Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  “Proof that my husband is behind the illegal access roads.” Diane’s face started to fall apart.

  Caroline Selkirk sank slowly onto the bench behind her, nearly missing it. She gave Luke a quick look of pure pain. “Martin?”

  Diane went on, “I’ve spent the afternoon getting as much together as I could. Invoices, letters of intent, email, documents of incorporation. I hope it’s enough to—”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But you will.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a shadow company he set up through Cintorix.”

  “His corporation?”

  “Right now the shadow company is paying a contractor to bring in the equipment and manpower to make these illegal access roads.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “It’s all there.”

  “Why?”

  Diane said softly, “Because he wants your land, Caroline.”

  “The camp?”

  “He wants all of it. He wants Selkirk Peninsula.”

  “For what?”

  “To develop, not to develop, his to decide. But first he has to own it.”

  “Why? Why now?” said Caroline, trying to understand. “In a year it all goes back to the Queen.”

  Diane said gently, “If you own it, it will.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Martin is rich. He gets to keep what he wants.”

  And there it was.

  “But the petition campaigns, Diane, and the—the meetings and plans and—”

  “The environmental bloc.”

  “Yes!”

  “Or blockheads, as he calls you.” She gestured to the sheaf of papers. “Page forty-three.”

  Caroline seemed dazed. “Why would he go to all the trouble to—”

  “Merely speaking of poison,” said Diane Kelleher, “poisons. If he can get you all worrying enough about the water quality and habitat destruction and threats of copper mining and clearcutting and—”

  Luke put in, “Illegal access roads.”

  “—illegal access roads, you will sell.”

  Caroline shook her head obstinately. “Martin knows these people. He knows they won’t sell. Their cottages go back in their families for a hundred years.”

  Diane said patiently, “It’s because he knows them that he knows they will. They will sell. You just don’t see it yet.”

  “How can he do all this, everything you’re telling me, on his own? It’s impossible, Diane. One man can’t—”

  “You’re right,” Diane said, glancing at her feet. “He had help.”

  One word: “Who?”

  Diane stood silent. Nobody moved.

  “Who?”

  Diane squared her shoulders. “Leslie.”

  The hands gently pushed a beer well out of the way of the fireproof old metal box that had belonged to the girl called Leslie Selkirk. The bent nail Leslie had pushed through the latch felt smooth. But, then, it really wasn’t a nail, after all, was it? Then, what? The hands took a soft rag and wiped it. But what had seemed like dirt and rust turned out to be tarnish, after all, and needed some real polish. But the piece of bent metal Leslie used on her Army surplus box was a piece of jewelry, it looked like—a silver stick pin, maybe, with the fastener broken off. It was finely worked with delicate rosettes. Too old to be Leslie’s. Or Caroline’s. Maybe Hope Selkirk’s, the mother. And wouldn’t it be just like Leslie to ruin a piece of silver jewelry when a two-penny common nail would do?

  Before reaching for the spiral notebook, the hands set aside the ruined stick pin, then stretched out flat against the table. It was all, all of it, just ruined stick pin, wasn’t it? The camp, the marriage, some reputations, other confidences. So why this ritual, this slow discovery of the extent of the damage? The wind was picking up, fluttering the loose pages the hands slid out of the metal box. Because ritual is my answer to Leslie Selkirk Decker. Against all her careless devastation, I set this slow mindfulness. I outlived her. I outloved her. And I retreated first, without ever taking a step. The beautiful silver stick pin is ruined, but I can set it where I please. If I control the rate of these discoveries, I make her small for all of time.

  The hands turned each page of the spiral notebook until an entry appeared. It was the final entry, and there was relief in that. The last entry Leslie Selkirk made before journals became uncool or she no longer needed to justify herself. Yesterday I was seventeen and Dad gave me a very cool underwater camera, she wrote. Caroline wants it, I can tell, but I told her she’ll have to take five of my night shifts here at camp before I’ll let her use it. I wonder if she will. She called me selfish and walked away, mad. That idiot camper Marcus Cadotte sneaks out practically every night and I’m sick of getting him back inside his cabin. That’s why Caroline has to trade. He’s big and fat and ugly at fourteen and he’ll still be big and fat and ugly at forty. He’s got crooked teeth and goofy hair and I hate the way he smells.

