The Carpenter (8 page)

In the early morning, Pete dressed in his work clothes. The light from outside was grey and cold. His knuckles were sore from striking the wall and his head hurt. He looked at Nancy. She was a stranger. She was snoring and was still wearing her jeans. Pete picked up her hand and put it down again. She did not stir. He shoved the clothes he’d worn the night before into his backpack.

He moved through the house. No one was around. He had no idea what room Billy and Emily might have ended up in, and he gritted his teeth against the idea of going door to door to find them. In the living room, he could smell burned carpet and spilled beer. It made his gorge rise. He went out the front door and down to his car and got his work jacket out of the trunk. It was a lined canvas jacket with his name stitched at the breast. He put it on and rubbed his hands together. He got into the car and started it. It was then that he saw Emily out on the front porch. She was wearing a cable-knit sweater and she had a steaming mug between her hands. She saw him and gave a little wave. He got out of the car and shuffled back to the porch.

—I was in the kitchen making tea, said Emily. I usually don’t sleep the whole night through. But I would have a nap every single afternoon if I could. Where are you going?

He found himself looking at Emily’s hair, looking for it to be askew, but it hung as dark and straight as the first time he’d seen her. At some point, she’d washed off her makeup, what little she had seemed to be wearing the night before, and though there were darker spots under her eyes, even in the early morning light she remained almost too pretty to look at.

—Well, some of us can’t sleep at night because they have a guilty conscience, said Pete. And some of us can’t sleep because they have to go to work.

—Guilty conscience?

—I’m teasing you.

—I know you are. You work at the gas station on the bypass, right?

—Yeah, that’s right.

—How long have you been doing that?

—Since May.

—And what else? said Emily.

—What else what?

—What else anything, Pete. What’s your story?

—Oh, said Pete. I don’t know. There’s not much to it. I was born in North Bay. We lived there until I was eight or so, then we moved back here, because this is my mom’s hometown, this is where she grew up. She’s married to a pastor now. I never met my dad.

—My mom teaches grade two, said Emily. My dad is a cop.

—And you play the piano better than anyone I ever heard.

—Thank you. My grandmother taught me. She could play like you wouldn’t believe.

—My grandma lives with us, said Pete.

He did not mention anything about his grandmother’s illness. For a moment he had a clear idea of how his story must sound to someone like Emily—his grandmother was dying, his uncle was an ex-con, he’d never met his father, and, as for himself, he was a dropout who worked at a gas station. Emily, meanwhile, had it good, and came from good people. At best, he thought, she might tolerate someone like him, as long as she was seeing his friend.

And yet, he was conscious of how he felt, standing here with her, watching her sip her tea. He said: Do you think you’ll go with Billy again?

She shrugged. The mug was in front of her mouth.

—You never know. If he continues to be a gentleman, maybe I’ll go with him again.

Pete rubbed the back of his neck: Yeah, Billy’s a good guy.

—He’s very good-looking, said Emily. He’s got beautiful hair. And my dad would absolutely hate him.

—I see.

—Maybe you can see Nancy again. We could go out, the four of us. That would be fun.

He agreed lamely that they should all meet again. Then he went down the steps and got in his car, wondering what it was like to have a place where you fit in.

He pulled onto the street and watched Emily in his rear-view mirror until he’d turned the corner and lost sight of her.

S
tan had a bad night. When he slept he dreamed he was awake but was unable to move. And when he was awake he lay looking around. All the ordinary features of the bedroom had new dimensions in the darkness. In the morning his whole body ached. He put on a track suit in preparation for his exercises.

Cassius was sitting by the woodstove when Stan came down. The last two nights had been cold enough to warrant a small fire in the stove, which Stan had kept because it was as old as the house itself and because it appealed to him in a way that electric heat did not. Stan scratched the dog between the ears and they went outside. Edna’s garden was choked with weeds. The flowers were all dead. Stan and Cassius went down the embankment to the basement door under the house. Inside the basement, Stan kept a workbench and a selection of tools. Across from that was the exposed bedrock on which the house was built, coming up in one place to the bottoms of the joists. There was space for storage, extra siding, shingles, storm shutters, life jackets and fishing rods, a paint-spattered wooden ladder. In the opposite corner, an Everlast heavy-bag hung from the overhead beam.

