The Dead Letter

by Finley Martin

  “And now?”

  “The University was impressed with my progress,” he said proudly. “They gave me a late-entrance scholarship to cover tuition for the courses I have left…and I work some evenings and weekends at Milton Springs. I’m on the front desk. It’s slow, but I can catch a few hours of study between calls or check-ins. Thank you,” he said to the waitress. She had slipped a plate in front of Anne, another in front of him. She was young, dark-haired, pretty. Her eyes were lively and her smile warm, and her attention lingered on Jacob.

  “Looks like you have a fan,” said Anne after the waitress left.

  “It’s an illusion, Billy. Once they learn my history, I’m history.”

  “That will change,” she said, “and you must have made some friends by now.” Jacob didn’t respond, and they continued their meal with little more than the clink of forks and knives to cut the silence.

  The first sign of alarm rang in the frozen expression on John Jacob Dawson’s face. He stared toward another booth as a couple was preparing to leave. The woman was in her late twenties, dark-haired, and dressed in a mocha business suit. Her low-cut blouse was not businesslike. She moved gracefully and sensuously across the room, quite accustomed to the gazes that followed her.

  The man was tall and solidly built with short, greying hair. He was good-looking, confident, and dressed informally in tailored slacks, a button-down shirt, and a lightweight Hudson’s Bay sweater. Unlike her, his eyes roamed the room casually and continually and unconsciously. His roving eyes stopped when they touched the table at which Anne and Jacob sat.

  Anne turned and looked. She watched Chief MacFarlane approach their table. Quickly, she turned to Dawson: “Take a deep breath, and act normal…don’t talk.”

  “Billy Darby,” said MacFarlane. “What a coincidence. Heard you weren’t around anymore.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, Chief. I don’t disappear very easily.”

  “A resilient spirit,” he said and then looked Dawson in the eye. “I don’t recognize your friend.”

  “Jacob. This is Jamie, Stratford’s Police Chief. Jamie, Jake. Jacob is a sociology student at the university. He’s writing a paper on law enforcement and is looking for a private investigator’s perspective.”

  “You’d make better use of your time if you interviewed real law enforcement officers, Jacob.” MacFarlane stared closely at Dawson. Anne fought back an impulse to match MacFarlane’s demeaning remark. Dawson took hold of his glass of water and sipped. “Do I know you?” MacFarlane asked.

  Dawson finished off his water. He put the glass down, a big smile blossomed on his face, and he chuckled.

  “I really doubt that we travel in the same circles, Chief, but it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Dawson extended his hand. MacFarlane shook it firmly, smiled back, and returned his attention to Anne.

  “Heard about your…unfortunate situation,” he said. “Heard, too, about your taking a vacation, so to speak.”

  “You’ve got big ears, Chief. Vacation? I prefer to think of it as a moment to pause and reflect on the evidence I’ve pulled together…loose ends…like false statements in a police report…like a potential suspect who lied about fathering a dead girl’s baby.”

  “A harmless embellishment to protect her reputation, no doubt…”

  “…or a bit of smoke to hide a crime…,” Anne said. “And I seem to find more smoke the longer I look.”

  “Sometimes the smoke you see has drifted from somebody else’s fire,” he said. MacFarlane leaned over the booth, one arm clutching the back of her seat, the other planted firmly on the table. He loomed over Anne and added in an ominous whisper, “And sometimes people get burnt, when they look in the wrong direction too long.”

  Then MacFarlane straightened up, stepped back, assumed a relaxed stance, and smiled.

  “But good luck with that…,” he said calmly. Then he turned toward Dawson: “…and good luck with your paper, Jake. Ms. Darby has my number if you need a professional point of view.”

  46.

  “I wanted to plunge my fork right through his windpipe. I wanted to hear the gurgle of his blood every time he breathed. The fork was still in my hand.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I thought of prison. It’d be a life sentence for certain this time. But I could have killed him…just like that,” Jacob said, snapping his fingers. “It all came flooding back…the relentless interrogations…the stink of the officer’s breath…the ache inside me…my need for a drink…so strong that all I could feel was my thirst and they all knew it. MacFarlane knew it even though he wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how to get around things at the station. He had leverage.”