  He’s what Mom calls a scholarship kid, which means he comes to camp for free. The more the other kids don’t like him, the harder he tries, and then he ends up spilling cherry Kool-Aid pop all over that cute kid Jeremy’s Upper Canada College sweatshirt. It’ll never come out, that idiot Marcus. At activity time, all the other campers wait to see what Marcus signs up for so they don’t get stuck with him. Mar-curse, that’s what I call him. Not to his face, of course, just to Caroline. Mar-curse, Mar-curse. When the Toronto Star reporter came to do a piece on Chez Trey, Dad made me sick when he put Marcus Cadotte out in front and made a big deal out of him, how good camp was for this dear lad. He actually called him this dear lad. Was Dad being funny? Doesn’t he realize kids like big fat Mar-curse will bring us down? One look at retards like Marcus Cadotte and rich Toronto parents aren’t going to send their kids to this camp anymore. They’re not!

  Dad is a fool. Dad is a blind old silly fool no matter what everyone else thinks and I love him so much. I think Marcus sneaks out at night to catch counselors making out, but Caroline says he likes the night sky and likes to lie on the archery field in the dark, even if it’s against the rules. That’s what he tells her. And she believes it because she’s full of shit and romance because she’s screwing Wade Decker and thinks nobody knows—

  The hands set down the spiral notebook.

  The reader pushed back from the table.

  Six o’clock. Time to get ready for the gala.

  Lucky thing.

  Lucky, lucky thing.

  The rest of that final entry would just have to wait.

  Val sat alone in the camp dining hall for an hour after she slipped out of the lodge when Caroline burst into tears. It was all too personal, and none of her business. And it seemed very odd to Val that she could make Leslie Decker’s murder her business, no problem, but when it came to the kind of betrayal that scrubs clean all the old safe illusions about the woman, then no. Caroline’s sobs filled the space, and Val knew she herself was one person too many.

  When Luke bounded over, straddled the bench, and pulled the last of the Selkirks into his arms, Val backed quietly out of the lodge. Only Diane Kelleher was left standing, her empty hands trying to come to rest somewhere, as they cupped her own face, smoothed the linen that wasn’t wrinkled, and just hung, finally, at her helpless sides.

  Outside in the sweet-smelling air, Val walked over to Kay, who was standing in the garden, her broad face turned toward the sound of the cries. Val gave her a look like she didn’t know where to start, and Kay held up a gloved hand. “I’ll hear later,” she said softly, then jerked her head up the path. Val followed, passing a tetherball court where weeds shot up, unpicked, through the cracks. Inside the camp kitchen, Kay set out cold drumsticks, sliced beefsteak tomatoes from the garden, and bread. Wordlessly, she left, and Val took a cup of coffee and a plate out
to the open timbered dining room and the wall of windows overlooking the lake. From the center rafter hung the Canadian maple leaf flag, unmoving in the still August air.

  From where she stood, holding her cup to her uninjured cheek, she would be able to see Wade Decker arrive. And she couldn’t hear Caroline Selkirk crying. Coming to terms with the truth about Martin Kelleher, the friend she wrangled with, but they had been safe wrangles, the kind you have when you know you’re on the same side. If Charlie’s still with us, then why doesn’t he do more? Can one of us get elected to council and put a stop to development? Who’s got the most passion for the cause, you or me? And then she finds out he was playing her—playing them all. For years.

  As for Leslie…

  As for Leslie. How will Caroline Selkirk ever make sense of it? She couldn’t consider the possibility that the murder was a result of anything other than robbery and random mischance. To Val, all death seemed like death by misadventure. With Leslie Decker, the misadventure had come at someone else’s hands. The question was whose. And Val realized in that moment, surrounded by other people’s pain, that it still mattered to her. She could go merrily ahead and publish Charlie Cable’s blockbusters, but when it came right down to it, in investigating Leslie Decker’s murder, Val had only really helped herself. Her own career, her own peace of mind. And it felt bad.