He turned on an FM radio he kept on the workbench, tuned it to the news. He wrapped his hands and knuckles, aching as they were, and he put on a pair of old sixteen-ounce training gloves he’d had for many years. He shadowboxed for a few minutes and then
he worked on the heavy-bag. In his youth, before his long tenure as a cop, he’d had four years as a professional boxer. His record was twenty-two fights, with seventeen wins, twelve of those by knockout. He’d been known as a good stylist and an outfighter, classing as a light heavyweight at a hundred and seventy pounds.

Stan had come back to exercising daily around the time he turned fifty and his doctor had given him some warnings about his blood pressure. So he’d quit smoking—which Edna had never cared for anyway—and had brought the fighting exercises back into his life. His knees and hips wouldn’t let him use the jump rope much any more, but he could still work combinations on the heavy-bag. It used to be his cross, thrown with his right hand, that would win him a fight, if the victory was to be by knockout. Stan would strike his opponent’s body until the guy let his hands and elbows down, and then he’d propel the cross from his hips and abdominals straight into the guy’s jaw or temple.

After four three-minute rounds he stopped punching the bag to listen to the news. His sweatshirt was damp right through and he felt older than ever. Cassius lay with his muzzle between his forepaws. As a puppy it had upset him to watch Stan work on the bag and he would bark and snap until Stan would have to get Edna to call Cassius out to her. Now the dog only watched through half-lidded eyes. Stan steadied the bag. The news broadcast finished. He stood looking out the yellowed window-glass over the workbench, down past the cedar trees to the western shore of the point, which endured the worst of the weather when the prevailing winds blew.

He had a list of chores he needed to attend to. The outboard motor needed servicing. The toilet was making erratic sounds. He went at the chores in a distracted fashion. After lunch, he set a ladder against the side of the house and climbed up to clean the eavestroughs. The sun was warm on his face and the
colours of the leaves were vivid against the sky. Somewhere, the sound of a chainsaw was buzzing through the trees.

He had been at this for twenty minutes when he heard the dog barking and a vehicle in the turnaround. He looked down and saw Dick Shannon coming to the base of the ladder. Dick was uniformed, carrying his cap in one hand.

—That’s a long way up.

—I’ll put that dog on you, Dick.

—That’s fine. He could watch me all the way to my car.

Dick bent down and picked up a stick from the grass. He held it for Cassius to sniff and then he hurled it across the yard. Cassius trotted after it but stopped halfway and just looked. Dick shook his head and looked back up at Stan and said: I told you I owed you a visit. Them things you asked me about on the telephone a few days ago.

Stan came down. He got some beers from the fridge and carried two lawn chairs to the dock. They agreed there were not going to be many more days this year that they’d be able to sit by the lake and take in the sun.

—How’s town? said Stan.

—Same as ever. Say, do you remember that business with Simon and Charles Grady?

—Christ, that’s a lot of years ago. King, wasn’t that his name?

—Leland King, said Dick. Anyhow, he’s been paroled. He’s back in town.

—I remember driving Leland King down to the provincial jail when his trial started. I thought he looked just like a kid. Remember how his dad—I think his name was George—dropped stone dead in that store of his one morning?

—Only from hearing about it later, said Dick. I think I was still overseas when he died.

—That’s right. It would have been ‘44 or so. Anyway, it was better for him, I guess, to die long before he’d see what his son would make of himself.

—I expect Frank will pay a visit to Leland before long, said Dick. Tell him how things are.

—It was Frank who was first on the scene with the Gradys, if I remember right. Frank was new to town. Him and Mary hadn’t even had Emily yet.

—I see Arthur Grady sometimes, driving around, said Dick. He still looks after the living boy. Hell of a thing.

—Yes, said Stan. When it happened, it was the biggest goddamn news in the county for a whole year. As big as the Lacroixes were … And Charles Grady, he was one hell of a hockey player, but I always wondered if maybe there wasn’t a little more to the story than what came out at the trial. There were a whole lot of people not saying anything at all.

