From muddy water, p.9
From Muddy Water, page 9
She was looking across the water and when I looked, I knew she saw the water’s two different blues.
She said, “Track it backward. There is always a pot somewhere brewing you a surprise that will change your life. Think for a moment. Pause for a moment's reflection. Here we are on the shore of the flat blue water. But in its underwater currents are two separate pairs of eyes that are both blue, but two different blues.”
I drank my wine; Kirsten sipped hers, her little finger cocked. “I don’t want to end up like my mother. I’m a hard worker, I have a good attitude and, as you already know, I will be a benefit to your business.”
Kirsten went back to eating, staring at me, nibbling at her dinner the way she nibbled at my mind, the way she nibbled at my emotions. She said, “I will tell Reverend Beachy I’m getting married, then I will shift the conversation to Lois, whom I might ask to sew the wedding dress. From there, I will lead Reverend Beachy into a conversation in which he will tell us everything he knows about Lois, like where she came from, and her family background, stuff like that.”
What I thought was, what I imagined was, her standing before the reverend in her white wedding dress with one of those bride things holding down her hair.
She continued. “What choice do you have? If you go to see Reverend Beachy without me, how much information do you think he’ll give you?”
I knew she was right. She had conned Lenssen into giving her the picture of the Gabriella statue, and now she was figuring out a way to con the reverend for information on Lois, and then I thought, I’m as gullible as the other two. And this made me feel uncomfortable to the point of doubting what sounded like a rehearsed story about her mother going to an execution. Then I thought about the same-coloured eyes being opposites. Then I thought about the innocent blue eyes of Mario’s baby that had not had a chance to choose a direction. Then I thought, I need another glass of wine.
Chapter Twelve
The morning after our dinner at Sailor’s, Kirsten appeared for breakfast in her usual bathrobe with cats and PJs with dogs. I was seated at the kitchen table writing up a contract on my laptop for the Shepherd Foundation.
Kirsten sat opposite me. “So, what made you decide?”
“Your story about blue-eyed good and evil. Mario’s baby had blue eyes. That karma thing you always wear that’s always looking at me has blue eyes. Maybe those missing children had blue eyes. The fact is, if the mothers believe their missing children are still with them, still calling to them, although the voices of the children grow fainter, those voices will never fade away, and neither will the blue of their eyes.”
“Sounds poetic, dude. Poetic but true.”
Kirsten plugged in the kettle and opened the top cupboard for one of her Tazo Organic Chai Black Weirdness teabags. She poured her tea into a Tim Hortons mug that Mrs. Ex had packed away out of sight years ago. She sat opposite me, looking into her tea. She said, “The Lazore family disappeared in June. The three girls disappeared in June. This is June. Make an appointment with Reverend Beachy, see what he has to say about Lois.”
“Reverend Beachy will protect his parishioners. He’ll tell me nothing.”
“Dude, I told you, that’s why you need the help of the associate you just hired.”
With her little finger cocked like teatime with the Queen, she said, “Here’s another idea. I will go undercover. I will find a way to get inside the Lazore and look around and give you another reading.”
“And if you get caught?”
“I’ll pretend I wanted to rent a room. I’ll say, I heard there might be a vacancy, so I thought I’d I have a quick peek. Oh my, yes, and what an interesting old house. But no one answered my knock, so I tried the door and oh my goodness, it wasn’t locked.”
Kirsten returned to the kitchen for more tea in her Tim Hortons mug. She stood at the counter, one hand on her hip, the other stirring in the sugar. She placed the mug on the table and went upstairs. She returned in ten minutes looking like a street kid, dressed in a short-sleeve T-shirt and ordinary jeans. There was that about her. She could go undercover as a fifteen-year-old kid trying to rent a room. She could go undercover in a bar trapping cheaters. She could con anyone into anything.
