by Lou Allin
“Very impractical. You’ll be forever switching glasses and losing track of them, but suit yourself.” He entered notes into her file, humming a tuneless version of “The Girl From Ipanema.”
“Go anywhere over Christmas?” Belle asked in casual fashion, knowing the answer.
Reid recounted visits to the mosquitoey rain forests of Costa Rica, the wretched food (monkey, he suspected), shabby hotels, the plane trip where they sat four hours on the runway after two hours of weapons checks. “Sounds exciting,” she said in dimbulb enthusiasm.
Leaning toward her, he bit like a hungry pike grabbing a wriggling worm. “Not half as interesting as what had happened when I got back to my apartment. A brutal murder. Balmoral Drive. Who would have imagined?”
After some discreet pumping, he dropped such a bombshell that Belle gulped back a yell. The new nugget involved yet another woman. “A bimbo, I’d say, though the word isn’t one I use at Mother’s table,” he confessed, steering her toward the frame room with a snap of his fingers to the assistant.
Shuddering at four hundred dollars for Yves St. Laurents, Belle browsed through discontinued selections and chose a bronze metal model with spring grips. When Reid heard she had no vision plan, he sucked his teeth but dropped the price, leaving her wondering if INCO workers with kingly bennies were subsidizing the rest of Sudbury.
“So the girl was that young?” Belle asked, noticing that extra charges for scratch protection and non-glare had doubled the cost.
Reid parked her on a chair in front of a triptych mirror, adjusting the fit with the fussiness he’d used with the lens apparatus. “Hardly twenty. Could have been his daughter. I saw her often.” He cleared his throat pointedly. “Late at night and quite early in the morning, unlike the MacDonald woman.” He cleared his throat with the baldest of innuendos.
“Are you sure it wasn’t his cleaning service?”
“Merry Maid doesn’t employ staff with lip piercings and blue crew cuts. And that’s not all.” With a touch of prurient interest in his voice, he described a “disgusting” kiss witnessed as the elevator doors opened. All three had headed in separate directions, and he hadn’t spoken to Melibee after that embarrassment.
“Fascinating. What a talent for details,” Belle remarked, noting in the mirror that she needed a haircut and that more grey strands were making incursions on the red. “Who was this mysterious woman? Did you hear a name?”
He shook his head like a parrot refusing a pineapple chunk, wrinkling his pointed nose. “Couldn’t help the police. Just ‘sweetie,’ ‘baby,’ common language. Never saw a car. Probably took the bus.” The last word was spoken like a lifestyle accusation.
Miriam’s battered Neon had replaced Jesse’s Bonneville in the parking lot at Palmer Realty. Entering the office and stuffing her coat into the closet, Belle heard “Baby Love” on the Oldies station, then “I’m baaaaaaaaack, and I’ve brought coffee. Kenyan.” Miriam danced out of the washroom.
“If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a dozen bagels,” Belle said, giving her a high five. Should she tell her the latest dirt about Melibee and spoil a rare happy moment? Eventually she’d have to dole it out like bitter medicine. And why compound the gloom with her worries about Steve?
“Everything’s caught up. Jesse was a doll.” Miriam said with a slight hesitation, the Yellow Pages open on her desk. Though she was smiling, a worry line traced up from the bridge of her nose.
“What’s wrong?” Belle sat down, feeling a twinge in her back. Probably stress. Maybe she could arrange a quid pro quo with a masseuse. “Dumb question.”
Picking up the blood pressure cuff like dirty laundry, Miriam stuffed it into a drawer and set her foot roller in motion. Instead of a blissful expression, she firmed up her mouth. “It’s Melibee’s funeral mass. I’m wondering where to—”
Belle pounded the desk, flipping a paper clip holder onto the floor, scattering its contents like juju bones. “Funeral mass? You’re giving that—are you cra . . .” She bit off the last word and looked out the window.
“I’m in a very difficult position, under arraignment for his death. But we won’t speak of that now. According to Celeste, there was no funeral. That sleazy wife scattered the ashes, probably in a very nasty place.” Miriam folded her hands and looked at Belle. “No matter what anyone says, he was a deeply religious man. His parents had no services, he told me, and he missed the sense of closure.”
