Why Men Lie (38 page)

Just before the causeway, she said, “You can take me to a motel in town. I know one with a car rental agency. I’ll need a car while I’m here.”

“I figured you’d be staying at the house. And there’s JC’s car.”

“No, John, please. I couldn’t …”

“My house. You’ll be staying with me. Janice is expecting us.”

It was late afternoon when they turned up the country road known as the Long Stretch, where their common life began, evolved and ended. She wished that she’d insisted on staying somewhere else, even at the apartment Sextus rented in town.

“I haven’t heard from Sextus,” she said.

“You will,” John said. “He called first thing Saturday. We decided it should be me contacting you. Since I was there when it happened, in a way. But I think he’s pretty shook up about it. Himself and JC go back a way, I understand.”

“Way, way back,” she said.

“He said he wants to get himself together before he sees you. Says he wouldn’t be much help to you the way he is now. Okay?”

She nodded.

The old house had the tidy, well-maintained appearance of a year-round dwelling. The grass was cut, firewood neatly stacked on the little deck that ran along the front. There was a car—a second-hand Toyota JC had purchased when he’d first arrived. This visible reminder of his recent presence was almost more than she could bear. She remembered how he’d used the word “civility,” and she suppressed a bitter laugh.

A yellow plastic ribbon fluttered in the gateway. “The Mounties put that there,” John said. “People were coming out all morning, just to look. This kind of thing is still pretty rare around here.”

She turned her face away.

Janice was holding the baby in her arms, pacing, when they entered the kitchen. Little Jack was squawking loudly, his mother shushing. John set his backpack on the floor and took the baby from her. “Hey,” he said. “Come and meet the visitor. This here’s Effie.” He turned the child to show his face. “What do you think? A Gillis or what?”

“He’s got the Gillis lungs,” his mother said.

Effie turned toward her. “Janice, we haven’t met,” she said. They shook hands.

“I wish the circumstances were happier,” Janice said.

Effie nodded.

John had walked away with the child, chatting to him with an intimacy that seemed to register, for the crying had stopped.

“You must be hungry,” Janice said, and Effie demurred. “Maybe a drink?”

Effie declined that too.

She sat on the bedside in the unfamiliar room. This had been her home, thirty years before. It was a place in the memory without
features, just a sensation of time passing. Two years, perhaps. Could it have been just two years? It had been not quite two years since her first encounter with JC Campbell on the St. George subway platform. She curled her body on the bed, hands clasped between her knees, trying to remember details of the two years she had lived in this place, but they were lost in the overwhelming immediacy of the time just gone, the two years that would define tomorrow and the unimaginable march of time beyond tomorrow.

Janice was speaking softly at the bedroom door. Effie had somehow unpacked, undressed and slept, and now she was confused. The word “police” brought clarity. An officer had called and would like to meet with her in an hour at her house. They were hoping she might be able to help them ascertain what, if anything, was missing.

“I asked if it could wait, but they said it was important to the investigation. They let me clean up the place yesterday, after they took their pictures and went over everything for fingerprints. It was a mess, but it’s okay now. I could go with you. Or John could.”

“It’s okay,” Effie said. “I have to face it sooner or later.”

The officer seemed young, his manner awkward. He explained much of what she already knew. John was their only source of information, other than the speculative recreation they had sketched out on a large yellow notepad. He explained a theory, referring to a floor plan of the kitchen/living area, the two small bedrooms, once hers and Duncan’s, one of which was now an office. There were dotted lines, showing the presumed entrance and subsequent movements of the attackers.

“We figure they didn’t get beyond the kitchen right away, or at least not far,” the policeman said. “There was a wallet, with money
and credit cards here.” He was pointing to the bedroom in the sketch. “We figure if anything was missing, it came from here.” Now he was indicating the office.

“There should have been a laptop,” she said. “Before I went away, he had it here.”

She walked slowly toward the office doorway. The table that had served as a desk was littered with scraps of paper, notepads and pens. There were books.

