The entryway had a vestibule and then another door beyond that, making it impossible to hear if anyone was coming. I gave her what I figured was the requisite amount of time to get from the back of her office upstairs to the front door, then I rang again.
After a while, I switched to knocking on the door, putting my hand on the handle for emphasis. The knob turned in my hand and the door swung open. Okay, for anyone who has watched one too many horror movies, that was creepy in and of itself. It was even creepier knowing how rigorous Marni was about maintaining security at the House.
I contemplated calling Steve or the police station but recalled our discussion about whether or not we should call in suspicious activity at St. Stephen’s College, and I figured an early-morning call to say my boss had left the front door to a public historic site open was perhaps an overreaction. It was a Saturday morning meeting, not a dark midnight rendezvous.
I told myself to get a grip and stepped into the dim house. The lights weren’t all that plentiful in Rutherford House to begin with, and whoever had left the door open hadn’t bothered to open the parlour drapes, which might have let in some ambient light. Of course, it was a rather grey day out there to begin with.
“Marni?” I called out, hoping my voice didn’t betray my edginess. I knew she was touchy about the idea that people were going to shun Rutherford House as a scary place to visit after the murder. It wouldn’t do to prove her correct, right off the bat.
“Marni?” I called again, and was rewarded by a thud from somewhere overhead. Great. The house wasn’t haunted, it had just turned itself into a two-storey Ouija board.
I headed for the stairs toward the noise I’d heard.
“I’m here, as requested, boss lady,” I chirped, trying to fill the silence. I thought I heard another thump coming from the front of the house, in what would have been Mrs. Rutherford’s sewing area. I hurried up the stairs and made the turn to find Marni tied up and gagged and lying on the floor. It looked as if she had tried to wiggle her way toward the door out to the balcony and had managed to pull herself into a semi-sitting position. I opened the small wooden gate that had been erected to keep schoolchildren from touching the displays and bent to reach for the duct tape covering her mouth.
Before I could tear it off, I noticed her eyes go wide, staring at something behind me. I froze; for some idiotic reason, the thought popped into my head that there was a bear behind me. I turned to see what she was looking at.
All I could see was the double barrel of a shotgun pointing directly at me. It took a moment or two for the rest of the image to come into focus, since the horror of seeing a gun, let alone having one pointed at me, is a complete shock, something most Canadians have no concept of, except on television.
“Don’t move,” said Greta Larsen, who spoke just as my eyes and mind began to take in the bigger picture. “Move over there and sit down on the floor.”
Marni made a noise in the back of her throat, which I took to be encouragement to follow this order. Never let it be said that I did not respect the power of a firearm. I dropped immediately to the floor and scuttled back into the corner Greta had indicated. Beside her loomed the tall young man who had been beside her when I had first seen her at the magic night and who I’d last seen dressed in devil horns at the Hallowe’en bash. Even in my terror, I could recognize a family resemblance. This was her grandson, Finn Larsen. Whatever genes Greta had brought to the Larsens, they had certainly won out.
“What are you planning to do with us?” I asked, immediately regretting I had even spoken. Why would I want to make the person with the gun pointed at me start planning her next move? Particularly when her next would probably be my last?
She motioned to the young man, who came forward with a roll of duct tape, and told him to tear off a piece and stick it over my mouth. So much for civil discourse. This was obviously going to be a one-sided conversation.
He tore off a piece of tape, and I recalled the pain of waxing sessions as he patted it roughly over my mouth.
“Now put your hands in front of you, wrists together.”
I could see that Marni’s hands had been taped together behind her. Greta was apparently directing affairs, and improving as she went along. I noticed the largish bump on Marni’s forehead. Maybe hands behind the back was too much effort. Greta had probably cold-cocked her before her henchman had bound her.
Finn had the tape stuck on my left wrist and was holding my wrists together. Greta aimed the gun at Marni’s head, effectively keeping both of us still. In a few strong twists, the young man bound my hands tautly together. Now that I was immobilized, Greta put the gun down at her side and young Lochinvar ripped the rest of the tape roll off my wrist. He pulled my feet together and wrapped them quickly too, which was even more uncomfortable, because the seams of my jeans dug into my ankles as they winched together. He then bound me at the knees, making it pretty much impossible to stand without a great deal of rolling, balancing and hopping, none of which could be done gracefully and silently while there was a gun aimed at me. I sat, hogtied and uncomfortable.
I looked over at Marni again; she rolled her eyes, which I took to be some form of apology. I tried to smile at her in encouragement, but all that did was pull at the duct tape, making me wince. Wincing at a fellow hostage does nothing to foster encouragement. Marni’s eyes began to well up with tears, and I realized she had already come to the conclusion that we were coming to a conclusion. Greta Larsen and her grandson were going to blast big shotgun holes in us, and we were going to die here in the sewing alcove of a historic site in Edmonton, Alberta.
There was absolutely nothing about this scene that I was willing to accept as my last. I had a lot still to do with my life. I had bills to pay, continents to visit, a man to marry.
