room. He wondered how he might pass the time. He could read the Nuremberg papers from beginning to end. He thought not. He could begin to pack. But what would he take? He’d take everything he owned. Every scrap. As if he’d never lived in that house at all.

Of course his father was right. Of course he should never have gone over to Scarfe’s. And why hadn’t he talked to his father? It wasn’t because he’d wanted to save Scarfe from embarrassment, or himself, if he’d been wrong. That wasn’t it at all. He couldn’t have stopped himself from going over there even if he’d tried. And he had. Hadn’t he? He’d been compelled to go, the absorbing sense of moving toward something fateful and eternal one limping step at a time.

When the phone rang Wilf was wrestling his suitcase out of his bedroom closet. He wondered if it was Carole. Perhaps she’d changed her mind. He felt a slight stab of panic. He walked into the hall and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Is this Wilf?” A familiar voice came down the line.

“Hello, Michael. That was fast.”

“Well, I still don’t have your medical records. I didn’t need them.”

“Oh?”

“Wilf, I’m sorry but I thought I’d better check out something first. That’s what serving in the army does to you. Proper authorization. Chain of command. All that.”

“You never used to give a damn.”

“I still don’t. But Wilf McLauchlin has always been a special case and I needed a clearance.”

Wilf clung tightly to the telephone. “For what?”

“First of all, you have to know that you’re fine. That was determined a long time ago. So don’t worry. Understood?”

Wilf could see Chasson’s tired and thoughtful face as plainly as if he were standing right there in front of him. He’d seen it enough times hovering over his recovery bed.

“Understood.”

“Then why don’t you ask your questions again.”

“Michael? What was wrong with my eyes?”

“No idea. If it was a symptom it was the only one you had. Other than that, the bacterium had no measurable effect at all.”

“Uh huh,” Wilf could hear the sound of his own blood pounding away inside his ear. “What bacterium?”

“That’s what got everyone so excited and why you ended up in isolation, Wilf. You had typhus, but with a significant difference. It showed up in your bloodstream first, just as normal typhus would, but then it migrated to your lungs. That was brand new. Typhus isn’t supposed to do that. And it scared the fuck out of us.”

“Why?”

“Because it meant the little bastard had the potential to become airborne, which meant we were looking at the potential for a catastrophe. You could have spread it by sneezing, coughing, talking. ”

“I don’t know what all this means.”

“Well, one of the things it meant to us was that you didn’t pick up that kind of mutation by accident. Remember those three lost days you were talking about? We think someone did take care of you. They were experimenting with typhus in Buchenwald.”

“Oh?”

Wilf wondered if he could stop now. If he did, if he just hung up the phone, he knew Michael would understand. He knew he wouldn’t call back. Ever.

“Are you all right?”

“Uh huh.”

“Kind of a shock?”

“I guess.”

“You either came down near Buchenwald, or for all we know you crashed right inside its perimeter. It’s large enough. They stabilized you over a day or two and then we think they injected you with this altered bacterium. You have to remember that the American army was only about twenty miles away by this time and those scientists, doctors, whoever they were, were feeling desperate enough to try most anything. And it almost worked. They trucked your plane outside the compound. They put you back inside. And just as they’d hoped, some American troops found you and took you behind the lines. Perfect. Fortunately for us though, you failed to go off. As a secret weapon you were a bust.”

“Michael, if this thing was in me, why wasn’t I put in isolation right away? Why wasn’t everyone around me put in isolation?”

“Because it didn’t show up in your blood work until you were in France. Some clever person in our lab identified typhus, which is bad enough, and then they had a closer look and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ Shortly thereafter that blind Canadian pilot in the general ward on our third floor became a very special patient.”

“Why didn’t it work?”

“Well, it did, partially. It had worked, in that it had migrated from your bloodstream into your lungs, just as certain types of infections that cause pneumonia can do, but from there it was supposed to become an airborne contagion similar to tuberculosis only ten times as fast and twenty times as deadly. Instead it seemed too susceptible to your own body’s defences; it could move around in your system but it couldn’t get a sufficient foothold. Once we’d cultured it in the lab we killed it off with the usual antibiotics.”

