Serpents Rising (8 page)

“The offer still stand? We have another go at this tomorrow?”

I nodded. “The offer still stands.”

It was a quiet ride back to my place. I thought we might stop for a drink, do a little recap of the day and what we'd learned. But I was relieved when Cobb seemed intent on taking a straight line back to Drury Avenue. I was too tired to make much sense and mostly wanted a hot shower to get the smell and feel of the places we'd been off me. And sleep, I wanted that most of all.

As we turned the corner that led to my apartment building, Cobb took a breath, exhaled, and said, “Interesting day.”

“It was,” I agreed.

“Listen … thanks.”

“I hope we get a little closer to the kid tomorrow.”

Cobb pulled to a stop in front of my building. Reached across, shook my hand. “See you in the morning. How about eight?”

“I'll try to be a little more ready for action then I was
this
morning.”

Cobb smiled and I stepped out into the street. The Jeep had turned the corner and disappeared before I had the front door of my building open.

T
he shower felt as good as I thought it would and I stayed in it until the hot water heater's supply was exhausted and the stream turned cool, then cold. My body was exhausted but my mind was on full alert. Thinking the whole time I was in the shower.

But I hadn't been thinking about Jay Blevins and the race to find him. Instead my mind was occupied with the conversation Cobb and I had had over lunch, when he'd suggested that maybe there was something in Donna's past that had led to the setting of the fire that killed her. That maybe she
had
been the target.

I stepped out of the shower, towelled off, and climbed into sweats and a University of Calgary Dinosaurs hoodie. I poured myself a stout portion of Crown Royal mixed with a lesser portion of Diet Coke, put Del Barber's
Love Songs for the Last 20
and The Tragically Hip's
We Are the Same
on the CD player and sat down to think about what Cobb had said.

What about before she knew you? Something or someone in her past?

I
had
thought and rethought about that possibility in the weeks and months after the fire, trying to make sense of the senseless. And I'd rejected the notion every time.

It simply made sense to me that someone in my line of work — work that involved offending, sometimes attacking people in print that thousands of other people might read — was the target.

Me. It had to be me.

The note had confirmed that, hadn't it? Why would someone send that note
to me
if Donna had been the target? The arsonist would have already accomplished his goal — Donna was dead. That certainty coupled with my absolute belief that no one could possibly have hated Donna enough to want her dead had been the basis for my rejecting the idea that she was the killer's target that night. And I was just as sure now, all these years after her death.

Or was I?

Weirder shit than that — a lot weirder — has happened.

I sipped on my drink, stared at a couple of flecks on the ceiling.
Something or someone in her past.

A nut job from when she was a teenager, some guy who felt slighted because she wouldn't go to the prom with him or got the scholarship he thought he should have got or …

But would a nut job wait years to exact his revenge? That's why the whole thing seemed so far-fetched, so impossible. Because it
was
impossible.

Weirder shit than that …

I glanced at the clock. 12:42 a.m. I set the drink down and walked to the main closet near the door. In it, below the clothes, footwear, and Christmas decorations I'd need in just a few weeks were some boxes. Including a couple containing Donna's stuff, things that had previously been in the garage and in a storage locker downtown — stuff that neither of us had done anything with in all the time we were married. Most of it I'd never even looked at.

I wanted to look at it now. Between the shower and the drink and the thinking, I was wide awake.

I set the boxes, there were three, in the centre of the room, sat cross-legged on a scatter rug at the end of the bed, and went through Donna's stuff for two and a half hours, feeling like a voyeur, like I was invading her privacy, the only thing that was left of her.

Two and a half hours of fifteen-year-old bank statements, Day-Timers loaded with to-do lists and appointment times, a couple of English essays from what looked like a first-year university lit survey course. I read one, Donna's take on choosing Marlow rather than Kurtz as the hero of
Heart of Darkness.
I read the essay and cried, not for the content but for the creator of the content. I set the second essay aside unread — it was something about Polonius's role in
Hamlet
.

Tax receipts, a phone directory, travel brochures, four letters from me during our courting days … I didn't read them but I did notice that she had written notes in the margins. “Sweet!!” and “I love that man” were a couple that caught my attention.

I tried not to let the time deteriorate into a nostalgia session and concentrated on finding some tiny hint, some clue that might provide a reason for someone to hate the woman I loved.

Two and a half hours of nothing. I was closing in on comatose. I picked up one more piece of paper. One yellowed piece of three-hole-punched paper like something torn from a school Duo-Tang or notebook. A neatly written note in what I was fairly certain was Donna's handwriting.

