Black Water

by Rosemary McCracken

  “What happened with the signs she hung on Lyle’s gate?” I asked.

  “He threatened to sue her for libel, and the police spoke to her. But nothing came of it. You see, everyone around here, including the police officers, knew Carly. She was a sweetheart. And the way she died…well, it could’ve happened to their daughters or sisters.”

  Still, the police probably had a record of what Jamie did, even though they hadn’t charged her.

  Veronica was thinking the same thing. “But when Lyle is killed, who’s the first person the cops look at?”

  “Jamie was here in Braeloch on Thursday,” I said.

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “She took Tracy’s car.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “She didn’t drop by here.”

  “Do you have any idea where she could be? With a friend?”

  She shook her head. “She stopped seeing her friends here when she went off to university.”

  “She got a letter from Lyle on Tuesday. He asked her for help.”

  Veronica looked surprised. “Lyle sent Jenny a letter? The police didn’t tell me that.”

  “Tracy doesn’t know what kind of help Lyle wanted, only that the letter upset Jamie. She’d destroyed it by the time Tracy got home. But she may have had a change of heart. She called Tracy at work the next day and asked to take the car.”

  “Did Jenny tell her she was coming up here?”

  “No. But as the police told you, her car was found here in town. And a red-haired woman was seen at Lyle’s that afternoon.”

  Veronica gave a small sigh. “She’s been coloring her hair that shade for years, ever since she started calling herself Jamie.”

  “Her red hair would have been a beacon against the snow,” I said.

  “So she was at Lyle’s that afternoon. So what? The fire broke out hours later.”

  But she looked defeated, and my heart went out to her. She had lost one daughter in a terrible accident. And now her other girl was in serious trouble.

  “Would anyone have a grudge against Lyle?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about a grudge, but he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. He was a cantankerous old man.”

  “He was a heavy drinker?”

  “He was known to be, but they say he never touched a drop after…” She gave a bitter laugh. “A lot of good that did my Carly.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I left Veronica’s house, I drove over to the municipal parking lot and got out of the car. This was where Jamie had left Tracy’s Honda. She could have rented a car or someone may have given her a lift.

  I took a walkway between two buildings and came out on Main Street. The blinds were drawn on the windows of the Norris Cassidy branch across the street and I saw a Closed sign on the front door. The branch was closed for the weekend.

  From what I’d seen on my drive through Braeloch, there were a few possibilities for lunch. Two doors from me, the Tiger Lily Café offered Chinese-Canadian cuisine. Joe’s Diner and Takeout was another block down and, across the street, the Dominion Hotel advertised its dining room. I headed for Joe’s.

  “Pat Tierney!” a woman called as I was about to open the diner’s door.

  I turned, surprised to hear my name in a town where I was a complete stranger. I did a double take when I saw my friend Sister Celia de Franco hurrying down the sidewalk toward me.

  The tiny brunette’s eyes sparkled with merriment. “You walked by when I was in Stedman’s,” she said. “I thought, ‘That can’t be Pat.’ But it was.”

  I gave her a hug. “Have you had lunch? I’m about to try this place.”

  “Good pick. Joe makes an awesome burger.”

  Inside, Barry Manilow whispered from the overhead speakers. Sister Celia waved at a stout waitress and led the way to a red leatherette booth. “My spot,” she said. “I’m here every day.”

  The waitress came over to us. “You brung a friend today, Sister.”

  “This is the best place for lunch in Braeloch, Sue.”

  Joe’s was a clone of the diner my friends and I hung out in in my final year of high school. I ordered my favorite back then—a burger, fries and a chocolate milkshake.

  “Make that two,” Celia told Sue.

  When Sue had left to fill our orders, I gave Celia’s arm a gentle squeeze. “Good to see you.” I hadn’t heard from her since she left Safe Harbor, the home for refugees she ran in Toronto, two months before. I had no idea where she’d gone. “You’re living here?”

  “For the next little while, I’ll be at the Catholic parish in town while the pastor recovers from heart surgery.”

