The Rain Barrel Baby (5 page)

On Tuesday Frank knocked off work a little early and went home to work on his garage. And to see his kids. Just Emma and Sadie were home; Garth had stayed at school for soccer practice.

Frank had an idea involving Jane Mallet, the daughter Greta Bower had given up for adoption. It was a feeble hunch — no alarms were ringing — but it was a hunch nonetheless. And it was the only thing he had when it came to the rain barrel baby, so he supposed he should follow it up.

His arms were getting tired. He had been scraping old paint off his garage for only thirty minutes but he was ready to pack it in.

I must really be out of shape, he thought, if I can’t even prepare my own garage for paint without feeling as though I’m going to have a major health episode of some kind.

Frank’s hunch, as well as being feeble, seemed a little far-fetched, so he had kept quiet about it. He didn’t share it with Detective Sergeant Fred Staples, or with his boss, Superintendent Ed Flagston. The official reason he gave himself was that he was grasping at straws, but there were other reasons swimming about in Frank’s thoughts. Reasons that had to do with Fred’s black and white way of seeing things, and his own tendency to hide the police manual under his mattress at times.

He didn’t want to involve Greta unnecessarily. She seemed so emotionally frail to him. He supposed he could be making that up, casting himself in the role of protector to make up for all his failures.

He couldn’t save Denise and worried that he was the root of her problems. She had seemed so…well…unalcoholic when he had first met her. She had been working hard to put herself through university. And she had done it — graduated with a degree in anthropology.

Her plan then was to work for awhile — she got a job with the provincial government in the archives — and then go back and get her master’s degree. She wanted to go on archeological digs, research the past. She wanted to go to Egypt.

Denise hadn’t wanted kids; she’d been definite about that. Frank had wanted them so badly he could taste it, but he wanted her, too, and figured she’d come around and get over her desire to travel the world looking for things that happened thousands of years ago.

She didn’t come around, but she got pregnant by accident and Emma was born. Frank had been so afraid she would have an abortion that he lost thirty pounds. He thanked God for the Catholicism that had been drilled into Denise as a kid.

They had both agreed that Emma shouldn’t be an only child and then, oddly, it had taken five years for Denise to become pregnant again.

She had been fairly well organized in her drinking. Never touching a drop when she was pregnant or breast feeding, but then going on binges. She usually managed to get supper on the table and the kids tended to, half-heartedly, but sometimes just barely. Frank had insisted on a mother’s helper part of the time and had taken two fairly lengthy leaves of absence from his own job to help out at home. Denise’s drinking had gotten worse since Sadie was weaned over five years ago.

Frank had suggested more than once that she try heading back to university for a course or two towards that once longed-for master’s degree. But she didn’t figure she could do both that and be a mother.

You combine being a mother and drinking like a wild woman! he had wanted to shout. You could substitute the courses for your benders. It would be easier! But he never had. He supposed the whole mess was his fault. He had wanted kids so badly. Surely that wasn’t wrong, was it?

“Hi, Dad.” It was Garth, smiling full tilt into the sun.

“Hi, Garth!” Frank came down off the step-ladder. “Do you want to help me scrape the garage?”

“No thanks.”

Frank chuckled. “I don’t blame you. It’s a horrible job. How was soccer practice?”

“Okay, I guess.”

Frank noticed that Garth’s neck was dirty. “Maybe you should have a bath. What do you think?”

“No. I’m fine, thanks.” Garth continued along into the house.

Frank wondered if Sadie’s neck was also dirty. He’d have to check. And if Garth wasn’t cleaned up at bedtime he’d make him take a bath and clean out the tub afterwards.

Frank sat down in a shady spot and leaned against the old wood of his garage.

Greta had been taking care of herself reasonably well for forty-two years. She had a hugely successful baking business and as for her drinking, Frank figured he was probably just overly sensitive to it because of Denise. But he didn’t want Greta involved unless she had to be. She was so messy.

He also didn’t want to embroil the mysterious Jane Mallet in something unless it became necessary. And he hadn’t even met her yet. But it was time to find her; he had a feeling it wouldn’t be hard. He could start with the River City Health Centre.

In the 1960s when a baby was adopted, the names of the birth parents were still put on the adoption order. A copy of this order was given to the adoptive parents if they wanted it. Frank had checked. Greta had told him as much, but he didn’t put a lot of stock in what Greta said.

Frank pictured the adoption order filed in a shoe box of important papers high on a shelf in Mother Mallet’s closet. And young Jane, snooping as children do, through the mysteries of her mother’s fabrics and scents, for secrets better left alone.

Frank took off his shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from his eyes. It was too hot for this kind of work. He made a pillow out of his shirt and placed it behind his head. Now all he needed was a cold drink. He was going to have to have a shower before figuring out what to do about supper. Manual labour on such a hot day was a stupid idea. Frank felt as though he was full of stupid ideas.

