Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  “As per orders, and all labelled in harmony with the notebook. I really appreciate this.”

  Linda, the ethereal redhead, ushered me graciously to the door, where my coat hung on an upscale version of a coat rack. Their offices, located in an old building on trendy 104th Street just off Jasper Avenue, were up two flights, but I didn’t trust the elevator, so I clomped down the stairs and headed to the Sobeys on the corner to buy a few groceries before popping into the LRT station to take me across the river.

  This supermarket had wedged itself into the downtown core to capitalize on the condos and lofts that were springing up all over the area. While not as large as most of the grocery stores in less dense neighbourhoods, it catered to the lunch-hour shoppers from the surrounding office towers who were looking for just one or two things to stuff into their kitchenette fridges till it was time to head home for the day, and to the urbane condo dwellers who alternated between trying quinoa-stuffed Cornish game hen recipes from Gourmet magazine and stirring up a box of Kraft Dinner before heading out to the clubs.

  For me, it was just the place to pick up a butcher’s foam tray of pork chops, a lemon, and a plastic clamshell of huge strawberries from California. I was always totally motivated to eat locally until I hit the fruit-and-vegetable aisle. Canada’s Food Guide surely couldn’t expect me to eat five to ten rutabagas a day, now could it?

  I was hoping Steve would be coming by for supper, as I hadn’t seen him the entire week I had been racing to put together my web notebook for the Widows. I would be hard pressed not to quiz him about Mr. Maitland’s death, since I felt so personally affected, having really liked the man. And of course, he would have nothing to tell me about Jossie’s death, as that wasn’t even his case, let alone the complication of my being a witness in the situation and the whole piddly ethics thing. God knows what we would find to talk about. We might as well take the pork chops straight to bed.

  My salacious joke made me laugh out loud, causing a young man with distended earlobes stuffed with black lab corks and a dotted line tattooed from the edge of his eye to his mouth to look at me in alarm, as if I was some sort of weirdo. You would think that by now no one would pay any attention to anyone laughing or talking out loud on the train, since so many people had a Bluetooth gizmo attached to their ear or were speaking loudly into a receiver on the line of their smartphone earphones. Still, it didn’t do to be pegged as crazy; the mentally ill were only marginally less disdained than the obese in today’s society, since it was no longer fashionable to publicly hurl epithets at immigrants or homosexuals.

  The not-so-silent majority were always going to find someone to place beneath their heel, I supposed, though why hatred was such a burning need for the human psyche, I still had not been able to answer to my satisfaction. Hatred was, after all, such a self-destructive emotion. I wondered whether someone had hated Mr. Maitland or Jossie in that concentrated, specific white-rage way, or whether they had merely been in the way of someone’s greed or need.

  Steve said that money, sex, or an escape route were the three main compulsions to commit violence. Since I couldn’t imagine anyone trapped in either the Archives or the guest bathroom at Rutherford House, I had to assume we were concentrating on money and sex. Well, who wasn’t?

  I must have giggled again, because Mr. Self-Mutilation gave me another troubled look. I studiously sorted out the plastic handles on my bags, and headed up to wait for my stop by the automatic doors.

  I wondered just how much the police were connecting the two murders. After all, the main connecting point, as Steve had pointed out, was me. Other than the fact that I had known both victims and had been in the same buildings with them within twenty-four hours of their deaths, the only connections were that both those buildings were owned by the Province and each housed items that had once belonged to the first premier of Alberta.

  I called Steve and left a message for him to come over for supper on his voice mail. I heard back from him almost immediately, and we settled on a seven-thirty dinnertime; that way he wouldn’t have to head back into the station after supper. Knowing I wouldn’t get to eat till more than two hours past my regular mealtime, I made a pot of tea and a huge sandwich for lunch, stuffing everything I could find in the fridge between the slabs of bread. Feeling like Dagwood, Jughead, and Wimpy combined, I put all my focus into the sandwich before me. The time it took to eat my way through the layers of cheese, shaved turkey, sprouts, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, mayonnaise, and mustard was therapeutic, sort of like yoga or meditation. My mind, released of the worry that had been spinning in a constant loop, had emptied itself while focusing on opening my jaws wide enough to clamp down on the sandwich without spilling the contents all over my plate, table, and lap. Zen and the Art of Deli Eating.

  Conventional wisdom has it that one should never eat a big meal and then go lie down if one wants one’s body to use up the fuel one has just ingested, rather than storing it in one’s hips and belly. Wisdom, however, hadn’t been clocking twenty-hour days trying to get the website notebook together, so I decided to listen to all of my crying muscles and brain cells that were begging for a nap. I considered setting my alarm, but figured that it would be so much more satisfying to just sleep as long as I needed, and if Steve got here before that time was up, so be it. He had a key, and pork chops can be ready in five minutes.

  I hung up the linen blouse and black trousers I had been wearing to meet with the Widows, pulled on a fleecy top and my sweats with U of A embroidered at the thigh, and crawled back under my covers for a nap. What luxury, to be able to immediately indulge in sleep in the middle of the day. This was truly the freelancer’s and contract worker’s ultimate reward. We may never have the ability to retire on a pension, but napping on a Tuesday afternoon was something most CEOs and executive directors were never going to experience.

