The Geranium Girls (17 page)

The next day was Friday. Beryl phoned Frank at work as soon as she woke up, just in case. He wasn’t there, but they assured her he’d be back behind his desk sometime in the afternoon. Then she phoned her own home for messages but there was nothing new.

It was strange waking up at Stan’s. She’d slept on a pull-out couch in the basement. She would have been sharing it with Hermione but they hadn’t been able to find her.

When they went by her shop they found the blinds pulled down and a note on the door in her backhanded scrawl: Closed for a few days.

Beryl ran up the stairs to the flat and knocked on the door, knowing she wouldn’t get an answer. The blinds were pulled in the upstairs apartment as well.

“Well, this is probably a good thing,” Stan said. “She’s gone somewhere safe.”

“It feels so empty, though,” Beryl said, “like no one lives here anymore.”

“It’s only temporary,” Stan said, when they were back outside. “A few days.” He pointed to the wrinkled note.

“I wish she had phoned me,” Beryl said.

“Maybe she will yet.”

“I could phone home for messages from your house.”

“Yeah. Come on, let’s go. This place is too quiet.”

“Stan?”

“Yes?”

“Look at the geraniums.”

Those that weren’t completely dead had wilted, sickly looking leaves. There were no live blooms.

“Stan, these flowers used to be the healthiest, happiest, most exuberant flowers in Winnipeg.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Stan said, and they drove to his place, where Beryl holed up with the Socz family for the night.

When she had phoned home for messages yesterday there had been two hang-ups, a message from the library saying she had a book waiting, and one from Dhani. He wanted to set something up for the weekend.

Beryl had returned his call when she was able to get some privacy after Ellie went to bed. She brought him up to speed as best she could. Dhani wanted to know everything, but she held back a little. It was difficult on the phone to talk about the complicated parts. She assured him that she was safe and that she would call him again when there was something more to tell. And she promised to introduce him to Stan and Raylene soon.

Now it was morning and Beryl was rethinking her plan of taking the day off. Her work ethic won out. She liked to think she was the type of person who could wake up feeling okay and phone in sick, but she wasn’t. And she didn’t feel like going home. Dusty and Jude would be fine. She had left lots of food and water out for them and they had each other for company.

Plus, it was the day she was to be officially hollered at. She didn’t think she should miss that; it would be too noticeable.

It had been years since she’d been yelled at in an official capacity. Last time, it was for storming out and not coming back one day, when the noise had seemed so loud she thought her head would explode. When she had complained, they sent some joker with an official noise measuring device who found that the noise was at an “acceptable level” unless it kept up for prolonged periods of time.

“Doesn’t all the fucking time count as prolonged?” she had shouted.

The official had looked uneasy and had been assured by her supervisor at the time that the noise was only intermittent. Beryl had had a different supervisor then, a woman, who was no help at all.

Stan lent her a post office shirt now, too big, of course, but it didn’t matter. The shirt was clean and even ironed; Raylene ironed Stan’s shirts for him. Beryl wore her own shorts, the ones she had been wearing the night before. If they wanted to yell at her for that, they could do it at the same time as her insubordination counselling. Kill two birds with one stone.

“Do you have a union steward going in with you?” Stan asked. “In case they start saying things they aren’t supposed to. That happens sometimes, ya know. And you probably wouldn’t notice.”

“Yes, I would.” Beryl twirled around in front of the full-length mirror in Stan and Raylene’s front hallway. She liked the look of Stan’s shirt on her. It was huge.

“I’ve got Bert Wheeler going in with me,” she said. “He’s pretty good, isn’t he?”

“Yup, he knows his stuff,” Stan said. “That’s good.”

Beryl made short work of her route. It was one of those great mail days that come a few times each summer, when there are no bills and no cheques, no
Chatelaine
magazines or
Reader’s Digest
s, and most importantly, no flyers. Just a bit of this and a bit of that. It was like a gift. Beryl sailed through the streets with her mind on what was to come.

As the morning went by she felt less and less like being hollered at. The counselling session wasn’t till the afternoon. What a waste of a great mail day! Maybe I’ll miss it, she thought.

