Masking for Trouble

by A J Maybe

  And the killer had put the mask on, and backwards of all things. Why? To send some kind of message?

  “We do funny things for our reputations, too,” I said.

  “Do we?”

  I certainly had, anyway. Why had I really been so addicted to online auctions? Did I really believe I’d find a genuine magical artifact? And what would that bring me? Maybe fame, attention, glory, or even riches… but it was more likely that I’d just get more derision and ridicule.

  Did you hear? Piper Mars thinks she’s got an enchanted amulet. Such a shame. She was pretty smart in high school, and now she’s right off the deep end.

  I stifled the urge to argue with the voices in my head. Now that I’d found magic, I knew it was nothing to be flaunted. Imagine if the enchantment/charm combo Sherry used at the OPP station fell into the wrong hands!

  The desire to show off was still strong, of course. I had to admit that trying to look fancy probably stopped me from going back to college. Two years of working at Seshman’s should’ve been enough to save the tuition, but I spent paychecks on nicer and nicer clothes, collector edition Chuck Taylors, started driving a car instead of riding my bike to work. Those things never made me feel like a success, but I thought they at least made it look like I was becoming a real adult.

  Plus, I was afraid to go back and fail. At least at Seshman’s I could just dog-paddle along, not really gaining but not sinking either.

  “Sherry, I just can’t shake the feeling that Rex’s murder had something to do with reputation.”

  “Sure,” she agreed. “Rex had an awful reputation. Or, I guess, a great reputation, as far as world-class creeps go. Coulda been King of the Creeps, that guy.”

  “No, not Rex’s reputation. What if it was about someone else’s reputation?”

  “You’re thinking that killing Rex protected the killer’s reputation somehow?”

  “Maybe. But I’m thinking... what about legacy? Barry’s legacy. The Bales name. Not protecting it, but what about avenging a tarnished legacy?”

  The idea felt right to me.

  Sherry opened the carton of eggs. “Barry’s reputation is fine. All anyone talked about at his funeral was how good a man he was. Imagine leaving nearly an estate like that to the humane society! He was practically a saint.”

  That’s what Sherry thought, but I knew Ty wasn’t focused on Barry’s final act of charity. He was haunted by the last period of Barry’s life, and by what he thought of as a serious downgrade of prestige.

  That thought brought me to the big question: Did Ty care enough about his father’s honour to murder his brother for ruining it?

  17

  The Park (Wednesday)

  That’s what I thought all night: It’s got to be Ty. Sherry and I curled into opposite corners of the couch with a heap of warm, gooey cookies in front of us, but I barely even noticed the videos casting to television.

  Sure, Ty had an alibi for my midnight visit, but maybe it wasn’t airtight. Kasper and Sherry struck me as heavy sleepers. Ty might’ve slipped out, driven over to deliver a message to me, and slipped back in. And he was in the Dungeon while Sherry and I talked over plans for my little vigilante investigation — he could’ve heard through the vent.

  Those were all just details. The important thing was that he had a real motive for the murder. Munching into my eighth cookie (but who’s counting?), I shuddered. Imagine killing your own brother.

  But I could understand it, too. I was 14 when my father disappeared. It was devastating, but the worst thing was the legacy left behind: high schoolers are ruthless. I never resorted to murder to protect my family’s honour, but maybe Ty had.

  “Hey Sherry, you didn’t charm these cookies, eh?” I was eyeing up my ninth.

  She shrugged. Her typical response, it seemed. “Anything can be magical, if you let it.”

  How vague. I decided to stick with eight cookies, just in case.

  Sherry hit the hay around midnight, and I lay down in the spare room for a few hours with dim lamplight keeping my lingering fear away. Sleepless, I flipped open my laptop and read Brennan’s reply. It was long and concerned and insisted that I call right away. I did the time zone math and concluded that he’d be sleeping: it was 11 p.m. on the West coast and Brennan was an early to bed, early to rise kind of guy.

