“Do you mind answering some questions?” He waited until she nodded, then came around to stand in front of the fireplace where she could see him. He was a stocky thirty, his round torso outlined beneath the blue uniform shirt.
“Did you see him fall into the pool?”
“He was lying on the bottom when we arrived.”
The constable scribbled in a small notebook. “Do you know if he had any alcohol to drink today?”
The paramedics must’ve passed on their suspicions. The cop leaned on one hip, non-judgmental, a gatherer of data. Bloodless.
“I smelled it when I was trying to resuscitate him.”
“A bad combination,” the cop was saying, “alcohol and swimming. Three-quarters of drowning victims have had too much to drink. Did Mr. Oginski have a drinking problem?”
“I didn’t really know him well enough to say.” She remembered the glasses of wine in Fran’s. “We just met last week. He was a friend of a friend.” It would’ve been too complicated to explain.
“Your mother tells me you’re the one who pulled him out.”
“Mother-in-law,” she said, put off by the mistake.
“Oh, beg your pardon.” He scribbled in a notation. Revise data. “It was a very brave thing to do.”
He was probably instructed to say that to anyone who had stupidly risked their life.
She was embarrassed by the compliment. “But pointless, apparently, since it was too late.”
The cop ignored her comment, barrelled right along. “Was there anything unnatural in his behaviour when you saw him last? Was he depressed about anything?”
She knew where he was going. “Michael didn’t kill himself, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was a vibrant man, interested in things.”
The cop’s pen waited above his notebook.
“He was writing a book,” she continued. “A novel. He was really excited about it. He said he was almost finished. He didn’t kill himself.”
“So what do you think happened here?” The pen still waited, stalled.
She tightened the quilt around herself. “He could’ve had a heart attack.”
“Did he have a heart problem?”
“I don’t know.”
The cop began to write in the notebook again. “There’ll be an autopsy because he died at home. Anything’s possible. But I can tell you every year we get a couple of calls where someone’s had a few drinks, then feels like a dip in the water. The lucky ones are pulled out in time.” He looked up at her. “What did he do for a living?”
“He worked for Baron Mines.”
He licked his lips and solemnly wrote it down.
“Do you happen to know the next of kin?” he asked, his pen at the ready.
What was it he’d said in the restaurant? “He has a son studying in Ottawa,” she said. “Edward. There’s probably an address book somewhere.” She waved behind herself at the desk.
He nodded his thanks. “Would you like me to take you to the hospital,” he asked.
She stared blankly at him.
“To get yourself checked out. You’ve had an ordeal.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” she said. As if to illustrate, she swung her legs down to the floor.
When the cop had gone, Sarah appeared at the door. “I put your clothes into the dryer. They’ll be ready in ten minutes or so, then we should go. Why don’t you rest till then?” Sarah headed back to the kitchen.
Rebecca listened to the low murmuring of the two women in the distance. She was too agitated to lie down again. Pulling the quilt around her she stood up and stepped toward the fireplace.
On the mantel stood an array of framed photos, mostly old snapshots in black and white. The exception was a colour headshot of a young man, probably a graduation photo. Edward. A handsome younger version of Michael, with sandy hair and an appropriately earnest expression.
In a brown-tinted photo a handsome young couple grinned at the photographer from a doorway, the man’s arm clasped around the woman’s waist, a very pretty woman with her brown hair pinned on top of her head. Michael’s parents. Next to it stood an old black-and-white studio shot of a girl, maybe sixteen, looking romantically off in some reverie. There was a resemblance to the man in the couple, and Rebecca guessed it was Michael’s aunt. He had inherited the delicate curve of the brows and the strong nose from that side.
She scanned the last photo. An impossibly thin young boy standing warily among the trees, a rifle slung over his shoulder. She felt a tightening in her chest, her heart clenching into a fist. His life had been a hard struggle and now it was over. Maybe the question the cop posed wasn’t so far off. Maybe there was a self-destructive urge in his drinking. Maybe he was having trouble making it through the day and was good at hiding it.
