She Felt No Pain

by Lou Allin

  FIFTEEN

  Don Yates, former English teacher at Edward Milne High School, lived in nearby Shirley. Yates had been Marilyn’s English teacher in Grade Ten, Sister had said on the phone. “Entre nous, of course, now that you are an adult and with law enforcement, I must tell you that Mr. Yates was urged from his career by the discovery of his predilection for young men. Not that such might have a bearing on his testimony on other matters.”

  “Was he prosecuted?” Holly asked.

  A bitter chuckle answered without words. “Those were very different days. And he was extremely careful. An errant hand. A close whisper. On the third offense, the principal took him aside and suggested in no uncertain terms that he was due for a very early retirement. He cleaned out his classroom that Christmas and marched down the steps. He was only forty but had a cushion from his parents’ investments.”

  A small frown crept across Holly’s brow. “I feel uncomfortable that you’re telling me this. So he’s been living in the community for decades? I’ve never seen his name on a list.”

  “For good reason. It was my understanding from the principal that the warning was sufficient. He was forbidden to have any contact with young people, and he’s not a stupid man.”

  A candidate for using underage porn sites, Holly thought. Maybe she should run a check. “Do you think I can trust his word?”

  “Donald was never a liar, just in the wrong profession. Far too many temptations. He was his own worst enemy. He’s probably never forgiven himself. The worst sin of all.”

  That Friday Holly kept the arranged appointment with Don Yates, preferring a face-to-face meeting, for obvious reasons. Calls to the detachments in Sooke and in Langford had turned up nothing new. Apparently the man was minding his business and didn’t even have Internet access.

  At Invermuir Road, she made a right towards the ocean. The rugged dirt road coiled through second-growth forest until it ended at the historic Shirley lighthouse. Now on an automatic system, the site was maintained by a faithful support group that raised money selling shirts and mugs. Holly noted the bulldozing devastation of yet another new housing development connected all the way to Seaside Road at French Beach.

  Then she turned down a drive of overlapping cedars with a sign long fallen into a tangle of berry bushes. It read “Manderley”. The Prelude’s front-wheel drive lapped up the steep, winding hill. She stopped at an unprepossessing bungalow. Its wooden roof was scrofulous with miniature ecosystems of moss and sprigs of future saplings. The stucco was stained and chipped, the place merging with happy slugs in the deep and dark.

  Don was seated in a single pool of sunlight, looking out at the waves. Haloed by the sun, he was a frail man, his chino pants almost empty on his crane-like legs. His head rode forward on his neck and thin shoulders as though from osteoporosis. Far away, a freighter full of logs plied the choppy strait. Despite its steep cliff instead of beachfront, the property was worth a fortune. The taxes would be enormous.

  “Welcome,” he said, reaching for a tray with a sweating pitcher, his sharp elbows jutting from sleeves of a linen shirt with bow tie. “Corporal Martin, is it? Please sit. I put out some lemonade for you. I don’t often get visitors.”

  With a thanks, she settled into the uneasy depths of a Muskoka chair. The tart lemonade slipped down well. She suspected he had a mind to match, judging from the Harper’s Magazine and Atlantic Monthly beside him. A faint English accent favoured by radio announcers tinged his speech, not unusual in a place “more English than England”.

  “Sister said you were interested in a former pupil of mine. Is there a question of a crime?”

  She didn’t know how much to explain. That depended on what he told her. “I’m not really sure.” That sounded sinister.

  His rheumy eyes sparkled. With evil or mischief? “Did you bring this document she spoke of?”

  “Yes, but please don’t touch it.” She opened an envelope, and with tweezers, set it on the table.

  He picked up a large magnifying glass. “Sherlock Holmes style,” he said with a wry grin.

  After no more than a few minutes, he glanced back at her. “Of course I recognize it. The eccentric handwriting’s a dead giveaway. It’s Marilyn’s work. Marilyn Clavir.”

  “I see.” Or did she? Holly scratched her chin, where a mosquito was tickling. In the dense forest, away from the sea air, the bugs reclaimed their territory. “What can you tell me about Marilyn and Shannon? You knew them in high school. What does this all mean?”

