by Eric Wright
She ran the tiny restaurant as if it were her own kitchen, cooking specials of meat loaf or stuffed roast pork every day for the regulars, and baking her own butter tarts and muffins. Once Pickett had discovered the coffee shop, he was in there more often than a man who had cooked for himself for years needed to be, even for political reasons. But Charlotte closed early on Sundays because she liked to cook her Sunday supper at home and because there was hardly any business. Then one Saturday, they got talking, and Charlotte invited him up to her house for supper on Sunday and that had become a regular thing.
“What time?” he asked.
“We’ll eat about seven. I’ve got a chicken. A good one. Farmer from Sweetwater brings them around on Saturdays. Fresh killed, they are. I asked him if they were free range like they have in the city; he said no, but they get out a lot.”
Pickett nodded, hardly listening. “Where did Marlow come from? Where did he live before he came here?”
“I thought that was cute,” she said, making a face. “Why are you so interested in Marlow? He just appeared. Betty said she sent for him to help her out, but I never thought she needed any help. I reckon he was out of work before.” She thought it over. “Somewhere out west, I think. I know Betty was born in Manitoba.”
“How long’s she been here?”
“Fifteen years, easy. Her husband came here to open the bakery. He set it up, then he died. Cancer, I think. And she just carried on.”
“How old is she?”
“Forty-five, anyway. There was a big gap between her and Timmy. I guess that’s why she felt so protective of her little brother. He was her only family.”
The door pinged and a man came in, another stranger off the highway. She touched the back of Pickett’s hand and moved to serve the customer. Pickett put a dollar on the counter and left while Charlotte was taking the man’s order.
As he drove along Queen Street to Caxton’s house, he was conscious of being looked at, already connected by the rumors to the body on the trail, but none of the people he passed knew him well enough to stop him and ask questions. He was surprised to catch the police chief on a ladder, once more putting on his storm windows as if nothing had happened; it looked like Caxton was trying to keep his distance from the investigation by finding any kind of thing to do to stay busy.
Caxton waved to Pickett as he approached. “Get yourself a beer from the house. Bring one out for me. Great day, huh?” He looked down at Pickett. “Or it was.”
“I’ll come back,” Pickett said. “When you’ve finished your windows.”
“No, no. Stop a minute. I can do this later.” Caxton came down the ladder and rolled up his hose. He coiled it onto the reel attached to the wall of the house.
“Mebbe pick up the windows, too,” Pickett suggested, looking at the windows spread out on the grass, then up at the brittle-looking branches of an old apple tree already shuddering in the freshening wind.
Together the two men stacked the storm windows against the house.
“I think I’ve reached the turning point,” Caxton said. “Next spring I’m going to get those aluminum storms and screens you don’t have to screw around with. I’ve always kinda liked this job, you know? Sunny day, spread the windows out, hose ’em down, wipe ’em off with a paper towel. Even going up the ladder with them wasn’t bad. And when you finish, when you’ve got the windows on and the screens stacked in the basement, it’s a lot quieter indoors. It’s fall; you can light a little fire, even if you don’t need it yet, put the fishing gear away, get out your curling sweater. You know? But this year, tell the truth, for the first time, it’s a pain in the ass.” He pointed to the big storm windows. “Those suckers are heavy when you’re on the top of a ladder. I’m too old, Mel. Too goddamn old. Not enough energy left to put up storm windows and have some left over.” Then, suddenly, he stopped trying to act normal. “And next year I’ll remember what we found today and know it’s time to put up the windows. Betty’s pretty upset,” he concluded.
They went inside and Caxton sat at his tidy desk, holding a bottle of beer, looking out the window down the road as if waiting for something to happen. In a few minutes he moved twice from the desk to an armchair and back again.
“Maybe you should be with her,” Pickett said.
“She doesn’t want anybody around. Not me, not anybody.”
Pickett did not know Caxton well enough to respond to this. “Did Wilkie’s crew find anything more?” he asked.
“He was shot, they know that. Probably with a small handgun, something like mine.”
“Did they find the gun?”
“Not yet.”
“So it wasn’t suicide.”
“I guess we all know what it was, eh?”
“Nothing else?”
“Not connected to him.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not my investigation, is it? Thank Christ. Can you see me questioning Betty? I’ve told those guys what I know. They can take it from there.” He got up and moved to the window, talking sideways and over his shoulder.
“Will Betty be able to run the bakery by herself?”
“Oh, sure. He wasn’t much use. When he wanted to work he had a strong back, but half the time he was dogging it, down in the beer parlor, over to Jensen’s, stuff like that. She couldn’t rely on him. Didn’t stop her defending the bastard, though. She thought he was a good boy in bad company, thought he’d straighten around any day.” Caxton stopped moving, looked at Pickett, and licked his lips. “He was a thirty-year-old bum and a useless tit, and worse. I know he was taking money out of the till all the time. Betty wouldn’t admit it. I saw the son of a bitch fill his wallet once when I was coming in through the back of the bakery. When I told her, she said she knew, she’d told him to.” Caxton’s tone was savage.
“He’s dead now, Lyman,” Pickett reminded him. “Somebody killed him. Would anybody he hangs around with go that far?”
