We watched three episodes of the second season of Joan of Arcadia before calling it a night. Steve hadn’t been able to come by, but he had called around nine, mostly to check up on us, but being deliberately chatty about the mundanities of his day to set me at ease. Denise and I had made popcorn for supper, neither of us feeling up to much more.
When we were ready for bed, all scrubbed up and teeth brushed, we stood in our pajamas at our respective bedroom doors for a few minutes, not quite wanting to break off into solitude.
“Oh this is silly, isn’t it?” Denise laughed, a bit forced. “Imagine two grown women afraid to go to bed.”
“Well, it’s not without cause.”
“But we’re being watched by the police and there are alarms on all the windows now, which I will probably be setting off accidentally for years to come.”
“You’re right. We are safe. Sweet dreams.” I turned to go into the guest bedroom.
“Same to you, Randy. And thanks for being here with me.”
“Any time, Denise.” After all, that’s what friends were for.
Despite our shared fretfulness, it didn’t take me long to fall asleep. I had taken a couple of painkillers to stave off a headache that all that television had induced, and the pills probably added to the soporific for me.
I might have caught two or three hours’ sleep before being woken by a noise in the hall. My heart was beating like a tambourine somewhere in the region of my clavicle. I convinced my body to move quietly out from under the covers, though all I wanted to do was freeze where I was, listening for another sound.
There was nothing to grab by way of a weapon, so I took one of Denise’s thick pillows as a possible shield against the killer’s knife-wielding skills. I crept to the door of my bedroom, and put my hand on the doorknob.
It was like gearing up to pull off a bandage. I took a deep breath and yanked the door open. By the glow of the hall nightlight I could see a figure creeping toward the stairs. The noise I had made stopped the movement and the figure turned toward me.
“Denise! What the hell are you doing?”
“Oh Randy. I’m so sorry to wake you. I was hoping I could go and be back without anyone being the wiser.”
“Go where? I don’t get it. We’re supposed to be staying here to avoid being killed. Why would you want to go out in the middle of the night, dressed all in black? You look like a cat burglar.”
Denise looked abashed. “I was thinking about what Jennifer Gladue said about who they were targeting, and it occurred to me that Kieran is all of those things. He is a director, involved with both the Freewill Festival and the Fringe, and he is very much into physical activity. We were talking about going skiing in the mountains this winter over the Christmas break, and maybe doing some ice climbing in the Maligne Canyon.”
“So he’s outdoorsy. That doesn’t explain why you’re sneaking out in the middle of the night. The police have just barely got over the idea that you are their prime suspect and here you go, playing right into the hands of whoever is trying to frame or kill you.”
“But I was thinking I could be there and back before dawn.”
“Dawn comes pretty damn early these days.” I had to go to the bathroom, but I couldn’t risk turning my back on Denise while she was set on doing something foolish. “Where were you planning to be back from?”
“Kieran’s back shed.”
“Okay, so I really have to go to the washroom. Promise me you will not go anywhere without me.” Denise brightened in spite of herself. I pulled the door closed, hoping she’d honour the promise. To keep her there, I kept talking through the door. “What is in Kieran’s back shed?”
“That’s what I was hoping to find out. I was lying there, thinking about what Detective Gladue had been saying to us, and thinking about him and his skiing and ice climbing, and the whole thought of climbing gear is what I landed on.”
I washed my hands and swiped them on a towel before rejoining my friend the second-storey gal in the hallway.
“So you think that Kieran’s climbing ropes are how he got Eleanor into position under the river valley stairs and hoisted Christian into the bell tower?”
“For all I know, they’re how he got onto my balcony the other night. And he would know where to find me. He has actually been here, which I can’t say for every other director in town.”
Once again, she had a point.
“Okay, give me five minutes to get dressed. I’m coming with you.”
Steve was going to kill me, but that was only if we didn’t end up dead first. I slipped into socks, a pair of jeans, a bra, and a sweatshirt. The nights were just starting to cool down a bit from the heat of the days, and although we’d been stuck inside for three days, we had spent enough time on Denise’s balcony to gauge a slight chill in the weather.
Denise was wearing her running shoes, but I grabbed my walking sandals. I hadn’t really packed for breaking and entering when we’d planned my extended sleepover. In fact, we were just lucky my sweatshirt was plain and dark-hued, and not my World of Science souvenir glow-in-the-dark constellations map.
