Last Song Sung. David A. Poulsen
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I heard, “Hey, cowboy,” after she picked up. “How’s the spying going?”
“Okay,” I said. “Kennedy’s left for the airport. I’ve been checking the place out. The crazy part is that I can picture myself actually being sort of busy between watching, recording what I see, and checking the tapes to look at what I missed.”
“No, sweetheart,” Jill countered, “that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is that you’re in a virtual stranger’s house looking for a clue into something that happened twenty-four years ago.”
“I guess,” I said.
She paused. “I’m sorry. It’s not right that I’m making light of it. I honestly feel terrible for that poor man who has given up his life for this. And I’m glad you called. I was kind of worried about you. Everything’s okay over there?”
“Everything’s fine,” I assured her. “I mean, this feels weird to me too, but I wanted to do this for the guy so he can be with his wife. And what’s weirdest of all, it feels like fishing. You sit there, you haven’t had a bite for hours, but you keep looking at your line in the water like at any second some fish is going to grab the hook, and bingo, you got ’im.”
“And you think you might see someone who could be the guy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean no, I don’t really believe that. But I also find it impossible to say I’m not going to see someone. That’s the fishing part. I guess that’s how it must be for Kennedy. Anyway, I miss you and I need to hear the voice of the young lady who lives with you … if she’s up.”
“She’s lying here right beside me. Wouldn’t go off to her own bed until we’d heard from you. I think she has a crush on you.”
I heard a “Mom!” in the background and could picture the pained expression on Kyla’s face.
She came on the line. “I don’t know why you even go out with her.” I could hear the urge to laugh in her voice.
“I do it only to get her out of the house and give you a break.”
The laugh surfaced then. We didn’t talk long, but she did tell me she’d thought about it and decided that Mr. Kennedy should not take matters into his own hands. Jill had been right about her daughter’s need to analyze.
“You’re a terrific kid, you know that? It must be about time we hit Chuck E. Cheese for a night of my beating the tar out of you in every game in the place.”
“You wish!” She laughed again.
“You know what I really wish? I wish I could give you a hug right now.”
“What you have to do is give me a think hug.”
“And I do that how?”
“You think about the hug, and I think about the hug at the same time. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s better than no hug at all. Wanna try?”
I wondered if Kyla and her dad used the “think hug” method — then decided it didn’t matter.
“I sure do,” I told her, and I actually closed my eyes and imagined holding her.
“Did it work?” she said after a few seconds.
“You’re a genius,” I said. “I’m not going to be around much for the next little while, so we’re going to have to rely on think hugs, lots of them.”
“Okay.”
“Have a good sleep, okay?”
“You too, Adam.”
I promised her I would, but as we ended the call I knew it would be a while before I slept.
For the next three hours, maybe a little longer, I alternated between the upstairs and downstairs locations. I spent more time on the upper level — on the stool and looking some of the time through the camera and some of the time through the binoculars at the garage and the alley behind it — two of the places Kennedy had spent something like half his life watching.
The stools were the tall kind you see in some bars and coffee places — comfortable for maybe an hour, nasty after that. The best part was the walk between the two surveillance locations when I was able to stretch and rub the numbness out of most of the lower back half of my body. I finally retrieved two of the blankets Kennedy had told me about and manufactured a couple of almost cushions, which helped. I took breaks every couple of hours to do bending and stretching exercises, a new appreciation for Kennedy’s dedication already firmly formed in my mind.
During the time I was watching from the upstairs perch, I saw one car go down the alley, just before midnight. Nothing and no one else. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, I checked the cameras to make sure that they were working and properly aimed, that I hadn’t accidentally knocked one off target. Then I went out to the Accord, grabbed my gym bag out of the trunk, and went back inside.
I checked the kitchen, more out of curiosity than hunger. Kennedy had stocked the place pretty well before he left. I wasn’t surprised by that, except that he would have had to do the shopping between our chat that morning and my arrival that night. Another example of the man’s attention to detail.
I took a shower and, after one last look out of the main floor window at what had been the Unruh house, I headed off to my own bedroom. I glanced quickly at Kennedy’s book collection — almost all non-fiction, with a strong bent toward biography. Again, I was surprised. Being a fiction guy myself, I went to bed with the copy of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness that I’d brought with me. I fell asleep with the light on and the book still propped on my chest, woke up a while later, and for a minute had to remind myself where I was. I shut off the light and thought for a while, mostly about the fact that I had just completed night number one of my surveillance. Just 8,999 short of Kennedy’s record.
Five
The next morning I made a pot of strong coffee and was back at my upstairs bedroom post just after 7:00. I watched the departure of the man who lived in the house where Faith’s body had been found. At 7:34 he came out the back door of the house, walked to the garage, and disappeared inside. A minute or so later, a brown Chrysler 300 backed into the alley, turned left, and headed west, disappearing from view in a few seconds. I noted that the man was thirty-something, wore a good-looking, lightweight suit, and carryied a briefcase. I recorded his departure in the notebook Kennedy used to diarize all “sightings” on either property.
Seventeen minutes later, a woman came out of the house. She had a little girl in tow, and they, too, entered the garage, then after a couple of minutes drove away, this time in a Nissan Murano. Nice vehicles — this family didn’t appear to have been affected by the downturn in the Alberta economy.
They were too young to have been living there when the murder had taken place, unless one of them had grown up in the house. I wondered if either of the adults — I assumed they were either husband and wife or live-in partners — was aware that they parked their vehicles just metres from where a little girl just a few years older than their own daughter had lain as the life drained out of her. I wondered, too, whether real estate agents were obligated to tell prospective buyers about horrific events that had taken place in or around properties they were trying to sell.
I drank coffee and watched for a while longer, then went downstairs. At 8:22, a red Equinox pulled up in front of the house where Faith Unruh had lived. An eleven- or twelve-year-old boy, backpack over his shoulder, dashed from the front door and down the sidewalk and then climbed into the back seat of the Equinox. The boy was dark-skinned, perhaps East Indian or Pakistani. He rapped knuckles with another boy, similar in age and Caucasian, already in the back seat. The driver — I guessed he was the second boy’s dad — pulled away from the curb, and I could see someone else in the passenger-side front seat, an older sister, maybe. All of them were likely heading for the kids’ school.
I recorded that departure too. I took a break between 9:00 and 10:00 to take in yogourt and a bran