Читать книгу Serpents Rising - David A. Poulsen - Страница 10

The shower felt as good as I thought it would and I stayed in it until the hot water heater’s supply was exhausted and the stream turned cool, then cold. My body was exhausted but my mind was on full alert. Thinking the whole time I was in the shower.

But I hadn’t been thinking about Jay Blevins and the race to find him. Instead my mind was occupied with the conversation Cobb and I had had over lunch, when he’d suggested that maybe there was something in Donna’s past that had led to the setting of the fire that killed her. That maybe she had been the target.

I stepped out of the shower, towelled off, and climbed into sweats and a University of Calgary Dinosaurs hoodie. I poured myself a stout portion of Crown Royal mixed with a lesser portion of Diet Coke, put Del Barber’s Love Songs for the Last 20 and The Tragically Hip’s We Are the Same on the CD player and sat down to think about what Cobb had said.

What about before she knew you? Something or someone in her past?

I had thought and rethought about that possibility in the weeks and months after the fire, trying to make sense of the senseless. And I’d rejected the notion every time.

It simply made sense to me that someone in my line of work — work that involved offending, sometimes attacking people in print that thousands of other people might read — was the target.

Me. It had to be me.

The note had confirmed that, hadn’t it? Why would someone send that note to me if Donna had been the target? The arsonist would have already accomplished his goal — Donna was dead. That certainty coupled with my absolute belief that no one could possibly have hated Donna enough to want her dead had been the basis for my rejecting the idea that she was the killer’s target that night. And I was just as sure now, all these years after her death.

Or was I?

Weirder shit than that — a lot weirder — has happened.

I sipped on my drink, stared at a couple of flecks on the ceiling. Something or someone in her past.

A nut job from when she was a teenager, some guy who felt slighted because she wouldn’t go to the prom with him or got the scholarship he thought he should have got or …

But would a nut job wait years to exact his revenge? That’s why the whole thing seemed so far-fetched, so impossible. Because it was impossible.

Weirder shit than that …

I glanced at the clock. 12:42 a.m. I set the drink down and walked to the main closet near the door. In it, below the clothes, footwear, and Christmas decorations I’d need in just a few weeks were some boxes. Including a couple containing Donna’s stuff, things that had previously been in the garage and in a storage locker downtown — stuff that neither of us had done anything with in all the time we were married. Most of it I’d never even looked at.

I wanted to look at it now. Between the shower and the drink and the thinking, I was wide awake.

I set the boxes, there were three, in the centre of the room, sat cross-legged on a scatter rug at the end of the bed, and went through Donna’s stuff for two and a half hours, feeling like a voyeur, like I was invading her privacy, the only thing that was left of her.

Two and a half hours of fifteen-year-old bank statements, Day-Timers loaded with to-do lists and appointment times, a couple of English essays from what looked like a first-year university lit survey course. I read one, Donna’s take on choosing Marlow rather than Kurtz as the hero of Heart of Darkness. I read the essay and cried, not for the content but for the creator of the content. I set the second essay aside unread — it was something about Polonius’s role in Hamlet.

Tax receipts, a phone directory, travel brochures, four letters from me during our courting days … I didn’t read them but I did notice that she had written notes in the margins. “Sweet!!” and “I love that man” were a couple that caught my attention.

I tried not to let the time deteriorate into a nostalgia session and concentrated on finding some tiny hint, some clue that might provide a reason for someone to hate the woman I loved.

Two and a half hours of nothing. I was closing in on comatose. I picked up one more piece of paper. One yellowed piece of three-hole-punched paper like something torn from a school Duo-Tang or notebook. A neatly written note in what I was fairly certain was Donna’s handwriting.

Kelly — The bastard did it again. D

And under that, what I guessed was the reply.

Pig.K

It had been stuck between the pages of a battered paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Hundred to one odds it was meaningless — there were a hundred innocuous explanations for the note. And I might have forgotten the whole thing except that it was out of character for the Donna I knew to vent her anger in that way, which wasn’t to say she didn’t get angry at times, but mostly she dealt with it internally or in some totally civilized and controlled way that didn’t involve name calling or writing angry notes.

Still, this was likely high school or even junior high. What kid didn’t vent occasionally as part of the growing up/going to school/rebelling against parents and the world phase?

And that was it. Close to three hours of searching had resulted in one hand-written note to someone named Kelly — a note containing six words. Seven if you counted Kelly’s one word reply. Not much there to make me change my belief that the arsonist had been targeting me and had messed up.

I left the stuff spread over the bedroom floor and stumbled into bed. Now I was tired. Del Barber was singing “62 Richmond” for the third time. I didn’t bother to shut off the stereo. I was asleep before the end of the song.

