Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  “Not upset, just wondering why you didn’t let me know when you were coming to town. I would have offered to pick you up at the airport.”

  “But you don’t have a car.”

  “No, but I could have been there to meet you, brought you up to speed on what’s been happening. When did you get back, anyhow?”

  Woody’s eyes took on a bit of a vague look.

  “Oh, you know,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “a little while ago now.”

  I knew it; I wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of him. He might have just arrived this morning, or he could have been here a day or two without my knowing it. Maybe he hadn’t actually left Edmonton at all, just made sure I hadn’t run into him. Who knows, maybe he was another potential suspect for the arson at the Barbara Shoppe.

  I was just getting carried away now, I chided myself. Just because he hadn’t let me in on his plans and moves, I was hurt. That was all. Well, it was no skin off my knees if Woody Dowling wanted to be mysterious. Two could play that game. Of course, one of the two couldn’t be me. I was about as mysterious as paint.

  I handed Woody the list of sound engineers and told him about the ideas for tapes of existing Folkways music in the same style being played while the stage was struck and the sound crew was working to set up the next act.

  “Of course, we can’t project it up the hill, because that would interfere with the sound crew, but a small speaker aiming downhill behind the stage, focusing on the people passing by along the path or waiting at the porta-potties, shouldn’t be too much of a disruption to the levels of the stage crew. Dr. F and I figured that if it was going to act as an incitement, we should concentrate on the act to follow rather than the act that just appeared. Don’t you think?”

  Woody grinned, nodding his head.

  “You’re all over this project, girlfriend! Sounds good to me. Can we get a tape of quality good enough for our purposes from the machinery here?”

  “It’s good enough for Dr. F to take to international music conferences; it should be good enough for a scratched-up speaker at an outdoor festival.”

  “So be it. I’ll leave that part of the project with you. I have to tackle the Festival organizers today and see about bringing in one of these two fellows to record the workshops and mini-concerts on our stage. By the way, you are planning to be at the Festival the entire weekend, aren’t you?”

  “We’ve had our tickets since June 1, Woody.”

  “Tickets, schmickets.” He pulled a lanyard with a plastic ID card hanging off it from out of his briefcase. “This will get you fed like royalty whenever you feel like it, access to the backstage of our little stage and the evening main stage, through the door to all the after-hours parties, and onto the free shuttle bus from the hotel. It will also get you onsite all through the week prior to the Festival during the set-up, but I doubt you’ll be required to head over there until Friday morning at the earliest. After all, we’re not doing a Thursday evening set at the folkwaysAlive! Stage.”

  The pass had my name on it, along with a thumbnail photo of me—the same one that appeared on my university ID, which I thought had been a one-off. The whole thing was laminated, which made me think this plan of Woody’s had been in the works for some time, although this was the first I was hearing the fact that I would be working the Festival rather than sitting on a tarp on the side of the ski hill, enjoying myself.

  Woody must have heard my inner thoughts, unless I’d unwittingly said them out loud.

  “Don’t worry; you won’t have to work the whole weekend. And it will be fun, being part of the in-crowd, believe me. Well,” he untied his legs from the crossed knot he’d had them in and slid gracefully to the floor, “I’d best be running. I’ll get back to you later in the day, to let you know which of these guys we’ll be working with and what else has come up, okay?”

  It was as if I had somehow been keeping him from his appointed rounds, rather than his having hijacked my afternoon. Still, I smiled and waved him off. I couldn’t help liking Woody. I just wasn’t sure I trusted him.

  25

  ~

  Woody hadn’t actually taken up too much of my time, a fact I realized once I came out of the hazy fog he seemed to wrap me in whenever we were together and looked at my watch. I still had the whole day ahead of me, and a whole slew of music to go through. There were two sets at the folkwaysAlive! Stage on the Friday evening before the mainstage concert began, and I had set myself the goal of finding music to augment those concerts by the end of the day.

  The first set was an instrumental workshop, comprised of a fellow I hadn’t heard of on a Chapman Stick; Bryan Bowers, the autoharp maestro; and a sitar player and actor from Central Alberta, Larry Reese. No problem. All I had to do was find some classical, eclectic Indian music. If only Harry Manx had recorded for Folkways.

