The Carpenter Page 12

  — Yeah, maybe. You know what? Maybe when you skip town I’ll come with you. Fuck it.

  — You bet.

  No, Stanley, said Dick. Like I said before, this Gilmore, he’s not anybody at all. He told Len Gleber that the work he had was groundskeeping around EZ Acres down the highway. His story checked out fine. He told Gleber when it got cold he might head down to the city.

  They were sitting in the front of the unmarked patrol car, rubbing the chill out of their hands in front of the heater. Stan’s truck stood alongside the unmarked car and both vehicles were parked outside of Western Autobody. A cold autumn storm was brewing.

  Dick went on: As far as it looks, all this guy did wrong was have another gal on the go. I’m glad Eleanor talked to you. Not just because of her sister but because of all the rest of it. Aurel and the brothers.

  — I’m glad she let me tell my side. I think she’s had a lot of sadness in her life.

  Dick had a cup of coffee he’d brought with him from the garage. He tasted the coffee and then he cracked open the driver side door and poured it onto the wet pavement.

  — One thing Eleanor said was how ordinary he was, said Stan. She said he didn’t look like he worked in an office or anything like that but otherwise he was just ordinary.

  — Ordinary, said Dick.

  — They never look like anyone in particular, not like in the movies.

  — You remember back when Fran and me were living in the city, said Dick. I never loved it at that time and I don’t miss it one goddamn bit. But you remember I was on the Metro force. I was doing prisoner transfers from the provincial courthouse downtown out to wherever those sons of bitches ended up. There’s not so much I care to remember, because when your job is to drive those kinds of men around, those men who rape or steal or harm children or kill for money, you’re best to not pay them much mind. They don’t deserve it. But I do remember one from all the men I transported, I remember one above all the others. Because he didn’t have none of that desperation about him. He was just ordinary.

  — Who was this?

  — I don’t have any memory of his name, though I suppose I read it a time or two on the paperwork or in the newspapers or on the radio, because his name was around for a little while. He was just a man with a plain face. We were taking him to Kingston. He’d worked in an Italian restaurant. He was a cook in the kitchen. He lived with his wife in the east part of the city. And one day this ordinary man, well, he goes into work, into the kitchen, and gets the biggest carving knife he can find and goes on into the manager’s office and he sticks that carving knife into the manager’s throat and cuts it wide open. Just like that, this manager sitting at his desk with his head, you know, hanging backwards just by the bones. Anyhow, the man went home on the streetcar and when he got home he got another carving knife from his own kitchen and tried to do the same to his wife. He would of, too, if he didn’t cut her arm open first. They said he slipped in her blood and hit his head on a chair when he went down. The gal got herself out of there. God knows what she must of thought of the turn of events. I never even heard him raise his voice, is what she said at the trial, and that was all the witness she ever beared against him. Anyhow when the city cops-boys I knew, some of them-got to the house, the man didn’t resist at all. They found him, they said, holding a towel full of ice to the back of his head. You know what he said on trial? He said the manager just talked too much. He said the gal talked too much too. He said he couldn’t stand everybody talking all the time. On the day we moved him to Kingston, this cook, he just sat there quiet as you like and watched out the window. It was around Cobourg or so, and I remember we were slowed right to a stop with some roadwork. Bill Finley, the chap riding shotgun, was dead asleep. So I catch myself looking at the cook in the mirror, just how goddamn ordinary he was. I must of looked away for a minute and then I looked back again and the bugger was looking right at me. Right at me. He says what we’re doing is a good thing. I should of paid him no attention, but him looking at me, it caught me off guard, and I says to him, Why is that? And he smiles and he says because he’s not ever going to stop. He says there’s too much talk in the world and he’s not going to stop till he cuts every tongue out of every head he finds. Right around then, Finley waked up and he saw this man was talking so he slammed the cage with his hand and told him to keep his goddamn mouth shut. Which is what I should of done in the first place. Or just paid him no mind at all.

  Dick was looking out over the dashboard. A leafless privet hedge was moving in the wind in front of them.

