Luggy balked at the door and refused to come in.
“Whatever happened to getting back on the horse after it’s thrown you?” I said to him. He just sat there, looking at me and whining. “No laundry this time, Luggy. I promise.” He still wouldn’t budge. I relented and put him in the cab of the van, feeling sick and guilty. I wanted to keep him with me and watch him every moment. If he was flaked out again when I came back, I’d have to shoot myself.
“I’ll just take these cables up to the sound storage room and then I’m out of here,” Tobin said, heading for the stairs. “You going for a drink?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I have to take Luggy home.”
I carried the pyro box down to the workshop. I was planning to stash it at the back of the paint cupboard for the time being, then try to convince Becker to have it checked for fingerprints. Ditto for Shane’s water-bottle, which I also carried downstairs, wrapped in a towel so I didn’t smudge the prints.
It was cool and pleasant down there. The water lapped gently at the sides of the pool, and someone, probably Tobin, had tidied up the worktables. There it all was, ready for the next show. In the middle of the worktable was an envelope with my name on it. From Juliet, I figured. Severance pay, perhaps. Quick work. I opened it, but there wasn’t any money inside, just a typed letter on Steamboat Theatre letterhead.
“Dear Polly Deacon,” it began. (Jeez, Juliet. If you’re going to fire me, you could at least do it to my face, I thought, then read on.)
Dear Polly Deacon:
You don’t know what it’s like to be an outcast. You don’t know what it’s like to have someone you admire betray you. I know that by now you will know what happened at your old school back in 1985. But what you found out isn’t the whole story.
All I wanted to do was work in theatre. My Dad said it would turn me into a homosexual. It didn’t do that. What it did do was hand me over to a monster. Mr. Amato was a great teacher. He was very friendly, and he had a couple of students that he’d invite into his office to hang out. I was one of them. He gave us booze and cigarettes and stuff, and he was a lot of fun. By the time things got strange, it was too late to back out.
One of his students was really into S&M, and there were a couple of parties in his office that would make your hair stand on end. When he died, it was an accident, but it was his fault. He had it coming. It wasn’t his death that ruined my life, it was what happened afterwards. There’s more, but I want to tell you face to face.
That was it. No signature, no indication of who had written this sad, bewildering letter to me. I sat back and considered my options. To my left, over behind the blank wall next to the pool, came a sound like the scrabbling of mice . . . or rats. Mice I was cool with, but rats had a bad reputation, especially dock rats. I lifted my feet up and stared at the wall, expecting a four-pound, red-eyed bruiser to appear and come for me like a rodent-extra from a Stephen King movie. Slowly and quietly, the wall opened, revealing a door I’d never known existed.
Jason McMaster stepped out into the workshop.
Thirty-Nine
MOTHER: Tell me all, my brave and clever boy / Your courage is a mother’s pride and joy.
-The Glass Flute, Scene x
I admit that I believe in ghosts, especially unshriven spirits that hang around in the places where they died, looking for absolution, or at least a convenient human out of whom to scare the poo. I was too frightened to scream.
“I thought you were supposed to be this shit-hot detective,” Jason said. “You didn’t get any of it, did you?” I just stared at him. He seemed to be pretty solid. No flickering. No banshee wailing. This must be a living, breathing person then, I thought. Relief flooded through me, and when I spoke, I was surprised to hear how calm I sounded.
“I was getting there, Jason. I was doing your job at the same time, and besides, I’m no detective. I’m just a backwoods puppet-maker.”
“You were doing okay. I watched you.”
“How? You got a camera set up somewhere?” Jason opened the secret door a little further and shined his Maglite in to reveal a narrow set of stairs leading up. The last time I’d seen the Maglite was in the pocket of his drowned vest in Juliet’s office. I guess he’d rescued it.
“I discovered this passage on my second day here,” he said. “I think they used it to smuggle booze up to the attic from the boats that brought it in. It’s really cool up there. There are spyholes all over the place.”
“You’ve been up there the whole time?”
Jason nodded, grinning like a kid who’s pulled off a particularly successful magic trick.
