Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  “I can’t imagine that Detective McCorquodale is going to get anything of use from Nathan’s tapes if she was strangled to death,” I said. “What sort of noises would that make, anyhow? Nothing that wouldn’t be covered by crowd noises, eh?”

  “Well, apparently they’re going over the tent bag and tarp that was left on the hill with all their CSI-styled wiles, and they hope to come up with a fingerprint or something that way. I still have a hard time believing that no one noticed a woman getting stuffed into a tent bag, when there had to have been people all around them.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It doesn’t really surprise me. After all, it’s dark, you’re focused on the stage, or the video screens, or the people at your tarp. People are moving all over the place, wiggling into sleeping bags, helping each other into coats or sweaters, moving those low chairs around. Some people are canoodling, and you try to avoid watching that. Others are smoking pot, and you try even harder not to notice. All the murderer would have to do would be to wait till it was fairly dark and then treat Pia as if she were a paramour or a drunken friend being helped into a jacket, and no one would pay any attention. In fact, once it was all done, I would figure the murderer or murderers picked up whatever was incriminating and then just walked off as if heading to the porta-potties or the beer tent for a while, and didn’t bother coming back. That way no one would pay much attention when packing up at the end of the night, if there was no one there to pick up the tarp.”

  “Apparently Security is really vigilant about tarp control, but they left a few of them till early morning to deal with, and unfortunately, Pia was one of those. Otherwise we might have had an earlier start on all of this. Of course, it might have meant me spending the night in the hoosegow, so on the whole I guess I’m grateful they left some.”

  “But none of this gets us any closer to why people are murdering the Finsters and people connected to them,” I sighed. “If it was just the Finsters, then maybe I could see a Folkways connection, or an anti-Folkways connection, because of the inheritance and all that. But murdering Pia sort of moves it toward a different level, doesn’t it? It becomes about them instead of their mother’s money.”

  “That’s what someone involved with the money would like to see, though. I think the police are considering Pia’s murder to be a possible red herring.”

  “Ooh, now that is awful.’

  “What?”

  “To be murdered for no other reason than to deflect attention from some other venue of inquiry. If I ever get murdered, I would want it to be because of me, not expediency.”

  “Should I make a note of that?”

  “Never mind. I’d settle for just never getting murdered, I guess. Speaking of,” I said, looking at my watch, “we’d better get back to the stage or Dr. F will have plenty of cause to kill me.”

  We headed back into what had become a very bright, hot day. It was a relief to get into the backstage area, even if it meant shouldering the minute-to-minute crises that seemed to happen in what passed for show business in these parts.

  Nathan stopped what he was doing to let me know that Steve had been in looking for me.

  “Did he need anything in particular?”

  “He just wanted to know where you were and who you were with and when you’d be back. You know, sort of half police interrogation and half Father Knows Best. He’s in uniform with a bike, though, so he shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  Trouble was, I couldn’t go looking for him. Dr. F expected me to be holding down the fort, since it was now her turn to head off for lunch. I think she was meeting up with Tom Paxton as well, to organize his recording session for the end of the afternoon. Meanwhile, I was flinging hats and helping to introduce the musicians for the “Bringing it Home” session. Jay Kuchinsky, a fiddler and banjo player, who had also brought along a guitar, an accordion, a mandolin and what looked like a saxophone case, was setting up for the set. Bill Bourne was tuning up, looking charmingly raffish this afternoon in his top hat and an orange T-shirt. Tim Tamoshiro was checking out the mikes, wearing a tuxedo jacket and Bermuda shorts. It looked like it was going to be fun. All three of these fellows used interesting ways to bring world music into their immediate forms. I’d heard Jay playing fiddle tunes and Ukrainian music on the banjo, Bill singing Caribbean-styled hymns set to bagpipe accompaniment, and Tim Tamoshiro crooning like Sinatra about cowboy romances. How Albertan could you get, putting these folks together? I thought Dr. F and Aric Skurdal were geniuses for thinking it up, and was looking forward to it. Now, I just wanted to get through it and get home where I’d be safe and sound.

