Going Out With a Bang

by Joan Boswell

  I picked up the office phone and called Stockton. Thelma said he was ill and she’d had to take him to the hospital. Just as I thought.

  Sanjit hovered near the front door, making Ashley ripple. She appeared on the verge of spontaneous combustion. “Excuse me, Constable, if I might have a word.”

  Sanjit joined me in the Blue Room. I frowned at the bowls of party food, all Margaret’s favourites, from the sour cream dip to the chocolate dipped donuts. He frowned at the row of coffee cups like a man who does not drink on duty. “What can I do for you?”

  “We were talking about what’s wrong with this picture. What’s wrong is the priest, the cop, the coroner, and the undertaker all walked into a hunt camp. And everyone knew they’d be gone for two weeks. Timing is everything.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Elizabeth and Margaret are sisters. They look much alike, except Elizabeth is a bit thinner and Margaret has naturally curly hair. When Brian is away, Stockton does the embalming and Thelma does the hair. She always gives ladies the bouffant with bangs, no matter what they normally wear. You can count on it, and someone did.”

  A light bulb flickered over Sanjit’s head. “Go on.”

  “You’ve noticed Elizabeth fiddling with her hairdo. Women do that when they have a new style they’re not used to. Tugging at bangs, flipping wisps out of the way, or pushing a bit behind the ears, then remembering and pulling it out. Maybe we should enlist Ashley. She’s young, and she knows about those big hair clips, like the one holding back Elizabeth’s French roll.”

  The light bulb blinked full on. “Let’s do it.”

  We strolled back to the door. “Ashley, you’ve been doing a great job here with the door. I hope you can come back tomorrow for the funeral. I could use more of your help.”

  Ashley almost grinned, but caught herself. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

  “There’s another small job you could do right now. Elizabeth is having trouble with her hair and that big clip. She was probably upset when she did it up. I wonder if you could go over there and offer to help her with it.”

  “Okay.”

  We watched Ashley work her way around the room, as far from the casket as she could manage. She paused beside Elizabeth and whispered something. Elizabeth nodded. They both dropped out of the cluster of mourners and slipped down the hall to the Ladies. We followed. As the door was swinging closed behind them, I caught it and held it open. We had a clear view of the big mirror over the sink.

  Ashley pulled a comb from her hip pocket, and with the quick hands of youth, unclipped the plastic thing, releasing long curly hair. She whipped the comb through the sides, pulling it into a tamed clump.

  Sanjit maintained his post at the door while I stepped in the room. “I’ll take that clip, thank you Ashley. Did you really think you could get away with it, Margaret?”

  Later that evening, in the blank spot that should have been evening visitation hours, Sanjit dropped by.

  “How did you figure it out?” he asked, placing his notebook neatly in front of him on my kitchen table. “Was it just the hair, or do you have some other evidence that will hold up in court?”

  “More evidence? The shoes were wrong. Elizabeth would never wear pink shoes, especially to a funeral. If you go down to Brian’s workroom, you’ll find the pair of shoes I collected from Margaret’s closet. They won’t fit on the body. I think Elizabeth and Margaret wore a different shoe size.”

  Sanjit bent over his notebook, scribbling.

  “That green stuff we had on our faces is still on the counter where Stockton chipped it off her face. I think it contains a skin-absorbed poison, courtesy of John the pharmacist. Samara mixed the stuff up, but Margaret delivered the pots. I think she slipped a trace of poison into each pot, just enough to irritate our skin and make us all look unrecognizable.”

  “I see. To help with the disguise. But enough in one pot to kill.”

  “Stockton didn’t use gloves when he cleaned her face up, and now he’s sick. Brian put a new box of gloves on the counter, but Stockton never uses them. It was still sealed when Thelma opened it to get herself a pair, and you’ll find only one pair in the garbage can. John and Margaret didn’t know that, so they don’t know Stockton is sick, and the poison can be verified through the hospital’s tests on him and the remaining green bits.”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “You probably won’t find the missing pot used to apply the goop at the party, but ‘Elizabeth’ wore her robe home, and must have taken the pot with her. There might be a trace in the pocket. John is having an affair with Margaret, so there’s your motive. Swap the wife for the mistress, and keep the wife’s inheritance to boot. He’s got his business up for sale, and I’d guess they planned to skip town as soon as possible. And if Doc Payne had ruled anything other than natural causes, they had a backup plan. Implicate Samara.”

