T
hat afternoon, after strings had been pulled all the way to the Vancouver labs thanks to Boone, the substance analysis from the stairs of the house on Booster Ave came back. Munching flaky kuchen from the Little Vienna Bakery, Holly sat with Ann in the easy chairs in the lunchroom. Things had been so quiet that morning that they’d both nearly fallen asleep. “Plastic wood,” she said, showing her the print-out.
“Kids in Wawa used to sniff that,” Ann said. “How long has the stuff been around?”
“Home Hardware guy said since the Forties.”
“And your theory is...”
“It’s obvious to someone looking closely. There was a trip string or wire on the second stair from the top. Two nail holes, an accident waiting for a victim. You don’t need much with a staggering drunk. If Clare Clavir had survived, she wouldn’t have known what happened. I saw a guy once who’d cut off his hand with a chainsaw. So drunk he was feeling no pain, or maybe it was the body’s defenses. Lucky his buddy knew about tourniquets.”
Ann crossed her legs and got into a more comfortable position. “Dee said that she and Marilyn were next door helping a woman can fruit when they heard the scream. Marilyn ran over there like a shot.”
“Joel was asleep in his room. That’s the strange part. Why didn’t he wake up?”
Ann’s eyes crinkled at the edges. “You’ve never been a mother. Teenagers sleep until noon like they’re unconscious. My son did.”
“So she yanked the nails then later, in the confusion, filled the holes with plastic wood. Maybe a quick sand.” Her voice slowed in contemplation. “You’d need tools. Sounds like a plan. She must have hated her mother, and from what I’ve learned, no wonder.”
“It looked like an accident. Paramedics tried to revive her, but she died instantly, the coroner said. No one considered it a crime scene.” Ann put down the old report Boone had also faxed over. “I still can’t believe it. Marilyn is the last person I’d suspect of violence.”
“I know what you mean. And, Ann, she couldn’t even have been sure Clare would be killed.”
Ann blew out a breath, then finished her tea. “But she’d sure as hell be incapacitated for a long time. Enough to delay or even prevent the move. Clare’s boyfriend didn’t sound like the kind to wait. Con men depend on timing.”
“What happened to Mitch Garson? You were going to run a check,” Holly said, wondering if he could be another slimy piece of this ugly puzzle. Joel had surfaced after over thirty years like a filthy penny. Why not this piece of trash? Except that he’d be in his eighties.
Ann put her arms behind her and stretched. “Did two years less a day in Milton for lottery fraud twenty years ago. Then he turned up in an obituary in the Calgary papers last summer.”
“What makes you think Joel had no role in his mother’s death?” Holly patted crumbs from her mouth, then tossed the serviette into a wastebasket.
“Hell, Dee claimed that Clare gave him everything he wanted, and he was happy to be moving to the big city with more scope for his schemes. No motive.” Ann gave Holly an even look. “We’re omitting one person. Shannon. What did she know? Nothing? Everything?”
“Or something in between. Nowhere to go on that.”
“Like in ‘two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.’ So what now?”
“Let me mull it over.”
“Mulling is good.” Ann smiled.
As Ann returned to her work, Holly finished the dregs of some coffee as noxious as her thoughts. The big dogs at headquarters were no more likely to consider this piece of history any more than they’d examine the Shroud of Turin for trace. Joel and Shannon were dead. Unless she got a confession from Marilyn, this was merely an exercise. And if the woman refused to cave, what then? Avoid her for the next few years and hope to be transferred? Face it, she thought. All over the world are cases in which the law knows the person is guilty but can’t do a damn thing about it. Still, as in her mother’s fate, she wanted to know. The truth was the thing. Painful or not.
What about Marilyn’s conscience? Was she waiting for the truth to free her? The cliché had legs. How many times on the
First 48
had a detective reduced even a hardened suspect to tears, forced him to admit what had been gnawing his soul? One minute the thug was talking tough or pulling his arms inside a hoodie in a gesture of guilty withdrawal. Then came the magic words. Asked to “man up,” tears would stream down his face, and the “baby daddy” would ask to see his three-year-old. Marilyn had been only fifteen. What about a reduced charge? Manslaughter. Reckless endangerment. If she claimed to have been abused as a child...all bets were off. But what proof remained of that? Only her word? And Aunt Dee’s.