Flowing into her own memories, Belle tuned out Miriam’s words. Her mother had been cremated, and her father had chosen the same plan. The First Nations people in nearby Massey ran the facility. Casinos, cut-rate cigarettes and cremations. Other than consonants, was there a sinister connection?
“Are you listening?” Miriam rapped the desk like a medium at a seance.
“Sorry. I was thinking of my mother.”
Miriam’s voice grew calm and decisive. “I refuse to believe that he was the fraud people are calling him. Didn’t you tell me that he gave that Finn woman thousands for the silver? And lots of firms make bad investments. Timing is everything. Who saw the tech crash coming?”
True enough. Luckily, Belle’s Royal Bank Sci/Tech fund had sold skyrocketing Nortel, Canada’s flagship, before it fell from $143.50 per share to the cost of half a Big Mac, even if the capital gains taxes had dinged her five thousand dollars.
“And I want to pay Celeste something, even if it is nominal.” She looked toward the closet where her old woollen coat hung. “I took the fox Mel gave me to the Hock Shop.” With a quiver of her lip, she added, “Turns out that’s where it came from. He was as broke as I am. Just put up a brave front, poor guy.”
Despite the skewed interpretation of Melibee’s actions, Belle melted at the evidence of Miriam’s unconquerable soul. Scoundrel or not, he was dead, and his chief mourner deserved support. Ashamed to have dragged her heels at offering help, she turned to her trusting friend, who had bared her humiliation like a raw wound. “So what are your plans? Did he have a local church?”
“He didn’t attend regularly, but he wore a small gold cross under his shirt. And he had a faith beyond the trappings of ceremony.” Miriam fingered the phone book. “St. Jean de Brebeuf downtown, the grey stone place they rebuilt after that fire. It’s lovely but so big. I’m afraid of the awkwardness of a few people in that cathedral.”
Pathos is a better word, Belle thought. What if they gave a memorial mass and nobody came? Or suppose an angry crowd turned out? She spoke with mustered caution. “Those people affected by his sc . . . unfortunate investments have lots of relatives.”
Miriam nodded, turning her gaze to a wall calendar with a nineteenth-century village scene painted by Cornelius Krieghoff, sleighs, puffing chimneys, a comfy inn. “We need some quiet little place. Just you, me, maybe Jack. Thank God he came down. Those long nights at the hospital, waiting for the sunrise, I wondered if I’d ever laugh again. Making me smile was always his greatest gift.”
“Leave it to me. My friends are religious in the traditional sense, even if I keep my cathedral in the woods,” Belle said. Speaking of Jack, where was the rascal?
Around six, she stopped at Jesse’s. Her friend was completing a clay mask the size of a dinner plate. Made of terra cotta and decorated with acorns and leaves, at a distance its large, rectangular mouth resembled Ernest Borgnine’s yelling for his girlfriend in Marty. Close up, the expression, a primal combination of earth and fire, chilled her. “It’s great, but very strong,” she said. “I’m not sure about that face lurking on my living room wall.”
“Lurking? Is that how you envision the woodland spirits, fearless bushwoman?” Jesse’s talented index finger gave a final smoothing to the bulging eyes. “Elves, fairies, my lesser beings wouldn’t frighten a child. Nice for prim ladies, yes? But the mask chooses, not the buyer. And when the Oak Lord selects a partner, he calls for someone equally as powerful.”
“Sounds like a mating ritual.” Belle shivered and scanned the bookshel
f, a repository of feminist bibles, from a signed copy of The Feminine Mystique to The Female Eunuch to Women Who Run With Wolves. From a shelf, she picked up a clay druid, wearing a hooded cloak and holding a songbook. “Anyway, Dr. Reid mentioned another of Melibee’s women. A girl, quite young. We should keep Celeste posted about these developments. Where is she, anyway?”
“Back in Ottawa until something comes up. She’s reviewed the disclosure statements, filed the briefs, done all that she could for now.”
“Sure, but what about the defense strategy?” Belle disliked the lawyer, and despite the possibility of hurting Jesse’s feelings, couldn’t ignore prickly questions that sounded like an assessment of a piece of horseflesh. With studied innocence, she added, “Celeste seems so young. How many trials has she been through? How many verdicts has she won?”
Jesse cleared her throat, covered the mask with damp cheesecloth, then wiped her hands on a towel. “None, actually.”
