Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  He held up his fingers. “There are six of them, and more on the periphery, mostly Len Hewlitt’s friends from Montreal drug gangs. They needed all kinds of expertise for those sweet little greenhouses. Plumbing, wiring and heating specialists, plus dormitory accommodations to be built for the caretakers. That operation was going to be the biggest in Canada. Ten thousand square metres. The returns would have been exponential. Within a year, they would have been doing five million dollars’ worth of business, going international immediately. Charges range from production of a controlled substance, possession and possession for the intent of trafficking.”

  “A thousand a plant sure beats Royal Doulton. I’m thinking of changing my profession.”

  “They were going to use the old rail spur. Buy a few used units. Gives a whole new meaning to the name Budd car.”

  Belle laughed for nearly half a minute, stopping short of wetting her pants. Steve did have a sense of humour, or was this a one-off? “When is the government going to wise up and legalize the stuff? Think of all that hefty tax revenue filling the coffers.”

  “Pot tax for potholes.”

  “Stop it. My stomach hurts from laughing.” Then her eyes saddened at the tragic side of the case. “What about Bea’s murder? Dave didn’t do it himself, but—”

  “Plea bargain is the concept du jour. Hewlitt’s fingered Dave for hiring him to kill Bea.”

  “Len killed Bea? I can’t—”

  “Didn’t have the stomach for it. Gave the dirty job to Allan Ritchie on a subcontract while he waited outside. Drugged the dog first with that famous bone of yours.”

  “Aha. When I tried to tell—”

  “Every now and then a blind squirrel finds an acorn. And the choice part is that Dave got to pay Hewlitt with cheques for his PI work.” He fingered quotes around the last two words.

  “So I wasn’t totally wrong about the man.” She recalled with some strange fondness their evening at the stakeout, that zany music, the jokes and the excitement of discovery. The fact that she had been a total patsy dampened the jolly memories. And pawning off the job didn’t make him more ethical than the actual murderer, just cagier.

  “There’s also a conspiracy charge for the three of them. As for the kidnapping, technicalities are tricky. Dave was Micro’s guardian, so we might be talking child endangerment and certainly abuse. No bail for anyone, and after Dave’s trial, they’ll all be away until the Green Party takes over Parliament. Too bad we don’t have capital punishment.”

  “And don’t forget attempted murder for me, the human pot roast.”

  “Allan Ritchie again, yakking like a parrot now that he can’t feed his crack habit. He parked a van with a car-topper at the public launch and rowed to your place along the lake. Dave told him to scare you off.”

  “Me and my big mouth, telling him about my sauna plans. But scare me? That’s a crock. What if Freya hadn’t run down the road?” She finished her coffee and placed the mug on the glass table, noticing the coat of ever-present light ash, the price of wood heat.

  “Claims he would have called you on some pretext, or gone to your house to invite you to join them. Sorry I blew you off when you told me about the those wedges.”

  “A rare apology. I accept. So was it all about money, then?” She recalled Sister Veronica’s description of Dave’s single-mindedness. Apparently that trait had led him in other directions.

  “Not exactly. Seems Dave had some inspiration from Len’s daughter.”

  “Lillian? Are you saying—”

  “You got it. They’d been having an affair, well before he married Bea. Lady likes to spend money. BMW. Caribbean vacations. In a few years, they would have had enough for several luxury homes where the rich congregate in places a damn sight warmer than this.”

  “But the CNIB? It’s hard to believe that ordinary people with ordinary jobs get involved in murder. And she’s gorgeous.”

  “Are you still that naïve? Tune in Court TV and meet the real world.” He grinned as he patted Freya.

  Belle showed him a postcard of Jacobs Field. “Micro wrote. He’s living in Cleveland with his Uncle Rafe. Can’t wait for baseball season to open. The Indians have better odds of making the playoffs than our Jays.”

  “You must miss him. Sounds like you made a good team, little mother.”

  “Don’t push it. He’ll come back each summer for a couple of weeks to stay with Hélène and Ed. I have a lot more to show him in the woods. And he wants to visit the Ukrainian Seniors’ Home again.”

