Gone for Good (10 page)

I met the police on the stairs outside my neighbour's apartment. During the short minutes we waited, he and I managed to introduce ourselves to each other. His name was Jeff. I apologized again for the kitchen flood. He blinked at me a couple of times. I thought maybe he'd forgotten about it. Then he said, ‘You're providing all the excitement for the building.'

The police – two young officers, both with crew cuts – told me to wait in Jeff's apartment while they went and checked out my apartment. That was fine by me. When they were finished, they called me up to assess the damage.

Having never been burgled before, I didn't know what to expect. My laptop went with me everywhere, and it mattered the most. I didn't own expensive jewellery or rare antiques. My television was close to ten years old, and I rarely turned it on. When I stepped into the apartment, I saw a mess. That's the simplest way to describe it. It looked like a small tornado had blown through, kicking up papers and knocking cushions off my love seat and chairs. The desk drawers had been yanked out and dumped. One of the cops emerged from the small bathroom and announced that the door to the medicine cabinet hung open, its contents scattered across the floor.

‘Meth heads,' his partner said. ‘Do you see anything missing?'

I
looked around the room. ‘Tidiness and order,' I said.

‘Ma'am?'

‘I don't see anything missing,' I said.

‘The TV and DVD player are there.' He looked around. ‘Phone. Toaster. Do you have a computer?'

‘A laptop. It was with me.'

‘Lucky. They take electronics and sell them to get money for drugs. Or they just steal drugs if you have them.'

‘I saw the man,' I said. ‘I passed him on the stairs as I was coming home.'

‘Oh, yeah?'

I told them what had happened – the man passing me, bumping into me. His rush down the stairs. I told them he looked like an older man, not a junkie.

‘They come in all ages,' the cop said. ‘Anything else you can tell us about him?'

I thought about it. ‘It was dark.'

‘Was he white or black? Anything?'

‘I really couldn't tell,' I said. ‘White, I guess.'

The other officer came out of the bathroom. They stood side by side, surveying the damage. They were both solidly built, former football players or marines or something. They looked like law enforcement bookends. Giant law enforcement bookends.

The one closest to me said, ‘Well, we can file a report. If nothing significant is missing, then you probably don't want to bother your insurance company with it.'

‘I don't have renter's insurance,' I said.

‘Then you should probably have your landlord get a locksmith over here,' he said. ‘And have them put in a dead
bolt this time. That lock you had was pretty flimsy. Especially if you're living here alone.'

‘There's something else,' I said.

Both officers turned to listen to me.

‘My mother died – she was murdered this past weekend.'

I'd managed to say it out loud. Murdered. My mother. All in the same sentence to complete strangers.

Recognition crossed their faces. They must have heard about it. I was sure everybody in town knew.

‘Do you think the two could be related?' I asked. ‘Someone kills my mother in her home, and then someone breaks into my apartment this way.'

The two officers nodded sympathetically. They seemed to be taking my concerns seriously and giving them their full weight. But I don't think they bought into it.

‘I understand this is disturbing,' one of them said. ‘Especially in light of such a tragedy. But these meth heads break into apartments all the time. We've had a little rash of them around the edges of campus lately. It happens. I don't think it was directed at you.'

The other one said, ‘They were clearly just looking for something to sell to buy drugs.'

I looked around too. I agreed with them about one thing: whoever that man was, he was definitely looking for something.

Since I didn't have a lock and not even much of a front door, and since someone seemed to think my home was a ripe hunting ground for whatever they were looking for – drugs or something else I couldn't even imagine – I needed someplace to sleep. A call to Dan would provide the easiest solution. I knew he'd be only too happy to open his door – and his bed – to me. But easy didn't always mean simple. And I worried about leading him on too much, making his life as well as mine more complicated.

So I called Paul and asked if I could spend the night in his spare bedroom. He readily agreed, and it was only when I showed up on his doorstep and saw him again, still looking tired and hangdog, that I wished I hadn't bothered him. The stress of my mother's death hung from him like heavy chains. I felt as if I'd just added a couple more links.

But I felt safe in his house. I locked the bedroom door when I went to bed and woke up every hour on the hour thinking someone was smashing the window to pieces and coming into the house after me. And once I woke up because I heard someone yelling from the other room. It was Paul, in the grip of some nightmare. I jumped up and went to his bedroom door, knocking lightly. When I called his name, he stopped yelling, but didn't say anything else.

I
stood there in the darkness, feeling very much like a lost and scared child. Two hours passed before I was able to fall back asleep.

Paul, the perpetual early riser, sat at the breakfast table when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. He looked showered and shaved, and some of the colour and vitality seemed to have returned to his cheeks. He smiled when he saw me and pointed to fresh bagels and a dish of fruit.

