Deadly Fall (35 page)

Isabelle came down the stairs carrying her box of movies and
CD
s. “Cool. I used to play with those when I was a kid.” She dropped to the floor and grabbed a mini pickup truck. Paula wandered back to the box-filled room. What if Felix's sister threw out those boxes without checking the memorabilia inside? That's what Paula would do if she had a packrat brother. Searching through them would help the overworked police. How was that for a rationalization? So many boxes. Where to start? At university, where his crush on Callie began and he formed a close group of friends.

Paula lugged the “university essays” box to the hall. It turned out to be full of yellowed newspaper clippings on subjects ranging from Saskatoon berries to travel destinations to racing cars to Barbie dolls to, not surprisingly, guns. These were probably ideas for magazine pieces. Evidently, the box labels didn't necessarily match the contents.

Isabelle zoomed two cars across the hall and squealed at their mid-air collision.

Paula slid the first box to the hall corner by the den, carried an unmarked one from the room and plunked it beside Isabelle. “Since you want to work for me, stop playing and look through this.”

“For what?”

“I don't know.”

Kneeling, Isabelle opened the flap and pulled out a bottle of Old Spice cologne. She screwed off the top and sniffed. “Phew.”

Paula smiled. “My great-aunt gave my dad a bottle of that for his birthday every year. He recycled it at his Christmas gift exchange at work. I wouldn't think it would be Felix's taste either, assuming he'd ever wear cologne.”

“Hey.” Isabelle held up a wallet. “I need a new one.”

“We aren't taking anything.”

“It's not like Felix can use it now.”

“It's a matter of ethics.” Was snooping ethical? “Put everything back and pile the finished boxes in the corner so they don't get mixed up with the ones we haven't searched through yet.”

The next box was full of 1960s car and
Playboy
magazines. If time weren't limited, the
Playboys
would be interesting to browse. The plan was to drive Isabelle to Erin's house tonight. They couldn't be too late; Erin had an early class tomorrow morning.

An hour later, about a third of the boxes were piled in the hall corner. Paula stretched and rubbed the small of her back.

Isabelle opened a box filled with books on Eastern religions. “Who'd have thought Felix would be into this junk? You learn a lot about him from what's here.”

“And from what isn't here. We haven't found one single thing related to Callie, the so-called love of his life. If I'd carried a torch for thirty years, I'd keep sentimental things connected to my loved one over car magazines.”

Isabelle disappeared into the box room. “This one's too heavy,” she said. “Since half of them are in the hall now, there's space to sit down here.”

Paula joined her. She took a light box from the top of the tall pile.

Seated lotus-style, Isabelle opened the box of university texts. She removed the musty books one by one, turned each one upside down, shook it, and scrutinized every scrap of paper that fell out. If she applied the same focus to insurance claims, hiring her might turn out to not be a horrible mistake. Paula's box contained a crunched sombrero and photographs. One showed a man, aged about thirty, wearing the sombrero in an outdoor market. It must have been taken on a trip to Mexico. Was that slim man with the head of bushy, blond hair really Felix? Isabelle squinted at the photo and agreed it was. Another shot showed him with an unknown woman on a palm-treed beach. Black and white photos went back to his childhood. Something bumped downstairs.

Paula looked up. “Is that Felix's sister? Vincelli didn't say she'd be coming.”

“I'll check.”

Isabelle thudded down the stairs. Paula closed the box. If it was the sister, she would imply they had found the boxes already out in the hall, where the cops had left them after their presumed search. She leafed through the pictures of little Felix, a curly-headed boy with mischievous eyes. In some, he posed with his sisters, two older, one younger. What was keeping Isabelle? Should Paula have let her go down there alone? Footsteps sounded on the stairs and approached the room.

Isabelle stopped in the doorway. “I couldn't see anything.”

“Might have been the furnace.”

Isabelle held out two apples. “It's all there was in the fridge. They're kind of wrinkled.”

Paula wiped her hands on her skirt. “My hands are covered with dust. Yours are, too. We'll wash them along with the apples.”

