The Geranium Girls (2 page)

The rain came lighter now.

Beryl snatched up her sock and shoe and stumbled through the trees in search of help.

The first people she met on the park road were an elderly man and woman in yellow rain slickers. She frightened them with her bare foot and stuttering explanations. Her teeth chattered as she spoke. It was the mushrooms that she mentioned.

“Sh…she has m…mushrooms in her mouth. Please help.”

The man seemed willing to listen, but the woman dragged him away.

“Come on, Carl. She’s obviously out of her mind on drugs or sniff.”

“Sniff?” Carl asked. “What’s sniff? Are you sure we shouldn’t help her?”

“Yes, I’m sure! For goodness’ sakes, come on!” the woman said. “She might have a knife or something.”

Carl shuffled off at the end of his wife’s arm.

“Sorry,” he said.

“But she’s dead,” Beryl croaked and fell to her knees.

She didn’t usually walk on a Saturday morning. It was a chance to stay home, sleep in. But today had been so crystal clear at the start, after the night rain. It enticed her and she hauled up her heavy one-speed bike from the basement. She pedalled through the glittering streets, turned in at the winding road leading into the park and locked her bike to a tree.

A tall man approached through the drizzle and crouched next to her on the road.

“Are you all right?” he asked, peering into her face. “Can I help?” His eyes were a deep blue.

She pointed to the spot in the bushes where the body lay, and said, “A dead girl… Please.”

The man, who was very thin, like the girl, ploughed into the woods and out again.

“Dear God in heaven,” he said.

“Then I…I didn’t imagine her,” Beryl said. She sat on the edge of the road, hugging her knees to her chest, oblivious to the wet.

“No. No, she’s very real. Dear God.”

The man fumbled through the pockets of his sweat pants for his phone and made the 911 call. The operator told him to stay on the line till the police arrived. She said it wouldn’t be long. And they’d want his help to find the body.

“I’ll be here,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll wave them down. Joe. My name is Joe.”

As Beryl and Joe waited for the cops to come the clouds shifted and the sun rose high in the June sky. They sat side by side on the edge of the road.

Lines from an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song played themselves over and over in Beryl’s head: lines about the smell of death, the smell of death surrounding you.

A policewoman placed a small blanket around Beryl’s shoulders, but she couldn’t stop shaking.

“Let me help you with your shoe,” Joe said and took a little blue towel from around his neck. It was damp but he dried her foot as best he could, removing old leaves and bits of twig. He fitted it back into the soggy runner, not bothering with her sock.

“I know it’s probably not very comfortable,” he said, “but you need to have shoes on.”

“It’s okay. It doesn’t feel so bad.”

They talked some, of small things. Joe Paine was a veterinarian out for a walk. He always walked in St. Vital Park on Saturday mornings, rain or shine. He had left his truck at the entrance, not far from Beryl’s bike.

Mostly they just watched, quietly sitting, then standing, then sitting again in their damp spots by the side of the road, through the cordoning off of the area, through the photographer and the medical examiner, and all the other people who came and went, people whose jobs were connected to suspicious death. Finally they watched the careful carrying away of the long form of the mushroom girl.

Joe stayed a little too close at times. Beryl wanted people around, but she also needed to breathe. At one point, she couldn’t tell if she was still shaking or if it was Joe’s shivery presence beside her. And he smelled funny. Medicinal. Or maybe it was the inside of her own nostrils. Everything seemed very confusing.

Beryl heard a young cop call the girl “it.”

“Looks like it’s been here for a while,” he said.

She wanted to object, but couldn’t speak. Another policeman did it for her.

“Not ‘it,’ asshole,” he said. “She!”

“Sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking.”

The older cop wore street clothes, jeans and a golf shirt. He walked away, slowing by Beryl to say, “I’m sorry you had to see her.”

He looked familiar.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t seem to recognize her and she knew they’d never met, but she’d seen him before, she knew she had. He was from her neighbourhood; that was it. She was glad he was here now. His presence comforted her, more than that of the jittery veterinarian who had come to her aid.

Beryl wondered aloud why Joe didn’t have any animals with him on his outing, his being a vet and all.

His eyes filled up.

“I’ve just been to the vet myself, actually,” he said. “I had to have my old cat put down this morning.”

“Oh, no,” Beryl said. “I’m really sorry.”

She reached out and suddenly didn’t know where to touch him. She chose his forearm and used her good hand, which was the way she came to think of the hand that hadn’t touched the girl.

“Jesus, I know how hard that is.”