  I thought about writing myself a note to ask Steve whether they had looked at the “To Be Refiled” shelves in the Archives, but figured I would remember to do so without one. Dumb me. Sleep took over, and I was out like a light.

  20

  --

  By the time Steve arrived, I was awake, had splashed water on my face and the dinner started. The light was waning, and I noticed one or two miserly snowflakes trying to start something outside, but they gave up with a stern glance from my direction. While I have nothing against snow in particular, I dislike its arriving too early. Not only does it make everyone’s winters that much longer and harder to bear, it really knocks the stuffing out of the little kids who want to Hallowe’en in fancy costumes. I am not sure why mothers didn’t just promote warm costumes, like Yeti and sheep and rabbits, made from the same material mall mascots were constructed from. That way it wouldn’t matter whether it snowed or not, and the kids would be cozy, trick-or-treating all over the neighbourhood.

  Steve shivered as he entered my apartment, shaking off the chill he’d brought in with him.

  “I don’t know. We might be seeing the last of fall this week,” he announced with that tone we all take when discussing the weather, the one that sounds like, “hear me? I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Really? I want it to hold out for another two weeks at least. Just long enough to get all the candy, bats, and plastic cauldrons out of the stores, and all the tinsel and singing trees into the aisles.”

  “I’ve already seen Christmas stuff in the stores.”

  “Have they marked down the little candy bars on sale yet?”

  “No, but it won’t be long now. Speaking of, what’s for supper?”

  “Pork chops, apple sauce, and salad. If you want carbs, you’ll have to have a slice of bread. I was going to do potatoes, but I had a nap instead.”

  “I thought you looked a bit fuzzy. Did you get the web designs in today?”

  “This morning. I took them downtown and came home and sort of crashed. It’s been such a push. Of course, now I have a week of waiting till the Widows get back to me and the board
meets to decide my fate.”

  Steve smiled around a forkful of pork chop. “You’ll be fine. After all, they’ve already determined a website was necessary, or else they wouldn’t have had the contract for you. It’s just this one woman, I bet, using the murder at the House to have another kick at a project she alone didn’t want happening. Mmm, these are good.”

  “I hope that a) you’re right about there only being the one person who is opposed, and that b) she’s not the sort of person who runs roughshod over a committee. Let there be strong-minded people on this board!”

  Steve laughed. “So you have a week. What are you going to do with yourself?”

  “Oh, I still have tons of research to do, so I’ll keep on until I’m told I can’t. No point in getting way behind in the project if they do give me the green light, and I will be charging for this week, anyhow.” I picked up the pork chop bone and gnawed on the bits of meat that wouldn’t come politely. “I was thinking of calling up Fort Edmonton Park and getting dispensation to head down there this week, since I never got around to heading down there the same weekend we hit the Ukrainian Village.”

  “Are they still open? I thought everything closed down after their Harvest Festival.”

  “Actually, they are still open weekends to the public for quite a few weeks into the fall, and they are open on a daily basis in the fall and spring for school groups. One of the servers at the House, who also does work at the Selkirk Hotel down at the Park, says there is more in the way of volunteer action and houses open during the week for the school kids at this time of year, and access to the inside of the old Rutherford House is what I really need. I think there are even whole weeks that schools can book to go to the Fort daily and immerse the kids in what it would be like to learn from memorization and scribbling on slates, after drawing water and chopping firewood and doing chores before school.”

  “Not a bad lesson to learn right there, that school wasn’t always the cakewalk it seems to be now.”

  “Steve Browning, I just for a minute there spotted you as a grandpa, poking your cane for emphasis and telling those young folk what’s what.”

  He had the grace to laugh. “I suppose I’m getting there. For me, though, it’s not so much a difference in the scale of difficulty between schools now compared to when I went, as much as it is the air of entitlement of the students I notice when I do school tours. For one thing, hardly any of the little kids actually walk to school anymore, and once they’ve stopped being dropped off by SUVs parked in the middle of crosswalks, they are clogging up school parking lots with their own cars. And they all assume they’ll be heading off to university or into a career that will eclipse their parents’ work. And I think, where are they getting these ideas? More young people are finding themselves staying at home longer, or going back to live with their parents, because they can’t afford to live on their own, let alone buy a house. So what’s with the attitude they’re slinging?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s that whole competence with technology aspect to their lives. They’ve spent their whole lives hearing people say how easily little kids pick up computers and new products. That could give them the edge of superiority, in that every time you turn around there is a new version of things.”

  “It’s wild, isn’t it? And, you know, do we need it? I was just reading about a museum run by the National Trust in England. It’s a row house and photography studio of a famous photographer who died in 1988. He and his wife didn’t seem to have remodelled or upgraded from when it was first built, post-war, and it’s all preserved as a tribute to the 1950s. There is no big stove or fridge or double-glazed windows, just a hot plate and a larder, but there is running water, electricity, a good old dial-up telephone, and furniture made from solid wood and dense upholstery, and it all looks serviceable and long-wearing.”