“Your parents think you’re dead, you know. How could you do that to them?” I said.
“Oh, they don’t care. They haven’t for years. Not since the Incident.”
“If you’re standing here alive, then who did the cops drag out of the river and make your parents identify?”
“That’s the thing of it,” Jason said. “This guy shows up on Sunday afternoon, the spitting image of me, I swear. Some foreign dude who was looking for work. I told him to come back that night. That’s what gave me the idea.”
“You killed him to fake your own death, you mean.”
“Yup. It wasn’t hard. I took him by surprise.” Jason’s eyes, even in that dim light, showed the kind of blank pleasantness of someone who has no conscience. It was like he was talking about brushing his teeth or wiring a lighting cable—just a task that he had completed.
“So how come you faked your death?” I said, trying to match his tone to show him that I was just as blasé about the whole thing, just as unconcerned and not a bit frightened. My legs were tucked under me (the rat-thing) on one of the two big easy chairs we keep down in the shop for catnaps. Jason came across and curled up in the other one. Storytime.
“Lots of reasons,” he said. He was carrying an audio cable, which he draped casually on the arm of the chair. I guess I could have made a dash for it, but I wasn’t sure he was out to harm me, and I really wanted to know what had happened.
“After the Incident, I told the police and my parents about what Mr. A. used to do with us. Shane Pacey and a couple of the other guys said I was making it up. It was Shane who came up with the strangulation-thing. We’d take turns jacking off while someone else tightened the rope. If you’re choking and coming at the same time, it’s amazing. Mr. A. really liked it, but I told him it was dangerous. I think Shane was the one holding the rope when Mr. A. died. I told the police that, but it didn’t help. Nobody believed me. It was obvious that Mr. A. was a sicko, they said, but they didn’t believe any student could be involved. Afterwards, Shane and the others left school, but my parents made me stay. Everybody knew, and it was like I was a leper or something.”
“That must have been a nightmare,” I said.
“It was. I thought it would blow over, and I went for counselling and everything, but nobody would leave it alone. I got suicidal and tried to off myself. That’s when my parents sent me to the North Bay facility.”
“How was that?”
“Up there, they believed me, which was good. I did anger-management and lots of therapy stuff. They eventually said I was cured, and I went back home and then to Theatre School.”
“You still wanted to work in theatre after all that?”
“Not much, really. I did it to piss off my Dad. It worked. He believed that the whole thing had turned me into a fag.”
“Does he still think that?”
Jason chuckled. “My Dad thinks I’m dead, remember?”
“I mean, before.”
“Yeah, he did. When I told him Amber and me were getting married, he couldn’t believe it—that I even had a girlfriend. He told me to prove it, like I was going to bring her up here and fuck her in front of them or something.”
“But you did agree to introduce them,” I said.
“Yeah, that would have been good,” he said, a little wistfully. “But as soon as I heard Shane was
coming up to do the show, I knew it would fall apart. I was right, wasn’t I? She’s never gotten over him, eh? No matter how hard I tried, I was just kind of a fill-in.”
I felt like a shrink or something. There we were, having this nice cosy chat on the comfy chairs at Steamboat, Jason telling me his life story. I was suddenly afraid that I would say the wrong thing, ask the wrong kind of question. He sounded so hopeless.
“So you went to Theatre School to piss off your Dad . . .”
“And to get away from Laingford. And wouldn’t ya know it, when I got to Theatre School, there was Shane Pacey. Star actor. Got away scot free while I went nuts. God, I hated him, and it was obvious I couldn’t get away from him.”
“But you ended up with his girlfriend.”
“Yeah. That felt great. After he dumped that other girl, he wanted Amber back, but I wouldn’t let him have her. She was mine, but only for a while. A fill-in, like I said. You saw how quick she went back to him after I was dead. That was one of the reasons I set this whole thing up. To see what would happen. If I was going to marry her and be normal for once, I wanted to make sure it would work. If I could prove to my Dad I wasn’t a fag, I’d inherit a whole bunch of money and we could start a theatre company together or something. But she had to really care about me. Turns out she didn’t. I suspected that already. Shane was always around, even after we all graduated. I was always real careful to use protection with Amber, so I guessed her being pregnant wasn’t me.”
