Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  “Yes, this whole hill is miked to give us a better sense of the ambience. Once I mix it in the studio, we should be able to approximate the real hillside experience. I based it on the principles of miking an opera house, to make use of the acoustical bounces from the back balconies and chandeliers and all. The purpose of digital recording has to be to fulfill the complete potential of the listening experience.”

  Iain was enough of an expert interrogator to hear a technical rant beginning, and he cut Nathan off before he could get full-swing onto his favourite hobby horse. “So these mikes on the hillside, how much spill do you think you’d have through the trees there to the mainstage hill?”

  I was starting to see where Iain was going with this line of questioning, and so was Nathan.

  “You think I captured the murder on tape? Like in Blow Out?

  “You mean the Antonioni film? Wasn’t that a photographer?” Iain McCorquodale’s breadth of background never failed to amaze me. I knew he was knowledgeable about jazz music and Eve Arden. Now it seemed he was also a foreign film buff.

  Nathan was no slouch, either, it seemed. “No, that’s Blow Up. Blow Out, the Brian De Palma version, uses a sound engineer looking for the perfect scream. Otherwise it’s very much the same film.” So maybe he was more into that since it was about his chosen profession. Or maybe everyone just had hidden depths.

  “Well, whatever the case, if you could isolate some of the mikes that might have caught some bleed from the mainstage, it might be useful. How late were you taping last night?”

  “For about four hours into the mainstage act. Partly, I was hoping to create a background wall of sound to play the folkwaysAlive! concerts against, just in case there were some crud noises I had to peel, like teenagers effing and blasting too close to one of the hill mikes during an official Folkways session. The idea was just to have some extra crowd sounds, just in case of whatever.”

  “We can’t pinpoint the time of death yet,” said Iain, who appeared to be understanding Nathan in a way I wasn’t, “but it would really help to listen to the ambient tapes from last night. Can you sign them over to me now?”

  Nathan looked stricken but quickly calculated with me that it would be better for him to be disconnected from his monitors for a few minutes now than it would be in twenty minutes’ time when Ferron was playing. He directed me to watch the levels on two tracks, and to bring them up slightly if more sound was heard, and then he and Iain removed themselves to the back of the tent to go through his masters from the day before. He was leery about handing them over completely to Iain, but he compromised by logging into a satellite Internet provider and e-mailing the files to Iain’s computer.

  The transfer took a few minutes because of the large size of the files, but pretty soon Nathan was comfortably back in the control seat and I was flitting about preparing for Ferron. Dr. Fuller had just made it into the back of the tent, carrying extra-large Tim Horton’s coffee cups, bless her soul. I filled her in on what was happening with Nathan’s recordings, and she brought me up to speed on happenings with Woody.

  “They’ve sprung him for now and he’s heading down to the hill immediately, as far as I know.”

  “Good. Maybe he’ll have some idea of what’s up with the police and the Folkways connection.”

  “I was listening to the news on the way here, and it doesn’t look all that good,” she said, frowning. “Already the announcers are making Finster/Folkways connections. I can’t imagine the provost of the university enjoying this sort of notoriety.”

  “But there’s not much they can do, is there? After all, the money was willed to the Folkways collection, and the people contesting the will are both dead. So there shouldn’t be any problem with the collection getting the money unless the police somehow prove that one of us killed the Finsters to keep the money.”

  I laughed, but Dr. Fuller didn’t. In fact, the look she gave me was weird, sort of halfway between looking nauseous and about to cry. Who knows, maybe she believed Woody was guilty of killing the Finsters. The police surely couldn’t though, or they wouldn’t have let him go, I figured. And let him go they had, because he was suddenly in the doorway to the backstage area, ushering Ferron in with enough of the Dowling charm to have her laughing as she entered.

