“Are you worried about something, dear lady?”
Where to begin? “No, sorry. I can’t get used to having an urnful of ashes in my house.”
“Indeed, perhaps we can find a...”
“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. The scattering plans sound excellent.” What the hell.
“Grand, grand. I’m glad you’re thinking that way. Marc André was going to contact the poets. But why don’t you ask him if he’d read a bit of his work at the event? He’d never come right out and offer, you know. The request will be better coming from you.”
My heart pounded just hearing his name. A sex life is one thing, but I was way way too long in the tooth to have a crush like this.
Josey called out from the kitchen. “We definitely want to have some poetry. It sounded so nice at Miz Gallagher’s reception. After all, Mr. Kelly was a poet. And we like Mr. Paradis.”
Who could argue? Why did I even want to argue? Benedict needed a ceremony, after all. I just wished it had nothing to do with me.
“Now, the fiddlers are all arranged,” Kostas said. “Quite a few French fellas too. It seems everyone wants to play at Benedict’s funeral. Or whatever we’re calling it. It’ll be a lovely shindig, with nearly every fiddler from Quebec to Eastern Ontario and back again.”
Josey returned with a plate.
I’d forgotten what I’d said about breakfast, and I slipped a slice of cheese onto the buttered brown bread.
“There’s still the matter of the food,” Josey said.
Kostas took over the conversation.
“Indeed, we’ll have to give them a bite and a jar. There’ll be quite a crowd. As Benedict would have wanted.”
They both turned to me, obviously expecting objections.
“Absolutely,” I said
Rachel had already agreed to do the catering. I wondered how she was with loaves and fishes.
Twenty
“Here you go, dear lady, it’s Marc-André.” Kostas’s surprise might have been more convincing if he, himself, hadn’t dialled Marc-André’s number and spoken to him for at least five minutes.
Marc-André sounded pleasant and cheerful and sexy enough to make my knees tremble. I sat again and crossed my legs. So what if the left one still ached?
“Hello, Fiona, Kostas says you would like me to read a few words at Benedict’s scattering ceremony.”
“Yes.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“Thank you.”
Amazing. I probably know umpteen thousand words in the English language and hundreds more in French plus a few in Latin, and where were they all now that I really needed them?
“Do you have any particular poems in mind?” he asked.
“Umm, no.” I’d never heard of Marc-André until the Benedict disaster and, for some reason, reading poetry had not been on top of my To Do list since.
“Would you like to get together and go over some of my work? You could pick what you think is suitable.”
Words words words think of some words.
“Fiona? Are you there?”
“Uh-huh. Absolutely. Good idea. Excellent. Fine. Right.”
“And, Kostas mentioned the urn is bothering you. Is it?”
“Only when I see it or think about it.” Oh good, a whole string of words. I hoped I didn’t open my mouth again and sing out A sex life a sex life I think I found a sex life.
“Of course,” he said. “I don’t think it would bother me. I might even enjoy it. I could keep it here for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Wait a minute. “What do you mean for me?
The urn isn’t mine. I hadn’t even seen Benedict for...”
“Fiona? I have a job to finish here, and I can’t get away this afternoon, but Josey says you are going to the Findlay Falls for a hike today. Would you like to drop the urn at my place afterwards?”
Would I like to get that damn thing out of my house and get to see Marc-André again? Would I like it?
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Hold everything. What was that about the Findlay Falls?
I wasn’t sure what I didn’t like about Marc-André looking after the ashes, but something about it seemed weird. What were the moral imperatives about keeping the remains of your former-almost-lover anyway? And more important, what would Bridget think about bouncing Benedict around like the hot potato he had become?
“I think Mr. Paradis was flattered when you asked him to read his poems at the scattering,” Josey said.
I tried to hold back the latest puce flush. Luckily, we were passing Nettoyeur Le Quikie at that moment, and I remembered they’d called to say my clothes were ready, earlier than expected. I swerved into their parking section and prepared myself to be the focus of gossip. I figured it would be worth it to get my periwinkle suede skirt and matching silk blouse back.
