When Boomers Go Bad

by Joan Boswell

  When Boomers

  GO

  Bad

  The Ladies’ Killing Circle

  When Boomers

  GO

  Bad

  A Crime and

  Mystery Collection

  by the Ladies’ Killing Circle

  edited by

  Joan Boswell

  Sue Pike

  and Linda Wiken

  Text © 2005 by the Ladies’ Killing Circle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Cover art: Christopher Chuckry

  We acknowledge the support of the

  Canada Council for the Arts

  for our publishing program.

  RendezVous Press

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  www.rendezvouspress.com

  09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  When boomers go bad / by the Ladies’ Killing Circle; edited by Joan Boswell, Sue Pike and Linda Wiken.

  ISBN 1-894917-31-6

  1. Detective and mystery stories, Canadian (English) 2. Canadian fiction (English)—Women authors. 3. Canadian fiction (English)—21st century. 4. Baby boom generation—Fiction. I. Boswell, Joan II. Pike, Sue, 1939- III. Wiken, Linda IV. Ladies’ Killing Circle

  PS8323.D4W48 2005

  C813'.0872089287

  C2005-903467-X

  Table of Contents

  Where Were You Then?

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  Spoils of War

  Barbara Fradkin

  Plenty of Time

  Melanie Fogel

  My Sister Caroline

  Brenda Chapman

  Booming

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  Slow Burning Fire

  Bev Panasky

  Call Him Ishmael

  Janice MacDonald

  Glass Eats Lights

  Susan C. Gates

  My Husband the Dead Head

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  How to Make a Killing in Real Estate

  Pat Wilson and Kris Wood

  A Little Bit Easy

  Therese Greenwood

  A Graceful Retirement

  Cecilia Kennedy

  The Black and White Blues

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  The Red Pagoda

  Day’s Lee

  Life Sentences

  Joan Boswell

  An Omen for Gwen

  Kathryn Cross

  Empty Nest Syndrome

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  The Day Before the Wedding

  Liz Palmer

  Cold Dead

  Linda Wiken

  A Nice Cup of Something Hot

  Linda Hall

  Hopscotch

  Sue Pike

  There Was an Over-aged Hippie

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  Seeing Strawberry Red

  H. Mel Malton

  Smoke Screen

  Mary Jane Maffini

  Dear Tabby

  Vicki Cameron

  A River in Egypt

  Jenifer McVaugh

  The Top Ten

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  Where Were You Then?

  I know where I was

  When Buddy Holly died.

  I was swinging on my swing.

  And when I heard

  That JFK was shot,

  I was in the high school gym.

  When Martin Luther King

  Dreamed his last dream,

  I was yelling at my spouse,

  And when the King

  Lost his crown

  I was knocking off the louse.

  But when the cops

  Questioned me

  Where the hell was I?

  My short-term memory loss

  Kicked in...

  I forgot my alibi!

  Despite her penchant for murderous poems, Joy HeWitt Mann’s primary writing is in the literary field. A short story collection, Clinging to Water, was published by Boheme Press, Toronto, in 2000, and she recently finished another collection, a full-length book of poetry, and a novel, all seeking publication. With the help of a Canada Council grant, she has just finished the first draft of the first book in a trilogy.

  Spoils of War

  Barbara Fradkin

  Mila’s dog started acting peculiar long before she caught the first whiff of rot. They had been walking for an hour down the old logging road behind her cottage. Around them, the June afternoon hung soggy and hot, redolent with the scent of pine loam, and nothing stirred but the deer flies buzzing around their heads.

  Pavlov began to zigzag along the road, swinging his shaggy head in restless, searching arcs. Suddenly he picked up speed, and just as Mila dived for his collar, he vaulted over the ditch and bolted into the trees. It was then, watching him disappear, that she finally caught the smell. The unmistakable, rancid stench of dead flesh.

  “Goddamn stupid dog!” Cursing at the prospect of his swaggering back in half an hour reeking of dead animal, she took up pursuit. Shoving aside branches and swatting mosquitoes, she fought her way deeper into the forest. Suddenly the brush opened up into a small clearing protected in the lee of a rocky outcrop, overgrown with daisies and interwoven with a network of paths. The stink hung like a pall in the radiant heat.

  Mila stopped, her gaze settling in surprise on an ancient picnic table in the middle of the clearing. Nearby sat the rusty shell of an automobile. Curiosity drew her closer. For years, the local farmers had been warning her about a squatter on her land, but she’d never run across him, and with hundreds more acres than she could possibly use, she’d never begrudged him a few.

  Pulling the weeds away from the car, she was able to make out the round roof of a Volkswagen beetle with patches of yellow and purple paint still defying the rust. Shock bolted through her, for she’d once owned a beetle painted purple with a yellow sunflower on its roof. After university, she’d driven it across the country with Dean the draft dodger during a year-long odyssey of self-discovery. When she finally left him, she’d given him the car as a consolation prize, for he had no home to return to and little energy left after years of LSD and Moroccan gold. That she had ended up in suburbia with a dermatologist instead, raising two children and working for the government, still gave her a twinge of shame from time to time.

