Fiona Silk Mysteries 2-Book Bundle

by Mary Jane Maffini

  “What stuff?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, people smucking you with cars, pawing through your things, following us with their license plates covered in mud, that kind of thing.”

  I kept my eyes on the road. “You mean to tell me you never thought about it?” she said.

  I shrugged, unwilling to say I’d been thinking about nothing else. I knew Josey well enough to believe that at the first opportunity, she’d be off in pursuit of evildoers with me waddling behind her. And we had enough problems.

  “Jeez,” said Josey, “I can’t believe you’re not more upset.”

  If she only knew. Cutting short her miscellaneous educational experiences would be the price for her safety. Josey would find that price too high, but it was necessary. I thought about Josey in that ramshackle cabin in the woods. Alone. Without the fugitive Uncle Mike. Or worse, with him, probably pursued by gun-toting police. And wild-eyed social workers.

  But I could make it up to her. If I ever got Cayla and Brandon off to the publisher, the advance could underwrite a little trip south in the winter. March Break, maybe. Or some other kind of France substitute. And then there was her birthday, what was I going to do about that? What a responsibility.

  “But at least we have all our new friends,” she said.

  I had a sick feeling in my stomach. For all I knew, one of our new friends was the reason why we were in the soup.

  “Especially Kostas.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, Miz Silk, before I met Kostas, I only knew how to knit and purl. I didn’t know about Fair Isle or tension or anything. I can’t believe he took all that time to teach me those complicated knitting stitches.”

  Neither could I.

  At ten o’clock, when Josey finally put down her knitting project and dropped off to sleep on the roll-out cot in my study, I crept out to use the phone. If anyone could arrange to get Josey into a safe place on short notice, it was Hélène Lamontagne.

  Moonlight filtered through the glass in the front door and scattered stripes over the walls and the phone.

  Hélène answered her phone on the second ring. “Oui, allô ?”

  “It’s me,” I whispered, “and I have a big problem.”

  “Fiona. What is it?”

  I took a deep breath. “There’s something strange going on here. It has to do with Benedict.”

  Hélène gasped. “Something else? What kind of... something?”

  “Let’s see, I’ve been hit by a car, someone broke into my house and rummaged through my things. And we’re being followed.”

  “Oh là là! Hit by a car. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I have things to do with Benedict’s ashes, but Josey’s staying at my place because old Uncle Mike is on the run from the police. He took her trip money for bail and now the old buzzard has skipped. I’m worried about her. I can’t leave her in this risky situation.”

  “But Fiona, you must be in danger too.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hélène. “Josée won’t like having her visit with you cut short. Especially after she lost her trip money. She loves it at your place.” Hélène has a soft spot for Josey and wants her to have a little bit of the good life.

  “She won’t like having her life cut short either,” I said.

  “Josée’s safety must be the most important thing, naturellement.”

  “She needs some place to stay,” I said. “If we go to the authorities, they might put her in a foster home. Sarrazin’s already been hinting at that.”

  “Oh, no!”

  It’s always so satisfying talking to Hélène. “Oh, yes. And I can’t send her to stay with Liz because...well, because.”

  “I understand.”

  Right. Hélène knows Liz.

  “And Woody is out of the question.”

  “Mon dieu.”

  “Even if Philip were home, I couldn’t ask him to do anything, let alone this.”

  “But of course.”

  “So I’m getting desperate. You read so many awful things about kids who are wards of the Crown.”

  “She can stay here.”

  I’d almost given up hope.

  “Oh, Hélène, really? What a wonderful idea. But that’s too much to ask. I mean she needs somebody who would make her go to school. Would you mind that?” My long dead aunt would have been proud of me.

  Hélène managed a ladylike snort.

  I had to laugh. “Am I laying it on too thick?”

  “Yes. But I would do the same. It will be nice to have Josée here. Jean-Claude is so busy, and with Marie-Eve away at Laval, I will enjoy her company. And I will make her go to school.”

  “What a relief. Well, maybe when all this is over, I can find some way to make it up to you.”

