Erasing Memory

For Jude and Shirley—thank you for being in my life
.

T
HE BLACK SUIT JACKET
was folded neatly on the bed. Beside it were two black metal suitcases, one open, the other closed. On the closed suitcase sat a smaller black case, big enough to hold a flute, which was open. Inside was a black Styrofoam nest. It was empty.

In the bathroom, the tap was running. A tall man in a white dress shirt and black trousers stood at the sink, humming, then broke into song.

“War. What is it good for?”

He took the hotel shampoo container and emptied it into a stainless steel cylinder, then placed the cylinder under the flow from the faucet till foam came up over the lip. Once the cylinder was clean, he took the last of the towels, smiling at the easel card that spoke about saving the environment by using your towels more than once, and dried the outside of the cylinder. He then took the hairdryer and blew the interior dry.

His eyes were dark and gleamed with intelligence. The skin was drawn tight over his angular cheekbones. Below them, his face narrowed so much that in certain lights you could see the embossing of his teeth on the skin of his cheeks. Even clean-shaven, he was cursed with a dark beard line that only served to make his face seem more sculpted and severe.

When his cellphone rang on the bedside table, he carried the syringe out of the bathroom, placed it in its black nest and closed the case before he answered the phone.

“Yes, it’s done. A policeman arrived within minutes of my call. Immaculate? Yes, like the conception. Send the wire transfer now. We are finished.”

He hung up. Slipping off the back panel of the cellphone, he pulled the SIM card and laid it on the ceramic floor by the straight-backed desk chair, then slammed the metal glide of one chair leg down on the card. Picking it up, he bent it in half and went into the washroom, where he dropped it into the toilet and flushed. Returning to the bed, he placed the syringe case and the cellphone in his suitcase and snapped it shut. Humming again, he rolled his sleeves down, buttoned them and put on his suit jacket, tugging each cuff sharply so that it hung a half-inch lower on his wrists than his jacket’s sleeves.

He wrote a note on the single piece of hotel stationery and propped it against the new vacuum cleaner by the bed.
My wife liked the suction but she didn’t like the colour. Please enjoy
.

Picking up his luggage, he opened the door and left the hotel room.

“War,” he sang. “What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”

I
T WAS THE SAME
as it always was, chamber music driving up and jazz driving back. But this time he’d asked her, “Why do you want to be buried so far from town?”

Kate had smiled and closed her eyes—for such a while that he thought she’d fallen asleep—then softly, but with some strength, as if to ensure that the point made it through the haze of morphine and fatigue, she said, “It’s beautiful there. It’s a lovely drive. Not too far. I know you’ll visit. And”—breathing deeply—“if it was in the city, I doubt you would. Anyway, it’ll get you out of your head for a few hours.”

She was right. He’d been up once a month for the past thirty-eight months. When he’d looked at her ashes, he couldn’t see the difference between them and the ashes he retrieved from the fireplace to sprinkle on the garden—he couldn’t reassemble her. And yet, below the ground, beneath a headstone that bore only her initials, KGWM, he could imagine her on
her side with her legs slightly tucked up—asleep.

And it did get him out of his head. A cemetery in the city could never do that—the sound of sirens, the headstones of people they’d known, the buzz of traffic nearby would distract from the solace of being near her.

H
E STAYED THIS TIME
, as always, past sundown, reading, watching for birds and announcing each out loud for the odd comfort it gave him—cedar waxwing, swallow, cardinal, chickadee, a rare ruby-throated hummingbird—not because he truly believed she would hear, but because he didn’t entirely disbelieve it. The kitchen of Martha’s Truck Stop stayed open till ten, and on the way back he stopped and ordered the same thing he always did: a hot beef sandwich with gravy, no fries, followed by apple pie and coffee.

He was just cresting the Canadian Shield above Lake Charles when the call came over the radio. “All units. All units. We have an anonymous call about a fatality in a beach house on Shore Road, Lake Charles.”

MacNeice pressed the hands-free button. “The caller—male or female?”

“Male. Over.”

“Did he sound agitated, Sylvia?”

“No, Mac. Cool as a cucumber, not hurried or concerned. Over.”

