Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  “Of course,” I said, and went next door to the travel agency, where a young woman with enormous grey eyes and a lovely lopsided smile made a copy. She refused to take any money, but gave me a handful of business cards and asked me if I wouldn’t mind handing them out. I said I’d be happy to. I returned to the antique shop, thanked Mrs. Martini for her assistance, then walked through the rain to my noisy, smelly car.

  When I got to the studio I was more than a little surprised to see Chrissy Conrad perched, legs crossed, on a high stool by the glass-topped display counter, drinking coffee with Mary-Alice. Chrissy was wearing a jean jacket and a skirt that showed off her very nice knees — and a good deal of her very nice thighs as well. The tips of her hair were curled from the damp. There was a backpack on the floor by her feet. I shook the rain from my squall jacket, hung it up, then crossed to the coffee machine.

  “Is something wrong?” Mary-Alice asked. “You’re walking kind of funny.”

  “Am I?” I said. “It must be the gravitational anomalies. I find they’re always stronger on Friday.” Mary-Alice frowned. I smiled at Chrissy Conrad. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Well, if you’ll excuse me,” Mary-Alice said. “I have a couple of calls to make.” She smiled at Chrissy Conrad. “Thanks for the muffins.” Then, to me, “I’ll talk to you later,” spoken in the same tone of voice my mother had used when she’d said, “Wait till your father gets home.” Once again, I wondered what I had done.

  Mary-Alice went up the stairs to the office. I poured a cup of coffee. There was a box of fat bakery muffins beside the coffee machine. I hesitated a nanosecond or two before taking a blueberry.

  “The police are looking for you,” I said to Chrissy, slurping my coffee and munching my muffin.

  “They found me,” she said. “A charming fellow named Kovacs grilled me for an hour, but lost interest when he finally got it through his head that I really didn’t know anything about what happened on that boat or about Anna’s murder.”

  I slurped more coffee and munched more muffin. I looked at Chrissy. She was looking at the map to Sam Waverley’s cabin. “Did you know that Sam Waverley was back?” I asked.

  “Yes. I spoke to him yesterday morning.” She unhooked the heels of her western boots from the crossbar of the stool and stood up.

  “Really. Why?”

  She moved away, closer to the door, maybe getting ready to run again, except that she hadn’t picked up her backpack. “It isn’t important,” she said, with a shrug. “Just business.”

  “Did you tell him about Anna?”

  “He already knew,” she said. “The woman who looks after the shop when he’s away told him. Do the police know he’s back?”

  “Yes. They interviewed him yesterday. He’s been cleared of any involvement in Anna’s death.”

  “You’re very well informed,” she said.

  “I have friends in the VPD.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Not really.”

  She circled back to the counter and pointed to the map. “This is a map to Sam’s cabin. What are you doing with it?”

  “I was thinking of paying him a visit.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to pay my respects.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I knew his wife,” I said.

  She looked at the map again. “I’ve been to the cabin. You’ll never find it using that.”

  I picked up the card. Though crudely drawn and not to scale, the map clearly showed the Sea-to-Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler, with the town of Squamish located about halfway between. And halfway between Squamish and Whistler was a turnoff to the left onto what was identified as Lake Lucille Road. It crossed some wavy lines representing the Cheakamus River and hatched double lines that I took to be the BC Rail tracks, before meandering past a blob labelled Lake Lucille toward a smaller blob named Lake Freeman. An X marked a location at the end of a short line jutting out from a sharp bend in the Lake Lucille road, midway between the two blobs. The map included distances, as well as the turnoff to the Black Tusk access road a kilometre and a half beyond the Lake Lucille turnoff.

  “Seems clear enough to me,” I said.

  “Sam drew that for me a couple of years ago,” Chrissy said. “You’ll get lost if you follow it. I know I did.”

  “Yet you’ve been to the cabin.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I drive a Jeep.”

  “Um, look, why don’t I go with you?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Maybe I want to pay my respects, too.”

  Right, I thought.

