Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by Jeffrey Round

  Magnus leaned the hoe up against the trailer and came over to meet him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, the way the Natives must have regarded the first white men to land on their shores right before it all went wrong for them.

  They walked slowly around the trailer as Dan described his search for Craig Killingworth and the events that had led him to contact Magnus. As they walked, Magnus appeared to be taking inventory of what he’d left behind on this plot of land as much as the measure of Dan’s intentions.

  Dan tried to look interested when Magnus pointed out the stubby basil and flat-leafed parsley. “They don’t thrive here — not enough light except in the morning. Then the deer eat the leaves down to the stems.”

  Crows hung and dipped their heads in the rust-flecked fronds of Western Redcedar waving overhead. “You must enjoy the solitude out here,” Dan said.

  Magnus scratched his chin. “Tell you the truth, most days I hate it. It’s a lonely life. Blacker than black. People always romanticize places like this. You’re still stuck with your own company, whether you like it or not.”

  He turned away and looked into the forest as though searching for a sign, some encouragement that what he’d endured hadn’t been in vain, or maybe just wanting a reason to go on. When he turned back, his face was set. “All right — I guess I trust your motives. Ask me what you want to know.”

  Dan nodded. “When we spoke on the phone, you said you had proof that Craig Killingworth was dead.”

  “I do.”

  “I was hoping you could show it to me.”

  Magnus waved him around to the front of the yard. He walked up to the steps of the trailer and pulled the door open.

  Inside was a world in decline. Everywhere were signs of hopelessness: cramped quarters that bulged with household goods, piles of discarded clothing, boxes making an obstacle run of the trailer’s length. The interior had been turned into a museum, a monument to lost time. There was more than a hint of mould in the air. Papers languished on shelves, letters whose corners had been nibbled by mice thieving for their nests, with droppings left on the counters and on the unwashed vinyl floor curling at the edges. It was a catalogue of despair, a last refuge of broken dreams.

  Dan watched Magnus insert his hand into a pile of papers and turn something over. A bundle of letters teetered and splashed to the floor. Magnus looked down at them with contempt, scratching through the refuse flattened into piles on the shelves. For a moment, Dan was afraid he’d come all this way to interview a crazy person who just wanted a little company.

  “Here — look at this.” Magnus handed him a photograph. Dan was expecting a picture of Craig Killingworth, but the attractive young man standing in a rose garden was a complete stranger. Dan stared at it, hoping to glean its significance.

  “Hard to believe that’s me, isn’t it?” Magnus said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I used to be very good looking. Turned a few heads in my day. Forty years of smoking will do it to you. I quit the day I got my death sentence.” Dan looked up from the photograph to the emaciated skull regarding him. Magnus nodded. “Terminal lung cancer. Well, here I am five years later with everyone telling me how lucky I am to be alive. ‘What’s so lucky about it?’ I ask them. ‘I haven’t had a cigarette in five years.’”

  His fingers went on scratching through the piles. He plucked out a page and stopped to read it, the contents unknowable from his expression. It could have been a laundry list or a love letter, an unpaid bill or an obituary. His hands shook with the weight of all those years of missing cigarettes. A tremendous burden.

  From out of the mire he lifted another picture, this one of two young men. Dan recognized a slightly older Magnus standing beside Craig Killingworth at roughly the age he’d appeared in the missing person report. But this was a transformed Craig Killingworth, smiling broadly and looking for once as though he knew how to enjoy life rather than just endure it. He seemed alive and vibrant. Dan thought of the hushed light falling in the Adolphustown sitting room.

  Magnus’s rasp intruded on his thoughts. “That’s Craig.”

  “Where was this taken?”

  He filched the photograph out of Dan’s hands and squinted, though he seemed to be focusing his memory more than his eyes. “Picton Town Fair sometime in June — maybe ’84 or ’85.”

  Dan looked up. “Do you recall the last time you saw him?”