  He was all in denim, looking straight out of a chain gang in O Brother Where Art Thou, but since I was pretty sure Alberta put prisoners in day-glo orange, it was likely his own clothes. On closer look, his shirt was pressed neatly and his faded jeans fit nicely enough to be tailored for him. He looked up at me and winked, making my face get hot. I swear, that man could read my mind.

  Ferron was working solo today, without the cellist she’d recently been touring with. I moved forward to welcome her and show her the lay of the land, leaving Dr. Fuller to deliver the front stage thank-yous. The hill was getting more crowded, but nowhere near what we’d been hoping to draw with a name like Ferron on the bill. I wondered if the lineup was still being let onto the grounds, or whether the radio news covering a murder on the hillside was keeping some of the folkies away. Ferron was taking it in stride, though, and seemed delighted to be recording for folkwaysAlive! She asked if we wanted any preamble and how much between-song banter we were up for. Nathan told her to play it however she wanted to, and that final editing would be seamless whatever happened.

  “Moses Asch had all sorts of spoken word records in the collection, so the idea of speech in a musical recording isn’t anything new,” he enthused. “After all, have you ever listened to any of Dave Van Ronk’s recordings? Talky! Another thing to remember is that you have liner note freedom too, in case there’s anything you want to add about any song, or the feelings you get performing it now or every time.”

  “Cool,” said Ferron, “this feels like a good thing to be doing.”

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” smiled Dr. Fuller, coming into the circle. “We’re certainly very pleased you’ve agreed to be one of the folkwaysAlive! performers.”

  “Indeed,” concurred Woody. “The Smithsonian Folkways Collection is equally pleased and I hope the connection will be equally beneficial to us both.”

  “Spoken like a true American,” laughed Ferron. “Don’t worry, I mean that as a compliment.”

  They went on bantering like that for a few minutes while the crowd responded enthusiastically to the high-spirited boys from Southern Alberta. Ferron was soon chatting with Hus, Stack and Wort Hannum as they poured into the backstage area, pumped up with the energy a good set gives a performer. Tim Hus poured the contents of the water bottle I handed him over his head and shook himself like a Newfoundland dog, all over me. It was a darn good thing his good old boy grin made for such disarming protective coloration. Next thing I knew, Dr. F was out on the stage, introducing Ferron, who was standing at the edge of the tarp curtain, hands folded on top of her guitar. She reminded me of an old wise woman, though she couldn’t be more than ten years my senior. There was just something so centred, so rooted about her. She was totally comfortable inside her own skin, and that ease emanated out from her like ripples in a pool. She stepped forward into the applause as if moving toward the warmth of a campfire, and I knew it was going to be a magical recording.

  I stationed myself near where Ferron had just been standing, except two steps down on ground level, behind the risers of the stage. From there I could see her and a good portion of the hillside, but it was unlikely anyone could discern more than that there was a shape where I stood, because of the shadow and the contrast to the brightness of the daylight beyond the tent. People were still streaming up the sides of the hill, still coming from other stages, or perhaps drawn by the power of “Shadows on a Dime.” The applause was tremendous, and Ferron moved right into her next song.

  I decided to see if I could gauge the number in attendance. Steve had once told me how to estimate a crowd by making a headcount of a set square of people and then determining how many of those squares would be in the total area. I had
got to two hundred and forty when I spotted someone I knew, which immediately threw off my estimating. Why the hell was Mary Montgomery here, harshing my mellow? Of course, I supposed if she was going to be anywhere on this site, it would be at the Ferron concert. It was just that I thought of her as too judgmental to be a folkie, and I’d really been hoping she hadn’t managed to score a ticket. On the other hand, I still couldn’t imagine Pia Renshaw as a folkie, and there was irrefutable proof that she had been caught dead on the hill. You never knew who you would run into around here.

