Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  The other listing that created a rock in the pit of my stomach was another critical work, one of about seven on file. Ahlers studies were steady if not robust. The one in question, though, had me pole-axed.

  The title was The Voice in the Enigma: A Study of Novels by Margaret Ahlers. The author cited was G.D. Larmour.

  28.

  I left the library with the book I’d come for and one I hadn’t even known about. It wasn’t all that surprising. As an MA, it wasn’t likely that I’d ever be able to teach my specialty, so why keep up to date on your thesis topic? I had spent more of my time reading contemporary Canadian novels, and boning up on computer skills, in order to fit into the sessional work of distance teaching and freshman survey courses.

  So Guy had stolen my thunder, had he? I refused to look into the book on the bus, because I had a sense this was something that needed to be done in private. I got off by the Garneau Theatre, which I noted was playing Down By Law and The Station Agent, two films I enjoyed for their odd characters. I walked through the alleyway toward the backdoor of my apartment.

  Once I was settled in my own sanctuary, with a glass of iced tea from the fridge, I sat in front of the short pile of books on my kitchen table, almost afraid to open the cover.

  I checked the publisher page. Rosetown Press, Indiana. I’d vaguely heard of Rosemount College because one of my sessional buddies from an online adjunct site taught there, but nothing on a Rosetown Press. Maybe it was a private press, or maybe it was a press associated with a college close to Rosemount. Maybe Guy was teaching there now. His dedication page was to his father, a sappy message about looking for where we come from. Men rarely managed to get dedications right in tone.

  The table of contents was next. I swallowed and turned the page.

  The first chapter was just titled “The Great Canadian Novel.” The second and third were what really caught my eye. “Facets of Faces: Similarity of Character in Ahlers’ Novels” and “The Last Frontier: The Peace Country in Ahlers’ Novels.” Those two chapters were my entire thesis. If he had lifted from it, to further his career, without any recognition or citation to my work, I would be beside myself. I was already finding it hard to catch my breath, and I hadn’t even turned the page yet.

  Guy must have been working with Quinn the whole time. He had lied to me about the scope of his own dissertation on godgames. Or this was the ultimate godgame. Befriend and seduce a fellow student and then steal her work. I flipped back to the publication date on the textbook in my hands. This had come out nine years after I’d graduated and he had left U of A. Ten years after Hilary Quinn had been found dead in her office, and I had sworn him to secrecy about her connection to Ahlers.

  Was he laughing at me the whole time? Had he set me up to do his dogsbody research from the beginning? Was he in cahoots with Quinn? Had he murdered Quinn, to pass it off as suicide? Was that even Quinn’s body?

  I read through the chapters with a sadness that would likely turn into rage later on. It was familiar territory. While he hadn’t plagiarized word for word, he had lifted my argument completely. It sounded a little more condescending in his archer tone, of course. There was an underpinning of judgment on Ahlers’ work: that somehow she was less than she was thought to be.

  His other chapters dealt with comparing Ahlers’ shyness from the limelight with Salinger and Pynchon, which was accurate but sort of slim in heft, since their writing didn’t offer any commonalities to use as clues as to why they would shun the prestige of public appearances.

  I pushed the book aside finally. I was feeling flayed. Twenty years ago I had worked my tail off to put together many of the threads of the argument I had just read. I had confided in Guy, and I had been vulnerable in his presence.

  All this time, I had believed we had just faded apart with the distance. He had taken a post-doctoral position with McMaster for a year, and then moved to the States when a position came up in a well-considered teaching college. We had lost touch after that.

  Now, it occurred to me that my Christmas cards had gone unanswered just about the time this text was getting published. Of course, that would have also been around the time that Steve and I had got together, so I might have not noticed the lack of communication quite so quickly.

  Who could I talk to about this? What could I do about it?

