Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  “I got business, Benny. Better clear out. Looks like it’s clouding up. May not get another chance for a return match today. Anyhow, seize the day, fella. Time’s a gift and time’s a-wasting.” And he was gone. I got into my rowboat and pointed it in the direction of Petawawa Lodge. A couple of loons gave me the raspberry as I passed them, then got out of sight. The sky was getting dark.

  TWO

  A hot, mid-afternoon heaviness hung above Petawawa Lodge as I came around the point where the lodge’s cove began. Ghosts of lightning far away lit up the insides of the clouds like fireflies in a smoky bottle. The dock was deserted unless you count the various boats rubbing their flanks against the rubber bumpers nailed to it. I tied up the rowboat and stowed the oars in the tack shed. The beach was guarded by an inflated innertube and an abandoned pail and shovel in the sand. A scrap of wind began to whip dust on the road and play with a line of towels and bathing suits hung out to dry.

  The lodge was made up of two medium-sized buildings and about six individual cabins fanned out under the trees at the edge of the lake. The large log building near Joan Harbison’s cabin was the Annex. This served as Joan’s office and the general get-together point. The long low building with the shadows of agitated birches blowing over it looked more like a bunkhouse or a primitive motel running parallel to the road. It contained four joined cottages, the Algonquin equivalent of row-housing. To the Annex, the motel, and the cabins, add a leaning double gas pump and an electric bug-zapper by a notice-board and you have Petawawa Lodge.

  My cabin was dark when I closed the screen door behind me. I couldn’t switch on the light. There wasn’t any electricity until Joan started the Delco generator. I pulled a coal-oil lantern from its nail in the beam above my head. I was still trying to light it when the sky opened up like it had something personal against us. The rain drove itself into the dust of the lumber trail. It flattened the petunias around the notice-board and beat upon the screens and windows. Across the lake the rain blew in waves and patterns from the first island, outlined against the hazy far shore. Nearer home it bombarded rowboats tied up to cleats on the dock. It was like a machine gun opening up from above. The tarp covering the big cruiser at the end of the dock looked like it had given particular offence; a froth of white water splashed off it in all directions. The cover looked riddled. My roof took a beating, but until I got some light I was helpless to see whether a puddle was collecting on my bed. Through the window, steamy with humidity, I saw Joan Harbison park her red Honda, unpack a carton of groceries from the back, and close the hatch with her shoulder. Her old straw hat dripping, she carried the box out of sight along the duckboards. She had a plastic bag of milk for me in there somewhere, but I could wait until the weather cleared. Meanwhile thunder rattled the spoons in the porcelain jar on the counter and lightning showed between the cracks in the two closed shutters. I got a candle going and tried to concentrate on what my next step might be while I stared through the patched screen. In the cabin, the only sign that life was still going on was a fly stubbornly struggling against the inevitable at the end of a coil of fly-paper.

  Before I’d left Grantham, I’d asked my old friend Ella Beames at the library to dig out for me all she could find on Norbert E. Patten. Ella was the farthest thing from a detective’s assistant in the business. She looked like a sweet, middle-aged woman with bright eyes under freckled lids, with velvet jowls on either side of a small perfect nose. Ella didn’t know she was on my payroll for the simple reason that I’d never put her there. Her cover as a librarian in charge of the Special Collections Department was too perfect to share even with her. She handed me a fat file and indicated a table.

  “Spread it out here, Benny, and tell me if you need more. We used to have a lot more on your man, but somebody walked off with every scrap we had about three years ago and didn’t bring it back. We had to build up the file from scratch.”

  “But you don’t let this stuff circulate?”

  “Of course not. I mean it was stolen. When I was at a librarians’ convention in Toronto I found out that the Patten files had been lifted from libraries right across the country. They even cleaned out the morgues of two newspapers. So, what I’m saying is, we are still sketchy on your Mr. Patten and his Ultimate Church.”

  “This will get me started, Ella. Thanks.”