  Some people came for the music. Others came to reclaim, one weekend a year, the whole “summer of love” sensation. Still others were playing hippie despite being too young to have even been born to parents who would conceivably name them Rainbow or Sierra. I came because I loved the music, and admired the skill of the musicians working acoustically and immediately to achieve what popstars only managed in the digitally sweetened mix anymore. So why would someone like Mary Montgomery, who seemed to have a real hate on for the ­folkwaysAlive! ­project, be sitting here grooving to Ferron on a Saturday afternoon? I had no idea. I’d given up trying to figure out what made that woman tick.

  Ferron asked people to take out their keys and jangle them for percussive effect. The whole hillside immediately sounded like finger cymbals and rain sticks, and it blended into the song gloriously. I tried to shake off the feeling of Mary hovering in my world, and went back to counting people. By my shaky approximation, there were over five hundred people on the hill.

  “So what do you think, about five hundred?” Woody’s voice sounded soft in my ear, spooking me. Whether it was his uncanny ability to sneak up on me and pinpoint what I was thinking, or that he was until recently “helping the police in their inquiries,” I couldn’t be sure. I hoped my edginess didn’t show, but I turned and moved back a couple of steps so that we were no longer in the doorway to the stage.

  “Yeah, I think. More people are coming all the time.”

  “I’d better tell Nathan he can open up some of the upper mikes, then.” He didn’t move though. I looked at him. Even in the half-light of the backstage area, he looked weary and haggard. There must be something marrow-sucking about jail, even momentary incarceration. Or maybe the whole responsibility of keeping the folkwaysAlive! business safe and on track was taking its toll on the pro from Dover. I wished all of a sudden that I could send him home to sleep, but the trouble with that idea was we needed every last one of us to keep things rolling.

  “How are you doing? Can I get you anything?” I asked.

  “Do I look that rough?”

  “You don’t look great,” I allowed.

  “I can make it till this recording session is done, I think. Then maybe you and I could pop over to the food tent for some lunch. It will be ambient sound and archival recordings till four, right?”

  I checked the schedule on the table, even though I knew it by heart. “Yep. We should be able to sneak off after seeing the next bunch onto the stage. You’d better tell Nathan about the crowd, and I’ll get back to watching. I have to toss some hats after she’s done.”

  It occurred to me to tell Woody about seeing Mary Montgomery, but I wasn’t sure why it bugged me that she was there, and I wasn’t sure I’d even mentioned her to him before this. I’d wait and try to remember to tell Steve when I saw him. For all I knew, Mary might have been the person I saw in the crowd yesterday, the one I thought I recognized from behind but then lost.

  Had I told Steve about that person? Everything was starting to run together in my head. I heard a familiar phrase and turned back toward the stage. Ferron was starting my favourite song in the universe, her “Ain’t Life a Brook.” Woody came to stand next to me. He put a hand on my shoulder and I leaned back into him as the song washed over us. “But wasn’t it fine …” seemed to hang in the air, and the whole hillside took a collective breath before rising to their feet in an ovation. I grabbed an armload of hat platters and Woody did the same.

  Ferron was flushed and triumphant, taking a third bow and smiling back at her adoring fans. Woody moved behind the tarp to stage left and I moved along the right side of the stage, and we began gliding our PR hats out into the crowd. Ferron took one from me, and pulled it onto her head.

  “Long live folkwaysAlive! folks! We’re going to be on a record! See you at the launch party!” The crowd roared its approval and she bounded off the stage.

  Woody waved at the crowd and headed backstage. I finished tossing out hats and conferred briefly with the sound crew, who were already readjusting the cables and microphone stands for the next workshop, which would begin in five minutes.

  I dashed backstage, but Ferron was already leaving. There wasn’t all that much I wanted to say apart from gushing, so I sucked it up and got to work setting out water and snacks. The next folks were already waiting in the cool of the backstage tent. They were from Finland, and sang a cappella. That was all I knew about them, other than the fact that poor Paul Calihoo had been over the moon to hear that they’d been booked. It was all right with them that we only had five mikes, since they doubled up anyhow. I went back to tell that good news to the sound crew, who took one of the mikes off to the side. I looked out at the mikes with their little Muppet-nosed windsocks on, and wondered what it must be like to have a thin microphone stand as the only thing between you and the whole vast audience. Maybe performers weren’t using it as a shield, though. That’s likely what made them performers and me an academic.