But not for long. I dreamt. Something about a fire and a fire alarm. At least it started as a fire alarm then morphed into a phone ringing. It took me a while to figure that out. The fog in my brain finally cleared enough that I realized the phone wasn’t in my dream. I was actually awake and the reason was that the phone on the end table next to my bed wouldn’t shut up.

After maybe the tenth ring, I got it picked up and juggled over to where I was. I rested it more or less against my ear.

“Hello.”

Cobb’s voice. “Sorry to call at this hour.”

“You’re hard on rest, my friend.”

“Yeah. I called to tell you you’re out.”

“What? Out what?”

“I won’t be picking you up in the morning. You’re out of the search for Jay Blevins.”

I rubbed my face with my left hand. “You find a better journalist or what?”

“Blevins is dead.”

I sat up.

“Jay?”

“Larry. The old man. They got to him before he could turn himself in. Shot in the back of the head but that was after someone did a lot of nasty stuff to him … something like forty broken bones. The cops couldn’t recognize him from his face.”

“How did you find out?”

“I was a cop, Adam, I know some people.”

“Any idea who?”

“He was found beside a Dumpster a few blocks from his house. Time of death about midnight.”

About the time we were getting back to my apartment.

“Shit,” I said.

“These are bad bastards, Adam. I can’t run the risk of having them come after you.”

“Isn’t that my risk and my decision?”

“No, it isn’t. I asked you to help me, you did, and I appreciate it, but things have changed and I’ll need to do this without having to … on my own.”

“You were going to say without having to look out for me.”

No answer.

“Back to my earlier point, I can decide for myself what risks I’m prepared to take. And besides, you can’t fire a volunteer.”

“I’m not firing you. Look, I’m sorry, but I need to be on my own and I haven’t got time to argue with you about it. Thanks for what you did on this.”

I wanted to debate it further but I would have been talking to a dial tone. Cobb had hung up. I set the phone back on its cradle and stared into the dark for a while. Knowing sleep wouldn’t be happening any time soon, I got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and made a pot of coffee. Finally shut off the stereo. I sat at the table and drank two cups of coffee with milk and more sugar than usual.

I turned on the TV to see if there was anything about Blevins. There wasn’t, although there were several reports about the “gangland-style slaying” of two suspected narcotics dealers. No names. Footage of the house on Raleigh, reporters voicing comments that were a collection of generalities, which was probably all they had. I doubted the cops would be all that forthcoming, especially since they likely didn’t know a hell of a lot themselves. I wondered how long it would be before they were able to tie Blevins’s death to the shooting of the two dealers.

I turned off the TV and started on a third cup of coffee while I leafed through Donna’s stuff again. It was a small pile — not much to show for thirty plus years of life. The fire had taken the rest.

But halfway through the third cup of coffee I started to question that supposition. I thought about my own situation — most of the flotsam and jetsam of my past had also been destroyed in the fire. Most, but not all.

If I were trying to uncover my own past, where would I look? Parents, best friends, maybe even school. The point was, there were places. It all hadn’t just disappeared over time. I spent the next half hour making a list of places I might be able to look to reconstruct at least some of Donna’s life from before I knew her.

The list wasn’t long; the truth is I didn’t really know much about Donna (then) Leybrand. I’d lied, I’m not sure why, when I told Cobb that Donna and I had talked about all that kind of thing. In truth we’d almost never talked about Donna’s life before we knew each other. I never got the impression she was hiding anything or didn’t want to talk about the past. We just didn’t.

But maybe that wasn’t quite accurate either. We’d talked about my past. At least the stuff I considered important: the deaths of my parents, Dad when I was twelve, Mom when I was seventeen; my baseball scholarship to Oklahoma State and a fling with a baseball career that ended at spring training with the Twins when my already too slow fastball got a whole lot slower courtesy of a torn rotator cuff. I had to choose between major surgery that I was told had maybe a fifty-fifty chance of getting me back on the field or getting a job. I decided to find out if my journalism degree was worth the four years it had taken me to get it.

Donna knew all of that, and more, about me. And I knew … not much about her youth. Which isn’t to say I knew nothing. I knew she’d gone to university, studied public administration, didn’t like it, left school without graduating, and got into retail and worked her way into management. I knew she liked to travel and had done the standard Europe thing and a couple of months in Australia after leaving Carleton.

But as I compiled the list of who I could talk to about Donna’s life before I came on the scene, I realized it too was pathetically small.

I knew none of her girlfriends from school (no, that was wrong — there was Kelly, though I knew her only from the note). I did know a couple of people from her college years, a couple more from the job she’d been working at when we met, Dr. Mike McCullers who had been her doctor from when she was a kid, the people who had attended the funeral — their names were listed on the guestbook that was somewhere in the apartment. Donna’s mom, Joan Leybrand. Donna’s father had passed away three years before the fire and Donna was an only child, no siblings.

Short list.