The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  So, there had been a murder. It was nothing to do with me, and, although it might cramp the style of our last day and a half of honeymoon, those were the breaks when you married a cop. We would get home, Steve would lead his investigation and life would go on.

  Well, not for Kristin Perry, it wouldn’t. The words of my book swam in front of my eyes as I recalled the solitary sunbather, left to burn and blister with no one to bother her. How had she come to be in that particular spot? Had her murderer lured her there in order to kill her? And, if she had been taken there straight from the nightclub, how had she been found in a bathing suit with all her beachwear? I made a note on my phone to tell Steve what I thought was a brilliant question, and then, in her honour, pulled out my 50 SPF sunscreen and slathered it all over my legs, arms and décolletage. My slight burn from Mismaloya had diminished, and I didn’t want it returning.

  Tans are a funny thing. Back in feudal times, it was unseemly to have sun-weathered skin, because it spoke of needing to labour on the land. Highborn women bathed in milk like Cleopatra, or at least covered their faces with wide-brimmed hats and wore gloves to ward off a tan.

  Then, when the Industrial Revolution pushed the working classes into factories, gaining their skin a lovely pallor, the wealthy classes took to tennis and yachting and a tan became a coveted feature. To keep up, the working class tanned on weekends and vacations, baking with baby oil and reflecting the sun with tin foil to up the browning factor.

  Now that the sun has become slightly less friendly, and melanomas more frequent and deadly, we are once more wary of overly tanned features, and those who are desperate for the beauty sensibilities of their youth head to spray tan boutiques. Of course, there are still those who gamble with their fates and sunbathe or visit tanning parlours, but I had noticed far fewer tanning parlours in Edmonton of late, whereas they used to be plentiful, offering heat and glow to people wanting to prepare for a winter holiday or preserve a summer tint.

  I had tanned easily in my youth, but had been quick to espouse sunscreen after an uncle had lost a good chunk of his nose to a melanoma. Now, my own skin never got more than a light tan, just enough not to glow fish belly white when exposed to daylight. Besides, if I didn’t wear a hat, my nose got incredibly freckled, and I felt that it didn’t help, when trying to keep a university class in order, to resemble Pippi Longstocking.

  On the whole, the people I had seen at our hotel pool were a sensible lot. They all had sunscreen bottles sitting by their books and beers, and most were wearing floppy sun hats. Mexican nationals themselves, at least in the shops and hotels, were always well dressed, in looser, flowing outfits like the men’s guayaberas and linen trousers or the women’s embroidered blouses and full skirts that repelled the heat and welcomed any breeze possible. Those who didn’t work in the tourist industry, or who chose tighter jeans and T-shirts, weren’t doing themselves any favours in this climate, but they probably didn’t see it that way.

  I was probably going to live in my embroidered blouse during summer weekends in Edmonton; I could already imagine it. In fact, with our new tablecloth, and the few pieces of glassware we’d picked up, and our tops and shoes, there would be a great many markers back home to conjure up memories of our magical days in Puerto Vallarta. And wasn’t that what you wanted from a honeymoon, or indeed any vacation?

  Why had Kristin Perry and her friends come to Puerto Vallarta? Was it just a Reading Week get away? Sun, sand, and sin? Or was there something special that drew them to Mexico rather than Honolulu or Vegas or Disneyland? That was another thing to note down for Steve, although I was pretty sure he would already be thinking along those lines.

  Before sliding my phone back in its little pocket in my bag, I checked the time. Steve wasn’t back yet and it was already past five o’clock. Most of the people had left the pool deck, although an elderly couple was still sitting at one of the patio tables with an umbrella up the middle, playing cribbage.

  I figured I should go back to the room to change before the sun moved too far toward the edge of the ocean, so I gathered up my towel, and slipped on my sandals, tossing my book and sunscreen into my bag. There was a woven basket for bottles and cans next to the garbage bin, and I tossed my two water bottles.

  Back in the room, I got dressed in my new blouse and a denim skort. I turned on the television for company. There was a soccer game playing on one channel, a rather steamy telenovela on another, and a news program on a third. The commentator was speaking very clear Spanish, but it was still too rapid for me to catch more than a word here or there. I kept trying to hear similarities to French, which was my only other competent language, but they really didn’t correlate. In fact, I remember my mother having a story about being in a restaurant with friends in Spain, and having one of them attempt to order for herself, instead of having Mom the amateur linguist of the group, help her. She had ordered café and a slice of gâteau, and the horrified waiter turned away and never came back, leaving them to pack up and depart without anything. It was only later, when their urchin guide was walking them back to their hotel that a stray cat ran across the street and he pointed, saying “Gato!” that they had realized how they had offended the restaurateurs.

  The news anchor here wasn’t talking about cats, but I did catch a couple of words, especially the word “Canadian.” There were no gory pictures, but the cameraman had caught a photo of fishermen standing on the spit of land where the body had been found, and then cut to the nightclub where the foam party had been, just down the Malecon from the club where the giant swing went out over the crowd outside.

