Grave Concern, page 18
Next, Kate would consider a complete change of career — offering balloon rides to valley tourists, say, or driving taxi, or expanding her grave-tending business to graveyards up and down the valley — before dismissing these as unrealistic, in that she was fond neither of heights nor of extended periods spent in cars. These options thus dismissed, Kate would then consider how long Gwyneth Waters could possibly hold out at Flower Power. Maybe Kate could buy out Gwyneth and do what was needed: a much better job. Sadly, though, other than perpetual exasperation with suppliers (and everyone else), Gwyneth had shown not the least desire to quit. Corporate takeover, indeed.
And thus was Kate inevitably led to a very dark place: the prospect of a salaried job. She’d try to picture herself in hospital administration or ensconced in the clerk’s taupe leather chair up at Town Hall. But these scenarios just didn’t ring true. Why? The simplest explanation was the jobs were taken. But the nut of it was that Kate, at this stage of life, could no longer bear the thought of working for someone else.
Thus was Kate’s mental course run, ending predictably where it had begun.
Having completed the circle yet again and with the same depressing result, Kate, like any unhappy addict, found herself falling off a suddenly rickety wagon. In Kate’s case, that wagon was abstention from the past. Launching her web browser, Kate informed Herr Professor Google of her wish to examine the local scene between 1976 and 1992, that is, between when she’d met J.P and his death. Of the dog’s breakfast that came up on the screen, Kate chose one of several links to The Pine Rapids News, hoping to find stories related to the King’s Hotel fire and subsequent trial. What turned up was a mishmash of front-page articles — titles only, neither archived nor indexed — and little else. Where were the librarians when you needed them?
And then the strangest thing happened. The cursor began moving on its own. She kept trying to click a link, but the cursor wouldn’t co-operate. It had a mind of its own. Kate had experienced this once before, when her computer guy down in Valleyview had somehow tapped into her screen to show her how to use the tools there. Like magic, the way he’d moved the little arrow around, pointing out boxes and opening windows. But this was different. Kate hadn’t called anyone. A rogue cursor was loose in cyberspace, closing out links as fast as she could open them. Each time she tried to reactivate a link, it disappeared. Kate returned to the original web page. Not a single link remained.
Kate nearly jumped out of her skin. Someone barging in her office door. Gupta stuck out his hand. “Mr. Prakash Gupta. We met each other at Longshots; you remember?”
“Oh. Right.” Kate wiped a swirl of drool from her cheek. She must have fallen asleep on her desk.
“Listen, Miss Kate. I will not beat around the bush.”
“Thank God for that,” Kate said.
“May I?” Gupta indicated the chair.
“Be my guest.”
Gupta’s his eye caught the poster on the wall behind her head. “ ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.’ Ha! You write that?”
Kate smiled in an energy-conserving way; that is, not too much. It was just too hot. “Only wish I did.”
“Oh.” Gupta looked disappointed, but forged on, “Miss Smithers, I am cognizant of fact we are not knowing each other well. My family is quite new in town. Only three years. Perhaps you are remembering us at Gupta Gas-and-Wash.”
Kate, feeling overwhelmed, did not acknowledge this either way.
“I am coming here to do you a favour, I hope so. At Longshots Bar, I was trying to warn you off, you see. To keep you away from the graveyard. It might be dangerous, you see, Miss. We are a group that is concerned about some wild beast in the area.”
Kate’s yawn, this time legitimate, could not have been timed better. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Gupta looked surprised, but went on. “I’d like to tell you, if I could, a little story.”
“Day’s shot anyway,” Kate said rather rudely. “Go right ahead.”
With some caution, Gupta proceeded with his tale. “In the town where I came up, in India, when I was about twelve years old, an old woman with a bad leg my mother knew was on her way home under a load of fuel, when she was most cruelly attacked and killed. Even some of her body was eaten. A man-eating tiger, you see, stalking our village. Everyone was afraid. Oh, extremely afraid, terrified. They sent out a hunting party to look for the offender, to try to kill the beast. I begged to go with them but unhappily my father wouldn’t allow.
“Now it so happens Uncle was a falconer. He kept a number of falcons for bird-hunting, as a sport, you see. One of them once caught a bird, a raven, which had gone astray from its course, blown down from somewhere up in high Himalaya. This bird was not dead but half-alive. My uncle had no use for it, and therefore my aunt, taking pity, nursed it up to good health.”
Kate was half-intrigued, half-stupefied. Her eyes began gently to close, which Mr. Gupta politely ignored.
“Meanwhile, another victim, this time a child, was taken by that ravenous tiger. The village went beyond terror. Now the people were like fire, white-hot with tiger-anger. My aunt was known in those parts as having some special power. Not a witch, exactly. But she could talk to the animals, make crops and flowers grow better than the neighbours. Hunters tried with no success for a week to locate the tiger. My aunt whispered something into that raven’s ear and off it flew into jungle. The villagers could hear it calling, and followed it, as my aunt told them to do.
“That very day, the village men returned triumphant, the tiger slung on a heavy pole on their shoulders, dead.”
