by Sky Curtis
My stomach was cramping up. God. I tried not to moan. The plug wouldn’t go into the socket. Why couldn’t I lose fifty measly pounds? With my left hand, I grabbed one of the spare tires around my middle and shifted it out of the way of the lip of the sideboard. I hoped Cindy wasn’t watching. I stretched my arm to its absolute limit, arched my wrist, and finally plugged the end of the fucking extension cord into the wall.
That done, I had to stand up. This was not going to be an easy endeavour. I could already tell that my arm was stuck. I twisted my body forward so I could get it out. And pulled. No luck. So, I jiggled it this way and that until it came free, badly scraped. Upon inspection, it looked like I had a foot-long hickey from my elbow to my armpit. Then, I heaved my body off the top of the sideboard and dropped the whole cord behind it. I collapsed on the floor like a deflated beach ball. I had a plan. I reached under the buffet, got the end of the cord, and wove it through the furniture legs until it was in the open. Finally, I stood up, waving the end of the plug like a white flag. Truce.
Cindy had been watching all this with undiguised amusement. “So. Congratulations. You win the grand prize. You made that look so easy.” She shoved another cord at me. “Here’s the charger. Plug the damn thing in.”
I took the charger from her and tried to push the plug into the end of the extension cord, doing my best to ram it home with the palm of my hand. “This extension cord is old. It’s hard to get this plugged in. It’s so ancient, it only has holes for two prongs. Thank heavens the charger doesn’t have a grounding prong. We’d never be able to do this.” I grunted, still trying to get the charger plugged into the extension cord. “Man, this is stiff. These prongs won’t go in.”
“Hurry up, Robin, or I’ll give you a stiff prong.”
“Hahaha. Aren’t you the funny one.” I gave it a final slap. “There, good to go.”
We were excited. What would the phone reveal? I inserted the charger into the phone’s jack and sat down beside Cindy. I was trying not to puff. She took the device from me and held it out so we both could see the screen. We held our breath.
Nothing.
A second that seemed like an hour ticked by. Nothing. A completely black screen.
We looked at each other in dismay. The phone had crashed. It was useless. The black screen was the proof. Or maybe the extension cord was faulty. Maybe the plug didn’t work. I’d be damned before I would find another and plug it in all over again.
But, suddenly, an apple missing a bite flashed onto the screen. I held my breath. Were we in luck? And then a charging icon appeared, a tiny battery with a small red stripe, indicating about a one-percent charge. Then the stripe widened. Two percent. We let our breath out in unison.
“It works,” breathed Cindy. She pushed the home button to bring up the screen. Nothing. She pushed it again. And again.
I took the phone out of her hands. “You have to wait until it has a bit more charge,” I said. “Be patient. It will only take a second or two. Don’t push its buttons.” I stroked the phone, trying to coax it along.
“How do you know this?” Cindy was worried and skeptical.
“I told you. I only charge my phone once a day. Sometimes it gets completely out of juice. When I plug it in to charge, I get exactly what’s happening here. Wait a second or two.” I stroked it again.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stroking the phone.”
“That’s the difference between you and me, Cindy. I stroke. You push buttons.”
“Stop telling me how to have a better sex life.”
“I thought we were waiting for a phone.”
We were crabby. This was stressful. She didn’t wait very well. I was really good at it.
Cindy crossed and uncrossed her legs. Drummed her fingers on the table, itching to push the home button. Like a child, she needed a distraction. “What are your password ideas?”
She wasn’t fooled; she knew what I was trying to do. She sighed. “Okay-y-y.” She pulled out the shred of kraft paper from her back pocket and read, “‘Sparling,’ ‘darlene,’ ‘mootpoint,’ sandraandharry,’ ‘spooky,’ ‘philip,’ ‘bowser,’ ‘bernardo.’”
“The first five I know, but what about ‘philip,’ ‘bowser,’ and ‘bernardo’?”