  “You can’t kill him. Not now, anyway.”

  “But I could have,” he said. Irene MacLeod couldn’t decide whether his answer indicated repentance for the urge or disappointment at the missed opportunity.

  Irene took away the untouched bowl of soup she had placed in front of Jacob when he returned home. She took it to the kitchen, and she poured it down the drain.

  Meanwhile Jacob stared at the empty white place-setting on the table in front of him. His hands trembled; his thoughts were a jumble; and he needed a drink.

  He longed desperately for a drink.

  Anne texted Jacqui that she would pick her up after school. She stopped at the Bottom Dollar Market, picked up a few sale items, and pulled into the pick-up lane at the high school. She was still a few minutes early, time enough to pick over the bones of her unlucky encounter with MacFarlane at The Crown and Anchor.

  So much for keeping a low profile, she thought. Ben would be pretty crabby if he knew, but it wasn’t my intention…or my fault. Meeting Jacob was a coincidence…and coming across MacFarlane, in that place, was a terrible fluke.

  The shocked expression on Jake’s face flashed through Anne’s mind. She was amazed at how quickly he recovered. MacFarlane hadn’t recognized him, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t pull things together later. Obviously something twigged in MacFarlane’s memory, and that was a worry. Another worry was her revelation about him getting Simone pregnant. That stirred something in him, too, but exactly what and how important it was, she couldn’t calculate.

  The school bell jarred her out of the reflections. Streams of students poured through every exit door in a blurry explosion of energy and movement and noise and colour. It was a bit dizzying, but the thump against the side of Anne’s car startled her. Unable to brake their run soon enough, Jacqui and Rada had fallen against it. A burst of chattery laughter, a thud of books, and the solid clunk of a closing rear door followed.

  “Hi!” both girls shouted out, almost in unison, and laughed at the coincidence.

  “No school for a couple days, huh?” asked Anne.

  “Nope,” both girls said, simultaneously again, and fell into convulsive giggles. “Teachers’ Convention,” added Jacqui.

  “I got some downtime the next few days, too. So what would you say to some driving lessons tomorrow?”

  “Super. Can Rada tag along?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  47.

  A solitary crow clung to a limb, topping the elm tree a few houses up from Anne’s home. The crow was motionless and barely visible, a shadow among shadows at four in the morning. Its head cocked perceptively at the soft grind of footsteps along the stone walkway below, but it kept silent, its black eyes peering through grey skies and mottled leaves at the dark figure beneath it.

  The figure was practically imperceptible as well, blending with darkened houses, the pre-dawn gloom, and street-front shrubbery. It stopped at Anne’s driveway, looked around carefully, and listened until the sound of a light truck on an adjacent street faded completely. Then it moved up the driveway toward a car parked within the deep shadows of her house. He slipped benea
th Anne’s vehicle. The narrow beam of a small Maglite illuminated the undercarriage and traced the line of the exhaust system back to the manifold.

  There was just enough room for the man in black to work his arms and hands and shift his head. He fitted two plastic cable ties loosely around the pipe. He took a pre-cut half-section of radiator hose from his overalls and slipped it between the plastic ties and the pipe. He carefully bedded a stick of industrial dynamite into the rubber hose, plugged both ends with cloth, and cinched the cable ties until the explosive and primer fuse were tightly secured in the rubber casing around the pipe, just behind the exhaust manifold.

  The man removed himself from beneath the vehicle and looked carefully around. Suddenly, lights flashed at the corner and illuminated the street. His heart began to pound. A car roared toward him. Its muffler had broken. A pipe on its undercarriage scraped and squealed when it struck the pavement, and it spat a stream of sparks with every bounce.

  The man in black sank into the shrubbery of a nearby house. A light snapped on in a bedroom window across the street. Perhaps others had been awakened, too, he thought. So he remained motionless in his shadowy hiding place.