Kate opened her eyes, incredulous. “That’s it? The end of the story?”
Gupta inclined his head and blinked his eyes, which Kate took as a yes.
“And what am I supposed to take from this?” she said.
“As I told you, I was not allowed along with the men. But I believe the hunters’ success was due to raven. My mother told us children that raven called tiger to its tree. All the men had to do was wait.”
“And why are you telling me this?” said Kate.
“That young boy swore at that time he would never let another such opportunity slip by,” Gupta said. “And indeed he has not.”
“But — ”
Gupta hastily interrupted Kate’s half-voiced objection. “But I myself am not bloodthirsty,” he said. “I am not in favour of killing for its own sake. Oh no. It is the hunt, the chase, that interests me. And this beast, this whatever-it-is, has done no harm here in Pine Rapids.”
Hmmm, thought Kate, Ned Nickers of the bloody withers would beg to differ. But Gupta wouldn’t know about that. And she was not about to enlighten him.
“I’ll ask again,” said Kate. “Why are you telling me this, fascinating as it is?”
“I wanted to explain, you see, about our group. Some of them are going one way, some the other.”
“You mean, some want to shoot to kill.”
Gupta bobbed his head again. “And then there is Nicholas Enderby.”
“What do you mean ‘then there is’?” asked Kate.
“He is what you call here a ‘loose cannon.’ Do you agree?”
“Didn’t we cover this already at the bar?” Kate said, confused. “You said he’s a CO.”
“Conservation officer. Indeed. But is he more, is what I’m eager to know.”
Kate’s headache, which had abated during her nap, now came roaring back. Her suspicion meter oscillated like mad. What was Gupta getting at?
“I believe,” Gupta went on, “from what others say, you knew him well as a child. You knew his connections, his motives. A man’s true nature can quite often be read in who he was as a young man.”
Kate perked up. “ ‘The child is father of the man.’ ”
Gupta’s eyes lit up. “Wordsworth! We learned in school back home!” He began to emote, and Kate found herself joining in:
“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”
There was a long pause as each was moved to reflect on their separate poetic pasts. Kate was the first to break the silence. “Yeah, I hear ya. But let’s face it, it’s been years. I don’t know Nicholas that well anymore.”
“Miss Kate Smithers, I’m asking you. Begging. What does this Nicholas have up his sleeve?”
“Well, I hate to disappoint, but with Nicholas I’d guess mainly an arm,” said Kate. “What I knew of him, he’s pretty genuine. He’s probably just doing his job. Saving the wildlife, or whatever.” Kate watched Gupta’s earnest face. “Why? What’s so urgent?”
“Please keep it mum, Kate, what I am going to tell you. We have, or had, regular Friday night meetings.”
“Oh, really?” said Kate.
“At the cemetery.”
“You don’t say.”
Gupta looked at her queerly. “So after finishing up the last time, all going back to our vehicles, I forgot my water bottle and returned. Nicholas appeared, well, in a compromising position.”
“You’re kidding me. A woman?”
“No, no. Not at all. Nicholas was … acting most unusual, as though waiting for something.”
Now Kate was really confused. Hadn’t they all been waiting for something? Wasn’t that why the men were meeting in the first place? For a guy who wasn’t beating around the bush, it seemed like Prakash Gupta was having an awfully hard time bashing through.
“Waiting for something, eh?”
Again, the head-bob.
“Like a spy waiting for a contact to show up?”
Now Gupta looked confused.
What the hell, she’d just say it. “Not waiting for something feline to appear?”
Gupta started at the mention of cat, but quickly recovered. “No. More like … I don’t know … you’ll think it weird.”
“I’ve heard weird,” said Kate in a bored voice, a false ennui she’d found useful to elicit information in the past.
“He kept glancing up, Kate. It was — it was like he was watching for something in the sky.”
Kate’s hands flew to her mouth “Oh, no! You don’t mean aliens!”
“What? No, no,” Gupta said.
“What then?” said Kate, rearranging her face into a serious expression.
“No idea. I hoped, as you were seen talking to him — ”
And there it was, thought Kate, Pine Rapids in a nutshell.
“ — you might have some information.”
“Only wish I had, Mr. Gupta. So what’s this about the merry band of men breaking up?”
“Some want to get rid of danger altogether.”
“Shoot it, you mean.”
“While others, Buck Miller and myself, Mr. P. Gupta, not so much. We simply want to know what is going on.”
“Going on? Like what kind of ‘going on’?”
Gupta lowered his voice to a whisper. “It is rumoured danger is not, as my son is saying, random. Some villagers say MNR is behind. Not only now but for many years past. And now it is all coming around again, like bad karma.”
“MNR’s behind what?”
“The danger. With all due respect, am I very difficult to understand?”
“Look, sorry,” said Kate. “It’s just I’ve got a crashing headache and it’s been a ‘no-good, horrible, very bad day,’ to quote something or other.”
“Ah!” said Gupta, his eyes lighting up. “A children’s book, correct? My daughter loved this book when she was little.”
