The Killing Type (15 page)

She laughs awkwardly at this and sets
down her own cup. I notice for the first time, with the light a
certain way and my own plans and aspirations at a certain angle,
how beautiful she is. It is my turn to be embarrassed now, at two
contradictory speculations that are now swirling in my tea-soaked
brain. The first is a desire for love, with scenarios quickly
formed of the seekers of information—the humble neglected scholar
and the integrative librarian—travelling the world from writer’s
birthplace to writer’s deathplace, Sam in Lichfield, Vladimir near
Montreux. Alas, I also have a horrible waking nightmare of another
speculation, with Rachel as murderer inviting the hapless
investigator to her house in order to get her name crossed off any
mental list of suspects. No need to kill me when she can just
distract me with feigned friendliness. Of course, even the bare
thought is utterly ridiculous, and I am saddened (but not
demonstrably so, I don’t think) that this is the kind of meanness
that my mind has been reduced to: everyone is a suspect, and the
least likely the more suspicious.

In fact, and I’ll say it here now, I
have heard titterings around town pointing to my own guilt, the
factitious “reasoning” being that the murders started soon after I
arrived in town, and why would a prestigious academic such as
myself choose to leave the big city anyway? Not that these charges
are within a small-town, country mile of any credibility—and are
actually something of an insult to perhaps the one person who has
been carrying on anything approaching an investigation—but
the—

“Andrew, are you OK?” It is
Rachel, whom I have been impolitely ignoring while I wallow in a
travesty of
post hoc
logic.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, quite
sincerely. “My mind was just wandering there for a while,
distracted a bit, you know. It’s wonderful of you to have me over,
and perhaps we can talk about …” I leave it vague in order to let
her have any entrance she is comfortable with.

She sighs and starts. “It’s so good of
you to even take the time to talk to me, and, yes, at first I’d
wanted to pump you for information about your theories, how your
research is going, all of that, and also tell you a bit of what I
think myself. But I kind of find the whole topic distressing and
depressing from that angle—no offence, of course: I think it’s
wonderful what you are doing. I guess now though all I want is
someone to talk to about, well, about what’s going to happen to me,
and to the town, after this whole thing is over. And I hope to God
that it is over soon.”

“I’m not sure what you
mean.”

Her mouth screws downward in a
peculiar way and for a moment I think she is about to cry. I am
reminded in passing of how utterly impossible it is to know what is
going on in the true heart of a person, no matter what the
dedication to forthright communication. She rights herself, though,
and continues.

“I guess my main point, my worry, is
how do people recover from this? Do you know what I mean? The guy
will be caught and jailed and there won’t be any threat any more,
but when will we all feel safe again? I’m not making any sense, I
know, but I’ve had these wild desires myself just to move out of
town, get a job somewhere else, either now or when the whole damn
thing is over.”

There’s a hint of a smile on her face
now, or at least something approaching confidence or defiance, and
that warms me.

“Listen, Rachel, from the research
I’ve done, all of what you are saying are common reactions. The
best I can tell you is that ultimately whole towns do recover from
this kind of thing, people get on with their lives, and not all of
them have to quit their jobs to do so.”

She laughs out loud at this, and I
genuinely feel that something has changed in the room and between
us. She gets up and replenishes my cup of tea, smiling at me as she
sets the pot back down. I sit and look up at her as she remains
standing.

“I lied,” she says, and my eyebrows
have literally gone up and down before she continues: “I do have
alcohol here: let’s have a drink.”

She is not really asking and
so I just sit there silently while
her
eyebrows go up, she smiles, and
then she corrals both cups and saucers and the teapot back onto the
tray and ferries it all quickly out to the kitchen. I hear what
sounds like a clattery avalanche into the sink and then the
distinct clack of dish onto floor, followed by “Shit!,” and ending
with a shouted instruction to me that I cannot discern.

I go into the kitchen and find her
kneeling, picking up the pieces.

“A little accident,” she says, but
still smiling.

“May I help?”

“Can you grab me a dishcloth, a clean
one, there in the second drawer from the top, by the
fridge?”

There is a very orderly stack of them,
mostly whites and blues and greens, and I shuffle down to the third
one, which I hand to her. It’s just one of the cups which is
broken, but it has splashed tea in a wide radius. While Rachel
wipes, I go to my knees myself and pick up some of the pieces which
she has missed. My former irrational worry sweeps over me briefly,
and I conclude that if she really wanted to kill me, this wouldn’t
be a bad method: break a dish, lure me into the kitchen, and then
have at me with the paring knife she has concealed up her
sleeve.

We both stand at the same time. She
takes the shards from me, wraps them in the dishcloth, and places
the bundle in the sink.

“Now where was I?” she asks
rhetorically. “It feels like a gin-and-tonic night to me. Is that
OK?”

“Perfect.” I loathe the mediciney
stuff, but it feels better to comply.

I cut slices of lime while she
measures exact ounces into a shot glass. We each pour tonic to our
taste and Rachel then plops a couple of ice cubes into each glass
and stirs them with a teaspoon. We resume our positions in the
living room, and I am happy that the conversation diverts to
something other than killing and feeling and feeling after killing.
Rachel has travelled extensively all around the world, Newfoundland
last year and Nepal in the fall. She’s a Scrabble fiend apparently,
having just last night cleared her tiles with BABYISH. She’s never
been married, is wary of dating, would like to have children some
day, but is generally very happy.

“I’m afraid I’m just a humble
scholar,” I tell her, adding “ex-scholar” when she brightens just a
tad too much and I suddenly want to dampen enthusiasm (maybe it’s
the drink affecting me).

“What’s your, well,
story
?” she asks. “You
know, what have you done, where are your friends and
family?”

