I was figuring on finding a local history section to occupy my time until I could check through the registry, but my eye was caught by the bulletin board just inside the doors of the library. There was a large poster declaiming the merits of an Old Time Country Fair being held at the college on July 1, 2, 3. Crafts, artwork, baking, preserves, and readings from local poets were promised. I turned back to retrieve my car from the motel lot. If I was going to find anyone who knew whether Margaret Ahlers had been part of the local arts scene in Grande Prairie, I had a feeling the fair was my best bet.
Whoever sang “it’s all happening at the fair” knew what they were talking about. Inside the rotunda, a woman with a full-scale loom was set up, demonstrating her warp and woof, while a macramé lady was explaining her use of “found art” to complement her hangings. I couldn’t imagine just “finding” an entire fan of partridge tailfeathers, but who was I to question the artistic process?
I moved on. Tables were set up as booths down the hall that led to the auditorium. These were laden with cookies, pies, preserves, paper tole, and pottery. Grande Prairie, from all appearances, was a crafts mecca.
I headed for the auditorium. On a table at the doors was a wooden bowl for loose change, a pile of pamphlets indicating the order of performances within, and a few chapbooks that were presumably the published poetry of some of the readers. I was leafing through these with one hand and scrabbling in the pocket of my jeans for some loonies when the woman behind the table spoke.
She asked me if I was enjoying the fair, and whether I was from around the area. I answered yes and no as I sized her up. She was petite and, as far as I could tell, in her early seventies—but then again, she was sitting down and I’m bad with ages. I did notice well-behaved grey hair, a clear complexion, and an ashes-of-roses outfit that coordinated beautifully with the silk scarf draped around her shoulders. She had a lovely smile, too, which she was displaying as we talked.
“How did you happen to hear about the fair?” she asked.
I explained about seeing the poster in the library, and on impulse I told her I was searching for some history on a local author.
This news seemed to delight her. “Oh, I’d love to talk to you about your research. I’m a bit of a history buff myself. Perhaps,” she glanced at her watch, “we could get together tomorrow sometime. I’m supposed to be judging the preserves right now, and then there will still be the ribbon ceremony and all the celebrations. Do you have a car?”
I said I did, and she whipped a pamphlet from the top of the pile, flipped it over, and sketched a quick but clear map to her farm with her name—Dorothy Lewis—neatly written in cursive underneath. We arranged that I should “pop by” at about 10:30 the next morning. She dashed off, leaving a hastily recruited teenager to man her table.
I checked the map and turned the pamphlet back over. After scanning the list of poets and musicians, I decided to keep my loonies in my pocket and make an exit of my own. Back then I was of the mind that poetry was meant to be kept in a small book tucked into a picnic basket, not declaimed from the apron of a stage to a crowd of sisters and cousins and aunts. Of course, back then, I had never heard of poetry slams.
I paused to buy a jar of saskatoon jelly and a small plate of chocolate chip cookies on my way out of the fair, feeling satisfied that I hadn’t been wasting my time. This might not have been how Ackroyd researched Dickens, but then again, they don’t have saskatoon berries in England.
10.
I turned up at City Hall spot on 9 a.m., and by 9:30 I’d discovered that there was no record of Margaret Ahlers ever having paid taxes to the City of Grande Prairie. All in all, it wasn’t surprising; it would have been somehow entirely too easy to have discovered that she’d run for mayor, but I was disappointed nonetheless. What had seemed like such a great project when I’d applied for the funding was starting to feel pretty thin. My great adventure needed a kick in the pants, so I found myself gearing up for my visit to Dorothy Lewis. My inner voice was warning me not to get my hopes up too high, but my inner voice had also been the one to get me into this situation in the first place.
I wasn’t sure how the judge of preserves at the fair could help me, but Dorothy seemed to be my only lead. Following her sketched map, I easily found my way to her farm and was rolling down her drive at exactly 10:30.