Except, the undercover idea returned me to that other thought that was bugging me. She had only one suitcase when she moved in, nothing more. Yet she had this endless supply of clothes picked up at Goodwill, she said. “No bed bugs or roaches, I hope,” I had said, and she’d given me her attitude, leaving me with an unanswered question: does she have another apartment that she’ll move back to when she feels safe? That would explain the difficulty with paying the rent. This would be the logical explanation.
Kirsten said, “Let’s go check out the Lazore. We park around the corner. I’ll see if anyone is there to rent me a room, which there won’t be. If I get in, I’ll phone you.”
“No, I’ll go with you. We look around outside. We look in the windows. We do not break in.”
As we were coming up the sidewalk, Kirsten walking ahead of me, a fat balding man was leaving the house next door. Since he made no effort to make room to pass, Kirsten had to step aside. The man outweighed me by a hundred pounds but I anticipated the collision and leaned in and knocked the man off the sidewalk. “So sorry,” I apologized.
Kirsten helped the man up. “Why did you do that? Jeez, dude. What is the matter with you? You don’t have to raise your leg on everyone bigger than you.”
The man muttered something.
Kirsten said, “You must live close by, Mr.…”
“Balinski.”
He stared at me. I said, “I apologize. I’m sorry.”
Kirsten said, “He’s sorry.”
With random slaps, she helped Mr. Balinski brush himself off. “I can’t take him anywhere. Bull in a china shop. I can’t teach him anything. He’s lost his filters. He should be in an institution, on the dribbler ward. There, that’s better.”
Kirsten pointed at the Lazore. “What a spooky place to have next door. Does it give you the creeps, you know, at night with a full moon and the wind moving the trees in the shadows?”
Mr. Balinski glanced at the Lazore. “I sometimes think I see someone walking around in there at night. But I think it’s from the street lights reflecting on the glass. That’s why people say it’s haunted.”
Mr. Balinski continued down the street. I followed Kirsten to the rear of the property. Kirsten tap-tapped on the door.
Kirsten said, “I think I heard someone call, ‘Come in.’ Maybe I’m mistaken. I’ll check around the front.”
I was not surprised when, five minutes later, the door swung open.
“How did you do that?”
“Better you don’t know. I don’t want you to lose your license now that I’m a paid employee.”
We followed a musty hallway into a kitchen, fully equipped with a fridge, stove, table, chairs, and in the cupboards and drawers, dishes, pots, cutlery.
“But no power,” I said, flipping the light switch.
Kirsten wandered into the living room, fully furnished with matching chesterfield and chairs, and an ancient TV that dated the family’s departure from the Lazore back to the sixties.
Kirsten examined the framed photograph of Gabriella hanging on the wall; she stared back with empty eyes. Then Kirsten went into the hall to look at the photograph suspended at a slant of baby Isabela dressed in a sleeper and bonnet, lying in a bassinette. Kirsten wandered farther along the hall and stopped to look at another picture of the baby Isabela. She went to the next, fat Mrs. Lazore seated in a high-backed chair holding the baby with the doctor behind her, hands gripping the edge of the chair as though he were hanging on trying to keep himself upright. He was as skinny as she was fat, but not as thin as Gabriella standing next to him, her spindle arms sticking out of a shapeless dress.
Kirsten came back to the living room doorway. She stood, hands on her hips, foot tapping, looking at Gabriella. “She looks dead already, and Mr. and Mrs. Lazore... No one is smiling, no joy on their blank faces.”
Kirsten went again from picture to picture and stopped at the doctor. “Where is your baby, Dr. Lazore? Tell me now, tell me later. Makes no difference to me. I’ll find out eventually.”
She checked her watch and said to the picture, “I should be on my way to work. I don’t need a ride, Dr. Lazore. It’s been a spooky pleasure. I will be back.”
I drove slowly; Kirsten was quiet, staring out the window.
I said, “What do you think?”
“I think there were no dead mice on the floor, no dead flies on the windowsill, no cobwebs hanging in corners. Someone’s been keeping it clean.”