  “So you and the DesRosiers did get in contact with the Restorative Justice people I suggested. How did that work out?” The group consisted of dedicated lawyers, judges, counsellors and volunteers who sought to build a bridge between criminals and their victims. Though Micro had not been charged with a crime, they had bent the rules to accommodate his case.

  “Micro repaid the removal costs with his savings. Then, until he left for the States, he spent an hour after school reading to the residents or writing letters for them. Had his cheek pinched so many times he looked like a kewpie doll. And he learned to make perogies and cabbage rolls.”

  “He’s a strong kid. Lost his father, sister, then his mother.”

  Belle felt a tiny throb in her chest. “He’s designing my business website long distance, using some fancy Flash program. Virtual house tours. Ain’t technology wonderful?” His rates were more reasonable than those of professional designers. Was she guilty of soliciting child labour?

  After Steve left, she went to the hall closet and retrieved a black plastic box with her mother’s name. She took it outside to the flower beds beside the house on the sunny side where a small patch of earth nestled in the inches of November snow. Setting it down, she pried off the square cap with a shiver, unsure of what to expect. Little finger bones? Melted gold fillings? No, her mother had teeth hard as rocks. She peered in, opening a twist tie around a plastic bag. Nothing but a few pounds of fine, innocent bone meal. Humming “Onward Christian Soldiers,” Terry Palmer’s favourite hymn, she scattered the ashes against the trimmed bases of the climbing roses. The earth was frozen, and it was the wrong time of year, but this gesture was long overdue. She replaced the burlap covers, snugging them around the thorns.

  She stood in satisfaction. “You always wanted to be six feet tall or a rose. Now you can be both.”

  Headed for the garbage box, she stopped and with a gimlet eye, examined the simple container. Cremation was becoming a popular option, and no one she knew was getting any younger. The label would peel off with a little soap and water. She tucked it under her arm and headed back, ahead by a cool fifty dollars.

  BUSHWOMAN BANNOCK

  3 cups flour

  Pinch of salt

  2 tablespoons bacon grease

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  Water as needed

  Cranberries, raspberries, blueberries, anything in season

  Combine all ingredients except berries, and knead well into a stiff batter. Add berries gently and form into patties 1/2 inch thick and heat in a cast-iron pan or seasoned griddle. If you are cooking outside at a fire, the pan can be leaned gently toward the fire, baking the top first.

  PROLOGUE

  The all-seeing lens of the sun was scorching and the blue sky so merciless that it made him dizzy. As he wiped sweat from his reddening brow, the warble of a swooping raven brought a smile to his face, and scarcely had he turned to follow the graceful wings than a stunning blow sent the world into such clarity that he gasped. There was no pain. Everything sped by like a silent film gone mad. A dizzying fall into the still mirror of the lake, the rush of the water meeting him like a merging twin. Bubbles blossomed from his mouth as he began to sink, his arms broken wings. The last thing he remembered was a tune from his youth. “I saw a man with his head bowed low./ His heart had no place to go./ I looked and I thought to myself with a sigh:/ There but for you . . .” As the words died in his mind, he blinked through the shadows to the lig
ht. And the raven flew on.

  ONE

  Over, under, under, under, over.” Miriam MacDonald ran an inquiring finger down a newspaper page.

  “Are you doing mental knitting or Sudoku?” asked Belle Palmer, as she entered the office and hung her navy trench coat in the closet after shaking off the moisture. Blessed rain—no need to shovel it.

  A frizzy eyebrow rose, matching the Brillo-pad hair on her associate’s greying head. Miriam engaged the wooden foot roller under her desk and gave a satisfied sigh as her baba’s bunion legacy eased. “Remember those stats that called Sudbury the most dangerous place in Canada? How we live three years less than in cities like Vancouver where eighty is the norm? I’m clocking everyone in today’s obits. So far we’re only one down. Old Finns and Italians are tough birds.”

  “What was that marketing ploy you emailed the mayor during his last brainstorming drive to attract business? ‘Move to Sudbury and get to heaven faster?’ ” Belle gave a quick genuflect, and they both laughed in the face of death.

  As they settled in at their desks, Miriam’s phone rang. She shoved aside a box of Timbits to pick it up, angling it between her ear and shoulder. “Palmer Realty. How may I help you?” A pause. “Yes, this is . . .”

