Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Val waited.

  “Trey Selkirk,” said Dixon Foote, downshifting. “Besides, the kid’s death broke the guy. They lost the kid, they lost Selkirk, and they lost the camp.”

  While Dixon loaded an order of two by twelve boards he’d ordered from the local lumberyard onto the Foote barge, Val scuffed through the gravel at the landing with her hands on her hips. The only other people in sight were a couple of what she could only call strapping young men unloading eight green canoes from a rack trailered behind a pickup truck with WENDABAN OUTFITTING CO. painted on the side. Their hair was clean, their teeth the bright white of sheer youth and no cigarettes, their bodies naturally lean. They were swinging canoes around as easily as if they were grabbing a box of cookies from a cupboard.

  A small yellow school bus thundered into sight, kids’ hands waving madly out the windows at the busy outfitters, voices high. Val figured them for the canoes’ intendeds, and when the bus braked and the door groaned open, she gave them a wide berth and headed for the community bulletin board. Charlie Cable wasn’t on the bus, or in the pickup, or hiding behind the bulletin board. How does the guy come and go so slickly? She scanned the notices. Some were handwritten scrawls seeking the return of a lost iPod, mutt that answers to Sheldon, and dock that had floated away in the ice breakup last spring.

  The better signs flogged the community for contributions to lake-related charities, and one announced the annual benefit gala, a square dance in support of the Wendaban Youth Alliance. August 16th, 7 p.m., Lake Wendaban Community Center, Municipal Dock. World famous caller Shelley Timms. Music by Finger Pickin’ Pea Pickers. Quilt Auction! Come support our kids!

  Only in this outpost of minimal civilization would a square dance be considered a gala. Val sighed, turning back to the teens pushing each other playfully and hauling their backpacks off the bus, loping over to the canoes that were riding lightly at the water’s edge. Overhead, towering white clouds were bunching and rising in the very blue sky. A sky she’d love to see at home, but not here. At that moment she heard a shrill whistle and saw Dixon Foote waving her back, his hands on his hips, all the lumber aboard the barge. Then he pointed to a boat idling fifty feet out, Camp Sajo peeling on the side.

  Caroline Selkirk stood at the wheel, Kay Stanley sitting beside her. Val hurried onto the Foote barge and went to the back, the closest she could get. Caroline cupped her hands around her mouth. “Wade called. Charlie got taken out by plane from the landing.”

  “Taken out?”

  Caroline smiled. “Taken back to his place in the wilderness,” she hollered. “Wade called the pilot.”

  She didn’t get it. “Okay…”

  “Told him to let Charlie know you two are coming.”

  “Oh!” So they were going to corner the fox in his den. It was finally going to happen. A signed contract. Or an exposed killer. Either way, the trip home. Standing there in the August heat, she got a chill. No, more like a thrill.

  “He’ll pick you up at four.”

  “Today?”

  Caroline gave a tight shake of her head. “Tomorrow. He’s got work to do, and tomorrow’s the earliest he can do it,” she called. “He’ll fly you.”

  Well, there had to be a downside. In this case, two downsides. A day’s wait—Peter will be so thrilled—and a small plane.

  At that, Caroline Selkirk ran a hand through the thicket of her red hair, then jerked her head toward Kay Stanley. “We’re going into town to pick up mail and buy provisions…” Provisions. The kind of word that sounds like wilderness adventures. The teens at the landing, heading out with packs and canoes, they had provisions. Caroline Selkirk had words. But Val found it oddly touching. “You’ll come with Kay and me to the Kellehers’ tonight,” Caroline threw back at Val. A smiling Kay lifted a beefy hand as Caroline shifted and the Camp Sajo boat cut through the water. Once she cleared the No Wake zone, the motor roared and the boat zoomed around a bend in the shoreline, disappearing white in the persistent summer sunlight.

  And there she was, Valjean Cameron, left behind on the slow boat to China. She spent a useless few moments wondering—as Dixon Foote settled himself happily back in his little weather-beaten wheelhouse—if the barge had been faster, would she have caught Charlie Cable there at the landing before he got spirited away by some local flyer? Would she have been spared a return trip set upwards of twelve thousand feet in the company of a man whose wife had met such a spectacular and mysterious end?

