Death Spiral (3 page)

“Yoo-hoo! It’s Mary, Dearie, come to do the floors!”

Mary stepped in on the landing, pulled off her boots and shook out the snow.

Wilf came up to the doorway and waited to see if what he’d guessed was right.

Mary climbed up two steps and walked into the kitchen in her sock feet. “Mr. Cruikshank, it’s me!” she called out and immediately went up on the tip of her stubby toes. “Jesus bloody Christ, it’s colder than a pauper’s grave in here!”

“I think the furnace has gone out.”

“You think the furnace has gone out?” The expression on Mary’s round and ruddy face changed. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s got a bad heart, he does.” She peered warily through a doorway. “Mr. Cruikshank,” she called again but without as much enthusiasm this time. She turned back to Wilf. “Do an old woman a favour, would you? Would you look through the house? There’s a gallant chappie.”

Wilf had to suppress a smile. He lowered himself down on the stairs and began to pry off his galoshes.

“I’m all talk, you know, that’s the thing, bluster and noise, but inside I’m a terrible coward. He’s had heart attacks before, you see? Not that I was here. No. Before my time. I don’t know just how many.”

Wilf braced himself with his cane, made the slow ascent up the steps and moved through the kitchen past the fretting Mary.

“There’s a good sport,” she said.

Wilf walked through an open door, circled around a large dining room table brought to a high shine by the rigorous efforts of Mary herself, no doubt, and stood in an archway that led to the front of the house.

The sun was still struggling to pierce through the thick frost on the bay window. An array of furniture, elegantly designed and looking as unused as if they’d just arrived from a store were distributed tastefully around the large room. The only exception was a threadbare easy chair covered in blue corduroy and assigned to a far corner. A magazine lay open on a small table beside it.

Wilf moved through the room into the front hall and called up the stairs. “Mr. Cruikshank?” He began to climb, his left leg supporting half his body weight and the cane taking on the other half.

“This ratio will improve in time,” a pretty English therapist had assured him, though more out of kindness than conviction it had seemed to Wilf at the time.

“Mr. Cruikshank,” Wilf called out again.

As he reached the top of the stairs he could see a four-poster bed through an open doorway. It was empty, the sheets and cover tucked in as tightly as a hospital bed. He took a step inside the room half-expecting to see someone lying on the floor or crumpled in a chair. It was empty.

Wilf came out of the room, stood in the half light and stared at a darkly stained door at the end of the hall. A line of white tiles peeked out from underneath it. “Mr. Cruikshank,” he said. He walked down the hall, turned the handle and pushed it open. An old man was sitting motionless in a thin sheet of ice in the bathtub.

Wilf dropped down beside him and drove his fist through to the cold water underneath, shouting, “Get out, get the hell out of it! Get out!” He snaked his good arm around the old man’s frozen back and under his arm and heaved. The old man resisted. “Get out, get out!” Wilf yelled again.

Mr. Cruikshank, fringed with ice, began to rise up. Wilf levered him onto the edge of the tub, balanced him precariously there and then lost his grip. Mr. Cruikshank hit the floor with a frozen thump.

Mary screamed, her hysterical screech filling the bathroom, the air, everywhere.

Wilf sat on the floor, looked at Mary standing in the doorway and cradled the naked man against his chest. Mary screamed once more and headed back down the hall. “Hold on,” Wilf whispered in the old man’s ear.

Mr. Cruikshank looked up at him with half-closed, lifeless eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR

Duncan Getty stood in deep concentration across the street. He had done this many times before, watching the office of McLauchlin and McLauchlin sitting behind its wrought-iron fence and its ornate gate, set back from the other storefronts and boxed in on both sides. It looked like a tiny house sitting there with its own front yard.

His face was surprisingly boyish, his expression open-spirited and hurt and sly all at the same time. At twenty-seven Duncan was as open-faced as any half-man half-boy might be, habitually hurt from years of teasing and sly from listening for far too long to only his own advice. Everybody in town knew Duncan Getty and everybody ignored him.

Duncan continued to stare at the office. On a few occasions he’d even mustered enough courage to stand right by the fence and try to see what Carole might be doing. He felt sorry for her. Everyone knew her boyfriend had brought home a war bride and a baby. It wasn’t right. But it had made him feel happy, too. She still lived at home with her parents. Her house was by the river, not that far down from the mill. Her bedroom was at the back.

Duncan loved her, he loved her with all his heart.

This thought propelled him off the sidewalk without a sideways glance. If there were any cars or trucks coming along they’d just have to stop. They always did. He was six foot two and close to two hundred and fifty pounds, his belly pushing out from under his shabby coat, a tumble of curly auburn hair falling about his round weather-reddened face. He stepped up on the opposite curb and looked toward the window. Carole was talking to some man and a woman. She was doing her work. She was busy.

He felt like going in. He felt like saying, “Don’t be sad. Donny Mason is stupid. He doesn’t deserve a wife as good as you.” He felt like saying, “Would you like to go to the movies this Saturday?”

