Innocent Murderer (3 page)

“George wants a word with you.”

The odd, resigned but angry tone of voice made me look up. He was standing in the aisle fidgeting with his hands. He was of medium height and build, about forty-five years old with a full head of straight jet-black hair, too dark for his age, so dyed. He had bushy, too dark eyebrows, and telltale grey stubble on a face that must have needed shaving twice a day. His face was pitted by old acne scars and his nose was the red of a man who liked to drink. His chin dropped off like a landslide from his mouth into his neck. The only part of him that didn't match his age was his body, which looked as finely tuned as a twenty-year-old's.

“They're sitting across from me so why don't we just switch.”

Terry looked up and grimaced. “Can't you handle it, Owen?” The way she said it sounded more like, “What kind of a fool are you?”

“No. He wants to talk to you about his wife's writing. She's pretty upset about what you said.”

“Christ, what a baby.” Terry quickly glanced up at him and then looked at me and began extricating herself form her paperwork. “All I said was that it needs work,” she scowled. “I could have said much worse.”

As she finally stood up she looked back at me. “You two haven't met yet, have you?” she asked, as if it were the most boring thing in the world.

“Owen this is Cordi O'Callaghan. Cordi — Owen Ballantyne, my right-hand man.”

I reached over and gripped his hand, then wished I hadn't. It was like getting flattened by a rolling machine, my rings mashed into my skin. He smiled at me and what should have been his chin bunched up into seven folds of skin, his smile sliding into them.

Terry stuffed her sheaf of unruly handwritten papers into Owen's hand, and in a soft, barely audible voice said “Put them in your briefcase.” Then she moved forward and took Owen's seat. Owen disappeared down the aisle and returned with his briefcase. He tidied the papers but didn't put them away.

As the plane took off and reached cruising altitude I kept to myself, reading a magazine about woodworking.

But it was hard to concentrate because there was a fair amount of whispering going on in the row ahead of me.

Suddenly, the seat in front of me bucked and a woman with the most amazing curly red hair stood up, forcing her seatmate to get up to let her out. He was a heavyset man in his early forties with a tremen
–
dous shock of pure white hair. I didn't catch what he looked like because he sat down immediately. I pre
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tended to tie my shoes and peered through the crack and watched as he took the woman's purse, a red suede eye catcher, and opened it. He looked around furtively and I backed off, but my curiosity was too much for me. I stood up and as I did so I saw him take something from the bag and slip it in his pocket. He looked up and our eyes glanced off each other as I stepped past Owen and went to the washroom. I could feel his eyes on me all the way down the aisle.

There was a lineup, of course, and I lounged against the side of one of the aisle seats. There was a man sitting in it who seemed to be nothing but a mass of hair. He was reading a paper that was about the illegal trade of wild animals. I wondered if he was a fellow lecturer. His seat
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mate, a diminutive blond, was reading a comic book. I had scanned back to the paper the man was reading when suddenly he looked up at me. I quickly looked away, but not before I saw the annoyance in his face. Who could blame him? All these people hovering over him as they waited impatiently in line.

When I came back the shock of white hair was gone and both seats sat empty.

I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew was hearing Terry's voice cutting through the plane “It's just a piece of writing for god's sake.”

And then a male voice saying, “Lady, you have no right….”

I couldn't hear what happened next, just a lot of muffled voices, but it was enough to catapult Owen out of his chair. He dumped the papers he'd been reading on the seat with the briefcase and they spilled onto the floor along with the case. Two of the sheets fluttered after him as he disappeared down the aisle. I picked up a manual on hot air balloons and then had to get out of my seat to retrieve all of the stuff that had fallen out of the briefcase, as well as the briefcase itself. I picked up the two sheets and put them back with the rest. They were in no partic
–
ular order and as I straightened them out a handwritten phrase caught my eye; the scrawl tight and legible.

