I am homeless and hungry, sifting through the garbage in an alleyway slick with rain and unmentionable filth. Strangely, the sounds I hear are not city sounds; I am surrounded by the secret, waiting stillness of the deep bush. A bird calls, and I hear the wind sighing through pine boughs, although there is not a tree in sight. I do not find this surprising, however, because I know I am mad. Homeless and mad.
Behind me there is movement and I turn to find a large, red-furred bear looking over my shoulder. I am not afraid, for once. The bear speaks with a cockney accent.
“You lookin’ for ’Enry?” it says. The bear’s teeth are very white, and its breath is curiously sweet.
“Yes,” I say, as if the bear has stated the obvious.
“’Ere’ ’e is.” The bear hands me a golden salmon, which I take solemnly but with some difficulty, as it is impaled on his claws.
“Thanks, mate,” I say, and then notice that his other paw holds Francy’s baby, impaled also and squirming like a hooked worm. I am instantly on the ground, curled up in a ball and gibbering with horror.
I woke drenched in sweat, my heart hammering. My dreams about bears usually ended up like that, but I never managed to get used to it. It took me a while to shake the fear, and eventually I got out of bed and lit the Coleman stove to boil water for coffee. It was five in the morning, but I was not going to risk going back to the alley for the sequel.
So much for my real-life, “everything’s okay now” bearexperience. My monster was back, and if anything, bigger than ever. Why couldn’t I dream about hamsters?
After a couple of cups of coffee and a cigarette to jump start my blood and bludgeon the last traces of nightmare induced adrenaline, I pulled on my overalls and headed down to the barn. The goats awaited, and I would surprise George by being early on the job for once.
George’s goats are delightful animals. Don’t believe that stuff you’ve heard about goats eating tin cans and butting humans in the bum. It’s all hokum. They are affectionate, intelligent creatures, and very picky when it comes to their food.
There were fourteen goats in George’s herd—there had been fifteen, but now Dweezil was frolicking about somewhere in heaven’s clover patch. Maybe Dweezil and John Travers would get together up there and chat about what it was like to end up in the wood-only pile of the Cedar Falls dump.
Most of the goats were females, “does” in goat speak, never nanny-goats. A goat farmer would no more call a doe a nanny than a pig farmer would call the sows “mummy piggies”. George kept two males, or bucks, for breeding purposes, and now that Dweezil was gone, he would have to choose one of the latest batch of kids to rear up to adulthood.
The male kids are normally sold for meat when they reach a certain size, as are all but the very best of the females. This is a part of goat farming that I find difficult to deal with, but if you’re going to eat meat, I figure it’s better to know where it comes from.
Adult goats aren’t terribly cute, but the babies are adorable, like rabbits with long legs and floppy ears. George’s herd is Nubian—the breed with ears like Basset hounds and liquid, loving eyes. Once you’ve fed a Nubian goat-kid from a bottle, you’ll never think of the animals as smelly garburators again.
George runs a modest dairy operation, hence the preference for females, and each one is milked twice a day by hand, despite the fact that he could easily afford milking machines. It’s my job to do the morning shift, and George milks the herd in the evening.
As usual, the goats heard my approach long before I reached the barn, and they started yelling as if their pens were on fire. A goat bleat is an odd sound, very human sometimes, especially when they’re giving birth.
To make a realistic goat bleat, (make sure you’re alone first), sit up straight, smile widely and call “Bleahhh!”, starting on a very high note and dropping instantly to a very low one. Make sure your lips are relaxed for the “BL -” part, as if you were blowing a raspberry. Practice this. Amaze your friends.
There are other sounds, too, like the comforting “Uh-hn-hn” of a doe to her newborn kid, the outraged “Wlaaah!” of a kid getting butted by a sibling, and my favourite, the contented moan of a hungry goat tucking in to a bit of juicy hay. A goat moan is just like the sound your pillow mate makes when you give him/her a really good massage.