  They were obviously talking about Kristin Perry, and I watched to see if they might have caught Steve talking with the Vallarta police anywhere. But no, that was all they had. I couldn’t even tell from the rapid Spanish whether they knew that Canadian police were helping with the investigation. The newscast went on to feature a car accident near Nuevo Vallarta, some stingray-stung tourists in Sayulita, and a record-setting marlin being caught by a local fisherman from Boca de Tomatlan.

  The weather was going to continue glorious, and just like back home, the rest of the newscast was devoted to sports. I turned back to the soccer game, not because I particularly enjoyed watching it, but because I knew the rules and could follow it in any language. The telenovela would be too hard to figure out, although I could try to look up the words “evil twin” in my phrase book.

  Steve walked into the room just as the match was finished, with Guadalajara beating out the Jaguares Chiapas 3-1. His eyebrows shot up as I whooped for my newfound team.

  “Where is my wife and what have you done with her?”

  I jumped up and hugged him, I was so glad to see him and it felt like it had been ages since we’d been together. While I knew Steve could take care of himself, an absence that long, especially with thoughts of tourist murders in my mind, had a chilling effect. He returned my hug with just as much pressure, and I knew it hadn’t been a good afternoon for him.

  “Do you have to go back tomorrow to deal with this?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.

  Steve shrugged his shoulders. “I’m really not sure. The roommates have been interviewed, and I read through translated transcripts of theirs and the nightclub workers’ interviews, and another set of interviews with the pirates, who are actors and sailing enthusiasts, but there is no way to find all the folks who had been there on either evening who might have seen anything. They are planning to put a flyer in the lobbies of some of the more popular hotels with the tourists who might have frequented either event, but aren’t optimistic. Who wants to get involved with a criminal investigation while on holiday?

  “That said, I do have some good news. If you can handle two tours tomorrow, you and I have tickets to the tours that Kristin Perry and her friends booked: the historic Mexico tour during the day that they all were on, and the Rhythms of the Night, which the two went on, hoping to see Kristin there. T
he idea is for the Canadian arm of the investigation to be familiar with all the territory discussed in the interviews. I will have to ask the guides a few questions and report back to the local authorities before we head home, but it shouldn’t get in the way of our having fun on the tours. How does that sound to you?”

  Rhythms of the Night was the tour everyone had been recommending, and the historic Mexico tour sounded similar to the one the Reineses from Albany had been on that sounded intriguing. Or maybe it had been the older couple by the hotel pool who had raved about it. People were starting to swim together in my mind. At any rate, at the risk of sounding ghoulish, I was delighted to be going on those particular tours. Although it would mean Steve’s snorkeling tour was off, his having to connect with the Mexican police had likely already put the kybosh on it, anyhow. And if we were getting the tours for free, maybe I could therefore afford to buy one of the lovely vases we had seen in a gallery down the street.

  “And whoever the local version of your Staff Superintendent Keller isn’t going to be upset that I am along with you on the tours?”

  Steve smiled. His boss really did seem to be averse to my being part of any incidents Steve was involved with back home.

  “No worries. In fact, one of the detectives in charge thinks that our being a honeymooning couple works in the investigation’s favour, since he believes the guides we’ll be speaking to will be more at ease dealing with us than with officials in uniform.”

  “Well, in that case, count me in!”

  11

  The next morning, we had to bounce out of the hotel early and grab a cab all the way to the marina district to meet up with the tour. Vallarta Adventures was housed in a strip mall with a small shop, large check-in counter and washrooms inside, and a seating area along the side of the shop outdoors, where guides would come and ask you to follow them based on the tours you’d signed up for.

  There were twelve of us signed on for Historic Mexico, and Luz, an intrepid young woman wearing red shorts, hiking boots, a Vallarta Adventure polo shirt and a kerchief around her neck, led us out of the holding pen and down the block to our Unimog, a huge utility vehicle with benches down either side of the back. Our driver, Fernando, helped us up the wooden step to get in, and once we and Luz were settled, he loaded the stool under one of the benches, strapped canvas strips across the back, and headed around to climb into the cab. The wheels were huge and capable of off road adventures when the tours went down riverbeds and into the jungle, but Luz assured us that while we were going to be on some backroads, we were using the Unimog mostly so that we could see the sights more easily. She did mention that we might get chilly as we went into the mountains, and that it might get windy along the highway, so I was glad I’d brought my sweater and my own windtunnel scarf, an extra wide hair band marketed mainly to skiers, but which I found useful on even ground, as well. It made a nice neck scarf when not needed, and kept my hair out of my eyes and mouth during Edmonton’s windy days in the spring and fall.

  As we headed out of the city along the route Steve and I had taken by bus to the beach, Luz pointed out the villas along the highway.

  “These are for wealthy people who have come here to live from the USA, some Canadians, too.” She smiled at us, inclusively, as if we could be included in that grouping—or perhaps knowingly including us in the group who would always be outside looking in. The places were ostentatiously innocuous from the road, offering only a driveway and garage doors, but the homes themselves were built down the cliffside with an unimpeded view of the ocean. In blustery weather, they’d be buffeted, I thought, but that could have just been sour grapes talking.

