“So?”
“Well, maybe she actually is the first person to read them.”
Guy snorted. “Why would a world-class writer hand over her manuscripts to a by-and-large unknown English professor? That’s a pretty pricey proofreader, isn’t it?”
I refused to rise to Guy’s ribbing. “All I’m saying is that Hilary Quinn and Margaret Ahlers are close.”
“Ah, the Dot Lewis lesbian theory.”
“What does it matter? They’re close enough to be intimate about their work. Maybe Ahlers just let her best friend read her novels first, to give her a break in the academic game. Why are you slowing down?”
“I thought I’d pull in here so we could stretch our legs a bit.”
The campground sign identified this as “Waskahigan River Campsite.” I checked the map to determine where we were. The only campground on this side of the road was marked “House River.” I asked Guy what he thought that meant.
“I don’t know—it’s a very old map?” he offered.
“Or that’s a very new sign,” I countered.
After he’d pulled up by a picnic table, Guy took a closer look at the map. “Hmmm, same place, as far as I can tell.”
“What do you think ‘Waskahigan’ means?”
“Probably means ‘house.’”
I snorted and went off to the little waskahigan marked “Ladies.” When I got back, Guy was alternating touching his toes and stretching his arms over his head.
Stretching looked like a good idea, but I’ve never been much for joining in on good ideas. I prefer to come up with them. Instead of exercise, I set myself to cleaning out the junk from the floor of the car. It’s amazing how quickly juice boxes and gum wrappers can multiply. I took one handful to the garbage bin and headed back to shake out the floor mats.
As I was pulling out the first mat, the fateful packet of carbon paper came with it. I’d shoved it under my seat and forgotten my shame. Now it surfaced again like my own peculiar albatross. The only thing to do was get rid of it. I pulled the lot out forcefully and sheets of flimsy blue paper escaped, flying everywhere.
“Shit!” This exclamation got through to my campground Charles Atlas. Laughing, he began to chase carbon paper like an actress chasing butterflies in a tampon commercial. I was scrabbling at the sheets nearest me when something brought me up short.
Most of the packet had never been used, but someone had shoved a little-used piece of carbon back into the plastic. On it were centred the words:
Feathers of Treasure
by
Margaret Ahlers
I screamed.
Guy paused in his Catherine Deneuve dervish routine. “What’s the matter? Did you see a snake?”
I was so excited I barely registered the semi-chauvinistic tone. Guy’s consciousness could get raised later.
“What do you think of this?” I shouted, waving the incriminating carbon in Guy’s face.
“I think it’s carbon paper,” he said.
“No, no—look what’s cut into it!”
He squinted at the paper and then whistled slowly. “It looks like you may be right after all.”
“Of course I am. As if there was ever any doubt,” I chirped. But deep down, I was not sure whether or not I was pleased or terrified that I’d been vindicated. After all, it’s one thing to suspect that a person has been murdered, but quite another thing to have it proven.
It was if Guy was reading my mind. “It’s not exactly irrefutable proof, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just because you found that in Quinn’s cabin doesn’t mean she killed Ahlers. God, it doesn’t even mean she knew Ahlers—she could have just been goofing around on the typewriter.”
“With carbon paper? That’s like doodling in oil paint.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“No, I don’t. First of all, this means that it’s very likely there’s a fourth novel, for all Quinn’s hot air. For another thing, it makes a direct link between Quinn and Ahlers. And, it corroborates the reports of the two women and explains the two different wardrobes in the cabin. I think it’s incredibly significant.”
“Okay, so it’s incredibly significant. What are you going to do about it?”
I stopped and stared at him. There was a moment or two of pugnacious silence before we began to laugh. It really was a silly scene; Guy was glowering and I was trying to stare him down, clutching a dirty piece of carbon paper. It’s lucky we were the only ones at the campsite. People would have been burning their marshmallows left, right, and centre watching us.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I finally admitted. “What do you think I should do with it?”
“The logical reply would be that you should go home, write your thesis, and forget all about this.”
“We may be talking about murder, though.”
“We may be talking fantasy. You really have no justification in assuming that Ahlers was murdered. You barely have proof that they knew each other. If you start spreading these accusations, we’re almost certainly talking slander.”
“You really are hung up on the rules, aren’t you?”
“Well, if you don’t want to follow my advice, what do you propose? Go to the police and say you’ve discovered a murder on the grounds that you broke into a summer cabin and stole some carbon paper?”
My elation crumbled. Of course I had no proof. All I had was my theory that Ahlers had been describing the Peace Country in her novels and a crumpled piece of carbon paper with an odd new title on it.
I was beginning to feel very foolish. I sat down on the picnic bench and scuffed my shoe in the gravel, feeling all of seven years old.
Guy sat down next to me and draped a long, warm arm over my shoulders. “Don’t take it so hard, Randy. I’ll bet Sam Spade had his off days, too.”
“But Guy, it was making so much sense.”
“Which is exactly why you should stop and question it. Nothing should make that much sense in this day and age. We are living in the world of open texts, after all.”
