The Minstrel & The Campaign

by Lila K Bell

  “It’s a question I’ve asked myself,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”

  She sipped her water again and shifted her position against her pillows. Although I had so many more questions, I didn’t want to push if she was getting tired.

  “To be — to be quite honest,” she said, after a few minutes had passed, “I always wondered if my husband didn’t have something to do with it.”

  Now her lip wobbled, and I couldn’t blame her. I was flabbergasted. “Amelia’s father?”

  Irene nodded, and I didn’t know what to say.

  I’d expected to hear something about trouble with friends, maybe jealousy from someone I hadn’t encountered yet, but her own father?

  I had issues with my parents, but I honestly wouldn’t think my father capable of murdering me, not even at his most irritated. My mother was another story. I wouldn’t put it past her to slip some arsenic into my breakfast. The chances of it happening increased with every new embarrassing story shared in the local gossip train.

  “Victor was a good man, and he loved his daughter, but when she started seeing John, their relationship changed. He felt John was too old for her, that it would make her look like a scheming career woman. She was so offended. She adored John, you see, so the suggestion that she was seeing him for any other reason was a heavy blow. They argued. Often.”

  The tears I’d expected to see at the mention of Amelia’s death now filled her eyes, and I handed her a tissue from the box on the table. She dabbed them away — not the careful “don’t want to smudge my makeup” dab, but a gesture to hold herself together.

  “The last time I saw Amelia, she’d come over for dinner. Victor was supposed to be out — they were hardly on speaking terms at this point — so she felt safe enough to join me. Only he came home early. They had a nasty fight. He screamed at her to break things off, and she swore she’d never speak to him again if he kept pushing the issue. He told her he would rather have no daughter than one who would choose to sleep her way to the top.”

  She paused to wipe away more tears, the memory of that night obviously a ghost she hadn’t yet exorcised. I reached for her hand and she squeezed it tightly.

  “She stormed out,” she said. “She even forgot to say goodbye to me. I was furious with Victor. I told him he was a miserable father if he could say, let alone think, such things about his daughter. He’d been drinking, you see, and whenever he had a few too many, his temper always got the best of him. I told him he had to go and apologize to her. He said he never would. The next day, he said he was going out hunting, that he had to get away from me, from the house, from the whole situation for a while. But—” Irene frowned again and rested her finger against her top lip as she drew in a breath. “But the skies were grey that day. Victor never went hunting when the weather was bad. I worried about him all afternoon, and when he came home it was after ten o’clock. He was shaken. He’d been drinking again, but it was more than that. He wouldn’t talk to me about what happened, would hardly talk at all. He’d had a fender bender on his way home, and at first I thought that’s all it was, that it had given him a bit of a scare, but when John came to the house the next day to see if we’d heard from Amelia, I had to wonder. She never came home, and Victor was a changed man. He never left the house, never talked to me. He just sat in his chair and drank. He died three months later.”

  Gentle sobs shook her shoulders, and I held her hand even more tightly. I wanted to go to her and put my arms around her, but she was struggling so hard to gain control over herself that I held off.

  It took a moment before her weeping subsided. She dried her eyes and cleared her throat. “All these years the question of what happened that night has hung over my head, and it’s another reason I distanced myself from John. Either he killed my Amelia, or, if my suspicions were correct, her own father — my own husband — was the cause of his unhappiness. How could I look him in the eye if either possibility was true?”

  What could I say to that? The awkwardness, the uncertainty, it would be enough to drive anyone crazy. And not to know? How did the woman have any sanity left?

  If I’d had any remaining hesitation of getting to the bottom of this, it had now been wiped away. Saving John was a good goal, but getting answers for Irene was now even more of a priority. For twenty-five years she’d been sitting with this, and now the opportunity was finally here to get some closure.

  I couldn’t let her down.

  “It’s a relief to say it all out loud,” she said. “I never had the courage to mention it to anyone before. With Amelia only believed missing, I knew what my friends would say — that I wasn’t being fair to Victor, that Amelia could still come home and what would she think if I’d accused her father? I don’t know how we’ll ever find out the truth now, though, with Victor being gone.”

  “You mentioned a fender bender. Was it reported? Was there any documentation?”

  “There was, though I’d have to search for it.” Her throat bobbed with a swallow and fresh tears shone in her eyes. “When they told me where they found Amelia, my suspicions were more or less confirmed. If Victor had been hunting as he said he was, why would he have been out near City Hall?”

  “How do you know that’s where the accident happened?”

  “Because the owner of the other car was Robert Carlson, John’s campaign aide.”

  11

  I made sure Irene was comfortable before I left, wanting to ensure that at least one of us was.

  My mind was all in a tizzy.

  Where had her story left me? John and Veronica were pointing fingers at each other, running me in circles without being able to give me anything other than opinions and twenty-five-year-old memories, and my only new lead was the victim’s father, who’d been dead almost as long as Amelia.

  No one’s alibi could be confirmed, very few details could be cross-checked.

