Anthiny Bidulka

by Aloha, Candy Hearts (lit)

  I gave Mom a quick hug, and dashed away.

  "Sonsyoul" Mom called after me. "Be careful. No shooting!"

  The four-storey parking lot where Reginald Cenyk wanted to meet had sat at the corner of 1st Avenue

  and 20th Street

  for a long time. It was one of those creepy places with ceilings so low that even in my itsy bitsy Mazda I couldn't help but feel the roof was going to scrape the top.

  Reginald was right. Except for a few random cars on the first level, the place was deserted. At a snail's pace, I wound my way up to the top floor, unconsciously bowing my head in a futile effort to make the car smaller. I was pretty sure no one was following me, but I'd extinguished my headlights as soon as I entered the lot, just to be sure. It made the going excruciatingly slow, but if nothing else, I hoped it gave Reginald some comfort that we'd be alone.

  It was dark outside when I pulled off the last ramp onto the rooftop level, grateful to be out from under the tomb-like ceilings. Conveniently, the southeast corner he'd chosen for our ren­dezvous, was just up ahead and slightly to the right of the ramp. I parked the car as directed, and waited. Over the edge, to my right, I could see the bright white and blue lights of the twelve-screen Galaxy cinema, and up ahead the cheery, neon, palm-tree-shaped sign of the downtrodden Capri Hotel. I looked down at my badly crinkled tux and muddied patent leather dress shoes. Ruining for­mal wear seemed to be a habit with me. At least this time there were no bloodstains. I lowered my window and drank in fresh, rain-scented air.

  A few minutes later, my eyes glommed onto the rear-view mir­ror as a pair of headlights inched up the ramp behind me. Reginald wasn't being as careful as I'd been. Then again, I'm a trained pro­fessional at this kind of stuff.

  I couldn't wait to hear what he had to tell me. I reached for the car door handle to get out. But I never made it. Instead, my body was violently thrust forward. I felt my chin crack against the Mazda's steering wheel.

  White Truck.

  Chapter 16

  Dazed, I lifted my head just in time to see the headlights back away from where they'd just rammed the back end of my car. It was the white truck, with its silly front vanity licence plate: a row-boat and a beehive. I heard its engine roar. It was coming back for more. Uselessly my right foot slammed down on the brake—as if that would stop anything.

  My fingers grasped for the seat belt doohickey. I had to get free before this idiot squished me into a pancake against the guardrail.

  With the next impact, I realized in horror that wasn't his inten­tion at all.

  The metal bar made a ghastly groaning noise as the vehicle behind me pushed the Mazda against it with all its horsepower. My eyes widened in full horror as I watched the steel give way.

  I was going over!

  The convertible jerked forward in stuttering protest. The nose inched over the edge. A gurgling noise escaped my tight throat. Strangely enough, I found I could not scream out the terror I felt infuse my body like a deadly venom. I knew I would never survive the four-storey drop. Four words blared in my head: The End Is Near!

  Further.

  Further.

  The car made a sickening thumping noise as the front tires rolled over the edge and the chassis hit cement. The nose began to teeter. It was only then, at that last, most desperate moment, that my fumbling fingers finally released the seat belt catch. I threw open my door.

  Maneuvering my torso through the door, in preparation for...I didn't know what...I could see that the car had caught on a thick shard of twisted metal. I was saved!

  No, I wasn't.

  The killer truck had repositioned and was zeroing in for one last smack. With no time to consider options, my brain screamed, "ooooh noooooooo!" as I tossed my body from my car. The microseconds that followed seemed much longer, long enough for me to feel a keen sense of horror at what was happening to me, and a burning guilt for abandoning my car. I was a cowardly rat, jump­ing ship, not knowing if my own fate would be any less cruel than the one I'd left behind. But I had no choice.

  I reached blindly into the air, hoping to find salvation. And I did. The fingers of my right hand fell upon an intact railing. Although it was hard and rough to the touch, the metal edge of it cutting into my skin, at that moment, the steel of that railing felt dearer to me than a lover's cheek.

