Bone Dance

A Collection
of Musical Mysteries
by the Ladies' Killing Circle

edited by
Sue Pike and
Joan Boswell

Text © 2003 by the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

Cover art: Christopher Chuckry

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative.

Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

07 06 05 04 03     5 4 3 2 1

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bone dance : a collection of musical mysteries / the Ladies' Killing Circle ; edited by Joan Boswell and Sue Pike.

ISBN 1-894917-05-7

1. Detective and mystery stories, Canadian (English). 2. Canadian fiction (English)--21st century. 3. Canadian fiction (English)--Women authors. I. Boswell, Joan, date- II. Pike, Sue, date- III. Ladies' Killing Circle

PS8323.D4B66 2003      C813'.08720806         C2003-903478-X

In memory of Audrey

Also available by the
Ladies' Killing Circle:

Fit to Die

(RendezVous Press, 2001)
Menopause is Murder

(General Store Publishing, 1999)
Cottage Country Killers

(General Store Publishing, 1997)
The Ladies' Killing Circle

(General Store Publishing, 1995)

More fortissimo. Lift your voice higher.

Your singing is terrible, where is your fire?

Fill up your lungs. You'll never get it right.

Practice, more practice, if it takes all the night!

You push me too hard, she gasped, in despair.

You sit there so smug, relaxed in a chair.

But you will get yours, rang out in her head,

And she forced a high C as she thought of him dead.

Well, her sharp note rose high, vibrating the room,

And the acoustic ceiling started to boom,

And the chandelier fell with that lethal note

And his tirade was stopped by a shard in the throat.

Joy Hewitt Mann
's work has appeared in hundreds of publications internationally. She has won the Leacock Award for poetry and the Acorn-Rukeyser Award. Boheme Press, Toronto, published her short story collection
, Clinging to Water,
in 2000. Boheme will publish her first full-length poetry collection
, Bone on Bone,
and her first novel
, Lacrima Christi,
in 2003. She is working on her next novel
, Los Penitentes.

Who set fire to Glen Wylie's barn? That question brought my boss, Sergeant Carr, to the hospital the night my son was born. He tracked me down at the display case of healthy newborns, where I looked past to the glass room marked
INTENSIVE CARE
:
NO ADMITTANCE
. No infant visible, just four white uniforms pulling lights and tubes and equipment toward a tiny hidden table.

Though I'd been on duty that night, I didn't see the big timbers of Wylie's barn collapse. Didn't even hear about it for hours, because I was holding April's hand in the nightmare light of the delivery room. This baby had showed up weeks ahead of schedule, a frantic arrival nothing like the gentle fiction we'd been prepared for in that birthing class. And then Intensive Care had kidnapped the baby.

So my mind was elsewhere when Carr fired off a rapid, “Hey, Tony, congratulations,” and scanned the lineup for a baby with the Aardehuis label. When he didn't see one, he skipped straight to quizzing me about Glen Wylie and the likelihood that he might have torched his own barn.

“Fire guys say it was arson. Nothing clever about it: good old gasoline. You think he might a done it? Place is insured to the max.”

My sergeant is a round-the-clock kind of cop. Neither sleet nor snow nor the birth of babies matter when he has a problem to solve. I could be like that too, but, though still wearing my
OPP
constable's uniform, that night my mind was down the hall, where April lay in the recovery room. Alone, because she'd sent me to find out what was happening to our son. I watched that glass room for the emergence of some oracle, a good word I could bring her. In my pocket a list of people to call with the news. Except I didn't know what the news might be.

Still, it was a relief to look away from that bright room and focus on something as uncomplicated as Sergeant Carr and a sixtyish farmer with a rep for thrift, perfectionism and bad temper.

Glen Wylie. The name meant loner. Pristine fence lines. Prize winning Aberdeen Angus herd. A wife who'd left years back, a son and daughter not seen in years. The burned barn yearly painted.

“Wylie wouldn't do it,” I said, as the curtains on the glass room snapped shut. “That place was his life's work. Did they get the livestock out?”

“Barbecued,” said Carr.

“Then for sure it wasn't him.”

Odd how the brain can work on more than one plane: asking what they were doing with that small new person I'd caught the barest glimpse of before they'd abducted him. Simultaneously certain Glen Wylie wouldn't burn a barn with livestock in it. Memory serving up a 4H show ring from years past, Glen Jr. taking second with a young bull; later, in the calf pens, kicked hard with his father's steel-toed boot because he'd
forgotten to keep the water topped up. That man let nothing trouble his animals.

But what the hell were they doing behind those drapes?

“What day is it?” I asked.

Carr gave me an odd look, but hey, a lot had happened in the last few hours.

“One in the morning, Sunday. They figure the fire started about ten o'clock last night.” He looked cute for a split second and said, “That was Saturday.”

“Who called it in?”

“Neighbour saw the smoke around half past. Volunteer firemen got there pretty quick, but there wasn't much left when Wylie came home. Says he was at the Legion.”

“He was. As a matter of fact, I had a run-in with him downtown. Must have been on his way to the Hall. Tried to drive through the intersection closed for that Busker Festival I was working. Bashed his truck into a hot dog stand and took some convincing to pay the damage. But there's his alibi.”

“Or his cover,” said the sergeant, who liked to harvest my brain for useful local knowledge so he could ignore it. “But thanks.” Then he paused to look through the glass at the sound and healthy newborns in the foreground. “Which one's yours?”