by Susan Calder
“Some of us are above petty revenge.” With apparent nonchalance, he dipped his fork into the coleslaw.
Would he take the high road with Sam, if given the opportunity to hurt him? “Since the cops suspect Felix Schoen, it makes me wonder if Kenneth told them something about Felix. Maybe he is the ‘him’ Kenneth was talking about.”
“Are you suggesting Callie had an affair with him? Potato salad?”
She finished off the container. “I wouldn’t think Felix was her type. He’s heavy, drinks too much, and is a major slob, although she might go for his artistic side. He’s a writer.”
Hayden chewed his salad.
“If Callie had an affair,” she said, “it would equalize matters between her and Sam. This morning, I learned he had an affair during their marriage.”
“There’s a shocker.”
His dry humor could be irritating. She could wipe off his smug expression by telling him about Sam’s estrangement from Callie, another thing she had neglected to mention last night. Why make him feel even more threatened by Sam? The point of this lunch was to smooth things out; gloss over. Sweep everything under a pile of leaves.
“Was Sam’s affair in addition to whatever he’s got going with Isabelle?” Hayden said.
“I told you, they aren’t involved.”
“You believe her about that?”
“I can judge people.”
“Hmpph.”
Paula resented his insinuation that she lacked judgment about Sam. So far, she had that involvement under control. More or less.
The Elbow River current carried a pair of geese sideways down river. On the opposite bank, another goose waddled up to explore a lawn that was far trimmer than Sam’s backyard. A week ago this morning, Callie had left her home upstream to jog the winding path that followed this river. Had anyone seen her from those houses lining the bank?
Hayden popped open a can of diet Coke. “If I work tomorrow night, I can clear the weekend for us. Are you free Saturday—I’d love a good game of tennis—or do you need to catch up on work?”
On Saturday, Sam was hiking in Kananaskis. Anne had invited her and Hayden to dinner. Shit. She had forgotten about that. If she brought it up—he was bound to say yes—she would be stuck and she wanted to keep her options open until she talked to Kenneth.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“This Indian summer is supposed to hold. It would be great for tennis.”
Saturday’s weather would be perfect for a fall hike with Felix and Sam, who had been foolish to withhold Dimitri’s crush from the cops. Its coming out now would make his son’s situation ten times worse. Why hadn’t he seen that? Dimitri was on public record for being hot-tempered, and Isabelle would report Callie’s accusation that he had stalked her at the Calgary Folk Festival. What had Callie meant by stalking? Isabelle didn’t know. It could have been anything from running into her by fake accident to following her around the park, harassing, threatening. Had there been other incidents? Was Sam aware of them? He must be, to risk trusting Isabelle to conceal her information.
“I’ll be glad when this business about murder is over,” Hayden said. “I’m tired of talking about Sam and his bunch.”
“We were talking about tennis.”
“Thinking about him counts.”
She flushed, which was stupid. She tossed her sandwich remains to the geese.
Hayden sniffed. “I smell cigarette smoke.”
“I slipped and bummed one from a friend this morning.”
His eyebrow shot up, “How come?”
“Stress. I’ll be glad, too, when this is done and I can focus on work.”
Nils van der Vliet sucked his pipe behind the stack of claim files. Twenty-plus were piled on his desk, in contrast to the usual three or four. In the visitors’ chair, Paula inhaled the room’s sweet tobacco aroma that reminded her of her long deceased grandfather.
“I don’t blame you for taking a few days off,” Nils said, “but this is one hell of a time for it to happen when we’re short staffed.”
“I was in yesterday.”
“For all of an hour.”
“I was running around all day meeting claimants, and whose fault, anyway, is the short staffing?”
“I’m not hiring someone with the wrong chemistry for this firm.”
Nils’ telephone rang. While he talked, Paula swiveled her chair. During the past two months he had vetoed five suitable candidates for the junior adjuster’s job. The workload might teach him to be less particular next time. Outside his smudgy window, vehicles streamed by the freight cars parked in the 9th Avenue railway yard. Beyond them, blue sky framed the Saddledome’s curved roof. A homeless man shuffled along the sidewalk, his arms weighted by shopping bags. His yellow vest looked familiar. She had probably seen him in her neighborhood, a twenty-minute walk away.