  As I took hold of the railing, my body crashed against the side of the parking garage, my legs flailing below me. My eyes jerked upwards in response to a horrible noise: the deafening sound of the final blow in a fight to the death. I watched as my sweet Mazda RX-7 convertible was viciously hit from behind. With a cry cur­dling in my throat, I witnessed the silver body nosedive into the back alley, far, far below. With a surprisingly muted wallop, the car crash-landed. One railing, one arm groaning with pain, were the only things keeping me from joining her.

  I looked up to where the driver's side of the gleaming white truck had pulled up to the pavement's edge. With a benign whir, the window was lowered. An unsmiling face appeared. Reginald Cenyk, archivist turned murderer.

  It wasn't exactly the best time for me to have a eureka moment, but there it was. It wasn't a rowboat on the white truck's licence plate: it was an ark. Like in Noah's ark. An ark and beehive. Ark. Hive. Archive. Sheesh. Reginald Cenyk, cheesy archivist turned murderer.

  The truck door opened. Things didn't look so good for me.

  I looked down. Deadly chasm. Nope, I still wouldn't survive the fall. I looked up. Killer who wanted to get rid of me because I'd found him out. Nope, things didn't look too good for me at all.

  "What was that for?" I asked as if he'd just given me an unan­ticipated noogie. I sometimes react weirdly in perilous circum­stances.

  "I know you know," Reginald answered back, his pale face flushed with colour, thinning red hair fluttering in the wind. "As soon as you stepped into my office and started asking all those questions, I knew you knew."

  He was giving me more credit than I was due. I actually didn't know anything for sure until his most recent phone call, when he specifically referred to a journal and letters. I hadn't told him what form the missing material was in. Then I learned Simon Durhuaghe was being blackmailed. But it hadn't started until after Walter's death.

  Who else could have known about the content of the damning material without actually having seen it? If I accepted that Walter and Helen were innocent in all this, who else was a common denominator between them and the archival material? And, who knew that Walter had the treasure map and would be on that plane from Vancouver?

  The answer to every question was the same: Reginald Cenyk. He'd been an employee at the archives when the controversial Durhuaghe material was first discovered. Walter had made calls to work from Victoria, no doubt to Reginald who he erroneously trusted.

  What I hadn't known was that he'd try to push me off the top of a parking lot. I expected something less dramatic from him. Like maybe a gun or knife. I'd been ready for that.

  Reginald stepped forward. "I hate this," he said, turning his baby face into a grimace. It seemed as if he was talking more to himself than me. "But it must be done. I have to get out of here."

  From where he stood, and how I was positioned, hanging by a metal thread, he had a good shot at my forearm. And the bastard took it. Pulling back his leg, he let loose against my exposed, straining limb, kicking it as hard as he could.

  I yowled in pain.

  He readied for another kick. My arm couldn't take it. It would do me in. I was going to fall.

  My eyes moved to a spot behind Cenyk's back. I screamed, "Darren! Help me!"

  Startled, Reginald whisked around to protect himself from a rear assault. It gave me all the time I needed. I'd managed to secure a piece of loose rebar. Using my uninjured arm, I whipped it up and over the pavement ledge, and in the momentum of an arc, swung it with every muscle I had against the tender midpoint of Reginald's calves. I knew that's where it would hurt the most.

  The slender man fell to the ground, his
hands tied around his legs, mewing in pain. I bunched up my screaming muscles and used the leverage of the railing I was holding on to to swing myself up and back onto firm ground. I rolled up next to Reginald and jumped up, rebar still in hand. I raised it over my head, peered down at him and growled, "Don't move, you piece of shit, or I'll archive your ass!"

  He didn't.

  I fished my cellphone out of a pocket and dialled. Now I'd call for the help of my cop friend for real.

  "I can't believe you," Kirsch told me in a tone of voice that left no doubt about how he was feeling about me at that particular moment. "You had me right there, you asked me for information, and then you went off to catch a killer on your own. Are you frig-gin' nuts?"

  If you put it that way, perhaps, but I'm an independent kind of guy-

  "I wasn't one hundred percent sure." I defended my reasons for leaving the wedding reception to meet Reginald Cenyk alone, rather than take the handy cop with me. "Only ninety percent, maybe even only eighty."

