Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  “Yes?” It was a short, grey-haired, rather transparent woman who answered the door. There wasn’t very much to her, apart from the freckles of age on her face and wrists, a hair-net, and steady eyes.

  “Are you Mrs. Kramer?”

  “That’s right. Are you another policeman?”

  “I hope I’m the last of them.”

  “Well, I declare I hope you’re right. If I’ve swept those stairs once, I’ve swept them a hundred times. You aren’t going to ask more questions?”

  “Not many, I promise.”

  “I’ve heard promises before. I’m an old woman. A woman grows old on promises.” She led me through the hall and up the banistered stairs to the front room. “I’ll leave you alone in there to look around. Most of the things belong to the house. The carvings and pictures are his.” I opened up the door to Aeneas DuFond’s room and went in. There were two large windows on the street side, a high ceiling with a plaster moulding all the way around. There was a centred plaster medallion from which dangled an old twisted electric cord ending in a light fixture of monumental ugliness: a cross between a seashell and a hoop skirt. The walls were covered with a patterned paper running through the various coffee tones and set off by watermarks which looked serious. The bed was narrow, but neat marks on the worn carpet showed the bigger bed that the Kramers used to occupy, or maybe the Waggoners. There weren’t very many personal things: a yellow hard hat in the cupboard, yellow working boots like George’s, overalls, plaid shirts in flannel, plastic slickers, rubber boots, hip-waders, and, at the back, a pair of snowshoes. The chest of drawers revealed underwear and shirts in various stages of wear. He darned his own socks; I found evidence.

  The paintings on either side of the big dark dresser were amateurish and crude. I wasn’t surprised to see Dick Berners’s name signed in the bottom right-hand corners. Dick had a belly full of expression, but the trail out was badly marked. He was on a par with the restaurant decorators in Grantham who sign their murals with their names and their telephone numbers. The drawers yielded no letters, laundry tickets, racing forms, or code messages. The OPP were pretty thorough, even up here. The best I could do was a wad of chewing gum. It had been well and truly chewed then wrapped in its own wellknown Spearmint wrapper. I couldn’t make much of it, so I went back to the paintings. One was a view of a lumbermill from a lake. I recognized the smaller building next to the mill as the Annex at the lodge. The hills behind were about the right shape, but I doubt whether they’d ever achieved the degree of mauve shown above the rooftops.

  The second picture was more ambitious. It was an interior scene with people in it. There were three of them, two men and a woman, standing in the middle of an octagon drawn on the floor in orange. Behind them a snake dangled like a fire hose on a cross. The figures were wearing black capes; the woman was clearly naked under hers. Three candles were shown burning at the angles of a triangle drawn on one of the right sides of the octagon. A pot or cauldron was steaming inside the figure near the older of the two men. What looked like a double-edged dagger rested with a drinking horn on top of a stone that looked like a millstone, but I could see that it too had been etched or painted with a triangle and a goat’s head. It was a very ambitious scene for old Dick. It had an intensity about it that none of his other pictures had. A witches’ sabbath or diabolic ritual, whatever it was, made a big impression. There was little attempt to show what the setting was. I recognized the vague shapes of tables and chairs and even some sort of machinery, but nothing further in the magic line.

  “Oh,” a voice said behind me, “I thought you’d be one of the policemen I knew.” I turned around to see the fairly familiar face of a man about my height. It was Hector DuFond in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt with a collar. “Wait a minute, I do know you. You were staying at the Harbison’s. What the hell is going on?” He looked a little hunched up, like he was protecting himself with lowered shoulders. “I’m Hector DuFond.”

  “That’s right, I met you at the lodge. My name’s Cooperman. Ben Cooperman.” We shook hands formally.

  “Mrs. Kramer said you were up here, but I was expecting someone I’d already talked to. Harry Glover told me I could come up and make an inventory of Aeneas’s stuff. The coroner’s still not released anything to the family.” He was pale and tense. “Are you some kind of cop specialist?”