She moved toward the window. It amazed her that the sun was still shining. It seemed as if hours had gone by, yet the sky still held that mid-afternoon blue.
She turned toward the desk, a leather-inlaid mahogany. In the middle lay a thick binder. She opened the black cover and read the first page: “The Stolen Princess, by Michael Oginski.”
Sophie
Voyage of Discovery
January 1744
The icy wind has followed our painful progress north along the Baltic coast. The shoreline is frozen, and beyond, reefs of ice drift in the leaden water. Where in heaven are we?
She read the first few pages and became transported. She felt Michael’s breath in the character, his sensibility in the description of the landscape. She became inexplicably close to him at that moment. The neatly typed manuscript grew suddenly precious in her hands — it was all that was left of him. Now the book would never be finished.
He said he had almost two hundred pages and was nearly finished. She turned to the end: one hundred and forty pages. Eight chapters. That couldn’t be right. He had said twelve chapters, she was sure it was twelve.
She flipped through all the pages from the beginning. There were only one hundred and forty. She glanced around the desktop. A dictionary, a thesaurus, a fancy pen in a marble holder. But no other pages. She pulled open the drawers one by one. Blank paper, pens, pencils, erasers, chequebooks, business cards — one from a publisher. Everything but.
Energized, she threw off the quilt and hurried out of the den into the hall. Sarah and Natalka were speaking in low voices in the kitchen as she jumped up the stairs on her toes.
The floor upstairs was covered in Persian carpets. She came upon the library first. Bookcases lined the walls. A brown leather sofa sat in front of a mullioned window. Some newspapers lay scattered on a coffee table. No pages of manuscript.
She noticed a filing cabinet in the corner. She pulled out the top shelf. Finally. A thick pile of handwritten pages had been deposited in the bottom. She lifted out half the pile, then the other half. There must’ve been three or four hundred pages made unreadable because of all the scratching out and written-over words. It looked like a rough draft. The last page was numbered 196 with a question mark. So where were the last sixty pages of the finished manuscript?
She entered his bedroom with misgivings. The walnut sleigh bed only made her remember he would never sleep there again under the high feathery duvet. She made a cursory check of his nightstand but found nothing.
Sitting down on his bed, she noticed a bit of pale turquoise slipping out beneath the pillow. She held the pyjamas up to the light and in the next beat pulled the top on in one smooth movement. The fabric felt silky on her arms, too intimate — he’d worn it next to his skin, and she wanted that right now, part of him that still felt alive, some of his smell still on it. Because she knew it wouldn’t last. Nothing lasted. She told herself Michael would not want her wandering around his house in her underwear. She let her eyes travel through the room unhurried, trying to see what was really there through the fog in her brain. Between the ensuite bathroom and closet, a leather briefcase sat on the floor.
She put it on the bed and opened it. T
here was some Baron Mines stationery, business letters and documents. No thick sheaf of pages that signalled a manuscript.
Among a few badly typed letters, one handwritten page caught her eye with its splotchy words scrawled across the page. It was attached to an envelope with a paper clip. The letter was dated May 1979.
Mr. Oginski,
I am writing this letter because I am at the end of my rope. I worked in the Baron Mines at Bear Lake for 15 years. I can’t work their no more as my lungs is shot. I developed the cancer of the lung! and people here say its because of the mine. It’s not just me. Lots of men here got sick in their lungs. Its hell working down there the air’s thick like shit. How do you breath in shit? Some say the owners would not let us get sick like that. But I’m not one of them. So I am asking you. What are you going to do about it? We’re getting sick in the lungs because the air is shit. John Baron shoud fry in hell but I told my buddies I’d talk to you when I come to Toronto because you’re a more reasonable man. I’ll be staying at my sisters on the Danforth.
Claude Simard
She stood up straight, her back painful after the strenuous CPR. Ahead, the ensuite bathroom tugged at her curiosity. She stepped inside and opened the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. The usual aspirin and bandages. A few leftover anti-inflammatory drugs. A bottle of Valium, nearly full. Nothing much of interest.