“Yeah. He was a wonderful cat. I had him since he was five weeks old. And he turned twenty last Tuesday. His name was Rollo.”

Beryl took her hand back. “That’s a good old age.”

She said the words, but her heart wasn’t in this. She wanted to be away from this man, to go home and shower and then bathe in fragrant bubbles and curl up in her nightgown in front of a wood fire and stare into it. If only it were winter. She looked over at Joe.

He rested his arms on his knees and his head on his arms.

“I think I may have jumped the gun,” he said. His voice had gone wobbly. “I don’t want to have done it today. Next week or next month, maybe, even tomorrow. Just not today.”

“I’m sure you did the right thing. I know you did.” Beryl moved away a little, wondering for a second if this was an act on his part.

How cynical is that, she thought.

The young cop, the one who called the girl “it,” drove Beryl home. There was a general agreement that she shouldn’t ride her bike. He settled it in the back of his van and drove her right to the door.

They didn’t talk together at all. He tried a bit, words about the dampness and the mosquitoes, but he was too loud and Beryl couldn’t answer. She didn’t like his way of doing things.

“Thanks for the ride,” she managed. And the mushroom face flashed behind her eyes.

The next day Beryl rode her bike to the St. Boniface police station to give a statement. Joe had offered to drive her but she needed to go alone. She wanted things to settle inside her and arrange themselves in ways she could see clearly. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to see Joe again. How could she ever see him in any normal, undeathly sort of way?

Plus, he had been too insistent about giving her a ride. As though she couldn’t possibly mean it when she said no thanks. She hadn’t liked that. If there was anyone she would have wanted to accompany her today, it would be her dad, but he had been dead for fourteen years. She could have used his quiet strength now and she tried to feel it herself, as she waited for someone to come for her. But she couldn’t manage it.

Yesterday’s policeman, Sergeant Christie, called Beryl’s name and guided her through a maze of cubicles. A picture of the mushroom girl was tacked to a bulletin board behind his desk — a picture of her face with her mouth open wide. Screaming wide. The photo was one of many items on the board, but it was the only one that Beryl saw.

She had been hoping for a different cop today. Sergeant Christie was civil enough to Beryl, but she didn’t like him much. His pale eyes bored into hers and made her uncomfortable. She wondered if they taught that at policeman school.

He left her alone to write what she had seen on a pad of lined yellow paper. As soon as he was gone she slipped behind his desk and removed the photograph of the girl. She placed it in her backpack, careful to lay it flat, so it wouldn’t get scrunched up amongst her other stuff.

An old banana rested at the bottom of her bag. She took it out and dropped it with a thud into Sergeant Christie’s waste basket. It was the only piece of garbage in the metal container and in its advanced state it split open. Beryl dug deep into a side pocket and found an unopened packet of Kleenex, which she cracked.

She laid four tissues over the dead banana and said, “That’ll have to do.”

“What’s that, Ms. Kyte?” It was the cop, Christie, back with coffee. “What’ll have to do?”

Beryl hovered over the waste basket. She stood first on one foot and then the other. The empty pad of yellow paper glared up at them from the desk.

“I made a little mess in your garbage can. I haven’t gotten started on my statement yet.”

“What kind of a mess?” Christie’s jaw tightened.

“Don’t worry.” Beryl suspected he thought she had vomited.

“It’s just a banana,” she said. “An oldish one, I’m afraid.”

“I see.”

He disapproves of me, Beryl thought, and wondered why. Maybe he disapproved of a lot of things. Or maybe just her.

If only she had been assigned a nicer policeman, like the one who apologized to her in the park, the familiar one. Perhaps he was a boss and didn’t have to work very hard.

The photograph in her rucksack was making her nervous. Maybe taking it had been a bad idea. She wished the cop would leave so she could think clearly and get on with her statement.

“I brought coffee,” he said. “I was thinking you’d be almost done by now.”

He placed the tray with its packets of sugar and non-dairy whitener on his desk beside the empty pad.

“Do you think you could get started on this, Ms. Kyte?”

If her dad were here, the sergeant wouldn’t have such an attitude. Her dad had commanded respect without even trying. How had he done that?

Sergeant Christie joined her beside the waste basket and looked into it with her. The banana had soaked through the Kleenexes and permeated the room with its scent. He picked up the container and left the cubicle.

Beryl struggled over whether or not to talk about the mushrooms in her statement and decided against it. It seemed too private, no one’s business but the girl’s. And the killer’s, of course. Definitely his business. She wondered if he had filled her mouth with dirt when he killed her; it seemed unlikely that it had happened on its own.

