Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  Next weekend would be soon enough to visit Fort Edmonton Park, and if I couldn’t coax Steve into coming along, I could always catch a bus at the South Campus LRT Station and walk in to the park from the bus stop on Fox Drive. Apparently, there was a shuttle that operated, but only during the peak summer tourist hours. As they were now focused on school groups who arrived in their own buses, solitary carless visitors had to leg it in along the river valley path running under the busy Quesnell Bridge, each step taking them further and further away from the twenty-first century and back into the early days of Edmonton, first as a trading post, then a settlement, and eventually a city.

  I hauled my purchases, including a new mop and doormat, out of the hatchback, unpacked a dozen more bags than I could have ever carried home on foot from the local Safeway, and filled up my depleted cupboards and rather empty fridge. I still had some time before I had to take the car back, so I called Denise to see if she had time for a get-together.

  “I am in the midst of marking research papers, and have torn out all my hair. Yes, please, rescue me!” was her response on the phone. I promised to be over within twenty minutes, and grabbed the paperwork for the car rental along with my satchel and keys. Denise and I could have high tea or an early supper or whatever you called eating when it occurred between lunch and dinner, and I could take the car back on the way home.

  Denise, my best friend since grad school days, had been moving up the tenure-track mountain and was now officially an associate professor. In another year, Routledge was going to be publishing her book on father-daughter relationships in Shakespeare, and my guess was she was going to be bumped up to full professor status. As far as I could tell, they had better up the ante pretty quickly or they might lose her entirely. In the last while, Denise had been having a long-distance relationship with a fellow Shakespeare scholar at Vanderbilt University. There were probably a lot of nice colleges a whole lot closer to Nashville who would jump at hiring a well-respected, published scholar like Denise.

  Maybe it was just that whole prophet-not-being-recognized-in-their-own-home-town sort of thing. Denise was unusual in that she had been hired straight from the moment she finished her PhD. Most departments tended to hire from someone else’s student pool, in order to maintain some sort of cross-pollination. Or perhaps there was a quota on just how many full professorships a department could engage. Whatever the case, Denise was to my mind the epitome of what a university professor should be—dedicated, curious, and engaged, and most of all, amazingly classy.

  As if to prove my point, she walked out of the tidy house she had purchased in Parkallen, dressed in a grey leather jacket over dark jeans and a green turtleneck. Her black leather gloves matched her boots, and her tam and matching scarf held black, grey, and green lines in the wool, tying the whole ensemble together. She had likely just grabbed it out of the closet as she saw me drive up, but I would have had to plan that look for half an hour.

  “Ooh, isn’t this fun! Randy Craig at the wheel. How have you enjoyed having a car this week?”

  “It’s been amazing. This is an entirely different town, depending on how you get around in it.”

  “Isn’t that the truth? I am constantly amazed at the various circles alive within this place that I am totally unconnected to. A student will make some reference, or I’ll read something on the news, and whole vistas will open up. For instance, did you know that raves were still happening here?”

  “Denise, I had no idea raves ever happened here. In fact, I only figured out what raves were about a year ago.”

  “See! You are proving my thesis over again.”

  We drove to the gallery district on the north side of the river, over by 124th Street, at the end of Jasper Avenue. For someone almost preternaturally slender, Denise had an extraordinarily sweet tooth and was opting for tea and pastries at the Duchess Bake Shop. As far as I am concerned, all bakeries should have a restaurant component to them, because sitting in the midst of all that yeasty, sweet deliciousness was the metaphorical icing on the cake. The real icing wasn’t bad either.

  Denise ordered a London Fog, pea soup, and a brioche. I opted for the beef and barley soup, but went along with her choice of drink and pastry. We sat ourselves close to the wall. Bright and airy, the Duchess had large windows facing the street that made you feel as if you were part of the display behind glass cases. Passersby on their way to a matinee at the Roxy Theatre looked in, very likely salivating at the thought of trading places with us.

  “So how goes the battle of the website?” Denise asked, daintily wiping flakes of pastry from her lips with her napkin. It was as if she had tacitly determined to resist talking about the murder, for which I silently thanked her. “Is it easier or harder to focus on researching one specific thing, rather than all those singers and recordings?” She was referring to the website writing I had done for folkwaysAlive! at the Centre for Ethnomusicology.

  “In a way, it is easier. There is more of a structure to hang things on, with the chronological history of the family, then the fraternity, and finally the push to make it a historic site. But, you know, it’s not that easy to humanize it, even with all the people involved, and that’s what really needs to happen. There have been books about Alexander Rutherford, and the centennial book about the House itself covers a lot of interviews with people who had some connection or other to the house or the Rutherford family. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel with the stuff people will find on the website.”

  “Do you envision the people coming to the website as the same people who will have read the book? Or is the focus to attract a different set of people, who might not have toured the House or read the book beforehand?”