“Oh, give me a break.” The last thing I needed was a lecture on post-modernist theory. What I did need was a bath. The blue from the carbon paper was all over my hands. I looked around, but the only source of water other than the river seemed to be the hand pump. I opted for the river.
When I came back up the bank, wiping my hands on the back of my jeans, Guy was already sitting in the car—in the passenger side.
The next four hours were taken up with white-knuckle driving. My fellow drivers, most of them in eighteen-wheelers, took the speed limit signs merely as suggested minimums. I wondered how many of them were wired on caffeine and uppers. I kept flashing onto images from Spielberg’s Duel, alternating the scenes of the truck driver hauling a semi full of toilets in Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy. When I finally hit the Yellowhead’s divided stretch, I felt like I’d been given a reprieve from death row. We’d all but ceased conversation by this time, so Guy’s voice startled me a little.
“Supposing there was a fourth novel. Where do you think it is now?”
14.
It seemed like the next few days after our trip to the Peace River Country blurred into still photos with weeping sepia edges. Nothing seemed to connect and nothing seemed to get done, either. I was in a fog, wandering from my apartment to the English department and back again. Every now and then, I’d punctuate my time with a coffee break at Java Jive with Maureen or whoever else was headed that way.
Summers on campus are a strange thing. There’s a distant bustle of spring and summer session students, but the upper office floors could be used as bowling alleys most of the time—they’re that empty. A lot of professors traipse off to conferences or to visit special collections or, heaven forbid, to actually go on holiday. Most grad students start taking things a little bit easier than they have done in winter session. In fact, by the middle of July, the Rasputin-on-a-bad-day look had faded from mos
t everyone’s eyes. For all I knew, it might have even faded from mine.
I hadn’t been seeing too much of Guy since the trip. I wasn’t sure, but I felt a coolness that hadn’t been present before the long car ride back to Edmonton. Since the weather had turned nice, I wasn’t staying inside all that much when I was home, and the library had better air circulation than my office, so who knows—maybe he had been phoning me without getting through. I didn’t really care. I was feeling too preoccupied to be worrying about our relationship, if you could call it that, and the sight of him reminded me of breaking into Quinn’s cabin—an incident I wasn’t feeling overly proud of. At the same time I was trying to put Guy out of mind, I was still pondering what he’d said to me about the fourth manuscript.
Suppose there was a fourth novel somewhere. Where would it be? Had Ahlers left a will? Was there any way of finding out? It occurred to me that Garth, my publisher, might know about the laws of wills —and especially about the willing of copyrights and manuscripts. I was just about to pick up the phone and call him when another publisher’s name leapt to mind. If anyone would know about Margaret Ahlers’ literary effects, it would be her publishers, McKendricks. A call to directory assistance got me the number in no time. I contemplated what sort of reason I could make up to get them to give me the information I wanted.
A male voice answered the phone. I tried the truth on them; I was a graduate student working on Margaret Ahlers and could they please tell me where her papers were being sent?
I made a mental note to try the truth more often; I was connected straight through to Duncan McKendrick. From what little I recalled of the Toronto literary scene, Duncan was the son and heir apparent to Daddy’s empire. I didn’t know how old he was, but since Angus McKendrick was still whooping it up in the celebrity pages, Duncan was probably only in his mid-forties. I tend to group people into three camps: under fifteen, over seventy, and in-between. Duncan was part of that “older than me, younger than Mom” in-between category. I’d had him pointed out to me at a couple of wingdings over the years, but I’m sure he had no idea who I was. And why should he? I had been a writer for hire, not a name author when I was freelancing. That was okay with me. I figured I might get farther on the innocent student ploy.
“How may I help you, Ms. Craig?”
I launched into my grad-student dilemma. I could almost hear him nodding sagely over the phone.
“I see. Well, of course you would want to examine Ahlers’ papers for your study. The only problem is that we’re not free to divulge any information concerning the placement of the papers until it’s been officially announced, and that won’t be for—let me see—several months yet.”
I had been puffing up expectantly throughout his little speech, but now I sagged. Months? My silence must have been loaded, because Duncan McKendrick leapt into the breach with an inspired suggestion. “Why don’t you write your request, care of us here at McKendricks, and we’ll see that it’s passed on to the executor? After all, I can’t see why anyone would want to stymie an academic interest in Ms. Ahlers’ work.”
It was grasping at straws, but I thanked him and hung up the phone. What did I have to lose? I drafted a quick letter asking for an opportunity to examine the papers, then went down to the department office to get an envelope. After opening several empty drawers that had once held envelopes by the gross, I finally asked one of the secretaries where they were being kept.
“Under lock and key—part of the new budget cuts. Sorry!”
I trudged down to the mall to buy a package of envelopes, feeling hard done by. My run of luck continued—the business envelopes were out of stock. I bought a package of ten designer colours and mailed off my letter to McKendricks in a neon fuchsia special. I hoped that Duncan and old Angus kept sunglasses handy.
15.
The character business came to me at about eleven on a hot July night. I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking iced tea while watching a spindly-legged bug dart around the standing lamp in the corner. Even in my basement suite, it was too humid to move, let alone kill anything. I was idly thinking about redecorating, which in my case meant moving the tacky furniture from one dim corner to another. I wondered if the landlord would contribute toward the cost of wallpaper, and pondered the walls to see which one I should attack first.
