On his way home, he saw the light on in Caxton’s office and tried not to notice, but Caxton was sitting at his desk, looking out the window. Pickett waved, and Caxton stood to wave back, so Pickett was more or less obliged to stop. Caxton met him at the door. “Come in for a nightcap, Mel? I could use the company.”
Pickett walked through into the living room and sat down, wondering what he had let himself in for. He did not think of Caxton as a serious drinker, but the half-full bottle of rye was open on the coffee table, and Caxton’s glass was in his hand. Caxton poured Pickett a giant drink and added ginger ale, all without asking, then handed him the glass. Pickett, who hated rye and ginger ale, wet his lips and sat back.“He’s done it to me, Mel, like I told you. He had to get killed to do it, but he’s done it. She’s leaving.”
“Betty? When?”
“Soon as she can sell the bakery. Maybe before. She’s closing the shop and going.”
“This is just day one. She’ll feel different in the morning.”
“I doubt it. But even if she does, I think he’s screwed us up.” He dropped his head, then slowly raised it until he was looking closely at Pickett’s face. Pickett wondered how drunk he was, and what kind of a drunk he would turn out to be. “What happened?” he asked, to have something to say.
Caxton focused on him, his eyes blinking as if against a strong light. “She doesn’t want me to come around anymore.”
“But …”
“But, but, no fucking buts, she just told me to get lost.”
“In those words?”
“Yes. No. What’s the difference?”
Pickett started to speak, but Caxton waved him silent. This was a monologue. “You know, finally I thought things were going good. I was married once, until one of the guys told me she was fucking everybody in the district. After that I could never find a steady, you know what I mean?” He waited until Pickett nodded. He knew what Caxton meant. “Mostly, you know, hookers, and then nothing. Then I met Betty again when I came here. Took a long time for us to get together, but it was worth it. She wouldn’t move in with me but she came over here, know what I mean?” Pickett nodded again. “We were going to get married soon. Just about to announce it, we were. You were on the list to come to the wedding. Not now. Not now. She says when they find out who did it, everyone will blame Timmy as much as the guy who killed him. So she’s leaving.”
“It doesn’t make much sense. But go with her. Start up again.”
“Don’t you think I offered?” Caxton’s face came closer.
Easy now, Pickett thought. This guy wants to hit someone. But Caxton quieted down with his next words.
“She won’t have me. Says we’d better break it up now. She says she won’t be responsible for me giving up everything that I’ve got here. But what have I got if she goes?” Caxton pulled out a desk drawer and emptied it on the floor. “Garbage is what I’ve got. Pile of garbage.”
“Why don’t I make some coffee, Lyman?”
Caxton seemed not to hear. “You know, when I left Lands and Forests everything turned to rat shit, until I came here. Then gradually it started to go right. When they made me chief, I was as happy as I’ve ever been. Betty was the clincher. Now she’s going. If that son of a bitch wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him myself.”
“Easy.” Pickett racked his brains in an effort to turn Caxton onto a narrative path, away from his misery. “You said you met Betty again. Did you know her before somewhere?”
Caxton looked at Pickett from a long way away, trying to get the focus right. “Didn’t I tell you? We met at a dance in Kenora years ago when I was working in the Keewatin district. She was on holiday there. But she already had a boyfriend in Winnipeg, so I never saw her again. I didn’t forget, though, nor did she.” He paused to keep his narrative straight. “Jesus, it was all going so well, you know? She’d just told Timmy he had to move out of the house, and if he would move away, even to Sweetwater, so as not to be a problem for me, she would have helped him out until he found a job. With him out of the way, we could get married. Now he’s dead, and she keeps saying she’s afraid of what might come out.”
“Does she think he was involved in something crooked around here?”
“She’s just afraid.”
“Did she know where he was this weekend? Did she know he was missing?”
“He told her he was going to Toronto. Says he acted like he was going to some woman. Maybe he was. But he didn’t get there. Maybe he met someone’s husband along the way.”
“She must have been shocked.”