Kirsten became reflective, hands in her lap, the thumb of her right hand stroking along the back of her left, an insignificant gesture, I realized, but so familiar it shouted, “Remember me, Quinn?”
Kirsten said, “While I was staring at Gabriella, studying her face, it was like looking at one of those inkblot pictures, you know. What does your mind see in this inkblot?”
“What did you see?”
“The Lazore back window looks directly across to Lois’s kitchen window. If I had strong enough binoculars, I would be able to see into Lois’s eyes and I would see evil, like my mother saw evil in that biker’s eyes. The evil I would see is that Lois sneaks across the backyard into the basement through those hurricane doors to visit Isabela lying under the concrete floor.”
When we arrived home, instead of going upstairs to get ready for work, Kirsten plunked herself down on the chesterfield. I sat beside her.
She said, “When I was looking out the Lazore kitchen window it felt like I was standing in a fog. If I looked one way, what was in front of me was too foggy to see clearly, and if I looked the other way, what was ahead was too foggy to see clearly. But I had the feeling that the fingers of Gabriella in the photo on the wall of the Lazore were holding a thread that stretched through the window to Lois, one end of the fog to the other. If I had infrared fog-penetrating binoculars, I could see that thread and all the other threads like straight lines going directly from Lois to Isabela and the three missing girls.”
I remembered working stakeouts, sitting behind strip clubs with Night Owls, on the lookout for drug violations by the bikers. I was never concerned about what the girls were doing in the club. They were just trying to make a living. I’d never heard of infrared fog-penetrating binoculars but imagined they’d come in handy for tracking cheaters.
She said, “Lois reminds me of Aunt Bessie, not her looks but the look on her face, like she’s hiding something. Aunt Bessie played dumb about my father. I’d ask her about him and her face would get a blank look. She told me he worked shifts. He chewed gum because he was drinking on the job. He’d throw the gum wrappers all over the place, she said. Then a few days later, talking about something else, she’d say he didn’t drink, ever. So, I knew she was hiding something.”
In vice, I’d met hundreds of strippers. They came and they went. Although there was a lot of drinking — too many times my mind was fogged with alcohol — my brain must have been keeping a log. That would explain my Alzheimer’s déjà vu, remembering but not remembering, both at the same time. Kirsten was handing me another snapshot of her background, one at a time, it seemed, and eventually, as the pictures began to line up, I would be able to follow them back one at a time, yes, like following a thread backward, one step at a time, and there she would be. But so what? I never had any real connection to the dancers. It was the bikers me and Parsons were after, never the girls.
Kirsten got up. I watched the too-familiar swing of her step as she walked away, and although she was only going to the door of her upstairs apartment ten feet away, I had the feeling you get when you need to catch up to someone and either go with them or bring them back before it’s too late, and they’re gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Kirsten was busy at the kitchen counter making lunch. She was wearing one of my Raptors T-shirts, which was hanging almost to the knees of her black tights.
“Lunch is a baked omelet,” she said, wiping her hands on a tea towel as she was coming into my spare bedroom-office to look over my shoulder at the original side-by-side photo of Gabriella and her father next to its reproduction.
She said, “Look at Gabriella’s eyes in the reprint.”
I opened my desk drawer, cleaned my magnifying glass with my tie, and squinted through the lens, raising and lowering it until I had a clear image.
She said, “It’s an optical illusion, but the eyes look luminous, as if they can see us.”
I now recognized that the photograph had been taken in the side yard of the Lazore, for the background was a stone foundation wall with one small basement window.
“There’s the baby.” Kirsten pointed one long red nail.
Sure enough, in the reflection from the glass of the window lay a baby on a blanket in the grass.
Kirsten asked, “So why would someone take a photo of Gabriella and the doctor standing against the wall and leave the baby lying in the grass? Someone should be holding the baby.”
“The photographer put down the baby to take the photo,” I suggested.
“That baby’s dead; the blanket is covering its face.”
