Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  I scanned the list of guests and checked especially the women’s names. There was one that stood out: Greta Larsen. Where had I heard that name before?

  “She’s on the Historic Sites Advisory Board and, if I’m not mistaken, the Friends of Rutherford House, too,” answered Mr. Maitland, who had appeared at my table with another box of material.

  “Ack, I am sorry. I didn’t realize I was talking out loud.”

  “Now that is a real researcher tic, talking to yourself,” Mr. Maitland chuckled. “Be careful, Randy, or we’ll have to put your name on a chair as a full-timer!” He turned to leave, but I wanted to pick his brains about this Greta Larsen a bit more.

  “Ms. Larsen, do you know her personally?”

  “We’ve been at some of the same meetings,” he nodded.

  “Could you describe her to me? I am not sure I’m putting the right name to the right face, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh you would know her, if for the simple reason that I don’t think Greta Larsen has smiled in the last three decades. She is the most ill-tempered person I have ever seen. Now, my sainted mother would likely have tried to explain her grimaces away with excuses of ulcers or scoliosis pains, but I have heard Greta talk to people, too. And she is just plain mean.” Mr. Maitland offered up an angelic smile that no one could ever take for ill-temper, and left the reading room.

  So the woman I had seen in the lobby of the House and then again on Whyte Avenue had to be Greta Larsen, member of the board. She had been standing next to Walter Karras, the chair of the board, so that made sense. Could that have been why Marni had been in such a tizzy just before the dinner began? Because one of the board members there checking up was renowned to be nasty? Was the board really that focused on what events were happening at the House, or was Greta Larsen just being a busybody? Or was she simply drawn that way, as Jessica Rabbit would say, and only attending because she was a fan of close-up magic?

  Regretfully, I closed my email program and turned my mind back to the job at hand, immersing myself in the world of the historical personages who had actually inhabited the House. Today’s bout at the Archives was already going to be cut short if I had to head to police headquarters to go over things once more with Detectives Gibson and Howard. I needed to hunker down and get to it.

  Mattie Rutherford had a charming flow to her diaries. While the earliest one began as a strict accounting of what she was seeding in the garden and when, the entries expanded quickly into a record of her thoughts and observations of the world around her. She adored her children and enjoyed the company of her friends and visitors from the east. She admired her husband intensely and approved of all his dreams for a civilized and forward-thinking province and city. I sketched out the bare bones of a potential web page devoted to Mrs. Rutherford, which included a sprinkling of a few of her quotes, and perhaps a shot of some of the pretty sketches of her garden dotted in her diaries.

  By the time the noon hour rolled around, I had listed volumes and page numbers for several requests for photo reproductions. There was a form for this purpose on the Archive website; I populated the boxes and sent it all over the universe to land on Mr. Maitland’s computer in the central foyer. Might as well get started on the requests now. This way, too, the images could be sent electronically, so that we could later insert them, with acknowledgement, straight onto the website and avoid any degradation to photo quality due to scanning or over-processing. My budget for this sort of thing wasn’t huge, but the cost per page wasn’t astronomical, either. I also had to admit, no matter how precisely, gracefully, and clearly one wrote, a photo was not only going to capture the imagination of the viewer better, it would also in the long run net a freelancer more money. I had once been contracted to write a short piece about a vacation destination for the Alberta Motor Association magazine and, on a whim, sent in five photos I had taken while holidaying. Their purchasing of the photos had more than doubled my take on the assignment.

  Mr. Maitland popped his head into the reading room to suggest we break for lunch. He smiled at the stacks of blue diaries piling up in front of me as if to say he knew I’d find them of interest. I leaned back to stretch and felt my back crack in protest of the length of time I’d been sitting still. I was ready. If I took a half-hour to heat up and eat my soup and sandwich with the little archivist, I could still work for another hour before packing up to go see the police. As there was still no one but me in the hall, I left my laptop and paraphernalia the way they were and followed Mr. Maitland to his lunchroom.

