by Lou Allin
James
Sister Veronica took a final sip of wine, cocking her head to notice with apparent disappointment that the bottle was empty. “Do you need to show it to the authorities?”
“What would be the point now?” Belle looked across the table, met those doleful eyes in a final challenge. “Did you read it?”
There was no immediate answer, only a pursing of lips as Sister folded her serviette with the patience and exactness afforded an altar cloth. “We are none of us without sin.”
Belle smiled crookedly despite the seriousness of the moment. “What does it reveal, though, that only one child was involved? That Charles was essentially innocent? I’d like to believe that.”
The compassion was gone, the voice low and uncompromising. “There is a higher power overriding earthly duties. Be that as it may, he felt guilty, and so the letter implies.”
“Exactly. And it explains his panic when Anni changed her mind.” She lowered her eyes. “But it could have been manslaughter, technically.” Would she ever concede that the blow had meant murder?
“God did not write the Criminal Code. You ignore the moral tenor this sad man took to his grave. ‘Neither the power nor the right,’ his letter said. A shameful hubris. The greatest sin.”
“The greatest sin?” What was the hierarchy? Belle shuffled quickly through the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadlies. Gluttony and envy were going to send most of North America to hell. The waiter arrived with two snifters of Remy Martin.
Sister warmed the cognac briefly over the candle at the table, then swirled it and inhaled. Raising one grizzled eyebrow, she sipped three times before answering. “The greatest sin is believing that your sin is unforgivable. He had not learned. He had not learned at all.”
EPILOGUE
A crisp frost had zapped summer into submission with the efficiency of a stun gun. Preparing the property for winter, Belle inspected the branches of her showpiece maple with guarded optimism. Decimated by the ’pillars, it had fought back by sprouting tiny auxiliary leaves to gather strength against the brutal winter. Nearby, the lush kiwi vine drooped. She brandished the pruning shears with vigour. “You’re supposed to be self-pollinating. Not one fruit in two years. All show and no go.” Then she grabbed a bag of tulip bulbs and headed for the triangular flower bed along the road, pleased that the late dahlias and monkshood were flanked by a pathologically glorious blood-red sumach.
Now that the vegetable garden had been put to sleep, forked up and dredged with manure and lime, it was time for the great zucchini burial, ten-pound jumbos too big to stuff into the composter and too full of organic gold to discard. She had assembled their plump bodies like pods from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “You’re next!” Kevin McCarthy had screamed, running wildly through traffic in an ending so alarming to audiences that a reassuring postscript had been tacked on. Perhaps she should secrete them into basements of problem clients and watch their faces assume that subtle neutral expression as aliens freed them from the burden of emotions. “The house between the railroad tracks and the swamp? With the smelly basement and leaky roof? Perfect, Miss Palmer. I’ll take it.” She dug trenches, tossed in the squash, then chopped them with a shovel to encourage decomposition. What were the proper words? Ave atque vegetables? Memento melons?
With Freya at her side, she started down the road. At the turnaround, she glanced at Charles’ property. He would always be Charles to her. Last week it had sold quickly to a family with two kids whose bicycle tracks ringed the dust. She liked to see young faces with their enthusiasm and boundless energy. Already a new plaque sported colourful representations of Mickey and Minnie Mouse: The Blairs, Ken, Judy, Timmy and Jean. In a pile for the trash collection, scratched and gouged, was the Paradise Regained sign. What a corruption of Milton’s theology. Paradise Lost was more apt. Better to reign in hell or Ottawa than to serve in heaven. A cardboard box sat nearby, full of ashes, as if they had cleaned out the sauna stove. City folk again. Ashes belonged in the garden. Then a glint caught her eye, and she fingered the debris. A tarnished metal heart-shaped clasp, its tiny keyhole distorted by the heat, unlocked the final chapter. With a tight throat, she closed her hand upon it and turned back down the road.
