Tell Anna She's Safe (29 page)

Tim said nothing.

At home she went into the sitting room and turned on the
TV
. She made sure she left the door open. For once she welcomed the mindlessness of the television. Maybe they needed to do more of this. Maybe Tim had the right idea—keep conversation and activities to the inane and innocuous. Keep their focus off all the red-hot areas. Fill their minds with irrelevance and just coast along in a vacuum.

She heard Tim's footsteps heading down the stairs to the bedroom.

Ten minutes later she heard him come back upstairs. She automatically moved over to make room for him on the small couch. When she looked up he was standing in the doorway, carrying his duffel bag in one hand. In the other he held something out to her. “Here—take these.”

She got to her feet. He was holding out his bank card and cheque book.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm leaving. For good this time.”

Her heart began to pound. Tim had threatened to turn himself in to the police so often the past four months, she'd stopped believing him. But this seemed different. This didn't sound like an empty threat. He sounded calm. Resolute. And devoid of hope.

“Where will you go?”

“Who cares?” he flung back. She heard him striding through the kitchen. A minute later the front door slammed.

She raced to the door, yanked it open, expecting to see his truck pulling away from the curb. He was standing on the front steps, his back to her.

She opened the screen tentatively.

Tim turned his head. There were tears streaming down his face.

She took his hand and they sat down on the porch steps.

“I got nowhere to go, Lu. I only got you.”

“Hush. I know, I know.”

She rocked him and waited for the tears and the shaking to stop.

On the fridge the next morning, she found a note:

Lucy,
Please don't give up on me now. My life is just now beginning to take shape. Something I have not experienced in a long while. I'm not sure I deserve your patience especially based on my behaviour of late. I do know you deserve much better than you have received and I fully intend to do all I can to produce for myself and for you.
I love you babe.
T.

20.

S
EPTEMBER BURNISHED INTO OCTOBER, AND
I thought about what had been happening in Lucy's life a year ago at this time. Each leaf falling off the trees would have been like another dollar bill—
hundred
dollar bill—dropping out of her line of credit. I sat down with the notes I'd made from all my conversations, and tried to assemble them into some kind of chronological order. But I didn't have any dates or many details. Just that the trucks had been stolen and then the biker threats had started. And Bill Torrence had promised money. I wondered if Curtis would know anything about these things.

“The trucks were stolen in the fall,” said Curtis. We were sitting at my tiny kitchen table, a bottle of wine and two flickering candles between us. It was my turn to cook dinner. I didn't know anything about vegetarian cooking, so I stuck to pasta. Curtis was always gracious in his praise. Now he waved his fork in the air, as if he were pointing at notes on an imaginary chalkboard. “First it was the pick-up. They found it in a field somewhere outside of town. Lucy said Tim wouldn't let her call the police. He didn't want to have anything to do with the police. He'd get in trouble with his parole officer. But I think it was the police who ended up finding it. Lucy never said if Tim got into any kind of trouble.

“Then,” he said, pointing the fork again, “it was the van.”

“A Curbmaster, I heard.”

Curtis raised an eyebrow at me. “Who've you been talking to?”

I smiled. “I can't reveal my sources.”

“Fair enough,” said Curtis in his measured way, meeting my eyes. “As long as you don't reveal this source either.”

“I promise. You were never here eating pasta in my house.”

“It's pretty good for pasta I never ate.”

“You're such a bullshitter.” We had, by now, reached a comfortable teasing sort of relationship, though our topic of conversation remained obsessively focused on Lucy. I wasn't the only one with a need to talk about her.

“When was the van stolen?”

“You're asking the wrong guy for dates, but it seems to me it wasn't that long after the truck. Maybe within a few weeks.”

“Do you know where the biker gang threats fit in?”

Curtis smiled. “Your source told you about those too? We had a conversation about that. I was trying to get her to see the unlikelihood of random theft happening within weeks like that, and she told me it might not have been random. Tim told her he thought it might be deliberate. I told her it was more likely Tim's lies were deliberate. But of course she wouldn't listen.” He took a long slow swallow of wine.