  “There’s the million-dollar question for sure. My theory is that they overlap in a way that makes me worry about overkill of some material. Some of the folks on the board would probably like to see everything replicated online. And I am pretty certain the interpreters would like the website to just offer the hours of operation, so that they can work their own personal magic on visitors to the House, without having to deal with people who already know a little ‘something something’ before they get up the stairs.”

  Denise wrapped her fingers around her tea mug. “Well, according to reading I’ve been doing lately on advertising and promotion, the best way to pull someone into caring about anything is to personalize it. People will spend more charitable dollars saving one Rosalita with her big sad eyes than they will if you tell them that over a quarter of a million children in any particular country go to bed hungry every night. So, you need to find your personal hook, and my money says it probably isn’t Alexander Rutherford himself.”

  “I think you’re right,” I nodded. “He was by all accounts a very impressive man, but there is something dry about that focus. I have been reading Mattie Rutherford’s diaries, to find a way into her as a personality, and I’d been thinking of focusing on the kids, but of course they were both technically grown-ups by the time the Rutherfords moved into the brick house. Having read my way through the diaries, I think I may introduce the maid’s role in a bigger way.”

  “A maid! Oh, I agree, that’s your hook. Bring in the groundling interest, with the lower-caste element. You can play the whole Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey card. Have you found any former maids in the interviews?”

  I tried to see the list of interviewees in my mind, closing my eyes and running mentally down the page. Looking back at Denise, I shook my head.

  “You know, I don’t think there were any listed. And that is so odd. Why hasn’t anyone come forward and identified themselves with that role?”

  Denise shrugged. “I can’t imagine it would have been the most prestigious thing to admit, and if you were a child or grandchild of such a person, would you automatically tell the world that your grandmother had been servant, even to a family such as the Rutherfords?”

  “I don’t know. My mother has always mentioned that her great-grandfather was the head
gardener at Stoneleigh Abbey in England with great pride.”

  Denise laughed. “Well, there are two things happening there. First off, your mother is falling into the great Canadian habit of noting that any connection to the British Isles somehow carries a cachet of great import and, secondly, being head gardener of an estate would be on a par with being the matron of a large hospital or the director of a foundation these days. But to be a housemaid to a well-to-do family out in western Canada in what is just barely a province? Not so much.”

  I licked my finger to pick up stray bits of sugary pastry off my plate. “You may be right. So, if I am going to create her presence on the website, she would have to be an amalgam of what was probably several girls over the years.”

  Denise nodded. “Yes, and using her as the entry persona, you will have created someone outside the family and not totally familiar with the society in which they move. In a way, you are creating a first-time visitor to the House. Of course, your visitors would be more educated in general, and probably more sophisticated, but their lack of specific knowledge could be mirrored in the maid’s outsider status, making it easier for them to gain entrance to the story.”

  Denise looked so happy with her pronouncements that I insisted on picking up the cheque and treating her for helping me clarify the patterns in my mind. Truth was, my task wasn’t going to be quite as simple as scouring the archives for more information on the Rutherford maids. I had a feeling Mattie Rutherford didn’t want all that much found. And if I was right about the missing diary, she had someone still watching out for her interests today.

  17

  --

  I had dropped Denise off and delivered the lovely little car back to the rental shop with an hour to spare. As I walked back up to Jasper Avenue, it occurred to me my choices for getting home were threefold. I could walk five blocks east and catch a bus in front of the Edmonton Journal building, which would drop me around the corner from my apartment. I could pop right down into the Corona LRT station and get off at the University station, leaving me three blocks from home. Or more sensibly, I could walk five blocks to the High Level Bridge and trudge the half-mile edifice home, working off the Duchess pastries in the process. On the whole, the subway was the most appealing. I turned in that direction, but was happily waylaid by the sight of the burgundy window awnings of Audreys Books.

  I don’t really ever need a good excuse to visit Audreys, but this time I had one. If I was going to get a handle on the maid persona as my fictional host to the website, I needed to do some reading. Nodding at the pleasant young woman behind the till, I crossed past the banks of enticing new releases and bestsellers that crowded the front of the bookstore and headed straight for the Canadiana section next to the history shelves. I was looking for one particular book, All of Baba’s Children, by Myrna Kostash, but was open to finding anything that would illuminate for me the life of the Ukrainian immigrant to Alberta in the early twentieth century. Kostash herself was of Ukrainian descent and had made a livelihood of researching and writing her roots and those of her ancestors. Her first book was the one I was searching for. I had owned a copy once, but had a vague recollection of loaning it out to someone who had likely packed it away with his books when he took a post-doc at Memorial. Academics are like magpies, only the shiny objects they steal and hoard are usually books.

  I found it, along with a couple of other books on the subject. Flipping through a highly-illustrated, coffee-table-sized tome, I came across several of the propaganda posters the Canadian government had sent out to lure broad-shouldered farmers from the breadbasket of Europe with the promise of cheap land all their own. I wondered how many second and third sons packed up their belongings the day they saw that ad.

