Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  “I think Iain and the crew are way ahead of you on that one, Randy.”

  “I should have said something then, shouldn’t I? If I had come forward about Quinn’s hoax, maybe none of this would have happened. She might even still be alive.”

  “You can’t readjust the lens like that. You have no idea how events would have played out.”

  “Actions have consequences, and inaction does too.”

  “And sometimes fate takes a hand. If Hilary Quinn was willing to move outside the way things are done, taking what seemed to her to be a shortcut to success, then she was probably prepared for the consequences of those choices.”

  “Do you think people are ever prepared to be murdered?”

  “Once you move to the dark side, you are subconsciously prepared for anything. Your sense of morality skews to believing that everyone has the same wonky compass as you do, and therefore you are more likely to expect bad from others rather than good.”

  “That make sense, but it makes my head hurt to think about it.” I tried to smile, but reached for the morphine button instead. Steve took that as a hint, and leaned over to kiss me.

  “I’ll be back in the morning, sweetheart. You get some rest.”

  Who am I to go against police orders?

  46.

  I slept, for how long I wasn’t sure. The next thing I knew it was dark, the room lit only by the spill of light from the corridor and the buttons and numbers on the blue machine at my bedside. As I looked on drowsily, one of the numbers went out. No, only half of it went out.

  My sleepy brain computed that a hand was moving across the machine, obscuring the number from my vision. I must have made a little grunt of comprehension, because the hand stopped, and my eyes took in the complete shadow of the person beside my bed.

  There was something familiar about the outline, but I couldn’t put a name to the face, which I had a hard time making out in the dim light, anyhow. It was a woman, wearing scrubs, with a long sleeved shirt underneath. She seemed older, maybe something to do with the slope of her shoulders, or the prominence of her knuckles on the hand that was still frozen by my morphine machine.

  It wasn’t Siti, my nurse, that I could tell. Aside from the thirty more years on the clock, this person didn’t have any of the aura of a competent, nurturing caregiver. There was something off about everything.

  I searched my foggy brain for an old woman to slot into the mix. Dale Wilkie, whom I’d spoken with at the reunion party wasn’t old enough, nor could I imagine her sneaking into my room in the middle of the night.

  Dr. Bella Spanner, former chair of the department, and the person who had identified me to my would-be assassin, swam into my brain. That’s when I recalled what I had been meaning to tell Steve. Dr. Spanner had been Guy’s PhD advisor. And she would have been the connection to the literary executorship of Ahler’s will when Dr. Quinn was killed.

  Was Dr. Spanner the killer? Was she here to confess? Or kill again?

  I reached for the call button, but it wasn’t where I remembered it being. I tried to turn my head to find it, but everything was getting much foggier than I’d felt earlier in the night. I wondered if I’d pressed the morphine button by accident in my sleep.

  “So you’re awake? That is better,” the figure whispered to me. Even in my groggy state, I knew that whisper was not the voice of the woman whom I had recently heard giving a five-part Ideas series on the CBC about Thomas Pynchon and the eccentricity of creativity. Dr. Spanner wasn’t the mystery woman.

  But I knew that voice. Cold and distant and acerbic, even after all these years. And all at once I knew who was in my hospital room in the middle of the night.

  Hilary Quinn wasn’t a corpse for Iain McCorquodale to exhume. She was still alive, slightly altered. Maybe she had received some plastic surgery, maybe she had just got old. I was betting it was the former.

  I felt a bit guilty assuming a scholar like Dr. Spanner was also a cold-hearted killer. Quinn hadn’t been murdered, nor had she taken her own life. Here she was in my hospital room, making me decidedly uneasy.

  So if she had orchestrated her own disappearance all those years ago, that meant she had killed someone to take her place that night in her office, probably much as I had imagined at some point. That sort of act took planning and cool reserve.

  And she had probably killed Guy, too, if he had worked it all out, or she had run into him somewhere in his plagiarizing adventures. Maybe he had worked it all out and was trying to blackmail her to keep quiet. Or maybe I was just hallucinating all of this.