“He’s been in a couple of fights. Used to drink with some guys from Dumpey’s Mill, and anyone else who was around. He put a guy in the hospital once, in a fight in Sweetwater, but the guy wouldn’t lay a charge.”
“There’s a few suspects, then.”
“When they get a better idea of when he was killed, they’ll check them out. If it was one of them, I guess they’ll find him.”
“Any other possibilities?”
Caxton relaxed slightly, the talk helping. “I’m wondering if it could’ve been connected with the stolen stuff in those cottages along the river.”
CHAPTER 6
Caxton was talking about an outbreak of theft and vandalism that had occurred among the cottages along the shore. The previous spring, owners arriving to open up their cottages on the Victoria Day weekend, the traditional cottage-opening weekend at the end of May, had found they had all been broken into. Any liquor they had left was gone, though not much else, and the beds had been used, condoms left behind; in one cottage was a calling card in the form of a turd in the middle of the floor.
The signs did not add up to a real thief, but—and here the turd was significant, according to one of the OPP—to a gesture of contempt from Indians who were trying to reclaim the land as their own. He had brought this theory with him from his last posting near Parry Sound, but, as the locals pointed out, it didn’t make much sense in Larch River because the nearest Indian band was thirty miles away. The actual damage was negligible, and there was not much to be done about it, anyway. The OPP cruised along the river attaching little labels to the cottages, assuring the owners that the area was being patrolled, but as the locals remarked, you would have to be drunk, stone deaf, and crippled not to hear them coming and have all the time in the world to disappear in the bush before they tied up at the dock. Some of the owners demanded a response from the police, and for these Caxton filled out a form; others, more philosophically, left their doors unlocked so that intruders would not have to break them down, and took their liquor home with them but left behind a cou
ple of bottles of beer to avoid irritating the callers. The incidents had continued sporadically all summer. Whoever was doing it seemed to know which cottages were uninhabited during the week. Two of the cottages were owned by Larch River residents; the others, by summer visitors. The cottages of the two locals were never violated, so it seemed clear that the vandals were local people. Caxton had suggested to the OPP that occasional aerial reconnaissance might help—the police had been lucky once in solving a case of theft of a canoe by picking out the boat’s hiding place from the air. And then one night a high school student had had a seizure after he had made love to his girlfriend in one of the cottages, and she had had to go for help and explain the circumstances in case it was the sex that had triggered his fit. After that it was agreed that Larch River’s own teenagers were probably to blame for all the incidents. Caxton got a list from the boy who had had the fit and visited the teenagers in their homes. After that, no more condoms were found, but the thefts continued.
There were levels of knowledge involved in using the land along the river. In general the cottage owners knew only the bit of land they owned, to a depth of about fifty yards behind them. They came and went by boat, ignoring the bush in the back. Some of the Larch River locals, chiefly the hunters, knew the trail that Marlow’s body had been found on, but only one or two people were familiar with the whole area.
Pickett said, “You don’t think some kid shot him?”
“What I think is that it wasn’t always kids who stole the stuff from the cottages. We just blamed them so we could forget about it.”
“Do you know which cottages were occupied?”
“That OPP guy is planning to take a poke around.” Caxton looked at his watch. “He asked me to go up with them. I don’t think there are any cottagers up there now, but if there are, someone could’ve heard a shot, then they might get an idea as to the time and start to pin everyone down. Trouble is, you spend half an hour on the river at this time of year and you’ll hear shooting, someone doing a little target practice waiting for the hunting season to open. There’s a target on a tree up behind the Broda cottage.” The last of his edginess faded as he began to speculate.
“Maybe someone like that hit Marlow by mistake.”
Caxton looked hopeful. “You don’t go hunting with a handgun, Mel, but it might turn out to be an accident. What it could be is one of the cottagers from the city looking to scare off what they thought was an animal, and killing Marlow.”
Pickett looked skeptical. “Even people from Toronto don’t fire off guns at noises in the bush. Not adults.”
Caxton continued, “Fact is, lately someone’s started to really steal stuff. The thieving’s getting serious, you might say—fishing tackle, radios, even a generator from the Schultzes’ place.”
Pickett nodded. “That’s more than kids looking for a place to screw.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Maybe Timmy did a little stealing himself. Then we’re back to thinking someone took a shot at him when he was where he shouldn’t be and didn’t miss. Maybe one of the American owners. It’s legal in the States, you know. If a guy breaks into your house you can blow him away. If you do that here, you have to be sure to kill him, otherwise he’ll sue you for assault. You could wind up supporting him for life.”
Pickett nodded at the familiar story, which Caxton had got from a Mountie, who might have been joking. “The OPP know all the possibilities?”
“Sure. They’re nearly as smart as you are, Mel.” He laughed briefly, then suddenly brought his hand down hard on the desk. “Son of a bitch. I knew that bastard would screw up me and Betty in the end. Never a day went by without I wondered if I would have to arrest him for something, and Betty wouldn’t understand why I had to.”
