Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle

by Blechta, Rick

  Arriving on the planet twelve years after my sister and fifteen after my brother, I’d been a “happy accident” for my parents. In many ways, I grew up like an only child. My sister Narissa had to put up with me more than was fair, since she was instantly elevated to the post of chief nursemaid. The novelty of a baby wears off pretty quickly when you’re on the cusp of teenagedom. It wasn’t until I was around fourteen that Narissa and I actually became close. Up to that time, she had generally referred to me as “The Creature.” In a lot of ways I deserved that, since I really took pleasure in annoying her. She had eventually settled in Victoria, British Columbia, where, true to our family background, she now taught at the university.

  My brother Clark, being even older and male, didn’t really have contact with me that I remembered in those early years. By the time I was really aware of my surroundings, he was off at university studying philosophy, appearing occasionally — like a semi-familiar ghost — at various family events and holidays. He didn’t begin to know how to relate to me, and I was completely tongue-tied in the presence of my mythical “big brother.” It wasn’t until I was appearing with the San Francisco Opera and spent an evening in his home that I found out he had every one of my recordings, and his wife admitted that he boasted about me shamelessly to his colleagues at Stanford.

  Narissa’s phone call was a bit of a godsend. A few days of something normal like hanging out with my big sister might just help restore my equilibrium.

  I also wouldn’t have to face Lili right away. Despite what she’d told me repeatedly over the phone, I felt as if I’d really let her down.

  Narissa picked up after three rings.

  “Hi! It’s Marta.”

  “Marta! Where are you?”

  “Back in Toronto. Just walked in the door and picked up your message.”

  “Good flight?”

  “As good as a flight can be.”

  “Fancy a trip to Ottawa? I can’t make it down to you.”

  “As a matter of fact ...”

  It was all set up pretty quickly. Narissa was staying with an old high school buddy since her husband had remained at home. I’d book into a hotel nearby, and we could spend a day and a half together before I had to move on to Montreal.

  I wanted to talk to her about my problem.

  I poured each of us another glass of wine. Narissa and I were in my hotel room, one of those places for visiting business people, so it had a small living room as well as a bedroom. We’d just returned after enjoying a seafood dinner at our favourite restaurant in the ByWard Market. Dad used to take us there for a special treat whenever Narissa or Clark came home for a visit.

  About the only good thing that had come out of Marc’s death was the strengthening of the tenuous bond between us. Certainly, a great deal of the distance had come because I was so much younger. But the distance was also the physical kind. I seldom got nearer to Victoria than San Francisco, and Narissa almost never came east — especially after our parents died.

  She’s much better-looking than I am: nearly six feet, congenitally slender, and with a long face framed by always impeccably styled brown hair. Where I’d been your typical tomboy — something that Gerhard had a hard time beating out of me — Narissa had always been a girlie-girl. What made me really envious was the fact that age only seemed to increase her beauty. We shared a common love of athletics and were both good at anything physical, but I enjoyed team sports, doing things with other people. She preferred solitary pursuits like running and working out. Since we’d bonded more firmly, I’d talked her into learning to play golf (I could outshoot her off the tees and on the fairways, but she trounced me in the finesse aspects of the game), and she’d introduced me to weight lifting.

  Having consumed more than a bottle of wine with dinner, we were both pretty tight, but in very good spirits. The further libation I’d just poured was my way of trying to work up the courage to tell her what had happened in Paris. For the entire train trip from Toronto to Ottawa, I’d worked out just how I wanted to put it, but all evening I’d lacked the courage to pull the trigger.

  Narissa sat in a corner of the sofa, legs curled under her. “So tell me all about Paris. I’m so envious. I love that city!”

  I was in an armchair at a right angle to her. “Well,” I began, “I didn’t see too much of it. I actually kept to my room most of the time.”

  “Why ever did you do that? You must have had a ton of spare time.”

  “There were reasons.”

  My sister knew all about the problems I’d had, and I believe to this day that she sicced Lili on me after she’d phoned one night to see how I was and caught me very drunk.

  Her pursed lips told me she was sizing up all the possible meanings in my statement. “Want to tell me about it?”

  I nearly said no, covering my indecision with another swallow of wine, but I’d come all this way with an agenda and it seemed stupid to abandon it. “I went to Paris feeling really strong and in control. During rehearsals, this continued, but the day after the opening, well ... something happened.”

  With that, I told Narissa everything. She took it all in without asking questions, a habit of hers I’d noticed before. Her face was devoid of expression so I had no idea what she was thinking. That made it a lot easier for me.

  After I finished, she sat swirling the bit of wine left in her glass before putting it down on the coffee table. “Has something like this ever happened before?”

  I sighed. “Yes. First on that horrible night at the Met. Then there were a number of times after I’d holed up in my Toronto apartment. That could have been due to the amount of wine I’d consumed, though.”

  Narissa nodded. “I knew you were in pretty bad shape, but I didn’t think you were that far gone. How about after you started therapy?”

  “Only once, but I was already nearly asleep so it might have actually been part of a dream.”

  “And since?”

  “No. Until Paris, not once.”

