In the folder for the current production, the résumés of the entire cast and crew were included, along with a sheaf of notes written in what looked like shorthand. The study of Pitman shorthand died out in Ontario schools in the early 70s, and I never had a chance to learn it. Actually, I’d rather have been set on fire than taken shorthand in high school, same with home-ec or typing, which is why I’m a perennially unemployed puppetmaker with no marketable skills. If I’d taken typing, for example, I could have risen in the ranks and been a wealthy Microserf by now. Still, at that moment I would have given anything to be able to translate Juliet’s notes, which were written on steno paper, one sheet per résumé, and I’ll bet they contained secret messages about each employee.
I scanned the other résumés quickly, out of sheer snoopiness, before I found Jason’s. It was quite dark by then, and I used my own Maglite, feeling like a cat burglar.
“Here it is,” I whispered to Tobin. When I got no reply, I looked up to see him standing in the middle of the room, his ears pricked like a terrier on full-alert. He put his finger to his lips, and then I heard it too. Someone was making their way down the hall, very quietly.
In an overstuffed Victorian office-space, there are plenty of places to hide. We could have dived under the big oak desk, which was surrounded by a coy, frilly thing that would have hidden us nicely. We could have thrown ourselves onto the sofa, which I swear would have swallowed us. We chose, however, in true Polonius-fashion, to head for the heavy velvet curtains. I chose the left one, Tobin the right. As soon as we were safely hidden behind the arras, someone came into the office.
Fourteen
KEVIN: Stand back, snake! / This flute can make a sound so shrill / You’d think it was a dentist’s drill.
SERPENT: What’th a dentitht?
-The Glass Flute, Scene vii
I peeked out. In what was left of the light, it was impossible to see who it was, because, like us, the intruder chose to work in the dark. They made straight for Jason’s vest. There was a wet rustle of fabric, as if the visitor were searching the pockets, and then the tiny, annoyed “Tsk” sound that indicated disappointment. Get a male friend and then a female friend to make that noise. You’ll find that there’s no gender difference. It’s about the only sound in the human linguistic spectrum that’s entirely asexual. The person left as quickly and quietly as s/he had come.
We didn’t move until we heard a car leave.
“Did you hear a car arrive?” I whispered to Tobin through a gap in our curtains. We were still masked from the room, but I realized, once I thought about it, that our hiding place would have made us plainly visible from the exterior. Seeing us from outside would have been like sneaking backstage to see two people peeking out into the audience from the wings.
“I might have heard a car subconsciously,” Tobin said. “My heart rate increased, and then I heard a door open.”
“Who do you think it was?” I said and stepped out into the room.
“Could have been Juliet,” Tobin said.
“No way. She’d have turned on the light and walked in as if she owned the place,” I said.
“She does.”
“I know. So it can’t have been her. Did you get a look at them?”
“Nope. I was making like a hatrack,” he said.
“You’re never going to get your junior detective’s badge at this rate,” I said.
“Don’t want one. I’ve got the decoder ring already,” Tobin said. “And it’s telling me we should get the hell out of here.”
“Agreed.” We slipped out of the room and tiptoed down to the shop. Don’t ask me why we tiptoed, but we did. The residue of the cat-burglar thing, maybe.
“So, what were they looking for?” Tobin asked, gathering some papers together and stuffing them into a worn satchel.
“The notebook, guaranteed,” I said, patting the pocket where it was safely stashed, creating a wet spot next to my hip. “I don’t know why, but when I get it dried out and the pages aren’t sticking together, maybe it’ll tell us.”
Tobin killed the lights and carried Jason’s cardboard Flute paperwork box to George’s truck for me. I was loaded down with the prompt script (Jason’s—now mine) and the various bags and baggage I seemed to have accumulated during the day. I’d have to get a briefcase, or a cool satchel like Tobin’s. Somewhere at home I had a thing I used to carry in my stage management days. I think it was in the closet, stuffed with orphan socks. I’d have to dig it out.
