Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  “Randy, don’t be so hard on yourself. Reunions are bad for that sort of thing—you start tensing up to compare yourself to everyone you weren’t even thinking about for years, as if their consideration of you will make or break your own stature in the world.”

  “Well, in the grand scheme of things, I have not cured cancer or written the great Canadian novel,” I said, feeling worse.

  Steve smiled. “But you have taught diligently, and worked to your max on every project you signed on for, and kept up with your rent and paid your taxes and sustained some great friendships and read some fantastic books and watched some exciting movies and played and listened to some fabulous music. On the whole, aside from refining cold fusion, what else could you want?”

  I smiled at him. “When you put it that way, where the heck is my Order of Canada?”

  “Are we staying for dessert?” asked Steve.

  “Not with this reunion looming. No sirree, I am moving into diet mode starting tomorrow. If I am not going to be the most successful, I will settle for the most recognizable.”

  “That’s the spirit,” laughed Steve. “By the way, am I invited to this reunion? Can significant others attend?”

  “Do you want to? I would love to parade you around on my arm. That would ease the lack of published articles and security completely.”

  “Get me a name tag, and I am yours.”

  “I love you, Steve Browning.”

  “Mutual, I’m sure.”

  Steve drove us to his condo overlooking the river valley and we proved it to each other. There is nothing better than feeding a steak to a red-blooded Canadian man. I am just saying.

  I spent a lazy morning drinking coffee on his balcony before finally hauling myself back down Saskatchewan Drive and into my little apartment. The sun was making everything sparkle, including the dust motes. I did a quick whip around with a damp cloth, and then changed into shorts and a tank top so that I could wash the clothes I’d been wearing for a second day along with my bedding and towels.

  Clean sheets, fresh scents, and open windows made me feel as if I could once again tackle the chores that had seemed too much the day before. I sat down with a glass of iced tea to check my email.

  “Coming to the Reunion” was the subject line I was hoping for, and there were ten of them. I copied and pasted their names into the database Sherry Brownlee had provided. Things were beginning to look promising.

  As I looked at the list, the majority of names dimmed and one stood out in harsh, strong print. Guy Larmour. My mouth went dry. This was not going to be a cakewalk.

  He really was coming, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  33.

  The weeks that followed were a blur of activity and stress. School began, with all the kerfuffle of room changes due to class size expansion, and the ensuing need to run off more copies of the syllabus, order more books in a rush at the bookstore, and discover that there was very little chance of making it to my second class on Tuesday/Thursdays on time unless I deked out the side door in building five, and ran outside to building eight. That was going to be fun in January.

  Denise, who was also starting classes across the river, had got very demanding about the reunion, wanting updates every evening on whether anyone else had responded to our invitation. We had to get thirty to qualify for a timeslot in the alumni tent on the quad, or some such, and she was apparently trying to will the last few people to RSVP with the power of her mind.

  My review copy of Seven Bird Saga had arrived in the mail, which was just as well, since my having started a bogus book blog in order to get it was getting on my nerves. People were suddenly linking to it, commenting on the few reviews I had put up, arguing with each other, and I’d received a variety of come-ons to link to a series of other blogs, join a consortium of book sites, and nominate my site for a Webby award.

  On the plus side, I lost eight pounds without trying.

  Steve was busy, too, with changes being made to the roadways and bike lanes and bar closures in Old Strathcona, so we didn’t see all that much of each other through the week. I already had marking the second weekend of classes, and was considering letting it stretch out, but we were planning to take in the Edmonton Expo the following Saturday, so I dutifully stayed home, when I so much would rather have been biking the river valley trails.

  It was a crime in Edmonton to squander good weather, especially as we moved toward our long, cold winter season. Once the leaves began to turn, every nice day felt like a gift. I compromised by pulling on capris instead of jeans and opening all the windows in the apartment.