  — I don’t believe there are too many of them out there, said Stan. Or at least I don’t want to believe it. I think like you say, most of them get rabid because of desperate times. Thirty-eight years and I don’t remember but maybe one or two times I dealt with a person that had it that way right down to the core. The couple times I did think I saw it in somebody I always came away thinking I didn’t have the real makings to do much about it. I was always afraid of that.

  — The only time I thought I was looking it in the eye was that cook in the rear-view mirror. I shouldn’t of even paid him any heed at all.

  — Listen to us. We’re a couple of miserable old bastards. Anyhow, the vet said he’d be done with Cassius at three.

  — Hold up, old man. I’m not done with you yet. I can tell you one thing maybe you’ll find interesting. Len Gleber thought Judy’s boyfriend might be hard to track down. So Gleber went over to EZ Acres. The manager had to radio for him, walkie-talkie, but the boyfriend came after five or ten minutes. The boyfriend told Gleber he was real sorry about Judy but he thought she’d made more of it than he had. Said he hadn’t seen her in a couple weeks. He didn’t think he’d go to the funeral because he didn’t want to cause any more upset to Eleanor, but would Gleber pass on a couple words of sorry. They looked into him after that and they didn’t come up with anything. He’d been working at EZ Acres for about three months, according to the manager, mostly part time.

  — You’re going to a lot of work to tell me what you’ve already told me, said Stan.

  — Well, look here. Gleber happened to see the boyfriend getting into a car after he interviewed him. Gleber didn’t see the driver, and it wasn’t a minute before the car was gone, but Gleber had a rookie he was training and he thought he’d get the kid to run the plates. So the kid runs the plates on the car and what he gets for the registration is Alec Reynolds.

  — Alec Reynolds, said Stan. I remember the name …

  — He’s been in long-term care a few years. Dementia, all the rest of it.

  — The car’s hot?

  — No. Alec’s only living next-of-kin is a niece. Arlene Reynolds. The girl’s name was registered on the insurance. When I got Gleber to talk about it last week, and I had to be careful about how I was asking these questions, he mentioned this girl’s name. I did a bit of looking on my own. She lived in Montreal for most of the last ten years and came back here in the spring. But that’s all. She doesn’t have a record or anything. Maybe she’s the other girl Judy saw.

  — Didn’t Alec Reynolds have a place on Indian Lake?

  — The marina in the north end, said Dick. Far as I know the bank hasn’t foreclosed on it yet but that can’t be long off. The store’s been closed up for six years, easy, as long as Alec’s been in hospital.

  — Eleanor talked about a place her sister had gone to try to track down the boyfriend. A motorhome was what she said.

  — Motorhome-could be EZ Acres, where he was working.

  — Could be.

  — Goddammit, Stanley, what do you have in mind here?

  — I don’t know. I suppose I just want to meet him. Have some words with him. I want to see what there is to see about him. Anyhow, Frank gave me a warning at Thanksgiving. I don’t want you to do anything to run foul of him.

  — Oh, he suspects I’ve been poking around. But he hasn’t come right out and said anything.

  — Still.

  — What�
��s the worst he could do, fire me? I’d be away hunting moose so goddamn fast your head would spin off. I’ll give you a ring, Stanley. Fran says she’d like to have you over for supper.

  — I’ll see you soon, Dick.

  Stan got out of the unmarked car and the rain came down on him. He climbed into his truck and started the ignition and the heater. Nothing made his joints ache like cold rain. His knuckles, his hips. He sat cursing while the truck warmed up.

  After Stan got up the next morning, he went down and did half a dozen rounds on the heavy-bag. It took some time to work the stiffness out of his joints. He’d spoken on the telephone to his sister in the evening after he’d brought Cassius home from the veterinarian. She was his only living sibling, seven years his senior. She lived out west and he’d last seen her when she came out for Edna’s funeral. They talked about the weather and health and grandchildren. She asked about the house and he told her he thought Frank and Mary might buy it from him. They agreed it would be nice to keep it in the family.