  In reality, I was more sure than that, but I thought I could take him. He was an archivist, for Pete's sake. I'm a macho gay man detective. It should have worked out okay. I just hadn't considered the possibility that I'd be battling a six-thousand pound, three-quarter ton truck, rather than a ninety-eight pound weakling. Lesson learned.

  We were in the police station outside an interrogation room. "So, what's he saying in there?" I asked, hoping to steer off the cur­rent topic. "You've had him in there forever."

  Kirsch let out an exasperated sigh. He was too tired to resist me. But he wasn't too tired to be a thief. He snapped the fresh cup of coffee out of my hand, and took a long sip.

  "I'm paraphrasing," Kirsch said when he was done, "but it seems he came up with the idea to use Durhuaghe's journal to sub­sidize an early retirement almost as soon as he and his pals at the archives found it. They debated what to do with it: return it to Durhuaghe, destroy it, or just include it with the rest of the mate­rial and let fate take control. Cenyk's vote was to put it into the archives along with the rest. Of course, he planned to steal it the first chance he got, and use it against Durhuaghe. Instead, Helen Crawford overruled him and hid the stuff."

  "She wanted to protect Durhuaghe's reputation."

  "Uh huh. Sounds like Cenyk harassed her about it over the years, hoping to trick her into revealing her hiding spot, but she never cracked."

  "She knew what he wanted to do with it?"

  "Not exactly, but she probably suspected. And if not Cenyk, somebody else might use it against her hero. She probably created the treasure map after she retired and before she left the city. It was her way of keeping the material safe, but still accessible after she died."

  "Accessible only if whoever had the map had the smarts to fig­ure it out."

  Kirsch nodded. "I think she hoped it would be someone of her choosing, someone she trusted. But yeah, if the map ended up in the wrong hands, she didn't want to make it easy for them."

  "That's why she picked Walter Angel to leave it to in her will. She trusted him to keep the secret."

  "When she found out she was dying, she pretty much had to concede that it was he, as new head archivist, who should take on the responsibility of deciding the future of the material. Unfortunately, Walter in turn trusted the wrong person. He told Cenyk about the map, and that he was going to Victoria to retrieve it. Cenyk knew his only chance of getting his hands on it would be as soon as Angel stepped off that plane in Saskatoon. After that, Angel could hide the map and Cenyk would be no further ahead than he was when Helen was alive."

  "How much money is this stuff really worth? In terms of black­mail cash, I mean."

  Kirsch shrugged and handed back my nearly empty coffee cup. "Dunno. Cenyk suspected a lot. He suspected Helen was already blackmailing Durhuaghe—he didn't know about the baby—but he did know that Sherry Klingskill was Sherry Fisher. He thought that was how Helen could afford to retire early and live the good life on Vancouver Island. When she died, he decided it was his time for a slice of the pie."

  "He was wrong about that, you know."

  Kirsch nodded. "Still, he had to be furious when he found out that instead of him, Angel was now getting a chance at plucking the golden goose. He couldn't take it. That's when he decided to get the map no matter what, even if meant killing Angel in the process.

  "But then along comes everyone's favourite snoop, always managing to get himself stuck in the middle of whatever mess is going down. Angel probably saw Cenyk at the airport. Maybe Helen Crawford left him a note, or her sister talked to him, I don't know, but he must have already begun to suspect Cenyk could be up to no good. He realized he needed to keep the map safe. So you end up with it. Maybe Cenyk spotted the two of you together at the airport. When he finds the map isn't in Angel's possession, he somehow decides he has to go after you."

  I let out a nervous cough, and said, "There might have been a business card of mine in Angel's pocket."

  "There ya go," Kirsch said, as if he expected nothing less. "In the meantime, even without the journal and letters in hand, Cenyk can't wait for a payday. He knows what's in the journal, so he decides to try an opening gambit with Durhuaghe to see what he can get."

  "When he finds out I've solved the treasure map and found the journal..."

  "At first he backs off, thinking the game is over, his chances gone..."

  "...then I turn up at the archives to ask questions..."

  "Yup, he knows it's only a matter of time before even someone with your limited abilities figures out a connection. Russell Quant has got to die."

  "There's only one thing I can't understand."