  She grinned and ran a hand through her head of dark curls. “Would you believe the parish is called Jesus of the Highlands?”

  I burst into laughter. The name made me think of a plaster statue of Jesus dressed in a kilt and sporran. “What kind of name is that for a parish?”

  “Yeah, too cute for words. It was Holy Rosary until the diocese changed the name five years ago. Figured it would appeal to the cottagers, I guess.”

  “What do you do at the parish?”

  “I run it.” She smiled. “You look surprised. Of course, I can’t celebrate Mass, but I hold a prayer service on Sundays—hymns, readings from Scripture and a short homily. I’m spiritual advisor to the parish groups. I go out on sick calls. And I run the office. Keeps me busy.”

  “I bet. Where are you staying?”

  “Father Brisebois, the pastor, didn’t want me living in the rectory. Considers it a male bastion. So I’m boarding with an elderly woman in town.” She shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t want to put her to too much trouble, so I eat most of my meals here.”

  Our food arrived, and we focused on our plates for a few minutes. It wasn’t the healthiest lunch I’ve eaten, but it was darn good.

  Celia signaled Sue to bring us coffee. “I’ve been dealing with the police for the past two days. Listen to this, Pat. Our seventy-four-year-old parish sacristan was murdered. Out here in the middle of nowhere. Can you believe it?”

  “Lyle Critchley was your sacristan?” I wasn’t sure what a sacristan was.

  “You know? Of course, it’s been on the news.”

  “Sorry to have to ask, but what’s a sacristan? A caretaker?”

  “It’s the person charged with care of the sacristy, the room in a church where the priest’s vestments and the sacred vessels are kept. But Lyle ran the entire church. He made sure the floors were washed, the walks shoveled, the lawns mowed. Served morning Mass for Father Brisebois every day. I take it Lyle had been lonely since his wife died.”

  I pushed my empty plate away. “Lyle Critchley is the reason I’m in Braeloch today.”

  I told her about Tracy and Jamie. She placed a hand on top of mine while I tried to explain how surprised and confused I had been. And how I’d let Tracy down.

  “Don’t let anything come between you and your girls,” Celia said.

  Then I told her about the letter Lyle had sent Jamie and that the police were looking for her. I told her about my visit to Veronica that morning.

  “I don’t know what else I can do to find Jamie,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone I can talk to.”

  The coffee arrived, and Celia stirred cream into her mug. “Can’t Veronica point you to some of Jamie’s friends?”

  “She says she’d lost contact with people around here.”

  She shook her head, setting her dark curls dancing. “I find that difficult to believe. She must see people she knows when she visits her mother.”

  Celia was right. There had to be people Jamie could have turned to. I should have pushed Veronica more on that.

  “I wonder why she abandoned the car,” Celia mused.

  “Maybe Jamie—” I sat up straight and coffee sloshed over my sweater. My mind raced as I dabbed at it with a napkin. “Jamie went to see Lyle in the afternoon but he wasn’t at home. She didn’t visit Veronica because she didn’t want
to tell her about Lyle and his letter. She may have gone back to his house that evening and saw the fire. She may have been the person who called it in.”

  Celia raised an eyebrow. “What was in Lyle’s letter?”

  “Tracy doesn’t know. Only that he asked Jamie for help.”

  “Legal help?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “There’d be lawyers around here he could have gone to.”

  “She didn’t rush up there to kill him for hitting her sister,” Celia said. “She would have done that years ago.”

  “She wanted to talk to him, not kill him.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew in my heart that Jamie hadn’t killed Lyle.

  “Maybe she did something, something that affected his business.”

  “His business?”

  “He ran Critchley’s Heating and Cooling. Sold it a few years ago when his wife took sick.” She stared at me, her mouth partly open. “A heating business would be open to all kinds of complaints.”

  “You bet. Liability claims too. If a fire broke out because of a faulty furnace…”

  “A fire.”

