Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “Yes, officer, I have.” That surprised him. “I had a small, watery scotch at about midnight, but I didn’t finish it because halfway through it, I broke my nose. Satisfied?”

  He made me do the breathalyzer anyway. It didn’t register. He seemed disappointed and shook the machine a couple of times, like it was a watch that had stopped. I think he was stalling, trying to think of another way he could get my goat, so to speak. Geez. Ex-boyfriends can be so vindictive. Whatever you do, don’t go to bed with a cop. You’ll never live it down.

  He escorted me back to my vehicle and watched me get in. I made a show of doing up my seatbelt and checking the mirrors.

  “Who’s that?” Becker said, peering in the window. Not that it was any of his business. Rico was pretending to be fast asleep in the seat beside me.

  “A friend from the party.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Geez, Becker. You never give up, do you? So what if he is? He’s not driving.”

  “He?”

  Oops.

  “Yes, he. It was a costume party, like I said.”

  Becker backed away from the truck, shaking his head.

  “Drive safe,” he said. At that moment, I didn’t know what I had ever seen in him, really, I didn’t.

  The light rain had turned to fog, and it was a long drive home. The Old Rock Cut Road is much better than the highway, because when the weather’s bad, you can creep along without some idiot coming up on your tail doing a hundred and thirty, trying to get past. I drove carefully, but Rico displayed an annoying tendency to cringe at every corner and apply the phantom brake at every opportunity.

  “So, Rico,” I said, “what exactly did happen back there with Shane Pacey—before the stairs incident?” It was a nosy question, I know, but he was hanging onto the strap above the door with a white-knuckled hand, and I thought that getting him to talk about the evening would relax him.

  “Oh, God, Polly, it was so embarrassing. I’ll never be able to go back there.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  “Well, it was, in a way. I suppose I led him on.”

  “He really thought you were a woman, didn’t he?”

  “He must have. Did you hear what he said after he . . . after he found out I wasn’t?”

  “I could hardly miss it. Not a nice boy, our Shane. But it’s weird. Guys like that aren’t usually so easily taken in. He must have been plastered.”

  Rico didn’t say anything.

  “Not that you weren’t totally convincing, Rico, but usually you can tell, really up close, you know?”

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” Rico said, finally. “I mean, when he made a pass at me upstairs, I thought, oh goody, a kindred spirit. Someone to—you know—flirt with a little. He kissed me on the way downstairs, you know. You’d think he would have figured me out by then, eh?”

  “Did he come on to you just out of the blue?”

  “I was talking to that lovely girl, Amber, when he arrived. Pacey was already drunk then, I think. He met Juliet at the door and made a big show of complimenting her and so on. He bowed and then swept her into one of those ballroom dips and kissed her on the mouth. Everybody laughed.”

  “I see. So why did you think he might be a kindred spirit?”

  “No straight guy would take a risk like that, would they? Juliet would swallow him whole.”

  “True.”

  “That’s what I thought. Then he came over to the bar, where we were standing. He knew Amber, you could see that right off, but it was obvious that they didn’t like each other much. She seemed really surprised to see him. They said hi, but they were sort of stiff. Anyway, seeing as every other male up there was drooling whenever they looked at her, I figured that Shane was more my type than hers. Then she introduced me and I saw his eyes light up. It was wonderful.”

  “She know, do you think? That you were a guy, I mean?”

  “Oh, yes. She had already said that she thought I looked incredible. She was fooled at the beginning, but it didn’t take her long to figure it out once we got talking. She’s smarter than she makes herself out to be, I think.”

  We had just taken the last corner before the rock cut, and a car behind us passed, flashing its lights. Rico didn’t even notice.

  “Anyway, when he looked me over, she smiled. It was a match-maker smile, like she’d done us both a favour and maybe would be collecting on it later. I was planning to thank her, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  “She set you up, you mean?”

  “Could be. If she knew him, then she must have known how he felt about girls like me. Men with that attitude don’t generally make a secret of it.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know him that well,” I said. It was hard to imagine the puppyish Amber deliberately being cruel.

