The Girl in the Wall (15 page)

More clouds drifted in overnight. They held no serious threat of rain but covered the sky so thickly it was hard to see the sun. Frank sat on the porch with the newspaper and a cup of coffee. The big headline on page one said, “Skeleton Discovered in Wall of Norwood Home; Police Without a Clue.”

The phone rang from inside the house at the same time his new neighbour — the one who lived where Gus was supposed to be — fired up his lawn mower, so he went back inside and closed the door behind him.

Chas was calling, to say that the police would be finished up at the house by the time the weekend was over, maybe even later today. They had taken everything that could possibly be of any help to them in the investigation. There wasn't much.

“The house is dead,” Chas said. “We're going to have to get what we can from the body.”

Frank suddenly knew with certainty that he had the best clue of all upstairs under his mattress. Oh, they might figure out who the little woman was, but not who killed her.

That would be up to him. He would solve this thing, with the photograph as his guide. No one would have to know how he did it. He could explain his way around the picture when the time came.

A deep sadness entered him and took his breath away. He recognized his superhero thoughts as immature and totally irresponsible, but they wouldn't shift. He didn't want the world the way it was and he could feel it pulling away from him. One day soon he would be perched on its very edge staring out into the void. Are these kinds of feelings just entry into the last third of life? he wondered. Is this what every person who turns fifty-six faces but keeps to himself? What lies do they tell themselves each morning to trick themselves into crawling out of bed one more time?

“There's been some interest from television and the newspapers,” Chas said. “So be prepared to be hounded some when you get back to the site. You and your girlfriend can most likely go back to work on Monday morning.”

“Jane's not my girlfriend, Chas. Please don't say things like that to me.”

He hung up without saying a proper goodbye.

What Frank needed now was to talk to Gus, but he no longer lived next door. It had been two years now since his old friend had died but Frank still found himself heading toward the door in the hopes of finding him out in his yard. All he would find today would be the slick new gunk-haired bachelor who more often than not “worked from home” and talked loudly into one of his hand-held devices. One of the things that annoyed Frank the most about him was that when he talked to Frank he talked so softly that it was necessary to say, “Pardon?” after most things he said. Why couldn't he — his name was Tad — speak quietly like that to his machines or at least find a happy medium and stick to it, both for human and electronic contact? Frank wondered if it would be all right to mention it to him.

His missing Gus was less complicated than his longing for Denise, but his body told him that it ran nearly as deep. It had a hard ache to it and very little in the way of regret. Maybe just that he hadn't been with him as he took his last breaths, but he couldn't be blamed for that. A man needed to sleep. He still talked to Gus sometimes to get his thoughts in order and imagine what his friend would have said in response. The loss of his daily presence, with his insights and gentle advice, left a giant chasm in Frank's life. He doubted he would ever have another such friend.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

Sadie kissed him on the cheek on her way to the kitchen.

He loved that she sometimes still called him Daddy even though she was fourteen years old. He was going to have to pull himself together, get his irritability and sadness under control for her sake and for the sake of Garth — Emma too, on the far side of the world. It was his good self that they counted on, not this new man that shouted at the river and wanted to squeeze the neck of young Tad next door.

That was another thing about Tad. He had the oddest-looking neck Frank had ever seen on a man. It was like the neck of a beautiful woman. Maybe he was a woman! Frank decided he would look keenly for an Adam's apple next time he encountered him. He found that he felt more kindly towards Tad hollering into a phone when he thought of him as a woman dressed up as a man.

Frank believed he was having an epiphany — one that would help him deal with the ogre he was becoming. He made a hasty promise to himself that when someone was driving him berserk, he would picture that person as a frightened member of the sex opposite to what he was, trying to make his way in a hostile world where he was living a lonely lie. Usually it was men that made him crazy but sometimes it was women: women drivers, for instance.

He followed Sadie into the kitchen.

“Is your brother stirring?” he asked.

Sadie was at the sink. She turned on the water and didn't answer.

“Sadie?”

“Uh, I think he might have gone out really early,” she said.

The blood vanished from Frank's head.

“On a Saturday? There's no such thing as Garth going out early on his day off,” he said as he raced up the stairs.

Frank remembered last night. He had fallen asleep before he heard the familiar clumsiness of his boy coming up the stairs.

Sure enough, the unmade bed was empty. It was the emptiest bed Frank had ever seen. He rummaged in the covers as though there were a chance his son had made himself small in the night and was there someplace inside the teenage-boy sheets.

He ran down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“Sadie, do you know anything about this?” he asked.

She was sitting at the table staring straight ahead.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Dad. Jeez.”

“I should never have allowed myself to go to sleep before I heard him come in,” Frank said, and put his hand on Sadie's shoulder. “I'm sorry, honey, I'm just upset with myself. And Garth, of course.”

His knees began to shake and he sat down. His throat was parched and his chest felt heavy, achy even. Maybe he was having a heart attack.

“I'm sorry, Sadie,” he said again.

“You look kind of grey,” she said.

“Sorry.”

The phone rang and they both lunged for it where it sat on the kitchen counter. Sadie got there first but she handed it to her dad.

“Hello?” said Frank.

It was Garth. He was calling from his friend Ian's house where he had spent the night. Ian lived a one-minute walk away.

“Come home right now,” said Frank.

He listened for a moment.

“Come home right now,” he said again and hung up.

Garth was in the kitchen in a little over one minute.

“I didn't want to wake you up by phoning.”

“Don't ever do that again,” Frank said.

“I'm eighteen,” said Garth. “I'm going to be living away from home in the fall.”

“You hope,” said Frank.

“Da-ad!”

“I think you better go to your room now before this gets any worse. We'll talk later.”