She forced herself to call Serenity. The answering machine gave a reprieve: “I’ll be out of town until Wednesday...sorry for the...if this is an emergency...” Holly tried her cell, but the line went straight to Telus voice messaging.
“There’s only one choice left. I’m going to talk to Aunt Dee,” she said to Ann, who gave her an ok sign.
Ten minutes later, she crossed the threshold of Eyre Manor, holding the door for a man exiting on a scooter and narrowly missing a bruised knee. The staff was cooperative, but curious. Holly explained that she was closing out an accidental death case involving Dee’s nephew. “She’s in her room writing down her mother’s recipe for bean soup. Dee has made a special project out of improving our meals,” an aide said.
Holly had never been in a nursing home and considered it as depressing as a hospital, but the place seemed cozy and friendly. A man with an accordion was playing “Lady of Spain” as dozen people in armchairs and wheelchairs clapped to the rhythm. En route to Dee’s wing, she found herself buying tickets on a log cabin design quilt from a fireplug of a lady with a chipmunk voice.
Dee looked up from her notebook and didn’t seem surprised to see her. Holly noticed the family resemblance in her classic features and strong cheekbone structure as she introduced herself. “I wondered about that other woman and her questions. Now it makes sense. Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we’re stupid.” Dee levelled knowing eyes at her. One visit was understandable. A second meant serious business.
Holly closed the door as Dee asked and drew up a chair. After giving Dee some background, she related the information about the stairs.
Dee spent a moment collecting her thoughts. She did not seem at all surprised. Then she reached for the comfort of Haggis and settled the large stuffed dog on her lap. Holly thought of children and the teddy bears many cruisers carried. “Over the years since...Clare’s been gone...seeing the girls grow up, I wondered. Not that I really wanted to know. The mill of God and all that baloney. I can’t tell you more. Marilyn can decide for herself.” She gazed out the window at a sparrow hopping for seed at a feeder. “What might happen to her? Can you arrest her after all this time? I’ve heard that—”
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder. If Marilyn set that trap on the stairs, if she doctored Joel’s drugs, she has to face those facts.” Holly looked into the faded sand-dune eyes. “No matter what I find, no matter what I can or can’t do with the information, I won’t turn back. And Joel’s death happened on my patch.”
Dee dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “She’s at the House of Alma. They’re putting in the gas for the stoves and for the fireplaces. Those big propane containers. Bringing in a crane, I imagine.” She seemed resigned.
“So close to realizing her dream. No points for atonement in this life. That doesn’t make this easier for me either.”
“The scales of justice must balance. I understand. As for blame? You won’t find this old lady pointing a finger.” Dee extended a paper-dry hand to Holly and squeezed for all her life. “He was an opportunistic little bastard. Took after his mother. No tears from me for his worthless life.”
“Where is it, then? Where’s the House of Alma?”
* * *
Back at the station, it was nearly five. Ann was straightening her desk prior to leaving. Holly went to a large topo map of the southern shoreline all the way to Port Renfrew. Marilyn’s property was west, in the San Juan foothills, a few kilometres into the heights. From a time when the island grew its own food, this area would have been hayfields supporting cattle and horses, even a few sheep. Since then, it had been a church camp. Any roads would be rutted and winding, part of the charm.
“I need the Suburban for some back-country work. What’s its status?”
“Apple pie order. Chipper just had it into Tri-City for its 300,000 kilometre checkup. Even filled up now that gas costs less than champagne.” Ann tossed the keys to Holly, who caught them in one hand.
“Call me a bloody fool. I’m going out to the House of Alma to talk to Marilyn.” She told Ann about Dee’s reaction. “If I can get her to confess…”
Ann scored a three-pointer in the corner waste basket. “I thought you might decide to talk to her. But seriously, do you really think that she’ll admit to killing her mother and Joel? Everything is so circumstantial. A fall decades ago. A drug overdose long overdue. He was no fool. She couldn’t have injected him, so how—”
“But killing a parent. I don’t understand.”
“Yours loved you and defined your upbringing. All Marilyn had was Shannon, and that relationship was being threatened. Passions run high.”
Holly turned at the door. “Wish me luck.”
An uneasy look came over Ann’s square face. “What about back-up?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. Marilyn is no low-life.”
“Maybe so. But that’s bad country once off the main roads.
And as for radio contact, you might as well send up smoke signals.” Ann gestured to the computer screen, gone to sleep with its wandering shapes. “Something more disturbing. The Weather Network said that winds from the south are expected to reach over sixty kmh by early this evening. Bad news for those fighting forest fires. The Otter Point dispatch called up reserve staff and asked for volunteers.”
