Don't Forget You Love Me

by Rosemary Aubert

  “And the other time-keeper? What was that?”

  She held me in her glance for a moment, and I knew she had something to tell me that was going to put me on the spot somehow.

  “The other time-keeper was a record of the instant that the Taser had last been discharged.”

  I held my breath. “And when was that?”

  “It was at three fourteen a.m. on the twenty-third of July of last year.” She looked away for an instant, then her eyes grabbed mine again and held. “Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s the day the Juicer died.”

  “It’s the hour the Juicer died.”

  In the distance, I heard the mournful sound of a piper breathing a lament. The slow procession of the casket, borne on the shoulders of six strapping officers, made its way up the long winding drive of Mount Pleasant cemetery and came to rest at the door of a mausoleum that must have belonged to the Hopequist family. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about the deceased except the paltry facts I was able to pull together in the futile days of my investigation into his doings during what turned out to be his last days.

  “If that is so, Aliana, then we have proof of his murder.”

  “Ellis,” she said softly, so softly that I had a hard time hearing her over the pipes and then the grave-side prayers, “we have nothing. The name of the person who had registered the Taser was gone. So were all traces of fingerprints and DNA, wiped off and irrecoverable.”

  Before I could respond to this, before I could even think where it left me, I looked up to see three figures headed toward me. And I realized that that the crowd was dispersing, that the funeral was over.

  “I don’t know what they want, Ellis,” Aliana said in her strongest voice, “but I’m sure you can deal with them. In the meantime, I think you have to realize that what you said the last time you talked to me was right. You’ve gone as far as you can. It’s over.”

  She turned and the last I saw of her was a bright red dot mixing in with the crowd like a drop of blood against the gray stones and the black coats of the mourners and the blowing white of the December snow.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  They were in dress uniform, all three of them, and I had to admit that they looked wonderful, Ted with his mature body, his almost noble stature; Al with his young, strong, muscular physique, and Feeance, the richness of her amazingly thick hair tamed and tucked beneath her uniform cap.

  The way they came at me, I was almost forced to back up until I couldn’t go any further on the path that led to the gate.

  I could tell by the way they were standing as they blocked my way forward that whatever they had corralled me to tell me, Ted was the spokesperson.

  “Ellis,” he said in a voice I had not expected to hear from him, it was almost respectful, “I’m glad we caught you here today. We were going to pay you a call, but speaking here will be more appropriate, I think. “

  The others nodded—almost as though they’d practiced this little act.

  “Appropriate to what?” I didn’t try to move. I didn’t want to take a chance of having them push me—or even touch me. I didn’t want to admit that I was afraid, but I was. “Appropriate to what?”

  Ted reached out and tapped my shoulder. He was wearing white gloves, dress gloves. “We came over here to thank you.”

  “Thank me?” I would have been less alarmed if he had said, “We came over here to hit you.” “Thank me for what?”

  “For all the trust you put in Mark. For believing that he could help that girl. For letting him try.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. You must have realized all along what was going on with him. I tried to warn you a couple of times….”

  “Warn me?” Suddenly I realized what he was talking about. That it had been Ted who had followed me that day in the valley, that it had been he who’d left me the note. But I wasn’t understanding what he was getting at. What this strange speech was about.

  “We’ve been limited in what we could say,” Ted went on. “But all of that has changed now. Mark is gone. And he’s a hero. He saved that girl’s life.”

  Al and Feeance nodded solemnly.

  “Yes,” I said, “Yes he did. But what else did he do to ‘save’ a person? What did he do to save the Juicer?”

  “The time has come to put that away.” It was Feeance who spoke now. Slowly, deliberately, as if she’d had time to weigh those few words before she’d spoken them.

  Behind her, Al Brownette stood, looking bored, but pulling himself back to the matter at hand.

  “Mark was a different kind of person,” Ted went on, “a different kind of man. He didn’t understand that the best way to help a person is to get them to straighten out—get them to help themselves. That’s why what you and Ms. Caterina have done for Kezia will be better in the long run than what Mark did for her—what Mark did for anybody.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, what he was really telling me.

  “What do you mean? What did Mark do?”

  Ted put his hand on my shoulder. I fought the urge to shake it off. If he was taking me into his confidence in some way, I didn’t really want to be there. “Mark hated to see anyone suffer.” He hesitated. “In a way, he was like Queenie. He actually felt sorry for that old reprobate. Sorry enough to take matters into his own hands. He figured he could solve the Juicer’s problems for once and for all and he knew that no one would be able to prove that he had intervened.” He hesitated again. “Happens all the time in hospitals, Portal. You should know that.”

  He was telling me that I should forget about what I now understood Mark Hopequist had done. That it was over because the killer had been brought to a justice above even the law.

  Ted Downs smiled at me. As though he could read my thoughts. As though he knew I was right.

  Al and Feeance turned then toward the gate of the cemetery. I could see a cruiser parked outside and figured they were headed toward it, not that it would have been distinguishable in a minute from all the other cruisers pulling away. Ted turned, too, and he stood in the middle of the other two with his arms around their shoulders. A show of camaraderie perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the day.

  Perfectly in keeping with the spirit of a brotherhood that would admit no others.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  When my so-called “case” ended, the real mourning began. I had heard that in the period immediately following the death of a loved one, a person finds so much to do, so many details to handle, that they manage to push away the real thing they are supposed to be handling.

