Acts of Murder Read online

  Acts of Murder

  L.R. Wright

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  This book is for John ...

  What we call the beginning is often the end

  And to make an end is to make a beginning.

  The end is where we start from.

  T.S. Eliot

  “Little Gidding”

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  May 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  1995 SECHELT, B.C.

  Chapter 1 Wednesday, February 1

  Chapter 2 Tuesday, February 14

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  May 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  Chapter 6 Saturday, August 19

  1996 SECHELT, B.C.

  Chapter 7 Sunday, March 24

  Chapter 8 Monday, March 25

  Chapter 9

  May 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  Chapter 10 Tuesday, March 26

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  June 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  Chapter 13 Wednesday, March 27

  Chapter 14 Thursday, March 28

  Chapter 15 Sunday, March 31

  Chapter 16

  September 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  Chapter 17 Monday, April 1

  Chapter 18 Tuesday, April 2

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 Wednesday, April 3

  Chapter 21 Thursday, April 4

  Chapter 22 Friday, April 5

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24 Saturday, April 6

  Chapter 25 Sunday, April 7

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is a Sunshine Coast, and its towns and villages are called by the names used in this book. But all the rest is fiction. The events and the characters are products of the author’s imagination, and geographical and other liberties have been taken in the depiction of the town of Sechelt.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to acknowledge the information and assistance provided during the writing of this book by Brian Appleby, Elaine Ferbey, Kate Jarvis, Murray F. Macham, Renee Patterson, Kim Reilly, Warren D. Turner and, as always, by John Wright; any inaccuracies are her own.

  May 1985 Abbotsford, B.C.

  MRS. O’HARA, DRIVING to work, reached a certain point on the road that crossed the floor of the Fraser Valley and pulled over, because from here was available one of the finest sights she knew, especially on such a day as this: it encompassed Mount Baker and its attendant peaks; and bumpy, low-slung green hills; and a row of poplar trees that had been there as long as she could remember, languidly sweeping the springtime sky in concert with the breeze; and herds of cattle, too. The sky was an unusually deep, radiant blue that morning, royal blue, it was, a pulsating concentration of blue.

  This was the second most important thing that happened to Mrs. O’Hara that day, savoring the sight of the mountains and the poplars and the sky, and the sweet scents of spring that drifted in through the car window...

  ***

  It was late evening and almost dark when she got home. As she pulled up in front of the house she was immediately enveloped by a stillness that was deep, fragrant, and significant. The porch light was on, spilling bright light upon the rickety staircase. Above her, stars pierced the darkness that wasn’t black, but navy.

  She could see no lights on inside the house, which stood tall and narrow and melancholy. Mrs. O’Hara felt an odd compassion for it at that moment and into her head came strange notions like buying it new curtains or painting its exterior, all the while knowing that camouflage wasn’t the answer.

  She got out of the car and closed the door—quietly, respectful of the hush of twilight—and headed across the yard. In her right hand she carried her purse and a plastic bag that contained her waitressing shoes. She was aware, as she approached the house, of the extraordinary, tender warmth of the evening.

  She started up the steps, gripping the railing with her left hand, and the tiny diamond in her wedding ring glinted in the harsh light from the porch. She looked down at the steps and saw her feet, uncomfortable in dark brown pumps. She was more than halfway up the staircase when the door at the top was abruptly opened.

  Mrs. O’Hara had heard nothing, had thought her husband, Tom, was out. She looked up quickly, stumbling in her shock, and her hand flew from the railing as she lost her balance. Tom was standing directly beneath the light so that from her vantage point his nose, his chin, his cheekbones flung small darting shadows upward, distorting his face, and where the light struck his pupils, she saw a glint of astonishment.

  Behind him, slightly shorter than he, huddled against his back like a shadow, was a white specter with long pale hair.

  Mrs. O’Hara’s shoebag and her purse went flying as she grabbed wildly for the railing. Her hands brushed it, missed it, and she felt herself falling backward down the steps. She wondered if the fall might kill her, and hoped it would not hurt.