“Not at first.” Caxton adopted a wry expression much magnified by his drunkenness. “I tried to break it to her gently. I told her they’d found a guy dead on the trail. You know what she said? ‘Timmy didn’t do it.’ When I told her it was Timmy who was dead, she didn’t react at all. Not at first. Later on she started to cry about her poor Timmy, but not right away. Then when I went back there tonight, she’d already made up her mind. She said she’d had time to think it over and if Timmy was killed up on that trail, then it was a local, and probably something to do with a woman, and when it all came out she wouldn’t want to live here anymore. So she’s going now. When I tried to tell her what a good-for-nothing, sponging bastard he was, always in rut, she started in on me. ‘He was my brother and he was all I had,’ she said, kind of shouting, ‘You’ve never liked him, and you’re glad he’s dead. So go.’ I never heard her shout before. What’ll I do, Mel? This is my whole life, right here.”
“Stay, then.”
“With her gone?” Caxton’s face twisted in misery.
And then, for all his sympathy, Pickett felt bored and tired. And embarrassed. He was not Caxton’s friend, and yet here he was being thrust into the role, because there was no one else. Pickett thought of himself as a loner; before Charlotte he often thought he knew about loneliness. But he could think of at least three people apart from Charlotte who cared what happened to him, and then, in his new contentment, he was flooded with pity for Caxton, who thought he had found someone like that, only to have her evaporate. “Don’t sit here drinking, Lyman,” he said. “I have to get home and let the dog out. Come home with me. Have some coffee. Stay at my place if you like.”
“She means it, I’m telling you.”
“Wait and see.”
It wasn’t going to be easy to get away. Pickett resigned himself to sit it out, and tasted his drink again. Then he said, “I forgot. I’m allergic to this stuff. You got any scotch?”
Caxton shook his head. “Got some cognac. Betty liked cognac.”
“Where is it? I’ll get it.”
Back in his chair with something drinkable, Pickett said, “Where did Betty come from? Before she moved here.”
Caxton squinted at him. “Barrie. Yeah, Barrie. That’s where she got married. Then her husband wanted to open his own business and they heard of the bakery up here.”
“When was this?”
“Fifteen years ago?”
“She was from Manitoba originally, right? Whereabouts?”
“She was born in Dauphin. She left home early, when she was about seventeen. Because of her old man.”
Pickett braced himself for yet another story of incest. But it was a more conventional brutality that Caxton was referring to.
“He was a drunk. Beat her up sometimes. Kept taking her money So she went off to Winnipeg, on her own.”
“And Timmy?”
“He stayed home. He was just a kid. Then her mother died and Betty went back to look after her brother. When he was old enough, he took off on his own and she went back to Winnipeg, but then she came east to get away from the old man. He had a bad habit of turning up on her doorstep in Winnipeg, drunk. He froze to death in the end. Drove his pickup into a ditch in the middle of winter.”
All this was helping. Talking seemed to calm Caxton down. Pickett tried again. “Where will she go now?”
“She won’t say. She won’t tell me.”
“So go to bed and think about it tomorrow.”
“She means it, Mel.”
For Christ’s sake. “So believe her. She’s gone. You have to start again. But not tonight. Tonight you have to go to bed. And I have to get back to let the dog out. I’ve been away too long as it is.”
But it took another hour. By that time Caxton had drunk the last third of the bottle of rye, and Pickett persuaded him to lie down on the couch and take his shoes off. When he passed out, Pickett turned off the lights and drove home to Willis.
Caxton called him the next morning as he was finishing his breakfast. “Was I being an asshole last night?” he wanted to know.
“No more than usual.”
“I told you about Betty, eh?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I just wrote her a letter. Told her how much I’ve appreciated her over the last few years.”
Jesus.
“That sounds good,” Pickett said. “But don’t send it off right away. Let it cook for a day or so.”
“Why?”
“Just to be sure it’s what you want to do. Last night you were … smashed. This morning you’re suffering. Wait until you feel normal.”
“That sounds like good advice. You’ve got a real head on you, Mel. That wasn’t what I called you for, though. See, Wilkie wanted me to drive Betty in to do the ID. I don’t want to do that now. Would you mind?”
“Tell Wilkie to send a car.”
“She asked me if I would ask you to take her in.”
“Why? I don’t even know her except to see.”
“I’ve told her about you and that cabin you’re building. She asked me.”
“Okay. What time?”
“All right. I’ll have to wash. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Pickett thought, When they ask you, you have to go, especially if they have no one else to ask.