Jane Mallet knew who her mother was. Frank didn’t doubt that. Nurse and happy marriage stories aside, he believed the basic information that Greta had given him: her daughter had been in touch. But why? She hadn’t wanted to get together with Greta, but she obviously knew where Greta lived if she had contacted her. That was a little odd.

Greta Bower was also a little odd and sometimes that ran in families. She was also a woman who had given away her child. Being given away was as good a reason as any for hating someone, Frank thought, for wanting to punish them. Perhaps Jane Mallet had placed her own dead baby in her mother’s rain barrel as a form of twisted revenge.

Emma held the screen door for Sadie, who balanced a tray containing a frosty glass of lemonade and three chocolate chip cookies, fresh from the oven. She approached her father carefully and didn’t spill a drop.

In her dream, Ivy can’t come clean. She showers and scrubs and showers again, but she can’t rid herself of the dirt. It comes from within. She sullies the world with her presence. Everything she touches is tainted with her filth.

Ivy Grace collects things with points. Dull points as in those eraser tubes where you pull a string to reveal more of the rubber. Sharp points as in scissors and pencils honed to nothing. Paper clips. Keys. Bottles. Bobby pins. Ornaments. Knives. Forks. Garden tools. Wieners. Licorice whips.

There are a couple of criteria: they have to be longer than they are wide and they have to be under a specific length. If one end is narrower than the other it is a bonus but not a necessity.

She finds these things and hides them in a satchel along with a length of heavy twine and some duct tape.

She doesn’t know why. It has something to do with the muddled Squeaks that she hears inside her head. The Squeaks come separately from the other voice, Gruck, the one that comes when she prays. The Squeaks lead her in directions that she isn’t aware of till after the fact.

For example: the duct tape. Where has it come from? She sees herself placing it carefully with her bag of pointed objects. But she can’t recall deciding she needed it or going to get it. The last thing she remembers is the Squeaks starting, and looking at her watch, she sees that was an hour and sixteen minutes ago. She has been lost inside the Squeaks for all that time and the result is a partially used roll of duct tape.

1960

“Shut up!” the mother shouts. It gets quiet then, too quiet, and she calls for her son. “Ray,” she calls. “Ray, come and see to your sister. The clumsy fool has fallen down the cellar stairs.”

Ray comes running from his bedroom, dread in his heart. He thinks his little sister is dead when he sees her motionless body at the bottom of the steps. In his panic Ray believes for a second it is possible for him to turn this thing around. One of her arms is askew. The elbow is facing the wrong way. He sees her other arm, twisted behind her back and realizes that it is broken too. Two wrecked arms, at the very least. He looks back over his shoulder at the mother who speaks through a cloud of smoke.

“Is she okay, Ray? I…I didn’t mean to push her so hard.”

Ray is afraid to touch her in case he causes more damage where there is already far too much. “Call an ambulance, Mum. Hurry up!”

“An ambulance,” she says. “Surely not.”

“An ambulance, Mum. Right now!”

The Present

Emma was a
Winnipeg Free Press
delivery person. Her job grew easier and more pleasant as summer approached. Some mornings were so clear and still that she wondered if they were real. Or if she was real in them. She often felt detached, disconnected from the life of the world. It was like looking at a picture in the art gallery and wishing she was in it. That happened sometimes. And it happened walking down Lyndale Drive on her paper route.

Why do I feel this way? she wondered. What’s holding me back? From the outside looking in I would probably appear to be a part of this scene. But I don’t feel it.

There were dog-walkers and exercise freaks in the early morning. She loved the dogs and some of the people weren’t so bad. There was a fluffy white dog named Easy who was her favourite. He was some elaborate purebred and should have been a snob, but what did he know? So he leapt and squealed and received Emma’s attentions just like the mongrels. The man who walked Easy was nice too. His name was Rupe. Emma liked sharing the mornings with these two.

Sometimes their cat came too. Emma envied them this. She wondered if she could teach her cat, Hugh, to follow along on her route. She doubted it.

It was after Easy and Rupe were out of sight that Emma noticed the long car with its closed windows creeping along behind her. It seemed out of place in the morning streets and normal people didn’t drive that slowly. Except for Gus, and this was no Buick. It worried her.

She wished Easy would appear again around the next bend in the road. Or even the Marlboro Man, as Emma had come to call him. He smoked while he walked and Emma got a kick out of him. But the Marlboro Man didn’t walk on Wednesdays.

