The Geranium Girls (12 page)

“I don’t think so, thanks.” She wanted a drink rather badly but not out of any of these bottles.

When Clive left the room she opened the fridge, which was surprisingly clean inside and filled with beer.

“Maybe I’ll have a beer!” she called after him. She twisted off the top and drank from the bottle.

Clive returned with a thin faded newspaper and handed it to Beryl: The
Pilot Mound Sentinel
. It was a summer date and the year was 1981.

“Did you notice the year on this, Clive?”

He peered over her shoulder. “Well, I’ll be fucked!”

“Yeah. This is really old. Did you read it?” Beryl asked as she gently turned a yellow page. There weren’t many pages to turn.

“No.” Clive opened the fridge and opened a beer for himself.

“Have you thought about phoning the police, Clive, about this newspaper and your bed and everything?”

Clive chuckled. “No way, man. The last thing I need is cops inside my house.” His eyes darted about. “Jesus, Beryl. I can’t be havin’ cops inside my house.”

Beryl looked around her, took in the pipes and papers and bags of dope.

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “And anyway, the crime is a little vague.” Just like my crimes, she thought, picturing her lobelia and the bright pink cat collar. She almost mentioned them to Clive, but decided against it.

“May I borrow this?” she asked, folding up the worn pages.

She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she knew there was something in this little newspaper printed so long ago.

“Sure. You can keep it if you like. I don’t have a lot of use for a Pilot Mound newspaper from 1981.” Clive drained his beer bottle. “Do you?”

“Well it’s a clue, isn’t it? Clive, aren’t you even a little bit interested in who left this, who may have been sleeping in your bed?”

“I don’t know. I guess not. So many people are in and out of here, Beryl. It’s probably somebody I actually know or have at least met. They probably knew I was out of town and crashed here, figuring it would be okay. Why are you so interested in this?”

Beryl couldn’t imagine living the way Clive did. At least not these days. Maybe back in the early eighties around the time when this little newspaper was published, but not now, when doors were double dead-bolted, alarms were set, and window bars were a matter of course. Except at Clive’s house.

She decided not to answer his question and he didn’t pursue it.

“Do you wanna share a little blow?” Clive was lining up two tidy rows of white powder on the crusty surface of the kitchen table.

“No thanks, Clive. I should be going.”

Beryl took a last drink from her beer bottle and set it down amongst the clutter. “I’m going to read this thing cover to cover and see what it tells me.”

She didn’t want to inhale anything more of Clive’s right now, least of all little pieces of grunge from his filthy table mixed in with some questionable cocaine.

“Take care, Clive,” she said and left him there, hunched over, with a five dollar bill stuck up his nose.

He gave her the thumbs-up sign but she was out the door before he looked up again.

“Fuck!” Boyo pounds the wall with his fist.

His newspaper is gone. He shouldn’t have been so careless. Imagine being that careless! It was the only copy he had of Auntie Cunt’s obituary.

He remembers the night soon after her death when he sat down to write it. Someone had to, he supposed, and he was the only one. She died in Winnipeg, but he composed a death notice for Pilot Mound too, where she had lived the first thirty-four years of her life. He sent it to the newspaper there, the
Pilot Mound Sentinel
. That way, anyone in that small southwestern town who remembered her could breathe their own sigh of relief.

Hortense croaked, he wrote, and laughed out loud.

Old Hort finally kicked the bucket. He opened a bottle of champagne and changed what he had written.

Finally he decided on: Hortense Frouten died.

He didn’t mention himself as her survivor or anything to indicate there had been a person there, where there was no more. She was just a name on paper, before and after.

He much preferred the after.

That night, after he’d finished with Hort’s obituary, he headed down to the Low Track for the first time. He came to find that hookers were much easier to deal with than the few girls he’d had a go at. They didn’t question him as much or seem to judge him. And if they wouldn’t do what he wanted them to, they could line him up with someone who would. They joked sometimes, about his ladies’ scarves and other items, and he didn’t like that much. But they also knew when to stop. They took him seriously; they understood that it would be very easy for him to pull just a little tighter.

Also, whores expected a little pain, to be on both the receiving and the giving ends of some discomfort. They weren’t as likely to get into a lather about it if they were squeezed too hard or if he wanted them to buckle him up a little more tightly than usual. He much preferred them to regular women.

So sometimes he made the trip to the Low Track, but more often he phoned a service that would deliver someone to his house in a taxi. It was slicker that way, less noticeable, except maybe to his neighbours. Also, he could use more of his equipment. He set up a special room for his needs.