  Narissa looked at me, forcing my eyes to meet hers before she spoke. “Have you told me everything?”

  “You mean about what happened in Paris?”

  “I mean have you left anything out, anything I should know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Are you drinking to excess again?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Drugs?”

  “Are you kidding me? Narissa, I’ve told you everything that happened. I’ve left nothing out!”

  “Have you told Lili about this?”

  “I told her about the first time when I saw him at the Métro.”

  “Why not the second time?”

  I put down my wine glass. I’d had enough for the night. “I got really worried that, despite what she was telling me, there was something ... something really wrong with me. You don’t know how hard I’ve struggled to get this second chance.”

  “Yes, I do, sister mine.”

  “If this ever got out, I’d never get a booking again. Nobody’s going to take a chance hiring a nut bar. There’s too much risk involved. Yeah, if someone like Renée Fleming went flaky, she might get some bookings anyway, but I don’t have close to her kind of profile.”

  “So what’s the harm in telling Lili? She’s certainly not going to blab. How can you think of not telling her?”

  “I really can’t say.” I looked down at the floor and mulled over how to frame the next bit. “If I’m seeing my dead husband wherever I go, I guess I’m afraid that she may suggest that I need more help than she can give me, that I should be ...”

  Narissa put down her wine, too, unfinished, and said it for me. “That you should be locked up? Do you think that’s what you need?”

  “If I really am seeing a man we all know is dead, wouldn’t you say that’s the case?”

  Narissa leaned across the corner of the coffee table and took my hands in hers. “It may not be as dire as that. Talk to your friend. Level with her. She’s the expert.”
/>   “But it also might be something else,” I said in a rush. There. It was out.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What if I actually did see him? What if Marc isn’t really dead?”

  Early the next morning, I was in a rented car, driving west from Ottawa.

  Narissa and I had ended our evening having a pretty serious argument. She could not believe that I thought Marc might still be alive. My story had convinced her that I needed more help, if not from Lili, then from someone else. She had been emphatic on that score and when I refused to acknowledge it, she became very angry, probably hoping to shock me into agreeing with her.

  But when I’d barricaded myself in that hotel suite in Paris, I had a lot of time to think, perhaps too much.

  Yes, I was horribly frightened that I might be seriously disturbed, that despite all Lili’s hard work, I really was crazy. It all made perfect sense: Marc had been my soulmate, the only person I ever really loved, and he was snatched tragically away from me.

  Of course, my whole being ached to have him back. Right after the accident, I dreamed of Marc night after night: it had all been a horrible misunderstanding; the fire had been a lie; someone had kidnapped him; and perhaps worst of all, that it had just been a bad dream. Every scenario of hope had played in my head nightly on the big screen of my unconscious.

  Pretty quickly, it led to my complete collapse and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I eventually would have been dead if it hadn’t been for Lili. Under the wheels of a subway train, throwing myself off a roof, or simply taking too many sleeping pills, it would have happened. I was just in too much pain.

  After days spent lying on that bed in a plush Paris hotel or pacing the floor, I’d forced myself to relive the whole thing and at the end of it, I came to the realization that there might be another explanation, one that meant I was okay, that nothing at all was wrong with me. Before I could throw in the towel, I had to answer one question: had Marc really perished in that fire?

  I had been hoping that my sister would accompany me on this trip. I desperately needed moral support, but she just couldn’t bring herself to be a part of it. It was my guess that she was probably on the phone to Lili, perhaps right at that moment, explaining my state of mind, and there would be hell to pay upon my return to Toronto that coming Saturday — maybe earlier if Lili could get hold of me.

  It was a beautiful fall day as I drove west from Almonte along Route 16 through the rolling Lanark Highlands. Everything seemed so familiar, yet so distant. I’d made this trip with my family hundreds of times over the years, but it was a bittersweet journey for me that day.

  I remembered driving this road like a madwoman to get to Marc when I’d arrived back from one absence or another, longing with frightening intensity to be in his arms once again. Occasionally, he’d pick me up at the Ottawa airport, always waiting in the car until I phoned to say I’d meet him out front. On those occasions, I’d wanted the one-hour trip back to the log home to take just a little longer so I could listen to his voice, look at his profile, and feel that I was complete once again.

  Until today, I hadn’t been able to face going back, to see that empty, burned husk where all my joy had been incinerated. My brother, Clark, had seen to everything for me at the time of the accident: closing up the old log home, locking the outbuildings, and as far as I knew, no one had been back since. Our neighbors, good people that they were, had kept an eye on it, of course, and would have reported to me if anything seemed amiss, but those calls had never come, thankfully. I don’t think I would have been able to deal with it.

  One man down the road had been tapping the sugar bush behind the fields and paid me a small yearly fee and another neighbor cut hay which I was happy to let him keep, but that had been it. For two years I’d had no contact with the place that once had been the centre of my universe.

  Today, for good or ill, I was returning.

  I stayed surprisingly calm until I turned onto the dirt road that wound through the nearly unbroken line of trees leading to the old farm. At that point, my hands began shaking and felt slimy on the steering wheel. I had to stop twice to wipe them off on the legs of my jeans.

