Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  I wasn’t sure what kept me from telling Guy about my discoveries. Maybe it was my suspicions about his motivations. I tried my best to shake the feeling; after all, he was doing me an incredible favour. All the same, I was uneasy. How loyal should one be to one’s third reader? I honestly didn’t know the answer to that question, and the whole set-up felt odd. MA candidates don’t usually know their third readers at all; typically, they come from another department on campus. And of course PhDs were a whole other ball of string.

  Could Guy have been tagging along this whole time on Quinn’s orders? Was there really something sinister going on, or was this all in my imagination? How could Guy wangle permission to use Quinn’s office without being close to her? That last was no mystery, I suppose; I’d seen Guy working his charms on all and sundry, provided they were female. He often had a trail of them simpering behind him. On the other hand, wasn’t Quinn supposed to be gay? Would Guy’s effervescent charms work on her at all?

  I decided—or rather my body decided—to give the puzzle a rest at about 4 in the morning. I set my alarm for 7 a.m., and woke bleary-eyed to a rainy day. Half of me was rejoicing; the much-needed rain would cool down my stuffy basement suite. The other half was wondering how on earth I was going to sneak into Quinn’s office wearing my bright yellow sou’wester.

  I needn’t have worried. Guy met me at Java Jive and bought me a seventy-five cent cup of heaven. He told me Quinn’s nearest office neighbour was away on naval exercises and that he hadn’t spotted anyone else in the hallway all morning. Quinn’s office was in the far northeast corner of the fourth floor. All I had to do was take the far eastern stairwell up from the mall level two flights of stairs and duck into the office. None of the English department staff who knew I shouldn’t be there would be around to see me, Guy claimed, and the Religious Studies folks across the hall wouldn’t know me from Adam. I countered that this last was an unfortunate choice of words, because Religious Studies types were more likely than most to recognize Adam if they spotted him. Guy gave only a nod for what I felt was a rather witty remark under the circumstances. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was feeling.

  Guy had been right about the ease of access to Quinn’s lair. No one saw us go in, I was sure of it. He looked me straight in the eye. “You’ve got one day in here, and be neat about it. If you have to go out for any reason, unlock the door and close it behind you, but make sure it’s locked tight when you leave for good.”

  “Aren’t you staying?”

  “No. One felony per term is enough for me. Besides, I have a dissertation to write.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be in the library most of the day. I’ll phone you later, shall I?”

  “Yes, call me tonight, after ten. If I don’t answer, please come find me.”

  Guy must have seen the sudden panic flashing across my face. “Hey, don’t worry about it. What can possibly happen to you in the Humanities Building?”

  “Right,” I laughed, a little shakily. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Yes, you will,” he said, and gave me a swift kiss. “Good luck, Randy. I hope this is what you really want.” He strode down the hallway, leaving me to curse his cryptic soul. Just what had he meant by that remark?

  I closed the door behind him and leaned against it, surveying the uncharted landscape I was about to dive into. My mouth felt dry and my hands were sweaty as I reached out for the drawer of the filing cabinet nearest to me.

  Three hours later, I was no longer nervous—just tired and dusty. I had finger-crept surreptitiously through every drawer and file in Quinn’s territory, and there was nothing on Ahlers apart from a few file folders with rough drafts of Quinn’s previously published articles on the novels. I plonked myself down in Quinn’s swivel chair and began to spin myself around aimlessly. There had to be a clue to the fourth novel here somewhere.

  I had been through the filing cabinets, desk, and computer table. The only other pieces of furniture in the office were the bookcases, which lined the walls with even a shelf above the door. Maybe the manuscript was in a hollowed-out book. I chuckled and tried to recall where this rather silly piece of detective trivia had come from, but by this point anything seemed worth a try. I decided to flip through all books more than an inch thick. I was going to concentrate on books that were larger than eight and a half by eleven inches, or big enough to hide print pages, but then I remembered the photocopy reducer in the main office and decided that any size book was fair game if it was thick enough.

