Crazy Lady Read online

“In that case we have a responsibility to find her ourselves,” proclaims Trina loftily and loudly as she snatches the guinea pig back from Rick. “This lot couldn’t find the hole in a donut.”

  “Are you quite sure you saw a woman?” asks Rick once Sergeant Brougham has angrily ushered them outside, where they shelter under a dripping arbutus tree to await the arrival of the remnants of Trina’s Volkswagen. “Only it was raining and almost dark. Perhaps it was a deer or a —”

  “It was a woman,” cuts in Trina defiantly. “She dropped her coat. She even said something about being saved by someone or other.”

  Janet Thurgood is still leaning on her Saviour for protection as she huddles from the cold dampness of the British Columbian autumn in a dark doorway. The lost coat should concern her, but she has sunk inside her mind, seeking answers from the past as well as the road that will lead her to the present. But there is a gaping hole in her memory — someone has ripped the centre out of her life’s scrapbook — and the hole is growing, and has been growing for sometime.

  “255 Arundel Crescent…”

  I know that. I know where I used to live. But it’s gone. Can’t you see that? Everything’s gone.

  “What came after then?”

  I can’t remember.

  “Think… think… think. First there was 255 Arundel Crescent…”

  With Mummy and Daddy…

  “Yes. Now go back. What do you remember?”

  Daddy hated me.

  “He wanted a boy. He would’ve liked that.”

  Joseph liked me.

  “Yes… yes… yes. Now go deeper. Who was Joseph? What did he look like?”

  I can’t remem… was he… I can’t remember. I can’t remember.

  “What’s up, lady?”

  Janet’s eyes open in alarm. A bagman leaning over a loaded supermarket buggy waits for a reply.

  It’s nearly eight o’clock, and the homeless have taken over: ghostly cloaked figures drifting soundlessly through the alleyways of Vancouver as they scavenge the detritus for a bottle of nirvana. Janet scrunches herself further into the corner and watches several men — grey-bearded cadavers of men all similarly beaten into the same haggard, hunched form — wanting to question, “Are you Jesus?”

  “I asked, like, who are you?” continues the bagman, then he drags a black garbage bag of clothing from his buggy. “Try these. They’ll keep you warm.”

  “Are you Jesus?” she asks, peering deeply into his lifeless eyes. He grins — a single-toothed grin that turns him into a caricature of a leering maniac — then laughs at the alarm on Janet’s face. There was a time… he thinks to himself, vaguely recalling an earlier life in a better world, but his memory is as clouded as Janet’s and, as he shuffles away, his laughter turns to a harsh cough.

  The clothes were a teenager’s donation to Children’s Aid until the vagrant did his daily round. Janet’s withered frame doesn’t overly stretch the modern garments, although the sight of a skinny sixty-one-year-old in baggy cargo pants, ripped Nike running shoes, and a T-shirt screaming “Eminem Fuckin’ Raps” turns a few heads as Janet resumes her search.

  The roadway to her past is there, she’s certain, but her mind is as fuzzy as a blurred windshield and she sees only isolated visions — visions that are startlingly clear, frighteningly clear, and she’s always running: running, terrified, from a perpetually angry father; on the run from her first Girl Guide camp after two tear-filled days and nights; running from schoolyard bullies; from unbelievers; from boys; from responsibilities. And at eighteen, running from her parents into the arms of a man — a married man. Then running back home in tears, pregnant, to a father who slammed the door in her face. On the run again, knocking on the door of a church — a church unsympathetic to harlots and home wreckers, and another door slammed in her face.

  Nothing makes sense as Janet wanders the grimy side of Vancouver that is kept out of the tourist brochures and off the tour guides’ schedules. If only she could find Mrs. Jenson’s sweet shop or even St. Stephen’s in the Vale parish church. But the twenty-first-century Canadian streets confuse her. The cars, quiet and fast, flow like a river of molten steel. Lights, bright and flashing, remind her of Christmas, and a store full of televisions mesmerizes her: movies, she assumes, though she’s not seen one in nearly forty years — not a real one, not like the ones they showed at The Odeon in Dewminster Market Square in her youth.