  “Maybe someone decided to fight fire with fire,” I said.

  I set my mug on the table. “The way to clear Jamie is to help the police find Lyle’s killer. And that’s what I intend to do.”

  Tracy came to the front door when I let myself in late that afternoon. “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “No.” My heart twisted when the smile left her face. “Sorry, honey. And I didn’t learn very much either.”

  Tommy came into the hall with Maxie. “Can we have pizza tonight?” he asked.

  I hadn’t given any thought to dinner. “That’s a good idea, Tommy,” I said. “We’ll wait till Laura comes home, then I’ll order it.”

  “Double cheese,” he said, and returned to the television at the back of the house.

  Tracy and I sat on the front sofa, and I told her about my visit with Veronica. “Apparently, Jamie doesn’t keep in touch with her old friends up there,” I said.

  “That’s not true. She got a birthday card from her friend, Al, last month. Al as in Alexandra.”

  “What’s Al’s last name?”

  “Jamie probably mentioned it but I don’t remember.”

  I told her that I’d met Sister Celia in Braeloch and that Lyle had been the sacristan at the parish she was running.

  “I take it he stopped drinking,” she said.

  “Veronica said he went cold turkey after the accident that killed her daughter.”

  Laura came in and I ordered two large pizzas. After we’d eaten, Tracy returned to the condo and Laura left for a party. I put on a video for Tommy, and booted up the computer in my study.

  I did a search for Lyle Critchley. The Highland Times, the weekly newspaper that calls itself “the eyes and ears of the Glencoe Highlands,” had a small article about a fire that broke out in a garage on Thursday evening. “An unidentified man died in the blaze,” the article said. I assumed the newspaper had gone to press before Lyle’s remains were identified.

  But the Toronto daily newspapers were on top of the story. “Glencoe Highlands resident killed in garage fire,” read the headline in Saturday’s Toronto World. “Murder investigation under way,” the deck under it added. A photo of an elderly white-haired man, his lower jaw jutting out like the prow of a ship, accompanied the article. The cutline under the photo identified him as Lyle Critchley.

  The only thing I didn’t already know was in the final paragraph. “Police are now looking for Jennifer Collins as a person of interest. Ms. Collins grew up in Glencoe Highlands Township and graduated from Highlands Secondary School. She is now a lawyer at Optimum Capital Corp. in Toronto.”

  So Jamie had left the law firm where she and Tracy had met and moved to Optimum, a large investment firm that was Norris Cassidy’s chief rival. I wondered why she’d joined Optimum when she had made a name for herself in claims against investment houses and their financial advisors. And why Tracy hadn’t told me.

  I logged into Norris Cassidy’s intranet, and did a search for the Braeloch branch. It hadn’t opened yet. Its launch was scheduled for the coming Wednesday.

  In the kitchen, I poured a glass of chardonnay and a tumbler of apple juice, and joined Tommy in the sunroom where Toy Story was on the wide-screen TV. I sipped the wine, and thought of how despondent Tracy had looked that evening. For her sake, I wanted to find Jamie and clear her name. But to do that, I needed to spend more time in Braeloch.

  I closed my eyes and the image of Norris Cassidy’s Braeloch branch popped into my mind. That branch was my ticket to finding Jamie and clearing her name.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Early the next morning, I took my coffee into my study. Bach’s “Violin Concerto in D Minor” washed over me as I turned on the computer and Googled “Norris Cassidy, Braeloch.” A page of articles from The Highland Times popped up on the screen. The newspaper seemed to have carried an article about the branch in almost every issue for the past few months. Local news, they say, sells local newspapers.

  There were articles about Nuala Larkin, the woman who had been hired to run the branch, and Paul Campbell, the young financial advisor who would work under her. There were articles about renovations to the building. Two years back, the newspaper ran an interview with Dave Dwyer, Norris Cassidy’s vice president, corporate development, who said the Braeloch branch was the first of many the company planned to open outside large urban centers.