“Farmyard” is not the word you’d use to describe Dorothy Lewis’s landscaped showpiece. I’d seen things like it in Better Homes and Gardens or Architectural Digest, but frankly I’d always assumed they were airbrushed or embellished somehow. A driveway of immaculate white gravel gave way to a front patio walk of flagstones that ran the full length of the house. On the borders of this welcoming stage was the most amazing border of foliage I’d ever seen. Many of the shrubs and flowers looked familiar, yet somehow out of place. I finally figured out that I was looking at a vegetable garden unlike any I’d seen before. Carrot ferns bordered purple kale like some sort of Japanese meditation garden; peas frolicked in a vanguard making way for troops of potatoes, rear lines of corn, and trellises of scarlet runner beans. Equally aesthetic arrangements of onions, marigolds, cabbages, zucchini, and pumpkins dotted the way to the house.
I suspect my mouth was hanging open as I walked toward the tidy woman standing in the doorway of the ranch-style house.
Dorothy smiled at me. “I’ve always felt vegetables get shortchanged by being lined up like criminals. They are honestly every bit as pretty as other plants. Why should they look dowdy just because they’re useful, too?” She smiled again after this little speech, but I had a strong feeling I’d been checked out pretty thoroughly by those shrewd eyes. “Well, Miss Craig, I hope you found my map helpful.”
“Call me Randy, please,” I said, scuffing off my loafers in the doorway. “I had no problem getting here at all, Mrs. Lewis.”
“If I’m to call you Randy, which must be a pet-name for Miranda—that is, unless you’re Norwegian—then please call me Dot. Everyone around here does.” She started off through the house, with me right behind her. “It’s such a beautiful morning, I thought we might have tea out on the deck. Come this way, dear.”
What I caught of the house fit right in with my thoughts on the front garden. This was one seriously arty woman. Driftwood for a fireplace lintel, pretty-coloured sands layered in a jar for a doorstop, various oils and watercolours on the walls. When we got to the deck, I figured out what she had done with all the flowers absent from the front beds.
The deck had a half roof, and pots of flowers hung from each rafter—begonias, fuchsias, and lobelia. Staircase ledges had been set into the two walls, and on every step sat a potted flower. Sweet peas ran riot on the third wall, which was not a wall at all, but a stretched piece of netting that made it possible to peer through vines and flowers to the sky beyond. Geraniums guarded the stairs to the lawn, one to each side of the three shallow steps. African violets sat in hand-thrown pots on the table. It was like sitting down in the middle of a bottle of Chloé.
Dot poured the tea. Sure enough, the cups were pottery, and so was the matching tea set of pot, creamer, sugar bowl, and lemon plate. She caught me looking.
“This set was a little project of mine. I was so excited after Harold built me my own kiln that you couldn’t pry me from my wheel for months.”
I murmured something complimentary.
“You’re not from these parts, are you, Randy?”
“No, I’m not. What tipped you off? My accent?” I’ve been told I’ve picked up a “Toronto slur” somewhere along the line. Personally, I believe it’s more of a western drawl, but then I don’t have to listen to myself.
“No, it was your name. I’ve never heard of any Craigs from around here. Of course, you might have been associated through your mother. What was her name?”
The name Summers did nothing for Dot Lewis, either. It seems our Mrs. Lewis was something of an amateur historian for the area, having helped to organize one of those massive books that l
ists everyone, quarter section by quarter section. While I felt a little snubbed to be so summarily excluded without even being looked up, I was beginning to think I’d come to the right place. If anyone knew Margaret Ahlers and her stomping grounds, it was going to be Dot Lewis.
It turned out that the name “Ahlers” rang about the same numbers that Craig had for Dot Lewis. “It’s not a local name, I know that much. Here, come with me.” She led me out of the conservatory patio and back into the cool of the house. In the living room, on either side of a magnificent flagstone fireplace, were floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One entire shelf, it turned out, was filled with local history books. Dot handed me one and took out another for herself.
“Most of these books have indices at the back, dear,” she informed me. “Let’s check and see if we can find your friend.”
