Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  They launched right away into Paxton’s set, starting with some well-known standards like “The Marvelous Toy” and “Did You Hear John Hurt?” before segueing into a couple of the heavier political satire and social commentary songs he was so renowned for.

  “I can see the headlines now: In his Dotage, Paxton Begins to Yodel,” he commented after finishing a lilting song called “My Pony Knows the Way.” Although his hair was white beneath his trademark poorboy cap, his comments on aging seemed odd. Perhaps it was because he always seemed like the elder statesman of the Edmonton Festival, appearing several times in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Maybe it had something to do with his connections to the heyday of the Village scene on McDougall Street that was spoken of reverently by Dylan and Pete Seeger and even Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in various folk documentaries. Whatever the case, Tom Paxton was an integral part of my vision of folk music, so much a part of it that I hadn’t till now paused to consider that he was aging at the same rate as the rest of us.

  My first urge was to have a Scarlett O’Hara fiddle-dee-dee moment. I didn’t particularly want to think about getting old, although I was pretty sure it might have been an acceptable scenario to Pia Renshaw about twenty-some hours ago. The second thing I thought was far more along the lines of what Steve would consider the “Bad Randy” train of thought.

  Tom Paxton had been around through the whole start of the folk scene. Wouldn’t it stand to reason, then, that he had been acquainted with the Finsters? Surely he would have met Mrs. Finster when he first came through Edmonton in the time of the Hovel and early festival days. Maybe he could shed some light on all that had been happening, even if only to explain some of the antipathy the children had shown for the music their mother had loved. I still couldn’t quite buy the idea that they’d been ignored by their mother in favour of folk music. That just didn’t sound to me like the way folk music worked. You wouldn’t ignore your children; surely you’d be hugging them to you and swaying along to “Kumbayah.” Something didn’t feel right about it all.

  I sat on an empty silver case Nathan had set near the doorway to the backstage. From here I could guard the door against anyone wanting to steal Jay Kuchinsky’s banjo—even though I knew that the joke was that people broke into cars to place banjos in them, not remove them—and still see part of Paxton’s right arm beyond the bulk of Woody and Dr. F crowding the stage entrance. I could hear fine, though, and besides that, I had room to think things through.

  I thought back to the time David Finster had surprised me at the Centre. He had been thoroughly disparaging of folk music, but even more so of academic practices on the whole. I tried to break the two apart, but it occurred to me that his dismissive attitude had been to anything that didn’t have an outstanding monetary value. He was a man who only cared to read a healthy bottom line, but he couldn’t find one in either the folk circuit or the ivory tower. No wonder he had been sneering. So maybe he just wanted the money for himself. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with beggaring the Folkways project. He would likely have been the same charmer if his mother had donated the money to MRIs for the homeless.

  So was he killed by the folkies? Or by someone who just disliked him? Or someone else who valued money as much as he did? His sister was no screaming altruist either, but she was also dead. And Paul had been attacked, so there was a Folkways connection, there had to be. Of course, one of Barbara Finster’s managers had also been killed, so maybe this was about her more than us, or her more than her brother.

  Or maybe this was all some sort of chaos theory experiment gone awry. I could see possible links between the deaths, but no through-line to all of them. Apart from me, of course. I had spoken with each of the victims shortly before he or she died. Maybe someone was trying to make me stop conversing with people. Maybe Mary Montgomery and Bill Bourne were the next victims.

  Maybe I’d had too much sun.

  By the time he finished the final notes of “The Last Thing on My Mind,” Paxton had the whole hillside in the palm of his hand. I swear I saw Dr. Fuller wiping tears from her eyes. I knew the song also signalled the end of the set. I got up from my perch to hurry over to the performers’ table so I could lay out towels and water and fruit. Before I could make it there, though, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder.

  34

  ~

  I’ve been looking all over for you. I’ve been back here three times.”

