LITMIR.BIZ

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to Keith, Keith to Grand Boulevard — always the same roads. Chef was telling him about the threat of coyotes to small pets. She had a cat named Radar, as he well knew by now. He didn’t bother looking at her as she prattled on about cats and coyotes. His mind was on his own inner processes, his cold and airy nasal passages, the tightness of his face. His teeth ached, pushing against his jawbone. How odd that nobody noticed the changes coming over him. When would Chef look at him, finally, and gasp?

      Someday, he would take her up into the wilds, where she would be the helpless one, and he would be in control. He smiled, and his mind went back to his next painting. It would be a self-portrait in vermillion. He would bring his long face out from the trees for a change, into the foreground. It was time to show his teeth.

      Three

       THE GHOSTS OF SUBURBIA

      Dave Leith sat alone in a haunted house. The house didn’t belong to him, but to the people upstairs. He had been on the North Shore since April and in this place since August, with his wife Alison and young daughter Izzy — they were away this week visiting Alison’s family in Parksville. He knew he was lucky to have landed the main floor of this sizeable home, even if the rent was hemorrhaging his bank account. He should be grateful.

      Instead he was sulking. He sat on a dining room chair by the living room window, looking out at the rain splashing down on somebody else’s rising equity.

      The ghost in the walls groaned. He ignored it. This was a nearly new monster house in a nearly new neighbourhood, and as far as he knew, it had no gruesome history. He hadn’t believed the warnings of the landlord’s young daughter the day he and Alison moved in. The kid had watched as they carted things from the U-Haul down to the side entrance, and on one of his passes she had told him, “There are ghosts down there, you know.”

      He had thought it was cute. He’d smiled at the little girl like the big, brave man he was. But he had since heard the proof, usually late at night: the sighs and thuds of what could only be the residual angst of those who had passed on.

      Leith was itching to leave this house. Not because of the ghosts, which he could take or leave, but because he wanted a place of his own, a place with property pins, a lawn, a concrete pad for his barbecue. All his life he had been a freehold landowner. Then he’d moved to North Vancouver and found himself out of his depth. Getting a house here was out of the question. A condo, maybe. Renting was just plain brutal. This was his third move this year, always on the lookout for a better deal.

      His work cell rang, and he hoped it was the office wanting him to come in and do something. Anything. Sitting alone and listening to weird noises wasn’t fun.

      “Leith,” he said to his phone.

      The caller was Corporal Michelin Montgomery — known to staff as Monty. He was a silver-haired newcomer to the North Vancouver detachment, even newer than Leith. Unlike Leith, he had already made a ton of friends.

      “Dave, sorry to spring this on you,” Monty said. “Looks like we’ve got trouble in Lynn Valley. Up to you, really, but we’re going to be all over this tomorrow, and I thought you might want to have a first-hand look.”

      Leith jotted down the address, agreed to be on scene in twenty minutes, and disconnected.

      He was putting away his notebook when something moved along the floor toward him. He jumped to his feet, toppling his chair, and stared into the shadows of the haunted house.

      He looked down. Nothing but a large house spider scuttling along the floorboards. The spider was as startled as Leith was and had frozen in its tracks, waiting for this hell to pass.

      Leith killed the spider with the slap of a rolled-up Westworld magazine, knowing that for a big, brave man, he had leaped fairly high. Not a good start to a new homicide. He stuck the mess in the kitchen waste bin, then fetched his fleece-lined RCMP jacket off its hook and headed out the door.

      * * *

      The rain poured on Lynn Valley. On a little spur of road that jutted up into the trees, out of line with the well laid-out suburbs, stood the subject house — behind the high fence that hid it. The spur of road was named Greer. Lynn Valley Road, intersecting Greer, was jammed with police vehicles. A handful of concerned citizens were out in their raincoats, talking to RCMP members about what the heck was going on here.

      Leith popped open his umbrella and made his way through an open gate and into a yard. The yard was big by North Vancouver standards, he saw. There were several ugly trees growing here, leafless and hairy, throwing spooky shadows. The branches seemed polka-dotted with withered apples hardly bigger than cherries. An old orchard, maybe, though North Van was anything but fruit-growing country.

      Light dazzled his eyes. A heaved cement path led to a front porch, but the action seemed to be at the side of the house. He left the path and crossed a stretch of soggy turf to join Corporal Montgomery and others in their rain capes. JD Temple was present, he was glad to see. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head and framed her face so that her eyes seemed larger than usual.

      LED torches cranked high and spiked into the turf directed splashy light onto the side of the house and all around, the beams fanning out to make rain and faces sparkle. The group was looking toward the house, not up at its boarded windows, but down at its foundations. Leith followed the general line of sight and saw that where concrete met dirt was a man-sized hole. It looked to him like a poorly installed access hatch had rotted out some years ago, allowing in the elements.

      “Shabby,” he said. He’d been in the construction trade for a few years before joining the force, and he knew everything there was to know about foundations.

      “Looks like the hole was covered with that bit of plywood, but it’s fallen down,” JD said. She pointed out the piece of wood half-buried in mud and a scattering of largish rocks that had maybe propped it up.

      “Or dogs smelled something fishy and got at it,” Leith said. Dogs weren’t supposed to run off leash in the city, but sometimes they got away.

      He could see water pooling in the dirt around the hole, building up and spilling into the crawl space. From the blackness within, a vague light shifted and flickered.

      “The cause of all this fuss is in a duffel bag,” Monty said. “Ident’s in there, just checking if it’s human. In which case we got a problem, ’cause Dad sure isn’t going to fit through that hole.”

      Dad, Leith interpreted — as he’d had to time and again since his arrival in North Vancouver — was Jack Dadd, the overweight coroner. Gauging the hole in the foundations now, he could see the problem. The wind shifted, and he could smell death.

      “Freaky place,” JD said. She was looking up into the stark branches of the trees, the unappetizing fruit that hung there. “What can you grow in this part of the world? Crab apples?”

      Monty looked around, too, but with something like admiration. “One week to Halloween, what a setting for a zombie bash. Great whadyacallit, ambience. Which reminds me —”

      A grunt from the base of the house interrupted whatever Monty was reminded of, and Leith watched a white-suited Ident tech squirm from the hole — like a weird birthing — and into the hard beam of the floodlight. The tech made it to his feet and approached the detectives, removing his mask and spitting into the grasses.

      “Yeah, well,” he said to Monty, “it’s a body, all right. Been there a while. Lying in a puddle. We got some pictures, but didn’t want to mess around too much. What d’you want us to do? Leave it as is, or haul it out?”

      “How fragile is it?” asked JD. “Are we going to rearrange the anatomy if we move it?”

      “I think we’ll get it out pretty clean.” The tech looked back at the foundations with a tradesman’s squint. “Shift it onto a tarp, pull it out slow. We got a clear path, no obstacles. I don’t see a problem.”

      “It’s either that or a Jack-hammer,” Monty said.

      Both

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