Kelly — The bastard did it again. D

And under that, what I guessed was the reply.

Pig.K

It had been stuck between the pages of a battered paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Hundred to one odds it was meaningless — there were a hundred innocuous explanations for the note. And I might have forgotten the whole thing except that it was out of character for the Donna I knew to vent her anger in that way, which wasn't to say she didn't get angry at times, but mostly she dealt with it internally or in some totally civilized and controlled way that didn't involve name calling or writing angry notes.

Still, this was likely high school or even junior high. What kid didn't vent occasionally as part of the growing up/going to school/rebelling against parents and the world phase?

And that was it. Close to three hours of searching had resulted in one hand-written note to someone named Kelly — a note containing six words. Seven if you counted Kelly's one word reply. Not much there to make me change my belief that the arsonist had been targeting me and had messed up.

I left the stuff spread over the bedroom floor and stumbled into bed. Now I
was
tired. Del Barber was singing “62 Richmond” for the third time. I didn't bother to shut off the stereo. I was asleep before the end of the song.

But not for long. I dreamt. Something about a fire and a fire alarm. At least it started as a fire alarm then morphed into a phone ringing. It took me a while to figure that out. The fog in my brain finally cleared enough that I realized the phone wasn't in my dream. I was actually awake and the reason was that the phone on the end table next to my bed wouldn't shut up.

After maybe the tenth ring, I got it picked up and juggled over to where I was. I rested it more or less against my ear.

“Hello.”

Cobb's voice. “Sorry to call at this hour.”

“You're hard on rest, my friend.”

“Yeah. I called to tell you you're out.”

“What? Out what?”

“I won't be picking you up in the morning. You're out of the search for Jay Blevins.”

I rubbed my face with my left hand. “You find a better journalist or what?”

“Blevins is dead.”

I sat up.

“Jay?”

“Larry. The old man. They got to him before he could turn himself in. Shot in the back of the head but that was after someone did a lot of nasty stuff to him … something like forty broken bones. The cops couldn't recognize him from his face.”

“How did you find out?”

“I was a cop, Adam, I know some people.”

“Any idea who?”

“He was found beside a Dumpster a few blocks from his house. Time of death about midnight.”

About the time we were getting back to my apartment.

“Shit,” I said.

“These are bad bastards, Adam. I can't run the risk of having them come after you.”

“Isn't that
my
risk and my decision?”

“No, it isn't. I asked you to help me, you did, and I appreciate it, but things have changed and I'll need to do this without having to … on my own.”

“You were going to say without having to look out for me.”

No answer.

“Back to my earlier point, I can decide for myself what risks I'm prepared to take. And besides, you can't fire a volunteer.”

“I'm not firing you. Look, I'm sorry, but I need to be on my own and I haven't got time to argue with you about it. Thanks for what you did on this.”

I wanted to debate it further but I would have been talking to a dial tone. Cobb had hung up. I set the phone back on its cradle and stared into the dark for a while. Knowing sleep wouldn't be happening any time soon, I got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and made a pot of coffee. Finally shut off the stereo. I sat at the table and drank two cups of coffee with milk and more sugar than usual.

I turned on the TV to see if there was anything about Blevins. There wasn't, although there were several reports about the “gangland-style slaying” of two suspected narcotics dealers. No names. Footage of the house on Raleigh, reporters voicing comments that were a collection of generalities, which was probably all they had. I doubted the cops would be all that forthcoming, especially since they likely didn't know a hell of a lot themselves. I wondered how long it would be before they were able to tie Blevins's death to the shooting of the two dealers.

I turned off the TV and started on a third cup of coffee while I leafed through Donna's stuff again. It was a small pile — not much to show for thirty plus years of life. The fire had taken the rest.

But halfway through the third cup of coffee I started to question that supposition. I thought about my own situation — most of the flotsam and jetsam of my past had also been destroyed in the fire. Most,
but not all.

If I were trying to uncover my own past, where would I look? Parents, best friends, maybe even school. The point was, there
were
places. It all hadn't just disappeared over time. I spent the next half hour making a list of places I might be able to look to reconstruct at least some of Donna's life from before I knew her.

The list wasn't long; the truth is I didn't really know much about Donna (then) Leybrand. I'd lied, I'm not sure why, when I told Cobb that Donna and I had talked about all that kind of thing. In truth we'd almost
never
talked about Donna's life before we knew each other. I never got the impression she was hiding anything or didn't want to talk about the past. We just didn't.