  Ten minutes past. Then fifteen. Twenty. By that time, all the lights in all the houses had darkened, the birds had become still again, and an unbroken peace had fallen over the street. Only then did the dark figure emerge from cover and steal away.

  48.

  “Girls, come on! Time’s a-wasting!” Anne shouted. She grabbed her jacket, slipped shoes on, and snatched her car keys from a pegboard in the pantry. A clatter reverberated in the upstairs bedroom and travelled down the stairs toward the living room. Choruses of laughter and indecipherable girlish gibberish preceded Jacqui and Rada’s near-collision with Anne at the back door, followed by a timely but not altogether convincing “sorry” from both girls.

  “All set?” asked Anne.

  “Yes,” both replied.

  “Learner’s permit?”

  “Got it,” said Jacqui.

  “And you’re sure your mother knows what we’re doing?

  “Yes, Mrs. Brown. I told her that you were taking us for a drive,” she said and glanced furtively at Jacqui.

  Anne paused for a moment, wondering whether or not Rada’s mother would equate that with Jacqui learning how to pilot a car in a parking lot. She thought not but shrugged it off.

  “Okay, hop in,” Anne directed.

  Anne glanced in the rear-view mirror. Rada looked somehow different, she thought.

  “Seat belts? Okay,” she said and turned the key in the ignition.

  Pius and Germaine Arsenault would celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary in two more days, but they wouldn’t celebrate at home in Tignish. Instead their five children had chipped in and arranged a vacation in New Orleans. It would be a pleasure trip. Music and delicious food were to be expected. But they were looking forward to more than that.

  Germaine had acquired an interest in genealogical research. In fact, she had become the unofficial folklorist and historian for both the Arsenault and the Gallant families.

  Great-great-great-great-great grandparents on both sides of their families had been transported to New Orleans by British occupiers of Isle Saint-Jean during the Acadian Expulsion in the mid-eighteenth century. A few family members had stayed and managed to escape the purge by fleeing to New Brunswick or hiding in the deep woods of Prince Edward Island until such time as the British gave up their madness or French troops retook the settlements, something which never came to be.

  Germaine’s research had turned up distant cousins still living in Terrebonne and St. Charles parishes in Louisiana. She had corresponded with them on several occasions, and they were anxious to meet face to face. Everyone was looking forward to that reunion and the festivities they knew would surround it.

  “You’ve got your passport?” Germaine asked.

  “Yes, yes, you ask me already two time,” he said.

  “And your pills,” she added.

  “Yes,” he replied simply. There was no point in arguing.

  “And you took them this morning,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. This time he became gruff.

  Germaine wriggled in her passenger seat as if to make it more comfortable. It didn’t. This was Germaine’s way of indicating that she was angry with Pius.

  That man always forget something, she thought.

  “I know what you are thinking,” he said. Germaine looked at him sternly. “Don’t think so loud. I can hear every word…and not very nice to me either. What kind of language is that from a lady!” he said and shot a leathery-faced grin at her.

  Germaine laughed and poked her fist in his side.

  The Arsenaults’ car sped through Cornwall and North River. Only another two or three more miles and they’d reach the airport.

  “Where are we going to practise?” asked Jacqui.

  “I think maybe the high school. It has a long access road with no ditches and no buildings and a huge parking lot. No cars there today. The teachers’ meetings that have set you loose from school are in Summerside and Montague.”

  “And we wouldn’t want to hit a teacher during practice,” laughed Jacqui.

  “Except maybe Mr. Shadi,” said Rada, who blushed at her own boldness.

  “Who’s Mr. Shadi,” asked Anne.

  “Just a teacher,” said Jacqui. “Hey, you missed the turn.”

  “Need gas,” said Anne. “And some extra-strength aspirin for later.”

  Anne stole a quick look in the rear-view mirror. Jacqui had caught her meaning and smiled back, more of a smirk really. Then Anne glanced at Rada again. Something different, she thought. Ah, yes, a hint of lipstick…and a little makeup has brightened her eyes.