  By 5:30 p.m. on Sunday I had graded three piles of introductory essays, sorted and flagged notes for my lectures for the entire week ahead, packed my satchel for hauling to class, checked my email for reunion responses, sent off two more welcome packages, and updated Denise’s list to twenty-eight.

  I made myself a plate of nibblies rather than a big meal: olives, crunchy baby dills, cherry tomatoes, pretzel Goldfish crackers, and little squares of Swiss cheese. Setting it on the coffee table, I allowed myself to curl up on the loveseat with the newly discovered Ahlers book.

  I’d already pored over the cover notes and preface to the book. There was nothing that really spoke to the discovery of the manuscript. Someone was being coy, but I couldn’t tell from parsing the language whether it was the publishing house or not. Maybe they didn’t have the answers either. All they were saying was that the new manuscript had been discovered and while it was impossible to ascertain where in the oeuvre of the late writer’s work it should sit, scholars had determined tentatively that it was a later work, rather than an early, unpublished manuscript assigned to a bottom drawer.

  I was wondering how they could tell such a thing, and just who those scholars were. It had never occurred to me that it might be an early attempt. Maybe Quinn had not found a publisher for her first try, and shelved this one. Or maybe it was on another floppy disc I hadn’t found when going through her office that fateful time. Maybe Guy had nabbed it, even before inviting me to check out the place. Or maybe he or someone else in the know had forged this manuscript, hoping to cash in on the nostalgia wave that was sweeping Canadian literature. New editions of Morley Callaghan, Farley Mowat, and Mavis Gallant were showing up in Chapters, on a chirpy “homegrown” table. That could have been the impulse to retool Margaret Ahlers for a new generation.

  Or maybe it was really a lost work by a dead Canadian writer who had been used and killed by Hilary Quinn, my former thesis advisor. Maybe Quinn had bamboozled me, to keep me from fingering her for murder. At this stage of the game, I was willing to believe anything. None of it made sense to me.

  If I had the wit and talent to write the four novels I’d cherished and enshrined in my thesis, I would have stood proudly and owned up to them. Quinn’s admission to me that it had been an exercise entirely created to give her fodder for scholarship was just too hard to understand, and if I, who aspired to be part of the world of academe couldn’t buy it, then how could I expect the rest of the world—who celebrated and celebritized writers and artists—to believe me?

  I stared at the cover, featuring a photo of seven magpies strutting in a sunny glade. The focus was on the birds, and the green of the leaves on the tree above them shaded out into a blur on the white cover. Only the faintest hint of iridescence could be seen in their black feathers, and the title and author name were the same black, printed above and below the photo. I wonder what it said about the publisher’s hopes for the book that the title went above the image, and Margaret Ahlers was in decidedly smaller print below. Added to the fact that the newly discovered work by a Canadian icon was being brought out in trade paperback rather than hardcover, it made me worry about the Canadian publishing industry as a whole. Well, the publishing industry for fiction. There were probably more than enough readers for self-help and investment, leadership, or organizational principles tomes. And e-books were hot, too, unless everyone I saw were wat
ching movies on their phones and tablets on the bus. Maybe soon no one would be published first in hardcover ever again.

  Whatever the case, the book was in my hands, and the moment had come. I smoothed back the crease of the first flyleaf page and noted the publication information. There was something exciting about reading a book a month before the publication date listed, as if you’re on the A-list of invites, rather than being part of the catering staff.

  The dedication page was next. In italics, it said: To H, for everything I am. Whoever was responsible knew of the ties to Quinn, obviously. Unless someone was trying to make out that Ahlers was a heroin addict. I chuckled, in spite of myself. I was making way too much out of this. I turned the next two pages, one of which was blank and the next had a huge Roman numeral I on it, and suddenly I was face to face with the words. Words from a dead woman? An imposter? A copycat imposter?

  We would see.

  34.

  Around 8:30, I had to stand up to turn on a lamp and draw the blinds. I took the time to go to the bathroom and make a pot of tea, but I didn’t put the book down for either of those chores.

