Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  I was fine with that. It was still more people than I could imagine forgetting, let alone remembering, but I had promised to help. Besides, embedded in that list was one specific name—Guy Larmour. It pained me to think about bringing an old flame near the relationship Steve and I had forged. After all, both of us had shown signs over the years that we could be jealous of each other’s attentions. Still, if I were to find out anything about this new book of Ahlers, it would help to talk with Guy.

  So many questions were swirling about in my head. Had Quinn written a fifth Ahlers manuscript before she had died? Had Quinn been lying to me about having created a false front in order to write the books she could then dissect critically? Did someone else who knew Quinn was no longer around capitalize on the situation and slide in a new manuscript? Was Quinn really dead, or had she faked her suicide and run off only to eventually succumb to the need to write a fifth manuscript? Had Guy been complicit with Quinn all along?

  Was I overthinking things?

  Dutifully keeping my receipts, I purchased several booklets of self-stick stamps, and a gross of envelopes. Within two days I had managed to knock out the invitation to our event, which looked very official with the approved logo of the Alumni Association and the Homecoming Golden Bear in the upper corner. Sherry Brownlee had explained to me that the joy of getting a personally written letter in this world of forms and emails was worth five per cent more uptake in the chance of attending. Who was I to argue? She had been inviting the whole campus back on an annual basis.

  I folded my personally written notes around the return postcards the Alumni Association had given us. A number on the card apparently sorted our replies into one batch. It was great. No one had to know my address and the fact that in twenty years I had managed to move only five blocks from the Humanities Building; the university could keep track of the actual numbers attending the overarching Homecoming, and the postcards were pre-stamped, ensuring a greater likelihood of response.

  I had been hoping to do the email invites as well, to make it even easier for the wired, but was astonished by the number of entries on the list without an email connected. These were university graduates who had stayed in contact with the Alumni Association, who presumably had been in contact with computers. Hell, I had written the final draft of my thesis on one some twenty years ago. Why were they leery about offering up their emails?

  Perhaps they really were Luddites. I had heard enough screeds about the death of the book and the rise of electronic illiteracy to fill an ebook. I wasn’t having any of it. To me, the link was the word, not the medium.

  I felt like crossing myself and whispering an apology to St. Marshall McLuhan whenever I thought this way. Of course I agreed with his theories that how a message is delivered can change the way people perceive it. That wasn’t what I meant. I just felt that too much time was expended worrying about whether or not people read fiction or non-fiction in large units. My theory was that no one was going to stop imagining and crafting any time soon. There would be plenty of novels for me to read, lots of movies to watch, and the musical theatre genre was on the rise once more.

  No, using a computer was not going to be the end of us as a species. If anything, it would bring us closer. I still kept in touch with people from all around the world I had met while monitoring in a chat room years ago, and now various video chat programs made the Jetsons’ television phone a reality. If we could see and talk with each other, surely we could learn to cooperate with each other, right?

  Leo would probably disagree with me. He was immersed in media studies and had recently written an article on scams and cheating in university studies, citing computer facility as the primary reason for plagiarizing and falsifying of information to occur. Denise had been at the session where he’d presented a year or two ago, and came home raving about the way he had handled the Q-and-A after. Leo knew his stuff.

  In fact, maybe Leo could help me with the manuscript issue. If his plagiarism studies had brought him information about good programs to run passages through to authenticate the authorial voice, maybe I could send some of Ahlers’ earlier works through and then the new text. Of course, if there was such a program, all it would take would for some industrious person to run some of Quinn’s own writing about Ahlers through to discover the secret I’d been holding on to for the last twenty years.

  Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

  It would be great to see Leo, anyhow. He and I had enjoyed each other’s company back in the days of our thesis writing and early sessional work. I could always count on Leo to be game to trek out to Audreys Books for Christmas shopping, or to Uncle Albert’s for pancakes.

  Leo hadn’t been back to Edmonton in years. He might be devastated to find that our favourite breakfast haunt had burned down several years ago. Whyte Avenue had undergone quite a significant change over the last decade or so. The eccentric little businesses like the Basket Shop, that never seemed to have shoppers in it, and the hundred-year-old, wooden-floored version of Hub Cigar, the city’s quintessential magazine store, were both gone as well. Now, a couple of boutique hotels, some fancy optical shops and some grunge fashion stores, a lot of bars, and coffee shops had taken over the strip.

  I liked Whyte Avenue during the Fringe Festival when the theatre crowd took over, and during the Artwalk, when local artists would set up all along the Avenue and adjacent streets. Otherwise, now, I mainly headed downtown, or to one of the malls, if I wanted to do any shopping. Mostly, I shopped online, to be truthful.

  Leo would probably have something to say about that, too.

  My use of online banking and shopping would have him in security conniptions. I didn’t care. If Steve didn’t see anything wrong with me ordering through encrypted sites, I figured I was safe. Besides, no one in their right mind would steal my identity when they could go after someone who actually had two RRSPs to rub together.