  Abruptly she stood, then braced herself against the desk, left hand on her ample chest as her cheeks went bone white. “In the hospital? How badly hurt? Don’t tell me that Jack might . . .” Her rapid breathing punctuated the stuttered sentences.

  Belle put down a pile of messages and came to her side. “Jack’s injured? What happened?”

  Miriam waved her off and listened, jotting notes on a pad, nodding and shaking her head. At last she hung up, by now only a slight hand tremor revealing her anxiety. Colour returned to her pleasant, round face, but a crease formed on her forehead, joined by another. Belle’s elder by ten years, Miriam was like a no-nonsense sister who reminds you that your boyfriend eats with his mouth open even though he owns a BMW and has shares in Microsoft. “An accident in the shaft. He was pinned by machinery.” Jack was a heavy-equipment operator at Kidd Creek Mines in Timmins, about two hundred kilometres north. The job was lucrative but dangerous. If not for helping to pay for their daughter Rosanne’s teaching degree, he could have taken early retirement.

  Belle put her hand to her mouth, had felt her heart dance in arrhythmia. “How serious is it?” Jack was a strong and vital man, nearer her age than Miriam’s, quick with a joke and a bottle but quicker to help a friend. Thoughts of paralysis or brain damage trickled icicles down her spine.

  “Just a fractured hip. He got off lucky. But he’ll be out of commission for a few weeks once he leaves the hospital. Tabernac.”

  “That’s a relief.” In a nickel-mining community like Sudbury, Ontario, everyone knew someone who had been injured on the job, the fortunate ones with only a truncated thumb or aching back.

  Spitting out more Frenglish curses, Miriam considered the inbox on her desk, the growing list of calls. Her small fist clenched in decision. “I have to go and help him, Belle. He doesn’t have anyone else.” As the penetrating grey eyes narrowed, quicksilver glittered in the iris. “He’d better not be collecting girlfriends, or the hospital will be his last home when I finish with him.”

  “I’ll bet.” Jack flirted with everything lacking an Adam’s apple but meant no harm—Belle hoped. She still recalled an impulsive kiss aborted by a rifle shot.

  Now that the crisis had eased, panic about the realities of Miriam’s absence took over. Summer was nearly underway, the Victoria Day lilacs ushering in the blackflies along with her clients. Palmer Realty specialized in cottage properties, and no one wanted to buy a camp in the winter, which took up half of Northern Ontario’s year. “What about a retirement home, where he can get meals and some attention short of actual nursing? Timmins is practically a ghost town. Health care is keeping the place afloat.” At Miriam’s shocked expression, she threw up her hands in surrender. “Sorry. Bad idea. He’d go bananas.”

  Miriam and Jack had been divorced for years but recently had been enjoying a renewed romance heated up by long distance. Nagging in the back of Belle’s mind was the possibility that Miriam might move away to join him, an alarming prospect in a two-person business. Jack’s connections might even land his ex-bookkeeper wife a job at Kidd Creek at top salary, not the “unshelled peanuts” Belle paid.

  With the deliberation of a numbers person, Miriam riffled through an address book. Whereas Belle often jumped to hyperactive conclusions, nothing fazed Miriam. Her voice assumed a preternatural calm as the grindings of logic began moving her sharp cerebral cogs. “I wouldn’t leave you stranded. You know that. I have a few people in mind.”

  “Jessie’s still in Israel.” Her venerable friend and the retired secretary of Uncle Harold, who had founded the business, spent many months a year teaching on a kibbutz. Figs and dates falling into her mouth, tropical plants and hot, dry sun.

  While Miriam ummed and ahhed to herself, Belle concluded with a panicky shudder that running the office on her own was out of the question. An answering machine gave a fly-by-night impression, and she’d have to close when she took listings, held open houses, and did the myriad chores Miriam shuffled with the deftness of a keno dealer. The smallest realty office in a town with an historic boom-and-bust mentality, her business skated on the edge of the edge. A couple of bad months in prime time could ruin her, and the downhill side of her forties was no time to train for a new career. She’d rather wrestle bears than go back to teaching Grade Ten English.

