The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  On the other hand, we had been playing with the whole “Mr. and Mrs.” and “home sweet home” phrasing. Maybe I’d been wearing him down with my turns of phrase.

  “Iain, did he say that to you? That he was ‘headed for home’?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, he told one of the officers at the front desk. Why?”

  “Because I don’t think that is what he would have said. Could you go and find out what his exact words were?”

  “Do you think it’s important?”

  “Well, he got a phone call and left and isn’t home now. Yeah, I think it is important.”

  “Hold your horses, I’ll be right back.”

  It was about three minutes, and a grimmer sounding Iain was back on the phone.

  “You were right, Randy. The officer just extrapolated. When he said to Steve, ‘So, are you calling it a night?’ Steve had smiled when he replied and said ‘Dave, I’m rounding third.’”

  “Rounding third?”

  “Yes, and now I’m worried.”

  “Why, Iain?”

  “Because that is our code for getting to the answers, Steve and I; a series of baseball metaphors. You know, ‘out on first’ means you tried something that didn’t pan out. And ‘stealing a base’ means you are flying close to breaking a rule, but just barely.”

  “And ‘rounding third’?” I asked.

  “Well, Dave got the gist of it, but he interpreted it wrong. When we say we’re ‘rounding third,’ it means we’re heading for a home run, a win, the answer. Steve wasn’t heading for home. He was off to solve the case.”

  Steve had gone after a murderer on his own and he hadn’t been heard from in two hours. Something wasn’t right.

  “Now Randy, don’t panic. We’ll find him. I’m going to find out where that last call came from and figure out where he might have gone. You stay put, you hear?”

  But I was beyond hearing Iain’s sound advice. I clicked off the phone and stared out into the greying summer sky. My husband had gone to meet a murderer. I knew it in my bones.

  But who was it, and where?

  38

  My first instinct was to get dressed. If I had to go out and find Steve, I wasn’t going to be of much use in sweatpants and bare feet.

  I traded the sweatpants for a pair of jeans and pulled on a thick sweatshirt, socks, and running shoes. Even though we were nearing the solstice, the early June nights could dip and get chilly, and I knew from experience that when I was tense, I felt the cold even more than usual. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail out of my eyes, and splashed cold water on my face to try to clear my thoughts.

  Back in the kitchen, I set out my notes to try to find some sort of order in the lists I had made.

  We had two young women murdered and placed in a similar format: in a bathing suit, on a beach, alone with a book and a towel and a sun hat. There were art card connections. One had been murdered in Mexico, on Playa de los Muertos, and the other had been killed and laid out in the waterpark in West Edmonton Mall.

  It struck me once more that the Mexican tourism board had to be pretty sure of themselves to keep a name like “beach of the dead” for one of the tourist hotspots. It certainly hadn’t seemed to slow down the scores of visitors. I had been told that the beach was named that for the currents, meaning that should there have been an accident in the Bay of Banderas, which was second in size only to Hudson’s Bay here in Canada, eventually the body would wash up at Playa de los Muertos. So, it wasn’t as if it was Murder Beach—that is, until recently.

  Why had the murders been staged on beaches? Because, of course, that is what the waterpark approximated up here in land-locked Edmonton. They even painted the wave pool area’s floor blue, and the surrounding area where the lounge chairs were lined up sandy brown. The murderer had gone to a great deal of trouble to use a beach setting, especially in the crowds that would have been present at the mall.

  Frida Kahlo had some paintings that depicted the sandy desert, but nothing that was really an ocean view. And besides, the paintings that resembled the murder scenes the most were both set outdoors on solid ground with a blue sky very far back on the horizon. So why the need for the seaside? Was it that connection to Edvard Munch, with The Scream art card in their beach bags? There was water in that painting.

  And why continue with the Frida homage with a murder set in Canada? Why not turn to Emily Carr or the Group of Seven to find a layout more suitable? There was something connecting Frida Kahlo, the shore, and the Fine Arts Department of the University of Alberta.

  And I had to find out what it was, because it was now connected to Steve. I could feel that he was in danger like a low-grade hum in my blood. I wondered if he had felt like this any time he had been rescuing me or if this connection had been created when we’d recited our vows in the glass pyramid of the Muttart Conservatory.

  I walked back over to the glass doors, and out onto the balcony, straining my eyes in the twilight to look for the pyramids. I could see the tips of them, just down to the far right, gleaming amid the trees on our side of the river valley. We hadn’t been back to them together since our wedding in January, but we’d been talking about it recently as the weather grew nicer, and we could have tacked a visit onto a picnic nearby.

  And suddenly I knew where I needed to go to find Steve.

  I grabbed my phone, a mini-flashlight that we kept in the storage room, and the car keys. West Edmonton Mall wasn’t the only place to find waterfront in Edmonton.

  Accidental Beach wasn’t the easiest place to get to. It was a spit of sand on the south side of the river, near the Muttart pyramids and the dock for the riverboat, but slightly east. It had been a sandbar in the middle of the river, but these days, with the activity upstream building the new bridges, the current had shifted to allow the sand to extend all the way along the shore.

