SHE WAS LEFT WITH THE LITTLE GIRL WHILE TORRY WAS away. She would walk with the little girl and talk with her, and they were seen together at the ice-cream stand. She still had a prescription for antibiotics and sleeping pills in her purse. Someday perhaps she would fill it, and that would relieve everything.
Eva left the house and went to live at her parents’ while he was away. The little kitten they had gotten Polly was left inside the locked house and wasn’t fed until she got home.
Knowing that he had just taken thousands of their monies, Mr. Ben Mott said nothing to her, but plied her with obsequious grinning compliments. Told her she and Torrent—who he always talked down to, disrespected and laughed at when others did—could use the recreational trailer any time they wanted.
But now looking at her father saying grace at supper, she realized the horror she had helped cause—the innocence of the boy she had married, and the way she had betrayed him. But the problem in part was that innocence—and the corruption she wanted in order to prove that she was grander than the innocence and more important than the one who had saved her life.
Her father had a giant bandage slathered on his forehead, right beneath the mole. He had banged his head on the cupboard door just the day before. Now with his small, flappy red tie, his pale shirt, his black ankle-high boots over his thin little ankles, he was out looking for a job, with what looked like a Kotex taped right across his forehead.
The dismal smell of soggy turnip, the piles of wash, the loose cupboard where he had banged his head, his antiquated “cheerio” to his wife made her feel as if she was thirteen years old again, sitting on her bed, wanting to escape. She remembered when she had told them she and Torrent might be in trouble with the business, how her father had supressed a grin.
Again the fights and broken dishes and squabbles in other apartments kept her awake, and the lights of the asbestos mine trickled in past her window.
She sat in the apartment with Polly for five long days. The young girl kept asking for her daddy, for the kitten named Peaches, and Eva kept trying to find things for her to do. The name MOTT scratched in ink on their apartment door was slanted and almost hidden. And the door itself had been banged at by people wanting money, so some of the wood was splintered.
“We’re here for our money.”
“Go away. There is no one here.”
“You’re here—because I hear you.”
“We are not home.”
“Where are you then?”
“We are out and about.”
“You aren’t out and about, you’re just behind the door.”
“No one is home. Go away now, please.”
The money she had allowed them had alleviated that at last.
Her little second-hand Honda was hidden in behind the building.
And then one day coming back to the apartment, with Polly in her arms, and a plastic bag of groceries in her hand, a young woman passed by her in a rush, carrying a box, going up the flight of stairs. She looked preoccupied, and stared through or past Eva Mott, with a certain kind of hilarity, as if Eva Mott did not exist, and in some way would never exist. Her name was Henrietta Saffy. Looking into her brilliant impenetrable eyes, Eva knew she would be more than a match for Faye Sackville.
She hoped no one would be told she had been at the cottage, speaking with those important people.
But unfortunately she found out differently. Professor Raskin was furious. He phoned her and told her never to come there again.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered into the phone. But not to Mr. Raskin. Perhaps to God.
Later that night she took the little Honda and drove up to town to see him. She wanted to talk to him about everything—but more importantly to get some relief for Torrent Peterson, the man who had saved her life.
“But you was our friend.”
“Oh of course I was your friend. But Torry did not tell me, Eva—he did not tell me he was culling on Native land. It put me in an untenable position.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
She grabbed him by the arm and asked him what was happening with them.
“Happening? What do you mean, happening?”
She had even worn a button that day made by some of his students: “I’m a Friend of Albert Raskin.”
Two days later, unable to sleep, even with the pills, Eva wrote him a letter; in it she said: “I am not going to university so there. I have to help Torry pay things back—so there.”
She was hoping for an answer, for him to run to her. She waited by the window, near the phone. But he did not come. But not one phone call came.
Albert went to see his mom a few days later. He knew that his mother had been worried that Shane was now out of jail. He had just heard it himself.
He entered the back of the house. All was dark. The place was dark—all was quiet too, and there was an odour, somewhat sweet and deep and offensive. She was sitting in her chair, her head tilted sideways, her neck wrinkled and blue. Her eyes were slightly opened. There was no movement at all.
“Hello,” he said. “Mother?”
She had argued with her male companion and caregiver, who gave up the position.