  “Another coroner is coming out from the city to review Doc Payne’s decision,” Sanjit said, turning a page.

  “The food is wrong, too. The survivors always order comfort food, not the favourite food of the deceased. Elizabeth favoured exquisite food, Margaret liked fast food. You saw the Blue Room tables.” I glanced out my window. Outside, Samara traipsed around my lawn, chanting and sprinkling herbs.

  In the distance, I heard the fire siren, followed by an ambulance. The box on Sanjit’s shoulder beeped and issued the garbled chant of a dispatcher saying something about a fatal shooting. Sanjit leaped out of his chair like a sprinter from the blocks and vanished out the door.

  Right. Every time Brian goes away.

  Vicki Cameron writes novels for young people and short stories. Her work has been nominated for several awards, including two Arthur Ellis and an Edgar. Her middle grade novel Shillings features Colonel By’s children during the building of the Rideau Canal. Her short story collections Clue Mysteries and More Clue Mysteries are each fifteen short stories based on the board game Clue. Her stories appear in the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthology series and Storyteller Magazine. Her inspiration for this story came from dining out with funeral director friends.

  Peace and Quiet

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  The sound gave me blinding headaches,

  His snoring drove me insane.

  The snorts of my sleeping husband

  Gave me a southerly pain.

  I tried everything on the market,

  But the pills just addled my thought

  And you could deafen a country

  With the earplugs that I bought.

  Ten years of noise was the limit;

  By then I had gone quite mad.

  A hundred earplugs down his throat

  Gave me sleep I’d never had.

  Hostile Takeover

  Sue Pike

  Nora stood in the Arrivals Lounge at the Manaus Airport waving a sign with the words “Tranquility Eco-Tours” etched on it, feeling anything but tranquil. Only eleven of the twelve-member tour had arrived. She’d watched for the missing woman at the departures gate in Miami but hadn’t spotted her there either. And now it seemed certain she’d missed her flight.

  Nora asked the man standing beside her to hold the sign up while she pulled a pencil from the pocket of her cargo pants and checked the list on the clipboard again, ticking off for the third time the names on the tags of the impatient men and women gathered around her.

  “Serenity Sims?” She peered through her smudgy glasses at the motley group surrounding her, but they shook their heads. “Anyone know her?” Shrugs.

  “I hope this is not a portent of things to come on this tour.” A burly, bull-necked man with a shiny shaved head glowered at Nora and tapped the face of his wristwatch with the nail of his index finger. His speech was clipped and guttural. She looked at the tag hanging from his neck. “Gunther Schwartz”, it said. And underneath the words, “Bonn, Germany”.

  “We’ll just wait a bit longer,” she said, trying not to wheedle. She could feel the f
amiliar signs of panic creeping over her—sweat breaking out on her forehead, her heart pounding in her chest. She tried to remember the drill if someone missed a flight, but her mind flitted about, unable to light on the subject long enough to make a decision. And since she’d bought the tour company six weeks ago, there was no one to call. She was on her own.

  Nora wiped her glasses on the tail of her shirt and stared through the grimy airport windows and along the tarmac through the gathering dusk. Her group was supposed to be on board the riverboat before nightfall, but that hope was drifting away like the vapor trail they’d left behind them in Toronto.

  “Yoo hoo!” She spun around and stared as a middle-aged woman in layers and layers of pink and lilac silk swept toward them, waggling her fingers and dazzling them with her white teeth. A porter staggered in her wake, loaded down with three very large pieces of Ralph Lauren luggage and a huge backpack.