“You may regret asking those
questions, because I can go on,” I only half-joke, and she shakes
her head vigorously but silently, allowing me to go on. “And
on.”

A short snorty laugh, and then:
“Please do.”

“Seriously, there is not much to tell.
I’ve always been a bit introverted, deriving my energy from
solitude, and often preferring the company of dependable books to
the messiness of personal relationships. I hope you know what I
mean—it’s not that I don’t like people, or that I don’t enjoy their
company as I am yours right now, but it often makes me a bit
nervous and uncomfortable.”

“I understand what you mean. I’m a
librarian, you know: we’re not exactly known for being the life of
the party.”

The gin is tasting just
fine, in spite of myself, and I sense a basic insight coming upon
me which reminds me of some of the eureka moments during my
research. It is embarrassingly very little this time—simply a
realization that this is how friendships begin. An invitation to do
X, a switch to Y, a tiny moment of intimacy and mutual comfort over
a broken dish, and then it seems unusual that we
won’t
be seeing each other
at least a couple of times a week. The reader should note that no
romantic inclinations are desired on either part here: I am sure of
my own and I have near-certain confidence of Rachel’s merely—how
they always say “merely,” as if friendship is any less because it
does not involve sex!—platonic intentions as well.

The evening proceeds like that, frank
exchanges of information and interest from both of us. We do have a
few more drinks, and end with some accident-free tea again and some
chocolate. When I am standing at her front door on my out, she puts
a hand on my shoulder and kisses me lightly on the top of my cheek.
Her hair smells like peaches and I walk back home fully intending
to see her again.

Chapter 16

A sleepless night in a sleepy town.
Insomnia is a rare problem for me, and I haven’t suffered through
its enforced hyperconsciousness since I moved from Toronto. There
the problem was generally some upset at the Department of English,
but the advantage of living in such a large city, and relatively
close to downtown, was that at any time of night there was always
some noise or other, a distraction from pure awareness, from that
state of frustration in which falling asleep seems like it requires
an effort and you are puzzled that you have ever been able to do it
successfully so many other nights before.

In Knosting, there is
nothing but silence at three in the morning, not a sound to pierce
the blanket of quiet doom which pulls itself over Andrew the
insomniac. I lie in the bed and look up at the ceiling, turn my
head to the left and see lights outside, turn to the right and see
something hulking which eventually reveals itself to be my dresser.
The ceiling, the foot of my bed, the headboard if I strain
backward: my options for variety of scenery are limited. I envy
those people who are able to, as they say, “relax,” either for mere
hours before they are scheduled to get up anyway, or for whole days
and weeks while they are on vacation. Relaxing means doing
absolutely nothing, getting more tanned, reading trash,
contemplating nothing more onerous than the variety of meat on the
barbecue. I envy that mind-clearing ability right now: ah, to sit
and just wait for the digital minutes to go by and never have to
deal with the guilt or the need to do something productive, to
do
something
.

I manage to clear my mind, but it
refills itself with images from my last months at Toronto U. A
smile, though, a memory about triumph and satisfaction, petty
though it might be (or seem). I remember the departmental meetings.
The hateful department head held them regularly, chaired them while
the secretary nervously took minutes, followed Robert’s Rules of
Order, and on and on. I made it my jejune mission to stall things
as much as I could, hold up the whole meeting on one agenda item or
point of order. My favourite was the call for approval of the
minutes of the previous meeting, when I would question the details
of the most insignificant occurrence, criticize the usage of words
and the punctuation (always bringing my dictionaries and manuals
along with me for props as much as for linguistic and syntactic
authority), and generally attempt to make my “point,” slender
though it might have been, that these meetings were a waste of my
time, beneath me and the other scholars who attended. Some days I
did secretly bemoan the sad irony that in order to prove that time
was wasted I was wasting even more, but on I pressed.

“I believe the recording in
the previous minutes of the call for approval of the minutes
before those
is not
accurate as to ...”

I admit it openly here now, whereas
then I was barely aware of it, that one of the main frustrations at
Toronto U. had nothing to do with the university at all, or at
least not directly. It was the extraordinary and mysterious
inability to have any of my research published. I had bouts of
paranoia now and then, during which I imagined the department head
or the entire department destroying my reputation with journal
editors and academic book publishers. I dreamt of doors, very
literal doors, being shut, abysses swallowing me up, a straitjacket
barely able to contain my rage as I screamed about the ill
treatment. More often, especially at the beginning, I was just
puzzled. I talked to colleagues, perhaps to ones I should not have
in retrospect, because I now realize that they disdained me and
took enormous pleasure in my squirming—but back then I talked to
them about the state of academic publishing, the sham of peer
reviewing, the pathetic little productions that clogged the pages
of what appeared to be pristine and stately journals.

I have a great deal of confidence that
things are different here and now in Knosting. I have not signed
any deal with a commercial trade publisher, and I do not have a
literary agent who could sell my wares, but I simply cannot believe
that this story is not sellable. I hope that the reader will
forgive me for being so crass, and understand that of course I have
nothing but sepulchral condolence for the victims’ friends and
families, and nothing but horrified outrage for the man who is
trolling this fair city committing these deeds. I am speaking now
only in a very narrow range and though what I say might look quite
selfish when taken out of context, yet believe me when I say that I
am on the side of right.

“You will not succeed here or not
anywhere else,” I remember the department head bellowing at me
ungrammatically off the record in my last days at TU. We were
squirrelled away in his grubby but meticulously organized office
and he was fairly shouting at me at times, so that as an
unconscious coping mechanism I found myself scanning his bookcases
(a full three shelves of Hardy, with little handmade labels along
the exposed particle-board edges to separate Jude and the mayor and
Tess) while he raved in his small-minded way, knowing that he was
safely ensconced in deniability, officer.