Читать книгу Tell Everything - Sally Cooper - Страница 7

I woke up hot. My eyes burned. Images of cellar windows, angled light faded into joy. I pulled the duvet over my head and tucked in my feet.

“Kiss me so I can go to work,” Alex said. He stood over me in his trench coat, two plums clutched to his chest. I lifted my head off the pillow, eyes shut, and we pressed lips.

In June, after we’d graduated, Alex and I had rented the bungalow on Shelby Street. Flats Mills had a Lucky Dollar, a diner, two churches, and a strip of antique and craft shops. Beyond the town sat hundred-acre fields of corn, potatoes, soy, and sod. The land moved higher to the north, and in certain darknesses its hills gave a view of Toronto lit-up, an hour away. We’d got what we wanted. Country and city. Space and each other.

We painted the living room Chimayo red and hung it with nudes. Some originals, some prints. Nobody dropped by, nobody had our phone number. Living here felt like an escape trick.

“I’m bushed,” I said.

“You screamed last night. And punched me once.” He sat on my feet. Images of wet hands, a dripping mattress seeped into me.

“I do that sometimes.” I stroked the sheet.

“Nightmares are hot. And I get to do the protective guy thing.” He swelled his chest and sucked in his cheeks.

I scratched his beard where the skin was peeling underneath. Last night Alex had hugged me as we walked around Flats Mills inhaling our skunky weed and our neighbours’ sweet maple firesmoke. We’d shared a pocket and a glove and talked about his internship at St. Mary’s Hospital. He’d called me his girl and said he’d buy us a farmhouse once he set up his practice. I liked his love, though it felt simple, finite. My own, lesser love dwelled on his staying and left it at that. I’d clutched his cuff and called him “Sweetness” to stop myself from showing him anyone but the person he knew he loved.

“You’d be surprised what I know, my dear.”

I found Alex’s statements cryptic, but they had their appeal. They kept us from talking about what made us uncomfortable.

We never said “I love you” or discussed what our love felt like and what it meant to us, and we didn’t talk about marriage or children or why he gave up art for medicine. Cozy, we stayed hopeful.

“What do you know?”

“Everything is good between us, and we made a good choice coming here.”

“Any choice we made would have worked.”

“But we made this one and we’re happy.”

“We are happy,” I said.

He got up, and the nerves in my feet sputtered. Then he was leaving — shutting off the stereo, rattling keys, closing doors. The hatchback’s engine turned over with a screech, tires swashed puddles, and the house fell silent.

I called Vangie and said I had a migraine.

“The flashes and bangs stopped an hour ago. I’m taking a break. Next comes the weeping and vomiting.”

“Make sure you have plenty of tissues, dear,” she said.

“It’s the season. You know —” I said, ready to talk, but Vangie had an interview and had to go.

Vangie was the head editor at InfoText. She had her own office and suffered from migraines, so I let her think I did, too. Once, I drove her to Emergency at ten in the morning. I had to pull over three times so she could throw up. The hospital gave her a shot and she slept for two days. Afterward, discomfited, she took me to dinner and I consoled her with a false list of my own symptoms. I liked the closeness, the shared burden. At InfoText, I sat in a cubicle cluster with five other grunts entering data. On a good week, I could do a whole book.

Afternoons I watched talk shows until Alex got back from the hospital. Whenever I brought up serial killers, Alex said, “Why do you want to glorify those losers?”

“Good point,” I said. “But successful couples keep some separate interests. All the magazines say so.”

“Why not get a more useful hobby, then? Make us a toilet paper doll. A driftwood centrepiece. A Popsicle stick lamp.”

“Because then you’d want to join me.”

Sometimes I worked on the outline of my novel about a sculptor who’d made a box that conjured up the ghost of a runaway slave. Mostly I built the box, so I’d know what to say about it when I was ready to write. It took up most of the second bedroom.

The box — my character’s box — tapered like a cone and had six sides made of chicken wire, foam rubber, and canvas. It could hold one person, two in a pinch. It needed a door, though, with a lock. I planned to use brass.

After a bath, I wrapped myself in towels and did a slow airdry in front of The Heidi Roth-Lopez Show. Heidi, a former alcoholic soap opera teen, hectored a forty-five-year-old man engaged to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d gone to the same school as his sons. The sons scowled from the audience. The girlfriend sat behind them, in her eyes an animal sheen. She looked caught, sore, her tight mouth ungiving. The man’s eyes were clear pools of unexpected, inane light.

Heidi emphasized key words in her questions then turned her sly gaze on the audience, who shouted “Perv!” and “Sickie!” at the father, the girl, even the sons. Throughout, the man looked lusty and contrite, the girl ready to bolt, yet their stories had a veneer of joy and rightness that aroused in me a quizzical respect. Clearly, they relished the spectacle as the holes inside them gaped for all to see.