  A round table with a couple of magazines sat in the centre of a room with only a simple high window in one wall. Along the opposite wall was a counter and cupboards, with dark melamine surfaces. A sink, microwave, and fridge were fitted into this as well. In between was a short wall on which hung a small bulletin board, a large government-issue calendar, and a framed cross-stitch of the famous Santayana quote, which I supposed had to be the archivist’s mantra: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” I commented as much to Mr. Maitland, who laughed.

  “No, our mantra would have to be, ‘Those who collect the past are condemned to re-shelve it.’ I have a soft spot for that picture, though, as it’s my mother’s handiwork.”

  He opened the fridge to produce my lunch bag, along with several plastic containers of his own that he set out, just so, on the counter. A loaf of bread and a butter dish were pulled out of the cupboard to the left of the fridge, and while I heated up my cabbage soup in his microwave, Mr. Maitland put together a fresh sandwich from a selection of cold cuts, lettuce, and tomatoes. He offered to make me one as well, but I explained that my wrap would be enough lunch for me.

  We brought our food to the table and sat down in companionable silence. It took Mr. Maitland half of his sandwich before he broached a subject I figured he’d wanted to ask me about all morning.

  “I’ve been reading about the terrible happening at Rutherford House,” he began.

  “The murder, you mean?” I didn’t mind talking about it with him. After all, I was going to discuss it within feet of Steve’s boss, who hated having me involved in things, in just a couple of hours. I might as well talk it over with someone I liked, and get my mind straight about whatever it was I was going to say.

  “Yes, I take it you were there?”

  I filled Mr. Maitland in on the general layout of events and where and what Jossie and I had been doing that night. He was properly shocked to learn how young she was, and how similar her tasks for the evening had been to mine, which was something I hadn’t really considered till he pointed it out.

  “It sounds as if it could just as easily have been you strangled in that bathtub,” he stated, in a shocked tone.

  “Her neck was broken, she wasn’t strangled,” I corrected, but his words hung in the air, and, in spite of myself, I shivered. Until that moment it hadn’t actually occurred to me that I might have been in danger that night.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve upset you,” Mr. Maitland said, filling a rather awkward silence. He began to clean up his lunch detritus and I did the same.

  “I have to leave early today, so I’d better get back at it. Mrs. Rutherford’s diaries are fabulous,” I told him and thanked him again for letting me share his lunch zone.

  “It’s my pleasure and please consider this an open invitation,” he said. “It’s so nice to have someone to break bread with.”

  Feeling re-energized, I headed back in to read though another diary. There was going to be no way the website could feature everything about each Rutherford, all the fraternity boys, every visitor who stayed overnight, as well as all of the individual ladies of the Canadian Federation of University Women who fought to preserve the House as a historic site, so my research path would have to be more bumblebee than beeline. I pulled a diary at random out of the box, setting one of the Archive’s cardboard markers in the space I’d removed it from.

  Mattie Rutherford didn’t date each diary page, but merely
denoted the day of the year at the top of each entry. She seemed to have written the year in the front fly-leaf of each book and then carried on, assuming she’d spend just one year within each binding. The first couple I had skimmed through were from 1906 and 1924. I flipped to the front to see what vintage this book was, but the numbers were smudged and I could only see the “19.” If I was well-versed in my Rutherfordiana, I could possibly suss out the year from context. I wondered if I was up to that challenge yet.

  It was worth a try, more so because her writing was clearly legible throughout and even a little larger than in the past volumes, making it easier reading. I decided to stick with this diary until it was time for me to head to the police office.

  Once again, she spent a bit of time discussing the children, who seemed to be an utter joy to her. Both were intelligent and curious, and Cecil seemed to be a devoted brother to Hazel. Hazel had sent a letter from the Ladies College she was attending in Toronto and had promised to write to Cecil next. Mattie and Alec attended the church picnic together and Mattie brought along four loaves of fresh currant bread and strawberry preserves, which were enjoyed by all. Alec was busy with a case involving several people near Lacombe and had had to travel back and forth twice for depositions. Mattie was worried that the new maid was homesick as she was certain she had overheard her crying for several nights when she herself awoke with leg cramps and had to walk them out on the cold floor.

