Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  Sniffing pointedly, he examined Miriam’s eyes and listened to her breathing. Then he took her pulse. “She’s just smashed. When she comes to, I’ll have to take her downtown. You can’t avoid an interview by staying drunk.” As he muttered legal technicalities, a small tear dripped from Miriam’s reddened eye.

  Belle moved into the bathroom to collect a cold compress, fill a glass with water, tidy the towels, anything to keep moving. How could Steve insist on cruel protocols in the face of such a pitiful spectacle? With a shudder, she picked up the empty medicine bottle, removed her distance glasses and squinted at the label. Voltaren, an anti-inflammatory. So Miriam had arthritis, though unlike Belle, the hypochondriac, she never complained. Nobody overdosed on that, nor on the Tylenol, yet unopened. The medicine cabinet was empty of other prescription drugs.

  As she soaked and rung a towel, she could hear Steve bark instructions on the phone in the living room. Returning to Miriam, offering soothing words, mindless but helpful to herself, she laid the cold cloth onto the pale forehead. When she tried to offer a drink, water dribbled from the slack mouth. “It’ll be OK. Relax for now. We’ll get a doctor.”

  Any more relaxed and Miriam’s heart would stop. Where was Steve? Did he intend to handcuff the helpless woman and frogmarch her to jail? And what awaited her in the humiliation of custody? Even in the new police building, conditions couldn’t be comfortable. A smelly holding tank of drunks and prostitutes? Drug addicts? A detox facility? And if she were jailed, for how long? What horrors would Miriam endure before the bloated justice system moved her case forward?

  At vigil by the bed, feeling more confident since Miriam had begun to snore, for twenty more minutes she waited for Steve. Gone to collect the manacles? Then she heard a door open, voices were exchanged, and in walked a silvery blonde angel with a single thick braid down her back. Evelyn Easton, an emergency room surgeon, a treasured combination of skill and savvy. Steve met Belle’s surprised look with a grin. “Ev’s granddaughter’s a friend of Heather’s. Luckily cops can pull strings.”

  Not one for unnecessary words, Evelyn nodded to Belle, whom she’d met professionally, opened a medical bag, and motioned them out with an imperious wave of her hand. At six feet, she was an imposing woman, a natural athlete, whose reflexes, even at fifty, served her well.

  In the living room, Steve sat on the overstuffed sofa and took notes while Belle paced around, unable to concentrate. One wall featured a gallery of family pictures, Miriam as a frizzy-topped baby, Rosanne in childish poses, then serious at graduation. Black-and-whites featured a pleasant older couple with a post-war Plymouth coupe, perhaps Miriam’s late parents. In a prominent spot in a silver frame, someone with a familiar moustache smiled. Melibee, larger than life. Belle read the signature: “To my beloved from Mel. Together forever, forever we two.”

  Absolutes always disappointed, she thought with a grimace. Weren’t those the words to a banal disco song which reverberated in the brain long after it had mercifully departed the airwaves? Instead, Melibee would be reunited with the dead wife Miriam had mentioned, if there were an afterlife. She turned to the window to watch the snowflakes cover the city grime and grit with a white innocence.

  From the frantic moments upon arrival, time had slowed to a crawl. Belle passed from the pictures to the quilts on the walls. Miriam’s award-winning hobby demonstrated patience, skill and a genius for colour. She remembered with fondness the thoughtful gift of a Whig Rose masterpiece that adorned her waterbed in the fleeting summer months when she could abandon the giant down duvet. One quilt presented a variation on the famous log cabin design, rectangles piled on rectangles, another the prickly maze of the pineapple pattern. The third held an odd blue and black modern piecework. She turned her head to follow the dizzying curves. While Steve continued to write, giving an occasional grunt, she browsed the crowded bookcase, a library of information on the artful craft. Thumbing through, she found a sister to the off-kilter design, then closed the book with an ironic sigh. “The Drunkard’s Path” the design was called.

  Finally, Dr. Easton joined them, her soft grey eyes reassuring, as she placed a cellphone into a capacious pocket of her dark blue padded cotton jumpsuit. “I’ve given her a mild stimulant,” she said, “and ordered an ambulance. It’s wiser than transporting her in a squad car. She’s on her feet now, and it’s important to preserve her dignity.”