  Behind her the outfitters were shouting instructions to the teens who huddled, smoking, and weren’t too cool to squeal as they loaded their packs into canoes. It struck Val that Caroline Selkirk and her sidekick Kay would probably be away from Camp Sajo for a few hours, what with just getting all the way to town, picking up mail, food shopping, and whatever other stops they had in mind for “provisions.” Unless Val was mistaken, what had just fallen into her lap was an opportunity.

  The barge might move at the speed of the last Ice Age, but Val had to give it points for stealth. When Dixon Foote sidled the forty-footer up to the Camp Sajo dock, Val shook his hand, thanked him for the effort, and saw him on his way. From what she could tell, her arrival hadn’t drawn anyone’s attention. No hockey-loving goldbricks. And, more importantly, no handyman Luke Croy. She had no desire to antagonize anybody with a power tool. But maybe he was off in the brush with noise-canceling headphones somewhere. Still, he wasn’t checking out the Camp Sajo dock to see who’d arrived.

  Val scanned the perimeter for movement and sound. No distant voices. No doors lightly shutting in the still morning. Nothing but a couple of noisy crows cawing high up in the treetops. Then she hurried to the camp office, where she slipped noiselessly inside and grabbed her briefcase. Stepping back outside, Val stood on the low porch and glanced around. Still no Luke in sight.

  She could justify hanging out around the camp office if she came across the handyman, but not what she was about to do in pursuit of information on Charlie Cable. Her first true act of due diligence. If Cable was just a little wrong in the head, Fir Na Tine could deal with it. The same could be said for half their authors, anyway. There were days when she suspected it was a prerequisite to a book deal. But murder? If Charles Cable had anything at all to do with the death of Leslie Decker, any talk of a contract was over. There were plenty of things she would take a chance on in this life—for instance, coming up to this godforsaken place to placate her boss—but just assuming the cockeyed best about Charles Cable in hopes of swelling Fir Na Tine’s bottom line was not one of them. In a matter of seconds, she found herself in front of the shutter next to the door of the old boathouse. With one last quick glance behind her, Val eyed the sad old empty camp, then slid her fingers behind the loose shutter and drew out the key.

  10

  A quick turn in the lock and she had let herself into the Camp Sajo junk room and laundromat, then slipped the key back into place behind the shutter. Once inside, she turned the lock on the doorknob, pressed the door shut, and moved soundlessly up the stairs to Leslie Decker’s private space. The murder scene. With any luck at all, she’d discover some overlooked piece of evidence that would pluck Charlie Cable right out of her suspicious mind, where he was starting to loom like a homicidal backwoods coot in Deliverance. Something. Something the cops might’ve missed two years ago because they were already looking at the crime a certain way. A robber. A husband pushed a little too far—

  No. Put that possibility right out of her head. Because to let it marinate there meant she was either being flown by a killer or to a killer, and nothing she had endured in the last years with Peter Hathaway could even prepare her for either of those truths. She looked around, a tougher thing than it had been on the first floor. The plywood board nailed over the window pretty effectively cut off any light from that direction.

  Leslie Decker’s private space, a room placed off limits by Caroline, was pretty much the way Kay Stanley
had described it: untouched. Kay may have swept and straightened up after the cops were finished with it, but dust had settled over every surface like a thin, dry snowfall. It reminded Val of an attic where nothing ever changes in a limbo of disuse. In this space devoid of life, where the remaining windows were shut up tight and the sun heated the semi-darkness, the only scent was what the unfinished pine boards of the walls gave off.

  Val crossed the large room to the window that looked south, toward the far tip of Selkirk Peninsula. She was surprised to see a fire escape just outside the window, rusting metal steps leading down to the narrow boardwalk that ran around three sides of the building. Next to the bottom step were two large, cylindrical propane tanks. Out the other window, the western exposure, all Val saw was forest. Somewhere in that direction was the illegal access road that Caroline was monitoring. The morning of her murder, had Leslie Decker seen trouble coming?

