4

The Abysmal

Fate, I thought to myself. Was this my fate? To be floating around out here all alone while Evelyn perfected her designs on my husband? For I had no doubt that was her plan. Mrs. Kowalski would have said there’s no such thing as fate, that you have to make your own destiny. Was she right about that? Should I have foreseen this crime? In retrospect, the signs were plain: the perennials, the monogrammed notebook, the stocking.

I wondered how long ago this chain of events had begun and whether it had been destined to unfold this way. Alika believed that our marriage was meant to be. But he’d also once believed he was meant to be with Evelyn. That was before he’d ever laid eyes on me, he said, so it didn’t count. He had first met her at the corner convenience store — nothing especially preordained about that. But then he began to run into her everywhere. He bumped into her outside his gym. He saw her at the hardware store. She even came into the studio where he worked to have some photos retouched. There must have been a reason for all that coincidence, he thought. She seemed to turn up everywhere he went, as if by magic, as if by fate. And so Alika, son of Rosa, simply surrendered.

Evelyn peeked out the curtains, scanning the street below for signs of a police car. She couldn’t see one. Nevertheless, she was convinced she was under surveillance. And she could feel someone watching her, even when she was alone in her apartment, which was pretty much all the time, lately. It was that wistful, anaemic presence she’d first sensed outside her window a couple of weeks ago. It seemed to have invaded her apartment now, and she encountered its cold hostility and melancholic longing frequently, as she turned a corner or stepped from one room into another. It might be an evil spirit, or a wounded one. It might be somebody Evelyn once knew, somebody with something to tell her. She considered trying to exorcise it. There were plenty of chants for this purpose on the Internet. But she was wary of addressing this thing, whatever it was. She just might bond it to her by mistake. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Evelyn’s troubles with ghosts could be traced back about six years, to St. Bernadette’s School. When she’d returned from her aborted escape to BC, nearly a week late for the beginning of term, Sister Theresa had marched her straight to her room and helped her unpack, sifting carefully through her things with disapproval. As soon as she saw the magic kit, she marched Evelyn straight downstairs again, all the way to the cellar, where she made Evelyn hold the kit open while she threw its contents, item by item, into the incinerator. When the box was empty, she burned it, too, saying there was no place here for such things, and then she sent Evelyn to confession, forgetting that Evelyn wasn’t even Catholic.

The three other girls in Evelyn’s dorm at St. Bernadette’s were Catholics. They all professed to believe in angels and purgatory and the Resurrection. They went to confession and repeated Hail Marys for infractions such as putting chalk dust on Sister Theresa’s chair. They repeated the things the priest said about hell and the punishment that awaited the wicked. But at the same time, Evelyn could tell they didn’t really believe these things. If they had, they would never have behaved the way they did.

All the nuns said that fortune telling was the work of the Devil. Yet despite these warnings, the girls were fascinated by tarot cards and tea leaves and magic eight balls. During an unsupervised outing downtown, two of the more daring girls bought a Ouija board at a department store and smuggled it up to their room. Soon, even the most devout of Evelyn’s dorm mates joined the group around the candle after lights-out to consult the Ouija about exam results and future husbands.

All the girls thought it was very romantic that Evelyn had a dead brother, especially a dead twin, and one night they convinced her to try contacting him through the Ouija board.

The boldest girl, whose name was Jo, placed her fingers lightly on one edge of the little planchette and persuaded Evelyn to place her own fingers on the other. Then Jo posed a question.

“Mark James, can you hear us?”

At first, nothing happened.

Jo tried again. “Mark James, can you hear us?”

Still nothing happened. Jo kept repeating the question, in a dreadful monotone, until Evelyn begged her to stop. But then the planchette gave a little jerk and began to glide toward the word yes. Evelyn emitted a yelp and the candle blew out. In the darkness, the other girls grabbed onto one another, terrified and thrilled. Jo struck a match and relit the wick. They stared at each other in the dim light of the candle flame.

“Try again!” Betty cried.

“No,” said Evelyn.

But there was no stopping them now. They insisted. Evelyn reluctantly placed her trembling fingers back on the planchette.

“Can you hear us, Mark James?” Jo asked. “Do you have a message for your sister?”

The pointer began to move again, spelling out letters, now. Each time it spelled a word, Jo would pronounce it aloud. “E, V,” she said. “He’s spelling your name! Evelyn, look!”

Evelyn was looking. She was watching Jo very closely, to see if she was cheating. She could feel the planchette being tugged along beneath her fingers, but of course it was impossible to tell, or to prove, who might be moving it. It spelled out Evelyn’s name, then paused, then headed for the W.

“Where!” cried Jo. “Is! My! Where is my.” The pointer stopped.

“Where is my what?” asked Betty.

Evelyn had turned pale, but nobody noticed. They were caught up in deciphering the message. The pointer moved to M.