She rummaged through her bag for the notice that Ed had given her. It was gone. It must have fallen out of her too-shallow mailbag. She decided to use the shallow bag as an excuse for not showing up. Her problems with the bag were well documented: she had filled out a form. Plus she’d done a fair bit of whining about it out loud; that should help.

The only problem was Bert Wheeler. She didn’t want to let her union steward down. He was such a nice guy.

Then she figured, what the heck.

As soon as she was finished her walk, Beryl went to the third floor of the Centennial Library to look up Hortense Frouten’s obituary in the
Winnipeg Free Press
. Word for word, it was the same as the one in the
Pilot Mound Sentinel
, except for two small additions.

First, there was an extra name: Keller. Hortense Frouten Keller, it read. Beryl supposed she must have married after she had left Pilot Mound for the city. Whoever wrote the obituary didn’t think her married name would be of interest to the folks back home.

The second addition was the fact that she had been buried in Brookside Cemetery. That’s actually what it said: Hortense Frouten Keller has been buried in Brookside Cemetery. Beryl had never seen such an obituary. Didn’t they usually use words like interment and final resting place and whatnot?

She stopped at the counter on the first floor and picked up the book that was waiting for her: Larry McMurtry’s latest, the only one of his she hadn’t read.

Beryl used a pay phone in the library. Frank still wasn’t back. She decided to take a trip to Brookside Cemetery and look for the grave of this Hortense Frouten Keller. She waited in the hazy heat of midday for a bus that would take her to Red River College. From there it was just a short walk to the graveyard.

She had heard Ariadne Kruck-Boulbria bragging one day to her neighbour to the south about how she and her husband would often go for brisk walks in the cemetery during their lunch hours to get some fresh air and exercise. She had used some stupid word when she was talking about it, something like “couched.” As in: Yes, here we are getting all this fresh air and exercise couched in a stroll through Brookside Cemetery.

Beryl could just picture them, her, anyway, moving her arms in an exaggerated manner, driving Mort bonkers with her healthy ideas.

She got off the bus at the college and made the short trek to the graveyard. It was a beautiful spot, huge, with grand old oaks and maples. And a brook running through it.

The August sun was so bright it hurt. Beryl was glad she had worn her sunglasses.

A number of Canada geese were paddling in the water and poking around among the gravestones, on their way south already. Surely they were jumping the gun. It was so warm yet, but anything could happen, Beryl knew, now that it was August. She supposed they knew what they were doing.

Unlike her. Here she was in a cemetery on the edge of town, wandering around looking for the grave of a woman she had never met, who could very easily not be connected to anything that mattered to Beryl.

But it felt important; it felt like the key. She tried to be methodical in her search. There was a lot of territory to cover. But every now and then she would get caught up and head off on a tangent — if she found some especially old graves, say, from the 1800s or graves with familiar names carved into the granite. Then she would haul herself back and try to inject some new order into her plan and hope that she hadn’t missed anything.

Some of the headstones were unreadable, the engraving worn away by decades of Winnipeg winters, or hidden under moss or mould that had grown right into the lettering. But those were the very old ones.

It took almost two hours of searching. In fact, she had almost given up. She had begun to wonder if the writer of the obituary had just buried the woman here himself and not bothered with a marker of any kind. She knew she would be looking for something small at best — certainly not ornate — probably the kind that lay right on the ground.

And then she found it in the middle of a young dogwood, barely visible inside the lush growth: Hortense Frouten Keller, Born 1933 — Died 1981.

Beryl gently moved the young branches aside. No “Rest in Peace”; no “Beloved Mother, Daughter, Sister, or Aunt”; nothing of that nature. Nothing more at all.

She thought she heard train cars banging together in a rail yard nearby. A loud sound, but one she didn’t disapprove of. She’d lived near the tracks all her life.

Beryl was afraid. She had no parents, no siblings, a few cousins she had lost track of, and a few friends. Her own gravestone could well be as bleak as this one. She decided to write down her arrangements when she got home, cremation for sure and a scattering to the four winds — so no future gravestone readers would pity her the way she pitied Hortense Frouten Keller. God, even her name was dreadful.

The noise turned out to be thunder. Lightning flashed in the darkened sky. It was just three o’clock in the afternoon, but it was darker than dusk. Beryl hadn’t noticed the change in the light and realized she still wore her sunglasses. She took them off now to have a better look at the grave.