  Leo better be coming to this shindig, was all I could think. Even though I had been fabricating his side of the argument, I figured he had some explaining to do. I laughed at myself, thinking about how startled he would be if I started in on him right there at the airport.

  That would be another thing, the need to pick up various of these people. Denise could do some of that, but I didn’t have a car. Maybe they were all so successful they could cab it in from the airport. Or maybe they could all take the airport bus to the south end of the LRT, and ride the train to the university. Denise was suggesting most of them stay in Campus Towers or the Garneau Hotel, but I was willing to bet that other Homecoming groups were targeting those hotels, as well.

  Let the neurosurgeons stay downtown at the Macdonald Hotel. Unless any of our cohort had invented an app or a game that had netted them millions, they might be looking for one of the more reasonable motor hotels along Gateway Boulevard. It would be fine. Edmonton is a relatively easy city to navigate, and aside from a new bridge here or there, nothing much had changed in the manner of road works in the last few years.

  I wondered how many people usually returned for Homecoming. Would the city feel fuller? Would it be hard to find a cab that week? While campus tended to fill up with a lot more white hair than usual, I wasn’t totally clear on how many people came back from far-flung places and how many grads had just settled nearby. Denise would know. Speaking of Denise, I had promised to call her when I was done the mail-out. I sat back to look at what I had accomplished.

  Three piles of envelopes sat before me. Two of them were substantial, folded, stamped, addressed to seven years’ worth of English graduates, many of whose names were unfamiliar to me. I had also placed the invites to the professors emeriti that Denise was anxious to invite, such as Drs. Spanner, Wilkie, Samson, and Demers.

  The third pile contained fewer envelopes, but every name was known to me. This was the bunch who had already received full Homecoming packages from Denise earlier in the summer. These were the people who had been in seminars with me like Axel Hamner and Shannon Maso
n, who had shared office space like Maureen Kelly, who had worked in the older houses that had been turned into sessional office space like Leo and Alan Knight. This was my cohort, and on top of that pile was the invitation to Guy Larmour.

  This could be wonderful, as I knew Denise believed it would be. Or it could pull apart everything I had built for myself over the last twenty years. There was only one way to find out.

  27.

  Denise was tickled to hear I’d got the mail-out ready, and offered to come pick me up to haul it all to the post office. We could head out for a meal after and catch up, she said. I wasn’t all that sure what we needed to catch up on, but the company was always good, and the promise of food had never failed to get me on board.

  We dumped the letters inside a post office outlet on the possibly misguided notion that another set of hands on the process would make it faster and more secure. Then we headed over to City Hall, to eat at The Kids in the Hall restaurant, a lovely place overlooking the fountain that served fantastic food for breakfast and lunch. The other great thing about the restaurant was that it served as a training ground for teens at risk, helping them adapt to workplace conventions like showing up on time, looking customers in the eye, speaking politely, and working in a group environment. Not all of them went on to service careers, but most of the kids who had been through the program were employed and stable now.

  The fellow who managed the restaurant, Calvin Avery, was at the desk when we arrived, and gave me a quick hug. We went way back. His family had lived next door to us the first time I had lived here, when my dad decided not to live on base but to buy a house in north Edmonton. In fact, I had babysat Calvin and his sisters from time to time. This really was getting to be a time of reunions.

  I introduced him to Denise and then he let a young woman lead us to our table. Throughout our meal, I saw him supervising all over, a calm and dependable presence in the lives of the youth surrounding him. He’d done well for himself in my books. I wondered briefly what he would think of my career path, if he indeed thought of me at all after greeting us.

  It wasn’t the clear trajectory his seemed, and perhaps I hadn’t done as much good for the community, but I certainly couldn’t call it boring. On the whole, I didn’t dwell overmuch on the past. At least not my past.

  Denise was deliberating between their daily soup, which today was carrot ginger, or the special, which was a seafood jambalaya. I was thinking of sticking to a salad for my main course, in order to justify a helping of their amazing bread pudding. At the last minute, I added a serving of chicken to the salad, which would likely tip the balance into the red zone calorie-wise. Oh well, if I didn’t think about the past, I was obviously equally uncommitted to the future.

  Once our orders were in to the lovely girl with two metal studs on her cheek and a tattoo of a treble clef on her wrist, Denise and I settled back to enjoy ourselves. It was nice to take a break before all hell broke loose in the weeks leading up to the new term. If students only knew how much prep time goes into the courses they take. She asked about my timelines.

  “I think we start classes the same Wednesday as you do, it’s just that we have a faculty meeting, then a department meeting to attend on the Thursday before the Labour Day weekend, and then we are required to be around for an orientation day on the Tuesday. The new vision is that we are the ‘accessible choice,’ though I am not sure what being in our offices a day before classes start proves. I would think it would be more effective to have us all downstairs helping pack and bag purchases in the bookstore if they wanted to make us the truly accessible spot.”

  Denise laughed. “Oh God, bookstore lineups. I certainly don’t miss those. I lost all feeling in my arms one year, and my books crashed to the ground seven people back in line, after standing there for an hour. They rushed me to the front of the line to get me out of there, but I remember the cashier glaring at me, because I am sure she thought I had just dropped them all on purpose. If only she’d known how irritating the bent jacket on my Chaucer has been, all through that course and even today. I would never drop a book intentionally.”