“So you faked your death and killed someone you didn’t know, to test your girlfriend?”
“Sort of. Mostly I wanted Shane to go through what I went through. I figured he’d be the number one suspect, but then the body didn’t show up and you all thought I just ran away. That burned me, Polly. So I started leaving clues. Talk about slow! Not only the police, but you, too, Polly Deacon. Miss hot-shit detective. Duhh.”
“So how come you’re telling me this, Jason?” I said.
“There were a lot of sick people up in North Bay,” he said. “One guy had killed his Dad, eh? He said they caught him because he couldn’t stand people not knowing how smart he was to get away with it. So he told his Mom.”
“Well, you certainly fooled us,” I said.
“Yeah, but I failed, as usual,” Jason said. “Shane didn’t suffer at all, even when I left puppets hanging around with audio cables around their necks. Pacey may be pretty, but he’s stupid.”
“Oh, he suffered, Jason.”
“Well, he did today, anyway.”
“You killed him at the school, I guess.”
“That was me. Fooled you again, eh? I just blended in with the students and sneaked backstage. I put gin and some pills in his water bottle while he was necking with Amber on the track and field mats. They didn’t even see me. Did your dog live, by the way?”
“Yes, Jason. He’s okay.”
“Oh. Guess the pills don’t work on dogs, then. I wanted to test them. Worked slower than I thought, I guess. He sure went for the meat, though, eh?”
“He sure did.”
“Anyway, I knew from the Mr. A. sessions that the gin would make Shane sick. When he was sick enough, I snuck up and throttled him. It was great. I don’t know if he came or not, though. You think he did?”
“I doubt it.”
There was a pause as we both contemplated the last moments of Shane’s life—me with growing horror, and Jason, I think, with fondness. He was gazing off into the middle distance, a smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“Nice explosion, by the way,” I said, to cover up the pounding of my heart.
“Thanks. One of my best. There are some things I’m good at. I like pyro.”
We sat there quietly, just the two of us in the dim light of the workshop. I don’t think I could have walked if I tried. And oddly, in spite of Jason’s horrible story and sociopathic lack of remorse, I felt sorry for him. Not so sorry that I wouldn’t have welcomed some backup, though. Tobin should have checked in by now, I thought.
“What do you want to do now, Jason? You want to go back to North Bay?”
“No way. The food sucks and they’d make me do anger management again. I’m too fucked-up, Polly. They’d keep me there forever.”
“Your options are limited, you know.”
“There’s only one option, really, after everything that’s happened. So, I was kind of hoping you’d help me on that.”
“What do you mean?” To say I was feeling uneasy would be really inaccurate. Quickly, Jason formed a noose in the audio cable he had brought with him. I tensed for a battle. He was planning to strangle me, too, but it wouldn’t be easy. I outweighed him by a good thirty pounds.
No battle. He slipped the noose around his own neck and unzipped his trousers.
“Oh, Jesus, Jason,” I said, standing up.
“It’s easy,” he said. “You just pull on the end of the cable here and I’ll do the rest. You don’t even need to watch if you don’t want to, just make sure you pull real tight and hang on. I won’t struggle. It’ll be something I’ve done right, you see?” He started rubbing himself.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Stop it, right now.”
He was crying.
“You can’t stop, once you start,” he sobbed. “That’s what Mr. A. always said. You can’t stop once you join the club.” He was pulling on the cable himself now, masturbating madly. I made a dive for him and he leaped up and ran to the pool, his trousers around his ankles. At the same moment, the secret door burst open and Tobin ran into the room.
“Tobin, help me!” I shouted, meaning “help me save this kid,” but Tobin dashed between me and Jason and spread his arms like a line-backer, to protect me.
“Not me—him!” I said, but Jason toppled backwards into the pool, didn’t even try to save himself, and sank like a rock.