  I headed off to the music library, after making sure to leave a note for Dr. Fuller. From here on in, I was going to signal all my turns and make sure everyone knew where I was at any given time. It was bad enough someone was getting away with murder; I was damned if they were going to have an easy patsy in me anymore.

  I was just passing a soup and sandwich place when I realized I hadn’t packed any lunch. The reserve energy bar in my backpack just didn’t seem too appealing, what with the smell of beef barley soup and fresh bread wafting toward me. I retraced a few steps and stood dutifully in line to get a large bowl of soup and a small roll. There was no place to sit right by the restaurant in HUB mall itself, so I took my food and headed into the Rutherford walkway. I perched on one of the seats, using the concrete table beside me as a makeshift dinner table.

  When the university is in fall or winter session, a person could sit in the spot I’d chosen and see practically everyone she knew on campus. Of course, the odds were against you a bit, since this was the time of holidays and conferences, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to see someone I knew passing through. It wasn’t exactly Piccadilly Circus, but then again, neither was Piccadilly Circus anymore. I therefore wasn’t all that startled when Mary Montgomery plopped herself down across from my concrete table and said, “Well, we meet again!”

  “Hi, Mary,” I managed, between spoonfuls of soup. “How goes the battle?”

  “You know the drill; hurry up and wait. I’ve been waiting sixteen weeks for a book on Maori customs from interlibrary loans. It’s the final icing on a Katherine Mansfield section I’ve been working on all year. It ties right in with that last book by Janice Kulyk Keefer, too. But there’s some holdup and no one will tell me why. I tell you, it would be cheaper, considering my time, to just order the book from the publisher. If only we had the budget for that sort of thing.” I wasn’t sure if that was a deliberately meaningful look on Mary’s part or not. I was just glad I was obviously on my way to the library so she couldn’t make comments on my spending more liberally on my grandiose budget than she could on her meagre allotment.

  I wasn’t so sure her allotment was all that meagre, either. Of course, it likely was nowhere near a science research budget, but the Social Science and Humanities Research Council grants seemed to be more and more respectable as the years went on. Besides, as I tried to tell myself every time I got resentful of full-time lecturers when considering my term status, it sure beats having to punch a time clock at a humdrum job for a living. Being paid to do research and think and talk and write about writers—or, in my case, musicians—and to be able to march to the beat of the university instead of the outside bustle of the commercial world was a great and glorious gift for which I tried to be consistently grateful. Just as long as I didn’t need a root canal, it was a good life.

  Mary was still sitting there, pensively drinking from her violet-tinted water bottle. I always feel awkward about eating in front of people who aren’t, but it’s very hard to share soup. Maybe if I could get her talking, I thought, I could finish my slurping and we could once again be on an even footing.

  “So, are you
doing any of the festivals this summer, Mary?”

  As conversation gambits go, this was as standard in Edmonton during the summer as, “So, is it cold enough for you?” is in the winter. Mary grimaced with the likely repetitiveness of it, but answered anyway.

  “Jessie and I are probably going to do our regular Fringing later in August. We each pick a play, then we pick one from the critics’ picks, and finally we pick one just by guess and golly. Then we figure out how to hit the beer tent in between them all. What about you? Folk Festival, I presume, eh?”

  “Well, this year I get to work the folkwaysAlive! stage, so I’m getting in for free. Of course, I had been planning on making that my break time.”

  Mary laughed harshly. Of course, that could just have been her laugh. I hadn’t heard a lot of it. “That’s the one big trouble with pursuing what you love as a career. Leisure starts looking a lot like work, and parties become seminars with pâté.”

  I nodded, chewing on my roll. It was true. The drawback to having a vocation was you never actually got a vacation.

  Mary rose gracefully from the padded bench seat and saluted.

  “Back to the grind. See you later, Randy.”

