And On the Surface Die

by Lou Allin

  Ann’s old Taurus chugged out in a cloud of blue smoke. With a sigh, Holly went inside to type her report. Then she set out the package of prints for the courier the next day.

  By nine, her father had already gone to bed, but he’d left her a plate of meatloaf, garlic mashies and carrot coins in the fridge. She heated the tasty meal in the microwave, then sat in his recliner in the solarium. The wind had been up all day, the tides at a horrific 9.5, and from the beaches surf pounded the rocks like incoming mortars. As she finished the last juicy bite and stretched back in the fullness of comfort, she saw in a seat fold the newspaper he had been reading, a tell-tale piece of white sticking out. Inside was an envelope type-addressed to him with no stamp or postmark. Her hand hovered over it as she weighed the ethics. A plain piece of cheap copier paper lay inside. With hesitation, she read it. “I hope you’re still losing sleep. You won’t get away with it, you know. The mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine.” Her heart chilled like a cold marble slab. No wonder he hadn’t been himself. And the wording. “The mill of God.” Hardly garden-variety prose. Who was harassing him, and for how long? Was he being blackmailed? She got up, her knees wobbly and her strategy uncertain. Secrets buried in more than one heart never kept their own counsel.

  She climbed the circular stairs slowly, thinking at each step.

  Then she looked at his door, closed against the unwelcome night heat rising from the woodstove in the foyer. A slit of light appeared under it. “Knock knock,” she said.

  An umhmmm followed, so she opened the door of the smaller corner bedroom. Only a highboy dresser and bed table served for furniture, and piles of books and magazines leaned in pillars. Wearing striped pajamas and a silk paisley dressing gown, Norman was propped up by pillows in a monkish single bed. A patchwork quilt covered one end, his mother’s work. Shogun lay on a soft foam pallet on the floor, his head sprawling, and his legs splayed, exposing his pink belly in a position of complete trust. A rope tug toy lay beside him. He was snoring. Another reason not to sleep with dogs.

  The sight amused her, but she hadn’t come for this. She sat at the end of the bed, focusing on her father’s eyes, sad as an old bloodhound’s. When the woodstove started burning in the fall, he developed allergies, a vicissitude of age, he claimed. “I have to confess something, Dad,” she said.

  “Oh my,” he said. “Your old man’s not a priest, though sometimes I live like one.” He put down his book. Peyton Place. “Bestseller in 1956. We kids used to find the paperback copies in the drug store and read the forbidden pages.”

  Wasn’t he a wizard at sidetracking, or was he covering embarrassment for the personal approach? “You’re joking. Show me one.”

  A slight smirk on his lips, he leafed on, then passed her the book. Something about getting it up good and hard, Rodney.

  “That’s it? Pretty tame for these days.”

  He was chuckling when she touched his shoulder, a rare gesture, brought his sea-blue eyes to hers, fawn like her mother’s but with emerald flecks. They saw the world so differently, he in his historical tower, she on the drawbridge tossing criminals into the moat. “This is serious. I found that note. Didn’t mean to... No, of course I did. I was wondering why you were a bit thoughtful lately.”

  He said nothing, but reached for a glass of water by the bed. Then he took off his black horn-rimmed Mr. Peepers glasses. “Don’t worry about...those letters. They mean nothing.”

  “Now letters? How long has this been going on? And no Judy Garland imitations, please.” She tortured herself about the unspoken fact that her father had been a suspect, had no alibi other than being in his office late that night marking papers. An old maintenance worker had claimed to have glimpsed a figure in his office, but the man had serious cataracts, a less than ideal witness. With no sign of her mother or the Bronco and no other forensic trails, the police had been forced to declare the case cold.

  “A poison little note comes every year around the anniversary of your mother’s disappearance.” In clear sorrow, he rubbed the bridge of his hawk-like nose where the glasses had left a mark like a bruise. “Anniversary. What an ironic word.”

  “Who’s doing this? Where are the rest? You know, we could have dusted them for prints. Was the stationery always just copier paper?” She gave a laugh. “My god, we could have taken DNA from under the flap.”

