by Susan Calder
Ten Days in Summer
A Paula Savard Mystery
By Susan Calder
Digital ISBNs
EPUB 978-1-72299-405-6
Kindle 978-1-77299-406-3
WEB 978-1-77299-407-0
Print ISBN 978-1-77299-408-7
Amazon Print ISBN 978-1-77299-409-4
Copyright 2017 by Susan Calder
Cover art by Michelle Lee
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book
* * *
Dedication
To my parents, Emilie and Murray Calder, who enjoyed garage sales and collecting old stuff.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to:
Judith Pittman and Books We Love Ltd., for publishing Ten Days in Summer. Editor Catherine Brown, for helping me clean up the clutter in the novel to bring out the real story.
Jamie Spence and the firefighters at The City of Calgary’s Signal Hill Fire Station 33, for sharing their knowledge of fires. Clive Don Zuber for providing advice on insurance claims. Any errors are mine.
Will Arnold, Lianne DesBrisay, Jean Humphreys, Stephen Humphreys, Shaun Hunter, Marilyn Letts, Pamela McDowell, Bernice Pyke and Anne Wilson, for generously reading drafts of the novel. Moira Calder, for her thoughtful review of the final version.
Eileen Coughlan, for offering insight and encouragement at the right moment. Ruth Daly, Leslie Gavel and the many talented and supportive writers I’ve met through the Alexandra Writers Centre Society, Calgary Crime Writers, Crime Writers of Canada, When Words Collide Festival for Readers and Writers and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
My husband Will, sons Dan and Matt and daughter-in-law Anne. You keep me grounded as I navigate this crazy writing life.
Chapter One
Paula Savard clacked up the chipped stairs toward the increasing odour of smoke. Her high heel caught a crack in the cement. She grabbed the railing. It shook while she steadied herself. This property was a liability claim waiting to happen. She would recommend that the insurers cancel coverage if they hadn’t already.
She pressed the bell buzzer. No sound. Behind the locked screen door, the front door stood ajar. She rapped the aluminum and stared down a hallway lined with enough microwave ovens and piles of paper to signify the home of a hoarder. This must be the right place, but where was Caspar Becker’s nephew? He had assured her he’d be here by seven o’clock and she was fifteen minutes late due to the increased traffic from the city’s Stampede festival.
With care, she crossed the driveway to a glorious view of the Calgary skyline. Stairs down the slope led to an entrance at the side of the building. A lower ground level lay beyond the ten-foot-high fence.
Footsteps sounded on the driveway. She whirled around to see a short man lumbering toward her. With thinning grey hair, he looked in his mid-sixties. The nephew was forty-three, according to the report.
“Are you Caspar’s niece?” the man asked.
“Insurance adjuster. I’m waiting for his nephew to arrive.”
“I came by, in case one of them was here, to ask about the funeral service. I didn’t see a notice in the obituaries.”
Since no new car was parked on the street, he must be a neighbour. “Are you a friend of the family?”
“Only Caspar. I’d call us friends.” The man blinked behind rimless glasses. “I’m still shocked by his passing. Last time I saw him, he was healthy as ever.”
“When was that?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“I take it you live nearby?”
He nodded toward the northwest. “We’d get together now and then to talk shop.”
“Would you mind giving me your name and contact details, in case I have any questions?”
The man extended a pudgy hand. “Garner Weir.” His palm felt sweaty on this warm summer night. “Insurance, you say?”
“For the building fire.”
“I wonder if they’ll sell or stay, with Caspar gone.”
The hoarder had no wife or children. A niece and two nephews inherited the estate. One nephew lived in eastern Canada. The other occupied the top floor of this building with his mother. The niece was ignoring phone calls from the police and insurance representatives.
“My address,” Garner said and provided the details.
Paula recorded them in her phone. On the street a sedan cruised to the dead end, where it would have to park or make a U-turn.
“That might be the nephew,” she said.
“Johnny? He drives a beat-up truck.”
The sedan reappeared and slowed to a crawl in the front of the house. Gawkers.
“No need for me to hang around,” Garner said. “If you hear anything about the service, can you call?”
“Sure thing.” It would give her an excuse to probe him about the deceased.
“I don’t expect many others outside of his family will turn up,” he said.
“Caspar was a loner?”
“Aren’t they always?”
By ‘they’ he would mean hoarders. Garner wished her good luck with the insurance claim. He plodded away, the sun brightening the bald spot at the back of his head.
Paula decided to use the time to check out the building’s ground level. No point in putting on a hazardous materials suit when Johnny was bound to interrupt. Today had been hectic: picking her mother up at the airport, reading the initial reports on the fire, debating whether to take on the claim when she was supposed to be on holiday. The police had judged the fire death as suspicious and had brought in homicide. How could she not leap at the opportunity?
The smoke smell intensified as she descended the stairs to the second-level landing. No windows along this side. The contour of the hill made the building appear to grow out of the earth. The top two floors sustained only smoke damage thanks to the 1940s construction, which contained the fire to Caspar’s lower apartment. Reports said the middle unit was vacant, of people, at least. Caspar used it for storage. What a waste of a million-dollar view. In her thirty years of work as an insurance adjuster, she had encountered her share of hoarders. There was no reasoning with them.