“How’s your leg, Miz Silk?” Josey asked when I got back in the car.
I was grateful she’d changed the subject from Marc-André Paradis. “It’s fine now,” I said without thinking.
“Good, so we can drop those ashes off,” Josey said, staring at my neck, which was already flushed in anticipation of whatever she was going to say, “on our way back from the Findlay Falls. Miz Lamontagne says it’s real beautiful there and worth the climb. And with all the people around, we’ll be safer there than here.”
“No Findlay Falls today.” I shot her a Sarrazin glare, which got me exactly nowhere.
“I worked on the maps while you were asleep, and I figured out the route where you can experience the most educational type of things. Outside of France, that is. But I guess I won’t get to see that anytime soon.”
Right. Full marks to Josey.
“It’s a good thing Miz Lamontagne packed us this excellent lunch,” Josey said from her perch on the rock. “We probably won’t get down from here before five-thirty. Didn’t it turn out nice today? The trees look really beautiful through the mist.”
We were finally at the Falls, or, more accurately, half-way up the steep hiking trail that ran alongside them. One of us was in a really good mood. The other one was me. I couldn’t bring myself to agree with Josey’s description of a beautiful day.
“Mist? Mist? Could you possibly be referring to this chilly drizzle?”
“Dr. Prentiss was right. It sure would be great to have a pair of binoculars up here, wouldn’t it?”
“Would it? I think it would be great if Dr. Prentiss were here, herself, climbing in this sleet.” It was easy for Hélène and Liz to approve of this climb. They hadn’t legged it up steep slopes for the past three hours. When we’d estimated the climb, it had appeared short and straightforward. Now we squinted down at stamp-sized fields. I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d been diverted from the simple task of delivering Benedict’s urn to Marc-André Paradis to galloping up what felt like a mountain. But somehow, on the way, I’d found myself pulling into the parking lot by the foot of the Findlay Falls trail.
It seemed like another lifetime when we’d passed the first of the two lookout points where all the tourists with any brains stopped. The ache in my leg muscles reminded me that the extent of my exercise was the regular half hour a day tossing a Frisbee for Tolstoy. And even that was getting short shrift with all the chaos in our lives. On the bright side, I didn’t have to lug the urn.
“She’s right about binoculars,” Josey said.
I flashed her a glance filled with recrimination. She missed it because she was fishing in her knapsack. “Those chicken sandwiches were good. Let’s see what else we got.”
She produced two nice looking pears and a dozen chocolate chunk shortbread cookies and proceeded to unwrap them.
“I really like this place, don’t you? Do you think anyone ever lived in those caves?” She slipped Tolstoy a shortbread cookie.
“No.” I reached for one before they all vanished.
“You sure?” I didn’t care for this cave talk. “Yes. Bears maybe.”
“Bears? Wow. We shou
ld check.”
“No. We shouldn’t.”
“But if they’re just ordinary black bears, they usually won’t hurt you if you don’t get between them and their cubs. Or their food. Or make any loud aggressive noises. Or...”
“I’m going back. Now.”
Josey paid no attention. “I like that waterfall,” she said.
I would have liked the waterfall a lot myself if it had been closer to civilization, and if it didn’t derive from a million little drizzle-fed springs trickling across the terrain we had climbed.
Josey stood and brushed off the crumbs. “You ready to go the rest of the way? Who knows what we’ll find.”
I gazed up the slope with mistrust. I wasn’t expecting to find anything more appealing than bear poop. “No. I’m not ready to go the rest of the way. Remember the tourists we saw around the bottom of the falls? Remember the dozens of cars we saw in the parking lot? Do you notice not one of those people came up this route? They only hike to the second level. There’s a good reason for that. Two if you include the bears.”
She shrugged.