  After Stan had cleaned up from his exercises, he lifted up Cassius’s ears and put in the drops that the veterinarian had prescribed. Cassius bore the indignity without complaint. Stan got a chunk of cold steak out of the refrigerator and gave it to the dog.

  He left Cassius at the house and ran some errands in town. By midafternoon he had parked his truck near a marshy inlet on the northwest side of Indian Lake. He got out and walked up onto a pressure-treated birdwatching platform framed over the cattails. He had with him a pair of Bushnell 10x42 field glasses. He steadied his elbows on the rail and looked through the field glasses, north, to the bay at the top of the lake.

  A rocky shore. One or two cottages closed for the winter. If Stan was correct, Alec Reynolds’s property was marked by an eroded concrete pier at the base of a high feature. There’d been a gas pump up there. Stan could make out part of what had been a small store and restaurant behind where the pump had been. The windows were boarded over and much of the building was lost from sight by a growth of spruce. Where the land climbed up behind the building, Stan could just discern the roof of a storage shed or barn.

  He got back in his truck and drove around the gravel township roads north of the lake. He kept driving until he saw what he thought was the same roof he’d seen from the lake, the storage shed or the barn. It was a hundred yards south of the road, with bush intervening. Stan drove slowly until he came to a possibly corresponding driveway. It wound out of sight through the trees. He stopped the truck for a moment’s consideration.

  A short distance back the way he’d come, the township road passed over a culvert. There were no other driveways between there and the one he reckoned led to the marina. Just past the culvert, a small clearing had been cleft into the bush. It was a good enough place to park. He got out of his truck and walked into the bush. Everything was still wet from yesterday’s rainfall but the trees were not as thick as they had looked from the road. Up ahead, a creek was curving tightly through the trees and beyond that was the abrupt face of a rocky rise. Stan made his way over the fallen leaves. He came to the creek, which was wider than it looked, but he managed to cross it without any trouble. He went up the rise and when he came to the top he was breathing hard and the stiffness was back in his hips. He leaned on a tree to get his breath.

  At the top of the rise was a thin treeline. Beyond the treeline, fifty yards of open ground led to the building he’d been seeking. It looked like a large shed for wintering boats, and on the far side of the shed he could make out half of a camper. Farther down, the roof of the store was just visible where the high feature dropped back to the lake. Stan unslung the field glasses from his neck and scanned the property. Nothing moved.

  At last he trekked into the open field. The uncut grass hissed as he came to the back of the storage shed. The wall was windowless. He moved to the corner and peered around. The driveway from the township road came out of the trees and into a widened terminus between the storage shed and not one but two campers. One camper was a thirty-foot silver Airstream. The other was a battered Prowler, no more than nineteen feet long. The windows in both campers were dark.

  Stan went to the door of the Prowler and knocked on it. Waited, knocked again. He went to the Airstream and knocked on the door. There was a window set in the door but a curtain was drawn behind the glass. He knocked again. After some minutes had passed and nothing happened, he tried the Airstream door and found it locked fast. He went back to the Prowler and found it locked as well.

  Across from the campers there was a man-door in the side of the storage shed. Stan crossed the driveway. The man-door, at least, was unlocked. He went in. There wasn’t much to see in the wan and dusty light. An empty interior. Hard-packed dirt for the floor. Two walls had been framed out of the back corner of the shed to make a large locker, crooked with age. The locker was perhaps eight feet by eight feet. There was a hasp for a padlock fixed to the locker door-frame but no lock was in place. Stan opened the door. The dark inner hollow could be illuminated by a forty-watt bulb overhead-you just had to turn the bulb in its socket. The yellow light it threw brought out the cobwebs and made eerie shadows, but the locker was empty. He darkened the bulb again.