  “But the liquor. It wasn’t like her. A glass of wine’s all I ever saw . . .” Belle said, her voice trailing off as if she were defending a wayward family member.

  Easton closed her black bag with a confident snap, then reached for her coat. “People have turned to worse in a crisis. I’ll ride along with her to the San. There’s a top psychiatrist who’ll admit her. She’s not to be questioned in this condition, not under any circumstances, much less in the intimidating atmosphere of a police station. Will that be a problem, Steve?” Her hands-on-hips gunslinger stance signalled her intentions.

  Steve backed off, shaking his head. “Your word is good enough for me, Doctor.”

  Belle moved forward as she searched Evelyn’s calm, professional face for solace, her lips tightened against trembling. “What can I do?”

  The blonde icon touched a talented finger to perfect, unrouged lips. How many times had those hands knitted back souls from the feet of God? “Call her relatives. Pack a bag with light, indoor clothes, anything else she might like. Personal items like sweaters, books and pictures can be comforting. I noticed a folded quilt in the bedroom. Drop everything off at the main desk.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t expect a Victorian bedlam. We have progressed since Dickens. Certainly, she’ll have a private room in the beginning.”

  As Miriam emerged minutes later, arm in arm with the doctor, then enveloped quietly by two young male attendants in heavy parkas, one line came to Belle’s mind: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois escorted from a marriage she couldn’t comprehend, primitive urges oceans below her effete capacity, the feral look in Kim Stanley’s eyes, scenes snipped from the original to censor the steamy sexuality that threatened Eisenhower’s snug little families with their smug little secrets. But that was the end of the movie. This was only a prologue. And didn’t Karl Malden have a moustache? His pious rejection had given fragile Blanche the cruelest blow.

  Four

  Belle sat morosely at her desk, the cold calls she’d planned all but forgotten, though she’d left a message for Brian Dumontelle about a LoEllen Park property. With Miriam in limbo, money might ease the tension. Her timetable displayed two open houses and three appointments to show, but the contracts were running out. With practical regret, she’d left the office answering machine to pick up calls all morning while she lingered in a mid-range tri-level on MacFarland Lake, inhaling pleasant aromas from the oven, where she’d dabbed a bit of vanilla. In her notebook, she scribbled another verse to her country song, “Come On Up to Mama’s Table”:

  There was Widow Nancy Davis

  And the orphan little Grace,

  Mr. Joe the blind man

  With a tear upon his face.

  Mama carved up that ol’ turkey

  And she heaped the plates up high.

  There was gravy for the taters

  And a crispy apple pie.

  An inveterate grammarian, Belle paused, her pen hovering at “There was.” Wrong, but very colloquial. And wasn’t Nancy Davis the stage name of Nancy Reagan? Would anyone remember? A plate of Tim’s chocolate chip cookies had gone largely uneaten, despite personal inroads. The few arrivals “loved” the place, coveted the pool, but found excuses not to make an offer. How would she manage without Miriam, a repository of statistics on every puddle and pond in one hundred miles? A temp would never do. Maybe the business had grown too small to be viable. The siren song sounded again to consider selling the valuable downtown property and joining a large company like ReMax. Generous bennies, no overhead, more time to herself. A crack ac
countant like Miriam could always . . .

  Near tears, she turned as always for comfort to the framed portrait of Uncle Harold. Unlit Cuban cigar clamped firmly in his mouth, he held a huge muskie, mugging at the camera. When she’d bailed out of teaching high school in Toronto twenty plus years ago, leaving the Big Smoke to those who could tolerate teenage testosterone and mind-blowing rudeness, the scorn for authors other than Koontz and King, he’d made her a full partner. She touched a trembling finger to a figure in the background, paddling a homemade birchbark canoe. Jesse Schoenberg, his secretary, a long-time girlfriend then in her late sixties, who’d retired after Harold’s death five years ago. Jesse had gone to Israel, funded by Hadassah to organize women’s consciousness-raising groups on the kibbutzim.