It was cold in the barn, and there was the thinnest skin of ice in the water buckets. I ran water from the main tap into a big bucket, plunked in the water heater, which looks like a giant potato masher, and plugged it in. Like most of us, goats appreciate a warm drink first thing in the morning.
I cleaned out the mangers, tossing the picked over hay into the pens so they’d have something to play with while they waited to be milked. Then I measured a couple of scoops of high grade, molasses-fortified grain into a feed pan and hooked it over the milking stand.
I milked Donna Summer first. She is the herd leader, a dignified old girl who has dropped triplets every spring for the past ten years. I opened her pen and she trotted out eagerly, conscious of her ranking as the first to get grain and the first to have the heavy pressure of a couple of pounds of milk lifted from her bulging udder. Milking her was like trying to milk somebody’s forearm. She’s old, and her udder has stretched like an overfilled water balloon. The younger ones are easier, but none of the others gives as much milk as Donna Summer does.
I leaned my head against her warm, hairy belly as I milked, humming a gospel tune to keep the rhythm. Donna Summer likes Swing Low, Sweet Chariot the best, although there are times when she responds quite favourably to show tunes.
After milking her out, I let her wander around the barn to make her morning visits while I weighed the milk and recorded it in George’s book, along with the tune I had hummed. George’s methods of record keeping are unorthodox, but if you discover that you get an extra ounce or two of high butterfat milk if you hum Dixie rather than Feelings”, then why not be consistent?
I was nearing the end of the roster, trying to coax a thin spurt out of Annie Oakley, a yearling who had got into Dweezil's pen by devious means and fooled around, later giving birth to a healthy pair of bucks that she hadn’t told us she was carrying. Milking her was a trial—her teats were as narrow as ballpoint pens and she misbehaved when she was in the milking stand, fidgeting like the teenager she was.
“You’re up early, Polly. Are you feeling all right?” George came in, carrying a pail full of vegetable scraps, the morning treat.
“Nightmare woke me,” I said. Annie was trying to kick the milking pail over, and I was only half listening.
“Detective Becker dropped in again on his way back last night,” he said.
“Hmmm.”
“He runs hot and cold, that young man. Friendly one minute and stiff as a board the next. Seems to think you are trying to put one over on him.”
“Yup. He sure does.”
“You’re not, I know that, Polly. But be careful around him. I don’t trust him.”
I started humming a Shepherd’s Pie tune from their latest CD. I didn’t exactly trust Becker either, but my reasons had more to do with chemistry than anything else. He was a cop investigating the murder of my best friend’s husband, but he was also a good-looking guy who had already pressed more than a few of my buttons. Being a child at heart, I knew that if George told me to stay away from “that Becker boy”, it would automatically make him even more attractive than he was. I had to keep my perspective, and it wasn’t easy.
“You don’t know where she went, do you?” George said.
I shook my head.
“Good. It is better if you don’t try to find out. You were never a very good liar. That policeman would have it out of you in no time.”
I didn’t argue, although I thought George was laying on the Finnish uncle routine a bit thick.
“George, we’re going to need some more grain,” I said, changing the subject. “It looks like we’ve got a raccoon again, and there’s a couple of bags gone.”
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“I’ll drive in and get some this afternoon,” he said quickly.
I finished milking Annie and let her off the stand. “No need for you to go,” I said. “That’s always been my job. I have to go into town anyway.”
“The truck has been misbehaving,” George said.
“Since when?” I asked. “It was okay yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“It coughs a bit. It might be an idea not to go all the way into Laingford, I was thinking. Maybe we could try that new feed store out by the highway.”
“George!’ I said. “How could you? Aunt Susan gives you a better deal than you could get anywhere else and she’d be so hurt if you bought your grain somewhere else.”
He shifted uncomfortably and avoided looking me in the eye.
“Hey,” I said, “have you two had a fight or something?” George and Aunt Susan were good friends, and I had been suspecting recently that the friendship might be turning into something a bit more serious. He had been over at Susan’s a lot during the past month, having dinner and not getting home until late. Perhaps they had got too close, too fast. Precipitous relationships run in my family, and my aunt Susan’s more afraid of commitment than I am. She’s fiercely independent, and if George was pressuring her, I could understand why they were having problems. She can be pretty prickly when she’s mad.