  “I answer to that,” I said with becoming modesty. Hector’s eyes scanned my face, trying to make me out. I flashed my open wallet at him, displaying a selection of credit cards and a reduced version of my PI licence.

  “But you were up at the lodge before it happened?”

  “Just coincidence. Don’t worry about it.” He looked like it was going to take a while before he’d be able to master that. I thought I’d better sound professional and not just idly curious. “This picture,” I asked, turning back to the wall and letting Hector gain a bridgehead in the room. “What do you know about it?”

  “Aeneas got it from a fellow called Berners, a trapper and—“

  “I know about Dick. Tell me more about the picture.”

  “Well, now, I don’t know. It’s just one of Dick’s fancies, I guess. I don’t think I ever looked at it and saw it, if you know what I mean. Let’s see. Looks like some mystical rite going on. That’s inside the mill at Big Crummock. I recognize the machinery. Old Wayne never did get rid of it; he just lived around it.”

  “So, it was painted before the big fire?”

  “He gave it to Aeneas when he retired back to Huntsville. He gave me one of a sunset painted from the Rimmers’ point at the same time. But I don’t know how he dreamed up the goings on in this picture. He wasn’t one to go to the movies.”

  “Then it might be a picture of something he actually saw at the mill?”

  Yes, I guess it might be.” Hector reached into a back pocket and brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. He waved the pack at me, and I took one. When we had both lighted up off my match, I told him that I was sorry about what happened to his brother, and that everybody I’d talked to had a great deal of respect and affection for him. He nodded slow agreement while he smoked.

  “I can’t get used to the idea that he’s really gone this time. He used to be gone on trips through the country around here most of the summer. I rarely saw him from June to late September.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “The same old question.” He laughed through a pasted-on smile and looked at the end of the cigarette. “I told Glover and the others, six or seven times. And you were there yourself, for God’s sake. He had a camp at the Pearcys’ old place, I mean where their cabin used to be years ago. The dock’s still there, but in 1954 the provincial government started trying to phase out lessees in the park. The Pearcys held on for a good few years, but they had to get out. It was a tidy little cabin too. I’m losing track. Aeneas had pitched a tent on the high ground between the old footings of the Pearcy place. He was worried that the blocked culvert was backing up water so that it was beginning to threaten his camp. I hadn’t seen Aeneas since the beginning of the spring term.”

  “I heard somewhere that you met in town outside the hotel and that you’d had words.”

  “You mean Wednesday night? Yeah, we had words, as you say it. He told me that one of the guests up at Petawawa Lodge, Lloyd Pearcy, in fact, had tried to hire him to take him into Little Crummock Lake. That was always a sore point between us, because my brother was superstitious about that country, wouldn’t ever go there.”

  “Was he like that about other places?”

  “No, just that lake and around it. I never heard of him going near there.”

  “Was the superstition one known to you? Is it part of a tradition or something like that?”

  “Well the story he told about hearing thunder—”

  “Yes, I know that part. Do you know anyone else who had similar fears?”

  “No. And Aeneas wasn’t ever able to talk about it much. He wasn’t one for ta
lking much at the best of times.”

  “Is that what the argument was about?”

  “Well, I guess, if you want to call it that. Harry Glover calls it an argument, because it makes him feel important. He has me written down as his leading suspect. Well, that would make my brother laugh, that would. He just doesn’t have a glimmer about what happened, that’s all.”

  “Get back to the argument.”

  “Well, yes. It was about his guiding Lloyd Pearcy into Little Crummock, like I said. I told him he was being stupid and backward and giving the impression that we were all superstitious and backward. He didn’t argue back. That was his big weapon—silence. He won more points by saying nothing than anybody I ever knew.”

  “You had this argument before?”