Denise popped her keys and a small flashlight from her kitchen drawer into a thin leather fanny pack. I grabbed my phone, setting it on silent, thinking it would be useful as either a way to call for help or to take photos of incriminating evidence we discovered in Kieran’s back shed. If we ever got to his shed.
I whispered to Denise as we went down the stairs to her underground parking stall, “If the police have the place under surveillance, what makes you think they’ll not notice us driving away?”
“They have been coming around on the hour. I don’t think there is anything happening out there right now, at 2:18. We can head out the parkade door, and left down the alley, drive through the next alley and be out on University Avenue within a block. Mostly, traffic goes in and out either on 76 Avenue to the east, or at the light right across from the Aberhart Clinic to the north. Very few people pay attention to the first Saskatchewan Drive entrance ever since they closed Keillor Road and the LRT tied things up at the other end. It just doesn’t pay to cut through Belgravia anymore.”
I shrugged. She sounded like she’d thought things through, and that was enough for me. My friend was one of the top scholars in her field. If she had set her mind to this problem, she had dealt with all the potential pitfalls and possibilities. In fact, that was the reason I had always known without a doubt that Denise was innocent of the crimes, even when the police were considering her their prime suspect. If Denise had been the killer, not only would no suspicion have fallen on her, but all the murders would have looked like accidents.
As we drove down a back alley completely free of police vehicles, I realized that the first death was indeed still looking like an accident. I glanced at my friend, so determined in her actions, which at present included driving down a narrow alley with only running lights on. This was no time to doubt her morality. Denise was no killer.
She flipped the lights on when we got to the end of the second alley. Another turn and we were making a left out onto University Avenue.
“Doesn’t Kieran live over in Old Strathcona?”
“He’s in Mill Creek, but I figured we would take the scenic route.”
“It’s almost three in the morning, what’s to see?”
“Trust me, Randy.” And sure enough, once we were down the hill by Hawrelak Park, where I had spent so much of the earlier part of the summer, we crossed the bridge and beetled along the northside of the North Saskatchewan River and down River Valley Road toward the baseball stadium. Denise turned right onto the Macdonald Expressway and crossed the river again before turning right up the hill by the Old Timers’ Cabin. I had counted perhaps three lights, and with Denise’s luck, they had all been green. Had she used the south-side route, there would have been at least fifteen intersections with streetlights.
“At this time of night there’s much less traffic, unless you are out on a weekend, but yes, if you try for the arterial routes through or around this city, you can mange pretty well.”
I let Denise talk, mostly to keep us both from fretting about what we were about to do. She drove two blocks further than Kieran’s street and turned left into a leafy, dark avenue.
We found a place to park a block and a half away. She and I walked quietly back the two blocks, turning down the alleyway behind Kieran’s house. After three or four lots, Denise shook her head and led me back to the mouth of the alley.
“All the fences are high, and I can’t figure out which is his house. We’re going to have to go around to the street side and count from the corner.” We walked to the other side of the road, which was the side without streetlights, and counted seven buildings till Denise nodded and pointed at the tall house with the huge veranda. It looked well kept, but older than the houses on either side. Since this was a desirable neighbourhood, with access to a ravine park and five minutes away from either downtown or Old Strathcona, a lot of people had been buying up older houses and razing them to erect modern megahomes in their stead. Most had incorporated elements of the neighbourhood into their designs, so it could have been a lot worse than it was.
Kieran’s house was painted in dark colours; maybe it was even black. All cats look black in the dark, as my grandmother used to say, which was some sort of sexual aphorism that I never wanted to get into with her. There were no lights showing from the front. There were no lights on in any of the houses, but of course, at three in the morning that wasn’t terribly surprising. Edmonton had never been accused of being the city that never slept.
We doubled back to the alley and walked in, counting to eight. There was a two-car garage taking up most of the access to the yard and a six-foot gate filling in the rest of the space to the left of the garage. Even in the dark, the fence boards looked darker than their neighbours’. Denise looked at me and shrugged before reaching for the latch on the gate.
The hinges were well oiled and made no sound as we let ourselves into Kieran Frayne’s backyard. “The shed is on the other side of the garage,” Denise whispered into my ear. We crept forward along the dark path beside the garage, me hoping that Kieran didn’t have an outdoor security system, or a dog. As we rounded the corner, no motion detector lights came on, so we picked our way past the jardinières that lined Kieran’s brick-covered yard. The man had no grass at all. I doubted we’d be tripping over a lawn mower in his shed.
