I grabbed my legal pad. Scribbling always helps me think. Quinn knew Ahlers. Quinn was making her academic reputation on Ahlers’ back, in a manner of speaking. Quinn was finally getting some recognition in her field. Ahlers, her so-called friend, turns around and writes a mystery novel—a form considered “sub-literary” by most academics and literary snobs the world over. Quinn would be apoplectic! And suppose Ahlers had intended to write more mysteries, perhaps even make Ophelia a series detective. It could be done, I supposed. She was a pretty rich character; maybe not quite Hercule Poirot, but certainly comparable to Peter Shandy.
That kind of thing could hamper Quinn’s career more than a bit. She’d have to branch into the study of genre work, and then who knows—she could attract hordes of pimply honours students, whose only virtue was having seen every episode of Star Trek, wanting to do their tutorials with her on the grounds that she was sympathetic to popular culture. I was beginning to see grounds for murder, all right.
So, if I was to assume Quinn read Feathers of Treasure and came to the same dire conclusions I had just reached, she would then murder Ahlers, become executor of her late friend’s papers, and sit on the mystery novel to maintain her ideal of a standard.
I bought it as a motive, but I wasn’t persuaded the police would. I couldn’t see them taking the mentality of “publish or perish”—or in this case, “publish and perish”—in its literal sense. Would anyone believe me? What I really needed was proof of the crime itself. Or perhaps a signed confession. Hey, I’m not fussy.
I woke up on Monday morning in a cold sweat.
I have always prided myself on bringing assignments in on time, no matter what. While it may mean a sleepless night or two, it also guarantees future business. Nobody wants to go searching for their hired-gun freelancer while technicians and typesetters twiddle their thumbs with nothing to do. There may be flashier writers in the business, but there are none more dependable.
Yet here it was Monday, and I had to have a chapter in to Quinn for Thursday.
I had to admit it was anti-climactic to be thinking about essay deadlines when there was a possible murder to uncover, but on the other hand I figured that even Miss Marple had to do her ironing on Tuesdays. I might as well dig in and get to work instead of wasting more time griping about it.
Guy phoned just as the coffee was perking. He was a lot easier to put off than enticing thoughts of the mysterious mystery novel, but even so it took twenty minutes to convince him that I wasn’t interested in driving out to see buffalo in a paddock at Elk Island National Park. I was laughing at his usual inanities as I got off the phone, but as I poured my coffee I began to wonder why he suddenly seemed so fancy-free. I thought he’d claimed to be slating in a long stint in periodicals or something. I dragged myself over to my Kaypro and leaned forward to find the ON switch at the back. Pretty soon I’d forgotten all about Guy, Quinn, and everything else—including my cup of coffee, which tasted horrible cold—in an attempt to pull together my thoughts on regionalism.
The more I worked, the more I realized that this was going to be a down-to-the-wire job. Not only was my pride a factor in all of this, I had to make the chapter good enough to convince Quinn that I’d been working on it for the past two months. The last thing I needed was my advisor suspecting I’d been exploring her past instead, burglarizing her cabin and ransacking her office.
It was past 9 in the evening on Wednesday when I hit the twenty-page mark. I was exhausted, and I’d been over the same passages so many times that any attempt to objectively proof the chapter would have been absurd by this point. There was no one to call at this time of night, although Maureen probably would have proofed it out of the goodness of her heart. I figured a whisk through the spell-checker would have to do the trick.
Finally, at 11:10, I was holding a printed copy of Chapter One. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever written, but it was by no means a disaster. Quinn might be able to find fault with my argument, but there was no way she could sink me on not knowing the material. I knew those books inside out. Upside down. Backwards. In fact, if hypnotized, I might even be able to quote most of Ahlers’ opus verbatim. That’s how immersed I was.
That’s one thing they don’t put in the “welcome to graduate school” materials: close textual analysis can sometimes get you killed.
21.