“Drenched in oil and blinded by blood she held her breath and jumped.” It was about a woman fleeing a black market organ attempt, or at least I thought it was, but I didn't get to read any more because someone above me cleared their throat in a way that demanded attention. I looked up and found Owen staring at me, his face so blank that there was nothing at all I could read from it.

“I'm sorry. They fell when you left …” I stumbled along into silence. He still stood in the aisle staring at me. I felt myself start to get hot.

“Do you always read people's private papers?”

“I didn't really read them, just glanced at them.”

He reached out his hand and I gave him the papers. He sat down and replaced them in the briefcase.

“Some of the students' work,” he said. “They wouldn't be keen to know some stranger was rifling through it.” I couldn't tell by the closed look on his face whether he was angry or indifferent.

“Your briefcase fell.”

“Nothing we can do about it. But thank you.” His face was inscrutable and then he smiled this weird, tight little smile and took out his earphones.

After that little rap on the knuckles I made him get up to let me out again. Most people were watching the movie and the legs of the men in the outer seats were encroaching on the aisle as they tried to get comfort
–
able while jammed into seats meant for their children. I manoeuvred around them and caught sight of Duncan and Martha, but they were engrossed in the movie.

When I got back to my seat Owen was gone and Terry was back, poring over her work with an air that unmistakably said, “Don't you dare interrupt me.” But I had to, of course, and she grumbled about people who can't sit still but she left me alone.

I felt really fidgety and shuffled around for some papers until Terry gave me the evil eye. I was about to check out the movie when I noticed a strikingly tall woman coming down the aisle towards us, her face dwarfed by the mass of curly red hair that scattered its way all across it — the woman from the seat in front of me. She wasn't just tall, she had muscle to go along with the height. And apparently she'd been crying, because her eyes matched the colour of her hair. She stopped at her row and cleared her throat. I wondered why she didn't sit down. Her white haired seatmate had moved to the window seat. She just stood there looking forlorn until I heard a hissing voice practically throttle her with its venomous intent. “For god's sake Sally, sit down or get out of everybody's way.” And she sat down beside him.

I watched the movie for a while but it didn't really grab me and the earphones weren't working very well; I had to keep hitting them to get them to work, which did not sit well with Terry. It was one of those movies strung together with very little substance and lots of gratuitous violence. The four-letter words were beeped out for the kids.

I took out my earphones and stashed them in the pocket of the seat in front of me. Then I rifled though it looking for a magazine. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Terry was watching the movie, so I was able to wrestle some papers out of my briefcase and started thinking about my upcoming lectures. It was quiet on the plane. That charged, ethereal kind of quiet that comes with being in excess of twenty thousand feet above ground and defying gravity. That is, it
was
quiet until I gradually became aware of people whispering.

“No, please Arthur.” The voice seemed deflated, stripped of any resolve, totally needy and therefore totally desperate.

A male voice, bitter and sarcastic replied, “I've had enough. I don't want you Sally.” He strung out the words as if she couldn't speak English very well. “What part of that do you not understand? It's over.”

The seat in front of me suddenly bucked and the white haired, heavyset man stood up and barged his way past Sally. Without looking back he strode to the front of the plane.

I heard Sally calling out, “Arthur!” and then I leaned forward and glanced through the crack between the seats.

She had grabbed her hair and was rocking back and forth.

I looked over at Terry, who had taken out her ear
–
phones. Sally had started to cry, low, gentle sobs under tight control. I wondered if I should do something, but then Terry got up and barged her way in. She didn't even hesitate. She told Sally to stop crying in a tone that sounded like a schoolteacher reaming out a student. Sal
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ly's sobs stopped, whether due to the suddenness of Ter
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ry's appearance, the sharpness of the tone, or something else altogether, I don't know. But it didn't last long. I sat there, prisoner to the conversation in front of me. After all, it's pretty hard not to overhear people talking, even in a whisper, when you're just three feet away.

“He's leaving me. He's leaving me.”

“For heaven's sake, pull yourself together,” said Terry.

“You're just a jilted woman not a mourning widow.”

That made the sobs grow louder. “I need to tell my friend,” she gurgled. There was a long silence.