—Oh well, said Dick. I don’t think it matters much any more.

They drank their beers and watched a boat cut across the lake two hundred yards out. The change in the colours had reached the point where there was an equal distribution of green and yellow and red around the shore. Edna had liked spring best because that was when she planted her garden, but she’d always said fall was the prettiest time. She came into Stan’s head abruptly now, as she sometimes did, and just as abruptly he tried to push the thought of her away.

—So, do you still think you’ll retire next summer? said Stan.

—You better believe it. They won’t have any trouble getting me out the door.

—I was a few years past the thirty-five when I went. I lost money on my pension but I just didn’t know what I would do with myself. I still don’t.

—Is that what this is about? said Dick.

—What?

—We’ve known each other a long time, Stanley. I don’t know anything else that’s dogged your heels like the Lacroixes, and that was, Christ, I was a kid when that happened. Now this with Aurel’s daughter, you being the one to find her.

Stan rubbed at a knot in the dock planking with the heel of his boot and said: It wasn’t you on the investigation, was it.

—No, said Dick. It was Lenny Gleber.

—Look. I don’t know what I’m thinking, Dick. Maybe I just don’t have anything better to do.

—I don’t think you owe that family anything. I don’t think you ever did. Judy Lacroix was a pretty poor-off girl with her illness and all, anyhow.

—Did you get a look at the toxicology?

Dick took a folded paper out of his breast pocket. He held it out to Stan.

—You know what Frank would do, don’t you.

Stan took the paper and unfolded it. He was looking at a photocopy. The reporting toxicologist’s name was blotted out. Stan read the date of the test and the details. He looked at the drug notes, and he said: Look at this man’s handwriting. Okay, that’s carbon monoxide, just like how I found her. But, there’s this, amitrip … What’s this hen scratch here?

—Amitriptyline. I didn’t ask Gleber about it because I didn’t want word to get back to Frank. Gleber’s alright, but he’s a company man. So I rang up a pathologist I used to work with when I was down in the city. Anyhow it’s a drug for a girl like Judy. It would make her feel normal, if you can call it that. It—what did he say about it—it can make you feel nothing at all. He said it could get you into a kind of mood where you don’t give a fart if you’re hurting or sad or even if you live or die. Judy was on that for her illness.

—This is goddamn hard to read.

—Or you just need glasses, Stanley. But what you’re looking at is that she had close to four hundred milligrams of that stuff in her blood.

—She overdosed on it.

—No. It was the exhaust that killed her. Carbon monoxide. But four hundred milligrams of the amitriptyline is near three
times the maximum dose for a full-grown man. With something like that, you might think all that work you had to do, putting the hose up from the tailpipe through the window, was just as easy as a Sunday drive.

—She left a note in the car, said Stan. I never got a chance to read it.

—There wasn’t much. She just told her sister she was sorry is all. But one thing Gleber did find out is that there was a boyfriend. You only asked about how the girl killed herself, but I thought you might like to know what else I found out.

—Yes, said Stan. Just for curiosity, let’s say.

Dick took out his notebook and flipped it open to a page he’d marked. He said: I knew I’d forget the boyfriend’s name so I wrote it down. Gilmore. Colin Gilmore. Seasonal worker, not too much on him. I guess Mr. Gilmore didn’t let on they were as serious as Judy thought they were. He said they’d stopped seeing each other a couple weeks before you found her.

—Maybe that had something to do with it?

—Maybe, said Dick. The gals that Judy worked with said she’d stopped showing up for work for a week or two. Her sister works at the National Trust downtown. She’d gotten Judy on with an after-hours cleaning crew.

Stan nodded. He drank his beer. Dick sat back in the lawn chair and rolled his cuffs up from his wrists. After a long moment, he said: People, when they take their own lives … You remember when we got called out to—What was his name?

—Templeton, said Stan. I knew him when I was a boy but I don’t remember his first name. But yes, I remember that call. You hadn’t been around real long.

—If he’d only had sense enough to put that .303 into his mouth instead of under his chin like he did. He must of lived forty-five minutes with his face like that. Between the two of us we could barely hold him in one place.