I turned the TV off, got dressed, and fastened my hair with a barrette shaped like a fish. In the foyer I double-knotted my boot laces and buttoned a trench coat against the dripping fog.

Head down, I fixed my gaze on the road. Corroded leaves rimmed the ditch. I stretched out my sweater neck, the air warm despite the damp. I stepped around potholes and puddles. Gravel and mud packed the grooves of my soles.

I walked the half block to Queen Street, past Sandy White Woolens and Beard of Bees Crafts, open weekends only. Tires slapped the wet asphalt. I crossed to the post office. The mail contained a hydro bill and a flyer for Drainy Days Plumbing. Only one letter had come for me since we moved here, from Jenna, my first-year roommate, who taught in Czechoslovakia. None of my friends lived close.

I passed the Cannonball Diner with its smoke and oil pong then ducked into the Lucky Dollar for a paper. The tabloids didn’t come in until Tuesday, so I got the Toronto Telstar. Outside, I checked out the front page. Yet another offensive headline: “Lawyer dead, wife nailed.” Beside it walked a tanned woman in a pink turtleneck and jean jacket flanked by two police. My breath cinched and I sank into a crouch, back against the ice freezer, the paper on my knees.

At twelve, I wrote my first story about a homicidal mother. I wrote more at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, right up until I moved to Cloud Lake. I typed the stories fast and made them bloody, amoral. In each one the mother swings her hair and looks over her shoulder the way my mother did the day she drove off with the man she met at the Dominion Hotel.

When he read them, Alex rubbed my earlobes and said, “It’s always the same story with you, Pauline,” and he was right. Only this one, I hadn’t made up. I knew the victim and I knew the killer. The accused. The woman on the front page. The police had arrested her because they believed she’d murdered her husband.

Fog buried the treetops and swathed the Bethany United Church steeple. Even under arrest, Ramona Hawkes wrapped confidence around sickness and fear. She’d gained weight. It was hard to see specifics, but I did check, then, ashamed, dug at my ear and scanned the highlights. She’d stabbed him — someone had stabbed him — thirty-one times. She was stronger than I remembered. But that was wrong. She had been strong. I remembered her strong.

In my office I dropped the Telstar on the floor. Ramona stared past me. Alex would comment on her body, compare it unfavourably to mine. I didn’t want to hear it. I placed the folded paper face down in the slave box and picked up some sandpaper. As I tried to block out James Hawkes and his wife, I ended up thinking about the profound connection between killer and victim. I missed my shows and didn’t hear Alex as I rubbed the brass to the smoothness of old skin.

That was October 1990. One cold morning the following summer, I lay wrapped in towels on the couch watching Heidi Roth-Lopez interview the mother of a giant baby. The baby sat in a separate room with a camera trained on him. A screen behind Heidi and the parents showed the baby to the audience. He had floppy legs and a wet, vapid face. His eyes were smart and dazzling, slightly drugged. The audience tutted and moaned. Someone yelled, “Freak!” I wanted him to be real as much as I didn’t. Maybe more. The mother wanted it, too, and I admired her show of helpless need. Shellacked with tears, she exposed the space in her the size of a fat, diapered teenager. I’d quit data entry by then and was collecting unemployment insurance and trying to write.

When the knocking started, I muted the TV and crouchwalked to the window, dropping towels. Two people in windbreakers stood on the stoop, their faces blocked by the awning. A cop car nosed my Hustler’s tail.

“Answer the door please, Ms. Brown,” a woman’s voice called. “It’s the police.”

I haven’t done anything. What about Alex? I don’t want to know. I skittered into the bedroom and got under the covers.

“Pauline Elizabeth Brown?” a man’s voice asked through the screen. I’d left the bedroom window open.

“Yes.”

“Let us in, please. You’ve already got two neighbours hanging over the fence. Or we’ll climb in through here. Suit yourself.”

I tugged the curtains across and crawled to the dresser. I had no clean underwear, so I put on a one-piece bathing suit under an Indian print skirt. By the time I opened the door I had goosebumps. The damp suit smelled of chlorine. The cops stepped into the foyer.

“I’m Detective Debra Young and this is Detective Wayne Stanton. We understand you used to live in Cloud Lake.”

Detective Stanton was black-eyed and tall with a meanwise smile that poked into one cheek. Detective Young had pink cheeks and a severe blonde ponytail. They held open leather wallets with gold badges on one side and photo IDs on the other.

“What’s the problem?” Behind them, the empty street looked expectant, prying.

