Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  Edmonton had done a lot of maturing in the last several years. The downtown had revitalized itself, and more and more people were living in the core of the city. Our film festival, comedy festival, improv festival, and rodeo brought in just as many people as did our mainstays of jazz, folk, and fringe festivals. Edmonton had nothing to be ashamed of, and people returning for Homecoming were going to be more than pleasantly surprised, I was thinking.

  Denise was still fuming about Guy’s stealing of my research.

  “You could take this book to the Graduate Studies office and see what they had to say about things.”

  I shook my head. “I am really not sure I want to get into any of that. After all, it’s not as if I’m up there with the Ahlers scholars. Most of the work I did was already touched on by the work Quinn did before she died.”

  Denise made a moue of a face, the sort of look that said either “I disagree with you heartily but don’t have the energy to pursue this now” or “I’ve just eaten a bad apricot.” I could tell the conversation was over, and I was just as glad it was. I didn’t want to get into the reasons why I didn’t feel up to waving the Ahlers flag too strenuously. I still had too much to hide on that score.

  Denise insisted on helping with the dishes, which was kind of her. I swirled rinse water through the teapot and set it back on its trivet. Our tea mugs and toast plates were done in a jiffy and pretty soon I was seeing her to the door.

  “Thanks for offering to put Leo up, Randy,” Denise said, as she pulled on her slouchy boots. “With all the stuff to organize, I will be running that entire weekend, and I know that if I left Leo to his own devices, he’d end up reorganizing my kitchen shelves on me.”

  We laughed, but it was true. Leo was the sort of person who just took over under the guise of knowing best. No wonder he was still single—he was probably way too picky to settle for just anyone, and I just couldn’t imagine a man out there who would meet his standards. Poor Leo, he should have been born a hundred years earlier and hetero, and he could have happily married my grandmother, who used to extend her dusting into the root cellar weekly.

  Once Denise was gone, I pulled out my laptop, with a view to seeing just how much I could discover about what Guy Larmour had been doing in the last dozen years or so.

  I might not be on top of every nuance of academic pursuits these days, and I certainly wasn’t in the know as far as what the graduate students of today were tackling, but I did keep up with work on theoretical approaches and articles to do with writers I was presenting in my freshman classes. Guy and his work on Ahlers had never cropped up in any of that general sweeping I did on a regular basis.

  Of course, I’d been making my rent money for the past few years doing research on all sorts of topics that weren’t my own. Surely I could take some of those skills and apply it to snooping out what Guy might have been up to.

  I checked his profile on a couple of the academic and business networking sites. His CV of publications was up on one of them, and he appeared to have been working on research to do with magic realism for the first few years after he graduated. He had two papers on a couple of South American writers, and then a book comparing W.P. Kinsella to William Cobb called Beyond the Margins: Magic Realism as a Response to Centralism. From the write-up, I gathered his argument was that writers outside the hubs of New York or Toronto were far more able to experiment with form, and that the Canadian West shared similarities with the American South in terms of recognition from the publishing centres.

  All this work seemed in keeping with the work he’d been doing on Borges and godgames and metafiction in his dissertation. It wasn’t until about a dozen years ago that he’d moved into examining the works of Ahlers.

  Sure, she was a western Canadian writer, so I suppose no one batted an eye as his interests seemed to shift. But really, she was to Borges as cashmere is to steel wool. Aside from her posthumous detective novel, there was merely the similarity of putting words together between the covers of a book. Had I been the dean of Rosetown State, which seems to have been where Guy had been located for at least fifteen years now, I think I might have questioned the shift. Of course, the dean might be so immersed in his own studies of James Fennimore Cooper that he didn’t really care what his faculty was working on.

  So, after an article about Ahlers’ duplicity in point of view in Two for Sorrow, which went out in a periodical from Hamburg dealing with Western Canadian literature, he had presented a talk about Ahlers’ sense of place in a colloquium in New Zealand geared to Commonwealth literature. I’ll bet he was pretty sure I wasn’t going to show up in the back of the hall there, like some avenging Richard Mason out to stop Rochester’s marriage to Jane Eyre. And he was right. I hadn’t even been aware of a Commonwealth conference in the University of Waikato.

  I had been in the trenches of sessionaldom at the time, just prepping and teaching and marking essays, too busy to keep up with my own interests in research, too broke to even think of going to a conference in New Brunswick, let alone New Zealand. And I had been unable to even sustain that sort of academic continuum. The last few years had been a patchwork of different jobs, mostly research and writing in tone, with ties to academe, of course, but nothing that would make a CV zing. No, I was pretty much the gypsy tinker, in comparison to Guy’s steadfast knitting of himself into the fabric of the university mainstream. Who would even care to believe me if I raised a voice of dissonance against his scholarship? I hadn’t even kept up with the literature; who was going to care about my measly thesis in the face of more than a dozen years of work by others?

  That night I dreamt of Dr. Quinn, chasing me through the stacks of the Periodical Library and down the groove-worn stairs of Rutherford South. As I looked over my shoulders to see if she was gaining on me, I saw that where her face was supposed to be, there was nothing but a smooth surface, as if she was wearing some sort of flesh-toned fencing mask. The absence of features was even scarier than the pursuit. I woke up sitting bolt upright in bed, pretty certain I had screamed loud enough to wake the neighbours.

