I switched my telephone ringer to mute and left my machine on to field calls. These days all I really expected were calls offering to clean my non-existent carpets, but even telephone surveys had been known to distract me in the past. This was vital research and I wasn’t going to take any chances on being sidetracked answering questions about instant coffee.
I had decided to start at the beginning and reread all three novels with pen in hand. I figured that since this would be at least my fourth time through each one, I should be able to spot character delineation without missing anything crucial to the plot.
It was harder going than I’d expected. The narrative kept winding around me, making me forget what it was I was looking for. I found that I’d have to back up constantly to find references that my eyes had swept past. If nothing else, I could testify that Ahlers had been a spellbinding storyteller.
One for Sorrow reminded me of a quirky Alice Munro with a dash of Iris Murdoch thrown in to keep things jumping. Andrea, the main character—whom I was betting had been patterned on Ahlers herself—starts out as a child of eleven and ages about fifteen years over the course of the novel. Each section focuses on an annual event: summer vacation, birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, first day of school, university exam week, convocation, Valentine’s Day. The context reveals how old she was in each situation, and they were roughly chronological. Explaining it makes it sound pretty complicated, I know, but it flows pretty naturally when you’re reading it.
I was getting a feel for Andrea the physical person, but the original essence that I’d felt on first reading the book was still overpowering. No matter what happened to her directly—like falling in the saskatoons or meeting the trick motorcycle carnie at the fair—it was as if Andrea was always watching more than participating. Her glasses, which were constantly described because the frames seemed to change in each section, seemed to act as portholes or proscenium arches on the world. Andrea just wandered around behind them, not particularly selective with the channel switch.
I knew I was reading far more into the character than I could justify with page references, but at this stage that was fine with me. If I could get the groundwork done on Andrea, actualities and gut feelings together would give me a sense of how Eleanor and Isabel fit into the picture.
I finished One for Sorrow just before midnight. It had taken longer than usual with all the stops and starts for jotting things down. When I looked up, the kitchen table was littered with cue cards of various colours. I grinned with self-satisfaction; I’d start pinning them up in the morning.
Sitting in one position for such a long time had taken its toll on my back. It was as if I had to go through a refresher course on human evolution just to stand up. I took a shower and went to bed. I figured I could expect dreams of Andrea and her antics all night, but the gods smiled on me and I woke up feeling refreshed and with no recollection of rapid eye movement whatsoever.
I spent the first hour after breakfast futzing around with organizing my cue cards on the wall. I’m not by nature a morning person; I have to edge into a day sideways. I start really cooking at about 11 a.m. and usually run out of mental steam around 3 p.m. I figured that if I got all the chores out of the way quickly, I could get through Two for Joy by about 2:30.
It was obvious this time around that Eleanor was an extension of Andrea. Even the glasses figured again from time to time. It took me till chapter fifteen before I understood why I hadn’t picked up on the connection before. Eleanor wasn’t officially the heroine; Marie was front and centre as soon as she came into the picture.
Two for Joy focuses on the friendship-cum-rivalry between two women who have known each other for many years. It’s written in limited omniscient, from the point of view of society watching the two of them. Every now and then you come across a bit in italics written from the point of view of one of the women. For the longest time, you think the voice is that of Eleanor, the retiring one who seems to adhere to everything Marie does. After a while, and I’m still not sure how she manages it, Ahlers shifts the focus subtly and you find yourself hitting your forehead in the classic “I-could-have-had-a-V8” action and shouting out loud, “It’s Marie!” All the time the reader is certain that Marie is the leader and Eleanor the follower, Marie is actually milking Eleanor for ideas and making a splash with them herself. She has fooled Eleanor, she has fooled the world, and she has almost fooled herself into believing that she’s the innovator.
Once the reader cottons onto the fact that Marie is actually using Eleanor and sapping her of all her strength, you’d expect the book to go for the jugular. There Ahlers goes and fools you again. The book becomes almost lyrical in its treatment of Marie after this point. Eleanor’s willingness to let Marie use her only serves to condemn Eleanor in the eyes of the reader, and even Marie herself is convinced by the end of the narrative that her hand has been forced by Eleanor’s passivity.
It’s a complicated little plot, and what with having to remember to juggle the italics back to Marie instead of identifying them with Eleanor, it took me some time to get through it again. I’d almost gauged it correctly, though. At 3:30, I looked up from the novel to find I’d managed to cover about fifty cue cards with notes and page references.
About half of these corresponded exactly with references from the first novel. The rest were what you’d expect to find of Andrea grown up a bit. I estimated the ages of Eleanor and Marie to fall into the twenty to thirty-five range as the story progressed.
I’d also had to create an entirely new category along the way. I turned the pink cards over to the unlined side and wrote down things that other characters (in this case, mainly Marie) said about Eleanor. The authorial voice wove in and out of the narrative so much, it was difficult to distinguish it at times from that of Marie.