“Plus, we’re vulnerable here. What if one of us, most likely me, sprains an ankle? How would we get help? We’re a million miles from anywhere.” Worse than that, we were separated from the crowds, and this was not the ideal situation, given earlier events. I noticed a whining tone creeping into my commentary.
“But it’s interesting. And this brochure says you can see for miles when you get to the top.”
I grumbled. “There are things worth seeing from the top of the Himalayas. But I’m not going to climb them to check it out.”
“We don’t want to be sheep and only do what other people do.”
“I have no problem with being a sheep. You will remember we passed the sheep some time ago. They’re a lot closer to civilization than we are, let me point out. And I’m not going any further. I don’t want to argue about it any more.”
“See, you’re wrong, Miz Silk, here comes someone else now.”
Sure enough, a baseball cap peeked out above the vegetation. A lone climber wound his way up the narrow, rocky trail.
I didn’t care. I had made up my mind, no more stumbling over bear droppings and slimy rocks.
The lone hiker crunched closer. Tolstoy cocked his head with interest. I opened my mouth to silence whatever preposterous proposal Josey was bleating.
“Miz Silk,” she squeaked. “Jeez. Let’s get out of here.”
“What?”
She stuffed our thermoses and her guidebooks back into the carryall.
“We gotta go,” she said.
“I love the idea, but why the hurry?”
“Because,” she whispered, “I’ve seen that hat before. It’s what the guy who smucked you with the car wore.”
I stayed calm. Josey scrambled over the boulders ahead. Tolstoy bounded after her.
“Hold on,” I said to their vanishing backsides, “there must be hundreds of red baseball caps like that. I’m sure that guy couldn’t have followed us up here.”
I changed my mind when the first bullet whizzed by my head.
Twenty-One
“I told you so,” Josey whispered.
Now I believed her. We hunkered in a small, dark, smelly cave. We rolled, tugged and pulled a large rock into the opening.
Outside we could hear the clatter of small stones being thrown. No doubt to cause us to betray our location by a yelp of pain. Or a bark.
Every now and then, in no particular time pattern, a bullet would ricochet off the rocks surrounding us. Josey and I alternated holding Tolstoy’s mouth closed.
We sat, racked with shivers, not knowing how long the rock would protect us. Stones rattled at sporadic intervals. It seemed like months. But we knew mere hours had passed, because the sky only darkened once.
Silence and the moon lay outside our cave. We could see slivers of silver through the crack between the rocks. From time to time, small scrambling sounds squashed any idea of leaving the cave. Bears? Rats? Or something much more dangerous?
“If we had a cellphone like everyone else in the world, we could call for help,” Josey whispered.
Usually, I hate the idea of anything that gives people one more way to invade your privacy and coerce you into doing things you don’t want to do. This time, I could actually see the point of cellphones. Not that either one of us had enough wherewithal to spring for one. As the hours wore on, I could see how I might want to rearrange my spending priorities, such as they were.
We snuggled together, with only our rain jackets and Tolstoy to keep us warm. Lunch was long gone. The dampness from the nearby streams on the hillside seeped into our clothing. We breathed the dank air and tried to ignore the smell of bear.
Josey whispered, “I’m glad there are no bears in here now.”
I twisted my head to squint at her and found she’d dozed off in the seconds since she’d made the comment. I had to admire her ability to do that, although it left me alone pondering when the bear was coming back. Was it next in line after the shooter in the baseball cap?
Some primeval survival mechanism chirped in my head: “At least you have lots of time to think.”
Right. I thought about Benedict and how certain I’d been that his murder had nothing to do with me. Some debt he owed. Some jealous husband. Some murderous poet. But what other reason could explain everything, including my bed, and not one, but two people stalking me. Who knew about the excursion to the Findlay Falls? Half of St. Aubaine, that’s who. One of our stalkers could have followed us for days, waiting to catch us with no traffic, no Kostas, no witnesses, no help. Waiting for what? To kill us or to scare us away?