It wasn’t well-tended but neither had it been ignored. There were offerings of a sort, and it was only when she crouched to look more closely through the shrubbery that the blood ran cold in her veins.

The rain started up but she didn’t notice. She knelt down on the wet grass and forced herself to examine what lay before her. This time she had the sense not to touch, except for the branches. She had to touch those.

The dead geraniums were the first things that caught her eye. Faded now, but formerly the bright scarlet variety, one of the types that Hermione favoured.

And a scarf. The kind that Beryl’s grandmother had worn, to “spruce up an outfit,” as she used to say. It looked to be made from nylon. And it had been a long time since this scarf had spruced up any outfits. Suddenly Beryl knew that this was the weapon used to strangle Beatrice Fontaine. She remembered the way Frank had described the scarf tied around Diane Caldwell’s throat, described it to Hermione, that is. An old-lady scarf was what he had called it. Well, that’s what this was.

There were two more items. One was a digger with a triangular point, like the one Frank had talked about, that had been used to gouge out Diane’s eyes.

And the other item was a jar. Beryl didn’t want to look closely because she already knew what was in it: the eyes of Diane Caldwell. But she did look, just for a second. And then she screamed, not knowing, when she stopped, if it had been out loud. Maybe it was just inside her head.

She could see a couple running toward her through the rain and realized then that her scream had not been silent. The look of alarm on both their faces told her this.

It was the Kruck-Boulbrias.

Beryl closed her eyes and began to shake.

Ariadne was suddenly on her knees with both arms around Beryl. Ariadne didn’t feel bony at all, not like Beryl figured she would, not like most of the other people she knew. She felt rounded and soft and supple and wet and she hugged Beryl close and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

“Beryl, what is it?” she asked.

Mort stood in the background with a look of concern on his face.

Why had she been so quick to judge these people? They were her saviours.

“It’s so complicated I don’t know if I can even begin,” Beryl said in a faltering voice. “But I have to go to the police. I have to go to a particular policeman.”

“Frank Foote?” Mort asked, with his phone already in his hand.

“You know him?” Beryl asked, and then remembered the ball game in Whittier Park, the two familiar men in their uniforms.

“Yes. Frank and I play on the same softball team,” Mort said. “I saw you two waving at each other a while back.”

He moved underneath the branches of a giant blue spruce where the rain didn’t penetrate and went through a series of numbers till he finally had Frank on the line.

“Thank God,” Beryl said.

Beryl and the Kruck-Boulbrias waited for Frank in the shelter of the blue spruce tree. The rain let up and they were soon able to move about. They didn’t talk much. Beryl didn’t want to tell them anything, despite their kindness. And they weren’t nosy. They made do with the sudden rainstorm, the weather.

Frank was there in fifteen minutes. Mort introduced Ariadne. And Beryl showed Frank what she had found. When he saw what he was dealing with he made a couple of calls, using Mort’s phone.

“I guess we’ll head on back to school if you don’t need us for anything,” Mort said, looking at his watch. “We both have classes in a few minutes.”

“Yes. Go ahead. By all means,” Frank said. “It was good to meet you, Ariadne, even under these bizarre circumstances. I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

“Are you going to be all right, Beryl?” Ariadne asked. “You should get out of those wet clothes.”

Beryl looked down at Stan’s gigantic postal shirt. She felt it warranted an explanation, but it seemed too hard. She looked at her neighbour in her fashionable walking clothes.

Ariadne smiled. “Anyway, let us know if we can be of any help. We’re off now.”

“Thank you both so very much for being here,” Beryl said. “And for being so kind.”

“No problem,” Mort said. He smiled too and they were gone, walking briskly down the cemetery road back to their classes.

Beryl realized she didn’t even know what either of them taught.

“They’re my next-door neighbours,” she said, “and I don’t know them at all.”

Frank looked at the grave site. He was gentle with the dogwood as he moved it aside.

“Hortense Frouten Keller.” He looked at Beryl. “This is the grave of the woman in the Pilot Mound newspaper, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“It didn’t say Keller in the newspaper, did it? It just said, Frouten.”

“No. You’re right. It did in the
Free Press
though. I went to the library after work and looked it up. It said Hortense Frouten Keller, like it does on the gravestone.”

