Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  Just then our server returned with our pints and cutlery rolled tight in dark cloth napkins. Steve took a long swig of his beer and sighed.

  “Now that hits the spot. What a tiresome day.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really. The bits I could talk about are tedious, and I would just rather shake them off. What about you? How was your day?”

  I told him about having a nightmare and then heading back to bed for a morning nap. He looked mildly concerned. I knew why. It certainly wasn’t my normal way of conducting a day. I rarely napped, and almost never had nightmares. In fact, I could rarely even recall a dream. This nightmare still was so vivid that I could describe the sensations as well as the timing of every moment to Steve.

  “Spooky. So what do you think brought that on? Something to do with this fellow stealing your research? Or were you eating pepperoni before bedtime?”

  I told him about Guy’s email, stating he’d be coming to Homecoming.

  “And you think he was part of the hoax that Quinn had perpetrated?”

  “That’s what I can’t be sure of. He certainly doesn’t intimate anything of the kind in his book, and now that he’s set out his shingle as an Ahlers scholar, he has a vested interest in not revealing the secret, if he knows it.”

  We ordered another round of drinks, but decided against dessert. Popcorn would be enough. I checked my watch against the movie times I could read from our vantage across the atrium from the cinema. We had time. I took a deep breath and hoped I didn’t sound too stupid to the man I loved.

  “So it occurred to me that Quinn might have faked her death, by killing someone else who fit her basic body description. Would that be possible?”

  Steve frowned. “It would be hard to determine one way or another after twenty years, but I would say it would be difficult on a variety of levels.”

  “But not impossible?”

  “Nothing is impossible, I guess. Hard to prove, though. Think about it. She would have to find someone, within twenty-four hours of talking to you, who matched her general build, and had no one especially looking for her. She had to lure her up to her office on some pretext, pull a shotgun out and shoot her, and then strip her and dress her, all without messing with the blood spatter and shifting residue. Then she would have to disappear effectively.”

  “I know. It sounds like a Liam Neeson film—almost doable, but doubtful.”

  Steve laughed. “Well, it would answer the question of who has penned the new Ahlers book, so we have to consider it a possibility.”

  “I wish we could get our hands on a copy of that book,” I mused.

  “When is it coming out?”

  “Supposedly for Christmas, so by book standards, that means October.”

  “Is there any way you could write to the publishers as a potential reviewer? Don’t they send out review copies willy-nilly to anyone with a blog these days?”

  I looked at Steve with admiration. “That’s not a bad idea, at all. I will try to get a copy, and we can compare it to the previous books. It’s obviously close enough to the original books to fool her publisher, but would they have read them so deeply as someone researching them for an academic response?”

  Steve nodded. “You check that out first, and then we will figure out if we need to be pulling cold cases out of storage. And in the meantime, I will pay up here and we can just make the movie, if you’re still in a mood to sit in the dark with a man who loves you?”

  “Well, since you put it that way, I just have one question. Can I pour M & Ms into the popcorn?”

  32.

  It was surprisingly easy to get a copy of Seven Bird Saga. I had logged into a free blogging site and crafted a book review blog, tossing a few recent reads up there, before sending in my request. I got a return acknowledgment almost immediately, with an offer to package two others of their new releases into the parcel. On the principle that free books are free books, I agreed.

  Meanwhile, my lunch with Sherry Brownlee of the Alumni Association had been very pleasant. She had taken me to the Faculty Club, a place I loved. Their food was the best in town, and you could eat either casually at the buffet downstairs, in the patio during the summer, or upstairs in a more refined and sumptuous manner. I had attended several weddings there, and been invited to a couple of open meetings of the Canadian Federation of University Women, who met to fund bursaries for young women graduate students and to continue to enhance their own learning through a program of fascinating guest speakers.

  “You should consider becoming an Associate Member of the Faculty Club, Randy,” urged Sherry. “The monthly dues are really nominal, and the benefits are pretty luxe.”

  “No one is going to look askance at a lowly sessional from another institution coming to drink or dine?” I wondered.

  “Pah! You have a graduate degree from here, you have taught here in the past and possibly will again—why wouldn’t they want you as a member? Remind me to get you an application on the way out. I will sign the sponsor line, if you like.”

  It wasn’t as if it were a hard sell. It would be nice to have a place I could take Steve without him fighting to pay the tab once in a while, too. I nodded and took another mouthful of the amazing salmon on my plate.

  Sherry had wanted to talk logistics of our event in the context of the larger Homecoming itinerary. I was pretty sure Denise had fobbed this off on me because her style of organizing and Sherry’s didn’t meet in the middle. I didn’t mind at all. Sherry was a listmaker, and that was all it took to sell me.

  We went through the all-invite general events first. In return for putting us into the programming, and setting aside room for our meet and greet wine and cheese in the Old Arts building rotunda, we were obliged to steer our attendees to the various events Sherry and her small but mighty crew had set up. I didn’t think too many of our bunch were going to take in a football game at the Saville field, but I could be wrong. Who knew what happened to people over the course of twenty years? Maybe some English major had moved to Alabama and married into a “Roll Tide” sort of family. Stranger things had happened.

