Best Debut R&B Country CD by a Female Artist, Solo)." Indexes never seemed to get to the heart of the matter. There was never a heading for hope or fear. Or dreams, recalled. Smiles, remembered. Anger. Beauty. Or even images that lingered, glimpses of something that had made an impression. A doorway. A window. A reflection on glass. The smell of rain. Never any of that. Just a tally of proper nouns and famous names. And why only one life? Why not the web of other lives that define us? What of their indexes, their moments?
"I think," said her father, "you need to cut back on the espresso and try to get some rest."
She'd laughed and agreed, had taken the elevator down to the pool, had swum laps. Had swum until her eyes stung.
And now, here she was, still at her desk, still indexing other people's lives.
"You, I love."
Why would he say that?
CHAPTER 16
A standard, paint-by-numbers biography begins with the subject's grandparents arriving from England/Ireland/Germany/Soviet Russia, then traces their humble beginnings as shopkeepers/farmers/miners, never imagining (that's what forebears do, they go about their lives never imagining) that one day, their grandson/daughter/son would grow up to become a world-famous/acclaimed/notorious athlete/entertainer/politician/merchant of death.
With celebrity memoirs, this would be more self-aggrandizing, of course, and would usually start with a defining public moment.
"As I sat in the audience, while [MAIN RIVAL'S] name was called to receive the award for Best Debut R&B Country CD by a Female Artist (Solo), I fought back tears, knowing that if I wanted to grow as an individual, I would have to reinvent myself as an artist/woman/merchant of death." But after that, they too would settle into a straightforward chronology. This happened, then this.
The human memory is a salamander, though; it squiggles from point to point, slaloms its way improbably up walls and across ceilings. A ripple of colour, appearing and disappearing at the same moment, an orange head trailing a fluid blue body. Had she dreamed that? It seemed more memory than dream.
No story based on human memory was ever linear. Memories folded back on themselves. They clustered, they clotted. They arranged themselves not chronologically, but clumped together thematically. Betrayal. Ambition. Regret. Dismay.
One of the first things Laura did when she took over a manuscript was to start a timeline of events, to ferret out any internal contradictions and make sure everything lined up properly. But the events that followed her father's death defied Laura's best copy-editing skills. They were tangled and jumbled. They overlapped.
They bled into each other: reds and blues, forming new hues and strange mixtures.
Try as she might, Laura couldn't sort these events into anything resembling a straight line. The devil wasn't in the details, it was the details. A memorial service to arrange. Relatives to contact. An obituary to write. And a mother too numb to help.
Somewhere along the line, Laura's father was turned into ash.
As for the obituary: "You're the copywriter," said Warren, doggedly erroneous. (No matter how many times she'd explained what she did for a living, he never got it.)
"I don't write copy, I edit it."
"Whatever. Just write an obituary, okay?"
It was an odd undertaking, the penning of obituaries. A life tallied up and charged by the word. What to leave out? What to leave in?
The deceased's full name, certainly, with educational abbreviations, strung like semaphores behind it. B.A. Spec. Honours. Teaching Certificate (Industrial Arts), Athabasca University. A checklist of children and a spouse survived by (if applicable). Address and time of service. Donations in lieu of flowers. Flowers in lieu of attendance. A quote from someone wiser, more sentimental. "To every thing there is a season..." Obituaries weren't written so much as assembled.
"What does that even mean?" said Warren, baffled at the notice his sister had run in the paper. "Let Heaven be done, though justice falls."
"It's just something Dad said—something he wrote, a long time ago." Maybe he hadn't written that at all; maybe she had imagined it. But it was still a message. From their father.
Sergeant Brisebois had delivered the autopsy results in person, cap tucked under his arm as a sign of respect. He'd gone over the results as soon as they arrived from the Medical Examiner's Office.
Cause of death: "Blunt force trauma." No shit. He didn't mention the fact that the tracks on Ogden Road had all come from the Olds, or that the investigation had expanded.
"There wasn't any alcohol in the bloodstream," Brisebois told the family. "No narcotics, and no sign of cardiac arrest, either. His heart was fine."
Laura heard this as: "He had a good heart." Laura heard this as:
"He was a good man."
When Laura's grandmother had died, it had barely caused a ripple in the family; it was more as if their Nana had evaporated than expired. But with her father's death, everything clattered together, yelling for attention at the same time like Warren's twin daughters. Laura had handled the funeral and Warren handled the money, calling the insurance company, refusing to be put on hold, berating a series of administrators over payments due and procedures Warren deemed "unacceptable."
