Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6)

by Janice Macdonald

  This whole idea of partying with people who were virtually strangers with the added horror of their having known something about me when I was younger and stupider was giving me hives to just think about. Sipping tea in a dark classroom, thinking about prairie angst, would be just the thing to calm me down prior to the party that evening.

  So I was quite pleased with myself and my own organizing around Denise’s shindig. I explained it all to Steve, who was looking a bit drawn. Although I didn’t really want to sound curious about cases he couldn’t actually talk about, I had to ask.

  “How did it go today?”

  He shrugged. “I helped with getting statements, but once Keller saw your and Denise’s names on the statement list, I was officially off the case. I’m assigned to my desk for the next week and a half.”

  I knew that deskwork wasn’t his favourite, but this sounded like good news to me. “Does that mean you are still okay to go to the reunion stuff with me?”

  He laughed. “Yep, you’re stuck with me.”

  I leaned over and draped my arms over his shoulders, leaning my forehead against his. “You don’t know what a relief that is to me. I mean, I am sorry you are on desk duty, but I was so worried you’d be enmeshed in all that stuff and we’d not be able to talk and it would all get awkward and tense, and besides that, I would look so weird with this fabulous ring and no man to go with it.”

  Steve laughed and hugged me back. “Not in a million years. You are going to introduce me to everyone at that party as the man who finally pinned you down.”

  We were interrupted from our nuzzling by a key in the door. Leo was back from the football game, carrying a pennant and sporting a green and yellow scarf he hadn’t been wearing when he left.

  “We won!” he announced, waving his pennant merrily and ignoring the fact that we were tidying ourselves up for a primetime audience.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Leo?”

  “As long as it’s not caffeinated. I’ll be up all night if I touch caffeine after 10 a.m.”

  “It’s peppermint.”

  “That would be lovely. Don’t get up, I will go get myself a cup.” He returned in a flurry of scarves with a cup and I poured, touching up Steve’s cup at the same time. Leo sat down and proceeded to ask Steve all the things I had tried not to.

  “How is the investigation into Guy’s murder going? Do you have any leads?”

  Steve shrugged. “I’m off the case, but from what I can tell, they are going through numbers on his cellphone to determine who he’d been in contact with, and trying to pin down his movements from the time he landed at the airport. An officer is going through the CCTV from the hotel lobby and hallways, to see if there is any correlation, but that’s the needle-in-the-haystack sort of search. They’re usually set on a five- or ten-second stills shot, so you get jerky motion at best, and people wearing hoods and hats and not looking up. Someone else is going through Denise’s list of attendees, and matching them to people signed in at the hotel. Aside from that, I couldn’t tell you what lines of inquiry they’re following, nor should I.”

  “Are they going to want to speak to me?” Leo was obviously hoping so.

  “I doubt it, Leo,” Steve deflated his hopes as gently as possible. “You hadn’t seen him at the airport, and Randy can alibi your overlapping time in town. Unless your phone number is on the list they are checking, I don’t think you’ll be getting called in.”

  Leo was pretty sanguine, on the whole. “I suppose it would put a cramp in the festivities, if I was, so perhaps it’s a relief. I do hope they catch whoever did it before the weekend’s over, though. It would be terrible to have to go home without knowing how it all ended.”

  “Spoken like a true English major,” I laughed. “We are so smitten with plot and closure and endings. Even when we talk theory and characterization and motifs, we are all about the plot.”

  “I’m all about the plot, about the plot, no theory,” sang Leo, to the tune of an earworm song from a season or two earlier. Steve and I laughed, and on the whole it struck me that although I might once have, no one in the room was mourning the passing of Guy Larmour.

  I wondered if anyone was, anywhere.

  Steve left a little while later, promising to shine up nicely and meet me at the Humanities Building at seven. Leo and I got out the air mattress from my room, and soon he and I were ensconced in our separate beds, conducting a conversation à la The Waltons.

