The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  “But if the married man was an instructor or another student, it would be perfectly natural to be seen together at work, or having coffee.”

  “But maybe not out for dinner or drinks, or posing for each other outside of class assignments.” Denise shook her head. “No, the longer a tryst runs, the more capacity there is for it to blow up in everyone’s face. And the married person always has more at stake than the unmarried liaison. Of course they would be saddened momentarily, but, more likely than not, also relieved. My money is on the lonely heart who was spurned.”

  “But do we know he was spurned? Maybe he did the spurning, after finding out that she was also dallying with the teacher, or another student?”

  “Do we think she was playing them all at the same time?”

  “They’ve run in the same circles for three years now, from the beginning of their second year of studies, when Diego Rivers came in as the artist-in-residence, through to this spring. There was plenty of time to date one after the other. It would be really interesting to know the order in which Kristin’s love life unfolded, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Who would know that?”

  “Not the roommates. They put their foot down right away. Of course, they put their foot down because she was seeing a married man. So perhaps that was Rivers?”

  “Why not Stauffer?”

  “Because I think that marriage was a lesser-known fact. When I suggested that he was a boyfriend, Briar Nettles shut me down on that, as if she had insider information. If she thought she was imparting a secret, would Kristin’s roommates, or even Kristin have known right off that Austin was married?”

  “Well, that sounds like an interesting string to pull on. Why was he keeping his marriage a secret?”

  “He’s not someone I’d want to ask. I got cornered by him when I was poking around in the sculpture studio and felt really intimidated. Not just by his size, but by his intensity.”

  “Maybe I could call up Briar and see what she knows about it,” offered Denise.

  “Do you think she would answer something that inquisitive?”

  “Can’t hurt to try, can it?” Denise was pulling out her smartphone, and had soon logged into the faculty directory. Within minutes I was listening to a one-sided conversation between Denise and Briar Nettles.

  “And the reason was housing? So how did that come out and was it settled in their favour?”

  More listening on Denise’s part ensued, with her nodding. Not for the first time did I wish they could make speakerphones less echoey and such a give-away. Finally, she thanked Briar, said good-bye and hung up.

  “Austin Stauffer and his wife didn’t indicate to the university that they were back together after their separation, it turns out, so that they could apply for housing closer to the university, over in that row they made for the Universiade Games way back. There are some two-bedroom units in there, and they use one as his studio. If they had flagged themselves as married students, they were worried that they would get housing allocated way over south of the University Farm, amid all sorts of families with little kids. Apparently, Stauffer uses earphones to drown out the sound of humanity while he creates.”

  “I wonder how he drowns out the sound of welding going on in the sculpture studio?”

  Denise shrugged.

  “Briar says that someone in the housing complex ratted them out recently, though why it mattered I haven’t the faintest idea. The wife is doing a part-time degree while working, so she is technically not a full-time student but they’re paying their rent and not making loud noises. Some people just want to get up in people’s lives for no good reason.”

  “Okay, so he was pretending to be single, or at least walking into school from a single-type direction. Maybe when Kristin hooked up with him, she truly didn’t know he was married.”

  “He may have fed her a line. Or maybe she seduced him.”

  “And we now know that his wife was nearby, and could have been watching every move. So we’re back to having a second possible murderer in that single student flat.”

  “Was Diego Rivers’ wife around all the time?”

  “I am sure Steve has nailed that down. Rivers moved here two years ago for the one-year artist-in-residence gig, but I think this year he’s covering off for a another professor who is taking a sabbatical. His wife is certainly living in Edmonton now. I’m not sure how much she enjoys that,” I added, thinking back to our brief meeting with them during the food tour in Mexico.

  “But maybe she wasn’t planning to join him for that first year, and only moved when it looked like he’d be here for a good long while. Maybe she was back home, wherever that was, when he and Kristin had their fling.”

  “What is it with professor-student relationships, anyhow? You would think by now that they were pretty uniformly seen as verboten or at least icky. Why do people keep falling into them?”

  “The university is such a secluded place, set apart from the rest of the world. It’s as if no other rules apply, I think. Our year begins in September, not January. Our nine to five routines shift depending on what day of the week it is, and our years are dictated by which grad seminars we teach, or which prerequisite we’re allowed to enroll in. When you make the world that different, it’s no wonder people begin to consider regular human rules, such as not combining power relationships with personal relationships, as more nebulous. You can justify it somehow if the student isn’t technically in your class that year, or if they’re a mature student older than you, or if you are only the second reader on their thesis, or if they were the ones who came on to you. I’ve seen all sorts of justification, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but it never quite holds water.”

  “I don’t think so, either.”

  “Have you ever been tempted to have a relationship with a student?”

  Denise laughed.

  “Oh good lord, no. But of course, I’m teaching higher-level Shakespeare. It’s not as if beautiful actors or muscular aggies are registering in my courses.”

  “Whereas, in the first-year courses, I see them all.”

  “And have you ever been taken with a student?”