The university was mired in that stalemated, becalmed time of the year; the stretch that hits just around the tenth of August, when it’s too hot to party, too late to make summer travel plans, and far too close to all the fall deadlines you set yourself back in May. I had about five hours left to complete as a research assistant for Dr. Spanner. RA work is never fun and rarely interesting, but at least Dr. Spanner’s requests seemed to have a purpose behind them. She would deposit detailed requests in my pigeonhole and leave me to ferret out the information from the MLA.
It now appeared that she’d received some rather ambiguous feedback from a reviewer when submitting her most recent article on the sonnets. The reviewer made some comparison to a fellow who’d made some comparison to Petrarch—it was all rather convoluted, and they’d neglected to provide a reference for the citation. It thus fell to me to find everything this fellow had ever written and locate the article the reviewer had drawn from.
I had a list of about nine titles dating back to 1968, which was the date of the fellow’s dissertation. I know, I know, some people publish while still in grad school, but I always assume those folks are either aberrations who are true geniuses or folks who just couldn’t get dates in grad school. Besides, the MLA makes me sneeze. Armed with my meagre list, I left Rutherford North and headed for the Periodical Library in Rutherford South.
I love the Periodical Library. For one thing, it’s housed in the older part of the library, which makes me feel like I’m in an old Jimmy Stewart movie just by walking through the doors. The marble stairs have grooves worn in them from seventy-odd years of academic trundling. The librarians’ counter is made of old oak, and the microfiche machines are tastefully tucked out of sight around the corner. As for the periodicals themselves, they are housed in rabbit warrens that can only be reached by climbing up and down narrow stairwells and sidling along ceiling-high metal stacks. Every time I came here, I promised myself that I would drop by weekly to read the Times Literary Supplement or browse through old copies of The New Yorker. I never seem to get around to it, though. Somehow, once I left the Periodical Library, it always vanished back into the mist like a bibliophile’s Brigadoon adjacent to HUB mall—reappearing only when I had another article to find.
I’d found three of the rather ponderous-looking journals on my list and decided to head upstairs to locate the fourth before lining up to photocopy them for Dr. Spanner’s files. I was so busy juggling tomes that it wasn’t until I was halfway into the tiny aisle that I realized I was no longer alone. I looked up, expecting to see a librarian or another grad student. Unless you had to be here, or suffered from sun allergies, no one would pick a beautiful day like this to visit the stacks. But it wasn’t a staff member, and I guess melanoma fears are underrated in Alberta. I was alone in the stacks with Hilary Quinn.
My startled gasp sounded louder than it should have been. Perhaps it was an echo effect, or maybe I feared this woman—whom I at least half-suspected as a murderer—more than I’d even let on to myself. I found myself wishing it back, partially because it sounded so rude, and partially because it seemed to affirm something for Quinn. Something about me. I wished to hell I could read what it was in her icy eyes.
“Dr. Quinn! I didn’t expect to see you here. Well, I guess I didn’t honestly expect to see anyone here.” Oh great, my mental editor sighed—when cornered, babble. Quinn seemed to take stock of my discomfiture and moved closer to take advantage of it.
“This is a fortuitous meeting, Miranda. I was thinking of setting up a session to discuss the implications of your chapter.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t think you’d be able
to get on to it so quickly. I’ve hardly begun the next one.”
“Well, that’s rather fortuitous, too, actually. I certainly wanted to talk with you before you went too far down the wrong track.”
The wrong track? What the hell was she talking about? I knew my chapter wasn’t a masterpiece, but it did lay out the basis of a thesis we’d discussed and agreed upon in our prior meetings. It was a little dry, sure, but that quality was de rigueur for this type of construct. After all, academic writing doesn’t tend to be edge-of-the-chair stuff.
“I notice,” she continued, “that you seem to have readjusted your thinking on the concept of Ahlers’ trilogy of place.”
There was something in her tone of voice that was making me sweat. But I still couldn’t figure out what she was getting at. Trilogy of place? A warning light was starting to glow in my head; when she hissed at me, the sirens came on.
