Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  “So why can’t the police just question the magician and his relationship with the dead girl?” she asked.

  “He’s gone missing, apparently.” I indicated the turn; Denise dutifully got into the right lane and aimed for the exit ramp that led to the highway overpass. “Steve, of course, doesn’t know everything to do with the case, as it’s not his, and besides, he can’t share every little thing with me, but they haven’t been able to find Dafoe since the night of the murder.”

  “Really? Then why don’t they have a manhunt going on? You would think the press would be going crazy over something like that. They love to post photos and wax on about ‘persons of interest to the police’ and all that.”

  I wasn’t sure why they were playing that aspect so low-key, either. “Maybe he’s not a person of interest. Isn’t it possible that he could have satisfied all their questioning the night of the murder and been struck from the list of suspects there and then? After all, the detectives dealing with the Rutherford House murder have not questioned me again, either.” Thank goodness. I had actually been a suspect once, and it was not a nice feeling.

  Denise nodded thoughtfully. We had slowed down quite a bit driving through Ponoka, which was charming in a clean-little-prairie-town sort of way. There were signs declaring it a winner of Towns in Bloom, but since the municipal flower beds had all been cleaned up and turned over for the winter, we were just going to have to take their word for it. A sign on 39th Avenue declared this the route to Highway 53, so we kept going past the Stampede grounds. I made a mental note to come back some time to make a day of it in Ponoka; it seemed like a nice little town.

  “Okay, so if we think everything is connected, what can we extrapolate? There are a lot of thefts on your list and two people taken permanently out of the way. What did they know that the murderer wanted hidden? What thing or things was the murderer after wherever a theft took place?”

  I tried to think of a connecting principle, like a shiny cord running through my memories, linking all my sticky notes and shaking them into a smooth line of cause and effect.

  “Well, I think perhaps the thefts are not successful. Whoever it is has been looking for something and hasn’t found it yet. If you line them up chronologically, you have the first Rutherford home in Fort Edmonton Park being broken into, then Rutherford House itself. The murderer might be just covering up his tracks. I haven’t heard whether Marni had an official inventory done after the murder, because, well, you know, there was a murder, and that sort of keeps you from thinking about theft. Then there was Mattie Rutherford’s diary, which no one but me believes is missing. Then the break-in at the Archives, which was also the occasion of the death of Mr. Maitland. He, I believe, was killed so the thief could get unrestricted access to the Archives.”

  “But he knew all the players,” Denise pointed out.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you said he was telling you about Greta Larsen, and Marni and people from the House were at his funeral with you. Maybe he did know something about someone. I’m just saying.”

  I nodded. “Maybe. But it could also be that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Jossie.” I was counting on my fingers. “So if you add on my apartment and St. Stephen’s College, we have six thefts or break-ins. And we are not even certain that the thieves took Mrs. Rutherford’s diary. Mr. Maitland might have removed that from the rest of the carton for reasons of his own. As for the possible loss of an inventory catalogue, that is just conjecture. Steve hasn’t got back to me on that.”

  Denise pulled onto a highway lay-by to let a truck with huge round hay bales get some distance. The place reminded me of car trips with my folks, when my mother would run around to the trunk to get a thermos out of a quilted plaid plastic picnic bag, and my father would embarrass me with deep-knee-bend calisthenics to “avoid phlebitis.” This roadside stop was partway up a hill leading to a promontory of sorts above the highway. There was enough parking for about four cars; near the crest of the hill was a stone cairn, delineating a provincial historic point of interest, next to a trash barrel with uninteresting graffiti sprayed on it. At least they hadn’t tagged the sign, which resembled a huge gravestone with a tall grey granite stone bisecting a long red granite stone. I got out of the car and walked over to the sign.

  MECCA GLEN. The grey sign told of the merging of the six townships and included a legend with a list of symbols and their meaning. The red granite held a carved map that indicated where each of the towns had been and what significant historical sites had been there. The problem was, there was no Highway 53 shown on the carved map and no convenient YOU ARE HERE star in their list of symbols. For all we knew, we might have driven right through the vanished towns of Magic and Eureka without even realizing it.

  On the other side of the granite monument was etched a picture of pioneers tilling the soil with oxen. Pictures like that always made me perversely thankful for microwave ovens and supermarkets.

  Denise came up behind me and spoke the words I was thinking. “Damn, well, I guess we have to turn back and see if we missed something. I don’t remember passing a school, but we were talking and I have to confess I was focusing on not being ground up under the wheels of that hay truck. What do you say we head on, maybe four kilometres or so, and stay on the lookout for the Magic School? If we don’t find anything, we can always turn back. There is bound to be a museum in Ponoka that would have some information about it all. We’re not far from there. They will have a proprietary interest, I’m sure.”

  I agreed and we hopped back in the Bug and pulled back out onto the two-lane highway.

  “So,” I said, “picking up our train of thought about what might have been stolen, I would be willing to go out on a limb and say something pertaining to the Rutherfords. If it were just an artifact of the time, the thief wouldn’t have bothered with the Archives. I think it’s information that he or she either needs for a specific purpose, or wants no one else to have, for whatever reason.”