  I dutifully wrote down the football game times, and agreed to stuff our “delegate pouches” with information on campus tours, talks from two Olympians, the Animal Planet bat guy and a nuclear physicist, the times when the Tuck Shop tent would be open selling their famous cinnamon buns and tickets to the LGBTQ poetry reading at Alumni House.

  That would likely be of interest to our gang, I figured, both as a literary evening, and as an indication of how far the university had come in inclusiveness over the years. We were still dealing with overt misogyny when I’d been enrolled. I had no concept of how marginalized students had managed prior to the embracing of Queer Studies. Twenty years ago, Hilary Quinn had still been able to fend off interest in her activities by pretending to be a lesbian at the lake. Maybe we really had come a long way, baby.

  True to her word, Sherry stopped us by the manager’s office on the way out of the Faculty Club to pick up and sign her sponsorship of my becoming an Associate Member. I was assured that my various cards and paperwork would arrive in the mail, but that I was to consider myself a member immediately. With old-world charm, the manager shook my hand solemnly and welcomed me to the Club.

  As we walked out into the late summer afternoon, Sherry giggled.

  “It feels like you should be heading to your courses in academic robes after that, doesn’t it? Well, there is something to be said for upholding traditions.” I walked with her back through the winding road toward Assiniboia Hall, the first of the three original buildings along the west quad. Athabasca Hall, in the middle, was where Alumni Services was housed. Pembina Hall, the closest to the Students Union Building, had been a female residence hall, and in fact had been where my mother and her friend Gloria had roomed when they had been U of A Juanitas.

  Sherry waved me off, and I set out across the quad to wend my way through the alleyways between Cameron Libr
ary and the Power Plant, around Rutherford Library and HUB and across the residential blocks toward my own wee apartment building. It was a fair hike, and I found myself wondering just how many calories I could burn off by walking to and from the Faculty Club for dinner once a week. There was no way I’d be able to afford more than that. Still, it would make a nice way to treat Steve and occasionally Denise, who had never felt the need to become a member.

  My apartment looked rather uninviting, with its piles of paper on both my coffee table and desk. I grabbed some files from the bottom drawer of my desk, and set to trying to bring order to the reunion papers before they got lost amid my class notes for the fall term.

  It was five o’clock before I knew it, and all I had to show for it were two piles of filing folders, neatly labelled. Paperwork is so underrated as labour. I pushed myself away from my desk, and set the reunion files into a clear dish tub, my travelling filing system. The class notes could stay on my desk.

  Steve would be here soon, and I wanted to get a fresh perspective on the whole Ahlers situation. Having not revealed all to Denise, it felt even more imperative to talk with Steve, who knew everything. Well, everything except how deep my relationship with Guy had felt. And knowing Steve, he had probably intuited most of that.

  I changed out of my buttoned-down look and pulled a Ralph Lauren peasant blouse over my head, one of my great Value Village finds. Steve was going to be wanting to eat somewhere a little more upmarket than Swiss Chalet, given he’d been talking steak for the last three messages. Luckily, there were very few places in Edmonton that required you to dress as fancy as an Arcade Fire concert to eat. They didn’t call the full denim look the Alberta Tuxedo for nothing.

  Steve and I drove out west to the Sawmill, one of the last of the great steak and salad bar restaurant chains in Edmonton. I opted for the prime rib and busied myself with the salad bar, while Steve reveled in the “baked potato with everything” lazy Susan.

  “This is the sort of meal I used to have when my parents would take us out for dinner. Everyone used to bring out the sour cream and chives and bacon bits. Somewhere there is a whole mountain of these swivel servers.” I laughed, thinking of them lying somewhere with a Smaug-like dragon guarding them, though it would more likely be a junkyard dog.

  “Everything is shifting and changing, that’s for sure.”

  Steve looked at me quizzically. Maybe I’d let more anxiety out in my voice than I’d realized. “Something happen today?”

  I shrugged. “I went to see the coordinator for the Homecoming weekend. She was rattling off things for our alumni to attend, and it got me thinking just how much campus has changed since we were all there. How much the world has changed, really. You know, things would have turned out so much differently, if all that had happened today.”

  “Like how?” Steve was working on his steak, steadily cutting bite-sized pieces and swirling them in the juice on the plate before popping them in his mouth.

  “Well, if Dr. Quinn had owned a laser printer, it wouldn’t have taken me forever to print the last manuscript. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so overtired when I wrote my last chapter, and she wouldn’t have caught me out.”

  “Well, if she hadn’t been using carbon paper, you wouldn’t even have known there was a fourth book. Heck, if she’d had better windows installed in her cabin, you wouldn’t even know she wasn’t two people.”

  I leaned forward, careful not to get the tassels at the neck of my shirt into my Yorkshire pudding. “Do you think it was my fault? I do. That’s why I have kept her secret till now, as some sort of penance. I didn’t even tell Guy what she confessed to me at the end. As far as he knew, she killed herself because she’d been caught out for killing her novelist lover, and the only reason we didn’t trumpet that fact was that we’d have had to admit to breaking and entering.”