‘I have cereal and oatmeal if you want it,' he said. ‘And there's coffee made.'

‘Thank you.'

The bagel and coffee brought me back to life. I needed it. My eyes were raw and aching from a lack of sound sleep. My landlord was supposed to have the new lock – a dead bolt – installed early in the day. I hoped so, so I could take a nap later – if I could manage to sleep in my apartment again.

‘Sleep okay?' Paul asked, although I suspected he knew the answer.

‘Could have been worse,' I said. ‘How about you?'

‘Not too bad,' he said.

I told him about his nightmare, and how I'd gone to his door and knocked until he stopped yelling. He listened to my story, his smile turning wry.

When I was finished, he looked more shaken than I would have predicted, and I wished I hadn't told him. He said, ‘I've had quite a few of those dreams since … you know. I think in all of them your mom needs my help, and I can't give it to her. Sometimes we're kids in the dreams.
It's weird. The dreams are disturbing, but I almost like having them.'

‘Because she's alive again,' I said. ‘Even just in your head.'

Paul stood up and started doing the dishes. He didn't say anything else and didn't need to. We understood each other.

Paul promised to see Ronnie early that day. Not only did I have a stack of student essays to grade, which had been sitting in my briefcase since before Mom died, but I also woke up to two messages on my phone. One was Detective Richland asking me to call him back. I assumed the two officers who'd responded to the break-in at my apartment had told him about it, and he wanted to get the straight story himself.

The other call was from Mom's attorney, Frank Allison. He too wanted me to call him back about, as he put it, a matter concerning my mother's estate.

Estate,
I thought to myself. Such an expansive word for describing the worldly possessions of someone who didn't have that much. I thought Detective Richland's call would be more complicated, so I called the attorney first. I hadn't heard from my landlord about the lock. I opted to head to a local coffee shop and grade my papers there. I was on my way, cautiously driving with one hand on the wheel and holding the phone with the other, when I was connected with Mr Allison.

‘Ms Hampton?'

‘Yes?'

‘Sorry
to bother you, but I wanted to touch base with you about filing your mother's will.'

I skirted the edge of downtown and headed north towards campus and the Grunge, my preferred coffee and grading hideaway.

‘I know I have to do that,' I said. ‘Everything's been crazy.'

‘Oh, no, no,' he said. ‘I'm not calling to put pressure on you.' His voice practically boomed through the phone, his tone somewhere between commanding and jolly. ‘I just wanted to let you know about a phone call I received.'

‘Okay,' I said as I slowed to allow pedestrians to pass in front of me. Classes were changing. It was close to nine, and the intersections around campus swelled with students. Traffic backed up at every crosswalk and corner.

Mr Allison continued. ‘Someone called, a woman, asking about Leslie Hampton's will. At first I thought it was going to be you. Your mother named you executrix, after all. But it turns out it was someone asking if the will had been filed yet. Apparently this person thought she might be named in there and wanted to know if she could do anything to speed the process along. I guess she needs the money.'

‘Who was it?' I asked.

‘She didn't leave a name. All I could tell her was that the will hadn't been filed for probate yet. You know, there's no time limit on such things. But you may want to tell your relatives that you haven't gotten around to it yet.'

He didn't say why, but I understood. He didn't want to
have a bunch of relatives calling to ask him if their ships had come in.

But there was something about the whole thing I didn't understand: who was this woman who thought she would be named in my mother's will?

I managed to grade a few papers at the Grunge. My mind wandered every chance it got – to Paul's state of mind, the break-in at my apartment, the woman calling about the will. I wondered how anyone functioned in the world when dealing with a crisis. And I answered my own question: you just do it. You do it because you have to.

I'd called Detective Richland back after talking to Mom's lawyer. Richland seemed thrilled to hear from me, as if I'd called to offer him a year's supply of tooth pain. He didn't give me a chance to mention the break-in. He was on his way to a meeting – could I come by the station around noon?

‘Sure,' I said.

And he hung up.

Which is how I ended up at the Dover police department after leaving the Grunge. It was a deceptively cheerful-looking little building constructed out of red brick in an almost Colonial style. Despite its classic appearance, it had been built only a decade earlier thanks to a property tax increase that most of the citizens of Dover still complained about. They wanted the police to do their jobs – they just didn't want to have to pay for it or give them any additional space.

An officer greeted me at the front desk, then buzzed back to tell the detectives I was here to see them. Detective
Post arrived in a matter of minutes and led me down a short hallway and then through a roomful of desks where officers in uniform and plain clothes pecked away at computers and talked on phones. Post turned back to me and said, ‘We can go into the conference room. It will be quieter.'