  I waved and wiped my mouth with the paper napkin the roll had been wrapped in, scrunching it into my now empty soup bowl. Even though I hadn’t been planning to take that much time to eat my soup, and she had been idle exactly the same amount of time as me, somehow Mary made me feel as if I’d been slouching while she was on a tight schedule. What was it about her that set me on edge every time we met? Could it be chemical? Or was it just a by-product of Denise’s warnings that Mary was out to scoop my grant monies? Whatever the case, now was no time to sit and ponder. I could barely make out her back, striding down HUB Mall. And I was still here, lolling about. Time to get on to the music library.

  I made it to the library corner just as Carmen was pushing the plastic retainer curtain aside. She nodded as I leaned over the counter to grab a mimeographed copy of the Whole Folkways Catalogue. I needed some instrumental string music. With luck, I might find an anthology album, thereby saving myself a whole heap of time on taping.

  It wasn’t as easy as flipping to “instrumental” recordings. Everything was listed by country of origin, with the largest selection coming from the United States. Within the States, it was broken into such categories as American Folk, Bluegrass and Old-Time Country, Cajun/Zydeco, African-American Traditions, Gospel, Blues/R&B, Jazz, Rock, and Hawaiian. That took up fourteen pages of the catalogue, then came nine more pages from other countries, and then seven pages of recordings organized by subject matter: American Popular, Historical and Political Song, Soundtracks-Musicals-Radio, Children’s Recordings, Christmas and Holiday, Euro-American Classical, and Contemporary Classical and Electronic. Then followed six more pages of Spoken Arts Recordings: Drama, Poetry, Prose, Humor, Historical, Instructional, Music Instruction, Science and Nature, Psychology and Health, and my favourite, Miscellany, a category that held diverse items like an interview with Timothy Leary and another with Alfred Fuller, of Fuller Brush fame, on “Careers in Selling.” I wondered if Arthur Miller had ever listened to that record. It would be fun to make some Death of a Salesman references when I was dealing with that section.

  I checked my watch and decided to pack up for the day; trouble was, I could just sink into this stuff forever if I let myself. Time now, though, for instrumental strings to connect to the Chapman Stick and the autoharp. Sadly, I flipped back toward Recordings from the United States.

  I made a few notes and then went back to find Carmen. She told me to help myself to the shelves. I guess she trusted me to put things back where I’d found them after watching my behaviour over the last month or so. The Collection was one of Carmen’s great joys. There’s no way she would ever be too busy to maintain order in it. I wondered how she would feel when it left forever to be housed in the Arts Building. Would having a lending set be enough after serving as the Lord High Grand Protectoress? After all, Carmen currently had the right to decree who could or couldn’t sign in to the listening area, and no one had been able to borrow the actual LPs for nearly a dozen years now. In fact, some CDs were off limits till the Smithsonian allowed for another pressing. Ever since the agreement signed with Washington, the music library was no longer allowed to burn CDs from the existing LPs.

  Carmen waved at me as I carted a stack of CDs into the listening room along the east wall of the music area. I had a few ideas, but I wasn’t totally sure about some of them. I had to check out how many straight instrumental tunes there were on the Iron Mountain String Band recordings, see if Uncle Dave Macon’s solo album could be used in its entirety, and check out the Mike Seeger collections. I had a feeling I’d have to edit the latter; he was always letting someone jaw on about making dulcimers out of barn parts or wailing along with a musical saw in the middle of his recordings. I imagined Mike Seeger as the quintessential Folkways collector, though; totally delighted with everything he came upon, and equally respectful of it all.

  Chet Parker’s Hammered Dulcimer was a great find, and I figured we could use a good three-quarters of it for the luring music. Maybe I could salt it with some Doc Watson instrumentals and a couple of mountain banjo tunes from the Mike Seeger Old-Time Country Music collection. I signed three CDs out after carefully reshelving the others. Carmen handed me another full box of tapes to haul back to the Centre, and pretty soon I was contentedly retracing my steps from earlier in the day.

  Wax on, wax off. There was a lot to be said for the comfort of the humdrum, after all. Maybe that’s what was wrong with my life. I couldn’t seem to retain enough of the humdrum to keep me going.