  “A window on Hell,” Janet’s mother told her whenever she protested that all her friends spent Saturday afternoons with Roy Rogers and Buster Keaton.

  The nearest she came to a movie in those far-off days was when a church missionary set up a flimsy screen in front of the altar, annoying a crusty churchwarden who considered it sacrilegious to block God’s view of His congregation, and showed grainy images from a 35-millimetre projector: little black boys wearing starched white shirts with ties, and skirted girls with spindly black legs and bright head scarves, their toothy grins showing delight as they marched down the aisle of a palm-roofed hut to signify their conversion to God. But which God? Whose God?

  “Why doesn’t God like seeing girls’ hair?” earned Janet a rap on the knuckles from Mr. Gibbons, the Sunday school teacher, and she seriously considered becoming a Roman Catholic until she discovered that their God seemed to have a similar aversion.

  Janet spots her reflection in the television store window and instinctively checks her head scarf. “Thank God,” she murmurs, though she questions the identity of the waiflike woman wearing it. “Who are you?” she asks and is surprised to see the woman’s lips moving in unison. “Mother?” she questions.

  In many ways, Janet has become her mother, a fearful woman devoted to God but lost to the world who slaved in the service of a man as required by her marriage vows.

  “Listen to your father… Do what your father says… Your father knows best… He must be obeyed,” Janet’s mother always said, using the same words her mother drilled into her as a child, and her mother’s mother before her. And then: “Listen to your husband… Do what your husband says… Your husband knows best… He must be obeyed.”

  And after that: “Listen to God… Do what God says… God knows best… He must be obeyed.” In Janet’s childhood world, political correctness was a thing of the future — God was still indisputably a man.

  With the growing feeling that her God was no longer on her side, and with a baby swelling inside her, Janet had thrown herself on the mercy of another man: Joseph C. Creston, a shy, pious young man, a man — a pimply youth, really — who, she was well aware, had lusted after her from the choir stalls throughout puberty.

  “That’s the third one this year,” complains Rick Button an hour later as he and Trina survey the debris of the Jetta in the police pound.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” she is protesting as she begins rummaging through the wrecked vehicle to retrieve her personal belongings, then she spots an unfamiliar garment bundled onto the back seat by the tow truck driver. “Yes!” she screeches triumphantly as she drags out Janet’s sodden raincoat and examines it in the headlights of Rick’s car.

  “Yes what?” inquires Rick.

  “I told you she dropped her coat,” Trina says as she fingers the wet material, searches the pockets, and comes up with a bronze crucifix bearing a figure worn smooth by years of veneration.

  “We’d better give it to Sergeant Brougham,” suggests Rick, taking a look at the aged icon, but Trina is shaking her head.

  “Not likely. Remember what happened when I turned in a stray goat.”

  “That was different,” protests Rick. “It was a wild animal.”

  But Trina doesn’t agree. “They still had no right to do that to it. And then there was the time I warned them about the anthrax in Wal-Mart.”

  “It was just a leaky packet of talcum powder.”

  “Yeah. But they had no right to strip-search me.”

  “Decontamination. They stripped everyone, Trina… mainly because you were running
around shouting, ‘I’m a nurse — we’re all gonna die.’”

  “Look. It comes apart,” says Trina, anxious to move on as she unscrews the base of the small metal crucifix and spots the end of a paper cylinder tucked into the upright of the cross.

  “This belongs to Janet Thurgood. 255 Arundel Crescent, Dewminster, Hampshire,” she reads once she had slipped the sepia roll from the inside.

  “What’s that?” asks Rick, looking over her shoulder.

  “Our first case.”

  “Whose case? What case? What are you talking about?”

  “Lovelace and Button, International Investigators,” she says, as if Rick should have remembered the zany scheme she cooked up with her elderly English friend following an escapade in the mountains of Washington State. “I’d better phone Daphne and let her know we’re in business.”

  “In business? I thought you were joking.”

  “No joke,” says Trina as she flicks open her cell-phone, but Rick clamps his hand over the keypad and points to his watch.

  “Whoops!” exclaims Trina realizing that it’s four in the morning across the Atlantic in sleepy Westchester, home of retired wartime agent Daphne Lovelace. “I’d better wait till tomorrow.”

