The Suspect - L R Wright (19 page)

"What's going on?” said George.

Tears appeared at the corners of the boy's eyes.
Carlyle let go of his wrist. He did up a button on the boy's white
shirt, which had come undone during the one-sided fracas. He tugged
indifferently at the shirt, smoothing it. Then he reached out and
with no expression at all patted the boy's cheek, his hand lingering
there, smudging the tears.

He turned to George, his eyes bright. "No
trouble, " he said. He pulled down his shirt cuffs and adjusted
his tie. "A small difference of opinion. That's all." He
turned and went back into the classroom without giving the boy
another glance. George turned to the student, who began shoving his
shirt back inside the waistband of his cords. "Are you sure
you're all right?"

The boy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What the hell happened?" said George.

But the student refused to answer. After a moment he
went quietly back inside the classroom ....

George stopped rowing. He hung onto the oars and
rested his face on the backs of his hands. The muscles in his
shoulders were fluttering. He checked his coordinates: the end of the
spit of land was almost directly opposite him, on his left. He
hoisted the burlap bag up onto the edge of the boat and pushed it
over. It made hardly any noise as it hit the water. He leaned over
and watched the ripples from its passage into darkness disappear. He
waited, watched, but it didn't return to the surface.

Wearily, he turned the boat around. The moon was to
his left, now, halfway between the horizon and the top of the sky,
and sometimes it disappeared briefly behind a veil of cloud
stretching across the sky from the west. Ahead of him lay the ocean,
a black carpet to nowhere; he could see it rippling. He thought about
turning around again and continuing to row out to sea, watching the
shore as it retreated farther and farther and then disappeared. He
would row on and on through the soft warm night until his arms
collapsed and the weight of them pulled him into the bottom of the
boat, where he would sleep until awakened by the day. Then he would
sit up and look around and find himself approaching a small
uninhabited island. He would let himself drift onto its beach and he
would climb out and lie down on the sand, and on the softness of the
sand with the sea kissing the soles of his feet he would sleep while
the hot sun soothed him and he'd never wake up, just sleep there
forever on the soft sand, in the hotness of the sunshine.

Except that there wouldn't be any sunshine tomorrow.
The clouds were coming.

The muscles in his shoulders bumed. He glanced behind
him, to see how far he had to go, and kept on rowing .... She ran up
to him, her arms filled with lilac. He remembered hinking that she
ought to be queen of that festival they had somewhere down in
Washington, a lilac festival, the color of the flowers suited her so
well. She thrust them into his hands and threw her arms around him.
The lilacs were smothered against his chest. He felt her cheek
against his, and smelled the lilacs, and ever since that day Audrey
never came into his mind without bringing with her the softness of
her cheek and the scent of lilac.

"Please be happy for me, George, like Myra is,”
she said.

"
We're going to be married, Carlyle and I."

It he'd had that kind of shock now, at age eighty, he
would have died of it.

"
You can't do this,” he had said, incredulous
and appalled, clutching the lilacs. But she laughed, and put an arm
around his waist, and led him into the kitchen where Myra waited,
smiling, ready to open a bottle of wine in celebration. If only he
could have found, somewhere, the right thing to say!

He knew he wouldn't convince Myra. Whatever he said
to Myra sounded weak and desperate because she couldn't know what lay
behind his fear, he had never told her; she could not possibly have
understood the bleakness, the sickness that struck at his soul, when
Audrey said it: "We're going to be married, Carlyle and I."
The more he railed against it, the more impatient and exasperated
Myra became. "What have you got against him, for God's sake?
Isn't she entitled to a life of her own? Are you going to keep her
chained to you—to us—forever?"

But Audrey understood. She knew exactly what he
feared, and why. But she refused to discuss it. So he had said,
"He's  too old for you!" and God knew that was true
enough, there were twenty years between them. And he had said, "I
don't like him!" and that ought to have been enough; oh, Christ,
if only that had been enough .... She would have been sixty-four,
now, he thought: a woman in her prime.

He hadn't given up. Not until the last minute. On the
day of her wedding, in desperation he told her about the episode in
the school hallway. He told her other things, he gave her other
examples of Carlyle's meanness, his cruelty. He rattled them off with
an urgency that caused his face to flush and his heart to beat fast:
Carlyle's snide remarks about his colleagues; his contempt for his
students; his hatred of women, hidden behind a facade of gallantry;
his loathing for animals; his appalling rages—George held his
sister by her shoulders on the day she was to be married and forced
her to listen to him, and when she averted her head, refusing to
hear, he shook her violently and flung her aside and saw in that
gesture all the things he feared for her.

From the chair into which she had fallen, Audrey said
nothing.

"Do you want this?" George shouted, almost
weeping. "Don't you see what you're doing?"

"What I see is that you can't forget things that
should be forgotten," said Audrey. "But I can, and I will.
You've made sacrifices for me, I know that. You made them for her,
too, I remember that. You couldn't help how it ended. You've got to
stop torturing yourself." She got up to embrace him, but he
wouldn't let her. "You're a good man, George,” said Audrey,
who was crying, now. "I know you mean well. But you've got to
stop this. I'm going to marry him. You're wrong about him, I know
it."

He hadn't been able to find the right words. He had
failed her, and for that he never forgave her, and in the end it had
idlied her.

He looked behind him. The shore was still a long way
off. He saw the moon strike from between two clouds and lay a cool
white path across the water, pointing obliquely at the land.

He didn't remember the wedding. He had no
recollection of it at all, although he knew he'd been there. He'd
given his sister away.

George hurt all over, now. The oars weighed a hundred
pounds each, and the ocean had transformed itself into molasses, or
tar. He had to stop after every two or three strokes, breathing
heavily, to flex his shoulder muscles and let his head drop while he
tried to relax and strengthen himself.