The last room was a guest bedroom. The son who would never see his father again.
She started back down the stairs, uneasy. Sarah was waiting for her at the bottom with her dry shorts and blouse. She raised an eyebrow at the shirt.
“Are you all right?”
Rebecca nodded.
“You know, I think the policeman was right. Maybe you should see someone. You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine, really.” She fingered the silky hem of Michael’s pyjama shirt. “Okay, so I’m feeling a bit strange, but I’ll be all right.”
She took the clothes from Sarah. “Look, something’s wrong here,” Rebecca said.
“I would say so.”
“No, look.”
Rebecca led her to the desk in the study. “The end of Michael’s manuscript is missing. There are only a hundred and forty pages here. There should be nearly two hundred.”
Sarah flipped through the pages in the binder. “How do you know?”
“He told me. He was almost finished.”
“Maybe he was exaggerating. To impress you.”
Rebecca shook her head. “There are hundreds of handwritten pages upstairs in his filing cabinet. Rough drafts maybe.”
Sarah looked at the manuscript. “Well, it does seem to stop abruptly. Maybe he gave someone part of it to read.”
Rebecca quickly threw on her shorts and top, then ran out the back door. She stood there, blinking into the sun. What was she looking for? A shirt matching Michael’s swimming trunks was draped on the back of a patio chair. She sat down at the white vinyl table and stared across it. There were no glasses, no bottles. If he’d been drinking, why was there no evidence of it? She peered down at the concrete. Maybe he’d set a glass down at his feet.
A wave of perfume from the nearby border of alyssum rolled over her. She bent closer to fill her lungs with it, push out that other smell that should’ve been only a memory. No glass appeared, but the sun set a small patch of concrete aglow behind her chair. No, it wasn’t the sun. Near the alyssum a cluster of tiny gold flecks of various shapes had arranged itself in a ragged mosaic on the concrete, as if a golden nugget had melted from the heat.
Under the other chair she spotted a pair of leather sandals, one thrust into the other, each toe stuffed into the opposite heel. She really knew nothing about Michael.
She headed inside to find his bar. In the dining room, little crystal shot glasses stood in a row in a cabinet. He had gathered together the usual components of a bar, an ice bucket (empty), a bottle of tonic water, seltzer water, half bottles of gin, scotch, and whiskey. But the vodka was nearly full up. And hidden behind the other bottles. Maybe it wasn’t vodka he had been drinking. She could’ve been mistaken.
She stepped into the kitchen. Natalka sat gloomily at the table while Sarah stood at the glass door looking out into the backyard. Rebecca opened the cupboard door under the sink. A plastic bag half full of garbage hung inside a brown bin. On top lay a crumpled handkerchief, a blue and green plaid she couldn’t imagine Michael owning. She pulled the bin out into the light to take a closer look. In the folds of the fabric the plaid was stained with blood. Maybe it wasn’t Michael’s handkerchief. She hurried upstairs to get the letter from his briefcase. Unwilling to offer explanations she went directly downstairs to her bag in the den and stuck the letter with its envelope inside.
Back in the kitchen, she felt Natalka’s eyes on her as she pulled the bag of garbage out of the bin. She massaged the outside of the bag but couldn’t feel the outline of a bottle. Maybe he’d already put it out. She found the garbage pail out the side door of the house. Two small plastic bags lay inside. Her fingers pressed on them as if they were someone’s abdomen. No bottles.
Back inside, Sarah and Natalka sat at the breakfast table watching her wash her hands. “Let’s go,” Sarah said.
Rebecca went to the den to fetch the manuscript. Sarah watched her carry the binder under her arm but said nothing as they walked out to the car.
“I’ll bring it back,” Rebecca said.
They were just getting into the Camaro when a black limousine with tinted windows screeched to a halt behind them. Janek flew out of the driver’s seat. He stopped at their car, a short, squat figure in a polo shirt.
