Authors: Carolyn Davidson
Three fourteen, this was it. Pulling up to the curb, Susan removed a sheaf of papers from her briefcase. She had left the station with a number of files holding information on potentially irate previous clients of Mr. Harmon’s, faxed to her from the internal audit department of Terry’s previous employers and obtained after jumping through countless hoops, and exchanging numerous faxes and phone calls. Clive Bird’s file had been the most glaring. The man had elected to entrust all of his savings to Terry’s scheme, evidently not having heard the ‘eggs in one basket’ warning.
Waiting on the doorstep for her knock to be answered, Susan looked around her. In keeping with the peeling paint of the front door, the deck looked in need of a varnish, and the wooden steps some new planks. An empty recliner sat facing the street, stuffing from its pillows pushing at the seams.
Glancing at her watch, she shifted her weight from foot to foot impatiently. Let’s get a move on, Susan thought to herself, just as the door was opened by a slightly stooped man who she supposed to be Mr. Bird.
“Inspector Susan Kovalsky,” Susan held her hand out to the man. “We spoke on the phone yesterday?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Bird stepped back and opened the door further. “Come on in then, come on in.”
He ushered her to the kitchen table and Susan soon found herself seated with a cup of tea in front of her, and a tin of just opened Walker’s shortbread within reach.
Hardly looks like the home of a cold blooded killer, Susan told herself, taking in the washed out couch with a crocheted blanket folded neatly over its bulging pillows, the framed picture of a sweet faced elderly woman smiling from an end table. Not that that means a thing, she reminded herself.
“So,” Susan cleared her throat, opening the file in front of her. “When did you first meet Terry Harmon?”
“Oh, that would be a while back now,” Mr. Bird looked up at the kitchen ceiling. “I’d say six or seven years past.” Susan waited for him to fill the silence that followed.
“Friend of mine told me about him, said he had a man who was helping him with his savings, setting him up for retirement,” Clive finally volunteered.
Susan took a biscuit when Clive held the cookie tin out to her, and took a bite while she waited for him to continue. “Mary and I were doing ok, but we didn’t have much put aside for the extras.” He gestured to the room around him. “We were comfortable you know, but retirement leaves a lot of years without much income. I thought we might want to take a few trips; Mary would have liked to have flown over to see her sister one last time if she could have.”
“Is your wife at home?” Susan asked, feeling certain the answer would be negative from the dormant feel of the home, suggesting it only housed one person.
“No,” Clive responded quickly, “No, she passed four years ago, not long after all the financial business. She had a bit of a tetchy heart, you know, the doctor said anything could have set it off.”
“I’m sorry to hear that” Susan said. She let a moment pass out of respect for his loss, and then continued. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Harmon?”
Clive thought for a long moment, drawing his lower lip in. “I couldn’t say exactly. He was pretty hard to get a hold of when things went south. I guess the last time I spoke to him would have been over the phone, when I was trying to find out what was going on, when we could expect to see our money.” He gave a humourless laugh.
“And what did Mr. Harmon tell you?” Susan enquired.
“Oh, the usual. He told me it was coming, it was in the works, I just had to be patient. He told me to have some faith.” He gave another laugh that sounded more like a bark.
Susan shook her head in sympathy, and let a moment pass for Mr. Bird to collect himself.
“Did you ever meet Mr. Harmon’s family?” Susan asked, when his hands had steadied around his teacup.
“His family?” Clive looked at Sarah with unkempt eyebrows raised. “I wouldn’t have thought that son of a gun had a family, excuse the language.”
Susan looked into Mr. Bird’s eyes, light brown irises in rheumy whites, faintly bloodshot due to age or a fondness of the bottle, she wasn’t sure.
“He never mentioned his family in all those times you spoke, when he was talking you into investing in his plan?” she asked in a slightly surprised voice. “The other victims of his scam mentioned he used his family as means to create a connection, to help establish trust.”