Dark pools of blood lay on the floor, some on the letters themselves. The blue stencilled copies of the letters the old uncles were looking for were spread around her—she had discovered them finally, rooted them out in her box of miscellaneous papers. For a while she had kept in touch with her brother, the defrocked priest, but that ebbed away, and no one knew where he was.
She had looked for the letters, found them to give to him.
She had sliced her wrists two days before. Perhaps it had been an accident. But she had phoned him, Albert Raskin, asking him to come and see her, that she had found something that would solve it, and wanted to give these things to him, but he had been busy.
The place had the ugly scent of sweet decay that was almost unnoticeable and then suddenly overpowering.
He picked the letters up. The earliest date was November 3, 1959.
He picked the stencilled copies up, put them in his briefcase and phoned the ambulance and the police.
To destroy the letters would leave his uncles with no last vestige of hope.
What had Tracy McCaustere said to the reporter last week? “We plan to make a stand, a new way forward, in hope and reconciliation. We plan to march across the field to show solidarity with our Native brothers and sisters whose Wigwam Blockade has been ordered down. We plan to show that protest is more just than power or police presence. No one wishes to destroy, we wish to raise people up, so all voices can finally be heard.”
He thought of his enemy Lampkey in Ottawa. Lampkey would end up on the best side—the side the professors were on, the revolutionary side of things.
He, in living his free life, had no choice in the matter at all.
It was strange she had only twenty people at her funeral, one her brother, the man who he had given the watch to years before.
So the house would be his; so would the assets. So would some remaining four hundred thousand dollars.
And then Shane Stroud appeared. He came in the night looking for something. It was two weeks after the funeral.
Shane was always looking for something. Even as a child he would wait to take advantage of someone. He had always done so. Then there was that moment when he had decided to get the watch Mrs. Wally had won. One night he saw her leaving bingo and walking home. That is when he went after the watch. Then, frightened what he had done, he had given his brother what he had stolen. Mary Lou had the watch, and unaware of its history, sent it to her child.
Torrent by a strange coincidence had been given these letters from his mother by Oscar just two weeks before Shane was released from prison. In one of these letters was Mrs. Wally’s watch.
Not knowing what the watch signified, he gave it to the planned recipient. That is, Eva Mott now wore it. No one knew that in this circuitous route the very emblem of crime and murder would find its way back to the intended love of his life.
It was stunning to see a vague shadow against the backyard tree. Albert thought nothing of it for a moment—and then he realized it was Shane Stroud, who suddenly began to move toward him, still in shadow, still almost unrecognized, except for the cringing way he moved across the lawn.
He was now on parole.
And seeing Albert closing the drapes, he simply walked to the door. He opened it and walked in.
“Who was that?” he said.
“Who was whom?” Albert asked.
“That woman who just left?”
“A friend,” he said. “A Professor Sackville.”
He tried to sound at ease but he was trembling. And Shane Stroud knew he was trembling. Shane was very well attired, in a new coat, and new black boots, and black leather gloves. He was incredibly happy at this moment. He was out and the world was free and he wanted money.
Then Shane said quickly: “Bad mescaline all those years ago. That’s what caused all your trouble—that’s what caused it all. You gave it to Annie Howl—how could you do it—I mean that you were so low to do that, an important person like you, going to those depths and everything like that there. It shows where the depths are, don’t it?”
“Where?”
“In the human heart,” Shane said. “Darren Howl contacted me, a few days ago. I told him to let it go.
“ ‘Let it go,’ he said, ‘no—let it go never.’ So I’m worried about you.” Shane sniffed and looked about the room.
“I gave you and Mel a lot of money. I don’t have more.”
“Oh you give Mel money. That’s what I wonder about. You just give Torry money—whosoever stoled my girl. You give Mel money, why not me? You give Mel fifteen thousand to keep quiet last month.”
This was true, he had done so. And now he knew it would not end. That they could accuse him now over the very fact that he treated one brother better than the other. That they would argue with each other over who had the most right to use him. This was the true con.
Shane kept looking at the dining room table, and then up at his victim. His coat was soaking wet as well as his boots. Albert could smell the dampness and sweat off of him.
