Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “Just look at them,” George said, “tied like animals.”

  “They are animals,” I said. “But I know what you mean. This isn’t right.” Both of us, I think, once we saw the conditions under which the Dogs from Hell were living, lost a lot of our anger about the noise and instead, channelled it to where it belonged, toward the owners.

  “I want to see how they live,” George said, creeping towards the windows.

  “Why?” I called after him. “Hush, Luggy! That’s enough, dammit!” I could hardly blame my dog for barking, considering that his fellow canines were making such a racket, but just because the next-door kids are foul-mouthed brats, it doesn’t mean you like it when yours is, too. Luggy’s eyes bulged as I yanked on the rope attached to his collar. Is that how animal abuse starts? Probably. He didn’t quiet down at all, so I tied him to the tree we were standing by, told him to stay, and fell into sneak-step behind George.

  The light coming faintly from the windows was too orange to be electric. There was a trickle of smoke oozing from a rickety chimney, and the woodpile was exactly that, a heap of raw logs and branches from the bush, unstacked and scattered everywhere. If they were burning green wood, they’d be prime candidates for a chimney fire, and the roof didn’t look like it could handle more than a spark without going up like a funeral pyre.

  As we moved closer to the house, the dogs all at once gave up. Maybe they were just exhausted. They’d been barking non-stop for the entire day. They hunkered down on their chains, heads between their paws, looking at us and whining. Luggy shut up, too, and they all just lay there. I had the sudden urge to set them all free and let them play tag.

  Just at the edge of the yard, the dark silhouette of an outhouse could be seen.

  “George,” I said in a low voice, “you know what? They live just like I do. No electricity. No plumbing. Wood heat. It’s just the same.”

  “It is not the same,” George said. “You live in peace and order.”

  “Not always,” I muttered.

  We had crept up to the windows—peeping Toms, both of us, and I didn’t feel very good about myself while I was doing it, but pure nosey-parker instinct ruled the night. Mixed with my vague feeling of wrong-doing was an intense fear and excitement. What if the neighbours had been watching us all this time and were waiting, hiding, with shotguns of their own?

  Through the small, filthy window, we could see a bit of the interior. There was an oil lamp on a kitchen table, throwing shadows around the room. A man sat at the table, his head on his arms, a hand clasped around a bottle of spirits. He appeared to be asleep. Another man was passed out, half-propped against the wall. Beyond him, in another room, a battered sofa contained a few more figures, all apparently asleep.

  Both rooms were crowded floor to ceiling with litter, green garbage bags spilling their contents. There were piles of newspapers and take-out food containers. The kitchen counter was buried under a mountain of dirty crockery, and some of it was stacked on the floor. One whole corner was devoted to beer empties. Redeeming them at the beer store would have been like a lottery win. There wasn’t a clear surface in the whole place.

  Looking into the heart of this chaos, I saw myself. I knew it wasn’t all that difficult to let things get like this. Let the dishes go another day, forget to take the recycling box out, save the empties for a rainy day and call it your bank. Get used to the squalor, because as it mounts, the enormity of it becomes too much to contemplate. Denial sets in, followed by indifference. Before you know it, you’ve forgotten what a nice clean kitchen counter looks like, and if the counter was miserably ugly and stained to begin with, what’s the point? Factor in the hopelessness of unemployment, addiction and hunger, and you’ve got all the makings of a slum. That’s what this was, and rather than being disgusted, as I’d have expected myself to be, I felt an enormous, overwhelming pity.

  George let out a defeated sigh, perhaps feeling as I did. When your anger has turned to pity, without the cause of action, you wind up being patronizing and judgmental. For the self-aware, it’s a very unpleasant feeling.

  Without a word, we turned to go. The dogs whined again, but did not bark. I turned back once, just before we moved into the forest. In the tiny window, set in the eaves of the shack, I caught a glimpse of a small face, peering out, and a tiny hand, waving goodbye.