  “Sorry” She ducked her head and made a little face. “American Airlines gave me a hard time about my carry-ons. I had to catch the Brazilian airliner instead.” She flashed the impossibly white teeth. “I hope you haven’t waited long.”

  “Exactly two hours,” Gunther Schwartz consulted his watch, “and three minutes.”

  “Oh, well.” Her laugh tinkled merrily. “I’m here now. What are we waiting for?”

  Nora clamped her mouth shut and led the way to the parking lot and the bus where she and the rest had already stowed their bags. Serenity waved the porter toward the open luggage compartment and disappeared up the steps, leaving Nora to deal with the mutinous man holding his open palm in front of her face. She reached into her belly-pack, extracted a handful of bills and watched while he threw the luggage into the hold.

  She boarded the bus to find Serenity dusting off the front seat where the sound system was installed.

  “I’m sorry, that’s my seat,” Nora said with as much authority as she could muster. “I have to be able to use the microphone.”

  “Oh, my dear. You don’t look old enough to be leading a tour.” Serenity put her arm around Nora’s shoulder and turned the younger woman to face the others at the back of the bus. “Now I ask you,” she raised her voice, “does this sweet thing look old enough to be our leader?”

  Nora could feel a blush spreading over her face. “I’m thirty-two,” she stammered. “Almost thirty-three.”

  “That old?” Serenity raised her eyebrows in mock horror. “Why, you’re practically ancient.” Laughter filled the coach as she sank into the disputed seat. “I’m sorry, but I absolutely must sit at the front. Otherwise I get sick.”

  Nora glanced back and noticed everyone still watching, waiting to see how this would play out. “But there’s another front seat,” she indicated the one across the aisle.

  “Oh, I would sit there, truly I would, but that window is so dirty, and the upholstery is torn.” She shuddered.

  Eleven heads swivelled back and forth. Nora heard the familiar tapping and saw the German glowering at her, the nail on his index finger beating out a tattoo on the face of his watch.

  She nodded to the driver and braced herself in the aisle between the two rows while the bus lurched out of the parking lot. There is strength, her therapist Dr. Bernstein had told her, in knowing when to retreat from battle. “Can everyone hear me?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll just point out some of the sights on our way to the boat.”

  “What about the Opera House? The brochure said we’d visit the Opera House.” Gunther Schwarz glared at her from his seat three rows back.

  “I’m afraid we got off to a late start. We’ll just have time to get to the boat before it gets dark.” She smiled, but her cheeks felt made of clay.

  Gunther frowned. “It’s all that woman’s fault,” he muttered, thrusting his jaw in Serenity’s direction. But Serenity was in another world, humming softly to herself and staring out the side window.

  “Oh, leave her alone, for heaven’s sake,” said a stout woman seated in front of him. She was wearing purple shorts and a faded T-shirt with the Tranquility Tours logo. Nora thought the woman was probably sizing her up, comparing her to other leaders she’d toured with.

  She pushed her glasses back and began the speech she’d rehearsed until she knew it by heart. “Early in the twentieth century,” she began, “Manaus was a thriving port, the centre of the worldwide rubber industry—” Gunther suddenly leapt to his feet and began twisting knobs on the ceiling above his head. “Mr. Schwartz? Is there a problem?” She tried to keep her voice steady.

  “We must turn off this air conditioning. It is deadly.” He stabbed at the roof a few more times before pounding on the vent. “Thousands of germs reside in these ducts.”

  “We’re almost at the equator here, Mr. Schwartz. It’s forty-five degrees Celsius outside.” Nora’s voice definitely squeaked this time. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, whispering the mantra Dr. Bernstein had taught her to use whenever panic threatened to overwhelm her.

  “Legionnaires’ disease!” Her eyes flew open. “Norwalk! SARS!” Gunther was shouting at the others. She saw flecks of spittle flying from the corners of his mouth. “They all lurk in air conditioning units.”

  A fat lady in yellow shorts lumbered to her feet and started wrenching at the buttons over her head. Others muttered to one another. An elderly couple half-rose to their feet.