“Where is my mother?” Betty suggested. But the pointer moved next to A.

Only Evelyn knew what was coming. She watched with dread as the pointer moved from letter to letter, and then finally sat still.

“Where is my magic kit?” Jo was puzzled. “What’s he talking about?”

Evelyn made no answer. She was staring at the candle, remembering the green flames that shot out of the incinerator when Sister Theresa fed it the last coloured scarf in the magic kit. It had seemed to her then a kind of cremation, a farewell. But now Mark had emerged from his long silence on the other side. How was she ever going to get him to go back?

Felix opened the paper and thumbed through the pages, reading about the planned expansion of the floodway, the larviciding of the ditches. He checked out his horoscope…not that Felix believed in astrology. He’d once had a few drinks with a copyreader at the Star, a terrible skeptic who admitted to switching the horoscopes around before they went to press, so that Cancers were reading the advice for Virgos, and Virgos were reading Scorpio. “Nothing happened,” he told Felix. “Things went on as usual.”

The letters on the editorial page were full of complaints about the new casino, but Felix knew this was only a ploy on the part of the newspaper. Tomorrow, the letters would be full of praise for All-Am Development and the economic boom that was sure to follow the casino opening. Felix was so bored by the new casino he couldn’t read another sentence. He looked out the window for Alice’s car, although he knew she wouldn’t be home for another hour or so.

Alice had gone out to meet with her editor, who was getting nervous about the book deadline. The date for delivery of the manuscript had passed two months ago, and Alice was still writing. Yesterday, Felix came right out and asked her if she wanted his help, but Alice had smiled as usual and changed the subject. Now Felix got up and entered Alice’s study. The manuscript was stacked neatly beside the keyboard, weighed down with the stone Buddha he’d given her on their anniversary.

It wouldn’t hurt, would it? Just to take a peek?

If Louise didn’t win today, she was in trouble. She sat at the bar, nursing her glass of ginger ale, watching the backs of all the people at the VLTs. Every single machine was taken, and Louise was keeping her eye on a skinny old man in a yellow sweater who was also waiting for a turn. Louise was five feet closer to the machines than he was, and if she kept a sharp lookout, she’d beat him to it as soon as somebody quit. She was hoping for the machine second from the left, being played by a woman in a halter top and short shorts — probably a prostitute. Louise hoped she’d get a trick and quit soon. That machine hadn’t paid out for at least an hour, and if Louise was lucky, she’d be the one to collect when it did. It was all a matter of timing.

She tried not to think about Bradley Byrnes and what he wanted her to do. She’d been running all over town for him this past winter, doing little favours to pay off her debts to him, and now she wanted out. If she could just get on top of this money thing — earn enough off the VLTs to place a solid bet on the horses — maybe even get to Vegas — she could come out so far ahead she’d never have to worry again. She could pay off Byrnes and never have to speak to him again. Her relationship with him was spiralling out of control, making her sick with anxiety.

It started off innocently enough, a couple of years ago. When she’d needed help to pay back some unfortunate loans, she’d offered Byrnes a little inside information, before the casino project was public knowledge. She told him about the proposal, making it sound like a done deal, and Byrnes had been pleased. He’d paid off her loans and then got to work buying up properties in the condemned zone. He purchased eight abandoned, dilapidated buildings from grateful owners who were glad to get rid of them at last.

But it hadn’t ended there. Byrnes could have sold the buildings to All-Am for cash and walked away with a handsome profit. How Louise wished he had! Instead, he’d sold them for shares in the casino. He was a partner in it now — a silent partner, to keep attention off the speedy flip of his properties — and he was committed to the project, determined to see it succeed.

For this, he seemed to need Louise at every turn. First, there had been the trouble about the bidding — with All-Am nearly losing the contract to another company. Then City Council had hesitated on the tax breaks. Then that Historical Preservation business. Now this hassle over the injunction. And Byrnes expected Louise to take care of it all.

Finally! A woman at the far right cashed out and Louise made a bee-line for her machine. It wasn’t the machine she’d wanted, but by now Louise didn’t care. As long as she could get on any machine and set the process in motion. It was the only thing that kept her sane. It was better than yoga or Valium. When she was sitting in front of the VLTs, lulled by the wide bank of blinking lights, the colourful spinning fruits, the hypnotic sound of coins dropping and buttons clicking, she entered a state of serenity that lowered her blood pressure, emptied her mind. It was the only sure way she knew to keep her thoughts from circling endlessly around her marriage and her money problems — and the ungrateful children she’d raised. The two tall boys who didn’t need her any more, who’d turned their backs on her and boarded airplanes to American colleges where they’d quickly turned into men like their father. Her lost babies. She couldn’t bear to think about them. She gave the button a vicious jab. Come on, come on. It was her turn, goddamn it.