Nils chatted with his business friend about football, while Paula sat here wasting her time. Unlike her, he didn’t have Alice, their secretary, screen calls. With no interruptions, and prioritizing claims, Nils could cut that stack in half. Yesterday, they had agreed on the ones that didn’t require immediate attention. One was the Jensen file sitting on top of the pile. He was going to spend hours on that and let slide ones that claimants, lawyers, and insurance agents had been calling about. His third flaw—or was she up to four?—smoking in the office, bothered her less than it amused her. She chuckled at Alice’s battles to keep his door closed and visitors’ futile attempts to explain that people did not smoke in today’s offices.
Nils hung up the phone and pulled out a file from the stack as deftly as a magician. “I sense we’re close to settling with your friend, Roy Turner.”
“One of our rare, honest claimants.”
“Which is fortunate or our job would be boring.”
“As if it’s not boring enough.”
“What’s the matter with you today?” Nils took another call.
Paula rubbed her head. Maybe she was simply tired or annoyed by the police report that had come in this morning. Someone had reported a hit-and-run in the neighborhood of her alleged hit-and-run claimant’s accident. The damage matched up with her claimant’s damages, which meant her guy was possibly lying. He was the hit-and-run perpetrator, not the victim. Had he been drinking? It wouldn’t surprise her. Normally, she loved nailing liars and cheats. Today, it was all extra work. Her gaze shifted from Nils’ files to his off-white office walls that hadn’t been painted since the 1970s, when he purchased the metal desks. The room’s only art was a sketch so small you couldn’t see it from more than a foot away. The venetian blind permanently drooped. Paula had taken the job with his little firm, in part, because it seemed a flashback in time. Nils refused to deal with computers. Alice printed everything out for his thickening files. Nils viewed the firm as David fighting Goliath insurance adjusting chains and multinational staff adjusters. All they needed was a niche, he said over and over.
Nils kept talking to his lawyer-friend. Paula walked to the room’s far side. She never came in here without her cell phone and a paper report to occupy her during Nils’ calls. She phoned Anne to ask about her husband’s heart palpitations. As they left the boutique yesterday, Anne said he was going in for tests, a routine occurrence for him that still stressed Anne.
“They’re keeping him in.” Anne’s voice shook. “I’m going to have to cancel our dinner on Saturday night. I hope Hayden understands. I’m really sorry. We’ll make it another time.”
Paula felt relief and guilt because she hadn’t mentioned the dinner to Hayden and Anne seemed to think it was a done deal. Events were pointing to the hike with Sam.
Anne suggested they take advantage of the fine weather and replace tomorrow’s workout with a walk to the hospital. Paula said she would come by the fitness center at one o’clock. By then, Anne would probably have found out about her son’s interest in Callie and its implications for the murder case. Poor Anne having to deal with that on top of her husba
nd’s problems. A weaker person would crack. Paula herself felt close to cracking these days, while dealing with less.
Nils hung up and placed another call. She stared at his sketch of the Lloyd’s of London coffee house circa 1688, where modern insurance began. Nils’ office door opened. Alice tiptoed across the room to Paula and whispered that she had a visitor.
“Who? I’m not expecting anyone.” A claimant angry enough to come to her office was the last thing she needed.
“Shall I tell him to wait?” Alice asked.
Nils looked entrenched in his discussion about whiplash. Paula signaled him she was leaving. He nodded and motioned them to leave the door open. Paula closed it behind her.
Alice scanned the reception room. “That’s funny. He was here a minute ago. In fact, he stopped in this morning and made a special trip to return. Your door’s open.”
“I’m sure I closed it.” Paula walked in to find a man standing next to her desk, holding a picture frame. “Sam?”