  Lying in bed, counting knots in the ceiling’s pine planking, a knot of my own curled in my stomach. It might’ve been all that cookie dough, consolidating into one big lump, but I knew better. It was a realization about to force its way to my brain, or a decision that, on a subconscious level, I’d already made.

  I tried to press it down, but the thought bubbled to the surface of my mind anyway: I have to bring those Seshman’s bottles to the OPP.

  No, what I really should do is call them, have them come get it. That way I wouldn’t be interfering with evidence. And they might not bother arresting me for the fiasco with Leo. By calling them, I’d be letting the professionals do their job.

  Even though they’d have questions.

  “Do you have any enemies?” A few.

  “Do you recognize the handwriting?” No.

  “What does “stop looking” mean?”

  And then I’d tell them about my planned investigation, and assure them that I’d shelved that silly idea.

  “Why would someone leave this message on bottle labels? What’s this number, what’s this date?”

  And then I’d have to come clean about the forklift accident, and my auction addiction would come tumbling out, and they’d think I was a hoarder too.

  Some people would celebrate a new life, a new beginning, but not me. That would mean announcing the problem, and that wasn’t my style. I’d made no farewell posts on social media, made no appointments for commemorative tattoo work. I kept it all to myself, kept up the image of perfection, all this time, but now I’d have to go confess.

  It’ll be fine. The police couldn’t care less about my addiction and recovery story. I mean, they might care about the forklift thing but I was sick of hiding it. There was a murderer to bring to justice, after all.

  I don’t know if I actually fell asleep, but I was definitely the first out of bed. It was still dark out. My stomach still squirmed like a snake in a sack, but I had my plan. I’d go to the camp and call from there, to keep Kasper and Sherry out of it. I’d borrow Leo for protection. She’d be good company too, while I waited for the police to arrive.

  I could clean the place while we waited. It’d be Wednesday, once the sun came up, so I had to have the place buttoned up and ready for the renters in four days. Didn’t hurt to start early.

  I left a thank you note on the dining room table:

  Sorry I’m not here to burn breakfast for you. Laptop’s dead. Going to camp for the cord. Don’t worry: brought Leo for protection. Will bring her back by lunchtime. Thanks for the hangout!

  -P.

  The big dog didn’t even hesitate to follow me to the car, but gave me a bemused look when I opened the passenger door for her. “Boof,” she said, eyeing the small space between the seat back and the dashboard.

  “Hm, good point.” I shoved some things around in the backseat and managed to cram the seat two notches rearward. “You can do it, girl!”

  Leo sniffed into the car first and then climbed in gingerly. She was more comfortable bounding into truck beds, I guessed, but I’d feel so much safer with her by my side at the camp. “Thanks, Leo. Honestly, I’ve always been more of a cat person, but you’re really doing me a solid here. I’ll owe you a beef femur, okay?”

  On the old highway, a twinge in my brain told me to take a left hand turn into ‘downtown’ Carterton Cove. I should at least SEE the park where it went down, the twinge said. I squinted in distrust. Was this the voice of the inner Addict Monster, taking any excuse to delay my confession?

  That part of me still insisted I could do everything myself, and, in doing so, keep my past struggles secret. I knew better than to listen to tha
t voice, but this didn’t feel like the Addict Monster. Sherry had said that diving into witchery was supposed to awaken my intuition, sure, but how could I know if this was the Intuit’s voice or the Monster’s?

  I resisted the twitch in my fingers, telling me to click on the turn signal, but then I found myself careening around the corner and trying to catch the debris tumbling from the back seat into the front.

  “Sorry Leo,” I said. She boofed in annoyance and pawed at a pack of English muffins that had bounced out of a box marked ‘pantry’.

  I found the park without problem. The Cove’s downtown core really only extended to the back fences of the Main St. businesses. After that, the bush took over almost immediately. The mixed boreal forest hid the park like a jewel of mowed grass and play sand. It couldn’t have been more than three or four hundred metres from Soggy Notions, where Rex’s last argument took place.