  Nothing could likely be done about the stealing of my ideas at this point that wouldn’t just be ugly, but what about if he were to show up at Homecoming? My name wasn’t anywhere on the invitation, so for all he knew, I would be well out of the picture, off getting conned by some other smooth-talking charlatan.

  Or maybe he knew exactly where I was, and had been keeping tabs on me all along. After all, he had a vested interest in me not getting all efficient and trying to publish any part of my old thesis.

  Thinking about this made me turn quickly to look behind me, checking to see whether anyone was looking in at me through my kitchen window. It was ridiculous, of course. Not only was Guy Larmour miles away in Indiana or somewhere equally remote, there was a film on my window that detracted from people being able to see in. Still, the thought of being monitored and used was strong.

  I couldn’t talk about this in any great detail to Denise. She might see it as annoying of Guy to have stolen my thunder, but she would have no idea of the barrel he thought he’d have me over, since I’d never confided in her. So, telling her now might hurt her feelings. I had kept the Ahlers secret from her, and she might see that as a betrayal of our friendship.

  The one person I would be able to tell was Steve. Of course, the fact I’d not ever told him before this, in the dozen or so years we’d been together, might make him rethink the openness of our relationship, too. But I’d have to risk it, because right now I felt unsafe.

  All the things I had thought were true might not be. All my certainties were shaky and the uncertainties I had learned to live with were looming too large once more.

  Guy had used me and may have been in cahoots with Quinn all along. And as Margaret Ahlers, the enigmatic and mythical writer who had started it all, Quinn might have had another book in her. After all, the children’s counting song hadn’t been completed.

  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.

  One for Sorrow; Two for Gold; The Children of Magpie; Feathers of Treasure; Seven Bird Saga. The story never told. Until now, presumably.

  I needed to know who was doing the telling.

  29.

  Steve was almost through his shift when I called him, and promised to get to my place by six. I in turn promised him dinner.

  It was good to get my mind off of the shock of Guy’s treachery, and focus on trying to cobble together a decent meal out of what was in the fridge and freezer. It had cooled off a bit outdoors, so I wasn’t too bothered about heating the oven. I sliced up some oranges and set frozen tilapia fillets on top of them in my glass dish. I poured in enough water to lap at the orange slices but not cover the fish, tented a roof of foil over the dish, and popped it into the oven to poach.

  I’d shopped at the downtown farmers’ market and Earth’s General Store the past weekend, and still had some parsnips and Swiss chard in the crisper. I peeled the former, sliced them into coins, and set them to steam. I stuffed washed chard into a pot with a cover, to boil up at the last minute. As soon as the chard went limp, I’d drain it and toss it with butter and vinegar. I checked my watch. If I started the oven in ten minutes and the appropriate stove burners in twenty, everything would be ready as Steve walked in the door.

  That was the trouble with me and cooking for guests. I could never figure out how to make a meal work so that company could arrive, have an aperitif, chat for a while and then walk into the dining room to eat. It always ended up with me taking someone’s coat and guiding them straight to table.

  Maybe you needed a cook and serving staff to manage the former scenario. Once more, Hollywood
had lied to me.

  I was just putting the cut glass bowl with tossed salad greens onto the table as Steve knocked on the door. I pulled the door open, and smiled. He was just so damned good-looking and the extra beauty of that was that he was all mine.

  Standing six-foot-three in his regulation boots, which he wore whenever on duty, he almost grazed the doorframe coming in, and had by habit learned to enter a room with a bowed head. Aside from the boots, which he was presently unlacing to set by the door, he was in civilian dress: casual navy trousers, and a striped navy, red, and yellow polo shirt. His socks were red and yellow stripes. I laughed at his socks, and he gave me a mock wounded look.

  “I took a lot of time coordinating this look, I’ll have you know!”

  “And I appreciate it. Come on, dinner is ready.”