Evelyn’s stomach knotted and turned over, making her groan. She was ill, too upset about that detective to be able to do her shift tonight. She couldn’t stop worrying that he’d come back; she had no alibi for the night of Wendy’s fall, and she knew her fingerprints must be all over Wendy’s house. She called in sick to the convenience store, speaking in a raspy voice and faking a few coughs. She hoped her boss would believe she had the flu. She couldn’t afford to lose her job, no matter what happened.

She’d been lucky to find this job right after she graduated from St. Bernadette’s. As a graduation present, her father had offered to help with university tuition. But Evelyn had had enough of school. She didn’t think she could concentrate on studies, anyway, with Mark keeping her up at night the way he did. She wished she had never called him back. He would stand outside her window, waving his wand or performing, in elaborate pantomime, the tying of knots, the palming of coins. It seemed he never tired of upbraiding her for losing the magic kit. No, she couldn’t possibly muster the solitary discipline that studying required. She needed distraction. And the convenience store provided plenty of that.

The convenience store, in fact, was nothing but an endless series of distractions, urgent, trivial tasks that interrupted each other in an unbroken chain from morning to night, so that nobody who worked there could ever string together two coherent thoughts. Evelyn liked it that way. She also liked the anonymity of the place. There was a pleasant illusion of intimacy in the store, never authentic enough to be mistaken for true intimacy, and far more comforting than the real thing. Customers told her the most surprising details of their private lives, then took their newspapers or milk or coffee and simply left. Nobody asked her much about herself. She lost touch with Jo and Betty and the other girls from St. Bernadette’s, most of whom went on to university. She rented a small apartment near the store and settled into a small, circumscribed life in which there was little hope and therefore little disappointment.

Among the regulars, Evelyn had a few favourites. There was the elderly widow who shoplifted tins of cat food, while Evelyn made sure to look the other way, and the firefighters from the fire hall down the street who called her “Sweetheart” and complained about their wives. Her favourite customer of all was a young man with golden skin and a glass eye, who was forever leaving behind his sunglasses or his cigarettes or his keys. Evelyn would place these objects into the lost and found box, a little off to the side, apart from the ordinary jumble of lost things, because they were special. And because she knew he would be coming back. She recognized it as a form of flirting, this constant pretense at forgetting. A way of seeing her again and again. A way of making her think of him when he was not there.

Evelyn felt a warm rush of regret, almost pleasurable, as she remembered the afternoon Alika left his wallet on the counter and changed her life forever. A wallet was a necessary item, and Evelyn expected him back any minute, but he didn’t come. She opened it up and found his identification, his address — he lived in a house close by — and his telephone number. So she called him. But first, she turned the wallet inside out, perused his business cards, driver’s license, gym membership, his receipts from the drycleaner and the hardware store.

“Thanks,” he said, as soon as he arrived. “I didn’t even notice it was missing.”

Evelyn handed the wallet back to him, and he put it in his pocket without looking inside. That meant he trusted her.

“You’re very kind,” he said.

Evelyn tried not to show her surprise. She tried to act as if people said such things to her all the time.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very — you’re beautiful.” She blushed. What had possessed her to say such a thing?

Alika was looking at her intently. He was seeing her.

“When do you get off?” he asked.

“Not until eleven.”

He smiled. “Should I come back at eleven?”

“Yes,” she said.

For the rest of her shift, she flew through her chores, dusting and ringing up purchases and counting out change with a grin. He had noticed her. He had really seen her.

Alika didn’t know how to cook. He was aware that cabbages and lettuce and basil and tomatoes grew in the backyard. He had, occasionally, purchased lemons, salt, and other necessities from the supermarket. But how these ingredients came together to create his meals, his home, his daily, unnoticed comforts, was a mystery to him. I watched him sadly as he ripped a piece of bread from a stale loaf, then looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was for.

Now that I was gone, the house was reverting to the chaos of its bachelor state. The drain in the kitchen sink was full of tiny objects — grains of rice, twist ties, noodles, the little leaves from the Brussels sprouts. Everything that resided under the furniture — socks and books and bits of string and unpaid bills — was accumulating a thin veneer of greasy dust. And there was nothing I could do about it.

I lingered by Alika’s side, longing to touch his beautiful black hair, his dark eyebrows, to trace the contours of his damaged ear. He closed his eyes, began to snore. I watched his temples, his smooth, high forehead. What on earth went on in there? I pictured the interior of my husband’s mind as a dimly lit space, crowded with tangled bits of string, dusty old noodles and leftover Brussels sprouts, their tiny leaves unravelling, seeking the light.

Seated at Alice’s desk, Felix moved his finger slowly down the pages as he read.

This wasn’t him. This fearless, swift-thinking hero. He read about a decisive, risk-taking Felix, a Felix who squared his jaw and looked danger in the face, barely wincing when the bullet came searing through his chest.

