by Warren Court
Besides with no job, Armour had to admit he had all the time in the world to indulge in his little quests. But the time when that would end was also approaching as his funds from his wife’s death insurance settlement were dwindling. Armour was pinching every penny he could. Living as frugally as possible. Melanie called him a minimalist but he didn’t think that fit. He had no aversion to acquiring things, it just so happened that whatever items Armour purchased were all discounted as they were usually thrift items or antiques like saw blades or hammers.
Melanie once told him that her bill for television, her phone and something she called why fy, ran close to two hundred dollars a month. Armour’s phone bill was less than fifty, having only basic service, no voicemail, no forwarding, no long-distance plan. Armour would be more than happy to get rid of the phone altogether and use the mail service and personal visits to reach out to his close circle of friends.
Armour saw the turn off he needed coming up and put his hand out and crooked it up in the visual sign of making a right turn. A red, low slung sports car, he was unsure of the make, came roaring by as he slowed to take the turn. “Flashy car,” he said.
He turned onto the Scotch Line road and went from the pavement of the highway to dirt and gravel. He could hear the stones hitting the underside of his fenders and supressed a grimace. He hated to see his beloved Ford damaged in any way, but according to the map this was the only way to get to the next graveyard.
Armour came up over a rise, in the distance was a farm house. Telephone poles lined one side of the road, there were deep ditches on either side, a quintessential Ontario bucolic scene. Armour suddenly felt nauseous and tensed up. Although each time it was slightly different he knew what it was. Oh no, was all he could think before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he was gone.
Everything around him was blurry, like he was looking through cellophane smeared with grease. There was a rhythmic sound over a swiping sound and it was dark. Something long and rectangular in front of him. Then a hand stretched across in front of him and suddenly there was music. The song sounded familiar to Armour but he could not place it. And then just blackness.
Armour felt a stinging blow on his cheek.
“Hey, buddy you alright?” someone asked. It sounded like a young man.
“Don’t hit him, Mark.” Another voice, older and deeper.
“He’s just knocked out, Dad,” the first voice said. “I’m just trying to bring him around. If we had a bucket of water we could throw it on him. Hey buddy, are you okay?”
Armour opened his eyes, his cheeks were hot and stiff, his face was pressed into his car’s steering wheel. He pushed himself off it.
“Take it easy man, you’re going to be okay.” Armour turned his head to look at the speaker and felt a wave of pain sweep across his head.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a ditch,” the man said. There was another young man behind him. They were farmers, rugged denim clothes and dark brown tans on their faces that went deep red around the neck line of their t-shirts. They both backed up to give Armour some space to get out of his car. In front of the car’s windshield was a grass mound, his car had gone off the road and into the drainage ditch. He stepped out and got a soaker, the two farmers both wearing rubber boats were standing in the six inches of water. One of them chuckled.
“Easy there, you’re in the ditch.” The man named Stan took Armour’s arm and helped him up to the road.
“What happened?” Armour asked.
There was a green John Deer tractor on the road idling. Hooked behind it was a large wagon with hay bales.
“You must have passed out,” the younger man said.
“My son, Mark here, saw you,” Stan said. “We were crossing the field. You okay buddy?”
“I think so.”
“You have too much to drink?”
“Huh… what? No.” Armour looked back at his stricken car.
“We can haul that out for you.” Stan offered.
Armour said nothing, just looked at the farmer in confusion.
“Won’t take but a minute. Don’t see how else you’re going to get it out.”
“I would appreciate that.” Armour stood back and tried to clear his head. The spell he’d just had was still grabbing hold of his brain and it was hard to drag himself out of it and concentrate on his present circumstances. He looked over across the field at the farm house about half a kilometre away. There was a woman in a white dress, long dark hair, stringing laundry on a line. She was not looking their way.
It took Stan and his son ten minutes to disconnect the hay bale wagon and position their big tractor to bring the Model T directly back up the ditch the way it had gone in. Mark fixed a heavy chain to the front of the tractor and connected the other end of it to the underside of the Model T. Armour wasn’t sure where on the car and was a little concerned but he was hardly in a position to help or provide direction. These men seemed to know what they were doing. He just watched, one hand on his hip, the other holding his jacket over his shoulder.
“Nice car,” Stan said when the T was dragged out. Mark had the chain off in a flash. Armour went to the front bumper which consisted of two strips of two-inch-wide steel that wrapped around the front wheel wells. The bumper was dented and the paint peeled off in one section but other than that, it was not serious. Rather than ordering a replacement part, Armour could bang that out and repaint it. Another penny-pinching method he was eager to employ as it would give him something to do. He never passed up an opportunity to work on his car or get his hands dirty.
The two farmers hooked their wagon back up to the tractor. Armour shook their hands and they asked again if he wanted a lift into town. Armour said no thanks but appreciated the offer. He made to pay them, pulling the two hundred dollars refund from the camp site out of his pocket but Stan shook his head.