“Oh, my God.” The colour had drained from Frank’s face. He noticed then that Beryl was still shivering. “I think I have a blanket in the car,” he said. “Let me get it for you to throw around your shoulders.”

“No, honestly, I’m fine. It’s starting to heat up again. Thanks, though.”

“Okay. I just have to wait till a forensics guy gets here and then we can go. Tell me everything, Beryl.”

She sat down on a flat granite gravestone and told Frank about how the man who helped her in the park was not who he said he was.

“Who did he say he was?” Frank asked.

“Dr. Joe Paine. You know, the famous veterinarian?”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank said.

“What?”

“That’s not who he told us he was.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I would have remembered if the witness had been Dr. Paine. That’s who we take Doris and Hugh to. And I read his column all the time.
Doggie Dog Days
, it’s called.”

“Yeah, I know,” Beryl said. “Well…who did he tell you guys that he was?”

“Joe Keller.”

“Joe Keller?” Beryl’s temples prickled.

“Joe Keller.” Frank looked again at the sinister collection of items and the simple marker on the grave: Hortense Frouten Keller.

“Dear God,” he said. “We’ve found him.” He corrected himself. “You found him, Beryl.”

He looked at her in her damp clothes. “What brought you here? What brought you to this grave?”

Beryl hugged her knees. The sun was coming out. She was glad of her wetness. It would keep her cool.

“It said in the
Free Press
that this was where she was buried and I…I just knew there was something about her. I didn’t know that I would find anything here, but I sure did, didn’t I?”

“Yup. You sure did.”

“So, you saw her obituary in the
Sentinel
then?” Beryl went on. “Didn’t it seem odd to you at all? Cold, kind of?”

“Yes. I did see it and yes, it did seem off somehow, but…God, I’m sorry, Beryl,” Frank said. “I’ve been so… And I had to go to that stupid conference. I should have given it a miss. I had to give a paper at it. That’s the only reason I went. I should have given it to someone else to read. Stupid fucking paper. Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Frank.”

“That was some hunch, Beryl. Have you ever thought about joining the police?”

She smiled. “No. I hear there’s lots of paperwork. I hate paperwork.

“I was really just putting in time till you got back,” she said, “and I could tell you about the man who’s not Joe Paine.” She squinted up at Frank. “He’s a murderer, isn’t he? For some twisted reason, probably connected to this long dead Hortense Frouten Keller, he’s killing tall thin women. I wonder if Hortense was tall and thin.”

“We have to find him,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s at the address we have for him. He’s probably not even hiding. God, I feel so stupid.”

“That’s quite an assumption isn’t it, that he’s not hiding? That he’s that sure of himself? He didn’t seem like that to me,” Beryl said. “He seemed more sad and scared.”

She thought then of Joe’s willingness to give her his phone number, which she never dialled. That carelessness. If she’d had “Call Display” she could have discovered his real name that way any time he called. Of course, that could be easily blocked. If he cared at all.

“Maybe he’s some of each,” Frank said. “Sure of himself and sad and scared. Maybe he’s a multiple personality-type guy. I mean, for one thing, he probably dressed up in women’s clothes to do that stuff in your yard. If Mrs. Frobisher is to be believed, and I think she is. This guy is wa-ay gone.”

“So you figure that was him too?” Beryl asked.

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. And Herm’s geraniums.” She gestured toward the dead flowers. “That was him. This was the first summer she put them outside. It was my idea. I don’t think she’ll be doing that again.”

Frank sat down beside Beryl on another flat stone; they sat atop a husband and wife who had died within the same year: 1927.

Beryl told him about Stan’s part in all of it, his discovery of Rollo alive and well in the waiting room of the animal hospital. And how one thing led to another.

“My God, this psycho killer was in my house,” she said. “And in Clive’s house too.”

A man and a woman from the police department arrived and Frank showed them the area to be dealt with.

“Is that eyes?” the policeman asked, pointing to the jar.

“It’s an eye,” Frank said. “Just the one.”

He led Beryl to his car and settled her in the front seat.

“I’m making your car seat all wet,” she said.

“Don’t worry. Lots worse things have happened to it than that.”

“Hermione has disappeared,” Beryl said, as they travelled the bleak route from the graveyard back towards downtown.