  I sat there in the dark, willing my heart to calm down, listening for movement beyond the walls. When I was certain no one was stirring, I looked at my clock-radio. It was 4:30 a.m. In another three hours it would be light out. Already the nights were getting longer. If this had been July, the birds would already be singing in the sunny branches.

  There was no way I was going to risk going to sleep again, so I padded out into the kitchen to turn on the kettle. I sorted out the Melita filters and funnel to make strong coffee. Thank goodness I had already ground enough for two or three days the last time, because my neighbours really wouldn’t have forgiven that noise. The walls were thick, but somehow noises flowed all over along the pipes that heated the building and brought water to each suite.

  Coffee and a small bowl of cereal later, I was back at my laptop, combing through responses that were already trickling in for Homecoming. As suspected, the local people were deciding first. There was far less at stake to cross the river for an evening, after all. Unless you’d gained four hundred pounds or lost all your hair, that is. Of course, given the last century’s penchant for big hair, that latter aspect might not be a bad thing. You never knew what would keep people from reuniting with folks who “knew them when.” There was bound to be some nerd who had parlayed his English degree into a role-playing game that had made him millions or a fascinating government job. There would be a couple who had gone on to be high-powered lawyers, or who had married into well-set families. There might even be a writer or two.

  There weren’t all that many local who had become academics, or Denise and I would know them. Most of those had gone further afield, and I wasn’t sure whether those who had become illustrious professors at Yale or Stanford would bother with a reunion weekend. Still, one never knew.

  I was starting to see Denise’s point. There came a time when you did get curious about those with whom you’d shared strong developmental tim
es. I was beginning to wonder about all the people I’d been in seminars and coffee-lines with. I hoped enough of them decided to come back to make it worthwhile.

  At 8 a.m., I closed my laptop. Intending to head through to the bathroom and have a shower, the lure of my unmade bed was too powerful. Nightmares be damned. Hilary Quinn couldn’t bother me with the sun streaming through the rice paper blind. I fell asleep almost immediately and slept without dreaming till noon.

  31.

  I awoke feeling as if I’d got away with something, and after a quick shower and a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, I felt pretty perky. After all, I’d already got half a day’s work in, so I was still on schedule.

  I opened my laptop to discover the world had conspired to fill my email inbox while I’d been sleeping in. Sherry Brownlee had sent along a list of people who had responded directly to the Alumni Association. Her cover email had been friendly, too, bordering on the point of bubbliness. I made a note to give her a call and see if there was anything I could do to make the process easier on her end of things.

  Leo had responded to my invite with enthusiasm and sent along a list of things we could do in addition to Denise’s very full schedule. Just reading it made me want to go back to bed. I added “vitamins” to my ongoing mental shopping list in order to keep up with my reunion houseguest.

  Steve had emailed to see if I’d like to catch a movie and dinner downtown. I sent back a quick “sure thing” and continued down my list. I consigned newsletters to a file to be read later, zapped shopping ad emails into the trash the same way I dumped fliers out of my mailbox into the receptacle the landlords left there for all junk mail, and responded quickly to the appointment reminders for my annual physical and yearly teeth cleaning. Pretty soon, all that was left in the inbox were a to-do list from Denise, a letter detailing all the meetings that would be required of me the first week of classes at MacEwan, and seven responses marked “U of A English reunion” as the subject.

  As I went to open the first on the list, another identically titled email pinged into my inbox. I looked at the sender. G. Larmour.

  I stared at the email, leery of opening it. Even though the response had been sent to an anonymous-sounding Alumni Association address and then forwarded to me, I felt as if somehow Guy would know to whom he was writing.

  I clicked open his email.

  Guy.larmour@rosetownu.edu

  U of A English Reunion

  I was quite frankly delighted to get the invitation in the mail last week, but haven’t had a spare moment to respond till now. I am just getting back from a sabbatical year, and everything I used to manage by rote now seems an ordeal.

  I would love to come to the U of A Homecoming. So hard to believe it has been twenty years. I want to do everything except the football game (of course) and I must get one of those famous Tuck Shop/CAB cinnamon buns.

  And I do hope there will be time set aside to connect with old friends.

  Yours in anticipation,

  Guy

  I read it through a second and a third time. I couldn’t tell whether he knew it was me he was writing to or not. Maybe he hadn’t kept close tabs on me after all. This sounded just like him being charming in the abstract. That line about connecting with old friends, though, that might be aimed at me. I wasn’t sure how many friends Guy Larmour still had in Edmonton.

  How could he even think about coming back to where I was, having gutted my thesis for his own use? Who had that much gall? Mind you, he might be thinking he was in the clear since I hadn’t challenged him in the decade he had been waltzing around as the Ahlers expert based on my research.