  “Do you think they will catch whoever did it?”

  “There is bound to be all sorts of forensic evidence in that hotel room.”

  “Do you think it was a robbery gone wrong? Or one of us?”

  “Leo, I don’t know. Maybe Guy had a whole backstory in Edmonton we didn’t know about. He could have been connected to something bad when he was here in grad school.”

  “Maybe you’re not the only person he plagiarized.”

  “Right.”

  “I hope you’re not. Because otherwise, you’re suspect number one, right?”

  “Goodnight, Leo.”

  “Goodnight, Randy.”

  42.

  Classes went according to plan on Friday, and I left my satchel in my desk drawer, all ready for Monday. No matter how much partying I did with my classmates of yore, I could be ready to roll come the new week.

  I caught the 9 home, jumped into a pair of velvety black trousers I usually reserved for Christmas parties and a black-and-gold pullover. I hooked gold hoops into my ears, dusted a bit of sparkly bronzer over my cheeks and dabbed on a bit more mascara. I was ready.

  At 3 p.m., I was waiting under a sign that said, “Turn off your ignition. There is an air intake here.” Denise was ten minutes late. Still, she managed to beat Leo, who came loping along from the direction of the Arts Court.

  Denise’s small car was filled to capacity with bottles of wine and cases of beer. Three bags of cheese and crackers were in the trunk.

  “Maybe we could wedge this door open and unload it all in one go?”

  “Is there a dolly or a trolly we could use?” asked Leo.

  “Let me go check.” I said. There was no sign of a maintenance person, who could probably have helped us out in a minute, unlocking some magical cupboard full of rolling stock. I took the elevator up to the third floor, where the secretary of the English department showed me to a dolly they kept for moving boxes of paper in the photocopying room. Promising to get it right back to her, I pushed it back to the elevator and back on to the loading dock, where Denise and Leo had stacked the crates.

  Leaving Leo to stand guard over the rest of the hooch, Denise and I wheeled up most of the beer, me doing the manoeuvring of the dolly, and she carrying the nibblies and pushing the elevator buttons.

  Another load, this time with Leo along, got all the wine upstairs. Denise left us there to set up the bar, while she moved her car back to her parking area. I found the fun-fact sheets and proceeded to tape them to the walls, as Denise and I had envisioned. Leo was festooning the tables with the plastic tablecloths, and setting them all along the west window. The plates of crackers and cheeses, as yet still wrapped, he placed in groupings of three at either end, with the fruit and pickles in the middle.

  Denise clapped her hands, happily. “This is perfect. Leo, was there another tablecloth in that bag? I was figuring we could cover the wee table outside the room, giving people the hint that the party could spill out into the hallway. And once the office closes in,” she checked her watch, “another thirty minutes, we can set up the bar on the counter, in front of the grill they’ll be pulling down.”

  “This is great, Denise,” Leo smiled. “It’s just classy enough to show us we’ve come along, and still makeshift enough to feel grad-studentish.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going for,” Denise burbled. “I wanted us to reminisce about the paper plates and stubby beer bottles of our student days, without it looking tacky and cheap.”

  Leo gave Denise a shoulder hug. “It’s
great, and if they don’t appreciate it, they’re boors who need to turn in their symbol-reading expert status cards!”

  I looked around the room. It was perfect. All Denise’s planning had paid off. A few streamers, with an Alumni Weekend official sign, were at the south end of the room, blocking what was a non-view of the parking lot, anyhow. The yellow and green tablecloths caught the colours of the banner, and the rest of the room had changed so little in the intervening years that the memory factor was on overload. I could practically see Guy lounging on one of the settees at the end of the room. I shook my head to clear my thoughts.

  Steve would be here at six. Some folks would be showing up by 5:30. That left us just under two hours to set up the bar and wait. Denise had put me in charge of registration, so I set up a station on the outside of the doorway, with my box of name tags, and list of names.