  Jay put on one of the Folkways hats immediately, and Tim did the same. Bill stayed with his top hat, but that seemed only fitting. I tossed some more hats out in the crowd. By now it felt like every seventh person should be wearing a Folkways sun hat, but I could still see quite a few Tilleys and peaked ball caps, and melanoma-baiting bare heads. I introduced the workshop with a lame pun about thinking globally while being a local act, and then headed backstage. Jay was already starting into a hopak on the banjo, which seemed so natural it was hard to believe that banjo wasn’t the national instrument of Ukraine. This was one set I was going to take a dub from Nathan on for sure, partly because I liked these musicians so much, and partly because I couldn’t pay the proper attention to them at the moment. I kept wondering about what Steve wanted, coming looking for me.

  33

  ~

  Since Woody was backstage and this was supposed to be his shift anyhow, I had no qualms about leaving things in his hands and heading out to find Steve. I still couldn’t imagine what he had wanted. The last thing we talked about was him bringing his uniform to the tent to store for later, but according to Nathan he was already on duty and in uniform. I supposed he had either been seconded to the case of Pia’s murder, or had been asked to spell off someone else who had been pulled onto the murder case.

  Maybe he had a purely romantic reason for finding me; that was actually what I was hoping for. I had no real desire to think about the Finsters and their wake of bodies. For one thing, I got a little bit nervous every time I did. I could still picture Paul lying there on the floor of the Centre in a pool of blood, and every time I thought about it I realized how easily that could have been me.

  It was as if violence had been stalking me this entire summer. I could have been mugged at the Centre, or burned up in the Barbara Shoppe fire. What if that fire had started while Denise and were in there shopping? What if it had been me lying dead across the lap of Barbara Finster’s Henry Moore statue? That put me in mind of the Murray McLauchlan song “Down by the Henry Moore,” but I wasn’t sure a murderer setting up “Tom Dooley” would aim for a relatively obscure Canadian pop tune for his next number. It might be a good idea to mention it to Steve, anyhow. If I could find him.

  I trudged down the side of the mainstage, past the wall of volunteer names and the plate-washing station, down the lane of food kiosks. I didn’t think it was likely that Steve had pushed his bike around the craft tent or halfway up the hills. I figured he’d either be patrolling the perimeter on the outside of the fence, along where the buses ran, or else down at the base of the hill near the food area or beer tent. On the whole, if there was going to be anything annoying happening during the day, it would most likely be emanating from the beer tent.

  The place seemed to be hopping, even though you could only catch one segment of a single stage from within its confines. I swear there were people who paid their weekend pass fees just to come and swill overpriced beer at sticky picnic tables all day long. It made for some irritatingly loud people on the mainstage hill in the evenings, though the experience wasn’t as bad as attending a concert in Rexall Place, the erstwhile hockey arena. Steve and I swore off attending concerts there, since the venue’s yobbo factor was greater than at a British soccer match.

  I just made it past the Funky Pickle pizza wagon when I ran into Mary Montgomery. If she looked startl
ed or worried about seeing me, she hid it well.

  She was holding a serving of sweet potato fries in one hand and a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade in the other.

  “Randy! I figured I’d spot you sooner or later. I have to tell you, the Ferron concert was just sublime. You’ll have to let me know when the record comes out. I’ll buy it for sure.”

  She offered me a fry, and even though I was stuffed with free Festival food, I couldn’t resist. As we chatted about all the nothing things people chat about when they run into each other in a different milieu, I examined her a bit more critically than usual. I was trying to gauge her body type and fit her into the memory shape of the person I’d seen walking away from me down the hill the night before. Mary was tall and elegant, with the look of an athlete, which was an irritating thing since I figured all academics should share my propensity for dumpiness. She looked like a swimmer, with broad shoulders and slim hips. In fact, if it weren’t for her hair, which curled to her shoulders, she could be mistaken from the back for a man. Well, come to think of it, she could pass for a member of Tanglefoot without her hair all stuffed up in a hat. She could have been the person I saw on the hill. I’d sensed that person was a man, and just glimpsing Mary from a distance, with a hat, sweatshirt and stonewashed jeans, I might take her for a young man.