“Let me think,” Clive returned his attention to the ceiling veined with water stains. “Well, now that you say it, there was a picture of him with a wife and two pretty young girls he kept prominent like on his desk, but I can’t remember that we talked about them.”
Susan spoke with the man for another twenty minutes, covering the details of his meetings with Mr. Harmon, and how much he had lost financially.
Leaving the house with a stomach full of the tea and cookies she hadn’t wanted, Susan pondered the interview. A feasible suspect to have crushed a girl’s skull with a rock near a cliff top of the Bruce Trail? Not likely, she told herself, but if they were looking for someone with a reason to want to hurt a member of Terry’s family, that was one solid motive.
One down, she told herself, two to go.
Alex ran his hand through his hair thoughtfully as he waited for Mrs. McKinnon to respond to his knock on the door. He had set up an appointment to talk with the librarian again, this time in the comfort of her home. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, but in a town whose population was largely made up of seniors, the young generation routinely leaving their rural upbringing when the time for college came, he often found there was an abundance of insight to be gleaned from the older peers who watched over their younger members.
Interesting that the ‘young folk’ often came back before middle age, ready to appreciate again the peace a small community could offer. He was one of those who had had followed the cycle full circle, returning to his childhood region after a number of years of idle travelling and the police training that followed.
Hearing the shuffle of footsteps approach the door Alex straightened, and returned his host’s smile as she welcomed him into her home.
“Have a seat dear,” she told him, waving an arm at a plush couch and leaving him alone in the sitting room momentarily while she went to the kitchen to retrieve something that he hoped was the result of recent baking he could smell in the air. His wish was rewarded when Mrs. McKinnon rejoined him with a plate of cinnamon rolls, white icing melting into the pastries’ golden surfaces.
“I’ll be making excuses to come here more often,” he joked, placing a roll on one of the dessert plates she had supplied.
“You’re welcome any time dear,” she told him, lowering herself into a matching plush chair kitty corner to him.
The woman’s home was not far from what Alex had pictured, crocheted doilies on the end tables and pictures of loved and smiling grandchildren gracing the walls. Savouring and then swallowing a bite of his host’s baking, he began.
“I don’t have specific questions for you,” he told Mrs. McKinnon honestly. “But you mentioned a couple things that interested me when we spoke at the library, and I wanted to discuss them a bit further.”
“Ask away,” Mrs. McKinnon responded, green eyes crinkling at the corners as she smiled at him.
Alex brushed the crumbs from his fingers onto the plate on his lap and began. “You mentioned that Sarah often seemed distracted. Do you have any idea of what was going on in her life that would cause her to be worried or under stress?”
The woman pondered his question as she played with the string of beads at her chest. “Usually its love at that age isn’t it?” she asked him rhetorically. “No, I’m afraid Sarah didn’t confide in me, and I’m not sure who she did confide in. All I can say is that I got the sense she went through some hard times.”
She paused to rearrange the pastries plated on the table in front of them. “She seemed to have come to terms with whatever it was before she was taken from us, mind you.” Mrs. McKinnon added, just as Alex had concluded she was finished. “In the last month or so she seemed more relaxed, more like the Sarah I knew when I first hired her. Like she’d let go of a burden, if that makes any sense.”
“It might,” Alex responded, putting his plate on the table, empty except for a few crumbs and the folded napkin. “The other question I have for you might seem a bit irrelevant. It’s about what you said regarding the first Mrs. Logan.”
Mrs. McKinnon raised an enquiring eyebrow.
“Did you know her well?” he asked, leaving the question wide open to allow for any opinion or gossip the woman felt inclined to share.
“I did, well enough,” she nodded. “My oldest son used to be good friends with her brother, the Everett lad.” She gave a small laugh, “well he wouldn’t be a lad now would he?” she continued. “Clare was her name. I knew her as a young girl, and then lost track of her a bit after she got herself married.”
She paused and refolded the napkin on her lap before looking up at Alex again. “You know how it is,” she told him. “It’s a small town, things do get around, sometimes the truth, and sometimes bits of truth that picks up stories of their own along the way.”
