“Or maybe something spooked him.”
“Maybe.”
“Can you find out where they were?”
“What?”
“You said they’d go away for the weekend? Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“Can you find out?”
I hesitated.
“Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t, Jeffers.”
“Why not?”
“I just … I don’t want to push it.”
“It’s just a question.”
“It’s not. It’s … Jeffers, I work with Powell. Very closely. There’s a trust that actors build together. Maybe because you’re vulnerable so often or maybe because figuring out the journey means trying new things and failing spectacularly. I don’t know. But there’s safety. You tell the story together. There’s a trust. And I jeopardized that today.”
Powell had been professional since our chat and we’d even had a great discussion with the director about a moment near the end of the show where Sally tells Cliff that she’s ended her pregnancy and that he should return to America without her. But there was no banter or regular teasing. No casual conversation or friendly touches. No one else would have noticed. But I did.
“Well, since the damage is already done …” Jeffers said, trying to add some lightness to the situation. When I didn’t respond he added, “Okay, I’m sorry. I get that this is tough, but he could very well hold key information.” I stayed silent. “Samuel, we are at a dead end. Maybe it’s the Penners and maybe it’s Vince. Or, like you said, maybe it’s someone else. We have nothing solid.”
“What happened at White Oaks? Vince’s alibi?”
“According to the computer login, he arrived at the club as soon as it opened at five thirty and left at seven. There’s video of him coming and going and walking into the weight room, but once he’s in there …”
“I don’t imagine there’s coverage everywhere. My god, there’s got to be some privacy. Let people sweat in peace.”
“No, that’s not it. The cameras show a pretty clear view of the weight room at all times. We see Leduc go in, but then nothing. He vanishes.”
“What?”
“I have some guys going over the frames at an excruciatingly slow speed right now and I’m on my way back there to walk his route. Get a physical lay of the land. So you see, nothing solid. And we’re almost out of time! You need to talk to Powell!”
“Jeffers—”
“Or I’m going to have to bring him in.”
I shifted the weight of the world from one shoulder to the other and returned to the rehearsal hall. Powell and all his stuff were gone.
“Evidently, he said he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could be excused from the rest of the call. He was only scheduled for one more scene and he really didn’t have much to do in it, so his absence really didn’t put anyone out.”
We were at Paul’s place and had just finished supper. A rumble of thunder sounded outside and he got up, made sure the cat door was unlocked, and pulled a can of cat food out of a kitchen cupboard.
“You think that’s true?” he asked.
“He seemed fine to me. My instincts are telling me he’s not involved, but why would he run?”
“Being asked if you killed the person you loved can have all kinds of effects. None of them good,” he said, opening the can and spooning the food into a small bowl.
There was another round of thunder and the beginning of rain. Paul set the bowl on the floor, took a quick peek out the back window, and returned to the living room. To me. He sat with his back against the arm of the sofa and put his feet in my lap.
“Did they ask you that? When Laura …”
“Isn’t that what good police officers are supposed to do?”
“I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”
“Give him some time,” he said, “If he’s not involved, he’ll understand you were just doing your job. And if he is …”
“But it’s not my job, is it? Not really.”
He smiled and worked his feet and legs to move me closer to him. The rain was falling steadily now. The thunder was more frequent and it seemed as if the wind had picked up. I brought my lips to his and he wrapped his arms around me. My hands reached up to caress the back of his head and brushed against something cold and wet.
Brimstone was sitting on the top of the sofa, soaked through, and not happy about it.
“Don’t move,” Paul whispered.
“How did he get here? I didn’t hear a thing!”
“Shh.”
We sat in still silence as Brimstone glared, clearly holding us responsible for the rain that forced him inside and for the indignity of his current appearance. Usually majestic and fierce looking, the storm had flattened his coat to his frame revealing a skinny truth. I pursed my lips to contain a threatening giggle. Paul caught my eye and put a warning finger to his lips.
The cat was steadfast in his disdain and blame and positively oozed contempt for the both of us. The urge to giggle quickly vanished and was replaced by a fervent wish for one of the protective rubber suits the vet techs had been wearing during his recent visit to the clinic. I didn’t see how this could possibly end with me and Paul coming out of it unscathed, let alone alive. I closed my eyes and prayed for a quick death.
What we got instead was a shower of mud and wet as Brimstone shook himself with all his might. We remained still and dripping while he stalked back and forth along the sofa’s back, and when he finally, stealthily, jumped to the floor and began to walk away, I involuntarily released a whimper that earned me a parting hiss.
Paul pulled me close and we laughed gratefully, albeit quietly, sure we had just survived a near miss of the reaper’s scythe. I lay in Paul’s arms, listening to the tinkle of Brimstone’s tags against his dish. Thinking of Laura. Thinking of Paul and Laura. Thinking of how to repair things with Powell; of Jeffers and Glynn and Vince and the Penners. Of Al Macie. And of the answers that were out there, taunting us, eluding us, waiting for us.
Chapter 23
“Where have you been?” Jeffers asked, exiting his car that was sitting in my driveway.