  Sixteen

  DRAGON: Your quest is noble, kid, but doomed to fail / I’ll whack you with one flick of this here tail.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene x

  I am inside the house of the Neighbours from Hell, my home, and I am very pregnant. Outside, Lug-nut is chained to a short tether and barking ferociously. I know that this is because he is hungry, but there is nothing left to feed him. Becker, my husband, comes in, throws his hat onto the table and demands food. I tell him that there isn’t any and remind him that he spent all the money on his new breathalyser machine, which he wears on a heavy key ring at his belt.

  “I bought it so I could keep an eye on you,” he says and makes me blow into it. His eyes widen.

  “You’re going to have puppies,” he says, and then punches me in the nose.

  I woke to find Lug-nut standing over me, holding my cell-phone gently between his teeth and batting it against my face. It was ringing, and he finds the noise impossible to ignore. When the phone rings, he has been known to break normal rules, like the ones that say “don’t get on the bed” and “don’t touch’a da merchandise.”

  “Thanks, Luggy,” I said and took it from him, probing tenderly at my poor nose, which didn’t take kindly to being smacked with a piece of plastic, however lightweight.

  “H’lo?”

  “Sorry, Ms. Deacon. Did I wake you?”

  “Becker. You just decked me,” I said, still half-asleep.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, nothing. A dream, that’s all. Yes, you did. Wake me, that is. Not deck me.”

  “You dreamed I decked you?”

  “It’s okay. You made me take a breathalyser first.”

  “All in the line of duty,” he said cheerfully, showing remarkable wit for seven in the morning, which is what it was. “Look, I’m sorry to be calling you so early, but I wanted to talk to you before you went to work. Seeing as you’ve got a phone, now.” The last time Becker and I had enjoyed dealing with each other, I was telephone-free and nobody was calling me at the crack of dawn.

  “It’s a work perk,” I said. “How did you get my number?”

  “From the contact sheet you gave me yesterday. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we think we’ve found your stage-crew guy, but the body’s pretty messed up. I thought we should get someone who’s not family, but who knows him, to identify the body before we call his parents,” he said.

  My gut wrenched. Messed up? Yuck. Why me?

  “Why me?” I said.

  “Because you saw him the night before last, you know what he was wearing, and you have experience with bodies,” he said, a trifle smugly. “And you don’t have an emotional connection to him,” he added.

  “Thanks a lot. Does this mean I’m not a suspect?” I said. The nice thing about cellular phones is that you can move around while you’re having a conversation. I shuffled off to the kitchen, lit the burner under my camp stove, let Luggy out for a pee and put some water on for coffee.

  “I didn’t say that. But I would appreciate you dropping in at the hospital morgue before you head in to work.”

  “I have to be at the theatre at nine for a production meeting,” I said.

  “This should only take a few minutes,” he said. I told him I’d meet him at the hospital at eight-thirty. If they had found Jason, especially if he was “messed up”, it would mean a real investigation, not just a missing persons report. If that were the case, I wanted to stay on Becker’s good side so I could make sure he didn’t make any stupid mistakes, as he had the last time.

  The number of unidentified bodies that show up in Kuskawa is very small. While I’d n
ever visited the morgue at Sikwan District Hospital, I was willing to bet it would be claustrophobic and low-tech, which meant that there would be none of that “viewing the deceased by video tape” stuff, which I hear the bigger centres offer by way of making the experience less unpleasant. Keeping this in mind, I skipped breakfast.

  The weather was shaping up in true Northern Ontario fashion. While the mornings were still see-your-breath chilly, the moment the sun came up, the maple-syrup-coloured light bathed everything in a gentle warmth, which made the hayfield steam gently in a fresh-baked kind of way.

  The black-fly had moved in, too, the scourge of the landscape. Seen through a fine mesh of bug-netting, May and June mornings in Kuskawa are spectacular. Seen with the naked, unscreened eye, the view quickly becomes obscured by a thick cloud of biting insects. Later on in the season, the mosquitoes would hatch, adding their hungry whine to the general background noise. Both insects are blood-feeders, and spring conversations commonly stray to the question of which of the two is worse.