He knew his failure had killed her. He was certain of
it. And all three of them were therefore culpable: Audrey, Carlyle,
and George himself.

He had put his own guilt in abeyance in California,
working furiously all day and gardening himself into exhaustion in
the evenings. Back in Vancouver he thought he had come to terms with
it, even put it finally to rest, by growing and nurturing with
increasing skill the living things that Audrey had loved. Years later
they had moved here, he and Myra. "It's the twilight of our
years, my love," she had said, smiling, teasing him. They bought
the little house by the sea and he started his small garden and they
went to Vancouver to see Carol every month or so and everything was
hunky-dory.

And then Carlyle had popped out of those goddamn
laurel bushes and George's guilt made a swift return, supplanting
almost everything in his life, creating dreadful, terrible flashes of
things in his head.

But he got it under control.

Until Myra died. He felt so vulnerable, then. He
thought about moving to Vancouver, living with Carol, who was all
alone now, too—but his garden, his garden—and then last
Tuesday...only six days ago, he thought: less than a week ago ....

He stopped rowing, lowered his head, and rubbed at
his eyes.

. . . he sees him shout at her, roar at her, his
eyes bright and his face shiny with sweat. She stands before him full
of sweet reason, and it means sweet bugger-all. His hand snaps back
and he hits her in the face; George sees her mouth bleed. . .

But is it Carlyle? Is it Audrey?

He jerked up his head and started rowing again, hard,
pain grabbing at his shoulders.

. . .he hits the floor, her limbs flying like
those of a doll . . . he crouches; his fist buries itself fast and
hard in her stomach. . .

But
whose
limbs?
Whose
fist?

He shook his head violently; he would not do this
must not do this will not think of this. . .

George was weeping now, hot tears gushing as he
rowed.

There was nothing to look at in front of him but
blackness, and to his right, the soft slow-moving land, lightless,
edged by a ribbon of silver sand. He rested again on his oars and 
knew he was too tired to take the boat back where he'd gotten it. He
changed course, heading straight for his own beach. Could he have
been wrong about Carlyle? Had the past laid such a black shadow upon
him that he couldn't see to make rational judgments? Had he struck
Carlyle because of the past, only the past, a time of which Carlyle
was innocent, of which he should have remained ignorant? Had he
killed him only because he was afraid to hear things he knew were
true, and thought he had learned to live with?

Was it possible that Carlyle wasn't guilty, after
all? Was it possible that he hadn't deserved to die?

Aching with exhaustion, sick with uncertainty, George
rowed still harder, battling the tide.
 

CHAPTER 20

Alberg drove slowly from the detachment office down
the hill and turned onto the highway leading south through Sechelt.
He made himself keep his eyes open as he drove, looking for the
vandals who had twice broken into Pete Venner's corner store, on the
watch for the kid who liked to roar through town at sixty miles an
hour flashing his father's Trans-Am under the streetlights, and
dutifully watching, too, for an old VW van with rainbows on its
sides.

He saw only quiet streets. Almost everything was
closed, now; it was after ten o'clock. There were no bars or beer
parlors in the village itself, only restaurants where you could order
wine or beer with your meal. There was the government liquor store in
the shopping center, which closed at six, and there was a lounge in
the new hotel down by the water; never any trouble there, the
clientele was middle-aged and subdued. It was a short drive to George
Wilcox's house. Alberg pulled up in front and switched off the
engine.

The house was dark. The neighbors' houses were dark,
too. The stillness made him uneasy, and for a minute he wished he
were on Denman Street, in Vancouver's West End. Everything was open
there, bars and restaurants and movie theaters, and there was lots of
noise. Kids with punk haircuts swished along the sidewalks on
skateboards, and the traffic was bumper to bumper, and bicycles
weaved among the cars, and English Bay at the end of the street was
still crowded even at this hour, and up and down the streets and
alleys prostitutes male and female young and old sold themselves
while trying to avoid being "pressing and persistent." And
children were selling themselves, too. Whenever he thought of the
West End, Alberg thought of Stanley Park, vinegary fish and chips,
and perversion.

He got out of the car and went through the gate up to
George Wilcox's front door. He knocked softly, waited, knocked again,
waited, knocked harder. Nobody came to the door. He couldn't hear a
sound.

He made his way around the side of the house and
looked in the windows of George's bedroom. It was empty, the bed
made. He went to the other side of the house, squeezing between the
house and the cedar hedge. The living room windows were too high; he
couldn't see what was on the sills. The cedar hedge made a
ninety-degree turn at the end of the house and it was too thick to
push through. Alberg went around the other way, to the back yard, and
got the ladder from the toolshed. He carried it around the house to
the living room side. He leaned it against the house and climbed up
until his eyes were level with the windows.

On the sill to his left he saw the three china
flowers set in a base, the two Hummel figurines, the empty pipe
holder. On the other sill, two Toby mugs, a pair of brass
candlesticks and a candle snuffer, a wooden salt shaker and pepper
mill. The objects had been distributed so as to fill evenly all the
available space on the windowsill. When he had first seen them they
were closer together, and first in line had stood two
forty-millimeter shell casings; he remembered thinking they were
probably from a Bofors gun, and noticing the decorative work that had
been done on them.

He climbed down and returned the ladder to the
toolshed. He knocked on the back door, but nobody answered. He tried
the door; it was locked.

Alberg stood in the middle of the lawn, his hands in
his pockets, looking at George's garden and wondering where he had
buried them. Then he turned and walked over to the canvas chair and
sat down. He put his hands on its wooden arms and crossed his anldes.