  “Surely you need a licence or something to be an investigator,” protests Rick. “You can’t just go around snooping…” But he knows he’s wasting his time; Trina has spent her life delving through other people’s garbage, both physical and psychological, and will leave no stone unturned to get at the truth.

  Answers are also being sought in the untimely death of Constable Roddick Montgomery. The suspected murder of a serving officer has galvanized the police community with as much fervour as the threat of an overtime freeze. Cruisers have been drawn from all over the city. The area surrounding the Mandarin Palace has been sealed off for several blocks, while officers trudge through the muddy back alleys rounding up the usual suspects: pimps, pan-handlers, hookers, and dealers. The fact that the officer’s demise occurred in a seedy back alley of Chinatown is sufficient confirmation of foul play. The possibility that it could have been natural causes is not even considered by his colleagues.

  Montgomery’s final radio message describing Janet Thurgood has yet to be associated with his death. Indeed, if Charley Cho hadn’t phoned to complain that someone had dived, headfirst, into his fish tank, the death of Montgomery might have gone unnoticed until shift handover at 10:00 p.m.

  “Come on,” says Rick, peering at the shivery creature in Trina’s arms. “Let’s get you home.”

  “But what about Janet?” demands Trina as they drive away.

  “Who?”

  “Janet. The woman.”

  “Forget it, Trina. Like the sergeant said, she obviously didn’t want to be caught.”

  “That’s not the point. Now that I’ve got her coat and I know her name I kinda feel responsible for her.”

  “You’ve got to get over this idea that everyone needs your help. Some people manage quite well on their own.”

  Droplets of tears glisten on Trina’s cheeks, her lips quiver, and she clutches the guinea pig tightly — too tightly, but she’s determined not to say anything. Then Rick comes to his senses.

  “All right,” he concedes, U-turning, “where did you last see her?”

  “Yes!” she exclaims triumphantly, and the furry creature makes a break for freedom and heads for the dark corner under Rick’s feet.

  chapter two

  Janet is prowling Trina’s luxurious basement suite, keeping pace with the guinea pig in the cage on the corner table, though she doesn’t realize it, and she’s thinking of running again; if only she could remember how to get home. The sopping clothes given to her by the bagman have been replaced by dry ones from Trina’s closet, but while the lost woman is about as meaty as a wire clothes hanger, Trina is only a notch or two short of voluptuous, and Janet is forced to hold both the clothes and herself in place with folded matchstick arms. She has slept little and eaten less.

  “You have to keep up your strength,” Trina insisted the previous evening as she laid out a smorgasbord of delicacies filched from the Christmas goodies that she has been laying away since Thanksgiving.

  Janet eyes smoked salmon sandwiches, banana cream chocolates, and marzipan fruits, muttering, “The Devil’s poison,” and her brow is furrowed as she warily glides a hand over the television, computer, and stereo, as if she is a time traveller beamed in from the past or, possibly, the future.

  “Where am I? Where am I?” she repeatedly intones as she searches the room for anything to give her a grounding.

  Janet’s temporary domicile is also a concern for Trina.

  “Just make sure she’s gone by the time I get home from the office,” Rick said on his way out of the door. “I’ve warned you before about bringing your work home and filling the house with strays.”

  “She’s not one of my patients,” declared Trina angrily, then she softened and gave him a placatory kiss. “Don’t worry. I’ll call Mike Phillips again. He’ll know what to do.”

  “He’d better, Trina. Either she goes by this evening or I will.”

  “Just remember,” warned Trina with a finger in Rick’s face, “you said that about the goat, and look what happened to him.”

  “How could I forget,” said Rick, laughing. “But if a Vancouver cop slits Janet’s throat and sticks her on a barbecue we’ll report him to the humane society. OK?”

  Inspector Mike Phillips of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has never swallowed the force’s mantra, and he has just as many failures as successes to show for his twenty-year career. And although it is barely eight-thirty, today looks like another check in the negative column as he scrutinizes the pathologist’s preliminary report into the sudden death of Constable Roddick Montgomery.

