The Glass Harmonica (26 page)

“I didn't even call them. I went straight to the police station, straight to Fort Townsend, and they treated me well, brought me into a room in the back and even offered me tea. And one of the officers was writing down what I was saying, about Keith and the girl, at least until the tea came, and the other policeman looked at me and said to the officer talking to me, ‘You know you're interviewing the-lady-who-cried-wolf.' He said it real quiet, but I heard it when he said it, as plain as that. And there was more, but I couldn't hear everything he said.

“And then the questions changed, went flat like he was going through the motions. They went away to, ‘How can you be so sure?' and ‘How dark was it?' and ‘Were you wearing your glasses?' and ‘Thank you very much.' And he wasn't even writing anything down anymore.”

Edythe stopped. Next to her, Mrs. Tinden was murmuring quietly, the felt sheets pulled right up over her mouth so that only her eyes were showing.

“That hurt, I'll tell you. That certainly hurt. A law-abiding person is supposed to do their duty, and when they do, they don't expect to be treated like some kind of joke.” Edythe gathered herself up and, without even realizing she was doing it, sat up straight in the bed so that her back was a perfect vertical line. “I certainly have called the police before, I'll admit that. I called them when there were teenagers chasing a girl down the street—it looked horrible. And when the drag racers were tearing up and down. But the police never got there fast enough. And when there was what looked like a man outside the O'Reillys' looking in the windows one night after dark, doing I don't know what. Casing the joint, isn't that what they call it?”

There was no response from her roommates.

“It's not my fault if they're not fast enough, finishing their coffee and doughnuts, if everything is over and done with before they get around to getting there. But it all counts against you, I can tell you that from experience. Everything always counts against you, even when you're the one trying to do good.”

Out in the hall, an orderly pushing a woman in a wheelchair stopped. The woman looked in the door at Edythe hungrily, her mouth moving gummily, collapsed, clearly without teeth. Everyone stares here, Edythe thought. Everyone. Outside, the fog was coming in over the land, catching and spreading over the hilltops like a fungus. Edythe thought that it wouldn't take long to reach the hospital, to cover everything right up in grey.

“I tried to tell Evelyn about her husband, believe me I did. It's one of my greatest regrets. I know it was the right thing to do, and I tried and tried. I must have gone across to her house a dozen times when I saw her out there in the yard. But every time I got across the street, no matter how hard I tried to steel myself for it first, her eyes just stopped me.” Edythe shuddered slightly at the memory. “Everyone thinks she's so standoffish, but it's not that. It's that she can see right through your skin, like she knows everything already, like she's choosing which things she knows and which ones she wants to ignore. You don't know what she's like, how she just stops you with those eyes. I tried. You can't blame me for that.”

There was noise in the hallway again. A small woman in scrubs came into the room with lunch trays, setting them on tables next to each bed and then turning quickly away. Edythe looked at her tray: a black-spotted banana, a cup of tea, devilled ham sandwiches and a plastic bowl that looked like it might contain soup. She felt the outside of the bowl: it was hot.

Edythe was cautiously opening the lid when Mrs. Walters spoke for the first time, sitting up straight in her bed, her eyes bright and bead-black as she stared out over her oxygen hose. “Excuse me,” Mrs. Walters said loudly to the woman with the trays, who was already almost out the door. “I have to see your face. I won't eat any of it if I can't see who's bringing it to me.”

That's a good idea, Edythe thought. That's a very, very good idea.

103
McKay Street

LEN MENCHINTON

AUGUST 27, 2005

T
HE YEAR
before her daughter brought her to the hospital, Edythe was gardening and carefully watching Len Menchinton on his deck.

He didn't even see her. Instead, he was remembering how once, while he was under contract as security at a home supply store, he had used one single look to catch a shoplifter on the way out the door. One look to freeze him in his tracks, a guy who had so much merchandise stuffed into his trousers that he couldn't even bend his knees to sit in the one folding chair in the holding room where they were waiting for the police.

As Len watched, the man undid his belt and pulled a long carpenter's level up out of each pant leg, and then started emptying fistfuls of drill bits and small power tool attachments out of his pants pockets and from somewhere inside his shirt. Len didn't ask the man how he had gotten into the locked display cases for the small things, or how he expected to walk out of the store with his knees locked straight and a sharply defined rectangle behind each inseam. It was hundreds of dollars'worth of hardware and tools, so much that there was absolutely no way the guy would have been able to shuffle his way out the front door without getting caught. Len didn't even begin to ask why, didn't even care why. But the man started answering anyway.

“My wife has problems, she's sick, and . . .” It was a long story, including words like “congenital condition” and “difficult childbirth” and “expensive drug regimes.”

But Len wasn't in a mood for listening. “This isn't about your wife,” he said. “This has goddamn nothing to do with your wife. Not now. She's not the one stuffing tools down your pants. You are.”

Then Len Menchinton did something he hadn't ever done with a shoplifter before, the kind of thing that the rules say you're never supposed to do, because suspects might try to kill themselves or eat the evidence or something, the kind of thing that “exposes the store to liability,” and God knows, you're never supposed to do that. Len got up and went out into the hall outside the holding room and closed the door, cutting off the suspect in mid-sentence. And he stood there, suddenly wishing he could have that cigarette that he hadn't wanted in years, wishing the cops would just show up and take the guy away so he wouldn't have to listen to him for even one more minute.