Johnny’s pickup still hadn’t arrived. From her purse Paula got out the code for the cheap padlock. She might replace it with a better one, assuming there was anything thieves would find worth stealing in Caspar’s apartment. Past the fence, the wooden stairs had no railing. She edged down the broken and warped steps. Through overgrown junipers she glimpsed woodpiles and dented trash cans along the fence that bordered the next property. She stopped beside a blue spruce tree, its bottom branches dead.
A van parked in the yard was so filthy she could only guess it was white. The wide gate behind it would open to a lane. Beneath the van’s dirt, she picked out a faded letter ‘B’ and what might be a picture of a mop. Had Caspar bought the vehicle second-hand from a cleaning service?
Past the van, she stopped at the garage. A sagging fence concealed the other next-door neighbour’s yard; his upper window looked out from a bathroom. The man had got up during the night and noticed flames in Caspar’s window. He phoned emergency in time to save the building but not Caspar.
The reports said Caspar’s detached garage was packed to the roof. Fortunately, Paula wouldn’t be involved with its contents. The smoke odour hadn’t travelled in that direction thanks to the prevailing winds. The van was okay, too. She tried its door. Locked. A front tire was flat. When was the last t
ime Caspar drove anywhere? So far the police had drawn blanks on his recent activities. If he had bought anything during the past few weeks, he paid cash. His credit cards were all overdrawn, but insurance money would more than cover his debts. The key question for her was: was the fire Caspar’s arson attempt gone awry, with a motive to collect on the insurance?
Paula realized she was almost used to the smoky smell from the building. She noticed that none of its stucco exterior was charred. That is, none she could see behind the jumble of shovels, hoes and rakes balanced haphazardly on lawn mowers and barbecues. She scanned the yard’s weeds and shrubs for a hint of gardening effort. In front of the garage, objects bulged under an enormous tarp. With her thumb and index finger, she lifted the greasy tarp. Metal rods, rusty grills. She let the tarp drop.
Balconies on the second and third floors ran the width of the house, shading Caspar’s entire porch area. Inside he would have lived in darkness despite the southern exposure. The three apartments had separate wiring. Down here the electricity was still turned off due to water hazard.
She moved closer to Caspar’s door, which firefighters had found unlocked the night of the fire. Someone could have entered from outside and set the blaze. Or a suicidal Caspar might have left it unlocked to make it look that way. Or he simply never locked it out of carelessness or lack of worry about intruders. It wouldn’t ruin her lungs to look in from outside.
Paula opened the door to a rush of smells: burnt plastic, wetness, soot. She raised her bandana over her nostrils and shone her phone on a narrow trail hemmed in by tables, chairs, an ottoman, a vacuum cleaner—and the firefighters had actually widened the path. How had they managed to push anything into the adjacent junk? No wonder Caspar got lost in the network of paths when he tried to escape. She coughed at the fumes. Reports speculated that on the night of the fire Caspar woke up in bed surrounded by smoke and flames. In panic and confusion he headed for the interior staircase and knocked over a tower of chairs and video machines. The autopsy showed blunt-force trauma consistent with one of those objects striking his head. Blood drops marked his crawl or stumble along another trail to the bend in the path, where he collapsed from smoke inhalation. She aimed the light on the spot about a few feet from this outer exit.
Sad that he came so close to getting out. But if he’d made it, his lungs might have been too damaged for him to survive. The fire report said his bedroom was littered with plastic bags, which had ignited. It was surprising the toxic fumes didn’t finish him on the spot.
“At last my insurance adjuster shows up.”
Paula turned toward a man, who stood at the bottom of the building’s side stairs. Black cowboy hat, black shirt and vest, jeans. The nephew, Johnny Becker? She clicked off the light.
“I was starting to think you were a myth,” he said. “But then I saw your car parked up front and the gate open.”
She closed Caspar’s door, locked it and slid the bandana down from her chin. “I was only assigned the claim today.”
“What happened to our other adjuster?”
“He’s busy with Stampede guests.” She moved closer to him. “The insurers transferred it to me.”
“You aren’t into Stampeding?”
“I’ll catch the parade tomorrow.” She shook Johnny’s hand. Bony and dry. “Paula Savard.”
He scanned her from head to chest. “I like your bandana colour. Yellow looks good with your dark hair.”
She stopped herself from fiddling with her hair or bandana. “If your apartment’s too smoky, we can talk outside.”
“I moved back this afternoon and discovered no food in the place. So I went out for pizza.”
He stepped aside to let her walk ahead of him up the stairs. She hoped he wasn’t staring at her rump. On the middle landing, she closed the gate after them and secured the padlock.
“Any halfwit burglar could crack that with a shoestring,” he said.
“Do you think your uncle has any items of value in his apartment?”
“Nothing worth more than five cents.”
Johnny’s turned-up nose and compact physique made him look younger than forty-three; his tanned, leathery skin, older. His pickup was backed into the driveway.
