Condemned to Repeat

by Janice Macdonald

  I shook my head. “Not before dinner. Marni had the staircase roped off. I had to move the cord to get the actress and myself upstairs to scope out her location for the murder mystery.”

  “And she decided to go in to the walk-in closet?”

  I nodded.

  “After seeing the tub in the guest room, I presume?”

  My face fell, literally. I could feel my jaw take the brunt of it. There is some truth to every old saying, I guess.

  “You think that Tanya Rivera murdered Jossie? Why?”

  Steve laughed. “No, I am not saying that. I was just pointing out that lots of people might have known about that quiet little tub room tucked away in the guest room. And it’s not as if the body wasn’t discovered pretty quickly.”

  “Yes,” I nodded slowly. “But maybe it was hidden away just long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “For whatever time the killer needed.”

  “So, Jossie was killed to get her out of the way of some other action that needed to take place.”

  “Because she was in the way.”

  “Or she had seen something she shouldn’t have.”

  “Or she knew something that would piece together the puzzle after the fact.”

  “But her death was the crime. Nothing else happened. Nothing was stolen.”

  “Nothing that we know of. Has the complete inventory been turned over yet?”

  I nodded. “I am pretty sure Marni sent it over by courier on Monday or so.”

  “And who completed the inventory?”

  I shrugged. “I guess just Marni, but she would have a catalogue for comparison.”

  “And where would that catalogue be kept? The Archives?”

  “I doubt it, though that would tie things up really nicely, wouldn’t it. No, as an active historic site, it’s more likely the catalogue would be housed with the provincial office.”

  “Which is where?”

  I looked at him and again felt the shift happen where puzzle pieces seemed to slide around to create a new design.

  “In St. Stephen’s College.”

  Steve smiled. “I thought as much. Whoever we disturbed last night may well have been making his or her way down to the historic sites offices to steal or alter that catalogue, having gained an easy entry from one of the shut-off floors.”

  “So something may be missing from Rutherford House?”

  Steve looked grim.

  “If it is, then your present boss may not be as much of a stand-up gal as she’d like you to believe.”

  I sagged a bit, both because of the hour and the thought that Marni might be capable of theft, subterfuge, or worse. Steve noticed and suggested we head to bed. The minute he said it, the accumulated efforts of my day caught up with me and I yawningly agreed.

  All I recall is heading toward Steve’s bedroom. I may have been asleep before my head hit the pillow.

  38

  --

  The next morning, I woke up before Steve, who refused ever to set an alarm on his days off. I got out of bed quietly and went to the kitchen to start coffee and raid Steve’s wealth of granola. He had seven or eight different blends and types, from regular-grocery-store boxed muesli-styled cereals to several bags of exotic nuts and dried fruit in with the oats. And to look at him, the average person would guess steak and eggs were his regular fare.

  While I was eating at his breakfast bar, I pulled the notepad he kept beside his phone over to me. It was a burnt-orange stickie pad. An erasable pen, Steve’s secret to success at crossword puzzles, was next to it.

  Instead of a to-do list, I found myself writing out all the criminal things that had happened in the last couple of weeks, one per stickie. First came Jossie’s murder. The death of Mr. Maitland came next, unless you counted the missing diary of Mrs. Rutherford, which I did, so it got a stickie as well. There was the “mess” in Rutherford House in Fort Edmonton, too, which young Jasper Peacocke had told me about. Might as well put that on a stickie. The break-in at my apartment. The intruder at St. Stephen’s College. I wondered if anything had been stolen from there. I wrote the question on a stickie. For that matter, was anything else missing from the Archives? Stickie. Pretty soon, I had quite an accumulation of paper squares on Steve’s counter. I cleared away my bowl and spoon to make room for some sort of organizing principle.

  If we supposed everything was connected, it might be useful to put events into chronological order. I flipped the stickies around so that the Fort Edmonton loss went before Jossie’s murder, and the possible thefts from the Archives and St. Stephen’s were attached to their break-ins. Even written out and organized, there was no order to be seen.

  I decided to add a few more things that we knew. The magician was missing. Jossie knew the magician. The person who had been in my apartment had been the St. Stephen’s intruder, because he or she had my cellphone number. Mr. Maitland had known everyone related to Rutherford House, because they all turned up at his funeral. Greta Larsen hated the Internet, and as an extension, me. The inventory for Rutherford House was at St. Stephen’s.

  I looked at all the stickies I’d now used. I would have to think about buying Steve another pad. How the heck could I organize them? Things were all over the map now.

  I decided to group things that had to be connected, like the break-in at my place and the cellphone photo from St. Stephen’s. I placed the inventory under those two squares, as a maybe. I then grouped the Rutherford House murder, Dafoe the magician, Greta Larsen all in a clump. I linked the Archive grouping next, with the loss of Mrs. Rutherford’s diary between that group and the Rutherford House cluster. I was pretty sure my laptop had been stolen because of its connection to the website construction at Rutherford House, so that went below Rutherford House, meaning I had to move the whole St. Stephen’s grouping under there.