  It didn’t kill her, but it knocked her out. Not for long, but long enough for the specter to vanish.

  1995 SECHELT, B.C.

  Chapter 1 Wednesday, February 1

  MRS. O’HARA NUDGED her old VW van along the road that led to her first house of the day, a residence several miles inland from Sechelt, out of sight of the sea. The wipers shuddered weakly across the windshield and back again and Mrs. O’Hara fiddled impatiently and unsuccessfully with the heater controls. She had wakened in a bad humor, depressed and dissatisfied, and had been tempted to grant herself a mental health day. She was a disciplined woman, however, and hadn’t considered this possibility for long.

  She had begun, four years earlier, when she turned sixty, to pace herself, to take on just as much work as she needed, no more, no less. She could afford to do this because her wants were few. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink. She hadn’t had to give up either of these habits—she had never found them particularly interesting. The only vice that had seriously tempted her was marijuana. But Mrs. O’Hara considered extremely dangerous anything that robbed her of comprehension and control, and had firmly triumphed over her urge to smoke pot. She needed food, and books, and money with which to maintain her house and her vehicle, and an occasional amount for clothes, and that was about it. No, Mrs. O’Hara didn’t worry about not having enough money to support herself.

  Especially since she had only eighteen months left to live. She would die, she knew, on or around her sixty-fifth birthday. Both her parents had done so. Mrs. O’Hara had no siblings, but if she had had a brother or a sister or two she knew that they, too, would have died when they were sixty-five. She didn’t know why.

  Until recently this fact had not bothered her much. It had certainly relieved her of worry about the concerns associated with growing old. Some of those concerns, however, were visiting her already—she was afflicted with arthritis, for example—and this was distressing.

  As she turned off the main road onto a narrower one, pressed upon by woods that dripped rain in what Mrs. O’Hara perceived to be an excessively mournful fashion, she fretted again about the task that had to be completed in the next year and a half, despite her arthritis and her declining vigor.

  Mrs. O’Hara was a tall woman, large, with long, thick gray hair and dark eyes, pouched. Her throat was wattled and her face was deeply lined, but she paid no attention to these things. She kept herself clean and presentable, and her clothes were unpretentious. Mrs. O’Hara thought herself humble, and called her pride by other names, called it self-reliance and conviction.

  The rain had stopped, at least temporarily, by the time she reached the Grangers’ house. She was about to pull into their driveway when she saw that Mrs. Granger’s car was there. So she drove
past the house and parked at the side of the road. She climbed out of her van and hauled back the side door to unload her supplies. And heard the dog barking. She had a certain amount of trepidation about this dog. She had never been an animal lover and found people who flaunted friendly, anthropomorphic relationships with dogs embarrassing.

  Mrs. O’Hara stopped what she was doing and gazed thoughtfully across the top of the van at the woods on the other side of the road. It had just occurred to her that ten years ago she wouldn’t have known that word, anthropomorphic, and now here it came spilling into her head, calmly and surely. She had made good use of these years, the final decade of her life. She had created a brand new existence, one that was centered, admittedly, around service to others, but one that had also tended to the critically important cleansing and refinement of her own character. She straightened, pulling her rib cage up and her shoulders back, grateful for the strength and suppleness she still possessed, and swung closed the van’s side door. She picked up the pails containing her cleaning supplies and strode across the grass toward the Grangers’ porch.

  The dog was bounding excitedly back and forth on the cement driveway in front of Mrs. Granger’s car, which was parked a few feet away from the closed door of the garage. It was barking and barking, and Mrs. O’Hara didn’t know if it was barking at her or not. She didn’t greet it, but threw an uneasy glance in its direction. Before she reached the porch, the door was flung open and the Grangers’ teenage daughter barreled through.