“Philip is her brother. I got that from her dad while you were upstairs. Bowser was her childhood dog. And Bernardo was a long-term boyfriend she had all the way through high school. I got that from her father as well.”
“Let’s hope one of them works. There’s no way these Apple phones can be cracked.”
Cindy said one word. “Alison.”
Alison Trent was the researcher at the Express. She was a recent university post-graduate of about twenty-four who could find out anything, anywhere. Tiny Rasta braids covered her head, all finished off with coloured beads. Every time she turned her neck they swayed and clacked together. The last time I had used her services she had even found out the income of various suspects from tax returns. “Hack, hack,” I said.
“Bad cough?” laughed Cindy.
Nonetheless, I doubted Alison the cracker hacker would be able to get into this phone. Not even the FBI could bust through the security on an Apple phone. I checked the charge icon. The red stripe had turned to green. “It’s ready enough. Do you want to turn it on or shall I?”
“I’m better at turning things on than you are.” She arched her back and threw out her chest.
Okay then. But probably true. Cindy took the phone back from me and ceremoniously pressed the home button with her pink nail. The phone sprang into life with all of Darlene’s app icons scattered over the screen.
I was impressed. “Wow. Look at all the apps she had. Try the passwords.”
Cindy looked at me, amused. She was grinning. “You really are a technotard.”
“I don’t think that’s politically correct.”
Her smile was patronizing. “Robin. Good news. She didn’t put a password on her phone. See?” She held the phone up for me to see. “It opened up right way. Those are her apps. We can access all of her information. Photos. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. And, best of all, her emails. See?” She tapped the blue envelope email icon and we were instantly connected to her inbox.
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right.”
I shimmied next to her and scanned the emails. None of them had a blue dot, so all of them had been read. By her? I could only assume so. My eye snagged on one in the middle of the list that looked interesting Spar123. “Look, I bet that’s Sparling. Open it.”
Cindy tapped the email and began to read. “Hi Babe.” She gave me a look. “I can’t wait to see you again. Dinner and a little fun? Tomorrow night? At seven? Let’s talk about your design job on my next production. Let’s meet at our regular place.”
“Ugh. Babe? Who says that these days? And it sounds a bit like emotional blackmail to me. It’s almost as if he’s saying, if you have sex with me, I’ll make sure you get work on my next production.”
“That’s typical in the theatre industry. Rampant abuse of power.” Then she made small circles with her thumb over the phone. She was scrolling. Suddenly she stopped. “Wait. There’s something really strange about this. He said on the stand, under oath, that he barely knew her. That she was lying about them having a relationship. That he never used his position of power to influence her future employment. That they only saw each other professionally at the theatre.”
“Really? Clearly that’s not true. None of it. Why didn’t her lawyer present these emails?” I grabbed the phone and scrolled down. “There are about thirty of them from him that show up right away. Probably more if we searched the history. This is way more than a professional relationship.”
“Let’s look at another.” She tapped one from six months ago. “Hey kitten, looking forward to
spanking your mommy pussy tonight. Your reward will be???”
“Ew, ew, ew. He’s disgusting.” Something inside me shrank.
“Oh, grow up, Robin. People talk dirty to each other all the time.”
“Not like that. It’s so um, so … ew.”
“Aren’t we the expressive one this morning.” Cindy thought for a moment and then ventured, “Maybe she was trying to protect him. Victims of a sexual assault from a person in power do that. And he certainly had power over her at the theatre. He was the lead actor and she was merely a lowly set designer. I wonder why she brought the case against him if she wasn’t prepared to register all her evidence.” She thought some more. “Maybe her parents pushed her to go to the police, but she didn’t want to.”
I sort of agreed with her. “That would make sense. Did I tell you that her parents moved her little girl bedroom from the family home into Moot Point? That’s why Spooky was there. Maybe she didn’t want her parents to know she was an adult, a sexual person. Maybe that’s another reason why she didn’t show these emails to her lawyer. She did what her parents wanted, up to a point, but held back so he would win and not be punished. She was probably still in love with him.”
