“Weren’t you afraid that John would come over here?”
“John Travers would never dare come over here,” Carla said. “Samson saw to that.”
“They didn’t get along?”
Eddie laughed. “That’s an understatement,” he said.
“Eddie,” Carla said, a note of warning in her voice. Then she smiled at me. “My husband and Mr. Travers had a disagreement a long time ago,” she said. “They don’t speak to each other, and they both respect each other’s property lines. That’s all. John knew better than to set foot in this house.” Her mouth was set in a prim, pink line. She looked like an illustration for a story about the good girl who gets propositioned.
“Besides,” Eddie added, with a wry grin, “he was dead drunk.”
“So, you just all went to bed,” I said. It made a weird kind of sense. “What about now? Your phone’s still out of order. Haven’t you tried to get it fixed?”
“Samson will see to it,” Carla said. “He’s coming back today.”
“And is this little coffee party in honour of his return?” I said.
Carla looked hurt, and I immediately wanted to take it back. She had gone to all this trouble, her eyes said. The least I could do was to be polite about it. I didn’t doubt that having a near-catatonic Francy in her house was not something that she would have chosen. Especially if Francy had been ripping the place apart. People like the Schreiers prefer things to be predictable.
“I know you’re worried about your friend,” she said, apologetically, as if it were she who had been rude and not me. “I thought she just needed things to be normal for a while, that’s all. We were waiting for the police to get here.”
“Why are you so sure the police are coming?” I said.
“Well, John Travers will probably wake up with a nasty bump on his head and sin in his heart,” she said. She stood up straight and clenched her little fists. “He won’t come alone, but he’ll come all right, trying to blame Eddie for what happened. Eddie’s a good boy, but he did hit John Travers on the head. He’ll have to tell his side of the story to the police, and policemen never say no to a cup of coffee, do they?”
It was a rhetorical question, and to fill the gap, I took a bite out of the pastry Carla had offered me. It was incredibly sweet.
“Why are you here?” Carla asked, while my mouth was full. “If you’ve come looking for Francy, well, you can see that she’s in no shape to go herb-gathering.” Her sarcasm surprised me. I wouldn’t have though she’d had it in her.
I swallowed the sticky mass and cleared my throat.
“I came over here because I wanted to ask Francy what happened last night before the police did. I wanted to give her some support when they told her that John was dead.” I stressed the last word and waited for a reaction.
Carla and Eddie gasped in unison.
Francy looked up. Her eyes cleared, and she began to laugh. It was just a chuckle at first, but it got louder and louder until she was howling, tears streaming down her cheeks. We all watched her, fascinated and horrified.
“Do something!” Carla said. I couldn’t move. Then Eddie strode to the end of the table, lifted Francy’s chin very gently with one hand and slapped her hard across the face.
“Jesus Christ, Eddie!” I yelled, going for him, but it had worked. Francy fell into his arms, sobbing.
“I can’t allow blasphemy in my house, Pauline,” Carla said, softly.
“I apologize,” I said. “Violence of any kind makes me angry.”
“Well, there’s no need to swear,” Carla said. “Eddie, you never, never hit a girl. You know that.”
“You did say to do something, Ma,” Eddie said.
“The police will be here soon,” I said. “Francy, I’m glad they didn’t see your reaction to the news, honey, but you’ve got to pull it together a bit, because they’re going to want to ask you some questions. You too, Eddie. What you told me just doesn’t tally with what we found next door.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie said.
“Broken beer bottles, lots of them. Blood all over the place. You may have conked John over the head with a wrench, but I don’t think that’s what killed him. Someone shot him at point-blank range in the chest and dumped his body at the landfill site. Know anything about that?”
Both Eddie and Francy froze. Francy was definitely coming back to life. Her face wasn’t empty anymore and a bit of colour had worked its way into her cheeks. Beth was quiet, amazingly, considering everything that had gone on in the past few minutes. Francy looked puzzled, and she turned her head to look at Eddie. She still hadn’t spoken.
Eddie had gone very pale and was staring at me, his lower lip trembling.
“I didn’t shoot him, honest. I just hit him on the head because he was hurting Francy. Is he really dead?”
“Very, Eddie.”
“Ma?” He was panicking. “Ma, you said all I had to do was tell the police I hit him on the head. You said it was going to be okay. They’ll think I shot him. They’ll put me in jail.”
Carla moved in and held him, pulling his head into her bosom and stroking his hair.
“They won’t put you in jail, sweetheart. All you have to do is tell what happened, the way you told Pauline. Somebody else killed him. Not you.” She sat him down at the table like a small child, took both his hands in hers and started to pray out loud.
“Dear Jesus, help us through this difficult time, Jesus, help the police to find the truth, Jesus, protect my boy from harm, Jesus…” in a gentle, soothing wave of sound which embarrassed me so much I had to leave the room.
I went to the front door to wait for the police.
As I stared out at the quiet road, I felt a touch on my elbow.
“Polly, get me out of here,” Francy said. “Hide me.”
Seven
Bear with me, he said
as his claws dug into my skin.
