Giles Blunt - Until the Night

As she spoke of her brother, she forgot about the tea and cups and spoons between them.

“He spent most of his days at the library-the university library. It broke my heart the first day he came home from an afternoon there. The joy on his face. Karson is not an effusive man, but he positively jabbered at me about advances in his field. He went back every day, got himself access to their online journals, and I saw-for a moment, anyway-something like happiness in his eyes. I know he also went because he didn’t want to be a burden to me-which was silly, because he was very helpful looking after our mother. But I’m sure he wanted to be out of my hair. And the happiness was soon gone. Prison-or perhaps not prison so much as injustice-took that capacity from him.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t get his own place, rent an apartment.”

“My brother is a man who is capable of walking across Ellesmere Island dragging a two-hundred-pound sled. Alone. He has lived entire winters with Russians, Laplanders and Inuit in places that are barely on the map and have numbers for names. He has been stranded for weeks in Good Friday Bay, saved an Inuit hunter on the pack ice of the Beaufort Sea. But eighteen years in prison? Eighteen years, Detective. Just going out on the street was disorienting. He was like a man afraid of heights stepping out onto a ledge forty floors up. He had to walk next to walls, step into doorways.

“The distances, the scale of things, were too much. Can you imagine? This is a man who has walked on icebergs the size of Manhattan. But after twenty years in prison he had to be accompanied everywhere. He needed time to find his feet, and he was intelligent enough to know it.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Not at all. Karson is three years older than me. I grew up absolutely adoring him. Even as a teenager, he absorbed knowledge the way the rest of us absorb pop songs. He used to speak of relativity, nuclear fission, differential calculus the way our contemporaries might speak of Led Zeppelin or the latest sitcom. That’s probably why I went into the arts-music-to avoid competing with him.”

Cardinal let her talk a little more. Then he said, “You mentioned some things you wanted to show me.”

“Yes. When you first appeared, I didn’t really listen to you. I couldn’t really hear you. I didn’t want to hear you. But I saw you waiting out there and I looked at the girl’s picture, and… Karson left some things. Nothing much-he’s always travelled light and actually doesn’t own very much-but he left a small box of things in the garage.”

“I need to see it.”

“Tell me truly, Detective-are you absolutely sure it’s Karson you want?”

Cardinal pulled out his cellphone and opened the photo Drexler had sent. He held it out for her to see. “Do you recognize the van?”

“Oh, dear God.”

“The girl’s fingerprints are all over the interior. It appears that both of them got away, but we don’t know in what vehicle and we don’t know where he’s headed. I need to see his things.”

“Yes, of course you do. It’s this way.”

She got up and put on a coat and boots and they went out the back door and through a small garden to a garage. It was brightly lit with fluorescent lights. There were gardening tools, a workbench and shelves along one wall. Oil stains on the floor spoke of a vehicle, but there was none there.

“I never come out here in winter-don’t own a car-but I let one of the neighbours use it. He used to own a small business until he had a heart attack a few years ago. I don’t know why he never sold the van. Anyway, a few weeks ago his son told me it was missing and asked if I had seen anyone in the garage. It didn’t occur to me that Karson might have taken it.”

“What kind of business?”

“A flower shop. You could still make out the logo on the van. But what I really wanted to show you…”

She pointed to the shelves along the back wall, a plastic storage container.

Cardinal prised the lid off the container and set it aside. Shirts, jeans, neatly folded. A pair of shoes. On top of these, several notebooks, the three-hole kind that schoolchildren use, with the map of Canada on the front and a blank class schedule on the back.

“I think it’s the blue one you’ll want first. Careful-the staples have been removed. Prison protocol, one assumes.”

Cardinal opened the blue notebook. The handwriting neat, controlled, easy to read. He thumbed through the pages.

I dreamed I had to climb a glass mountain that glittered in the glare of a savage sun. I was in the company of a man and woman who claimed to know the way but did not… when I woke in the darkness, my eyes were wet as if I had been crying.

“I just noticed something else.”

Cardinal looked up. She was contemplating the far wall of the garage.

“My mother-I told you she was living here the last few months of her life? She was in a wheelchair much of the time. She had a motorized one in the house, but she also had one of the basic push models. It was folded up and stored out here.” She pointed a slim finger at the garage wall. “And now it’s gone.”

Delorme pulled back the glass shower door, thought about it for a moment, then closed it again. Instead, she went to the bathtub and put the plug in and turned on the water. She knelt there feeling the water until the mix of hot and cold was right.

She went into the bedroom and pulled the curtains and took off her clothes. For a while she sat on the edge of the bed listening to the water run in the other room. Now that she was on the bed, she thought maybe she should skip the bath and just get in between the sheets. You wouldn’t sleep, she told herself. You’d just lie there running the whole day over and over again in your head.

She went back to the bathroom and poured a capful of foamy stuff into the water and swirled it around. She stood in front of the mirror to put her hair up and secured it with a headband, then put her left foot into the tub. Just hot enough to sting. She turned the cold on and swirled the foamy water around with her foot for a minute. Remembering the light, she stretched and reached for the wall switch and flicked on the night light near the sink.

As she lowered herself into it, the hot water rose over her up to chest level. She could see half of her reflection in the shower enclosure, and beyond that the open bathroom door. She soaked a washcloth and squeezed the water out, then lay back, covering her eyes with the folded cloth. Sound of water rattling into the overflow drain. She sank down so that her shoulders were submerged.

The steam felt good in her lungs and she breathed it in deeply, letting it out with a sigh. She lay there for a while commanding her muscles to relax, but she didn’t really believe that kind of thing worked and gave it up after a while. The water began to cool and she sat up to turn on more hot.

While it was running, she thought she heard a floorboard creak, and turned the water off again. She sat listening, hand on the tap, water dripping. Clearly the hot bath thing wasn’t an instant cure for tension. She soaped up the washcloth and went over her entire body, toes to shoulders, before lying back again for one last soak. She closed her eyes and the image of her bed, the cool sheets, drifted into her mind.

Another sound. Movement of some kind, not quite identifiable. Silently, she submerged her hands to stop any dripping sounds and listened. Her back was to the door, but the entire dark rectangle was reflected in the shower enclosure. The human instinct was to lie still, to wait for danger to pass, no matter how fast the heart might pump, and it was going full tilt already. Her bathrobe hung from the hook on the back of the open door.