  “Sounds eminently reasonable,” Denise teased.

  I grinned in acknowledgement and went on. “So, let’s think about who is involved and match them to either needing something or wanting something to stay hidden. First we have Dafoe, the magician, who could probably steal anything he wants from right under your nose. He was hired by Marni, but recognized by Jossie, and spent his dinnertime with me. If he had been trying to steal something, why did he stick around for dinner, talking to me?”

  “He could have been looking for a secret treasure buried in the walls or under a floorboard, and talking to you was misdirection.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, as insulting as it is to think that talking to me wasn’t a scintillating experience but just a cover.”

  “Or he could be totally innocent and sincerely interested in good dinner conversation.”

  “But if he’s so innocent, then where is he now?”

  “He could be so totally innocent that he’s gone on vacation and doesn’t even know this is happening. Or maybe he is down in Mexico, performing nightly at some resort hotel.”

  “Maybe. I’m not so sure, and I wish he’d checked in with the police before he left if that’s the case.”

  Denise slowed. We had come to the Mecca Glen School site. It was a nice modern building, with a very cool-looking playground off to one side. Because it was surrounded by trees, we hadn’t seen it from the road or from the hilltop cairn, which was really saying something in this remarkable valley, where you could see for miles. Denise pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car.

  “We might as well look around here, don’t you think? Maybe there’s someone who could figure out where things used to be.”

  “What, like go in and check with the principal?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it looks like hardly anyone is here, is why not. Look at the parking lot.”

  There were three cars in the lot.

  “Well, let’s knock any
how.”

  “We can do better than that.” I pressed the institutional button that mimicked the doorbells of private houses and heard the obnoxious buzzing reverberate through the halls. I was willing to bet several little boys had been punished for pressing that buzzer at recess.

  While we were waiting for someone to come to the door, Denise picked up our conversation about suspects.

  “Okay then. So, Greta wants to maintain family decorum for the Rutherfords and Dafoe wants to steal a secret treasure. Anyone else on your list of suspects?”

  “Well, aside from person or persons unknown, I guess Marni is the only other person I’ve been wondering about.”

  “Your boss? Classic.”

  “Actually, she’s a good boss. She was just born to manage people, I think.”

  “But you think she might manage one or two of them into the grave from time to time?”

  “I think she is a highly motivated person with bigger fish to fry than running a historic house. She’s so full of energy she almost hums, and I’m not quite sure what she’s doing is what could be perceived as a dead-end position.”

  “So you’re saying she’s suspicious because she seems too good for where she is.”

  “Does that sound stupid?”

  I didn’t get to find out whether Denise thought I was stupid or not because just then someone came to the door. He was probably ten years older than us, wearing dark green trousers and a matching shirt tucked into them, looking like every plumber and workman I’d ever seen before the invention of Carhartt overalls. I suspected he was the school’s custodian; just to be certain, I introduced myself and Denise and asked if there was someone we could speak to about the history of the school in relation to the Magic School.

  “We don’t want to interrupt school, though.”

  The man laughed.

  “Can’t do that today, no how. It’s what they call a PD day. The kids get to stay home and sleep off their Hallowe’en candy rush, and the teachers have gone into the city for a daylong course. No one here except my cleaning staff and the librarian.”

  That accounted for the dearth of cars in the parking lot.

  “Do you think we could talk with the librarian?” asked Denise.

  It was as if he had just seen Denise for the first time as she spoke, and I could see his eyes refocusing on her, the way men’s eyes always did.

  “You might as well come with me and meet her. For all I know, she might have some idea of what you want.” He opened the door a little wider and ushered us into the hall. The overhead lights weren’t on, but all the classroom doors were propped open and sunlight streamed through into the dim hallway.

  He introduced himself as Mike and led us past bulletin boards full of bright orange and brown paintings and collages of leaves, the first fall artworks of the children. A tall trash bin on wheels stood in the middle of the hall, filled with orange and black streamers and construction-paper pumpkins.

  Mike nodded to it as we past. “We had a costume parade and sock hop for the older kids.”

  The school was built like a lower-case T, and we had come in at the bottom of the stem. We were headed up to the junction of the cross bar. The gym lay in front of us, the office to the right, and the library directly across from the office. We had passed eight classrooms. I presumed the staffroom was somewhere behind the general office. All in all, it was a tidy little school.

  Mike knocked on the library door before trooping us in, to give the librarian a heads-up, I supposed. Working in a deserted school had to be a bit spooky; I wouldn’t want anyone sneaking up on me, either.

  A woman came toward us from between waist-high shelving stacks of books.

  “Yes, Mike? Oh, hello. May I help you? My name is Rhea. I’m the teacher-librarian here at Mecca Glen.” She smiled, a bit puzzled to see two strange women checking out a rural elementary/junior high school. I could see her running through different scenarios, possibly trying to shape a welcoming face to greet the new lesbian couple who had moved out of the city to raise their edamame- and quinoa-fed children. I spoke quickly before she said something that would make us all uncomfortable.