“No thanks, just being neighbourly.”
Armour watched the tractor go down the road the way he had come. Then he snapped his fingers and in a moment of panic he got in his car and tried the starter. Luckily the car groaned over once and then started up fine, a bluish cloud of exhaust puffed out of its tail pipe. That was a bit foolish, not trying to start the car until after Stan and Mark had departed the scene.
Armour figured that the angle of the car when it came to a stop in the ditch must have starved the carburettor of gasoline as the car was not running when Armour was roused but still had half a tank of gas. He let the car settle in to idle for a bit then put it in gear and drove away.
He drove past the farm house, he assumed it was a farm house, there was no barn or crops but there was a well-kept wooden fence and yard and the building was in the style of a farm house. There was tall wild grass on either side and at the back of the property but it was cut back from the house. The laundry was still blowing on the line. There were dark clouds coming from the south and the woman he had seen was no longer outside. He thought about stopping and telling her to get the laundry in, then smiled and said. “Mind your business, Armour.”
He was too late now to explore the second cemetery so when he got to an intersection of Regional Road 7 and the Scotch Line road he turned left. He knew from his map that a motel was nearby.
The Country Inn Motel was quiet and looked run-down with only two vehicles in its parking lot. One was parked in front of the office and the other in front of one of the units at the far end of the complex. The parking lot was in rough shape and Armour almost did a U Turn to pull around and drive out but then he saw the storm, it was minutes away. He decided to stop for the night.
After checking in and getting a room key, Armour ran across the road to a general store. He ran because it was pouring buckets outside. He bought a few snacks and a readymade submarine sandwich for dinner and glass bottle of spring water. It was more expensive than the plastic bottles but Armour was sticking to his guns. In his world those modern things were verboten.
Back in his musty sme
lling small hotel room, he watched from his window as the rain pelting his Model T turned to hail. He felt bad for his poor little car, she was not having a good day but he doubted the small size of the hail pellets would do any further damage.
3
Armour managed to visit the two graveyards on his list the following day but did not have time to backtrack and survey the one near the Turkey Point camp ground, that would have to wait. He got his car out onto Highway Six and headed towards Hamilton. He had to go back, no choice. His cash supplies were running low. Although he had a bank card it was kept in a wooden box on his mantle back at his house, only to be brought out on trips to his bank downtown. He never carried it around for emergencies or unexpected expenses. With the completion of any banking, back in its box the card would go, safely out of Armour’s eyesight, minimizing the damage to Armour’s pretend world of the 1920s when everything was done by check or cash.
Back at home Armour inspected the undersides of the fenders. The rattling of the gravel from the Scotch Line road had done some damage and he had a wrench in hand to remove them but then thought better of it. He couldn’t deny that he would be back out on that gravel road or one just like it at some point in the future. Better to wait until his business of finding his ancestor’s grave out there was done before repairing his car.
In the two cemeteries he had managed to thoroughly survey were several tombstones and memorials for people named Black but none had been his great-grandfather, Armour Blane Black, died 1916. Nevertheless, he had written down some of their names and particulars thinking that, maybe, they were distant relatives.
Armour had searched through those two cemeteries robotically, the blackout he had experienced on the Scotch Line road preoccupying his thoughts. That was typical, when Armour had one of his spells it seemed to drive everything else out of his mind. It was very annoying. Now that he was back home he tried hard to remember the details from the spell. The dashboard of the car, it looked modern but there was something odd about it. The rhythmic sound of something whacking, like something dragging. Then that hand reaching across in front of his vision. And that song. He struggled to remember the lyrics but could barely recall the tune. He tried to hum it but it sounded silly. There was one thing Armour knew, that spell would come on again eventually. They always did.
Armour switched his focus to the location of the spell, maybe that meant something. Why had he gone under there, on the Scotch Line road? He couldn’t remember ever travelling down it but he was pretty sure he had come across the name when he was employed as a cub reporter for the Hamilton Spectator. Something had happened on it.
Armour put the wrench away and went inside. On the second story of his house in the closet of a spare bedroom were six boxes stacked in two columns of three. Each one was labelled on the front and he quickly found the one he was looking for, marked 1991–1994. He carried it down to his kitchen table.
While the kettle boiled he took the lid off the banker’s box and started going through files. Armour spent the rest of the day walking down memory lane. Some of it wasn’t as pleasant as he might have expected. They were the notes on the stories he filed as a reporter with the Spectator. Some of them had the resulting newspaper clipping stapled to them.
Most of them he had forgotten, they were part of Armour’s past. A past which in his mind represented the future and something to be shut out. The world he had left behind after his wife had been taken from him.
In more than one article he saw the name Detective Blain Henderson. Poor Blain. He swallowed hard thinking of how he first came upon that name and of Blain’s body, buried at the bottom of the escarpment and how he got there. He remembered Blain’s last words before he fell to his death, I know who killed your wife. Armour flipped quickly past those stories.
