was cruising into his late eighties with the gusto that had served his long-lived ancestors. Cherie greeted her at the nurses’ station. Belle knew every staff member, from the kitchen team to the laundry workers and handymen. “Six pieces of toast for him today. Extra marmalade. What an eating machine.”
“Every meal my mother ever served him was the ‘best ever.’ ” She presented a box of Laura Secord miniatures to the smiling nurse. Their daily acts of kindness to her father were beyond price.
With a quick stop in the kitchen for bib, serviettes and cutlery, balancing her boxes down the long hall, railings on each side, Belle entered her father’s private room, his door decorated with craftwork using gold-painted pasta pieces. She nearly tripped as a plump bichon frisé wove through her legs on his way out. Puffball, the activity director’s dog, an irresistible food hound who knew the best places to panhandle.
The new paint and easy-care linoleum provided some cheer, along with the Blue Jays curtains she’d bought. He sat fixated on the blaring television, hands clasped on the lap table of his gerry chair. Up until his breakdown, he’d been a great walker. Three miles with their dachshund Lucky every glorious Florida morning. At Rainbow Country, he’d fallen a few times, the dizziness of age, not Alzheimer’s, a future dread. Since seniors ran a risk of broken bones, his chair had become his jailer.
She put down the boxes and turned the TV to normal. “Hello, old man,” she said with a grin. “Your usual plus apple pie.”
“No cherry like your mother’s?”
The man knew what he liked and liked what he knew. “The Berlin air lift was fogged in. Next week for sure.”
His broad mouth wreathed a smile. Clean-shaven, baby-pink cheeks, but perhaps not always by noon, though the staff worked like carthorses. As in all health-care areas, the sad truth was that a person needed an advocate who visited regularly. “A la mode?”
“A la everything. Your French is très bon!” The first word he’d learned in his new home was “sables” from the box of shortbread. They’d shopped for snacks each week when he could still walk, and he picked out apples, bananas and Mars bars, seven of each.
“Your mother was half-French. Remember what my family said when I told them we were getting married?”
She nodded, attaching his bib and opening the boxes. “Everything was hunky-dory because she was Anglican.” Toronto, Belle’s birthplace, had never been a French enclave. On the other hand, Francophones made the largest ethnic group in Sudbury, the generic “English” in second place, followed by Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Scandinavians, native peoples and a sprinkling of latecomers from the Middle East, Far East and Africa. No melting pot, but a multicultural mosaic.
The news was broadcasting an update on the murders. A pizza delivery man had been brought in for questioning. As earnest civic faces filled the screen with promises to make the city safe for women, she nibbled at her tender sandwich, taking an occasional swig of chocolate milk. Her father ate at a rapid rate, and she gave him verbal prods to stop and drink water. That choking incident had left him an inch short of joining her mother’s ashes in the closet.
“Hey, what’s going on here? Another woman dead? I left my sanctuary in Port Charlotte for this and blizzards, too?” His voice rose, but the twinkle in his cornflower blue eyes spelled humour.
With an assurance that any crime perked up his brain cells, she said, “She was my client in a house sale. I found her . . . body.”
He gave his leonine head a shake, the thick white hair parted neatly. “Houses. Harold’s business. But didn’t you also . . .” Then he stopped, unsure of his memory. Sometimes D-Day was fresher to him than the morning’s menu.
“It’s possible that the same person killed all three women.”
“A serial killer? Surely not in Canada.”
“We’re catching up fast. Bernardo and Homolka, now the pig farmer in B.C.” As many as seventy prostitutes who had vanished from the Vancouver netherworld over the last twenty years had found ugly graves. Bereaved families were outraged that reports of their missing loved ones had gone into File Zed, merely because they had been street people and not debutantes. She got up to mash the pie and ice cream into mush.
Her father followed her motions and began tapping his watch, his woolly eyebrows contracting, as if he could will the hands to move faster. “Where’s that dessert?”
She put the box on the lap table. “It’s very sad. A lovely woman. She looked like Marie Dressler in the Sennett comedies.” From the time she’d been able to toddle around Toronto, she and her father had spent two evenings a week in a private screening room at Odeon Pictures. As a booker, it was his job to slot each film according to the local preference. The boondocks of Owen Sound didn’t have the same tastes as Rosedale.
“What a puss on that one. Last in the Canadian Three-Peat for the Oscar. 1931.” He smacked his lips as he savaged the pie.
She sorted her mental files. So many rainy days in her youth she’d sat on the sofa and paged through Daniel Blum’s pictorial histories of films. “Marie won for Min and Bill with Wallace Beery.”
“Mary Pickford was first in 1929 for Coquette. Canada’s sweetheart. Played a teenager at thirty-seven. She was born where the Hospital for Sick Kids stands. Then Norma Shearer, a Westmount beauty. Your mother always said she had a cast in her eye, whatever that meant.”
Belle rocked and rolled into their repartee, striking a vamp pose. “Divorcee. Very risqué, since she was trying to hide her pregnancy.”
Of the three women, Belle had a special fondness for gruff old Marie with the bulldog face and a body like a bag of fighting Dinky toys. One of the greatest directors of women, George Cukor capitalized on the beauty-and-beast theme in Dinner at Eight. Blonde bombshell Jean Harlow was talking about reading “a nutty kind of a book,” adding with wide eyes and raised, pencil-thin brows, “The guy said that machines are going to take the place of every profession.” Doing a stage-trouper double take, Marie scanned Harlow’s silvery cling-wrapped body, platinum hair, and shook her jowls, “Oh, my dear, that’s something you’ll never have to worry about.”
“Got a problem.” Her father patted his pockets and looked around in annoyance. “Maybe you can find my gol-durn wallet.”
She smiled, thought a minute as she scanned the room, then bent and reached into the elastic of his sweat pants for a suspicious bulge over the ankle. “Here you are. We’ve got to get that pocket sewn up.”
He opened it, no credit cards, no identification or money, only a picture of her with her mother. Poignant proof of time, the identity thief. “Miracle Worker!”
She mock-punched his arm. “Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.”
As she turned to leave, an old ebony man with a walker shuffled into the room. His short hair was curly white, and his dapper moustache reminded her of Cab Calloway. He wore suit pants, a white shirt, tie and a vest. “George,” he said, “come on down and join our rummy game.” He introduced himself as Henry Morgan, a retired miner.
Belle knew that her father didn’t like to leave his room, but this might be a chance for a short stroll and healthy socialization. “We’ll walk, and Henry can get a wheelchair for your return. Okay? Bet you win the pot. Think of the chocolate bars.” She knew he’d never cooperate
