The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  Not that we had been avoiding that. Steve had joked that we probably could have ordered a few more margaritas without worrying about their caloric content. The origins of the word “honeymoon” referred to the month after the nuptials, when couples were left to their own devices, and not expected to rejoin the community activities. It had since morphed into a getaway vacation for the bride and groom, to relax after the tensions of the wedding planning. And while we weren’t even getting a full week’s worth of days to fritter and sigh, this honeymoon was so much more than I’d ever dreamed possible.

  I wonder when I had stopped thinking pink unicorn thoughts of weddings and marriage and babies, or if I’d ever thought them at all. Steve had been a part of my life for so long now that this transition in our status, while delightful, seemed almost inevitable. And of course, we were certainly too far down the road to consider children, even adopted ones. Some people our age were becoming grandparents already.

  No, we were fine as we were, loving and supporting each other and doing our bit to keep the planet sustainable, even if we wouldn’t be doing much for the Canada Pension Plan. I looked at my watch and reluctantly patted Steve on the arm to wake him up. We would have to change now if we hoped to have one more fabulous lunch before heading homeward.

  My suit was almost dry as it was, so I wasn’t overly afraid of it mildewing in the hold of the airplane. We stuffed the bag with our suits into Steve’s suitcase and walked around the corner to Joe Jack’s Fish Shack for our last lunch in Mexico.

  The place was already full, but we were led upstairs to a table halfway onto the open patio. Steve ordered the three-ceviche platter, and I opted for the fish tacos. We also decided to throw caution about being level-headed for Customs to the wind, and ordered mojitos.

  “I heard she was a cheerleader,” said a woman at a table near us to her companion.

  “Right? And she was killed by her football playing boyfriend,” her friend replied.

  Steve’s eyebrow shot up.

  “They’re not having the success they hoped tamping down the news, from the sounds of it,” he whispered to me. “They were hoping the general populace wouldn’t be aware of the investigation at all.”

  “In a city this size? I can imagine everyone knows about it.”

  “Probably every resident knows, but tourists, especially those with limited or no Spanish, were hoped to be kept in the dark. After all, they don’t want people thinking it’s an unsafe destination.”

  “No kidding. Although, Denise went on a Jack the Ripper tour the last time she was in London. Maybe murder would be a selling point? After all, the beach is called Los Muertos Beach.”

  “Historical murders targeting one specific group of women that have almost entered the realm of legend rather than fact are one thing; trying to make a tourist mecca out of a warzone would be more in keeping with the concept they are trying to avoid.”

  Steve took a long sip of his mojito, pushing the straw into the mint leaves for maximum zest. He put down his blue-rimmed tumbler and gazed about the restaurant.

  “How many of these people do you think are feeling safe and easy, now that there’s talk of a homicide on the beach?”

  “All of them. No one thinks they will be the target of something like that. Besides, all these people are with someone else, and I will bet you that even the single girls travelling together will stick a bit closer together for the next little while. And from what I understand of the subtext before the Mexican Superintendent Keller hustled me out of the office, the general idea is that she brought her killer with her, so there is no danger to anyone here in Vallarta, right? The killer, whoever it is, is presumably heading home with us.” I looked around the restaurant, echoing Steve’s movement of a minute before. “Boy, doesn’t that make me feel all warm and cozy.”

  “You’re right, of course. That is how they want to play it, and I’ve got orders from Edmonton to maintain connections with the officials here once we’re back. I think Iain has already spoken to the girl’s family, but we’ll likely go out again when I get back. I’m just hoping that they keep an open mind about it possibly being a Mexican national. I wouldn’t want murder swept under the carpet for the sake of a shiny reputation for tourism.”

  We couldn’t overhear any other conversations from where we were sitting, so we reluctantly paid up and headed back to our hotel. The concierge hugged us and offered us a bottle of chocolate infused tequila, which Steve somehow found room for in his suitcase. A yellow and white cab was called and soon we and our suitcases were bumping along the cobblestone roads heading to the airport.

  The terminal was full of tired, happy looking people, mostly red, some brown. Steve may have been on the lookout for Kristin’s roommates, who were supposedly on the same flight as us, although they may have been on the Sunwing flight heading homeward half an hour later than ours, but I was determined to keep them out of my mind.

  It was amazing to me that Puerto Vallarta, that compact little city, could have held all these people—none of whom I had seen in any of our forays about the town, or on the tours we had taken—and more besides. How was it possible for it to maintain such an easygoing attitude when it must have been at capacity for filled hotel rooms, judging by the crowd in the airport, and the numbers lined up below us waiting to be let through into the sunshine? It was attitude and magic, I decided. In this part of Mexico, everyone was welcomed readily, and the pace was so even and serene that you didn’t feel crowded. Oh Puerto Vallarta, I was going to miss you.

  Reading my thoughts, Steve leaned over and kissed my hair.

  “We’ll come back, Randy. I promise.”