  "Whazzat?"

  "Why did Molly have to die?"

  Kirsch frowned and gave me a quizzical look. "Molly? Who the hell is Molly?"

  I looked down at my feet. "I loved that car."

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  It took some practice to get the pebbles to hit the third floor window. Tap.

  A silhouette appeared. I knew it wasn't Damien. I had seen him leave the wedding reception early. His working Sunday morn­ings was a bit of luck I intended to use to my benefit.

  By the time things were wrapped up at the police station and I drove back out to Ash House, the party was long over. It was the middle of the night. The clouds that had caused such havoc earli­er in the evening had evaporated, leaving behind a peaceful, star-speckled sky. For the next couple of hours I toiled. And now I was ready.

  I was standing in the middle of the backyard, near the pool. I raised my right arm and gave the dark shape in the window a jaunty wave.

  At first there was no movement from the lone figure. Then his right hand rose and began to move in a hesitant wave back. He had a right to be cautious, suspicious.

  I stepped on a button on a control panel at my feet, never tak­ing my eyes off Ethan in the window. At the extreme far end of the yard the smallest of Sereena's electric candy hearts lit up. "You're Sweet," it read.

  Then another, bigger heart, lit up. "Hug Me."

  And another. And another.

  On and on hearts lit up behind me, until all twenty-four of them, spread throughout the yard, were blazing, with me in the middle of them.

  Another toe tap on the controls.

  I'd hoisted, with great effort and near misfortune, the electron­ic message board into a tree. Because of the parking lot incident, my arm was in considerable pain, but I was determined. Nothing was going to stop me. I'd attached it to the side of the tree house Ethan had built for his daughter. It had taken me forever to figure the thing out, then forevermore to choose just the right words I needed Ethan to read that night.

  SORRY 2 WAKE U, it began.

  I KNOW MY TIMING SUCKS.

  IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.

  YOUR NEW HOUSE IS IN SHAMBLES.

  YOUR BACKYARD IS A MESS.

  YOU HAVE A BOYFRIEND.

  I HAVE A FIANCE. Then came a lot of ellipses ..........................................
.........followed by: BUT I AM IN CRAZY LOVE WITH YOU ETHAN.

  Another tap. The hearts began to flash on and off like some wild valentine kaleidoscope. The light show was to give him a few seconds to digest what I'd just told him.

  As I stood there, the absolute silence of the country night seemed impossibly inapt. With so much going on: the lights, the message board, the declaration of love, I would have expected the sound of blaring trumpets and crackling fireworks. But there was nothing. Just me in the dark, looking up at a man in a window, hoping.

  I saw the figure move. My breath caught.

  I watched as Ethan shifted from one side of the window to the next, almost as if he was pacing, uncertain of what to do. Can't imagine why.

  Another foot tap.

  I EXPECT NOTHING FROM U.

  I JUST WANTED U TO KNOW.

  Another tap. The lights stopped flashing.

  I APOLOGIZE TO U AND DAMIEN.

  FOR BEING SUCH A JERK.

  DOING THIS BEHIND HIS BACK.

  IF U LOVE HIM.

  I PROMISE TO LET THIS GO.

  IF YOU DON'T...

  Ellipses indicate the omission of words needed to make sense. Perfect. Life, I'd come to realize, doesn't always make sense. Happy ever after isn't always what you thought it would be.

  Tap. The lights began a riotous dance, wildly flashing on and off to some rowdy, unheard rhythm, filling the yard with candy heart colours. And then I did what only the bravest of men have done before. In that shrivellingly cold night, I slooooowly stripped naked.

  When I was done, I stood there, straight and proud, hands at my side. I gave the control board one last tap. ETHAN...

  WILL YOU TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH... AND GO OUT WITH ME?

  And with that, I performed a near perfect backflip into the icy pool behind me.

  Honolulu in late August is hot. Thirty degrees Celsius hot. That sounds even hotter when converted to eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. But I love the heat, so it didn't bother me much.

  Not surprisingly, Alex had sounded a bit taken aback by my request to meet on the island again so soon. I had to see him. I knew it wasn't easy for him to get away. He could only commit to one night, then he'd have to catch a plane back to Australia.