  Before long, I spotted a book that protruded a bit from the others on the shelf. The dust on the shelf in front of it had been recently disturbed as well. In my eagerness, I tried riffling from front to back, but it was a no-go. The pages seemed to be stuck together. My heart began to beat faster. I sat the book on the desk and opened it to the first page. As I leafed past the frontispiece and the table of contents, I got more and more excited. As my elation built, I slowed down my actions to accentuate the anticipation. I just knew that in a page or two, I would be looking at Ahlers’ final novel, Feathers of Treasure.

  I was wrong.

  What I found in the book safe, for that indeed is what it was, were four floppy disks. All they had for identification was a number in the upper-left corner: one, two, three, and four. Was this what I had been looking for? Why would Quinn input an entire manuscript onto floppy disks? And where were the two paper copies of Ahlers’ last novel? I knew there had to be two copies—otherwise, why bother with carbon paper? But inputting a whole novel that had been typed out as hard copy originals? That was one humungous load of typing. It was, however, the only lead I had. I had just hoped Quinn hadn’t taken her command disk with her.

  I quickly located the command diskette, the floppy containing the operating system for her word processing program, in the left drawer of her desk. Thank God, I thought, she used Wordstar. The last thing I needed was the challenge of figuring out another computer language.

  My happiness was short-lived. Quinn may have guilelessly relinquished her office keys to Guy’s big green eyes, but she had most definitely locked down her computer work with passwords.

  Second-guessing an enemy can sometimes be easier than second-guessing a friend. That said, having to second-guess anyone is a pain in the ass.

  After about two hours of steady plodding, I had worked my way through all the characters’ names in Ahlers’ opus and most of the place names as well. On the theory that the vowels would fall in order, I tried every girl’s name that I could think of that begins with an O. I tried all forms of the magpie rhyme that I could think of, including the word “magpie.” My vision was beginning to blur from staring at the blinking green of the screen. I leaned back in the chair and tried to relieve my tired eyes by focusing on alternating far and middle distances. I looked out the window at the High Level Bridge, and then moved my head slightly to the right and stared at the Euphemia McNaught painting of the lake with the mega-horizons, then repeated the sequence again and again. Suddenly, something made me stop and focus more intently on the McNaught.

  I hadn’t looked at the painting closely since I entered the office, but now I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off it. When I’d first seen it, I’d been captivated by the stylishness of the work. Armed as I now was with first-hand knowledge of the Peace Country, I recognized the realism behind the abstract lines. That was Trumpeter Lake; I’d stake my life on it. It was, in fact, almost exactly the same view I’d seen from Quinn’s cabin.

  A devilishly simple idea stole through my brain. The floppies had been found in a book subtitled Art and Artifice. Obviously, things were not what they seemed in this office. Well, two could play at that game. I wasn’t looking for an Ahlers name; I was looking for a Quinn name. I turned back to the computer keyboard and typed EUPHEMIA.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the screen went temporarily blank. I was beginning to think I’d destroyed Quinn’s computer when the cursor at last began to mo
ve across the screen. Trailing in its wake, like a banner behind a biplane, were the words Feathers of Treasure: A Novel by Margaret Ahlers.

  I checked the length of the files on the disk. The novel ran about 350K. As much as I wanted to read it right away, I knew that the best idea was to get a copy. It would be an easy matter to copy it all onto another diskette, but that wouldn’t do me much good once I was out of Quinn’s office and away from her command disk. I’d have to get a hard copy. I glanced at Quinn’s old-style dot-matrix printer. Why didn’t they equip profs with laser printers, or even bubble jets? This was going to take forever.

  I checked the printer ribbon and paper supply, and then set the ON switch alight. The PRINT program was a single-command affair, and pretty soon the office was echoing with one of the most irritating sounds known to modern man. Pages were churning out at the rate of about two per minute. I calculated that I was in for about three hours of this cacophony. If I could get hooked into a story, I could distract myself from the sound. I settled into Quinn’s easy chair with her copy of Rita Donovan’s Daisy Circus. As much as I wanted to be reading Ahlers’ novel instead, I wasn’t about to scan it line by line as it fed out of the printer. That kind of behaviour was enough to drive you mad in hurry.

