Smoke

by Catherine McKenzie

  But that was probably because there were so many towns nestled into Nelson, like those Russian dolls that lived one inside the other. On the outside were the “real” Nelsoners, who could trace their families back two generations at least. Then came the rich, both old money and new—though that created divides too. And then the Sportiva Crowd, as her friend Kate called them—young men and women who were attracted to the place because of the great outdoors, and who all looked like they’d stepped out of some Nike+ ad—tall, taut, and clear-eyed.

  There was a middle class too of course; she and Peter were part of it. But it always felt to Mindy like they were rubbing up against something, as if the two halves of their doll hadn’t been machined properly and could never quite match up.

  “Sit two minutes!” Lindsay screamed.

  She didn’t seem to be sweating, Mindy noticed, which really wasn’t fair.

  “Did you read about that guy who lost his house in the fire?” Kate Bourne asked Mindy, talking out of the side of her mouth so Lindsay wouldn’t see.

  Talking was strictly forbidden in class, and even Kate was a little scared of Lindsay, who’d actually tossed a few offenders from the class permanently a few weeks back.

  “I was just thinking about that,” Mindy panted back as she pushed the strands of dirty-blonde hair that had escaped her ponytail away from her eyes.

  She had been coming to this class for a year now, when Kate first invited her, but it never seemed to get any easier. Nor had she experienced the benefits Kate had promised (toned thighs, a butt that didn’t sag so much, losing the fifteen pounds she never lost after Angus, and the other ten she never lost after Carrie). But Mindy knew better than to complain about that to Kate. “If you really worked at it, you’d see the benefits,” she’d say, and Mindy would feel worse about herself than she already did.

  “It’s so sad,” Kate said, pedaling smoothly to the beat of the salsa music Lindsay played to motivate them.

  Kate didn’t seem to be sweating much either, Mindy noted. But, then again, Kate was one of those women who always seemed to look put together, no matter what the circumstances.

  “It is,” Mindy said. “I was thinking—”

  “How many times do I have to say it? NO TALKING!” Lindsay’s voice sounded as if it had been amplified by a megaphone.

  Mindy looked at the ground, wondering if it was possible for her face to get any redder. Or whether there was any way she could quit spinning class without it causing a crisis with Kate. After coming to the conclusion that neither was possible, she spent the rest of the hour focusing on her pale legs as they pushed the pedals up and down.

  Her feet kept spinning, but she couldn’t get John out of her mind.

  “So what were you saying in there?” Kate asked as they peeled their wet clothes from their bodies. Kate’s black hair was pulled back in a perfect ponytail, the ends perfectly even, and the slight redness in her cheeks made her green eyes glow bright like a cat’s.

  Mindy looked away. Maybe it was because she had twenty pounds on Kate (at least), but she never felt comfortable stripping naked in front of other women. There was something about it that reminded her of the humiliation she’d endured in her high school locker room. If she was being honest, that’s how she still felt. Like her body was something that had to be hidden away, a secret she had to keep.

  “About Mr. Phillips?”

  “You mean Fire Guy?”

  Mindy bit the inside of her cheek. Kate was always doing this, classifying people by a defining characteristic. On one level, it made it easier for her to talk about people openly. (Who but Kate’s closest friends would know that Bad Hair Mom was really the mayor’s wife, who did, admittedly, have bad hair?) But Mindy couldn’t help but wonder what Kate’s name for her was, when she wasn’t around. Hole-in-the-Heart Mom, probably, though most of her would rather not know.

  “Yes,” Mindy said. “That’s his name. John Phillips. His wife died two years ago.”

  “Right. I read the article.”

  “Anyway, I was thinking, maybe we could do a fund-raiser or something? You know, like the Fall Fling, only it would be for him? So he could buy a new house?”

  And there was another thing—when Mindy was around Kate, she lost the ability to speak in declarative sentences. She was just one big question.