“Describe his voice—north-end, west-end, local, foreign?”

“I’d say foreign, but very educated in English. You can judge for yourself when you hear it. Over.”

“Thanks, Syl. I’m about five minutes away from the cut-off to Lake Charles.”

H
E COULD APPRECIATE THE
rare beauty of it, the ice-blue chiffon of her gown spilling about her, the white sheers from the window billowing with the breeze off the lake, almost touching her legs, which were still and slightly—but not unnaturally—akimbo. But what stopped him, arresting all the clock wheels of his experience and wisdom, was the way her right arm rested, the hand dangling above the tone arm of the pale green Seabreeze, which soldiered on—the second Schubert Piano Trio, music that had formed something of a through-line in his life—skipping each time it hit her hand, then going back to the beginning.
That’s persistence
, he thought as the familiar melody began again.
We’re both just trying to do our jobs
.

He slid the sheers aside and looked out over the lake, which was romantically perfect. The music swelled and the breeze lifted the waves, spilling small shells and tiny pebbles onto the shore with a soft hiss and sigh.

Soon enough the scene would become the macabre job site of the professionally detached. But for these moments he allowed himself to listen, to absorb the inglorious end of a clearly glorious young woman. No blood. No obvious trauma, needle marks, coke residue—she had been a healthy woman, until the moment she wasn’t anymore.

Reaching down, he lifted her hand as a gentleman would to usher a lady onto the dance floor, then lowered it again as the needle passed by. The music continued as if nothing had happened, but his own blanket of forced detachment was already descending. “We’re all machines,” he said wearily—he wasn’t sure to whom—as he rose again to survey the room.

When the Schubert ended, the yellow plastic arm rose to return to its cradle. Once again he lifted the cold hand so the cheerful arm could pass underneath, but instead of settling into its cradle, the arm paused as if considering what to do next. The black vinyl slowed, hesitated, then kept spinning, and the needle eased down, caught a groove and began playing the music again. It had been set on repeat. MacNeice let her hand descend to where, in roughly fifteen minutes, the skipping game would begin again.

In law enforcement an established mantra was applied to every crime scene: look at the big picture. And yet every success in his life had occurred through an intense scrutiny of detail. Only recently had it occurred to him that the thrilling intensity of life close-up was what made him effective as a cop. For better or worse, that was his “big picture.”

He knelt down and leaned forward, supporting himself with one hand on the wall, to study her face, looking for a sign of trauma or fear, but nothing was revealed. Her skin, slightly olive, was without blemish. Her eyes were closed as if
she’d fallen asleep watching a movie—or listening to Schubert. He leaned closer and inhaled the remains of a floral perfume. With his nose less than an inch from her chin, he let his face glide slowly up hers, inhaling deeply to the hairline. There a subtle but sharp smell invaded his nostrils; he rocked back on his heels, put his hands on his thighs and exhaled before standing up. In an hour or so this young beauty would be transformed into something awful on the olfactory, overpowering her perfume and that pleasant scent of the night coming in off the lake.

No signs of strangulation or that broken-chicken look of a snapped neck. But high up under her chin was a bruise, an old, brownish mark like a three-day-old hickey—a conclusion he was sure the Young Turks would jump to when they arrived. But he knew this style of bruise; it was identical to the mark tattooed on the neck of a girl he had loved. She’d been proud of her bruise-in-training even when it was still pink.

This woman’s mark had the look of permanence, of someone deeply committed to practice. She had been a violinist. He bent down to look at the soles of her shoes—no sand. She hadn’t walked up from the beach. He turned back to the front door and examined the carpet, expecting to see the imprint of her high heels. Other than the impressions of his shoes, only the track patterns of a vacuum cleaner marked the carpet.

He began moving about the room. To the right of the bar was a component system that in its brushed-silver coolness made the Seabreeze look childlike and simple. There were no CDs, however, no stacks of 45s or LPs, and while the jacket from the Schubert appeared to be missing, its inner sleeve was on the sofa within reach. That the Seabreeze was on the floor
and not neatly set up on one of the tables suggested that it had been brought here for the occasion.