Like a director in waiting, the brilliant fall had crowned goldenrod and asters lords of the fields. Bliss Carmen might have dwindled to a footnote in Canadian literature, that vagabond poet of the 1890’s, but his lyrical soul had seen “the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.” Distracted by inspiration, she nearly plunged into a heap of bear scat in the middle of the road. Bears don’t shit only in the woods. Like many whimsical animals, they enjoy decorating the middle of the path. Shovelnose would be heading for a cozy den. How far back would he go? Would she discover the lair on a snowshoe trek some bright January afternoon? Bears often emerged from their sleep for a mid-winter walkabout.
She followed the dog back to the DesRosiers’ place. Hélène was picking the last parsley, and in the garage, Ed had their snowmobile hoods up amid sounds of tinkering and mild cursing. Belle clapped her hands. “Roll out that party barge before the lake freezes. There’s one last lake trout with our names on it.”
CHOCOLATE ZUCCHINI CAKE
Mix the following dry ingredients:
2 cups flour
¾ cup cocoa
2½ teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Beat together:
1½ cups vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
Add:
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
3 cups grated zucchini
1 cup chopped pecans (optional)
Combine dry mixture with wet mixture and beat well.
Bake in greased pans at 350°F for one hour. Makes three small loaves or two large ones.
Prologue
Darkness. The pungent herbal smell of leaf mould in a den with an earthen floor. A certain slant of grey light peeked through a crack in the snow cover, soon fading shut as a howling wind drifted white lattice across it. Then black. A cold, dry womb. She shivered, twitched as a web of roots over her head pulled at her soft felt hat.
Hunger. No lunch or dinner for the first time in recorded memory. But food was banished to an idle corner. Beyond panic, thoughts keened by the cold, she tried to recall the last weather report. -15°C, barometer falling, accounting for the snow. But after the predicted foot dump, skies would clear by morning, ushering in an Arctic front, a mid-February deepfreeze, minus thirty degrees Celsius all day. And Monday? She’d hardly been listening. Hadn’t the forecaster said “single digits,” a balmy minus nine or better?
In her more fashion-conscious youth, she’d cross-country skied in that temperature wearing only a shapely nylon racing suit, pumping her arms to work up a sweat, cooling her brow with snow when she stopped at the top of a hill to catch her breath. But she hadn’t been running for her life. The glow-watch read 7:00 p.m. Thirty-six hours. She could leave before dawn. Were those five miles another lie? And what about the system? She cursed her laziness for not trying it out. Five or six hours, the brochure had said, depending on temperature and exercise levels. Her toes flexed in the clumsy felt-pack boots. Moosehide mitts kept her hands from freezing. Wrapped in a featherlight silvery space blanket, the extremities were protected, but her down parka was blowing in the wind, Dylan.
Something round and hard poked her back as she rolled onto her side. A rock or . . . ? From close by came the soft burble of contentment.
One
The hunchback of Notre Dame with a Rastafarian haircut. “Cute,” Belle Palmer observed as a six-pound bundle of coppery fur with a woolly chest squirrelled past, leaped to pose standing on thin, shaved legs on a rocky outcrop, and then sprang off to clamp onto Freya’s nodding German shepherd tail until long hairs dangled from its tiny jaws. An insult to the dog kingdom, sh
e thought, a seven hundred dollar rodent.
“Strudel’s her name. She’s good enough to eat,” Miriam MacDonald said, at fifty-five Belle’s elder by a slight decade.
“Let’s hope Freya isn’t hungry,” Belle said with a grin. She’d suggested that their recent Christmas pounds might be pared by a long snowshoe. Gentle on the knees and hips, like walking on pillows, this exercise the aging boomers had adopted quickly. Their high-tech aluminum and neoprene models with the price tag of her old college VW glided over the narrow trail. Half an hour later, they were approaching a swamp she’d named after the conservationist Gene Stratton-Porter’s 1909 novel Girl of the Limberlost. A fan of classic films as well, Belle had enjoyed the film version, but mourned the former Indiana wilderness lost to resource exploration and agriculture.
“I never imagined you as a dog owner. But now that Rosanne’s living in North Bay . . .” Miriam’s daughter was getting her teaching certificate, a career choice Belle didn’t envy, given her own checkered experiences before a chalkboard.
“A thoughtful Christmas gift from dear Mel. The sweetie sensed that I was lonely and drove all the way to Kingston to buy her. Apricot mini-poodle pups are hard to find, especially off-season.” A perturbed look passed over her face. “One problem, though.” She called the dog, turned its face to Belle and spread its lips.
