by Howard Engel
NINE
That night in the Annex, away from the smell of scorched hard-boiled eggs, I got to see most of the regulars. There’s nothing like a little gore to make people huddle together and congratulate one another for still being counted among the living. The Kipp kids, Roger and Chris, were perched by the fire, supervising the four birch logs in the grate with pokers, waiting for some promised marshmallows. Their father sat in a far corner. He looked hunched, almost truncated, sitting in a high-backed rocker, reading a detective novel.
So far neither the Pearcys nor Maggie and George had appeared, but an ample place had been left for Maggie on the couch by the card table. Des Westmorland was sitting on the piano bench next to the fireplace with Delia, his friend from the end motel unit, next to him. The fire made both their faces look ruddy and took a decade off his age. Delia had brought knitting with her, but hadn’t done anything about it. I was watching all this from the coffee urn. The silence in the room was almost noisy. I could hear coffee gurgling inside the urn. I tried to stop it, but I only succeeded in rocking the ping-pong table. The coffee in the glass gauge exaggerated the whole incident.
Was this better than sitting alone in my cabin, I wondered. A log crackled and fell sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. David Kipp turned the page of his Simenon. Des Westmorland caught my eye. He introduced himself and Delia. He called her “his friend.” It was nice to have it official.
“What do you know about this business about the guide, Mr. Cooperman?” He sounded like I might have some obscure information that was being kept from him. “What was his name?”
“DuFond. Aeneas DuFond. I don’t know much. He was a good guide, but a little suspicious and shy. A loner. A quiet man with a touch of superstition who knew his way around in the woods.”
“I don’t know how anyone can think that we had anything to do with it. Corporal Glover kept Delia with him for nearly half an hour. I mean, really. We didn’t come up here to get involved in a backwoods feud.” He looked at Delia, who was trying to smile through makeup put on in the dark, or so it looked.
“I only have two weeks off, Mr. Cooperman. From my job, I mean. I hope Corporal Glover won’t keep us here. I don’t think he can, legally, without laying a charge I mean. But if one is asked to assist, that puts the moral pressure back on one, doesn’t it?” Delia Alexander had been a very attractive woman, now that I saw her up close. Good bones don’t lie, but I got the idea from the way she was always fussing with her hem even when she was wearing jeans, that she’d blossomed long after the rest of her generation.
“You’re in the cabin next to Mrs. Harbison, is that right?” Des was working at getting less intimate. “Terrible thing about that fellow. Time was when you used to need a special government form for reporting the death of an Indian,” he said. I tried to show my fascination, but I wasn’t at my most convincing. My coffee tasted burnt.
Back at the fire, the Kipp boys were busy with marshmallows in a silent, businesslike way. This wasn’t their idea of a picnic either. Joan Harbison stood nearby, a new arrival, suddenly there, keeping her eye on young Chris, whose marshmallow was ablaze. The couple on the piano bench began to console one another, and it built up a wall between us, so I took off towards Joan.
“Harry Glover told me that Hector and Aeneas were seen arguing outside the hotel in Hatchway Wednesday night,” Joan said.
“Does that mean he’s decided to pin it on the brother?”
“I don’t know anything,” she said, and looked like I’d taken a swipe at her with a two-by-four.
“They were friendly enough in here last night,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder to make things better. She squeezed out a pained smile and moved off to pour herself coffee.
Maggie and George were suddenly in the room, she in one of her voluminous caftans, and George in yellow boots and his usual sartorial indifference. He laid a fourcell flashlight near the coffee urn and drew a cup for himself and one for his mother. His nod in my direction was not convincingly friendly.
Maggie and George McCord used the lodge, or at least the Annex, as though they were paying guests instead of next-door neighbours. So did the Rimmers, but at least they were former owners. I wondered whether Joan’s hospitality ever extended as far as the Woodward place and its tenant.
In a few minutes everybody was seated around the fire with Maggie acting as keystone in the arch. Soon the Pearcys came out of the night, with a squeak of the double screen doors. Tonight we were all moths drawn to the fire. It was good to be warm, with company, and alive.