Alex nodded at her encouragingly.
“As far as I recall Clare married young, and gossip had it that the Logan lad was a bit of a philanderer. Not easy for someone in a small town where one person’s heartache is everybody’s business.” Mrs. McKinnon twisted her wedding ring around her finger thoughtfully.
“I think Clare was another girl that had a hard time of it. She seemed like a delicate thing, the type who needs the support of people around them to flourish, without it they tend to wilt. It’s a hard life for people like that I think.”
She smiled at Alex. “Easier for those of us that have a bit of a tougher skin, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Alex agreed thoughtfully, “I would say so”.
Accepting the offer of a second pastry he considered that if the interview hadn’t offered up solid evidence it had at least saved him the time of stopping for lunch.
*
“You won’t be getting married on your looks,” he had told her, “so you best be a hard worker. At least one of you should know how to work,” he added, giving her brother a cuff on the ear as he left the room.
Trudy had pretended not to notice that the side of her brother’s face was stained red and his eyes were glistening with tears of pain or anger. She and her brother had early on formed an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge any discipline done to them by their father. It somehow made it worse to have a witness to the indignity.
Her father had a number of things that made him angry, and she and Eric knew the signs of when to avoid him. Mention of the wind turbines that had recently sprouted up in the country side, dotting their fields with their long white arms: “city folk stealing farm space to support their greed and stupidity.” Prices of beef at the market on a bad week, the sighting of a Logan construction sign. A no good cheat, her father called Tom Logan, spitting out the window when he drove past the building site of a castle-sized home with the Logan’s Construction sign in front of it.
All of which amounted to her father being angry pretty well most of the time, as the number of wind turbines kept growing, along with the Logan construction signs, and poor prices of beef. Trudy had learned to tone out his explicit tirades on what he would do to the politicians, stock marketers and Tom Logan if he had a chance. She had also learned to keep her head down on chores and feigning study in her room, and basically doing as little as possible to attract attention to herself.
The self-imposed distance between Trudy and her brother grew wider as they got older. It was so brief that it sometimes seemed to her she had dreamt it, but there was a time in their childhood when she and her brother were allies. They would sit on the floor in Eric’s room on a Saturday afternoon when chores were finished, and he would let her flip through his paltry collection of hockey cards. The much thumbed cardboard pictures of players had retained the scent of the long gone bubble gum they had been wrapped with. The faces on the cards didn’t mean anything to her, but being included in the knowledge of these items that would have been confiscated by her parents upon sight made it all the more significant to her.
Her brother had confided to her about his dreams of the farm he would own one day, bigger than the one they lived on now. Their father would come for Sunday visits and he would be impressed by the number of cows and the cleanliness of the stalls. That, or the ways her brother would get revenge on the Logan family, and find a way to hurt Tom Logan, because their dad made his hatred for the man well known, even if they didn’t know the reason behind it back then. So Eric would tell her of the ways he would find to win their father’s approval, and Trudy would in turn bask in the pleasure of being a part of her big brother’s world.
Of course this was long before their teenage years when thoughts of having his sister even enter his bedroom would be out the question. It was also before Eric grew tired of their father’s unexpected cuffs on the ear, or the shouts that would shake the walls when he was in a bad mood. Back then their tall, bearded father was a figure to look up to – someone who, while always feared, was also someone to seek approval from; the occasional grunt of appreciation all the more valued because it was so infrequent.
All of this ended when Eric grew lanky and pimpled and began locking his bedroom door when he retired to his room after Saturday chores. Trudy figured it was teenage hormones or the pressures of high school, paired with their father’s more frequent black moods as they grew older. Cuffs on the ears were replaced with belt lashings if their father felt the chores weren’t up to snuff, and she could tell Eric had lost his desire to want to please the man as he grew older.