  “But you think she killed herself because her life was no longer worth living once she had admitted her fraud to her graduate student.”

  “Well, yes. Although spoken out loud like that, it does sound sort of small.”

  “And you’ve been beating yourself up about this for twenty years?”

  I shrugged again. “Give or take. It’s not like I think about it all the time. Every once in a while I have a nightmare.”

  “That is why Guy figured he could get away with stealing your research, and probably how he did. You have avoided discussing your thesis, or talking about Margaret Ahlers because it is too painful to think about Quinn’s death and your part in it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Amateur Psychologist. It could also be that I have backed away from my thesis work because of the whole lack of support for remaining in academe. Maybe it’s one of those ‘you can’t reject me if I reject you first’ sorts of things?”

  “You think you are being rejected from academe?”

  “Ejected, more like. I got assigned more classes twelve years ago than I get now, when I actually know more about both theory and teaching. In fact, there is a stricture against giving sessionals more than a certain number of classes, so there is really no way to earn a living wage teaching anymore, unless you can patchwork together a term from more than one institution. This may indeed be my last year butting my head against the ivory tower.”

  “Really? What will you do instead?”

  I pushed Yorkshire pudding around my plate, swirling it in the gravy. “I don’t know. Maybe I could get a government job.”

  Steve raised his eyebrows, Groucho-style. “Wow, that would be a change.”

  “I need to feel as if I am doing something that is valued,” I said slowly, hearing my thoughts clearly as I spoke. “It’s not enough to keep shoring myself up with the thoughts that delivering an understanding and appreciation of literature and the means to critically speak of ideas are useful gifts to society. I go in front of recalcitrant youth who are all staring at email on their laptops rather than taking notes, or hauling up crappy notes and facts off their smartphones to toss at me in the form of arguments. At a staff meeting, it was suggested we walk behind the students, to keep them on the straight and narrow, but I don’t have the heart to do that. Besides, I like to write things on the white board up front. I can’t be policing them at the same time as I am supposedly feeding their souls.”

  Steve looked sympathetic, which was all it took to open the floodgates.

  “If the institution took me seriously, well, all sessionals, but I’m talking from a personal focus here, then maybe it would bolster me up to go in there day after day. But we are just cannon fodder, covering the compulsory courses that all the students have to take. We are a dime a dozen, and completely replaceable with any other MA or PhD who didn’t land a tenure-track job. English departments survive on the required courses that other programs make their students take, and yet the people hired to teach the very courses that keep them relevant are treated like drones.”

  “You are sounding burned out.”

  I nodded. “I really think I am. The whole time I was landing other jobs, like the contract work for researching and writing the websites, or the short stint teaching for the summer camp, I was pining for the classroom. But this last year back in the classroom has changed me. I am really not looking forward to starting classes next month.”

  “It’s sooner than that, you know. August is into its second half now.”

  I sighed. “I know. You don’t need to remind me. Denise is so annoyed that we are not hearing back from reunion people already. I could have predicted that English majors would leave it all to the last minute, though.”

  “Have you heard back from anyone?”

  “Comparatively, I would say loads.”

  “What does that mean in real people numbers?”

  “Eight.”

  Steve laughed so loudly that several other tables of people looked over at us. “Eight people are coming?”

  “No. Eight people have responded. Three of them are actually coming.”

  He laughed again. “And
how many people were invited?”

  “About one hundred and seven. You have to realize, we pulled it down severely as we went, to people who would have met and known each other in the halls. So we have everyone who graduated with a PhD, MA or BA Honours in English that year. There are all sorts of other folks who were around, but at a different point in their program.”

  “And of those hundred and seven, eight have responded and three of them will come. That leaves you with ninety-nine yet to hear from in the next month?”

  “I think the Alumni office wants people registered by the end of August, to be able to send out name tags and such, but Denise has told me she’ll hang on till the week before Alumni Weekend, before putting in final orders to the caterer.”

  I thought it was utterly brilliant that Denise had managed to snag the old Graduate Lounge for our mixer soirée. People were allowed to spill out into the lobby area. The general office would be closed, as would most of the offices and classrooms in the Humanities Building, but with a liquor licence and dispensation from the Dean of Arts, we were going to serve beer, wine, and canapés at our mix and mingle event on the Thursday evening.

  “Who has responded?”

  “Leo Durochers, whom you met, come to think of it. He was still around while I was teaching and had my office in the House.”

  “Leo, the flamboyant fellow with the blond tips and Gatsby scarves?”

  I smiled. “That’s the one!”

  “He seemed solid,” Steve nodded. “Who else?”

  “Lyle Weis, who is now a kids’ author and living in the south end of the province. I think he might still have some family up here, so that makes it more of a draw for him. And someone named Bill Rankin, who I cannot remember at all, though Denise says she does.”

  “Maybe reconnecting with all these folks will re-inspire you in terms of teaching?”

  “More likely I will see that they’re all tenured professors or went on to become lawyers or writers, and I’ve been spinning my wheels this whole time.”