Felix knew he’d screamed when the bullet hit him. Just like a girl. And he’d cried in the emergency ward, while a beautiful young doctor worked feverishly to staunch the wound, and a nurse held onto his hand. He’d wept, remembering he hadn’t taken Poppy for a walk that morning, that he’d neglected to feed her, that his morning had been erased, and there was no way he was ever going to recover it.

As he read further, Felix noticed that Alice couldn’t seem to keep the story on track. She kept going off on tangents, or adding details that had nothing to do with the murder case. In the third chapter, in the middle of a scene about Felix’s physiotherapy, she began to describe the time he’d swum out into the middle of Falcon Lake to help a drowning boy — an event that occurred when Felix wasn’t even on duty. It had happened long before the double murder, long before he'd even met Alice. It had merited only two inches of newsprint at the time, but Alice, an assiduous researcher, had found them. She had gleaned the bare facts of the incident and embroidered them wildly.

Felix remembered the occasion very well. He was on vacation and it was his birthday. Early in the evening, as the sun was sinking in an overcast sky, he’d been waiting for his friends to arrive to take him into town for a birthday dinner. He’d been hungry and a little impatient, barely paying attention to the crowd of boisterous, splashing teenagers cannonballing from the off-shore diving dock. But he happened to be watching, idly, as one of them attempted a one-and-a-half off the three-metre board. Felix saw the boy go up and up and then tuck his head into his chest, and he knew something was off. A miscalculation had been made. Felix started running even before he saw the diver’s head graze the edge of the board as he came down. He was in the water before the other kids yelled for help. When Felix saw the boy in danger, Alice wrote, his first thought had been to save a life. But that wasn’t true. Felix’s first thought had been that the water was cold, that he didn’t want to get wet, that he’d just dressed for dinner. He dived off the boat dock and swam about a hundred yards and then began to surface-dive, while the boy’s parents paddled frantically in their canoe toward the spot where their son had vanished. Alice spent two long paragraphs describing that hundred-yard swim, putting all sorts of thoughts into Felix’s head, about not giving up, about the value of the boy’s life. The only thought Felix remembered having spared for the kid was “you idiot!” He had dived and dived again until he caught the boy by the hair and dragged him to the surface. It was an ugly business. The kid had vomited, and so had Felix. The mother had been hysterical. Felix’s birthday plans were ruined. But Alice made it sound like a miracle.

Felix read again the description of his own heroism. He wanted to be fearless and swift-thinking. But he knew he wasn’t. No. Alice had dreamed this story. She had made it all up, out of some deep, Irish corner of her imagination. He ran his finger lightly across the description of this other Felix, this distorted reflection. Who was this man his wife had created? Whoever he was, it was clear that Alice was falling in love with him.

Evelyn curled up on the couch with a hot water bottle and a quilt, just as if she really were sick, and thought about Alika. Her first date with him had been her first date ever. He picked her up at the store at eleven o’clock, just as he’d promised, and took her to an all-night doughnut shop nearby. Evelyn was too excited to eat her walnut cruller, even though Alika had bought it for her. She just sipped her soda and asked him questions about his family and his childhood in Hawaii.

“Why did you move to Canada?” she asked.

“My mother grew up here, in Winnipeg. She met my dad in Hawaii when she took a vacation there. So then, when she left him…” He shrugged.

So, he was a child of a broken home, too. They had something in common. A bond.

“Have you ever been to Golden?” she asked. She tried to tell him how the light hit the mountains there, but she couldn’t get the words right. She sounded dumb, and Alika was growing distracted, bored with her.

Evelyn felt that old, panicky flutter in her chest, that feeling that she might crack in two. She had to get his attention, make him see her again. So she told him the story of her brother, Mark, and he listened. He was sympathetic, placing one of his large, warm hands over hers, sending a tingle through the veins of her arm into her heart. But afterwards he never called her. He didn’t come back to the store for a whole week.

Evelyn knew the name of his gym from the membership card in his wallet, and she strolled up and down the sidewalk in front of it, trying to look casual, stopping for coffee in the restaurant across the road, watching the gym door through the window. When Alika came out, she ran right into him. What a surprise, he said. Of course they just had to go for coffee.

As she sat across from him in the restaurant, trying to force another coffee into her stomach, Evelyn realized Alika wasn’t interested in what she was saying. When he said goodbye so easily it almost broke her heart, he made no promise to call. But she remembered where he worked, where he shopped, his home address. He had invited her to all these places by leaving his wallet on her counter.

Evelyn got up from the couch and retrieved her phone from the kitchen. Then she snuggled back under her quilt and dialled Alika’s number. She’d been calling him several times a day, since she learned that Wendy was in the hospital, but she was never able to reach him. Tonight it was the same. Wendy’s voice on the answering machine. Evelyn hung up. She laid the phone on her belly and closed her eyes, losing herself again in the memory of the happiest days of her life.