“You’re telling me, I was meant to cause a plague.” Wilf tried to sound matter-of-fact about it, as if he was just remarking that he was meant to practise law, or meant to fly a plane.

“And that it didn’t work. They were desperate enough to try but the science wasn’t there. What you have to remember is that you’re fine. It’s almost two years ago now and you were clear of that thing within a few months. You were monitored long afterwards, of course. Nothing is going to come of it now.”

“Right.”

“That’s an absolute guarantee.”

“Right.”

“We should have told you long before this but germ warfare is top secret these days. Individual sacrifice for the greater good. All that.”

“Sure.”

“Any time you want to come down here again, we can go out for a drink. We can talk about it some more. We can talk about it until the sun comes up.”

“I appreciate that, Michael, but you know what I’m like. Thirty thousand feet. Steady at the controls.”

“That you are, my friend.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Wilf put down the phone.

When his father arrived home a half-hour later, Wilf was still standing in the upstairs hallway.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The cottage didn’t look quite like Carole remembered it. It was empty of furniture and stripped of curtains for one thing, which made the rough plaster walls look grimy and the windows bleak and in dire need of a wash. And for another it was raining outside and it had turned cold. The rooms were even smaller than she’d thought. The bedroom seemed scarcely larger than her mother’s clothes closet.

“What do you think?” she said.

Wilf was still standing in the living room looking out the window. “I like it.”

“So do I.”

He turned to look at her. “We’ll probably need some furniture.”

“I have some furniture. I mean, I bought some out of my own money so I guess I can take what’s in my bedroom, and there’s a settee my grandmother gave me.”

“We won’t need much.”

“Do you think it’s too small? It’s really small, isn’t it?”

Wilf crossed the room, gave Carole his cane and put his hand on her shoulder. “No.” His hand touched the back of her neck, it moved to her hair, trailed gently across her face.

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“I don’t have a thought in my head.”

He kissed her so gently she could hardly feel his lips.

“I don’t know about my body, though. Sometimes it gets up to things all on its own.”

“We’ll have lots of time for that out here.”

“So you say.”

Carole handed him back his cane. “You’ll see. Country people do it all the time. That’s what I hear anyway.”

Wilf laughed. Carole adored his laugh. She moved toward the kitchen. She could hear the rain pattering just above her head. She’d regretted all the way out to the house that they weren’t driving through sunshine. The rolling countryside had looked bleak and forlorn. She’d kept her hand on Wilf’s leg all the way.

“I have to tell you about Sylvia Young,” Wilf said.

Carole’s heart sank. The whole purpose of the move was to get him away from all that. “What do you mean?”

He began to tell her all the things she didn’t know. She could never have guessed, dreamed in a thousand years what he was telling her, though he had said something on the phone about having been the cause of the shooting. It had sounded crazy—she had closed her mind off to it.

As Wilf talked he sat down on the window ledge. He’s going to go on and on, Carole thought. And he did. Sylvia’s connection with Scarfe Telfer and the unthinkable thing that Scarfe had finally done. And how he’d tricked Scarfe into confessing. And how that had led to Scarfe picking up a shotgun.

Wilf finally finished his story and just sat there in the grey rainy light.

Carole turned away and went into the bedroom. “There’s no closet in here. Of course, if there were a closet there’d be no room for the room.” And she said, “You were right all the time then. They were murdered.”

She could hear Wilf getting up, crossing the floor toward her.

“She was,” he said, “drugged and gassed. Bradley’s death was a mistake.”

Carole wasn’t feeling frightened exactly. Not of Wilf. But there was something that felt cold and foreboding. She’d felt it when she’d got up first thing that morning, like a presence in her room, she’d felt it driving along the river and turning into the half-hidden lane. “What’s happening?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Wilf said.

Carole turned to look at him.

He was resting against the doorway. His eyes were closed. “This will be good out here. Listening to the flowers grow. The beat of butterfly wings. I need to get away from people. I just need some peace now.”

“You’re tired,” Carole said.

