© 2005, C.C. Benison
Print Edition ISBN 1-897109-03-2
Epub Edition, 2012
ISBN 9781927426159
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.
Photo of C.C. Benison by James Hammel Photography.
Acknowledgements
Many minds make light work. Well, lighter work. My thanks to the following for their comments, contributions, expert advise, and commiseration: Esme Langer, Bernie Chodirker, Tim Ingles, Rita Kurtz, Tom Moffatt, Lenore Richards, John (“Shelterbelt”) Whiteway, Jim Hammel, Michael Phillips, Rorie Bruce, Jackie Mitchell, Jim Sutherland, Annalee Greenberg, Sarah Burton, and Susan Falk. Thanks to the Manitoba Arts Council for its generous support during the writing of this book.
We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Benison, C.C.
Death in cold type / C.C. Benison.
I. Title.
PS8553.E5135D436 2005 C813’.54 C2005-903089-5
Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon
Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7
Winnipeg (CP) – Author C.C. Benison today dedicated his new novel Death in Cold Type to four women – Barbara Huck, Hope Kamin, Marilyn Mackinnon and Barbara Robson. The dedicatees were unavailable for comment at press time.
This is a true story.
Only the people and events aren’t true.
Contents
Book 1 - Tuesday, September 27
1. Birds
2. The End
3. Seventh Wheel
4. Death of an Angel
5. Qwerty
6. In a Yellow Wood
7. Four Lies
Book 2 - Wednesday, September 28
8. Welcome to the Word Factory
9. Nasty, British, and Short
10. Connect the Dots
11. Winnipeg Life
12. An Heir
13. Nadir
Book 3 - Thursday, September 29
14. The Darkroom
15. What the Busboy Saw
16. Antonioni
17. Jeopardy
18. Déjà Vu
19. On Horizontal Hold
20. Wooden Nickel
Book 4 - Friday, September 30
21. Pissed Off
22. A Nice Cup of Tea
23. Fugue State
24. Shades of Mary Jo
25. Bumpf
26. A Cool Reception
Book 5 - Saturday, October 1
27. Fish
28. Vanity Fair
29. The Famous Chapter Twenty-Nine
30. Design is Everywhere
31. Déjà Vu All Over Again
Book 6 - Sunday, October 2
32. Bees
33. Keys
34. Island Episode
35. Rendezvous
36. Hide in Plain Sight
37. Mnemonics
38. I Walk Alone
39. Concatenation
40. Missing
41. Family Matters
42. Abyss
Monday Edition
43. The Beginning
Book 1
Tuesday, September 27
1
Birds
Stevie gripped the banister.
Was she alone? Had only one car left? Or both?
She couldn’t remember. Everything was hazy.
And if only one car, which one?
At least the carpet on the staircase muffled sound. But the texture: to her bare feet the plush was as smooth as a blanket of butter. In the state she was in, it was all she could do to keep from careening to the bottom of the stairs and landing—sound unmuffled—in a heap under the front hall table.
There would be no escape then.
She groped her way to the bottom of the stairs, her ears alert to the slightest noise. But the only sound was that of her own blood pumping past her ears, her heart pounding in her chest. Her mouth was dry. God, was it dry. Then her feet hit the cold tile of the hall and she nearly cried out. Sucking in her breath, she tiptoed past the arched entranceway into the living room. In the morning light, filtered by ivory silk drapes, the furniture lay heavy and grey, like hippos dying beside some African water hole, the stillness broken only by some obnoxious bird screeching outside the window. Stevie’s head throbbed. She took a few soft steps forward. If she could get to the kitchen, then…
But the dining room lay in between. And if anything lurked, it would lurk there.
She stopped. She strained to listen.
All quiet.
Two cars must have left.
She was alone. A reprieve. Stevie’s heartbeat settled into normal rhythms. She pushed aside an obstructing ottoman with one foot and turned the corner to the dining room. Here, the drapes had been pulled back and she caught a glimpse of the elms along the river before a shaft of hazy autumn sun pierced her eye and brought a spasm of pain. She leaned away from the light.
Then her heart jerked.
Only one car had left that morning.
A figure, caught in a ray, stood sentry by the sideboard, cloaked in black. An arm came up, and an arrow of light glanced off something metallic, piercing Stevie’s eye anew.
“What time do you call this?” Kathleen Lord glanced at her watch, then resumed pushing a hoop of silver into one of her earlobes.
“Morning, Mother.” Stevie’s voice emerged as a croak.
“It’s 9:30.”
Stevie sighed and tightened the belt of her bathrobe. She had been home for five months, not doing much of anything—and enjoying it, by and large—but she was beginning to dig herself into a hole of guilt. Her mother—worried, she knew—was beginning to act like the mother of a teenager. Lately, if she’d been out in the evening and rose as her mother was leaving for work, she was in for what she and her two older brothers referred to as the Standish Inquisition, Standish being her mother’s maiden name.
“You must have got in very late. You weren’t with Michael, were you?”