“But why not simply delete the emails? And why hide the phone at all? Maybe she was protecting the information so that it wouldn’t disappear. Maybe her parents weren’t involved at all. Maybe she thought she would win the case without the emails, but when she lost, she saved them for her lawsuit.”
“When was that going to happen? The lawsuit? Didn’t you say it was in June?”
“I’m not sure exactly. I’ll have to look it up. Soon, though. June sounds about right.”
Meanwhile, I was scrolling through her emails and noticed quite a few from [email protected]. I pointed them out to Cindy. “Who could that be? Sounds a bit like a bank or something. An investment firm.”
Cindy was whispering to herself. Sounded like she was spitting. “If you say it fast it sounds like Moot Point. Open the last one sent. I bet it’s from her mother.”
I read it out loud. “Hi, sweetie.” I looked at Cindy. “You were right, Just wondering how much longer it will take for you to finish up measuring the property beside Pair o’ Dice. I can hold dinner for another hour, but after that it will be too dried out. It seems this was probably the last email her mom sent her. That’s so sad. Unless her mom was the one who killed her. And this is a decoy. Let’s see. It was sent on the Saturday of Andrew’s party.”
“No one killed her, Robin. A bear mauled her to death.”
“I don’t think so. There’s something off about everything. I mean, sure, if we were in British Columbia where there are grizzlies, then maybe a bear killed her. But here? In Ontario? Once in a blue moon, there’s a rogue bear that will attack a human, but usually there’s food involved. And there was no food involved here.”
“She was the food, Robin. Don’t waste your time on this theory.”
A little flicker of annoyance flamed in my chest. Why was I always dismissed? Was it because I was fat? That my muffin top hung over my waistband? Or was it because my job was trite? That a person who knew what colours went together couldn’t possibly figure out a mystery. I was certain something was mysterious here.
Cindy continued, “Besides, if that’s your theory, how do you explain the bear going for Niemchuk? Two random attacks? I think there was simply a rogue bear out there.”
“Maybe.” I was sulking.
“Okay,” Cindy said, relenting. “Maybe she was killed elsewhere and then brought into the woods as bear bait.”
That was the theory I had implanted in Ralph, but I doubted it. It looked to me like the bear had targeted Darlene, exactly as it had targeted Niemchuk. But I wasn’t going to split hairs. If she could accept that maybe Darlene was murdered, then at least she would be on the right track. “That’s what Ralph is going to find out. The coroner will be able to tell.”
“Lividity and blood splatter and pulsing veins and all that. Yada, yada, yada.”
Her attitude was pissing me off. “Arteries. Pulsing arteries, not veins. Veins don’t pulse.”
“Aren’t you little Miss Perfect. But I still think we’re both wasting our time. There was simply a rogue bear. Period. That’s all.” Cindy brushed some hair out of her eyes. “That has to be the explanation. Otherwise, why was Niemchuk attacked?”
This conversation was going in circles. Frankly, I didn’t care what Cindy believed. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Darlene had been murdered. How, I didn’t know, but I would find out. Little Miss Muffin Top could be pretty smart. “Let’s check out some more of her emails.”
Cindy ran her finger down the list. Here’s another from her mother. It’s from over a year ago. She opened it with a tap of her finger and began reading. “Darling, I know you don’t feel up to talking to the police about Sparling, but really, sweetie, you should. The only people who are allowed to do that to you are your family. Sparling needs to be punished. I think you should move back home and let us take care of you. It’s time to get back on the right path. And so on.”
Cindy and I looked at each other, dumbstruck. Neither of us spoke. The family? Had someone in the family abused Darlene? What exactly was going on here? That poor girl. She was being assaulted on not one but two fronts. And we had the proof in our hands. Cindy began to rapidly tap on the phone. What was she looking for now?
