“That really isn’t the best attitude to take on the cusp of a reunion weekend,” Leo tapped his finger to the side of his nose, in the manner of Paul Newman in The Sting, but ended up looking more like an inebriated Lady Bracknell. “Rummaging around in the past is what it’s all about.”
“Yes, but I hardly knew anyone back then. No one is going to say to me, ‘Gee Randy, you have fewer bookcases than before.’ I don’t know that I ever let anyone except you, Denise, and Guy into my apartment. Oh, Candy and Lynn might have dropped over for tea once, way back then. But if you are dusting off your memories of way back then, you probably will recall that I wasn’t surrounded by an entourage during grad school.”
“I tell you what I remember the most, was the evening you’d broken your ankle and you sang show tunes to keep the pain from getting to you.”
I was touched that Leo recalled that much detail about our shared past. Of course, having that memory of me at my worst be his touchstone wasn’t all that flattering. I shook my head, trying to physically remove the memory from my own personal slide show, the way you dissolved the effects of an Etch-a-Sketch when you were ready to move onto another picture.
“Well, anyhow, I am pretty sure that most people will be connecting with one or two other folks, rather than all linking elbows and starting a line dance. We weren’t a hugely collective group, as I recall.”
“You’re right,” sighed Leo, obviously relishing the line dance image. “I’m betting we recognize everyone, but I would be hard pressed to put names to them all.” He looked momentarily frightened. “We will all have name tags, won’t we?”
“Oh don’t worry about that. We have name tags with a huge font, so you can check them at a distance before moving in to pretend you remember people. And they are attached to lanyards, making them easier to wear and not lose.”
“Oh goodie. Then when I get home I can hang it with my collection of plastic-names-on-lanyards. Wouldn’t you like to be the person who invented the lanyard? We have one at work, to wear at all times now. As if anyone would come onto campus and try to fake their way through a lecture on Boswell’s biography of Dr. Johnson.”
“We have them at MacEwan, too. All the doors are swipe-locked now.”
“It’s the dystopian future of Brazil already happening,” Leo wiggled his fingers at me with spooky menace. “Your movements are being recorded and your thoughts monitored.”
“Ha, I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” I laughed. “It more like the whole visual recognition element, like school uniforms letting people know where you belong and that you belong where you are supposed to be.”
“Oh, speaking of school uniforms, you’ll die when you see what I found in my bottom drawer. I just had to bring it.” Leo reached over to the left of the loveseat where his satchel and carry-on were tucked, and pulled out a dark green tee shirt. On it was a growling Golden Bear waving a pennant. “Isn’t this just too ‘Twenty-three skidoo’ for words? I intend to wear it to the football game.”
“You’re going to the football game?”
“Of course I am! I used to go to all the games when I was a student here.”
“I had no idea you liked football.”
“I like football uniforms, Randy. The game is a bonus.”
I offered to make us a pot of tea, but Leo was beginning to wane. It had been a long day for him, what with travelling across the country and not being able to order curried chicken, so I obligingly hauled out the air mattress and sleeping bag, along with pillows and an extra blanket. Leo went to use the bathroom while I made up his bed, and I cleared away the glasses off the coffee table, which I wanted to push to the wall so he didn’t inadvertently hit his head on it in the night. It was going to be a tight fit in the living room with the air mattress set up, but doable.
Leo came out of the bathroom looking a bit more vulnerable without his glasses. He was also wearing plaid sleep pants and a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.
“I really do appreciate this, Randy. It’s more than just saving the hotel fees. I think coming back to a reunion without a partner to help buoy you up is just the scariest thing. It really helps to be connected.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Leo.” And I was. Catching up and visiting with Leo had kept me from fretting about Guy for almost twelve hours, which had to be a record. Since I had discovered he’d plagiarized my work, I doubt an hour had gone by without me fixating on what was going to happen when we met up at the reunion. I realized I hadn’t yet told Steve about Guy’s having called me.
As I took my turn washing up and crawling into bed, something Steve had said popped up to the top of my mind. He was off to an incident on Whyte Avenue. I wondered how close that incident was bringing him to the Garneau Hotel, where Denise had booked most of our reunion class.
I hoped his serious incident wasn’t connected to our reunion and his body wasn’t going to end up being one of our English alums. I hoped Steve wasn’t right at the moment running into Guy Larmour somewhere in his investigation. I hoped that my newly minted fiancé was going to be okay to be paraded about as part of the reunion weekend.
I lay under the covers, and turned my ring clockwise, like a worry bead. With any luck, the serious incident would have nothing to do with us, Homecoming would slide by in a breeze, Guy would apologize and rework his research to acknowledge my work, I would get such great student evaluations that MacEwan would move heaven and earth to hire me full-time, Steve and I would get married and grow tomatoes, and life would be merry and bright.
I fell asleep while accepting the Order of Canada. If only dreams could last longer than a night.
39.
Steve called at 5:30 a.m., beating my alarm by thirteen minutes. I had brought my cellphone into the bedroom with me, so as not to disturb Leo, and it was just as well. I fumbled for it, and answered in a croak. “Hello?” At that time of the morning, you don’t have to pretend you are awake.
