Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (38 page)

Dan heard Magnus chuckling on the other end. “Oh, she can be persuasive, all right!”

“Do you know where Mr. Killingworth is now, by any chance?”

Magnus snorted. “He’s dead.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“Oh, I know it all right.”

“May I ask how you…?”

“No, sir — I will not discuss this over the phone. I don’t trust the phone.” Dan waited. “You come here and I’ll give you proof.”

Magnus agreed to meet with Dan on the island. “I haven’t been back out to my trailer for a long time,” he said. “I think it’s time I paid a visit.”

Anywhere else, and at the very least they would have been hookers. In some parts of the world their dress would have got them killed. Here, they were schoolgirls having a lark — fishnet stockings, high-heels, pert fresh-cut hair, trim buffed nails, and pretty, chirpy smiles.

Dan and Donny navigated the narrow aisle leading to the back of the Walnut Café. With its Korean décor and mostly Korean clientele, the place was known mainly for one thing: a menu consisting of walnut-shaped nuggets of nougat-filled delight, with side orders of sugar-coated berry or seaweed pancakes, and lacy, tongue-shrinkingly sweet cookies. Make that two things: it also had the worst coffee Dan had ever tasted. It was Donny’s favourite café.

In the back room, they found a chipped table among the coat racks and stacked take-out boxes. Inflected Korean syllables filled the air. On TV and in newspapers, reporters bemoaned once-liberal Canada’s growing racism, as evidenced in the polls and statistics revealing a negative attitude toward the country’s burgeoning immigrant population.
Are we no longer the tolerant, accepting land we once were? I doubt it,
Dan thought, looking around him. The question was wrongly put. Canadians were what they’d always been, but they’d grown wary on realizing a noticeable number of the new arrivals crowding their shores and cities in search of a better life had come intolerant themselves, or had at least come ignorant of the ideals of liberal humanism that allowed them to be here.

He looked over at the table of teenage girls trembling with laughter as they ate their treats and gossiped in Korean. Chances were some of their fellow immigrants would have sent them packing rather than allow them access to these same shores, given half a chance. Dan also knew that men like him and Donny would quickly have been refused entry or denied their rights by many of these same new citizens. That is, if they weren’t imprisoned or killed outright. You didn’t overturn positive human values and replace them with weaker, intolerant ones. That was not the Canadian way.

Donny was nearly over his gloom-and-doom act about the lost job, no longer convinced his life was at an end if he never sniffed another vial of overpriced skunk gland reduction. He was even considering taking time off before embarking on a search for the next phase of his existence. Still, he’d come in reflective, on the down-turned side.

Dan turned his attention to what Donny’d been saying.

“… and you start to wonder, you know, are the good things still ahead of you or have they already passed you by? And did you even notice?”

Dan listened as a sailor might eye heavy, low-lying clouds in a rising wind — concerned, but not overly. And then it was his turn. He described his confrontation with Lucille Killingworth outside her estate.

Donny paused, walnut cake halfway to his mouth. “As if I don’t have enough to worry about! First the incident on the boat with the Brazilian boy, and now attempted murder. Is there nothing you won’t stop at? I think you’re becoming unhinged. And nice shiner, by the way. I assume you’ll let me in on that one eventually?”

“Nothing to tell — I got mugged in Sudbury.”

Donny looked at Dan for a long while before speaking. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“This!” He waved his hands about, oblivious to the Korean family sitting next to them warily evading his reach. “All of this crazy man stuff.”

“It’s my job.”

“Your job is not to run amok at weddings and attack rich heiresses whose families comprise the bedrock of the Canadian establishment.”

“True.”

Donny slowly shook his head and looked away, a monk contemplating life’s greater mysteries. Finally, he turned back. “Who were your heroes, man? And don’t give me some crap about Superman, ’cause he’s not a real hero and you’re not an American.”

Dan shoved a bite of walnut cake into his mouth, savouring the sweet warmth. “What if he
was
my hero?”

“I detect insincerity.”

“Okay, then maybe I don’t have any larger-than-life heroes.” Dan shrugged. “My heroes are the people who manage to get through the day without doing damage to themselves and others around them. The ones who do the best they can, without throwing the towel in and crying foul because they wanted more than life’s meagre offerings allowed them. People like my Aunt Marge.”