“How did you get hold of the fourth book?”
“Fourth book?” I stuttered. For the briefest of moments, I felt thrilled and justified in my reasoning—until I realized that I hardly needed this kind of confirmation from Quinn. After all, it was her computer I’d lifted the manuscript from. Still, how did she know I’d seen it? My confused thoughts must have flashed across my face, because she laughed—grimly.
“You mixed up the character names in your chapter. It happens all the time when working closely with more than one novel, especially when the characters are all fabrications of the same author. I even find myself mixing up Isabel and Andrea at times. But you really left yourself wide open when you mistakenly referred to Eleanor as Ophelia. Really, Miranda—that’s rather clumsy. How did you find out about Ophelia?”
I’m accustomed to thinking on my feet. Years of freelance interviewing—to say nothing of a session spent teaching freshmen—had inured me to off-the-wall and trick questions. Still, how do you lie convincingly when your hand is caught in the cookie jar? She was on to me. She knew, thanks to my weary brain doing a sloppy job of editing, that I had seen Feathers of Treasure. Where could I have seen it without risk of being charged with a felony?
I tried my best to paste on a smile bright enough to couch the bluff I was about to attempt. “I have a friend at McKendricks who let me peek.”
“You’re lying. McKendricks has never seen the fourth manuscript. I suppose the ins and outs of your knowledge are not really the point; what is important to me is how much you know. Your curiosity might be a very dangerous thing, for both of us.”
Any doubts I’d had about her murdering Ahlers faded to black. She appeared before me as the most thoroughly cold-blooded mammal I’d ever seen. With that realization, a funny sort of calm settled over me. Otherwise, I’d never have asked her my next question.
“When did you decide to kill her?”
Quinn looked at me and laughed. It was an eerie laugh—part mockery and part crazy. “Margaret? Oh, I always knew she’d have to die.”
I’ve heard about people who can talk terrorists out of planes, jumpers off bridges, and crazies away from their weapons. People like that must have some innate grace that overtakes them in moments of crisis. Having confronted such a critical moment, I now know one thing: I’m not that sort of person.
Dropping three volumes of The International Symposium of Petrarchan Studies, I turned and ran with Dr. Hilary Quinn at my heels.
22.
I dashed out of South Rutherford Library with the knowledge that at least one hound of hell was right behind me. I could hear her heels clattering on the marble steps and she was hissing my name. It just goes to show how deeply the training not to shout in libraries is embedded in our psyches. Murder was one thing, but raising a ruckus in the library was still off limits. Once outside, I turned automatically south toward the bus stop. I wasn’t sure how close Quinn was to catching up with me, and I had no intention of taking the time to check.
My running must have struck a prehistoric sympathy chord in the lone bus driver there, because he paused to let me on before pulling away in one graceful motion. Fumbling with my wallet, I spotted Quinn standing at the receding curb, squinting into the sunlight to read the number on the back of the bus.
The thought that she knew where I was headed made me shudder, and was closely followed by the realization that she was one up on me; I had no idea which bus I was on.
“Where does this bus go?” I asked, over the clatter of the nickels and quarters cascading into the change box. The bus driver seemed to think my question absurd. After all, how many people rush for buses in the generic?
“West Edmonton Mall,” he growled, as if I should have been able to assume as much from the tilt of his cap. I thanked him, and stumbled back into the moving vehicle to find a perch.
Oh God, not the Mall. This bus would actually go right past my home on its way to the mega-mall, but I was sure Quinn would have either looked up my address or have easy access to it. I didn’t want to be cornered in a cramped basement suite with just one entrance past the furnace and laundry room. Even worse, my copy of Margaret Ahlers’ unpublished novel was sitting right out on my kitchen table, and all my cue cards would clue Quinn in to the full extent of my activities. But let’s be honest: she’d already figured out that I knew enough to need silencing.