  “Heart attack,” he mutters with a tone of disappointment, though the marks on the dead man’s hand left by Janet’s fingernails caught the mortician’s eye and suggest that the deceased officer was engaged in some kind of struggle prior to his dramatic plunge.

  “If someone attacked him and he died as a result,” explains Sergeant Brougham on a technicality, “it would still be homicide.”

  “That’s true —” begins Phillips, but he’s interrupted by his personal cellphone.

  “She seems to be a bit of a stray,” explains Trina Button once the pleasantries are over.

  “You could try the pound, then,” jokes Phillips and catches a rebuke. “All right,” he relents, grabbing a pen. “Give me her name. Who is she?”

  “An angel.”

  “What? Come along, Trina, I don’t have time to play. The Vancouver City boys have called me in to investigate one of their officer’s deaths.”

  Trina stalls for a second, knowing that she’s about to stretch. “OK, Mike. She says her name is Daena the fifteenth, though she insists it has to be written in roman numerals, like Daena XV.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “It’s what she believes.”

  “Sometimes I believe I sing Verdi’s La Traviata just like Pavarotti — just don’t ask my wife.”

  Trina laughs. “Knowing how much Ruth loves you she probably thinks you sound better than him, but actually I think the woman is Janet Thurgood, originally from England, though she denies it.”

  “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Date of birth?”

  “Ah… I don’t…”

  “Look, Trina. Missing persons in Vancouver are the City police problem. Sergeant Brougham is with me now. Give him the details —”

  “He’ll reckon he’s too busy dealing with accidents and things,” Trina sneers, as if she was in no way responsible for the previous evening’s snarl-up. “Anyway, his lot couldn’t detect a bad smell in a bathroom.”

  “Trina!”

  “I suppose I could try Raven. She’ll know.”

  “Raven?” queries Phillips.

  “You remember — the psychic who told your wife she’d won the lottery.�
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  “And she was right.”

  “I know. But she also told me I wasn’t gonna get hit by a bus.”

  “And were you?”

  “No. But I was bowled over by a kid on a bike. It’s just as painful.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” promises Phillips once he’s elicited a brief description of Janet. “But you really should hand her over to the Vancouver authorities.”

  “Not likely. I handed over a lost goat once and they ate it,” Trina says snidely. “Anyway, she’s scared of authority. She’ll probably run again.”

  “Trina, be careful,” warns Phillips, suddenly concerned. “Maybe she’s on the lam from a loonie bin.”

  It’s a good job I kick-box, thinks Trina as she puts down the phone. And she takes a practice leap at the kitchen door as fifteen-year-old Rob throws a cereal bowl on the table and heads for the fridge saying, “Who’s the skeleton in the basement, Mum?”

  “Oh. You mean Sister Mary?” jests Trina, straight-faced. “She’s the new animal trainer: guinea pigs and uncouth teenagers.”

  Rob stops in thought, just for second. “Grow up, Mum.”

  “Touché. Anyway, what were you doing in the basement?”

  “Watching television — Ky took mine.”

  “Right. That’s it,” seethes Trina, then she screeches to the ceiling, “Kylie Button, you’re grounded.”

  “Mum. Forget it,” says Rob. “She’s already grounded, remember? No TV, no boys, no emails, cellphone, or texts. So she just takes mine.”

  “OK. So what’s our visitor doing?”

  “I think Bart Simpson freaked her out.”

  “Trust you,” mutters Trina, picking up Janet’s crucifix and making for the basement. “And tell your sister to get a move on or I won’t drive you to school.”

  “Fine with me,” replies Rob as Trina heads downstairs wondering whether or not it might be more sensible to give her teenagers a day at home as backup.

  Janet leaps up from the television like a kid caught with his hand in his pants, and Trina switches it off, lightly saying, “It’s all a load of garbage” as she tries to calm the woman with a hand, but Janet backs away until she hits the wall. The fearful woman’s salt and pepper hair, scraped sternly back from her forehead, hangs like a frayed sisal rope down her back, although it is more knotted than plaited. And her pinched features and faded brown head scarf, as tight as a tourniquet across her forehead and around her face, have Trina thinking of a bald-headed buzzard.