  There was no crime scene tape to be seen. Two swing sets, one small and one large, backed against the western treeline. A pair of spaceship-shaped monkey-bar sets aimed at each other in the back corner. Rolling down my window to see better in the waxing light, I picked out the torn-up grass where the wrestlers must’ve been training before Rex’s murder closed the park to the public.

  An ornamental garden defined the eastern edge of the park, and a stone woman endlessly poured a jug into a small wishing well. My heart skipped a beat as a picture formed in my mind. I remembered Sherry, quoting the coroner’s report: “victim aspirated a quantity of fine particulate and water’, and ‘victim received a single, significant blow’.

  The mental picture was of Rex, unconscious from the blow, face-down in the pond.

  “Rex didn’t just choke,” I told Leo. “That’s where he drowned.”

  Then, from the treeline not 10 meters from my door, a broad figure emerged. He fumbled to do up his pants while gripping a big brown bottle by the neck.

  Cheese and rice. It was Ty, and drunk as a skunk.

  “Ey!” he called, noticing my car. “They’re gonna rename this place Bales Park. You know that?”

  I froze. I probably should’ve raised my window and sped off, but I didn’t. The urge to be polite is stupidly strong, so instead of running from a killer, I faked a smile. “What a lovely tribute,” I said.

  “But which Bales, you know? Like, Rex, because he died here? Or my dad, you know, Barry Bales, Mr. Big Time, Mr. Put-The-Cove-On-The-Map?”

  I put a hand on Leo, to calm her, except she seemed perfectly happy to see Ty. Whatever happened to a canine intuition for bad guys? Some protector she was. Still, stroking the thick black fur gave me a small sense of security.

  Ty leaned on one of the ornamental pillars marking the closest edge of the park, but missed on his first two attempts. It occurred to me that Ty wasn’t an experienced drinker. Overdoing it at Soggy’s on Sunday, then at Kasper’s, and now stumbling around as the sun came up? All rookie stuff, like a high school kid at a party.

  Finally settling on an awkward leaning pose, he said, “You know what though, hon’stly?” His voice squeaked, breaking with emotion as he said it: “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  My hold on Leo’s scruff tightened involuntarily and a clump of fur came out in my hand. I yelped, but since Leo didn’t flinch I figured she must be shedding.

  But forget that, what about Ty? Did he really just say that? Is he about to confess?

  From what I’d seen, killers only confess their crime to people they’re about to kill.

  I’m staring straight into the eyes of the murderer, aren’t I? Oh sweet cheese’us.

  His eyes swam with tears and, overwhelmed with emotion, they searched left and right like a drowning man looking for land.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, “I haven’t exactly found a line of people moaning ‘what a shame’ about your brother’s death.”

  I took my hand off the dog and shifted into drive.

  “Rex?” Ty barked. “No, not Rex. I mean… I mean my dad. It’s better that he’s gone.”

  I kept the brake pedal pushed to the floor. What?!

  “He was back on those rotten pills, ya know? Some booze too,” he added, casting a guilty look to the bottle in his right hand, “but issa pills that always threw him off the rails. Nine years! He’d been off ‘em nine years! And then the cupcake business tanked —got tanked, I should say— suddenly his back starts to flare up again, and his knees, and the headaches come back.

  “Migraines, he said. He’d just sit in the basement all day. All that land, all that house, and he’d sit in the dark, in the basement, moaning with a towel over his head. So I took him. We got him back on the painkillers. Legal ones, light dosage, from a doctor!

  “But that’s how it starts, right? In two weeks he was on the hard stuff, and off the rails. My fault, at least a li’l bit. I took him to the doctor, vouched for him. It was just a matter of time before he screwed up. Did something really crazy, and wrecked his legacy. He didn’t care about the money, you know, which is easy when you have lots but he didn’t. He cared about what he left behind. He was always goin’ on about ‘the stories people will tell’...

  “But I’d seen him slide before, half a dozen times. Stronger and stronger pills, and eventually the doctors cut him off, and then... then you end up doing something stupid trying to get the next dose.

  “Falling down those stairs? Was a’best thing that could’ve happened, hon’stly.”