  That realization didn’t necessarily move her up the list of people I thought might be the killer, because even though I could envision her as someone out to scuttle the Folkways project, I couldn’t necessarily see a key figure from the Orlando Project deliberately torching clothing stores and smothering women on the hillside in the dark. I believed Mary was capable of drugging and hefting Pia into a duffle bag, I just couldn’t see any reason for her to do it. Not that madmen needed a reason to do mad things, but this series of events all felt like there was real reasoning behind it, not just random potshots of evil.

  Mary took her leave and headed back toward Stage Two, and I moved on down the food lane toward the beer tent. I still hadn’t spotted Steve, but it was all I could do not to bump into surging crowds of people balancing plates of tabouleh, or nachos, or huge Greek platters. Little boys trying to make money by returning the recyclable plates for the two-dollar deposit were annoyingly underfoot, as well. When I finally got to the beer tent gate, I nodded to the security volunteers, and headed left toward the porta-potties for a pit stop before searching for Steve.

  Surprisingly, considering the location, there was no lineup. Maybe the drinkers were sweating out their fluids on such a hot day. I was in and out and squeezing sanitizing gel on my hands within minutes.

  Then I walked the length of the beer tent, looking for Steve. I didn’t expect to see him sitting at any of the tables, given the fact that he was in uniform, but I considered he might be close to the fence to keep people from wandering throughout the grounds with beer. No such luck, though. I did spot another officer, whom I didn’t recognize, near the back of the enclosure, and the demeanour of the crowd was certainly mellow enough for just one uniformed officer, so perhaps Steve had biked up to the top of the hill the roundabout way. I decided I would be better off heading back to the Folkways stage and waiting there for Steve to return to me. At least it was one sure place. I decided to head back via the craft tent so I could wander through both it and the record tent before heading back to my duties. I didn’t think I’d actually buy anything, but you never knew. I still had a fabulous brooch of Gumby and Pokey made out of Fimo that I’d bought at the craft tent a few years earlier.

  I was watching some people try on funky woven hats made along the same principles as old-fashioned rag rugs, and wondering about the price of the silver spoon jewellery, when I spotted the same person I’d seen on the hill the day before. Again, the back was to me, but this time the distance was only half a tent away. Was it Mary? I had just seen her a few minutes earlier, but in the dimness of the tent, with the distance and the angle, I couldn’t be sure.

  You would think I was attempting to cross the Grand Canyon on a tightrope against monsoon winds, instead of trying to get through the tent heading westward. For some reason, the prevailing thought was that one entered from the west and moved east. I’d had the misfortune to come at things from the beer tent end, and I was paying the price in time consumed moving around people who had come to dawdle and window shop. The person I was following, who was also moving westward, seemed to have a much easier time of it. I was losing ground. It was dim in the craft tent, but as far as I could, tell he or she was wearing a loose denim shirt, white jeans, and a slouchy brimmed hat. Of course, they could have been very pale stonewashed jeans for all I could tell. The diffused shade from the red and white tent roof made all the colours slightly off.

  By the time I got to the halfway bend in the craft tent, the mysterious person had disappeared out of the tent and into the bright hillside of people. I stopped pushing my way through. The chances of spotting anyone outside in the milling crowd was one in eleven thousand, and I wasn’t even sure why I was trying to nail an identity. I guess it had something to do with grounding any determinables at a time when so much was up in the air.

  I found myself at the west door to the craft tent and looked up the hill to my left. I could see only the edges of Stage Two’s audience from where I stood, but I could see lots of people moving about at the mainstage hill, even though there was no show happening there till six. For some reason, people just liked to return to their tarps at various points in the day.