  “Here we are,” she said and swung off the road into a gas station at the intersection of the Trans-Canada Highway. She glided into an empty spot at a pump and turned off the ignition. She popped the fuel cap, activated the pump, and squeezed the handle. Her fuel was low, but it seemed to take forever to fill the tank. She stared off toward the intersection absentmindedly and then back at the girls who were busy texting someone.

  It was a busy location, this close to the highway. Several vehicles were stacked up and waiting for an open pump. So, when she had finished, Anne backed out and parked the car out of the way along the curb of a walkway and went inside to pay. It was busy there, too. Three people had lined up ahead of her. Another stood behind.

  Anne’s car chugged merrily along the curb. The girls texted friends from the back seat. Anne waited in line with dwindling patience. The first customer started to pay for his gas and a special on milk and bananas but had to exchange the whole milk he had grabbed for 2%. The second customer bought scratch-and-win tickets, scratched a small win without leaving the lineup, and used that to buy more tickets.

  That’s when it happened.

  “Pius, you look like you chew on a lemon.”

  “Heartburn. Gas,” he said. “You bring those Tums or Rolaids or whatever they are?”

  Germaine dug around, grasping for something in her bottomless purse. Her hand found a roll of something. She picked two tablets from it and handed them to Pius.

  “Here,” she said.

  Pius said nothing. His sunburnt face was turning grey. His eyes were closing. His fingers gripped the steering wheel. His chin nudged his chest, and his car hurtled toward a red light at the intersection.

  Germaine’s eyes grew wide. She dropped the tablets and tried to wrestle the wheel from Pius’s hands, but she could not do so. Luckily, no one had stopped at the light ahead. But Germaine looked with horror at two cars just past the intersection, approaching and preparing for a left turn in front of them. Germaine desperately hung onto the steering wheel. She pushed it up, counter-clockwise, but it wouldn’t turn. She pulled down o
n it, and their car sprang across three lanes. Germaine watched the widening eyes of the first driver, in a little white pickup, as he entered the turn. He hit his brakes quickly enough, but the driver behind him was slower to respond, rear-ended the truck, and drove it forward so that it clipped the rear fender of Germaine’s vehicle.

  Germaine’s hand slipped from the wheel when her car spun round and round, but, when it straightened, it pointed toward the corner of the gas station, the corner where Anne had parked. It picked up speed. Pius’s foot had remained on the accelerator, and Germaine was too shaken and disoriented to respond.

  49.

  Ben would describe himself as robust; his wife, Sarah, would describe him as overweight. Not more than fifteen pounds, he would argue. Day to day, his size was not a problem. But for Ben an airline seat always felt like being bound in a straitjacket. Fortunately, on this day and on this flight, the seat next to him was empty. Sarah had decided that she had too much year-end gardening to attend to. So she had stayed in Charlottetown instead of travelling.

  He missed her but still nodded to divine providence for the small kindness that now his arm and elbow could sprawl wherever it wandered, and it could still share the empty seat with the Simone Villier case file, the part of it he had brought with him anyway.

  Time to boldly think where no cop has thought before, he reflected as he paged through the file. Then the urban sprawl of Montreal Island broke through the clouds, the seatbelt sign illuminated with a ringtone, and the pilot announced the descent. Okay, Scotty, time to beam me up a lead.

  Ben repacked the papers and reports and looked at his watch. It was twenty after ten. He must remember to change to Eastern Time after the plane landed, he thought.

  The scratch-and-win woman was getting on Anne’s nerves. Another small win and another ticket taken in exchange. Anne looked at her watch—almost ten-thirty. She had hoped to complete a solid hour of driving practice and pick up a few groceries before lunch. That was not so probable now, and Anne was about to clear her throat loudly and wave her charge card in the air, but the clerk suddenly straightened and stared past her out the window. She almost produced an expression of profound bewilderment, but horror displaced it. Then terror struck with a resounding crash, the shattering of glass, and an explosion.