Sundowner Ubunta (3 page)

grocery store that my husband and I ran; we had no other employees to help out. Matthew seemed so well-adjusted, and well, we just didn’t realize he was having problems; he got in with the wrong kind of kids, I guess.

“By the time he was thirteen he started getting into trouble with the police. At first it was petty vandalism, bullying kids in school, that kind of thing, not serious really. Even so, my husband, Clement, would punish him, severely. We thought it helped, but I guess…well, I guess it didn’t. Things got worse.

By the time Matthew turned sixteen he had started stealing things, getting involved with drugs.” She seemed a bit flustered and began to peel off her fur. “I’m hot now. Perhaps I will take off my coat. Could I have a glass of water, please?”

While Mrs. Ridge de-furred herself, I poured a glass of water at my office sink and found ice cubes in the bar fridge that holds up one end of my desk. She accepted the drink and downed half of it, her eyes glued to the ceiling.

“Was Matthew arrested?” I queried to get her going again. “Is that why the police took him away?” I knew at sixteen Matthew Ridge would have been a minor and subject to different laws than an adult, but even so, there was punishment available for serious crimes committed by a teenager.

She nodded. “Yes. The summer after he completed grade ten. He got caught one too many times. He had multiple charges against him, a long history with the police by that point, so they decided-and we agreed-he needed to be rehabilitated. He was sent to reform school.”

I do not know a lot about reformatories, but I was pretty certain they weren’t in the habit of cutting off all contact between parents and their children. So then why had the Ridges never seen their son again?

“Did Matthew escape from the school?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Quant,” she said, dabbing at her upper lip with the cocktail napkin I’d given her with her drink, “this is very difficult to talk about.” She dug around in her purse and pulled out a neatly folded pile of tissues, no doubt softer than the napkin. Withdrawing one from the pile, she dabbed at the area under her eyes.

“Take your time,” I said, touched by her obvious torment. There was something she wasn’t telling me yet, but I could almost see it on the tip of her tongue. “Can you tell me why you didn’t see Matthew after he went away? Did something happen to him at the school?”

“That’s not it,” she said. “You see, Mr. Quant, we hadn’t seen Matthew for several weeks
before
he was sent away to reform school.” She wrung her leather gloves and tissue together into a twisted rope of leather and…whatever it is tissues are made of. “You see, grade ten was a difficult time for Matthew, and he got into a lot of trouble. When it continued into the summer, my husband finally got fed up. He kicked Matthew out of the house and told him never to come back. Matthew’s actions were affecting our business; most of our customers were local, friends and neighbours, but no one wanted to shop in a store owned by the family of Matthew Ridge, the biggest troublemaker in the area. People knew he was into drugs, and they thought he might be a dealer- although I’m sure he wasn’t-and they didn’t want their children anywhere near Matthew or his bad friends.

“I know it sounds stupid, I know it,” she said, her voice growing hoarse with sorrow and despair. “We should have tried to help Matthew rather than put him out on the streets, but I was powerless against my husband’s wishes. I told Clement it was better to have Matthew at home where at least we could watch over him, try to teach him some sense. I begged. But there was nothing I could do. When we heard that Matthew had continued to get into trouble and had been arrested, that was just the last straw for Clement.

He washed his hands of him, as if he had no son. They sent him away. Matthew never called us; we never visited him, I don’t…,” she sobbed, “I don’t even know if he ever got out of that horrible place, if he even survived it. I don’t know what became of him. Oh God, Mr. Quant, I feel so horrible. I’ve been a terrible mother.”

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And she cried.

I offered her a box of tissues even though I knew she had her own stash somewhere in her lap. She took one and gazed pleadingly at me through a curtain of tears. “Can you help me?”

I looked at her, not immediately answering, wondering what happens to a middle-class but troubled, sixteen-year-old boy abandoned by his parents and left to fend for himself in the world.

“There was nothing I could do twenty years ago, but there is now,” she told me, her voice suddenly strong, belying the tears.