  I bustled through to the kitchen to get the fish out of the oven. I served up from the stovetop, and brought the dishes to the table. We added salad where we could on the plates. My table wasn’t big enough to afford extra salad bowls, though I did have a nice wooden set on the top shelf somewhere—another gift from my mom.

  “This is great, Randy. I’ve been grabbing too many burritos on the go this week. It’s nice to sit down to a proper meal.” Steve wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin I’d folded by his setting. Cloth napkins were my addition, not my mother’s, who still used printed paper towels. I figured a stack of napkins bought at various times from yard sales and thrift shops and dumped in the laundry regularly were better for the environment. Every time I used them, I knew David Suzuki was smiling.

  “It’s good to see you. I feel like, with the prep for the school year and Denise’s Alumni Weekend demands, I’ve not seen you face-to-face in ages.”

  “It’s been over a week, for sure.”

  “And I miss seeing you. Texting and emails are all very well, and thank goodness for them, but geez I miss you when I don’t see you from day to day.”

  My toes reached under the table to rest in the arch of his feet.

  Steve smiled broadly at me. “Why don’t I help you with the dishes and then we can figure out how to make up for lost time?”

  I laughed at his attempt at a wolfish swagger.

  “I hope you can stay, but I need to talk to you first. And the dishes can wait.” There must have been something in the tone of my voice, or perhaps Steve could read something in what he always called my transparent face. His joking Lothario look disappeared, replaced immediately by intelligent concern.

  “What’s the matter?”

  In response I removed the plates from the table, and brought Guy Larmour’s book from my desk to place before him. He read the title quickly, and then looked up at me quizzically.

  “Isn’t this who you did your thesis on?”

  “Yes, and Steve, oh gosh, do I have a lot to tell you. It goes back a long, long way.”

  “Best place to start is at the beginning.”

  And so I did.

  By the time I got to finding Guy’s book earlier in the library, we were sitting in the living room drinking beers I had retrieved from the fridge. We’d pulled the blinds an hour earlier, and Steve had even started taking notes to keep things clear in his mind.

  I finished talking and leaned back to look at him.

  He took his time looking up. The longer he stared at his notebook, the more worried I got. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to be with me anymore; after all, I had kept quiet about Margaret Ahlers for so long. Maybe he wouldn’t see any difference between my actions and those of Guy Larmour’s.

  Finally he spoke.

  “So this book has been out there eleven years, and you just now found out about it?”

  I nodded.

  “And you stopped hearing from Guy around the same time?”

  “I guess so. I just wasn’t thinking much about it at the time. You and I had just met. Crazy things were happening in the department.”

  “How normal is it that a critical work on your writer could come out and no one would think to tell you about it?”

  “I’ve been trying to consider that, and I think it might be quite normal. I don’t hang out with a load of Ahlers scholars, after all. Denise is a Shakespeare prof, and most of the reading I do critically has to do with work I teach in my freshman courses. There you get to teach one classic work, and one modern work. I’ve never taught Ahlers in any of my classes. It would be too problematic for me, I think. I was too close to it when I was teaching at the U of A, and now over at MacEwan, they encourage you to teach their Book of the Year as your modern Canadian text, since they pay to bring the writer in for a set of lectures, and so on. And it’s not like they could ever bring Margaret Ahlers in to speak, eh?”

  “So, Larmour may have figured he could get away with this forever? Or perhaps, he was ready for your attack a decade ago, but has determined you’re not a threat to him now?”

  “Or maybe he just figured that as a lowly MA, no one was ever going to take my word over his, especially as he had helped me with my work enough to go into my acknowledgments. Maybe he’d tell them I had used his notes, for all I know.”

  “One thing we need to do is check the police records for aything about Quinn’s death. If Larmour was responsible, or if they both conspired to cover up her disappearance, we may find some anomaly in there that will help us.”

  My fears and hollowness were dissipating now that Steve was speaking as if we were still a team. “I’m so glad I told you all this.”