“I had a mini-reunion with some of the girls I graduated with at Balmoral Hall. We had a few drinks…somewhere. I forget.” A few too many margaritas at Grapes, she remembered very well. Her head throbbed.
“I thought it was Michael you were seeing.”
“Tonight. I’m seeing him tonight.” Stevie declined to catch her mother’s eye.
Kathleen pushed a hoop through the other ear. “There’s an envelope for you.” She motioned with her head toward the dining room table on which lay, besides the usual breakfast things, the leavings of Canada Post.
“It feels odd,” she added.
Feels odd? Stevie glanced with dismay from her mother’s avid expression to the stationery as she passed the table. She noted it was not the official letter she had been expecting. Even more dismaying, the envelope bore both a familiar return address and familiar handwriting, which declared that the correspondence was for Stevie Sangster—the last name heavily underlined—not Stevie Lord, which was who she was now.
And forever, if she had anything to do with it.
“Mailman’s early.”
“Well? Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Don’t you have a patient waiting?”
Kathleen tapped her fingers along the top of the tablecloth, her diamond rings flashing as they caught the light—the same light, Stevie figured, against which her mother had tried to scrutinize the contents of the envelope not moments before.
“I think another few minutes won’t kill her.”
>
“I hope this one’s not suicidal.”
“Stevie…!”
“Mother, that letter is addressed to me. I’ll open it when I damn well feel like it.”
“Which will be thirty seconds after I leave this house.”
“Or less, even.” Stevie smiled fondly at her mother. She pondered the creamy stationery a moment. “Or maybe more. Anyway, it’s my decision. Now, is there any coffee?”
“If you like coffee four hours old. Your father was up at 5:00, you know, and I was…”
Stevie disappeared into the kitchen. Of course he was up at 5:00. He had a surgery to perform at Health Sciences Centre. He was up at 5:00 and she was up at 9:30. She sighed, opened a cupboard and reached for a mug.
“All right, I’m leaving now, Stevie.” Her mother’s voice came through the door in a kind of steely singsong. A discreet click signalled a briefcase closing.
“Byeeeeee,” Stevie began to sing back, but her voice died in another croak. Her throat constricted. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt even a little hungover.
She stood before the coffee maker, noted the time on the inset clock (9:37) and waited for the sound of the front door to close.
Then for the fainter grinding noise of the garage door opening.
Then for the car ignition.
Stevie waited a little longer.
9:39.
It wasn’t above her mother to feign starting the car, then, as it idled, dart back into the house under the pretext of having forgotten something to try to catch Stevie opening the envelope. A file (unlikely—she had a mind like a steel trap). Her umbrella (it hadn’t rained in ages). Stevie opened the connecting door to the dining room a notch and pushed one ear through. The throb of the Saab’s diesel engine grew loud a moment. And then fainter, pitch falling. Good old Doppler effect.
Stevie returned to the coffee maker (9:41), poured herself the dregs, then shuffled back into the dining room and settled herself at the table. Next to the pile of mail lay folded the Winnipeg Citizen. She sipped the hot molasses-like brew and glanced at the headline. “Our Day of Shame,” the sky-is-falling type size shrieked. “Ben Johnson stripped of gold after positive test for drugs.”
Stevie yawned. Ben Johnson, poor boob. She glanced down the paper’s index.
Ann Landers...32
Bridge...34
Business...43
Classifieds...47
Comics...41
Crossword...42
Deaths...2, 50
Editorials...10
Horoscope...35
Thirty-five, she muttered to herself, and began flipping through the pages, flicking a glance at the buff-coloured envelope on top of the pile as she did so.
Feels odd? What did her mother mean, feels odd?
Stevie set aside the Citizen, lifted the envelope, and weighed it in her hand. It was plump. Heavy. She fingered the surface. It did feel odd. Lumpy. No, that wasn’t the word. Textured. That was the word.
She tossed the thing back on the pile, disgusted. What now? What was David, her bastard of a soon-to-be-ex-husband, pray god, playing at now? She sipped her coffee, wondered if there was any Aspirin in the kitchen, and flipped through the newsprint to page thirty-five. She furiously folded the paper into a manageable square.
Just then, a key rattled in the back-door lock. Startled, Stevie called out.
“Just me,” a voice said as the hollow thump of something plastic hit the floor.
Sharon Bean, once the star pupil of their grade ten Latin class at BH, now sole proprietor of Bean Cleans, came Tuesday mornings at 10:00 for four hours. Overkill for three people, Stevie thought, but what the hell, I’m not paying for it.
“How are you?” she shouted and felt a pain shoot through her head.
“Fine.” Sharon popped her head through the door from the kitchen. Her hair was in a chignon so tight her eyebrows were locked in permanent surprise. She had once been one of her mother’s patients. Hated doing social work, she told Kathleen Lord, Psy.D.(Berkeley) in despair. Hated the human misery. Hated the bureaucracy that manipulated so much human misery in order to save its own skin. Loved to clean things. Wanted to clean things.
So clean things, Kathleen had advised, presenting her with a potential client list.
“I’d suggest you have some coffee before you start,” Stevie offered. “But you’d have to make a fresh pot.”
