Читать книгу Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Sylvia Maultash Warsh - Страница 24

Rebecca drove home along Eglinton Avenue with Rosie’s voice ringing in her ears: She came to you before she was killed? She came to you...? It was barely 9:15 a.m. and Rebecca was already tired.

She had a few hours before her first patient, scheduled at one. She thought of flipping through the Yellow Pages to look for the store Rosie had mentioned — if it was a store — but she didn’t know where to begin. She couldn’t look up restaurants or furniture or garden supplies. All she knew (and that was probably too strong a word for it) was that there might be a river in the name of it, whatever it was. A river. How many rivers did she know the names of? The Mackenzie, the Missouri, the Thames....

From habit Rebecca’s eyes searched out the watercolour on the wall of the den. The only painting of David’s she hadn’t taken down to store in the basement. It had been hard to come across them at every corner of the house. Now it was just hard in the den. David had painted her in profile sitting with her ankles tucked beneath her on a green verge of grass by the lake. The picture was bathed in the kind of golden light the sun might deliver on a late afternoon in summer. He had told her she was like the sea when he made love to her because she was all around him, she was everywhere, and he had to submerge himself in her even if he drowned. She hadn’t the heart to take this one down.

Okay, the river. She stepped over to the bookcase in the den and retrieved an atlas. Happily, there was a page on world statistics: the largest countries, the highest mountains, the most populated cities, and among this fascinating lot, the one she needed — the longest, ergo best-known, rivers. Only she couldn’t imagine how anyone would work them into the name of something in downtown Toronto. The Nile What. The Amazon Something. The Yangtze Such and Such. And there were columns of them, rivers she had never heard of, rivers she had forgotten about. There was no easy way to find what she was looking for. She would just have to get on with it.

She was putting on her jacket when the phone rang.

“Rebecca? Are you all right, dear?” said the Polishaccented voice. “I saw your picture in the paper and I got worried.”

That awful picture of her coming out of Goldie’s place. “I’m fine, Sarah; thank you.” Rebecca didn’t want her mother-in-law to worry; she was still getting over the death of her son.

“Was it someone you knew?”

“A patient of mine.”

“I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’m fine, really.” Sarah was an elegant, cultured woman who loved art and had imparted that love to her son. She had been responsible for David being the man he was and Rebecca would always be grateful to her for that. But his death, instead of bringing them closer together, had formed a wedge between them, each reminding the other of their loss.

By 10:15, Rebecca was driving along College Street at a snail’s pace in the right hand lane. While she read the names of each shop on both sides of the street, drivers who found themselves behind her honked and veered to the left to pass. Gino’s Hardware, College Gifts, Margo’s Donuts and Coffee Shop. Drier than dry. No hint of river, lake, or stream.

A few blocks east of Bathurst, she made an illegal U-turn and drove back along College Street, reasoning that Mrs. Kochinsky wouldn’t have been able to run to the office from further afield. Rebecca turned down Spadina and suddenly came to a full stop. While traffic whizzed around her, she sat just north of a street that intersected Spadina and led into Kensington Market.

She felt as if she were poised on the edge of a time warp. The market, its chaotic goods stacked and sprawled on the sidewalks under sun-faded awnings, looked like it could toss her back fifty years. The genteel veneer of Beverley Street, barely two blocks away, may as well have been on the moon. She blinked at the crisply painted sign several stores down the side street: Atlantic Seafood. What if Rosie didn’t know an ocean from a river? What if her translation from the Jewish was slightly off? Rebecca parked and set out on foot.

She stood at the corner facing the noisy clutter of the narrow street jammed with small shops and cars. Pungent smells of butchers and fishmongers and God knows what else trailed into hints on the air. She approached Atlantic Seafood. Iridescent layers of whitefish, red snapper, and perch glimmered on beds of crushed ice outside the store. The effect was esthetic, spoiled only by their blank eyes, empty as glass.

Inside the store, two dark Mediterranean-looking men stood wiping down the cutting boards behind a counter piled with shrimp and snails.

“Can I help you?” one of the men asked.

She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the photo she had taken from Rosie. “I’m trying to find my aunt,” she said, showing him the picture. “The one on the left. She may’ve come in here on Tuesday. She was wearing a beige trenchcoat and polyester pants. She had ... she has an accent.”

The man reached across the counter and took the photo, showing it to his partner. “I don’t know, lady. Lots of people come in here. I don’t know if I’d remember. Why don’t you go to the police?”

Rebecca looked at their faces. There was no guile; they didn’t know and they didn’t care. “Are there any other fish stores in the market?”

“You kidding?” he said, handing her back the photo. “Probably five on every street.”

Outside Rebecca squeezed by sidewalks that shrank around stalls of fresh fruit and vegetables and spices by the pound. A skinny cat slunk into an alley to forage through the garbage. She passed stores that sold schmatas and handbags and gifts from the Orient. Lucky for her, the other fish stores bore names like Joe’s Fish, Kensington Fish, and Ontario Seafood.

Down the street a truck was being unloaded. As little room as there was on the sidewalks, at least people could move through. The same couldn’t be said for the road where cars parked along one side left a single lane for the one-way traffic. The delivery truck was parked half on the road, half on the sidewalk, effectively blocking the only lane open. A line-up of cars that had turned down the market street could go nowhere, their exhausts humming with poison. Pedestrians managed to squeeze by single file. As Rebecca approached, a man inside the elevated back gate of the truck flipped a huge side of beef onto the waiting shoulders of another, standing on the road. Sinew-red with the leg still on, it looked alive, as if it would jump down and walk away if the man let go. He started toward her, carrying it slung between his head and shoulder the way one carries a child high above a crowd. She stopped and gasped as he carried the thing toward her. Pale cushions of fat bloated the surface of the meat; blood from the flesh grazed his hair, his collar. In her panic she retreated into some shoppers, then swung across the street between the cars.

Standing on the opposite sidewalk she stared across at the butcher’s. The morning sun glanced off the metal of the sign. In the window David hung by his feet upside down, his back to her. She began to run. The cold wind chilled the sweat off her neck and she thought of Goldie. She imagined Goldie running, running through the streets just as Rebecca was running now. From what? From herself? Shoppers moved aside from her as if she were crazy. As if she were Goldie. Rebecca was nearly back to Spadina again when she realized the shops had ended abruptly, giving way to the sudden high grey wall of George Brown College, a building wildly out of place here, too linear, too simply rendered in the complex spring sun.

Then she saw it. The noise from the cars on Spadina was suddenly deafening. She had found her river and it flowed loud. Not more than three shops in from Spadina stood Blue Danube Fish.