For various reasons, I had figured that The Children of Magpie would be the easiest of the three to get through. For one thing, Isabel is front and centre as the main character. Not only do we get her in the story’s present, at about age thirty-five, we also get her flashbacked as a child and younger woman. I jumped right in after scoffing down some Kraft Dinner, estimating that I’d have at least half the book covered by the time my eyes gave out for the night.
As usual, I’d figured wrong. By 8:30, I had only managed to fill eleven cue cards, and I felt myself bogging down. I set the book aside and tried to figure out where I was going wrong.
I knew it wasn’t the character; Isabel was obviously the extension of Andrea and Eleanor. She was quiet and very internalized. Unfortunately, for my purposes, there was not enough time spent on Isabel—she acted more as a lens for the action. Any information I did glean was mainly old Andrea-covered territory. The Children of Magpie, which had practically led me like a Baedeker up to the Peace River Country, was not taking me anywhere close to Isabel. In fact, if there was anyone I got to know well in these pages, it was Isabel’s grandmother.
Sure, there had been a lot of focus on her in the first novel, but that was from the viewpoint of a child. The grandmother in Magpie was seen in hindsight, which they say is 20/20. I’ve never been completely convinced of that old fallacy, but how else to judge what a character written by a specific author does or doesn’t remember about another character on two different occasions?
To make a long story shorter, I didn’t find any glaring character discrepancies in the cue-card reportage I’d culled from the third novel. The books obviously formed a loose-knit trilogy—One for Sorrow, Two for Joy. If only there were a “three” in the third title. I looked at the titles again, where I had been doodling them on a yellow cue card. Together, they looked like some sort of nursery rhyme, but not one that I was familiar with. And why “Magpie” anyway? There was no reference to it in the novel, and I’d not come across any magpie references up in the Peace Country. Now, if it had only been a trumpeter swan in the title, we’d have been cooking. Was it some Aboriginal legend, perhaps? I was going to have to hit the reference library
tomorrow, and the realization deflated me. What if I wasn’t on the right track after all?
17.
Google and Wikipedia may have changed the game, but back when research required physical movement instead of Boolean searches, the place to go was the library. I loved libraries, especially the open-stack variety. I’m a lot better off combing the shelves, once I’ve zoned in on the general area, than whipping through card catalogues. Closed stacks are sort of like those fishing games at the county fair; you cast your hook, but you never know what you’re going to get, or what’s sitting right next to what you hooked that you should have been asking for. I headed for the subject card drawers, figuring I would focus on which floor to aim for after narrowing down the search. I ended up with three main places to look: children’s literature, ornithology, and Aboriginal legends.
I riffled through nursery rhymes with no luck. Four-and-twenty blackbirds was as close as I could get to magpies there. I headed next for the birding books, from Audubon to local editions. Still no luck, although I learned that the magpie is a scrappy, thieving bird that has taken to city life like helzapoppin’. It was also apparently a nickname for an Anglican bishop. I had a sneaky feeling this wasn’t the kind of information that would help me. Reading through First Nations studies on legends got me no further. The Micmac have a legend about some geese and a turtle, and the coastal nations favour the Sunbird and the Thunderbird, but as far as I could figure, neither of these feathered deities even slightly resembled a magpie.
After a discouraging hour or two, I wended my way back down to the reference table, knowing that I should have headed there first. I was also armed with the self-righteous knowledge that I had done my level best not to bother the reference librarians.
Seriously, my advice to anyone who wants to know something, and doesn’t have all the time in the world to soak up lots of other information along the way, is to make a beeline straight for the reference librarian or archivist’s desk. Not only do these people know their information storage systems backward and forward, they are also goldmines of information in their own rights. I’d once met an archivist in Kingston who was an expert on the history and craft of taxidermy, and there’s a woman at the Glenbow who knows the words to all the old Wobbly strike tunes.
I wasn’t expecting miracles this time, but I sure wasn’t going to leave an unturned stone in my wake, either. The woman smiled as I approached. A university library can be a lonely place to work in the summertime. She looked to be about fifty, and when she said hello she gave away her origin as somewhere in England. I can’t often pinpoint regional dialects, but I felt safe enough in guessing she was from the southern part of the island nation. I flashed what I hoped was my winningest smile and began what I knew was going to sound like a very strange request.
“Magpies? You mean the black-and-white birds that you see all over campus?”
“Yes, those are the ones. I was wondering if you knew of any legends or local stories attached to them, or where I might find such stories.”
“My goodness, I’m not sure I know of any. Wait a moment … they’re the birds my Auntie Jean used to count on, aren’t they?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She’d spot them in groups and count them off with a rhyme.” Her smile faded as she furrowed her brow. “Now, how did that go…”
While it was a long shot, I figured I’d give it a try. “It wouldn’t go something like, ‘One for sorrow, two for—’”
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. The desk librarians shot a judgmental glance our way. Her voice modulated down quickly in embarrassment, but her words hung in the air for me anyway. “Yes, that’s her rhyme:
One for sorrow, two for joy,
Three for a girl, four for a boy,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a story never told.
I suppose it must be odd to see seven of them together. It’s a little fortune-telling game, you see? Silly, I suppose. Now where else might there be something?”