  “Hi, Mrs. O’Hara,” she said, and turned to shout into the house. “Mom! Mrs. O’Hara’s here!” She rushed past Mrs. O’Hara toward her mother’s car and the dog followed, loping, continuing to bark. Mrs. O’Hara decided that it was only excited, and not potentially dangerous.

  She knocked on the half-open door and while she waited she watched the two of them, the ungainly girl and the rambunctious dog. The girl was speaking loudly to the animal, as if it were deaf. Well, of course, maybe it was. But Mrs. O’Hara doubted that. Suddenly the girl raised her arm, as if to clout the dog on the side of the head. The dog flinched and reflexively sat, eyeing the girl uneasily. Perhaps the Grangers’ daughter felt Mrs. O’Hara’s disapproval, for she turned, then, and caught Mrs. O’Hara’s eye.

  “He’s trained,” said the girl defensively. “He just likes to pretend he isn’t.”

  Mrs. O’Hara raised an unfriendly eyebrow. She glanced impatiently inside the house and heard a distant call: “I’ll be right there!” She set down her pails with a sigh.

  “Watch this,” said the girl.

  Mrs. O’Hara folded her arms as the girl wrestled the dog into a sitting position, his back end almost nudging the closed door of the garage.

  “Stay!” she said loudly, sounding surprisingly stern, and delivered a sharp-edged gesture that Mrs. O’Hara assumed was a hand signal. The girl then turned her back on the dog, marched briskly around the car, climbed in, and fired up the engine. The dog watched, his head cocked. He waited, panting, but not barking, apparently content; Mrs. O’Hara saw no impatient quivering in him. The girl revved the motor with heartless fervor, and Mrs. O’Hara winced.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs. O’Hara,” said Mrs. Granger, slightly breathless, appearing in the doorway. The dog turned his head at the sound of her voice, and his tail swept congenially across the cement. Mrs. O’Hara would always remember that single languid sweep before Mrs. Granger’s daughter slammed her foot down on the accelerator, flooring it.

  “Jesus God!” said Mrs. Granger, her voice rising and becoming a scream, piercing the air like a swarm of mosquitoes. But she didn’t move, and neither could Mrs. O’Hara, and neither did the astonished German shepherd, as Mrs. Granger’s daughter Rebecca shot the car down the driveway in reverse gear, slamming the dog into the garage door.

  ***

  In the next days, Mrs. O’Hara felt she had been plunged into an abattoir. Everywhere she turned, she encountered examples of man’s inhumanity to animals: an upended truck on the television news, crates of chickens smashed, chicken blood running crazily along the highway, cracking thin red splits in the asphalt. A small, casual story in a magazine recounted the pilgrimage of a confused and panic-stricken deer trying to get through traffic: “Two cars were banged up when they hit the animal and three others, including a police car”—Mrs. O’Hara could hear the smile in the story—“smashed into each other during the incident. There were no human injuries. The deer’s condition is not known.”

  The night she read this, Mrs. O’Hara sat upright in her bed trying to erase from her mind the unwelcome images that had lodged there: the deer’s terrified eyes, the thumps heard as the cars struck it, the crumpling of its internal organs, their collapse, their bleeding, as the deer staggered off the highway and into the woods.

  She also read about a dog-grooming establishment that was fined $500 after two dogs died there: they had been confined to a cage with an industrial blow-dryer running on a summer day when the outside temperature stood at thirty-two degrees centigrade. The veterinarian who testified at the long-delayed trial said that one of the dead dogs was still hot to the touch forty-five minutes after it had died. What would they have felt, those dogs? Mrs. O’Hara imagined herself in the hottest desert, deprived of shade and water. She felt her skin begin to crack; breathing created inconceivable pain in her lungs; every drop of moisture in her body was quickly evaporating, leaving her an agonized husk.

  Mrs. O’Hara pored over newspapers, she found an abundance of horrifying television documentaries, and she wept...for dogs and cats abandoned on country roads; for cattle squashed together in trucks and transported for fifty-two hours without food, water, exercise, or consideration of weather, kicking and screaming in pain and terror until the trucks’ steel trailers rocked; for poultry whose limbs were ripped off when they froze, alive, to tarpaulins in winter; for pigs who fell and broke their necks while being herded into trucks.

