Innocent Murderer

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  LuEllen’s home was right at the top at the end of the road. It was tiny; from the outside it looked like little more than a wooden shingled shed with three enormous freezers lining one side. She’d painted her wooden shutters a coral colour to match the door, but there were no flowers, mostly because the house stood on bedrock and was surrounded by trees, except on the far side, which I could not see.

  I walked up the flagstone walkway and took the little brass knocker, shaped like a dolphin swimming around a circle, in my hand and let it go. It didn’t make much noise, but then it didn’t have a big job to do. The door had two glass windows in it and I could see LuEl–len sitting on a sofa facing an enormous picture window.

  Scruffy came flying around the corner of the sofa, yap–ping so hard it made it impossible for him to stay still, each yap jerking him sideways.

  She turned as I knocked and got up and grabbed a baseball cap, but not before I’d seen her head. I thought I was prepared, but without her ball cap and her heavy winter jacket her disfigurement was frightening in its com–pleteness. I tried to keep my features steady as I gripped her one good hand. She led me inside. It was a simple room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, dominated by an enormous loom and a piano, with a bedroom off to one side and presumably a bathroom. There was a modest granite fireplace festooned with pictures.

  What made the room was the view from the pic–ture window. In front of the house the bedrock dropped away into a forest of trees and cliffs that landed far below on the shores of the Gatineau River. Her view encompassed the cliffs, the river, and the far side where the land was flat before it rose into another Gatineau Hill. She was very isolated and I wondered if she had lived here before the accident, or if the accident had caused her to seek solitude.

  We took a seat at either end of the little sofa.

  “You have a beautiful home here. Very isolated.”

  “I like it that way. I don’t usually invite anyone here,” she said, staring at me.

  I found it very disconcerting and wondered why she had made an exception with me.

  “You see? Look at your face. Pity, that’s what’s there. People find it uncomfortable to be with me, and because of that I find it uncomfortable to be with them. So I avoid people most of the time.” She smiled a rictus smile and I tried to hide my discomfiture. “I’m self-contained here. I buy all my food once a year, I have satellite, and I have my weaving and my writing. No one needs to pity me.” Her words echoed around my head. I thought of the three freezers and the loneliness that suddenly envel–oped me was cold and hard, like a lump of ice.

  “Sally was a good woman. I’m sorry she’s dead,” she said changing the subject so fast that it took me awhile to react.

  “I don’t believe that she killed Terry,” I said, coming straight to my point.

  “Is that what the police are saying?”

  “Yes. They think she killed Terry and then committed suicide by drowning.”

  I was at a disadvantage. I couldn’t read her face, it was so scarred and stretched. She reached over and picked up Scruffy, who began slathering kisses onto her face. “I think that’s best left to the police,” she said.

  I changed tack. “Why did you take Terry’s course?”

  “I’d heard that she was a good teacher and I thought writing would be a good thing for someone like me. It’s an isolating profession and that’s the way I live.”

  “I don’t understand. You go to great troubles to avoid people, but then you not only take a creative writ–ing course, you go on a cruise.”

  She was still and Scruffy began to whine. LuEllen got up and put him on the floor, asking if I wanted some tea.

  “I know you’re juror number nine,” I said.

  She whirled to look at me. “How did you find that out?” she whispered.

  I told her about the newspaper coverage of Terry’s trial.

  “But that was years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “You read the papers. You know.”

  “They said you were going to convict when the rest of the jury wasn’t.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “But you had an accident and Terry was acquitted.”

  She held the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and said nothing.

  “Was she guilty?”

  “What do you think? She sleepwalks and murders a man, then walks? What kind of justice is that?”

  “Justice by jury.”

  “Yeah, but I was missing.” She had raised her voice. “It would have ended in a hung jury and then gone on to another trial. She would have lost.”

  “Except that you accidentally tripped and fell down a twenty-five step flight of cement stairs.”

  “It was no goddamned accident,” she yelled. “Some–one pushed me.”

  She stopped then and stared at me, her eyes wide. “Please get out. I’ve said too much already.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I stopped at a St-Hubert restaurant for some chicken and fries, then headed back to Martha’s apartment after wrestling with the option of going straight to Rose’s and calling Martha from there. Cluck, cluck, I thought. By the time I got there it was already dark. She opened the door to me all sweaty and dressed in a black leotard.

  Even before I saw it I could hear the TV intoning, “Stretch your arms. Good. Hold them for ten, nine, eight, seven, good, keep it up, four, three.”

  Martha switched off the TV. “Just watch, Cordi. I’ll be as thin as you.” She smiled. We both knew it was an empty threat since she had tried dozens of exercise regi–mens and hadn’t been able to stomach them.

  I plopped down on the sofa and closed my eyes. I was more tired than I knew and one more night in the hammock would have been a death sentence.

  I had to stick to my resolve to tell her I had to leave tonight and tell her why.

  “How did you know?” asked Martha, hands on hips.

  I opened my eyes and found her staring at me.

  “Know what?” I asked “My job offer.”

  “Dean,” I said.

  “He told you?” she asked incredulously.