  Magnus screwed up his face, summoning the recall. “Yes, I do. Twenty years ago this coming November first. That was the day I left Prince Edward County. I never saw him again.”

  It jived with the police reports, Dan noted. “Did you expect to?”

  Magnus turned a sorrowful gaze on him. “Son, I expected to hear from him every day for ten, maybe fifteen years. On a bad day, I still do.”

  “Why is that, if I may ask?”

  A spasm of emotion charged Magnus’s face. “That’s the day we were supposed to leave together.” He looked at Dan. “Me and Craig …”

  For a moment, nothing registered. Then suddenly the piece fell into place. “You were … together?”

  Magnus nodded. His eyes misted over, his voice came out a croak. “We had it planned. I couldn’t believe when he didn’t go through with it.” He sniffled. “It was Craig’s idea. He wanted us to be together, but because of his family we had to go far away. It’s why we planned to come out here. So that’s why I wondered, when you said his name on the phone, if you had some news of him.…”

  Dan leaned against the counter. Somewhere far away a dog howled. Twenty years ago a man had planned his escape, chosen his companion for another chance at life, and disappeared. An hour ago Dan had had no clue what had been going on in Craig Killingworth’s mind. Now here was the answer, but he was still no closer to knowing what had happened to him.

  “Did you ever try to get in touch with him again?”

  Magnus shook his head softly. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “At first I just assumed he’d either ditched me or decided not to leave his family. He was awfully keen on his boys. It was harder back then to make such life-altering decisions. It’s easier today. Kids nowadays know what they want and go out and get it. Will and Grace and all that.”

  Easier for some, maybe, but not all. Dan thought of Richard Philips, newly christened Lester Higgins.

  “Back then if you were gay, you constructed a family life on top of what you were inside and prayed no one ever found out. We had no choice, see? We covered our tracks so no one would know. If you weren’t careful, you could get fired or beaten up. Or, if you were someone like Craig Killingworth, you could lose your family. Oh, yeah, the authorities were only too happy to take your kids away from you. It happened all the time.”

  Dan felt shot through with emotion. What would have become of him and Kedrick twenty years ago? Impossible to say. He considered the question before he spoke. “Did you ever suspect that Craig was murdered?”

  Magnus’s face exploded with anger. “Oh, he was murdered all right.” Dan was startled by the vehemence in his voice. “But you’ll never be able to pin it on the bitch!”

  “Lucille?”

  Magnus nodded. “Oh, no — she was too smart. And she had help in high places.”

  Dan wondered if Magnus was referring to Burgess, the OPP commissioner with the barracuda eyes. “But why do you still hope he’ll turn up alive if you know he’s dead?”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself.” Magnus nodded toward the creased piles on the shelf. “The letter. I got it two, maybe three weeks later. It took me a while to get out here, but it was waiting for me when I did.” He held up the piece of paper he’d been scratching through the debris for and offered it to Dan. “You can read it for yourself.”

  November 1st

  My dearest, darling Magnus,

  Forgive me. I should be with you instead of sending you this sorry letter. I know how hard this is going to be for you. I am a weak man. I can’t spend the rest of my life
with you.

  An hour ago I told you I was leaving with you tonight. I lied. I know now I can never do that. She’s won. I cannot live without my sons. It’s all in the diary. Do what you see fit with it.

  Please forgive me. I’m going to give her what she’s always wanted. By the time you get this, I will be a dead man.

  Love always, Craig

  Dan looked up. “Suicide?”

  Magnus nodded. “It’s what she wanted. Craig talked about it often enough. Even said how he’d do it, if it came to that. He said if he ever disappeared, he’d be under the ice in the bay. In the winter the reach freezes over. Only the ferry passing through every half hour keeps the channel open. The ice is thick. Thick enough to keep you under till it thawed. It would keep you down all right. Your bones would stay covered over till spring.”

  “You think he’s at the bottom of the Bay of Quinte?”