“Can’t stop. Has your mother left?”
“Omnia vincit labor,” Stevie responded airily. She had been a Latin star too.
Sharon laughed and passed back through the kitchen door.
Work does conquer all, Stevie reflected, and I should go and look for some, if I’m not going back to Toronto. Or am I? She turned to the horoscope.
Taurus (April 21– May 21)
Something you have been working on for months will bear fruit today. Others may say you are lucky, but the fact is, you have worked hard and long to get this far and deserve the good things now coming your way. A letter may contain a surprise.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” she sputtered.
“Something the matter?” replied the kitchen.
“Oh, nothing.”
Stevie thought: There are twelve signs of the zodiac and about five-and-a-half billion people on Earth. That means—she calculated quickly, the way she might if she were sizing square-footage for an impatient client—some four hundred and fifty million people can expect to learn something in a letter today. What are the chances?
She glanced again at the envelope and the familiar pompous handwriting.
Sharon poked her head through the door again. “Can I tidy in here? Have you had your breakfast yet?”
“No, sorry.”
“Then I’ll make a start with the kitchen.”
“Leave the door open so we can talk. I don’t feel like reading about Ben Johnson and his drug problems.”
Which reminded her of something. She raised her voice slightly to be heard over the clatter of Sharon stacking the dishwasher. “Is it Merritt’s you do next?”
“No, I’m back doing Michael’s Tuesday afternoons. Merritt is Monday mornings. Why?”
“Just wondered.” Stevie unfolded the Go! section of the paper and looked for Merritt’s RE: column, which was usually in the Tuesday edition’s fashion page. RE: Polka Dots was this week’s pressing concern. Several paragraphs followed filled with ellipses and sentence fragments, which was intended to be stylish, she supposed, yet was somehow more symbolic of Merritt’s attention span.
“Just wondered what?” Sharon said after a moment clattering around the kitchen.
“Haven’t seen much of her the last little while. It seems like she’s gone kind of reclusive. New boyfriend, do you think?”
“How would I know?”
“You get to snoop around.”
“I do not snoop.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t notice things in bedrooms and bathrooms?”
“Okay, sometimes. But I’m mostly interested in making things clean and tidy, Stevie. I’m not trying to piece together clues of someone’s private life.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Why are you concerned about Merritt Parrish anyway?” Sharon shouted over the splash of water hitting the sink.
Stevie waited until Sharon turned off the tap, reflecting how odd it was to have an old high school friend become your family’s cleaning lady. “Oh, I don’t know.” She glanced at the selection of cereals on the table. “Just…”
Sharon came through, wiping her hands on a towel. She cocked an eyebrow at Stevie. “You think she’s doing drugs again.”
Stevie was surprised. “How do you know about that?”
“It was the way you moved from Ben Johnson to Merritt. I’m putting two and two together.”
“You do snoop!”
“People tell me things, like they do with their hairdressers. I wish they wouldn’t. I got out of social work so I wouldn’t have to hear about peo
ple’s problems.”
“So is she?”
“Doing drugs? I haven’t a clue.”
“You won’t say, in other words.”
“Something like that.” Sharon turned away and ran a finger over the top of the sideboard. “Has your mother ever worked her magic on her?”
“Magic?”
“Well, she helped me.”
“No offense, but your problem just needed a practical solution. And that’s what PKT does.”
“PK what?”
“Primal Katie Therapy. You know—you go in, you tell your tale of woe, and she goes: ‘you think you’ve got problems?’ and then she gives you an embellished version of her last client’s predicament.”
“Now, Stevie, how would you know that?”
“Okay,” Stevie laughed. “I’m making it up. But for all her diplomas and letters after her name, and after retailing every therapy under the sun, her treatment boils down to this: go to school, get a job, fall in love, get married, have a baby, play nice, finish your soup—”
Some of which had been winging her own way lately. Her mother’s expectations for her had always been high. Leaving a marriage seemed like a failure.
Sharon was regarding her inquisitively. “And her therapy wouldn’t work on Merritt?”
“You’re a social worker. You know it wouldn’t. Or maybe you don’t know how bad it was—Michael having to yank her out of New York and get her into treatment.”
“Actually, I didn’t know it was that bad.”
Stevie reached for a cereal bowl. “Merritt lived here for a few years after her and Michael’s parents died in that accident. She was more than a handful. “
“Odd her living here.”
“It was the arrangement her parents made with mine.” Stevie shrugged. “You know—if we’re ever in an accident, you take the kids, blah, blah, blah. Who knew it would actually happen?”
“But they have an aunt and uncle in town.”
“Somehow, I don’t think the childless and immaculate Bunny Kingdon would have wanted a grubby teenager around. It’s not like she challenged the custodial arrangement. Besides, the two sisters—Bunny and Merritt’s mother—had some sort of estrangement, even though their husbands worked together. Anyway, I was away studying in the States when Merritt lived here. So a kind of mother-daughter relationship grew up between them, I guess. Hey—maybe that’s why Merritt is so screwed up.”
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