Garth trudged upstairs and Sadie busied herself with flour and eggs and other ingredients.

The heavy feeling in Frank's chest had grown and sunk to include his stomach. It felt as though he had eaten a woollen blanket. He hated fighting with Garth. He was a good boy, an excellent boy, who had worked hard at both his schoolwork and baseball to earn a scholarship to the University of North Dakota in the fall. When Frank recalled the things he himself had been doing at Garth's age, he cringed. He'd been having sex off and on for three years by then and was smoking, of course, drinking, staying out all night with no consequences at home. He was even dabbling in dope at eighteen. The only reason he hadn't started in on that sooner was that it wasn't around yet, not in his circles, anyway. As soon as it was, he'd leapt right in.

Things were different then; the world was different then. But that wasn't an argument he could give his son. He had tried it before. It wasn't a good argument.

Frank feared for the life of his children every time they left his sight. Again, he wished he could speak to Gus. He would set him straight on this, tell him to ease up. Still, it was wrong of Garth not to have called last night, even if he was eighteen. It was 2006, not 1968. Much as it wasn't a good argument, it held water as far as Frank was concerned. If no one had answered the phone, Garth could have left a message for Frank to find first thing in the morning or as he roamed through the house at night as he often did.

He tried picturing his son as a girl dressed up as a boy to try out his new idea. It didn't work. If Garth had been a girl and stayed out all night Frank would have stopped breathing and died. So much for the effectiveness of his epiphany.

In spite of his anxious thoughts and the heavy feeling in his torso he hoped that Sadie was making a cake.

“What are you doing, Sadie?”

“Making a carrot cake. That's okay, isn't it?”

“Of course it's okay. It's great. Be sure to take a piece up to Garth when it's done.”

“I will, Dad.” She smiled.

Frank got himself together, phoned Jane, and headed off to the house on Lloyd. It seemed a good idea to keep in touch with the situation.

When he got there, a young constable he hadn't met before was removing the yellow tape surrounding the yard and a forensic photographer was packing up her cameras. After doing so, she stood and stared at the house for a long time. Frank stood back and stared too. He didn't want to be in her way. There were other people out on their sidewalks, watching the house, but it was obvious by now there was nothing much to see. And they would have learned that their questions would mostly go unanswered.

Jane had said she'd meet him there. She was walking towards him now and he felt his interior woolly blanket begin to evaporate ever so slightly. He liked the way she walked, a bit like the tomboy she said she had been as a kid. Frank hadn't known her then, though she, too, had lived in the neighbourhood for the whole of her life. Her parents moved to their home on Pinedale in 1967, one year before she was born. Both sets of Frank's grandparents had settled in the area in the 1920's. His parents had never left and neither had Frank. He didn't suppose anyone would describe him as an adventuresome man.

He went to meet Jane.

“When can we pick up our tools?” she asked.

Frank spoke to the constable who told him to phone downtown when the weekend was over.

Jane started to protest and Frank put his hand on her arm.

She shrugged him off.

“I hate that they've got our tools,” she said. “What if they wreck something?”

“There's nothing we can do and it has nothing to do with this officer.”

Frank felt pleased that someone was more upset about something than he was. It made a change.

“If we had our tools we could have gone back to work today,” said Jane.

“We've never worked weekends,” Frank said. “Why start now?”

“To make up for losing yesterday.”

“You're starting to sound like Featherstone.”

The photographer and constable finally drove away in their separate vehicles.

“Let's see how much of our work they've done for us,” Frank said.

Sure enough, the upper level had been stripped pretty well bare and all the materials removed. There was no evidence of any interior walls at all except for a few support beams — nothing left but the memory of a tiny woman sealed behind drywall and the little ghosts of their missing tools.

They were exiting the house just as Norm Featherstone drove up in his brand new unattractive Cadillac.

“Great,” Frank muttered.

“Where are you two going?” he asked.

“Good morning, Norm,” said Frank.

“Are you getting back to work today?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know we don't work weekends.”

“But so much time has been wasted already.”

Frank looked at Jane and smiled.

“Half a day, Norm,” he said. “Plus, they finished gutting the upstairs, which is all we would have ended up doing yesterday anyway.”

“Anyhow, they took our…” Jane began.

Frank nudged her perhaps a little too hard and she stopped talking. He didn't want to give Featherstone anything, let alone a good reason for their stopping work.

Norm looked around him.

“Where are the new materials?”

Jane looked at Frank.

He realized in the emptiness of the yard that he hadn't placed an order yet with McDiarmid Lumber. If they had wanted to work today, if they'd had their tools, they would have had no materials, no lumber, no anything to work with. He wondered if it had occurred to Jane. Maybe he should hand over all the thinking aspects of the job to her. He could become the grunt man, follow her orders and work only with his aching back and stiff hands.

“I called and told them to hold off till Monday,” he said. “They couldn't have dropped anything off past the yellow tape with the police milling around.”

Now that was quick thinking, thought Frank. If I had placed the order I would have had to do exactly what I just lied about doing. I've had a brief moment of quick thought.

He was certain his brain was shrinking and changing. The parts that he'd used as a detective — the keen, intuitive, deductive parts — were no longer being exercised to their full capacity. He needed to whip them back into shape. He pictured an amorphous blob inside of his head flopping about, interfering in ways that were ever-growing and ever-changing.

The blob — it was mauve — also affected what he thought of as the other part of his brain, the part that was turning him into a man who raged and blamed and behaved badly in front of his kids and friends like Jane.

Norm Featherstone jingled the change in his pocket. He was wearing the same horrid brown suit he had worn the day before. The jingling sound made Frank want to turn Norm upside down, empty his pockets onto the ground and light the contents on fire, melt down the coins and pour them into Norm's ears.