stools were the tall kind you see in some bars and coffee places — comfortable for maybe an hour, nasty after that. The best part was the walk between the two surveillance locations when I was able to stretch and rub the numbness out of most of the lower back half of my body. I finally retrieved two of the blankets Kennedy had told me about and manufactured a couple of almost cushions, which helped. I took breaks every couple of hours to do bending and stretching exercises, a new appreciation for Kennedy’s dedication already firmly formed in my mind.
During the time I was watching from the upstairs perch, I saw one car go down the alley, just before midnight. Nothing and no one else. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, I checked the cameras to make sure that they were working and properly aimed, that I hadn’t accidentally knocked one off target. Then I went out to the Accord, grabbed my gym bag out of the trunk, and went back inside.
I checked the kitchen, more out of curiosity than hunger. Kennedy had stocked the place pretty well before he left. I wasn’t surprised by that, except that he would have had to do the shopping between our chat that morning and my arrival that night. Another example of the man’s attention to detail.
I took a shower and, after one last look out of the main floor window at what had been the Unruh house, I headed off to my own bedroom. I glanced quickly at Kennedy’s book collection — almost all non-fiction, with a strong bent toward biography. Again, I was surprised. Being a fiction guy myself, I went to bed with the copy of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness that I’d brought with me. I fell asleep with the light on and the book still propped on my chest, woke up a while later, and for a minute had to remind myself where I was. I shut off the light and thought for a while, mostly about the fact that I had just completed night number one of my surveillance. Just 8,999 short of Kennedy’s record.
Five
The next morning I made a pot of strong coffee and was back at my upstairs bedroom post just after 7:00. I watched the departure of the man who lived in the house where Faith’s body had been found. At 7:34 he came out the back door of the house, walked to the garage, and disappeared inside. A minute or so later, a brown Chrysler 300 backed into the alley, turned left, and headed west, disappearing from view in a few seconds. I noted that the man was thirty-something, wore a good-looking, lightweight suit, and carryied a briefcase. I recorded his departure in the notebook Kennedy used to diarize all “sightings” on either property.
Seventeen minutes later, a woman came out of the house. She had a little girl in tow, and they, too, entered the garage, then after a couple of minutes drove away, this time in a Nissan Murano. Nice vehicles — this family didn’t appear to have been affected by the downturn in the Alberta economy.
They were too young to have been living there when the murder had taken place, unless one of them had grown up in the house. I wondered if either of the adults — I assumed they were either husband and wife or live-in partners — was aware that they parked their vehicles just metres from where a little girl just a few years older than their own daughter had lain as the life drained out of her. I wondered, too, whether real estate agents were obligated to tell prospective buyers about horrific events that had taken place in or around properties they were trying to sell.
I drank coffee and watched for a while longer, then went downstairs. At 8:22, a red Equinox pulled up in front of the house where Faith Unruh had lived. An eleven- or twelve-year-old boy, backpack over his shoulder, dashed from the front door and down the sidewalk and then climbed into the back seat of the Equinox. The boy was dark-skinned, perhaps East Indian or Pakistani. He rapped knuckles with another boy, similar in age and Caucasian, already in the back seat. The driver — I guessed he was the second boy’s dad — pulled away from the curb, and I could see someone else in the passenger-side front seat, an older sister, maybe. All of them were likely heading for the kids’ school.
I recorded that departure too. I took a break between 9:00 and 10:00 to take in yogourt and a bran muffin and thought about the fact that I hadn’t, during my time in the surveillance rooms, listened to any of my music. Music was part of virtually every one of my days. It had been the therapy I relied on after Donna’s death. Yet it had felt somehow wrong to have even that small pleasure while I looked out these windows hoping to spot a killer. I wondered if Marlon Kennedy looked at his time on the surveillance stools the same way.
Cobb texted just after eleven o’clock:
Read again your report on the conversation with the former assistant manager of Le Hibou. Good work. Want to hear your thoughts. Interesting the attitude change in Ellie after she’d played the other club. Might be a good idea to do some checking on the place when you get time. I’ve got a lot on my plate today — some domestic, some case-related. I’ll call when I get some time.
And that was my morning. For lunch I went down to the kitchen and made myself two baloney and lettuce sandwiches and took them and a Diet Coke back upstairs. But this time I decided to take my laptop with me. I pushed aside cords and power bars and made space on the table that occupied much of the centre of the room. I set up to do a little work on the Ellie Foster disappearance while I kept an eye on the scene outside.
The afternoon went by surprisingly quickly. I divided my time about equally between surveillance and research, looking, as Cobb had directed, for connections to Ellie Foster’s music career. And I spent a fruitless hour and a half trying to find out something about the coffee house known as The Tumbling Mustard. Found one mention — actually, a poor-quality photo of a poster from the club dated October 17, 1964. It was promoting a singer who called herself Angie. That was it — just the one name. Nothing on anyone named Fayed. I wasn’t sure I’d learn anything even if I was able to track down Mr. Fayed, but I was intrigued by the notion that Ellie had undergone some kind of personality or attitudinal change during or around the time of her Tumbling Mustard gig. Maybe Fayed could shed some light on that.
On a whim I checked out performers named Angie and actually surprised myself when I discovered a Wikipedia mention of a “Fredericton-born folksinger who enjoyed a brief career in the early and midsixties and retired to a sheep farm in the Shuswap area of B.C.” I tried to find more about the elusive Angie, who may or may not still have been raising sheep in British Columbia, thinking she might be able to direct me toward Fayed, but I turned up nothing. Then I came across a brief notation that offered “prayers and thoughts to the family and friends of Angie Kettinger, the wonderful New Brunswick–born singer who passed away last night in the Salmon Arm hospital at just sixty-six years of age.” The piece, dated April 29, 2011, included details of a memorial service to celebrate Angie’s life and music.
I was hoping that the passing of Angie Kettinger wasn’t a harbinger of things to come as Cobb and I tried to track people with some knowledge of Ellie Foster’s life and disappearance.
When I broke for dinner — a pizza warmed up in the oven — I had an almost blank page where I’d hoped several lines of meaningful text would be. After I’d cleaned up the dinner dishes — one plate, one glass, my kind of cleanup — I once again returned to the surveillance locations. As I sat on the upstairs stool looking at the quiet scene that was the house across the street, I realized how little I had accomplished that day. At eight o’clock I broke for a run, weaving my way around the pleasant neighbourhood and passing in front of both of the houses I had been watching on cameras. Back in Kennedy’s house I spent twenty minutes sitting in the dark of the dining room, trying without success to pull together even one thought that would move the Ellie Foster investigation forward.
After a quick check of the two cameras I was back at my computer feeling, more than anything, useless and depressed. For the next while I again immersed myself in the musical career of Ellie Foster. It wasn’t a long career. She had sung professionally for just over two years, but even in that time — as I read reviews, promo pieces, and comments about