  For Irene’s sake, I could look into the car accident. If a report had been filed, there would be a record of it somewhere. Any security camera footage, assuming there had been any, would be long gone, but insurance company records last forever.

  I hoped.

  Not yet sure how I would get my hands on the paperwork and certainly not yet ready to go home and share my update with Gramps, I distracted myself with a day of errands and an extra pilates class. I needed a healthy way to get rid of the excess energy running through my veins — the rush telling me to push harder, to dig faster.

  I’d made those mistakes before and nearly wound up sued for slander. This time I would be cautious and force myself to move slowly, considering every point of evidence as I learned it. Even if it left a sour taste in my mouth.

  Around nine o’clock, I drove home and took the twenty-minute walk to the Eagle’s Gate restaurant, bypassing the front door in favour of the side entrance to the Treasure Trove.

  Opal was coming out as I was coming in, and she brushed a loose lock of wavy hair behind my ear. “You staying out of trouble, Fiona?”

  “I’m trying,” I said, “but trouble seems to keep finding me.”

  She flashed me a smile and headed out, leaving me to make my way toward the bar.

  Where I spotted Ryan Clark sitting on his regular stool.

  My heart did a double-beat, and for a moment I stood frozen by the pool tables, unable to convince myself to move closer.

  He was dressed down tonight. No leather jacket, but a plaid dress shirt over a white T-shirt and jeans faded at the knees. He drank from a bottle, generic label, and his attention was focused on the small TV mounted above the bar.

  Someone bumped me, giving me the impetus I needed to move forward, and I slowly made my way to my stool.

  “Hey stranger,” I said as I approached.

  Was it my imagination that his back tensed? That the grip around his bottle grew a little tighter?

  For that matter, when did Ryan Clark order a bottle? As long as I’d known him, he’d been a pint guy.

  “Hey,” he s
aid, and left it at that.

  I settled on my usual seat beside him and waved at Troy, who acknowledged me with a raised glass. I nodded, confirming my order, then turned my attention to the TV. Hockey tonight, of course. I could have sworn the season had just ended, and here we were ramping up again.

  Not caring much about who got the puck in whose net, most of my attention was directed at Ryan through my periphery. He’d peeled off the corner of his label and was busy picking at the rest of it, his long fingers flexing and contracting with the effort as he spun the bottle around. His eyes were glued to the screen, but when the rest of the bar rose in a cheer at some good play by Team A, he gave no reaction.

  My jaw twinged, and I realized I was grinding my teeth.

  What was going on here?

  Finally, after what felt like an age, Troy delivered my drink. “So?” he asked.

  “So what?”

  “How’s life? You left the other night on the brink of some quarter-life crisis and now you’re back looking… even worse, if I’m being honest.”

  “Are you always this charming?”

  The corner of his lip quirked. “When needs must.”

  I should have put on an extra layer of mascara. Amazing how some plumper eyelashes can hide all manner of evil.

  “I’m feeling stuck,” I said, and did my best not to glance at Ryan as I said it. There was no way he couldn’t hear what I was saying, but he’d made no effort to join the conversation. Also not like him. “I’m caught in the hub of a maze and I don’t know if I’m supposed to go left, right, up, down, or just stand on my head until the scene changes.”

  Oh man did that apply to so many areas of my life right now. My future, this case, my situation with Ryan. The only solid relationships I had were with Gramps and this whiskey sour.

  Someone at the other end of the bar waved Troy over, but before he left, he said, “Start with one drink. If you still feel like standing on your head, make sure you charge for it. People would pay.”

  He gave me a wink and a smile, and then I was left with Ryan and the silence between us grew even more awkward.

  He couldn’t possibly be that wrapped up in the hockey game, could he?

  I sipped my drink and waited for the commercial break. Maybe this was his team. Maybe he hadn’t seem them do so well in a long time and he was captivated by their success.

  It was easier on my ego to think that might be the case.

  Otherwise I had no idea what was going on. The last time we’d spoken, I’d asked him out to dinner and he’d bought me a drink instead. We’d chatted, laughed, and I thought things were fine. But he hadn’t invited me into his apartment that time I’d driven him home, and there was still the whole thing with him coming out of that downtown office building in a suit and driving away in a car I didn’t recognize.

  As though he’d been a completely different person that day.

  I didn’t know what made Ryan Clark tick — I’d never pried enough to find out — but everything I thought I’d figured out had now exploded into a million tiny dust particles.

  Would I ever be able to piece them back together?

  Did I even want to try?

  With everything else up in the air in my life, how smart was it to chase after a guy who wasn’t sure what he wanted? Sounded like trouble to me.

  The game paused, a commercial rolled, and Ryan’s gaze flicked to me. “Things are good?” he asked.

  Dost thou condescend to speak with lowly me?

  “Not bad,” I said. “Keeping busy, for better or worse.” When he didn’t ask for more details, I did my best to keep the conversation going. “You haven’t been around much lately. Is everything all right?”