  He sputtered with phlegm then pounded his birdlike chest with a liver-spotted hand. “Arcadia.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It was a world they created. An escape from reality. The concept thrived long before Sir Phillip Sidney and his opus. Every society looks back, however purblind, to a Golden Age.”

  “I know Marilyn’s life was hard. She lost both parents. What about Shannon?”

  “Shannon’s father was a minister, what some would call a talibangelical today.”

  “Tali…oh, I understand.” The man had a sense of humour. Perhaps a charm of sorts, but she hadn’t forgotten his predilections. Sociopaths were excellent conversationalists.

  “A wee joke. Anyway, he was a remote and demanding man. Her mother bowed to his wishes, and Shannon was an only daughter. In a small school, you get to know this.”

  “Was the play, or this plan, an assignment?”

  “Yes,” he said. “For creative writing. They were very precocious, you see. Always reading ahead of their age. At the time all we had were the old classics, Wizard of Oz, the Narnia series. Tolkien. Very male-oriented. The idea of a female knight intrigued them. Galvanized their thoughts. That’s how they latched onto Spenser’s Fairie Queene. It wasn’t the historical politics of the poem at all.”

  “Today they might be as obsessed about vampires or sorcery.”

  Don found this amusing. His shoulders jiggled, and he stifled a cough. “Oh, my dear. No animal torturing or spells. Merely the epic struggle of good and evil that has fascinated mankind.”

  “Evil. So who was the villain?” At the word villain, did she see his brow rise?

  “Villainess, actually. Throughout Spenser’s saga, Duessa, the false one, takes on many beautiful shapes and forms, but she lurks everywhere. She enlists the Blatant Beast with his lies and slander, much like the tabloids today. Now the Salvage Man—”

  “Salvage?” This man spoke a language long forgotten, and for good reason.

  “A variant of savage. Untutored and entirely amoral. Like Nature, I suppose. Then there’s my favourite. Talus, the iron man, gave rise to those heroes in films who have a psychopathic sidekick to do the heavy lifting. Nothing is new under this old sun.”

  “I took English lit, but it wasn’t my best subject. And I don’t remember Spenser at all.” The way he related the themes to the modern age made it come alive again.

  “Indeed, it’s a formidable work even for graduate students. I read it through once a year. But those girls devoured it like candy. Total immersion. The Garden of Adonis vs. the Bower of Blisse. The lovely mutability which orders that winter must follow summer as opposed to the brittle and unchangeable fabrications of man. A flower cast of metal. Beautiful but sterile.”

  She looked at the scrap again and the cast. “But is The Fairie Queene a play?”

  “An epic poem. Don’t look for that genre in Canada later than E. J. Pratt’s Titanic. The girls chose a play for the narrative possibilities. Simple iambic pentameter, not those tedious Spenserian stanzas. I suspect they planned to stage a few scenes for the class. Plays are not for reading. They are for experiencing.”

  “Is this all there was?”

  “Spenser’s work was never completed either. He had planned to cover all the ten virtues, twenty, some say.” He shrugged with a sad expression that urged his jowls downward. “Even on their smaller scale, the girls never completed theirs, other than the first three acts. But after they graduated, who knows?”
>
  “Most of us leave our high-school days behind. I presume their interests changed.”

  A dry laugh sounded from the folds of lizard-skin on his throat. “Nothing was beyond them, with their steely focus, but events caught up to them. It happened so fast. Marilyn’s mother died in the late fall. And I went on…sick leave after Christmas. And then I retired…early. I suppose you know all about that.” His gaze sent her a challenge that she ignored.

  “Did you keep in touch with the girls?”

  “I saw Marilyn in the Sooke library from time to time. Shannon became a nurse, I hear.”

  Holly looked the old man in the eye. “The Duke has her father’s name, Thomas. The ghost’s invocation. What does that signify?”

  “Ghosts are always appearing in Renaissance plays to give advice and warning, or charge the main character to make a pledge. Helps start things off with a bang. Catch the attention of the groundlings. You did read Hamlet, didn’t you?”