  “In the meantime,” Chrissy said, “I was wondering if there was anything I could do around here to earn a couple of bucks. I’m a bit short of cash and … what?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “C’mon,” she said, a hurt expression on her face. “Cut me a break, all right. I know a little about photography, which end of a camera is which, anyway, and a fair amount about retail. Plus, I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty. Your sister —” She paused.

  “My sister what?”

  “Well, she said you could probably use some help till your partner comes back to work.”

  “My insurance company is upset enough as it is, without me inviting the fox into the henhouse.”

  “Hey, it was just an idea,” Chrissy said, an edge of anger in her voice.

  Mary-Alice came down the stairs from the office. “Did you ask him?”

  “Yeah,” Chrissy said glumly.

  “And …?”

  Chrissy shook her head.

  “We could use some help, Tom,” Mary-Alice said. “And someone who knows something about retail might prove useful.”

  “Do you know who this is?” I said to Mary-Alice.

  “Yes,” Mary-Alice said. “She told me. She made a mistake, Tom.”

  “Explain that to Bobbi.” Mary-Alice looked at me as though I had just kicked her puppy, if she’d ever had a puppy. Chrissy Conrad just looked prettily woebegone. “All right, fine,” I said, relenting. “Find something for her to do. But she’s your responsibility. Just don’t leave her alone with anything of value.”

  I left Mary-Alice to work out the details with Chrissy, put on my jacket and went out, without any idea where I was going, succumbing to an urge for random motion.

  chapter twenty-three

  Where I went was home. I had something to eat, then went back to the studio. The rain had let up, but the sky remained threatening. I found Chrissy in the darkroom with Wayne. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers blasted from Wayne’s CD player and they sang along to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” loudly and off-key while they applied a coat of matte black paint to the walls. She’d changed from her skirt to jeans, presumably from her backpack.

  “Still feel like taking that drive?” I said to her.

  “Um, sure, I guess.” She looked at Wayne.

  “I can finish up here,” Wayne said.

  “I’ll get cleaned up,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the Liberty heading north through Stanley Park toward the Lions Gate Bridge. Chrissy sat quietly beside me, staring into shadowy green forest that pressed close on either side of the road. Was she having second thoughts? I wondered. Was I?

  Anna Waverley’s description of Samuel Waverley had left me with the impression of a selfish and self-centred man, a serial philanderer who did not want children, who did not like home-cooked meals, and who had encouraged his wife to take lovers. Why had he married her in the first place? I wondered. Had he ever intended to be faithful? Perhaps, but, as Anna has said, it simply wasn’t in his nature.

  “What is Sam Waverley like?” I asked Chrissy.

  “He’s a bit of a cold fish, I guess,” she said. “Particularly where people are concerned. He doesn’t relate to them very well, emotionally speaking. He probably regards Anna getting h
erself killed as a terrible inconvenience.”

  “You don’t like him much.”

  “No, I guess I don’t. I liked Anna, and he treated her like shit.”

  I hadn’t got the impression from Anna Waverley that she’d thought her husband had treated her badly, that he’d been inconsiderate or unkind, just that he’d been somewhat emotionally detached.

  “You don’t like him, but you’ll do business with him,” I said.

  She gave me a “You know how it is” shrug.

  “Can you think of a reason why Sam Waverley would want her dead?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean he didn’t have one, I suppose, but even if he did, he wouldn’t have a clue how to go about hiring a hit man.”

  “What about his girlfriend?”

  “Boudica? Please.”

  “I thought her name was Doris.”

  “It is. Boudica’s just what I call her.” At my blank look, she explained, “Formerly known as Boadicea, the Queen of all the Celts. Wait till you meet her. You’ll see why.”

  “How about you?” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Would you have a clue how to go about hiring a hit man?”

  “I might,” she said. “More than Sam or Boudica, anyway. But I didn’t.”