One evening, a year ago last spring, Alika and Evelyn ran into each other for the sixth time. Or was it the fifth? Evelyn counted. No. It was the sixth time, and Alika had taken her to a lounge for drinks. And that night he’d taken her home. To his house. She never wanted to leave.

All last June and July, she went to his house every Friday night and spent the weekend, working at making him fall in love with her, at making his house her home. She left her toothbrush, a comb, articles of clothing. She was only waiting for the word from Alika and she’d give up her apartment. She bought a new mat for his bathroom floor and stocked his shelves with her own favourite brand of shampoo. She dug up his garden, even planted those doomed roses.

The roses were cursed. It was because of the roses that Alika met Wendy.

Sure, everyone was thinking about me, but no one believed in me anymore. It was unfair.

Evelyn could sense my presence, and I made sure to haunt her as often as I could. It was lonely, though. It seemed unfair that the only person who believed in me was my own murderer. I mean, something had happened to me, at last. Something momentous. All my life I’d been of little consequence, a nobody, a person whose very birth was accidental, a person shifted from family to family at the merest whim of circumstance. And here I was, outrageously wronged, at the very centre of a tragic drama, and nobody even knew about it.

I tried to tell Felix about it, to convince him to give up on questioning Alika, that Alika didn’t know anything, and that he should question Evelyn again. But he couldn’t hear me. I don’t think he believed in the afterlife. He didn’t seem to have any religion at all except for the bibliomancy he practised. Every morning he tossed coins on a table top and consulted the I Ching, though he didn’t seem to find any answers in there about my murder. But I could tell he wasn’t giving up. He spent a lot of time in his office leafing through the file that held the unfinished story of my death. He’d sigh and rub his head with his hands. He had that look people get when they know there’s something they’ve missed, something that’s nagging at them. So I tried to be patient. I was sure he’d figure it out soon, provide some sense of closure to this thing, and Evelyn would be punished. Then I’d finally be able to — well, I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do.

Louise had lost two thousand dollars in the past week, even though she’d played every day. The household account was dangerously low, especially since the mayor had bought himself a handsome new tailor-made pin-striped suit with wide lapels that made him look like a Hollywood gangster.

She needed Bradley Byrnes, but she hadn’t been able to reach him for days. So today, though she’d just come from a late afternoon tea at the Chamber of Commerce, and wasn’t disguised in the least, she’d taken a chance and come up to his consulting firm.

She waited in the lobby of his building until his receptionist left for the day, and then she took the elevator to the nineteenth floor. He was furious when she walked into his inner office.

“What are you doing here?” He locked the door behind her.

“Why don’t you return my calls?”

“I’ve been busy.” Now that the door was locked, he relaxed a bit. He pecked her on the cheek, caressed her hips. “I was going to call you tomorrow.”

“Uh huh,” said Louise. “Well, I can’t wait until tomorrow. I’m in — I’m a little short this month.”

“I can fix that,” he said. He smiled as he drew his cheque book from his pocket and began to write. “But you remember what we talked about? Last week? I haven’t seen any action on that front.”

“I know. I talked to him.”

“Well, he hasn’t done anything. The injunction’s still standing. Every day that goes by is money down the drain. And our investors are getting nervous. If they start pulling out — ”

“I know, I know.” Louise reached for the cheque, but Byrnes held it up above her head. With his other hand, he drew an envelope from his inside pocket.

“It’s a simple matter to fix,” he said. “A few words in the right places. Give this to your husband, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

Louise took the cheque and the envelope and stuffed them in her straw purse. Nothing to worry about? What the hell did he mean? She placed her hand on the doorknob, planning to flounce out without so much as a kiss goodbye.

But Byrnes grabbed her, hard, by the wrist.

“Not that way,” he said. “Take the freight elevator and leave through the loading zone at the back. For God’s sake, if anyone sees us together now we’re screwed.”

As she minced down the alley in her new silk sandals, dodging broken glass and garbage, Louise was fuming. She’d thought she was finished with this damned casino business. She’d thought it was over and done with and Byrnes was in her debt for good. But now he wanted more.

Back at home, she locked herself in her bedroom and opened the envelope. Newspaper clippings. Louise read the first article, something about a trial ten years ago, a trial presided over by the same judge who was in charge of the injunction against demolishing the Walker Theatre. He had given a suspended sentence to a stockbroker accused of embezzling. There were nine articles altogether, spanning twelve years, and in each one the same judge had let somebody off for something.

She hoped Bradley Byrnes knew what he was doing.

The garden was overgrown and past all hope now, Noni thought. Only Wendy knew the peculiarities of each plant, each one’s special needs. Noni wasn’t even sure she knew the difference between a dillweed and a carrot top. It was the first of September, and soon the plants would go to seed, ruining the garden, wasting it. Then Noni would have to phone someone from the yellow pages to come and dig the garden under, but she didn’t want to think about that. That was too final. She dipped her spoon into her bowl and tried to eat some of Rosa’s pea soup. Maybe she could tempt Alika, who was sitting in front of his own soup, watching it grow cold. But her throat wouldn’t open.