  August 15. —I’m not certain S. is suitable. I had no idea who or what Mattie was referring to, with her penchant for abbreviations. “S” could have been a person, a thing, or even a place, such as the Strathcona Club. I was going to flip back to see if one of Cecil’s friends’ names started with an S, or if Mattie had mentioned an “S” anywhere within her own circle of friends. However, one glance at the wall clock and I realized I would have to put a move on it if I was going to make it to the south-side cop shop by two o’clock as I had promised.

  I slid the diary back into the box, leaving the cardboard marker beside it so I’d find it when I returned, trotted the box over to the shelves, and quickly packed up my satchel. Saying a quick goodbye to Mr. Maitland, I hurried out the door to the parking lot.

  12

  --

  The police station where Steve worked was probably pretty much like any police station across North America, though there wasn’t quite as much bulletproof glass in the lobby as I’d noticed in the movies. I wrote my name on the sign-in list, showed the desk officer my driver’s licence as identification, and was given a visitor tag with the number 66 on it. He pointed me toward the bank of moulded plastic chairs along the wall, and I went there to sit and wait.

  My wait wasn’t long, which was just as well, as the chairs had obviously not been moulded with anything resembling comfort in mind. Steve showed up to take me into the inner sanctum. Noticing the number on my visitor tag, he laughed.

  “Keller’s going to want another 6 put on there for you!”

  “Very funny. I’m nervous enough about potentially running into him. Do not joke about that to me. I can just imagine what he’d say.”

  We turned a corner, and who should be right there but Steve’s superior officer, Staff Sergeant Keller. The tilt of his eyebrow told me he had likely heard every single thing I had just said. I could feel my neck and ears starting to burn into what would be a full-fledged blush in a minute or two.

  “Ms. Craig. I am sorry that we have to meet again under such circumstances. Please accept my condolences on the loss of your colleague and thank you for coming in to help us with our investigation.” He nodded his head in that same crisp way Christopher Plummer perfected in The Sound of Music, and continued down the way we had just come. Steve and I looked at each other in astonishment. Who had replaced Keller with a placid clone, and what had they done with the real Staff Sergeant Keller?

  “He had a month off, and there was some speculation it was health-related,” Steve whispered to me, as we headed down the hall. “I got the sense he was pacing himself a bit differently, but maybe he has had a whole new mind change.”

  “Like what? He went up Leonard Cohen’s mountain and found nirvana? Or his doctor told him not to get het up over insignificant bugs like me, for his angina’s sake?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Randy.” Steve sounded a bit exasperated, as if filling in the void left by Keller’s lack of animosity. “It’s not a social club here. He didn’t come back from his time off with presents for all of us and vacation photos.”

  “Really? Cops don’t do that?”

  “Well, maybe some of us do, but I don’t think anyone would expect it of Keller. No fraternizing with the lower ranks is more his style.”

  Steve opened a door with a frosted-glass panel on the top.

  “Here we are. Joe, you’ve met Randy before at Rutherford House. Randy, Joe Howard.”

  It was odd to be going through introductions as if we were at a party, but courtesy was Steve’s middle name and somehow he made it work. Detective Howard and I shook hands and he thanked me again for coming in to help them with the investigation. I took a much more comfortable chair by his desk. Steve squeezed my shoulder in farewell and left us to it.