A heavy oak table dominated the centre of the conference room, and the thick carpet and heavy drapes absorbed most of the noise. When Post closed the door behind me, it felt as if I'd been sealed in an airtight chamber. We were the only ones in the room. Detective Richland was nowhere in sight, and I asked about him.

‘He's out on another call,' Post said. ‘We're covering a lot of cases, so we divide the labour.'

I didn't say it out loud, but I didn't miss him.

Post pointed to a small table in the corner of the room. ‘There's coffee,' she said. ‘Or I could get you a soda.'

‘I'm good,' I said.

We both sat down near the end of the table closest to the door. Post carried a manila folder, which she placed in front of her but didn't open. Post wasn't wearing a jacket, and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows as if she was about to do some serious work.

‘I hope things have been going okay for you,' Post said.

‘Aside from my mother dying and my apartment being broken into, things are fine. Oh, I forgot that my brother is the prime suspect in the murder of my mother.'

‘What about your apartment?' Post asked.

‘It was broken into last night,' I said. ‘I thought that's what I was here to talk about.'

Post looked puzzled. ‘Tell me about this.'

‘Two
of your officers responded to my apartment,' I said. ‘I told them about Mom's death, and that you and Richland were investigating.'

Post took a deep breath. I could tell she was trying to project calm and professional cool. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a little notebook.

‘I'll deal with the communication issues later,' she said. ‘Can you tell me about this break-in?'

‘They really didn't tell you?' I asked.

‘I mostly work with men,' she said. ‘What happened?'

So I told her about coming home, the still, quiet night. I told her about passing the man on the stairs, the one in a hurry who apparently wasn't coming from any of the other apartments. I told her about the shattered lock and the ransacked apartment, including the violated medicine cabinet.

‘The cops who were there chalked it up to meth heads or something like that,' I said. ‘But none of my electronics were missing. Granted, they might be worth up to three or four dollars on the open market.'

‘Junkies don't make those distinctions,' Post said.

‘Exactly.'

‘Still, we've had a lot of these break-ins lately, especially around campus. The meth heads and even just your garden-variety burglar think college kids have a lot of money and are careless with their things. They tend to leave doors and windows open and their toys just lying around. And a lot of that is true.'

‘I'm a grad student,' I said. ‘I'm poor.'

‘They also don't understand that distinction,' she said.

She scribbled in her book. I waited. She kept scribbling,
so I said, ‘Don't you think it's odd that my mother is murdered and then all of a sudden someone is breaking into my apartment? Doesn't that seem strange to you?'

‘But why your apartment?' Post asked. ‘Why not your mother's house?'

‘Maybe they did break in there,' I said. ‘I haven't been back in days.'

Post looked at me, the wheels in her head turning. Without saying anything else, she stood up and left the room, taking the notebook and folder with her.

I waited. I stared at the bookshelves filled with law enforcement manuals and textbooks. Quite possibly the world's most boring collection of books. Post came back a minute later and closed the door again. She sat down.

‘I sent a car to check your mother's house,' she said. ‘Just as a precaution.'

‘So you agree with me. This break-in at my apartment isn't just a random crime.'

‘Was anything missing?' she asked.

‘Nothing that I could see.'

‘Any important papers? Photos? Anything relating to your mother?'

‘I didn't check that carefully,' I said. ‘To be honest, I was too freaked out to stay. I haven't been back yet. They're putting in a new lock.'

‘Make sure it's a dead bolt. And get a chain.' Post tapped her pen against the notebook a few times. ‘I still think it's a long shot this would have anything to do with your mother's death. Like I said, we get a lot of this kind of crime. If they just ransacked the place, it's not significant.'

‘It's significant to me,' I said.

‘I
understand. It's a violation. It's unnerving.'

‘If I hadn't stopped to have dinner with my uncle, I might have been home when that man came into the apartment.'

Post watched me for a moment. She made a little noise in the back of her throat. It sounded like ‘Hmm.'

Someone knocked on the door. Post rose and opened it. She stuck her head out, nodded, thanked the person, and came back into the room.

‘Well,' she said. ‘Your mother's house is fine. Our patrol car checked it out. No sign of any break-in or vandalism.'

I felt a little deflated hearing that news. It was almost as if I wanted there to have been a break-in at Mom's house – then the one at my apartment would have made more sense. It would have all been part of a whole, something that started to form a coherent picture.

‘Detective, if this break-in at my apartment is related to my mother's death, then doesn't that prove that Ronnie didn't do it? How could he be locked up in Dover Community and break into my place?'

‘I wanted to talk to you about your mother a little,' she said.

‘You didn't answer my question,' I said. ‘How could my brother be in the hospital and involved with that break-in?'