Trudy guessed that her brother’s daydreams were now about leaving home instead of trying to make their father proud, but it was knowledge she wasn’t privy to, as the siblings no longer exchanged words aside from the necessary, and Eric spent his time when not at school or in the fields shut in his bedroom.
She was almost a teenager herself when Eric did leave them, and she didn’t feel it to be much of a loss. He must have snuck out in the night, because when her mother called him for breakfast there was no answer, and when she finally stomped in exasperation up the stairs to rouse him, there was no one in the room.
“Didn’t even make the bed,” she heard her mother say to their father when she told him Eric was gone. “And he took the good clothes we just bought him over in town. Fat lot of thanks,” she complained. Her father had grunted in response and didn’t look up from the breakfast he was forking into his mouth.
By then Trudy had her own concerns anyhow, and no longer craved the brotherly companionship she had found briefly in her brother’s bedroom on weekend afternoons. If she were ever to wonder what had happened to him it was something she quickly pushed aside. He had abandoned her, so she wasn’t about to waste time wondering where he ended up, or if she would ever see him again.
*
“Hey Dad.”
Susan looked at the man hunched in the wheelchair, looking through watery eyes at the TV screen in front of him. Was something missing in her that she felt no surge of emotion? Whether it was daughterly love, or guilt for the years that stretched since her last visit, surely either would be more normal than the complete indifference she would feel on meeting a stranger.
“Huh,” her father grunted, shaking his head no to whatever he imagined his visitor was offering.
“It’s me, Dad,” Susan half-heartedly attempted to draw his attention away from the flashing screen.
To her surprise it worked, and he turned to face her. Susan kept her expression blank to mask her reaction to the difference a few years had made.
“That you Susie?” her father squinted in disbelief. “What in God’s name brings you here?”
Susan smoothed a smile over the irritation at a nickname that had always rankled, paired as it was with memories of the drunken drawl of her father gone maudlin in the evening, or bitter and reckless by the time night came.
“I’m in the city on work Dad, came in to see how you’re doing.”
Her father waved a hand at the room around him. “How do you think I’m doing? Boxed up in this crate full of old folk, half of them out of their minds. I’m alive, if that’s what you were wondering.”
Susan looked around the room herself. Her dad had a private room. It was done up in pale green, tasteful if unavoidably institutional. No personal touches had been added, no pictures or books.
Well this was the better version of what it could have been; she had walked into the government funded nursing home and walked right back out. Not on her conscience thank you, she would gladly fork out the extra money for the nicer curtains and dessert, the better disguised scents and better paid for smiles of the staff. If her father didn’t appreciate or acknowledge it, she did.
“You look pretty good, Dad.” Susan pulled a chair from the wall to sit facing him.
He snorted again, and Susan noted the inevitable slide of his eyes back to the TV screen.
A moment passed in silence, bar the babble of a commercial encouraging viewers to order their revolutionary skin care product, decades promised to fade from your face.
“What kind of business?” Her father finally enquired. “Still in the police gig?”
“Yep,” Susan answered. “Investigating a murder,” she heard herself say, berating herself as the word came out of her mouth. At what age would she stop trying to impress, stop caring where she sat in her father’s esteem?
“A murder huh?” her father nodded, looking her in the face for the first time since she had arrived. And then he sat back in his chair, as if the movement had exhausted him. “Turn the volume up would you? Jeopardy’s on.”
“Okay Dad,” Susan stood and raised the television volume two bars, setting the remote close to him. “I have to get going anyhow.” Standing for a moment watching him stare at the screen she asked pointlessly, “Anything I can get you? Anything you need?”
Her father gave a headshake and a grunt, waving his hand without turning his head.
Cutting through the main area on route to the elevator, Susan made accidental eye contact with a nurse she recognized from preliminary visits, the numerous appointments it had taken to get her father set up here.
“Officer Kovalsky,” the woman beamed at her, approaching with her arms out. “We haven’t seen you in a donkey’s year.” Carmel, Camillia, her name was something warm and sunny sounding.