“Has your husband had a change of heart?” I inquired.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said. “My husband had a heart attack.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised for some reason. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He’s dead. Six months ago.” She didn’t seem too broken up about it, so I swallowed any further words of sympathy. “In his will he left me everything. And do you know what that bastard did?”

I didn’t, but I had the feeling I was about to find out. Something about a wife calling her dead husband a bastard sends a guilty thrill of anticipation through me. This was going to be good.

“He left me over a million dollars.”

I cocked an eyebrow. Bastard wouldn’t be the first name that came to mind for someone who left me a million bucks, but okay.

“We lived like paupers all our married life,” she explained, her cheeks grown pink with emoting.

“Clement always led me to believe that we were on the brink of bankruptcy, that we should eat hamburger rather than steak, repair our clothes rather than buy new ones, stay home rather than go out.

And that’s what we did, year after year after year. No joy in life at all. None of those special treats that people need sometimes. We just need them. Don’t we? Sometimes? I hope you don’t think me a frivolous woman, Mr. Quant, a pleasure seeker, because I’m not. I just wanted…I want-ed…something more out of life than what we had.”

She readjusted herself in her seat and kept on. “But do you know what the truth was? All along, instead of improving our lives, Matthew’s life, my husband was using the earnings from the grocery store to invest in real estate, mostly houses near the university. Houses. He bought and sold houses. According to the people at the bank, most of them became little gold mines and netted him big profit, so I suppose he knew what he was doing. But we could have used that money, not only for ourselves, that’s not what I mean, Mr. Quant, but we could have used it to get help for Matthew; he obviously needed it. We could have been a real family. We could have gone on vacations and done things together. Instead, our poor boy, our poor little boy, just disappeared…oh God,” she sobbed, “how will he ever forgive me?”

I couldn’t answer that. Although I admired Clara Ridge’s desire to reconnect with her son, I couldn’t help but wonder what twenty years of abandonment does to a boy’s mind. Then again, he wouldn’t be a child any more. Assuming Matthew Ridge was still alive, we were now dealing with a thirty-six-year-old man.

“Mrs. Ridge, are you certain this is what you want to do, to find Matthew? Have you thought it through?” Her son could be anywhere; he could be anyone. He could be alive or dead. He could be the president of a company or a low-life criminal. He could be married with six kids and living a happy life he didn’t want interrupted by a woman who had, for all purposes that mattered to him, given him up to the streets. Or he could be a manipulative piece of scum who’d more than welcome a millionaire mama to take advantage of. At this point, the possibilities were endless.

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“I’ve thought of nothing else since Clement died, and certainly since I found out about the money. I want to share it with my son. He deserves it, certainly more than I do. Who knows how hard his life has been? This could really help him. I hope it can help him,” she told me in a voice confident that she was doing the right thing. “But I know what you mean, Mr. Quant. I want to find him, but he may not want to be found. I’ve thought about that too. And that’s why I want you to keep your investigation a secret. I want you to find him, but when you do, don’t let him know; don’t tell him anything about me. I don’t want to scare him off. Just find him-tell me where he is, what his life has become, where he lives, where he works and then…well, then I’ll decide what to do. Maybe…maybe I’ll just send him some money anonymously. All I know for sure is that I want to know if my son is alive or dead. And if he’s alive, I’m going to help him.”

I finished up my business with Clara Ridge-collecting what little data she had about her son, her contact information, a signed contract and a retainer cheque to get me started-by about quarter of five. After asking Lilly to show her out the front, I dashed down the back fire-stairs like a crazy man, jumped into my Mazda and headed for John G. Diefenbaker Airport.

Downtown and Idylwyld Drive were sausage-packed with rush hour traffic, and I was running about ten minutes late when I pulled into a metered spot in front of the terminal. Lucky for me the flight was running about twenty minutes late-weather delays in Vancouver-so I was waiting next to the luggage carousels (like a dutiful boyfriend should be) when Alex Canyon walked through the security doors.