  Outside, Stan went down the slope to the back of the store. He felt certain he had some memories of this place when it was operational, summertime, kids with ice cream cones. The rear windows of the store were boarded over and No Trespassing was spray-painted on the plywood. The back door was locked. He did a circle of the building. The spruce on the headland had not been thinned in some time and grew close to the walls. Out front, Stan came to the pad where the gas pump had been. The wide panorama of Indian Lake lay beyond. The water licked against the short concrete pier below the pad. One front window of the store was unboarded. He cupped his hands around his face and looked through the glass into the darkness, saw the shape of a counter, a table with chairs stacked on it.

  Stan crossed back through the property and walked the driveway through the trees to the township road. By the time he reached his truck he’d worked up a thin sweat. Sitting behind the steering wheel he tried to decide how he felt. Absurdity hovered close but there was more to it-what Eleanor had said her sister had told her about a place by the lake, and how that fell into place with the property he’d just wandered about. The vague signs of life around the mobiles and the storage shed. In his mind, he’d made a picture of the man, Colin Gilmore, who’d come and gone from Judy’s life. And he thought how he was mocked by this, his own undertaking, when the pieces didn’t even hint at a whole. Edna occurred to him again, what she would say about this. But behind Edna came an image of Judy Lacroix dead in the back of a car and, years ago, her uncle Darien turning at the bottom of the hangman’s rope.

  Perhaps he couldn’t put it all into words-for Dick, for Frank, for the ghost of his wife-but he was gripped by it all the same. He was not going to stop now.

  I’ll be goddamned.

  Speedy had said that a few times, each time shaking his head. He was driving them south out of town along the highway for a short stretch. His car was a Mercury Monarch, a wreck on four wheels. The springs were pushing through the upholstery. Between I’ll-be-goddamneds, Speedy talked at a rapid rate about the woman he lived with, who he said was half wagon-burner and was therefore prone to going on drinking benders where she’d find herself in another town altogether. Lee smoked and listened. He had a low throb in his back and his shoulders from work that day. They were finished at the lakeside cottage and had spent the day cleaning up the job site.

  — But I’ll be goddamned, Lee. When was the last time we drove anywheres like this?

  Before long, Speedy brought them to a truck stop off the highway. Down the other end of the lot was a concrete roadhouse that a neon sign advertised as THE NORTH STAR. The parking lot was perhaps half full.

  — This is a good old place, said Speedy.

  Lee took in the sight of the roadhouse through the windshield. He was quickly agitat
ed. He said: Speedy. I can’t be around here. I don’t drink at all. I’ve been sober going on four years. When you came by you just said there was a place you wanted me to take a look at.

  — A place to look at?

  — That’s what you said. I figured you meant a job site or a house that needed to get fixed up. I didn’t think you meant nothing like this.

  Speedy looked incredulous in the dashboard lights.

  — Well, shit, Lee, I didn’t know about the soberness. Listen. Let’s just pop in for a minute then. Usually they got a band going. Plus, I got some buddies out here.

  — I don’t know.

  — Lee, you crazy old bugger. Come on, ten minutes. Have a 7UP, see some music. You probably need to just get loose.

  Speedy was already getting out of his car. Lee opened his mouth to summon Speedy back but he ended up saying nothing. He got out of the car and they went across the parking lot. There was a doorman who knew Speedy by name and he showed them into the roadhouse. The inside of the place was bigger than it had looked. A row of booths lined the far wall and tables were arranged around a riser. They’d stood jack-o’-lanterns around the stage and hung some dejected rubber bats from the ceiling. A lone man with an electric guitar and an amplifier was doing a decent cover of “Sundown.” There were townies and truckers, and someone Lee recognized from the lumberyard. Speedy stopped briefly at the bar. There was a girl pouring some drinks and a man whom Speedy called Mike. Speedy ordered a draft of Molson and Lee ordered a Coke and then they sat down in a booth and watched the musician.

  — Speedy, said Lee.

  Before Speedy could reply, the girl came from the bar with their drinks on a tray. She had blond hair and a sexy sway.

  — Always good to see Speedy, said the girl.

  — Arlene, this is my pal, Lee.

  She smiled, offered her hand for Lee to shake. When she left them, they watched her go until she was behind the bar again.

  Speedy leaned over to Lee: What would I give to put the cock to her.