Outside the room, Len noticed for the first time how barren the walls looked in the back hall of the building supply store, all painted a creamy yellow with dents and scuff marks as high as his waist along both sides, but without a single picture or poster, without any decoration at all. And he thought about how desolate those bare walls made the place, even with the steady noise of the shoppers so close outside, a noise that migrated right through the thin walls.

He remembered whole rows of shoplifters then, like a highlight reel on the sports channel. The woman with a purse full of cassette tapes who started crying the moment he spoke to her and, as far as he knew, never stopped. Even in court she cried. The guy who had just piled a cart full of kitchen cabinet doors and went right out through the front of the store like he had paid for everything already, nine hundred dollars of heavy new oak still in the plastic shop wrap.

The regulars, like Bart Dolimont. He must have caught Dolimont ten times by now, and he was never any trouble at all. Dolimont would hold his arms out and say, “You got me, sheriff,” as soon as Len came around the corner and spotted him with something, and he would be all smiles and chatter waiting for the police, like he couldn't wait to be arrested. Len knew that Dolimont would always have something big under his jacket, something worth at least $150, so that the charges were always for theft instead of shoplifting, the kind of things that always carried the promise of jail time.

And Len would never have to testify when Bart was in court, because he would plead guilty at the first opportunity anyway, usually clearing off a whole raft of theft and burglary charges at the same time, a weary judge adding up the consecutive and concurrent sentences in a tangle of numbers and dates. Dolimont made no sense to Len at all, the man being led quietly, compliantly away in cuffs, calling back over his shoulder, “See you next time, sheriff,” like it didn't matter whether he'd been caught with whatever he was stealing or whether he had gotten away with it.

What a contrast with Ron Collins, just a kid when Len grabbed him trying to get out of the mall with a fistful of cheap girls' jewellery—Ron Collins, a little stick of a thing then, but Len would never forget those eyes, the way they turned black as ink when Len turned him around, like his eyes were all pupil and nothing else. Len remembered thinking that it was like looking at some kind of primal thing, like looking at someone who was capable of absolutely anything. And the way the kid had fought, Len thought. Fought like a cornered animal, even though Len had forty extra pounds on him, easy. If he hadn't been a young offender, if he'd been a bigger guy then, there could have been real injuries and assault charges, instead of a slap on the wrist from the damned youth court judge, Paddock, who felt sorry for them all and was always sending them home to Mommy, saying, “I hope you've learned your lesson,” so they could come back to the store the very next day and try to lift something else. They'd come back all sneering—catch them again and it would just be, “See you again tomorrow, old man,” already certain of their imminent release.

Len suddenly wanted to be far away from the store, far away from the shoplifters and the shoppers and all of their particular needs. Len wanted to be fishing on a big, noisy, fast river, watching trout rise and sip at his fly, the small fly caught there on the edge of some big foaming eddy. He wanted to be in a wilderness cabin where one of the jobs was making sure the wood stove never, ever went out. Len wanted to be fucking Ingrid in a motel where the only features worth remembering were their bodies, slick with sweat, and the white plain of the bed with all the blankets stripped off and thrown into rippled, unconsidered topography on the floor. And he wanted Ingrid to be the one who started it all.

And Len wanted Vernie too. But he kept that thought small and quiet, like a whisper.

Len found himself inspecting Vernie's bras one Saturday afternoon, well into summer, when the sun was hard and brassy and yellow. He had his chair turned slightly by then, so that instead of taking in the length of his own yard as he usually did, he was now looking across the fences on the left-hand side of his house, a view-plane across wedges of Vernie's yard and then Mr. Nostrand's and even the yard after that, where a family with small children had set up a hard plastic play castle that the kids ignored unless it was raining and they needed to duck under it for shelter.

And all at once, there they were: two creamy white brassieres with big soft cups, and two others, lacy, filigreed almost, made with the kind of flimsy yet deliberate construction that made them impossibly difficult to figure out, Len thought, like you'd need an engineering degree to decide where all the seams went, what they did and why.

You wouldn't think that Vernie was big like that upstairs, Len thought. Sure, she was a good-looking woman, he'd certainly have had to be blind not to notice that. But the size of the bras, especially the red one, suggested that she was hiding it well.

He hadn't been watching when she'd hung them out, but had come outside with a beer and a newspaper instead, looking for classified ads for flea markets. Sometimes, he'd found, you could get a pretty good idea about what was going to go missing by what was already being sold new on the flea market tables. Razor blades were always a favourite: small but expensive, flat and easy to hide. Lipstick. Eyeshadow. Pockets full of the high-priced things you could move again real quick. But Len found that the lure of the flea markets faded fast once he was looking at the clothesline again.

The summer heat was pelting down on him, the air humid like it rarely is in St. John's, and Len could imagine that there was no way anything would ever really dry on a clothesline, and he could imagine exactly how the damp fabric would feel to his hands, the way the damp would smell if he held it up against the smooth, shallow dip in his upper lip, right there under his nose. To his amazement, the smell was there in his head, damp cloth caught up there as distinctively as if it were a critical, sharp, memorable smell like dark chocolate or burnt cedar.

A week later, across Forest Road at the small convenience store, he ran into Vernie with an armful of packaged hamburger buns and plastic sleeves of potato chips, the bags held up with one arm in front of her chest as if she knew something about what he was thinking, a case of beer dangling at the end of her free arm. She was ahead of him at the short linoleum counter, and they'd waited together as the clerk counted out Vernie's change and put the groceries into bags.