  Darkness came without another bootstep through the door, and Belle stared into the teeth of a fresh storm. With her eyes sensitive to light halos and glare, night driving was difficult enough without that complication. Iced over, the van door stuck, so she gave it an Eric Lindros hockey block, bruising her hips. Living in the North got harder each year, or was it just her? She had been born in Floridian Toronto, where the panicky mayor had earned national mockery for calling out the army to rescue the city from a paltry twenty-five-centimetre dump. The radio predicted the dreaded “periods of light snow,” aka PLS, five centimetres tonight, no doubt followed by another five, another five, and another five. The regional plow that serviced Edgewater Road would have a great excuse to sit idle, forcing a packdown effect that grew ruts rivalling Kosovo’s best. Ortega y Gassett had said, “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” She felt like a soldier in a four-season battle: nearly winter, winter, still winter and construction.

  After taking a spare key which Miriam always left in her drawer, Belle went to the apartment and completed the lonely task of packing a few essentials as Evelyn had advised. On a whim, she stopped at Blockbuster Video to purchase several classics. Then, she parked the van near the front door of the San and dropped off the bag, looking up at the lighted windows as she left, wondering absurdly if Miriam’s face would peer back. Likely she was sedated in an effort to stabilize her before treatment began.

  The trip home took an hour. Two vehicles had crashed at Radar Road and the turn to Skead, backing up traffic for a mile. Whirling blue lights of police cars and departing ambulance sirens warned drivers to slow. Whiteouts along the airport hill, a problem unsolved even by the pseudo-scientific erection of hundreds of yards of snow fences, wiped out all shape of the road and obscured the painted lines.

  Relieved at arriving at Edgewater Road, Belle paused at the armoury of metal postal boxes, opened her cubicle with a customary fist pound to the lock and groped for a postcard stuck at the back. In the snow-scattered light from the van, she couldn’t read the writing, but the picture resembled a sunny beach. A snowbird neighbour polishing his clubs after the eighteenth hole? She gritted her teeth and stuffed it into her pocket along with delivery flyers useless in the bush. The new perogy pizza sounded intriguing, though.

  The floodlights beamed welcome when she skidded down the long, winding driveway. As she opened the house door, unlocked with the dog inside, Freya bounded out, down the steps and into the woods for her duties.

  An hour later, Belle was decompressing in the TV room, solaced by quesadillas filled with Monterey Jack, onions, peppers, black olives and mushrooms. She dosed them with Mcllhenny’s Tabasco sauce.

  Trudging up to the master suite for bed, she noticed the red blink of the answering machine. A familiar voice, its booming cadences balm in an icy Gilead, said: “Out in this mess chasing filthy lucre? You need a mother, and I’m back.”

  Choking back a laugh, Belle went downstairs to collect the postcard. From a tourist spot on the Mediterranean, palms, sand and beach umbrellas, dated three weeks ago. “Watch the stars for me. I’ve shaped up the last kibbutz and run out of maple syrup. Love, Jesse.”

  At thirty-five, Belle hadn’t been a baby when her mother had died of cancer. But with only Uncle Harold and her father as immediate family, she’d welcomed Jesse’s gruff, no-nonsense affection. In the confusion of grief, Belle had had no idea how to write an obituary, jotted the bare facts and stared bleakly. Then a mechanical whizzing had sounded from the kitchen, and soon Jesse was gripping her shoulder, easing a glass of fresh-squeezed carrot juice into her inarticulate hand. “She had a life, girl. Now drink these anti-oxidants and remember that this is for her, for your father, not you.” And a chastened daughter had summoned bit by bit her mother’s career as a legal secretary, leading her class in Toronto, a wizard of torts and public relations. Terry Palmer’s garden met the challenge of an unforgiving climate, those violet delphiniums winning prizes. Belle had passed the empty glass and completed notes back to Jesse, who read them with grunts of approval. “Where do you think you got your love of plants, Belle, out of the sky?”

  Jesse had been married back in the “Stone Age,” her philandering dentist husband dead of an aneurysm at forty in his mistress’s bed. Her only boy roamed somewhere chasing a cause in Nicaragua, Chile, or other points south. Jesse waved a wrinkled hand and shrugged. “He’ll float back some day like Odysseus, and if not, good riddance to a father’s son.” With this dismissal, her hooded tortoise eyes would blink, and she’d look away. Belle had never met Pete, but his picture by Jesse’s bed, a long-haired hippie demonstrating at a peace march, showed that he was more his mother’s son.