“Well, we’re a bloodthirsty lot,” announced Maggie after looking around. “Your faces are a study. Mine too, I’m sure. A lynch-mob without a rope, that’s the lot of us tonight. I don’t think I could bid straight, Cissy, so there will be no cards tonight.” Lloyd laughed a little too loudly, and stifled it when he found himself alone. There was the kind of silence in the room that stepped on talk. Nobody else said anything, so Maggie started in again, keeping the show together, keeping up her spirits, whistling in the dark. “I know what,” she said, “Let’s tell murder stories. The messier the better. It will clear the air. It will work like a dose of salts. Come along. The policeman’s gone back to Whitney. I’ll start the ball rolling myself. Let me see. Did you know that when they hanged the notorious Captain Kidd, the rope broke and they had to do it again?”
“Really, Maggie, I think you could lift our spirits without dangling our feet,” Joan said, and everybody laughed.
“They say that the man who invented the guillotine was beheaded on it,” said Cissy Pearcy in a confidential voice that allowed only two or three words to burst out at a time.
“Justice for all,” Lloyd chimed in.
“It’s easy to make jokes,” said Westmorland. “I’m sure he deserved what he got.”
“What Dr. Guillotin got,” said Maggie, “was an immortal name and a pension from the French Assembly. The man died in his bed long after the Revolution.”
“So much for poetic justice,” I said with a look at Westmorland.
“Well,” said Cissy with some effort, “it may not have been him, but somebody who invented something was killed on it. I’m sure I read it.”
“You’re quite right, Cissy. You’re thinking of Lord Morton. The enterprising Earl of Morton introduced into Scotland a guillotine-like machine he’d seen in Halifax, Yorkshire, for the execution of felons. Long before Dr. Guillotin. They called it the Scottish Maiden, and the poor earl was one of its victims.” Cissy smiled at Maggie for this help and then at everybody else in the room.
“Where on earth did you learn that?” Joan asked from where she was leaning against the fireplace.
“Ask any Scottish schoolchild. We were all solemnly taken to see it in the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities.”
“There’s a sort of guillotine in the police museum in Toronto. I’ve seen it there,” said Delia Alexander. “Horrible thing. A man named—what was it?—Malbeck, John Malbeck, made it to commit suicide on. About a dozen years ago. It was in the papers. Terrible, really. He worked for Revenue Canada.”
“A fitting end,” said Maggie, and George began to laugh at the thought of it.
“What would make a man do a crazy thing like that?” asked David Kipp, moving closer to the group. We all looked to Delia for the answer.
“It appears he was some kind of mystic, belonged to a devil-worshipping sect. He was insane, of course, and if I remember he was disappointed in love.” George sniggered.
“In Germany,” David Kipp said, “there is a Crime Museum at Rothenburg. That’s where they keep the Iron Maiden. Michelle and I saw it when we were in Germany.”
“I thought that ‘Iron Maiden’ was just a political term of abuse,” said Des Westmorland. Our conversation, in spite of its grizzly subject matter, was integrating Des and his friend into the group, as my old counsellor at Camp Northern Pine might have said. “Was there really such a thing?”
“In the olden days it was a wooden sh
ame-coat that women who committed certain crimes were forced to wear,” said Kipp.
“With steel spikes on the door,” whispered Cissy, making her s’s hiss like coiled snakes.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” shrugged Kipp. For a moment it looked like Maggie was going to regain the spotlight, but Kipp had tasted the power of regurgitated travel yarns. “There is another crime museum in Paris. It’s the official collection of the Paris Police Department. I’ve seen that, too. It has all the usual Black Museum sorts of things, along with a history of law enforcement from the earliest times. There are documents dealing with the Revolution, and mannikins wearing the old-fashioned police uniforms as they developed through the years. I spent most of an afternoon there. Fascinating.”
“Get back to the ’usual Black Museum sorts of things,’” said one of Kipp’s boys. It was a mistake, because his father at once ordered Roger and Chris out of the Annex to bed. That seemed to lighten spirits a little.
“Too bad he can’t hear this,” David said. “That part of the collection is full of shabby-looking knives, daggers, and guns. I suppose if you’re looking for something specific it might be interesting, but to me a bread knife looks like a bread knife whatever its sordid history.”