  Finally, I came to the top of a small hill and stopped, looking down into the gully where the driveway lay on the left, mostly hidden by underbrush. It took ten minutes for me to be able to move the car forward.

  Stopping well back of the big farm gate that blocked the driveway, I got out and leaned on it, staring at the old homestead two hundred feet away. It seemed to float on a sea of gently waving dead grass like some magnificent ship. The two-storey log house, now over one hundred and forty years old, didn’t seem much changed. Maybe it needed a touch of paint around the windows and one of the shutters was a bit crooked, but it looked the way I imagined it would. The woodshed, which had been slowly collapsing for as long as I remember, peeped out from behind the half-dead apple trees to the right of the house, and beyond that, I could just make out the peak of the old barn’s roof, the barn whose doors I’d hired Marc to re-hang.

  It was only when I allowed my eyes to move right that I could see the abomination on the highest point of land, the dream that Marc and I had shared so breathlessly together, the place where we had planned to live out our lives together.

  The three white pines that stood close to the site were black and withered where the fire had partially consumed them, but their farther sides appeared all the more green and healthy for it. I felt glad they’d survived, although they were greatly diminished. The foundation of the house was nearly invisible in the tall grass. Other than that, I could only see a few blackened pieces of wood. Nature had already almost erased what had happened.

  I stood for several minutes, my mind scrolling back through all the time I’d spent here with Marc. Was this a fool’s errand? Was I desperately clinging to an explanation that had no basis in reality? I hoped that today would put me out of my misery — one way or the other.

  Two fence posts down from the gate, there was a large rock. I rolled it away, and underneath was a small plastic container containing a key ring. Tears welled in my eyes as I looked down at them. They spoke to me of the good times that, regardless of what I discovered today, were gone forever.

  I could see Marc hiding them under there when I’d misplaced my keys yet again. Bent over with the rock held up, he looked at me with laughing eyes. “Marta, do you think I should be hiding several sets under here so you will never be without?”

  The padlock on the gate was well oiled and opened easily, speaking of the watchful eyes of my good neighbors. People out here took care of each other.

  Hopping back into the car, I drove slowly up the overgrown drive, stopping in my usual place near the house. The barn with Marc’s big doors was clearly visible now. They had held up well, but the wood was darkening to a grey that would soon match the rest of the building.

  Once out of the car, I looked over to the ruin, more visible now than it had been down by the road. More blackened wood and two cement foundation walls, but I could still see the shape of the structure in my mind’s eye as it had looked the day I took leave of my love for the final time. Little did I know, as I’d kissed him and driven off to the Ottawa airport, that so much tragedy would soon befall us.

  I hardened my heart to the task at hand.

  Grass had grown up around the house since they couldn’t hay there, and I waded through it toward the barn, about a hundred feet away. Around back, the lower level was basically just a big opening. Generations of farmers had kept their livestock down there, the generated body heat keeping them warm and the building intact due to the moisture they also gave off. My father had redone the foundation nearly forty years earlier, opening up the back wall when he’d decided at the death of his father that he’d rather be a university professor than a hard-scrabble farmer. Having no doors made it easier to get the tractor and its tools in and out.

  I’d spoken to my brother two days earlier and found ou
t the last thing he did before leaving two years ago was to drive Marc’s pickup truck under the barn to protect it from the elements. It had seemed the sensible thing to do.

  “Unless someone’s swiped it, it should still be there.”

  “I assume you locked it. Where are the keys?”

  “They’re on that nail in the floor beam near the stairs. You know, where dad used to hang his fishing gear. I figured no one would spot them there.”

  “Thanks, Clark.”

  “Why do you want to know about all this?”

  “I’m thinking of going back for a visit.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “To look around, see what there is to see.”

  “You take my breath away sometimes, little sister. You swore you’d never go back again. I can’t understand why you haven’t sold the place yet.”

  “I think I was waiting for a sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “If I find it, I’ll let you know.”

  Chapter Six

  The trip along the side of the barn had covered my jeans with the burrs that always grew there — something I’d forgotten about. When I got around back, it took several minutes to pull them all off, after which I spent a few moments gazing at the familiar scenery. The sugar bush, spreading out behind the barn, held only a forlorn remnant of its fall glory. The hardy winter birds that remained around the property flitted around from branch to branch, but without any real purpose. The scene, lovely though it was, felt desolate: birds, plants, and trees, all making the most of those last few days before winter marked the end of another growing season by closing its iron fist.

  The barn’s foundation had been cleverly dug into an incline so that animals could be brought in at ground level in the back, while the upper hay storage area would also be accessible from ground level at the front. Even though animals had not been kept in the lower level for many years, the hard-packed earth floor, imbued with nearly a century of dung, still made the space’s former use clear within a moment of entering. Oddly, I’d always loved the mixed smell of manure and dirt, and on that day, it sent me right back to my childhood. Most weekends had found our family out at the farm, and since there was such a huge gap of years between my siblings and me, this old barn had quickly become my pirate ship, my fairy tale castle, my dragon’s cave, my friend.