  Her shock gave way to reason. She’d left Dean over thirty-five years ago, three thousand miles away. Although he’d made noises about coming for her, he’d never shown up. It was ridiculous to think this was the same car. She peered through the broken windshield, but the fabric seats had long rotted away, leaving only blackened springs.

  Wrinkling her nose against the smell, Mila squatted in front of the fender, pawed aside the weeds, and uncovered a licence plate lacy with rust. Oklahoma 1971. She sat back with relief. The car she’d left Dean had an Ontario licence plate.

  Puzzled, she looked around the clearing for other clues. Along one side stretched three orderly rows of vegetable garden, and near the picnic table was a blackened iron grate propped over a circle of stones. The fire pit was cold but free of weeds, which meant someone had been here until recently.

  In the distance she heard a single bark, more a question mark than a threat. She called out, but there was no sign of Pavlov. The idiot dog would only return when he’d had his fill of adventure, so she continued exploring. Tucked into the bush, an old river dock had been sawed into four pieces propped on their sides to form walls and topped by branches and moss. Probably little defence against a Northern Ontario winter, but a paradise i
f you were down and out.

  She tugged at the slab of plywood that served as a door, and it broke off its hinges. Dank, mouldy air rushed out. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out a sleeping bag neatly stretched out on a pad of straw and two wooden planks propped on cinder blocks, which served as shelves for dishes, clothing, and dozens of books. The earthen floor was swept and the clothes folded. This hermit had obviously settled in for the long haul.

  Bending to clear the low ceiling, she crossed the room to study the books. She’d always thought you could tell a lot about a person from their books. In keeping with his armchair rebel’s identity, Dean had devoured conspiracy thrillers and protest literature, all of which solidified his choice not to follow Uncle Sam into an immoral war.

  The hermit’s paperbacks reflected a soul far more preoccupied with the brutal side of life. In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, Confessions of Son of Sam, Hunting Humans... All tales of lives gone horribly wrong and violence unleashed.

  Disquiet piqued her. What kind of man was this beneath his Spartan precision? What would he do if he found her in here? She scrambled back outside, her gaze raking the surroundings. The tall weeds in one corner caught her eye, and she stared in disbelief, followed by anger. Christ, the guy’s been using my land for his goddamn grow-op. Some nerve!

  In disgust, she turned to leave, when in the distance Pavlov gave a sharp bark, as if he were calling for her. A moment later, he came bounding back through the trees, but her relief was short-lived when she saw he had something in his jaws. Something bleached and rotting. He dropped it at her feet and backed up, his bright eyes fixed on her expectantly. When she looked down, her stomach lurched. A long bone, picked white in places. Flies covered the bits of flesh still clinging to the ends. A deer, she thought, but dead at least a week and no doubt the source of the stink.

  “Thanks a lot, Pav,” she muttered, sidestepping the gruesome gift and reaching to snap on the dog’s leash. But Pavlov danced away, barking as he tried to lure her towards the woods.

  “Come here, you idiot,” she snapped. “No more smelly bodies.”

  The dog circled the bone, more agitated than she’d ever seen him. Reluctantly, she bent down to peer at the bone.

  “What is it, Pav? What did you find?”

  The bone was about eighteen inches long. One end bore the unmistakable marks of teeth, as if it had been gnawed from the carcass. The other end had two smaller bones, not a hoof as she’d expected, but something more delicate. Something almost...

  She felt a rush of horror. Glanced around the campsite, which showed signs of recent neglect. Was it possible the hermit was dead? She backed away, trying to gather her sickened thoughts. Should she call the police? Raise the alarm over a single bone and, if she was wrong, expose this harmless recluse to the heavy hand of the law?

  Swallowing her revulsion, she turned to Pavlov and gestured towards the woods. “Okay, go find. Show me where this came from.”

  The border collie set off at a trot down a well-worn footpath leading deeper into the woods. She struggled to keep pace. As the stench grew stronger, her resolve faltered and she cursed her idiocy for not calling the police.

  Squinting through the sweat in her eyes, she barely noticed Pavlov until she nearly fell over him. He was standing over a large, amorphous mass at the base of the tree. Flies and maggots covered nearly every inch of visible surface, but even so, one glance was enough.

  “Be awhile before the coroner and the crime scene boys get out here, ma’am,” said Constable Leblanc of the Ontario Provincial Police. “My partner will drive you back home, so you can get cleaned up.”

  Mila nodded gratefully. She’d been trying to answer his questions intelligently, but suspected she looked as sickly green as she felt. She’d been forced to lead the police back to the grisly scene, and she was covered in dirt, insect bites and the stench of death.

  “Any idea who he is?” she asked.

  “Never seen his camp before, but I heard it was back in here someplace.”

  “Who?”