  Norbert Edgar Patten was born in Huntsville, Ontario, forty-three years ago. I checked an atlas and found Huntsville about where I expected, 215 kilometres north of Toronto. His parents ran a bakery on the main street, were nominally Baptists, but admitted to being only “wedding and funeral Baptists.” Patten went to local schools, appeared in The Mikado, and took summer jobs in nearby Algonquin Park. When he was eighteen he went off to the States. It was a break in the pattern. What could he be doing in Washington, D.C.? I sifted through the rest of the file without seeing what had taken him from Huntsville to the Harland Lee Academy in Maryland for two years. The Vietnam War halted the American adventure for a time. Like a lot of young Americans, he went north to Canada until the heat cooled. But no sooner had the U.S. Army evacuated Saigon than Patten was back in the District of Columbia area. It was on the road to Washington, near Alexandria, where Patten claims to have seen a blinding light. “With the nation’s capital shimmering in the distance, like St. Paul of old, I saw it and it changed me as it changed him.…” There was a newspaper clipping advertising a rally near the historic Presbyterian Meetinghouse in Alexandria, and a write-up describing its success. Taking full-page ads quickly became Patten’s style. Thousands attended a rally near the Lincoln Memorial the summer after the war. He packed a stadium with sailors in Annapolis. Norbert Patten became news. He began to rival the Bible-belt evangelists with his calls for making an end to war.

  Soon after the east-coast success, he went off to California to consolidate what he called the Ultimate Church in that hotbed of cults and religions. His first California branch was located in Burbank, with others starting and slowly spreading up and down the San Andreas Fault and across the Midwest to New York, New England, and finally the birthplace of the movement, Washington.

  Patten was the first of the new wave of evangelists to make full use of television. Preachers had been seen before on the tube talking to thousands in a stadium and millions on the air, but Patten had hit on the idea of pitching his sermons, whatever the size of the audience, to one viewer at a time. It didn’t seem to matter whether you caught the show in the flesh or at home; Patten made you feel like he was talking to you. He was also the first into the field of prime-time television when nobody in the networks had guessed the audience potential. Or maybe they’d guessed and decided to forget about it. Patten made them take him seriously.

  In 1976 he was pictured on Time’s cover wearing a white robe of office. He was quoted in the article, when asked about his globe-trotting, as saying that if God ever looks in on us, we’d better look busy. In a piece in Newsweek, the same year, he defended the church from being lumped with the California cults that had so often been confused with his flock. He was notorious for catching all derogatory comments in the press and suing writer, editor, publisher, right up the line. He’d retained a fat stable of lawyers who rarely lost a case. For example, one well-known magazine devoted to the lives of men and the bodies of women lost an undisclosed amount in a hard-fought case that was finally, at the last minute, settled out of court. That was in 1977. Patten’s victory had given cults a new lease on life, and only the most foolish papers tried to pillory them after that.

  From the articles before 1977, I was able to get a fair idea about how the cult operated. Patten was the absolute despot; his rule was law. All submitted to his whim. He was suspected of seeking sexual favours among the faithful, and most certainly relieved the members of their private property. Everything was owned in common by the church, but on paper the church was Patten. At the beginning, Patten urged his flock to imitate the practices of early Christianity: they met in secret, referred to the mysteries of
faith in anagrams and symbols; there were no churches as such. But there were collections, and the proceeds maintained Patten in several earthly kingdoms. There was a large estate near Reno, Nevada, formerly owned by another celebrated multi-millionaire, a hideaway on the coast near San Clemente, and later a villa outside Palma de Mallorca.