She felt sure by now that the car was connected to her in some way. But she also worried that maybe she was just being paranoid. And she didn’t want to embarrass herself with her own dark imagination. Time and again she found herself imagining the worst. Picturing death and pain and closed-up spaces. And her dad going out the door into the rain and never coming home. She saw herself by his grave at a policeman’s funeral, where they would give her his badge or hat or whatever they presented the wife with. Because of course the wife wouldn’t be there. Just Emma. And Sadie and Garth. And then she alone would be responsible for them. It would be just her.

She finished up the last of her papers and started to make a beeline for home. The car had disappeared but still she felt uneasy and resented the urgent feeling that pushed her home in such a hurry. What was the point of being up at this hour if you couldn’t enjoy it?

Her wagon rattled along behind her till she turned into her own yard and abandoned it on the lawn.

“Hi, Mr. Olsen.” She waved to Gus who was digging in his front garden.

“Howdy, Emma. Beautiful morning, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She ran up the steps and into the house closing the door behind her against the cool spring air.

Nobody was up yet. This was the time that she usually spent reading her copy of the newspaper. But she didn’t feel like it today. Just the deaths to see if Esme Jones’ longer obituary had turned up yet. It hadn’t.

Gus had been thinking about the Lincoln Town Car from the other night. He couldn’t get it out of his head. He must make a point of speaking to Frank about it, although he realized what he had to say didn’t amount to much. Maybe he was making a mountain out of a molehill.

Such a wisp of a girl, he thought, when Emma turned into her yard. Thirteen she was, but she looked like a child still, with her pale features and slight frame. He didn’t doubt that she would blossom soon. It all happened so fast at that age. But she seemed slow physically and Gus figured that must be a relief for Frank. He could imagine the anguish of being the father of a beautiful daughter that first boys and then men couldn’t wait to get their hands on. Poor Frank.

Frank sat at his desk thinking about Jane Mallet. It was time to make a visit to the River City Health Centre. It had been called the River City Mental Hospital when Frank was a boy. And according to legend, it had started out as the River City Lunatic Asylum.

He drove a few miles south of the city to the grand old structure on the banks of the Red. It’d had its very own dike built after the flood of 1950. New wings had been added to the original building in the sixties and again in the eighties. Administration was still located in the old part. Frank knew this because his work as a policeman had brought him here before.

Frank loved old buildings. It was easy to pretend while he walked these halls that it was 1910 and he was sauntering toward the head nurse’s office to talk with her in her starched whites about the criminal lunatics under her care. He could be smoking a cigarette or even a cigar. Like Emma.

The head psychiatric nurse was new. Her name was Norma Wayne and she didn’t look anything like the nurse Frank had conjured up in his mind’s eye.

She didn’t try to hide her surprise when he inquired about a nurse named Jane Mallet.

“We don’t have a nurse here by that name but we do have a patient.” She pulled up Jane’s file on her computer screen.

“She’s been here a long time, our Jane.”

“How long?”

Nurse Wayne gave Frank a flirtatious smile but didn’t answer.

“Do you think I could have a copy of her file to take away with me?” Frank asked.

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No.”

She laughed. “Well then, no, you may not.”

“May I look at it while I’m here?”

“No. You may not.”

“How about if you read it to me, Ms. Wayne?”

She laughed again. “That sounds like the most fun idea so far but I’m afraid I can’t do that either. You know that, Inspector Foote.”

“Frank. Please call me Frank.”

“Okay, Frank. If you’ll call me Norma.”

Norma was willing to admit that there wasn’t any record of the patient having been pregnant. “But that doesn’t rule it out,” she said. “More than once at my former place of employment a baby popped out unannounced. It wouldn’t surprise me. No, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

Nurse Norma Wayne sighed and smoothed her red skirt over her thighs. She sat up straight at a table that didn’t really qualify as a desk in Frank’s opinion. There were no drawers. Where would you hide your stuff?

I guess head nurses don’t have to follow a dress code these days, he thought, as he took in the snugly fitting skirt and high heels. Far too high for a nurse. For any prairie person. They belonged in Bangkok.

“I’d be lying if I said we were able to keep an eye on all the patients all the time.” Norma leaned back in her chair. “We quite simply can’t. There aren’t enough of us and it’s getting worse.”

Frank could tell exactly what her breasts would look like naked. Nicely shaped, medium sized and supple.

She caught him before he had a chance to determine if he was seeing her nipples or just a trick of the material in her silk shirt.

She smiled as she adjusted her reading glasses on her toy soldier nose. Her nose was the one thing about her that wasn’t beautiful. It was a relief.

“Sometimes I think the old way, sterilizing patients, wasn’t as barbaric as they make it sound,” she said.

“It was a very small baby,” Frank said. “It wouldn’t have been hard to hide.”