  She gave an noncommittal monosyllabic answer. “Who are these two characters listed first?”

  He held the magnifying glass over the words. “Faded, but you can make out the letters if you know what you’re looking for. Britomart and Belphoebe. They are key characters in Spenser’s poem. Britomart has an entire book to herself. A female knight the equal of Arthur himself. Belphoebe was raised by Diana. She’s a heroine of chastity and may represent Queen Elizabeth on another level.”

  Marilyn and Shannon had committed themselves to a long-term relationship. “Surely Spenser didn’t intend…they weren’t…”

  “Spenser was very conventional.” Don leaned back in his chair and assumed a lecturer’s voice. “The lady knight Britomart was in love with Artegal. Arthur’s equal, you see. Belphoebe was a huntress, riding through the woods. In the true courtly love tradition, the lover admires from afar. It derived from medieval times when lords were away fighting in distant lands, and their ladies, complete with chastity belts, had younger admirers writing songs for them.”

  “And…”

  “And look at the name of the play, The Triumphe of Love.

  Anyone who might threaten to part such destined souls…”

  “Like Clare Clavir.” She found herself whispering, “Clarissa.”

  “A fall down her basement stairs. Steep, those old houses. There were rumours that she…” He tipped a glass for effect. “I felt sorry for Marilyn. Once the mother came to a parent teacher conference. She was like a dog in heat. Ripe in more ways than one.” His long nose wrinkled in distaste. “Reeking of cheap perfume and hormones. Short skirts and plenty of cleavage. Scarcely the motherly type. You’d never have known they were related.”

  Holly told him about Joel’s life and death. “This fragment was found hidden near his body. As if he had some purpose for it.”

  He looked sidelong at her. “Joel was in the bonehead English class, not mine. They read short stories and other trash. He was such a contrast to Marilyn. But it takes all kinds, doesn’t it? And if he were the blackguard you say he was, I leave you to conclude what he was doing with this evidence from the distant past.”

  Holly collected her papers and stood as the brief sun flickered out behind a cloudbank. “Your information has been helpful, but we don’t operate on pure speculation, no matter how tempting. My discoveries keep leading me deeper into the forest.”

  He waggled a bony finger. “Your images sound like Dante and his dark woods, or nearer to home, Robert Frost on that snowy evening. We are all of us lost at times. That makes life interesting. The object is to make the right choices at the crossroads.”

  “Suppose there aren’t any more crossroads?”

  SIXTEEN

  Holly had dinner with her father, beginning with cocktail wieners and bacon-wrapped water chestnuts and pineapple, then spinach salad and chicken baked in mushroom soup with Minute Rice. A Jello poke cake made her fake a smile. Norman had put Animal House on the DVD player, but she begged off.

  “Your mood ring is jet black. No wonder you’re so crabby tonight,” he observed.

  “I’m still cold from that walk to the beach with Shogun,” she said, taking off the ring and placing it on the table. “This isn’t rocket science. It reacts to body heat.” As “The Way We Were” played, she thought of the girls and their alter egos. So much time had passed. If there had been a crime, where did it begin and end? At the old family home Marilyn had mentioned.

  “I’m going into Sooke,” she said. “Gotta check something out.”

  “Take Shogun. He loves car rides.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she was in the town core. Turning at the stoplight, she passed rows of older bungalows on a geological plate. Rhodenite, Quartz, Pyrite and Talc streets spread out against a distant backdrop of steeper hills and valleys which “smoked” when warm air met cold. Marilyn’s former house at 125 Booster Avenue looked vaguely Victorian, as if it had stood there since the Spanish-American War, daring civilization to approach. On one side, a mammoth housing development was gnawing at its edges, the vegetation sheared off and erosion washing red soil from the nude hills. Next door, working overtime, a noisy backhoe with a diesel engine puffing black diesel clouds was moving its slow thighs to clear a final patch of land.

