Condemned to Repeat
Page 23
We drove to the station, dropped off my phone, and then went back to Steve’s. I was too wound up to crawl into bed right away, and felt grimy besides. I opted for a shower while Steve made us hot chocolate. By the time I got out of the bathroom, skin scrubbed and pores wide open, wrapped in his green terry robe and a towel turban, the chocolate was steaming out of oversized pottery mugs at his kitchen counter bar. Steve decided my idea was a good one, so while he was off having his shower and I was waiting for the cocoa to cool a bit, I pulled his grocery list pad and pencil over to see if I could make sense of any of the recent events.
The stand-out thing to me was that if everything was tied together and connected, then whoever was responsible for Jossie’s and Mr. Maitland’s deaths and for breaking into St. Stephen’s College had to be one and the same. But it was more than that. Whoever had been in St. Stephen’s tonight knew exactly who I was. In the dark. In disguise. And to top it all off, they had my cellphone number.
I could count on one hand the number of people who had my number. Steve had it. Marni had it, because she was a texting fiend, but I had specifically asked her to list only my landline on the employee contact list. Denise had it. My folks had it written down somewhere for emergencies, but had never used it. Hell, I hardly used it. Steve had insisted I get a cellphone, and I had to admit it came in handy from time to time. I felt more secure with a means of communication always available, the way Albertans feel more secure driving throughout the year with a blanket and candles and a shovel in the trunks of their cars. To me, it was a just-in-case device. Most calls I made were still by landline.
Steve slid onto the stool next to me, wearing plaid pyjama bottoms and a grey tee-shirt, his hair spiked up and towel-tousled. He slurped his hot chocolate and pulled my half-baked list toward him.
I had written my cellphone number and my contact names.
“I don’t think your mom was hiding in St. Stephen’s College tonight, for what it’s worth.” Steve grinned at me.
“Thanks, I’m glad you find her to be of unblemished character.” I scrunched my face back at him.
“Yes, that, and the fact that she and your dad are out visiting your cousin Fay somewhere on the Miramichi.”
“Well, there is that.”
“And I cannot see Marni being responsible for this, in that chasing you away from things is against her own self-interest. Of anyone associated with Rutherford House, she is the one least likely to be creating a stink. And it’s not me, because, I would like to point out, that is my profile in the photo.”
In spite of everything, I laughed. “They teach you that sort of amazing deduction in police school?”
“Pretty good, eh?”
We deliberately aimed our conversation at lighter topics, trying to settle ourselves before heading to bed. I made a stab at determining what my schedule would be for the next day, but it was amorphous. I had to call Marni, check in with my apartment, and go to IKEA. Whether or not I stayed there, I would still need a new couch and bed.
Steve would be working, so I figured I would call Denise and see if she would come and help me decide which element of Swedish functionality I should haul home. It would be a full day, trying not to think about having been in the sightline of a killer.
I had heard it said that when you walk in the river valley, chances are you will be seen by at least one wildcat, but you will not see any. I presumed the intention was to make you feel terrified walking there, but Steve tried to make the case that it was meant to demonstrate that wildcats were typically afraid of humans rather than being predatory. I pointed out that a woman in town as well as a couple of people in Canmore had been attacked by cougars while jogging along well-marked trails. His argument was that the runners had surprised the cats by coming upon them silently, and that they should have been wearing bear bells to herald their arrival. Bear bells just make me think of ice cream trucks, announcing delicious treats on their way. Nature and I were not meant to co-exist without a certain edge.
Licking the last of the hot chocolate from his lips, Steve decreed it was time for bed, so I hung my hair towel back in the bathroom and traded his robe for the lovely crisp sheets he favoured. Instead of changing to flannelette sheets in the winter months, Steve used a heavier weight of duvet with a fuzzy cover. It made sleeping there feel like one was encased in a s’more, all smooth and warm and toasty.
Usually, Steve would leave the bedroom drapes open, letting the downtown lights act as a pretty backdrop. Tonight, he had closed off the panorama, making both of us feel a little less vulnerable to prying eyes. He could talk a good story, but this action told me that the photo warning had got under his skin just as much as mine.
The next morning, we woke to Steve’s alarm, and for the first time I felt the encroaching presence of winter. Lights were still shining in the dark across the river valley as we drew the curtains back, and the sun didn’t make any inroads until an hour after Steve was gone and I was ready to get going myself.
The air was crisp with the smell of dry leaves. I walked through the neighbourhood, one block in from the river valley road, to keep a distance from the rush-hour traffic. Here, houses had begun to set up their Hallowe’en decorations, which were a bit more muted than I was sure they would be in communities with a younger demographic. Black and orange streamers, a jack-o’-lantern or two along the stairs, and orange bags sporting faces and filled with leaves indicated who would have a bowl of candy ready in the evening.