The wizened fruit flesh tasted better than she had expected. Hard work must have piqued her appetite. She wouldn't mind a coffee break or a shot of vodka from Felix's stash downstairs, if the cops hadn't taken it for evidence, but stopping would kill her momentum. From a box labeled “work distractions,” Isabelle pulled out a Rubik's cube.

“What is this?” she said.

“You haven't seen one before? You twist the colored shapes to get a single color on each side. We don't have time to fool around with that.” She would have loved to try.

Isabelle tossed the cube. It bounced down the bamboo floor. She started working on a metal puzzle, losing her focus for the task at hand. Who could blame her? Paula sat down to examine her box full of paper. Her ass ached on the hardwood. Across the hall was a comfortable bed. Why hadn't she thought of it before? She carried the box to Callie's and Dimitri's bedroom and plumped the pillows against the headboard. She sank into the mattress. “Ahhh.”

The top essay was titled, “Jay Gatsby and Billy Budd: American Dreamers.” It made sense that Felix, a journalist, would have majored in English. Term papers underneath analyzed classic novels, poems, and Shakespeare plays. At university, Paula had avoided literature as much as possible. Wading through those essays now would be torture.

Spinning, “a novel-in-progress.”
She turned over the title page and read the first line:
The day was golden.
She finished the paragraph. This wasn't a school assignment. She skimmed the page and went on to the next and next. Her heart raced to
The End.

“Isabelle,” she shouted. “Isabelle. We found it.”

Pre-dawn sky silhouetted her crabapple tree, now bare of all but the most tenacious leaves. Paula sipped coffee, waiting for Detective Vincelli to arrive. When she called him last night, he said he would pick up the manuscript around seven o'clock, on his way to the station.

She flipped the corners of the sixteen pages, now wrinkled from so many readings that she could recite key passages by heart. The manuscript's date stared up from the title page. October, 1979. Felix would have been in his late twenties. Evidently, he had set out to write a book, but rushed the story to the end. The result was a novel synopsis in semi-legible handwriting with numerous misspellings and crossed out words. The first pages chronicled an idyllic boyhood spent shooting gophers in wheat fields that led to Felix's love affair with guns.
I blame the Y-chromosome for inspiring my passion for shiny cylinders that go “pow” and explode with the force of death.

A creak down the hall made Paula turn. She hoped it wasn't Isabelle waking up. After her first skim of the story, Paula had read it aloud to Isabelle to make sure she wasn't exaggerating its significance. She phoned Detective Vincelli's cell and caught him at home, apparently watching
TV
. She summarized Felix's story and their discovery of it. Vincelli didn't see an urgent need for her to drop it off at the station and said he would stop by for it this morning on his way to work.

No more sounds. With luck, Isabelle would sleep through Vincelli's visit. Paula had told her he wouldn't be coming until eight o'clock, so Paula and Vincelli could have a quick, serious talk without Isabelle butting in. It might help that Paula had disrupted Isabelle's sleep at 3:00
AM
to use the copier in the den. Paula would have a copy of the manuscript to peruse during the day. A second one lay in her underwear drawer for safe-keeping. The police would get the original sitting on the kitchen table.

She refreshed her coffee and got out a bowl of grapes—she'd served the same thing to Vincelli and his partner Novak during their first visit here—how long ago was that?—eleven days. Grapes were fitting since this new evidence might bring about the end of the case. One thing was sure: Felix hadn't murdered Callie for love. If he had murdered, it was to cover up a thirty-year old crime, and odds were the killer wasn't him. Three or four others had equal motives.

For the umpteenth time, she turned over the title page. While he had changed the names, clearly Felix had modeled the story characters on himself and his university friends. He was the unnamed “I” narrator, a sensitive, aspiring writer. Callie and Owen, her rock-singer boyfriend, were Cassie and Ozzy, two non-students living in the house. The character named Kendall seemed loosely based on Kenneth. Samantha, an architecture student, might be a composite of Sam and Anne. Who was the sixth resident named Merritt? A friend who had moved away after university?