Inside the cloak, the druid was a hollow man, an illusion. Belle’s voice rose along with her heart rate. “I thought she was a crack attorney. You’re telling me that—”
“Calm down. She never won technically because no cases ever went to court. Either she plea-bargained, or the charges were dropped over insufficient evidence.”
Belle lapsed into a grim funk as she drove home, letting her wipers clear soggy flurries from the windshield. Jesse’s advice about spinning plates worked only with an anaesthetized brain. Hers wouldn’t stop chattering mixed metaphors. What miracle was Celeste planning? Were they all living in a fool’s paradise? Floating in the same leaky boat? No light at the end of the tunnel of love, and who wants to go down on the Titanic? Preoccupied, at a particularly wicked turn with high banks, a luge track, she nearly collided with a large white car of an innocuous make coming the other way. Idiot, she thought. No one observed the posted 50K max. When she’d bought the property, only twelve families lived full-time on Edgewater Road, and she knew every vehicle and snowmobile track. Now there must be nearly forty. Civilization was crowding her, and giving it the elbow had no effect.
That night she called Hélène, a faithful at Sunday mass, who suggested the little church in Skead across the lake. “Father Mike’s very easy to talk to, what we girls used to call a dreamboat. In my younger days, I might have dreamed of luring him from the priesthood.”
Eighteen
At eight that morning, before Miriam arrived at work, Belle took a call from New York. “Bill Evans from Verity Antiques,” a voice said with the nasals of the Big Apple. “I understand that you were asking about the Tiffany Chrysanthemum plates. A splendid example of art nouveau. We have a wonderful Talashkino candelabra set in bronze. Enamel-decorated ‘champlevé’ style after a design by Princess—”
“Actually . . .” Belle flattered the man shamelessly, sketching the image of a serious collector marooned in Ultima Thule. In the information network surrounding rare pieces, Bill had been at Sotheby’s auction where the plates had sold to an Australian software tycoon for over eighteen thousand. Belle recalled the seven thousand that Hilda had received. Melibee’s commission had been reasonable, considering his travel costs and Sotheby’s cut. Perhaps he had a softer side.
“I have friends at the firm,” he added with a conspiratorial chuckle. “And I asked who had brought the set in. Perhaps more treasures lurked in the attic, so to speak. We do cooperate when we can. It’s a tight market.”
“A Mr. Elphinstone, I presume.”
“No, a woman. Let’s see, jog the old brain cells.”
While he hemmed and hawed, Belle ticked the seconds. Melibee with a conspirator was not an unfamiliar idea. His wife Debby came to mind, with her acting abilities, a natural liar. Then there was Dr. Reid’s bimbo. Catching connecting flights from Toronto or Ottawa, either could have been in and out of New York on a weekend.
“Sue.”
“For Susan?”
“Susanna. A sweet old name you rarely hear anymore. I wonder why? Susanna Moodie, that’s it! And there was something about two separate cheques issued. An odd Canadian tax situation, I suppose.”
Belle set down the phone with a tingling in her toes. Either someone was playing a practical joke or was a direct descendant of one of Canada’s first authors, Susanna Moodie, whose Roughing it in the Bush in 1852 warned naïve British settlers against coming unarmed to a rugged country. Did Debby have a literary side? Was the bimbo a prodigy?
After calling the rectory, Belle and Miriam took a late afternoon drive to Skead. Half an hour later, they passed deep kettle lakes formed by the last glacier melt, punctuating hills of sand and gravel which fuelled Rainbow Concrete’s nearby pit operation. Scrub birch and poplar dotted with hollow four-foot-diameter cedar stumps served as remnants of a forest fire in the Fifties that had stopped a few kilometres short of charring a few cottages. Then, as they crested the last hill, instead of heading left down Edgewater Road, they went towards the town, Lake Wapiti shining in the distance like a giant’s white tablecloth, crisscrossed by snowmobiles following the trail poles.
“Sometimes it doesn’t thaw until early May,” Belle said. “Then pray God the ice goes out peacefully without taking my dock.”