  By 11 p.m., I was finished.

  I put the book down on the table in front of me, next to the plate of crumbs of cheese and pickle juice. I wasn’t sure whether I was happy or sad or in some parallel universe. Maybe I wasn’t completely out of the world of the book yet.

  It sure felt like an Ahlers story, whoever had written it.

  There were differences from the first four books. For one thing, there was no solid female protagonist in this one, let alone one with a first name beginning with a vowel. The story revolved around a view from a window, and it wasn’t completely clear whether it was the same window at different times, with different people sitting at the desk, or whether it was the same time, and view, but from different vantage points in the same building. Each of the seven sections of the book began with the same paragraph, describing the magpies on the lawn, but in the first section a man named Martin gazed out at the scene without taking it in, worried as he was about his wife’s pre-eclampsia and hospitalization. The next section had Tomas observing the birds and wondering whether they were picking at something that had died, and musing on the scavenger nature of magpies before taking a phone call that changed his life for the better.

  Walt saw the birds, but his attention was drawn to the woman jogging along the path beyond. He was trying to come to terms with the fact that his daughter was about to marry a jerk. Interestingly, the jerk sounded a lot like Terry, who was the character in the next section. He was looking at porn on his phone, so that it wouldn’t be flagged on the company mainframe, and not noticing the birds at all.

  Fran was a cleaner, or maybe she was packing the office. It was not clear which, because her section involved a long memory triggered by the birds of finding the dead body of a cow in the back forty with her brothers. They had tossed stones at the bloated corpse, hoping to see it explode. Instead, they had dislodged a swarm of crows who flew at them like a murderous thundercloud.

  Sam was logging the movements of the birds, and apparently had banded the legs of a bunch of magpies the year before. His work was being called into question and he was hoping for results that would astound his committee. It wasn’t clear whether he was an MA or PhD student, or whether his work was in zoology or some sort of computer synthetic gaming work.

  The final section, devoted to a boy called Simon, was almost dizzying in its lists. He seemed to be autistic or some sort of odd savant. The view outside the window went from the now-familiar bird paragraph into a detailing of every tree, horizon, car, and jogger. The vision moved to the inner walls of the office where he had been placed to wait for his mother, and each was clinically listed, until he returned to the window, having rotated on the office chair 90 degrees each time.

  It was a disquieting novel, if one could even call it a novel. The dissonance of thought, as shown by the seven different interpretations of the natural scene outside the window, was a strong theme. Of course, it was hard to tell whether they were all seeing the same birds, or whether it was meant to be a continuum of thought, with each new generation or iteration of people unable to build on what had come before.

  I wasn’t certain what to make of it. It didn’t pull me in the way the other books had. If this had been my first exposure to Margaret Ahlers, I wasn’t sure I’d have been so ready to devote two years of my life to the study of her works.

  Did that mean it wasn’t Ahlers? Or was it early Ahlers? Or late, disillusioned Ahlers? Or was it my vision that had changed over the years? Was I still the naïve reader who had been besotted by the stories of young women setting out to conquer their worlds? Did novels have to feature women for me to treasure them, clearly mirroring my life in some way back to me? I hoped I wasn’t going to be turning into some reverse snob in my dotage.

  It was late and I had a headache from the concerted reading I’d been doing. I picked up my dirty plate and took it to the sink before padding off to bed. I needed to be lively enough to engage first-year students in the art of the short story the next morning. The puzzle of the new Ahlers could wait.

  My dreams were muddled and confusing, and all I remembered from them as I showered the next morning was that they had been monotonously work-oriented. As a result, I felt tired from the effort. What a great way to start a new week. I splashed toner on my face before my moisturizer, to try to tingle me awake.