  We had put everyone’s tickets into their name tags, which were on lanyards. It occurred to me that it would be far less embarrassing to just set out all the name tags for people to pick up themselves, instead of risking not recognizing people as they approached the table.

  I set them out alphabetically, with the lanyard tucked in behind the name tag. I popped my own lanyard on, as a positive example, and set Denise’s and Leo’s to one side to give to them. Halfway through my task, I came upon Guy’s name tag, bringing me up short once more. This weekend was going to be a minefield of emotions, or as my students said, this would be a time of “all the feels.”

  Setting his name tag back into the box, which I placed at my feet beside the chair, I took a few deep, cleansing breaths to bring myself into the equilibrium I was going to need for the evening.

  “Hi Randy, Denise said to come see you for a name tag.” A voice brought me back to reality. It was Dr. Samson, who had just retired the year before, but shared the emeriti office down the hall. He had taught most of us one way or other, since as well as Romantic Poets and the History of Theory course he also had taught the Teaching and Pedagogy course, helping us all to be better teaching assistants and eventual lecturers.

  Denise and I had worked out a system to cover the professors we’d invited as a matter of form. We didn’t think many of them besides the ones who had officially confirmed would turn up, but we wanted them all to feel welcomed. We had printed up name tags for everyone, but only purchased twenty extra lanyards. I flipped through the alphabetized prof pile, and deftly slipped Dr. Samson’s tag into a lanyard. He smiled at me, and popped it over his head. “This is a real walk down memory lane for me. Two of my favourite students are planning to come back this weekend. We keep in touch through Christmas cards, of course, but it will be lovely to see Shannon and Gerald. Do you still keep in touch with your advisor? Who was that again?”

  I grimaced. “No, I’m afraid not. I studied with Dr. Quinn, before she died.”

  Dr. Samson looked flustered, and I made a mental note to figure out how to get around mentioning death to elderly people this weekend. He smiled at me distractedly, and I pointed to the bar, which Leo had set up across the rotunda, to where he gratefully escaped.

  While we had been talking, three or four other people had appeared in the area, and were lining up for name tags. I smiled as they found their names and we pretended to remember each other. I surreptitiously checked my watch. It was 5:15. It would be still two hours till Steve arrived and another three hours before I could even think of the party running its course. We had to be out of the building before 11, but at this point, that seemed a lifetime away.

  Shannon and Gerald, Dr. Samson’s former students, showed up together, which was a good thing, since they were apparently still happily married to each other. I did remember Shannon, but mostly because she and I were connected on social media. She reached out to hug me, which, being Shannon, seemed totally natural, so I hugged her back. I caught sight of Leo watching me and laughing to himself. He had probably already figured out there was going to be more hugging than I was used to involved in this weekend.

  More fool I.

  The people were streaming in by now, and it made my job a bit easier. I pointed at name tags, created another three or four professor tags for staff and former staff, and smiled and nodded at people who looked a whole lot older than I felt.

  Denise was flitting about, ushering people into the grad lounge, heading over to the bar with one or another alumnus to introduce them to Leo and top up their red plastic cups. She headed over to my table, where there were only three or four tags left out.

  “I got a message from Eleanor that she won’t be able to come, so we can pull that one, and David and his family get in too late for this event. That leaves Steve, who should be here any minute. I’m going to get Dr. Spanner a drink and then I think things can pretty much take care of themselves, don’t you?”

  I looked over where Denise was gesturing and spotted the former chair. She had held up remarkably well, and still looked chic and and modern in what had to be vintage Chanel. Her bobbed hair was now completely white, and it suited her complexion of creamy skin and rosy cheeks. It was funny how some women aged into looking like grandmothers and others turned into Anna Wintour.

  Denise was still talking. “I am impressed with how many Honours students decided to attend, as well. It makes us look like quite the impressive crowd, don’t you think?”