“What I do remember,” he went on, putting the glass down, “is that she phoned me some time before Christmas. November maybe. And she said Tim was being blackmailed. I told her it was extortion, not blackmail—if it was even true.”

Lucy, I mused, would not have liked to be corrected. Curtis seemed like her match in many ways. It was sad they hadn't been able to make it work.

“Some biker-types were coming up to him and demanding money,” Curtis was saying. “He'd gone into her account and withdrawn some substantial sums to pay them off.”

“And you think he was making it up?”

“Do you doubt it, in light of what happened?”

I shrugged. “It seems obvious from where we sit now. But maybe not then. He would have made enemies in prison, especially over the Archie Crowe thing. What came of it?”

It was Curtis's turn to shrug. “Nothing, of course. Except for more money disappearing out of her account without being replaced. And I think that's when Tim started talking about his pal—someone named Torrence, I think.”

“Torrence? Who was that?” I asked it in my most innocent voice.

“Oh, some figment of Tim's psycho imagination, no doubt,” said Curtis. He paused with his fork in mid-air. “Supposedly he was some rich guy Tim knew in prison. Who had some influence. Torrence was going to make sure the threats stopped. And, guess what, they did.”

*

THE NOVEMBER STATEMENTS WERE LATE.
All the other bills had arrived. She checked the mail every morning, but there was no sign.

Tim shrugged and shook his head when she asked him if he'd seen them. “I don't pay attention to your mail. It's none of my business.”

“It
is
your business. You're in charge of paying back the line of credit.”

She rummaged furiously through the papers on her desk. They must have arrived—the other batch of bills were there.

She shifted through the wastepaper basket.

“They're not going to be in there.” There was scorn in Tim's voice.

She pulled a statement out of the garbage, checked the date, and sucked in an angry breath. “They are,” she said between gritted teeth, “if you put them there.”

“Why do you hafta blame me for everything? You must've thrown them out by accident.”

She barely heard him. The room was suddenly spinning. The negative balance in her line of credit was even bigger than she was expecting, almost seven thousand dollars. She steadied herself against the desk. Then she fished in the garbage for the other statement. The room started to spin again. She sat down hard.

“You've been taking money again, Tim. There's seven hundred here, and another five hundred two days later. I never said you could take those amounts out.” Her voice was shaking.

Tim grabbed the statement from her hand. “Lemme see that. That can't be right. The bank made a mistake.”

“The bank did not make a mistake.” She glared at him. And was shocked to see his righteous indignation transform into terror. There was no other word for it. It was an emotion she knew all too well.

“I need money, Lu—”

She exploded. “You always need—”

“I'm being blackmailed.” It came out in a shout over her voice. It was a shout ragged with fear.

She stopped her tirade in mid-sentence.
“What?”

“It was two biker-types. I heard Archie Crowe got outta the joint recently. I think he put them on to me. I don't know how they found out where I live. They come right up the driveway with a knife. In broad daylight. I didn't want to tell you. I didn't want to scare you.”

He was strangely excited as he poured out the story, obviously relieved to finally be telling her. “I never even seen 'em coming. I was working in the garage. They were big guys—lot bigger'n me.”

Her heart was racing. “What did they say?”

“One of them said he was going to put a bullet between my eyes unless I gave him seven hundred dollars.”

“A
bullet?
I thought you said he had a knife?”

There was momentary confusion on Tim's face. “Well, he musta had a gun too. I never seen it. That's what he said. I told him I didn't have the money, that I needed time to get it. I told them I'd have the money in an hour—that I'd meet them at Rick's Bar. Then I went to the bank machine. I had no choice, Lu. I had to take it out of your account.”

She was breathing fast, feeling the first signs of panic. “What happened when you showed up? They didn't try to hurt you?”

“No, I waited outside, and they came out and I handed them the money, then I got the hell out of there. I didn't tell you cuz I didn't want to worry you.”

“And the second amount?”

Tim looked down at the statement, as if that would help him remember. “They found me at Hurley's two days later—made me go to the bank machine and get five hundred more.”

She watched him register the shock on her face. “I think that's all, Lu. I don't think they'll bug me anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“It was just the feeling I got.”

She stared at him.