  “He told me he’d kill himself if she managed to keep him from his sons. And she did.” Magnus nodded to the picture in his hands. “And she did.”

  Dan was prepared for a long wait, but Magnus started in again, the telling easier now. “Twenty-three years ago we met at Lake on the Mountain. I was the gardener up at the lodge. Have you been there?”

  Dan nodded.

  “He’d just separated from his wife, but he hadn’t told her he was gay — just said he had things he needed to work out. We had an affair. It was going along fine until he decided to tell her about it. He thought she’d understand. So he told her — and she threatened him. She said she’d never let him see his sons again. And she had ways to make sure that happened. He was terrified. He broke things off with me and went back to her. It hurt, but I understood how he felt. I didn’t hear from him for a year. She got him into some kind of therapy, one of those programs where they try to change you. But you can’t change these things. I know it’s hard for your sort to understand, but that’s just how it is….”

  “I’m gay, Magnus.”

  Magnus gave him an appraising stare. He nodded. “All right. Then you know.”

  “And I also have a son who means more to me than anything in the world. So I know what that would mean to a man like Craig Killingworth.”

  Magnus nodded. “Anyway, he wasn’t cured. He just buried it inside. One day he snapped. He drove his car over the side of the road trying to kill himself. For four days they couldn’t find him. He lay in that car, pinned against the steering wheel, hidden by the brush around it. Some kids picking blueberries spotted it and called the police to get him out.”

  “But he survived?”

  “That time, yes. Anyway, he went back to her again. Crazy — just plain crazy. She’d been happy thinking he was dead. Now she had to worry about him all over again. That’s when I came to work for them. He thought it might help him get better if he had me around, at least part-time, puttering around the grounds, though he was still pretending to be what she wanted him to be. I think it made things worse for him, though. It was harder for him to have me there and not be with me.”

  “And she didn’t suspect you?”

  “I think she knew something was up. That’s why she concocted that story about him attacking her and claiming he was mentally unstable.”

  “It wasn’t true?”

  “Nah, it’s a lie. They were arguing and she started to beat him with her fists. He put up his hand to stop her from hitting him. She called it assault.”

  “He told you that?”

  “I was there. I saw it! Right after that, she fired me.”

  Dan flashed on the OPP report stating Magnus had been fired by Craig Killingworth. “Did you tell this to the police?”

  “I tried. They didn’t care. I think that was when she decided to kill him. She vowed that if she couldn’t have him, no one would. ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will!’ She actually said those words to his face. That’s when Craig got suspicious and started taping her phone conversations. He got her on tape asking a friend how she could drive him to suicide. He’d tried it once — she knew it wouldn’t take much to make him try again.”

  “Why didn’t he go to his family for help?”

  “Oh, she was right tricky. When he was in the hospital recovering from the car crash, Lucille told Craig his family had turned against him because he was gay. And then she phoned his family and said Craig didn’t want to hear from them any more because they’d caused the trauma he was going through. Anyway, they all believed her stories.” He clucked his tongue. “She was a monster!”

  Dan thought of Trevor’s story about how his mother had stopped talking to her brother when he first left home.

  “This was back in the eighties. It was all AIDS-this and AIDS-that. They were pointing fingers, blaming us for the epidemic. ‘God’s wrath on queers’ and all that rot. Nothing but ignorance and superstition.”

  “The old man — Nathaniel Macaulay. Did he know what was going on?”

  “He surely did. He hated the fact that his son-in-law was a hell-bound faggot. Worried himself sick one of the grandsons might catch it. Never stopped nagging his daughter about it.”

  Which explained the will, Dan realized. “What happened the last time you saw Craig?”