  “Dan. That’s the only name he ever gave when he came to town. Which wasn’t often, mind you. Kept to himself, obviously had some kind of survival training. Dead-eyed Dan, people called him.”

  Dan, Dean... She felt a twinge of worry. “How long has he been around?”

  “Since I can remember. I was raised in Iroquois Falls, and the rumours about Dead-eyed Dan eating kids were around when I was knee-high.”

  Which wasn’t all that long ago, Mila thought. He’d tilted his peeked cap low over his brow to add menace, but the baby blue of his eyes ruined the effect.

  “Eating kids?” she echoed dubiously.

  He chuckled. “Dan was harmless. Had this thing about non-violence, wouldn’t kill so much as a mouse if he was starving to death. But he had this mass of shaggy hair and these coal black eyes that sent a chill right through you.”

  Mila thought about Dean’s dark eyes and shaggy hair, about his abhorrence of killing. Then about the violent books in the dead man’s library. Something didn’t fit. “Where did he come from?”

  “Never knew. He just shows up in Iroquois Falls two or three times a year to buy supplies.”

  “What happens now?”

  “Depends on what the autopsy shows. Most likely it was misadventure, maybe a bear. Big problem will be locating next of kin. I don’t imagine anybody will be missing him after all these years.”

  “There’s a car back in the bush with an American licence plate.”

  The constable shrugged. “Yeah, but that could have come from anywhere. I’d say he’s been squatting on your land for over thirty years. Just your luck, I guess.”

  A fresh queasiness washed over her as she thought of the shaggy-haired, down-and-out recluse with the purple VW. Luck, or something else?

  One of the perks of working for the Immigration Department was that Mila had connections all over, and even from her cottage, she knew how to ferret out obscure information about foreign nationals in the country. A quick call to a friend in Security netted her a contact in Oklahoma State who could help her track down the licence plate.

  Roy had a deep gravel voice, as if he’d smoked three packs a day for a hundred years. “Nineteen seventy-one?” he wheezed, sounding both dubious and intrigued. “Tricky. When do you want this for?”

  Yesterday, she thought. “No hurry. When you can get to it.”

  She supplied no explanation for the request, and he didn’t ask for any. Both were good public servants who knew the value of hiding behind ignorance. Roy took her phone number and promised to get back to her. To quell her impatience, she fed the name Dean Fellows into a variety of databases. Dean had known about their family cottage up north, for they had spent one glorious, back-to-the-earth summer there in 1970, before Nixon began napalming the hell out of villages and before body bags began arriving back in the U.S. by the planeload. Dean had felt safe at the cottage, far from the scrutiny of the law.

  Once they’d re-entered civilization, he retreated behind a wall of fear, picking fights in bars and impugning the motives of innocent passersby. And increasingly as they drove west, he coped through a haze of drugs. She suspected that, for all his lofty ideals about non-violence, he was struggling with a deep shame about abandoning the country he loved. And about his childhood friends who had gone off to war, some not to return. It was a gut-level guilt, below the reach of reason, but it wore down the edges of his soul. He saw it reflected in the eyes of strangers and even in the cheery embrace of this wide-open land. It drove him in on himself until she could stand it no more.

  He’d been such a hopeful young playwright when she’d met him at McGill. He had spectacular, long-lashed dark eyes and lithe, sensual hands that still set her body on fire when she thought of him. When no one wanted his plays, when critics scoffed at their adolescent tone, she watched the hope slowly fade from his eyes and the doubts crowd in. Had the past thirty-five years destroyed him entirely?

&nbs
p; The first database she searched was Immigration, which had no record of a Dean Fellows applying for status of any kind. Next she tried the provincial departments of transportation and finally a simple Google search. Nothing. As if he’d fallen into a black hole.

  Discouraged, she logged off and headed outside, just as a white Malibu pulled into the cottage drive. A burly man with grizzled hair and florid cheeks emerged, waving a police badge. “Mrs. Hendricks? Detective Watts of the Ontario Provincial Police. I have a few questions.”

  A detective. Had something suspicious come out of the autopsy? She gestured him inside briskly. “Have you identified the man yet?”

  She held her breath, but instead of answering, the detective poised his pen over his notebook. “Who else besides you comes up to this property?”

  “All of us occasionally. My three children, my two brothers and their families. But so far this season only me.”

  “Mr. Hendricks?”

  She tensed. “Divorced. Long ago.”

  He raised his eyes from his notebook to study her. Purple bags under his eyes made him look like a prize fighter with too many bouts under his belt. “When was the last time you visited that section of your property?”

  “Years, actually. I don’t usually go back there because it’s too buggy.”

  He kept his voice deadpan. “And why did you do so this time?”

  You should know damn well why, she thought, because Constable Leblanc took a detailed statement. But she suppressed her impatience and repeated her runaway dog story. Watts didn’t take a note.

  “Does anyone besides your family use that road? As a right of way, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen anyone in the vicinity in the past month or so? Anyone come to call, anything happen out of the ordinary?”