  “Same paper and the same message, with minor variations. And the envelope’s never sealed.”

  “Cleverer than I thought. How do these messages get to you?”

  “They’re left around the department, the offices, sometime in the week before the date. Often a cleaning person finds one and brings it to me. Last year I didn’t get anything. Maybe it was thrown away by mistake. There’s no proof. Hundreds of people pass through. We don’t have a...what do they call those spy things?” He passed a hand through his thinning hair.

  “Eyes in the sky. Closed circuit television.” In the driveway, a caterwauling emerged. Felines from the surrounding houses made the front lawn a combat area. “Give me a name. You must have your suspicions.”

  He blew out a heavy breath. “Larry Gall. I’m sure he’s behind this nonsense. That’s why I never keep anything. Why let the idiot get to me?”

  Shogun growled and raised a lid over one sleepy eye. She was becoming used to his grumblings. “So who the hell is Larry Gall?”

  “He teaches social work at Camosun College, or so I presume he still does. He and your mother were quite...close, so some say. Activist causes brought them together. I wouldn’t be surprised if he goaded the police into...” He sucked at his tongue as if a bad taste lingered. “You know. Their investigation.”

  She had another thought, but considered the phrasing carefully. “If they were...close, do you think that he had anything to do with her disappearance?” She refused to say death to her father. The lie kept hope alive.

  “I can’t believe so, but you know me. I like to think the best of people, not imagine that they could harm others. She always spoke well of him. I respected your mother’s opinions on...most subjects. We were different, but we shared the important values.”

  Bonnie had a temper, but she rarely meant the harsh words she said and calmed down later. Norman was slow to anger. But to protect what he held dear, nothing was beyond him. On one of their rare hikes, they’d met a cougar. Placing little Holly behind him, he’d raged and waved his arms, jumped up and down until the beast retreated. Then he sat on a stump and cried, shaking with relief. He’d saved their lives. She owed him one.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then about Gall? Why let all these years go by?”

  He shook his head slowly from side to side. “You were working so hard at your studies. You wanted to come home and help search, but I talked you out of it. It was just gossip. I’ve never even met him.” The hesitant look on his face made her sure that he was still trying to convince himself. “The man is harmless. He’s just a wounded beast, striking out at the only person left.”

  “Even if he hasn’t made any threats, this is harassment. I’m going to talk to him.”

  Norman folded his hands on his chest. “Don’t do that, my girl. Waste of time. He’ll never admit it...or perhaps he will. That would be like the man. Those kind think that they can save the world. Tell me, is it getting any better?”

  Eight

  Holly called the main number at Camosun and was routed to Gall’s department. The secretary told her that he had office hours every day at eleven. She took Sooke Road to the Island Highway, turned off at Hillside, and drove ahead to the Lansdowne Campus.

  Once at the college, she parked and walked to the main building of the small enclave of four thousand students. Gall must feel like a large frog in this pond, she thought. Postmodern and utilitarian. Nothing like the stately halls of UVic a few miles away, where her father taught. Was Gall jealous of Norman’s prestige on the venerable university campus? To insiders, the hierarchy in post-secondary education was more than a ma
tter of tenure or salary differences. University professors could be passport guarantors, while only an administrator in a college could sign the photo. “And they want to be called professors,” her father once said in a huff, rattling the paper as he read about a recent strike at the colleges. “Few have doctorates. Some have no degrees at all. Professors of welding indeed.” Her mother would have torn a strip off him for such elitism. For all Holly knew, she had.

  Gall’s office was tucked away in a cranny at the end of a hall painted a psychedelic sunflower yellow and purple. A scribbled paper sign on the door read “Larry Gall. Social Work.” Posted nearby was his timetable with office hours highlighted in marker. Political cartoons taped on the wall featured George W. Bush, though a few involved the Prime Minister, to whose body were added horns, a tail and a long fork.

  The door was closed, but she could hear vague music inside. Perky. Upbeat. Caribbean. Relaxing, sunny climes where fruit fell from the trees. She knocked.