  A voice in the back of my mind told me I was being reckless trusting Chrissy Conrad, or believing anything she told me. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t be silenced. Why did she offer to come along? it asked. For all you know, boyo, she’s luring you into the middle of nowhere to thump you on your pointy noggin and bury you in the piny woods. It was a possibility, I supposed, although not a very likely one. She knew more about Bobbi’s attack and Anna Waverley’s murder than she was letting on, but how much more, I couldn’t begin to guess. However, while I may not have been the world’s best judge of character, my instincts told me she wasn’t a killer, although it was certainly conceivable that she was an accessory, before or after the fact. I felt, though, that if she were an accomplice to murder and attempted murder, she was an unwilling one, perhaps even an unwitting one. There was a better than even chance that she was as far in over her head as I was. Nevertheless, it might pay to be vigilant, I decided, and avoid turning my back on her.

  “If Anna Waverley had a lover,” I said to her, as we motored north along the edge of Howe Sound toward the town of Squamish, “what sort of man would he be?” The road was called the Sea-to-Sky Highway, except that there wasn’t much sky, just a lot of low, dark clouds that periodically dumped buckets of rain on us.

  “How would I know?”

  “You knew her fairly well, didn’t you?”

  “Not that well. Anyway, what difference does it make?”

  “She described her husband as something of a wimp, not very physically competent, she said.”

  “Well, he’s no Lovejoy, that’s for sure,” Chrissy said.

  “Who?”

  “Lovejoy was a British TV series about a shady, crime-solving antiques dealer,” she said. “Sam’s a bit on the shady side, I suppose, but that’s where any resemblance to Lovejoy ends. What’s your point? If you’re worried about him roughing you up, forget it. Sam wouldn’t hurt a fly. He never laid a hand on Anna, or even raised his voice to her. He just wasn’t very, well, attentive.”

  “Would she take the kind of lover who was likely to physically or psychologically abuse her?”

  “I doubt it. No. Definitely not.”

  “Which is it?”

  “She wouldn’t put up with any kind of abuse.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Being ignored was a kind of abuse in my books. Maybe the worst kind.

  “Look,” Chrissy said, “why do most people have extramarital affairs? To get something they aren’t getting at home, right? What Anna wasn’t getting at home was any kind of intimacy. If she had a lover, it would be with someone who satisfied her need for intimacy. Not just sex, but sex would be part of it, too, probably. Sam’s pretty boring in bed, which might explain why he’s had so many lovers: they get tired of him, not the other way around.”

  “And you’ve no idea who Anna’s lover might be?”

  “No,” Chrissy replied, with a sigh in impatience.

  “I hope you won’t be too offended when I tell you that I think you’re lying through your almost-perfect teeth.”

  “I might be offended if I gave a fuck what you thought,” she shot back.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  She smiled thinly. “Besides, if I knew who Anna’s lover was, why wouldn’t I tell you?”

  “I don’t know. It’s in your nature?”

  “I think I’ve had enough of this crap,” she said. “Turn around and take me back to Vancouver.”

  “We’re past the point of no return,” I said.

  “I’ll have you charged with kidnapping.”

  “Wayne will testify you came willingly. We’re just a few klicks from Squamish. I’ll let you off there, if you like. You can catch a bus back to Vancouver.”

  “Forget it.” She slumped in her seat, arms folded across her chest like a petulant child.

  The Sea-to-Sky Highway dropped down to sea level one last time just before Squamish. I thought of Jeanie Stone. I was undoubtedly romanticizing, but she seemed like such a refreshingly straightforward, uncomplicated person, until I remembered that she was taking a doctorate in geology. Everybody has hidden depths. Even me. I just wasn’t quite sure how deep mine went.

  After Squamish, the Sea-to-Sky Highway lived up to its name as it snaked along the Cheakamus River gorge, climbing into the Coast Mountains toward Whistler. Due in part to construction on the highway in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics, but mostly because Chrissy insisted the map was wrong and we had to backtrack from the Black Tusk turnoff, it took longer than I thought it would to find Lake Lucille Road. When we finally found it, I was soon very glad that I had a four-wheel-drive vehicle; after the first kilometre the road was rutted and muddy and so steep and rocky in spots that the Liberty had difficulty maintaining traction, especially since it wasn’t equipped with off-road tires.