  Val stood in the center of the room and did a slow 360, taking in what the murdered Leslie had left behind. Then she moved methodically around the space. Near the top of the stairs was a small but functional bathroom that would have been right at home in an Airstream. The toilet paper roll was almost at an end, one half-torn sheet still hanging, forever hanging. A mink-colored plush towel, shoved hastily onto a towel bar, had long since dried. A plastic bottle of Alba Botanica body wash was nearly empty. A bottle of Alpha Keratin shampoo, nearly full. Val unscrewed both tops and sniffed. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but the bathroom seemed disappointingly normal…right down to the two blond, desiccated hairs trapped forever in the shower drain. Suddenly the dead woman seemed disturbingly close, and Val was struck by how the merest things of life outlast the flesh and blood—the dried, cramped towel, the shed hair, the toilet paper torn by fingers long gone.

  Suspended from the ceiling next to the john was a rack holding a few clothes Val forced herself to riffle through as minimally as possible. A dusty Lily Pulitzer dress. A couple of Banana Republic shirts, one yellow, one melon. Two pairs of slim Ann Taylor pants. In a large, square canvas bin on wheels was a jumble of colorful lacy camisoles, Reef sandals, thongs, a floral bikini. On the outside of the canvas bin was a small wash of spattered blood. Duly noted? Overlooked?

  The most imposing piece of furniture, in a tidy kind of way, was a large cabinet of some kind of expensive hardwood on the wall between the two windows. Tugging at a handle, Val peeked inside at a Murphy bed. No blankets, but fine Egyptian cotton sheets in sage green. Was the bed up or down, in or out, at the time of the murder? Why had Leslie Decker lied to her husband, telling him she was visiting her sister? What was behind the lie—an affair? In which case, maybe the bed was down and deployed and Leslie had fought for her life with a crazed lover. Val always hated crazed lover scenarios, whether she found them in the lives of her friends or in fiction. They always seemed like the easiest, tawdriest explanations for anything. Like Daria Flottner.

  What else could be behind Leslie’s great lie the final weekend of her life? A secret meeting of some other sort? Did the woman have that kind of life? A Persian rug stood rolled and vertical in a dark corner behind the S-shaped glass and chrome desk that dominated the other half of Leslie’s upstairs room. Attached to it by a stiff wire was a cleaning tag. So it had been sent out for cleaning after the crime—blood?—but nobody had the heart to put it back down on the floor. Or take it out forever.

  An Aeron desk chair stood at an angle away from the desk, as if Leslie Decker had just pushed herself back to greet somebody coming up the stairs. Stacks of papers ranged over the desk, hastily tidied, probably by Kay Stanley in that moment in time when Caroline needed something to be done at the scene, to reassert some normalcy over the grief and awfulness, before she closed it off for good. Thumbing through the stacks, Val found the papers to be the same stuff in anyone’s life, murder victim or not. Printed receipts for books ordered online. Empty new manila envelopes. Post-it notes. Scratch pads—nothing incriminating, just doodles.

  Brochures from Save the Children and Heifer International. Old flyers from Lake Wendaban events—including the annual fundraising square dance “gala” for the Wendaban Youth Alliance from two summers ago. A couple of two-year-old People magazines. Alumni directories from Trent University and Humber College. Nothing had any bookmarks or dog-eared pages to point Val to a useful clue. Somewhat in frustration, she took the Trent alumni directory and shook it open. Two slips of paper fluttered to the floor.

  Deposit slips for an account at Toronto Dominion Bank. Was it the Camp Sajo account? Did Leslie Decker do the bookkeeping up here in her upscale renovated boathouse? Thirty grand, forty grand, dated a month apart. Leslie had to keep better records than this. But where? Any computer equipment had been removed. At any rate, the camp must have been doing better than Caroline was letting on—at least as of a couple of years ago. Val set aside the deposit slips.

  Then she tackled the final dark corner on the same wall as the boarded-up window, where one large covered basket and two metal boxes were lined up alongside each other—stored upstairs, Val noted, and not downstairs at Leslie’s. Interesting. The tightly woven basket had a hard shape with straps and ties and a flat side. On the hinged lid, CAMP SAJO was stenciled in brown. Above it, in sunny yellow, TREY. Val opened the lid and pulled the basket away from the wall to shed more light on the contents. It turned out to be a trove of random things, a catch-all of little things valued by the embattled owner of Camp Sajo. Val crouched by the basket, which was not even half full, and grabbed a handful of items she set out on the floor.

  Homemade Valentines addressed to Trey.

  A wind-up sailor toy.

  A wind-up Yeti.