“That sounds very brave. I wonder whether you’d spend the night there.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, if that’s what you mean, Maggie.”
“Oh, these new rationalists! I’m sure that the angels weep for you.”
“If any place has ghosts,” said Joan Harbison, “it’s this place. The police left the body of Dick Berners, the old prospector, in this room overnight. And three months later Wayne Trask was laid out here waiting for them to arrive from Whitney.”
“Albert told me that two lumbermen were killed in an accident on a log boom out on the lake. They brought the frozen bodies in here and stood them up against the wall like sticks of timber.”
“Honestly, Maggie. You’re a storehouse of the strangest information.”
“Well, I have a head full of odd things, I’ll not deny it. I have to fill my head, you see, I have no books.”
“What was this fellow Trask like?” I asked Maggie.
“From what I hear he wasn’t a very savoury character.”
“Unsavoury. Yes, that’s the word for him all right. For a while the police thought he’d been murdered; there were many hereabouts who’d have liked to have seen him dead. But they gave up that line.”
“He did have lots of enemies,” Cissy said. “He was a madman. He used to chase women in here. One time he held a shotgun to his own wife’s head, and she ran out through the bush naked as a jay-bird and flagged down the first car that came by.”
“He spent time in the loony-bin one year,” Lloyd added, looking at me for some reason.
“They ran him out of Cornwall, Ontario, for fooling around with a doctor’s wife,” said Maggie.
“He went after one of my girls one time,” Lloyd said. “He was a crazy man for the drink, you know. Once he got to drinking there was no holding him.”
“He was the former owner of the lodge? Is that right?” That was Des Westmorland again. He was taking in more than I imagined. His lady beamed shy approval of his taking an interest. Cissy, suddenly animated, nodded.
“Flora, his wife, was the only one who did any work on this place. Wayne Trask didn’t lift a finger. And when she left, the place just ran downhill. After Trask died, they practically gave the place away it was so rundown.”
“Flora was a great one for crocheting,” Lloyd added. “She sold tea-cosies, scarves, and sweaters to the people staying at the lodge. That’s how she put by the money to leave Wayne. She left for a visit to see her mother and never came back. Practically with just the clothes she was standing in. How do you like that?” We all made noises by way of answering, and he began to chuckle to himself, very much aware that he had his audience hooked.
“Trask, you know, old Wayne was a character though. He came up to Sudbury one time and I gave him some work. He was coming off a tear and was short of money. He’d come in to see me and we’d have a drink, and he’d stay and have a few. Then I kept him on the job after there was nothing for him to do—just out of sympathy like. And then one of the last times I saw him, my young lad was with me up here at the lodge, you know. The lad had a Coke and Trask said, ‘That’ll be thirty-five cents, please.’ I thought he was making a joke.”
“After all the meals he’d had at our house,” Cissy put in.
“Was Trask a prospector?” David asked, a little confused.
“You’ve been hearing about Dick Berners. He was the prospector,” Joan Harbison said. As though she was feeling a sudden draught, she picked up a heavy piece of birch and threw it on the fire, sending up another shower of sparks. Everybody was quiet for a minute.
“Old Dick was a joke all over,” said George sitting at his mother’s side. “He went prospecting all right, but any fool knows there’s nothing to prospect for up here. And even if he found a ton of gold, he couldn’t mine it because it’s illegal to do any mining here in Algonquin Park.”
“Albert and I used to have many a laugh at poor Dick’s expense. He was so sure there was gold up here, they say he wrote the Department of Mines. All he ever found was a chunk of quartz, no different from the one Joan’s got the door propped open with. Claimed that he should know about gold because he was a mining engineer one time. Albert knew all the men who used to work for the Dunlap Lumber Company in the old days and he found out that Dick was just as much of a joke back then as he was in our time. He’d go into the bush, stay there a few weeks, then come out again. He always said he was getting closer and closer. He finally retired somewhere around Huntsville or Haliburton. He’d done pretty well with his trapping, you see; that was his main occupation. He lived comfortably until he got sick. That’s when he came back.” Maggie was looking me in the eye. I was beginning to fidget in my seat.
