The Suspect - L R Wright (14 page)

It comforted him to keep nearby these reminders of
some of the other temporary occupants of the house. It was almost as
though he expected one winter evening to hear a knock at the door
and, when he opened it, holding an open book in one hand (he would
have been sitting in front of the fire, reading, for once), there
would stand one of the directors, who would apologize for intruding
and begin a stammering inquiry about an object he had only recently
discovered was missing. (It would be the pen, probably; hardly the
jockey shorts.) Alberg would invite him in, return the object to his
delighted visitor, and they would sit together in front of the fire
and have a drink and talk about television until the director had to
leave to catch the last ferry back to the mainland.

But nobody at all knocked on his door, that first
winter. It had been a very lonely time. Work had kept him busy during
the days, but the evenings were bad.

It seemed to rain incessantly. Sometimes there were
winter storms, and that was all right, a fire in the fireplace and
candles to eat by and the excitement of wondering whether the huge
Douglas fir across the road was tall enough to crash into his house,
if uprooted by the raging winds. But mostly it just rained, straight
down, no breeze to angle it, bathing his house and trickling down his
windowpanes and pattering on the foliage with a sound like eternal
grieving, and it was this, the rain, with which he struggled as he
wrote upbeat affectionate letters to his daughters and occasional
notes to his wife which he hoped were graceful as well as
businesslike. He would look up from the paper, after signing his name
to these missives, and there was always a moment of shock as he
looked blanldy around him, and this was followed by a jolt of pain so
severe that the first few times he had seriously considered seeing a
doctor.

One day in February he had noticed on his way out to
his car an unfamiliar fragrance in the air. He looked carefully about
him but couldn't see anything unusual except a few small green
shoots. Their presence in the earth of his front yard surprised him
until he realized that the Sunshine Coast had had only a few nights
of frost, and that was back in December.

On a Saturday in early April he glanced from his
kitchen window and found that growing things had thrust themselves
high enough to almost block his windows.

That was the start of his battle with the greenery
which last year had threatened to swallow up his house. He was
determined it wasn't going to happen again.

The house was on the side of a hill that reared up
out of Gibsons. It looked down upon a disorganized tumble of small
houses, and below them the town's main street, and beyond that the
government wharf and a woodpiling breakwater that protected several
finger floats. The back yard wasn't large, and most of it was lawn. A
lopsided wooden fence surrounding the yard supported the climbing
roses, which, when untended, went mad. Until Alberg's attack with the
hedge clippers on Tuesday, some of the canes had stretched twelve
feet into the air, clawing wildly at nothing when the breezes blew in
from the ocean.

He pulled up late this Saturday afternoon in front of
the house, which faced Schoolhouse Road sidelong, thrusting a
suspicious shoulder at the traffic. A fence in dilapidation similar
to that in the back yard offered yet another line of defense, and
hydrangea bushes grew in glorious disarray along the fence and across
the front of the house, encroaching upon the somewhat rickety front
porch.

It was a small house, but he liked it. He was now
even thinking about buying it. He toyed with the idea each time he
thought of requesting a permanent posting to Sechelt, which had first
occurred to him about a month ago.

There was a sun porch at the back, on the southwest
side, and through its wide windows he got his best view of the town,
the wharf, and across Shoal Channel to Keats Island. He had noticed
during his preliminary inspection of the house that there was a hole
in one wall of the sun porch, where it met the floor. He also noticed
a large battered cardboard carton in which lay some rags, and a
scratched blue bowl next to it. The first evening after he moved in
he was standing in the sun porch looking down at the town and at the
black sea, on which floated the running lights of a few invisible
boats, and listening to the rain, when he heard a scrabbling sound.
He got a flashlight and found in the box of rags a thin gray cat who
remained for a moment pinioned by the beam of light and then leaped
from the box and disappeared through the hole in the wall. Before he
went to bed that night he filled the blue bowl with milk. In the
morning the box was still empty, but so was the bowl.

The cat hung around for a few days, then disappeared.
Alberg left the box of rags, and filled the blue bowl with fresh milk
each night, but months passed and he didn't see the animal again.
Finally he repaired the hole in the wall.

But late in the summer the cat returned. He heard
meowing, and scratching, and went outside to see her (if it was, in
fact, a she) trying to claw her way into the sun porch where the hole
had been. He left the screen door propped open, put out some milk,
and went to bed.

This continued until fall, when once more the cat
vanished. Alberg thought she must have discovered in her feline
wisdom a way to escape the wet British Columbia coast winters for a
dryer, warmer place. So far she hadn't come back again, but he left
the box and the rags out there, just in case, and had begun in April
to call her softly before he went to bed.
 
Now
in the kitchen he boiled water for instant coffee and looked in the
fridge for a while, but he didn't see anything that interested him.
He shouldn't eat anything anyway, he thought; not with an expanding
waistline.

He took his mug of coffee into the living room and
settled down at the heavy round dining room table he'd put at one end
of the room. He brought with him his notebook and a pen, intending to
make notes about the Burke homicide. He had lived through that first
awful winter with a minimum of furniture, only what the house itself
provided. But when spring came and the sun emerged he began buying
things. At first he felt uncomfortable, going shopping alone, with
only himself to please. But eventually he began taking pleasure in
surrounding himself with things that satisfied his own tastes. These
tastes sometimes astonished him, as if they were new ones, as perhaps
they were.

Restless, the page in his notebook still blank, he
moved to a wingback chair near the window and put his feet up on a
hassock.