  I turned off the computer. The Braeloch branch was a major step for Norris Cassidy. A lot of money had gone into renovating that grand old house on Main Street. The firm was targeting the wealthy cottagers who owned vacation homes in the area.

  It was just past eight. I toasted a bagel, poured another cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to map out my strategy.

  “See ya, Mrs. T,” Tommy said as he left the house at nine-thirty.

  I’d asked Tommy to call me Pat. I didn’t expect him to call me Mom because his mother had died only three months before. But now that he was part of our family, Mrs. T was too formal.

  I watched through the front window as he crossed the street to spend the morning with his new friend, Jake Mackenzie. When the door to the Mackenzie house closed behind him, I dialed the home number of Keith Kulas, our CEO. I hesitated to make that call, but I couldn’t wait to reach him at his office on Monday.

  A woman with a foreign accent picked up after the second ring. “The Kulas residence,” she said.

  I gave her my name and asked if I could speak to Keith. Moments later, he came on the line.

  “Pat,” he said. “How are you?”

  I told him I needed to speak to him in person.

  “Now?”

  “I’m sorry, Keith, but if you have time…”

  “Can you come over right now? Evelyn and I are driving to Oakville in an hour to visit our daughter.” He gave me an address.

  I went upstairs and told Laura that I’d be gone for a few hours. Then I called Peggy Mackenzie and asked if Tommy could stay with Jake until I returned.

  “No problem,” she told me. “I hoped he’d stay for lunch.”

  I changed into a pair of black dress trousers and a black sweater, and left the house.

  Ten minutes later, I was in the heart of Rosedale, the enclave for Toronto’s wealthy residents just north of the downtown core. In front of me was a stately Victorian home. I rapped the brass knocker, and a Filipina in a maid’s uniform answered. She led me to a room at the back of the house, where Keith, a distinguished-looking man with a head of silver hair, was seated on a sofa. He was dressed in his idea of weekend casual, a cream-colored cashmere cardigan and pressed gray pants.

  The maid set a tray with two mugs of coffee and a plate of miniature blueberry muffins on the low table in front of him.

  “This must be something very pressing if it can’t wait until tomorrow,” he said when the woman had left the room.
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br />   Keith has a type A personality. A as in anal. I knew I’d get nowhere by playing on his sympathy. I had to show him how I could help Norris Cassidy.

  I gave him my best smile. “I was in Braeloch yesterday and I saw the new Norris Cassidy branch. Very impressive.”

  A frown crossed his face as he picked up a mug. “That building has taken a ton of money to renovate.”

  “You’ll go up for the opening?”

  “Can’t. Shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday.”

  “None of the other directors will be there?”

  He shook his head. “Bad timing. Shareholders’ meeting and a branch opening the same day? Should not have happened.” He sighed. “Too late to go back to our day planners.”

  “I could go to Braeloch for you. I can cut the ribbon, serve the cake or whatever’s planned.”

  Keith is shrewd. “There’s something else going on, Pat. What is it?”

  I hesitated. “It’s…family business.” I had to find my daughter’s lover. “It’s…complicated.” Because she works for our chief rival. “I’d rather not say anything more.”

  He leaned back in his chair and his pale blue eyes studied me. “What’s in it for Norris Cassidy?”

  “The people you’ve hired at the branch are new to the company. We need to show the locals that Norris Cassidy is interested in them and their community, not just their money.”

  “Hmm.” He sipped his coffee before turning his attention back to me. “It’s not a bad idea, Pat. Go up to Braeloch and fly the company’s colors on Wednesday. Then stay on. Vet all client accounts. Make sure everything runs according to our standards. Get out in the community and find businesses that need our services.”

  He wanted me to stay on after the opening. “For how long?”

  “Three weeks maybe. You can stay at Norris Cassidy’s executive vacation home. It’s a great place out on Black Bear Lake.”

  This was the opportunity I’d wanted, but three weeks of it? I had Laura and Tommy to think of. But my mind began to scramble for ways to make it happen.