  “Or maybe she sicked Pacey on me, then stepped back to watch the fun. You keep an eye on her, Polly. Pacey, too. If you guys hadn’t been at the bottom of those stairs tonight, I’d probably be dead.”

  “I’m glad we were there, Rico.”

  “Sorry about your nose, eh.”

  I knew my nose would be a conversation piece for the next couple of weeks, and I was already tired of it. I just nodded.

  “I’ll never be able to show my face at Steamboat again,” Rico said for the millionth time. “They’ll all be laughing at me. And I’ve got to go in tomorrow to meet with Kim Lee about the AIDS benefit. I can’t cancel. We’ve had this set up for weeks.”

  “It’ll blow over, Rico,” I said. “You know how self-absorbed theatre people are. As soon as they get into rehearsal, they’ll forget it ever happened. Anyway, tomorrow, you’ll be Rico, not Ricki. They won’t even know you.”

  We were almost home. Crossing the highway from the Old Rock Cut Road to our concession road was usually a nightmare, but it was nearly three at that point, and there was nothing coming either way. I gunned it and pulled into the strip mall where Rico’s antique store sat sandwiched between the hardware store and the Quick-Mart. He lived upstairs in an apartment cluttered with his favourite pieces, the ones he “simply couldn’t give up”, and the tools of his trade—sanders, cans of paint, varnish and polish, ledgers and reference books, and a fat old cat called Oscar. We could see Oscar sitting in the upstairs window, waiting. Rico had left a light burning, and the apartment looked cosy and inviting.

  “You want to come in?” Rico asked. Usually, I would have, but I had chores to do at home in less than four hours, and my own pet, Lug-nut, would be waiting for me, too.

  “Not this time, thanks. I need to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before rehearsal tomorrow. You want a lift in for your meeting with Kim?”

  “Thanks. I’ll be ready. I’ll dress butch. Maybe Pacey won’t recognize me.”

  “He’ll have forgotten the whole thing, guaranteed,” I said. One could only hope.

  I don’t even remember driving the last two kilometres home. My nose throbbed and I was utterly bagged. I had to work with the cast the next day—well, the same day, really, and I wasn’t going to get much sleep. Still, I figured that everybody else would be in more or less the same shape.

  I parked George’s truck next to the farm house and staggered up the trail to my cabin. Half-way up, Lug-nut met me on the path and gave me a hero’s welcome, jumping up and licking my face and wagging his butt-end as if he hadn’t seen me in years. Once home, I lit an oil-lamp (I don’t have hydro) and shucked my goat-costume (ruined forever by blood-stains and bad karma). Then I set the alarm for seven-thirty and flumped down on my futon. Just before I fell asleep, I reflected on why I love my dog so much: he was the only one who had made absolutely no comment about my damned broken nose.

  Five

  PRINCESS: Our castle’s built with bricks of gold / but one-by-one they’re being sold.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene viii

  Early mornings in Cedar Falls in the District of Kuskawa are always beautiful, even if it’s pouring rain, which it wasn’t. The air was
soft, full of moisture, and there was a mist rising off the hayfield, mingling with the pale lavender of the sunrise. It was a little chilly, though, and my breath was visible as I shivered on the porch in my long underwear and mukluks while Luggy had his morning whizz. Over at the far end of the field, a small herd of creatures was grazing. It surprised me to see them. George couldn’t possibly have milked the goats already and let them out, could he? Then I noticed the rack of antlers on the largest one. Deer are very like goats—same delicate necks and curved lines. Same colour, too. I felt myself grinning with delight until a peculiar pain in my nose caused me to lift a hand to touch it. Oh yeah. Reality.

  The cabin where I live is not mine, although I’ve called it home now for several years. I had moved in after fleeing from a bad affair with a bad actor back in Toronto, and somehow I had become a permanent fixture. I was introduced to George by my aunt, Susan Kennedy, who runs the feed store in Laingford, the town to the north of Cedar Falls. She had arranged for me to stay in George’s old homestead cabin on the edge of his property for as long as I wanted, to make my puppets in peace and nurse my wounded pride. George Hoito, the septuagenarian Finnish farmer who is now my landlord, runs a modest dairy-goat operation, and in lieu of rent, I help out with the chores.