  With two acres of gnarly and neglected fruit trees and slumped bee hives, the Clavir home had been one of the holdouts. Holly hopped out, leaving Shogun in the car, and began a methodical assessment. Three stories with an attic on top and dormer windows. A roofing job sometime after asphalt shingles had replaced cedar shakes. A dark basement with a storm door more practical for Kansas tornadoes.

  All first-floor windows had been boarded, presumably to prevent access. In human form, the house would have begged for euthanasia. Yet overgrown lilac and spirea bushes, indefatigable red and white peonies and a pink rose climbing a lurching trellis showed a loving hand gone to the grave before Holly’s birth. Out back were a whimsical playhouse turned chicken coop and a rusted swing set, its bones creaking in the wind as one seat moved.

  An ancient Douglas fir with large conjuring arms held split and greying boards from what Marilyn had described as Joel’s tree fort. Holly had taken many a tumble in her own climbs. Life wasn’t much fun wrapped in cotton batting with monkey bars now forbidden on playgrounds. Sometimes, like wood-duck chicks, you had to trust in luck and leap from the nest.

  Mounting a set of cement steps, she tried the large front door with its round ringer in the middle of the panel. Locked. Then the back door to the kitchen. Both seemed firmly locked. On the overgrown lawn, a faded realty sign had fallen to the ground like a tired tombstone. A snail had left a trail of shiny slime on its mossy plane.

  Perhaps someone with more nerve and fewer civic morals might have found a way to break in. Holly took stock of her information and her choices. Joel’s body had been found under suspicious circumstances, Chipper’s information about the Fentanyl, Ann’s talk with Dee, her own intuition, for what that was worth. Maybe old Dee was confused. And certainly Don had his own credibility problems and a past he wished buried. Hampered by her lowly status as a corporal, Holly needed all her stuffed cats in a row before throwing the carnival baseball. It was an entertainment cliché that the police arrested people on spurious causes, proving their case later. What could the sad house tell her?

  It was eight p.m., but in high summer during the real-estate rush and the wealth of light, Valerie Novince was cruising 24-7. Feast or famine in her risky business. She answered on the first ring. “Holly-O?” The middle name of Oldham came from her great-grandfather in Devonshire. Only Valerie knew about it, and for good reason. With schoolyard tongues and taunts, Holly would have been called Old Ham.

  “Lemme pull over and still my heart. Back for friggin’ months, and you’re finally calling me to get together? I was beginning to think you didn’t like me any more. Or do you want to buy a house? The market’s full of bargains for first-timers, and you don’t even have to sell yours. Tired of living with your father? He’s a
doll, but a girl needs her independence and—”

  Valerie could talk the pants off of the prime minister, an unnerving concept. “Slow down and breathe, you. I need to see a house.”

  “Reeeeeeeeally? Getting married, are we? Tell Val.”

  “Give me a break. As if I have time to date, keeping you safe. Call it research.” Holly felt almost embarrassed at being tossed back to adolescence. Val had been her one friend, heading straight from high school to a stint in the army before growing up. Now she had a seven-year-old and a handsome Norwegian husband who ran a specialty woodworking business.

  A loud guffaw ensued, and Holly pulled back the phone. “So you are cereal…or serial. What was that joke we used to—”

  “Get serious for once. I need your help.” With a friend like Valerie, a decade could pass like an hour.

  “Not one customer in two weeks. Only poor sods who want to sell. And only four closings since Christmas. I was thinking of trolling the pubs. Now, what kind of—”

  When Holly described the property, Valerie’s voice dropped a few decibels, along with her enthusiasm. “God, the old Mattoon place? That’s been on the market for dog’s years. Rental in between minimal cleanups. More run down each time, like an old whore without lipstick or powder. I was surprised it didn’t burn to the ground some Hallowe’en, the kids these days, my dear daughter aside.”

  Holly laughed. “You’re sounding your age, which is mine.”

  “So true, girlfriend. You always knew me best. Didn’t we do detention together every week? Wait a sec. Lemme get my Blackberry. Don’t know what I did without it.”

  There was a sudden quiet. “Some people look at houses for free entertainment. Have me drive them all over on Sundays blowing gas bills out my butt then never make an offer. Sheesh.”