  “This is ridiculous,” Chrissy said more than once. “We’re never going to make it. We should go back.”

  It took over an hour, but we finally made it to the turnoff to the cabin, which was set a few hundred metres back in the trees along an even rougher track. A mud-spattered Mercedes sedan was parked haphazardly about halfway up the track. I was amazed it had got this far, until I saw that it was a 4Matic all-wheel-drive model. Even so, it must have been a difficult drive, particularly for someone who had been described as physically inept. I said as much to Chrissy as I parked the Jeep behind the Mercedes.

  “Boudica probably drove,” she said.

  We got out of the Jeep and picked our way up the track through the gloomy, dripping woods, our breath smoking in the cool pine- and cedar-scented mountain air. Sam Waverley’s cabin was a rough-hewn log structure with a high, steeply pitched corrugated steel roof, better to shed the nine or ten metres of snow the area received every winter. The roof overhung the front door by a metre or two, supported by thick timber posts. Under the overhang, quarter cords of split firewood were neatly stacked two deep along the exterior walls on both sides of the front door. Wood smoke wafted gently and aromatically from a large stone chimney that protruded from the peak of the roof, as well as from an external insulated steel chimney at one end of the cabin. The windows were modern double-glaze, and glowed warmly in the shadowy afternoon gloom. There were no power lines that I could see, but a generator thrummed quietly somewhere nearby. It took a long time for anyone to respond to my knock.

  “Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called through the door. Boudica, I presumed, a.k.a. Doris Greenwood.

  “My name is Tom McCall,” I replied. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Samuel Waverley about his wife’s death.”

  “Are you the police?”

  “No.”

 
; “Go away, then. We aren’t interested in talking to the media.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m here with Chrissy Conrad. I was a friend of Mrs. Waverley. So was Miss Conrad. She’s also a former employee of Mr. Waverley.”

  “I know who she is,” the woman said. “Go away.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Doris,” Chrissy said. “Let us in.”

  “No. Please go away.”

  “Not until I’ve talked with Mr. Waverley,” I said. “Is he here?”

  “Yes, he’s here …”

  “Then I need to speak with him. Please.”

  After a moment a latch rattled and the door swung open. Standing on the threshold was a tall, raw-boned woman with shoulder-length unruly red hair. She was about forty, with a long, strong face, awash in freckles. Definitely of Celtic stock. She was barefoot and her simple cotton housedress hung on her rangy frame like an afterthought.

  “Hello, Doris,” Chrissy said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Hello, Chrissy,” Doris replied stiffly. The smell of fresh coffee wafted from the warm interior of the cabin.

  “May we come in?” I asked.

  Silently, Doris stepped back. I went in first, tried wiping the forest muck off my shoes on the mat inside the door, then gave up and toed my shoes off. Chrissy followed, removing her boots. Doris closed the door behind us.

  The room into which we stepped was the living room, occupying the full width of the cabin and the middle third of its length, dominated — almost overwhelmed — by a square fieldstone fireplace in the centre of the room. The ceiling of the living room was peaked, supported by thick, rough-hewn beams, and the walls were cedar plank, decorated with framed wildlife prints and drawings, as well as the obligatory old-fashioned snowshoes, wood skis, and bamboo ski poles. The floor was pegged oak, worn smooth and dark with years of waxing. The furniture was appropriately rustic. A wood and fieldstone counter separated the living room from the kitchen/dining area at one end of the cabin. I guessed the bedrooms were through the doorway at the other end. Ladder-like stairs led to lofts over both the bedrooms and the kitchen area.

  A man stepped out from behind the fireplace. He was medium height, plump, and grey. His hair was grey. The jogging suit he wore was grey. Even the skin of his face had a sickly grey tinge. He did not have the look of a well man.