“We need you to confirm that you lived in Cloud Lake, in Brampton.” Detective Young’s voice had a pleasant gloss that strove to make you like her even as she extracted something dear.

“That’s right. I did.”

“Good. Did you know Ramona Hawkes?”

Cornered, I croaked a yes, with dread and relief. The Telstar with Ramona’s picture sat in my box, but I hadn’t read about her since that day. I’d avoided the news, too. Without details, my mind had offered flashes of pores, stubble, and knuckles — my body greased with a smell that brought me up to three baths a day. I snapped the bathing suit strap and agreed to let them drive me to the station.

“Ramona Hawkes is accused of a Peel County murder,” Detective Young explained over her shoulder as we headed up Highway 400. Her ponytail draped over the headrest. I studied the handle-free doors. I used to know a guy, Dave Watson, who’d busted free of a cop car by kicking the window out with his feet. “But the South Simcoe station is closer to your house, only ten minutes away. We’d rather talk to you on your own turf.” Suddenly I had a turf. I felt like pawing it.

The air smelled of corn. “Tornado ripped through here a few years back,” Detective Stanton said. “You can see the damage if you know where to look.” We were driving past a break in the trees where the brush lay flat.

They took me to a room with a scarred table and four chairs. Detective Young fiddled with the blind so it blocked the sun and a blue patch of Lake Simcoe then sat at the end. She was tall, and her knee hit the table when she crossed her legs.

“You’re late-breaking,” Detective Stanton said. He spoke with relieved glee, as if he’d expected I’d give him more trouble. “We didn’t know about you until after Ramona Hawkes’s preliminary hearing.”

“How did you find me?” Maybe Ramona had given them my name. I tugged each finger away from its socket.

Detective Stanton looked at Detective Young, who twitched. He leaned an elbow on the table as if he wanted to share a secret, his body poised in the relaxed coil of a practised flirt. His wedding band caught the light like treasure.

“You weren’t in her yearbook, that’s obvious. She had letters and scripts. Your name turned up.”

“Scripts?”

“Scripts with your name on them. It appears you wrote them. Keep in mind your statement could help convict Ramona Hawkes at the trial. Smoke?”

I took one and let him light it. After an easy drag, I tapped the cigarette against the crimp-edged ashtray then held it away from my body. The scripts I remembered, but I couldn’t think of what letters I’d written. I wanted to help but didn’t see how I could.

“How will talking to me make a difference? I knew her five years ago. I have no idea why — or if — she did it. I haven’t followed the story at all.”

“What happened at the prelim is public domain,” Stanton said. He hitched the back of his pants with one hand. Young inspected her nails, cut blunt and left bare, then spoke. “You might want to bone up further at the library, but we can give you the basics.” She had the soothing voice of a shill, and I quickened, alert for loopholes.

“There is evidence that Ramona and James Hawkes drugged and assaulted teenage girls. While Ramona Hawkes is not on trial here for sexual assault, at issue is whether her husband forced her to participate and she killed him out of fear for her own life, or whether she shared her husband’s proclivities and killed him out of jealousy over someone else.”

She twirled the words “someone else” into a question, as if she had an idea of the other woman’s identity but wanted to see how I responded. After all, Ramona had kept my scripts. I must have meant something to her. Maybe she envied me all these years later. If so, I didn’t want to know. Let another friend carry that burden.

“We’re going back to establish patterns, digging up what we can. Every small detail could help.”

“Whose side are you on?” I asked.

“It isn’t about sides, Pauline. We work for the Crown.”

“So you think she did it?”

“There is enough evidence to go to trial, yes.”

“We’d like you to tell us whatever you remember about the times you spent at the Hawkeses’ house,” Stanton said. “What you saw and heard, whatever you observed, however small.”

“But I didn’t know them long.”

“We have one witness who knew them less than a week. Your story has merit. We’d like to hear it.”

“How about some pop? A coffee?” Palms on the table, Detective Young shifted her weight as if to stand. She had a precise assurance that spoke of no disappointments. A leader. A prizewinning girl.

I brought the cigarette to my mouth. Ashes rose then settled on my skirt. These two had the main events figured. I’d have to give them details, tell them what I guessed they already knew.

“Shall we?”

“Okay.” I tucked my hands into my armpits. “But go easy on me. I’m nervous. It’s hard to talk about this kind of thing.”

“We understand. We’ll take it slow, then,” said Detective Young. “As slow as you like.”

“How did you meet Ramona?” Detective Stanton asked. “Give us times and dates.”

“I knew her a year,” I said. “Him less than that. I met them in 1985.” I took care not to say either name.

Detective Stanton asked about touching. Sex.