  Why was she sitting helplessly, waiting for rescue? Hadn’t Canada’s pioneer author Susanna Moodie advised souls lost in the wilderness to be “up and doing”? Belle grabbed the phone book to search for a temporary help pool. In a minute, she had located three agencies and started pounding numbers. Magna Personnel Resources had a listing no longer in service, Yours Temporarily had been hit with a bout of the flu and three unplanned pregnancies, and Bullworkers provided manual labour but nothing secretarial.

  Hands on her hips, Miriam marched over with an annoyed look as Belle shrugged her shoulders. The older woman snapped the Yellow Pages shut. “Stop that. I told you I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch. Those people aren’t trained in real estate. Probably a bunch of yahoos. I’m sure I have just the person. Her number’s busy, usually is, but I’ll call you tonight. I know she’s in town, because I saw her at Value Village last week.”

  Belle gave a sigh of relief. Value Village, too. Sounded like a sensible person. The used clothing store was no stranger to this loonie stretcher, who had grabbed a pair of Buffalo jeans for five dollars. Balancing optimism with fears, she nodded and tried to assume a grateful expression. Miriam was under serious pressure, and she deserved empathy and encouragement. In her youth, Belle had prized brilliance above all qualities in a friend, silver-tongued devils who cared nothing for feelings; now kindness was nudging into first place. “Jack will be okay. He’s tough. And I don’t want you taking the bus up Highway 144. Use the company car.” She spread her hand in a magnanimous gesture. Miriam leased a pink Jetta, and with her book-cooking accounting skills, had also wrangled a tricky tax-deduction deal for Belle’s Sienna van, complete with business logo, all-wheel-drive and automatic sliding doors.

  Leaving at five, Belle climbed into the van and slid a Statler Brothers CD into the slot. Listening to “The Class of ’57” always made her feel younger. She cast an eye at the mock Victorian home that housed the business on a shady cul-de-sac downtown. Massive cottonwoods were forming fluffy seed pods and mustering their leaves. Starting down the Kingsway, she ran into the only serious traffic in the Nickel Capital. Ninety thousand people lived in the core, though the City of Greater Sudbury served as healthcare and taxation centre, as well as shopping hub for another seventy-five thousand in outlying small towns.

  As she took Falconbridge Road north, she passed through Garson, the bedroom community with the nursing home where her father lived. Tuesday, Tuesday, the
ir lunch day, was coming up. She was getting used to his double language and often used it herself, either an ominous or comical sign.

  Monitoring the landscape in this seasonal transition period, she blinked at the latest offering. At first a distant mist, the leaves were shy debutantes wearing spring-green dresses on the poplar and birch. The maple and oak foliage would be slower to unfurl but hung on stubbornly into the late fall. Approaching the airport, she gave a bemused glance at the venerable orange steam shovel that marked the entrance to a busy gravel pit. It was set up on crushed white stone and lit up at night like a proud icon of industry.

  While operations had closed in Cobalt, Kirkland Lake and other more remote outposts, the gigantic Sudbury deposits, courtesy of a meteor two billion years ago, were revealing deep pockets. The lode of high-grade nickel, gold, silver and platinum ran thirty miles into the earth’s core. The International Nickel Company (INCO) and little brother Falconbridge once had twenty thousand workers. Now the number had fallen below five thousand, but the tons of mined ore rose steadily thanks to modern machinery. Owned by Swiss and Brazilian consortiums, they were a combination powerhouse on the international scene, with the base metal at a twenty-year high.

  Belle collected her mail at the kiosk and turned down Edgewater Road, passing Philosopher’s Pond, a kettle lake left by glaciers, then reached the road to the former Blue Lake mine, now Nickel Rim South. Though the mine had closed in the Fifties, scientific advances were permitting deeper excavation. Nearly four hundred million dollars had been spent on the venture, including a massive complex rising from the crumbled foundations of the old site. But industry came with a price. The project was squeezing both people and wildlife. No longer could she ramble its wide, dozed roads to avoid bears and blackflies in the first weeks of summer. A massive parking lot had been backfilled onto a swamp, and above, a gleaming headframe bestrode the hill like a colossus, fed by an army of marching hydro lines.