It is amazing how the barrel of a gun can focus one’s priorities.
Greta had picked up the gun once more and was standing before us, moving it back and forth toward each of us, as if it was a willow stick and she was witching for water.
“I have had about all I can take from you two meddling girls. You think you can come here, turn everything into Disneyland, and bring the world tromping through this old house.”
I was not sure what she was talking about, but Marni was moaning softly to my left and generally letting me know she was not going to be much help for anything. It was up to me to divine whatever meaning I could from Greta’s ramblings that would give me an idea of how to get out of this mess alive.
“You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
I shook my head, trying to seem abject enough for her.
“No, you had to dig and dig. You wanted to name names and make everything ‘tangible’ so that the modern generations could feel the ‘people’ behind the history.” Greta was waving the gun in time to her pronouncements, and I wondered vaguely if she really was speaking in iambic pentameter or if it just seemed that way because of the force of the weapon pointed in my face.
“Well, let me tell you, you live-everything-on-the-computer-no-privacy people should think about what you do. You step all over others, people who don’t want their dirty laundry hung out in public, who want to just let the past remain buried and the future to be the only thing to worry about.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I got the idea she was mocking something Marni had once said, because I could hear the air quotes around some of the words she was tossing in our faces, but she was still making no sense. What really worried me, though, was that her movements with the shotgun were getting more erratic as she spoke. Finn was standing behind his grandmother, with a look of loathing that matched hers. I couldn’t see appealing to his better nature. He seemed to be right onside with whatever Greta had in mind, and I had a fair idea what that entailed.
She was winding herself up to shoot us, I was certain of it.
My puzzlement about what she had said must have read on the half of my face that wasn’t covered in duct tape,
because Greta looked at me impatiently, as if I was a surly nine-year-old who wasn’t obeying her wishes.
“I am talking about all this website business, and bringing people into the House who aren’t concerned with the Rutherfords. Always, you are trying to make them learn more.”
Why was this a bad thing? Surely, that was exactly why the board had hired me to work on the virtual museum. Surely that was what museums were all about. Why was Greta even on the board if she didn’t approve of museums? I realized she was still droning on, and the gun was still punctuating her words with its metronomic pattern between Marni and me.
“More about the times, about the people they met with, about the maids they hired.” Greta’s voice took on a keening wail. “Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone?”
All of a sudden, like a kaleidoscope shifting, pieces of what she was saying began to fall into place. I wasn’t completely aware of every nuance, but I was beginning to see why Greta Larsen hadn’t wanted my website and its new focus on the activities of the other staircase coming to light.
She must have seen the dawning realization in my eyes.
“That’s right. My mother was a maid here in Mrs. Rutherford’s day. She was fourteen when she came to work for the family. She helped them move to the new house and was kept on, helping out with all the tea parties that Mrs. Rutherford and Hazel and Mr. Cecil’s wife got up to while Cecil was at war. Can you imagine being a maid in a house with three grown women pulling at you in different directions? Still, she was a good maid, and she worked her way up to becoming the real housekeeper.”
Finn’s face took on the look of an acolyte who was finally hearing the secrets of the Grail. Somehow, this was the crux of the matter, why this family was so intent on closing down my project.
“She might have gone on to become a matron at an old folks’ home or a head housekeeper for one of the big hotels, later, with a good reference. But one of the young men from home, who drove deliveries from Edmonton to Smoky Lake all summer long while the roads were good, started courting her. She got herself pregnant, and when she finally began to show, that was it for her career. No matter that hers had been a strong back and quick hands and a quiet step on the stairs. No matter that she had worked for them for years.”
Marni moaned again. I was beginning to think she might have a concussion from the bump on her head. Greta kept talking. I kept listening, mesmerized by the gun, but also beginning to see the girl Greta was obviously pining for. Her mother who had stood here, perhaps in this very spot, and been chastised for loosening her stays and her morals. The words in Mrs. Rutherford’s missing diary were coming clearer.
“In the middle of the night, she was taken to the ferry, and off on the road back home. She and my father didn’t get too far, though. No one was sure whether it was the bumping on the road, or her working so hard through her time, or being a bit older than usual for a first pregnancy, or her girdling herself pretending she wasn’t gone, but the pains started before they were well away. She began to shiver and get ill, and they took a room along the Fort Road, at the old Transit Hotel, so that she could be seen by a doctor. Just that visit would take all she had managed to set aside from her wages, her nest egg. And they couldn’t save her in the end. The baby came, and the man who loved her took her home in the back of his truck, with me swaddled tight in a hotel sheet and wedged into an apple crate lined with his winter sweater.”
Marni was silent beside me. I wasn’t sure whether it was the power of Greta’s delivery or that she had finally succumbed to unconsciousness. I wasn’t about to lose eye contact with the madwoman pointing a shotgun at me to check.
“They buried her at the edge of her father’s farm, because in that three-street town she came from, where there were four fat-domed churches and no forgiveness, she wasn’t allowed in the cemetery. And that’s the history you want to broadcast to the world.”