Terry's voice dropped to a low whisper, but I could still make it out. “Don't go blabbing it around.”

Sally's sobs turned staccato, as if she was trying to hold them in but was not succeeding — she already was blabbing it around. There was a long pause and then Terry finished, “Or I won't help you.”

Chapter Three

“I
never should have listened to you in the first place,” I yelled at Martha over the crash of the rubber Zodiac bucking over a wave and skittering down into another endless trough of icy cold Arctic water. I could feel my stomach start to slither around like a drunken snake and I prayed we'd make it to the ship before it decided to embarrass me.

Right after we'd landed in Iqaluit we had been given a tour of the town. Coming from a land of trees and bushes that bring softness to the harshness of manmade things, I was struck by the lack of even a little bush. I remembered hearing about an Inuit who came to south
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ern Ontario and felt so claustrophobic he had to go back to the land of Inukshuks, those eerie stone sentinels of the north that point the way for those who are lost.

After visiting the Art Centre and watching Inuit carv
–
ing stone into works of art full of motion and whimsy, we went to the community centre where we waited for hours without being told why. I should have suspected something when I went into the washroom. A group of women who had just come off the ship were gathered around the hand dryers, trying to get their clothes dry. One woman was wearing nothing but her underwear as she shook her clothes in front of the dryer. At the time I didn't really register what that meant.

I was trussed up like a cocoon, at least from the waist up. The hood of my orange rain jacket was pulled tight around my face, practically obscuring it, but my legs were drenched because I had forgotten my rain pants.

I concentrated on gluing my eyes to the horizon while everyone else stared at the rolling ship that was looming up on the starboard side. I was sitting right at the rear, beside the guy manning the boat, the illegal trade paper guy. So I'd been right — he was part of the crew, which probably meant he was also a lecturer.

I was sitting amid all of the diesel fumes, fervently wishing I was on dry land. It was so tantalizingly close, yet so far away. We'd had to trudge through two hundred yards of low tide muck to even get to the Zodiacs — which wouldn't have surprised me had I known that Iqaluit has some of the largest tidal variations in the world. The muck may not have been firm land, or even dry land, but at least it hadn't bounced and weaved and ducked and dipped.

“Oh c'mon, Cordi,” Martha screamed into the wind.

“There's nothing to it. We'll be there in less than fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen long, lurching, wiggly minutes in a boat with eight lolloping passengers and one driver, all perched on the pontoon shaped sides. And we were going to land on a bigger boat that was equally rolling and pitching. I certainly hadn't thought I would get seasick or I never would have taken this trip. I groaned and wished there was something else to take my mind off my stomach as Martha crashed into me on the next wave.

And that's when it happened. Terry, who was now wearing a yellow Eddie Bauer Gore-Tex rain suit and sit
–
ting near the bow, suddenly lurched up and staggered towards the stern of the boat where I was sitting, her eyes boring into the space between me and the orange clad driver like a razor sharp drill. I heard the driver cursing. With one hand on the engine he used his other hand to madly wave Terry down while yelling words into the wind that she couldn't hear.

When the next wave hit, Terry seemed to leap straight at us in a slow motion blur. When the boat bucked side
–
ways on a wave she raised her arms in a futile effort to save herself, and instead of crashing into me she was thrown onto the driver. The two of them fell heavily against the bulwark, the driver's head crashing against it with a sick
–
ening thud that I could hear above the wind.

The Zodiac began to dance and slew sideways to the waves and a sickening accordion motion gripped the boat as an icy wave broke over the starboard side. The cold of the water felt like a burn, searing my face. I saw, as if in slow motion, the now bare handle of the engine jerking spasmodically, the heaving rubber and slat wood floorboards, the wildly slewing boat broach
–
ing the waves — I leaned over and grabbed the throttle with both hands, more to calm my roiling stomach than for any altruistic reasons. The thing felt alive, like a horse straining at the reins, full of power and poten
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tial, but unable to choose a direction in which to go.