  I couldn’t find any evidence among the clippings that Patten’s empire was in any way corkscrewing down from its eminence. But there was a shipbuilder in Spain who had repossessed a yacht in Palma, and the U.S. Army, in light of the many ex-GIs who had flocked to the Ultimate Church, was checking whether the events described in The Blinding Light, Patten’s uplifting best-seller; ever in fact happened. A fifty-year-old hack journalist from Baltimore claimed in one of the clippings to have ghosted the book in 1975 from six hours of tape Patten had dropped off in a Georgetown apartment. Nevertheless, the book remained on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty-two weeks. And even in Grantham I found a copy nestling on a shelf next to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. The bookseller told me it had been translated into seventeen languages and was on sale wherever books of any kind are known. He said it in a funeral director’s voice. I couldn’t figure out whether he was a consumer of Patten’s doctrine or simply impressed by the book’s sales.

  Well, Patten was a long way from Time magazine this afternoon. The rain was falling on the just and the unjust alike. I wondered how the park looked to him after Newsweek and CBS. What was it like to come home again when you couldn’t whisper who you are. No drums and no trumpets for the local hero, not even in the Huntsville Weekly Register.

  I heard the bang on the screen door and guessed Joan was coming across the duckboards between our cabins. She came in, bringing the rain and a scent of freshness and earth with her. Her glasses were steamed up, and she took them off along with her big soaking straw hat.

  “Gawd, what a downpour! This is what the weatherman called intermittent showers.” Thunder shook the roof; a reminder not to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. “I brought your milk.”

  “You didn’t have to bring at over at the height of the storm. That’s above and beyond the call of duty. I’ve got the kettle on. Tea?”

  “Fine. Only, let’s get some light on the subject.” She took the lantern from the table where I’d left it and primed it and pumped it until it hissed. She added a match and a high intense light brought colour back into the cabin and sent long shadows from the ketchup bottle and the salt and pepper shakers radiating along the caramel-coloured table top.

  “That’s better,” she said, climbing out of her black raincoat and setting it on the horsehair sofa. “The Goddamned beavers have blocked the culvert again. I knew those bedsprings wouldn’t keep them out of there. There’s a lake across the road a foot deep. And after this rain … Oh damn, I don’t want to think about it.” I made the tea and kept my mouth shut. In my line, that’s the way to find things out. When it happens. A set of ironstone mugs for the tea were finally located on the shelf above the sink. I bashed the teabags to cut down on the waiting time and got out the open can of evaporated milk.

  “But I just brought you fresh,” she said. She had cleaned her glasses on a piece of pink Kleenex and put them on again.

  “New habits die hard. Take it easy. I’m just learning the ropes around here. First you show me how to do everything, then you come over to see that I do it your way. There’s more than one way to trim a wick.” She smiled and I poured her a cup. I took out the fresh milk and punctured the plastic bag. Joan, the diplomat, took a drop of both, then showed how a real frontiersman stows the plastic milk in a plastic pitcher.

  “Are all my chickens safe?” she asked.

  “I guess I haven’t taken a proper count, but I haven’t seen anything unusual. Your coming in with the groceries was the big event of the afternoon.” I lit a cigarette and put the wooden match in an ashtray with the name of a defunct brewery on it.

  Joan Harbison had a good ordinary face with blue eyes that didn’t grab you all at once. It took three days. Under light eyebrows, their effects were subtle, like the way the dimple on her right cheek played tag with a little brown mole. Her hair, when it wasn’t soaking wet, was kept in a light and airy brown tangle. Now it hung in dark fangs stuck to her forehead. She didn’t use makeup and she didn’t have to. On the day I arrived she was changing the air filter in her Honda and confessed that she was stealing time from the generator which really needed attention. Since then, I’d seen her cutting the grass, chopping and stacking cordwood, rebuilding an outboard motor, flinging a pail full of fish heads to the four cats, and wrapping a piece of brown paper around an ovenproof casserole. She was followed everywhere by a twelve-year-old boy who belonged to the American in one of the log cabins.

  She sipped her tea. The downpour gave her a few minutes to relax. The Delco, the cats, the boats, and all of us could run around the block until the weather cleared.