  “We spoke on the phone that morning. He sounded moody and went on for a long time about not wanting to leave his sons. It was killing him, I could tell. Craig was living in Bloomfield by then. Because of the assault charges, he wasn’t allowed to see his sons at all. The court had stayed that verdict the day before we were to leave. He’d also been suspended from his job as principal at the high school. Shocked them all, too — everybody loved Craig.” His voice caught again. “Anyway, I convinced him that leaving was for the best. I told him there was no telling what else she might do. Better to get away and deal with it from a distance. We’d talked about it a million times already. I was just repeating myself.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Around noon. I went over and helped him get ready. I remember we had a little fight over it, because I was in a hurry and he was terribly fussy about packing his clothes, so I did it for him. He was always a very smart dresser, and it was the only thing I’ve known him to get cranky about.”

  “How were you going to leave?”

  “By car. I was supposed to do all the driving, take our time to get here. He still couldn’t drive after his accident.”

  And thus the bicycle, Dan thought. “Then what?”

  “I called him again in the afternoon, maybe five o’clock. I just had a feeling he might change his mind. But he didn’t answer.”

  Because by then he’d been spotted on the ferry to Adolphustown, Dan thought. Maybe he was already scouting out a place to throw himself under the ice. Only he couldn’t do it in the light of day with everyone watching. He’d have waited till it was dark, when no one would see. “What then?”

  “I went and waited for him up at Lake on the Mountain as we’d planned. He was supposed to be there by eight. I got there an hour early, I was so nervous. I sat in the parking lot and waited for nearly five hours, but he never showed. It was cold that night. I kept running the engine then turning it off again to save gas to make sure we had enough to leave.”

  “Did you see anything while you were waiting?”

  Magnus shook his head. “The place was deserted. It was eerie and dark. It was past season and there were no lights on at the resort. A couple of cars drove past. One pulled into the parking lot and stopped for a second, then drove away again when they saw me. Probably lovers looking for a make-out place. Then nothing for almost an hour. I was ready to give up. Then a kid came by on a bike and I split. It was nearly midnight by then and I figured Craig had changed his mind. I was crying and pretty confused. I couldn’t believe he’d decided not to come with me. There was a couple walking up the hill. I passed them on the way down. I didn’t recognize them. I don’t think they were townies. Not sure who they were. It was odd to see people out walking at that time of year.”

  An
d by then Craig Killingworth had succeeded in killing himself, Dan calculated. “And after that?”

  “After that I drove by his place in Bloomfield, but all the lights were off and I just kept heading west. Didn’t stop till I hit the Sault thirteen hours later. I pulled into a motel, cried for an hour and then slept. I made it out here a little over two weeks later. I didn’t even know he was missing till I got here and found his letter. Then I knew what he’d done.”

  Twilight had come and gone. The sky was black outside the trailer, as dark as Dan remembered from his time on Mayne Island. Magnus lit a lamp — the power hadn’t been reconnected. Their faces were orange moons in the dark. Moths batted themselves senseless against the screen outside.

  “You see what I’m saying. No one looked for him. No one cared. No one wanted him found but me. And who was I? Just some faggot gardener who got involved with a man and tried to help him understand himself. I wouldn’t do it today, let me tell you.”

  Craig Killingworth’s suicide note lay on the table before them. Dan fingered it. “This diary he mentions. Do you know where it is now?”

  Magnus pondered this. “Probably still in a locked box in the Bloomfield bank where he left it. I opened the account for him in my name, but only Craig used it. He was documenting evidence of Lucille’s campaign against him. I think he put the tapes in there too. He didn’t want anything to be associated with him. He thought they might come looking for it and he was still pretty scared of her. But they didn’t know him in Bloomfield, so he’d go in with his key and forge my signature whenever he wanted access to the box. He sent me the key in the letter.”

  “You never opened the box?”

  Magnus sat back and sighed heavily. “Even now, after all these years, I still haven’t the heart.”

  “Do you think it might still be there?”

  Magnus squinted at Dan in the false light. “Hard to say. I paid the account up until about five years ago, then I got sick and moved and the bank lost track of where I was. I’ve thought of it many’s a time, but never did a thing about it.”