  Kate let her towel drop to the floor as she stepped into her barely-there underwear. Mindy could never tell whether Kate just didn’t care or was showing off her fit and tanned body.

  “Mmm. What do you think, Bit?”

  Bit—Betsy—Loman was another member of the Spinners’ Club, as Kate called them, a subset of the Coffee Boosters, the group of twenty or so women that Kate ran herd over. Mindy had known most of them for years, mainly through her kids, but had only started hanging out with them regularly about a year ago, after The Falling Out, as Kate would call it.

  “I think it’s a . . . great idea?” Bit said as she watched Kate’s face to register her reaction.

  Bit always wanted to please everyone. Even Mindy felt full of self-esteem when she was around Bit.

  Kate nodded. “In fact, we should just turn the Fall Fling into a fund-raiser for Fire Guy. It’s not like the hockey club really needs the support.”

  Bit colored and went silent.

  “Maybe we could split the money?” Mindy said, worriedly. “Didn’t we raise a hundred thousand dollars last year?”

  “Don’t be silly, Min. What’s a hundred thousand going to buy you in this town?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Private Eye

  Elizabeth

  The first time Ben brought me to Nelson, I couldn’t stop staring at the view. It was everywhere, that heart-stopping beauty of snow-covered hills and bluebird skies. Even though it was winter, and terribly cold, I felt the damp bone chill of my native Ottawa lift. This is what winter is supposed to be like, I remember thinking. This is a place where I could live.

  And that’s exactly what Ben asked me to do four days later, after we’d skinned our way up one of the smaller peaks and were resting on a sunny rock before taking our powder run down. Live with him. In this town. Be his forever.

  It had, up to that point, been a rocky four days. Though I knew Ben came from money, and I’d met his parents in other settings, it was an adjustment seeing that money up close.

  Being inside the money.

  It wasn’t just his parents’ Ridiculously Large House. Or the fact that his sister, Ashley, actually wore pink Polo shirts and kneesocks, like something out of The Official Preppy Handbook, which had been a joke in my high school, something to consult at Halloween. I hadn’t grown up in a hovel, and I knew which fork to use with which course, but everything around me seemed so antiseptic. Every corner tucked, every meal restaurant quality and prepared by the staff—the staff! If Downton Abbey had existed then, I would’ve felt like I was caught in one of its episodes, that I was the crass Canadian visiting my very proper relatives, and it was only a matter of time before I—gasp!—served myself from the wrong side of the platter.

  The only place that felt anything like home was Ben’s room. It had been professionally decorated, sure, but Ben had covered over the handprinted wallpaper with posters of his favorite book and album covers: Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Dark Side of the Moon, The Outsiders. The posters themselves were kind of magical—they looked more like paintings—and when I got up close to them, I realized that’s exactly what they were.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked.

  “Oh, I, um . . . I did those.”

  “You paint?”

  Ben ducked his head, looking for something in one of his desk drawers.

  “I used to.”

  “Why’d you give it up?”

  “Because I’m not any good.”

  “Have you looked at these? They’re perfect.”

  He turned toward me with something hidden behind his back.

  “I can copy. If you know of any art-theft rings that
need a good forger, I’m your man.”

  “But surely if you can do this, you can paint other things?”

  “If I’m not working from someone else’s piece, I might as well be drawing stick figures.”

  “That’s . . .”

  “Pathetic?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m over it. Besides, Grace and Gordon would freak if I told them I was going the starving-artist route.”

  “Have you told them you’ve decided to go the starving-teacher’s route instead?”

  “I thought I’d leave that till the last minute.”

  “Mmm. Say, what’ve you got behind your back, there?”

  “Oh, this?” He pulled his hand out in a magician’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t move to reveal a baggie half-full of hash. “You think this stuff’s still good?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  So we went out to the back of the property and got stoned while sitting in a snowbank, then giggled our way through another proper dinner like teenagers. Three days later, when we were resting on that mountaintop, breathing in the thin air, our hearts racing from the altitude and effort, and Ben put his hand behind his back again, I laughed.