  I nodded.

  “But why?”

  “He knew how much I valued you and I guess he was being considerate and giving me advance notice.”

  “And what about me? Don’t I have any say in all this?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Your word is the only word that matters here.”

  “Cordi, did you know that I didn’t know he’d told you?”

  “No, I didn’t know. Not until I saw the look on your face when I asked you about the job offer. He shouldn’t have done it without asking you first.”

  The defiance in her eyes died down and she whis–pered, “I thought I’d lost you, Cordi. Friends don’t hide stuff like that from each other.”

  I wondered about that, since she hadn’t bothered to tell me about the job offer either. She read my mind. “I didn’t tell you because I don’t know what I want to do. And if I decide to stay with you I didn’t want you to always worry you were going to lose me.” Martha sat down on a little stool.

  “It’s a good offer, Martha — a promotion and he’s a nice guy. Not to mention he can pay you more because he is a full professor with full tenure. You’d have job security. With my position I could be gone next month.”

  I could not believe that I was practically pushing her toward the job. It sounded a little callous so I softened it with, “On the downside, you’d be irreplaceable both as a lab tech and as a friend.”

  “Lord love you, Cordi. Don’t get so melodramatic.

  Even if I take the job you’ll still be my friend.”

  I smiled and closed my eyes.

  “Hammock’s getting to you isn’t it?”

  I opened my eyes. It was the opening I was looking for. I nodded, “It’s a bitch on the back.”

  She regarded me. “Why don’t you go back and stay with Ryan? I’ve been thinking, no one’s
going to go after you with Ryan and Rose and a bunch of kids.”

  I sat forward on the edge of the sofa and rubbed my eyes.

  “I know you’re afraid someone will try to kill you again, but really Cordi, it’s time you accepted that maybe you’ve been the victim of a series of unfortunate acci–dents. I mean, if someone is trying to murder you they aren’t very good at it.”

  Odd that she’d used the same words as Duncan: “A series of unfortunate accidents.”

  “Unless they’re just trying to scare me.”

  “Cordi, let it go and go home. They’re going to need help with the milking until Ryan’s better, aren’t they?”

  I nodded and began to protest — I didn’t even feel guilty about my charade, I was so tired.

  I stood up and began collecting my things, but Mar–tha wasn’t finished. “I overheard you arranging a meet–ing with LuEllen today. Any gossip?”

  I smiled and told her about the clipping I had found and the fact that LuEllen was juror number nine.

  “She claims she was pushed down a flight of stairs?”

  “Yeah, the newspapers say she was in the stairwell of an office tower when she tripped and fell. LuEllen says someone pushed her and implied that it was because she was going to vote guilty.”

  “But that’s jury tampering, not to mention attempted murder.”

  “Who and why is what comes to my mind.”

  “The why is easy. Terry walks free versus another trial, so she has a lot to gain.”

  “But she couldn’t have orchestrated LuEllen’s fall or somehow listened in or bugged the jurors to see which way they were leaning. She was in custody,” I said.

  “Exactly. So she must have had an accomplice.”

  “Either that or LuEllen is lying.”

  On my way back to Ryan’s I stopped in at the lab and picked up Paulie. She moved around a lot in the cage as I took her to my car, but she didn’t meow. My plan was to leave the cage open on my front porch with enough food for a day and see how she adapted. I couldn’t do it on Ryan’s porch or she’d adapt to the wrong house. I hoped the smell of the fire wouldn’t drive her away. As I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Paulie fast asleep I wondered about Duncan’s comment that she wasn’t good in cars.

  I drove straight to my house and was glad the porch light was on. I wrestled the cage out of the car and took it to the porch. Then I got two bowls, and filled one with food and the other with water from the garden tap. I placed them down carefully next to the cage and then opened the door. Paulie stayed inside. After waiting twenty minutes I left her there, hoping she could find a way to feel she belonged. She’d lived in the wild for more than a year. I figured that giving her her freedom, along with plenty of food, would win her over in time.

  The next day was the day Patrick had his interview, and Rose woke me at 6:00 a.m. Full udders wait for no one! I was glad. It meant something else to think about besides Patrick. Maybe he wouldn’t get the job, maybe he’d blow the interview. I hated wishing for something negative to happen, knowing how much he seemed to want it. As I pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt I had bought the day before I looked longingly at the bed.

  Once I’d splashed half a lake on my face I began to feel better. I poked my nose around Ryan and Rose’s bedroom door to check on Ryan. He was just a lump on the bed, still asleep, so I headed down for some of Rose’s bacon and eggs and then went out to the barn. I looked for Pau–lie and thought I saw her disappear behind the barn, but it could have been one of our other barn cats. I began fitting the teat cups to the first cow. Mac arrived shortly after my third cow and waved. I waved back and we did our work in companionable silence for as long as it took.