She turned to her computer to see if she could locate anything else about the squawky birds, but I thanked her and wandered out of the library in a semi-daze. I needed a cup of coffee. I’d happily have substituted a beer, but it was only 10 in the morning.
One for sorrow, two for joy. Three and four became the children of the magpie. I knew then that there had to be a fourth novel. The carbon paper was not lying. This wasn’t planned as a trilogy, it was a quartet. Somewhere, somehow, I was going to find a copy of Feathers of Treasure—silver and gold.
18.
I probably over-caffeinated myself the rest of the day, but I was too preoccupied to notice or count cups. By 10:30 that evening I was pacing around my apartment, feeling like a computer cursor buffeting through its program on sensory overload. I was almost literally bouncing off the walls trying to figure out what to do next. It was really no wonder I almost had a heart attack when I spotted the face peering in my window.
Though not as far north as Grande Prairie, Edmonton still boasts long summer nights. Around the solstice, the sun doesn’t set completely till after 11 p.m. By 10:30 on the 28th of July, though, there is enough shadow cast to make even your mother look like the Garneau Grabber, in the right context.
I screamed. The face didn’t disappear.
I screamed again and began pawing for the phone, which was supposed to be somewhere on the wall beside me. I had the receiver in my hand before I realized that the face belonged to Guy. With my heart still doing aerobics, I made my way up the stairs to let him in.
“You scared me half to death,” I sputtered at him.
He was too busy chewing me out to notice. I was crazy, I was impossible to reach; I put people in the awkward position of worrying about me. Why hadn’t I answered my phone messages? Now I was overreacting and making him feel like some kind of peeping Tom.
I had a feeling that blame for the greenhouse effect was going to be laid at my feet at any minute—no doubt it had something to do with the deodorant I used. I am always amazed at people’s capacity to designate blame. There was really nothing to do but let Guy’s tirade run its course, so I turned my back on him and plugged in the kettle.
I had mugs and milk out on the table and the water was nearly boiling when he finally stopped for breath. Because I knew it would really bug him, I apologized. It had been careless of me to disregard my phone machine, but the truth was I’d forgotten about it. I’d only bought it in the first place because people were always harping on at me about my not being available when they wanted me. Now I was getting chewed out anyway. Life was not fair.
My meek reply deflated Guy’s pomp like nobody’s business. I grinned as he sat down and accepted a steaming mug of tea. Even after the tongue-lashing, I was glad to see him. I was longing to tell him about the magpie verse, and the character connections, but something warned me to keep my trap shut. After all, he had been pretty distant recently. Besides, I was curious to know what had brought him here out of the blue. I couldn’t even attach a date to the last time I’d seen him. Maybe my mother did have cause to worry about my marital future.
“So, do I have to go rewind my phone machine, or are you going to tell me what you want?”
Guy looked smug. “Do not ask what you can do for your fellow grad student. Ask what your fellow grad student can do for you.”
“You came over in the middle of the night, scaring me out of my socks, to do me a favour? I think it’s time you brushed up on your Emily Post, my boy.”
“You neglect to realize that had you, like a reasonable human being, deigned to look at your answering machine, I wouldn’t have been forced to stoop to the ignominy of tapping at your basement window.”
“That’s as may be, but you still haven’t told me what you want.”
“Let me savour the moment, Randy. It’s not that often I find myself in the position to be magnanimous.”
“Hmmm. Maybe I will go listen to the phone machine after all.”
“Guy! Will you tell me already?”
“Okay. As you may have noticed, I’ve been spending a wee bit of time with my third reader lately.”
“Your third reader?”
“Hilary Quinn.” He read the puzzlement on my face. “Oh, I assumed you knew. She has no position even remotely close to my dissertation, but for some reason it seemed politic at the time to ask her.”
“Hilary Quinn is your third reader.”
“There’s an echo in here, kiddo. You should have that seen to.” Guy crossed his long, hairy legs, making himself more comfortable. He really did have very nice legs, especially in shorts—a soccer player’s legs. He caught me staring and grinned. “Are you even listening?”
“Of course I’m listening. You were just telling me how you’ve been consorting with the enemy.”
“I had a feeling you might take it that way. Let me explain. Think of me not as a traitor so much as an infiltrator. Kind of a Trojan Horse, if you gather my meaning.”
Guy went on to explain that he had talked the Ice Lady into lending him her office for the rest of the summer while she was off doing some research. The upshot was that he had access to Quinn’s office—and he was offering me a wallow in forbidden mud. Would I like to see the interior of some fascinating filing cabinets?
Would I? Would I ever.
19.
To say I was too excited to get much sleep that night could be a winning entry in the Guinness Book of Records as “understatement of the year.” I could almost taste victory. In less than twenty-four hours, I would be inside Hilary Quinn’s office where I was certain I would lay eyes on Margaret Ahlers’ fourth novel. She had killed Ahlers and stolen her work, and would somehow gain superstar status by “discovering” her posthumous work. And I was going to stop her.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 9