I looked more closely. “I think you’re jumping to conclusions. I think you might cover a baby’s face for other reasons, bugs for example. And why, if you’ve got a dead baby to deal with, would you be thinking about taking a photograph?”
“I’m just saying what it looks like. That’s what eyes do, they tell you what stuff looks like.”
“Who is taking the picture?”
“The mother. She set the dead baby in the grass to take the picture. Can you get that reflection part blown up?”
She stood back, waiting for my answer.
I said, “I had a case once, the perv photographed his victim. In one picture, the reflection in the eyes of the vic identified the perpetrator. Too bad I can’t give this to Parsons for forensics.”
“Why can’t you? It’s cop stuff. You worked the streets together. Take a bullet for your partner, like in the movies.”
“My old partner helped solved this case. I’m not interested in proving him wrong.”
“But that’s what we’re doing.”
“I’m proving him right. And I’m giving closure to the parents who are haunted by the idea that the police were wrong and the bodies of the children are buried somewhere on the Lazore property, sitting there every day in a yard full of weeds and coming to them every night in their dreams. I’m giving them closure.”
The oven timer buzzed, a feature I did not know I had. Kirsten hurried away. In a few minutes, she called me for lunch. It smelled delicious, and with the cheese and mushroom topping, it looked professionally made.
“How did you do this?” I didn’t know I had anything to eat in the fridge, except leftover chicken.
“I used what I found: eggs, cheese, mushrooms, cooked ham. All of it left over from when you went to high school.”
“You know how to cook, you’re telling me.”
“I’ve worked all my adult life in restaurants. Of course I know how to cook. Hurry up and eat. The way you drive we’ll be late for Reverend Beachy. And wear something appropriate.”
I was standing at the bathroom mirror adjusting my two-tone blue tie when she returned from upstairs, appropriately dressed in a blouse and white capris.
“Very nice,” I said. She stood beside me and began beating at her hair with her brush, apparently trying to put it in a style suitable for visiting a reverend. At the same time, she was giving me non-verbal criticisms by way of sideways glances at my shirt/tie/jacket combo.
I looked down at my clothes. “What’s the matter with them?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You don’t like the tie.”
“Would look great if this was 1970.”
“My ties are all 1970.”
“You look like a cop wearing a blue-striped tie, brown tweed jacket, and grey shirt. As soon as I saw you that first day on your doorstop, lost and penniless, I said to myself: cop.”
I felt another far away jolt. “Why when you first saw me were you already thinking cop?”
“Only businessmen and detectives wear suits, but a businessman would never wear a 1970s tie.”
I took it off.
She gave up on the hair and took over on the tie. “What are you going to ask the reverend?”
“Good question. If I say I’m a detective, he won’t tell me anything.”
“Then let me ask the questions. You keep quiet.”
She had lifted my shirt collar and was concentrating on positioning the tie, her fingers smoothing it along the back of my neck. This was another question needing an answer. Yes, her familiarity was part of how she was and she was using it to get what she wanted, not only free rent but also protection and a job. But there was an innocence about this familiarity that suggested that she considered her relaxed closeness as both normal and natural, as though I was some harmless uncle, just as she had walked into my apartment and, in a normal and natural way, made herself right at home, as though she actually felt she belonged there.
Still busy with the tie, she said, “I’m thinking of getting married and need a reverend to do the deed and we’re thinking of moving into the area and the real estate lady said Lois might be selling her house and what does he, the reverend, know about Lois and so on and stuff like that.”
I knew she would make it work.
She did the loop over and slipped the knot tight and stood back to look.
Reverend Beachy’s address was a manse on a tree-lined street next to the Presbyterian church. The reverend was wearing his white collar and black clerics. After a warm handshake, he ushered Kirsten and me into the living room and offered coffee.
Kirsten got right down to business. “We’re thinking of getting married and I had some sewing done by Lois Miller and she suggested we see you.”