“I have suffered enough,” Albert said. “I have not done one good thing since that night.”
And that was true.
“Ah, but suffering is the human condition,” Shane said. “I know a man from here who wrote that in a book. He writes books—you only pretend to. I used to drink with him at the tavern—he could drink for months, not like a piss-ass like you. He might write a book someday about this here murder. He said to me suffering is the human condition.”
“Yes, I know,” Albert said, who had laughed at this writer. He was suddenly ashamed that he had to hear this from Shane Stroud. He was suddenly every bit as ashamed of himself as poor Eva Mott.
“But Mel and I know this too—you know nothing—those people you are saying you are in with, to protect the environment, they are just going to cut every tree on Good Friday.”
“Why?”
“For stove pellets—ha. That Professor McLeish, a horse’s arse—that’s what he’s up to. He wants a lot of money to go back to Scotland—so the runoff in the spring will wash houses away, then the dry in summer will make Arron Brook a puddle. And he’ll go back to Scotland and pretend he did something wonderful here.”
Albert was stunned that Shane would know this. Shane smiled at him being stunned. Shane and Mel knew far more than Albert about the world he pretended he wanted to save, and the smile said as much.
Shane picked up Faye’s scarf, the one she had left, and looked at it while saying Darren now wanted to question him.
“I will go and see Darren—tell him what I know.”
“I never did a thing to her. I never meant anything!”
But Shane didn’t miss a beat. “And you with Eva too, love of my life. Don’t think I haven’t kept tabs.”
“What do you want?” Albert had never fired a gun. But if he could find that pistol, if he could—
“Ten thousand and it is forgot, swear to God Almighty.”
“Ten thousand?”
“Yes.”
“Ten thousand.”
“Yes, what I said. I’m going out west—I have lots of girlfriends out west—so out I will go.”
“Okay. Next week, ten thousand. But that has to be it. That has to be it! Or I will go to the police myself.”
“Oh, and her.”
“Who?” he asked, astonished and unbelieving.
“Her. I haven’t had sex in a long time neither—not real sex.”
“Ms. Sackville?”
“No, not her. I wouldn’t fuck her.”
“Who, then?” Again Albert was panicky and astonished.
“Eva Mott,” he said.
“Eva Mott?”
“Yes. Get me Eva for a day, and that will be it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I want her—so do it, or you will be in jail. Or ruined. One or the other. I will go to the paper. You always go to the paper.”
“I will deny it.”
“Okay, fine. Deny it,” Stroud said very simply as he got up to leave. “Yes, I will go to the paper and you can deny it.”
Eva Mott, even more than she thought when she saw Albert Raskin and Ms. Sackville drive by without noticing her as she carried Polly through the rain, was now absolutely alone.
Albert needed her now to excise the demons playing in his soul. “Why are you naked?”
Now he would make Eva terrified, and it was the only way to save himself.
So he knew what he must do. Either kill himself, or confess.
He walked to the police station. He stood outside for an hour and a half. He went up to a police car, to the officer sitting inside, and almost said what he wanted to say. But the officer was eating a chicken sandwich and looked at him with his cheeks full and smiled, and Raskin, so handsome now it was a plague upon young girls, only managed to smile back.
When he was young and pudgy he had always wanted to be handsome. Now looking into the mirror in the morning he often wanted to cut open his face.
He spoke to Sackville later. He said he needed her advice. He said he was being bothered by a man named Shane. What could he do?
“It’s an old incident—it should have been forgotten,” he said.
“From your youth?”
“Yes.”
“And not from Eva—who you had in ecstasy?”
“No—well no, not really.”
“I see. I see! Well then—he threatened you? My dear man, what are you little Canuks made of, mush? Get one of those fucking pistols you spoke so often about—and shoot him.”
But he had already tried to get the pistol. He had already paid money and was promised a delivery that did not come.
He went the next morning and tried to buy a shotgun; a double- barreled twelve-gauge pump. He had never fired a gun before, and unfortunately he had not taken his required safety test, and moreover he didn’t know how to hold it. So the clerk told him to take his test, learn how to use the gun safely and come back.
“If I had to use it safely I wouldn’t need to buy it,” he said.
But if he could get the pistol—if he could find the pistol—that would change everything.