  I must have dozed off, lulled to sleep by the mechanical drone of the printer. I woke to a loud pounding. My first thought was that the printer had run amok, but it seemed to be fine. In fact, it seemed to have completed the task. I just had time to quickly check my watch and glance out the window into the dusk to ascertain how long I’d been out before the pounding started up again. My brain finally woke up enough to realize that someone was at the door. I crept up to the door as quietly as possible and peered through the keyhole.

  A few years ago, it seems there was a lot of trouble in the Humanities Building with nutjobs harassing the female staff who worked late at night. In a fit of brilliance, the maintenance department had installed peepholes in the doors of all the female members of the staff—and only those of the females. I figured it was probably cheaper than flashing neon lights—but equally effective at identifying the proper doors to any wandering weirdoes. Even so, tonight I was grateful the peephole existed.

  Maybe it was Guy, piped a hopeful little voice in my head. No such luck. What I saw through the fisheye lens was a stern-looking man in a brown uniform—campus security.

  “Who is it?” I called through the door.

  “Just checking, ma’am. Someone reported seeing a stranger in the building. I saw your light on and thought I’d check to see if you needed an escort out of the building.”

  A stranger in the building? All my worst nightmares were coming true—the ones about being locked up in a dark hallway with a serial killer. Unless I was the “stranger,” in which case I was miffed. I glanced at the printer—it was definitely finished. “Please give me just a minute!” I yelled. I yanked out the floppies, popped them back in their booksafe, turned off the machinery, and was in the hallway out in the corridor, clutching the manuscript under my arm, in less than a minute. “Let me just make sure I’ve got everything,” I smiled at the guard, praying he didn’t know Dr. Quinn on sight.

  I turned and gave the office a thorough visual scan to double-check that everything was as I’d found it that morning. I caught sight of a pile of mail on Quinn’s desk that I’d shuffled aside but not paid much attention to earlier in the day. “Wait just one more moment, could you?”

  “Sure, but I’m going off shift now,” he said with that added tone of belligerence that high school graduates reserve for those of us who’ve thrown away honest monetary pursuits for a more esoteric quest.

  “I won’t be a sec,” I promised over my shoulder, dashing back into the room to pull something from Quinn’s mail pile. Guy must have been emptying her pigeonhole in the main office. Nothing had been opened, and it was just as well. Among plastic bags containing the Times Literary Supplement and departmental fliers was a bright pink envelope I recognized in an instant. It was my letter to Ahlers’ estate, re-labelled and sent via McKendrick Publishers. What was it doing in Quinn’s office? Was she the executor I had guilelessly written to?

  The security guard coughed behind me. I stuffed the envelope into my pocket and turned back to him, pulling the office door shut and locked behind me.

  Within five minutes I was on a bus home, feeling like Jack sliding down the beanstalk. I didn’t miss the irony that I was equating myself with a hero who was also a thief, and who by doing so had placed himself in grave personal danger. Fee fie foe fad, I smell the blood of an English grad.

  20.

  If McKendricks had forwarded my request to Hilary Quinn, it meant that Ahlers had made her executor of her papers. I wondered what Ahlers would have thought of a professor who denied access of such materials to her own grad student. Was that the sort of person who should be made executor of an important literary figure’s work?

  My irritating little inner voice piped up: “You broke into her summer cottage, ransacked her office, and have practically accused her of being a murderer, and you’re annoyed that she hasn’t shared Ahlers’ papers with you?”

  All right, all right, so I’m easily wounded. All I knew was that Quinn’s disregard for the virtue of sharing had wiped out any residual guilt I’d felt about my puny crimes toward her. Reading Ahlers’ last novel was going to be especially sweet because I knew Quinn would writhe if she knew about it.