“What? Will I have to testify? I don’t want —”

“Possibly,” said Detective Young. “Though I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, if it comes to that. What is it?”

“This is embarrassing. I hardly knew this woman and I don’t remember much. My husband doesn’t even know.”

“I’m sorry,” said Detective Young. “Maybe you’ll want to speak someone about that?”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing?” I reined in my smile so they wouldn’t take me for a smartass. I wanted to leave but I had no way to get home.

“A professional, I was thinking. A counsellor. We can give you some names, if you like. So you know, we do sometimes use the statement, no witness. The trial starts in March. Please, your story’s important. Tell us every detail. Don’t lie or guess. Wayne will take notes, and I’ll tape you.”

Someone else would come forward. Another friend. They wouldn’t need my story to get a conviction. Girls, he’d said. There were others. Even if I was the other woman in Ramona’s mind, I didn’t need to be in theirs. I talked for almost an hour then stopped.

“I don’t remember any more,” I said, and I didn’t, not really. I hadn’t for a long time.

The house reeled, too bright, nothing in its expected place. My body felt wrong, far away and not my own. After the detectives dropped me off, I stood inside the door and held out my hands. I touched my fingers as if I’d never seen fingers before. In the living room I stared at the nudes. Not one looked back at me, the faces haircurtained, buried in armpits, turned away, or cut from the frame.

Until I saw her photo in the Telstar, I’d forgotten Ramona. I never thought about what happened and I never talked about it. Today, I’d rewarded the detectives’ questions. They’d picked at the details and prodded until I told more than I’d bargained. The cops had my statement now. I’d signed it so they could read it in court and I wouldn’t have to appear. Since Alex didn’t follow murder trials, he needn’t find out. I could stay the same in his eyes. I could forget again.

In my office, I kneeled in front of the box and turned the Telstar over. Ramona had worn Ray-Bans for her arrest, and a pink turtleneck. She’d rounded out, but little else had changed in five years. I brought the paper to my desk. My novel outline had hit a hundred pages. The novel needed scenes. I tackled one in which the ghost watches the sculptor with her lover. Soon I switched to my stack of character cards. I crossed out the sculptor’s description and wrote “blonde.” Then “Ramona.” I scribbled over the card and shredded it. Cards were stupid and they weren’t writing. I shut off my computer and grabbed a notepad. With the Telstar on my knee, I leaned against the box and wrote. I wrote what I saw and what I thought and what I might have thought. Some of the places changed, our names, too. I put Ramona’s side in, but writing it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t think I would do it again.

The first time Peck saw her, Mona was applying lip gloss in the parking lot of the Rodeo strip mall. Peck was seventeen, had moved to Westwoods three weeks earlier, and was sticking Velcroed poker chips to the New Releases shelf near the window of Venus Video when she saw this woman in a black leather mini and a pink ripped T-shirt with the word “City” across the front in script. The woman had long platinum hair and wore a police cap and frilly anklets inside white leather pumps like the ladies in the ZZ Top videos. She stood on the asphalt in the “Reserved for Venus Video” spot. Her perfectness bugged Peck. Her phoniness. She looked like nobody Peck had ever seen close up, not in Kashag and certainly not here, and Peck couldn’t stop staring at her, trying to break the whole into pieces she could understand. She applied the lip gloss so slowly, dabbing the fuzzy end of the applicator on her puckered lips, dipping the stick in the pink container, swiping it back and forth, loading each lip with oily goo. Peck could imagine the candy smell. The Vaseline taste. The lip gloss irked her.

At the time Peck saw her applying the pink lip gloss at the Rodeo strip mall, Mona lived with Jim Hawkes at 17 Covered Wagon Trail in a detached home that backed onto a field. She had met Jim the previous Christmas at a law school pub she’d gone to with Larry Buxton, her Man & Society teacher. She went home with Jim and never left. She worked as one of three legal secretaries at the small firm of Henderson, Albert & Tizz. A picture of her Rottweiler, Albert, sat in a brass frame on her desk. The Rotty wore a blue kerchief and stood splay-legged and smiling on Wasaga Beach, an orange KONG at his feet. Jim had a dog allergy so Albert lived with her parents in the Smythefield subdivision west of Main Street and north of Buyers World mall. Mona liked the fields behind 17 Covered Wagon Trail. She liked squinting at the light on the pond water and hearing the cracked sounds of the ducks. Smythefield had no open spaces. It had older and taller trees. She liked being the only one walking the streets in no shade. She liked the sameness of the houses. By June 1985, she was engaged. She was planning her wedding. She had girlfriends both older and younger than seventeen. She liked a good caper and was impressed when she walked into Venus Video and Peck Brown was watching Bonnie and Clyde.