I stopped at Remedy for a pistachio chai latte to take with me to my apartment. There was no mail delivery yet, so I headed down the long hall to my apartment and opened the new deadbolt they had installed the day before. Even with all my cleaning and sorting, the space seemed foreign to me each time I stepped across the threshold. The people who had trashed my apartment had stolen its soul along with my laptop.
Speaking of laptops, that was something I was going to have to replace pretty darn quick. The Widows had been nice enough to loan me one till the insurance money came through, and I had now deposited the insurance cheque, so I could afford it, but I wanted to savour the sight of that large a number in my account a bit before depleting it all once more. Still, I needed to work.
I called Denise from the phone at my desk in the dining area of the apartment, sorting through the closest pile of papers stacked there as I waited for her to pick up. There is nothing like the odd break-in to make you realize you store too many useless papers. I vowed to create a better system for storing tax-worthy receipts, and to be more rigorous with my recycling from here on in.
Denise answered and agreed to come get me for an IKEA date, if I sprang for meatballs. It sounded like a very good deal to me. She said she’d need about an hour, so I continued to clear the desk area. I was soon done with the surface of the desk, and two of the three desk drawers were nearing some semblance of order. One of the local Szechwan restaurant’s take-out menus was all I would need, so I tossed three others in the blue bag filling up beside me and tacked the first on the corkboard to the right of the window above my desk. Things were going to be very tidy in my new life.
I pinned the menu at the bottom of the corkboard, which also held three postcards—two from my folks and one from a friend who was flaunting her research trip to Peru, a map of the university libraries, a brochure of Rutherford House, and a list of phone numbers. At one point, I had industriously typed all my frequently used phone numbers and printed them on a sheet of green paper. Scrawled at the bottom was my own cellphone number, so that I would remember it.
I stared at my bulletin board.
That was how the phantom photographer had discovered my cellphone number. Whoever we had been searching for in St. Stephen’s College last night was the same person who had trashed my home. The robbery was connected to the murders of Mr. Maitland at the archives and Jossie at Rutherford House. It was all one big ugly situation, and I was somehow right in the middle of it.
35
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Denise pulled up behind the apartment and honked. I waved through the kitchen window and hurried to lock up. Pretty soon we were tooling down 109th Street, on our way to the south side police station. Denise had the hardtop on her creamy Volkswagen Bug, but I was pretty sure she was going to be pulling its quilted tarp over it soon and leaving it in the garage she rented. Denise refused to drive in the winter, citing poor road conditions and good public transit.
It was nice to drive today, though, since everywhere we were going to visit was the hell and gone on the edge of town. After I picked up my phone and gave Steve a quick kiss, Denise and I headed south on 99th Street, which turns into Parsons Road just where it gets twisty. Eventually, Parsons Road led us right into the belly of the beast known as South Edmonton Common, an area of big-box stores and strips, each with its own parking lot, all jumbled together next to the highway. Traffic to this area—where IKEA, the mega-discount grocery store, several outlet stores, a huge cinema complex, Indigo Books, the Wal-Mart on steroids, various electronics and home furnishings stores, restaurants, and Home Depot had all sprouted—was so dense that the city had to cough up tons of money for an overpass system to alleviate the snarls and accidents occurring from shoppers going headlight to headlight with commuters and traffic from the airport.
It was a place I liked to avoid, mostly because people drove on its streets as if they were parking lots and in its parking lots as if they were on the street. Besides, when I shop in suburban Edmonton, I really prefer to do it in the relative climatic comfort of a mall, rather than having to move my car every fifteen minutes when wandering to a different store.
However, for our purposes, South Edmonton Common was the only place to go. The only IKEA in town was on the west edge of the development. We decided to go there first, since I didn’t want to risk leaving a pricey computer in Denise’s car while we shopped for furniture. I figured that if I rented a van to drive my purchases home, I could stop by the Apple Store on the way out.
The parking lot at IKEA was already full, and it wasn’t quite noon.
“Don’t let that spook you. It’s so vast in there, we probably won’t see anyone,” said Denise blithely, as she locked her little car with a friendly beep of her keychain.
I wasn’t quite so sanguine about the lack of other shoppers. They couldn’t all be registered in the ballroom play area. We took the escalator up to the showroom floor and headed straight for the living-room sofas.
Denise also figured I should look at loveseats, to maximize the space in my tiny apartment.
“They did you a favour, wrecking that old chesterfield you had. I know you loved it, but it dwarfed your space.” She moved toward a flowered overstuffed two-seater with high arms and plunked herself down on it. “I could see you curled up here very happily. The colours aren’t overpowering, and you could easily get a solid-coloured chair to complement it. And, if you do choose to move to a larger space, you could always come back and buy another loveseat.”
She was right. It was comfy and would fit better into my apartment. Not only that, it was at least two hundred dollars less than I had been budgeting, so I could indeed get a chair to match. And, should I choose to merge furniture with Steve, it would look great in a corner of his second bedroom/den. I noted the bin numbers with my golf pencil and we moved on to the chairs, where I wrote down the numbers for a PÖANG chair and head cushion.