  It was possible to see links between all the major incidents. Every grouping of stickies connected to another, but it was all conjecture. What if there were two murderers and a completely separate thief, all working with distinct and unique agendas? It could be. Edmonton had, after all, lived down the moniker of “Murder City” once, after a spate of drug-related murders had taken place in an immigrant community. Maybe we could expand and be known as the “Crime Capital.”

  My hypothesis was possible, but not really probable. For one thing, if three different criminals were operating within my vicinity, it stood to reason that they’d be tripping over each other. Was there really that much honour among thieves, that you would just smile and nod when another criminal was on your turf? I didn’t think so. But still, maybe everything wasn’t related. Maybe, if I were to take one or two squares out of the mix, as coincidence or some weird sort of karma, everything would come clearer and I’d be able to see plainly who the murderer was.

  Because, when it came down to it, no matter how much I hated the fact that someone had trashed my wonderful little sanctuary of an apartment, murder was the absolute worst.

  I went back to my stickies.

  Which one could I remove?

  I looked at the clusters.

  The first one, standing on its own, represented the purported thefts from the original Rutherford House down in Fort Edmonton Park. While it seemed a long shot to be taking something an earnest five-year-old had told me at face value, I’d put Jasper’s testimony and perspicacity above that of many adults. Besides, the Park wasn’t the most secure place in the universe. Although they had watchmen and patrols, no fence is entirely impregnable, and it would be hard to maintain historical integrity with a load of state-of-the-art security wires everywhere.

  I believed Jasper. There had been a break-in. I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out what could have been so valuable in a historical display.

  The only other solitary stickie was the Greta Larsen note. I couldn’t in all conscience attach it to any of the others. As much as I disliked Greta, I wasn’t about to tie her into a crime just to get her out of my
hair. It would be pleasant, though, to be shot of her hovering over my project, trying to get it cancelled.

  I pulled the stickie pad toward me. Maybe my project fit into this mix somehow. I wasn’t sure where to put it, but seeing “virtual museum” on a stickie, right in the middle of the lot of them, made me feel as if some fat spider was going to crawl out and get me if I wasn’t too careful. As the nominal fly, I was going to have to be very careful not to get stuck in this puzzle if I didn’t want to be a statistic on the final stickie.

  I heard stirrings from the bedroom, and preemptively poured Steve a cup of coffee. He came out, fuzzy-headed and adorable, wearing his terry robe and padding slowly in his bare feet. He looked grateful for the coffee, and after a swallow or two, seemed to focus. His eyebrow arched as he took in the countertop awash in rust-coloured squares, but he came around to my side to read what I’d written.

  The nice thing about Steve was that I rarely had to fill in the blanks. He always managed to tune into my wavelength effortlessly.

  “Trying to see how all the crimes are connected?”

  “Having all these things happen so close together seems like just too much of a coincidence.”

  “This is the one that bugs me.” He pointed to the cluster near the left, dealing with Jossie and the missing magician. “Jossie knew the magician. Walk me through it again. How do you know she knew Dafoe?”

  “She said something about him working at the magic school, or being from the magic school, or something like that. I figured she meant a business here in town, though at the time it surprised me that a teenager would be all that interested in magic. I don’t know, it’s not the ‘in thing’ anymore, is it?”

  “You never know,” Steve shrugged. “Penn and Teller have shows all over TV and on YouTube. And there are all those punk-danger magicians these days. For all I know, magic could be the latest greatest thing.”

  “Okay, so say she hangs out at a place called the Magic School, because she’s some sort of Harry Potter fanatic. And she sees Dafoe da Fantabulist at this place, either performing, if it’s some sort of club, or buying something, if it’s some sort of shop, or teaching tricks, if it’s some sort of training centre.” I was stretching to try to find a reason. “So, if she sees him, does he see her? Is this the sort of place where a teenage girl would stand out? Was she memorable? Did she see something she shouldn’t have?”

  “What we really need to do is ascertain where exactly the magic school is,” said Steve. “If we were to begin with the idea that it’s a proper name, how would we begin to look it up?”

  “We could come back at things from the other direction—focus on where Jossie was from, and where she could possibly have come across a place called Magic School.”

  Steve nodded. “Good idea. If we follow the same process with Stephen Dafoe, we should eventually come up with where their paths bisect.”

  “Look at you, all woke up and sounding mathematical.”

  He groaned. “Not quite awake. But give me ten minutes in the shower, and I should at least be human.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Care to join me?”

  Showering together is one of those things that sounds a whole lot sexier than it ever turns out to be. Having bruised my knee on a tap once too often, I shook my head and told him to go ahead, but to leave me some hot water.

  “That’s the beauty of high-rise living, Randy. The hot water never runs out.”

  Steve padded off to the bathroom, leaving me to ponder the stickies and figure out how I could trace the path of one dead young woman.

  Marni would be able to give me her home address from her work application. The Rutherford House form asked for applicants’ permanent addresses as well, since so many of their part-time employees were students who sometimes had to have a last cheque mailed to their parents’ home. Could it be that Jossie came from the same small town as Dafoe?