“I was over at—how long have you been here?”
Through the passenger window, I could see Jeffers’ front seat was littered with empty remnants of takeout coffee and snacks.
“It doesn’t matter. I gotta show you something.”
Moustache danced circles on our arrival, jumping back and forth from me to Jeffers, his whole body wiggling and his mouth open in excitement. Jeffers passed the sniff test and was allowed entry into the kitchen. I was detained under an umbrella of suspicion. His nose worked up one of my pant legs and down the other without getting any satisfaction. It was like Brimstone had left just enough of a trace to drive the dog crazy but not provide any definitive answers.
“Do you have anything to eat?” Jeffers asked. I could hear him rummaging through the fridge.
“Are you kidding me?” I said, wrenching free from Moustache’s probing snout and ushering him to the back door. “Your car looks like you’ve been in a burger-tasting competition. How are you hungry?”
“That’s not all from today.”
As long as I’d known Jeffers, he’d always kept his car immaculate. A speck of dirt would think twice before falling off a shoe and onto the floor mat.
“Lately a drive is the only thing that will quiet the baby. I’ve been taking him out in the night so Aria can sleep.”
He pulled a plastic container from the fridge, smelled its contents, and made a face.
“It’s curry,” I said.
“Doesn’t smell like curry. It smells like … I don’t know what. Not curry. Are those …”
“Raisins.”
“In curry?”
“Give me that,” I said, taking the container and replacing the lid. It was my lunch for the following day. “Here,” I said, tossing
Jeffers a loaf of bread and some fixings.
He set about making a sandwich while I put the kettle on. Moustache scratched furiously at the back door as if every raindrop that fell onto his fur was a flaming poison arrow. He darted into the house, tolerated a once-over with a towel, and reattached his nose to my pants. I pulled a rawhide strip out of the cupboard and held it out for him. Normally, he would have snatched it and run out of the room to chew it in privacy, but today he was hell-bent on decoding whatever message Brimstone had left. It seemed the cat had woven quite a mystery. An amazing feat given that I’d had virtually no contact with the fiend. But I supposed the reach of evil could extend far beyond what one could imagine. I threw the rawhide, hoping a little play might entice Moustache away from me. He didn’t budge.
“What did you want to show me?”
“It would seem,” Jeffers said, holding his sandwich in one hand and operating his laptop with the other, “that our dear Mr. Leduc was not where he claimed to be on the morning of the murder.”
“What? I thought the surveillance video showed him at White Oaks?”
“It does. It shows him arriving at five thirty and walking into the weight room, and it shows him exiting out a back door at approximately five forty-five.”
Jeffers played the video and there, clear as day, was Vincent Leduc talking briefly with a man using a leg press before heading toward the towel rack in the back. Then I lost him.
“There,” Jeffers said, pointing at the screen. I could barely make him out through the grid of machines and the rising and falling of arms and legs, not to mention the distance. Jeffers pointed again. I watched Leduc put his water bottle and towel on the floor next to a rack of free weights then use a nearby wall to brace himself while he stretched out his quads. There was a door next to where he was stretching, and he inched closer and closer to it so that when it was time for him to switch legs, all he had to do was apply a little pressure on the push bar. The door opened a crack and he was gone.
My jaw dropped and I looked to Jeffers.
“That door opens to a staircase that leads down to maintenance closet and to an outdoor access,” Jeffers said. “I don’t know if he propped the door open or what, but he returns about an hour later, collects his things and leaves.”
“Would he have had time to get to the school? To kill Al? And what about Ellie? She was there around the same time?”
“It’s fifteen minutes to the school, give or take. Remember how Ellie said Macie wouldn’t let her in the office? Spoke to her from the doorway?”
“Which means Vince could have been inside and Ellie never would have known.”
“He would have had a half an hour.”
“That’s not a lot of time,” I said. “And to be fair, we don’t even know if that’s where he went.”
“No, we don’t. But we know he went somewhere. And he lied to us about it.”
“Can you play it again?” I asked. Jeffers restarted the video. “Pause it there.” Vincent Leduc froze midstride on his way to the weight room. “I know the footage is black and white, but check out his shorts. Any chance they could be the blue we’re looking for?”
“There’s always a chance, Samuel. Unfortunately, there’s no way of telling. Can’t extract colour from black-and-white digital images.”
“They don’t look black or white to me.”
“To me either. Looks like Leduc has more than just his whereabouts to answer for.”
“Do you really think this Vince guy could have done it?” Natalie asked over the phone after Jeffers had eaten me out of house and home and finally left.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything anymore. This case has Jeffers and me going around in circles.”
I plopped down on the sofa with a glass of wine and pulled a blanket over me. As soon as Jeffers left, I had removed my pants and thrown them onto Moustache’s chair. The dog was fully engaged and fully entangled.
“Did you find out anything more about Laura?”
“She was a vegetarian and not really into mac and cheese.”
“What?”
“Nothing. No. I haven’t really asked and he hasn’t offered.”