  “A Muslim friend once told me that his tradition was if you dropped a book, you had to kiss it when you picked it up, to apologize, for learning was sacrosanct, and books represented learning.”

  Denise nodded. “Good tradition. We need to foster that reverence in the kids we teach, I think. And to get them inured to buying books. That is perhaps our greatest role as educators, turning them into happy consumers in bookstores.”

  “I can dig it,” I said. “I doubt I have ever looked at the price on a book I wanted, but I can’t even count the number of times I have put back cuts of meat once I checked the price. It has to be my being required to buy long lists of books back in university.”

  “Maybe we should make that one of the questions at our homecoming: how many books do you buy per year to this day?”

  “There’s going to be a quiz?”

  “More like a survey. Don’t worry, I’ve got Alvin Morrison handling all that. He says he can collate the answers online and have it all printed out in time for the registration at the Telus Building on the Thursday. People just fill it out as they sign up.”

  I was thankful I wasn’t the only one being roped into things by Denise. Alvin was on campus daily, and obviously way more invested in computers than I.

  My contributions so far were far more old-school in terms of manipulating data bases, in that I’d used a highlighter instead of an algorithm to sort my invite set.

  “Old-school,” mused Denise. “Makes me think, all this reunion stuff, of how young we really were. I look out at my classes sometimes, and I just want to stop the lecture and say to them, ‘You are so beautiful and lithe and the possibilities are endless, so stop worrying about your skin and your hips and your empty dance card and just enjoy yourselves—you will never be this glorious again.’ Not that they’d listen, of course.”

  “I know. I was looking at some old pictures of us the other night, trying to put a face to someone on the list named Rudy Semple, and I was thinking the same thing. Even at thirty, we had such vigour, and shiny hair. And I must have been at least two sizes smaller.”

  “It’s all relative,” Denise mused. “In a year or so, we’ll remember this lunch and both of us will wonder why we worried about eating these desserts.”

  “Well, I’m not wondering now. This is divine.”

  “I know, what do you think they put in this sauce?”

  “I think it’s the cinnamon from the bread that makes the difference.”

  “Mmm, you might be right.”

  Once we were finished our rich and wonderful bowl of bread pudding, we settled up and made our way back into the foyer of City Hall. The fountain was arcing, casting rainbows into the air, and children were wading and squealing in it. Their mothers lined the sides of the pool, some of them holding squirming babies on their laps. I loved this part of our city, where the decorous element was pushed to the side in favour of the community sensibility. Water was for splashing in, not just to walk past and admire. In the winter, this pool was turned into a community skating rink, and a set of benches outside the restaurant we’d just been in were placed there specifically for skate donning and removal.

  Denise asked whether I wanted a ride home, but I declined and gave her a quick hug. I needed to walk off the dessert, and pick up a book from the library on the way. I promised to check in with her for more homecoming preparations in a week or so. She headed for the elevator to the car park level, and I pushed open the glass door, exited the glass pyramid and headed past the water play toward Sir Winston Churchill Square and the Stanley Milner Library across the cemented park.

  Our library had recently won the title of North American Library of the Year, a first for a Canadian library, and we were all justifiably proud of it. They deserved it, too. They had launched a colourful campaign to make library use cool, installed a multiuse room that included a print-on-demand pr
ess, a 3-D printer and all sorts of other neat gadgets, and their children’s library was a warm and welcome corner. I loved the banners declaring “We make Geek Chic” and “Smart is the New Black.” The logos showed up on tee shirts, drink bottles, travel mugs, book bags and library cards, which probably helped funds. My own card reads, “I’m happy and I know it.”

  I went off in search of the holds shelf, where I picked up the copy of James Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance that I wanted to source for my notes on popular culture. I was going to be teaching a section on graphic novels and formula fiction later in the course, but I figured that by the time I got to it, some first-year would have already taken out every copy of what I considered the seminal text on genre studies.

  Once I had found the book, I wandered over to a computer terminal to search some other titles. On a whim, I typed in Margaret Ahlers, to see what came up. The computer listed all the books I had: One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Children of Magpie, and Feathers of Treasure, which the University had seen to having published after the floppy disks had been found next to Quinn’s headless body. There had been some clause in the tenure contract that dealt with intestate research materials, and Dr. Spanner had determined that this included novels. I recalled reading something about McKendricks and the U of A having “discussions,” which we had all figured was a diplomatic way of saying “fighting it out for the royalties.” After all, as the literary executor, the English Department benefited from an annual stipend, so it was in their best interest to be sure the manuscript was published.

  The library computer screen also listed Dr. Quinn’s posthumously published critical work gathered under the title The Next Margaret: The Works of Margaret Ahlers. At the bottom of the second screen I found several other titles, two of which gave me pause. One was the unreleased book, Seven Bird Saga, which I knew about, but still gave me a shock to see included. According to the library listing, it would be published and in circulation before Christmas.