  I had time for a proper breakfast, thanks to my marginal work schedule. I had only one class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which didn’t start till 11 a.m. I had scheduled my office hours for the hour after that, which supposedly worked for my Tuesday/Thursday students, as well. Them I saw from 11-12:20 and then from 12:30-1:50.

  Taking advantage of my morning at home, I made toast and eggs, brewed half a pot of coffee and read a couple of news sites on my laptop. I then washed up, and got ready to leave the house. At the last minute, I stuck the Ahlers into my satchel.

  I had planned to walk each day to Grant MacEwan University, across the High Level Bridge and down 109th Street to the corner of 104th Avenue, where the compact university stretched along the former CN railway yards corridor. It seemed, though, like just too much effort for that morning, so I instead popped across the street to catch a downtown bus. The rush hour had abated, and I managed to sit all the way to City Centre Mall. I got off there and zigzagged the few blocks west to the east end of the pedway-connected college.

  Construction on the arena and the myriad tentacles that seemed to stretch in every direction had pretty much made 104th Avenue impassable, and as a result, the traffic both on wheels and on foot along 103rd was more than the narrow sidewalks could bear. Buildings laid claim to land right where the sidewalk ended, and if you were passing someone using up too much space, you risked scraping your arm on the bricks beside you.

  Panhandlers chased from Jasper Avenue by vigilant peace officers leaned out of doorways, and some were a little bit crazier or more aggressive than I was comfortable with. I tended to skirt the very edge of the sidewalk as I headed to the college, willing to risk a dash into a busy street if necessary.

  As a result of my brisk avoidance striding, I made it to the college ten minutes earlier than I’d estimated. I stopped in the cafeteria area to line up for a cup of coffee. There was a coffee pot made in the English Department staff room, an all-purpose storage and photocopying room behind the secretary’s desk, but you had to pay in five dollars a month to be part of the coffee crowd, and I had never had the ready cash at the right time for things like that. I had to forage for myself for coffee and lottery tickets. Not that I had ever been anywhere where a group of lottery players had struck it big. That reminded me that I had a 6/49 ticket stuck to my bulletin board at home from my parents’ birthday card. One of these days, I had to check those numbers.

  Coffee in hand, I took the stairs to the English offices on the second floor. The glass elevators scared me, mostly because
I thought the only thing worse than being stuck in a box would be to be stuck in a box where people could see you panicked and stuck in a box. The stairs, polished granite and open, wound their way around the elevator. They were harder to climb now that I had progressive lenses to deal with, and my focus would waver between the stair and the space beyond.

  I’d gone back to see Myra McCorquodale several months after she’d first prescribed me glasses, and at her suggestion I’d opted for invisible trifocals. I rather liked wearing them, since grit from the roads no longer blew into my eyes on windy days, and I fancied my mock-turtle frames made me look dashing and artistic like some female Raymond Chandler. I couldn’t carry off bigger-statement glasses like Sophia Loren or Nana Mouskouri, and there didn’t seem to be any other female glasses-wearing icons to emulate. The journalist Alan Kellogg had already cornered the James Joyce look here in town, so I had to be content with an ex-pat thriller writer.

  My office was moderately close to the main department office, and closer to a washroom, suiting me perfectly. Fulltime staff had the furthest offices, as if they were older and more dependable and didn’t need watching over. They also had offices to themselves. We sessional folks had to share office space and time. There were three of us in this space, which also held two small desks, a large bookcase, four chairs, one telephone, two garbage containers, one blue box for recycling, a huge rhododendron on the windowsill, and two desktop computers.

  I had yet to meet the third member of the office, Peter Snaring, who apparently taught one evening and one Saturday morning class. Wendy Parrot, who owned the rhododendron, taught Tuesday/Thursdays at 8 a.m. and 12:30 and Monday evenings. She had her office hours during my 9:30 class times and whirled in to drop her notes off at about the same time I was finished teaching my 12:30 class. I never saw her on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, though I sometimes had to shoo away students looking for her on those days.