  “I am happy to do it. There will be nothing to make up. Unless you wanted to give us a hand with the Hospital Auxiliary Tea and Sale in October. I’m doing up a roster now.”

  Oh, couldn’t I just chew up a bit of crushed glass instead? “Sure. Absolutely.”

  “Wonderful. Let me find the right time to tell Jean-Claude about Josée. I will make the arrangements as soon as possible, and I’ll call you. Tomorrow morning I hope.”

  Tomorrow would be fine. More than fine. And October seemed safely in the distance.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said.

  “Pas de problème.”

  When I hung up, I jumped at the shadow which moved behind me.

  Josey’s eyes were slate-coloured in the darkness. For once, no expression showed on her freckled face. Except for the kind of emptiness you might expect from a child whose life had been spent in squalor and whose hope of escape had just evaporated.

  She pivoted on her heel and marched back to the study. She closed the door. When I checked on her later, she lay under her covers with her face to the wall.

  I hit the laundry room and poured myself four fingers of the finest. I headed for the wingback and slumped there for an hour trying to work things out in my own mind. I had no choice but to send Josey away. The only sensible, adult, moral thing to do. Too bad I felt so rotten.

  Why couldn’t Josey have had a family like the one in the photos in Stella Iannetti’s home? The pretty smiling mother, the tall, shy father, the twin brothers and baby sister, happy and loved. Children whose pictures predicted stable, sensible, confident adults. Just like Mary Morrison’s school photo of Benedict and Bridget and Rachel showed children like the adults they grew up to be. I was thinking about that photo when it hit me, like a sock full of nickels.

  The man in the bar, the man in the car following us. That face had been in the photo too. The eyes with their tilt, the strong cheekbones, the swarthy skin. I’d seen them before on a resentful childish presence photographed more than thirty years earlier.

  Now I had more reasons to spin all night.

  The old Josey returned at breakfast, not the silent stranger of the night before. But underneath her good humour and pep, I sensed something different.

  “You can come back,” I blurted as we dodged the drizzle to get to the car. “We could plan a...a...” I searched for something sufficiently appealing, “...a museum tour. Or something.”

  She trained her freckles in my direction. She’d believe that when she saw it.

  If it hadn’t been Saturday, I could have driven her to school and watched her safely through the doors. As it was, I had to decide if she was better off alone in my house or safer coming along for the ride. It’s the kind of decision where you know whatever you decide, you should have made the other choice. We rumbled down the driveway and onto Chemin des Cèdres. “I have no alternative. I can’t take the chance you’ll be hurt. Or worse.”

  Tolstoy leaned over from the back seat and licked Josey’s ear. I got the cold shoulder from both of them. A game of Frisbee could win back Tolstoy, but what would it take to have Josey trust me again?

  Outside the small pink cottage, a handful of dead ros
es remained on their stems. Josey raised her eyebrow. We could hear Tolstoy whining from the car.

  In the few days since we’d seen her, Mary Morrison had aged ten years. Her translucent pink skin had turned grey and opaque, her hair sagged, she leaned on a pair of canes, and she shuffled as if to the grave.

  I took a step back in surprise when she opened her door.

  “Oh, sorry, Miz Morrison,” Josey blurted, “if you’re not feeling well, we can come back. It’s not real important.”

  I nodded. I desperately needed the name of the man in the photo, but it could wait until we found out what dreadful thing had happened to Mary Morrison. I couldn’t interpret her guarded expression.

  “I guess you’d better come in,” she said.

  We sniffed no delicious smells of fresh baking. Something felt wrong in the tiny room.

  “Sit down.” Mary Morrison sank into a chair. “I’ll get a pot of tea in a minute or two, if you’d like.”

  Josey and I inhaled simultaneously, alarmed at the idea of her teetering into the kitchen to wait on us.

  “No, tha...” I started to say, but Josey stood up first.

  “I’m supposed to be learning to do things like that.”

  “Are you? That’s nice.” Mary Morrison said, leaning back. “Do you think you can find everything?”