“See you at nine tomorrow,” he said, driving away in his buttercup yellow Neon, into which he had folded himself with extraordinary ease, as if he were one of those collapsible bridge tables. Big guy. Really small car.
I fired up the beast and headed home, yearning for Lug-Nut, peace and some dinner. It had been an insanely busy day, and my life, apparently, had changed. I was now a stage manager, with responsibilities coming out the wahzoo, a paltry one-week rehearsal schedule, a two-month touring schedule and a lot of forms to fill in. My broken nose throbbed, and I also had what I believed was a murder on my hands, which I absolutely had to solve, even if there was no corpse in sight. It was obvious the Laingford OPP wasn’t up to it.
The peace I was looking for at home didn’t materialize. I’d dropped in to Rico’s for a quick cappuccino on my way home, rehashed the day’s business and gossiped a bit about the cast. Neither of us had been inclined to talk much about Jason. I think we were afraid that if we did, his being dead would turn out to be true. I had cut my visit short, because the subject had been hanging in the air above our heads like a bad smell.
As I passed the shack where the Neighbours from Hell lived, I couldn’t help but notice the big bonfire, the beat-up pickup trucks lining the dirt road and the hectic figures staggering around in the orange glow. My window was open, and I could hear the music and the barking dogs above the rumble of the Ford’s engine. The Neighbours were partying, Big Time.
I pulled into the driveway and found Luggy and George sitting on the porch. George was cradling his head in his hands and Luggy’s hackles were up. Luggy was tied to the porch railing too, which was unheard of.
“Hey, George. Trouble?”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, tight-lipped. “The noise. It’s horrible.” Next door, heavy-metal rock music was blaring, the dogs were barking and the night was shattered by it.
“Has this been going on long?”
“Since dusk. They have been shooting guns. The dogs are howling. I think they shot one of them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not. There was barking, barking, for hours and men shouting at them to shut up. Then some shots and yelping.” George was profoundly upset. He was almost in tears.
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
The Neighbours from Hell were a good acre of woods away, but sound carries beautifully in the bush when everything’s dry and there are no leaves on the branches to absorb the sound. The trees can perform acoustic miracles. The din, which came in waves like a bad headache, ricocheted off the tree-trunks, surrounded the house and poured through the window screens. The windows were open, because, in spite of the noise, it was an incredibly beautiful spring night.
George and I had shared dinner, done the dishes, and were now trying to relax beside the woodstove in the kitchen. The dogs next door were still at it, although the music had stopped.
We shared the highlights of our respective days. I told him at length about finding Jason’s vest and all that went after. I tried very hard to be balanced and objective—to give the “Jason had a hissy fit and walked out” theory as much weight as the “Jason fell in the Kuskawa River and sank to the bottom” gambit, but I’m not sure I pulled it off. I had a sense of déjà vu as I pleaded my case, hearing my own words eight-odd months ago, when I was trying to convince George Hoito that my best friend Francy hadn’t murdered her husband. I’d been right then, too, but if this were anything like last time, there’d be a second murd
er before George agreed with me.
“The young man will show up,” he said. “He’ll need to be sure his disappearance is causing some concern.”
“Oh, I think he’ll show up. I just think he’ll be too drowned to care,” I said.
He countered my story with the news that my aunt Susan had told him she was selling her business. I don’t know which upset me more, the mystery of Jason or this revelation and the fact that Susan hadn’t told me first.
“How can she go out of business? People rely on her and she’s thriving. Besides, she’s run that store since I was a baby.”
“She has two reasons,” George said. “The new feed store on the highway is undercutting her prices and carrying the American stock she refuses to sell. That means people aren’t relying on her as much as they used to. And the other is something she wants to tell you herself.”
“Oh, God. She’s not sick, is she?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“So?? What is it? What’s this reason number two?”
“You’ll have to wait until you can see her.”