  It’s my job to do the morning milking, which explains why, despite my late night, I tugged on a pair of overalls, which covered longjohns, workpants, undershirt, sweater and plaid Kuskawa dinner-jacket at seven-forty a.m. I was late.

  I can’t say I hurried down the hill to the barn, though. The morning was perfect and the deer were still peacefully browsing, as motionless as OPP deer-decoys, the kind they use along the local highways to entrap drive-by poachers.

  The goats yelled, as usual, as soon as they heard me outside the door. The noise they make, if you’ve not heard it before, would make you think that none of them had been fed, watered or milked for a year and a half. Goats are good at sounding desperate, but it’s all a ploy. Actually, contrary to popular belief, it takes a lot to rile a goat.

  I was greeted inside the door by a tumble of goat-kids, the first spring crop, all ears and legs and too cute for their own good. George’s goats are Nubians, with long, floppy ears and Roman noses. They’re gentle, loving animals, they don’t stink (well, the females don’t) and they’re very finicky about what they eat. No tin cans or shirts off the laundry line for them. Only the very best hay and molasses-fortified grain will pass Nubian inspection. If there’s even a tiny bit of dust in the hay, or a touch of mould in the grain, they’ll look at you with their weird, lozenge-pupilled eyes, curl their fuzzy lips and sneeze in your face.

  The kids weren’t hungry, because they were still small enough to be nursing off their mother, Donna Summer, the herd leader. She was going on eleven, but still producing triplets every spring, predictable as tax time. I fed her first, because those were the rules and she would have made her displeasure known if I hadn’t. I cleaned her manger, doled out her grain ration for the day and watched her gobble it up, scratching her ears as she chewed. She moaned with pleasure, a curiously human sound, like someone who has just finished an enormous Italian meal and is contemplating a plate of fresh, perfect cannoli.

  The kids climbed into the manger too. The slats are too wide-apart to keep them from going wherever the heck they want, but it doesn’t matter. Goats are pretty relaxed about whose kids are where, although a milking doe won’t let someone else’s kid steal a quick drink unless she’s too busy to notice. The only problem arises when, as sometimes happens, a female kid with no sense of decency happens to slip into the breeding buck’s pen and gets pregnant prematurely. It doesn’t hurt the doe any, but pre-teen goats have teats like plastic drinking-straws and milking them is a pain in the butt.

  Donna Summer’s kids were too small to worry about that yet, though. They were about the size of long-legged retriever puppies, and primarily interested in things that looked like they might produce milk. As I scratched Donna Summer’s ears, one kid already in the manger put its forefeet up on my back and started sucking on my left earlobe, while another grabbed my thumb.

  Next in line was Julian of Norwich, a patient old girl whose milk production was down a little, on account of the fact that she was fifteen years old and getting a bit creaky in the joints. Most of the goats had no trouble leaping up onto the milking stand, but Julian executed the manoeuvre in several stages, fixing me with a reproachful eye, as if I were somehow responsible. I sang as I milked her (which often coaxes an extra ounce or two of milk into the pail—don’t ask me why). I noticed right away that my voice had a curiously nasal quality to it. Great, I thought. It probably meant that my speaking voice sounded stupid, too, which meant that not only would I be dealing with nose-comments during every single face-to-face encounter in the foreseeable future, I would also have to deal with it on the phone.

  Good thing Juliet had given me a cellular. I could take the batteries out whenever I got home. There, at least, safe in the cabin, I could be miserable in peace.

  My nose throbbed as soon as I thought about it. Up until then, the pain had remained in the back of my mind. With both my nostrils stuffed with cotton, I could hardly miss the bulging, which insinuated itself into my normally clear peripheral vision, but hadn’t taken centre-stage as yet. It did, though, not long afterwards. I finished the milking, let the goats out to browse and frolic in the early spring air and headed up to the farmhouse to join George for breakfast.