In early August of 1981, someone from the
Pilot Mound
Sentinel
sent Boyo a copy of the paper that ran Hortense’s obituary.

He has carried it with him ever since. Not all the time; but often. And when it isn’t travelling with him, it’s in a plastic folder on the mantle where he can see it from his chair.

And that’s where it isn’t right now.

Losing it bothers him very much. He needs it back, or at least another original copy. He can’t live without one.

Beryl watched Dhani sleep. It was the morning after the first night he had slept over and she wasn’t sure yet whether it had been a good idea to let him stay. It would depend a lot on how he behaved when he woke up. She didn’t want to fight with him first thing in the morning. It would colour her whole day.

He looked so clean and smooth. He looked healthy — indestructible. She loved the look of him.

She knew the indestructible part was an illusion and that even the healthy part could be. She’d had another friend like that — not like Dhani, no one was like Dhani — but a friend who had shone with life and good health. A pre-Georges boyfriend, named Brian. He had up and died on her. One day he had been laughing his head off on the corner of Portage and Main and the next day he was dead: a blood clot in the brain.

Dhani’s eyelids fluttered open and he smiled. Beryl kissed him on the temple and he closed his eyes again.

“I’m going to make us some pancakes this morning,” Dhani said and Beryl kissed him gently at the edge of his mouth.

“Mmm,” she said. “That’s my favourite breakfast.”

“I know.”

He put his arm around her and she rested her head on his chest. Her feet were touching his feet. They felt fine to her. She had been a little worried about seeing and feeling his feet minus their toes, but it hadn’t been scary at all. They both drifted off for a few more minutes. Beryl continue to doze while he got up and prepared the pancakes.

He had kissed the smooth skin on her back last night, softly and all over. It was almost her favourite place to be kissed.

They ate breakfast in bed with the late July sunshine streaming in the south window. Dhani made very good pancakes and he made them from scratch.

“It’s a recipe my dad used to make, apparently,” he said. “It’s better than a mix. At least, I think so.”

“I do too,” Beryl said. “Every bite was delicious. Did your dad not make them for you, then?”

“If he did, I don’t remember. He died when I was just four.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Beryl wanted to know more, but didn’t want to ask too much at once.

They sipped their coffee, which was also delicious, albeit a little weaker than what Beryl was used to. It reminded her of their many differences.

“If only we didn’t fight all the time,” she said.

Dhani sighed in a very contented manner and smiled at her.

“I think it’s okay that we fight as much as we do,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

Jude and her brother, Dusty, had settled in at the end of the bed and were staring at Dhani. This was something new for them.

“Some of our differences are rather great, don’t you think?” Beryl said.

“Oh? Like what?”

“Well, like the invisible connections you’re always rambling on about…”

“Wait!” Dhani said and set his coffee down on the bedside table. “I get the feeling when you say invisible you mean something totally different from what I would mean by that same word. You mean non-existent, don’t you?”

He was accusing her and she knew she deserved it. That was what she’d meant, but she’d thought she could bury it inside the word invisible.

“Yeah, I guess that is what I mean.”

“Say what you mean, Beryl.”

“I’ll try.”

“What else?”

“Pardon?”

“The other huge differences between us, besides your disrespect for my ideas about connections. What are they?”

“Uh-oh, I should never have started on this. It can’t lead to anything good,” Beryl said. “And disrespect isn’t right. I don’t disrespect anything about you.”

“What else?” Dhani asked.

“Well…” Beryl crossed her arms in front of her chest. She had thrown on a tee shirt. “I think you rifling through my kitchen drawers is kind of a big thing.”

“I agree that I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’m ashamed of having done that.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. You say ‘really’ a lot. Do you know that about you?”

“Dhani, if you realized you were wrong in looking through my drawers, why didn’t you apologize?”

He picked up his coffee and took a sip.

“Shame…pride…embarrassment…wanting to forget I ever did it. I don’t know. I’m sorry for having done that, Beryl, and I’m sorry I didn’t apologize right at the start.”

“I totally forgive you,” Beryl said, and kissed Dhani’s brown shoulder. She loved the way her white skin looked against his darkness. For years she had tried to tan in the summer, but she burned so easily it wasn’t worth it.

Dusty and Jude had moved halfway up the bed now and were nestled in between Beryl and Dhani’s legs. They still stared at Dhani but both cats were getting heavy-lidded and it wouldn’t be long till their heads started to nod and they dropped off to sleep.

“This discussion is a pretty good idea, I think,” Beryl said.

