Читать книгу Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Sylvia Maultash Warsh - Страница 33

Friday, April 6, 1979

Detective Wanless saw to it that a constable followed Rebecca in a squad car as she drove home. The young uniformed officer watched her open the front door with her key and turn on every light, going nervously through the rooms as he waited in the hallway. In the kitchen she turned on the floodlamps that bathed the backyard in artificial light. Even if the driver of the van knew her name, she thought, she was not listed in the phone book. He would have to find her address some other way, like following her home. She had lost him this time. But how did she know he hadn’t followed her before?

The constable waited at the foot of the stairs while she climbed to the second floor and wandered from bedroom to bedroom, flicking on the lights. By the time she was finished, the house blazed with lights in every room and closet.

She smiled sheepishly at the constable. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

But she wasn’t fine. She felt completely alone and without help. Wanless, with his professional sympathy, had made up his mind about her the way she had made up her mind about Goldie. Would Goldie still be alive if Rebecca had believed her? She slunk into bed, feeling the old familiar pang in her heart. Stop it! she cried to herself, Goldie’s paranoia had precursors; it had been a valid diagnosis for Rebecca to make. Even Wanless saw that. She imagined that he considered his reasoning about the case was sound, too. Her blood froze when she took the comparison to its logical conclusion: Goldie had ended up dead in her own living-room. Rebecca had no intention of submitting to that fate.

Even with the kitchen knife stashed away in the drawer of her nightstand, Rebecca slept fitfully, the glare of the van’s headlights piercing her shallow dreams. Sometimes Capitán Diaz got out of the van and sometimes it was Feldberg’s face she saw coming toward her.

Feldberg. Seeing him at the club was a shock. And the relationship with Isabella. How long had he been cheating on Chana? Before her illness, Rebecca guessed. Was that a motive for murder? How was he involved with Diaz? She seemed to have come to a dead end with the Capitán.

If only Chana could talk. There was no one else to ask about Feldberg. She was loath to go to sleep; if only she could keep looking for the killer round the clock. Maybe then she could survive. He knew her; that was his advantage. She had to find him. In that twilight between sleeping and waking, she saw Feldberg in his leather armchair, his legs crossed, one knee pointing toward her. “Too many letters’ ” he whispered. “Why should Chana miss Goldie, they wrote and wrote, always writing. She told Goldie everything.”

Rebecca opened one eye to check the clock: 7:10 a.m. She told Goldie everything. Rebecca sat up with a start. There would be letters. Goldie might have kept letters from her sister. But would Chana have written anything important in them?

By eight-thirty, in the muted light of a grey morning, she was heading along Eglinton Avenue toward Bathurst. Her eye caught every dark van that passed by. How was she ever going to feel safe again? She parked on a side street south of Goldie’s duplex. The yellow police tape flapped in the chill morning breeze, but no police stood guard. Their investigation seemed over. They were giving up.

She ignored the tape strung across the front door and tried to turn the knob. The door was locked. Traffic on Bathurst drifted by as always, people going to work, people going for breakfast. Good God, what was she doing here? She squared her shoulders. Trying to survive, that was what.

She walked down the lane to the side door, looking over her shoulder. Maybe she had missed him in the mirror. Maybe he was watching her right now. She tried the side door. Locked.

She stood a long moment facing Bathurst, scanning the circumscribed view of the street that the lane afforded her. If he were there, she would see him. She had to stay calm, keep her head clear.

She walked further down the lane toward the garage, wondering if Feldberg would see the irony of her asking him for the key. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the back the blinkered bedroom window reflected the morning light.

“Argentina too hot,” Goldie had said more than once. “In Poland, air was fresh. Canada, too. Air fresh. Can’t sleep with window closed.”

Rebecca glanced around at the backs of the houses facing the rear of the duplex. People still minded their own business in a big city. Thank God for small mercies.

She gingerly tried the whitewashed sash of the window on the ground floor. It seemed loose in its place but wouldn’t lift. She knew from experience that everything stuck in old houses. That didn’t mean it was locked. She braced herself and pushed hard against gravity and old paint and damp-expanded wood. The window moved. Marginally. She was dogged about it and pushed the sash up an inch at a time till there was an opening wide enough. She wondered what the College of Physicians and Surgeons would say if they could see her. One more cursory glance at the blankeyed windows of the houses opposite, then she heaved herself up one leg at a time, wondering why, at her weight, it was still so hard to lift those bones a few feet. She fought with the drapes inside the room before finding herself crouched on top of Goldie’s dresser. Some tubes and jars clattered beneath her.

There was less debris in the room than she remembered, the remainder no doubt divided onto glass slides in the forensics lab. What could she possibly find that they hadn’t?

Creeping up the hall — why was she creeping? — she could see there had been no attempt to clean up the apartment. The police had collected their samples, then left without looking back. So much for civic responsibility.

She headed to the living-room, drawn by some ghoulish force. Goldie was gone, there was no blood, no bodily evidence to mark her final resting-place. Nevertheless Rebecca knelt down near the spot, trying to evoke earlier memories of Goldie than the image of her that had imprinted itself on the inside of Rebecca’s eyelids.

She had to get on with it. Who was she feeling sorry for anyway? Goldie, or herself?

Rebecca began methodically opening drawers in the dining-room and kitchen, then in Goldie’s bedroom and the den. She went through every paper she could find, foraging in the apartment for nearly two hours. So far, she had come up empty.

The last stop was the spare bedroom near the front. She had the least hope for it since it appeared unlived in. The closet had been trashed, its contents helter-skelter on the floor. Nothing of interest: old shoes, sweaters, blankets. The top drawer of the dresser had been left pulled out. She searched it and pulled out the other drawers in a cursory shuffle if only to convince herself she had looked. Then she found them. In the bottom drawer, pale blue against the nightgowns and slips lay a sheaf of airmail envelopes bound with an elastic. The police had found them and hadn’t bothered with them.

The top envelope was written in a rounded European hand addressed to Mrs. Goldie Kochinsky in Argentina. Rebecca slipped off the elastic. All the envelopes were the same. The return address from Chana Feldberg on Bathurst Street in Toronto. Rebecca pulled out a letter and sighed. It was written in Polish. At least she assumed it was Polish, the strange dots over letters and strokes through l’s. It certainly wasn’t Spanish.

Suddenly a noise startled her. A key turned in the apartment door. Someone was stepping in. She held her breath while the blood began to roar in her ears.