He wore a white shirt and shorts. Sunglasses arced over his head. He returned the photo of Leah to the bookshelf. He couldn’t have missed the picture of Hayden she had added only last month.
“I was checking out a building near here,” he said. “I remembered you worked in the East Village and figured I’d look you up.”
“You don’t look dressed for work.” Had she told him the name of the firm she worked for? She closed her office door. Alice was a bigger eavesdropper than Isabelle.
“I’m on my way to play squash.”
Where was her second visitor’s chair? Alice must have borrowed it for the reception area. If Paula offered Sam this one, she would have to talk to him from behind her desk, which might feel too business-like. Clearly, he had made a special trip to see her. Why?
“I hear you’ve inherited Isabelle,” he said.
“Only until Saturday, I hope.”
He studied her bookshelves, rubber tree plants and wall paintings. One featured a mountain scene, the other a field with oil pump under a wide open prairie sky. “Your office looks homier than your home.”
“I’ve worked here longer than I’ve lived there.” She pushed her penholder away so she could lean against the desk. “Isabelle told me about Dimitri.”
Sam didn’t flinch. “I kind of figured she would, she’s not so good with secrets.”
“She kept a good one from the police.”
“It seems she’s capable, when she wants to be.” From the bookshelf, he picked up her souvenir of Mount Saint Helens. “I was there, too. It was amazing, the trees all crashed down in the direction of the blast. They didn’t know what hit them.”
“Sam, I have to tell the police about your son’s interest in Callie. Or you could do it today. That would be better.”
“For whom?”
“For you, I guess. They’d appreciate your coming clean.”
“What difference would that make?” Sam returned the miniature volcano to the shelf.
Paula waited for him to turn around. “Were Callie and Dimitri involved?”
“Why would you ever think that?” His eyebrows rose in surprise that appeared genuine. “She was twice his age.”
“Women go for younger men.”
“Callie wouldn’t, for him. She found him too priggish and too religious.”
“She joined a church last year.”
“Not Dimitri’s fundamentalist one. Even if she was interested, he’d have been too prudish to follow through. It was a fantasy. Now that Callie’s dead, it’s over.”
“His feelings wouldn’t end with her death. Have you discussed them with him?”
“Not recently.”
“Since she died?”
“No.”
He was so close she could see a faint dent in his left cheek. It made his face look so vulnerable at the moment.
She leaned harder against the desk. “After Callie died, you and Dimitri agreed not to tell the cops about his interest. So you and he did talk.”
Sam turned away to look at or pretend to look at her shelf full of photographs.
Paula pressed her hand on the desk so hard her knuckles went white. “What about Callie and Felix Schoen?”
“What about them?” The back of his shirt was bunched around his shorts belt.
“Why do the cops suspect Felix?” she asked.
“Felix is nervous. He’s got a house load of guns. His house backs on the Elbow River and he saw her jogging every day.”
“Did he?”
Sam turned around. “Felix has a weird sleeping routine. Out like a rock for a few hours, prowling around the rest of the night. He saw her jog by each morning at the same time. In the summer, when she started, she would have set out in daylight. I guess she got used to leaving at that time, even when it was dark. She wasn’t a nervous sort of woman, that way.”
Unfortunately, as it turned out. “Did you know about her routine before her death?”
“Felix told me afterwards.”
“Did he tell the cops?”
“Yes. That’s likely why they suspect him. He knew her habits and could easily have followed her along the trail or driven to your neighborhood to intercept her at the murder spot. I’m sure he didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“For starters, he had no reason to kill her.”
“Could they have been having an affair?”
Sam chuckled. “That’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible.”
“Felix would have told me about it, for sure.”
“Men don’t usually confide their affairs to their lover’s husband.”
He averted his eyes. “Felix knew about Callie’s and my situation.”
“Did he know about you and Bev Berwell?”
Sam’s face grew pink. He raked his hand through his hair, knocking the sunglasses to the carpet. “Shit. Isabelle told you? How did she find out? From Felix? Bev. Fuck. Biggest mistake in my life.” He squatted to pick up the sunglasses. “Scratch that. I’ve made worse ones. My whole life’s a mistake.” He placed the sunglasses on his head. They pushed his hair back so it stood up like a giant cowlick. “You must think I’m a complete shit.”