“I called Bill Torrence,” he added. “He's got influence. He said he'd check into it. I don't think it'll happen again.”

“And is this related to the car thefts too?”

Tim looked startled. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “They were trying to scare me.”

She was starting to shake, her mouth was dry. She swallowed hard. “This has got to stop. They could clean us out. They could hurt you. They could hurt me.”

Tim put his arms around her. “Hey, baby, relax, it's okay. Bill's going to take care of it. I promise you. They won't bother me again.”

She pulled herself out of his arms, wiping tears away. She felt overwhelmed, out of her depth. They needed help. “I think we should call the police.”

“No!” It was Tim's turn to panic. “No police. Please Lu, it'll just get all screwed up.”

“But it's theft. They're stealing from me!” She thought she was going to start hyperventilating. Money just kept leaking out of her account. Everything was spinning out of control.

“I talked to Bill about money too,” said Tim. “He says he might be able to give me a loan—a big loan. Enough to cover my debt to you and give me some capital to get a business going.”

“He has that kind of money?
Clean
money?”

“We're still working out the amount. When we do, I'll pay you back everything I owe you. Even for the money they blackmailed out of me. You shouldn't have to suffer because of my past. It's not fair to you.”

“Nothing's fair,” she said. But a glimmer of hope came into her heart. Bill Torrence sounded almost too good to be true. But a mentor, a wealthy mentor, was exactly what Tim needed. Someone to support him, get him on his feet again. And someone who'd been in prison would be doubly understanding. Maybe everything was going to be alright after all.

*

CURTIS AND I MOVED TO
the futon couch with the remainder of the wine, leaning back on cushions, facing each other. Our favourite position for Lucy conversations. Sometimes Curtis reached out and performed reflexology on my feet. He usually found painful trigger points, but I didn't pull away. I would never have admitted it to him, but I usually felt better for it afterward. My left foot was in his hands now, being subjected to what I called his torture treatments.

“Have you gone to see Kendra yet?” he asked me.

“Not yet. I'm thinking about it.”

Curtis shook his head. “Stop resisting, McGinn. You and Lucy are opposite poles—you resisting everything you can't explain, she way too willing to believe the unbelievable.”

I pulled my foot away then, annoyed. “What's my foot doing in your torturing hands if I'm resisting everything I can't explain?”

Curtis grinned. “It's not. You just pulled it away.”

“Because you're so provoking.”

“I think you like being provoked.”

“I think you like being provoking.”

Curtis reached for my foot again. “Give it back. I promise to provoke you only physically.”

I laughed then and relented. “Did you provoke Lucy this way too?”

“Lucy needed provoking. It was the only way to get her to see any sense.”

“But it sounds like she was starting to see through Tim. Didn't he move out sometime around Christmas? She told me he was moving out. That he needed to gain some independence, and she needed her space. She didn't make it sound like they were breaking up. But maybe that's only what she told me. Was she trying to end it then, do you think?”

Curtis gave an exaggerated shrug. “Who knows? She gave me the same story. And there was the snowplowing thing too. Tim supposedly had a bunch of snowplowing contracts for the winter, which meant he had to get up at something like four a.m., and Lucy didn't want her sleep disturbed. So I think that was part of the rationale for getting separate places. She might have been secretly hoping they'd end up going their separate ways eventually, but she would never have admitted that to me either. And I gather money was still an issue. I think he was still stealing from her, because she told me she went over to his place and made him sign an agreement that he would stop taking money out of her account and would pay her back everything he owed her. She finally took him off her account around Christmas time.”

*

SHE WOKE UP TO SILENCE
and daylight—the little that winter could siphon into her basement windows. Winter: her worst time of year. She'd endured two winters on her own, waiting for Tim, cursing the system that was keeping them apart. How ironic that now that they were finally free to be together, she was alone in winter's hell again. The lesser of two evils.

She couldn't bring herself to get up. The silence was a drug. Tim wasn't banging around upstairs or slamming the front door at four in the morning. He wasn't even slamming the door on his way back in to see her. She had forbidden him to come before noon. Even when there were no driveways to plow. Mornings were to be hers again.