“I did not say that,” George said. “You go if you want to, I don’t care. Just be careful on the hills.” He turned away. What was bugging him? He was usually perky and full of fun in the mornings. Maybe it was delayed shock after yesterday. He had coped with finding the body awfully well, but maybe he had had bad dreams about it, too.
“I’ll be careful,” I said to his retreating back. He just shrugged his shoulders. I weighed Annie’s milk.
“Wow,” I said. “Annie’s outdone herself. George, you have to learn this tune.”
Rico Amato grabbed both my hands and kissed me on both cheeks when I stepped into The Tiquery. He had left a message on George’s machine, asking me to drop by. I knew why.
“Oooh, sweetie, you must be so upset,” he said. “Here, sit down. Let me make you an espresso.” I could see that he was dying to hear every detail. He was practically drooling.
The gossip grapevine works quickly in Cedar Falls. The day after John Travers’s body was found, everybody knew about it, everybody knew who had found it, everybody knew that Spit Morton had been donked on the head, and everybody had a theory.
“Is it true there was an Italian stiletto sticking out of his chest?” Rico said, with great relish.
“No, Rico, he was shot.”
“Oh. Thank God. They’d think I’d done it, wouldn’t they? All those big policemen in my little shop.” The concept was not without its attraction, judging from the way he was grinning. Rico’s delicate olive features simply glowed with suppressed excitement. His natural taste for melodrama was seldom satisfied in sleepy Cedar Falls, and I could tell that he was planning to make the most of this episode, even if he hadn’t been there.
“Have they found Francy yet?” he said. I shook my head, and he sighed dramatically. “So sad,” he said. I noticed that Rico had finally sold the stencilled trunk. In its place was an old wash stand, also stencilled with roses and intertwining vine leaves. It looked vaguely familiar.
“Nice washstand,” I said. “Did you do the painting?’
“All my own work,” Rico said. “You see that table, too? It’s new. Nice piece, eh?” Then his voice dropped to a whisper. “Just two days ago, that table stood in a house of tragedy.” It was a pine kitchen table, lovingly hand-finished, with an unusual carved drawer in front.
“Hey. That’s Francy’s drawing table,” I said. “The one in her studio. What’s it doing here? Francy would never sell it.”
“Francy didn’t sell it to me,” Rico said. “Her husband did. The washstand, too. I paid a good price for them.”
“I’m sure you did, Rico, but they weren’t John’s to sell. At least the table wasn’t. I helped Francy finish that table. She bought it at an auction a couple of years ago. That’s where she did her work, right there. She kept her brushes in that drawer.”
“I wondered where the paint stains came from,” Rico said. “I thought they added authenticity to the piece.” He was beginning to look uncomfortable. “Am I going to have to give it back?”
“I don’t know, Rico. It’s hard to imagine Francy agreeing to sell it, but I can’t see John carrying the thing downstairs by himself. Francy’s studio is on the second floor. Maybe they were short of cash.”
“I gave Travers four hundred,” Rico said.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s a good piece, Polly. And the man seemed kind of… I don’t know, pathetic. Desperate.” The price tag said $1200. Rico noticed me looking and gave a little deprecating cough.
“Overhead,” he said.
“So John just showed up with this stuff and you bought it, no questions asked?”
“You know me,” he said. “Someone brings me something I like, I buy it. My turnover’s pretty good. Nobody bugs me.” What he meant was that sometimes his merchandise was a little warm. Everybody in Cedar Falls knew that, but Rico was generally careful to avoid what he called “local produce”.
“If Francy wants it back, will you forget the mark-up?” I said. “For you, anything,” Rico said, but he looked miserable.
I decided that, after I found Francy again, I would get to the bottom of the table question. I was sure she would want it back. What was more pressing, though, was to ask her why John was desperate for cash all of a sudden. It seemed to have, as Becker would probably say, some bearing on the case.