Soon it would be time to drive to the hospital again, where they conducted a vigil that filled Noni with dread. Because Wendy wasn’t at the hospital. Wendy was lost, and Noni didn’t want to look at the body she’d left behind. It lay there, apparently complete, content to rest in its bed almost casually, as though nothing were wrong. Alika spent hours looking at it, and Rosa often talked to it, but Noni hated it. Noni wanted Wendy back, and she often had to leave the building to cry in the parking lot.

Alika did not cry. He didn’t even speak of the catastrophe. But Noni noticed that everything slipped through his fingers these days — teacups, pepper shakers, pencils, keys. He had broken most of the wine glasses in the house. Rosa brought him home-made casseroles and fresh salads, but he barely touched them. He was losing weight, growing pale. The scars on his face stood out more prominently than ever.

The doctor had explained several times now, in patient detail, that Wendy might never wake up. The respirator was keeping her lungs and heart functioning. Feeding tubes had been attached to nourish the body, but Wendy’s coma, he said, was the deepest he’d ever seen. The possibility of brain damage was high. He suggested gently that the feeding tubes could be removed, if the family decided it was for the best.

“No,” Alika said.

It hadn’t rained once since the night I died, and the garden was beginning to shrivel. The only plants thriving were the weeds. I was worried about the vegetables. They were ninety percent water, after all, didn’t Alika know that?

No, I reminded myself, he didn’t.

I thought he would miss all the chores I’d performed on a daily basis, but he didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t seem to care about the things I’d left undone. Did he think that the house would tidy itself? That his drawers would fill up with clean socks of their own accord? Objects lay about the house just as I’d left them. The spoons I was going to clean, more tarnished than ever. The open tin of polish. He hadn’t even put the cap back on. He didn’t sleep in our bed anymore. Upstairs, the bed remained unmade, the pillow lying carelessly tossed aside since the morning I’d found that stocking. On the dresser, my music box was still open, the way I’d left it, all my personal items jumbled about in plain view.

Worst of all, my library books were overdue.

At first, it had given Evelyn some small satisfaction to look up the love spells in the very library where Wendy worked. Evelyn had despised Wendy from the moment she’d heard about her. The day Alika came home with the books about perennial flowers, he’d talked too much about her, mentioned her name too many times, and Evelyn had gone straight down to the library to take a look for herself. Wendy wasn’t much to look at. Mouse-brown hair and a sunburned nose. An irritating manner — that dumb, breezy way she gabbed with her co-workers, that dippy way she grinned at the little kids. But in a matter of days she had stolen Alika away from Evelyn. Evelyn was no longer welcome at Alika’s house. He was always too “busy” to see her. He told her he didn’t think things were “working out” between them.

There was a poetic justice in using the computers at Wendy’s branch to steal him back. As she did her research, copying incantations into her notebook, Evelyn kept tabs on Wendy and eavesdropped on her conversations. She knew when Wendy got engaged, when she got married, what Alika had given her for Christmas. She knew all about Wendy, and Wendy had no idea who she was or what she was up to. Or so Evelyn had believed. By the time spring arrived, she was no longer so sure about that.

It was the garden that finally clued Evelyn in to the truth. There was no way any normal person could grow such a garden in that soil, in this city. As she’d watched the seedlings sprout and rise so quickly toward the sun out of that clay-based muck, she realized that Wendy had some sort of unspeakable power. So that was why Evelyn’s rituals never succeeded. She remembered that once, in the library, when she’d been copying the recipe for a potion from the computer screen, Wendy had walked by, right behind her. At the time, Evelyn had smirked a little. Poor, unsuspecting Wendy! But now she wondered whether Wendy hadn’t been reading over her shoulder. Maybe Wendy had launched a counterspell. Wendy was blocking her. Wendy had enchanted Alika somehow, made him immune to Evelyn’s magic.

So Evelyn had begun to search the sites for something stronger, something to aim at Wendy, instead of at Alika. That’s how, just this spring, a few short months ago, she’d discovered the binding spells.

The instructions for the first binding spell were complicated and required a lot of equipment. It took Evelyn a long time to copy the whole thing off the screen, and it took her several days to collect a black candle, black felt, cotton balls, a metre of red ribbon, and the ingredients for the banishing oil, including pepper oil gum, which Evelyn had never heard of before. In the meantime, she resorted to entering the house when Wendy and Alika went out. She needed certain personal items of Wendy’s. And she always left something of her own behind. She became a kind of reverse thief, planting mementos strategically throughout the house. She’d learned from experience that people most desired the things that they had lost, and she wanted to remind Alika that he had lost her.