  “No!” Serenity’s shriek ripped the air. “We’ll die in here with the air conditioning off. The heat will kill us.” She turned a pathetic face to the people behind her and wiped imaginary sweat from her flawless brow. “Please.”

  “Excuse me.” Nora tried to make her voice heard above the babble. “Please, let’s just try to stay calm. If you look out the left window, you’ll see the fish market.” But no one was listening. She’d lost them.

  The bus trip lasted another twenty minutes, and she watched helplessly as the ranks formed behind Serenity on the one hand and Gunther on the other. People who hardly knew one another were arguing the pros and cons of air conditioning.

  By the time they arrived at the riverboat, it was dark, and the impatient captain glared at Nora and hurried them through the safety drill in halting English. He gave them their room assignments during a cold supper of salad, ham and the inevitable deep-fried manioc. Nora and Serenity would share a cabin, he told them, as they were the only single women on board.

  The cabin was only big enough to turn around in. It had dark mahogany panelling, a couple of portholes, narrow bunk beds and a diminutive closet that Serenity immediately filled with her flowing garments, forcing Nora to leave her clothes stuffed in the duffel bag under the bunk. The older woman couldn’t possibly sleep on the upper bunk with her vertigo, so Nora scrambled up a narrow ladder, bumping her head on the low ceiling. She lay awake, trying to control her panic. It was all going wrong. Dr Bernstein had said that owning the company could give her the control she so desperately needed. But that wasn’t the way it was working out at all. She pounded the mattress and wept silently into her pillow. It was nearly dawn when she finally fell asleep to the rumbling of the motor and the sound of water lapping against the hull as the riverboat made its way up the Rio Negro in the dense Amazonian night.

  Sosa, the Yanomami guide, pounded on the cabin doors at five thirty in the morning for a dawn tour of the flooded rainforest. Serenity shot into the bathroom, and Nora jiggled on one foot then the other while waiting. After a quarter of an hour, she heard the others making their way up the stairs to the dining room, but still the bathroom door remained closed. Finally, just as Sosa called her name, the door opened and Serenity appeared in full makeup and a trim safari outfit. Nora was finished in the bathroom in four minutes and tore up the stairs two at a time but found her charges muttering to one another and glaring at her accusingly. Gunther tapped his watch.

  Two wooden launches lay against the side of the boat, bumping together softly in the early morning mist. Nora began to help the more elderly of the tourists
down the ladder while Sosa held the launch steady with a boat hook and the second guide, Eddie, led them to their seats.

  Suddenly, Serenity grabbed Nora’s elbow and squeezed it hard. “I absolutely refuse to sit in the same launch with that German brute,” she hissed. Nora’s cheeks burned as she held Gunther back for the second launch.

  She climbed onto the seat next to the German, hoping to smooth over the insult, but he only muttered darkly and turned away from her. The guides pushed off and started the outboards. As they putted among the trees of the flooded rainforest, they listened to the dawn chorus of thousands of birds and watched as pairs of brightly hued parrots flew squawking overhead. Howler monkeys began their morning chant, sounding like snow tires on a distant expressway. A couple of large Cayman slipped under the water as the launches floated by, and a Collared Aracari hopped out of sight behind a rocky outcropping.

  Nora explained that successful bird watching demanded quiet, so they wouldn’t frighten the shyer birds, but she could hear peals of laughter coming from the other launch and Serenity’s voice, strident and raucous. She was in full storytelling flight, and the words “Nazi” and “Herr Schwartz” skipped easily across the water towards them. A pair of scarlet macaws, startled by the noise, flew away into the jungle.

  Nora didn’t dare turn to her seatmate, but she could sense the tension in his body as he pressed binoculars to his eyes. Her own panic mounted as she met the accusing looks of the other four people in the boat.

  “You must speak to that woman,” said the tall man who had held the sign. The others nodded silently.

  When the sun was fully up, the tour returned to the riverboat, climbed out of the launches and sat down to a meal of scrambled eggs and toast. Nora stood to announce she would be conducting an orientation talk in the dining room right after breakfast.