  So it was with me.

  The winter months dragged on, a winter of bitter cold, but ironically, of great beauty, so that on many sleepless nights, I would rise in the dark and go to the window and see the silver of the snow caught in the cruel grasp of the cold blue moon.

  There were seemingly endless days on each of which I rose with great determination, planning to go through the whole apartment and get rid of things that no longer belonged in my life.

  Some days, I would find a photograph and be brought back to times that Queenie and I had enjoyed with such love, such gratitude. We travelled up north sometimes—all the way to Moosonee where Queenie came from. Here was a picture of her with a caribou. A tourist shot really, though not many tourists made it to James Bay. And here was a picture of the two of us at a Canada Day celebration at our local Scarborough park. Like everybody else in the neighborhood…

  The funny thing about happiness, it started to seem to me, was that you couldn’t tell the difference between simple happiness and something much more complex.

  And I now knew, more than I had ever known in a long life of much experience, that the same could be said of sorrow. Simple sorrow is as deep, as abiding, as the complicated wanderings of the mind in the complexities of losing many intertwined things.

  So I grieved.

  And the winter melted and disappeared
and spring came and the valley grew green beneath my balcony and I woke up one day and got on with my life.

  I started with Jeffrey.

  Over the winter, I hadn’t been down in the village much, but now I decided to get down there and lend a hand.

  When I got to the lodge on a day on which the small green rapids that flowed past the building were singing in their new-found release, I found my son with his nose buried in a gigantic piece of paper that I soon learned was a plan.

  “A plan for what?” I asked, peeking over his shoulder but unable to see anything that made sense to me.

  “Dad,” he said without answering. “We have to have one of our talks….”

  And he told me that one of the benefactors he had told me about before had “come through”.

  “It’s more than a million dollars, Dad, and it’s going to be matched by the city!”

  “Where would we get a million dollars, son? And why would the city give us a hand when they’ve given us nothing but trouble for years?”

  “Dad, I have to tell you who the donor is. And I don’t want you to be upset. I want you to think about the people who will live down here in decent housing, some of them for the first time in their lives.”

  Alarm bells went off. There was only one person I knew who could blithely hand over a million dollars and also convince the ornery city politicians to dish out too. And that person was someone I had deliberately not communicated with in years. I wasn’t at all sure how he always seemed to find his way back into my life, but I knew before Jeffrey even said his name that it was he and he was back.

  “Look, Dad,” Jeffrey reached out and put his hand on my shoulder—a rare gesture of caring, but a sincere one. “John Stoughton-Melville is in a perfect position to help us. He’s retired from the Supreme Court now.…”

  That was news to me, not that I cared. “So? Lots of people are retired. That doesn’t give them the right to interfere in the affairs of others.”

  Jeffrey laughed. “Come on, Dad. He’s not interfering. He’s enabling us to build your dream. We can upgrade the housing a hundred per cent. And we can install the latest in environmentally-friendly features. Everything. We can use natural building materials. We can landscape the whole village using plants that are native to the valley, including many that haven’t been able to thrive here for years.” He paused. “And we can get City Council off our back for good.”

  “You’re going to need more than two million the way construction in Toronto is these days.”

  Jeffrey nodded. I knew what he was thinking. With Supreme Court Justice, Retired John Stoughton-Melville on his side, the two million was only the beginning.

  “You can’t be sorry, Dad, you have to be immensely pleased and gratified for our people and for our valley.” He made a wide, sweeping gesture that took in the newly greening banks, the swiftly flowing water, even the bright, new blue sky, though he wasn’t going to convince me that that bastard Stoughton-Melville had had anything to do with that.

  As the weeks went by, I had to admit that I was getting caught up in the excitement down there. I spent a good part of each day helping Jeffrey in whatever way he needed, sometimes including physical work.

  So I was often dead tired when I went back up to my apartment at the end of a long day.

  But even so, I sometimes found it hard to sleep. So of course, I read. I had got in the habit of bringing Jeffrey’s copy of the Toronto Daily World up with me when he was finished with it.

  Which is how I discovered that Aliana was writing for them again.

  She had, in the past, always written commentary on tough news stories and pressing social issues. But I saw that she had changed her focus. Her new column appeared not in the news section of the paper, but in a section I had always ignored, the section labelled “Lifestyle.”

  At first, I still ignored it, but the temptation to learn what she had to say about her own lifestyle—“single over fifty and being okay about it”--was too tempting, and I soon found myself digging through the World every day to get to her column first.

  And then one day, I saw it. Aliana’s interview with Kezia. The girl was newsworthy because she had just become the youngest writer ever to have secured a book contract with one of the country’s biggest publishers.

  I thought about that all day. I thought that maybe I could find a way to reach Kezia. I thought about how happy the kid must be. And how happy Aliana must be, too, since she had had such a big part in the girl’s success and had done such a great job of interviewing Kezia.

  And I thought about how well Aliana and I had worked together.

  And how well we had gotten along until the very end when the stress of our unsolved mystery had finally gotten to us.

  And I realized that when she had said, “It’s over,” she might not have meant us—not that there necessarily was an us. And I saw that maybe there could be.

  And I picked up the phone.

  Rosemary Aubert has achieved world-wide attention with her Ellis Portal series. She is a Toronto writer, teacher, speaker and criminologist who mentors fresh mystery writers and treasures classic ones.