  These were not matters that had engaged her attention in the past, and eventually, after several days, she emerged with considerable relief from her distressing preoccupation.

  Then Mrs. O’Hara had a dream. She dreamed that she was in a familiar house. It was dusk. She prowled through the rooms, turning on no lights, looking for something, or someone, tiptoeing, moving cautiously, so as not to be discovered. But discovered by whom? The house, she knew, was empty. She moved up a staircase and along a hall and into a bedroom that, unlike the other rooms in the house, was furnished: there was a large, canopied, four-poster bed, its covers thrown back and rumpled. A stuffed chair, worn on the arms and the headrest. A faded carpet on the scuffed wooden floor. And a desk, with many drawers. Although this room was not familiar to her, Mrs. O’Hara went straight to the desk. There was light, from somewhere, and it shone directly into the widest, shallowest drawer as she slowly pulled it open.

  Only one thing in the world terrified Mrs. O’Hara: snakes. She thought the bravest thing she had ever done in her life was to not run but to stand still on the steps of the post office in Abbotsford, as a ten-year-old girl, while a grinning boy waggled a live snake in her face, holding it by its tail as it whipped hopelessly in the air.

  In the drawer was an orange and white snake. It was curled up, but as she opened the drawer it lifted its head and the first several inches of its body, gazing at her, and Mrs. O’Hara knew that it had been waiting for her.

  Mrs. O’Hara found herself standing, awake, beside her bed.

  When she felt calm enough, she stripped the bed, shook out the sheets and the blankets, and made it up again.

  She had never dreamed about snakes before. She knew, therefore, that this was serious.

  And the more she thought about her dream the clearer it became that the snake had intended her no harm, but had been of a tender, compassionate nature, and had wanted to convey to her an urgent message, which was twofold: in the contrivance of the important matters within her purview, age was not a consideration; nor was species.
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br />   Chapter 2 Tuesday, February 14

  REBECCA GRANGER STUDIED her mirror self, seeking the sunny, optimistic sixteen-year-old she was when daydreaming, the person for whom good things waited just around the corner. She wished she could lapse into a daydream whenever she needed to. But it didn’t seem to work that way—it was the daydream that snared Rebecca, not the other way around. This wasn’t fair, but then hardly anything was, in Rebecca’s opinion. A person just flailed away at life, not knowing what else to do, and she ended up creating confusion and disorder—and sometimes pain and grief—where she desperately wanted only calm and purpose.

  In the mirror, her face looked blank and hopeless.

  She also saw zits there. “Shit,” she said, leaning closer.

  Paula Granger tapped on her daughter’s door and peeked in. “Ready for breakfast?”

  “I’m not hungry,” said Rebecca, turning quickly from the mirror. “But I’ll have some coffee.” And she followed her mother to the kitchen.

  Halfway through breakfast, Rebecca’s ten-year-old brother Timothy, looking up from his comic book, asked, “Can we get another dog yet?”

  “No we can’t,” said his father wearily. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet. Not yet,” said Simon, who was six, kicking the table leg. There was raspberry jam all over his face. “That’s what you always say, Dad. When can we, then? Huh?”

  “Eat your breakfast,” said his father sharply.

  Paula, buttering toast, saw that Rebecca’s face had become blotchy and miserable. Paula wanted to comfort her, but knew she mustn’t. She offered a sympathetic smile, though, which Rebecca chose to ignore.

  She was a big girl, tall and broad, with a brooding presence that Paula found occasionally stifling and always unsettling. It was perhaps as much because of this as because of the recent family tragedy that she had lately been allowed, in her father’s words, “to get away with too much.” This had exasperated Paula, for he had said it to her—to Paula—and not to his daughter, for whom he had a spot so soft it had turned squishy and begun to decay.