  Ty’s broad chest shook with sobs and he bent his head toward the bottle in his hand. An anguished cry wracked his body and he stepped clumsily forward and tripped over nothing. He spun as he fell but instead of bracing his hands for the fall, he reared back his right hand and launched the bottle.

  I could envision its trajectory better than Ty could, drunk and in mid-fall. I swore and stomped on the gas but the glass still thwacked the rear of my car. It bounced off the corner panel and shattered on the pavement as I sped away.

  I hyperventilated and tried to focus on the road. Leo whined sympathetically. I felt sympathy too, for Ty, but what could I do? I had to think of my own safety first, right? I was overwhelmed, so my mind basically shut down. I didn’t know if I still thought Ty was the killer, but I knew it wasn’t smart to stick around a brawny, unpredictable drunk guy.

  I successfully navigated two of the road’s turns, but then I approached a hard left with too much speed. To avoid skidding out, I bailed on the turn halfway through it, stomping on the brake and letting the wheel straighten itself. The tires chirped but the car came to the far shoulder of the road and stopped before the trees. I shot a hand out to steady the big dog, but that took away my ability to steady myself, and I bounced my lip off the steering wheel.

  That’s a bleeder, I thought. I didn’t even remember taking my seatbelt off, but I must have when I pulled up beside the park.

  “Jeeze, sorry Leo,” I said between my still-panting breaths, and then I pulled my hand back from bracing her chest. A giant clump of fur basically enveloped my forearm.

  “Shangri la!” I exclaimed. I gaped at the dog. She was half nude! Softball-sized poofs of fur piled up around her, clinging to my upholstery. I pulled to the correct side of the road immediately, watching Leo closely. Her breath seemed a little quick, but she wasn’t panting or shaking.

  The dog’s stomach convulsed and her head swung back and forth, like she was looking for a place to throw up. “Oh no, it’s the donuts!”

  I jumped out of the car and ran around to let her out, realizing too late that I could’ve just reached under Leo’s chin and pushed open the door from the inside. Bad move, Piper. I was sure I’d be opening the door to find stinking vomit splashed all around the inside of my car.

  I held my breath and prepared for the worst as I yanked open the door.

  Leo didn’t get out.

  In fact, Leo didn’t appear to be there at all. Instead, among a foot-deep pile of black fur, sat a somewhat oversized but otherwise picture-perfect… Golden Retriever.

  “U
hhh… Leo?”

  The dog smiled at me, allowing its tongue to loll freely between grinning black lips.

  I blinked about fifty times in one second. I steadied myself with a hand on the roof, and reached out with shaking fingers to touch this hallucination. “You’re real enough…” I said. I found her collar. It was still pink leather with pointy studs, but fit sloppily now. The camo tag still read “LEO” in that military stencil font. Her tongue still had that curious constellation of black dots.

  “Well… glad you liked my donuts, girl.”

  18

  Crossed Off

  It was crazy, of course, that Leo had traded her bear-like appearance for the unassuming, dopey grin of a Golden Retriever, but I’d seen plenty of crazy things lately. A sense of power and pride welled up inside me, catching like a flame and growing as I thought about it: I MADE those donuts! And those donuts made a dog!

  Changed one, anyway.

  Forget about a glowing headlamp for my bike, this was the full transformation of a living being! Maybe I was some sort of prodigy, even if my donuts weren’t edible by human standards. I had an image of myself in billowing robes, surrounded by the various forest animals and household pets which I commanded to do my bidding. In the image, my arms were outstretched and birds of prey perched there, at the ready.

  It wasn’t until I pulled into the camp driveway that I realized I would’ve been better off with Leo, the big scary protector, instead of Golden Leo. In her new form, the biggest threats posed by the dog were:

  1) Death by a thousand licks, or

  2) Shedding all over your favourite little black dress.

  Still, I felt better with her at my side as I knocked at the door. It was silly to know, but who knows? If the killer had come to check up on me, maybe they’d answer it. I heard nothing, and Leo seemed at ease, so I flung the door open like a police officer conducting a raid on some cop show. Golden Leo sauntered in, tail softly wagging.