  “Every year or two he’d beg off going up there, and I’d give him hell. Aeneas was a poor man. He couldn’t afford to turn down a guiding job, and I told him. I tried to explain to him the way it is with thunder and lightning, how the one is the sound of the other, and how you can’t have one without the other. I told him about the speeds of light and sound. But it didn’t do any good.”

  “How did you part?”

  “As usual. He was quiet, reflective, a little drunk, maybe, a little truculent, but nothing wild.”

  “Was it an ’I’ll show you’ kind of mood?”

  “Maybe. He often went off to prove he was right about something, then dumped the proof on my floor. I remember one time I said there were no pike in a certain river. Next week I found one wrapped in a green garbage bag on my floor. Never said anything about it. He just went and caught one.”

  “Have you ever been to Little Crummock Lake?”

  “I don’t get the time. I’m marking papers most of the year.”

  “Yes, but not right now. What about lately?”

  “No, I’d get lost. I’m not much of an outdoorsman.”

  “Maggie McCord says that you know your way around.”

  “Maggie’s romantic about Indians. She thinks we are all out of Fenimore Cooper.” We both smiled, while I tried to remember whether Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans or The Song of Hiawatha.

  “But you can paddle a canoe?” I asked. He nodded. “You would be unlikely to get lost or be eaten by bears in the park?”

  “No more than my grade-eight kids,” he admitted. That seemed to be the end of the conversation, but on my way to the door another question hit me.

  “When you saw Aeneas on Thursday night, either at his camp or at the Annex, did he say anything to you that referred back to your argument and his superstition?”

  “He didn’t say anything. But he had his special look on his face.”

  “What sort of look?”

  “Whenever he’d won a point or beaten the odds. Call it a look of pride, or inner calm. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  I said I thought he’d done a good job of it; we shook hands again. He told me about the funeral arrangements and I repeated my condolences, and found my way down the linoleum-covered stairs into the cranberry-lit hall, where Mrs. Kramer was waiting to show me off the property.

  TWELVE

  I returned to the lodge in the cab of a lumber truck. The driver was a cousin of a friend of Bonnie’s sister. Bonnie was the waitress at the Blue Moon Café. The driver and I spent the first half of the trip bouncing along in complete silence. The view from the cab of a lumber truck makes you feel both giddy and king-of-the-highway. The last part of the trip was as full of gossip as the café. I was reeling with news about the intermarrying heads of the lumber companies and fairly drunk on talk of provincial patronage and evil doings. I slipped into my cabin without seeing anybody but one of the Kipp kids wrapped in a towel.

  I picked up my car keys from my other pants and walked through the dust of the parking lot to turn my motor over. That swim I’d promised myself came to mind as I sat behind the wheel. It was hotter than the sweat room in a men’s club.

  Starting back to the cabin still shaking from the truck ride I came abreast of the motel building, and could hear raised voices. I stopped in my tracks like a milk train. The noise was coming from Westmorland’s unit. The voices erupted out of the screen door before I could even turn and hide. It was George McCord reeling out backwards down the steps with Des Westmorland almost on top of him.

  “… and bloody well stay out! You come here again and I’ll twist your other arm. Now clear out! Clear out!” George picked himself up out of the dirt and tried to untwist himself from the clothesline full of bathing suits and towels that he had fallen into.

  “You won’t take on so high and mighty when it’s known. You hear? When people find out, you just remember throwing me out of your place. I just come to talk.”

  “Next time I’ll throw you out the front door!” Des went back into his unit, and while the screen was open I could see the pale face of Delia Alexander through it. George McCord pulled a bathing suit off his shoulder, hurled it to the ground and shambled off.

  Thinking about what that all added up to was interrupted by a racket from the direction of the generator. I wanted to get back to polish off the last of my Cokes, but curiosity again got the better of me.