The sign on the door of the bakery was turned to CLOSED. Betty Cullen came out as he pulled up in front of the store and stepped immediately into the car. Pickett turned onto the highway to Sweetwater. He waited for some indication from her that she wanted to talk, but they drove in silence until they reached the edge of Sweetwater. Then she said, “I guess you think I’m being hard on Lyman.”
So that was why he was driving her. She wanted to get a message to him, and probably through him to Caxton. He said, “You’re having a rough time. I don’t have any opinions on how you should be. You have to do what you feel like.”
“I won’t be able to stay here after they find out who killed Timmy.”
“Why don’t you wait and see? Could have been a stranger. Anyway, people won’t blame you.”
“They’ll point me out to each other.”
“For a few …”
“Look,” she interrupted him fiercely, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get rid of the bakery and go somewhere else. I’ve thought about it enough. But Lyman hasn’t done anything. He’s got a good life here, and it’s not fair that he should have to give it up.”
“Maybe he would want to.”
“I’m not letting him. Best for him that we finish now. But I didn’t ask you to drive me in for that. I just wanted to ask you to be a pal to him. Would you? He thinks a lot of you, and he doesn’t have any buddies. That’s partly his job, I suppose, but he’s always been more or less on his own. He needs someone to talk to, I know that. So I thought I’d tell you how much he admires you and maybe you could spend a little time with him. For a while.”
It was naked, embarrassing, and naive in its assumptions about relationships. How could he explain to her that he and Caxton had no history on which to base a friendship, that it wasn’t something you could just initiate if it hadn’t happened in the past three years? And then he thought that she wasn’t asking him to be bosom pals with Caxton. Just to keep an eye on him and listen to him occasionally. In other words, be a neighbor. He could do that.
“I’ll look him up,” he said. He added, “If he stays around.”
“Tell him to,” she said again, with a fierceness that surprised him. “Talk him out of leaving. Where would he go?”
Pickett pulled into the parking lot of the OPP detachment in Sweetwater and offered a thought. “You’re leaving because of the shame of it all, or some such, aren’t you? Don’t you think he might have trouble with that, too? He might not want to carry on being chief, might think that he’s tainted. He could well want to make a clean break.”
“Tell him not to,” she said. “Tell him to forget about me.”
★ ★ ★
They met Wilkie in his office, and he drove ahead of them to the little hospital where Marlow’s body was being kept in cold storage.
“Let me go first,” Wilkie said. “I’ll put the light on and you can go in when I come out. It’s pretty bad, you know that.”
She stood close to the door, waiting for the moment to go in. “I don’t want anyone watching me,” she said.
She came out almost immediately, nodded, and turned away, trembling slightly.
Pickett took her arm and led her back to the car. When he had helped her inside, he came back to Wilkie, who was standing by his own car. “She’ll want to know the schedule,” he said. “When can she think of a funeral?”
“There’s an autopsy, an inquest—I don’t know. Not until we’re sure what happened. Why are you driving her around?”
Pickett explained briefly her desire to keep Caxton out of any unpleasantness.
“Bit excessive, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not for her. I’ll do what I can.”
“Who shot him, Mel?”
“Everyone in Larch River is hoping it was a stranger.”
“You have to, don’t you?”
By the time Pickett had returned to the car she was composed enough to ask him to stop at a grocery store on the main street of Sweetwater. “I don’t want to be stared at, shopping in Larch River,” she reminded him. She seemed to be surviving her ordeal well enough now.
He waited at the door of the store to help carry her grocery bags to the car. They said nothing on the ride back. Pickett was feeling himself being sucked into Caxton’s world by the sheer pull of the man’s need of him, and he wanted to preserve some distance. He felt uneasy. There was no way of knowing where the investigation might lead, and while the idea of Lyman Caxton as a killer was absurd, his training told him that Wilkie couldn’t think that way. He did not want to be privy to any of Caxton’s secrets that Wilkie ought to know.
Betty unlocked the door of the bakery and stepped in, turning in the doorway to take the groceries from him. He was very conscious of Lyman Caxton sitting in his car, watching the house from a block away. In spite of wanting to stay clear, he would have to find an excuse to drop by; Caxton, it seemed to him, was capable of getting emotional enough to do something silly, like trying to hunt down the killer all by himself.