Greta’s voice had a shrill edge to it. Her cause was so justified in her mind that she was projecting the kind of fervour you would hear from an earnest student actress cast as St. Joan. And we all know how well that turned out.
“The sort of story that made a little motherless girl the butt of every cruel joke in the playground, that made her move to the city as soon as she could—away from the father who saw in her only the woman she had killed with her own birth. That made her fearful any time someone mentioned the town she came from or the family she fled. That’s the history you want to celebrate?”
The shotgun was moving up and down for emphasis, and it occurred to me that it might not have been the wisest course of action, getting her started on justifying her actions. There was nothing I could do to stem the tide, though. Any placatory noise or motion I might make could be misconstrued and cause her to pull the trigger.
“That’s why I needed to see the diary you found. Alastair Maitland called me after you and he had talked at the Archives. I think he’d always suspected something about my past and my interest in the Rutherfords. I had the idea he was going to blackmail me with the diary he’d pulled from the box you had been looking through. But,” she shrugged, “he didn’t have a chance. Finn shut him up, didn’t you, boy?” She acknowledged her henchman with a nod. My eyes flicked over to his, and saw growing horror in his face.
“There was a locket that my father used to speak of, that he had given to my mother before I complicated matters, a locket she didn’t have with her when she died. He always thought she had sold it, and believed that betrayal to be a sign that she really was the tawdry woman that the rest of the town and her own family had painted her, even though he was the only one she had given herself to. That made growing up such a joy, let me tell you.”
Marni’s eyes were still closed. I hoped she hadn’t passed out. You weren’t supposed to let someone with a concussion go to sleep. Of course, shooting them with a twelve-gauge was probably not all that health-inducing, either.
“I don’t think she sold it. I think she put it somewhere for safe-keeping, and that’s all we were looking for when that twerp of a girl found me up in the attic. I was not trying to steal artifacts that belonged to the Rutherfords. I am not a thief! I was merely looking for what was mine by right.”
I had sent Jossie up to the attic to get another umbrella stand. She had said nothing about seeing Greta rummaging up there. She probably had thought nothing of it. Greta was a board member and fully entitled to be wherever she wanted to be. I wouldn’t have been suspicious, either, if I had been the one to see her. But Greta was so tied up in knots about the secrecy of her mission that she had broken the girl’s neck, or had her sidekick do it, rather than let her tell anyone what she had seen Greta doing.
If they could snap the neck of an innocent girl and show no remorse for bludgeoning Mr. Maitland and leaving him in a pool of his own blood, I realized with a chill that bit into the marrow of my bones—and a solid lump that felt like someone had dropped a brick into my gut—that Greta was going to kill us, here and now. She had nothing to lose, from her viewpoint, and neither did her grandson. We had become the reason they were forced to commit all these heinous acts, and we had to pay for it. After she had dispatched us, they could continue to conduct a thorough search for her mother’s locket. I considered following Marni’s lead and passing out, so that I didn’t have to be around for the painful denouement.
Would it be painful? Or immediate? I tried to imagine the size of a hole that big a shotgun would blow in a person at this close range. My next thought was that it really didn’t matter what size the hole was.
With all this running through my mind, it was a moment or two before I tuned in to the argument Finn and Greta were having.
“You said it was a great secret that could ruin the family, Grandma. You said it would ruin us.”
“Exactly. Your grandfather was a Larsen. It would never do for him to have married a bastard. It would have closed society doors to him and to all of you. We have to be sure it is never spoken of, never b
roadcast.”
“But Grandma, you said it would ruin us. I thought you meant your mom had killed someone or stolen something important from the Rutherfords. I helped you because I thought it was something criminal, something that would blacken all our reputations.”
“Finn, be quiet. This was something that could sully reputations, all the way to you.”
“No, it couldn’t, Grandma. No one cares anymore. Some people are even proud they’re bastards. Look what you’ve managed to do, how far up the social ladder you’ve climbed—it’s not even worth mentioning, let alone killing for. Oh, Grandma, why didn’t you tell me before?”
Greta drew herself up as tall as she could, and even without the shotgun in her hands, she would have terrified me. She was like a Valkyrie, icy and driven.
“Not worth mentioning? This shame is what shaped me, and what I spent a lifetime hiding. Who are you to tell me what is worth mentioning? Do you think you’d be here if your father had been shunned in society? Reputation is everything!”
It was as if Finn had woken up from a trance. He lunged for the shotgun, but Greta anticipated his move and whacked him across the face with the barrel of the gun, felling him on the stairs.
Suddenly I heard Iain McCorquodale’s voice ring out from the stairs: “Police! Put down the gun and put your hands up!”
My head shot up in time to witness Greta whirl around. Steve and Iain were positioned on either turn of the staircase, guns drawn on her. She aimed the shotgun at Iain and pulled the trigger. The blast echoed that of Steve’s handgun, which dropped Greta where she stood. The shotgun must have tilted upward as she fell; the blast missed Iain, but brought the entire stained-glass skylight down in shards on Finn’s, Iain’s, and Steve’s heads.
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