“She’s not actually my friend, Dot. She’s an author I’m interested in.”
“And she comes from around the Peace?” Dot beamed with pride of ownership. “Well, we do have a very active artistic community here.”
“But you’ve never heard of Margaret Ahlers?”
Dot smiled. “You know how it is. I don’t get much reading done, except in the winter, and you know how secretive writers can be.”
“Tell me about it!” I was just about to expound on the secretiveness of Margaret Ahlers when I spotted something familiar on Dot’s shelf. “What about this book?” I asked, pulling a twenty-pound tome off the shelf toward me.
Dot gave me a cursory glance. “Beaverlodge to the Rockies? No Ahlers there, and I should know. That’s my old stomping grounds.”
It was the cover that had attracted my attention. It was a wrap print from back to front, depicting a brownish-green landscape with about seventy-five horizons. Something about that picture was scratching at my memory like a potshard. Dot noticed my concentration.
“Lovely cover, isn’t it? It was just super of Betty to allow it.”
“Betty?”
“Betty McNaught. You’ve probably heard of her as Euphemia McNaught. She’s a Beaverlodge girl. In fact, she was my Grade One teacher.”
McNaught. Of course, it was the same artist whose work I’d seen hanging in Quinn’s office. A Beaverlodge artist. Dot was amazing; I think she really did know everybody. At last, I had the feeling I was getting somewhere.
I flipped to the index. No Ahlers, but of course Dot had already told me to expect that. This time, instead of closing the book, I flipped to the Qs. Sure enough, there was a Quinn listed.
Dot looked at me quizzically. “Have you found something, dear?”
It turned out that Dot knew quite a bit about the Quinns of Huallan. There had only been one child, Hilary, who went off to the big city to “become somebody.” Mr. Quinn suffered a stroke after his crops were hailed out two seasons running, and Mrs. Quinn had moved to Edmonton to be near her daughter. Apparently she held onto the family land for years, but finally sold the farm once she knew for certain that Hilary would never marry and come back home.
Dot had gone to school with Hilary’s dad, but said she didn’t know all that much about her. I figured if Dot didn’t get to know everything about a person, there was something wrong. She already had enough material on me to produce a reasonable genealogical chart, and I’d only met her the day before. She could tell me quite a bit about the senior Quinns, but now the fountain of information was starting to dry up.
I offered to put the kettle on for another pot of tea. Dot would have none of it, and began bustling around the kitchen like a banty hen. Never one to be overly pushy about chores, I sat back.
“So Hilary went off to the big city and never looked back?”
Dot ran tap water into the kettle. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly, dear. Her parents are buried here, and she still comes here every summer, after all. It’s just that she never really socializes with any of us, and there’s still a lot of us around who are rather active.”
From what I’d seen at the fair, this was an understatement. That was the point that interested me though. “She comes up here every summer? But I thought her mother sold the farm.”
“The farm, yes; the cottage, no. It was something else when they bought that property out on Trumpeter Lake. I mean, can you imagine wanting to spend your holidays cooking on a stove even more rustic than the one you use all year long on the farm? What is so relaxing about chopping wood by a lake when you can do that at home? It seems that Mrs. Quinn—she was from Ontario originally—had to have a ‘summer place’ as she called it. I remember a few of us howling when we heard about it.”
“And you’re saying that Dr. Quinn still comes out to this rustic summer cottage every year?”
“Hmmm. From what I hear, she’s got it pretty winterized by now. The Giebelhaus boy had the job of insulating it, as I recall.”
“So you see her up here quite often?”
“Not really. I mean, we know they’re here, but they just don’t seem to want to connect with anybody. There have been rumours, that, well…” For the first time since I’d known her, Dot looked rather uncomfortable wading through someone else’s autobiography. “But then again, I suppose they always say that about brainy ladies who don’t get married, what with Gertrude Stein and all.”
“People here think that Dr. Quinn is a lesbian?”