  We passed Mismaloya, and Boca de Tomatlan, and continued down the highway. Eventually, we turned off the highway onto a country road, which meandered through scrub farmland until we found ourselves on an actual farm track and Luz announced we had reached our first stop. My initial reaction was disappointment. This was historic Mexico? However, we all gamely climbed out of the Unimog and followed Luz down a track between two pastures. About fifty metres in, she turned into one of the pastures at an opening in the fence, and led us to some black basalt outcroppings.

  As we gathered around, she pointed out the petroglyphs which Luz announced anthropologists were still uncertain about, though some seemed to indicate season, and others showed numbers. It was posited that this was a hunting area, and the third stone was either a place where they dressed the meat or where they made sacrifices, because bloodstains had been noted there. The people of ancient Mexico were nomadic in nature in the same way as western Canada’s original indigenous inhabitants, moving with the seasons and the food supplies.

  I surveyed the farms near the stones. A cactus crop was being tended in straight lines in one field, and goats were grazing in another. Ingenious farmers had developed ways to sustain themselves in this area, where most of the fields had been given over to growing blue agave for the tequila industry. I considered the groceries we bought at home and wondered if I’d see where my tomatoes and strawberries came from, but Luz told me that the strawberries I ate all winter long most likely came from the state of Veracruz rather than Jalisco.

  We ambled back down the farm lane and climbed back into the truck with the help of Fernando, who was also doling out bottles of water from a cooler. I noticed that Steve had managed to walk back behind the rest of us, in discussion with Luz. While it may have looked to the others that my husband was an anthropology geek, I knew that he was more likely quizzing Luz about whether or not she recalled Kristin Perry and her friends during this same tour earlier in the week. Luz was nodding seriously and quite animatedly using her hands to describe the girls: one very petite, another tall, and Kristin in between, with long hair and a good figure.

  Steve must have impressed Luz not to ruin the tour for the rest of the people by sharing who he was with the nice family from Seattle, the retired couple from Calgary, the touchingly young newlyweds from Winnipeg, and the pair of British travel writers.

  On we went to see a tequila factory, a rosewood carver trained by his father and grandfather before him, the city square in El Tuito where, according to Luz, each evening, the entire town would take a stroll, and a small cheese factory where we were given tortillas and salsa with the lovely fresh cheese to sprinkle on top. Then we went to the botanical gardens where we were toured through medicinal plants and shown the magical properties of cactus, and finally, to my personal favourite, a roadside bakery carved out of the side of a clay cliff, with the ovens part of the hillside and the sales area just a long table under a canvas awning. The product was a rectangular pastry the length of an éclair, with different flavours baked inside, from sweet to savoury. Luz cut a few up for us to sample, and we were encouraged to purchase some for ourselves. The elderly couple with us declined to buy anything, and the others only bought one each. Trying singlehandedly to improve the Mexican economy, I bought several, since both Steve and I had been taken by the smooth taste of the pastry dough; the fillings were just a bonus. The price, given the product, was negligible, and I couldn’t figure out how a bakery, way out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, could make a profit. Luz assured us that this was actually a well-travelled road for commuters and that the bakery often sold out by midday. That tempered my irritation with my tour group compatriots for not buying more.

  Luz and Steve had been conferring a bit more, and once we were back bumping along in the noisy Unimog, he leaned into my ear and told me she was quite helpful in recalling things as we drove along. Perhaps, having the same tour stops was jogging her memory, but she had been able to give him a strong sense of what the relationship between the three girls had been the day before Kristin was killed.

  Fernando wheeled the Unimog into a stylish estate that reminded me of a golf course back home, and Luz announced that this is where we would be eating lunch. A Vallarta Adventures crew had come out ahead of us and cooked up a meal featuring t
he same cactus I’d seen growing in the farm field, guacamole, salsa, chicken, and of course, refried beans. A makeshift bar was set up and Luz was pouring margaritas and mojitos for everyone except the two teens from Seattle, who had to settle for guava juice. We ate heartily, and I spent most of my time with the travel writers, alternating between envying them their lifestyle and trying to lure them up to visit western Canada with promises of bison, mountains, and green, glacier-fed lakes. What can I say? I’m an Alberta booster.

  Our final stop was appropriately the final stop for most Mexicans—a graveyard. Luz walked us through the dazzling spectacle of little houses built over graves, and intricate decorations for the dead. She explained the concept of the Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, where families went out to the graveyard to visit with their ancestors, clean the graveyard, and party. Some of the houses around us contained chairs and televisions, so that the dear departed could be entertained when they came back to visit. Steve smirked and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: that it was more likely a way to entertain those coming who didn’t want to be pulling weeds or polishing marble.

  Every spare inch of the graveyard seemed to be occupied, and some of the graves were newer and more ornate than others. We fanned out to explore, and once again Steve and Luz walked on together while I diplomatically hung back and took photos of the graves that caught my eye.