That first binding spell hadn’t worked at all. Everything had gone wrong. Evelyn couldn’t obtain any of Wendy’s fingernail clippings because, though she had access to the house, and could probably find nail clippings in the trash, she was afraid of collecting Alika’s by mistake. So she settled for wisps of hair from Wendy’s hairbrush, easily identifiable because of the colour. And instead of pepper oil gum, whatever that was, she used black pepper, chewed-up bubblegum, and a little canola oil. It made a disgusting mixture, and Evelyn could hear Mark laughing at her outside the window as she tried to stir it with a teaspoon. But she didn’t allow him to deter her. The June moon was nearly full, and she had to act quickly.

When she had everything assembled, she followed the instructions for making the potion, being cautious while mixing the oils, because the instructions warned that they were volatile. Then she fashioned the felt and cotton poppet that would represent Wendy, stuffed it with the recommended herbs, and sewed it up. She carved Wendy’s name into the candle with a thumbtack, anointed the poppet with the binding oil mixture, and began the difficult, somewhat hazardous, ritual, trying not to lose her place as she read aloud from her notebook.

“I bind thee from doing me harm,” she said, tying the red ribbon around the poppet’s feet. “I bind thee from interfering with my life and my love.” She wrapped the arms and the head and finally the entire body of the poppet, so it looked like a little red mummy. The spell went on for several verses, and she had a hard time reading the words while keeping an eye on the candle, trying not to let the flame get too close to the poppet doused in volatile oils.

When at last she’d recited every verse, she held the mummy up to the mirror and visualized all of Wendy’s negative energy being reflected back at her. Then she blew out the candle, bundled it together with the poppet in a paper bag, and left the apartment. She carried the package down to the end of the street and buried it on the grounds of the abandoned abattoir.

But it didn’t work. If anything, Wendy’s power over Alika only increased. It seemed Wendy had created some sort of force field around him, so that Evelyn couldn’t arrange to run into him anymore. In mid-August, Wendy took holidays from the library, so that Evelyn was blocked from the house. Then Wendy changed the message on the answering machine so that Evelyn didn’t even have the pleasure anymore of hearing Alika’s recorded voice before she hung up. Nothing appeared to be binding Wendy from doing Evelyn harm.

Evelyn knew that it must be her own fault. She was an amateur, and the ritual was too advanced for her. Probably the substitution of hair for fingernail clippings had ruined it. Or Evelyn had copied it wrong, skipped some of the words by mistake. Or maybe she hadn’t buried the poppet far enough away. She resolved to find some other method, something simple and powerful, something not even a loser like herself could screw up.

The mayor was nervous. He understood fully the significance of the newspaper clippings Louise gave him. Or at least he understood that the judge would understand. On the surface, there were no connections linking the items together. They were published articles, articles anyone might have in his possession, about acquittals and suspended sentences. But the mayor knew how these things worked. A story lurked beneath the surface, a pattern that the judge would recognize. The pattern was a hidden threat — sent by whom?

Louise was silent on that point. It was just a little research she’d done, she said. Something she hoped might help the project along. Her behaviour was worrisome, and the mayor tried not to dwell on it. Who had she been talking to? He could ask her, press her on the matter, but it was better if he didn’t know. He had learned long ago that the key to staying in power was not knowing things and, with Louise’s help, he’d become an expert at it.

Still, he felt he was in over his head. He’d never blackmailed a judge before. He was unsure about the protocol. How should he approach the topic? Jovially, over a glass of whiskey at the Club? Should he make a few jokes about the injunction, man to man, then slip him the envelope of clippings? Hope he’d get the message?

As he listened to the uncertain rhythm of Alice’s typing, Felix felt a twinge of jealousy, all the more painful because he knew it was irrational. He tried to concentrate on the newspaper spread out before him. Just as he’d predicted, all the letters in today’s paper were breathless endorsements of the exciting attractions of the casino. A two-page spread revealed the architect’s plans for the new luxury complex, with its skylights and swimming pools and its four-storey arches, like the arches of a Gothic cathedral, that soon would dominate the cityscape. The banality of it all was staggering. Felix felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He folded the paper neatly and carried it into his backyard, where he tossed it into the recycling box.

He stood for a few minutes listening to the rustle of the poplar leaves in the heat. The neighbourhood was quiet, summer languor heavy in the air, hovering low across the yards and gardens, stifling sound. He thought about his neighbour, Wendy Li, and her garden and her fall, and the fact that he still didn’t know what had happened to her. Felix and Paul were keeping her file open, but they had no leads.

Restless, he returned to the house and dialled the hospital’s information desk to check on Wendy’s condition. No change. What if she never woke up? He pictured Wendy lying a few short blocks away, her memory locked inside her, and felt helpless.