  “Come,” said a low voice.

  On a quick assessment, she was surprised to see that Larry Gall was much younger than her mother, in his mid-forties even now. In opposition to her conservative, fussy father, his thick black hair was tied in a ponytail, and he wore chinos and a denim work shirt with a pelt of curly hair at the V. The bookshelves were crowded, and hanging baskets of spider plants and ivy competed for the sun through the institutional window. On the desk were requisite piles of marking and a CD case reading Songs of the Coffee Lands.

  “Great music,” she said by way of opening the conversation. “Putamayo. Always cheers me up. Especially in the winter. Live here, you’ve got to make peace with the rain. Nirvana it’s not.” His lean face was brown and weather-beaten, as if he spent much time outside. A carved hiking stick with a silver knob leaned in the corner next to a battered pair of boots.

  Holly gave the usual answer which helped islanders bond. “Don’t have to shovel it.”

  He looked at her uniform, one corner of his thin mouth rising. “Speaking of shovelling, if you’ll pardon my French, you have me at a disadvantage. My name’s on the door. I don’t know yours, but you don’t look like a student.”

  She extended her hand, and he gave it a perfunctory shake, earning 5/5 for comfortable pressure and duration. “Holly Martin. Bonnie Martin’s daughter.”

  “Holly.” He made no effort to disguise the fact that he was searching her face. For her mother? A muscle twitched at the edge of his square jaw, a slight haze of beard showing. He pulled out a rumpled pack of French cigarettes and fingered one out, offering it to her. Holly shook her head. “Then this isn’t a social call.”

  “Not exactly. But it could have been. I know you were...good friends with my mother.” Coy language sat ill with her, but she needed to find her bearings.

  He groaned, tossing a glance of his head toward the wall behind Holly. She turned to see a large pastel portrait of her mother, expensively framed under anti-glare glass. Against her will, she gave a small gasp.

  “I thought you might walk through that door some day. In fact, I hoped you would.” Then his face grew colder, as if a band of steel had tightened along his spine. With a book of matches, he lit the cigarette and pulled up a small ashtray shaped like a pitcher’s mitt.

  Uninvited, she sat in an oak chair where many a student had waited. She expected no courtesy from this man, someone who had lurked in their lives all these years, yet she chose her words carefully. “Is that why you keep sending my father those notes? To bring me here?”

  “I don’t keep tabs on you. That would be neurotic, but I see that you’re all grown up. Last I heard you were in university.” He drew in a long breath of smoke and exhaled with apparent contemplation. The air filled with the strange tang of exotic tobaccos foreign to North America. “The coward. He’d never come himself.”

  She bristled at the insult, tempted to abuse her power. “Who’s the real coward if you don’t even sign these notes? You haven’t threatened him in so many words, but this harassment stops now. And this has nothing to do with my position.”

  “The horsewoman rides to her doddering father’s rescue. Precious.” His lips appeared poised to spit. Yet he stood and went to the portrait, stroking her mother’s bright cheek, which shone with youth. She looked the same age as Holly, but she must have been older, because the hair had grey streaks. When had she posed? Or had the portrait been done from a photo? The glimpse into her mother’s other life frightened her.

  “I loved her, you know.”

  “You think you did.” She was still smarting about his comments about her dad. To many who didn’t look deeper, Norman was the quintessential professor, no mystique, no romance, just a dusty cypher.

  He turned with a vengeance. “You know nothing of this. She and I were to be married.”

  Standing abruptly, Holly mouthed the words like a death sentence. “Married. I don’t believe that.”

  A desk drawer opened, and Gall lifted a pack of letters tied with a blue ribbon. “Here’s proof. She didn’t want to hurt your father, but by the time you left for university, our relationship had become serious. She was waiting for the right time to tell him. And she would have, except that...” He took a deep breath, then exhaled as if it were too painful to continue. “Anyway, I thought you were studying Botany, becoming a useless collector of information like the Professor.”