  “So?”

  “So, it made me think that, given a radio and a newspaper delivered and possibly an upgrade to a colour television, a person could survive perfectly well using all the things I could see in the displays. There is very little we actually require that has come about in our lifetimes. Most everything we have around us is a time-saving device or a luxury. Aside from, say, the polio vaccine, what invention would you say has made the world a better place?”

  “Spandex.”

  “Really?”

  “You have no idea. But seriously, I hear you. The more I delve into the past or spend time in Rutherford House itself, the more I wonder about that sort of thing. Of course, a project like mine would be impossible without a computer, and my laptop has made going to the Archives so much easier, since there is no need to bring in a pen or anything that might mark up or damage any of the artifacts.”

  “But an artifact still went missing.”

  “Yeah, I think so. God, who am I going to tell about that?”

  “You put it in your statement. We can take it from there. If you are not absolutely certain how to identify it besides it not having a clear date marked on it, I’m not certain how we’re going to track it, but it may turn up in another box.”

  “I hope so. Not that I think it has anything to do with why poor Mr. Maitland was killed, but I hate to think that somehow I contributed to messing up his legacy of organization.”

  Steve was spooning out some more salad onto his plate. I hopped up to get the apple crisp I’d popped in the oven at the beginning of the meal. I had three of them in the tiny freezer compartment of my fridge, given to me by an elderly neighbour down the lane who made them from the apples on her lovely tree in the backyard. I had helped her last month by climbing the stepladder and filling up buckets, pans, and an old baby bath full of apples; and she had later presented me with enough ready-to-freeze desserts to last me well into the winter. I had ten more piled in my corner of the apartment’s communal chest freezer in the laundry room.

  Steve oohed at the smell of the warm cinnamon and brown sugar wafting toward him, and I spooned a massive helping into a cereal bowl for him, topping it off with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

  “This is fantastic,” he murmured between spoonfuls.

  “I know. Just nothing like harvest bounty.”

  I was still halfway through my dessert when Steve, finished, hopped up and began to clear the table. His belief was that the cook never cleans up, which is one of the reasons I so enjoyed cooking for him. While he ran hot, soapy water into the dishpan, I continued to chew my dessert.

  “So, aren’t you worried that if you add the earlier version of Rutherford House into your virtual visit, you’ll siphon off visitors to present-day Rutherford House by sending them to Fort Edmonton instead?”

  “Well, this website is meant to promote more visits to Rutherford House, and Fort Edmonton already seems to lure its fair share of tourists and return visitors, so there’s that aspect. Mostly, I figured it would do me some good to see some of the other houses of the era that they’ve amassed on 1905 Street, as well as walk down 1885 Street and get a sense of what was there when Alexander Rutherford built his dream home. History hits us in its relativity, right? We have to see what was there before, compare it to what would have been amazing then about this new thing, and then set it into context with what we know now. If we were to just take Rutherford House as a big brick house on Saskatchewan Drive, we might not get the full import of what it means to Edmonton and the university and our past. After all, there are other big brick houses all over Edmonton.”

  “Well, not that many, when you think about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, most of the brick seems to have gone into businesses and factories, while stucco went into wood frame houses. Brick houses always seem to me to be a more eastern thing. Maybe brick was more plentiful there, or trees less plentiful? But I think Rutherford making his house of brick was a real three pigs sort of thing, just like the Magrath Mansion over on Ada Boulevard, or some of the big houses on Valleyview Point and off River Valley Road by the zoo. Built of brick to last an
d to be a cut above the run-of-the-mill houses in the rest of the city.”

  “You may be right. I should check the Edmonton brickyard and see if there is anything in the Archives that shows how much went to private homes.”

  Steve sat back down with a cup of tea for each of us.

  “This was nice, thank you.”

  “That sounds as if you can’t stay.”

  “I really can’t. I do have to be at work for seven, but there is also the connection to the case; there is no way I want anyone saying that our relationship might somehow jeopardize the integrity of the police work in searching for Mr. Maitland’s killer.”

  “Is there any chance of my getting back to the Archives any time soon?”

  “How does slim to nil strike you? Seriously, we are still dealing with it as a crime scene, and having to examine everything with white cotton gloves on is making for a slow and painstaking process.”

  I shrugged. What can you do?

  “Have fun at Fort Edmonton, soaking up flavour. Maybe, by the time you present and hear back from the board, all this will be cleared up and you can get back to the land of musty documents.”

  We watched a bit of the news and an episode of Justified, the Elmore Leonard television show that featured a modern-day gunslinging sheriff in Kentucky, which seemed plausible enough that I wondered if we in the Wild West should be suing our Blue Mountain cousins for encroachment. True to his word, Steve shrugged on his coat around ten o’clock and headed home, leaving me to brood about just how I was going to fill my week, and just how involved I actually was with the deaths that were populating the periphery of my world.

  That’s the real trouble with afternoon naps. They leave you way too wide awake in the evening, when the grim thoughts appear.