  Maybe he had figured I had decided not to stir anything up, given the whole sense that my work had driven Quinn to take her own life. There was some truth to that. It probably had something to do with why I had never tried to turn any part of my thesis into a publishable article. If I hadn’t been so insistent on digging for the truth, she might still be scaring grad students with her icy efficiency, just ready to retire into emeritus status about now. Or she might have risen up the ranks to become Dean of Arts. She might have even invented another writer or two, and given the world another couple of great works of literature.

  Because, when it came down to it, that was Quinn’s real legacy. As much as she had wanted to be an academic, it was her creative lens on the world she had delivered in the four books she’d written as Margaret Ahlers that were the true gift to the world.

  If I could have written even one of those books, I could have died a happy woman. I wonder if Quinn had died a happy woman.

  In fact, I wondered if Quinn was really dead, at all. Maybe it was the dream I’d had still hovering, but her suicide being so quickly dealt with combined with the thought of a new Ahlers manuscript being discovered, added to my penchant for conspiracy theories—well, it had all the markings of a Byzantine plot.

  Maybe Quinn, on her own or with the help of her trusty acolyte Guy, had managed to lure someone who looked enough like her to double for her dead into the office, and blew the stranger’s face off to avoid questions.

  Dressing the corpse in her clothing after the fact would be gruesome, but not impossible. Maybe she had offered the woman a new outfit and a shared trip to wherever she was headed. They just needed to stop off in Quinn’s office on the way, where she was planning to leave a couple of things, like a shotgun tucked into an equipment bag? I could imagine it all too well. Who would believe a well-dressed, educated woman was planning to do you harm?

  The hard part would be leaving everything that pertained to the old life: car, house, credit cards, clothing, and mementos. In this scenario, Quinn would have needed an alternate bank account and persona at the ready, so that she could just step off the earth as Hilary Quinn and show up somewhere else as a what? Roving academic? Freelance writer? Journalist?

  I wondered if there was still a file on the apparent suicide of a professor, some twenty years after the fact. If the case were open and shut, would the paperwork even still exist? Would there have been tests done? Would Quinn’s fingerprints have been on file for any reason? Who fingerprinted professors? CSIS? Were routine DNA tests done back then?

  I had a lot of questions that were going to be tough to ask without arousing a whole lot of suspicion. Thank goodness for Steve. If I had to break my silence about the works of Margaret Ahlers to one person, I was glad it had been him. If there was one person in the universe I could trust, it was Steve Browning.

  Resolved, I worked my way through the rest of the RSVPs and sent off a note to Sherry Brownlee to see if she wanted to meet for lunch in the next couple of days. By the time I was through populating Denise’s chart for yeses and nos, I had an enthusiastic response from Sherry and a lunch date for the next day.

  I tidied up the apartment and had a quick shower before dressing for my date with Steve. It was still warm enough eat on outdoor patios for another month, but cinemas were notorious for being icily air-conditioned, and I would shiver through whatever show it was Steve had his heart set on if I didn’t plan appropriately.

  I was just braiding my hair back when I heard the knocking at the door.

  “It’s open,” I called from the bedroom door, and Steve let himself in, ready to launch into one of his diatribes about me and locks. “I just unlocked it this minute,” I fibbed, “because I was going to have my hands full of braid and didn’t want you waiting. I’ll be ready in a minute.” I went back into my bathroom for an elastic and last look.

  I’d do. I was dressed in a peach and blue cotton blouse tucked into freshly washed blue jeans, the kind without holes or bling or bizarre lines of fading. I had laid out a peach cardigan, which I grabbed off the bed on my way back out into the living room.

  Steve hadn’t bothered to take off his boots, and was standing at ease in the doorway corner of the room. I tilted up for a kiss and he obliged. I closed my eyes for a moment and drank in the warm, clean, safe smell of my man. Things would be all right. I would
find a way to lay out all my fears and possibilities, and Steve would find a way to disprove the worst of them and help me through the rest.

  “Shall we head right to the cinema and eat at the pub beside it?” he suggested.

  “Sounds good to me,” I smiled, and after locking the several locks that made him happy, we left out the back door where his unlocked car was waiting.

  I cocked my head, and he smiled ruefully at me.

  “Do as I say, and not as I do?”

  “Right.”

  In no time at all, we were circling our way up in the City Centre parkade. While pricier than some, it was conveniently located right beside the downtown mall with the cinemas on the third floor. Also located on the third floor was a mock Irish pub called Fionn MacCool’s, a franchise that served Guinness on tap and waitresses in microkilts. We ate here quite regularly when heading to the movies, and I already knew what I wanted to order.

  “Shepherd’s pie with the house salad, and a pint of whatever your summer ale is,” I told the waitress who was at our table with large tumblers of iced water almost as soon as we’d been seated. She laughed and asked if I was sure I didn’t want to hear the specials.

  “I’ll hear the special,” Steve allowed, “but don’t get between Randy and her favourites, I’m just warning you.” The waitress rattled off a fish dish, the soup, and a sandwich platter, and then Steve calmly ordered the steak and kidney pie and a Big Rock Traditional, as he always did. She wrote down our orders dutifully and raced away.

  “You make me sound like a stick in the mud, but you always order that, too,” I complained. He laughed.

  “You have to let people do their job, Randy. It’s her job to upsell the specials, and it’s our job to listen.”