  I had just settled into the one comfy chair in my apartment, the accordion of computer paper stacked on my knees, when the phone rang. It was late, and I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone. I was just about to let the machine answer when I remembered that Guy was supposed to check on me. I raced to the phone, barking my leg against the doorknob as I rounded the corner.

  “Hello?”

  “Did you leave any signs that you’d been in there?”

  “Hello, Guy. Always nice to hear from you.”

  “Quick, Randy, I’m serious. Should I race over there and tidy up, or what?”

  “Not to worry. Of course I left it tidy—no tell-tale signs that anyone has been in there at all, with the exception of you taking the mail in.” Guy’s voice didn’t usually carry such a tone of panic, which made me highly curious. “Why do you ask?”

  “I got home about an hour ago and there was a letter from Quinn in my mail. She’s coming home earlier than expected. In fact, she’ll be back on Wednesday. I just wanted to make absolutely sure that everything is as it should be, because I have to spend the next two days down in Interlibrary Loans, filling out forms.”

  “So there’s no pressing need to get the wagons in a circle?”

  “No, I guess not. Why do I feel like everything gets a little cloak-and-dagger whenever you’re involved in things, Randy? Did you at least find what you were looking for?”

  “I found plenty of evidence that she’s not gifted in the filing department. Apart from that, not much.”

  “Ah well, I thought it was worth a try.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks anyway.”

  “I guess I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yeah. Take care, Guy.”

  “You too, Randy. G’night.”

  “G’night.”

  I hung up with a sigh and stared at the phone in front of me. Why had I lied to Guy? It must have been a reflexive action, because consciously I’d had every intention of telling him about the manuscript. But there had been something in his voice, something odd. It made me wonder again if he wasn’t a little closer to his third reader than he liked to let on.

  That was ridiculous! If he was Quinn’s henchman, why would he have let me into her office? Quinn certainly wouldn’t have wanted me there. Again I thanked the heavens that I’d been able to rescue the fuchsia envelope. I certainly didn’t need to telegraph my moves to Quinn any more than I already had.

  I wandered back into the ersatz living room. Waiting by the chair was a cup of decaf and three hundred pages’ worth of Pandora’s b
ox. Was I worried?

  I smiled and went for it. A person can’t spend her life ruled by fairy tales and superstitions.

  The first thing that struck me was that Feathers of Treasure was a mystery novel. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first, but as I turned the pages it became clear that the character ­Ophelia wasn’t kidding when she introduced herself as a private eye. It was the first of Ahlers’ novels to be written completely in the first person, and I wasn’t initially sure that I cared for the change.

  About midway through the book, I realized that not only was I enjoying myself, but that this was no ordinary mystery novel. If you can imagine Paul Quarrington getting together with Italo Calvino and reworking an idea by Dashiell Hammett, you’d have some concept of what I found myself reading. There were mysteries within mysteries, and Ophelia wasn’t much good as an investigator. In fact, she was turning out to be a much better victim in a “Perils of Pauline” sort of way. The evil characters kept splitting into twins; as the story became increasingly confusing, it also began to take on more and more characteristics of the old hard-boiled detective novels.

  Ophelia wore white all the time. She had a theory that being very showy was in itself the best camouflage. No one would suspect her of being a private eye if she was so obvious. The trouble was, absolutely everyone knew she was a private eye—they just didn’t take her seriously.

  Ahlers had turned the entire genre on its ear without malice. In fact, even though it was a wicked parody of the form—even the title was a parody, based on plucking and trussing The Maltese Falcon—I wouldn’t be surprised if Feathers of Treasure wasn’t good enough to be at least nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award by the Crime Writers of Canada.

  I wondered what the academic circles would make of this shift of genre. And I was willing to bet that Quinn didn’t like it one bit. In fact, it made me chuckle out loud to imagine Quinn’s reaction to this final book from Ahlers. My laughter died in the air as my thoughts shifted clear; Quinn’s reaction to Ahlers’ last novel might indeed be what motivated the tragic events that had ensured it would be her last.