Before long, we had snaked our way through the display floor, picking up some cardboard boxes to store things on the upper shelves of my bookcases and a couple of matching picture frames. Denise had been right about it not feeling overly crowded, but there were still enough people that we had to line up for our Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce.
While we were eating, I filled Denise in on our Spooktacular evening and the spookier still St. Stephen’s College adventure after that.
“I cannot believe that Steve let you go in after a bad guy,” she said. “Isn’t he always the one trying to make sure you are well out of dangerous situations?”
“What were we supposed to do?”
“Duh, I don’t know, wait for the cavalry to arrive?”
I sliced through my last meatball, sopping up gravy with it. “It seemed like the right idea at the time.”
“Yes, well, now it seems like you’ve painted a big target on yourself for someone who doesn’t seem to have any trouble killing people who get in his way.”
“That’s something I’d rather not focus on,” I said.
“I’ll bet you would rather not. But it’s all honing in on you, isn’t it? What you have to sort out is why. What sort of knowledge do you have that the killer wants? Or what sort of knowledge do you have about the killer that the killer doesn’t want out there?”
“What do you mean? I don’t know anything about the killer.”
Denise looked thoughtful. “I doubt that. You were there when the young woman was killed during the magic show. You were a regular at the Archives the week the archivist was killed. You may know something or have seen something the killer doesn’t want you sharing.”
“What could I know? I was on the main floor when Jossie was killed upstairs in the guest room.”
“Were you? I thought you were eating in the maid’s room with the magician.”
“Well, that is where I was when dinner was going on. I was downstairs when the body was found, and there’s no way to pinpoint to the minute when she died. The last time I saw her was when we were hanging up coats as the guests arrived.”
“And the two of you were together there right up till the magic show?” I could tell Denise was getting into Trixie Belden mode; like most professional researchers, there was little she liked better than solving a puzzle.
“Well, Jossie had to run upstairs to get another umbrella stand from the attic, but she was back pretty quickly.” I closed my eyes to try to see the order of events more clearly. “Then Marni announced the magic show and the guests moved into the parlour. I was standing near the piano for that. I put the cover over the keys so no one would make any noise while the show was on.”
“And did you see Jossie in there with you all?”
“The police asked me that already, and I really had no idea. It was a very well-attended event. I know that some of the actors were mingling with the paying guests, in order to see the magician at work. He was amazing, you know.”
Denise nodded. “I remember seeing Dafoe da Fantabulist on TV all the time when I was younger. What got me was how quiet he always was. I had been reading about how patter was used as a deflecting element, to keep the audience from paying attention to the sleight of hand, and most magicians tend to use a running line of talk—well, except Teller, of course. But Dafoe was doing that here in Edmonton long before I’d ever heard of Penn and Teller. I thought I’d heard something about his having a speech impediment, which is why he never spoke on camera.”
“This was the first time I’d ever seen him, but he certainly didn’t have a stutter or lisp or any such thing when we ate supper together. He seemed very pleasant, although I have to admit it took all I had not to pester him about magic tricks.”
“You not pestering him was probably what put him at ease,” laughed Denise. “Can you imagine always having to discuss your work, even on your off times? It would be like being a doctor at a cocktail party, being asked to diagnose aches and pains over drinks.”
“Well, you are always happy to discuss Shakespeare at the d
rop of a hat.”
“Shakespeare is different,” Denise sniffed. “Everyone has the right to my opinion.”
I laughed, because Denise was the least pushy scholar I knew.
“Well, anyhow, I suppose I could have been right down the hall from Jossie getting killed, which would get Stephen Dafoe off the suspect hook. But she could already have been killed by then, or she could have been downstairs eating her supper.”
“The coroner would be able to tell if she’d eaten supper,” noted Denise, popping a meatball into her own cast-iron stomach.
“I suppose so. It’s not something Steve shares with me.”
“I guess not. Have they combined the investigations yet? Jossie’s and Mr. Maitland’s?”
“I’m not honestly sure about that either. But you think they are connected? The whole method of killing is different.”
“I’ve never been overly fond of that as a reason against, in mystery novels. This whole idea that some methods are more of a man’s or woman’s purview is so sexist and out of touch with the modern equalities. And to think that murderers always use a consistent pattern gives brute, amoral monsters a lot of cerebral credit.” Denise took a drink of coffee and wiped her lips with her napkin. “If I needed to kill people, I would use what was at hand. Maybe he snuck up on Jossie, so he didn’t have to do so much damage in order to kill her. Or maybe he didn’t have his hammer at Rutherford House that night.”
“You think for sure it was a man?”
“Okay, there you have me, getting all sexist. I suppose a woman could break another woman’s neck. I wonder just how much upper-body strength you would require. Maybe just some basic martial arts training would do you.”