  “No, though every now and then there is a very beautiful one I can’t seem to take my eyes off when lecturing. Or,” I suddenly remembered, “I get taken with a voice, and find myself asking him or her to read passages more often than the other students.”

  Denise laughed.

  “You’re blushing.”

  “Yeah, well, I got caught once. He was originally from Ireland, and the timbre of his baritone voice still held just a bit of a lilt. And he could sight read well. I remember turning to ask him to read a poem, and the class starting to giggle, and I realized how obvious I was being. So I had to start working my way through the roster very consciously. But oh, that voice.”

  Denise laughed.

  “Does Steve know?”

  “He probably knew before I did. Anyhow, that was several years ago. None of them can read well anymore.”

  Denise looked at her watch and checked it on the green digits on our microwave.

  “Oh good god, I have to head out. There are two stacks of essays waiting for me, and I promised I’d go to the movies with Justin tonight.”

  Justin was Denise’s new beau, an erudite co-owner of a gaming company who had attended one of her public lectures on Shakespeare’s plotting devices, and pursued her relentlessly until she agreed to go out with them. They had discovered a ton of shared interests, and it looked as if Denise had finally met someone she could enjoy spending more than just a short relationship with. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I did wish her well, in the way I suppose all married people do for their single friends. There really is nothing like having someone to come home to who is totally invested in your happiness.

  She packed up her things, we hugged at the door
, and I stood in the doorway till the elevator doors opened and she was whisked out of sight.

  37

  Our discussion kindled my need to write lists, so after putting away all the coffee detritus, I made a pot of tea and hauled out a notepad.

  I wrote the three men’s names at the top of the page, and drew columns down from each of them.

  Under Diego, I wrote, “When did wife arrive in Edmonton?” “Were Kristin and Marta in his first class?” “Who dated him first?”

  Under Austin Stauffer, I wrote, “Single student housing,” “Where did Marta live?” “Was Marta a sculptor?” and “Connection?”

  And finally, under Cole Vandermeer, I wrote, “Who broke whose heart?”

  I wasn’t completely certain Steve, Iain, and the gang would be quite so invested in gossipy sorts of questions, but it wouldn’t hurt to share them when Steve got home.

  I flipped back a few pages in my notepad, looking over some of the notes I’d made about the Kahlo book Kristin and I had both been reading. I wondered if Marta’s beach bag had contained the same book, and if so, what that might mean. For one thing, it could mean that Kristin hadn’t purchased the book, the killer had. And it might mean he or she had bought two at one time. Would that have been enough for a salesclerk in a tourist town to recall, especially this far along?

  It was one thing not to have much information from Steve’s investigation, but there was a complete blank from the Mexican end of things. I couldn’t even know from a physical view whether or not the police were out measuring the beach or combing through the sand. For all I knew, they were just happy to write it off as a Canadian crime transported thoughtlessly to their vacation paradise. So much for polite Canadians.

  Maybe we were thinking about this wrong. Were these really art installations, or where they deliberate murders meant to target an artist as the supposed perpetrator? Maybe someone was trying to frame one of the men on my list by creating these macabre set ups, complete with a real dead body?

  And maybe I needed to back away from it completely. This was Steve’s case, and it was a police matter, and it had nothing to do with me or my work. We had only intersected with the case because of our choice of honeymoon destination. As much as I’d loved our stay in Puerto Vallarta, part of me wished we’d gone to the Dominican Republic and missed the case altogether.

  My pen was tapping on the notepad as I stared blindly at it, the words blurring in front of me. It was the tapping that brought me back into focus. I was tapping the Mexican Hat Dance, the dance that all little Canadian children learned in movement or music class, where couples danced individually, and slowly, and then whirled together, with arms linked, presenting politely and then coming together to spin passionately. Was that the manner of relationship Kristin had had with any of these men?

  Her relationship with Diego Rivers would have been clandestine, because both of them would have known of the strictures against such a connection. Even if there hadn’t been a Mrs. Rivers, or I should say Ms. Delahaya, in the picture, Kristin would have known to sneak around. That was certainly the relationship that her roommates condemned.

  The situation with Austin Stauffer was more problematic. Had Kristin known about his marital status? Did he play up the break he and his wife were taking as an actual split? Or was he snowing her along with the housing authority? When she did find out, was it she who had called it off? And were we certain the Stauffers had such a strong and steady marriage, anyhow?

  And finally, was Cole Vandermeer somehow secretly in Mexico to follow Kristin, or win her back? Or had Kristin known Cole was going to Mexico, and it was she who was pursuing him?

  Cole was the only man Kristin had been involved with who didn’t have a marital encumbrance. I paused, thinking that was a pretty cold way for a newlywed to frame a marriage, and decided not to write it down in exactly those words, just in case Steve should interpret them as dismissive of the state of the union in my mind. This whole relationship wording was tricky, and I wasn’t even the person getting murdered.