Holly went to the closet. “I’ll be fine. This won’t take long. If she stonewalls me, there’s nothing I can do. No prosecutor would go to court on this.” As she put on her jacket, she felt something in the pocket. The mask she’d given Chipper. Then she went back to her desk for one last item.
Giving a guttural groan, the old Suburban roared into action. Without a functioning air conditioner, hot blasts rushed through the open windows like the punishing mistral winds. As she accelerated up the first hill, dollars blew through the exhaust. Maybe Tri-City had rebuilt the carburetor, but the response was jerky. She passed Point No Point resort, then the former logging flats of Jordan River and China Beach. The fog across the strait had blown north, enveloping the land and disorienting her. Washington State to the south might have been as near as Asia. Finally she headed up an old logging road into part of the Jordan River watershed. Nearby in the hills, a massive steel pipeline snaked down.
Someone had started upgrading, Holly noted as the tank-like vehicle shuddered forward on the washboard. Tracks showed where a grader had passed, followed by pit-run gravel dumps to level dips. People spending hundreds for a spa weekend wouldn’t appreciate leaving a muffler behind. When the tires spun, she stopped and switched to Four-Low gear for more traction. Stress clamped her jaw. She was coming to accuse a woman she liked of murder. Denial could keep Marilyn safe, but would her body language betray her?
Now that she could see how far she was from the main road, being out of contact added a second worry. The island’s problematic CREST emergency radio system, constructed at a cost of seventeen million dollars in 2003 to unite police, fire, ambulance, military and transit agencies didn’t work west of Fossil Bay.
At the top of the ridge, as a rising wind rustled the undergrowth, she gazed across the strait at the changing view. Huge cumulus clouds brooded over the blackened waters with not a boat in sight. Ann had been right about the dangerous weather. Then she headed north as the dirt road smoothed between wide brown meadows of former grazing land. Old-fashioned split-rail cedar fences stood after a hundred years. Heavy lug marks indicated that a large truck had passed. Probably delivering propane tanks, followed by a gas truck for the fills.
She heard a solid wall of crackling, ear-splitting cicadas in a group mating effort.
Pick me, pick me,
their whirring wings seemed to plead.
As she drove, the wind increased, and tumbleweeds of tangled brush blew across the road. Ringing the property like rolls of barbed wire were burn piles of second-growth aspen cleared to improve the view. The grass was golden and dry, wild shafts of timothy hip-high like a Kansas wheatfield. At a padlocked gate, she stopped the vehicle, her lips parched. Sweat poured down her brow, wicked off by the wind, and she felt like removing her confining vest. Had she been wrong to come without backup? In a three-person detachment with one out of commission? This wasn’t a drug bust of Hells Angels. But she needed to remember that life often had a blackberry custard pie up its sleeve.
After parking, she stepped over the heavy chain meant to keep out motorcycles and ATVs. The crack of thunder in the distance made her jump as she smelled faint ozone. Roiling clouds launched themselves across the strait as if Woden himself was orchestrating the Ring cycle, tossing lightning bolts for emphasis. Like a dark grey velvet curtain concluding a final act, the sky was darkening, even at five thirty in the afternoon. She felt exposed in the face of nature, especially since that typhoon last year. Spruces and firs six feet in diameter had crashed to the ground like toothpicks, their rootballs groping twelve feet into the sky. After a year of clean-up, many monsters still lay in the deep woods back of town, mute witness to a century storm which took no prisoners.
New hydro poles marched to the complex. A main log house and several outbuildings appeared, their wood refreshed with varnish. A handsome sign, “The House of Alma”, featured a dove nestled in strong, welcoming hands. Holly’d learned online that in
The Faerie Queene,
Alma’s castle represented the balanced body under command of the rational soul.
Mens sana in corpore
sano,
Sister would have said. Banks of white feathered pampas grass led down the drive, with freshly mulched beds planted with drought-resistant agaves, yuccas and heather. Scottish highlands met the desert. A series of barks overhead startled her, and she looked up at a single bird, fighting the winds as if floating in place. A rare snow goose, not the usual grey Canada version or smaller, darker short-necked cackling relative. Its cries were more raucous. Warning or announcing? As she trod the dusty track, her boots complained and her toes ached.