Murder Sees the Light (11 page)

“Ma, I'm just over to see Harry. He's talking to Cissy Pearcy and he wants to see me next. Oh, sorry. I didn't see you had company.”

“George, come in here. You won't keep Harry Glover waiting long. I want you to say hello to Benny Cooperman. He's got a voice like your father's. He's staying at the lodge.” They both overlooked our introduction in the Annex the night before. George grabbed the back of a chair like he had no pants on and nodded his how-doyou-do. A smile showed that he'd thrown away most of his molars. It was a flicker of recognition but some miles short of an offer of friendship. I put down the hand that had been about to reach for either his outstretched hand or more cake. He didn't offer a hand, and I thought I'd had enough cake.

“George, say hello to the man.” George was a man in his forties, it looked like, but around his mother he acted all of fourteen. He blushed, and his mother settled back satisfied: she'd drawn blood.

“Ma, I gotta talk to you.” I shook the crumbs off my lap and got up.

“You're not leaving, Benny?” Maggie's voice sounded surprised, but her hands were already folding her table napkin.

“Yes, I'd better get back to my place. With this Aeneas business, there's lots of things I haven't attended to. Nice to have met you George. Thanks for the tea.” I began backing off towards where I remembered the door sound having come.

“Well, now you've found your way, don't be a stranger.”

“G'bye,” said George.

“Probably see you over at the Annex later for coffee.” I found the door and made it slam behind me. I thought of making loud noises on the steps and soft ones coming back to listen close to the door, but I gave up the idea. In a screened-in cottage you could never tell when you were in sight and when you were invisible. George's reluctance to talk to Glover sounded genuine enough. I didn't much like talking to him myself. Everybody has guilty secrets.

* * *

I put a black frying pan on the propane stove and added the last of my butter. I thought about sniffing it, but decided not to. My mother always says that if you have to smell something, you might as well get rid of it. Ma was never stuck in a place miles from a fresh pound of butter. I'd heard that breadcrumbs were a good thing to fry fish in, but I hadn't brought any. So I bashed up some soda biscuits and rolled the fish in them, then, before they all fell off, I dumped the lot into the pan. While I was at it, I put a couple of eggs in a saucepan on the other burner. I could use them for sandwiches, I thought. The eggs floated to the top of the water. I couldn't remember whether that meant that they were fresh or old. Old was my guess, but I put a lid over them so no one would notice. The fish was beginning to look better. The butter was browning it and the noise sounded very convincing. It even smelled good. I set a place for myself at the table and poured a glass of milk from the ugly plastic pitcher. I considered eating the fish from the frying pan, but I lifted it out onto an ironstone plate. To hell with washing up. Let the maid look after it.

The trout went down very well, if it did taste a little too much like fish. I added a little pepper and salt at the table and was sorry there wasn't a sprig of parsley handy for garnish. Just under the edge of my plate I propped open
The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book
, the only book in my cabin, and dined royally. When I was through, I dumped the plate and the pans into the sink and went out to the pump for a pail of water.

Harry Glover was sitting with his tie pulled loose on the dock having a smoke, watching the shadows darken along the shoreline. I left the pail under the nozzle and walked down to the water with my hands in my pockets, feeling the inshore breeze coming off the lake.

“Nice night,” I tried for an opening.

“Uh huh.” This was a very conservative play.
Pawn to King Four … Pawn to King Four.

“Still holding the fort all by yourself? No reinforcements in sight?”

“Whitney's not going to send for Criminal Investigation Branch help from Toronto until they've seen the medical report. Too far to come if it's an accident.”
Knight to King's Bishop Three, twice.

“But you don't think it was an accident?” He ignored that.

“Then the coroner will get into the act. God, the coroner has a lot of clout. Under the Coroner's Act, he can seize anything. He could take possession of the whole goddamn park if he wanted to.”

“You've decided it was murder. Why?”

“You've never been a corporal. You've never been a cop in a three-holer town like Whitney.” I must have missed a few moves, because it looked like he'd castled early on his King's side.

“You can grow old behind a desk in Grantham or Toronto just as fast.”