  “You’re finally putting the pieces together, Miranda? Frankly, I was surprised you hadn’t done so earlier, but then you just walked away from the whole story, didn’t you? Defended your paltry little thesis and let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Seven for a story never told,” I whispered. It was hard to speak, and I realized that Quinn’s hand had been monkeying with my morphine drip. I was getting too big a dose. Her hand wrapped around the button dispenser and pressed again.

  “Yes, well, times being what they are, a lost manuscript can bring a little ready money into the estate. I might as well fill you in, as you head into the arms of Morpheus.”

  This wasn’t a morphine nightmare. My former advisor, whom I had thought dead for twenty years, was totally alive and in my hospital room, about to kill me. Of course, as soon my emotional brain put it that way, my logical overlay determined it had to be a morphine dream.

  “I didn’t expect your silence about the novels. My plan had been to create the suicide scenario to leave you with everything tied up in a bow. Penitent ghostwriter of books of a fictional author, sacrifices herself for the sake of propriety and art, sales skyrocket, ghost of ghostwriter slinks away to spend the rest of her days beachcombing in Belize.” Her fingers busied themselves with something on the blue box on the morphine stand, but it was as if I was mesmerized, a loagy rabbit watching an oncoming snake in slow-motion horror.

  “But no, instead, you do nothing! You defend your thesis, and do nothing with it. You don’t go to a conference, you don’t give a paper, you don’t even try to get it published. My death is a nine-days’ wonder, and it isn’t until Larmour decides to cash in on lesser-known studies from back home that Margaret Ahlers surfaces at all.”

  “Guy found you out?”

  She laughed. “No, while he was writing the book he cribbed from your thesis, he tackled Bella about the proprieties of the estate, who wrote to Ahlers’ ‘cousin’ who lived in the Caribbean. McKendricks sent the royalty cheques to the university where Bella carved off the executor’s fee before shipping the rest to Ahlers’ heir apparent. With the reunion happening, he wrote to her again and she got in touch once more. I suppose she thought he was sniffing around ready to possibly kill the gravy train, as meager as it was, so she was more than willing to forward a new manuscript to the publishers that the cousin had ‘discovered’ in my papers.”

  “Seven Bird Saga,” I muttered.

  “It was something I’d been tinkering with for a while. It’s not as if I had all that much choice. Even though it’s cheap to live in the tropics, one still has to pay one’s bills. I had to do something because the royalties were drying up; no one was teaching Ahlers in their classrooms anymore, the first book was going out of print. And it’s not as if I could teach. It’s one thing to fake a passport and driver’s licence—I just kept up my late cousin’s paperwork and shifted into becoming her. It’s quite another to produce a fictional CV. So I figured I’d give in and write another book.

  “Don’t even get me started on trying to get a first book published by an unknown writer. Besides, what else is there to do when you’re hidden away in paradise? Joseph Conrad wasn’t creating a metaphor after all, you know. Idleness in a tropical stupor can drive you crazy.”

  “You weren’t working together with Guy way back when?” My voice sounded slurry and as if I was speaking from down a deep well. I hoped Lassie was off getting help.


  “While you were nosing around? No. He was a convenient distraction for you, that is all. Having a grad student trying to do research into Ahlers while I was trying to keep her background fuzzy was not an easy thing, you know.” Quinn sounded as if she were chastising me for interfering with her plans. “I was frankly as surprised as you that he turned out to be a thief. He swiped a bunch of work on Frederick Philip Grove from a foreign student who submitted the year before you did, too, by the way. If the academic police come digging, they’re going to find more to cavil about in Guy Larmour’s closet than in mine, that is certain.”

  “You killed people.”

  “Well, besides that. I am speaking of academic and creative matters. The others were necessary evils of the path I’d chosen.”

  “You killed Guy.”

  “I was doing academe a favour, believe me. And he was getting a little too nosy for my liking.”

  “And Natalie Dussault?”

  “Oh that was just kismet. She was crying in the hotel restaurant, at a table right beside mine. A couple of well-placed hints and a bit of innuendo turned her into a superb weapon. If only she’d gone for a cheese knife instead of a spork.”