It made no sense, except that it made sense of why Caxton had been so agitated when Pickett arrived. Pickett would not have been surprised to learn that Marlow had taken advantage of the relationship to claim a little immunity in minor matters, drunkenness and speeding, for example. But now, as far as he could see, the problem of Timmy Marlow had solved itself. Caxton and Betty could grieve, a little hypocritically in Caxton’s case, then pursue a much easier relationship. “Why would she blame you?” he asked, more or less rhetorically.
“She’s afraid of what may come out.” Caxton gestured vaguely to cover the unknown. “So am I.” Then he turned away abruptly and reached for his holster. “She thinks he may have been part of the cottage problem, too, I guess. Something like that.” Caxton was cutting the conversation off. He opened the drawer for his gun, buckling it into the holster, stuffing change and a ballpoint into his pockets. The telephone rang and Caxton listened for a moment, said, “Twenty minutes. Right,” then hung up.
Pickett said, “But you’re not even involved anymore. It’s Wilkie’s problem now. Leave it that way.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what Betty says, too.” There was no conviction in his voice. “Let me lock up now, Mel. Wilkie’s coming and I have to get my boat and take them up to the cottages.”
Feeling bundled out of the office, Pickett got into his car and pulled out of the driveway. In his rearview mirror, he watched Caxton come out of his house and look up and down the street, ignoring a greeting from Dr. Kuntz, standing in his drive two houses away. He had intended to ask Caxton if there was any way he could help—not with the investigation, of course, he wanted no part of that, but perhaps literally in the bakery. But Caxton clearly wanted no one around him. He was probably afraid that the killer would turn out to be someone he liked a lot more than he had liked Marlow.
Each of the cottages had its own dock, and the policemen tied up to each in succession as they searched their way along the shore. None of the cottages was locked, and a glance through each room was enough to tell whether it had been disturbed. While Wilkie checked the rooms, Copps and Caxton looked around outside.
“How big are the lots here?” Copps asked.
Caxton said, “They’ve got about a quarter of an acre each, but it’s frontage that matters. A little piece of sand for young kids, an easy place to build a dock, that kind of thing.”
“How far back do they go? The lots.”
“You could probably still find the survey stake if you had all day. I don’t know. See, nobody worries about a property line on the sides or the back, because it’s useless land except for summer cottages. No one is about to build a fence. Let’s see how far back we can get.”
He led Copps straight back, away from the river, through dense scrub and then suddenly they were faced with a solid wall of rock about twenty feet high. Caxton turned and led them along the foot of the rock until it became lower and they could scramble onto the top. Above the wall they crossed a smooth curved expanse of rock to a huge split, a sharp-edged gap about ten feet across and at least fifteen feet deep. “See,” Caxton said, as if he had been looking for just such a crack. “You fall down there, we wouldn’t even hear you shout.”
“Where’s the trail from here?”
Caxton pointed farther back into the bush. “Over there. The land rises to meet the height we’re standing on.”
“Can we get to it?”
“Not from here. There’s another big rock fault between us and the trail. The people don’t bother. They come and go by boat. The trail is for hunters.”
“So no one goes through the bush from the shore?”
“No. Oh, heck, you can get through just about anywhere, but you have to know to go a couple of hundred meters one way, and then jump up to the next level of rock and come back, really pick your way. It’s just too much trouble.”
Wilkie called out to them from the shore, and the three men moved to the next cottage. Each cottage had presented its own building problems. Some of the owners had had to build high above their neighbors in order to find a large, flat foundation. Others were set much farther back in the bush to get on land high enough to avoid flooding. “Even in daylight you have to know your way around,” Caxton said, “if you
don’t want to break a leg.”
Only two cottages showed any sign of being used. In all the others, the water lines had been drained, the propane disconnected, and the bedding put into storage.
“Who lives here?” Wilkie asked. He was standing in the doorway of a large cottage, part of an odd little row of buildings starting with a one-room shack near the shore, then behind it a larger cottage with a screen porch, and finally the big one, a three-bedroom cottage with an inside toilet.
“This is the Beavises’ place. They started with that ittybitty little shack and then kept building new ones behind as they got some money and the family got bigger.”
“Look at this.” Wilkie was standing in the door of the kitchen. The cupboards hung open and there was a mug and a half-full percolator on the counter. “I guess they haven’t left for the season.”
“I saw them driving home last weekend,” Caxton said. He tested the coffee grounds with his finger. “Still damp.”
“After a week? See anything out of place?”
They searched all three cabins carefully. In the smallest one, used as a storeroom, they found a human nest—a sleeping bag, a cushion, an empty Coke bottle, and three cigarette butts.
“Kids,” Caxton said, automatically.
“In one sleeping bag?” Copps picked up one of the cigarette butts. “Do kids round here roll their own?” He sniffed the end. “It isn’t pot. Someone holed up here.”
“Before or after?”
“I would think before. You wouldn’t shoot someone, then look for a place to sleep nearby, would you? Or would you?” He took a plastic bag out of his pocket and emptied the tin lid with the cigarette butts into it.
“You got a map of the area, Lyman?”
“In the office.”
“Let’s finish up here and take a look at it.”
Only one other cottage had not been closed, but it had been tidied and there was no sign that it had been used by an outsider.