“Glad to hear it. Look, Mr. Gupta, I’m going to go home and have a long, not-too-hot bath and a glass of uh, rosé, I think, on this hot a day, and think over everything you’ve said. Thank you for your, uh, concern.”
Gupta stood up from the chair, and ambled toward the door.
“Oh, and I completely forgot. I’ve been meaning to ask you about.”
Kate’s tank was nearly drained. “Yes.”
“Just a little thing I noticed. My mother’s grave. You remember, she passed away not long after we arrived in your beautiful town.”
Kate tried the head waggle as a kind of neutral response. She didn’t remember a mother at all. But now she thought about it, there was a Gupta stone in the graveyard. She’d never put two and two together.
“Well, I must tell you what I noticed, Miss Smithers, the last time we went up to pay our respects.”
“I’m all ears.”
Gupta’s brow furrowed, but he went on. “The flowers we had placed had disappeared.”
“Not unusual,” said Kate. “Town workers take away the old, dead bouquets sometimes when they’re cutting the grass.”
“But these were not old. And they were fox.”
“Fox? Oh, foxglove! A natural bouquet; how nice.”
Gupta picked up a Grave Concern brochure and began twisting it in his hands. “No. I mean ‘fauks.’ You know, silk. They have such ones at the dollar store.”
“Ahhhh,” said Kate. “Faux. Got ya. Fake, it means.”
“Although looking very real. There was one particularly, a yellow rose, Aama’s favourite …” Was Gupta tearing up?
“I, I’m sorry, Mr. Gupta. I’ve no idea where the flowers went. I’ll keep an eye out next time I’m up. I think your mother’s grave is on the north side, there? Perhaps they got blown into the trees by the wind.”
Gupta’s grimace was half-pained, half-skeptical. “Perhaps,” he said and left.
When Kate woke up, she was in her own bed. With the worst headache she’d ever had. It’s not like she’d drunk that much from J.P.’s mickey. Had she?
Torturous sunlight streamed in her window, and the clock said 2:15 p.m. She’d slept right into the afternoon. Had last night’s events really taken place? Or was it all just an extraordinarily vivid dream? Kate rolled over — an electric pain shot up behind her ear — and peered under the bed. If the army coat was there, she would have her answer.
It was. Keeping as still as possible, so as not to dislodge the large boulder in her skull, Kate got up and locked her bedroom door, then dragged the coat from its dusty lair. She brought the rough boiled wool to her face: sweat and cigarettes. She inhaled again. Wood resin: spruce?
There was no way she could use the coat again — questions would be asked. She would either have to get it back to J.P. or hide it away. No way she would throw it out; that would be like throwing out their time together.
She tucked it back under the bed. And lay — carefully — down.
Kate persisted in querying Nicholas. Did J.P. ever mention her? Did Nicholas ever bring up Kate with him? Could he, please?
“Okay, if you really want,” Nicholas said. He hadn’t said a word to Kate about J.P. saving his life. He figured that would just clinch her hero worship. She would build it into her dream like a castle of light. “Give me a week.”
He knew exactly what Kate was thinking as he spoke: Good old Nick — quiet, straight up, devoted. Nick won’t let me down.
Did she have any idea what it cost him, running go-between?
Kate lay in her coolish bath and worked on the last problem first. What exactly was Gupta getting at? The missing bouquet was a puzzle, she had to admit. But the crazy story of the tiger and the raven: What was the point of that? And the rift in the posse of cougar hunters — why was he telling her this? Simple altruism, or was there an agenda?
Gupta had asked her about Nicholas’s character, and she had answered as honestly as she could. Still, what did she really know of Link’s present life? He had always been a straight arrow; if he’d shown any evidence of change, she would have been first in line to take advantage. Gupta was worried about Nicholas’s interest in the sky. Could Nicholas not simply have been reading the clouds? Would the weather have some significant impact on cougar movement? Unlikely. Gupta believed Nicholas was waiting for something. A helicopter, perhaps? More MNR support? Had he called in airborne trackers? Less likely still, Kate thought.
Kate was getting nowhere with this. She slid completely under the water and blew some bubbles. She opened her eyes and looked up. A transparent skin of water separated her from the world above. As Kate was wont to do in the bath, she played with ideas, experimented with possibilities, or impossibilities. A transparent skin. What if such a skin existed between this world and the next, or, in Leonard’s quantum language, between this world and its alternates? The main difference Kate could see between old-time religion and quantum physics was in how they imagined time. Religious intuition through millennia had created a “hereafter,” effectively stacking one life on top of another like caskets in an overcrowded cemetery, following one after another in linear time. In the quantum view, multitudinous variations of a life worked themselves out side by side from the outset, coexisting in parallel.
What if, as in her bath, a transparent skin were all that stood between life now and the life beyond, between one’s existence here and everywhere? Of what did that skin consist? Could its membrane be ruptured? Would one break through in a particular location, a graveyard, for instance? Or was the membrane perhaps temporal — consisting of something common to present and future, or (now Kate was really excited) present and past?
