Helpless Read Online Free Page B

which was mauve with a pattern of pink daisies.
    Once again, she and the boy went north on Parliament and disappeared into the video store. This time, though, the boy reemerged almost immediately and continued up the street. Ron waited a minute, then remembered that Nancy’s friend Angie had her salon in this neighbourhood, so he walked a little farther along to a bus stop, where he merged in with the crowd. Five minutes passed, ten. The bus pulled up. Ron wondered if Rachel had left by a rear exit, but why would she do that? He tied Tasha to a bicycle stand. He had to know what was keeping her.
    She was behind the counter, sitting on a stool and drawing on a pad with a marker. She didn’t look up, and neitherdid the woman at the cash register. A small blond woman with a hard, lean face. Ron strolled along the wall of new releases. He took down a DVD and pretended to consider it. “Oh, good, you gave me eyebrows!” the woman said.
    “Mom, you have eyebrows,” Rachel said. “And see! I drew your shadow behind you.”
    Ron replaced the DVD. A moment later a group of kids came in and he was able to slip around them and make his escape.
    He went across the road to a restaurant and got a table out on the patio, tying Tasha to the railing. The video store closed at midnight, but he figured that the mother, or somebody, would be taking Rachel home long before then. If she lived in this neighbourhood, and she most likely did, he’d find out where.
    I N HIS van down the road from the Casa Hernandez Motel, he watches the lights of the CN Tower come on. He has always considered the CN Tower a reassuring structure: hopeful and nostalgically futuristic, like a hand from one of those starburst wall clocks people had in the 1950s. It used to cheer him up. He finds this hard to believe. He finds it hard to believe that only ten days have passed since he had the self-possession to sit out on a public patio and drink nothing but coffee.
    Now it’s alcohol and never in the company of other people. He gets going after breakfast, a couple of beers. By the time he’s closing shop to drive to Spruce Court for the threetwenty bell, he’s put away another four or five and a double shot of rye. He parks in a different location every day, which might fool the neighbours but not Tasha: she knows wherethey’re headed. She even seems to know that it’s Rachel they’re following, because when the boy drops her off (at Tom’s Video or, as he has done two Fridays in a row now, at her house) she wants to keep going after her, right through the door.
    So does Ron. He feels better, though, less on edge, and when he returns to the shop he usually gets in some good work while the feeling lasts. At sunset he makes another trip, this time to satisfy himself that she’s not in danger. On weekends it’s his only trip, a restraint achieved, just barely, by a steady, measured increase in his alcohol intake. He always half expects to find her house up in flames or to hear her screaming. This afternoon the fear seized him the minute he got home, and he drove straight back and kept vigil behind the Shoppers Drug Mart dumpster until she left with her mother in their car, and then he followed.
    He realizes he’ll have to make up some story for Nancy about where he’s been all evening. She’ll have phoned, for sure…she knows something’s going on. A couple of nights ago she came right out and asked if he was seeing someone else.
    “I’m a little stressed,” he said. “That’s all. The work isn’t coming in.”
    It’s coming in. He just isn’t keeping on top of it.
    What’s eating away at him, aside from the craving to see Rachel, is his conviction that she’s being mistreated. She sleeps in an unfinished basement, for one thing, as he discovered last night when he turned onto the lane that runs along one side of the house and saw her through the security bars of a cellar window. She was lying on a cot and staring up at the ceiling. There was a