“Yes. I think so.”

Carole crossed the small room and put her arms around him.

“All right,” she said. She pressed her face against his face. “All right.”

* * *

Duncan trudged along the road past Eric’s home. The light near the barn was on but the windows in the house were dark. It was the middle of the night.

Eric’s stupid dog began to bark even though he must have known who it was that was passing by. Duncan hurried on. He felt sore and cold and half-starved. He came over the top of the last hill and saw the top of the roof on his own barn. He laid down in the ditch. He had to be very cautious now.

Duncan had seen the police two days before, lined up on a narrow iron bridge somewhere between Brantford and his own town. There were police cars and trucks. There were dogs. He’d had to wade through a swamp deeper into the woods and hide himself under a log. He’d had to lie there for the rest of the day.

Once the light had faded he’d retraced his steps and looked out at the bridge again. The cars and trucks were gone but he couldn’t be certain that they hadn’t left someone to watch. He circled around and came out on the edge of the gravel road some distance away. He could just make out the bridge at the bottom of the hill. He continued to wait until it grew dark and then he made a dash for the other side. No one yelled. No dogs pursued him.

Early the next morning he snuck into a henhouse and stole some eggs. An implement shed was standing nearby. There was someone’s oil-stained winter coat hanging up on a nail inside the open door. He stole that too. The eggs tasted good but the coat wouldn’t work because he still had his chain on. He had to wear it thrown over his shoulders like an old woman wearing a shawl but at least it made him feel warmer. He only had a shirt on and the temperature had dropped below freezing every night. His feet were continually wet. His body was shaking all the time.

It had taken him four days of mostly hiding and four nights of mostly walking to cover the ten miles of river that led to the town, and then he’d snuck across the river on the town’s high level railway bridge and had hurried toward the sawmill.

Duncan crawled out of the ditch and up the embankment. He could see the barnyard now, and the stable door and the shop beside the barn, and across the side yard he could see his home. Everything looked shadowy in the moonlight. Abandoned. But he couldn’t know that for sure. Someone could be hiding in the barn or watching from a window in the house. After all, every cop in the world seemed to know he’d escaped and where else would he go? Duncan couldn’t resist any longer. He began to run across the intervening field.

As soon as he reached the barnyard he knew something wasn’t right. He pushed open the stable door. “Dandy,” he whispered, “Babe!” He walked into Babe’s empty stall. And into Dandy’s. He sank down on the straw. Everything was quiet. Quieter than in the deepest heart of the woods. Quieter than in his own most secret thoughts. He closed his eyes and stretched himself out. He could feel the touch of Dandy’s nose on his cheek. His moist warm breath. “Let’s run in the pasture,” Dandy might say. “Let’s go into town,” he’d say.

And Babe would complain. “It’s always Dandy,” she’d say.

Duncan knew one thing for sure. He’d known it all his life. If he’d been someone else the neighbours would have helped. They always did when people got sick or had to go off someplace because there was an emergency. But he was different. There was lots of hay in his mow. Lots of oats to keep Dandy and Babe fed so they could stay right where they belonged. But no one had helped.

Duncan rubbed his eyes with his swollen and chained hands. He had to find Babe and Dandy. He had to see them. They had to be somewhere.

Wilf McLauchlin hadn’t helped. Wilf McLauchlin hadn’t done anything.

Duncan felt around in the straw until he found one of Dandy’s horse buns. It was cold and dry and hard as a rock. They’d been gone for days. Days and days. He tried to think of where they might be. He couldn’t think. He stretched out in the straw again and closed his eyes.

When Duncan woke up a faint light was coming in through the stable window. He got up and looked out. There was no police car pulled around to the back of the house. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. No sign of anyone stirring around.

He tried to think things through. If he was going to find Babe and Dandy he’d have to get rid of his chain, he knew that for a fact. Who would talk to him if he was standing in chains? Who would tell him anything?

Duncan snuck out of the stable and hurried over to the shop. As soon as he turned the corner he could see the door was off its hinges. It was lying there flat on the ground. He stepped over it and looked inside. All the table saws had disappeared and so had the big rip saw. He could see where they’d been unbolted from the floor and pushed through the deep sawdust toward the freight door. The freight door had been left wide open.