  In a quick burst of understanding that popped and dissolved in the second she saw it whole, she knew she wanted to see it through to the end, this search for the treacherous Leslie’s killer, for Wade. “It’s for Wade,” she said softly to herself, with a strange kind of wonder that this fact was only just this moment clear to her. She could barely carry a heavy pack, or fire up a camp stove, or even just keep her city girl misery to herself on what was probably just as difficult a trip for Decker as it had been for her—but this thing, she could do. She could get all the way to answers in the matter of his wife’s violent death. This time, for Decker, the man who was only just free enough to stand naked and battered in a powerful waterfall. As she looked out over the lake from the dining room of Camp Sajo, she didn’t want to think too long about why any of it still mattered. She had planes to catch.

  Diane Kelleher was heading down the path from the lodge, and the slant of her gray-linen shoulders told Val that she was leaving a scene of wreckage behind her. As well as a messenger bag that held a load of sorry truths. She watched the perfidious Martin’s wife stumble on a tree root and keep right on going. Tree roots were small things compared to the faithlessness of human beings.

  With a pang that there was someone heading somewhere off the lake—Philadelphia, was it?—so much as half an hour ahead of her, Val sipped her coffee. Diane Kelleher’s story had opened up a range of new possibilities in terms of the murder. If Arlo the bait boy hadn’t provided Charlie Cable with such a snug alibi, she thought the revelation about Leslie’s treachery ramped up the motive for Charlie to have hurled her in a rage through the second-story window. All these years, he had not only kept the faith, he had been jailed and made sacrifices for preserving the lake environment—shoulder to shoulder with his beloved comrade in arms, Leslie Selkirk. The Leslie who, in his mem-WAHRS, came across as a goddess activist. Fine, principled, unyielding.

  But on the day Leslie died, Charles Cable was off on a secret assignment to dynamite a dam. With his spray paint and his explosives and his willing sidekick, Charlie was suddenly flung back to his radical days—at the very same time Leslie Decker was being flung to her death. Broke up something terrible about it, Arlo had said, when they had got the news. If not Charlie, then who? Martin Kelleher had certainly been playing a double game, and even had more to lose in terms of position in the community than the eccentric Charlie. And lose he would, because although Charlie had been blowing up dams in pursuit of an ideal, Martin had been manipulating his friends and neighbors in an underhanded land grab.

  What if Leslie had the goods on him? Diane had access to files and documents and email accounts, but what if Leslie had secretly recorded her conversations with Martin, and then threatened to expose him? Was it possible Leslie Selkirk Decker had played a double game of her own? Could it be that Trey Selkirk’s younger daughter was everything Charlie and Caroline had believed her to be—a passionate eco-warrior—and she had somehow cottoned to Martin Kelleher’s selfish ambitions about lake property and had…daringly…set him up?

  She set down her cup so hard the coffee sloshed onto her hand, then looked down at some of Mario Prada’s finest work and kicked them off—then set off at a run. Out of the Camp Sajo dining hall, where nothing much ever happened anymore, and at a pretty good barefoot clip down the path to the docks. Kay was nowhere in sight and neither was Luke, probably tending to a devastated Caroline. “Diane!” called Val, waving her arms, trying to get the attention of the woman at the controls of Martin Kelleher’s fancy new boat, still tied to the Selkirk dock.

  Val came to a halt alongside, clutching the edge of the white half-canopy. Lined up neatly on the carpeted floor of the boat were two leather suitcases, a laptop, and three Rubbermaid bins of what looked like art supplies. Diane walked over to her. “Can you get the stern line for me, please?” The long, graceful fingers of one ringless hand lifted in the direction of the rope.

  Val nodded. “Diane,” she said, catching her breath as she untied the line from the silver cleat. “October, two years ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “The weekend Leslie Decker died.” Val tossed the line into the boat.

