The Bay of Love and Sorrows (25 page)

He stood, brushed his pants off, and walked towards the Smiths’ yellow house at midday, and remembered Karrie when she was in grade nine.

Dora was standing in the gas bar in the mild yellow sunlight.

She stood behind the counter waiting on two customers, and did not look his way. He wanted to ask her about the money and about what she had heard that night, so after the customers left he approached her.

“Oh, there wasn’t much money,” she said as she took a breath. “I’d already said all that, my, my — “

“Are you sure there wasn’t much money?” he said. “Perhaps there might have been some
other
money — I’ll confide in you, I think money was used to pay off a debt — I mean a lot of money — Would Karrie have any reason to have a lot of money on her — was she going away? I mean, if there was a lot of money it might just change the complexion of the case — Vincent was not really a thief, was he? I don’t care
where
the money came from. My concern is to help get Tom Donnerel out of jail”

Dora smiled. There was a hesitation, as she looked towards the back of the store, where Emmett stood in a kind of acute resignation.

“Get Tom Donnerel out of jail — get Tom Donnerel out of jail,” she said in an almost pleasurable, catatonic way “You know Judge Skid is a friend of mine. I’m up their place all the time — “

So John left these questions unanswered. But he asked, “Did you hear anything?”

She thought a long moment and then nodded.

“Something — a door — I was tired, it was after midnight — I said ‘Karrie — get in this house.’ Yes — I do remember that.”

He went out into the flat parking lot, looked at the penned-in tires, all of this vista having an uncrowded mild despair, and glanced up at the window over the porch. It was as if he could see Karrie leaning there one summer night.

He glanced at the pumps, and walked over to them, looked back to see Emmett staring out the window. Then he turned and walked sanguinely back down the path and to his car.

Far across two fields and a fence, near the dry autumn inlet, the large old farmhouse that Michael had rented was boarded-up and empty. John sat in his car, with the door opened to a gentle autumn breeze, the scent of fall musk-like and sexual on the warm, fading yellow grass. The arm of the bay moved dark and full. He read over his notes, flipping through the pages as if angered by them.

“Carried money next to skin, under panties — robbed gas bar — tin box, robbed for who — “

He had written this line sometime during the day of September 10 when everyone was in a rush.

Now, in red pencil, while the fall wind came up and gently buffeted the car, he wrote, “Someone in house — murderer? Two robberies — Karrie’s and ??? — “

He then took a walk across the field and went onto the verandah of the old farmhouse. The wind had picked up. The porch was saddened by vacancy, the window ledges glutted with fallen leaves. He thought of all Karrie’s eager laughter frozen in time as he looked across the shore. He stood a minute and walked away, and as an afterthought turned and walked towards the barn.

It was already the middle of the day. A shotgun sounded in the distance. It seemed to John that he was visiting ghosts in this autumn wind. He tried to open the barn door to go inside, and found that the door was blocked by the dinghy they had used to travel to and from
The Renegade.
He moved it as he came in and set it against the cord of yellow birch.
The Renegade,
its bow showing the beating of summer, was also housed here. John leaned against the woodpile and shone his flashlight at the sailboat.

Now the barn door banged open and closed. He started to leave, and as he stood he heard something almost weightless drop from underneath the dinghy’s rear seat and land against his left shoe. He lit a cigarette and waited, five minutes, maybe longer, and then he reached down and picked it up. It was a small plastic bag.

The next day — November 19 — John took the bag of mescaline and went to see Laura again. She was just leaving the house to go to Michael’s parents’, and she looked at him like one does when they expect never to see someone again. He recognized in her eyes the soft beat of instant dislike.

“Do you remember the mescaline that made those Ingersol kids sick on the Island?” he said. “I might have found that mescaline, or some of the same, downriver. I’m sending it to the lab, but it will probably take weeks.” He looked at her, as if wondering what she might know, and this bothered him.

She nodded, said she vaguely remembered something about it, but seemed distracted.

“Do you know a Professor Becker?” he asked.

Her face suddenly blanched. And he noticed that she was wearing a diamond.

“He’s to be Michael’s best man — why, is he hurt? Has there been an accident?”

“No, no — he’s fine — “

So John, with a sense of chivalry, kept the bag of mescaline in his pocket. For her sake he would not use it against her fiance if he could find some other explanation.

And this was something of that secret summer no one else knew.

As time went by, rumours spread about where the money was. Rumours spread about how much money it was. Rumours also spread, almost with a kind of gaiety, that someone else must have killed Karrie Smith.

Dora couldn’t sleep, thinking of this money, and as a byproduct of this thinking how much she had always disliked the Donnerels. At first she felt the money had to be at Donnerel’s house, and though she had no part in the burning of Tom’s property, she had searched the ruins. There was no money found. Now she felt someone else had it.

Emmett began to have trouble with his stomach. He took pills, and his hands, brown with hairy wrists, began to shake. He came to her on the morning of December 11, and said timidly: “It couldn’t have been Tom.”

“Why in hell not?”

“Because he wasn’t found guilty — he
pleaded
guilty — Why wouldn’t he tell where the money was? He has no knowledge of our money —” And for the first time in his life he grabbed her aggressively by the shoulders. “This is our fault” he said. “All of it.”

