Fall from Grace (6 page)

He smiled at her, of course, but she ignored that and told him calmly and politely to go away.

“Give me a cup of coffee at least,” he protested. “And get me caught up on stuff. I hear you're married, for instance.”

“Yes I'm married,” said Annabelle primly, “and I have several children, too.”

“Several?” said Bobby. “What's that, ‘several'? Whaddya mean, ‘several'? How many've you got?”

“Three.”

“Three's not ‘several,' ” said Bobby, and he stretched out his arm and pressed his hand against the side of the house, leaning there. “Three's three.”

“All right then, three,” said Annabelle. “Now I'm very busy, Bobby, and you have to leave right away.” He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and he was tanned very brown. She wondered where he'd been since he got out of jail. She thought he must have had an outdoor job of some kind, to have gotten so brown.

Finally he shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and she watched him amble across the yard toward the road, where a small blue car was parked. She was still watching when he reached it, and somehow he knew this because just before he got there, while still sauntering away from her, he lifted his arm and gave a wave; and then quickly turned to look at her over his shoulder. He shook his head, laughing, to see Annabelle still standing there.

She was flustered by her encounter with Bobby Ransome, and went into her garden to calm herself.

It was a very private place, virtually surrounded by trees and brush, about thirty feet behind the house. It was small, about twenty feet long by fifteen feet wide, including the small lawn she had built there, with strips of grass purchased from the garden shop. At the east side of the garden, where it shouldered into the hillside, was a stand of alder trees. On the other three sides there was brush, which Annabelle kept cut back, and down, so that it gave privacy to her garden without keeping out the sunlight.

She looped the handle of her pail over her left hand, took a pair of pruning shears in her right, and began a slow inspection. Carefully she removed several dead blooms from one of her rosebushes, cutting them off at the first five-leaflet leaf that faced away from the center of the plant. The flowers were oyster-colored. They fascinated Annabelle, who had never seen roses that color before. She also had a bright yellow rose, a dark red one, two pink ones, and one that was the color of an apricot.

She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sundress, and her feet were bare. Her back was sweating, and under her arms. Annabelle lifted her face and closed her eyes and stood quietly, feeling the heat of the sun, listening to the bees nosing at her flower beds and the birds murmuring in the alder trees. Her feet seemed to be gripping the earth like roots. She let her body sway slightly; the smell of roses and crisp dry grass was thick and sweet. She heard leaves rustle and opened her eyes, slowly, and with a sleepy smile turned to greet her child, whichever one it might be who was coming through the brush.

But it wasn't a child.

The smile stayed on her face, forgotten, as she looked at him. He was holding branches apart with both hands. He stepped toward her and let go of them and they sprang together again, closing the gap. Now they were together, she and Bobby, in her garden.

Annabelle didn't think to say anything to him. He was looking at her intently, and he seemed much nearer to her than he actually was. She wondered why they weren't speaking, either of them. She wondered what he'd heard about her, since he got back. She felt the smile tremble on her face and thought it was going to disappear, but instead it changed.

Oh, well, thought Annabelle, only vaguely aware of having made a decision.

She looked up into his green eyes, and there grew inside her joy and mischief and exhilaration. She allowed her smile to bloom. She saw that Bobby was holding his breath, but Annabelle breathed deep and slow, giving him her blazing smile.

“I didn't say goodbye,” he said, after a long time. He stepped close to her. “Annabelle—”

“Shhhh,” said Annabelle, laying her index finger across his lips.

“Mama!” cried Camellia, crashing through the bushes. She stopped in confusion to see a strange man in the garden with her mother.

Annabelle stepped away from Bobby Ransome, toward Camellia.

Bobby looked at the child, and then at Annabelle. She imagined that she could hear his heartbeat, fast and hard. Finally he nodded, and backed through the brush, and was gone.

C
ASSANDRA MITCHELL LEANED back in the swing, letting her long dark hair hang down behind it. “Maybe she
is
crazy,” she mused. “She could be crazy. She talks to herself, after all.” She closed her eyes, and the day was still so bright that light filtered through her eyelids, creating a field of pink.

“Me, too,” said Alberg. “I talk to myself, too.”

Alberg's daughter Diana, who had a summer job with the local newspaper, was working that evening. So Alberg and Cassandra had gone to Earl's Café for hamburgers. Now they were sitting on a garden swing in Cassandra's backyard, drinking lemonade and talking about Hetty Willis.

“Probably you're both just eccentric,” said Cassandra tolerantly.

Hetty Willis pedaled about the town on an elderly bicycle, a brown-paper shopping bag riding in the wire carrier. She wore a black shawl all the time, whatever the weather; it was draped around her shoulders and tied in a knot in front. She was never seen wearing a jacket or a coat; she never carried an umbrella.

“She lives in that big house all by herself,” Cassandra went on. “Except for her cats.”

And she did talk to herself—often, and unintelligibly. Sometimes she came into the library, to peer at the spines of books, and her incoherent mutterings could empty the place in minutes.

Cassandra lifted her head. “So, tell me. Why're you asking about her?”

“I have to talk to her,” said Alberg.

“What about?” said Cassandra. She didn't really expect him to tell her. “See, look at that, now,” she said in disgust, pointing at him.

“What? What?” said Alberg.

“Your face gets all closed off. It smooths itself out and closes itself off. That makes me so mad, I cannot tell you how angry that makes me.” She pushed herself off the swing. Sometimes she thought she didn't know him any better now than the day they'd first met, in the Harrisons' restaurant for lunch, after he'd replied to her “Companions” ad in the
Vancouver Sun
.