“Randy, I need you to get dressed and ready to come over to the station to make a statement. There has been an incident connected to your reunion. A man registered as Guy Larmour has been murdered in his hotel room. When I was called in, and the identity was made known, I was obligated to divulge the information I had.”
I must have made some sort of indistinguishable groan, because Steve hurried up the pacing of his words. “There is no reason to worry. From what I can tell, according to the preliminary time of death, I can give you an alibi for your whereabouts. It is just that we need to fill in some of the background about the reunion, and about his plagiarizing your thesis. If he did that to you, there is precedent that he may have stolen intellectual property from someone else at the U of A. Anyhow, we need to move quickly on this. The hotel is antsy and so is the university.”
Steve’s thought that I might be worried about being a suspect was slightly jarring, but we had been down that path before, so I suppose it was reasonable of him to assume I’d be reacting to that. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Something was affecting me about news of Guy’s death, of course. I could feel it in my stomach. I didn’t want to explore too closely and discover it might be relief.
Like all English majors turned humanists, I tried to live by the whole John Donne anti-island concept of “each man’s death diminishing me” but in tourist brochures, islands were linked to paradise. I shook myself mentally, realizing I was still connected to Steve, who was waiting for a response from me.
“Right, I will get there as quick as I can. Do you know how long it will take? I may have to call in and cancel my morning class at MacEwan.”
“Call them from here. I will call Denise and see if she can come down, too. Take a cab and get a receipt.” He rang off without a closing goodbye, so I knew he had to be in a busy area.
I pushed back the covers and stood up. I had to work quickly, and that always meant forgetting something if I didn’t watch out. I headed to the bathroom with a fresh set of underwear in my hand. A fast shower later, with a slat
her of moisturizer on my face, I was back in the bedroom pulling on a pair of black jeans and a lightly felted pink and black shirt I’d picked up the year before in the Army & Navy. If worse came to worse, I could teach in this outfit, though normally I went for something slightly more formal, as my way of signalling respect for the students whose task it would be to stay awake staring at me for an hour.
It would be chilly out now and warm later. Edmonton weather was a challenge to dress for in spring and autumn. A cardigan would be warm enough to wear to the police station, which I could then stash in my satchel if need be. I made sure I had my class folder in my bag, in case this meeting went longer than Steve imagined and I had to boot it to class straight from the police station.
I had left a quick note for Leo on the kitchen table, since he was still zonked out on the air mattress as I tiptoed through the living room. The sun was just starting to make the eastern sky pink as I left the building. Once I was out on the street, and walking toward 109th Street, I pulled out my phone and called a cab. I had made it to the vegan restaurant a couple of blocks south by the time a yellow taxi pulled up, and I climbed in.
The south side police station on 51st Avenue was in dire need of a makeover, but I doubted it would ever happen. Who thinks making an alleged criminal’s first impressions with the legal system a pleasant one is vital at tax or election time? People would rather get snow removed, potholes fixed, and the scare of Jesus put into petty thieves.
I identified myself at the desk, letting them know Steve Browning had called me in, and didn’t have to spend long on the moulded plastic chair bolted to the floor where I had been pointed. Steve came out of the back area and buzzed me through. We wended our way through the desks till we arrived at his. Iain McCorquodale’s desk was piled high with paper, but Steve had a different system, with a line of binders across the back of his desk, creating a fence between him and Iain. They had been partners for a long time, but their methods were complementary, rather than identical. Obviously, their hours weren’t identical either, as Iain was nowhere in sight.
Steve noticed my glance, and nodded. “Iain went home about an hour ago. He was the first on site and helped document the scene. Now it’s up to me to pull in statements from the initial list.”
“And I’m on the top of that initial list,” I grimaced.
“Afraid so,” smiled Steve. “On the plus side, having told me as much as you have already, I think we can make the interview go fairly painlessly, unless you’d rather just make a statement.”
“No, we might as well do an interview. I am not sure exactly what you’d want in a statement, so it would probably take me longer.” Steve nodded and stood up.
“In that case, let’s go into the interview room and get it over with. I might be able to get you on your way in time for your class.” I checked my watch. It was 6:30 a.m. I didn’t have to teach till ten. I sure hoped we’d be done by then.
Steve spoke into the machine, stating the date, the time, his name, and mine. He also listed a number with a couple of letters in it, which I presumed must be the way they identified the case relevant to the interview.
“Can you tell me how you knew Guy Larmour?”
“We were at graduate school together.”
“And why would he be back in Edmonton now?”
“There is a reunion planned for our group, twenty years since grad school in the English Department. About sixty-five people are coming for Homecoming Alumni Weekend.”
“And did you know where Mr. Larmour would be staying?”
“No, but if I’d been asked to guess, I would have said the Garneau. Most of the people coming had chosen to stay there.”
“Were you in touch with Mr. Larmour since graduate school?”
“Not really, not until this past week. He called me last night.”
“He did?”
“Yes, that was the call I had to take when we were at dinner.”