  It had been a big hit last summer, with photos all over social media of the sandy expanse with sunbathers dotted all over and the downtown skyline in the background. Edmontonians are always quick to celebrate anything fun or unusual, and people had been tromping down behind some rather fancy condos to play beach volleyball, suntan, and picnic all last summer, chasing away the Franklin’s gulls who normally set up a colony there every June.

  Only the hardiest went into the water, because the North Saskatchewan is a tricky river with some strong currents, and the E. coli warnings were still pretty stern, but it looked inviting burbling past.

  The beach was still with us this summer and there had been murmurings in the news that City Council was thinking of making sure it was a constant. Steve and I had been meaning to check it out, but what with my spring session work and his big case, it had slipped our minds.

  I drove down to Gold Bar as if I was going to the Folk Festival, and aimed for the easternmost street in the neighbourhood. There had been rough steps cut out of the incline behind the riverside condos on the other side of the thoroughfare at that end, which the Edmonton Journal had noted in one of their articles about the pros and cons of the site. I saw neighbourhood parking restrictions signs up everywhere, but I figured those were enforced mostly at festival times, and besides, a parking ticket was the least of my worries at the moment.

  I locked the car and pocketed the keys. I didn’t need the flashlight yet, with the streetlights and the sun still streaking the western sky, but it would disappear soon; and besides, there would be no streetlights on the beach itself.

  I crossed the avenue and headed toward the river. I soon found the steps the news article had mentioned. I was glad I’d brought the flashlight to navigate my way down to the sand, but turned it off to see how much I could see without announcing myself, and once my eyes reacclimatized, I was okay. In another half an hour or so, it would be a different story. Of course, I was hoping I would have found Steve by then. It wasn’t that big of a beach.

 
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I found him, or what sort of state I was going to find him in, or whether he would be alone, or if I’d be walking in on a killer, but I really didn’t have the time or ability to think of those things. All my energy was channeled into picking my way along the edge of the beach, where it met the rougher outcropping of what was normally the river’s edge, avoiding bits of driftwood, and maintaining my footing in the sand.

  It was odd to feel such fine sand here in the middle of a landlocked province, but of course, at one time this had all been a huge primordial sea, and the source of all sand—the moraine stones and scree of the mountains—were all upstream, happily eroding and sending this pretty silt along to find its way to this turn in the river.

  There was a large condo complex built right up to the river’s edge in a marvel of flood denial, with just a narrow road and a thin line of trees between the condos and the beach, making whatever ambient light I might have got from undrawn, draped windows diffused and dimmed. Still, I could see the general layout. I was just hoping I didn’t stumble across a grumpy hobo or some drug deal happening in the shadows.

  I stopped for a minute, trying to get my bearings and figure out how far I had come. What I wanted to do more than anything was call out for Steve, but something told me to keep my presence as unknown as possible. If I had anything going for us and my rescue attempt, it was sneaking up on whatever was happening. If there was anything happening.

  Maybe this was all a wild goose chase, based on hunches.

  Just then I saw a light flicker, about a hundred yards away, further down the beach.

  39

  I gripped the flashlight, which I might be able to use as a cosh, and stepped forward as quietly as I could. The flowing river was covering up whatever noises were happening up ahead where the light was flickering close to the sand, and I hoped it was masking my footsteps, too.

  The closer I got, the harder it was not to shout. A figure was bent over another figure, putting on or pulling off a jacket. The second person looked drugged or drunk. Maybe it was two tramps, one stealing the other’s jacket. Or maybe it was the murderer posing Steve before killing him. I didn’t even want to think that he might already be dead.

  There was no way a solitary killer could get a big guy like Steve down here already dead. He would have to have walked to the beach on his own. I was praying the killer needed him alive long enough to set the scene.

  I should have been praying to be silent and invisible, because all of a sudden the figure holding the other one stood up, dropping the other person to the sand. The lantern I’d seen flickering was held up to shoulder height, and a distinctive voice I’d heard before called out.

  “I’ve got a gun. Drop whatever weapons you may have and walk forward slowly.”

  “I don’t have any weapons, Alessandra.” I stepped forward with my hands up in the air, having tucked the thin flashlight into my back pocket.

  “Ah, the old bride! This is perfect, better than I could have hoped. Move over here into the light.”

  Alessandra Delahaya was standing over Steve, holding a gun on me. She had brightened the lantern, and the scene it showed was bizarre. Steve lay on the ground at her feet, alongside an open duffle bag filled with tools and fabric.

  “You really are too tall, but we’ll make do. I could cover your shins with sand, and set the shoes just over your knees.”

  “What are you doing, Alessandra?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? This is Frida and Diego’s wedding scene. I was going to create a Frida out of sand and lay the wedding dress on top, to signify the emptiness of the sacrament, but now that I have a real bride, it will be even better.”

  “Did you kill Kristin and Marta because they’d been having affairs with your husband?”