That was the first inkling that something was wrong. "The added coverage on your father's policy was too recent. It doesn't apply." This is what the insurance company told her brother. Read the fine print, bozo. As it turned out, their father had increased his life insurance in the week before the accident, more than doubling his premium. But a six-month waiting period was required before any added payouts could be claimed.
Their mother was now staying at Warren's house in Springbank, having finally accepted that their father was (a) never going to call to say it had all been a terrible mix-up, and (b) never coming home.
(Even after his body had been incinerated, she'd expected him at any moment; it was only over the triangular-cut egg-salad sandwiches at the reception after the memorial service that she realized she was, indeed, a widow.) Warren's home was in a cul-de-sac amid other cul-de-sacs, and their mother, having packed only an overnight bag, spent most of her days in a flannel nightgown. Laura collected her mom's mail, kept it by the fishbowl in her apartment with a rubber band around it. "The mail can wait," she'd told her mom. But it couldn't.
Life insurance. Egg-salad sandwiches. Final notices. In lieu of flowers. The events continued to blur into each other, seemed to happen both at the same time—and separately. And then the ATM at Laura's mall swallowed their mother's bank card and nothing was ever the same.
Warren had taken their mother to see Laura, if only to get her out of her flannel nightgown. He'd dropped their mother off at Northill Plaza and she'd stopped by the bank at the mall to withdraw some money—she was planning to take Laura for lunch at the food court. It was a joint account she'd had with her husband, but when she entered her PIN the machine refused to give her any money or even to release the card. It held it hostage instead, with a message that read simply: SEE TELLER INSIDE.
Laura's mother fled instead. She took the mallside exit, past Shoppers Drug Mart and the Flight Centre to the lobby of Laura's building, pressed desperately on the buzzer.
"Laura, it's Mom. Please come down."
Together, they'd walked back to the bank and asked to see the manager. "It's clearly some sort of mistake," Laura said, using the definitive when she knew full well she should have been using the conditional.
The bank manager was pudgy and young, with Clearasil-pink skin and a tie knotted too tight for the overlap of his neck. He provided a bank statement. It showed a balance of ($189,809.51).
"What do these parentheses mean?" she asked, though she already had a sickened inkling.
"The what?"
"The brackets," she said. "Around the total. Explain those."
The bank manager blinked. "That means it's a negative balance.
You didn't get the notice?" He turned to her mom. "About the default? On the house loa
n?"
"Loan?"
"The house loan. It's like a mortgage."
Her mother said, "We don't have a mortgage. We paid our house off years ago."
"Yes, you did," said the manager. "That's why your husband was able to arrange a loan. More of a line of credit, really, against the equity."
He showed them the paperwork for that as well. "Your husband," he said, sliding the papers across. Your husband. As though that explained everything.
Laura shoved the papers right back at him. "My mother didn't sign anything. This is a scam."
"Your mother didn't need to sign anything. The house was in your father's name."
"Why would the house be in—"
But her mother stopped her with a touch on the arm. "I was still in teachers' college when we bought the house," she said. "Back then, property was often in the husband's name. It wasn't unusual."
"But it's your house, too," Laura said.
"Urn, actually," said the bank manager, "it's our house. The loan is in default." Then: "You should probably get a lawyer."
Laura could do better than that. "I'm calling my brother," she said, threatening him as though she were seven years old again.
"You," she said, "are going to be sorry,"
She sat there, staring defiantly at the bank manager, cellphone to her ear. But the days of her brother acting as protector were long gone, and when Warren picked up, he didn't let her get a word in. He'd been having his own runaround with the life insurance company. "They're freezing Dad's payout, ‘pending investigation.'
Can you fuckin' believe this?"
Laura turned away, lowered her voice, said, "Warren, we're at the bank. You need to come here right away."
"Dad took out an extra half-mill in added coverage just a week before the accident. And now the bastards are refusing to cough up any of it! Good thing the house was paid off."
As Laura tried to get her brother to listen, even for a moment, her mother asked the manager, "What about our savings?"
CHAPTER 17
The following Monday, the police seized Laura's parents' computer.
After the fallout from the bank, her mom had made the mistake of contacting Sergeant Brisebois, thinking he was on their side. He was on no one's side; he was in the business of turning question marks into full stops, of explaining away discrepancies, of teasing out the hidden meanings in the seemingly innocuous and the apparently inconsequential. So when Mrs. Curtis called him, distraught, saying someone had stolen their life's savings, his obligations were not to her but to the larger narrative.
With Mrs. Curtis's approval, the bank had released her late husband's financial statements to the police, along with a list of transactions spanning the last six months. The balance in their chequing account had barely wavered. But their savings?
Withdrawal after withdrawal, some in the hundreds of dollars, some in the thousands—money, bleeding away—followed by a final flurry of paperwork for a line of credit against home equity.