  We couldn’t see everywhere from our vantage point, but the conversational buzz was strong from inside the lounge, and several groups were creating circles in the open area between us and the makeshift bar.

  “Are we sure we know any of these people? I think I only recognize about seven.”

  “Well, you should mingle and find out.”

  “As soon as Steve gets here, I promise.”

  “Why don’t you scoop up his name tag, put the rest away for tomorrow at the tent in the quad and come get yourself a drink? Then you can mingle and have fun.”

  It sounded like an order. I must have been letting the horror show on my face a little too much for her vision of how the evening should progress. I dutifully put away the lanyards into the shoebox and stowed it behind the door to the grad lounge. As I was heading over to get a beer from Leo, Steve came out of the stairwell, and I felt the tension leach from my body.

  He hugged me, and shook Leo’s hand while receiving his lanyard from me. He took a beer, as well, and soon we were walking into the bedazzled grad lounge, ready to take on the shared reminiscences of people I had never been all that close to in the first place.

  “So, is this limbo, purgatory, or hell?” I muttered to Steve, who had done almost a minor’s worth of religious philosophy during his Sociology degree.

  He laughed. “Nothing close, although introverts would liken it to one of Dante’s inner circles of hell, I suppose. I am not sure why you don’t like this sort of thing. You can get up in front of classrooms and talk, what is the difference?”

  “I’m no extrovert, though. I do it because it has to be done, and because in those situations I am the one with the most knowledge to impart and the means to offer it up. I think I am what they’re calling an ‘ambivert’ these days. I can be in crowd or spotlight situations, but it doesn’t feed me like it would an extrovert.”

  “That makes sense. So, do you think Denise is an ambivert, too?”

  “Nope, she is classic extrovert. Look at that glow. Put her in the centre of things and she becomes even more adept, more on point, more adroit. She will be high as a kite for three hours after this party ends, too, whereas I will be ready for an eight-hour nap to get me rested enough to go to bed.”

  Steve laughed. I steered him over to the wall where some of the memory posters were hanging. He pointed to a photo of the House, the North Garneau home that had been bought up by the university and turned into sessional offices. It was where Steve and I had first met. Like much of what had personal history for me, they had knocked it down a couple of years ago. It was a good thing I’d worked for a while at Rutherford House; it was a designated h
istoric site, so they couldn’t pull it down.

  We were so focused on the photos that we didn’t hear the woman come up behind us.

  “You’re Randy Craig,” she stated, as if she was saying “you’re on fire” or something equally abhorrent. As I was turning and nodding my agreement that indeed I was, her hand came up toward me quickly, blurring in its speed and proximity.

  “You killed Guy!” she screamed in my face. I noted spittle in the corners of her mouth, and how one of her front teeth was slightly yellower than its twin. She was way too close for my comfort, and as if to agree with me, my collarbone began to throb in violent discomfort.

  43.

  I heard someone scream, and Steve was somehow wrestling the woman with the bad teeth to the ground. I saw Denise running toward me, but before she could reach me, Shannon Murray was clamping a wad of paper napkins to my neck, telling me to sit down. She was pushing on my neck, right where it curved down into my shoulder, which seemed to pinch a bit, but I felt too distracted by everything to ask her to stop. She was looking stern and telling Gerald to call Emergency. He was suggesting that he might not have the roaming capabilities to reach the local 911, so Dr. Samson pulled out his smartphone and dialled quickly.

  Steve had the woman trussed, and was asking a couple of the beefier alumni to keep an eye on her. She had a defiant Squeaky Fromme sort of look to her, and was saying nothing. When I looked at her, she spat at me. I looked back to Shannon, who was holding her compress to my neck, but beginning to look a bit pink along her sleeve. I realized it was blood. My blood.

  Dr. Spanner was looking fraught, and saying something about being asked to point me out, and not being aware of the reason, but my focus was pulled back to the fact that I was bleeding out of the side of my neck.