“Here, look Robin, in her sent messages, is the reply to that email from her mom. Thanks Mom, for the invitation to move back home. I am quite convinced that the best place for me to be right now is in my own apartment with my own friends. I’m sorry I told you about Sparling. And no, I won’t go to the police. I’d never win against him and he would go free.”
“She got that right,” I said.
“No kidding. She was torn into tatters by the judge.”
“I wonder how she got from here,” I tapped the email on the phone, “where she wouldn’t move home, to her complete childhood bedroom being transported to Huntsville with her in it.”
“Or from here, where she says she won’t go to the police,” Cindy tapped the phone, “to going to the police. Who knows? All I know is I feel sorry for that poor girl. First abused by someone in her family and then by Sparling.”
“That’s unlike you.”
Cindy’s eyes flashed. “I’m not a hard-hearted bitch, you know.”
I kept the peace. “I know. I’m sorry.” But not really. And she sure could be.
“Righto.” She didn’t believe me. But she let it go and turned her attention back to the screen. “Let’s see what else we got here.”
Cindy hogged the phone and tapped open Darlene’s Facebook page. She scrolled through the postings with a practiced circular motion of her forefinger. Her hand stopped abruptly at an entry. I looked over her shoulder and saw that it was a picture of Darlene. “Look at this. Her last updated status. A photo of her in her new outdoor gear, announcing her new job. She’s so cute, isn’t she? She looks about twelve with that pixie haircut.”
I took the phone from Cindy and saw that there were about fifty likes of her new status and one comment. I tapped on the comment to read it. My eyes widened when I saw what it said and handed the phone dumbly to Cindy. She read it and then whistled.
“Maybe you’re right, Robin. Maybe she was murdered. This here’s what you call a clue. It couldn’t be clearer. Your gonna die if you divided that land. Spelling and grammar mistakes aside, I would say she had something to worry about here.”
“Here, give it back. I want to see who wrote the comment.”
But Cindy was already on it, peering at the small type. “Ursula Major. Not a photo, just a cartoon image of a bear wearing an army uniform. I’m going to search her profile. If it is a her.” She tapped on the tiny cartoon to bring Major’s page up. “Oh great. It’s not a singl
e person, it’s a group of people.” I watched as Cindy sped-read the postings. “Their mission statement says they are militant flora and fauna protectors. Animal rights people. I guess they took exception to the land being divided up into private plots.”
“You think?”
She ignored me and read, “We are dedicated to the preservation of land so that all species can live upon it in harmony without threat. We respect all life and expect it to be treated with dignity at all times. We will take extreme measures to ensure our beliefs are upheld. Typical Facebook rant.”
“Except she is dead.”
“Mauled by a bear, Robin. By a bear.”
I gave her a look.
She acquiesced. “Okay. Maybe dead before that. I’m sure we can figure out that rogue bear’s part in this.”
“And maybe she was murdered by one of the Ursula Major group. They sound very aggressive and militant.”
“Lots of people might have motive to kill her, Robin, but it was a bear. Face it. I saw the claw marks.”
I pursed my lips and held my hand out. I didn’t think so. Cindy relinquished the phone. I scrolled through some of the photos that Ursula Major had posted. “No wonder they want to protect the land. There are some truly beautiful pictures here.”
Ralph walked into the living room. “Hi girls.”
Cindy bristled. He’d committed a sin.
“Are you looking at some photos of your trip?”
What trip? Oh right. Cindy’s trip with her parents. “Oh, hi Ralph.” I was trying to sound sincere. I’m sure my cheeks were burning, although not quite as hot as the hot phone I was holding. I stood up. “Yeah, have a look. Here are some pictures that Cindy’s parents took. The Italian mountains.” I was so calm. I was getting good at subterfuge. I wasn’t sure if I was proud of it or not.
Ralph barely glanced at the pictures. I could smell beer on his breath.
“Good lunch?” I leaned into him, trying to distract him from the phone, my breasts brushing against his arm. I wasn’t sure if he knew what Cindy’s phone looked like.