The investigation had grown to include the possibility of financial crimes, insurance fraud, and possibly extortion.
—Shall I stay on then? As family liaison?
—That's the plan. Call Lloyd at the Crown Prosecutor's office, get his advice. You'll want a standard warrant for the house and a production order for the hard drive.—The widow's being cooperative.—Get the warrants anyway. I've had sweet-smiling seniors suddenly get cold feet and withdraw their cooperation. What starts as a consensual search suddenly becomes a standoff, and next thing you know, you've got a suspect who's pissing backward, the arrest is tossed on a technicality, and the whole case has gone south.
—Understood. I'll contact the Crown right away.—Sounds good. Keep me posted.
And so it was, on the Chief Inspectors directives, that Sergeant Matthew Brisebois arrived at the Curtis home at 9:34 A.M. on Monday, accompanied by a district officer and two members of the Tech Unit.
Warren arrived soon after and was already in high dudgeon by the time Laura showed up. How does he get all the way in from the burbs before I can even walk down a hill?
"You don't have to give them the computer," Warren was telling his mom. "This is bullshit." Warren had a mouthful of beef jerky that he chewed like it was a wad of tobacco.
Who eats beef jerky for breakfast? There were days Laura forgot to eat entirely, but her brother had never had that problem. He was always chewing on something.
As the IT officers removed the hard drive and placed it into a protective carry case, Brisebois sat beside Mrs. Curtis, speaking softly, sipping tea.
"Matthew," she began, a waver running through her voice,
"will this help us find out what happened? Will this help us find out who stole our money?"
"That's what we're hoping, Helen." She would have handed the computer over, even without a court-ordered warrant.
Laura had arrived still smelling of chlorine from her swim. She ignored Brisebois, asked her mom, "What are they looking for?"
"Kiddie porn and terrorist training manuals," said Warren with a snort. "These cops have got fuckin' blinders on. They think Dad was some sort of master criminal. Meanwhile, whoever drove him off the road is running free and laughing."
—Is the wife a suspect?—The wife is always a suspect.—But did she do it?—No.—How about the son? The daughter?
The officer with the pale eyes looked at Laura, the woman from the tower window.
—The son? No. The daughter? She does seem... strangely removed from the situation.
"Your father was sending a lot of money to people outside the country. Any idea why?"
"Dad never travelled," said Laura. "Who would he know?"
"We were going to travel," said her mom, jumping in to defend Henry. "Around the world and back again, it's what your father always said. The house was paid off, we had our pensions and some savings, our RRSPs. We were going to travel, going to see the world. Of course... we hadn't gotten around to the details of it yet..." Her voice trailed off. Laura watched the officer as he jotted this information down in his notepad. "How's your cat?" she asked.
"My cat?"
CHAPTER 18
Laura's father, reading a bedtime story. Warren, too big for books, had wormed his way free, leaving Laura alone under her dad's arm as he turned the pages, slowly, deliberately.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair!" he intoned in the sort of voice he imagined a prince might have.
Laura looked up at her dad. "Why didn't she climb down?"
Her dad looked back at her.
"The girl," said Laura. "Why didn't she just tie her hair to something at the top and climb down by herself?"
"You know," said her dad, "I never thought of that. I suppose you're right. She could have cut her hair when she got to the bottom."
"Hair grows back, right?"
"It certainly does," said her dad.
"So why didn't she just tie a knot and climb down?"
He frowned, considered the question. "I don't know. Maybe she was scared of falling."
"If she tied a good knot, it would hold her, even if she was scared." Then, with arms crossed, "This is dumb."
"Well, it's not a true story. It's a fairy tale."
But even fairy stories have to make sense, she thought.
Laura would later write a short story of her own when she was in elementary school, one about Rapunzel after her escape, running free with short hair.
She thought about that sometimes. About that other her, wondered what ever became of her. It happens so slowly, doesn't it? We surrender by inches. We surrender until one day when we're brushing our teeth, instead of Rapunzel plotting her escape we see a hermit staring back at us.
Warren, too big for books, had wormed his way out, leaving Laura alone under her dad's arm.
CHAPTER 19
"Wait." This was Laura's mother stopping Brisebois as the officers wound up the last of the computer cables.
"Yes, Helen?"
"There is one thing. It's probably nothing, but I remember Henry said something about a message he got... a message from Africa. Some sort of mistake, like a wrong number, but in an email.
I never heard anything more about it, though."
CHAPTER 20
They call us wizards for a reason. This was alchemy, not science. The IT officer knew this—knew it instinctively. He was navigating as much by magic as by prescribed protocol, by touch as much as by training. He was weaving his way into memory itself.