  Maybe Cole had been dating Marta at the same time as he was dating Kristin? That would certainly seem to make him more in keeping with the sort of man Kristin went with, supposing that she did know about Austin’s marital status. So, if Cole was dating Marta and Kristin, did it stand to reason that he would be their killer? Or would he have seen how incriminating that would look, to date women only to kill them and arrange them in artistic tableaux? They were sophisticated layouts, so did it stand to reason that there was a sophisticated mind behind the work? A mind capable of working in a way so as not to incriminate its owner?

  And of course, I was not adding in the women concerned.

  What about Diego’s wife, Alessandra Delahaya? In the same way that Diego overshadowed Frida until his death, maybe our muralist’s wife was an artist in her own right, using his discarded playthings as her materials.

  And what about Austin’s wife the nurse, while she was doing her part-time degree? There was some knowledge of anatomy inherent in these killings, and both girls had been drugged. Was she at all artistically inclined? Or maybe forensically focused?

  And were there others?

  I startled at the noise of the fridge grinding on and looked up. The sky outside the window was looking orange as the sun was heading toward setting, indicating that we must be receiving smoke from some of the early BC wildfires.

  I had spent most of the afternoon, after Denise had left, worrying over these lists and hadn’t even considered what to make for supper. These days, with the Marta investigation on the boil, it was never a sure thing that Steve would make it home for supper, so I’d been aiming at stews and casseroles, which could reheat nicely for leftovers.

  I padded over to the pantry to see if we had any cans of mushroom soup, my ingredient of choice when creating a casserole, and pulled out a can of corn, and a tin of tuna along with the soup tin. I checked the freezer drawer for green beans, and I was soon in business. The casserole was in the oven within ten minutes, and required an hour.

  Dessert would be simple, just berries. I got the plastic clamshell out of the fridge and washed and cored enough strawberries to fill two bowls, then sprinkled powdered stevia to melt over them.

  I decided garlic bread would be nice with the casserole, so I whipped up some garlic butter and spread it on several pieces of sourdough rye I’d bought earlier in the week at the K & K. I wrapped them in tin foil and slid them into the oven beside the casserole dish.

  Soon the kitchen was filled with the smell of garlic, which made me think that everyone in the building would be wanting to come eat with us. There was nothing like the smell of garlic to get my taste buds salivating.

  The thought of garlic bread reminded me of an Italian restaurant that Steve and I used to frequent near campus, and made me want to get out the candlesticks again. I wondered whether any sociological studies had been done of how long into a marriage people put candles on the table. To be perverse, I set the counter island instead of the dining table. It wouldn’t do to look too Stepford.

  I tidied up my papers and moved my satchel closer to the door, keeping the list of things I wanted to ask Steve on top. I checked the clock. Fifteen minutes to casserole, and still no word from Steve. This really wasn’t like him. Normally, he would text to let me know that it was going to be a late night.

  I put a load of laundry in to wash, and cleaned the sink and mirror in the half bath by the kitchen. When the buzzer rang, I pulled the casserole and garlic bread out of the oven, and set them on top of the range to cool a bit.

  Still no word from Steve. I wandered into the bedroom to check whether he had somehow left a voicemail on the landline without me hearing it ring through. There was no blinking light, meaning no message.

  I peeled open the garlic bread to pull out a gooey piece, and doled myself out a generous spoonful of casserole. I might as well eat w
hile it was hot and fresh.

  I cleaned away my dirty dishes and put away the setting I’d laid out for Steve. No need to make him feel awkward about not phoning. I wiped the counter and put the casserole in the fridge once it had cooled off enough. I took my phone over to the living room side table where I had my charger laid out, and plugged it in, so I’d be certain not to miss a call.

  I tried to watch TV, but I couldn’t commit to anything on, and nothing appealed on our massive list of waiting-to-be- watched shows. I turned the television off and picked up a book from the coffee table. It was the Frida Kahlo book I’d bought on our honeymoon, the one I’d had to write up a synopsis of for the police case. I’d not looked at it since.

  Where was Steve?

  The phone rang just as I was in the bathroom, so I ran back to the living room pulling up my sweatpants as I went. Thank goodness our living room windows looked out onto the vast expanse of river valley, and not another set of high rise windows. Unless someone was watching us with a high powered telescope, my indiscretion would go unnoticed.

  “Steve?” I barked into the phone.

  “Sorry, Randy, I was hoping to talk to him, myself.” It was Iain, Steve’s partner. “Isn’t he home? I figured he’d be there by now.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “About, well, about two hours ago, I guess.” Iain must have been looking up at one of the huge wall clocks in the station. “We’ve been working a case pretty steady…”

  “The Marta Gainer death?”

  Iain paused. He hated the way Steve talked to me about his work. Iain made sure the ugly of the job never went home with him to Myra. I wasn’t all that sure Myra appreciated it.

  “Er, yes, that one. Anyhow, Steve apparently took a call, said he was headed for home, and left.”

  “He hasn’t called here, and I didn’t call him two hours ago.” A thought hit me. Steve wouldn’t have said “headed for home.” That was my sort of phrasing, and it drove him crazy whenever I mentioned to him that I was “heading out” or “headed for the grocery store.” The fact that he so often pointed out my dialectic tic would mean he certainly wouldn’t be using it himself.