  Belle dialled her friend, received a computer voice saying that the line was not connected. She’d soon be catching up with old pals, many in retirement homes or nursing facilities. How old was Jesse? Seventy-five? Belle’s Jewish mother was as timeless as the rocks of the elemental Cambrian Shield.

  That night Dr. Easton called as Belle assembled a host of vitamins on the bathroom counter. “I know you’re concerned, and I don’t think I’m breaching ethics by telling you that Miriam will be at the San for several weeks.”

  Belle felt a lump rise in her throat. “And a visit?”

  “Dr. Parr thinks that would be a good idea. But not until she’s settled in and therapy is underway. Wait another week.”

  “Why not sooner?”

  “A surgeon’s a glorified mechanic, not a psychiatrist, but I suppose that in every illness, treatment depends on the individual. Healing the mind is complex. Along with choices of drugs and therapy, some people need the constant comfort of family, if they’re used to—”

  “But Miriam—”

  “Has been an independent lady, I gather, from what she did confide. Aside from her daughter . . .”

  I’m not chopped liver, Belle thought, then responded to the last word. “Rosanne. Has anyone called her?”

  “I suggested that when we arrived. Miriam didn’t want to worry the girl with exams coming up. She’s very prone to stress.”

  Belle assumed the mantle of bearer of bad tidings, never a strong suit. “I’ll take care of that, and I appreciate your going beyond the call.”

  She frowned at the neon glow of eleven on the bedside clock. Wait until morning? Rosanne should have been contacted days ago. What student went to bed before midnight?

  Flipping through her address book, Belle found the number Miriam had given her for emergencies. According to her roommate, yakking faster than an over-caffeinated monkey, they were pulling an all-nighter for a wicked math exam. “Rosie! Get your butt in here!” Belle heard, before she saved her ear drum by muffling the receiver.

  She related the gist of the tragedy with as many encouraging notes as she could fabricate. “You’re sure she’s OK? I could get a bus in a couple of hours,” the girl said, her voice faltering, a tiny sniff revealing her distress.

  “I know you want to help, but mostly she needs time, Rosanne. The doctor advises no visitors . . . just for a while,” she explained in off-hand tones. “It’s shock mostly. The death of a good friend.” Somehow she couldn’t mention that Miriam faced arrest when she left the dubi
ous sanctuary of the hospital.

  “I was away all summer on an exchange program in France, then skiing in Quebec over Christmas. I only saw her for a weekend when I came home in September to pack. Who is this guy? Mom doesn’t date.”

  Belle forced a laugh to deflate the growing tension. “Listen to you, sounding like a parent. Maybe she was afraid you’d tease her.” After providing a home for her daughter through her undergraduate work at Shield University, Miriam had been only too glad to cut the apron strings and reclaim her personal life. There had been arguments over some pot found in the girl’s room, the usual debate about recreational drugs as well as Rosanne’s occasional use of uppers to stay awake studying.

  Her duties over, to momentary relief, Belle climbed into the cozy king-sized waterbed which fuelled her dreams. The patio doors and the window were rimed with frosty curlicues. The room was heated by the stove downstairs, with only a wall louvre to the cathedral ceilings of the living room. She poked a cigarette into her Adolph Menjou (another moustached man, the lovable rogue) jewelled holder, her father’s present from Universal Studios Park in Florida, and poured scotch into a deceptive antique bar glass, heavy on the bottom and tapering, an illusion opposite to the murder, holding less than it appeared. The talented Nevada Barr’s mystery, Deep South, hot and humid on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, warmed her along with Whyte and Mackay’s best.

  Feeling an annoying tickle, she snagged another pumpkin-coloured ladybug from her shoulder, getting up to flick it outside onto the Papal-blessing token balcony instead of nestling it on the Dieffenbachia to winter over. The warm fall had brought a deluge, thousands of tiny rosy bodies trying to muscle in for the duration. A Japanese invader brought to fight aphids, hybrid colours and every combination of dots including none. “Too long at the fair, my dear.”

  As she turned out the light, chapters later, to the soft snore of Freya on the sheepskin rug at her feet, she drifted into half-sleep, smiling to think about Jesse, then when Miriam’s hollow-faced shade appeared, shifting restlessly. The dog scrabbled after elusive rabbits in her carefree sleep. Belle’s weary eyes snapped open as a poodle scampered across the busy blackboard of her mind. Where was the creature?