  13

  I slept in Thursday morning, and then, armed with a pot of coffee and guilt-ridden homage to my pioneer grandparents, I sat at the kitchen island in what had been Steve’s and now was our condo, dressed in leggings, a pullover sweater, a cardigan, and thick wooly socks, marking two piles of essays. I had no foundation for complaining, either, since I’d just spent a week in paradise, without a care in the world.

  Likewise, Steve had picked up the mantle of responsibility and headed out to work after starting a load of vacation laundry that I promised to sort for the dryer when the buzzer went off.

  While we had moved what belongings I needed and wanted to keep to Steve’s a week before the wedding, having given notice to my landlords a month earlier, it didn’t yet feel like our place; more like his place with a hint of me about. That was primarily because I had not been quite so acquisitive since my belongings had all been trashed in a break-and-enter some time earlier. I had replaced necessities, but hadn’t had much of a chance to rebuild my library or record collection.

  My clothes were now along half of Steve’s walk in closet, and we had wedged my old dresser in there, too, partially so I could reach for underwear at the same time as I was deciding on what clothes to wear, and mostly because it just didn’t match Steve’s Danish modern sensibilities. I loved his bedroom just as it was, although I tended to creep out of bed and open the drapes after we had turned out the lights, so that we could wake to the view of the dawn on the river valley.

  We were discussing the addition of some bookshelves in the condo. I was advocating for floor-to-ceiling shelves along one wall in the living room and all down the halls, which were terrifically wide and spacious. Maybe the builders were thinking we’d be there till we required wheelchairs, which was a nice consideration for them to have had. However, at the moment, it was the need to expand the library we were now sharing. Steve had books in one small bookcase just outside the kitchen alcove, and in about five piles on the floor in the corner of the bedroom.

  While I wasn’t up to par, given my setback, books cling to me like cat hair to black trousers, and I had moved in with seventeen liquor store boxes filled with literature. I didn’t really expect that to slow down, either. Steve acknowledged my need for books graciously
, but I didn’t really give him too many props for that since to me it would be like graciously allowing someone with diabetes access to insulin.

  I expected to receive some physical tokens of inheritance when my parents either passed on or downsized, but on the whole, I was entering this marriage, middle-aged and world weary, with about the same amount of belongings as a co-ed moving into a dorm for the first time. Luckily, I had no time to think about the pathetic quality of that because I had to focus on thirty-four more papers offering insight into what the green light on the dock meant to Jay Gatsby.

  I had made quite a dent in the pile by the time Steve called at lunchtime. At peak marking, I can manage three essays an hour, and counting back, I could see I’d been running true to form. I had a pile of ten graded papers, marked up with green ink and margin notes, and only about eight hours left to go to get through this class. The other class had sat a midterm in-class essay prior to Reading Week, and their papers would go faster, since I went easier on their grammar and punctuation. I anticipated being through marking by Friday evening, and able to spend the weekend thinking about the last push of the term and what to wear on Monday.

  Steve’s call had been more than a check in. He wasn’t going to be home for supper, because he and Iain had to brief both the university and the Canadian Consulate about the murder in Mexico.

  While we had still been in Puerto Vallarta, Iain McCorquodale, Steve’s partner, had taken on interviewing and informing Kristin’s family. Though her parents lived in Edmonton, Kristin had decided to move out and live closer to campus with her two roommates, which said to me that either she had a phenomenal part-time job, or her parents were loaded. In this economy, very few students who could pull off free room and board in town passed on the chance to stay home.

  Or maybe they had a difficult relationship, Kristin and her parents. Or perhaps they were seeing this step toward full independence as a transition, and were underwriting it for her as a learning process.

  Whatever the reason, they had of course taken the news hard. Kristin was an only child, and they had been relatively older when she was born. Now, the promise of someone to care for them in their older years was gone, and the added horror of the violence of her death probably brought their own mortality shuddering closer to them.

  That was my imagination and too many essays about Scott Fitzgerald fueling the simple facts Steve had gleaned after he’d talked to Iain on the phone the night before. He had merely been relieved that Iain had got the notifications out of the way.

  Steve had anticipated talking to the roommates again once they were back in Edmonton, but everything was, of course, complicated by the cross-border aspect to the crime. Staff Superintendent Keller had been sorting through the formalities required of the situation, and assigned a few more people to Steve and Iain’s investigation, with the hope that the Mexican authorities would note how seriously the Canadians were taking things and keep up their end of the process accordingly.

  I had so much marking to do that my new husband deserting me for his own work didn’t bother me in the slightest. What did bother me was the lingering memory of seeing Kristin lying on that spit of sand, alone in the blazing sun. My conscious mind knew that she had been already dead when I had spotted her, but something in my soul kept gnawing at my conscience, blaming me for not running down to the island’s edge and waking her from her fate.

  While I had more than enough experience with death, I hadn’t seen all that many corpses in my life, and even though I had thought her sunbathing, not posed in death, Kristin Perry monopolized my thoughts. I stretched, and slid off the high chair to head to the bathroom, then made another pot of coffee. I was determined to get through the essays in one shot, and to make a dent in the midterms.