I was certainly scared away. A discussion with Sarrazin seemed pleasant in comparison. You could count on him to be cranky but predictable, which seemed far superior to holing up in a mountain cave hiding from an armed maniac. How did I get bullied into this?
Beside me, Josey stirred and stretched. “You know what I want if we get out of this place alive?” she said.
“What?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“Hmmph. If we get out of here, the first thing I’d like to do is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”
Hanging around with Kostas obviously had an effect on Josey. She’d turned beating around the bush into an art form. “And what’s that?”
“There’s a lot of stuff I never had a chance to do yet. I want to make sure I don’t miss a minute.”
I already knew what I would do if we got out. I would learn to stick to my guns and do a better job of keeping Josey far from this whole mess until it was safe. Then when things settled down, and only then, I would give her a hand with that not-missing-a-minute stuff, even if it meant more educational experiences, indoor only.
Josey drifted off to sleep again. She made soft, guzzling snoring sounds with her head on my shoulder. Tolstoy made remarkably similar noises. I went back to thinking.
I concentrated on the man I had seen in the photo in Mary Morrison’s house. The same person who’d been in the Britannia and who had followed us in the black Acura. Was the killer in the red cap a confederate of the creep with the yellow hair? He must have been. Then it hit me. Yellow hair already seemed familiar when I spotted him at the Britannia.
Why was that?
I had nothing better to do than try to mentally revisit every place I’d been for the last few weeks to see if his face popped up again. Where did I spend my time? The Régie d’alcool, L’Épicerie 1759, the Chez, the Caisse Populaire, Nettoyeur Le Quikie, the post office, Tom and Jerry’s service station—until I switched to Marc-André. The thought of Marc-André pushed the man in the black Acura out of my mind, and I concentrated on him for a while. Single. Sexy. A man who worked with words. An artist. An accomplished mechanic. A potential sex life on wheels. But would I live to see him again?
Blessed drowsiness crept over me. Until a new thought flickered, and my ey
es shot open. I knew where I’d seen the man who’d been following us. He was the same ominous yellow-haired tramp outside L’Auberge des Rêves. Not only that but except for his bright matted hair, he could have been the twin of the one who hung around outside of Bridget’s during the memorial. And he’d also been panhandling outside the Museum of Civilization just before the car hit me. Plus I’d spotted him through the window at the Chez, where he’d had the nerve to feed Tolstoy fries and pat him on the head.
My heart rate rose.
The man with the yellow hair had been spying on us since right after Benedict’s death. So what was the grubby panhandler doing driving around in a sleek black Acura sedan?
The other thing I planned to do if we escaped alive was find out who the hell he was. No matter if the photos were gone from Mary Morrison’s. If Sarrazin didn’t deliver, I could talk to everyone who’d been in Benedict’s class. In a nosy locale like St. Aubaine, someone had to recognize his description.
The silver slivers of moonlight disappeared. Nothing but black showed through the rocks. Was something sniffing and grunting? Coming home for dinner? Yes. Coming closer. Fading away. I never thought I’d rejoice at the soft patter of drops.
Rain.
If the half-dozen teenaged hikers found it strange to have two ratty females and a formerly white dog crawl out from behind a rock the next morning, they didn’t mention it.
“Bonjour,” one of the hikers said, as we joined them on their way down.
“Good morning,” Josey answered, her spirit undimmed by sleeping sitting up, her back pressed to a cave wall.
Tolstoy issued a joyful bark.
I didn’t say anything. My own spirit was seriously dimmed by my wet bum. We hiked through the drizzle for a brisk hour back to the car park. No red baseball caps showed up on the way.
Our new friends disappeared as soon as we limped into the parking lot.
“We’d better call the Quebec Provincial Police,” Josey said.
“Absolutely,” I said, meaning it for once.
Fiona Silk Mysteries 2-Book Bundle Page 37