  “I changed my mind, and you can imagine why and when.” She shot a finger at him. “So just before she disappeared, she was supposed to have told him?”

  He cast down his oyster eyes, heavy with pouches, but creased at the corners from staring life in the face. The price of hard work, dissolution or genetics? “Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” Then he gave a dismissive gesture, and a long ash dropped to the tiled floor. “She and your father had nothing in common. I don’t understand why the marriage lasted so long.”

  “I can’t speak for either of them. But he would never have harmed her.”

  “And you know that I didn’t. I was cleared from the start...unless you think I had a body double to speak in Calgary that week.”

  “Move on with your life. I have.” Or had she? The past was returning to bite her on the neck like a loving vampire.

  “Have you? I think about her every day, and if you’re the daughter she deserved, so do you.” He stubbed out the cigarette, punishing it until the paper separated from the tobacco. But though he said nothing, his eyes glistened.

  “You said ‘deserved’. Why the past tense?”

  He barked out a laugh and coughed a cloud of smoke. “Oh, come on. You’ve been watching too many of those old movies with your father. Don’t start living in other decades like he does. Christ have mercy. What a useless dreamer.”

  She ignored the gibe and took out a fresh notebook brought for this purpose. Hers alone, off the clock. “Tell me about that last week. Where did you see her? What did she say?”

  He remained silent for nearly a minute. Then he firmed his lips. From under his shirt, he pulled an ornament that glittered as a shard of light punched from behind a cloud. “Recognize this?”

  Holly tensed, steeled herself from reaching forward. She didn’t want to appear weak, so she forced her trembling grip to the chair arms. The rawhide cord held a round silver image of a raven with the sun in its beak.

  A corner of his mouth rose at her reaction. “I see you remember it. Your mother probably told you the story. It’s one of my favourites, perhaps because of her.”

  Raven the Trickster was one of the most popular figures in native mythology across North America. Suddenly Holly was back in her childhood bedroom in that dark East Sooke property. The papery leaves of the eucalyptus whispered prelude to the croaky warble in the night. Her mother was explaining that when the world was in total darkness, Raven was tired of bumping about. He learned that an old man who lived in the woods with his daughter had a secret treasure, all the light in the universe packed into a tiny box. Spying on them as the girl was dippin
g her basket into the water, Raven turned himself into a hemlock needle. When she swallowed the needle, it grew into a human baby. She gave birth, and crafty Raven set to work coaxing his “grandfather” to let him hold the light. Losing patience, the old man threw the sphere to the child. Retransformed into a bird, Raven caught the light in his beak, flew out of the smokehole and escaped to bring sunshine to the world.

  Suddenly she felt a squeezing in her chest. Was he admitting guilt by showing it to her? No one would be that stupid, or was it a clever ruse? “When did she give this to you?” It hadn’t always been in her mother’s life, though often it was unseen, nestled between her breasts to “keep it warm.” Had Holly noticed it first around the time she left for university? A milestone? The end of her dependence on the concept of family? Did that ever end?

  “I brought it back from a trip to the Queen Charlottes and gave it to her. It’s Haida, a talisman. Very old. A hundred years, the seller said. It was tarnished when I found it, but I polished it. Cleaned up nicely.” He gave an ironic shrug. “Little good it did her.”

  “And she gave it back? Why?” His alibi was solid. What did this mean?

  “No. I found it.”

  “How do you know it’s the same one?” she asked. He hadn’t answered her question about “when,” but she’d figured it out.

  He pointed to a small scratch on the sun. “As I told you, it was an old piece. We thought that the flaw added character, a story within a story.”

  He was right. Her mother had postulated that Raven had bumped into an overhanging branch as he left the house. Suddenly her eyes felt wet, betraying her, and she blinked. She leaned forward, and he sat back, splaying his large hands on the desk. Clearly he had no intention of removing it. “Then how did you get...when did—”

  One of his stubby fingers waggled at her. “Not so fast. Here’s what happened.” He lit a fresh cigarette and opened the window. “Thank god there are no smoke alarms in here...yet. Damn nicotine Nazis.”