Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  Such a nice man—I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the thought that he was gone. I had been looking forward to heading back there to talk to him about the missing diary.

  That was a lie, of course. I had not been looking forward to it in the least, as part of me was suspicious that he had removed the diary himself, so that I couldn’t see it again. Somehow, there was a connection between Mr. Maitland and the murder at Rutherford House, but I was buffaloed if I could see it.

  Steve had suggested I write up a statement about being in the Archives to do research on the Rutherford House website, so that it could be added to the file on Mr. Maitland’s murder. That way, any link that might be there would be acted upon. Although I knew Staff Sergeant Keller, seeing my name on yet another open file, would likely spew coffee all over the report, I wrote a short statement and sent it by email, not wanting to make the trek to the station for so marginal and voluntary a report. It would also nicely avoid the risk of running into Keller face to face.

  Meanwhile, I still had work to do on the Rutherford House website. I had spent most of Monday just trying to regain equilibrium, and started slowly on Tuesday morning, by remaining at home to read through the books on Ukrainian Albertans I’d bought and download the photos I had taken when we’d been out at the Ukrainian Village. That trip now seemed like months ago. Nothing like a murder now and then to really screw with timelines. Huge shocks to the system tend to reinforce Einstein’s theory that time is indeed the most relative of measurements. I looked at the pictures Steve and I had posed in together, which he had taken by extending his long arm to get us both in the frame. We looked so relaxed, even though we’d been dealing then with the death of a young woman. But that had seemed so random, so disconnected to me then. I knew that were I to take a similar photo today, the skin around my eyes would be tight, the brow furrowed, the nasolabial folds on either side of my mouth far more pronounced. Death was closing in around us, and I had no idea why.

  I dragged myself over to the House on Wednesday morning. It seemed like forever since I’d been there, cleaning up after Jossie’s murder. In reality, it was just ten days ago. Ten days and another death.

  Marni was in her office, I was told by Roxanne, who was manning the front door, but she wanted to see me if I came in today. That was fine with me, as Marni was the person I had come to see. Not only did I have to report to her where I was at with the research, I wanted to run by her the idea of a maid persona to introduce people to the site. Since the folks here were so tied up in the personalities of the Rutherfords themselves, I wasn’t sure how much buy-in I was going to get, but something about the idea of the vaguely anonymous character of the maid drawing in the casual Net surfer had a real appeal for me, and I intended to fight for it.

  I also wanted to get some pictures of the maid’s areas so that I could use them for a better connection to the text I intended to produce. Up the Back Stairs was my working title so far, even though I had been assured by several egalitarian interpreters that when there were no guests in the house, the Rutherford maids were allowed access to the main staircase. None of them ever sounded ironic when stating this, either.

  I clomped up said staircase to get to Marni’s office. She was at her desk, staring at her computer screen when I got to the doorway, but turned to me immediately. She looked terrible. Dark circles defined her eye sockets and her hair, which was usually tidy in a French roll, hung limply to her shoulders, tucked behind her ears, which were without jewellery. It suddenly hit me that Marni had known Mr. Maitland. Of course she would have, they were in the same line of work. No wonder she looked like hell. If I thought I felt bad, I could only imagine how she was holding it together.

  “Oh Randy, how are you?”

  “Hanging on,” I said. “What about you? Mr. Maitland was a friend of yours?” It was a stab, but a fairly positive one. Bull’s eye. Marni’s eyes filled up with tears, threatening to flood.

  “Alastair and I go way back. We were in grad school together, and of course, there were always curatorial workshops. We didn’t socialize much, but he was always there, you know?”

  I nodded. Other people’s grief makes me uncomfortable, not because I don’t want to validate it, but because I am so terribly worried I might inadvertently say the wrong thing.

  “I only met him last week, but he was very personable and nice. I really liked him.”

  Marni yanked a tissue from the box on her desk and dabbed at her eyes.

  “God, I must look a sight. Sorry. The reason I wanted to see you was that I needed to warn you that one of our board members is not too happy with the whole idea of an interactive website and has made her feelings known to me. Her argument seems to be that offering too much on a computer site negates the need to visit the House itself, and may remove the government’s sense of urgency to maintain funding. After all, if they can just run a virtual museum, perhaps they could board up the actual site and save on upkeep. She is talking about bringing it up at the next meeting of the board in a couple of weeks’ time, and I wanted you to be prepared for that. I was also wondering if you would have anything by that time to produce for the board, to show them the project’s scope?”

  “In two weeks?” I squeaked. “That’s pretty short notice. I can mock up some of the material, but I have barely scratched the surface of my research, and what with the Archives being closed as a crime scene, that end of things has been put on hold.”

  “I’m not saying anything has to be completed. I just thought that if we could have you present something to the board to counter Greta’s bad-mouthing of the project, there’d be a chance to maintain it. Otherwise, there is a possibility she could stop things in their tracks.”

  Greta Larsen. How on earth did I know Marni had to have been talking about her?

  “What about my contract with the Friends?”

  Marni looked worried. “That’s the problem. There is a condition in that contract that the board has to approve all aspects of the project. If it gets voted on and there isn’t the support of the board, we may have to enact the kill fee. Which is not something I want to do,” she hurried to add.