“But hell, Cooperman, time limps like a one-legged centipede in Whitney.”

We both scanned the water. The islands were standing out against the farther shore. As the light changed they blended in and disappeared like a startled loon. “A case like this could get me out of the rut for a few days. You know, I've never been to Toronto. I wouldn't mind doing a little CIB work instead of writing up a report on another accidental drowning. I could use some attention, just to remind the force I'm alive.”

“So that's why you're going by the book.” Another dose of silence.

“Sit down, Cooperman. You make me nervous standing there. Take a load off your dogs.” I pulled up one of the white slatted deck chairs. “Smoke?” I took his package of filtered cigarettes and fished in my pocket for matches. A line of light was moving into the dark reflection of hills on the far side of the lake, a bright knife blade the colour of the sky.

That'll be Lloyd Pearcy, I guess,” Glover said. I nodded and we both watched the shape of a boat materialize, getting slowly bigger and bigger. For a long time you couldn't hear anything. “He knew Aeneas pretty good,” he said slowly. “I guess I better tell him.” He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the water. His face looked older than it had this afternoon. I could see the lines it was settling towards—Harry Glover at fifty, with a little grey hair sticking out of the unbuttoned top of his shirt. “I remember one time climbing the stairs to a walk-up apartment over a store in Haliburton. This was some ten years ago. We got there fifteen minutes after some reporter from the paper arrived asking for a picture of the deceased before the family knew that the head of the house had become deceased. A three-car pile-up on Highway 35. It took most of the night to get them settled. Yes, sir: ‘We need a picture of your daddy for the paper.'” You could hear the outboard getting closer now. Lloyd's shape was visible in the stern, almost a silhouette. “Lloyd Pearcy and Aeneas did a lot of fishing together. Yes, sir. A lot of fishing, a lot of years.”

NINE

That night in the Annex, away from the smell of scorched hard-boiled eggs, I got to see most of the regulars. There's nothing like a little gore to make people huddle together and congratulate one another for still being counted among the living. The Kipp kids, Roger and Chris, were perched by the fire, supervising the four birch logs in the grate with pokers, waiting for some promised marshmallows. Their father sat in a far corner. He looked hunched, almost truncated, sitting in a high-backed rocker, reading a detective novel.

So far neither the Pearcys nor Maggie and George had appeared, but an ample place had been left for Maggie on the couch by the card table. Des Westmorland was sitting on the piano bench next to the fireplace with Delia, his friend from the end motel unit, next to him. The fire made both their faces look ruddy and took a decade off his age. Delia had brought knitting with her, but hadn't done anything about it. I was watching all this from the coffee urn. The silence in the room was almost noisy. I could hear coffee gurgling inside the urn. I tried to stop it, but I only succeeded in rocking the ping-pong table. The coffee in the glass gauge exaggerated the whole incident.

Was this better than sitting alone in my cabin, I wondered. A log crackled and fell sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. David Kipp turned the page of his Simenon. Des Westmorland caught my eye. He introduced himself and Delia. He called her “his friend.” It was nice to have it official.

“What do you know about this business about the guide, Mr. Cooperman?” He sounded like I might have some obscure information that was being kept from him. “What was his name?”

“DuFond. Aeneas DuFond. I don't know much. He was a good guide, but a little suspicious and shy. A loner. A quiet man with a touch of superstition who knew his way around in the woods.”

“I don't know how anyone can think that we had anything to do with it. Corporal Glover kept Delia with him for nearly half an hour. I mean, really. We didn't come up here to get involved in a backwoods feud.” He looked at Delia, who was trying to smile through makeup put on in the dark, or so it looked.

“I only have two weeks off, Mr. Cooperman. From my job, I mean. I hope Corporal Glover won't keep us here. I don't think he can, legally, without laying a charge I mean. But if one is asked to
assist
, that puts the moral pressure back on one, doesn't it?” Delia Alexander had been a very attractive woman, now that I saw her up close. Good bones don't lie, but I got the idea from the way she was always fussing with her hem even when she was wearing jeans, that she'd blossomed long after the rest of her generation.