But maybe that wasn't quite accurate either. We'd talked about
my
past. At least the stuff I considered important: the deaths of my parents, Dad when I was twelve, Mom when I was seventeen; my baseball scholarship to Oklahoma State and a fling with a baseball career that ended at spring training with the Twins when my already too slow fastball got a whole lot slower courtesy of a torn rotator cuff. I had to choose between major surgery that I was told had maybe a fifty-fifty chance of getting me back on the field or getting a job. I decided to find out if my journalism degree was worth the four years it had taken me to get it.

Donna knew all of that, and more, about me. And I knew … not much about her youth. Which isn't to say I knew nothing. I knew she'd gone to university, studied public administration, didn't like it, left school without graduating, and got into retail and worked her way into management. I knew she liked to travel and had done the standard Europe thing and a couple of months in Australia after leaving Carleton.

But as I compiled the list of who I could talk to about Donna's life before I came on the scene, I realized it too was pathetically small.

I knew none of her girlfriends from school (no, that was wrong — there was Kelly, though I knew her only from the note). I did know a couple of people from her college years, a couple more from the job she'd been working at when we met, Dr. Mike McCullers who had been her doctor from when she was a kid, the people who had attended the funeral — their names were listed on the guestbook that was somewhere in the apartment. Donna's mom, Joan Leybrand. Donna's father had passed away three years before the fire and Donna was an only child, no siblings.

Short list.

I decided to start with Joan. We'd always gotten along well. She was far from the stereotypical mother-in-law — she was more concerned about observing our need for privacy than we were.

I'd call her in the morning. Now that I'd been bumped from the search for Jay Blevins, I had nothing pressing for the next few days. I decided to use some of that time to satisfy my belief, as much as possible, that I'd been right all along. The killer had wanted to get me, had screwed up, and an innocent woman died as a result.

End of story.

I
slept well. Maybe it was the notion that I was active, actually doing something, however trivial, that made me feel good. I decided to start the day with something I hadn't done since Donna died. I went out for breakfast to the place we used to go almost every Sunday of our four-and-a-half years together: Bobby's Omelet on 11th Avenue. I wasn't sure Bobby would still be a part of the place and I was fairly certain the omelets couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered them being seven or eight years before.

Before I left the house I called Joan and told her I'd like to stop by, if it was all right. She said she'd look forward to seeing me. I picked up a
Herald
on the way to Bobby's, parked across the street, and found a table near the back of the restaurant. No familiar faces among the other diners, but the place hadn't changed much. Bobby had tried for homey and succeeded. No two tablecloths were the same but they worked. The walls were adorned with fifties and sixties vintage photographs of Calgary, all of buildings that no longer existed. There were two over my booth. One was of the Capitol Theatre, a wonderful old Famous Players palace that I'd been to a couple of times before they knocked it down. Calgary hasn't always been real big on preserving its heritage buildings.

The other photo was of a church — The First Church of the Nazarene. The cutline below it told of the fire that had destroyed it a decade earlier. What the cutline didn't mention was a murder that had taken place in the church basement in the late fifties or maybe early sixties — a little girl sexually assaulted and murdered. I remembered it because I'd known a family member.

I shivered though Bobby's was anything but cold. It felt like my life was suddenly caught up in some ghoulish theme park of death and murder.

I took the menu from its perch at the wall side of the table and read. It looked pretty much the same as I remembered it — every permutation and combination that involved eggs, bacon, ham, cheese, home fries, and toast. All of it prepared (at least in the old days) by the loving hands of Bobby Panzer, one-time member of the Edsels, Calgary's first really popular teen band, later a morning radio DJ, and for the past twenty years or so, the greatest purveyor of the cheese omelet on the planet.

I was trying to decide between the “Basic” — mushroom, cheese, and ham — and the “Calgary,” which was like the Denver that every restaurant served except better. Bobby served it as a torte with herbed cheese and spinach. It had been my favourite back in the day.

“Cullen, been a long time.”

I looked up at a smiling face and extended hand. Bobby was thicker by thirty pounds and sported a goatee that stood out on a red face that labelled its owner as either a surfer, which Bobby wasn't, or a drinker, which he was.

I shook the hand, returned the grin, and said, “Too long. I've missed the place. Thought it was time to stop by, see if you can still remember how to cook.”

He slid into the other side of the booth, tapped his temple. “Everything is deteriorating except for right here.”

“That's a relief,” I told him.