“What happened?” he cried. “The police called me at home — there was an accident?”
His pomaded grey hair fell forward in spears. He looked like he had been in a scrape: the skin around one eye was dark, and a bruise mottled his cheek.
Rebecca faced the bulldog man. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but Michael is dead. He drowned in the pool.”
He stared at her, his eyes growing narrow. “Not possible. He was a good swimmer.”
“He might’ve had something to drink. Did he drink vodka?”
“All Poles drink vodka.”
“To excess?”
“He was an aristocrat. He didn’t do nothing to excess. This is completely impossible. He was a strong, healthy man.” His brown eyes bulged at her.
“You look like you’ve been in an accident yourself,” she said. “Have you had that checked?” She pointed at his face.
He waved his hand in the air impatiently. “It was nothing.” Then, eyes blazing, “You were here — why didn’t you pull him out? Why didn’t you save him?”
She stared at the bullying posture, the jowls swaying, felt bile rising in her, but could not bring herself to answer.
Sarah said, “He was dead when we got here.”
He set squinty, critical eyes on Rebecca and said something to Sarah in Polish. Sarah turned abruptly from him and said to Rebecca, “Let’s go.”
The two women got into the car. Sarah was about to close her door when Janek caught it with his hand. He stooped to look in the back, where Natalka sat quietly.
He gave her no greeting, instead spat out in English, “Where’s Halina?”
“She’s at my house,” Sarah said, anger lifting her voice.
“Then why doesn’t she answer the goddamn phone?” he said.
Natalka’s swan neck stiffened and anxiety rose in her eyes.
chapter ten
No one spoke in the car. Rebecca drove along St. Clair Avenue back to Sarah’s house, the only sounds the engine humming, the radio buzzing beneath comprehension. The sun hung behind them, its heat receding in the late afternoon. It amazed Rebecca how the street, the sky with its high elusive clouds, looked the same as before. Nothing had changed: women shoppers still laughed on the sidewalks, kids licked ice cream cones in the shade of awnings.
Saturday afternoon traffic bunched up in Little Italy h
eading toward Dufferin Street. A red light stopped them at every block; pedestrians crossed laden with grocery bags.
Every now and then she glanced in the rearview mirror: Natalka gazed out the window with a blank stare.
Rebecca drove mechanically, the street, the stores a blur, the only clarity Michael at the bottom of the pool, her jumping in, kicking, kicking in slow motion to get to him, his hair floating around his dead face.
She pulled into Sarah’s driveway, thankful for the automatic impulses that had kicked in to get them home. Sarah rushed out of the car and ran ahead to unlock the front door. Natalka, in no hurry, trailed inside after Rebecca.
“Halina!” Sarah called out at the foot of the stairs leading to the bedrooms.
No reply.
She climbed the stairs, Natalka watching. Rebecca took a quick look around from where she stood: everything appeared as they had left it.
After a minute Sarah returned to the top of the stairs. “She’s not here.”
Natalka sighed and began to climb; Rebecca followed.
Sarah had given them a room with a queen-sized bed. A valise stood in a corner. Everything looked in order.
“She’s gone!” Sarah said, puzzlement in her voice.
Natalka stared at the made bed, her hands clasped in front of her. Wisps of white hair trailed from the bun at the back, framed her face.
“There’re no signs of a struggle anywhere,” Rebecca said. “Did she take anything with her? Some clothes?”
Natalka’s small, elegant head trembled on the stalk of neck, her bravura gone. She had turned very pale.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, are any of the bags gone?”
Natalka glanced at the valise. “The smaller one is inside the bigger one.”
Rebecca thought of all the years of squeezing together into a small space, the accommodation that must have become instinct in Poland.
“What did your mother say on the phone?”
Natalka avoided her eyes.
“At Michael’s. You called her.”
Natalka sat down on the bed, staring into the distance. “She was upset. She was shocked.”
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 34