“No. No, she hasn’t,” Frank said. “I forgot to mention, she left a message for me.”

“For you?”

“Yeah. She called you but you weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer the phone, and she didn’t want to leave a message. She thought that whoever this lunatic is might have the wherewithal to access your phone messages and she didn’t want him listening to her, figuring out she was going somewhere.”

“Good. Good for Herm. She’s quite a bit smarter than me. Where is she?”

“She’s safe in the country with some friends of hers out near Tyndall. She didn’t leave their name or address or anything, which is fine. She’s safe. I do have a phone number for her.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Frank said, as he turned onto Logan Avenue. “Let me get this straight. The guy who helped you in St. Vital Park told you that his name was Joe Paine. And that he was a veterinarian.”

“Yes.”

“He told the police that his name was Joe Keller and that he was a part-time janitor at one of the Catholic schools in St. Boniface, which checked out. So it looks as though it was only you he was trying to trick,” Frank said. “I wonder why.”

“Maybe he was trying to impress me,” Beryl said.

Frank smiled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Frank said. “You’re probably right.

“Okay,” he continued. “So yesterday you came face to face with Dr. Joe Paine and confirmed what your friend Stan had led you to suspect — that the guy who helped you in the park was not Joe Paine, much-loved veterinarian, author of
Doggie Dog Days
.”

“Right.”

“Creepy.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you phone the police?”

“I tried quite hard to get hold of you.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I even left a message with your daughter, Sadie.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. She said you might be phoning home.”

“I did and she didn’t say anything about you having called.”

“That’s okay. She probably just forgot.”

“No, it’s not okay.”

“Yes, it is, Frank. Please don’t yell at her on my account. She was very helpful.”

“Still…it was really important.”

“Frank, there was no way in the world for her to know how important it was. I probably didn’t even say it was important. Promise me you won’t yell at Sadie.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I tried to get the last name of the pretend veterinarian out of Sergeant Christie,” Beryl said, “but he wouldn’t tell me.”

“Prick.”

“Yeah.”

“And Frank?” Beryl sighed. “It seemed so complicated, you know, all the stuff about flowers and furnace pegs and everything, I thought I’d just wait for you.”

“You could have just mentioned that the guy who helped you in the park wasn’t who he said he was.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay. Never mind. So. While you’re waiting for me to come back, you figure you’ll investigate the one thing that you saw in the
Pilot Mound Sentinel
that you found to be a little odd.” Frank looked at her. “You have good instincts, Beryl.”

“Thanks.”

“So in the
Free Press
you find that this Hortense Frouten Keller is buried in Brookside Cemetery. You come out to look at her grave and find all kinds of evidence pointing to the guy who killed Beatrice Fontaine and Diane Caldwell.”

“Yup.”

Frank turned off the Norwood Bridge onto Lyndale Drive. They were almost home.

“I wonder what relation Hortense is to Joe,” Frank said. “Mother…aunt?”

“I’m thinking aunt,” Beryl said. “I don’t think she was a mother.”

“It would be interesting,” said Frank, “if tall thinness is a part of it, like you say, if that is the connection to the dead women. Whew! I hope this Joe Keller is a talker.”

Frank saw Beryl into her house and looked around to make sure everything was as it should be.

“You’ll keep me posted, won’t you?” she asked.

“I’ll call you as soon as we pick him up. If we can’t find him, I’ll come back. Are you sure you’re going to be okay here?”

“Yup. I’m going to lock the doors and wait for your call.”

“I think I’m going to get someone over here to sit outside till we get him. Can I use your phone?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Frank. That’s a good idea. If you’re going to do that, I’ll feel safe enough to have a bath and a sandwich.”

“Good. Oh. I talked to Katy in the VSU, the gal who’s keeping an eye on the boys who found Diane Caldwell.”

“Oh yeah. And?”

“Well, neither the boys nor their parents or guardians or whatever have mentioned anything strange going on at their homes. Two of the young fellas have started crawling in with their mums at night, though. Poor little guys.”

“Okay. Thanks, Frank. Maybe it doesn’t matter now.”

“Probably not.”

When he left, Beryl locked the door behind him and waited till a uniformed cop pulled up and stationed himself at the curb. Then she poured a tub full of hot water and magnolia-scented bubbles.