Belle squinted at the minute display, toy teeth next to Freya’s noble fangs. “Hmmmm. An underbite. Still, you aren’t going to breed or show her, are you?”
“No, but this mess has to be corrected, Shana says. She’s pulling the front ones tomorrow, a small fortune, and the anaesthetic is risky. The adult set will probably be normal once there’s room. It wasn’t Mel’s fault. The breeder said that the parents are champions. Makes you wonder.”
“When am I going to meet this answer to a maiden’s prayers?” She’d been listening to Miriam describe Mel’s virtues for over two months.
Rounding a turn, brushing against soft white pines, Belle eased down the bank sideways by forcing the metal grips into the snow and pulling on a willow bush for balance. The poodle was running circles around Freya, who pleaded soundlessly at her owner for moral support, soft brown eyes communicating that she hadn’t bargained for motherhood at the ripe age of eight, Mr. Red Chile Pepper toys aside.
Miriam dropped to her ample posterior, sliding the last two feet with a laugh. “Thank God, it’s not like skiing. I’d be lining up for a hip replacement. Six months’ wait under our pathetic health care system.” She blew her nose on a tissue, then clicked her snowshoes together like Dorothy in Oz, Redfeather models replacing ruby slippers, speedy but not built for the bullwork of trail-breaking like Belle’s Atlas tanks. “May I borrow these? Rosanne used the trails near Shield University’s Conservation Area. They sound a bit tamer than this.”
“Keep them until the lilacs bloom on Victoria Day. They’re better suited to townie paths anyway.” Discreetly she assessed her friend, glad that the crisp air, a mild minus ten Celsius, was putting bloom back into her cheeks. Miriam’s scare with a breast exam had worried her for several weeks before the biopsy had come back negative. “I’ve never known a Melibee. How could his parents do that to a child? Chaucer’s most tedious storyteller, as I recall—with considerable rue—from trying to introduce English lit to teenagers hooked on Goosebumps. They might have related to the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” with the bum kissing, but our version was expurgated.”
Miriam gave her a sharp look and perched on a large cedar stump. A light wind was rising across the expanses of the icy Limberlost, a frosty postcard of grey, leaning cedar spars, a few topped with five-feet-wide great blue heron nests. Leathery Labrador tea scrub rustled beside cattails leaking stuffing like exploding cigars. The dogs snuffled along a marten path and clambered to the white dome of a beaver house. “Takes a strong man to carry it off. The Elphinstones were titled back in Scotland. Lairds, or some such. The Isle of Bute. Some legendary Marjorie buried alive.”
Belle shuddered at the idea. “What happened to her?”
With a wave of her hand, Miriam said, “Robbers dug her up to take her jewels, she scared them away and went home to outlive her husband by six years.”
“What a woman. And the family property?”
“Gone now, even the baronial castle sold to rich Americans.”
“Isn’t everything? But God bless our patriotic cousins. They always let us bring our wagon when a war starts.” Joking aside, Belle persisted in her questions. If this affair were serious, apparently the only one since Miriam had divorced a decade ago, would she lose her cohort at Palmer Realty? Who else would work for little more than shelled peanuts, even with rare bonuses? Belle’s business tiptoed on the financial edges that ruled Sudbury’s boom-and-bust Northern Ontario economy, and even diversification and the civil service infusion of the Taxation Data Centre hadn’t slowed the bleed. Ten thousand people were “missing” since the last census, a job plague that had the mayor under constant harassment.
“So how did this paragon escape the clutches of matrimony?” she asked, her mouth running on like a bad pup’s.
“He’s a widower. Poor woman passed on from lymphoma years ago. He’s poured himself into his work as a grief response. It took a long time before he was willing to commit to someone, risk getting hurt again.”
“Sounds like the perfect reason for dinner. On me.” She had to scope out this man, discover his intentions. Calling him “sweetie” and “dear,” Miriam sounded like a schoolgirl. Or was Belle jealous of sharing her friend?
“On you, Madame Scrooge? Are my ears frostbitten?” Miriam pinched them, then gave an impish look.