“Wait? For the weekend? I’m in rehearsal every day until Sunday.”
Our voices had been getting progressively louder, not because we were having a difficult time seeing eye to eye, but because the barking was, I think, subconsciously making us angry.
“Sometimes,” George said, “I play a game with myself. I listen very carefully and try to guess how many dogs there are. Once, I counted seven. Tonight, I hear a hundred.”
The spring peepers would usually have started their evening song by now, but they’re a choir that likes to be centre stage, and they were waiting for the warm-up act to finish their set. Even Poe was bothered, which wasn’t like him at all. He stayed on his bookshelf above the woodstove, huddled into an angry black ball of feathers. He shivered the way he does when it’s really cold and muttered occasionally to himself.
The dogs barked on, and George poured an unusually hefty slug of Glen-unpronounceable into our coffee mugs. He drank most of his in a mouth-scalding gulp.
“Maybe if we get drunk, we won’t hear them any more,” he muttered.
“Have you tried calling the police?” I asked.
“They told me it was a bylaw problem,” he said.
“So you called the Town?”
“They said we were zoned rural,” he growled and poured another slug into his empty coffee cup.
I had a rehearsal the next morning, so I didn’t join him.
“I live here for 26 years in peace. I pay my tax. Why will nobody give me an answer?” George said.
“I guess we could go over there . . .” I said.
George grabbed my hand and stared into my face. “You will not—I will not go over there. People like that, you stay away from. Don’t even let them see your face. They are dangerous.”
I was inclined to agree. Anyway, it was a bit too late in the game to pay a visit with a blueberry pie and a Howdy Neighbour dinner invitation, and going over there in anger would be stupid. The dogs barked on, sometimes frantically, sometimes ferociously, but incessantly, with only the occasional pause to fill doggy lungs with air.
“I don’t suppose they have a phone, do they?” I was sort of joking. Bad timing.
George slammed down his mug and stood up. “They do not even have a proper toilet or an outhouse,” he shouted. “They have no electricity. They have nothing!” He was generally a controlled man, and he had shouted at me only twice before—once when I was about to sever my toes with an axe, and once when had I almost thrown up in his barn. Finns are slow to boil, but when they do, duck. I admit I flinched.
He stomped off towards the bathroom, and I prepared to go. I had to do some work on my prompt book and dry out Jason’s notebook, and Lug-nut needed to be further away from the barking, or he’d start pissing everywhere.
I went out to George’s mud room to look for a rope or something for Luggy. With the noise the Hell-hounds were making, he’d be over there like a shot as soon as I opened the door. Lug-nut was big, but I’d tried George’s trick and counted at least three barkers, and they all sounded like Cerberus.
The mud room was screened in and open to the night. As I started thumping around, looking under the pile of coats, boots and tools, the barking dogs re-doubled their efforts. Maybe they could hear me, or smell Luggy or something, but they were suddenly a heck of a lot louder.
The door to the house opened behind me and George brushed past, at great speed, ignoring me. I grabbed Luggy’s collar and watched as George ran out onto the porch, down the steps and into the driveway, carrying his shotgun. The gun’s an antique in perfect working order, made when they didn’t care how much noise the thing made, as long as it fired lethal stuff out the business end. It had two clumsy grey barrels, an oak stock and a kick that could knock you down.
The dogs were going postal. George stood, his legs planted wide, and lifted the big old gun to his shoulder, aiming straight up at the sky. Then he fired. The noise was prodigious. I lifted my hands to my ears.
For a split second, everything was still. Every dog on the planet stopped barking and I stopped breathing. Then, with a roar that I swear must’ve been heard at the Cedar Falls Dinette in the village, George let fly.
“SATANAN PERKELE! HILJAA!!”
Then he stumbled off into the dark, still carrying the shotgun, towards the dwelling next door. Lug-nut, no longer held, flamed off after him like a hot arrow.
