like the pink worms in her garden.
She must remember to take the dahlias in before the frosts came. The rains could stop any day now. Then the frost would come.
When had she started feeling revulsion watching her husband eat? She watched Albert’s lips, pouting in repose, wriggling in action. She tore her eyes away from his mouth and read his upside-down newspaper instead. A skill she had acquired over thirty years of silent breakfasts.
A murder in the West End, on Haro, only a block away. She shivered. The killer chopped off her head and- what? Buried it? Took it away with him?
Matty must have cried out, for Albert was watching her over the tops of his glasses with those black eyes and that familiar sarcastic look on his face.
“What?”
She nodded at the paper. “A woman-”
He blinked, staring at her, saying nothing, waiting for her to finish her sentence. As though she were a child struggling with new words. Or an Alzheimer victim like poor old Ellie Benson on Comox Street, who couldn’t even remember her own name from one day to the next.
“Murdered!” said Matty.
“Ah.” Albert’s upper lip curled in a pink sneer as he returned to his newspaper.
She was born Matilda Harrison sixty-two years ago in this same Nelson Street house where she had lived all her life. Her father died when Matty was in her mid-thirties. Her mother followed him a year later. Matty then met and married Albert. Albert Kayle was thirty years old. She was thirty-seven. He had burning dark eyes and dark hair. He worked as a lineman’s assistant with the telephone company, where Matty worked in the typing pool. He proposed to her almost immediately.
She was overwhelmed. Nobody had ever proposed to her before. They were married that same year. Matty hoped she wasn’t too old for children. She looked forward to raising a family in the house where she’d grown up and known so many happy times.
That was twenty-five years ago. Now she was an old woman.
She refilled Albert’s coffee mug. He didn’t look up. He was now absorbed in The Globe and Mail.
He looked young for his age and still had most of his hair. His face, unlike Matty’s, was relatively unlined. Matty put his youthful appearance down to his regular exercise.
Matty had never been a beauty-she was “plain,” she would be the first to admit-and had never been smart enough for college. She wondered what Albert had ever seen in her. After a few years of marriage and one miscarriage, she had discovered Albert’s true nature. His blind, red-hot anger if crossed. He bore no love or affection for her. He had married her only for the mortgage-free house. And the bit of money left her after the death of her mother.
Albert was often out of work. There was a pattern: he would work at whatever job came along for a while, and then would be let go or fired. Then he would sit about the house for a month or so before looking for something else. Garbage pickup, road repair, gardening, swamping, janitoring-anything that came along. In his time off between jobs, he puttered about in his basement workshop making ugly rustic furniture. Or he took long naps on the livingroom sofa.
She carried her cup to the sink and rinsed it absentmindedly, gazing out the window at the backyard. What a fine place it would have been for children to play. The children she’d never had.
She would like to have a dog-a puppy- or even a cat. But Albert forbade animals. This was typical of him, acting as though the house were his. He took over most of the basement for his workshop, filling the house with horrid smells of varnish and paint. She never went into his workshop or his den. Both were kept locked. Only Albert had keys. Matty wasn’t welcome there.
If she suggested that he might help with household chores, he flew into a frightening rage.
She was safe upstairs. She had her own bedroom, thank goodness. Albert stayed away and never bothered her there.
She put her cup away in the cupboard. Once again she gazed out the window. Tiny water globules hung like teardrops from the leaves of the hydrangeas and from the withered clematis vines near the back door. She glanced at the stove clock: 6:55. She had a chiropractor appointment at ten. For her back pain. She rubbed the small of her back. Lumbar vertebra number five, or L5 as Dr. Malley called it. Why couldn’t she have married someone like David Malley, a kind man with enough tender affection for every lonely, unloved soul in the West End? She pressed her hands around her waist to her stomach, still flat and slim. And barren.
She came to realize much later that it wasn’t because she had been too old. Many women had babies later in life. The reason she and Albert had never had children was because he’d never loved her.
She tidied the kitchen, rinsing out the coffeepot, putting things away, brushing Albert’s bran buds-he always spilled some- into the sink.
She went downstairs to the basement and loaded the washing machine. The front door rattled upstairs. Albert was off for his walk. She set the timer and closed the lid. Then she went outside and started sweeping leaves and branches off the walk, debris from last night’s windstorm.
CHAPTER THREE
“G ’morning, Matty.”
“G’morning, “Good morning, Casey. I’m just about to put on the kettle.”
“Sounds like an invitation.”
Casey sat at the kitchen table while Matty made tea. The office could wait. He liked the solid feel to this house. Its smell of furniture polish and cracked leather excited a sharp and satisfying nostalgia in him. It evoked childhood memories of his Aunt Maeve’s house in Belfast, a veritable museum of Edwardian bric-a-brac.
Matty placed the tray on the table. “Albert’s out.”
“Yes, I saw him set off. Y’know, I’ve always liked that coffee table of yours, Matty.” Casey nodded toward the living room. Made from a burl, a wart-like knot cut from the bole of a tree, the table was finished with what Casey guessed was probably a polymer resin. Its unique grain swirled in surreal patterns under its clear glassy surface.
“Albert’s hobby. He spends a lot of time in his workshop. It’s a terrible thing, the murder of that poor woman,” she said, changing the subject as she poured the tea. She pointed to her newspaper on the table and sighed. “Will you be writing a report about it in your paper, Casey?”
“Not likely. My colleague, Jack Wexler, is on the police beat. I take care of the politics and the human-interest stuff.”
“It must be a very interesting job, being a newspaper reporter.”
“The Clarion is only a weekly community paper, Matty, as you know. I like my job, but I don’t cover great events or important issues. Just the small stuff. A tiny brick in the huge skyscraper world of journalism is all I am.”
“Every brick is important, Casey, if the building is to stand. Help yourself to a butter tart. I made them yesterday.”
Casey thought again about his waistline as he helped himself to a tart.
“So what’s the story, Doc?”
“For an old guy of forty, you’re doing not too badly.” Tom Watterson frowned.
“But-”
“But?” Casey buttoned his trousers.
“It’s the weight. Two years ago you were a few pounds over. But now?” Watterson’s black eyebrows disappeared under his untidy gray mop. “Now you’re twenty pounds over.”
“Hmmph.”
“Still happy at the West End Clarion?”
“You’re asking me if I’m a contented man, Tom. You know I am. The job’s fine. So what is it you’re trying to tell me? Out with it.”