  “No problemo,” Josey said.

  “Use the good china, dear.”

  “Sure,” Josey said, making for the kitchen. “Is there anything else I could do at the same time?”

  “Why, yes. There are some lemon squares my neighbour brought me, if you’d like to put a few slices on a plate.”

  I checked out the room. Dishes and books were piled on the table in the corner. Like a packing job had begun. I couldn’t see any of the photos we had come to ask about. What was going on?

  Mary Morrison leaned back in her chair with no sign of the light we’d seen in her on our first visit. She waved her hand in the direction of the half-packed objects. Her lower lip trembled.

  “They want me to leave my little cottage and move to Toronto with them.”

  I could hardly imagine such a grim change in one’s life.

  “Why?” I asked. It came out as a whisper.

  Her eyes filled, and the tiny hands shook a bit. “After you visited me, the same night, someone broke in here and made off with some of my things. Imagine, right here in my little cottage while I slept. You know, we always used to say, safe as houses. And now my nephews are all up in arms and insisting I can’t stay alone.”

  I imagined Mary Morrison transported away from this world of green tunnels and fields and river and mountain and the scent of roses. I imagined her reaction to the dubious advantages of city life. It would be the end of her. I reached out and touched her shaking hand.

  Josey chose that moment to arrive from the kitchen with a tray, loaded with teapot, milk and sugar and a flowered plate with precisely arranged squares.

  Mary Morrison didn’t even notice when Josey set her tray on the small table between us and plunked herself into a chair.

  “What did the robbers take?” I asked.

  “They stole my past.”

  Josey sat up and stared. “Your past? How?”

  “My pictures, my photographs. All my photographs. Every one, even the boxes from the cupboard.” The tears spilled over and trickled down her cheeks. “Why would anybody do that?”

  We paid no attention to the tea or the lemon squares. Mary Morrison’s loss of a lifetime of memories blotted out everything else.

  I thought I knew why. “Tell me, did many people know you had these photographs?”

  “Everyone knew. Everyone who’s ever been here.”

  “And no one ever tried to take them before?” Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I realized how foolish they sounded.

  Mary Morrison didn’t react to the foolishness. “No one ever did,” she said. “In fact, that’s why the police wanted to talk to the two of you.”

  Josey was less upset by the police wanting to talk to us than by the plan to uproot Mary Morrison. “Toronto is supposed to be a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t be happy living there.”

  “Thank you, my dear. I know.” She reached for a cup of tea.

  I wondered how long she would remain alive, if she were yanked from her roses and her view of the river and the mountains.

  “I don’t think we can let them take you,” Josey said.

  Mary Morrison perked up, perhaps from the combined effects of the English Breakfast tea and Josey’s call to rebellion.

  “But my nephews are frightened this robber or some other one will come back, and perhaps this time I’ll be hurt or maybe even have a heart attack.”

  Josey pursed her lips. “It’s your life, isn’t it? Where do you want to live?” She shot me a look dripping with meaning.

  “Here in St. Aubaine,” Mary Morrison said, “in this house.”

  “There’s a lot of unemployment around here. Couldn’t you make arrangements for some young kid to be here every night, as a protection? Pay them a few dollars, so you don’t have to feel obligated. You could get them to help you in the garden.”

  This gave me new insight into Josey. Maybe instead of a career as a wild-eyed entrepreneur, she would make her mark on the world as a defender of the rights of the downtrodden. She could give Natalie, the lawyer, lessons.

  But I needed to get our business accomplished. “Miss Morrison, we came here to ask about one of the children in the school photo with Benedict.”

  She put her hand to her head and rubbed her temple. “My dears, this robbery is such a terrible thing for me. I can hardly think straight. Usually, I can see the faces of those children as clearly as if they were right here in this room. Now, it’s like I’ve lost my memory.”

  “Of course, it’s the shock.” I reached over to pat her hand again. “I’d like you to think about it if you can, and I’ll come again when you’re feeling more settled.”