It would be extremely convenient, he thought, if a
satisfactory relationship should develop between him and Cassandra.
He'd started answering ads only a couple of months ago. When he first
arrived in Sechelt he was too busy with his job and too unhappy and
bewildered in his personal life to seek female companionship. He
wasn't sure he remembered how to do that, anyway. Eventually he began
spending an occasional weekend in Vancouver, frequenting the singles
bars. He felt excessively middle-aged in those places. He ignored
this for a while, because he did manage to meet women there, all
right. But it soon became depressing. The sexual experiences were
more reassuring than anything else, and while he had badly needed
that reassurance, he also needed somebody female to talk to and laugh
with. He probably shouldn't have given up on those bars so soon. He
thought it must have been the music in those places that finally sent
him fleeing.

So next he tried answering ads. He met a lot of the
same kind of person he'd met in the bars—bright, well-dressed, much
too young—and he also met a great many women whose ages and
personalities suited him better but whose loneliness had made them
desperate. Their desperation caused him great discomfort, knowing how
close he was to desperation himself, and he saw few of them more than
once.

All he wanted was friendship and sex combined in
women who were content in their singleness. He hadn't expected this
to be so difficult to find.

He couldn't figure what the hell it was that kept an
attractive, intelligent woman like Cassandra Mitchell buried alive on
the Sunshine Coast. Still, he told himself, she must have her
reasons. just as he had his.

He hoped her friend George was no longer even a
remote contender as Sechelt's felon of the year.

But he made a note—finally—in his book. He'd have
to check out that business of the color of Wilcox's sweater. He was
pretty sure Frank Erlandson had gotten his times mixed up, all right.
Yet if he and his sister both took naps after lunch, it was just
possible that he'd sat out on his porch twice that day and had seen
George the first time.

But that didn't make sense, Alberg thought
impatiently, closing the notebook. It Wilcox had killed the old man,
why the hell would he come trotting down the road two hours later to
find the body?

Alberg stood up and stared out through the window.
It's got to be the fishmonger, he thought. And we'll find him. It's
only a matter of time.

He noticed the sunlight slanting intohis front yard,
shining almost amber upon his hydrangeas. He felt a sudden
inexplicable exhilaration. The flowers were larger than they had been
four days earlier, and beginning to show their blueness. He was very
happy that he hadn't gotten around to chopping them down.
 

CHAPTER 15

The weather was holding. Sunday was again hot and
dry, with not even a sea breeze to temper it. Nothing but total
immersion in the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean, thought Alberg,
baking in his back yard, could bring his body temperature dovm. Yet
he wasn't complaining. This kind of heat was unusual in Sechelt at
any time of year, rare indeed in June, and unusual weather heightened
his awareness of things and increased his interest in them.

Besides, the waitress at the diner where he'd had a
late breakfast had told him it wouldn't last.

"Watch the sunset," she'd said, lifting his
coffee cup to wipe up the liquid she'd sloshed into the saucer.
"It'll be clear as a bell, not a cloud in sight. But it'll be
the last one like that for a while." She tossed the cloth into
the sink behind her, put her hands on her wide hips, and inspected
the street outside the window; Alberg could almost see the heat
shimmering there. "Tomorrow'll start out just like today, get
even hotter, probably, but by evening the clouds'll start coming and
you'll see, we'll have rain by Tucsday.”

"
And how long will the rain last?" said
Alberg.

She calculated, her hennaed finger waves shining in
the sun. "A week,” she said firmly. "Maybe longer.”

He ate a sandwich and drank a can of beer for dinner
and tried calling the cat again. He had a tin of tuna for her if she
showed up. But there was still no sign of her.

He dressed carefully before going to meet Cassandra
in tan chinos and a green shirt and, because they were going to walk
on the beach, sneakers. He looked at himself, dissatisfied.

Finally he rolled the sleeves of his shirtup to just
below his elbows and undid the first two buttons, revealing some of
the blond hair on his chest. He combed his hair, wishing it were
thicker, and checked under the clump that fell over his forehead, but
decided, probing cautiously, that it hadn't receded any more under
there since the last time he'd looked. He studied himself somberly in
the mirror for another minute, thinking about Freddie Gainer's hair,
which certainly looked a lot thicker since he'd had that damn
permanent.

Alberg was suddenly
embarrassed by his absorption in his physical self. He actually
glanced around him, as if someone might be watching and finding great
amusement in his performance. Then he shook his head to unsmooth his
hair, did up the second button on his shirt, and left the house.

* * *

Golden Arms was a place created by one of the local
service clubs for elderly people still self-sufficient but aware that
they were losing the confidence necessary to live alone. It was a
single-story complex, U-shaped, with a large lawn in the middle. The
units at the end had small patios with sliding doors and were
occupied by couples.

Alberg hadn't given much thought—until he found
himself walking down one side of the U, looking at the numbers on the
doors—to the intimacy his picking up Cassandra there might imply.
He felt there were people peeking at him from behind their curtains,
up and down the rows on either side of the large lawn, and called
himself paranoid.

When he had found the right door, and knocked, and
been admitted by Cassandra, he completely filled the dining area of
Mrs. Mitchell's kitchen. She was sitting in a chair by the window in
the living room, to his right, fanning herself with a magazine.

"
l won't get up,” she said. "If I did,
one of us would have to move outside." She was a small, rotund
woman with gray hair cut like Prince Valiant's. She wore glasses and
smiled at him with an air of cool speculation that made him uneasy.

Cassandra introduced them, leaned down to kiss her
mother's cheek, and reached around Alberg for a straw handbag sitting
on the kitchen table. She seemed anxious to leave.  ln the car,
he made a polite remark about her mother.