Twelve
With a breathtaking Doppler whoosh
your image spun in,
sleep-wrapped still,
and dangled perfect from my rearview,
spread-eagled like a plastic Jesus.
—Shepherd’s Pie
Rico's espresso left me totally wired. After I said goodbye and climbed into the cab of George’s truck, I could see that my hands were shaking.
Sooner or later, the health Nazis, who have marginalized smokers to the point of desperation, are going to turn on coffee drinkers. I figure that caffeine is the next frontier—they’ll raise coffee-taxes, overwhelm our teenagers with anti-caffeine slogans (JUST SAY MILK) and then vilify the public health system for treating caffeine addicts with money from the pockets of clean living taxpayers. After that, they’ll focus on television addicts. That’s when I’ll be dancing in the streets.
I stopped off at Gretchen’s Petrocan Diner to fill up the tank before hitting the highway and nodded to Bert, the gas guy. He was the one who had attended Dream-Catcher’s workshop and subsequently claimed the cougar as his power animal. He was a weedy young man, so thin you could see daylight through his wrist bones, and he kept his long, mouse-coloured hair pulled back in a pony tail. He was wearing those baggy trousers that are hip these days—the idea being to wear them so big that your butt disappears completely, leaving about a yard of wasted material. He was always quick with a hamster joke, but I didn’t mind it coming from him. I figured he needed all the self-confidence he could get.
“Fill it up with regular, please, Bert.”
“Hey, Polly. Got something for you.” He poked the nozzle of the gas pump into the tank, scurried over to the secret glass booth, where only gas guys are allowed, and returned with something in his hand.
“What is it?” I said.
“I found it at the Lo-Mart last week. I couldn’t resist.” He handed it to me closed fisted, and I opened my palm to receive it. It was a small stuffed animal on a key chain, perhaps designed to look like a koala bear, but I could see why Bert had thought of me when he saw it. It was no koala, for all the designer’s efforts. It was a hamster, and it was really cute.
“Oh, gee, Bert. A mascot.”
He grinned, studying my face to make sure that I wasn’t mad. “I thought you could, you know
, hang it on the rearview or something,” he said.
“It’s adorable. Better than a St. Christopher medal. It’ll protect me from the lumber trucks.”
“What’s a St. Christopher medal?”
“Never mind,” I said. What did they teach them in those schools, anyway? “Thanks, Bert. I really like it.” I handed him the Petrocan card (it’s in George’s name, like everything else) and waited, chewing my fingers, while he ran it through the authorization machine in his booth. George and I share a special relationship with Petrocan. We get into debt up to our eyeballs and skip the monthly payments, then Petrocan sends us a kneecapper letter and cancels our card. So we send them a small cheque, at which point they send back a note telling us we’re a preferred customer and activate our account again so we can get deeper in debt.
We were, as it turned out, a preferred customer that week. I reminded myself to pay the bill soon, waved at Bert and chugged off to Laingford. The hamster mascot swung merrily from the rearview and I felt invincible.
The highway between Cedar Falls and Laingford is treacherous. It’s a two laner, with sporadic passing lanes disguised as paved shoulders. Every six kilometres or so, there’s a “keep right except to pass” sign, and if you don’t move over, you’ll get a lumber truck up your wahzoo.
George’s truck was almost as old as me. I was born in nineteen-sixty-two, and his truck was pulled howling off the line in sixty-three. It “ran good,” as they say around here, but it was not designed to gobble up the tarmac the way these plastic, Smartie-coloured compacts do. If I pushed it, the truck would do a hundred and ten clicks, but it would set up a whine like a dog who needs to pee, and I preferred to do the limit. Doing the limit on Highway 14 was not a popular tactic and driving to Laingford was always a lesson in self control. When you’ve got people passing you doing a hundred and thirty, it’s hard to keep cool.
I was just huffing and puffing up the long hill before the exit ramp to Laingford when I saw the cruiser in my rearview, cherry-flasher spinning and headlights pulsating like a demented Christmas tree.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 8