“The witness, from up the road, said he saw a young female carrying something,” the policeman said.

“I believe that would have been the laptop.”

And suddenly the scene was clear to her.

“He would have fought them for the laptop,” she said. “He wouldn’t have allowed them to take that without a struggle. Money wouldn’t have mattered, or if they tried to take his car. But the laptop …”

“Do you know what was so important about the computer?”

“Yes,” she said. “He was writing something.”

“Do you know what he was writing? It’ll be important if we find it. Unless, of course, they deleted everything.”

“Yes,” she said. “He was writing about something that happened to someone he knew.”

“I see. Like a book?”

“Like a book.”

The policeman walked past her to the desk, and when he turned, he was holding the manuscript that Sextus had written.

“Would this be the hard copy?”

“No,” she said. “That’s something else. Something different.”

“Do you know the make of the laptop?”

“No,” she said. “I never really paid attention. It didn’t seem important.”

“I’m sorry to be dragging you through all this,” the policeman said. “But every little bit of information helps.”

“You have no idea who did this?” she said.

“No,” he said. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen much around here, though there have been a few recent cases. Some old folks don’t trust banks and don’t lock doors. It’s usually about drugs.”

“What are the chances you’ll find out?”

“Oh, chances are better than good,” he said. “It’s still pretty shocking when this happens here. Even the perpetrators are kind of disturbed by it. They have to talk about it; word gets around.”

The policeman returned the manuscript to the desk. “I guess that’ll be all for now,” he said. “Do you need a lift home?”

“This is home,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose. Sorry about that. I meant, to where you’re staying.”

“I can walk,” she said. “I need fresh air. May I take that with me?”

She gestured toward the manuscript.

“I suppose so,” he said. “It belongs to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s mine.”

He picked it up again, examined it briefly. “Why
Men Lie,”
he said. “Sounds interesting.” He handed it to her.

“There was a plastic bag,” she said. “A No Frills bag.”

“No frills,” he said, and smiled, and looked around him, taking in the bare wooden walls, the modest furnishings. “You could do a lot with this place.”

“That’s the bag over there,” she said.

Duncan arrived Monday evening. On the telephone he’d inquired about a funeral. She gave the phone to John and left the room. John told her later that Duncan felt he had to be here. Now he held
her briefly, and it felt odd, the comforting of this familiar stranger. She realized that he was wearing his priest’s collar and black suit. “The collar,” she said.

“I had to go standby,” he said. “I thought I’d use all my assets.”

She forced herself to listen as John again recounted what he knew, the scene inside the house, the fleeing girl.

“It wasn’t anyone you recognized?” Duncan asked.

“I never really got a good look at her face,” John replied. “The light was behind her. I was distracted by what was going on inside.”

“So what’s next?” Duncan asked.

“They told us it might be days before they release the body,” John said.

“I can stick around,” said Duncan.

After John and Janice had gone to bed, they sat in silence in the living room. “Do you remember how we’d come over here on Christmas Day and they’d always have a tree decorated? Over there, in that corner. We weren’t much for Christmas trees at our place.”

He laughed. “John always got things from Santa. We did too, but his stuff was always better. I remember once he got a train set. I had a cap gun and was pretty thrilled until I saw that thing.”

“There was always something here for us too. Under their tree. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” he said. “And it always felt queer. Like they felt sorry for us.”

“They meant well.”

“We should be home,” he said.

“I don’t think the police want us staying there yet,” she said.

“They told you that?”

“No.”

“He was happy here,” she said eventually. “He liked the quiet.”

“He had it tough growing up.”

“He never talked much about it.”

“He’d get beaten up a lot as a boy,” Duncan said. “Once he asked his dad if he could join a gym so he could learn to box. His dad said, ‘You don’t need to learn to box, you need to learn to fight. Boxing’s a game. Fighting isn’t.’ So his dad taught him how to fight. I guess he remembered.”

“But not enough,” she said.

Duncan produced a bottle. “A little splash?” he offered. She declined. “It might help you sleep.”