  “Is this really the place?”

  “I thought it might be the perfect place, actually.”

  I was about to protest, to say that we still had a tricky descent to do, and there was the risk of avalanche—

  Then Ben was on one knee in the snow, and the hand behind his back held a small velvet box. He told me that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to offer me all that his parents had, but he loved me with his whole heart.

  “Will you be my wife?” he asked.

  And every part of me shouted yes.

  Between my fire-site diversion and my reunion with Kara, I end up getting to the office way late, which is sure to piss off my boss, Rich Parker, the town’s prosecuting attorney. He was elected to the position three years ago, after serving as deputy to the previous prosecutor for most of his career. Rich’s latest deputy—a kid fresh out of law school who’d read To Kill a Mockingbird one too many times—quit a few weeks ago, so it’s just me and Rich and Rich’s assistant, Judy, in the office.

  We work in a small building across the town square from the courthouse. I’m Rich’s private investigator. I’d taken an investigator course years ago as part of my arson training, and when I quit fighting fires, it seemed like a natural fit, though I didn’t have any real idea what the job would entail. I guess I had vague notions of unraveling mysteries—corporate frauds or missing-persons cases, with maybe a murder thrown in there every once in a while to keep things interesting. Not that there’d been a murder in Nelson in twenty-five years, which was obviously a good thing.

  “We mostly get domestics here,” Rich had said, propping his cowboy boots up on his desk, his chair at a precarious angle. Those boots were his only concession to his good-ol’-boy upbringing. From the knees up, he cultivated a bigger-city look: pinstriped three-piece suits, mostly, whatever the weather, with conservative ties knotted with a full Windsor.

  “Domestics?” I’d said, nervously wondering if the summer dress I’d chosen for the interview was a misstep. My usual work clothes were fire retardant. The dress was the closest thing I had to office attire.

  He looked at me like he was pretty sure I was one of the stupider people he’d met. He had a few wisps of gray hair he combed across his head; the rest of it was a close-cut monk’s cowl. His eyes were an indiscriminate brown.

  “Domestic violence. You did say you were trained, yes?”

  “Yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking. Sorry.”

  He rested his head back on his chair like he wished he had a ten-gallon hat to tip back.

  “Domestics, drunks, a couple meth labs. That’s the usual.”

  “And what would I be doing?”

  “Evidence gathering, mostly.”

  “Isn’t that the police’s job?”

  “You’d think. But no. There are fifteen guys in the whole department, and only one of them is detective grade besides the chief, and he’s too busy running the place. The deputies do the basic legwork, but if we end up taking something to trial, we need more than they can provide.” He swung his legs forward and leaned toward me. “I like to win. Do you like to win, Elizabeth?”

  “Of course. Who doesn’t like to win?”

  He took me on, mostly, I think, because there weren’t any other candidates. The work was usually pretty basic: skip-traces and property searches and canvassing witnesses for the way-too-many “domestics” that happened in this town, especially on Friday nights. There had been one murder since I’d arrived—I couldn’t help wondering whether my morbid assumption about the job was to blame—but the guy confessed tearfully within minutes of being picked up.

  Another domestic, gone terribly wrong.

  I ended up liking the routine more than I thought I would. It wasn’t just an office job. But it could be damn depressing too, especially when the women wouldn’t press charges, despite the cuts and bruises evident on their faces. Two years in, I was still trying to decide if it was going to be a long-term gig, but given the other turmoil in my life, I’d put off thinking about that for the time being.

  Thankfully, Rich isn’t in when I get there. Maybe he’s late getting back from his Labor Day weekend fishing trip with his buddies. He was planning on going to Nelson Lake, where he maintains a rustic cabin I’m always slightly fearful he’ll invite me to.

  I ask Judy where he is. There’s a fifty-fifty chance she’ll tell him I was late out of boredom. I know from past experience that my dustups with Rich are one of the things that “keep it interesting ’round here,” according to her.