  I turned toward Steve, who was looking pretty sexy for someone who today was showing his knees. I tilted up my head to kiss him, working on the age-old theory that you can’t stay really mad at someone you’re kissing. He gave me a quick peck, and then followed me to the performers’ table.

  “Are you okay? Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “I went for lunch with Woody, and then I went looking for you about an hour or so ago. Aside from that, I’ve been here all day. What’s up?”

  “I’ve just been a bit edgy about your safety, that’s all.” He took off his ball cap and wiped his brow. “This is all sort of weird, having three teams working on murders and not being sure if they’re related or not. If you look at them one way, they have to be connected. If you look another, though, all the ties between them disappear.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” I replied, excitedly. Too excitedly, maybe, because Steve gave me that warning look he tends to get whenever he thinks about Staff Sergeant Keller and the talking-to’s I’ve been given. “I’m not doing any digging, honestly. It’s just been that same sort of day for me, wondering who the murderer is and whether or not I’ve been talking to him or her, and whether or not I’m next.”

  I told him about running into Mary Montgomery, about the Murray MacLauchlan song, and also about seeing someone I’d recognized on the hill the night before, but not being sure of who it was. “I think it might have been Mary. At first I thought it might have been a man, but now I’m thinking it was a woman, a tall woman. Thing is, you know how it is at folk festivals. Unless it’s one of the watch-my-hands dancers in their bare feet and hippie gowns, most people tend to wear the same sort of thing on the hill at night—jeans and sweatshirts, or jackets and jeans. Hard to really tell from behind, sometimes, who you’re seeing.”

  “Do you think it means something? After all, a good percentage of Edmonton was on the hillside last night.”

  “I dunno. It’s preying on my mind. Maybe it imprinted as someone from some other part of this situation, or maybe I’m just paranoid. Thing is, I saw the person before I knew anything about Pia being killed, and it stuck with me.”

  Steve made a note of it, probably more out of kindness than actual need, since all I had to go on was some pretty vague description.

  “Any news from Iain and the sound analysis?”

  Steve shook his head. “Forensics are working full time on all sorts of angles, but they’re still working the fire scenario, too. They are pretty definite that it was arson, though, so the push is on to determine whether she was confined there or killed accidentally. There was a real whack of insurance on all of the Barbara Shoppes, but that doesn’t seem like a motive, unless we have someone who stood to inherit from Barbara Finster in the picture. As far as we can tell, the last will she made was in 2000, and there haven’t been any changes. That’s public record. Her lawyer is keeping pretty quiet, though, till all the forensic evidence is in, because the ID is still only tentative.”

  “It’s all pretty complicated, eh?”

  Steve sighed. “It seems more so when it’s an ongoing investigation. There’s this fear that the bodies might keep piling up if we can’t figure out why things are happening and who’s doing them. That’s what puts everyone’s nerves on purée. Every minute counts, and some elements of an investigation just have to be given time. You can’t rush the lab coats.”

  “I was thinking about how so much of this connects to either folk music, Finsters or the university. If we wanted to pursue the folk music/Finster connection, you
might want to talk with Tom Paxton when he gets back here. I’m betting he knew Lillian Finster personally.”

  Steve nodded thoughtfully. “You could be right. It might be good to get some sort of perspective on her involvement with the folk scene other than what you said David Finster went on about. After all, it’s that bequest that brings you and the university into all this. That connection needs to be clarified.”

  “Here he comes now.”

  Dr Fuller and Woody were applauding the man as he stepped down into the backstage area, grinning at the joy of a set well done. Paxton looked over to where Nathan was sitting. The sound engineer gave him a big thumbs-up, and Paxton’s shoulders seemed to relax an inch or two even though he had already looked perfectly composed.

  “Good show, everyone. That’s a nice crowd on that hill out there,” Paxton commented. I handed him a towel and a bottle of water, while Woody took his guitar and set it reverentially into the open case.