  Visitors to the area tend to react more to black-fly than to mosquito bites, although both can raise red, itchy welts, but the black-fly actually razors through your skin, while the mosquito merely slips its proboscis through until it finds lunch.

  Black-flies crawl into your hair and nibble your scalp, crawl up your trouser-legs to get at your shins and into your sleeves for a snack on your wrists. They’re silent and can be deadly if you’re lost in the bush without the proper protection. Black-flies rarely bite indoors. If they get in, they’ll gravitate to your windows and skitter up and down, looking for a way out. That’s when you exact your revenge, with palm or folded magazine, creating a scene of carnage on the window pane. The blood smeared there will be yours, half-digested. I know this is gruesome stuff, but it’s part of the Kuskawa reality. They never tell you this in the tourist brochures, but I think it’s only fair to warn you.

  The illusion of a lovely spring morning was quickly dispelled when I stepped out onto the porch to test the air before I went down to tend to the goats. Swarmed, immediately. I went back in to get my bug hat and overalls, thinking, as I suited up, that the costume of the intrepid Kuskawa native was not much different from the sweaty black get-ups used in The Glass Flute. I made a note to mention it, the next time Meredith or one of the others complained about the costumes. “It’s traditional up here,” I’d say.

  After doing the chores and letting the goats out for an early spring frolic in the pasture, I dropped in on George. He was suffering from a massive hangover and wasn’t exactly scintillating company. The Dogs from Hell were, not surprisingly, barking.

  “Today I will call the Animal Shelter again and insist they do something,” George said. “By the time you get back from the theatre, it will be quiet.”

  “You might want to think about calling the Children’s Aid, too,” I said. “The conditions over there are pretty horrible for a kid.” The memory of that little face in the window was haunting me.

  I knew that one of the hardest things a neighbour can do, no matter what the circumstances are, is to call in the authorities when they suspect that a child is being abused. Nobody likes to rat on somebody else, and the average person still maintains that what goes on in the home is a private matter. And so it should be, to some extent, but when there’s a child at risk, a neighbour who suspects nastiness is forced to do battle with her or his own concept of What Is Right.

  In the past couple of years, some particularly ugly cases of child abuse in the city, coupled with a shockingly ineffectual and underfunded child welfare system, have made the public sit up and take notice. But there’s a difference between reading about child abuse scandals in the paper and dealing with one right next door.

  This train of grumpy thought carried me all the way into Sikwan, and by the time I pulled into the hospital parking lot to help identify Jason’s body, I was ready to bite someone’s head off.

  It was an appropriate state of mind, actually, because that appeared to be the method of dispatch used in the case of the poor soul who lay in several pieces on the gurney in the morgue.

  Seventeen

  WOODSMAN: Cutting trees is not the game it seems to you, my child / Just try it for a minute and you’ll learn the woods are wild.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene vi

  Becker was waiting for me in the lobby. He looked a little impatient, which wasn’t fair, as the time was exactly eight-thirty, and I’d rushed my whole morning for his sake. I’d called Rico and told him I had an unexpected morning errand, and to be ready early. I didn’t elaborate. I was nervous enough as it was, without having to satisfy Rico’s Insatiable Curtiosity all the way to Sikwan.

  I dropped him off at the theatre, where he was planning to spend the rest of the week hanging around the office with Sam and Kim, who were helping to organize the benefit. It surprised me that he’d want to, considering everything, but maybe Shane’s pretty apology had cancelled Rico’s earlier reservations.

  Becker hadn’t shaved, and his hair had that just-out-of-bed look. I had an impure thought and marvelled for a moment that the human libido picks the most inopportune times to rear its peculiar head. Golly. In a hospital lobby, just before viewing a cadaver. How romantic.

  “Morning, Becker. Where’s your partner?”