  Detective Howard had me read through the statement I’d made the evening of the murder, to see whether there were things I wanted to add or correct before signing it. Reading it brought all the memories of that night flooding back into the forefront of my mind, making me wonder, as a side thought, just how much compartmentalizing I did on a regular basis. As it stood, the statement seemed accurate to me, so I took the pen offered and signed and dated my statement. Detective Howard, who had been doing some sort of Internet search, or perhaps playing mah-jongg on his computer while I read, now swivelled his chair toward me and focused his full attention on me. He asked me if I’d mind being taped during my interview and ushered me into an interview room that was just the tiniest bit claustrophobic. He set out an old-school tape recorder, spoke the date and time, identified himself, named me, and rattled off the case number. Then he stopped the tape, rewound it, and listened to whether or not it had taped. I smiled. He shook his head at me.

  “I lost vital testimony my rookie year by forgetting to hit ‘record.’ You do that once, you check every time for the rest of your career. I am not sure whether I’m looking forward to us going digital, if we ever get new equipment in here, or not. It’ll be one more thing to worry about, if you ask me.”

  “Wow, no kidding.” I settled into the chair and Howard started the machine once more.

  “You are not quite the same level of employee as the deceased, in the hierarchy of Rutherford House, are you?”

  “Well, no. Technically, I suppose I am not so much an employee of Rutherford House as of the foundation that supports it. I am under contract to design and write the virtual museum website that is going to accompany the centennial book recently published about the House. I was just pitching in to help, because the manager, Marni Livingstone, was short-handed that evening.”

  “Were you being paid for your efforts?”

  “I sure hope so. I think Marni was going to write it up as an honorarium, rather than set me up with an employee number. That was how she paid the magician and the actors, too.”

  “The magician, Stephen Dafoe, is who you are referring to, correct?”

  “Dafoe da Fantabulist. That is how he billed himself, and it was written that way on his storage bins. All six of them.”

  “Had you met Mr. Dafoe prior to that evening?”

  “No, but I think Jossie had seen him perform somewhere before. It may have been she who suggested him to Marni, who put the entire evening together. Marni thought the actors’ production of a mystery-dinner show set around a magicians’ reunion was good, but would be stronger if a real magic act was part of the event. None of the actors could do more than fan a deck of cards, so she went outside to hire Mr. Dafoe. And it was great. All the guests were still buzzing as they went in to dinner, and the th
eatre worked so much better, I think, than it would have otherwise.”

  “Tell me how things ran at the dinner.”

  I took him through the various steps, trying to remember if at any points I had seen Jossie where she wasn’t supposed to be, or anything else that seemed out of place. Howard sensed what I was doing and broke in to tell me to just describe it as I saw it in my mind’s eye, and not to worry about analyzing things as I went. I guess, having had to go through this sort of exercise a few times more than the average citizen, I was more self-aware of what was expected of me.

  You would have thought that, with the number of times I’d actually given a statement to Steve or his colleagues over the years, I would be a master at detailing my recollections and reflections, but maybe that never becomes a learned behaviour. I tried to just hit a mental replay button, but even such a short time after the event, some things were fuzzy, and I said so.

  “Shock and trauma will do that to a person,” Howard nodded. “Everything gets coloured by the ending you already know is there. You’re doing fine, though. So, the paying guests had sat down for the meal and you were helping the magician clean up.”

  I went back into my part of the evening. I had gone down to the kitchen to get meals for Mr. Dafoe and myself, and had carried them up the maid’s staircase to the maid’s parlour. We had eaten there until the time I was to act as sentry for the actress playing the body to slip upstairs with no one seeing her. I saw that happen, and saw the play-acting murderer move into place in the study, from my place in the foyer. Once the guests were on the move, I was back in service, cleaning tables. I had assumed Jossie must have been doing the same thing, but I couldn’t actually see her from where I was working. I then found out the dining room hadn’t been cleared and had to race to do it myself.

  “So, guests are milling about, some of them in the parlour where the clue board is, some of them in the library where two of the actors are talking and possibly giving clues. Some of them may have gone upstairs by this time, but for certain, we have Tanya Rivera up there in the master closet and Dafoe the magician in the maid’s parlour, unless he has already gone home. You are in the restaurant area, cleaning tables. Who do you actually see when you are taking plates downstairs and bringing up dessert settings?”