“I wouldn’t have thought Bev was your type.”
“Do you know Bev? Shit. Don’t tell me she’s your friend.”
“Hardly, I met her this morning.”
“Where? What do you think of her?”
She faced him squarely. How to sum up Bev? “I didn’t totally dislike her.”
“I found her scary toward the end.”
“Only toward the end?”
He shook his head. “This is so totally screwed up. I don’t think it can get any worse.” He spun toward her mountain painting. “This reminds me of the reason I dropped by. The Kananaskis hike with Felix is a definite go for Saturday. Did you decide if you’re interested?”
Nils opened the door. “There you are.”
Alice appeared behind him. “I tried to keep him away.”
“I was just leaving.” Sam startled Paula by extending his hand for her to shake. It seemed oddly formal. “I’ll call you tomorrow about the hike.”
He squeezed between Alice and Nils and out the door.
“Who was that?” Nils said.
“I thought he looked familiar,” Alice said. “He’s better looking in person than in his newspaper pictures where he looks so somber. I find his face pleasant.”
“Is he one of our claimants?” Nils said.
Paula sunk to her chair.
“There’s something delicate, yet strong, about his hands.” Alice stroked her own palm. “He could be a surgeon or violinist.”
“He’s an architect.” Paula jiggled her computer mouse to get rid of the screensaver.
“For God’s sake,” Nils said. “I’ll be in my office when you’re finished.”
“Not many men can wear shorts without looking foolish,” Alice said.
Paula recalled Sam’s shirt b
unched in the back above his shorts, the T-shirt sleeves hugging his biceps
“He’s got the full package,” Alice said. “Legs, bum, arms, chest.”
“I didn’t notice.”
Chapter Seventeen
For the second time in one day, Paula entered Mount Royal’s winding streets, which had been designed to thwart traffic. The major city routes bypassed these wealthy homes. The few pedestrians she drove past today almost certainly either lived here or had come to service the residences. This wasn’t Ramsay. No homeless people roamed the streets; no airplanes roared overhead; no trains enclosed the neighborhood and whistled when they passed.
She parked in front of Kenneth’s house. Nothing had changed since she was here three years ago. A dozen mature trees drained the front lawn of nourishment. Patchy grass struggled through dirt in the sunken yard. The walkway bridge connecting the city sidewalk to the porch had been the highlight for her young daughters during their first family visit from Montreal. They called it a drawbridge and the yard, a moat, and played endless games of castle and fort with Callie’s children and their friends. Gary, Paula’s ex, kept an eye on the kids, while Paula and Callie went for walks that always ended up in 17th Avenue cafés. She and Gary had left thinking Calgary wouldn’t be a bad place to live.
When she was halfway across the drawbridge, Kenneth opened the door. He greeted her with a hug that was slightly less stiff than the one they had shared at Callie’s funeral. Inside, the house also looked the same. In contrast to the modern decor of her Riverdale home with Sam, Callie had furnished this earlier one with antiques, many of them purchased at estate auctions. She had reupholstered the French provincial sofa in 1990s mauve and gray. Perhaps the Riverdale decor had been a compromise, since Sam didn’t find it contemporary enough.
Kenneth had set out a plate of cookies on the coffee table. He offered her a drink. She asked what he was having.
“Milk.” He tapped his long leg. “I have a touch of osteoporosis. I know it’s unusual for a man.”
It wouldn’t hurt to join him in a glass. The dog barked in the kitchen. Callie and Kenneth always gated the golden retriever when they had visitors. She followed Kenneth to the gate and petted Mandy, who had sprouted white fur around the muzzle. Bev had compared Kenneth’s face to a basset hound’s. Paula still thought Eeyore was closer to the mark. Kenneth was her age, fifty-two, but his bald crown, cardigan, and slippers made him look older. She hoped she didn’t look that old.