Fifteen
CAT: The words that mothers say are often true / and spoken when their child is feeling blue / There’s other people far worse off than you.
-The Glass Flute, Scene vi
George had told me not to go over there, that the people next door were dangerous. Normally, a remark like that would have had me doing the opposite in about five seconds. I hate being told what I can and can’t do, but in this case I agreed with my old friend. However, George was likkered up (as we say around here) and armed, and though it was unlikely he’d shoot anybody, it made him more dangerous than the unknown entity of the Neighbours from Hell. Also, my dog was involved. As I plunged into the bush after them, I could hear Lug-nut’s bark mixing with the cacophony of the neighbour’s dogs. Visions of enormous vet bills swam before my eyes.
“George, get the hell back here, you idiot!” I yelled. It was sort of like trying to recall an untrained dog. You can call out a name over and over, in an increasingly desperate and angry way, and the person or dog being called is about as likely to come as they are to grow another head. George was beyond reasoning, and my only hope was to catch up to him before he burst out of the bush into the midst of the partying neighbours.
In rural Kuskawa, just like in any rural neighbourhood, there’s a highway you never see from the road, a criss-crossed grid of forest paths between houses, established by dogs and children, discovered and made use of by adults and the occasional deer. The width and clarity of an inter-household path, if you cared to study it, would tell you the degree of intimacy between neighbours. Abandoned cairns, forts and toys would indicate that the children living in adjacent houses were friends. A canine companion would be able to tell you if other dogs he knew had passed that way by sniffing at markers and leaving his own. The path between my cabin and George’s house was well-worn, strewn with chewed Luggy-sticks and bootprints. There used to be a path between my place and that of my old friend, Francy Travers, who lived near the Cedar Falls dump, but she died last year, and the overgrown trail would be able to tell you that, if you asked it. There was no path at all between George’s house and the Neighbours from Hell.
The light from the bonfire next door glimmered through the trees. The party people had turned off their music some time ago, around the time that George and I were finishing dinner, but the dogs were still barking, now using the fully-engaged warning voices that herald the approach of strangers. Obviously, they were tethered, or they’d have been on top of us by now. I couldn’t hear any human
voices, though.
I caught up to George while we were still masked by trees. He was standing behind a large oak, propped against the trunk, his shotgun at the ready like a Rambo-movie sniper. Lug-nut was right at his heels, silent and quivering. When George heard me, his head whipped around and he pointed his gun at me, lowering it as soon as he saw who it was. I’d had a gun pointed at me only once before, on purpose that time, but this was equally as frightening. In the darkness, George’s eyes seemed to glow.
“What are you planning to do, George?” I whispered. “Pick the neighbours off one by one?” I was so mad at him I could feel myself shaking.
“They must be inside,” he said. “They are so used to the sound of barking dogs that they do not hear them any more. I wonder how their children can sleep. We could go right up to the windows, and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
I looped the rope I’d brought through Lug-nut’s collar.
“We could go home, and it would make even less of a difference, which would be a good thing,” I said.
The Dogs from Hell were looking right at us. There were six of them visible in the light of the bonfire. Each was staked out on a short tether, about three feet long, far enough apart so they couldn’t touch each other. There were no feed bowls or water bowls in sight, and their ribs stuck out. Three of them were mixed German Shepherd types, with intelligent faces and enormous eyes. If they’d been in better shape, they’d have been beautiful. Two of the dogs were scrawny hounds, contributing to the general din with soulful houndy-howls. The sixth was a small, mixed breed puppy which couldn’t have been more than two months old. The chain to which it was tied probably weighed more than it did. Its yips were ear-splitting. According to George’s earlier count-by-ear, there were supposed to be seven of them. Had number seven been shot, as George suspected? It was too dark to see if there was a furry body stashed nearby. The whole scenario was horrible. What was worse, in a way, was that the dogs were plainly doing their job, warning their masters that there were intruders, and the masters were oblivious.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 33