  He shook his head and smiled sadly at me. “Randy, I can understand why you kept this secret all this time, but I am glad you let it out, too.” He set down his notebook and opened his arms. I moved into the bear hug that made me feel both secure and strong. “Don’t worry. We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

  I decided not to tell him then that I was still worried.

  After all, if I was the only other person who knew the truth behind Ahlers’ non-existence, I was a threat to Guy’s scholarship.

  I really needed to know if Guy Larmour was intending to come to Homecoming.

  30.

  Leo Desrochers really was a cheapskate. As well as the card he had sent begging a bed from me, he sent a long letter to Denise, which she brought over to show me the day after I had unburdened myself to Steve. I read it while she pored over Guy’s text, which I’d handed her silently.

  By the time I finished reading Leo’s chatty missive, where he pointedly also asked if he could crash on her couch rather than shell out for a hotel room, Denise was finished flipping through the book. From the look on her face, I figured she had come to the same conclusion I had, that our former friend had ripped off my research.

  “How could he think he could get away with this?” Denise sputtered. “He’ll be drummed out of academe.”

  I shrugged. “The truth is, he’s gotten away with it for more than a decade. He didn’t publish it here, and what university publishing arm in the States was going to comb through old masters’ theses to see if there were any correlations? It’s not as if he has lifted it line for line, either, so how would they have caught it?”

  “If that is a university press at all,” Denise mused. “I’ve never heard of them. It could be a small publisher operating without the rigour or staff of an academic press.”

  “The thing is, now that I have come across it, what do I do? And what happens if he comes back for Homecoming? How do I face him?”

  “Maybe you should talk to Steve about it,” Denise suggested.

  “I told him last night, and he thinks I need to be careful in the way I approach things. A lot depends on how much I want to pursue it, after all, he could lawyer up, and so could the university press. Reputations are at stake.” I didn’t want to get into the whole secret of Ahlers with Denise if I didn’t have to. Keeping that sort of information from her for twenty years might be more than our friendship could handle.

  I had made a decision that night, after speaking with Dr. Quinn for the last time, that
I would tell no one about her authorship of the Margaret Ahlers novels. I hadn’t even told Guy. Until I spoke of it to Steve, I hadn’t even shaped the words in my mind. If Guy knew that Quinn had written the books, he knew it from Quinn herself, not me.

  I wanted to tell Denise now, but something held me back. It was bad enough to share the possibility that someone we were inviting back to her reunion preparations was a plagiarizer. She’d already discovered another of our crew was still a moocher after twenty years. If I was going to add on my complicities in hiding a literary fraud all this time, she might just throw in the towel.

  “Leo can stay with me if he pays for an air mattress,” I offered, trying to make things easier on my friend. “After all, it will feel like old times.” All throughout grad school, Leo was constantly showing up just around mealtimes, ostensibly on his way home. To his credit, he had also been there when I had moved to this apartment, and had brought champagne over the day Denise had defended her dissertation. Leo himself had bundled himself out of town and off to Newfoundland and into what sounded like a very solid job teaching North American Literature. That’s what a comparative dissertation featuring Sinclair Lewis and Sinclair Ross will get you: how the west was won in two parallel studies. I think he also branched out into popular culture studies once he received tenure, and could safely dabble in the “sub-literary.”

  It would be good to see Leo. Hell, it would be good to see anyone who made it back for Homecoming. Of the entire list of invitations we had sent out, only about fifteen were still in Alberta. The rest were scattered all the way across the globe. Quite a few were along the eastern seaboard in the United States, and others clumped in Upper Canada. That made sense, considering just how many universities and colleges were found there.

  I wondered if anyone would be coming from Europe. Katherine was in London. She might show up, if it coincided with a visit back to see her mother, whom I think still lived here. Richard was retired early to Amsterdam, having taught in New York for twenty years. I had a feeling he wouldn’t show up, even out of prurient curiosity. He had not enjoyed Edmonton much, finding it too provincial.