“You're in the cabin next to Mrs. Harbison, is that right?” Des was working at getting less intimate. “Terrible thing about that fellow. Time was when you used to need a special government form for reporting the death of an Indian,” he said. I tried to show my fascination, but I wasn't at my most convincing. My coffee tasted burnt.

Back at the fire, the Kipp boys were busy with marshmallows in a silent, businesslike way. This wasn't their idea of a picnic either. Joan Harbison stood nearby, a new arrival, suddenly there, keeping her eye on young Chris, whose marshmallow was ablaze. The couple on the piano bench began to console one another, and it built up a wall between us, so I took off towards Joan.

“Harry Glover told me that Hector and Aeneas were seen arguing outside the hotel in Hatchway Wednesday night,” Joan said.

“Does that mean he's decided to pin it on the brother?”

“I don't know anything,” she said, and looked like I'd taken a swipe at her with a two-by-four.

“They were friendly enough in here last night,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder to make things better. She squeezed out a pained smile and moved off to pour herself coffee.

Maggie and George were suddenly in the room, she in one of her voluminous caftans, and George in yellow boots and his usual sartorial indifference. He laid a fourcell flashlight near the coffee urn and drew a cup for himself and one for his mother. His nod in my direction was not convincingly friendly.

Maggie and George McCord used the lodge, or at least the Annex, as though they were paying guests instead of next-door neighbours. So did the Rimmers, but at least they were former owners. I wondered whether Joan's hospitality ever extended as far as the Woodward place and its tenant.

In a few minutes everybody was seated around the fire with Maggie acting as keystone in the arch. Soon the Pearcys came out of the night, with a squeak of the double screen doors. Tonight we were all moths drawn to the fire. It was good to be warm, with company, and alive.

“Well, we're a bloodthirsty lot,” announced Maggie after looking around. “Your faces are a study. Mine too, I'm sure. A lynch-mob without a rope, that's the lot of us tonight. I don't think I could bid straight, Cissy, so there will be no cards tonight.” Lloyd laughed a little too loudly, and stifled it when he found himself alone. There was the kind of silence in the room that stepped on talk. Nobody else said anything, so Maggie started in again, keeping the show together, keeping up her spirits, whistling in the dark. “I know what,” she said, “Let's tell murder stories. The messier the better. It will clear the air. It will work like a dose of salts. Come along. The policeman's gone back to Whitney. I'll start the ball rolling myself. Let me see. Did you know that when they hanged the notorious Captain Kidd, the rope broke and they had to do it again?”

“Really, Maggie, I think you could lift our spirits without dangling our feet,” Joan said, and everybody laughed.

“They say that the man who invented the guillotine was beheaded on it,” said Cissy Pearcy in a confidential voice that allowed only two or three words to burst out at a time.

“Justice for all,” Lloyd chimed in.

“It's easy to make jokes,” said Westmorland. “I'm sure he deserved what he got.”

“What Dr. Guillotin got,” said Maggie, “was an immortal name and a pension from the French Assembly. The man died in his bed long after the Revolution.”

“So much for poetic justice,” I said with a look at Westmorland.

“Well,” said Cissy with some effort, “it may not have been
him,
but somebody who invented something was killed on it. I'm sure I read it.”

“You're quite right, Cissy. You're thinking of Lord Morton. The enterprising Earl of Morton introduced into Scotland a guillotine-like machine he'd seen in Halifax, Yorkshire, for the execution of felons. Long before Dr. Guillotin. They called it the Scottish Maiden, and the poor earl was one of its victims.” Cissy smiled at Maggie for this help and then at everybody else in the room.

“Where on earth did you learn that?” Joan asked from where she was leaning against the fireplace.

“Ask any Scottish schoolchild. We were all solemnly taken to see it in the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities.”

“There's a sort of guillotine in the police museum in Toronto. I've seen it there,” said Delia Alexander. “Horrible thing. A man named—what was it?—Malbeck, John Malbeck, made it to commit suicide on. About a dozen years ago. It was in the papers. Terrible, really. He worked for Revenue Canada.”