He walked down the hall to Alice’s room and stood outside her closed door, his knuckles raised to knock. The sound of her typing no longer soothed him. He pictured her fingers as she kneaded the keys, moulding her paper lover into being. He’d seen the way she stacked the pages after she completed each chapter. She held the bundle vertically, tapping the edges of the paper into place, until they were flush. Then she’d lay the new chapter tenderly on top of the growing pile and run her freckled hand across the surface, as if it were a bedsheet she was smoothing.

Felix was beginning to think of the white paper as the surface of a deep lake into which his wife was falling. Far below, a wavering image was forming, a liquid husband who floated among the weeds, holding his arms up toward the light, toward the air, toward Alice, coaxing her to grasp his hand. He was strong, and his voice, made thick by the water, called out for the one who had created him.

I was getting fed up with Detective Felix. He was letting himself be sidetracked by every minor detail that crossed his path, while the truth was staring him in the face. All he had to do was return to Evelyn’s apartment, perform the most minimal search, and he’d find the evidence he needed. He’d see the photograph of Alika, and he’d surely find the — well, the murder weapon — whatever it was. I was lost, there, as I didn’t know how she’d killed me. Whacked me on the head, most likely. Or maybe she had stabbed me. It was hard to tell. The whole event was clouded over in my memory.

I watched while Felix cooked dinner. He was making curry. From scratch. As if he had all the time in the world. Well, you don’t, I wanted to scream. A horrible thought struck me. What if Evelyn got away with it? What if she wormed herself back into Alika’s life and took my place? It was too terrible to imagine.

Felix, oblivious to this possibility, chopped up everything with excruciating care — onions and garlic and carrots and cauliflower and a big zucchini that looked awfully familiar. What was the matter with him? He had work to do, and instead he was forever cooking dinner and reading newspapers — he was a newspaper addict, this guy–and mooning after his wife. He heated olive oil in a pan and sautéed the onions with the garlic. Then he sprinkled cayenne pepper into a bowl of yogurt and stirred it up. When that cayenne-flavoured yogurt hit the frying pan, a rapturous, pungent aroma suffused the air, and a fierce hunger cut through me.

I felt very keenly all the things that I’d lost. All I had left was my dream of revenge on Evelyn, and now that seemed to be evaporating, too. Here I was, the victim of a gross travesty, the wronged party in a fatal love triangle, and nothing was being done about it. Was it possible that justice was merely an earthly thing? Nothing more than another possession, like a book to read or a bowl of vegetable curry? Would I be forced to surrender it, too, along with everything else?

Evelyn’s boss telephoned to see if she was feeling better, and she said she was. He sounded sincerely concerned and remarked on the early onset of flu season this year. Evelyn hadn’t caught the flu, of course, but she was feeling better. She hadn’t seen or heard from that detective again. He seemed to have forgotten all about her. Like her boss, he must have believed her lies.

She’d been lying when she said she couldn’t remember her activities the night of August twenty-first. It was true she’d been home that evening, but she remembered exactly what she’d been doing. It was the day after she’d found the new binding spell. When she first came across it, on a new magic web site, she’d been delighted. It was elegant and clean. She had all the necessary materials right in her apartment, and she resolved to cast the spell right away. But back at home, she had second thoughts. Even though the spell seemed simple, she didn’t want to take any chances. She would practise, test it out on someone else first. Now, who else was sapping her energy? Who was else was harassing her, refusing to leave her alone, making her life miserable?

She drew a picture of a mosquito on a piece of paper, copying it from her old biology textbook. She folded the paper three times, tied it up with black thread, and put it in an old marmalade jar full of water. She repeated the words of the spell, which were eloquently sparse and easy to remember, even a little silly: “Do as I please, stay there and freeze.” Then she put the marmalade jar in the freezer compartment of her fridge.

That very night, the fogging trucks drove down her back lane and up her front street, spraying the neighbourhood with insecticide. In the morning, Evelyn had a dry, sore throat and a headache. But when she stood outside and offered her bare arms up to be bitten, only one mosquito appeared. It flew toward her, weaving wildly as though drunk, then fell dead at her feet. There was not another one in sight. The courtyard outside her apartment block was mosquito-free.

When she opened the freezer again, she saw that the ice had expanded, cracking the glass. She wrapped the broken jar in newspaper and threw it in the garbage. Searching among her cupboards, she found a plastic yogurt cup with a lid. She planned to use it that very night, when the timing would be most fortuitous. That evening, August twenty-first, a full moon would rise, lending its womanly powers to any spell cast beneath its light. Evelyn hurried home from her late shift at the convenience store. She lit a few candles, just to set the right atmosphere, get herself into the mood. Then she ripped a scrap of paper from her notebook and wrote Wendy’s name on it carefully, in blue ink. She placed the scrap in the yogurt cup, filled it with water and snapped on the lid. At midnight, she recited the magic sentence as she placed it in the freezer behind the vanilla ice cream. Take that!