—Shepherd’s Pie
It's hard being in Ontario cottage country without wheels. When the corner store is five kilometres away and you need a pack of smokes RIGHT NOW, having a car helps. If you have to go to the post office, its a trip—an outing. The closest beer store to Cedar Falls is all the way over in Laingford, so locals either stock up or make their own.
I was auto-free—not by choice particularly. It was a money thing. So, when Francy tugged on my arm and asked me to rescue her, the first thing I did was curse the fates for not providing me with a getaway car.
If I’d had my bike, an old Raleigh I kept on the porch of the cabin with a seat wide enough for a sumo wrestler and his trainer, I could have taken Francy away by road. But I’d arrived by police cruiser, and that was not, at this point, the transportation of choice for either of us.
“You up for a hike?” I said.
“You don’t have George’s truck?”
“Nope. I came with the cops. They asked me to be there when they told you about John.”
“Oh. They’ll be here soon, I guess.”
“Very soon, Francy. How come you don’t want to talk to them? Is Eddie’s story that much of a lie?”
“Let’s just get out of here,” she said. “I’ll tell you later. Trust me, okay?”
“We’ll have to take the old logging road,” I said. “Are you sure you can make it?”
“I’m tough.”
“Is Beth?”
“Like mother, like daughter,” she said and gave me a pale smile, the first I’d seen. I didn’t argue.
We had discovered the old road by accident, the previous summer. After we had become friends, we discovered a mutual interest in herbal remedies and had spent lots of time hacking through the bush together, stalking the wild asparagus. We nicknamed ourselves the “Falls Witches” and had gained a bit of a reputation in the community for pouncing upon anyone with a runny nose, diagnosing their symptoms and forcing herbal teas down their throats. We were often remarkably successful, which is probably why Carla Schreier, who was the kind
of person who went to the hospital emergency room with a hangnail, was so snide about our “herb-gathering” activities. Alternative health practices, to some people, are Devil’s spawn.
The old logging road meandered through the bush between the dump road and the Dunbar sideroad, and Francy and I often used it as a shortcut to each other’s homes. It was a favourite of snowmobilers in the wintertime and was well-marked, though a bit rough in places.
“Let’s go, then,” Francy said. Carla was still praying up a storm in the kitchen, the sibilant hiss of her “Jesuses” seeping down the hallway like holy smoke. “Now, Polly, while she’s on a roll.”
“I’ve spent the whole day sneaking around,” I said, as we slipped out the door, closing it softly behind us. I told her about the cloak-and-daggering with Dweezil, then how I took off on Becker and Morrison. “Now I’m escaping from the holy rollers,” I said. “I should have stayed in bed.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, Polly,” Francy said and squeezed my hand.
We knew the police car would be along at any moment, so we stayed on the woods-side of the ditch, keeping our ears open for the sound of an engine so we could crouch in the bushes if we had to.
“Shit. Car.” Francy said. We dropped instantly, like they do in the movies. It was kind of fun, except that I whacked my knee on a stump going down, which hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I didn’t yell. Brave little me. I imagined John’s fist in Francy’s eye. That’s what shut me up. Everything is relative.
As the car went by, I risked lifting my face to see, and it was the cruiser, all right. I caught a glimpse of Becker in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead and looking like thunder. My fault, I supposed, although he may very well have forgotten all about Ms. Deacon, now that he was hot on the trail of the prime suspect.
“It was them, wasn’t it?” the prime suspect said.
“Yup. Let’s move.”
We found the entrance to the trail in a few minutes and struck right into the bush, relaxing as we got further in. Although the trees were still full of splendid gold and orange leaves, the foliage was thinner than it would have been in summer and I didn’t feel safe until we were over the first rise in the ground. That safe feeling didn’t last long. I’d forgotten. Bears.
“Hey, slow down,” Francy called, and I realized I’d been doing the Polly-trot.
“Sorry,” I said, waiting for her to catch up, “it’s that bear thing.”
“They don’t attack on sight, you know,” Francy said.
“Thanks. I feel a hell of a lot better now.”
We trudged on, me feeling like a dink for being so self-centred and frightened about my own skin when it was Francy who was in real danger. Her husband had been murdered, and here I was thinking about myself.
“Polly,” Francy said after a few minutes of silence.
“Hmm?”
“You ever think that maybe your bear-thing is a substitute for something else? Some other kind of fear?” I slowed down.
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t know whether this was the beginning of some sort of confession on her part, or if she was actually talking about me. While I was ready for the first, I wasn’t sure I could handle psychoanalysis in the bush, particularly because Francy, for all her own demons, was a pretty accurate judge of character. What amazed me was that she could switch like that, from her own private hell to my minor one. Still, I guess that’s what friends are for.
“Remember that seminar we took?” she said. “The Vision Quest one?”
A few months earlier, we had attended a weekend retreat led by a Caucasian, New-Age shaman who called himself Dream-Catcher. (We ended up calling him Bum-Scratcher behind his back. These New-Age people get you in touch with your inner child real quick.) I had seen the ad for it in Aunt Susan’s feed store and it wasn’t very expensive, so we figured, why not?
Aunt Susan came too, but she only lasted one day.