  “Wow. Well, I had better get cracking then.”

  “Was there something you wanted to talk about?” she called, as I turned to head out into the upper hallway.

  “No, nothing that can’t wait till after the board meeting ultimatum, I guess. Sorry, Marni, if all I have is two weeks, I don’t have time to talk.”

  Two weeks. How was I going to get things organized enough in a linear fashion to create a mock-up of the website by then? I knew I had an opening, and I had some ideas of how to progress through the Rutherford years into the fraternity days, but the thought of making a presentation to a negatively-minded board filled me with dread. Bloody Greta Larsen. What was it about that snarly-faced woman that made her hate my project? And why was she so determined that Rutherford House not be as celebrated a historic site as Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump or Stephansson House? Damn, the Brookes Aqueduct had more of a web presence than Rutherford House.

  I popped down to the Arbour Tea Room to grab a bite to eat. A table of three women and another two tables of couples were seated in the sunroom area, but luckily there was no one in the breakfast room portion of the restaurant. I plunked myself into the two-top tucked in around the wall, so that should someone glance casually into the area, they wouldn’t spot me. I had no desire for Roxanne to head over and try to winkle out any information the police might have neglected to tell her. I had no desire for anything more than a scone slathered in raspberry butter and a pot of Earl Grey tea.

  I had two weeks to justify my existence. There would barely be enough time to track down the site builders, let alone get my vision laid out for them in any sort of translatable manner.

  When we had worked together on the folkwaysAlive! website, Judy and Linda, the designers I had been paired with who were both working on their master’s degrees in computer science, had realized I was never
going to get my head wrapped around much more than rudimentary HTML, so they decided that my laying out my ideas and content in a storyboard manner would be the easiest to follow and translate onto the web. I produced a notebook that looked like a treasure map created by the Jolly Postman when I was through. There were pages taped into it that unfolded downward to show scrolling areas, and envelopes glued into places where sidebar information and hyperlinks had to occur. My miracle workers, who had since graduated and formed a company together called the Black Widow Web Works, then took this hodgepodge and turned it into a working website that opened and worked smoothly on every computer platform you could imagine. Contracting out to them had been part of the deal, and I had even worked sane, civilized deadlines into the project. When you have two fancy degrees on the wall, you should no longer be sleeping under your desk with empty pizza boxes for a pillow, trying to meet crazy deadlines.

  Now it looked as if I’d be asking the impossible again. I hauled out my cellphone and texted Linda, giving the gist of what to anticipate. Within five minutes, I had a response.

  “No bigE. Meet nxt 2sdy, J Xed week 4 U.”

  Translating, it sounded as if the Widows would be able to accommodate the quick turnaround. If I could get materials ready enough for next Tuesday, which gave me just under a week to prepare, then I would be ready for Judy, who had blocked off the entire next week of her timetable to deal with my issue. I texted back that this would be great and I would get to them by one o’clock on Tuesday and then tucked my phone back in my bag before Roxanne caught me. She was a real stickler about anachronisms in the House, and since she couldn’t chide paying customers, she saved her wrath and took it out on staff.

  I scribbled sketches into my notebook as I drank my tea. If we were to start with a view of the House, and be welcomed in the front doors with a sweep, we couldn’t begin with the maid’s story. That is, unless I had two or three different linkages from that front-door splash page. I could have one link that showed Mattie Rutherford coming to the House when it was finally complete. I could have another link that gave us the servant’s voice, and then took us around to the side door and up the maid’s stairs. I could also have the voice of a young man who was starting out university on the promontory above the North Saskatchewan River and joining the Delta Upsilons to forge lifelong friendships and business connections. Each one of these stories could unfold from the opening page.

  If the Widows could build me a shell that included an opening page and a sketchy follow-through based on those three storylines, then I could present it at the board meeting and show the value of an interactive site. The province and the board shared the aim of getting people aware of their local history and interested in the preservation of historic sites. That a website could engender this sort of interest, leading to more visits to the physical site, had to be a no-brainer. Marni had certainly seen that when she hired me.

  I wondered if Greta Larsen actually stood for the whole board, or whether she just personally had some bee in her bonnet about the Internet. For all I knew, other members of the board had been against the project all along, too. There was likely no way of knowing before the meeting, unless I spent time researching every other board member. In ordinary circumstances, I might have, but I had a deadline to meet.

  I paid for my tea and scone and left the breakfast room. There were still three hours till the House closed for the day, and I had my work cut out for me. Since the Archives were closed and I wouldn’t be able to purchase any photos for the Widows to use in their presentation, I was going to have to provide the pictures needed.

  Although I had taken a photography course in my teens and used to know my way around a darkroom, I had never pursued my early fascination for photography. My camera was barely one step up from a digital point-and-click, but it did have some interesting features and a solid zoom lens. I had a great photo of the front of the House from the street already; what I needed were some shots of hallways and rooms that the Widows could manipulate into a virtual tour.