  Tarps. Damn. I had forgotten, in all the hell of the morning, to take a tarp up to the mainstage hill for the evening’s concert. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to stay for the evening concert, to tell the truth, though Steve and I were considering going to the volunteer after-show party that night. What with the murder and Woody’s early morning call and all, I’d used up energy resources that should have seen me through the evening. I was blitzed already and it wasn’t even four o’clock.

  Maybe that’s what Steve had been trying to see me about! Maybe he managed to put a tarp on the hill. If so, that would be great. If he hadn’t, I decided I would fly the idea of our just heading home after we’d closed up the Folkways tent for the night. I knew Steve liked Tom Paxton; maybe he’d manage to get back to the Folkways stage by five for the concert. Speaking of which, it occurred to me that I should get back to the stage pretty quick myself. I took a quick detour through the record tent, saw seventy things I’d like to buy, watched Spirit of the West sign a few CDs and the back of one woman’s shirt, ran into a former student whose name I actually remembered, and turned left past the CKUA broadcasting tent. Someone was interviewing Alison Brown, my absolute favourite banjo player. I listened for a few minutes, but she was talking, not playing, and while she was very erudite and intelligent, I couldn’t really justify playing hooky unless she was actually picking. I checked my watch. Woody and Dr. F would be ticked with me if I didn’t get back to the Folkways stage pretty dang quickly. I clumped along the wooden walkway and headed up toward the path to the further stages. More people were walking with me than against me, so I made pretty good time.

  Bill Bourne had the entire hillside singing along, and all three musicians were jamming together along with Tim’s pianist and bass player. The workshop vibe was really high, and you could tell the players were enjoying themselves just as much as their audience. I moved from the side of the audience to the entrance to the backstage before they ended their set, just to see if I could be of use. It turned out Woody had things set up for them, water laid out, orange slices in a bowl for a bit of energy replenishment, and towels ready. It looked like a race station for distance runners. In a way, that’s what Festival performers were like: long-distance athletes, giving their all in the heat and the sun.

  Woody greeted me with a smile and a nod, and spun me around in a polka step, in time to the music rolling in from the stage. “Have a good time?”

  “So-so. It’s hot out there, and full of people.”

  “Yes, and w
e are in our Arctic misanthrope mood today, are we? Lots of people means lots of potential Folkways fans. This is a good thing. Keep telling yourself, ‘I am a people person, I am a people person.’ And drink this.” He handed me a cold bottle of water, which was a good idea. I ran it over the back of my neck and then cracked the lid open. I drank the entire bottle’s contents in three gulps, which is not something I normally can even keep my throat open long enough to manage.

  “They say that by the time you feel thirsty, you are already two or three litres dehydrated,” Woody said. Where he came up with this endless supply of fascinating trivia, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it came from working at the Smithsonian; all those amazing things housed together just had to rub off on a person eventually. Or maybe people who collected information by nature were drawn to working in places where collecting was privileged. It would be interesting to find out sometime. But not now. I was still down a litre or two.

  Jay, Bill and Tim came off the stage looking flushed and happy. We gave them water and oranges, gushed approvingly, and helped them with their instrument cases. Meanwhile, Dr Fuller had arrived with Tom Paxton and his bass player, Richard Lee, and they, too, were chatting with the local fellows. Tom had such a personable way of engaging people in conversation. Jay and Bill asked if it would be all right to leave their cases backstage while they caught Tom’s concert. I was planning to be there, anyway, and Nathan sure wasn’t going anywhere, so we agreed, even though the principle was to make sure all instruments went to the huge trailer marked Instrument Lock-Up. Woody and Dr. Fuller went out to introduce the Paxton concert and to let people know that it was being recorded for ­folkwaysAlive! and would be available in record shops in the new year. The crowd agreed to rehearse their cheering quite happily. It was a beautiful summer day and they were about to be entertained by one of their favourite performers. Why shouldn’t they cheer? Tom and Richard arrived on stage to a very happy ambience, and immediately made it more so.