I shook my head to clear the gothic thoughts that seemed so incongruous on a lazy August day in suburban Edmonton. Hilary Quinn, a respected scholar at the University of Alberta, was out to murder one of her graduate students? It didn’t sound credible. But I remembered the chill feeling of dread when I’d been alone with her in the periodical stacks, and I knew I didn’t want to be alone with her again. I’d take my chances at the Mall.
I’ve never understood the urge to hide away from other people in unpopulated areas. Humans tend to stick out, rather than blend into nature. My best shot at anonymity was to disappear into the biggest crowd I could find. If that kind of crowd was anywhere in Edmonton in the middle of a summer day, it would be at West Edmonton Mall.
I got off the bus at the terminus and scurried through the parkade to the door of the Zellers discount store. Gosh, I miss Zellers, the last of the discount stores you didn’t mind getting caught shopping in. Getting caught was exactly what I didn’t want, though. I figured I’d need a different shirt; my striped aqua top was too distinctive, and it’s what Quinn would be looking for. I riffled through the first rack of tee-shirts I came to, picking out a black short-sleeved shirt with no advertising on it. I hate paying to be a sandwich board for a brand, band, or cartoon figure on principle, and now I needed to fade into the scenery without any catchy message or visual focus that would blare out and render me memorable to sales clerks—or easy pickings for murderers. I paid cash and hurried to the public washroom near the skating rink so I could discreetly bite off the sales ticket and whip on the shirt. It was a little loose, but I figured frumpy was better than skin-tight when I was trying not to draw attention. I pulled the elastic out of my French braid and finger-combed my hair around my shoulders. I stuffed my old shirt into the Zellers bag and froze—someone was coming into the washroom. Only when the stall door next to mine banged shut did I gather the courage to creep out of my cell.
My heart stopped again as I tried to leave the washroom. My strongest urge was to hole up, to take no chances on being seen, but I knew that I’d be crazy to sit and wait here where I could be cornered. Besides, it’s one thing to see two teenage girls hanging around in a mall washroom, quite another for a lone thirty-year old. If Quinn didn’t find me, I’d likely be reported. I had to keep moving.
It’s all well and good to hide in a crowd, but I couldn’t stand the thought that Quinn could also be somewhere among this overwhelming mass of people; I could just as easily tread on her toes as avoid her. I had to find a place where I could see without being seen first. I also really needed to sit down, gather my wits, and think. I couldn’t run forever. If only the panic could subside, I might be able to formulate a plan. At this point, all I wanted was a st
rategy that would save my own skin. Margaret Ahlers was already dead, and there was nothing to be done for her.
I bought a coffee at the food court next to Fantasyland and sat as near as I could to the back wall. I could keep an eye on both entrances from my vantage point, and quickly make a beeline in either direction. Sitting among the tourists, tired shoppers, and overstimulated teenagers calmed me down for a bit. Everything was so … ordinary. In a way, that was the most macabre thing about my whole flight from the library—it was so clean and bright and non-threatening. Sort of like the Bates Motel the morning after.
I noticed a kid with curly blond hair and thought about Guy. Could I trust him enough to let him know where I was? What was his connection to all of this mess, anyway? Why had he tried to get me off campus today? Did Quinn know about our collusion—or was it really collusion at all?
Call me a hopeless romantic, but intuitively I couldn’t accept Guy as some sort of double agent attached to me. For one thing, Quinn had no reason to suspect my motives, or at least hadn’t until the lousy Freudian slip in my thesis chapter. Freud now had even more to answer for in my books. It occurred to me that if Guy weren’t in cahoots with Quinn, she would soon enough twig to how I’d got my hands on Ahlers’ manuscript; only Guy had the keys to her office. But even he didn’t know what I’d found there, because I’d held back on the information. If Guy really was innocent, I’d made him a sitting duck. I had to get hold of him, fast.
I carefully checked the scene before I got up to stow my coffee cup and find a phone. This would be the dangerous part. All the phone kiosks were located in highly visible central areas near the centre of the concourse. I made sure I had quarters in my hand and was jiggling them like worry beads as I nervously made my way into the middle of the mall.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 11