“How've you been?”

“I'm doing okay, Bobby. Doing okay. I guess the fact that I'm here is proof. How about you?”

“Amazing. I'm still fooling the customers, I'm moderately rich, happier than a pig in ten feet of shit, and I got grandkids, three of 'em. That's the best of all. Oldest one's seven — kid plays guitar like he was born with a Fender in his crib. Gonna be the next Edsel.”

“Bobby, I heard the
old
Edsels. I hope the kid aims a little higher.”

He laughed loudly. “Maybe you're right. Anyway, this grandpa thing is a great gig.”

“Yeah.”

We were silent for a long minute — old friends savouring a moment. Bobby pointed at the menu. “Made any decisions about breakfast?”

“Better go with the Calgary, I think. Actually do me a favour, make two, the second one to go. The orange juice still freshly squeezed?”

Bobby nodded and grinned.

“I'll take two of those too. But they're both for here.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. I stayed away way too long.”

“I know. And I know why. You don't hear me criticizin'.'

“Thanks. That Calgary better be as good as I remember it.”

He stood up. “It will be. And don't even think about taking your wallet out of your pocket or I'll make you listen to old Edsels eight tracks the whole time you're eating.” He grinned again and was gone.

Forty-five minutes later I was stuffed, happy, and pulling up in front of Joan's sixties bungalow with a takeout Calgary omelet in hand.

Joan greeted me with a smile and a hug, then stepped back to let me in.

“Wonderful to see you, Adam. It always is.”

I handed her the takeout container. “Brought you breakfast, or lunch, or brunch. It's an omelet — world class.”

“Bobby's?”

“You know it?”

“The best.”

“Enjoy.”

“I will. Thank you so much, Adam. Come and sit. What can I get you?”

We walked through to the living room, which was tidy and clean without giving the impression that the person living here was a neat freak. Comfortable.

“Nothing for me, Joan. I just drank a lot of juice and a couple of gallons of coffee. Don't need a thing, but you go ahead.”

She shook her head, walked quickly to the kitchen to deposit the omelet in the fridge, and was back in seconds. Joan didn't move like an older person. She sat on a couch that had been in the same place for maybe a couple of decades and still looked good.

I sat in a pale blue armchair that sported half-century-old doilies. I looked at Joan, decided to get right into it.

“I … uh … I was wondering if you still had any of Donna's stuff around. You know, her kid stuff, growing up stuff, young woman stuff.… I don't know if you kept any of that kind of thing.”

Joan seemed surprised by the request and didn't say anything for probably thirty seconds.

“There wasn't much, not really. You are no doubt aware that Donna wasn't a hoarder. Not as an adult, not as a child. She kept some things, of course, and I still have some of them around, but not a lot. And once she went off to college, there was even less. Some of her favourite texts, a few clothing items, a sampling I suppose, but not much more. Of course, you're welcome to see what there is. I'd just like it back when you're through.”

“Absolutely.”

“Why are you wanting to see these things, Adam?”

“I guess it's a nostalgia thing,” I lied. “I got looking through what's at my place, you know, what survived the fire, and it's next to nothing. I guess I'd just like to feel close to her again. Maybe this'll work. Maybe it won't.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

A beat.

“Yeah.”

There was another hesitation before Joan said, “How far back do you want to go?”

“I'm not sure, really. I guess sometime after her dolls and picture books phase, you know, teenager, young woman stuff as she was becoming the person I knew.”

Joan nodded and looked down, adjusting the doily on the arm of her chair.

I said, “I don't want you to do something you're uncomfortable with. I'll be very careful with everything.”

Joan looked up, nodded, and smiled. “I know you will, Adam. I guess I haven't stopped being the protective mother. Right, I think we can do this. Although you might regret passing over the dolls phase. We were very big on Barbies around here.”

One more thing I hadn't known about the woman I'd been married to.

“Adam, are you sure I can't get you something?”

“Okay.” I grinned. “One more coffee can't hurt.”

“There's no such thing as too much coffee.” Joan laughed on her way to the kitchen.

She wasn't gone long — the coffee must have already been made. “I remember you as a milk and sugar guy, right?”

“Absolutely right.” I took the cup she offered and she sat back down with what looked and smelled like herbal tea.

Joan sipped, then set her cup down. “One thought I had — the one thing Donna did keep was her pictures, photo albums. They were like her diaries, she had them all in chronological order with little captions for lots of them. It was really something.”