He stood there, indecisive, rocking back and forth a little, and then he thought better of it. He already knew what she’d say. The same thing she’d been saying to him for years. “Hi Duncan,” she’d say, and she’d smile so that the world would light up all around him. “I’d like to, but I can’t right now.” And it was enough. It had always been enough.

Not like the other girls who always laughed when he asked them out to the movies, as if he’d just said the funniest thing in the world. Either that or they’d walked away real quick, like they were really busy and had to be someplace else.

Carole wasn’t like that. Carole was perfect.

Duncan thought maybe he’d wait for a better time, when she was alone. He thought maybe he’d go around to her place that night, work through the brush along the river and stand in the freezing dark. Sometimes she remembered to pull her curtains closed, sometimes she forgot. It didn’t really matter to him because he loved her so much.

He walked with renewed purpose back toward the feed mill. Just the thought of Carole’s dark window lighting up at around eleven o’clock enlivened him. And anyway, it was past time to hitch Babe to the cutter and get back to the shop. He had an order to fill. Twelve hundred running feet of white pine ripped in one-inch boards and cut to sixteen-foot lengths. With any luck he’d have it all finished and stacked by suppertime. And then he’d listen to
Amos ’n Andy
. And then he’d hitch Babe up again, or maybe give Dandy a run instead, and head back into town to his favourite beverage room. Maybe some of the fellows would let him sit in with them. Some of the war vets. But at ten o’clock he’d have to say “S’long,” and leave. And when no one was watching he’d slip over to the river.

And one night he knew he’d walk right into her backyard. And one night he’d toss something against her window. She’d lift her window up and put her head out and her hair would tumble down like he always liked to see it, her hands going up and pulling out a bunch of pins and her hair tumbling way past her shoulders.

“Is that you, Duncan?” she’d say.

“I was just passing by,” he’d say, “And I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me.”

“Yes,” Carole would call back down to him, “I would, Duncan.”

And the night would light up.

* * *

Wilf held Mr. Cruikshank’s icy body in his lap and listened to Mary’s frightened voice coming from downstairs. He knew she was on the telephone talking to the police, maybe to Andy.

He was beginning to shiver. Beneath his coat, his shirt and pants were soaked through. He pulled himself out from under the old man, fumbled for his cane and struggled to his feet. Mr. Cruikshank lay there in a puddle of water. Wilf leaned against the wall trying to catch his breath. A wave of shame washed over him. A fighter pilot, and he’d reacted no better than a frightened kid. Or a blithering idiot. He walked back along the hall to a smaller bedroom than the first one and stripped the top blanket off the bed. When he came back, the old man’s knees were still raised to his chest as they had been in the bathtub, his head still thrown back, his body the palest of blues. Wilf covered him up and sat down on the toilet seat.

There was no bath mat to soften the tile floor. There were no bath towels in sight. A thin ridge of ice gleamed under the baseboard.

Wilf’s eyes went back to the tub. Shards of ice were still floating around in it, swishing around and around. He stared at the ice for a long moment. He could still hear Mary chattering away. He’d have to call himself a taxi once she’d finished. He’d have to go home and change his freezing clothes.

He got up and walked back down the hall. A round window the size of a ship’s porthole was positioned near the top of the stairs. As he passed it some movement from outside caught his eye. Flames of silvery frost laced the glass and at first he wasn’t sure he was seeing what he was seeing. He put his face close up to it and scraped the frost away.

A man was standing in the middle of Mr. Cruikshank’s backyard. His slight body was covered in a dark shabby coat; his feet were wrapped in rags. He stared directly up at Wilf.

Wilf hurried down the stairs. When he reached the kitchen Mary was still holding onto the telephone. “Now don’t go anywhere, Ducky,” she called out.

Wilf waded out into the snow and struggled along the side of the house. A scattering of fruit trees stood throughout the yard, their limbs bare and black against the sky. He looked down a ravine toward a railway line. He waded back toward the house, made a large circle of the yard and stood more or less where he’d just seen the man. There was no one in sight.

Wilf’s eyes began to water. His heart raced.

The only tracks in the snow were his own.

* * *

Carole was still sitting at her desk when Wilf came back in. “What do you mean Mr. Cruikshank is dead?” Her light-grey eyes were quite large at any time but now they grew even larger, her hands suspending over her typewriter keys.

Wilf didn’t bother answering. He pushed through the wooden gate and sat down at Dorothy Dale’s desk.

“That can’t be right,” she said.

Wilf looked at her from across the small space that separated them as if he couldn’t quite make her out.

“Oh my god,” she said, “what happened?”

Wilf began to unbutton his overcoat. She could see that he’d changed out of his suit coat and dress shirt. He was wearing a dark wine-coloured sweater and a yellow-checked shirt. They really didn’t go together. Snow was melting off his galoshes, forming a pool of water on the floor.

“Doc Robinson says he had a heart attack. He died while he was taking a bath. He has to do a more thorough examination, though. When the old man thaws out.”

“Oh my god,” Carole said again, and then she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “have you changed your clothes?”