Though cooling off as they stood, Belle felt her face flush. “I’m not cheap, just prudent.” She pondered the choices. Nickel City College’s Versailles Room, run by the Hospitality Program, had theme nights. At a government business, liquor sold at cost. Surely there would be one decent wine.
Unused to rigorous exercise, checking her watch pointedly, Miriam begged for rescue, so Belle chose a secret loop back to the path, breaking carefully for her friend. They stopped to admire a squared pattern in the snow, trodden stitches that resembled a crazy quilt. Suddenly Freya dashed into the woods. A fat grouse fluttered up, heading for the tall pines. Typical of companionable species, another followed. Picking up a shining tailfeather, variegated stripes of black, brown and burgundy, Belle tucked it carefully into her inside pocket. “They nest under the spruces and cedars, nibble the tender cones. Often snow covers them, except for a breathing hole. Not very smart birdies to advertise a delicious lunch for a roaming fox.”
Back at the trailhead, Belle shoved the fidgety poodle under her arm for safety as a pickup truck hauling a trailer with two snowmobiles buzzed by soundlessly on hard-packed Edgewater Road. Three feet of snow had fallen in December, yet on weekends, the municipality rarely sent the plow, reasoning that schools were closed and most people didn’t have to get to work. The Sudbury Star pegged the cost for a single scrape at sixty-five thousand dollars. This budget-balancing mentality irked Belle, who often showed houses on those days. Why pay high taxes with no sewer, water or sidewalks? To subsidize pampered townsfolk?
Ed DesRosiers, Belle’s retired neighbour, was backing his ancient plow truck out of her long driveway as they took off their snowshoes. “Smooth as a baby’s butt for you ladies,” he said, nub of a cigar in his broad mouth, his diesel exhaust puffing clouds of potent fumes as he headed home.
“I’ll leave Strudel in the car. She’s only ten weeks old. If she whizzed in your living room, I’d be appalled,” Miriam said, opening her battered Neon and wrapping the dog snugly in several comforters.
Inside the storey-and-a-half cedar house, the women peeled off layers of clothing and wiped their fogging glasses. Belle propped the icy snowshoes by the woodstove, then, from a full wheelbarrow beside the tile platform, added a huge maple chunk, sending up sparks. Miriam planted herself on the blue leather sofa, wiping sweat from her
face. “I don’t know how you live out here, though the view is spectacular.” She swept her hand toward the rows of six-foot windows framing the vastness of Lake Wapiti, a meteor crater deep as hell itself. Gelid waves undulated toward the shore, doubling the protective rock wall with layers of ice, but relentless when the wind blew from the northwest and besieged the dock, constructed in the year of Belle’s birth and long overdue for destruction.
Belle whistled to herself in the compact kitchen as she prepared coffee, adding a vanilla bean for flavour. Then she brought their mugs, Miriam’s triple creamed and sugared. Her friend’s bulldog exterior hid a vulnerable core. What a great prison guard she would have made, except that she’d have cried herself to sleep every night. How odd it seemed to imagine her in a hot romance.
“What exactly does Melibee do, or is he a man of leisure?” she asked, tongue in cheek.
Miriam bridled at the insinuation, arching a fuzzy eyebrow, which matched her short, grey, Brillo-pad hair. “He owns a penthouse at San Rudolpho, Balmoral Drive, which as you well know is our most prestigious address.” A cool million way down south in Toronto, but in the newly amalgamated mouthful called the City of Greater (in winter, dubbed Crater) Sudbury, still a solid three hundred thousand.
“Didn’t you mention once that he was my age? Does that make you a cradle robber?” She toyed with her friend, their banter balm to a healthy relationship.
Miriam stuck out her lower lip and nodded in a worldly way. Belle hadn’t forgotten that her background included a soupçon of spicy book cooking for shady small businesses before she had joined Palmer Realty as accountant cum everything. “Investments, Belle. With international instability and our third-world, resource-based economy, the only way to ensure a comfortable future.” She flashed a wry look. “Especially with your slave wages and the meagre Canada Pension, which by the time I collect will pay in Canadian Tire money.”