Post smiled without showing her teeth. ‘I think you're probably letting the emotion of these two events cloud your judgment. It's very likely you were just the victim of a random break-in. I can show you the charts we have to track these things. Break-ins in that area are up about twenty per cent this year. Someone – or a group of people – is doing it. We'll find out eventually, but it won't
be connected to your mother's death. As for your brother, I can tell you that it's moving slowly because your brother hasn't been as cooperative as we need him to be.'

‘Cooperative?'

‘I know,' she said, holding up her hand to fend off my objections. ‘I'm not unsympathetic to all the issues associated with him being in the hospital.'

‘You can't just dismiss them as “issues.” '

‘What I'm saying is, if you have any ability to talk to him, to get him to open up a little to the doctors who want to speak to him, then maybe things will move along more quickly. I don't like the idea of a guy like your brother being cooped up in a hospital either. But we need to find out more from him. We all have the same goal here: to solve your mother's murder.'

Her words took the slightest edge off my anger and frustration. Not all of it – just a bit. It was remarkable what treating me as a human being could do.

‘I'll try to talk to him,' I said. ‘He doesn't listen to me. He's all doped up. They medicated him yesterday because someone upset him.'

‘I heard about that,' Post said.

‘Do you know who that woman was?' I asked.

‘No. Do you?'

‘No. That's just it. What's going on here? A strange woman shows up at my brother's hospital room and sends him into a fit of hysterics. My apartment gets broken into. And then –' I stopped myself. I realized my voice was getting louder. Post looked at me with the calm condescension usually reserved for mental patients. ‘I'm going
to get some of that coffee,' I said, getting up and walking over to the other side of the room.

The act of pouring it into the cup and adding sugar, then stirring and watching the dark liquid swirl around in the cup soothed my nerves just enough. I came back to the table and sat down. Post gave me a moment. I sipped the hot liquid. Despite the generous amount of sugar I added, it still tasted bitter.

Post said, ‘It's been a few days, and we were just wondering if anything else had come to mind about your mother. Any problems she might have been having. Any relationships that might have been a source of trouble for her.'

‘I've thought about this a lot,' I said. ‘I don't know who would hurt my mother.'

‘Anything at all? Money problems? Something else?'

‘If there's been a rash of break-ins around town, what's to say Mom's death wasn't the result of one of those?'

‘You said your lock was splintered and your apartment ransacked?' Post asked. ‘You saw your mother's house the other night. There's a difference there, right?'

I didn't answer, but I understood. My attempt to make a connection between the two events, to stretch a link so far between two dissimilar events, made me seem amateurish and desperate. I wanted Mom's death to make more sense than it did, but I couldn't. And neither could Detective Post.

‘What about your father?' she asked. ‘He's deceased, right?'

‘He died almost five years ago.'

‘Was
there anything about him that might be relevant to your mom's case?' Post asked. ‘Any unresolved problems? Any issues?'

‘My father?' I said. ‘That man didn't have any issues. He was peaceful and easygoing.' I felt myself smiling just thinking about him. ‘I got along with him much better than with Mom. I guess Mom and I were too much alike in a lot of ways.'

‘Did your mother date anyone since your father died?' Post asked.

The question – no, the idea of the question – almost made me fall out of my chair. ‘Date someone? My mother?' I laughed, and the expression on Post's face didn't change. ‘No, she didn't date anyone. You wouldn't ask that question if you knew my mother at all.'

‘But you didn't know everything about your mother,' Post said. Her voice was flat. She didn't add any ‘gotcha' inflection. She didn't need to. She had, indeed, made her point and proven my argument to be vulnerable.

But I wouldn't be so easily swayed, at least not on the point in question. ‘I don't think my mom even dated any other man
before
my dad. I know, I know – we all find it hard to think about our parents as sexual beings.'

‘It can seem like parents didn't have lives before their children were born.'

‘My mom especially,' I said. ‘I know you didn't know her, but she was so … closed off to the world. So rigid and uptight. She didn't let anybody in. I don't know how my dad ever got through to her.'

Post leaned back in her chair, stretching her thin body
out and trying to adopt what might look like a more casual posture. Was she trying to suggest we were just two girls chatting? That I could tell her anything? Anything at all about the murder of my mother?

‘You never really told us about this argument you were having with your mother,' she said. ‘Things were chaotic that night, of course. But could you tell me what it was about?'

I told her about Mom's insistence that I promise I would always be there for Ronnie and always take care of him. I explained that Mom's biggest fear was what would happen to Ronnie if she were ever incapacitated or died. ‘My uncle says Mom was really worried about it because she was getting older and my uncle is getting older. I guess she saw me as the last, best hope.'