  It took me a while to cover the main floor because I had to change my settings from colour to sepia on every shot. I wanted the website to be able to bleed out of the look of old photographs into modern-colour reality and back. By the time I got upstairs, my system was up to speed and I managed to capture a 360-degree view of Cecil’s room, the Rutherfords’ bedroom, the sitting and sewing area, the guest room, which was no longer cordoned off by the police, and Hazel’s pretty room. I shot the maid’s staircase both heading up and going down.

  I took some time in the maid’s sitting room and bedroom. If I wanted an entire thread following a young, anonymous girl from the country, I would need to flesh out her particular world. I shot the view directly down from her window, since she would have been looking out toward trees and houses, not the backside of the Humanities Building. Finally, I slipped off my shoes and lay down on the narrow iron bed, to approximate the start of her day. For such a thin mattress, the bed was comfier than it looked. There was no way I could make any sort of claims that the Rutherford maids weren’t well treated; from this angle I could see that the maid’s bedroom was slightly larger than my own bedroom in my small apartment a few blocks away.

  My eyes gauged the wood floor, which looked solid and unbroken with no possible loose board for hiding treasure under. The baseboards might be a better possibility, though the ones visible all seemed to be of one piece. Would someone risk the noise of dragging their iron bed frame away from the wall in order to hide something from the mistress of the house? Was it worth looking?

  Of course, the bed might have been against the other wall when she was the maid. I rolled off the bed to look underneath it.

  In keeping with the time frame of the museum, a metal chamber pot was stationed under the bed, but nothing else, not even a dust bunny, could be seen. The coverlet hung down on either side of the bed, making it very dim, but it looked as if the baseboards were of a piece on that wall as well. The excitement that had built up as a result of my conjecture deflated just as quickly, and I knelt in the middle of the room on the small braided rug and considered the impossibility of what I was doing. With a deadline looming that could mean my livelihood for the next four months, I was searching for clues to what Mattie Rutherford had written cryptically about in a missing journal I couldn’t even get into the Archives to search for. I felt like an idiot.

  I was pushing myself oh-so-gracefully up off the floor into a standing position when the door behind me swung open with a bang against its stopper, causing me to shriek and twist around.

  Roxanne was standing in the doorway with a look that could have shut down the most defiant rebel, one of which I certainly wasn’t. Put her in a wimple and she could have been a kick-ass Mother Superior. Put her in a nurse’s uniform and even McMurphy would have taken his medicine.

  “Why was this door closed?”

  I felt like a preteen boy caught spending half an hour in the bathroom. I stammered my response, which likely made me sound even guiltier than I felt.

  “I was taking pictures from the maid’s point of view, Roxanne. I just wanted the idea of what she would see, waking up in the morning.”

  She stood there, resolute. “Do not close any of the doors in the House which are open. Do not open any doors in the House that are closed. Is that so very difficult to understand?”

  There are very few things I hate more than condescension. Well okay, genocide, bigotry, blatant non-environmentalism and the neo-conservative dismantling of the social safety net in favour of trans-global corporations were slightly higher on my list, but condescension was right up there, about ten times higher than off-leash dogs. And that is probably why I answered Roxanne so snappily, something I realized in hindsight I shouldn’t have done.

  “Why thank you for reminding me, Roxanne. As a professional contracted to provide you with more visibility, I guess I just had more pressing things on my mind than adhering blindly to your petty regulations. As it is, I don�
�t think my closing the door momentarily has stopped any of your countless visitors from seeing this priceless view, has it?”

  The shock of being given back some of her own acidity may have been what made Roxanne step aside out of the doorway and allow me clear passage into the hallway. On the other hand, my irony might have been lost on her, as it is for so many Mike Judge fans, and she just wanted me out of there. Whatever the case, the exit was presented, and I lost no time making myself scarce. I was still feeling the frisson of looking for something someone didn’t want me looking for, the maid’s hidey-hole.

  If there was such a thing. Having combed the Spartan space on my own hands and knees, I wasn’t so sure. Grabbing my coat off the rack in the lobby, I made my way out the front door, the bell spring signalling my departure. I had till next Tuesday to shape up a design that would pacify the board and save my contract. I didn’t have time to waste on a treasure hunt. And when it got right down to it, I couldn’t imagine one of the Rutherford maids getting her hands on anything that would cause the death of two good people. It was a false trail, like one of those red herrings set out in mystery novels to keep readers occupied while the detective juggled all the clues into place.

  I gave myself a shake and headed for home. History was not going to write itself.

  19

  --

  Steve being tied up in the Archives investigation turned out to be a good thing for my schedule. I managed to crank out what was for me an amazing output toward my website notebook. I walked into the Black Widow offices on the following Tuesday, confident that I had enough for Linda and Judy to spin some of their trademarked magic.

  I wasn’t wrong. Judy was particularly entranced with the idea of a Ukrainian maid leading the viewers through the history. I hadn’t realized that she, with a last name like Thompson, was of Ukrainian descent.

  “Ha, all you have to do is poke the average Albertan and you will find all sorts of roots. My grandmother was a Lyzaniwski. Really, this is great. I think we can cobble something together for your deadline, no problem. You do have all the printed matter on a flash drive for us?” With her huge eyes and short dark hair, she looked like a slightly manic pixie.