Duncan circled around the near-empty room. All the power tools were missing. So were all the good hand tools. He circled around again, as if they might appear if he did it enough times and then he turned back and went through the open door. He’d had a terrible thought. He ran across the side yard toward the house. He barged in through the outside door and through the kitchen door.

All his planes had been ripped down from the ceiling. They were lying all over the floor, broken-winged and crushed, floundering in a sea of newspaper clippings that had been torn off the walls.

Duncan crossed the room. Hidden beer bottles hit up against his boots and rolled emptily away. There were more empty bottles on the counter and on the table too. Someone had tipped over the refrigerator. Someone had wrenched the cupboard shelves half off the wall.

He climbed the stairs and went into his mother’s room. The drawers in her dresser had been pulled open as far as they’d go, her clothes that were hanging in her closet since the day she’d died had been strewn all around. Somebody’s muddy boot prints marched across the quilt on her bed.

A word was written in bright lipstick on the mirror.
FREAK
, it said.

Duncan began to rock back and forth. The floor creaked under his weight.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, sticks and stones will break my bones.

“Ohhhh,” Duncan said. “Ohhhh.”

* * *

Wilf could see Andy draped over the fender of his rusty old Ford, his head hidden under its raised hood. The car’s motor was chugging away.

He took a deep breath, tried to summon up some measure of his old self and walked into the garage. He poked Andy in the ribs with his cane. Andy lurched up and hit his head.

“Jesus Christ, don’t do that!”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to save a few dollars and asphyxiating myself at the same time. Shut it off, will you?”

Wilf leaned through the window and turned the key. “Maybe you should work outside.”

“It’s snowing.” Andy put his screwdriver down and began wiping his hands on an oily rag.

“I have a favour to ask.”

“My carburetor is sucking too much air. Or not enough. I don’t know.”

“I need a truck.”

“You need a truck?”

“Carole and I were looking at this cottage out on the East River Road, we think we might rent it but we need a small truck to take out some of her furniture. I thought you might know someone.”

Andy’s face broke into a smile. “Let me get this straight. A cottage? You and Carole Birley?”

“There’s no fooling you, is there?” Wilf circled the car. “I would have asked the first of the week but my father’s been keeping me busy the last couple of days.”

“Right. Scarfe Telfer. The OPP again. All that.”

“All that.”

“I think we could locate a truck. Have you heard my news? I’m back to being a constable again.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Demoted.”

“Jesus, Andy, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You should be. You and that goddamn piece of ice.”

“Maybe I can talk to someone.”

“After Scarfe Telfer, I don’t think so. Aw shit. I didn’t mean that, I’m just pissed off.”

“That’s all right. But look, don’t just take it. Put up an argument with the Chief. And maybe the mayor. You acted on sound information. You took charge. If it wasn’t for you Duncan might still be running around.”

Andy looked at Wilf. “He is still running around. Didn’t you know? He escaped Saturday.”

“What?”

“I’m not kidding. He just walked out of the courthouse in Brantford. Good old Drunken Duncan. He’s probably hiding in some woods again.”

“Saturday?” Wilf leaned up against the car. “My father hasn’t been telling me anything. He’s been tiptoeing around me like I’m breakable.”

“Yeah…well,” Andy said.

“Why didn’t Carole say something? She’d know by now, Nancy Dearborn would have told her.”

“There you go with Nancy Dearborn again.” Andy headed out of the garage. “I’m supposed to be babysitting.”

“Where’s Linda?”

“Don’t ask.”

Andy stopped at the open door. A wet curtain of sleet was pelting down, covering up the grass again. “Riding around with one of her girlfriends because our car won’t go and she doesn’t think we can afford to get it fixed. She’s looking for a job.” He put his head down and ran for the side door. “Come on!”

Wilf followed him across the slippery lawn and into the house. Andy brought him a kitchen chair. Wilf had dispensed with wearing his galoshes. He sat down and began to untie his shoes.