“And did he mention during that call where he was staying, or ask you to meet with him prior to the reunion?”
“Yes, he was wondering if we could meet up but just as I was trying to tell him I had no spare time, he cut me off, as if he suddenly had to deal with something else.” I looked at Steve quizzically, wondering if he was going to ask about the more incriminating stuff. I needn’t have worried.
“Were you aware that Mr. Larmour had published a book recently about Margaret Ahlers, the Canadian novelist?”
“Yes, I just took it out of the library a week ago.”
“And why did you do that?”
“Well, I wrote my thesis on Margaret Ahlers, and as far as I knew, Guy had no interest in that line of research. He was doing his dissertation on godgames and metafiction when I knew him.”
“And Ahlers didn’t write metafiction?”
“Not as such. She was playful in her style, but nothing like the Latin Americans.”
“Was Larmour’s book familiar territory to you?”
“You might say that. Three or four chapters of it were lifted straight out of my thesis.”
“Your thesis on place and voice in the work of Margaret Ahlers?”
“Yes.”
“And was there any conversation between you and Mr. Larmour about the use of your material in his book?”
“No, it wasn’t until the new Ahlers book was published that I even knew he had published on the subject.”
“This new Ahlers book is unusual?”
“Yes, it’s a posthumous publication, and when I was studying her work, there was no sign of it, so it coming out after all this time is very unusual.”
“Your advisor for your thesis was Dr. Hilary Quinn, is that right?”
So, Steve was planning to get everything down on tape.
“That’s right.” I pointed at the machine and then ran my finger across my neck. Steve stopped the machine after announcing he was stopping for a moment, and the time. “Do we have to get into all this now?”
“Randy, I think it’s your best bet to make as clean a statement as you can. Something very ugly is bubbling up, ugly enough to get somebody killed. Keeping secrets at a time like this just makes you vulnerable.”
He had a point, and I knew that whatever was happening, Steve would always have my best interests at heart. Under the table, I twisted his grandmother’s ring, already my go-to way to keep calm and steady.
“Okay.”
He started the recorder once more, stating the time, and picked up where we left off.
“Dr. Quinn was a specialist on Ahlers and was personally acquainted with the writer?”
“That is what brought me to the U of A in the first place, yes.”
“How close was Quinn to Ahlers?”
“Well, you might say inseparable. They were the same person.”
“You are saying that Quinn wrote the works under the assumed name of Margaret Ahlers? What proof do you have of that?”
“Dr. Quinn admitted it to me before she took her own life.”
“And did you tell anyone else of this confession?”
“Not at the time. About a week ago, I told you.”
“And your reasons for keeping this secret?”
I sighed audibly. Let the transcriber make of that what he would. “My reasons were complicated and sort of stupidly romantic, I guess. I didn’t want the power of the books themselves to be diminished by the story of the hoax. Quinn was dead. There was nothing to be gained by exposing her as the author, and mucking up the provenance of the works. And I figured I owed it to her. She had worked so hard to keep it a secret, and staked her academic reputation on writing about the books—who was I to take that all away without her around to defend her actions?”
“So you told no one else of the secret?”
“No.”
“Not Guy Larmour?”
“No one.”
“Do you think Quinn told anyone else?”
“Not that I know of, or it would have come out by now, right? Wha
t is it that they say—a secret between two people is only a secret if one of them is dead.”
“And Dr. Quinn took her own life while you were in graduate school.”
“Yes.”
“Did you identify the body?”
“No. I believe the professor in the next office did that. Dr. Quinn had no immediate family left, as far as I knew.” I thought about Dot up north, who was likely long gone herself by now.
“Was Guy Larmour a student of Dr. Quinn’s?”
“She was the third internal reader on his committee, I think. I am not sure how much he had to do with her, but he told me she had loaned him her office over the break, in return for him taking in her mail and forwarding whatever was important.” I wasn’t about to tell the police that I had stolen a look at the last manuscript because of that connection, no matter what Steve said about clean sweeps.
At that point, Steve read another file name into the recorder, identifying it as the inquiry into the death of Hilary Quinn.
“All right. To capsulize this, you believe you are the only person to whom Dr. Quinn revealed she had written the books of Margaret Ahlers. Guy Larmour published a book of criticism about the works of Ahlers, using your work without attribution. A new Margaret Ahlers has recently been published, meaning that either Dr. Quinn had written another book which was just recently discovered or that someone else discovered the secret and has penned an “Ahlers” of their own. And Guy Larmour, arriving in Edmonton for a twenty-year reunion, has been killed in his hotel room, shortly after having called you. Where were you between the hours of noon and 7 p.m. yesterday?”
“I was in the company of my friend Leo Durochers, who has come in for the reunion and is staying with me, from about 11 a.m. onward. I met him at the LRT station, and brought him to my apartment. We then went for dinner with you, until you were called away.”
“Right. So this concludes the interview with Miranda Craig on the 21st day of September, at 7:15 a.m.” Steve turned off the recorder. “I can get you a copy of this to sign later today, if you want to head out now.”
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 22