“Good one.” Donny nodded, downed his coffee with a flourish. “Me? Angela Davis. She was my hero as a kid — and still is now. Black rights, human rights, women’s rights, the struggle for truth and justice. She fought for what she believed in and she paid the price. All those years in jail and all those words written for the cause. That woman had more conscientiousness and compassion in her little finger than … I don’t know what. But is it not the very
definition
of tragedy,” here his eyes glinted mischief, “that this woman who did so much to further the cause of race and class struggles and fight for human dignity, should be reduced in our collective consciousness to a hairstyle?”

Dan grinned. “But a hairdo with attitude — or latitude. It was a pretty big ’fro, remember.”

From self-pity and childhood heroes through to the shear absurdity of life. A trip across the universe over a cup of coffee. That’s what he loved about Donny. You could never tell what would come out of him next: gloom or joy, kindness or anger. He was a jazz riff tossed from horn to bass to sax, used up and carried around and turned inside out till it was almost gone, only to return triumphant in another key. That was his genius.

“Compassion, huh?” Dan said.

“That’s the word.”

“So just how compassionate are you feeling these days?”

“I smell a leading question,” Donny said, eyeing him with suspicion.

“Are you willing to do your part for the cause? To help further the struggle, given the opportunity — and I gather that you have time to do so, given the inclination.”

“Now I’m really suspicious. Tell.”

Dan took a sip of coffee, tried not to gag on the taste, and added another spoonful of sugar. “I only do this for you, you know,” he said. And proceeded to fill Donny in on his adventures with Lester and his upcoming trip.

“Another chapter in the Craig Killingworth Saga?”

“Uh-huh. And what I need,” he said, “is for you to take Lester for a few days while I’m in B.C. Because I still haven’t found a place for him.”

Donny’s face was impassive. Dan felt the need for a sermon coming on, one of those “Here Are Ten Good Reasons Why You Should Do This” manifestoes. The kind he’d invariably failed at with other kids at school. “Ked’s going to stay with Kendra, of course. But I can’t ask her to take in a stray.”

“Okay,” Donny said. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay? Just like that — okay?”

“Do you want me to say I’ll think it over?”

“No, I want you to say okay.”

“And then you say…?”

“Thank you.”

Donny nodded. “You have a need. I have time and opportunity, as you put it. I’m out of work, feeling suicidal, and in need of distraction. Plus I am deeply concerned about you, so I will do this for you. A few days, you said? As in three or fewer?”

“Guaranteed.”

“And then the Craig Killingworth Story will be over for good?”

“Absolutely.”

“Done.”

Dan watched the big boat manoeuvre the cliffs and head into the harbour, water dividing white and dark behind it.
The Queen of Nanaimo
. The wake rebounded off the island. He’d watched with a feeling of regret as they passed between Mayne and Pender Island, but there was nothing to be done about that. He’d sensed the unvoiced questions in Trevor’s emails, heard the hopeful tone when he asked if Dan might be coming back that way for a visit. It wouldn’t do to contact him if he had no intention of staying.

Once off the ferry terminal, he noted the wary faces that marked his progress up the coast. They seemed to sense his outsider status, the eternal other-ness about him that followed no matter where he went. He passed farms and homesteads. Here the roadside stops were less inviting, less intriguing to his eyes. He recalled the angry dogs running alongside his car on his last visit. Having retreated to an island in their minds, these people were relegated to one in time as well, cut off, isolated, and dwindling slowly to nothing. On Mayne Island he’d felt a sense of community. Here they were lost in the landscape and wanted nothing so much as to stay lost.

He was at the dirt road leading to Magnus Ferguson’s trailer in less than half an hour. From a distance he saw the tall white-haired scarecrow tugging at the earth with a hoe. For a second, it seemed as though he were looking at a badly aged version of Craig Killingworth. He thought he’d found the missing man. A whole scenario flashed through his mind, how Killingworth had simply disappeared to escape his past and ended up in the woods of B.C., aged but alive, and mostly nuts.