For the first time Dora looked at him, confused. But she hated what she was hearing.

“I can’t do anything about
him —
what do you want me to do — save the man who killed your girl? You weakling — you weakling — you weakling — you keep your mouth shut.”

And she smiled because he dropped his hands.

Emmett sat on the couch and looked about, distracted, shaking his head in dignity.

They were now enemies. She, herself, with great pride, refused to go to the graveyard and was fighting over the price of Karrie’s stone.

At night, Dora tossed and turned. She wanted one thing: to find the money and move away to Moncton to live with her sister, where no one would bother her again.

She then asked someone to look for this money — for a 5 — percent finder’s fee. Someone whom she could count on. Gail Hutch.

So on the afternoon of December 16, suffering from a heavy cough, wearing a pair of men’s rubber boots, the road she walked trailing off long and broken and barren, Gail came to the house. They sat in the porch overlooking the back field.

“I might be able to find it,” Gail said. “I could ask people at church or I could put up posters about it. How much was there?”

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” Dora said. “But don’t put up posters — just keep this quiet. The only thing I can tell you is if you do find it it might have “D” marked on the bills — have you seen any bills like that? Did Karrie ever give you one?”

Gail tucked Brian’s shirt in, and then took a puff of air, from her inhaler, and looked perplexed.

“Comme ah sa va — da diddly poop,” Dora said suddenly, looking at the boy. Dora’s victories were always over other people — children and the brokenhearted especially — and she laughed a short presumptuous laugh.

“The money might be all gone by now, Mrs. Smith,” Gail said. “It could all be spent.”

“Yes,” said Dora. “It might — but I have a feeling it is not.”

Wind blew over the field, blew snow over the paths, and down against the old crab-apple tree and over the graveyard on the left where Karrie’s grave was already a sunken mound, against the brittle salt air.

“Karrie didn’t say nothin to you?” Dora asked. “You were so close to her — she didn’t say nothin to your son about getting money for you?”

“Mrs. Smith,” Gail said,” Karrie was kindest ta us — all summer — except for you.” She shook her head rapidly and shifted her gaze, and then breathed a sigh, and then popped the inhaler in her mouth and took a breath. Her thin legs seemed to grow out of her rubber boots like twigs out of a pot, and she moved them back and forth, touching her toes together in the chill afternoon air.

“Well, I know she liked you. I don’t know what could have happened to all me money,” Dora said.

Gail and Brian went back to the small shack and sat on the bed, looking at Brian’s toys, and the wind blew snow off the pines and spruces and lifted the snow from the ground. At twilight, everything was black except this wind, which had the reddish tint of the sun. All day that sun hung over the rivets on the tin roof and the one window, and splashed on Gail’s straw-like hair. All day the boy tried to put the blanket against the holes to keep the wind out.

“A flat wind,” Gail called it, as she coughed, fumbling with the damper on the stove. A small yellow plume of smoke rose in the raw air outside. The little boy went to the door, opened it an inch or so to let the smoke out, and came back and sat on the bed, where he too began to cough.

He and his mother were filled with plans, and some of them were wonderful. His mother planned to have his birthday party before Christmas and said she would get party hats. And Brian was hoping to go to the store for them the next afternoon.

The boy had witnessed many things. They tried to get Everette to go away, and once Brian tried to lock the door when he came.

Gail had often been struck and bullied.

Once, after Everette had gotten out of the hospital, she had been hauled all the way down the wood path by her feet, so her head hit all the bumps.

“You are going to hurt her head! You are going to hurt my mommy’s head!” Brian kept shouting, astonished. But Everette said he would make Gail take off her clothes, and he would strap her legs apart on the bed and let his friends come and do it to her if she didn’t smarten up. And that’s how he would get back all the money. And then, after swearing about this, he got Gail to make him a Pizza Pop.

Whenever Brian remembered these things, he would sit in the shack in a kind of startled agony with a small apocalyptic smile on his face.

Brian had tried to protect his mother, but he was too little.

And though they were broke, had nothing, their nights were tortured by the thought of what they owed. The little boy would count up all his toys, and think of how much he could get if he sold them.

Gail looked towards the window. She was waiting for word from Social Services about a piece of paper coming from Quebec that would ensure her child’s welfare. Then she might be able to get some kind of job, perhaps at the fish plant in Neguac.

Every week they went to the road and hiked to town for a stipend of money. But they got little else. The local Social Services took a cursory interest in anyone who demanded nothing. And they would stand at the corner and hike home again.

“What would you do if you found Dora’s money and we got the reward?” she asked Brian, moving her fingers through his hair.

He sat on the bed beside her and smiled as light beyond the plastic on the window came in, and washed his face.

“We would pay back the business loan,” he said, for that’s what Everette had always called anything he had loaned them, “and move into a big house,” he said, “for my birthday is what I would want, with heavy locks on the door that no one could kick at — “

“A house,” she said.

“Yes — where you would have your own room,” he said. “And we would have our own stuff. And go on a trip. I would take you on a trip. That would be my present at my birthday party, if I had money”

They talked about what they would have in their house. And then she tucked him into bed, even though it was early, and turned off the light.