He didn’t want to hear any more of Nurse Wayne’s opinions. He’d rather think about her nose. It looked exactly like the cylindrical pieces of wood glued onto the faces in Garth’s wooden soldier camp.

“Well, there you are, then.” She snipped off the words. “One more very small unwanted baby in the world.” She looked heavenwards, puffing a breath upwards so it lifted the fine hair of her bangs off her pretty forehead.

She smelled like licorice.

“I don’t know the half of it?” Frank guessed.

“You said it, Frank. You don’t know the half of it.”

“Would you mind checking to see if there was any trouble with Jane Mallet last October? Or if she had any passes out of here for a day or a weekend or whatever around that time?”

Frank pressed on. He had established by now that Norma Wayne was a blabbermouth. She had to work very hard at not giving Frank the information he wanted.

“Fra-ank.” She sang out his name. “You’re pushing me-ee.”

“Yes, Norma, I am.” He smiled.

“Okay. This is the last question I’m going to answer.” She fiddled on her keyboard. “Let’s see. Jane doesn’t get passes out of here. She could if there was someone to accompany her, but there isn’t. She’s a sad case, your Jane Mallet. She does go on excursions sometimes with a group from the hospital, swimming and whatnot. Those are fairly tightly supervised. Okay, October you say? No. No report of anything untoward.”

“Was she sick around then at all? Did anyone come to visit her?”

“I don’t know and I don’t know,” Nurse Wayne replied. “Look, Frank, I really can’t tell you anything else, unless you get the necessary paperwork. I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes while I see to a matter on one of the wards.” She winked. “I expect you to behave yourself while I’m gone.”

A printer sat on the table next to the computer. Frank got it going and stuffed his briefcase with as many pages of Jane’s life as he could before hearing Norma’s cheery voice in the outer office. He stopped printing and turned off the machine. It clicked and sputtered to a halt as the doorknob turned and she swished into the room. She left the door ajar this time. The visit was over.

Frank settled himself in his car and pulled the pages out of his briefcase. He read what he had.

Mr. and Mrs. Mallet had been killed in a car crash on the August long weekend in 1969, on their way to a rock festival near Denver. A couple of weeks before Woodstock, Frank thought. Too bad they hadn’t driven east instead of west.

The one-year-old girl, Jane, had been hurt but the file didn’t go into the nature of her injuries. After a lengthy hospital stay she was placed in a foster home while she awaited readoption. It never happened. Frank guessed that must have been because of the nature of her injuries; she was, after all, in a mental hospital. She spent the next seventeen years being shifted from foster home to foster home with the occasional stay in an institution.

The piece of paper, the order of adoption from 1968 with her birth mother’s name on it, must have followed along with her for a while, at least till she was old enough to read it and understand what it meant.

Grim, Frank thought. Very, very grim. Even without craziness bred in her bones or inflicted on her through injury, there was enough woe in the life of Jane Bower Mallet to turn her into a loon.

She had lived at River City for approximately nine years. She had admitted herself in the fall of ’86 and been here ever since.

Frank’s breath caught in his throat as he read on: In 1991 Jane Mallet had a complete hysterectomy after years of painful endometriosis.

So much for his hunch.

He found Jane in her room. She sat by a window gazing out at the big Manitoba sky. Frank wondered if it was the sky she saw or if she was looking at something else, a picture behind her eyes.

She turned around to look at him. She looked her age, twenty-seven, but there was something odd about her. Her skin was so smooth. There wasn’t a line or a ripple, Frank realized, on a face untroubled by years of decision making and responsibility that form a part of a normal person’s life. Her face was a blank.

Jane smiled like he was the only visitor she’d ever had. Her face lit up and Frank’s heart ached for this woman who was so alone through no fault of her own.

“Hello, Jane,” Frank said.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you the police?”

“Why yes, I am,” Frank said. “How did you know?”

“I know what you’re here for,” she said. “Are you going to arrest me?”

She talked slowly, haltingly, just as Greta had said, with lots of pauses.

“No, Jane dear, I certainly am not. Why would you think such a thing?”

“Because I lied,” she said. “I lied to my real mother when I told her I was a nurse, when I told her I was married.”

“Those are just tiny white lies, Jane. No one blames you for those. No. I just came to say hello really. I know your mother. She lives on my street. May I sit down a minute?”

Frank straddled a chair across from her and peered into her face. “Why did you write to your mother, Jane?” he asked. “Why did you phone her?”

“I dream about her. I dreamed her voice and I wanted to see if she really sounded that way, the way I dreamed.”

“And did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like to see your mother, Jane?”

“I don’t know.” She cast her eyes down. “Why are you looking at me?”

“You look a bit like your mother,” Frank said. “Just a bit.”

Frank would tell Greta about Jane; he was certain she would want to know. But not today. He was suddenly very tired today.