Denise got to the shed first, but I managed to grab her shoulder before she touched the hasp on the door. I motioned to her to pull her sleeve down over her hand. She smiled grimly and did so. The door wasn’t locked, mostly I guessed because who would assume there was a narrow building wedged in between the garage and the neighbour’s fence? The shed was tucked back two feet from the edge of the garage, so from most of the yard it would be invisible. I wondered how Denise had known it was there.
She turned to me and held her finger over her lips, the universal sign of “you’re too stupid to realize we need to be quiet now.” Reaching into her fanny pack—which she must have bought for her trail running, because there was no way Denise would keep something that was no longer in style just for sentimental reasons—she pulled out her penlight. It was a surprisingly wide and powerful beam.
The first thing we saw inside was Kieran’s ten-speed bike. Or maybe it was a fifteen-speed; I couldn’t tell. My bike was a single-speed with the brake in the pedals A skateboard was leaned up against the wall between the studs, and some high-tech snowshoes were in the next section of studs. Cross-country skis and their downhill cousins were tucked back-to-back between large brad nails that appeared to have been pounded in deliberately for them. A scuffed pair of polymer-and-clamps speedskates hung from another nail.
Denise knelt near a red bag and unzipped it to reveal its contents. “Here’s his climbing gear.” She sat back on her heels to let me see inside the bag. There were various shiny metal pieces with one sharp end and a hole at the other, a short-handled pickaxe, a belt or harness of some sort, a helmet that looked like fibreglass cladding on a Styrofoam bucket, and a bunch of carabiners and hooks.
“Where are the ropes?”
“That’s a very good question,” Denise whispered.
I took pictures of the bag’s contents, the bag in situ, and the length of the shed, hoping the flash of my camera wouldn’t alert anyone to our whereabouts. Finally, I tapped Denise on the arm. She was poking about at the far end of the shed in a jumble of old lawn chairs and a frayed umbrella.
“We need to get out of here.” She nodded. We made our way carefully past Kieran’s tidy sporting equipment and out of the shed. The space and relative brightness of the outdoors made navigating the backyard a breeze. Pretty soon we were heading down the alley and back toward Denise’s car.
On the way home we stayed on the south side. Denise drove Whyte Avenue till it meshed with University Drive and then replicated her earlier route back to her condo. By mutual agreement, we decided sleep was out of the question. Although Kieran’s shed had been almost unnaturally tidy, I showered quickly to remove any possible residual cobwebs while Denise put on coffee. When I came into the living room in my sweats and a towel turbaned on my head, she excused herself to wash up.
I drank coffee and uploaded the photos I’d taken on my phone to my laptop. The flash had done a good job of brightening the scene, showing more in the split-second captures than we had managed with a concentrated flashlight source. I was right. Kieran was an amazing housekeeper. Make that shedkeeper. Everything was in its place. Everything was clean and tidy. There was no dirt on the floor to show up footprints, which was lucky for us, because we hadn’t even thought about that when we’d sneaked in.
There was a shot of half of Denise’s face in one photo, which was something we didn’t need to have as evidence. I scanned it for any other useful data, but it was mostly of the far end of the shed, where the junky stuff was stashed. I pulled the photo over to the recycle bin on my laptop and clicked on the next photo. The bag of climbing gear, open on the floor of the shed, looked even larger and emptier as I thought about the missing ingredient of ropes. I wondered if they were now in the evidence room at the southside police station, or still hanging in the bell tower of the Walterdale Theatre. Or maybe they were somewhere else, for a perfectly valid reason. For all I knew, climbers didn’t store their ropes with their clamps and hooks.
I looked at the other pictures, and Denise came and sat beside me, eager to find something useful from our dangerous foray.
“He’s awfully organized.”
I nodded. “I’ve never seen such a tidy shed. Is his house the same?”
“His pantry looks like a store display. And everything is where it needs to be. There is a second shampoo bottle behind the one presently being used. The recycle bin is under the mail table in the hall, and his chequebook, stamps, and extra envelopes are in a drawer there, in case he wants to send a donation to a charity that has written him.”
“Wow, what sort of mind does it take to be that organized?” I wondered.
Denise shrugged. “He directs two plays simultaneously each summer and is constantly looking ahead for the next winter projects to tide him over between seasons. To survive in that context, you’d need to be organized.”
I gazed at the photos. Everything was in its place in Kieran’s world. Everything except his ropes.