  “I was away on business,” he said, and took a sip of his drink to finish off the bottle.

  I waited for him to order another, but he made no move to get Troy’s attention.

  “Anywhere fun?”

  It was the closest I’d ever come to asking him about his life outside the bar, and the words glitched in my throat before I finally got them out.

  “Just Montreal.”

  “Always a good time.” A fresh silence spilled between us, but I was determined not to let it sit. “It’s been different here without you. Quieter. Less judgy.”

  I meant it as a joke, the way he and I always bantered about things. Typically I would throw something insulting his way, and he would pitch it right back with something witty.

  Tonight, he just gave me a smile and dropped a ten on the counter for Troy.

  “I’m glad to know I have my place,” he said, and grabbed his jacket out from under him. “Have a good night, Fi.”

  He headed out and I dropped my forehead onto the bar.

  Had I been cursed?

  That had to be it.

  Something I’d done in the last couple of weeks had set the gods of fortune against me.

  “Here,” Troy said, dropping another drink in front of me. “This one’s on the house. That was too painful to watch.”

  I mumbled a thank you as he walked away.

  Hopefully I’d figure out the right words to break the spell soon and have things go my way for a change.

  12

  That night I dreamed about Veronica and John.

  I knew it was a dream, but every time I tried to direct what I was seeing, it kept coming back to the same arc: Veronica chasing John, literally running after him down the street. She was shouting about an argument that never happened.

  It did! Dream Veronica cried. I swear it did!

  I woke up feeling more positive than I had in days.

  Unless Veronica was outright lying about the argument, she’d overheard something. If it wasn’t John, then someone else had to have been at City Hall that night. Someone else had to have argued with Amelia.

  Irene had mentioned Robert Carlson, a person that so far no one else had brought up. He had to be the aide Gramps had mentioned.

  Was John trying to protect him or was he actually ignorant of Robert’s presence there that night?

  Irene could have been mistaken, of course. Brookside isn’t a huge town. As coincidental as it would have been, there was always the possibility that Victor Wright had slammed into Robert Carlson’s car somewhere far from City Hall.

  There was only one way to find out, and that was to speak with Carlson.

  A quick search on the internet made him easy to find. After so many years of being John Kingslake’s aide and going off to start a successful investment company, Carlson had returned to the political fold, first as a city councillor and now running for mayor in the next election.

  I supposed it was a fitting circle of events — it’s not like he didn’t know what the job entailed. And from his smarmy smile in his headshot, he had the right personality for the job.

  Meeting him would be a real treat, as I was certain I would have to suffer under what appeared to be a massive ego, but I was willing to do what needed to be done. If he could prove or disprove Irene’s theory, I could give the woman some peace of mind. After so many years living with her doubts, she deserved it.

  With the address for Carlson’s campaign office entered into my GPS, I pulled Mercy out of the laneway and drove downtown.

  As I wound my way through the streets, I found myself wishing Sybil were with me. The girl had a knack for getting people to talk — probably her age and semblance of innocence — that I suspected would make a world of difference in getting answers I’d so far failed to uncover.

  Only the desire to keep her out of trouble prevented me from waiting until she was done school for the day and having her ride shotgun. So far I’d managed to fly under Sam’s radar, but if he did find me out, I didn’t want him to tear his sister apart as well.

  That was a consequence I was willing to endure all on my own.

  So, alone, I pulled up in front of Carlson’s campaign office.

  Vote for Carlson! signs were posted in all the windows, along with catchy taglines lik
e Best for your Community, Best for You and Carlson for a Cozier Community.

  I wasn’t a huge fan of the alliteration, myself, but some people might get a kick out of it.

  The open room was quiet when I went in, so I followed the lone voice to an office in the back. Carlson was on the phone, a big grin pasted on his face as he guffawed over something he obviously found hilarious. When he caught sight of me, he waved at me to take a seat, and I promptly obeyed.

  While I waited for him to wrap up his conversation, I took in the man in front of me. Mid-fifties, with hints of crows feet lining the corners of his eyes. Wrinkles around his mouth indicated a one-time smoker, but the lack of odorous evidence told me he might have succeeded in becoming an ex-smoker. His dark suit was expensive and well-pressed, his dark hair — greying at the temples — neatly brushed. All in all, a standard man. Nothing that made him stand out, but nothing that made you turn away in disgust, either. Even if his laugh was a little fake and boisterous.

  From him, my attention shifted to the office decor. Which was… something. If the taglines on his signs came off as a bit hokey, the evidence that he at least meant what he said was right here in front of me.

  He was a community nut. One of those people who invested himself in as many associations and charities and societies as his busy schedule allowed. Certificates of acknowledgement for donations and participation lined his walls next to his political sciences degree, and his bookshelves were full of trophies for hockey and… was that a gardening award on the end?

  I wasn’t inclined to like the guy, for the sole reason that politicians always made me a bit iffy, but it was nice to see someone who lived up to his claims.