Alberg, smiling, stood up and put his arms around her. “I like the way you smell,” he said. “I like the way you look, too.”

“I'm overweight,” said Cassandra into his shirt. “I'm getting old.”

“You don't know nothin' about old,” said Alberg with a sigh, “until you're staring fifty in the face.”

She gazed at him, thoroughly exasperated. Was it a good thing, she wondered, or a bad thing, that he'd forgotten she was only three years younger than he.

He touched the side of her neck with his tongue and moved his lips to her ear. “I love you,” he said to her ear; he didn't even know for sure that he'd said it out loud. But then she turned her head and drew back to look at him, and there was such solemnity on her face that he knew he must have actually said the words. And he was dismayed. And this must have shown in his eyes, because she shook her head and laughed at him.

The blue house stood on the east side of the road, high on the hill that dropped down to Davis Bay. He pulled off the highway onto a chunk of concrete that was cracked and crumbling, with weeds growing from every seam and fissure, weeds now brown and dead, killed prematurely by the brutal summer.

Alberg cut the motor and rolled up the windows. He got out of the car and locked it, then looked up. The house stood at the top of a very long flight of cement steps. He couldn't imagine an old woman lugging bags of groceries up those steps. There had to be a back entrance.

From this angle the house looked like the house in
Psycho
. Except that it was bright blue. And painted not so long ago, either. It was a particularly noxious shade of blue, he thought, to use on a house.

The steps went up, and up, and up. There was a railing beside them. Alberg put a hand on it and gave it a quick shake and watched as the resulting wobble scurried upward; the whole damn railing all the way up the hillside shuddered. He squinted upward at the blue house, a bright blue shriek against the fading evening light, and started climbing.

He labored up the crumbling steps thinking about his upcoming birthday—it made his heart grow cold to acknowledge that he would be fifty in less than three weeks. But my God my wind's better since I quit smoking, he thought, beginning to pant.

Halfway up the stairs there was a landing, a concrete pad about three feet square upon which sat a deck chair. Alberg stopped and looked at it approvingly. It was the old-fashioned kind made of wood and canvas, like a hammock with a frame, faded and torn but still usable. For some reason it made him think of his mother's piano, an upright with a stool that you twirled around to make it higher or lower.

He looked up at the bright blue house. He saw no lights, no sign of life at all—except for two cats peering at him from the veranda, beneath a window framed in lace curtains. He grasped the railing and propelled himself up the last six feet of steps and stood in front of the veranda, breathing heavily, eyeing a big sofa that he figured used to be maroon. Three more cats lay upon it. The sofa had been torn almost to shreds.

Alberg walked up the steps onto the veranda and looked for a doorbell. There was no bell and no knocker, either. But there was a little brass crank, which he turned, and he heard it squawk inside the house. Almost immediately the door opened, and an old woman looked out from behind it.

“Mrs. Willis?”

“MizMiz,” she said, unblinking.

Alberg thought for a moment. “I beg your pardon?”

“MizMiz. NoMissus.”

“I'm sorry,” said Alberg. “Ms. Willis.”

She wasn't much over five feet tall. She seemed a collection of sticks and knobs, with very little hair; it was long and gray, what there was of it, and he could see her scalp through it.

“My name is Alberg. I'm with the RCM Police. Can I talk to you?”

“Ohohoh,” said Hetty Willis. She stared at him for a few more seconds. Then she pulled the door open wider, and scurried inside.

Alberg stepped through into the house. He realized that he had been aware for several minutes of an unpleasant odor, which now surged out of the house and smacked him in the face. It was the smell of cat urine. He tried to breathe through his mouth.

Hetty Willis had hurried on stick legs through the vestibule and was now crossing a large entrance hall from which a wide stairway led to the second story. There were three doors, all closed. She scuttled toward the door on the left, and as she neared it she started to make high-pitched crooning noises around quick repetitions of the word “Hurry.” Her hand reached for the glass doorknob; a roar of animal clamor rose from behind the closed door, surely too big and too loud to be coming from a few domesticated cats—Christ, thought Alberg, images of rough-coated cheetahs and cold-eyed lions springing to his mind. The old woman turned the handle and pushed open the door, releasing a tide of normal-sized cats that streamed across the threshold and into the hall. It undulated speedily across the worn hardwood floor toward Alberg.

There were dark cats and light ones, sleek cats and fat ones, large cats and small ones. Alberg, who had acquired two cats of his own, had begun thinking of himself as someone who respected and appreciated cats. At this moment, though, it was difficult not to at least flinch as the swarm of feline bodies swept around him; what he really wanted to do was get the hell out of there.

“How many have you got?” he said to Hetty Willis, who had squatted to stroke several of her cats, her voice thrumming wordlessly. “Miss Willis? How many cats have you got?” She stood up and hustled across the hall to the doorway opposite. Oh my God, thought Alberg, but this time when she opened the door nothing emerged. She motioned to him. The cats swirled around her feet but when she went through the doorway they didn't follow. Some sat, some wandered back to the room from which they'd come, some disappeared into the shadowy reaches of the hallway, some climbed the stairs. Alberg followed Hetty Willis into what seemed to be a parlor.

“Sixtytwo,” she blurted, perching on a straight-backed chair.

The room was dark and cool. Heavy curtains hung at the windows; they were dark green, and might have been velvet, Alberg thought. There was a large fireplace at one end of the room, with two loveseats in front of it, facing one another over a long, low table. Opposite the fireplace was a wall of bookcases. A rolltop desk stood nearby, and a couple of easy chairs, each with a standing lamp behind it. There were two large rugs on the floor.