  Aware that I had to carry home whatever I bought, I put back the big hard-covered volumes and took Kostash’s book, an overview of historic sites of Alberta, and two other smaller paperbacks to the till. I didn’t dare wander the stacks, or I’d end up with two mystery novels, the new Trevor Cole, and box of magnetic fridge poetry. I wasn’t safe on my own in a bookstore, especially this one.

  “Did you find everything you were looking for?” the young woman asked me and I nodded. She placed my purchases in a burgundy bag and I exited toward the LRT steps across the intersection.

  My phone was ringing as I got in the door to my apartment, and I dashed for it without turning on the lights, bumping my shin on the coffee table that had not moved an inch in the seven years it had been mine.

  “Randy?”

  “Hey, Steve! I just got in.”

  “I have been trying to call you on your cellphone. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Really? I had it with me in my purse.” I rummaged into the front pocket from where I had just dug my keys. Yes, my phone was there, but as I pressed the button to unlock it, I realized that the ringer was set to silent. Sure enough, there were several missed calls, message notifications, and text messages lit up on the face of the phone.

  “Oh rats, it was on silent, I’m sorry.”

  “Randy, the point of getting you that phone was so that you could be accessible to the rest of the world, most specifically, me. It doesn’t work if you don’t have the ringer on.”

  “Do you want me to listen to all these, or are you going to tell me what you wanted? I was out with Denise and then taking the car back.” I didn’t figure I needed to admit I had also been spending money in a bookstore.

  “I just wanted to make sure where you were and to find out whether or not you had heard.”

  “Heard what?” I suddenly was tuning in to the grim tone of Steve’s voice.

  “The archivist at the Provincial Archives was found murdered this afternoon.”

  There was a fuzzy noise beside my temples, and I sat down unceremoniously on the edge of my sofa.

  “Mr. Maitland? Murdered? But I eat my lunch with him.”

  “Randy, I am so sorry.”

  “Steve, I don’t think I can talk on the phone at the moment.”

  “I am coming over, as soon as I can.”

  I don’t recall hanging up the phone, or how I made it to the washroom, but the shock of hearing that another person I’d been so recently connected to was dead acted like ipecac on the system. Luckily, there was something in my stomach to throw up, because the retching would probably have occurred anyhow. I am not certain why the verbal news of Mr. Maitland’s death would hit me harder than actually seeing Jossie dead in the tub. Did it have something to do with being alone when I got the news, instead of seeing her through all that puzzling mayhem? Or was it linked to my feelings for each person? Maybe it was Mr. Maitland’s kindnesses to me, or the vision of me leaving him on his own at the end of the day on Friday. All I knew was that the news hit me hard.

  By the time Steve arrived, I had cleaned myself up and was lying on the chesterfield with a cool washcloth over my eyes, trying to restore some equilibrium.

  “I’ll make you something to eat,” he offered, but I couldn’t bear to think of food, so instead he produced tea and toast, the international offering to weak stomachs and shock victims. We were both sitting on the sofa, my knees now bent and my toes wedged under his thigh for support and warmth and solidity.

  “He was the loveliest man, Steve. It’s like he was the most perfect person for the job, as if he was himself a cog in the machine that was the Archives. I cannot imagine him gone.”

  “All I can say at the moment is that I was relieved to hear you weren’t still working there this weekend,” Steve answered, patting my knee. “When the call came through, I was scared to death.”

  “No, I only had the car this week, so I did all my Archive stuff earlier, though I was intending to head back to discuss that missing diary with him next week.” I sat up straight, bringing my chest to my knees. “Steve, you don’t think Mr. Maitland was killed because of anything to do with the Rutherford House research, do you?”

  “It’s hard not to make that connection when Jossie Jaque w
as killed at Rutherford House itself just a week ago. Regardless of the fact that Maclean’s magazine had dubbed us the murder capital of Canada a few years ago, Edmonton is just not the hotbed of crime they wanted the country to believe. When two cases occur with no clear suspect and a possible link, we have to examine the link. And that link is.…”

  “Rutherford House,” I interjected.

  Steve looked at me, and I was about to apologize for interrupting him, but he squeezed my knee and continued.

  “What I was going to say was, that link is you.”

  18

  --

  The death of Alastair Maitland, found bludgeoned in the lobby of the Provincial Archives, was front-page news in both papers, and made it below the fold in The Globe and Mail. The general idea was that Mr. Maitland had been set upon by a petty thief; the till in the shop area had been broken into and emptied. One of the newspapers was tying it to some thefts in the Mill Woods area and linking it to the rash of robberies perpetrated by a group of teens in hoodies, who apparently had been swarming convenience stores, demanding money and goods while threatening to beat up the proprietor or wreak havoc.

  If that was the case, I was thankful that whoever it had been had not gained access to the archives themselves. It seemed that Mr. Maitland had been in the process of locking up on Friday evening and had already set the combination lock to the climate-controlled warehouse. The thieves would have had to beat that information out of him, since he was so protective of the materials. I shivered as I realized that quite possibly they had tried.