“Those are minuscule differences,” Dhani said. “Both of them.”

Beryl turned to look at him. He meant it.

“Do you really think so?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, give me an example of what you think a big one would be,” she said.

“I don’t think we have any what you would label really big differences.”

“Really?”

“You make coffee too strong and you say ‘really’ too much.”

“What word would you have me use instead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let me know if you think of it. I think that you make coffee too weak.”

“You know what?” Dhani placed his drained cup back on the table and took hold of one of Beryl’s hands.

“What?”

“I don’t think I can think of a difference between us that would be bigger than what we could handle,” he said. “Go ahead, say it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll think about it some more, but unless I find out you have bodies in the basement or something, or you find out I’m an impostor or something, which I’m not, by the way, I can’t imagine…”

“If I hadn’t seen you before, I may well have thought you were an impostor the first day I met you, when you put my foot in your mouth. A layman impersonating a pharmacist.”

Dhani laughed. “You had seen me before?”

“Yup. I had seen you behind your counter. I hoped that you’d be the one to help me on the day I got stung.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Really.”

Beryl wasn’t entirely sure she agreed with Dhani about being able to handle their differences but she was very glad that he thought he could. He even thought that she could. She wondered if he would feel the same way if he knew the secret she was hiding from him: that both the murdered women, Beatrice Fontaine and Diane Caldwell, were customers of her good friend, Hermione — that she, and therefore he, had that added connection to the victims.

“I love that you think we could handle all our differences,” she said out loud.

She almost said, I love you. That was what she wanted to say. But she was glad she didn’t.

After Dhani left, Beryl made a fresh pot of strong coffee and took the little newspaper Clive had given her out to the deck. What had happened in Pilot Mound, Manitoba in the summer of 1981? Behind the bold type,
Pilot Mound Sentinel
, was a drawing of a low mound of earth with a cheerful sun rising up behind it. A happy little town?

She perused the news items on the front page: an introduction to the four new members of the “Division Board”; invitations to sign up for bridge and cribbage tournaments and curling leagues; news from villages in the area, she supposed, with names like Wood Bay and Marringhurst; an announcement about the number of babies born in the whole of Manitoba the previous year, and the number of weddings, and then comparisons to previous years.

Beryl wanted to hop in a time machine and travel back to 1981, to the sunny little town of Pilot Mound, where she could take up with one of the Board Members, the one named Earl Addison, marry him and bear his children. She could join the United Church Women, perhaps be a Unit Leader and organize tea towel showers for the old age home and rummage sales in the church basement. She could bake buns and have a dog that ran free.

Not that the world was innocent in the summer of 1981. Richard Speck and Charlie Manson were old news. Even Canada’s own Clifford Olson had done most of his bloody work by then. But still, maybe in a small prairie town, maybe in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, a person could have found a terror free life.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow
starring Charles Durning and Tonya Crowe had been playing at the Tivoli Theatre.

The drugstore advertised perfumed talc “fresh from England” for only one dollar and thirty-nine cents.

There were two obituaries — also on the front page. One for a man named Wilfred Simpson Harvey, who had lived his entire life in Pilot Mound. Practically a whole column rambled on about his war record and his willingness to lend a hand. His relatives were listed: siblings, wife, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Even one or two life-long friends. A well-loved man.

And then there was Hortense Frouten. Hortense Frouten died, it read, and not much else: her dates, the fact that she spent her latter years in Winnipeg, and that was about it. A feeble effort by the writer to plump it out a little. It must have been done by either someone who didn’t know her at all or who didn’t like her one bit.

That obituary was the only thing on page one that stood out for Beryl. Not what it said, but what it didn’t. The person who wrote this felt they had it right with just this terse announcement. There was nothing more to say.

Hortense Frouten was not a loved woman. Not by the person who wrote her obituary, anyway. Beryl wondered if there might be a longer notice in the
Winnipeg Free Press
and decided to try to find out. Maybe this was just the condensed version for her hometown paper. After all, she had lived the final years of her life in Winnipeg.

Beryl perused the rest of the newspaper: the Horticultural Report, Rebekah notes, CGIT notes, a column called
Along the Farm Front
. There was a classified ad for a well boring service, one for the sale of a cow (a heavy milker), and one with an offer of one hundred pounds of netted gem potatoes for $5.89.

Nothing jumped out at her the way the death of Hortense Frouten did. That was it. The stark obituary was definitely it.

But definitely what? She didn’t have a clue. Her gut told her it was something, though. I’ll let it sit, she thought, as she drank the last of her coffee. Something will come clear.