“Arizona licence?” she said.
“That’s home. Calgary’s only liveable three months a year.” He loped to the pickup’s passenger door and took out a large pizza box. “You’re welcome to join me. There’s plenty of cold beer.”
She had grabbed dinner with her mother, but the spicy scents tempted. Was it the smoke that made her throat feel so dry? Paula reminded herself that shared food forged connection. She rarely drank alcohol on the job, but this was the opening night of the Stampede. Cutting loose might work with Johnny.
“I could manage a slice of pizza and beer,” she said.
Johnny tapped the brim of his cowboy hat. “We’re on, babe.”
Chapter Two
“The firemen wrecked the door with their sledge,” Johnny said as they walked up the front steps.
Paula tried to jam the door shut. “Your uncle’s insurance covers its replacement.”
“That idiot fireman almost killed me. I open the door, and he’s standing there, sledge raised like a madman ready to slice my head.”
“Or save you.”
“I’d have got out on my own.”
“You’re lucky the screen door locks.”
“Like someone couldn’t kick in the glass and screen.”
They entered a hall crowded with microwaves topped by stacks of paper. Paula was relieved to find the wet, smoky and burnt plastic odours much fainter than down at Caspar’s. She noticed two open windows in the first bedroom. Its décor was Spartan: a double bed, one dresser and, on the walls, a couple of framed photographs of mountain scenes.
“Is this your mother’s room?” she asked.
“Yup.”
The reports said Johnny’s mother, Florence, had been on an overnight hiking trip the night of the fire. Her bedroom was a startling contrast to the next room’s mountains of baby carriages, cribs and toys. A trail carved a route to its open window.
“You’ve done a good job of airing the place out,” Paula said.
“Ma’s been by every day since the cops released it to us.”
They stopped at the entrance to the living room, where blenders, toaster ovens and slow cookers sat on washing machines and dryers. Rays of light streamed through the weird sculpture of appliances, which touched the ceiling at precarious points.
“Ma gave up trying to reach the screens below the picture window,” Johnny said.
“Is this her stuff?” Florence’s bedroom, which Paula thought could have belonged to a nun, seemed the opposite of a hoarder’s.
“Uncle Caspar’s.”
“She let him store his things at her apartment?”
“She’s a push-over when it comes to him.” Johnny said. “Came. I’ll have to get used to thinking of him croaked.” He set the pizza box on a coffee table in the centre of a cleared-out nook with a sofa, platform rocker and 1970s console TV.
“Are we sitting here?” Paula asked.
“Hell, no. The deck. Inside is stifling.”
They squeezed between an antique sewing machine and door into a kitchen with a stained avocado-coloured fridge, a harvest gold stove and peeling linoleum. Lace curtains, grey from dust or soot, fluttered in the breeze. At least the clutter in here belonged in a kitchen. Plates and cups overflowed the porcelain sink; spice bottles staggered on the counter. The open bags of potatoes, rice and beans would be a treat for mice.
Johnny yanked the fridge door handle. “For beer all we’ve got is Grasshopper.”
“Works for me.”
“You’ll find glasses and plates in the cupboards, if you need that crap.”
Was he challenging her to come off as refined? “Okay if I grab a wad of these paper towels?” They’d absorb some pizza grease.
As they manoeuvered by the sewing machine, s
he asked if the door across from it was for a pantry or closet.
“They’re the stairs to Brendan’s and my uncle’s apartments.”
Caspar had tried that escape route, but fallen objects had blocked his door. “Brendan is…?”
“My little half brother. I don’t know if we’ll ever get all the mouldy, smoky smell out of that staircase.”
“Insurance restorers will take care of that.”
“What do they charge?”
“Too much. It’s covered by your uncle’s insurance, assuming everything is in order.”
Johnny paused under the arch between the living room and a large alcove. “My mother was wondering if you’d pay us to do the smoke clean-up.”
“It’s highly specialized work—”
“That’s what we Beckers do, clean houses.”
She glanced at the living room junk.
“I mean, my grandparents ran a housecleaning business. Ma worked in it. Caspar, too, before he retired.”
The dirty van in Caspar’s yard had a mop and letter ‘B’ on the side. ‘B’ for Becker?
“I bet we could do it for a lot less than your experts and come out with a better job.”
The inevitable outcome was that the Beckers would wind up dissatisfied with the result and insist it all be redone by the smoke specialists. No way would Paula approve this. “We can talk about it when I meet with your mother.”
The alcove furniture consisted of a mattress littered with dark-coloured shirts, socks and underwear. Clothes and old-fashioned furs formed piles along the walls. A tuxedo and sequinned evening dress dangled from hangers on wall hooks.
“Is this where you sleep?” Paula asked.
“When it’s too cold or rainy outside.”
“You sleep … Wow.” On the deck, she scanned the panoramic view of the Saddledome stadium and downtown skyline.
Johnny lowered the brim of his cowboy hat to shade his eyes. “I’ve got a balcony seat to the Stampede fireworks every night. You’re welcome to join me anytime.”