She stood. “I don’t think so.” She yawned. “I’m tired,” she said, then leaned and kissed her brother’s forehead.

Later she heard the outside door closing behind him.

Awaiting sleep, she fought the urge to speculate. The safest place, she realized, was memory, where there were no longer any questions of importance. But memories were painful. She left the bed, stood by a window that overlooked the lane. It was a bright night, illuminated by the rising moon. She could see the road, but looming poplars blocked the sightline to the house where she’d grown up. She raised the window, felt the instant breath of cool, moist air and shivered. Then she donned jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, running shoes, and followed her brother into the revealing night.

Duncan was leaning on the gate, elbows resting on top of it, one foot on the bottom rail. He had the whisky bottle in his hand. “A crime scene,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”

She took the bottle from his hand. The cork squeaked as she twisted. “Depends on what you mean by ‘crime.’ ”

He was staring at her, but she resisted the implicit invitation. “You were right,” she said. “We should have just moved in here. Move in and move on, I say.”

She sipped straight from the bottle and handed it back.

“I was thinking, walking over, that we should just get rid of the place,” he said. “Bulldoze it. But that would be pointless.”

“What’s your plan?” she asked.

“It hasn’t changed,” he said. “One day at a time until I hear the call.”

“Could you be alone, for the duration? I mean, knowing solitude as well as you do, in every sense.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can join the Anglicans.”

“That’s one solution,” Effie said.

“There was a fellow in the seminary, Aloysius Ball, his name was. Used to say that he was going to join the Anglicans just so he could be called Canon Ball.”

“You’re ducking the issue,” she said.

“Who knows what I’ll do? Everyone has needs,” he said. “Including me.”

“JC didn’t,” she said. “He was self-contained. It was what attracted me and scared me at the same time.”

“What scared you?”

“I needed him to need something from me, something that would hold him.”

She heard the plunk of the extracted cork, and a gurgle as he swallowed. “Let’s walk back,” he said, disengaging from the gate.

He draped a heavy arm over her shoulder, and she caught his hand as they walked. “Would it make you feel any better,” he said, “if I was to tell you that he so badly needed something you have that he once did something almost … unforgivable to get it?”

“I wouldn’t believe it, anyway,” she said. “So …”

They walked in silence for the remaining distance to the Gillis driveway. Then he stopped and seemed to study the ground at their feet. “Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you anyway. JC needed to have you in his life. And he needed it badly enough to make up a big bad lie to get you.”

“A lie?”

“He lied to both of us about Stella and Sextus.”

After she had listened and understood, she said, “He didn’t really lie, did he? He never said it in so many words.”

“That’s true. But he intended to make something happen, and he did so by creating false impressions. I told him so.”

“You told him?”

Duncan hadn’t really expected to see JC again that July night in Toronto. And it was late when he reappeared, maybe just past eleven. He seemed preoccupied, lost in thought. He asked if Duncan had anything to drink and, while it was strictly against the shelter’s rules, Duncan was able to produce a bottle from somewhere deep in his personal belongings. “It’s medicinal,” he said. “I keep it for emergencies.”

He poured two drinks. “So you didn’t find your fugitive?”

JC shook his head. “But that isn’t why I’m here. I didn’t come to tell you that.” After a pause, he said, “I owe you an apology.”

And he explained how Sextus, distraught, had been in touch with him just before Easter—Palm Sunday, in fact. He asked JC to intervene with Effie and her brother, to explain a situation. Duncan had misunderstood something Stella had attempted to communicate, then Duncan had compounded the damage by telling Effie. JC had history with everyone, and yet, because he’d
been away so long, he had the appearance of neutrality. Sextus wanted him to set the record straight—to tell them that he and Stella were just friends.

Except that JC was anything but neutral. For decades, Effie had represented, in his mind, an ideal that no other woman could ever hope to meet. “At some deep level he was a Platonist.”

“A Platonist?”

“An idealist. They tend to be extreme in their expectations. They aren’t afraid to lie for a good cause.”