“Is it still driving you crazy?”
“Not really. Maybe a little.”
“Bel?”
“Okay, yes!” I confessed. “It shouldn’t! It’s a relationship that’s way in the past. She’s dead, for crying out loud! It shouldn’t matter at all!”
“So why does it?”
I shook my head and escaped into my wine glass. It was a very good question for which I didn’t have a very good answer.
“Maybe because I want him all to myself,” I conceded. “When a relationship ends, the heart eventually lets go of the other person. But when someone dies … there’s always a part of them there, you know?”
“That’s true,” Natalie said. “But, Bel, he’s with you now. And you two are making your own memories and writing your own inside jokes. There may always be a shadow of Laura, but a shadow can’t compete with you.”
“Yeah,” I said, not entirely convinced. “But how could they not find her body? I could understand if she’d been murdered. There are a million ways to dispose of a body. But you can’t do that to yourself. Can you?”
“Sure you can. Jump into a volcano.”
“Natalie—”
“What? Tell me that wouldn’t work.”
It was actually pretty genius, but highly unlikely in Laura’s case.
“Best bet is probably tying rocks around your body and throwing yourself into the water and letting nature eat away at you,” Natalie said.
Again the image of the torso sprang to mind.
“I suppose you could encase yourself in concrete,” she said. “Or—”
“Okay!”
“Google it, Bel. You can find anything on the Internet nowadays. I bet it’s not as hard as you think. Listen, why don’t you and Paul come into the city for supper? Zack would love to see you. It’s been so long. We can do dim sum!”
It had become a thing, early in our friendship, to gorge ourselves on Chinese food. Toronto’s Chinatown was a culinary paradise that was a must-visit whenever I was in the city and one that saw all of my self-control fly out the window.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for Paul to see that side of me,” I said, laughing.
“It’s all about making new memories, remember?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll check our schedules.”
“Hey,” she said. “Maybe it’s not so much circles as it is a spiral,” Natalie said.
“What?”
“You said before, you felt like you were going in circles.”
“Yeah? So?”
“With a spiral, you’re still moving in circles, gathering information, but the circles get smaller and smaller until you reach the centre.”
“Yeah, but with a spiral, it’s a common thing around which everything else swirls. I don’t think that’s the case here. All of the suspects—the Penners, Vince, Powell—there’s no relation. Except Al, I guess.”
“And maybe the person who killed him.”
“I’m not sure I understa—Oh my god, Natalie. Are you suggesting that all of the suspects know who the actual killer is and that the killer is at the centre of the spiral?”
“They may not know the killer is the killer.”
“No. But maybe he’s someone they’re all connected to in some way.”
I ran Natalie’s theory by Jeffers the next day as we made our way to the school. It was one of my teaching days and I was resentful. I wanted to be at rehearsal patching things up with Powell. Not to mention actually rehearsing. Previews were approaching quickly and while I had reached a comfortable place in my scene with Eeyore, I was feeling more and more insecure about my impending musical debut.
“I can see how Leduc and the Penners might know some of the same people, but I don’t know how Powell Avery would figure in,” Jeffers said.
&nbs
p; “That’s what’s tripping me up too. As far as I know, he has no association with the school. Vince has no connection to the hospital or Adele. And we know Armin Penner’s view of the theatre. So how can they all possibly be related?”
“Let’s not worry about that for now. Let’s first get to the bottom of Leduc’s little disappearing act and see if that clears anything up.”
Vince was in the studio arranging chairs when we arrived.
“Oh good, you’re here,” he said. His acknowledgment was brief, and he immediately returned his focus to the chairs. “There’s a Spirit Day next week and all of the classes with visiting artists have been asked to do a little showcase of sorts at the assembly. I thought we might—” Vince looked up and registered Jeffers’ presence for the first time. “Detective.”
“If you have a minute?” Jeffers said.
“I don’t actually,” Vince said. “I have a class starting in five minutes and—”
“The question was just a courtesy.”
Vince pursed his lips, pulled a chair out of his careful arrangement, and sat. He indicated that we should do the same.
“The morning Al died, you said you were working out at White Oaks.”
Vince smiled sardonically, brought his elbows to his knees, and laid his head in his hands. Eventually he met Jeffers’ gaze. He knew he’d been caught.
“You want to tell us where you really were?” Jeffers asked.
Vince took an excruciatingly long pause then, very simply, said, “Here.”
“At the school?”
“That’s right.”
“With Al?”
“Yes. Well, no, not exactly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I came here to see Al, but I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Why did I come or why didn’t I see him?”
“Both,” Jeffers and I said at the same time.
A group of girls, Ellie among them, came chattering into the room. I caught Ellie’s eye. She looked away and separated herself from the group.
“Morning, Mr. Leduc. Hi, Bella,” one of the girls called.
“Hi, Samara,” Vince said. I waved and offered a smile. “Listen, Bella and I need to finish up here. We’ll just be a minute. If you guys can get the rest of the chairs in a circle, that would be great. And maybe one of you can lead the class in a warm-up?”
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