  That way, I could do a little research of my own, although I wasn’t sure Steve would appreciate it, and I knew his boss would be apoplectic if he found out. Keller had taken an early dislike to my “interference,” as he termed it, in Steve’s investigations. He wasn’t entirely certain Steve didn’t share more than he was allowed in any particular investigation, but he needn’t have worried. My husband had absorbed the ethics of law enforcement and lived and breathed the rules.

  It was just that I was often somehow connected to situations he ended up investigating. It was how we had met, after all. I knew, even then, that Steve had information he’d never be able to share with me, and that most of our conversations dealing with any of the cases where we’d interconnect were more about him quizzing me rather than him sharing classified secrets. As for inside information, I heard only what he would tell reporters or any other witness he was questioning.

  One thing that he and Iain might not have picked up on, though, which I had found fascinating when I had heard about it, was the nature of Kristin’s interest in Mexican art. Her parents had informed Iain that she was an Art and Design student who had travelled to Mexico for Reading Week. She had visited galleries, and her notebooks, which Steve had only seen that morning in the luggage that was delivered directly to the police station from Mexico, were full of sketches. Maybe, for Kristin at least, the trip was more than a tequila getaway. Maybe she had been working on something up here that would give Steve an indication of where she had been while in Puerto Vallarta and whom she had talked to or interacted with.

  The investigation back in Mexico had assumed Kristin and her roommates were just typical party girls, wanting to let off some Reading Week steam. Maybe there had been more to it than that, and we’d missed the real connections she might have been making, one of them a fatal one.

  I could hear the frustration in Steve’s voice when he mentioned the notebooks and her major. If he’d had that sort of information while we’d been in Vallarta, it might have been very helpful. I hated to think he was going to beat himself up about it, especially because I knew he had been working full out while he should have been relaxing.

  Maybe I could help. If I could scout the art students’ studios for some ideas of what was driving Kristin’s interest in Mexico, it might be of use to Steve. And it might get Kristin and her lonely, sunburned body out of my head.

  But first things first. I had to get these papers marked. By five o’clock, I had turned on the overhead lights to illuminate my work on the island better. An hour later, I got up to stretch and turn on the living room lights. By seven, I was finished the long essays, and recording the marks in my roster.

  There was still no sign of Steve, though there were several text messages on my phone. He suggested bringing pizza home with him in an hour or so, to which I texted delighted approval.

  Not cooking for a week had not made me long for my own kitchen; it had pushed me into the other direction, where I was quite happy to contemplate budgeting for more restaurant meals. I knew it couldn’t last, but today, at least, all my energy was focused on getting through my marking. How could I be expected to drop everything and whip up a pot roast, especially with Steve being away all hours? I was totally happy with his exhibiting his hunter-gatherer capacity, and looked forward to him carrying in the mighty pizza when he arrived.

  It took longer than either of us had anticipated, and I only had five of the shorter essays left to mark when he finally walked through the door around nine thirty. He looked tired around the eyes, and I realized I hadn’t seen that look for more than a week. The job he had chosen was a difficult one, and it took a lot out of him, I could tell, having just seen so clearly what a full-tilt vacation could do to clear those lines and furrows from his face.

  I slid off the chair stool, and went round the island to greet him.

  “I brought the pizza. I hope you weren’t starving in the meantime?”

  “I didn’t eat, but until I smelled it, I wasn’t hungry, so that’s okay.”

  I burrowed into his chest, smelling the cold of the outdoors on him and feeling it chill me. “Welcome home. You must be exhausted. What a lo
ng day to have as a first day back on the job.”

  “It felt like three days in one,” he nodded to me as he shrugged off his parka. I busied myself getting out plates, napkins and parmesan cheese while he went to hang up his coat and shuck his teal pullover. He was wearing a tieless shirt of blue and teal gingham beneath, and I could tell how long a day it had been by the fact that he didn’t immediately head off to hang it up and change into a T-shirt. He probably felt as if he had sweated through his work-dress shirt sufficiently to warrant a wash, rather than airing it and hanging it for another day or two’s wear.

  He rolled up his sleeves, and I tidied away my piles of marking, and together we ate silently, polishing off two-thirds of the huge beef and onion pizza before either of us made a sound other than my normal food moans.

  “Iain made a few cracks about getting the short straw in this case, and not having the tan to go with the file.” Steve laughed, but it was a short bark, probably because he, too, was remembering Kristin’s sunburned body. “But he’s done a lot of the legwork already, even more than I had thought. He had a hard time locating the boyfriend, though he eventually found him sleeping in one of the art studios.”

  “Is he homeless?”

  “No, apparently he is working on some time-activated project, where he has to take a photo every hour of things that change slightly, like a bean seed and a melting popsicle and some shadows. I’m not certain whether it is going to be a film or a mosaic of some sort, and I don’t know if he knows, either. Iain wasn’t all that impressed with it, as far as I could tell, but I wouldn’t mind checking it out.”

  “Sounds a little derivative of films like Koyaanisqatsi, from what you’re describing.”

  “That’s exactly what popped into my head, too, so maybe it’s my interpretation of Iain’s description that’s leading us both there. I should check it out for myself.”