  I hadn’t actually seen a reflection of myself yet that morning. There was only one mirror in the cabin, and I must have forgotten to stop by for a pre-dawn primp before heading to the barn. I should have checked, I guess. I should have prepared myself.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what happened to you?” George positively yelped as I walked in the door. I explained.

  “You poor child,” he said gently, which made tears well up in my eyes again. I realized I would have to get a grip on that if I was to get through the day. “You look,” he said, “like a raccoon.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. The remark effectively dispelled the weepiness. He probably said it to have precisely that effect. George is not a cruel man, normally.

  “Your eyes, Polly. Have you seen your eyes this morning?”

  Oh, God. Spare me. I went to peer at myself in George’s hall mirror. Shiners. Two of them. One on each side of my pathetic nose, which, I was glad to see, had shrunk a little from the bloated root vegetable it had been at the hospital. But the two black eyes were there to stay for a while. I smiled in a friendly way at my reflection. The effect was horrible.

  “At least I’m not actually performing in the show,” I said, returning to the kitchen table, where George had poured me a big steaming mug of fresh-ground coffee. “At least I won’t have to go on stage looking like this.”

  “Didn’t you say the actors have to wear masks anyway?”

  “That’s true. Of course. Black hoods, actually. Maybe I should ask Juliet to give me a part. I could wear the hood all the time until my face gets back to normal.”

  “It is not that bad,” George said, soothingly. Then he ruined it by asking if I had any makeup up at the cabin.

  He put together a wonderful fry-up of bacon, eggs, fried green tomatoes and fried bread. I had three cups of coffee with cream and sugar, and in the last cup, George tossed in a capful of scotch (Glen impossible-to-pronounce) to chase the chill away. He is a lovely man and I want him to be my wife.

  We took our plates outside for Lug-nut to lick, and then we smoked on the porch, me a cigarette and George a pipe full of new tobacco he was trying out because it was on sale at the Quick-Mart. It didn’t smell as good as his usual cherry-scented stuff, but he soldiered on with it because he is a Finn, and Finns never give up.

  “It’s Canadian,” he said, coughing. “Susan says it’s additive-free and politically correct. I must give it a chance.”

  George’s pet raven, Poe, who was watching George struggle with brand-loya
lty issues, croaked in disgust. Poe was perched on his old friend’s shoulder, but as the tobacco began invading his space, he shook his black, sleek head, did his usual inelegant flapping hop and landed with a thump on mine, instead. I didn’t mind. In fact, when Poe sat on me, I felt blessed. Poe seemed to like cigarette smoke.

  “You’re right, my friend,” George said, nodding at the bird. He dumped the smouldering mass into the bay tree that sat in a pot on the porch, refilled the pipe with the old brand, lit it and sighed in satisfaction.

  “You can’t teach an old dog new vices,” he said. He sent a perfect smoke ring into the morning sky. “Peaceful,” he murmured. “Perfect.”

  That was when the Neighbours From Hell kicked in.

  A week or two previously, the abandoned tar-paper Kuskawa shack adjacent to George’s farm had been invaded. For years, we had assumed that it would crumble into the ground, as it was destined to do. It backed on to a useless piece of swampland (well, useful to frogs and marsh creatures, but no good for farming) and the shack itself was hideous and needed pulling down.

  The deed (George checked) was in the name of an old Kuskawa family that no longer lived in the area. George had been keeping tabs on it at the municipal office, preparing to put an offer in when it came up for back-taxes, so he could buy it and ensure his privacy. No such luck. In late April, the Neighbours From Hell had moved in.

  We had never been formally introduced and were only vaguely aware of what they looked like, having stolen sly glances sideways when we drove by. Finns and old British stock share this trait. Never stare at people you want to kill. The racket they produced, however, was prodigious. We didn’t need to see them to know they were there.

  There were three adults. The older man was Grandpa, or, as he was more frequently called, in voices that were too loud to be real, “You Stupid Old Fuck.” The younger woman, pregnant (this much became obvious during a drive-by) was Stacey. The younger man, according to the Cedar Falls grapevine queen, Donna-Lou Dermott, who knew everything, was an ex-con called Randy.