  It sounded like an old-fashioned siren on a fire engine at first, but I then placed it as a circular saw, as it changed pitch. The Delco shed and the woodshed backed on the extremity of the clearing occupied by the lodge. The low ground, where the cars were parked, lifted slightly as you got near the sheds. From here too you could look into the back of the motel units. Only there was nothing to see except rickety back steps and patched screen doors. From the Delco I could see a cloud of sawdust, like an aura, around the open front of the woodshed. I walked around into the yellow fog and noise and could see two figures decked with sawdust on their heads and eyebrows. They were feeding cordwood into the spinning saw. Most of it was birch, but there was a mixture of other hardwoods too. I shouted something but it disappeared in the racket. Joan Harbison appeared from nowhere and killed the switch. That was a shock to all of us. The restored silence sat there like a snared animal, while both of the yellow figures by the saw blinked. One of them—I saw that it was Lloyd—removed a pair of earmuffs and wiped his face with a cloth cap after slapping it on his leg. He looked from Joan to me without reading any answers to his questions in either of our faces.

  “Lloyd, give her a rest for a bit. She heats up if you run her steady,” Joan said. The other man lowered a yellow kerchief from his nose and removed his earplugs. It was the neighbour from across the lake. He added the last sawn log to the accumulated pile.

  “Come away out of the dust, Benny,” Lloyd said, and he tipped up a couple of uncut, drumlike tree sections to sit on.

  “Lloyd, you were after Aeneas to take you in to Little Crummock Lake. Did you ever find out how to get there?”

  “There’s no secret getting in there. I just wanted Aeneas’s company. We fished every other lake up here just about. Oh, say, you wouldn’t be acquainted with Dalt Rimmer, would you?” He indicated the other man who was already glaring in my direction and giving me a look at one of the more neglected mouths in the north woods. Most of his teeth were stumps of blue, stained with tea or tobacco. I reminded Lloyd that we’d met at the Annex Thursday night.

  “Up to Little Crummock, is it?”

  “Looking for lake trout and speckled,” I said.

  “That’s a rough way in,” said Dalt Rimmer. “You’d best take the York River and go up from Four Corner Lake. They call it Buck on the map. Fish is good in there.” I smiled my answer and turned back to Lloyd.

  “Joan says that other people have been in to Little Crummock. I may look like a tenderfoot, but I think I can follow a trail or carry a pack if necessary.” Now it was Lloyd’s turn to smile.

  “Little Crummock’s about thirty feet higher than this lake. The river that joins them—”

  “The Durwent River,” added Dalt Rimmer with a gleam in his eye.

  “Yes, on the early maps i
t is, but around here you won’t hear it called anything but the Tom River, named after Tom Mowat, who was foreman at the lumber camp up on Deer Lake.”

  “That’s Bice Lake on the map,” said Rimmer.

  “How far up the river can you go by boat?”

  “You can go around the first two bends in a motorboat if you stay in the middle of the channel. You may go half a mile farther in a canoe, but it becomes too shallow and full of boulders after that.”

  “The portage trail goes up the right-hand side about a mile up from the lake.”

  “What are you saying, Dalt? Dick Berners told me himself that the trail winds up past the dam from the left. The early map, Benny, shows it as Crummock Water, because of the long length of it with a twist at the north end.” I must have looked confused. “A crummock is a shepherd’s staff, his crook, you see. There’s a river feeds into it from Pine Lake.”

  “And that’s called Percy on the map,” added Dalt Rimmer to make everything perfectly clear.

  “Why not just draw him a map, Lloyd? That would be simpler,” Joan asked from the sidelines. “All the fish will have died of old age if he has to wait for you two to agree about anything.” Dalt looked lean and awkward on his stump, as though his joints were leftovers from a bigger man.

  “Is there a lean-to, or cabin, or shelter of some kind?”

  “There’s Dick’s place. I guess it’s still standing. Nobody’s been in there since they carried poor Dick out dead. Glover and them brought him out.”

  “Now if you want another way to get in there, you can take the lumber trail past Kettle Point …”

  “That’s the point past Giffords’ Point,” Lloyd added by way of clarification.