  I wasn’t feeling all that academic at the moment. My jeans were a bit grimy because I wiped my hands on them each time before I grabbed water bottles for the performers. My hair felt thick and unruly, and I was pretty sure I was freckling from all the sun this weekend. Maybe I should try to think of it as fieldwork; I was certainly far more fashionable than anyone working an archeological dig. On the other hand, I was never going to compete with the Finnish women walking on stage in their flowing dresses. This was the perfect time to get away from the backstage area, and to take Woody with me.

  I spoke briefly to Nathan, telling him of our plans, and then waylaid Woody at the back end of the tent as he was re-entering from seeing Ferron off. “Want to head over for lunch now?”

  “Sure thing. I could eat an entire steam table’s worth of food. All I got at the police station was a bag of two-bit brownies and coffee out of a machine.”

  “I think they’re called two-bite brownies.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.”

  We continued the superficial banter until we’d walked through the food line and found a place to eat away from most of the others. As usual, Woody had piled his plate into a pyramid point with every kind of food available. I wasn’t feeling all that hungry, given the worry about everything, but then I hadn’t spent the morning in the Big House, either.

  “So, what did the police want with you, and why do they think everything is tied to the Folkways project?”

  “That’s what I love about, you, Randy, your delicate way of beating about the bush,” Woody grinned. “First off, they called me in because the three deaths all involved Finsters, and Finsters mean money. If you follow the money, it ends up at Folkways.”

  “But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why didn’t they haul in Dr Fuller if that was their reasoning? She has more at stake than the Smithsonian in regards to the money.”

  Woody nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. And I wasn’t even in the country when David Finster was trussed up and left on display, which I think is the main reason I’m sitting here with you right now instead of downtown trying not to drop the soap. On the other hand, Dr. Fuller doesn’t pose any threat to a police officer’s romantic relationship, so that might be part of the reason for the alternative focus.”

  “Are you accusing Steve of picking on you because you and I are friends?”

  “Nope. I’m not accusing Steve at all, even if I’m not sure that friends are all we could be. I do think, though, that colleagues of Stev
e might perceive me as a threat, and they might have been doing their best to help him out.”

  I was glad the tent we were in diffused the light, since I had the distinct feeling I was flushing. As much as I was curious what Woody meant by us being more than friends, it wasn’t something I felt like getting into right then, with a murderer loose on the hillside and my job in jeopardy.

  “But they determined they couldn’t hold you. Does that mean they don’t think there’s a Folkways connection anymore? Or just that you are squeaky clean? Did they tell you anything? It feels so frustrating to be completely in the dark about things.”

  “Are you channelling your inner Trixie Belden?” Woody chuckled. “I don’t think there’s much we can do, in any case. There are forensic tests ongoing, apparently, and the police are working as fast as they can under the circumstances. They are, I gather, just trying to make sure nothing more happens while they get all their ducks in a row.”

  “Well, if the Finsters are dead and Pia from the Barbara Shoppe is dead, I would say the next person to watch out for is that Audrey woman who runs the other shop. Where is she?”

  “Audrey? You mean Holly Menzies? The manager of the shop that burned down? That’s someone they were asking me about. Apparently no one has been able to contact her since the fire. They’re looking at her as number one, I think. After yours truly, of course.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were enjoying this.”

  “I was, almost, up till the moment they showed me pictures of the victim on the hill. Pia? She had been drugged and then zipped into a plastic tent bag with duct tape over her mouth and nose. It must have been horrible.” He shuddered in a way that made me realize that Woody Dowling was very likely claustrophobic. If he hadn’t been before, he was now, at any rate.