At which point, detective constable Mark Becker entered the scene, slouching casually down the stairs.
“You guys finished unloading yet?” he said. “Anything I can do?”
Epilogue
WOODSMAN: My life as a woodsman was lonely, you see,
MOTHER: But there’s three of us now,
KEVIN: Like a family, you’ll see.
-The Glass Flute, Scene x
Jason’s body was found later that night. The OPP sent a diver down (they didn’t blow it off this time, seeing as Becker had been right there), and they found him right away. His half-dressed state and the cable around his neck confirmed my story, but Becker didn’t think it was as sad as I did. He was just annoyed that he had missed Jason’s confession. At least Tobin had witnessed Jason’s last hurrah, and I gave a pretty clear account of the whole thing.
Tobin said that someone had locked him in the sound storage cupboard upstairs. As he was wandering around in the dark trying to find the door (so he could kick it down), he heard footsteps overhead. When he got out, he climbed up the ladder to the attic room, saw the sleeping bag and fast-food boxes and thought it was a vagrant camping out. The entrance to the secret passageway was open and he followed it down to the workshop, carrying a beer bottle as a weapon.
The dead guy they had thought was Jason was, of course, young Negjib Ademi, Ari Ademi’s brother. Morrison showed up at the theatre moments after Becker did. Ari had shown him a snapshot of Negjib, and Ari’s daughter, Saba, had insisted that she saw Uncle Negjib in the auditorium of the high school, slipping through the backstage door. That’s why she had come backstage, to find him. Earlie put the pieces together pretty quickly after that. They were actually further ahead in their investigation (at least Earlie Morrison was) than I gave them credit for.
Jason’s parents were no more upset identifying the real body than they had been the first time, according to Morrison.
“Dr. McMaster’s a pretty cold guy,” he said.
Even with a total of three dead people, the whole mess still ended up being labelled “The Steamboat Incident”. I suppose this was because of its connection
to the original Incident, and the fact that the murderer wasn’t around to face the music. The police still did all the necessary paperwork, and the deaths made the papers, but they were never connected.
The photo that the local newspaper reporter took of Shane, Amber and the puppy did end up on the front page, in full colour, with a discreet little article saying Shane had died of an allergic reaction to alcohol, which, in fact, was true. The audio cable had made him choke on his own vomit, but it hadn’t cut off his airway. Jason had still effectively murdered him, but it might have turned out differently if Jason hadn’t had the chance to fill the water bottle with gin and pills. I blame myself for that.
The Ademis buried Negjib in a private ceremony which was covered by a total media blackout. The Kosovars had traded one regime for another, I guess.
Jason’s death wasn’t reported at all. Up here in Kuskawa, suicides never are.
The Glass Flute never did go on tour. In spite of the fact that Juliet plied Amber, Meredith and Brad with drinks, sympathy and the offer of ridiculously high salaries, none of them was up to it. Instead, Juliet called in a bunch of favours and had a remount of The Happy Little Computer up and running in less than two weeks, so she didn’t lose much money. She didn’t offer me the stage manager’s position, and I returned the cellphone and laptop.
Meredith got a last-minute gig understudying the role of Anne in Anne of Green Gables at a summer festival in Thunder Bay. (Ironic, considering her disastrous Anne in Gananoque, but perhaps that mark against her career died with Shane.)
Brad went back to Toronto and waited on tables for the rest of the summer. I haven’t heard how he’s doing, but I saw him playing a villain on Nikita a while ago.
Amber also went back to Toronto. As her pregnancy, which she decided not to abort, progressed, she got lots of work doing diaper and life insurance commercials. Eventually, she bought a condo and found a nice ad executive to settle down with. She didn’t want to keep Portia, so she gave the puppy to me before she left town. Lug-nut now has a buddy, and he’s teaching her everything he knows, which is basically how to be a dog. I renamed her Rosencrantz (Rosie for short) because I figured if she was going to be stuck with a Shakespearean name, she might as well have one that wasn’t goody-goody.
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