Magnus leaned the hoe up against the trailer and came over to meet him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, the way the Natives must have regarded the first white men to land on their shores right before it all went wrong for them.

They walked slowly around the trailer as Dan described his search for Craig Killingworth and the events that had led him to contact Magnus. As they walked, Magnus appeared to be taking inventory of what he’d left behind on this plot of land as much as the measure of Dan’s intentions.

Dan tried to look interested when Magnus pointed out the stubby basil and flat-leafed parsley. “They don’t thrive here — not enough light except in the morning. Then the deer eat the leaves down to the stems.”

Crows hung and dipped their heads in the rust-flecked fronds of Western Redcedar waving overhead. “You must enjoy the solitude out here,” Dan said.

Magnus scratched his chin. “Tell you the truth, most days I hate it. It’s a lonely life. Blacker than black. People always romanticize places like this. You’re still stuck with your own company, whether you like it or not.”

He turned away and looked into the forest as though searching for a sign, some encouragement that what he’d endured hadn’t been in vain, or maybe just wanting a reason to go on. When he turned back, his face was set. “All right — I guess I trust your motives. Ask me what you want to know.”

Dan nodded. “When we spoke on the phone, you said you had proof that Craig Killingworth was dead.”

“I do.”

“I was hoping you could show it to me.”

Magnus waved him around to the front of the yard. He walked up to the steps of the trailer and pulled the door open.

Inside was a world in decline. Everywhere were signs of hopelessness: cramped quarters that bulged with household goods, piles of discarded clothing, boxes making an obstacle run of the trailer’s length. The interior had been turned into a museum, a monument to lost time. There was more than a hint of mould in the air. Papers languished on shelves, letters whose corners had been nibbled by mice thieving for their nests, with droppings left on the counters and on the unwashed vinyl floor curling at the edges. It was a catalogue of despair, a last refuge of broken dreams.

Dan watched Magnus insert his hand into a pile of papers and turn something over. A bundle of letters teetered and splashed to the floor. Magnus looked down at them with contempt, scratching through the refuse flattened into piles on the shelves. For a moment, Dan was afraid he’d come all this way to interview a crazy person who just wanted a little company.

“Here — look at this.” Magnus handed him a photograph. Dan was expecting a picture of Craig Killingworth, but the attractive young man standing in a rose garden was a complete stranger. Dan stared at it, hoping to glean its significance.

“Hard to believe that’s me, isn’t it?” Magnus said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I used to be very good looking. Turned a few heads in my day. Forty years of smoking will do it to you. I quit the day I got my death sentence.” Dan looked up from the photograph to the emaciated skull regarding him. Magnus nodded. “Terminal lung cancer. Well, here I am five years later with everyone telling me how lucky I am to be alive. ‘What’s so lucky about it?’ I ask them. ‘I haven’t had a cigarette in five years.’”

His fingers went on scratching through the piles. He plucked out a page and stopped to read it, the contents unknowable from his expression. It could have been a laundry list or a love letter, an unpaid bill or an obituary. His hands shook with the weight of all those years of missing cigarettes. A tremendous burden.

From out of the mire he lifted another picture, this one of two young men. Dan recognized a slightly older Magnus standing beside Craig Killingworth at roughly the age he’d appeared in the missing person report. But this was a transformed Craig Killingworth, smiling broadly and looking for once as though he knew how to enjoy life rather than just endure it. He seemed alive and vibrant. Dan thought of the hushed light falling in the Adolphustown sitting room.

Magnus’s rasp intruded on his thoughts. “That’s Craig.”

“Where was this taken?”

He filched the photograph out of Dan’s hands and squinted, though he seemed to be focusing his memory more than his eyes. “Picton Town Fair sometime in June — maybe ’84 or ’85.”

Dan looked up. “Do you recall the last time you saw him?”

Magnus screwed up his face, summoning the recall. “Yes, I do. Twenty years ago this coming November first. That was the day I left Prince Edward County. I never saw him again.”

It jived with the police reports, Dan noted. “Did you expect to?”

Magnus turned a sorrowful gaze on him. “Son, I expected to hear from him every day for ten, maybe fifteen years. On a bad day, I still do.”