  Mary Morrison opened her mouth to speak when the knock came on the door. She motioned us back into our chairs and teetered over to answer it. She teetered back in, followed by the last man in the world that I wanted to see.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, “oh, dear.”

  Sarrazin settled his large frame into Mary Morrison’s remaining chair. He smiled affectionately at her. He retracted the smile and focussed his black bear eyes on us.

  Eighteen

  “Must have been rough, kiddo. That Sarrazin guy? He’s a weirdo, all right,” Woody said. “Can’t stand the sight of him. I don’t think he has the brains for the police. Kinda makes you sick, doesn’t it.”

  Our humourless encounter with Sarrazin hadn’t bothered Josey much. She comes from a long line of Thrings, all of whom had a lifetime of disagreements with the law. But I found it hard to get used to being suspected of breaking and entering. And theft. At least being suspected of murdering Benedict had a certain passionate grandeur.

  Josey and I were in Woody’s back storeroom, recovering from our interview. With Woody’s help. Tolstoy crunched organic dog biscuits underneath the I NTERDIT AUX C HIENS sign. Josey snacked on some all-natural sesame bars. I had some sunflower seeds.

  Woody passed around cans of Jolt. “You want a burger? We can send out.”

  “He’s a detective. He must have brains,” I said.

  “You ask me,” Woody said, apparently to himself, “he’s a lousy detective. Look at his priorities.”

  Woody had a point. Sarrazin was the senior detective in St. Aubaine. It was strange he’d put a murder investigation on hold to hightail it over to question me about some old photos.

  Woody said, “He was just sticking his nose into it because of Miss Morrison. He’d stand on his head for her. Let’s put it this way, my business was burgled. It took him two days to send someone here.”

  It made me think, which wasn’t that easy since Woody never shut up. “No Jolt, kiddo? What about a Diet Coke? Put a little colo
ur in your cheeks?”

  Josey was chortling, as only a Thring, hearing disparaging remarks about the constabulary, can chortle.

  Woody was on a roll. He basked in Josey’s amusement. “Listen, I know about this guy. I remember him from St. Aubaine Elementary. Booted out of class. Getting the strap. Came from a real rough family. Trouble reading and everything. Never did his homework. Got everything bass ackwards. Especially Bs and Ds.”

  Josey stopped chortling. Much as she disliked the police, her sympathies would always lie with the outcast in the classroom. “That wasn’t his fault, was it? He must be forty-five years old, and people still remember every mistake he made in elementary school? It’s extremely mean, Mr. Quirke.”

  If Woody was startled when her eyes got to the size of soup bowls and her freckles became three-dimensional, he chose not to mention it. Being Woody, he just kept on talking. “That Miss Morrison? She was the best teacher we ever had at that school. She worked with him and worked with him. I guess it made a difference. He seems to have done all right for himself.”

  Josey nodded with some satisfaction. She liked stories to end well, even if a teacher played a role.

  “I thought he came from Montreal.” I said.

  “Nah. He went to Montreal. You ask me, he couldn’t cut it. Couldn’t take the big-time pressure. Hopped home again. Major frog in a minor puddle here, ha ha. Probably going to end up Chief of Police here. Big deal.”

  “I love a happy ending,” I said.

  “You were lucky Miss Morrison put in a good word for you. If it hadn’t been for her, you might have found yourselves overnighting it in the slammer.”

  “Humph,” said Josey. “It didn’t stop him from searching our vehicle and going back and rooting through Miz Silk’s house again.”

  Woody nodded. “Right on, ferreting for loot.”

  “We had nothing to hide,” I said.

  “And what did he think we were going to do with a bunch of photos of people we never even knew?” Josey said.

  “Hey, I don’t read minds. But I think that guy means trouble. He’s been talking to a lot of people about your alleged relationship with Benedict. Asking about your about-to-be-ex. That’s what I heard from Gisèle at the Caisse. Philip was bad enough when he thought you were as pure as the driven. I can’t imagine what he’d be like now that everyone’s talking about events in your bed.”