  She stood at the end of my bed, and I could sense she was smiling that same tight little smile that would follow one of our uncomfortable graduate sessions.

  “There is very little left to say. You won’t be waking from the nap you’re about to take, not with the amount of morphine in you I have given you. And don’t bother looking for the call bell.”

  “I’ll scream,” I croaked. Quinn laughed.

  “We’ve been chatting away quite a while and neither of your neighbours here have noticed. I think they’re drugged, you know. Besides, vocal cords are so temperamental when narcotics are concerned. It’s as if they are the first to shut down. I’ll just leave you, shall I?”

  “But you haven’t explained it all,” I wheezed.

  “I’ve noticed that people who spend their getaway time explaining things to their victims tend to get caught more often than not. I have spent too much time living in the shadows for the last couple of decades to want to get nabbed now. It was foolish pride that kept me here to talk to you at all. Goodbye, Randy Craig.”

  She was gone, disappearing into a hospital filled with tired-looking workers in scrubs. She could get away on the LRT with no one looking at her the wiser.

  I reached for where the call bell was pinned to the sheet of my bed. It was gone. She had also pushed my table out of the way, making it impossible for me to reach anything to throw on the floor and make a sound.

  I tried to call out to the sleeping people on the other side of the curtain. My voice barely sounded like a sigh. I was going to fall asleep and die here in a hospital bed on the fifth floor of the University Hospital, where I would become just another sad statistic. And Hilary Quinn would disappear again.

  Well, if I couldn’t throw a thing on the floor, maybe I could throw myself. I took a breath, which felt ragged, and pushed myself over onto the bad shoulder. The sharp pain cut through the morphine cloud for a moment, making me gasp. This was not going to be pretty, but the alternative would be much, much worse.

  I pitched myself off the bed, bringing the morphine tower crashing down beside me, and a heartening beeping alarm began to sound from the overturned equipment. Before I passed out from the pain and the drugs, I thought I heard the sound of running feet.

  47.

  It took two days for my system to clear itself of the narcotics. Thank goodness the fall had pulled open the repairwork in my shoulder—necessitating a return to the OR, instead of just tucking me back into bed—or they might not have noticed the incipient overdose. As it was, the anesthetist took one look at the colour of my skin, tested my blood pressure, and connected the dots. They got me on naloxone, the antidote to a morphine overdose, right away, but it was several hours before I was in a state to be sedated properly for repairs.

  It was apparently also touch-and-go for a while with my respiratory system, so I wasn’t the one giving Steve the earliest news about Quinn. She was long gone and still at large, but Iain had managed to get a semi-coherent statement out of Natalie Dussault, my cutlery-wielding attempted murderer.

  An older woman at the hotel had told her about my involvement with her longtime dream date, Guy Larmour. They had managed a composite drawing of Quinn from Natalie, which ended up looking a lot more like the Quinn of my memory rather than the present-day shadowy Quinn of my hospital room.

  Quinn had apparently decided to use the crazed younger woman as a weapon against me, offering her a buffer between her actions and desires. What she hadn’t counted on was Natalie not having enough of an anatomical aim for the jugular or the sense to use a proper weapon, and the Canadian police force not killing Natalie before she could divulge her incriminating babblings.

  I wondered if my recollections of Quinn’s looks changing in the hospital had been due to the morphine. Steve wasn’t so sure, and sent the police artist to me for a second sketch. This one ended up looking like Quinn with a slightly more pronounced jaw, wider nose, and eyes slightly tilted. Whatever plastic surgeon she had used must have wondered at the choices that made her less attractive and distinctive.

  Steve took the new sketch to the airport, to pass around among the security agents and ticket folk who worked the tropical flights. She looked familiar to two or three people, one of whom had fixated why someone who actually lived in the tropics would ever want to holiday in Edmonton. Everyone’s a critic.

  While Iain and Steve were researching extradition agreements between Canada and various Central American countries, I was recuperating at home. Denise had taken Leo off to the airport, but before he left he had rearranged my spice rack, dusted the shelves in the front room and bought a huge bouquet of freesias for the kitchen table. It was a salve to the fact that I had lost the classes I was teaching at MacEwan to a replacement sessional. Oh well, it wasn’t as if the students had had time to imprint on me, like orphaned ducklings following the farm’s red setter about.

