to him in the darkness — there she stood, almost invisible by the blue dumpster, with her woolly coat wrapped close. She smiled and nodded at him, and together they headed toward her car. A crackling series of bangs sounded off in the distance. Halloween was around the corner, and even in the drizzle kids were out getting a head start on the fun.
Chef was stuffed into her driver’s seat now. Stefano took his place beside her. It was icy cold in here, and his fingers, linked on his lap, looked bony and blue. Chef twisted the key and started the car, her Rabbit, her Little Lemon, as she called it, and along with its uneven poop-poop, something in its workings chattered like windup teeth. Chef said, like she said so often, “Oh dear, there go the valves.”
What could he say to that? “Oh dear,” he murmured.
He knew she must wish him gone. She would prefer a small-talker like herself, what with all the hours they’d spent jammed together going to and fro since May, when she had moved in just down the block. How did it happen that he was so well read and not a bad writer, yet in her presence, the spoken word got stuck somewhere between his brain and his tongue?
His few attempts at rejoinder were always drowned out by something larger than himself. If it wasn’t the drone of a truck, it was a passing siren. If not a siren, it was her exclaiming about the funny bumper sticker ahead. There was always something.
The Rabbit idled on the white line. Chef looked westward for a break in traffic. “Problem is, you take her in for the valves, and they say, ‘Sorry, ma’am, looks like the whole tranny’s gotta go.’ You say, ‘Ouch, how much is that gonna set me back?’ They say, ‘Ooh, well, this one’s kind of a doozy.’ It’s always a doozy with cars, Stef. Trust me, you’re better off with public transit.”
He looked at her sidelong and bent his mouth into his sexiest practiced smile, but her eyes were on a passing bus. She pulled out so fast they nearly hit its rear end. Stefano seized the grab handle at his side. Chef was a menace on the road. It was a miracle they weren’t both dead, with all the miles they put in between the harbourfront, where they worked, and upper Lynn Valley, where they lived.
Lonsdale to Keith, Keith to Grand Boulevard — always the same roads. Chef was telling him about the threat of coyotes to small pets. She had a cat named Radar, as he well knew by now. He didn’t bother looking at her as she prattled on about cats and coyotes. His mind was on his own inner processes, his cold and airy nasal passages, the tightness of his face. His teeth ached, pushing against his jawbone. How odd that nobody noticed the changes coming over him. When would Chef look at him, finally, and gasp?
Someday, he would take her up into the wilds, where she would be the helpless one, and he would be in control. He smiled, and his mind went back to his next painting. It would be a self-portrait in vermillion. He would bring his long face out from the trees for a change, into the foreground. It was time to show his teeth.
Three
THE GHOSTS OF SUBURBIA
Dave Leith sat alone in a haunted house. The house didn’t belong to him, but to the people upstairs. He had been on the North Shore since April and in this place since August, with his wife Alison and young daughter Izzy — they were away this week visiting Alison’s family in Parksville. He knew he was lucky to have landed the main floor of this sizeable home, even if the rent was hemorrhaging his bank account. He should be grateful.
Instead he was sulking. He sat on a dining room chair by the living room window, looking out at the rain splashing down on somebody else’s rising equity.
The ghost in the walls groaned. He ignored it. This was a nearly new monster house in a nearly new neighbourhood, and as far as he knew, it had no gruesome history. He hadn’t believed the warnings of the landlord’s young daughter the day he and Alison moved in. The kid had watched as they carted things from the U-Haul down to the side entrance, and on one of his passes she had told him, “There are ghosts down there, you know.”
He had thought it was cute. He’d smiled at the little girl like the big, brave man he was. But he had since heard the proof, usually late at night: the sighs and thuds of what could only be the residual angst of those who had passed on.
Leith was itching to leave this house. Not because of the ghosts, which he could take or leave, but because he wanted a place of his own, a place with property pins, a lawn, a concrete pad for his barbecue. All his life he had been a freehold landowner. Then he’d moved to North Vancouver and found himself out of his depth. Getting a house here was out of the question. A condo, maybe. Renting was just plain brutal. This was his third move this year, always on the lookout for a better deal.
His work cell rang, and he hoped it was the office wanting him to come in and do something. Anything. Sitting alone and listening to weird noises wasn’t fun.
“Leith,” he said to his phone.
The caller was Corporal Michelin Montgomery — known to staff as Monty. He was a silver-haired newcomer to the North Vancouver detachment, even newer than Leith. Unlike Leith, he had already made a ton of friends.
“Dave, sorry to spring this on you,” Monty said. “Looks like we’ve got trouble in Lynn Valley. Up to you, really, but we’re going to be all over this tomorrow, and I thought you might want to have a first-hand look.”
Leith jotted down the address, agreed to be on scene in twenty minutes, and disconnected.
He was putting away his notebook when something moved along the floor toward him. He jumped to his feet, toppling his chair, and stared into the shadows of the haunted house.
He looked down. Nothing but a large house spider scuttling along the floorboards. The spider was as startled as Leith was and had frozen in its tracks, waiting for this hell to pass.
Leith killed the spider with the slap of a rolled-up Westworld magazine, knowing that for a big, brave man, he had leaped fairly high. Not a good start to a new homicide. He stuck the mess in the kitchen waste bin, then fetched his fleece-lined RCMP jacket off its hook and headed out the door.
* * *
The rain poured on Lynn Valley. On a little spur of road that jutted up into the trees, out of line with the well laid-out suburbs, stood the subject house — behind the high fence that hid it. The spur of road was named Greer. Lynn Valley Road, intersecting Greer, was jammed with police vehicles. A handful of concerned citizens were out in their raincoats, talking to RCMP members about what the heck was going on here.
Leith popped open his umbrella and made his way through an open gate and into a yard. The yard was big by North Vancouver standards, he saw. There were several ugly trees growing here, leafless and hairy, throwing spooky shadows. The branches seemed polka-dotted with withered apples hardly bigger than cherries. An old orchard, maybe, though North Van was anything but fruit-growing country.
Light dazzled his eyes. A heaved cement path led to a front porch, but the action seemed to be at the side of the house. He left the path and crossed a stretch of soggy turf to join Corporal Montgomery and others in their rain capes. JD Temple was present, he was glad to see. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head and framed her face so that her eyes seemed larger than usual.
LED torches cranked high and spiked into the turf directed splashy light onto the side of the house and all around, the beams fanning out to make rain and faces sparkle. The group was looking toward the house, not up at its boarded windows, but down at its foundations. Leith followed the general line of sight and saw that where concrete met dirt was a man-sized hole. It looked to him