  “Tom,” I interjected, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Steve Browning.” They shook hands. “Actually, Steve is working on the deaths of David and Barbara Finster, and the murder of the woman on the hillside last night.”

  “Yes, sir,” Steve smiled. “I was wondering if I could take a few minutes of your time.”

  “You think I had something to do with murders?” Tom asked, his expressive eyebrows shooting up into his hat brim.

  “Not the murders, no, but I think it would help us understand a lot more of the dynamics at work if you could tell us something about Lillian Finster, her involvement in the folk scene here in the Sixties and such.”

  Tom Paxton smiled. “I knew Lillian quite well. It was one of the treats of the circuit that you could be wined and dined like royalty when you hit Edmonton. She was a very nice lady who made you feel as if folk music was as valuable to the culture as opera or Philip Glass. Not everyone sees it that way, you know.”

  Dr. Fuller laughed knowingly. She had plenty of experience trying to explain the validity of her studies in esoteric music, too.

  “So Mrs. Finster was well-known in the folk circuit?” Steve asked.

  “Very well-known. Edmonton was one of the only places we folkies knew we had a great place to stay. Most of the time we stayed in what Tom Waits used to call ‘an international hotel chain called Rooms.’ Folk music, by its very nature, didn’t pay all that well. It was difficult to sing Woody Guthrie songs and then get all hard-case over your contract. Most of the time, you filled up on the food tray in the dressing room and made do between times. If you weren’t driving yourself in a station wagon filled with guitars and equipment and sleeping bags, you were going from gig to gig on the Greyhound. You better believe Edmonton was a good place to play. Don Whalen would always have a basket of fruit backstage and he would take us out for dinner after the show. Lillian would make sure we had a place to stay, and if we hadn’t been booked into a hotel, then she’d bring us back home with her. When a woman in a full-length sable picks you up at the bus station in a Bentley and drives you back to a mansion overlooking a forest of a river valley in the middle of the city, you better believe you appreciate it.”

  “Can you remember meeting any of her family?” Steve asked.

  “I met her husband a couple of times, but he was sort of a distracted science type—pleasant but absent when people were around. Nowadays I’d probably say he had Asperger’s. Then we called it being an absent-minded professor.”

  Tom was warming up in his reminiscences. Nathan had almost packed up his equipment behind us, and the festival techies were winding up mike wires and setting them in the cabinet beside my table, but Woody, Dr. F, Steve and I were rapt.

  “The kids she had were sort of funny. She called them folkie names, as I recall, like Barbara Allen and Black Jack Davey. They were the oddest teenagers I met in the Sixties, I think. They stood out mostly because they looked like such throwbacks to my generation. You’d think that when your mother is into the folk scene, you’d have dispensation to grow your hair long and loosen up a bit, but David Finster had a brush cut well into the Seventies. At first, I thought it was rebellion against his mother, a sort of reverse thing from what the rest of the kids were doing, but then I had another idea. With all the girls and their long hair, he might have been worried he’d end up being mistaken for his sister if he had hair the same length as the other fellows at the time. They were as alike as twins, you know, but I don’t think they were actual twins. Poor Barbara, even with hair down to her waist, I’ll bet she was mistaken for her brother loads of times.”

  That was an interesting idea. Wouldn’t it be funny if David Finster’s reaction to folk music had been sartorial rather than musical? From my exposure to Barbara Finster as a well-dressed doyenne, I had to squint a bit in my imagination to see her as boyish, but I could sort of see what Paxton was talking about. Her broad shoulders had made her tailored suit drape elegantly, and of course, the fashions worked so much better with no hips to cut the line of the fabric. She might have been as tall as her brother, too, although it didn’t occur to me at the time. For one thing, I was sitting down most of the one time I saw them together, and when a woman is dressed up, we tend to absorb quite naturally the idea that she may be wearing heels. That day in the Barbara Shoppe she looked long and elegant, but I was too worried about being recognized by her to spend a lot of time analyzing her looks and body type. Being tall myself, I generally only notice height if someone is about an inch or two taller than I am, and then I start stretching my spine up as I walk, in order to compete for superior airspace.