  Me, not so much.

  “He’s at court,” Judy says between cracks of gum. She’s fifty, and it’s a habit she should have given up long ago, like the cigarettes that have stained her fingers yellow, but I guess it’s really none of my business. “They’re arraigning the robber.”

  “Oh, right.”

  The town’s first bank robbery in years was all anyone was talking about last week. The man had been caught on Friday, three counties over, and hauled back to town. I wonder if he’s willing to confess after spending a weekend in the town jail, which is 99 percent drunk tank, especially on a long weekend.

  “Where you been?” Judy asks. I notice she’s switched to her fall look, an ill-fitting suit and a mock turtleneck in a berry color. Her steel-gray hair is in an elaborate topknot. “You need to dress for where you want to be in life,” she often says. “An extra in a movie?” I was once unwise enough to ask.

  “Thought I’d take a look at the fire,” I say.

  “That’s not likely to be our jurisdiction.”

  “I know some of the people working it.”

  She shrugs and turns back to the game of Scrabble she’s playing online. Her score is 455 to her opponent’s 212. She’s kicked my ass every time I’ve played her, so much so that she won’t play me anymore. “Too boring,” is her assessment, and I can’t help but agree.

  I grab a cup of coffee from the teensy kitchen, and go to the nook I call my office. It’s really just a large broom closet that was cleared out when I arrived. The only other real office is reserved for the deputy, and Rich refused to let me move in there, even temporarily. It might give a candidate the “wrong impression,” apparently, to know that he’d be working in a space that used to be occupied by the likes of me.

  The floor and shelves are littered with case files and banker’s boxes, mostly to do with closed cases. We don’t have a budget for filing cabinets. I’ve almost spent my own money to buy a couple, but I make so little that Ben talked me out of it. I did splurge and buy a small metal plaque for my door, so my shiny name, ELIZABETH MARTIN, greets me like a brass band each morning.

  I open my e-mail to check for new fire advisories and find a message from Ben.

  Thanks for leaving a n
ote, it says.

  Two years ago, I’d know exactly how to take this e-mail, and the note I’d left would have said something funny, maybe something suggestive. Terrible stick-figure drawings of what I’d do to him in bed later had been a staple between us, for instance.

  And back then, the e-mail reply from Ben might have contained a further suggestion. Or a link to a related video. Fun. Lighthearted. An example of the reason he was still the person I most wanted to talk to in a room full of others.

  But now, now, I read his words, and I don’t know what to think. My note was neutral. Couldn’t sleep, off to work. This e-mail might be too. Or it might be veiled sarcasm, simmering anger, a passive-aggressive fuck you. We are both so full of sarcasm and anger and aggression these days, always so ready to take anything that could be read two ways in the worst direction. Just reading this e-mail makes me feel drained, like I’m a tubful of stale water whose stopper’s been pulled.

  Sorry, I write back eventually, my go-to response, one that should never give offense but still manages to. Sorry. An apology, a state, an expression of sympathy. I’m all of these things and none of them. And if I keep thinking this way, Judy will be in here cracking her gum at me while I cry into my desk’s enameled surface.

  Instead, I check the rest of my e-mail (no new fire advisories) and read the town newspaper (big spread on the fire filled with pathos, which is the paper’s bread and butter). Then I spend an hour poking around the online property register, which, as a killer of feelings, is about as good as you can get without a prescription.

  I’m looking at the property register because Rich has this “feeling” someone’s manipulating the real estate tax system by putting false property values into the deeds of sale. He gets these feelings every couple of weeks, mostly when he’s worried about his poll numbers. He’s up for reelection next year, and because the conviction rate hasn’t gone up under his watch (to be fair to him, the rate was already crazy high, so going down a percentage point would be a disappointment), he needs a “major takedown” to keep his seat. Of course his “poll numbers” are just the scuttlebutt he hears at the local coffee shop, and there isn’t anyone running against him, but “constant vigilance” is apparently needed.