Death Spiral Read Online Free PDF

seeing. He put his face close up to it and scraped the frost away.
    A man was standing in the middle of Mr. Cruikshank’s backyard. His slight body was covered in a dark shabby coat; his feet were wrapped in rags. He stared directly up at Wilf.
    Wilf hurried down the stairs. When he reached the kitchen Mary was still holding onto the telephone. “Now don’t go anywhere, Ducky,” she called out.
    Wilf waded out into the snow and struggled along the side of the house. A scattering of fruit trees stood throughout the yard, their limbs bare and black against the sky. He looked down a ravine toward a railway line. He waded back toward the house, made a large circle of the yard and stood more or less where he’d just seen the man. There was no one in sight.
    Wilf’s eyes began to water. His heart raced.
    The only tracks in the snow were his own.
    * * *
    Carole was still sitting at her desk when Wilf came back in. “What do you mean Mr. Cruikshank is dead?” Her light-grey eyes were quite large at any time but now they grew even larger, her hands suspending over her typewriter keys.
    Wilf didn’t bother answering. He pushed through the wooden gate and sat down at Dorothy Dale’s desk.
    “That can’t be right,” she said.
    Wilf looked at her from across the small space that separated them as if he couldn’t quite make her out.
    “Oh my god,” she said, “what happened?”
    Wilf began to unbutton his overcoat. She could see that he’d changed out of his suit coat and dress shirt. He was wearing a dark wine-coloured sweater and a yellow-checked shirt. They really didn’t go together. Snow was melting off his galoshes, forming a pool of water on the floor.
    “Doc Robinson says he had a heart attack. He died while he was taking a bath. He has to do a more thorough examination, though. When the old man thaws out.”
    “Oh my god,” Carole said again, and then she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “have you changed your clothes?”
    “I soaked myself trying to save an old man any fool could see had been dead for days.”
    “I’m sorry!”
    “Yeah. Poor old guy,” Wilf replied, though he knew the concern she was expressing was intended for himself. Which made everything seem worse. He leaned toward her. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
    Carole nodded cautiously.
    “In all your life, have you ever taken a bath without a towel or a bathrobe in sight?”
    Carole stared at him. “Not on purpose.”
    “Me, either. Not on purpose. No one has. Or does.”
    “I don’t know what that means.”
    “It means that there wasn’t even a bath mat on the floor.”
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “Maybe I’m talking about nothing.”
    “I see.”
    “If Mr. Cruikshank was feeling pain in his chest, maybe he thought a hot bath might ease things and in his growing confusion he got into the bath without thinking about a towel.”
    “That’s very possible.”
    “He’d been dead for a few days. Whatever coal he’d banked in the furnace burned out. The water in the tub was frozen and there wasn’t any water on the floor. No water left on the floor, I mean, when I came in, because it would have frozen, too.”
    “Why would there be water on the floor?”
    “Because opposite the bathtub, between the baseboard and the tiles, there was this thin ridge of ice. So there must have been water on the floor, quite a bit of it. But someone soaked it up with the towels. Maybe the bath mat, too. But they missed the water pooling under the baseboard.”
    “Who would do that?”
    “Whoever drowned Mr. Cruikshank.”
    Carole turned back to her typewriter.
    “He was a large man,” Wilf was continuing on, “it wouldn’t have been an easy thing to do. They slopped water all over the place and so they had to clean it up. But they couldn’t leave a pile of soaking wet towels around, could they?”
    “Why are you going on like this?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like you’re trying to make something out