  While she struggled with how to phrase the next question, Diane Kelleher crossed her arms, then squinted at the disappearing sun with a small smile. “All I can say for sure is that Martin was not at home.”

  “All weekend?”

  “All weekend. He told me he was taking out the schooner we keep on Chesapeake Bay.” Then she widened her eyes at Val. “Two years ago, I believed him.”

  “And now?”

  She lifted her shoulders in an elegant shrug. “He may very well have been on the schooner out on Chesapeake Bay, but if he was, I doubt very much he was alone.”

  “And if he wasn’t on the schooner?”

  Diane said softly, “Then he could have been just about anywhere, couldn’t he?” She held out her hand to Val, who took it. “I’ll leave that to you to figure out.” Her eyes narrowed. “I never believed the innuendoes about Wade.”

  Val’s heart pounded. “Why not?”

  “Leslie could only hurt him just so much, and no one ever kills from a place of indifference.” Diane let go of Val’s hand. “And I never believed the robber scenario Caroline is so hoping is the truth about her sister’s death. Or if it was a robber, it was one we know, one of a different sort. After all these years of marriage, Val,” she said finally, as she set her sunglasses in place, “I cannot alibi my husband. After everything he’s done, even if I could,” she gave a short laugh, “I’m not sure I would.”

  Val stepped away from the boat as Diane Kelleher backed it up with practiced ease, shifted, turned the wheel, and headed up the lake. Three short toots in farewell. Then, as she shifted into high and sped toward town, she passed a boat heading for Camp Sajo, shot an arm over the top of the canopy, and waved. Something kept Val on the dock, maybe the sound of the wake from Diane’s boat that splashed against the pilings, maybe the quick look at her wristwatch that told her it was six thirty. Could be her date for the Lake Wendaban gala was early.

  23

  Wade Decker was wearing a light denim shirt and a pair of nylon cargo shorts that may have been what he wore the day she met him. He looked shaved, reasonably combed, and even the Nosekote had been rubbed in until it disappeared. She eyed those heaven-loving great legs and couldn’t help notice the old pair of tennis shoes. “Thanks for the loan of the boat,” she said, giving him a quick look while he reached for a colorful bag.

  “No problem.”

  She looped the rope aro
und the cleat and made a string of chain knots. “And thanks for the loan of Josie.”

  “Right.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  He gave a short laugh. “Josie Blanton does some chores, and I pay her pretty well. But I keep her out of my bedroom, out of my board room—”

  “Your what?”

  “—and out of my life.” Then he passed her the thin cloth bag that was two shades of pink. “Here,” he said, “this is for you.” Then he added, with a sniff, “For the gala.”

  It was from the Free People boutique. “You went shopping for me?”

  With a small smile, he held up a hand. “Well, I didn’t go to Toronto just to get you something pretty,” he explained, “but while I was there it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Did you get Peter?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said inscrutably. “And the poet.”

  “Ah.”

  Decker looked away from her, a little embarrassed. “Since he thought you were still at the cottage, he muttered something about awkward, and said he and Darla—”

  “Daria.”

  “—would figure something out.”

  So Peter Hathaway was on the lake. Any time now he would meet up with Charlie Cable and discover Fir Na Tine already had a signed contract. Decker went on, “They’ll be coming to the gala, just so you know.”

  Val fell silent. Then she loosened the bag, reached in, and pulled out a billowy, light cotton dress with irregular layers of skirting in red and yellow paisley. The neckline was ruffled and low, but not too low, and the sleeves were roomy and came to the elbow. She held the dress up to herself. “Bohemian without being too weird,” she said approvingly. Forget the Prada shoes. Not for this Colorado hippie look. Decker gave her an appraising look. “Thank you,” Val said gruffly. Suddenly she felt moved, then surprised about it, and clutched the dress in a knot against her swollen cheek. “Very much,” she added, trying hard not to choke. With great care, she folded her new dress, fingering the light fabric. “I’ve got something to tell you. Diane Kelleher stopped by.”