Eight months earlier, in a set of complex circumstances involving my missing neighbour Sereena, my not-so-dead Uncle Lawrence, and a killer named Jin Chau, super hunk security specialist Alex Canyon had come into my life. Originally, although we were immensely attracted to one another, things were just too complicated to consider acting on our desires. Well, to be absolutely honest, Alex had proclaimed his attraction to me, and I sloughed it off because that’s just my way of doing things around devilishly attractive men. So off he flew into the wild blue yonder to a world I knew nothing about. But then, under the guise of chaperoning Sereena back to Saskatoon, he had returned. So I showed him exactly how I felt about him, and continue to show him each time he is able to pull himself away from his
Get Smart
-secret-agent-type security duties long enough to catch a plane to Saskatoon- which was working out to be about once every six weeks or so.

“We just have time for a quick shower before we’re expected at Sereena’s for a fundraising dinner,” I told Alex on the drive home, grinning to myself at the way he’d had to scrunch his Superman-sized body into the tiny confines of my Mazda RX-7 convertible.

“You’re getting a different car,” he announced with a mimicking grin of his own. “What fundraiser?”

“She’s calling it her Robin Hood fundraiser: taking from the rich to give to the poor.”

“Couldn’t we just slip a cheque for a coupla hundred bucks under the door and stay home?”

My eyes moved from the road ahead of me to the man next to me. Of everyone I knew, Alex Canyon was the person most like the Energizer Bunny, with a seemingly endless source of oomph keeping him going and going and going. So, if he was tired, I knew he must have just come from a doozy of an assignment. We had an understanding whereby I didn’t question him about his work-I had no clue whether he still worked for my uncle or even if my uncle, fatally ill when I last saw him, was still alive-and he didn’t interrogate me about how many times I ate bologna sandwiches while he was out of town.

“Tired?” was all I asked.

He shifted in his seat, as best he could, to face me. “That’s not why I want to stay home.” His left arm went behind my neck and I felt his lips zoom in on the spot between my right ear and where my hairline begins-one of my erogenous zones. (He’d been extraordinarily adept at finding every one of them in surprisingly short order given our minimal time together.) His right hand began doing other stuff I was 16 of 170

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finding to be pleasurable but quite distracting. Fortunately, by this point I’d reached the turnoff into the back alley behind my house and, although it was difficult manipulating the gearshift without disturbing Alex’s actions, thanks to a remote door opener, I made quick work of pulling into the garage. Within seconds I had many fewer clothes on than I’d started with, and used a lever under my seat to recline back to enjoy the rest of the ride.

After several minutes of snuffling about below my waist Alex looked up with a serious look on his face.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, concerned.

He sniffed at the air. “Not really. I just think it would be a good idea if you turned the engine off.”

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She was once a complete mystery to me. Sereena Orion Smith, the woman who lives next door to me, reminds me of a magnificent piece of art, an oil painting perhaps, displaying her flaws with as much unabashed prominence as her beauty.

Peals of laughter rang through the frigid air of the late-March night and I realized they’d come from her.

I had never heard her laugh quite that way before. I’d always imagined there was something about her life, her past in particular, that restrained her from real laughter, the hearty, happy kind that many of us love to indulge in. Her laughs-the ones I was used to-were dry and brittle, her smiles wan and enigmatic. But tonight she laughed. Maybe it was because we were alone-despite the be-suited and be-gowned crowd we could see through the balcony’s French doors. Maybe it was because I now knew a great deal more about her previously unrevealed past; maybe it was because she irksomely found the tale of our near demise extremely amusing.

“Sereena,” I chastised, “it isn’t funny. I’m telling you this story to elicit sympathy, not thigh-slapping guffaws.”

“Oh, but Russell,” she said, quickly recovering her composure, “just picture it, Mr. Courageous Detective and Mr. Macho Bodyguard, caught with their pants down in their own automobile, in their own garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. All because they were too horny to turn off the engine after lowering the garage door. Honestly, Russell, it’s too much. Imagine the obituary. Russell Quant, intrepid Saskatoon detective found…”

“Stop right there,” I warned with a slight smile.