“Old Dick came back up here to die,” Lloyd said. “No two ways about that. He had cancer and he came back up here, went in to his old camp, and died.”
“Oh, he was a character,” George said. “You could smell him coming through the bush. And always covered with soot from his campfire. You wouldn’t want to get closer to him than the end of the cottage units across the field. He was that high.” He started to laugh through his teeth, as the picture of old Dick became clearer.
“Oh, let’s hush up about poor Dick Berners,” Maggie said, holding her puffy hand to her cheek like Queen Victoria. “I’m sorry I encouraged this. He was a good man, better than any of you will ever know.” She didn’t enlarge on that. It was the sort of statement that you have to leave alone. It tended to kill conversation. Joan took a look at her watch and left the Annex.
“Nobody mentioned the incident that happened half a mile north of here at the Woodward place. That fellow had a close call and it was no accident.” I said this and looked around to find guilt written on one of the assembled faces, but all I saw was either blank ignorance or very good play-acting.
“He must have had God on his side to have escaped,” Maggie said, making a private joke.
“Poor Aeneas wasn’t so lucky,” Cissy said, half whispering to herself. It was the first time the name in the back of all of our minds had been mentioned. Poor Aeneas.
“You wanted him to take you fishing in the lake northeast of here, didn’t you, Lloyd?” Lloyd grinned uneasily.
“Little Crummock, you mean?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t Aeneas take you in there?”
“Damned shame about Aeneas,” said David.
“I hear he would never go into Little Crummock, Lloyd.” My voice sounded a little more than casual. I tried holding my breath.
“He’d go anywhere else,” said Lloyd.
“But not into Little Crummock.” I stayed with him.
“Superstitious.”
“In what way?” I asked, and Lloyd slowly leaned across to me.
“He said he wouldn’t walk into country where he’s heard thunder during a thunderstorm without seeing any lightning. That’s what he told me.”
For a moment all you could hear was the steady throb of the electric generator. Nobody said anything, and then the lights began to fade as the generator died. The silence that took hold in the dark seemed a million miles deep.
Outside, a few minutes later, the stars were out, more than I’d ever seen before. I looked north for the dipper and found four rather misshapen ones. Cissy and Lloyd bent their necks with me for a few minutes, carrying the indoor silence outside.
“That Maggie’s a caution,” said Lloyd.
“She means no harm,” Cissy explained. I looked at both of them, puzzled.
“She is colourful,” I admitted.
“Yes, I love her stories. She just lets them carry her away too far, that’s all.”
“I don’t understand. She has a good imagination.”
“She has that! In spades. But you see, Benny, she makes things up. You have to take what she says with a grain of salt.”
“A grain?” said Cissy. “You mean a cupful! You can’t believe a word she says, she makes everything up.”
“She wasn’t born in Scotland. That’s one thing for a start. Oh, I allow she was over there one time.”
“But those stories?”
“Something she heard or read about years ago. I think sometimes that she really believes her stories.”
“Is the truth about her so awful?”
“Not awful, just humdrum, like the rest of us. She has a way of talking, though, that hints at a past. I think it’s because she looks like a woman with a past. She just plays it up.”
“She comes from Cornwall, Ontario. How’s that for a past?”
“I’ll have to sleep on that,” I said.
TEN
“What are you daydreaming about?” Patten looked cross. I’d beaten him in the first game and I was throwing this one his way with a silly Queen’s Knight’s Pawn opening that wasn’t going to do me any good. Patten was wearing a buff-coloured safari jacket over his usual torn khaki shorts. Without his sunglasses, he looked less menacing. His eyes were narrow and appeared to be lidless, as though the brows themselves were enough protection for those deep blue, cautious eyes. Up close, the end of his nose was red and shiny, with tight skin pulled over a bum-shaped bulb. This and the thin lips seemed to have been added to his broad face by accident, clearly having been intended for a long lean face. But that was the chemistry that worked so well on television: his features had the look of a man who’d not had a square meal in months but were set in a face that was well fed and content. The beard confused things, of course, but nobody’d ever seen him with a beard on television.