  Once I was finished I headed over to my house to reassess the damage. It was pretty intimidating, but when I ran a finger across one of the walls it left a nice slash. Nothing a good scrubbing couldn’t fix, but it was everywhere. Not so bad upstairs as downstairs, but the coat of soot was tenacious. The kitchen, on the other hand, was a disaster. It would need to be gutted and rebuilt, something I fervently hoped the insurance com–pany would pay for. I just didn’t have that kind of cash lying around and the thought of taking out a loan that would take me years to pay down left me cold.

  I collected some of my clothes and went back to find Ryan sitting in the living room, eating a big hunk of bread. I went over and threw my arms around him, whispered thank you in his ear, and gave him a big kiss on the cheek.

  He returned my hug and said, “I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost you, Cordi.”

  I hugged him harder to let him know I felt the same way. He started to cough so I had to let him go, but he flapped his hand to make me stay. When the coughing was over he asked me my side of the fire story.

  I filled him in on everything he’d missed. When I was finished he said, “So you really believe someone is still after you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does anybody else?”

  “No. Although Duncan and Martha are not as ada–mantly opposed as they were.”

  “Watch your back, eh?”

  I would have hugged him again for his implied sup–port of me, but he was coughing again so I merely nodded and went in search of a phone. I hired a cleaning company to come in for two days, or however long it took to clean my house, and then I called a carpenter who said she could come right away and give me an estimate. I jumped at the offer. By the time she was finished it looked as though my bank balance was going to be a whole lot lighter. And that didn’t even start to address what I’d lost in the shed.

  I went back to Ryan’s and faxed the quote to the insurance company, including what I’d lost in the shed, and then put it out of my mind. I hauled out the boxes Derek had given me that I’d brought home for weekend work and dumped them on the front porch, sat down on the floor, and began to go through them amidst several visits from the kids.

  I was going through more of the newspaper clippings when my eye was caught by a photograph of Owen and Terry. They’d been caught unawares, Owen’s face ugly and clean-shaven but recognizably Owen, and Terry unmis–takably beautiful, the contrast between the two painful.

  My eyes drifted to the caption below and screeched to a halt. “Terry Ballantyne Spencer and Owen Ballan–tyne in Happier Days” I sat back in my chair and eyed the photograph more carefully, but there was no resemblance between the two, so how exactly were they related?

  At that moment the phone rang in the hall and Rose answered it. I could hear her voice rise up an octave — it must have been someone she knew — then she called out my name. I frowned, but got up and went inside. Rose mouthed at me “Patrick,” and I felt my heart drop and lift at the same time. Weird sensation.

  I answered the phone with a chirpy hi.

  “How are you doing?”

  I brought him up-to-date on everything right up to the fire, which elicited all sorts of questions, the last of which was why I hadn’t phoned. I told him I’d tried but he interrupted me to ask for the tenth time if I was okay and should he come home? I studiously avoided asking about his interview and waited for him to say something.

  When he didn’t I finally blurted out, “How was the interview?” I was hoping for a pause but instead I got an immediate reaction.

  “Good. They liked me. I just have to wait for them to interview the rest of the candidates.”

  “That’s good Patrick,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it and he knew it.

  “Look, Cordi, we’ve been …”

  I interrupted him. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone okay? It’s so impersonal. When you get home.”

  We talked about a few more things, and some X-rated stuff I was glad Rose wasn’t around to hear, then we rang off.

  I stared at the phone in my hand and then dialed 411 and asked for directory assistance for Owen Ballantyne.

  I drove in to work and spent some time catching up, read–ing research papers that I’d been putting off. Then I called Owen. I wa
s really apprehensive because he was mono–tonally monosyllabic on the phone. I really had no idea what I was up against and I hadn’t actually talked to him much, except on the plane. I wished now that I had so I’d have some idea how he’d react to me and to what I had to say. He had told me to meet him at a motorcycle shop on Bank Street in Ottawa. He gave me the address and nothing else, no cross street, nothing. But in the end it was easy to find.

  I pulled up in front of a small shop with a big BMW in the window and Ballantyne Bikes emblazoned above the door. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I had just assumed that he worked full-time for Terry. But why would Terry’s job require a full-time assistant? I opened the door and was assaulted by the smell of oil and gas. There was a man behind the counter and I told him Owen was expecting me.

  He opened a door behind him and yelled, “Owen. A lady to see you.” He turned back to me and said, “Take a seat. He shouldn’t be too long.”

  I had just sat down when he came out, wiping his hands with a blue rag.

  “Ms O’Callaghan,” he said and offered his hand. He led me back into an office with a tiny window looking out onto a brick house next door. His walls were covered with pictures of bikes of every description and it sud–denly occurred to me that my brother had probably been here, being the bike enthusiast he was. Owen sat down behind an old wooden desk and waved me to a chair on the other side.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I read about you in the paper.”

  “And?” He was giving nothing away.

  “I know you were related to Terry in some way.

  Brother? Cousin? Husband?”

  He touched the fingertips of both hands together.

  “And what does that have to do with your visit?” No sign of sorrow.

  “Sandy doesn’t think that Sally killed Terry.”

  “That would be the natural reaction of a friend,” he said.

  “Aren’t you interested in who killed Terry?”

  “I accept the police’s verdict on that. They are profes–sionals, you know.”