  A wind-up Superman.

  Some unopened packs of Smarties.

  Unopened bars of Cadbury chocolates, years old.

  Framed photos of Trey with different campers. Some with heart stickers glued all around the borders.

  Unframed photos—even some old Polaroids—of Trey with different campers.

  A pair of crudely knitted wool gloves.

  A pair of more crudely knitted wool socks.

  Postcards from far-flung campers after they returned home.

  Crocheted neck gaiters in blue. In brown. In green.

  Val could tell she was digging into a stockpile of all the little love tokens starry-eyed campers had presented to Trey Selkirk over many years of operation. She wondered if the drowned boy, Marcus Cadotte, had given him anything. Probably not, considering it was his first time at camp and he had never returned home. Never missed Sajo, never missed Trey. But over the last twenty years, missed everything else.

  Val dug out a bunch of old photos rubber-banded together, slipped off the band, and thumbed through them. For the most part, small group shots, the handsome, craggy, buff Trey Selkirk at the center of every grouping, his hair graying over time. But in the earlier shots, before the gray, before the shoulders seemed a little more fragile, he was a compelling figure, a bright smile and crinkled eyes deathless in the summer sun. These pictures were all anyone would ever need to understand the concept of charisma.

  He was gorgeous.

  She quickly separated out a few shots of Trey Selkirk with family—a young Caroline, a younger Leslie, what could only be a windblown wife, Hope, looking ever so stalwart in a buffalo plaid jacket—and then shots of others Val recognized. A younger Martin Kelleher in his safari jacket, still a powerhouse of concentrated will, his arms folded, his stare seeing four moves down the road in the chess game, Trey’s arm chummily around his shoulder. A much younger Trey Selkirk, Hope, and Kay Stanley with shoulder-length hair and bangs framing a slightly worried face—and off to the side, carrying canoe paddles, that face Val recognized across time from the back jacket of The Nebula Covenant: Charlie Cable. A Charlie Cable in an era when he still apparently cared to shave daily, caught mid-sentence, clearly ribbing the photographer about something. Talle
r even than the magnetic Trey, more powerfully built even than Martin Kelleher. Val re-banded this little stack of old photos and slipped them into her briefcase for a closer look later on.

  Then she held up the old gaily painted kaleidoscope from Trey Selkirk’s basket of treasures and saw—nothing. Pressing the eyepiece against her eye, she rotated the tube. Still nothing. Puzzled, Val tapped it lightly against the basket, her breath catching when it came apart in her hands. Inside the old tube was a roll of papers. She knew she was onto something, and her fingertips separated the papers enough to see that they looked like old letters, maybe a couple of camp forms. For this discovery, she wanted time and a whole lot more privacy than she could get trespassing at Leslie Decker’s. Val tightened the roll of papers, slipped the tube back into place, and set Trey Selkirk’s kaleidoscope into her briefcase, where it bulged at the bottom, but not too suspiciously, she thought.

  She pushed the basket back into its place against the wall and checked out the two identical metal boxes. Old Army green, big enough to hold file folders and records of all sorts if you didn’t mind ugly. Stenciled in white on the dusty metal lid of one was HOPE. Etched neatly with a knife on the front of the other was CAROLINE DUNGANNON SELKIRK. Neither had a lock. Val took a quick look inside Hope’s storage box and discovered old knitting pattern books, straight and circular needles, stitch holders, and a skein of rainbow-colored acrylic. It was nothing more interesting than Hope Selkirk’s knitting bag, camp-style.

  Caroline’s held a spiral-bound notebook filled with decent fashion sketches done in colored pencil, signed CDS. In the margins were funny little notes to herself: Chiffon, Selkirk, really? and See if L. will model this when I run it up. And next to a diaphanous blue nightie she had penned, Too sexy for W.D.? In another notebook, labeled THE LIVING HISTORY OF CAMP SAJO, WENDABAN, ONTARIO, CANADA, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, THE WORLD, were the first few chapters of a book begun by Caroline, who saw herself as the camp chronicler. A quick look yielded nothing more scandalous than the camp’s original building, back in 1899, as a Jesuit mission. The earnest little historian was careful to include footnotes everywhere. No photos, no hidden roll of secret letters. No knitting, even. Nothing to shed light, all those years later, on the murder of her sister.