I probably should have trundled out a euphemism; Dot looked uncomfortable with the “L-word” hanging in the air. There was something else bothering me about what she’d just said, though, something that hadn’t come up before.
It hit me just as the kettle started to sing: “They?”
11.
I made it back to town, filled with tea and innuendo. I also now had a lead to something I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle alone. Maybe it was time to bring in the cavalry. The card beside the telephone in the motel room was too convoluted, and from what I could tell, it would cost fifty cents a minute to call Edmonton. I opted for a payphone I could see from the window, out on the corner by the parking lot. God, the trouble we went to before cellphones.
It seemed like ages before Guy picked up the phone. The operator cut in over my answering “Hello.”
“I have a collect call from a Randy Craig. Will you accept the charges?”
“I suppose so,” Guy drawled.
“Never try joking with paid officials, Guy, especially not when they have the power to cut me off.”
“Hold on there, ma’am. Since when does someone instigating a collect call have the right to tell someone off without even saying hello?”
“I did say hello, and thanks for accepting the charges. I couldn’t figure out the change system on this payphone.”
Guy chuckled. “Whatever—it’s great to hear from you. Where are you and what have you found out?”
It was so good to hear Guy’s voice. I told him all about the rumours I’d harvested from Dot Lewis. Guy whistled over the phone, nearly deafening me.
“And you think the ‘other woman’ was Ahlers? What makes you so certain it’s not her mother or sister or someone like that?”
“She doesn’t have a sister, and her mother is dead. Anyhow, you should have heard the tone Dot’s voice took on when she started tut-tutting about ‘how people like to talk.’ Besides, while ‘far be it from Dot to spread a malicious rumours,’ this other woman seems to be Quinn’s partner—whenever they catch sight of her.”
“What do you mean, catch sight of her?”
“Well, it seems that she never comes into town to go shopping, but the lake is pretty well overrun with pleasure boats during the summer, and people occasionally spot two women around the place.” A wind blew at the phone booth door, and I suddenly remembered the cost of little conversation. “So anyway, I thought I’d just phone to let you know that I’d be in Grande Prairie instead of Peace River for the next few days.”
Guy’s voice took on a note of suspicion. “Randy? What are you planning on doing?”
“Oh, I thought I might take a litt
le tour out to Trumpeter Lake.”
“Alone? You must be out of your mind! You can’t go snooping around Quinn’s cottage.”
“Why not?”
“What if she’s out there? What kind of an excuse would you have? I can see the headlines now: GRAD STUDENT FOILED IN ATTEMPT TO MURDER PROF.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Guy.” He wasn’t even close to spooking me, but the wind whistled through the phone door again and I shivered.
“Listen, Randy, where are you staying?”
“The fabulous Swan Motel. Why?”
“Why? Because I’m coming up there is why.”
“And why would you do that? Because you don’t trust me?”
“In a word, no. But to be honest and lay all my cards on all the table, there’s nothing much happening down here right now anyway.”
“How will you get here?”
“I’ll take the bus.”
“It’s a six-hour trip, Guy.”
“Hey, what can I tell you? I care enough to send the very best. Just sit tight till I get there tomorrow, okay?”
I smiled in spite of myself.
“Randy?”
“Yes?”
“Scout around for a good pizza joint.”
During the next fifteen hours, I did some heavy soul-searching and some light reading. I was examining why I’d called Guy with my discovery. On the whole, I hated to admit to myself how nervous Quinn or anything associated with her made me feel. It would be good to have a friend with me to navigate the unknown waters.
I wondered if my calling him had something to do with the lesbian connection to Dr. Quinn, too. Dot Lewis might have stirred things up when she spoke about academics and lesbianism in the same sentence. There used to be this smirking association between the two, as if women could only engage their brains if penises weren’t preoccupying their minds. Maybe that was why I’d phoned Guy: to prove to myself that I could handle both at the same time. Or maybe I was scared it was something I couldn’t tackle on my own.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 6