  Of course, I also had a wedding to plan, which ought to keep me busy for a year, if the emails I’d been getting from my mother were anything to go by. I had no idea she’d be this excited with our news, and it made me feel a tiny bit guilty that I’d not managed to bring her this sort of gift earlier. She and my father were thrilled I was marrying Steve, and I had a sense they were secretly more in love with him than I was, if that was possible. He had made a great impression on them the first time they had visited me, and they had been including him on the Christmas gift roster ever since.

  I was answering the third email of the day from her just as a strange email address popped up on my screen. It was from Goldwin’s, a respectable publishing house. Thinking it had to be a come on for some sort of purchase, I waited till I had finished Mom’s letter, in which she was extolling the value of creating registry lists in a country-wide chain department store, to aid everyone in purchasing wedding presents.

  The letter from Goldwin’s was written personally to me by the chief editor, Marissa Dayn. She had heard about my involvement in the works of Margaret Ahlers and understood there was a story regarding creativity, fraud, murder, and mayhem in Canadian academe that they would be interested in publishing, and I might be interested in writing. Would I be interested in taking a meeting by Skype in the next day or two to discuss her idea?

  Would I ever. If Hilary Quinn and Guy Larmour could profit from deception and blood, why shouldn’t I? It was a story I was perfectly equipped to tell. And who knows, after I got through all the research and the rewrites, if academe didn’t want me, maybe I could make my name as a crime writer.

  Stranger things had happened.

  Acknowledgments

  This has been a strange voyage, jumping back in time to an earlier book and grafting it into a whole new story. There were people then whom I thanked who are gone from this world, and a few who would be decidedly off a present list.
At the same time as this story took me back into Randy Craig’s world, I had to revisit pockets of my past I’d sewn shut so the coat would hang better. This really wasn’t the easiest of projects, but I am so much happier with this way of serving up the genesis story than with people digging up old copies of that first slender novel and judging me. Besides, it won’t fit on the same shelf with all your other pretty volumes.

  I’d like to thank the folks at Turnstone for allowing me to find a way to bring a lost story back into circulation—Jamis Paulson had a quizzical look in his eye when I proposed it, but he let me try. Sharon Caseburg, my editor, juggled the established norms of the previously crafted work with the story arc that had grown in the meantime, and kept me sane. And Michelle Palansky has championed this strange hybrid of a book to everyone who would stand still to listen. What’s more, between them, they have crafted another gorgeous book to hold, to keep, to sit in pride of place as number six, as well as number seven or perhaps number one (it’s a mystery!).

  My friends and family continue to be supportive, interesting and fun to be with. You are all intelligent and attractive. Thanks especially to Marianne Copithorne and Martina Purdon for cheering me on; Conni Massing for tackling university with me in the first place, as well as recent reminiscences about the beauty of youth; Susie Moloney and Suzanne North for commiserating on the process; Sandra Gangel and Wayne Arthurson for sharing the genre road; Candas Jane Dorsey, Timothy Anderson and Cora Taylor for being there with laughter; Dale Wilkie, Jim DeFelice and Tom Peacocke for championing me; Kate Orrell, Kelly Hewson, Alan Penty, Brad Bucknell and Marni Stanley for living it with me; Gudrun Hansen for being outside the door the day I defended my MA with a cup of coffee and a rose; Michael Rose for the hospitality whenever we blow into town; Sabra Kassongo for graciously sharing her baby for hugs and giggles; Dianna Wilk, Angela Pappas, Var Passi and Arif Kassam for keeping me centered during the workaday world; Mary Montgomery, Valerie Bock, Cheryl Fuller, Morgana Creeley, Karen Hanson, Kristie Helms, Kathryn Nettles, Jo Howard, Andrea Lobel, Howard Rheingold, Richard Lee, and Iain McCorquodale for being the best imaginary friends; Jossie and Maddy Mant for delighting me always; and the wonderful and virile Randy Williams for loving, cherishing and promoting me.