***
Armour was right about the connection to the Scotch Line road. The story he was looking for was from his first year as a cub reporter and thus at the very bottom of the box.
Though it was his first year on the job it was not his first story. He filed so many that year, small things of little consequence, a lot of human interest stories. Art Gallery openings, arrival of a baby elephant at the African Lion Safari, a couple of restaurant reviews. He chuckled at that. What would a kid barely out of college know about critiquing a restaurant?
In all that fluff though, that first year there was one juicy story. A big story that filled Armour with a flush of pride. He thought he’d done a pretty good job on it back then but now, he wasn’t so sure. He pulled out the file folder marked Truscott and it all came back to him. He knew the summary details without even opening the file; Sheila Truscott, fifteen-year-old, found dead, raped and strangled on the Scotch Line road.
He had followed the investigation, doing the first reporting on the murder. But once the sensationalism of the story was picked up, especially the belief that a crazed killer was still on the loose as there had been no arrest, two seasoned reporters from the Spec were assigned. Armour remembered feeling slighted at that but one of the reporters had pulled him aside and told him it was only natural, a big story like this had to be covered by more experienced reporters. There was too much at stake. They’d bought Armour lunch and told him he had to pay his dues and he had accepted it. It wasn’t like they kicked him off the story completely, the two reporters used him as a gopher, chasing the mundane details on the story and fetching coffee when needed. Armour had paid his dues alright.
Armour kept flipping through the story. His last byline that fed into it was about the police searching for a car that was seen on that road, a compact foreign car, either a Honda or Toyota. That’s all there was. There were other clippings but none had been posted by Armour and he wondered why he had put them in that file. They were of the subsequent arrest several days later of a friend of the young girl. A sixteen-year-old boy and classmate of the deceased. Kevin Macintyre. He was seen with the girl by two boys fishing an hour before the coroner said she was murdered. He was giving her a ride on his bicycle.
Kevin Macintyre, was arrested and charged with the murder. The last article in the stack of clippings was of the boy’s confession and then a plea of guilty in front of a judge to the charge of second degree murder. The sentencing had happened pretty quickly after that, Armour remembered, but he hadn’t included a clipping on it in his file. Armour couldn’t remember how long the boy got but he knew that it was substantial. A good part of the boy’s life would have been spent in the penitentiary.
Armour sat back in his creaky kitchen chair and stared at the file folder and scratched his head. The Scotch Line road, why was he having a flashback about that? The body was found there, the boy had confessed, killer found case closed. Had the spell been triggered by the proximity to where the girl was found and if so why wig out on it? Armour shivered.
He wasn’t sure how long he was sitting there. The sun was going down and he was finally shaken from his trance by his phone. It startled him and he almost fell out of his chair.
He got to it on the fifth ring. It was Melanie.
“Armour, where are you? I’m sitting here, dinner is done, ready to go.”
“Oh my god, Melanie I am so sorry. I got caught up in something. Coming now.” He hung up, and ran out the door, two seconds later he was back to snatch up the file on the Truscott murder to take with him.
He saw the curtain flutter in Melanie’s front window when he pulled up in front of her apartment block. It was a four-unit building built in the fifties. She had the top right-hand unit. Two bedrooms, a separate living room and dining room and a narrow kitchen. It was all she needed, she said.
The stairwell smelled vaguely of Old Port Colt cigars, the ones with the bunch of grapes on the package. Her neighbour down below smoked and there was always a little pile of butts out front. The man was Chinese, in his twenties and not all there in the head, Melanie had said, but was quiet and polite.
Melanie’s door was open but he knocked as he entered. She was i
n the kitchen. The apartment smelt of spaghetti sauce and it was delightful. She was checking something in the oven and came over and gave Armour a hug and peck on the cheek. He hung his straw boater and coat up on a hook by the door.
“Your neighbour left butts out in front of the building again,” Armour said
“Armour, I can’t say anything to him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a nice guy and I think he’s autistic. He’s definitely developed mentally delayed.”
“What the…?” Armour said as he sat in a club chair.
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh, you mean he’s re–”
“Armour don’t say it, not in this house. Up here it’s the twenty first century. The R word is not allowed. Same goes for the N word, the F word, the C word. All those words.”
Armour smirked. She came over and squeezed between a planter and his chair to look out the window. Her thigh brushed against Armour’s shoulder. He didn’t move.
“So, what happened?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Your car’s bumper, it’s dented. I can see it from here. Saw it when you pulled up.”
“Oh, that just happened yesterday.”
“Still not like you to leave something for that long. Not like you don’t have the time or inclination to fix it. Or the skills.”
Armour blushed. He drummed his fingers on the side of the club chair and looked around the room pretending he hadn’t studied it carefully every time he’d come over in the past. Melanie went back to the kitchen and came out with two plates of spaghetti with steaming sauce already on them.