“I soaked myself trying to save an old man any fool could see had been dead for days.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Yeah. Poor old guy,” Wilf replied, though he knew the concern she was expressing was intended for himself. Which made everything seem worse. He leaned toward her. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

Carole nodded cautiously.

“In all your life, have you ever taken a bath without a towel or a bathrobe in sight?”

Carole stared at him. “Not on purpose.”

“Me, either. Not on purpose. No one has. Or does.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that there wasn’t even a bath mat on the floor.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe I’m talking about nothing.”

“I see.”

“If Mr. Cruikshank was feeling pain in his chest, maybe he thought a hot bath might ease things and in his growing confusion he got into the bath without thinking about a towel.”

“That’s very possible.”

“He’d been dead for a few days. Whatever coal he’d banked in the furnace burned out. The water in the tub was frozen and there wasn’t any water on the floor. No water left on the floor, I mean, when I came in, because it would have frozen, too.”

“Why would there be water on the floor?”

“Because opposite the bathtub, between the baseboard and the tiles, there was this thin ridge of ice. So there must have been water on the floor, quite a bit of it. But someone soaked it up with the towels. Maybe the bath mat, too. But they missed the water pooling under the baseboard.”

“Who would do that?”

“Whoever drowned Mr. Cruikshank.”

Carole turned back to her typewriter.

“He was a large man,” Wilf was continuing on, “it wouldn’t have been an easy thing to do. They slopped water all over the place and so they had to clean it up. But they couldn’t leave a pile of soaking wet towels around, could they?”

“Why are you going on like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to make something out of nothing. Out of just a series of coincidences. Or something!”

Wilf wasn’t actually sure why. These thoughts had just come to him. He hadn’t made any effort. But once they were in his mind, they seemed shot through with a kind of urgency. They seemed the truth.

“There must be some other explanation,” Carole said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he thrashed around in excruciating pain. Maybe he spilled some water.”

“Then it would have frozen on the floor.”

“Maybe the floor was slanted. Maybe it ran off somewhere.”

“There’d still be a skim of ice on the floor.”

“People do not go around drowning people in our town!” Carole’s voice rang through the empty office and took her by surprise.

Wilf felt a surge of joy. He hadn’t felt so much like his old self in months, but then again, in some way, at its heart, this feeling was nothing like his old self. “Is this the only Cruikshank file we have?” He got up out of his chair.

Carole glanced up at the clock. It was almost five. Fifteen more minutes and she could go home. “No. That’s a new one. There’s at least two more.”

Wilf was leaning over his desk toward her, looking obstinate. “Let’s have a look.”

“I don’t believe anyone drowned Mr. Cruikshank.”

“And I’m glad to hear you admitting that your opinion is actually only a belief.”

“Don’t you think you should wait for your father?”

“No.”

Carole began to examine her fingernails. She’d painted them a soft coral colour. She’d been thinking about letting them grow longer but the problem was that even at a moderate length they began to interfere with her typing. She could feel her pulse beating in her wrist, she could see it.

“Are you going to get the files?” Wilf asked.

All she had to do was start typing. Why should she do anything else simply because there was an absence of towels in Mr. Cruikshank’s bathroom?

Carole got up and with an irritated sigh she meant Wilf to hear, went over to the filing cabinets and pulled out two dog-eared files. She came back and dropped them on top of his desk.

“Why don’t you pull up a chair?” Wilf said pleasantly, sitting back down. He began to leaf one-handed through one of them.

Carole remained standing.

After a while Wilf remarked, “Mr. Cruikshank and his wife seem to be in continual litigation. Against each other.”

“Correct,” Carole replied.

Wilf continued to read.

Carole watched him. His dark hair, his dark eyes. For the first time since he’d arrived he seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Mr. Cruikshank was the owner of quite a few farms,” she said, sounding more collaborative than she’d intended.

Wilf nodded.

“About a thousand acres in all.”

He nodded again.

Carole felt oddly encouraged. “A few years ago he left his wife and moved into town. She still lives on the home farm and runs things along with their son. Mr. Cruikshank always paid his son a fair wage and he continues to do so, but he refused to pay his wife anything.”

Wilf looked up at her. He seemed impressed.

“Frank Cruikshank, that’s the son, he made a formal offer to buy his father out. You’ll see it in there somewhere. Mr. Cruikshank refused the offer. He said Frank’s mother had put him up to it, it was a ridiculously low offer and if he’d only be patient he’d inherit everything anyway. That’s when Mrs. Cruikshank went to court and argued that by virtue of forty years of shared labour she had a proprietary right to a fair portion of the business. She lost that suit so she took him back to court to force him to pay her a reasonable wage for services provided. Mr. Cruikshank argued that he was providing her with free room and board which was the equivalent. The court forced him to pay her a reasonable wage. Mr. Cruikshank sued her, claiming that she was selling calves behind his back, cheating him blind. He lost his suit. She countersued for calumny and libel. She lost. Mr. Cruikshank tried to fire her and have her removed from the property, claiming it was his right to fire and hire anyone he wanted. He lost. And so on. And so on.”