The bulletin board with the big map of the province was still staring down at me from the opposite wall. I’d have to do something about that. If I took down the map, the cork would be too dark for the room. Maybe I could spray-paint the cork a lighter colour; I was getting sick of staring at Big Sky Country.
A slight breeze riffled the curtains and gave me the impetus to heave myself out of the chair for more iced tea. On the way to the fridge, I yanked the pins out of the map. A bunch of file cards tumbled down with it. As I bent down to pick them up, it occurred to me that the system I’d created on this wall had been what sent me to the Peace River County in the first place. I started to remove all the cards from the board. It was ridiculous to even contemplate throwing them away—at the time I was such a packrat, I had trouble pitching out egg cartons—but I wasn’t quite sure of what order to put them in.
Should I order them by location, or by which novel they came from, or alphabetically by the first word in the quotation? Idly, I began to cut and shuffle the cards like a poker dealer. I finally decided to order them by novel. I’d written the title at the bottom of most of the quotations, but on some I’d just jotted page numbers.
It became a game. Would I be able to recognize the novel from a cryptic, area-specific quotation? I was doing pretty well until I came to the part where Andrea is picking saskatoons and becomes disoriented in the bush. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember whether that was from an early childhood sequence in One for Sorrow or one of the flashbacks in The Children of Magpie. It was driving me crazy. So, even in that stultifying heat, I plodded into the living room to pull out my copies of the novels. Pouring myself some more iced tea, I began leafing through the third novel. Even before I hit page eighty-three, I realized my mistake. The passage had to have been taken from One for Sorrow because the heroine in The Children of Magpie was Isabel, not Andrea.
I checked through the first novel, now dog-eared and heavily penciled throughout the margins, just to make sure. I was right. The quote came from the passage where Andrea has gone to the farm for the summer and her grandmother sends her out for saskatoons with two honey pails strapped to her waist. She dodges a hornet and trips, spilling berries everywhere. After a good cry, she looks up and realizes that she’s lost all sense of direction there on the ground among the bushes. For the first time in the farm context, she is pacified rather than frightened by the experience. She limps home eventually, with next to nothing in the pails and purple stains all over her matching shorts and pop-top.
It was a great sequence, and it finally occurred to me why I had mixed it up with the third novel. In The Children of Magpie, Isabel travels back home for her grandmother’s funeral, and keeps travelling back in time to flashbacks similar to the saskatoon scene. There’s the day her grandmother pushes the lawn chairs together and throws a quilt over them to make a playhouse for Isabel, and the time Isabel tries to be a home help for her grandmother when the old lady is laid up with arthritis. No wonder I’d mixed up the quotation. Grandmothers and saskatoons were laced through both. I closed the book and returned to staring at the now-empty cork wall.
Andrea and Isabel. They were the same woman. And, of the two central characters in Two for Joy, Eleanor was far closer to the mould than her friend Marie. Andrea, Eleanor, Isabel—A, E, I. Why hadn’t I seen it before?
The answer was simple. I’d been looking for locations before, material for my thesis. Now I was looking for Ahlers herself, any clue that could bring this author “to life” for me now that it was too late to ever encounter her in person. I don’t know if I was already thinking of myself as some sort of literary Mrs. Peel at this point, but my urge to fi
nd out whether Quinn had anything to do with Ahlers’ death had been simmering ever since I’d first connected them in Dot Lewis’s living room.
I know that authors are never completely autobiographical, and that most of the characters they create are amalgams of various people they have met, observed and imagined. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, though. There was a definite through-line in these novels, and I was going to navigate it. In the same way I’d let the novels lead me to the Peace River Country, I was now going to let them lead me to their author. Maybe knowing how she’d lived would tell me how she’d died.
I decided to use the pink cards for physical descriptions, green cards for thoughts and dreams, and yellow cards for activities or events that might leave a mental or physical mark on the character. Starting tomorrow, the corkboard would have a purpose once more. I set my glass and empty pitcher in the sink, and then carefully straightened the pile of novels and cue cards.
For good measure, just before I turned out the light, I swatted the bug. I was back on track.
16.
Will Rogers once said that being on the right track was fine and dandy, but you could still get run over by the train if all you did was sit around. I was not intending to sit around.
I began preparing first thing the next morning. I washed the floor, cleaned the apartment till everything was either gleaming or a reasonable facsimile thereof, dragged my folding grocery cart out of the storage closet, and lugged home provisions from the Safeway. I also picked up fresh packages of cue cards and pushpins, three new pens, and a jumbo bag of strawberry licorice from the Shoppers Drug Mart next door.
It took most of the day to do all the chores I’d set for myself. Some people might find it ridiculous, but I’d discovered through experience that I had to clear everything else out of the way before beginning a new writing project. If things got rough, defrosting the fridge might look inviting, and a trip to the store could be extended with ease to fill an entire afternoon. I therefore had to get rid of externals before I could put my head down to concentrate.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 8