  “Hi, my name is Randy Craig, and this is my friend Denise Wolff. We’re here doing a bit of research on the Magic School and wondered if you could tell us something, anything, about it? I’ve been working for a provincial historic site, putting together an interactive website for them.”

  “And you want to connect to other points of interest? Of course. Were you hoping to tour the school today?”

  Denise piped up. “You mean it’s still standing?”

  Rhea laughed. “Last time I looked. It’s right out back.”

  Denise and I looked at each other and laughed as well.

  “So much for our map-reading skills,” Denise said. “I was pretty sure we had already driven through what had been Magic before we got to the hill.”

  Rhea nodded. “The map on that cairn is really misleading. I wish they’d drawn in Highway 53, but they based it on a 1912 survey map, and the highway didn’t come through here till around 1940. I’m not sure it was paved till the ’50s.” She nodded to Mike, who had gone through a door into the office and reappeared with a single key on a keychain. “I’ll turn off the alarm, Mike, but perhaps you could reset it before you leave today?”

  It sounded as if Rhea alone would be showing us around the old school.

  We left the big building by a side door between the library and the gym, and crunched our way down a pebble gravel path around the back of the gym.

  There, among a grove of trees, was a schoolhouse that looked very much like the one I’d seen at the Ukrainian Village. A set of stairs led up to the entrance, which had a small bell tower overhead. Rhea unlocked the door and stepped quickly to a numberpad just inside, disarming whatever alarm would have sounded. I couldn’t imagine who would have heard it, beyond the folks in the Mecca Glen School office, but perhaps that was enough. The alarm was there to keep out students with petty vandalism on their minds, not to repel thieves after a massive treasure.

  Because there was no treasure here to be found. A mannequin dressed in an early-twentieth-century dress stood at the front of the classroom near a blackboard filled with beautiful copperplate writing. The contents were a couplet from what I was pretty sure was a Shakespearean sonnet but would check with Denise later, a complicated algebraic equation, and a list of the colours of a rainbow prism in order, along with a couple of simple arithmetic problems.

  Rhea saw me looking. “The idea is to show people just how encompassing a Grade Eight education really was. So many of our elderly generation today have alternated between being ashamed of getting only so far in school and bragging about getting so far with only a rudimentary taste of schooling, but really, in the days of the teacherages and one-room schoolhouses across the province, a Grade Eight education was nothing to sneeze at. You’d have enough poetry memorized that you could provide a quote for any occasion, and the capacity to memorize would hold you in good stead throughout your life. Your mathematical abilities would allow you to buy the right amount of seed for whatever size your fields might be, or enough paint to cover the barn, or an eye for laying out a dress pattern in the most efficient configuration for fabric use while still matching the seams. You would be able to make change and recognize when you’d been shorted, know the capitals of all foreign countries and thereby understand the news, read the weather from your science-class cloud identification, and write polite notes for any occasion. There was nothing second-class about the education you received here, by any means. If you had no need for more book-learning, you were set for life.”

  It was a spiel I figured she had recited several times. I could see her being a very good storyteller, which had to be a prerequisite for being a librarian. Rhea walked us through the display, which took up the front quarter of the schoolroom, and showed us some of the books set open on the desks.

  “There would have been upward of thirty or forty
desks set up here, with children ranging in age from five to seventeen. School would have begun later in the year than we’re used to, so that the older children could help with the harvest, but by mid-September, they’d be coming to school on horseback or walking across the fields with their lunches in lard pails.”

  “This is wonderful,” I said. “Is it open to the public in the summer? Or do you rent it for special events at all?”

  A quick frown passed over the librarian’s face. “We do rent it out when we can. The display can be packed up relatively quickly, and the desks line up under the window, leaving a good-sized space for meetings and the occasional performance. Local council meetings used to take place here, too. In fact, that cupboard back there, which at one time was the teacher’s bedroom, holds folding tables and stacking chairs. There’s not all that much call for it, though. People tend to favour Ponoka if they want a meeting of any size, or else they vote for meeting in Edmonton so they can shop at the Bulk Barn before they return home.”

  “I don’t suppose there was ever a magic show here, was there? I mean, it would be sort of cool to hold a magic show in the Magic School.”

  Rhea smiled.

  “There was—for just that reason—and not that long ago. It would have been May, I think. School wasn’t out yet, because I had a poster for it in my library and there were leaflets for the kids to take home. How did you hear about it?”

  “A girl I knew told me she had seen a magician at the Magic School, and it took me ages to work out what she meant. I thought she was talking about something like the Magic Castle in Las Vegas, but when I heard about there being a town called Magic in Alberta, everything clicked into place.”

  “Very few people even know about us, unless they’re from these parts. People just tend to refer to it as the Mecca Glen area.”

  “She may have been from here, I am not sure. She was a university student, and I guess they come to Edmonton from everywhere. Did you ever know of a Jocelyn, or Jossie Jaque?”

  The librarian’s eyes clouded over.