She flipped to page six, where the narrator introduces the street kid.
The boy told us he was sixteen. He looked younger and we didn't ask. He was skinny and short, with bright yellow dyed hair. He wore bellbottom jeans and scuffed cowboy boots. He said he had run away from back east. We didn't ask from where.

The gay student, Merritt, had brought the boy to the house. That was the moment Merritt came out to the group. Felix, sleeping in the bedroom next to Merritt and the boy, got to listen to moans and bed creaks all night. A virgin, Felix wished he was getting it on.
During the day, the boy helped Cassie with the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping.
The story really began about a week after the boy's arrival.
It was a Saturday night. We were all home, which was rare. Usually Samantha was out on a date. Cassie and Ozzy had a music gig. I often went to movies with friends. Kendall did things like play chess. That night, he was studying in the basement. Cassie, Ozzy, Samantha, and I were in the living room listening to music, burning incense and smoking up. Cowboy boots stomped toward us, from the hall. Merritt followed the boy. They got into a screaming match. Merritt explained the boy had dropped acid.

“Is there any left?” Ozzy asked.

Acid was another thing I was afraid to try.

Paula took off her reading glasses. She got up to microwave her coffee. The wall clock said seven ten. Vincelli should be here any second. The microwave hummed. Felix described the boy as moving his arms over his torso and legs, moaning that he was full of holes.
Merritt ordered him out of the house. Cassie said they couldn't kick him out on the street. “That's where he came from and where he belongs,” Merritt said.
Paula didn't know Merritt, but the others sounded true to their real-life counterparts. Twice, Felix had slipped into Callie's real name.

The boy ducked into Felix's bedroom and emerged with the box of guns Felix had stashed under his bed. He'd locked the box and locked the bullets in another box in the closet, but had used obvious combinations: Callie's birth date and gun caliber numbers. The boy had figured them out. He was obviously smart.
“I know everyone's secrets,”
he had taunted them in the living room.

Paula took her coffee from the microwave. In her rush back to the table, she spilled coffee drops on the linoleum. She rubbed them clean with her stocking foot. In the manuscript, she found the line where the boy sat cross-legged on the floor, pulling guns from the box
. Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolver in .38 Special . . . Colt Woodsman semi-automatic in .22 caliber, the “Woody,” the first gun I ever bought, my sentimental favorite.

“Are they loaded?” Callie asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I'm not stupid.”

The boy pointed a revolver at me. Samantha wrestled it away from him.

Such wrestling seemed a Sam/masculine action. Merritt refused to take a gun until the boy threatened to tell his father he was gay. Cassie accepted a Colt Pocket Hammerless. Why? Because she was stoned? Because the little gun seemed like a toy? Because everyone else was doing it and, like the others, she didn't know it was loaded? Because she was attracted to the danger?

The boy gave Ozzy the prettiest gun. “You're all glitter, all on the surface. You're empty inside and you know it.”

“Shut up with the insults,” Samantha said. “Loser.”

The boy smirked at her. “You're ugly and fat. Porky Pig.”

I giggled, from nervousness and marijuana and, I admit, a little cruelty toward Samantha, who had confessed to Cassie she had been fat as a child. The other kids ridiculed her, calling her Porky Pig. Her mother put her on diets. She had slimmed down, but told Cassie she still felt like the fat girl and only did it with her boyfriend in the dark. Samantha glared at Cassie for telling her secret.

Had Anne or Sam been fat kids? Anne was slim now. In all their talk during workouts, Anne hadn't said she was ever overweight. Sam had a husky build and kept his weight down by working out. Even though it was over between them, Paula hated to think Sam was involved in this grubby crime. It would also give him a double motive to murder Felix: to both protect the secret as well as his son from being accused of the Callie's murder.

The boy rotated toward me. “You're a coward.”

I stepped back. Someone else giggled. Did everyone know? I was a coward at heart, scared to try hard drugs, scared to have sex, afraid of everything.