Suddenly she was alarmed at having taken the picture and wondered if she could fasten it back onto the bulletin board without getting caught.

Christie returned with the empty basket and sat down behind his desk.

“Sergeant?”

“Yes?”

“How did the woman die?”

“We’re suspecting foul play at this time.”

“Yes, I guess I kind of assumed that.”

Beryl drew a little picture of a mouse next to her words on the page in front of her.

“I was just wondering,” she said, “if you could tell me how it came about.”

“No, I can’t.”

Beryl sketched in some long whiskers. “Does that mean you don’t know, or that you just aren’t going to tell the likes of me?”

Sergeant Christie smiled, but didn’t speak. At least, Beryl assumed it was a smile; it wasn’t a very good one, just a pursing of the lips. She decided she wouldn’t want to kiss this policeman, under any circumstances. Not that it would ever come up. She suspected that he wouldn’t want to kiss her, either. He probably thought she wasn’t pretty enough to kiss.

“I see,” she said. “I just have to wait and find out from the newspaper like everybody else? No special treatment for the finders of dead people?”

“No.” His pinched smile was gone.

She finished her statement and signed it, scribbling out the little mouse before pushing the paper across the desk. She hadn’t meant to draw it.

The photo was hers to keep. It reminded her of another photograph. When she had lived in Vancouver in the late eighties, the
North Shore News
had run a picture of a young native girl. Dead. It was an attempt to identify her, but it seemed wrong to Beryl. She had never seen such a thing before and she wondered at the legalities of it. If it was legal, why didn’t it happen all the time? Maybe because it was wrong, even if it wasn’t against the law.

No one had come forward to claim that girl. Not as far as Beryl knew anyway. She had cut that picture out and stared at it. The way she was going to stare at this one. The Vancouver girl’s eyes and mouth had been closed at least, and she’d looked pretty in death.

Beryl didn’t want to die in a way that would mean people snapping pictures of her and posting them on bulletin boards. She didn’t feel as though photographs did her much credit when she was alive. It was doubtful she’d look any better dead. She supposed it was necessary, all this splattering about of dead faces, but it didn’t sit well with her.

When she got home, Beryl gently removed the photo from her backpack and placed it in a drawer in her kitchen desk. She didn’t feel up to looking at it again today.

She shook the rest of the contents of her bag out onto the kitchen table. There was a small stuffed animal, a chicken. Beryl had bought it for a guy at work whose wife had had a baby. But then she struggled with whether or not to give it to him. Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was too little. And then time went by and it was definitely too late. So now it belonged to her: a small peach-coloured stuffed chicken. She placed it in one pile.

Many tiny pieces of paper with names and phone numbers and e-mail addresses began another one. Joe Paine and Sergeant Christie were in that pile. She removed the policeman’s card and formed another pile for recycling. If she ever had to talk to another cop, she didn’t want it to be him.

A package of Player’s King Size Extra Light. Beryl tried to smoke on social occasions only — dangerous behaviour; she could make a social occasion out of practically anything. The smokes formed a fourth pile.

The phone rang. It was Joe. She didn’t want to talk to him, so she let the message run: “Hello, Beryl. Joe Paine here. I was just wondering how you got along at the police station. Call me.”

He left a number, the same one that was on the little piece of paper. His home number; it was Sunday.

Joe seemed okay; he wasn’t unattractive, if a bit skinny. His blue eyes were prettier than Sergeant Christie’s, that’s for sure. But they seemed naked somehow. Maybe his eyelashes were blond or missing or something. If she ever saw him again she would make a point of checking that out.

Beryl thought about the way he moved to help her. The trouble was, he cried. She realized that the circumstances called for crying, called for wailing like a banshee, but still, she didn’t entirely trust Joe’s tears.

She picked up the slip of paper with his number on it and put it in the recycling pile along with the sergeant’s card. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to dial that number.

The phone rang again. This time it was someone named Gregor. Beryl couldn’t figure out who that was. He left a brisk message about calling him back and it wasn’t till he had hung up that she realized it was the sergeant. Gregor Christie, the sergeant, phoning about the photograph, of course, though he hadn’t mentioned it in his message. It hadn’t taken him long to notice that it was gone. Perhaps he gazed upon it in his spare time.

Beryl placed her Bic lighter next to the pack of cigarettes, then picked them both up, went out to the front deck, and chose a shady spot for her chair.

It definitely wasn’t a social occasion, but the circumstances were unusual and called out for a change in routine: just one smoke.