“If I wanted to spend a weekend listening to other people trying to out-dream each other, I’d set up as a shrink and make them pay me for it,” she had said. Which is more or less what Dream-Catcher was doing, I suppose.
The idea was to sit in a big circle, then close your eyes and try to envision going down a long tunnel, while Dream-Catcher played a drum. When you got to the end of the tunnel, an animal was supposed to meet you and take you on a journey of self-discovery. The meditations started out short, ten minutes or so, and by the end of the weekend they were running an hour or more.
After each meditation was over, Dream-Catcher led a talking circle, where everybody shared their journeys.
The problem was that, although your own little subconscious adventure might have been fun, the visions of strangers were about as interesting as a three-hour shopping-channel marathon. Some people went on and on, and we were all supposed to intone “good medicine, good medicine” after they’d finished. Francy and I didn’t behave very well, although we stuck it out for the whole weekend. (There were no refunds.)
The animal who was supposed to have met us at the end of the tunnel was officially our “power animal”, according to Dream-Catcher. He told us this before we started, his white beard trembling with emotion. This was significant. We were supposed to take the power animal with us in our hearts when we left the weekend.
The people in the circle got all sorts of neat spirit guides. Francy got a hawk, Aunt Susan was met by a wild boar, a woman with a voice like Shirley Temple on amphetamines got a king-snake and talked about it for so long I wanted to strangle her, and the young guy who works at the Petro-Can got a cougar. I got a hamster. Really. A hamster popped out of my subconscious on that first Vision Quest and bowed ever so politely, like the white rabbit in Alice. It had spots and stupid little pink eyes.
I was horrified, and although I tried to think up something impressive to tell everyone when my turn came around, I ended up admitting that my power animal was a hamster. They all laughed, in a good-medicine kind of way, and Dream-Catcher spent some time alone with me trying to put a positive spin on it. I could see that he was at a loss for what to say, though.
I didn’t want to be reminded that my power animal was a domesticated rodent, particularly when I was tromping through a forest full of ferocious bears.
“Yes, I remember the seminar, Francy,” I said. “How could I forget it? I’ve never felt so stupid in all my life. You tell just one hamster joke and I’ll never forgive you.”
“Oh, relax,” Francy said. “I was just thinking that maybe the hamster-thing was your mind playing tricks on you.”
“Huh?”
“Look. You dream about bears a lot, right?”
I nodded.
“They scare you, right?”
I nodded again.
“But you’ve never even seen a bear, so maybe the bear is really your power animal and your mind was just trying not to scare you, so it made it smaller. I mean, a hamster’s pretty harmless, but it does sort of look bear-ish.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“I think that if you’d been met by a bear at the end of your tunnel, you would have given up right there and left with your aunt. Instead, you learned all about Vision Questing—yeah, I know a lot of it was stupid, but it was cool too, right? So your hamster was sort of a substitute for the real thing, so you could learn.”
“This is a good theory, Francy,” I said. My mind was split between the notion that I was not of the hamster clan after all, which made me feel good about myself, and the realization that Francy was acting like Francy again. If talking about bears and hamsters could take her mind off the mess she was in, I was prepared to cope with it, uncomfortable as it made me feel.
“But if the bear is my power animal, my spirit guide, why the dickens am I so scared of them?”
“Maybe you’re afraid of dealing with something which the bear-spirit can help you with,” Francy said.
“Ooooh. Deep,” I said. It was, actually. I knew that I was suppressing something—I had been fo
r years. My parents’ deaths, my grubby string of failed relationships with inappropriate men, my lack of ambition and my complicated vices were all probably bear-related.
Then, as if summoned, from out of the bush came a great big, black, smelly, grunting not-a-chance-it-was-a-hamster.
Eight
Truth’s drowned in whiskey and water
bargain smokes and trying to keep clear,
truth cant speak after all these years
—Shepherd’s Pie
The bear looked at us, we looked at the bear. Time, as they say, stood still.
I didn’t do any of those things I’d been told to do. No climbing of trees. No singing. No playing dead. At that moment I couldn’t have told you what my name was. I couldn’t think, and I am certain that my heart stopped beating. I do know that I took a deep inward breath because the next thing I registered after my mind had stopped screaming BEARBEARBEARBEAR was an outrageous smell, as if a huge wet dog had burped in my face.
The bear shook its head, registered extreme annoyance and surprise (which, on a bear, is very funny to watch), then showed us his lardy butt and crashed off into the bush.
My legs gave out completely, quivering underneath me like a ruined soufflé. My heart started beating again, pumping hundred-proof adrenaline through my veins—I could hear it goosh, goosh, in my ears. The kind of hyper-awareness I usually only got from dope spread through my body like warm honey.
My vision became so clear I could see the veins of every leaf on every tree. I could have counted the pine needles beneath me, one by one.
“It was only a bear!” I said and started laughing. “He stank. He ran. He ran away!” It was the funniest joke in the world and it was a moment before I realized that I was crying as well.
Francy came over and kneeled down beside me, touching my shoulder.
“You okay?” she said.
I smiled up at her, and she helped me to my feet.
“That was fun,” I said. “Sort of cleansing. I think I might have wet myself.”
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 5