  “Busy”

  “You’re sure it’s Jason?”

  “No, we’re not. That’s why you’re here. If you can give us a positive ID, we’ll get the ball rolling.” He led the way past the receptionist’s bullet-proof kiosk to the elevators.

  “So, if it is Jason, you’ll want to come back to the theatre and interview everybody properly this time,” I said, trying to keep the accusation out of my voice. Becker pursed his lips and punched the elevator down button. Off to hell, the two of us. “Actors have short memories for everything but their work,” I added. “We may have missed the opportunity to pick up the nuances.”

  “We?” Becker said. “There is no ‘we’ here, Polly. If this turns out to be a homicide investigation, I’ll expect you to behave like an average citizen and mind your own business.” The elevator reached rock-bottom and pinged ominously as the doors opened. It was cold down there.

  Somehow, movies and television have managed to glamorize the clinical side of dead people. The men and women who perform autopsies, manipulate dead flesh and oversee the realm of the corpse have achieved a level of celebrity formerly reserved for athletes. When an actor portrays a forensic scientist, she or he is usually presented as brilliant, oddly sexy, humane and possessed of a sardonic humour. They may be carving up cadavers, but by heck, they also have a thriving social life and the stink of death never makes it to the big screen.

  In the morgue of the Sikwan District Memorial Hospital, the stink of death was masked, not very well, by one of those automatic air-freshener things plugged into an outlet on the wall. The result was unspeakable, a mixture of chemicals, corruption and lilac.

  “Nice atmosphere,” I said, following Becker down a dim hallway. There is no need for cheerful lighting, I guess, when most of the residents aren’t looking at anything. “That lilac air-freshener smells exactly like the one they used in the outhouses at the summer camp I went to when I was a kid.” It did, too. And it was no more effective in the morgue than it had been in the privy.

  The morgue attendant was unlike the movie version. She was middle aged and plump, more Nurse Ratched than Quincy Jones. Her eyes were masked by a pair of coke-bottle glasses, and she watched me very closely, as if I were an interesting case.

  The body was lying on a gurney in the middle of what appeared to be a storage room, where it had obviously been wheeled for the viewing. In another room, I supposed, there would be a steel meat locker thing (as seen on TV) with nice drawers and bodies filed neatly with toe-tags attached. I wondered why they used this space and not the meat-locker-room for this kind of thing. The gurney was wedged between a bouquet of mops and some supply shelves filled with linen. Not exactly the
place where the bereaved would feel comforted. Cutbacks, I supposed.

  This body, revealed when Nurse Ratched pulled back the sheet covering it, had suffered, as they say, some trauma. It was also a heck of a lot longer dead than Jason would have been, if it had been him. The face was sort of caved in, and there was something dreadfully wrong with the flesh. I won’t even talk about the eyes. Well, I will. Think about grapes. Boiled ones. They could at least have closed them, I thought. The body was thoroughly water-logged, soaking the sheet which covered it and making a puddle on the floor. There was no sound but my own rather laboured breathing and the drip-drip of the wet lump of ex-humanity in front of me. The smell was excruciating. Becker pulled the sheet down further, revealing the interesting fact that the head was only partially attached to the body. It hadn’t been severed very neatly—there were pale, raggedy bits and fleshy-boney bits poking out here and there. I was extremely glad I had not eaten breakfast.

  The torso, what I could see of it, appeared to be clad in a snowsuit.

  “Just about thawed out now, Officer,” Nurse Ratched said.

  “You mean this body was frozen?” I said.

  “Yup. Stiff as a board when they brought him in. The Kuskawa River water’s still awful cold this time of year.”

  I turned to Becker, realization dawning. “Becker,” I said, softly, “you know that there’s no way this could have been Jason. Jason disappeared yesterday, not two months ago.”

  Becker smiled slightly. “We pulled him out of the river last night. Got a call about midnight. He washed up on shore near the Port Mortimer marina. I didn’t get a chance to see much of him until now, though.”