  Nathan nudged me and indicated two of his heavy cases with a nod of his head. I poked Woody and passed the buck. Pretty soon everything was packed up on the golf cart. I managed to lock away the water bottles and unused towels, and loaded the bag of laundry on top of Nathan’s equipment. There was no way I was hauling it back on my bicycle.

  Tom Paxton and Dr. Fuller had decamped for Instrument Lock-Up and then the dinner tent. I thought about joining them, but decided that I wanted to be home more than I wanted lasagna and chocolate pudding cake, no matter how wonderful the food sounded. Steve had his bike with him, and his shift had ended twenty minutes earlier, so we decided to ride back together to my place. He had clothes enough to change into after a shower, and I figured I could whomp up a salad with the fixings in my fridge.

  “Sounds good to me,” Steve said as he leaned over and kissed my ear. We were halfway to the bike lock-up area, having shed Woody and Nathan at the performers and volunteers’ gate. They were going to load up Nathan’s van, and then he and Woody were heading out for some grain-fed Alberta beef, which Woody had pronounced superior to corn-fed American beef.

  “I’m surprised that Woody can be so chipper, considering all he’s been through today,” I opined.

  “Well, if he’s a mass murderer, then he’s likely used to this sort of thing. And if he’s not, then it’s probably something to do with his metabolism.”

  “Steve! You don’t actually suspect Woody of murdering anyone, do you?”

  “Why? You sound worried.”

  “Well, I would be worried if I thought I’d been working with a murderer all this time.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Are you asking me if I have feelings for Woody?”

  “Well, yes. It has crossed my mind that you’ve been together a lot these past few weeks. I have to admit it’s somewhat awkward seeing my girlfriend with a fellow who seems to be so connected to the same things that interest her. After all, you two speak the same language. Maybe he has more to offer you.” Steve pushed his bike along morosely.

  I stopped in the middle of the road. It would probably have made a greater impact if the road hadn’t been closed to traffic, but you can’t always have a Hollywood moment.

  “Steve Browning, I can’t believe I am hearing this from you. It seems so self-doubting, which is something I’ve never thought of in any context with you. Woody may be a funny, good guy t
o work with, but he doesn’t speak my language any more than you do, and you forget the mundane fact that he’s from Washington, DC. Is this really about Woody being a suspect, though, or is it about you and me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you really worrying about Woody and me, or are you worried about you and me getting too close? Maybe this is just a smokescreen because you’re not sure about committing? I can sort of understand if that’s what it is. Commitment is a big thing. I just don’t want to muddy things up by attributing weight to red herrings like Woody and me.”

  “Sweetheart, if Woody is nothing more to you than an interesting co-worker, then I’m satisfied. And I’m not worried about commitment.” He reached over to pull me close to him, since his bike was leaning up against his other side. I had to turn my head slightly to avoid getting the sun visor from his bicycle helmet imbedded in my forehead, but it was worth it.

  35

  ~

  I retrieved my bike from the lock-up with no troubles, although the volunteers there looked at me as if I were stark mad, leaving just before the evening concert was to begin. Let them. For me, it’s always been the daytime workshop stages rather than the evening mainstage concerts that defined my Folk Festival experience. Although I’ve gleaned every moment of these wonderful music weekends I could get for years now, the times spent sitting in the dark on a bumpy hill with a bunch of strangers—some of whom are smoking pot, many of whom are visiting and chatting over the lyrics to my favourite songs—are not the best memories of the events. I just smiled and shrugged and pushed my bike out of the compound to where Steve was waiting for me.

  He had to slow down from his usual gears to pedal along beside me. We drove along back the way I had come in the morning, then opted to push the bikes to the top of 99th Street hill and go home via Saskatchewan Drive.