I nodded. “She was the same way with us. I think our wedding pictures were catalogued by the Dewey Decimal System or something close to it.”

Both of us laughed, remembering. Joan sipped more tea.

“I'd love to take a look at those albums,” I said. “Do you still have them?”

“I do, but it might take some time for me to find them. How about I dig around, and when I find them I give you a call.”

“Perfect, but please don't go to a lot of trouble, and if you need any help finding —”

“It won't be any trouble. I'll phone you in the next day or two when I have them located. In the meantime, I have Donna's things — except for the pictures — in a couple of different places in the house. Maybe you can help me with the gathering.”

A half hour later, I was on my way back to my apartment with the back seat half full of cardboard boxes and a couple of green garbage bags of Donna's things from before we were married. I felt uneasy. What if I did find something? You snoop around in someone's past long enough, there's a chance you'll find out some things you'd rather not have known. But while that prospect troubled me, I was willing to take the risk if there was something in those old mementos that might offer a clue as to the reason my wife had died the way she did.

I pulled up in front of the apartment but before going in I called Cobb on his cell phone. No answer. I talked to his voice mail. “If you change your mind, I'm ready to jump back into the fray and help any way I can. And I do know there are risks and am willing to accept that. Just give me a yell if you need help.”

And, for the second time in as many days, this time after a not badly concocted plate of spaghetti and meatballs, I sat on the living room floor and pored over the earliest strands of Donna's teen and young woman years.

Different background music this time. Bruce Cockburn's
Stealing Fire
CD. Early Cockburn to go with Donna's early life.

Joan was right, there wasn't much. I spent an hour mostly sorting — one pile that I would go through in some detail, the other, items that I didn't think could conceivably give me anything that would be helpful in finding her killer.

And again, I didn't feel I was making headway until I came to her grade eleven yearbook. Northern Horizon Academy.

I'd asked her once why she'd gone to private school. She'd said her parents had wanted her to attend a school that offered excellent academics and a focus on the arts. She'd made sure I understood that it wasn't a Christian school or some offbeat charter school that didn't allow “regular kids” in. I don't remember our talking about her schooling but for that one time.

At first I merely browsed, flipping pages, pausing at a page near the front of the book with its top third missing, the bottom two thirds comprising a roster of teachers — their pictures showing smiles, outdated hairdos, and clothes that would be a big hit in today's retro stores.

I flipped some more, skipping over the section showing the various students activities from the sports teams to the clubs that occupied noon hours and after school time. Several pages were devoted to drama productions, musical performances, a few pieces of writing from the Creative Writing Club.

I leafed through the section of student photos and found Donna's fairly quickly. I moved closer to the lamp, wanting to study the photo — really
see
the woman I would eventually marry. She wasn't one of the school knockouts but she was far from unattractive.

I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to get a feel for what she might have been thinking at the moment the photographer snapped the picture. Got nowhere, scolded myself for getting sidetracked, and set the book aside. Then picked it up again. An idea.

Kelly
.

The girl whose name had been on the note.

Kelly — The bastard did it again. D

Pig. K

I started through the yearbook again, looking for Kelly. I started with Donna's homeroom class.

No Kelly. I flipped back to the first page of student pictures and went through the book page by page. There were three Kellys: a ninth grader named Kelly Howe, a grade ten girl named Kelly Blakeley, and a grade eleven student, Kelly McKercher.

Google time. On the way to my computer I switched up the music: this time it was Broken Social Scene's
You Forgot It in People.
I typed in each of the names. Nothing on any of the three girls. Not surprising since it was likely they had married in the decade-plus since they'd been in high school. I trolled Facebook with the same non-results.

Next I tried the various high school social media sites that connected former students with their classmates. I found Northern Horizon Academy and looked for the Kellys. Got lucky with one — Kelly Blakeley, the eleventh grader, now Kelly Kamara, living in Vancouver. I tried Googling every Kamara in Vancouver without much luck. I finally decided to go old school; I phoned the information operator and got the names and numbers of the various Kamaras — five in all.

My first call was to Dio Kamara; the number I called had been disconnected. I got answers at the homes of Ronald R. Kamara and Jaron Kamara, but when I asked for Kelly I was told that I had the wrong number.

I dialled P. Kamara and this time a woman answered. I asked for Kelly Kamara, got silence, then a slow, “Who's calling please?”

“My name is Adam Cullen. I'm not a telemarketer and I'm not conducting a survey,” I said. “I'm the husband of someone Kelly Kamara may have known in high school. Are you Kelly?”