  He didn’t live in Edmonton proper, as I recalled. He had mentioned something about a forty-minute commute, but I wasn’t positive in what direction. For some reason, I had pegged him as coming from the northwest, but that could have just been because his name sounded French to me, and there was a whole enclave of Franco-Albertan towns, starting with St. Albert, just to the northwest. Or had he actually mentioned St. Albert? I really needed to start doing daily crosswords and eating zinc and all the other things purported to aid memory.

  I would certainly be happier knowing where Dafoe was at present, as well as where he was from. How could someone disappear in the middle of a criminal investigation and not be suspicious? For that matter, how could anyone disappear in the middle of a criminal investigation? With all the GPS tracking on phones, monitoring of ATM transactions, and CCTV cameras about, I had long ago figured that Big Brother had effectively tagged and branded most of us. So, how could the police have lost track of someone like Dafoe?

  Well, if anyone could elude discovery, it would be a magician, I supposed. But only the most naïve innocents wouldn’t consider how their actions and movements might be perceived when the police were involved. Or maybe not. Having been on a list of suspects in the past for a crime where I was totally innocent, it occurred to me that I had not over-thought what the police might construe my choices to mean. Maybe Dafoe had innocently gone on an off-the-grid vacation.

  I was hearing more and more about that. People ceremoniously stripped themselves of cellphones, tablets, computers, and watches, then took off to the lake or the mountains for some total down time. I imagined little trays of buzzingly annoyed rectangles of various sizes, all vibrating in anticipation of getting their hooks back into their owners.

  I pulled out my own little rectangle and texted Marni, asking her to check into Jossie’s home address for me and any other information she might have on her application or résumé, such as schools she had attended. Then I flipped open my computer and sent an email to a friend from grad school who was working for the province. Emmanuel had done his history thesis on place names in Alberta before and after the railroad. Chapters of it had been published almost immediately in Canada’s History, when it still had the much more evocative title The Beaver, and he had been hired to some sort of provincial cross-ministry task force between Culture and Infrastructure, to research and record naming across the province. If anyone could find me a Magic School, it would be Emmanuel Aleba.

  Steve came back into the kitchen, shiny and dressed, and offered to make French toast. I figured I had five minutes for a quick sluice in the shower, so I raced off to get cleaned up for the day.

  I got back to the kitchen to find that Steve had rearranged my stickies onto one of his oversized lap trays, so that he could set out the breakfast dishes. I moved the lap tray onto the couch, leaning it against the back, so it appeared like a miniature whiteboard in one of Steve’s investigation rooms.

  He had placed the stickies in six tidy rows, rather than clusters, and in each row, the thefts were stuck at the bottom, with a bit of space between them and the other squares. It made for an interesting balance—murders on top, and thefts below.

  “Food’s ready,” Steve announced, so I tore myself from the patterns and went back to the bar chair. Steve’s French toast was to die for. It was fluffy and crisp at the same time, and there was a secret ingredient that he wouldn’t divulge. I could taste the nutmeg and vanilla, but there was one other taste at the back of the tongue. Someday, I figured, I would catch him adding it to the bowl and the jig would be up.

  “Do you think Jossie saw something happening she shouldn’t have, when we were all at the House that night? Or was she killed because she knew something about someone? Like something from the magician’s past that he didn’t want anyone in Rutherford House talking about?”

  “Maybe she had seen his show before and knew how one of his good tricks was done?”

  I shook my head. “A) I don’t think a magician would actually kill anyone over a trick. B) I don’t think anyone would actually go to the effort of telling peopl
e how the trick was done, because who really wants to spoil someone’s entertainment? And c) well, you never met her, but I can’t really imagine Jossie spending her energies on trying to figure out a magic trick. Most young people these days seem both sneeringly judgmental and bored out of their minds as they’re talking to you. Magic tricks wouldn’t have been her style unless they were approached ironically. Come to think of it, I have no idea what her style would be. She mostly exuded polite blankness to me.”

  “Sounds like a real princess,” Steve laughed.

  “I know it sounds harsh.” I nodded. “But I used to get students like her a lot in first-year English courses. They were annoyed that they had to take a prescribed course, and that resentment seemed to colour everything for them. Half of them could be won over by the material or the enthusiasm of the other students who actually enjoyed English, but some of them sat and stewed in their own juices the entire semester.”

  “Okay, so she was a typical teenaged cypher, in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Steve flipped another sizzling piece of eggy-bready goodness in the frying pan while I mopped up stray bits of maple syrup on my plate with my last bite.

  “Maybe. Or maybe her knowing the magician from before was enough. Maybe he was trying to erase that element of his past. Or maybe she reminded him of someone else back home. An older sister, an aunt. People look alike in families. Maybe it wasn’t Jossie at all that he was worried about, she was just a reasonable facsimile thereof.”

  “We’re now presuming Dafoe was the killer, then?”

  “Why not? It’s not my case.”

  “Speaking of not your case, what about the Archives murder? Have you got any further on Mr. Maitland’s death? And more importantly, when I was making the stickies this morning, it occurred to me to ask you, was anything else missing from the Archives?”