  “Affairs is too dignified a word to describe what was happening. Diego was rutting, and they were handy. He cared nothing for them, but he couldn’t help himself, just like Frida’s Diego, who always came back to her.”

  I didn’t like the look in Alessandra’s eye, but I figured it was best to keep her talking, because that seemed to be keeping her from doing anything else, like stabbing.

  “Does Diego know you’ve done this?”

  “He may suspect. But he hasn’t said anything. I think he is afraid to say anything. He likes it here, and it suits him to be the flamboyant visiting artist.”

  “But you want him to know, don’t you? You want him to admit his guilt?”

  “At first, I thought it might implicate him, to have his student found there, all laid out like an iconic Kahlo painting. As if taking a weeklong vacation to the seaside made her an acolyte of Frida. Such a simpleton, so easy to peel away from her friends with a mere suggestion of a shrine to Kahlo.” Alessandra laughed, not a pretty laugh.

  “It was my husband’s fault. He went and taught that course, the one that ignited all those little whores to see themselves as a potential Frida to his Rivera.” She waved her lantern around, and the light bounced off some nearby trees. I thought I heard Steve groan, but it could have been the river. I was hoping he was still alive, and that my stalling for time wasn’t actually killing him. Had she poisoned him? Or stabbed him so he was bleeding internally? Or was he just anesthetized until she could set up her tableau?

  “But they didn’t hold him for questioning, or delay our trip back to Canada, and then the investigation was taking so long, and Diego had to dip his wick another time, so I thought I’d up the ante. Marta was very easy to lure out, and the drugs I got from my brother made it easy to manipulate her to the water park chair without anyone the wiser. I even went for a swim while she lay there!”

  Alessandra’s laugh was not a pleasant thing to hear.

  “And even then Diego said nothing, though the wedding painting should have reminded him of our vows and his misdeeds. And still your policeman didn’t drag Diego away to answer for his crimes! What was he doing; was he still on his honeymoon? Is he not a very good detective?”

  “Steve’s a great detective,” I couldn’t help myself. “Processes have to be followed, though. You can’t just haul everyone in and browbeat them into a confession.”

  She sneered at me, and looked down at the man at her feet. My man.

  “Well, he came to the right conclusion eventually, didn’t he, with a little help.”

  “How did you get him down here?”

  “I called him and told him to examine the names of his suspects.”

  “And he came here because of the river? Diego Rivers? Did he think he was meeting your husband?”

  “Oh, I think after all he was brighter than that. In fact, if they were to check his computer history, I am sure they would see he had used a translation device before he left the police station.”

  “And what was he translating?”

  She sighed and I felt insulted. After all, it wasn’t as if I was against learning other languages. I spoke and read French at a working, if not poetic, level, and I had a smattering of German. In Puerto Vallarta, I had worked with a phrase book to attempt to learn some Spanish. But apparently not enough for Alessandra, who had been so dismissive when I had thought she’d been introduced to me as Alexandra. Were we both going to die because of a social faux pas?

  “He probably put ‘Delahaya’ into the translator, because he arrived here very quickly after we spoke on the phone.”

  “And what would he have seen on the translator?” I was really curious, but also I was still aware of trying to keep this madwoman talking.

  “He would have seen ‘of the beech’,” she smiled. My family is from northern Mexico, where the beech tree is more profuse, and the valley we are from is full of them. I thought it was something Diego would catch, since the paintings Frida made weren’t set on the sandy shores. But like I say, I am not sure he wants to know the truth. And he has never really put
his heart into learning Spanish, either.”

  Beech and beach. A homophone as the final clue, letting Steve know he was rounding third. He must have been certain he could hold his own against a tiny woman like Alessandra Delahaya, and got too excited to pull a full complement along with him.

  It was as if she was reading my mind.

  “I told him to come alone or my next victim would die. He thought he was coming to save someone else from my web, not become the fly.”

  “How did you manage to sedate him?”

  “My cousin the pharmacist is such a handy man to know. The tranquilizer comes on little darts, for zoo veterinarians to stick or blow onto their larger patients, who might be shy of a tranquilizer gun. When your man came up to me, I had a pop can with a straw in it. What he didn’t know was that I had a blow dart in the straw. I hit him with the tranquilizer in the neck. It was very fast. He dropped like a tree being cut by a lumberjack. Timber!” She laughed again and I thought to myself, if I never heard that laugh again, it would be too soon.

  So, Steve was tranquilized with some sort of large animal drug, not dead. Now that I had the time to think and notice, I realized that the gun she was pointing at me was Steve’s police issue pistol. She had been planning to set him up in her so-called art piece, and then kill him. If I could keep her talking till the tranquilizer wore off, perhaps he could overpower her. Or maybe she would get tired herself, and fall asleep on her own and I could tie her up. Or maybe a flying pig would drop out of the sky and knock her out.

  I was screwed. I had a flashlight, my phone, and some keys. She was out of reach with a gun on me, and totally in control.

  “What brought you here, if you didn’t get the play on words?”