Other than the First Nations reserve, the only other settlement on the lake, Skead had barely six hundred souls but a strong collective spirit, including a website and a newsletter. Seventy-five years ago, a small lumbering encampment began on the shore, now merely a scattering of company houses refitted many times over, a newer subdivision and tons of sawdust at the bottom of a bay where the sawmill had stood. Those who wanted to live on a permanent vacation spot and raise their kids in country quiet chose these streets. Tony’s Marina, the only business, was closed in winter. Past the Recreation Hall, site of holiday pancake breakfasts and home of the tiny library, was St. Bernardine’s.
They parked in the empty lot, passing a simple shrine to Mary often duplicated in the yards of devout French Canadians. A knock at the side door brought Father Mike Belmore, dressed in sweatpants and a cable knit cardigan. A stocky man, he carried ample poundage, with a dimpled, cherubic face framing his generous mouth.
“Welcome, ladies. I’m glad you called. Normally, I’m here only on Sundays,” he said, his hands fluttering like white monarchs. “Let’s go into the vestry. I save the heat for our services. Keeps the altar flowers fresher, too.”
The cozy nook downstairs had second-hand furniture but first-rate hospitality. An electric wall unit which cranked the temperature over twenty-five degrees Celsius made them shed their coats promptly. Humming “The Lusty Month of May.” Father Mike bustled around, steeping a huge Brown Betty pot of tea and passing a plate of oatmeal cookies the size of hubcaps. “One a day’s my limit. My parishioners keep me in desserts and sweaters,” he said, his double chin nodding onto his collar. “Can’t hurt their feelings.”
Miriam explained that the mass would be a memorial. No remains. No family. The priest’s Jersey calf eyes blinked in understanding.
“A celebration of his life by friends is just as fitting. The church is here for all, despite the falling numbers. Our congregation is as compact as the building,” he said, stopping to mop his broad brow with a handkerchief. “But to be quite frank, five or ten years from now, our parish will likely close, as have many.”
“Perhaps a renewal of faith,” Miriam said, with a gesture of hope meant to reward his kindness. “In the wake of the U.S. attack, more people are going back to church.”
“Unfair weather friends, I fear, though blessed be the return of all lost sheep.” He took a third cookie and finished it in three bites as if following a personal ritual, then picked up a pad and pencil. “So to business, as we began on the telephone. I’ve mentioned the nominal fees, but will anyone be speaking a eulogy?”
Miriam folded her hands. “No, Father. Just a discreet remembrance. His life and his passing were . . .” here she paused to glance at Belle, “more than words could express.”
Two fu
rrows parted the heavy brows as he eyed the remaining cookies. “I see. His true place lies in your hearts. What about the service? Is either of you Catholic?”
“Lapsed Anglican,” said Belle, who hadn’t seen the inside of a church since she was kicked out of the Girls’ Friendly Society at fourteen for smoking at an Easter picnic.
“Abandoned Methodist, or United, or whatever it’s become,” Miriam confessed, shifting in her chair.
“Not to worry. If you have a few more minutes, I’ll explain the program. And would you like a notice in the paper or on the radio so that other friends can attend?”
Miriam turned pale, finished her tea with a distressed expression only Belle could decipher. “I don’t think so.”
“As you wish. Any particular hymns that were his favourites? Our organist is very versatile.”
They left having learned that St. Bernardine (1380-1444) appeared in Siena as a young man at the height of the plague and volunteered his talents to nurse the sick. “Father Mike’s a good man. We chose the right place,” Miriam said. “I feel better about saying goodbye to Melibee in this lovely setting.”
“You seem back to your old self. But too mellow. Can we hope for a bout of cantankerousness?” Belle said as she drove, stealing a glance at her friend’s calm profile.
“Calice! You’re over the centre line.” Miriam’s hand gripped the dash.
Resisting the panic which could send them into a spin, Belle guided the steering back to the right as they navigated a wicked curve marked by reflective plastic strips. Every other week, cars were off the road on this stretch, usually bogging harmlessly in the snow. But a flip could be fatal. Did the wandering van need an alignment? She watched her speed dip back below 90 kph, though it was difficult to read numbers on the dash. Maybe she could move from that problem into telling Miriam about the optometrist’s babe. “I should get bifocals. That’s what Dr. Reid advised.”
“Giving him your business after what he told the police? Mel didn’t like him, and neither did I. Nose in the air. Smells like a clove factory, too.”