  26

  ~

  After a pleasantly humdrum evening, I woke to a pleasingly humdrum morning. I ate a moderately ordinary bowl of oatmeal, washed up and headed off placidly to my nice, if more than ordinary job.

  When I got to the Centre, the door was unlocked, and sitting at the central table were Steve and Iain. Since no one else was around, I gathered they were waiting for me. They didn’t have the look of wanting to take me for an after-work beer, either.

  “Don’t tell me there were more than two Finsters,” I sighed. Steve snorted and Iain looked askance at my bad taste.

  “No more bodies, Randy. We just want you to come with us to the precinct to look at some pictures.”

  “Okay. Pictures of what, though? Bodies? Suspects? Folk musicians?”

  It was Iain’s turn to snort.

  “Actually, we want you to look through some pictures of clothes that may or may not have been at the Barbara Shoppe while you were there,” Steve explained, looking a bit uncomfortable. As well he should have. He knew me well enough to know I am not fixated on fashion.

  “I’ll try,” I shrugged, “but you might try asking Denise. She would be better able to tell you.”

  “We will be talking with her, as well as the store manager.”

  “You mean Holly who thinks she’s Audrey Hepburn?” I grinned as I locked up the door to the Centre behind us. I had left the box of tapes on the table, and checked my backpack to make certain I had laptop, notes, instrumental CDs and the Folkways book I’d meant to get before Woody’s appearance had startled me the other day.

  “I mean the manager, Holly Menzies, who is on holiday somewhere incommunicado,” Steve answered. “We haven’t been able to track her down yet. Supposedly, she left for somewhere near Puerto Vallarta a couple of days ago.”

  We were approaching the unmarked Crown Victoria in the parking lot by the Law Building. I wondered why “undercover” police cars still always look so much like police cars. I figure they’d catch a lot more speeders and other assorted bad guys if they drove around in souped-up minivans. Then they’d be truly unremarkable in the crowd.

  Iain drove and Steve turned halfway in his seat to continue to talk with me in the back of the car.

  “Were going to ask Denise to come in tomorrow if it’s convenient. We�
�ll pull in Grace Galbraith from the west end and Eve Sampson, the manager from Calgary after that.”

  “Eve? Are you sure it’s not Lauren or Ava?”

  “Nope, it’s Eve.”

  “Maybe she’s Eve Arden.”

  “Who?” asked Steve.

  “You know,” drawled our driver, “Our Miss Brooks. Tall and ascerbic with a beauty mark.” I looked in amazement at Iain McCorquodale, and, it seemed to me, so did Steve. I guess you can be partners a long time and still get surprised from time to time.

  “It really makes you wonder if people are born and raised to do the jobs they find in life, doesn’t it?” I pondered. “Or do they wend their way to jobs that make their peculiarities somehow validated?”

  “If that’s the case, can you figure out how he and I came to be cops?” Iain muttered. Steve laughed.

  “Don’t even try answering that one, Randy,” Steve cautioned.

  I wasn’t going to. We’d arrived at the station, and even though I’m the most law-abiding citizen I know, police stations always make me nervous. It’s all those buzzers and locking doors, I think. Or maybe all those uniforms. Unless a uniform has a smiling tooth on it holding a toothbrush, I’m leery, and even then I’m not all that at ease. I took a deep breath and followed the team of McCorquodale and Browning into the precinct.

  Steve and Iain led me to a room beyond the open area where their desks sat nosed in against each other amid others. This room had a door and white boards along the walls. Photos were stuck up along one wall, and various notes were written in blue and black whiteboard pen. There were a couple of desks with phones and files stacked on them, but what seemed completely incongruous was a wheeled clothes rack in the centre of the room. It was the sort of thing I’d seen in movies set in New York, where people pushed these racks along in the garment or fur district. This one, though, gave off a pungent reek of fire.

  “This is what we managed to salvage from the fire at the Barbara Shoppe, Randy. What we’d like you to do is look at each item and then mark the letter on its tag to where you recall it being in the store on this map.” Steve handed me a clipboard with the basic layout of the Barbara Shoppe I had visited in Petrolia Mall. Iain handed me a pen.