  “I’ve got to do something about that beaver,” she said, watching my cigarette smoke drift up to the rafters. “He can build a dam faster than I can pull it down. It’s a pair, really. For two cents I’d scalp both of them, sell the skins in Toronto, and fix my chainsaw with the proceeds.” Outside, the belly of the window screen was luffing in the wind, sometimes flattening itself against the glass with a muffled smack. Joan hunched over her cup. “I’ll let the rain settle overnight,” she said, “but tomorrow’s another day.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh and reached for the teapot again, just as she’d reached for the Nescafé I’d made that first afternoon. Beyond the screen door, the fury of the rain was settling down. It was losing its tropical passion; the wind was no longer raking the ground and blowing the puddles from one depression to the next. One of the cats peeked in the door, and I gave it a dirty look: let it walk with its dirty, wet feet over a floor I don’t have to sweep. I was taking my domestic responsibilities to heart.

  “It’s giving up,” I said, nodding at the weather. Joan smiled distantly. “Good weather for fishing.” She didn’t seem to hear.

  “When Mike and I moved into the lodge, it was a day like this. We looked like a couple of drowned rats by the time we had the truck unloaded. Everything had been left in terrible shape, and in the rain it looked like we’d made a bad bet. Then I found mice running around in the oven, after I got the generator going. When I saw that, all I wanted to do was pack up and head back to Toronto.”

  “Is that where you and Mike go in the winter?”

  “Of necessity. As it is he can’t leave his city job except in August. I’m glad to see him on weekends though. Maybe next year we’ll go south.” Joan sighed at the sound of that. She was too realistic to allow herself to dream, even on a rainy afternoon. “Fat chance,” she added, like a footnote. “To be brutally frank, Benny, the lodge isn’t the gold mine we thought we were buying. I made more teaching. We’ve taken ads in the papers and magazines, put up signs, but our main business still comes from the people who’ve been coming up here year after year. Oh, there’s a little word of mouth but not enough to retire on.” We listened to the rain slacken off for a minute.

  “It’s giving up,” I said again. This time you could hear the difference. Individual plonks of rain were hitting the roof. I could see drops form, grow fat, and drop off the leaves outside the window. “This is the best fishing weather, they say.”

  “Well, make sure you put motorboat fuel in your tank and not straight gas. I wouldn’t want to lose another boat like the one I rented to Mr. Edgar over at the Woodward place.”

  “That was your boat, was it?”

  “Oh, he paid me for it. But I just meant be careful.”

  “What makes a motor explode like that? Do you have to be that careful?”

  “I get all kinds of people through here, Benny, and most of them know nothing about motors. This is the first time I’ve heard of one blowing up. It had to be more than the wrong fuel to make it do that.”

  “You’re not saying you don’t think it was an
accident, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. What a funny idea. Why would anybody want to hurt Mr. Edgar? I could understand somebody putting a bomb under George McCord the way he zooms around the lake, but …”

  “It was just a thought on a rainy afternoon. It’s just a game I play. If life’s a mystery, who are the suspects?”

  “Hey! Your suspects are my paying customers, Of course, you are free to suspect Maggie and George McCord, and I’ll throw in the Rimmers. You can have them for nothing.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest … I haven’t really met many of them.”

  “Well, I’ve been neglecting my duty as owner then. I’ll see that you meet all the suspects you want in the Annex tonight.”

  “Fine. I’ll sidle over and you can fill me in when they aren’t watching.”

  Joan left a handful of change on the pine table, put on her boots and the grim expression of someone who has a generator to fix, and disappeared splashing into the subsiding weather. I pulled on a sweater, a waterproof groundsheet that also worked as a poncho, and collected my fishing gear. The red fuel tank was where I’d left it the day before. I used the rowboat in the mornings; couldn’t stand the noise of the motor until the afternoon.

  It didn’t take me long to attach the tank to the motor again and untie the soaking painter. I tipped out the puddles in the indentations in the plastic-covered cushions and steeled myself to pull the starting cord.