by Eric Wright
They were sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee. Sergeant Wilkie had appeared just as they were leaving, and Pickett had stayed to talk with him. Charlotte had gone back to her house. It was late on Saturday afternoon. The police had finished scouring and recording the scene of the crime, the body had been removed, and the stove lit.
“Did you meet him very often?” Wilkie asked.
“Just once. When I agreed he could come, Charlotte took over and moved the guy in. He didn’t have a car or anything. He had to walk back and forth to town, to work.”
“Was he still working for Harlan?”
“No. He got everything of Harlan’s painted and fixed up. Then he started to do little jobs around the town, mainly ones he got through the hardware store—you know, repairing windows for widows, stuff like that. There’s not as much call for handymen here as in Toronto, but I guess just enough to keep Thompson eating.”
“Did your friend in the trailer report having many visitors?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“No carloads of kids? No punks?”
“No, she’s only come up two or three times in the winter. Once she couldn’t turn in at the lane because of the snow. Thompson had dug a footpath, but it hadn’t been plowed yet. Eliza started coming regularly the last two or three weekends.”
“I’ll talk to her again. Come on. I’ll take you home. I’ll get you to come back later.”
At Charlotte’s house, where they lived now when they were in Larch River, she tried to persuade Wilkie to stay for supper, but he declined, giving the impression that his wife was making an elaborate dinner that she wanted him to be on time for. In fact, on this night he would have a choice between frozen lasagna or chili, also frozen, because he did not want to be seen too often in one of the town’s restaurants. He felt sorry for himself and didn’t want anyone else to feel sorry for him, too.
Wilkie’s wife Helen was an academic administrator. When they married, she had been a clerk in a dean’s office at York University in Toronto, and he had been a constable with the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force. She liked her work; she liked the university; she liked Toronto, even the badlands where the university was located. She claimed still to love Wilkie, but he was beginning not to believe her. They might have fared better if he had stayed with the Metro police, but he had grown to dislike patrolling downtown Toronto—he had joined the force only because his father had been a policeman, and lately jobs had become hard to find—and believing his glumness was caused by the city, he had resigned and joined the provincial force, to work in the country.
“What about me?” Helen had asked. “Do I get consulted? Am I supposed to load up the wagon and follow you?”
“What else?”
“I’ve got a job of my own. And I like it.”
That was the point when Wilkie realized that Helen’s job meant more to her than a way of helping out with the groceries; she had created her own world. As his wife, she would have followed him to wherever he was posted. As herself, she would not. At first he had been posted to units in southern Ontario, close enough to enable her to commute to Toronto, but Sweetwater was two hours away, and four hours of driving on top of a day’s work was too much, she found. So she had taken a room with her sister, who lived in midtown Toronto, where she stayed four nights a week, coming home on weekends, and at first, one night a week. Now she came home on Friday night and left at noon on Sunday to avoid the weekend traffic.
It was an arrangement that could only last until he was posted even farther away, but while it lasted, she did her best to make up for her absences. She cooked hard, leaving him with enough frozen meals to last the week, and they stayed in bed a lot during the two days she was there. But one day he would be posted to somewhere like Sioux Narrows, a thousand miles away in Northwest Ontario, and that would be that. Even Timmins, four hundred miles north, would be unmanageable. When that day came, they would have some hard decisions to make.
He was sure that in other circumstances, their marriage would have been as durable as most; but it was just a marriage, and so far, childless. In the end, her work would come first. Wilkie had wondered occasionally when she started to stay in the city if she had a boyfriend there, and he had tried the usual tricks—driving in unexpectedly, finding excuses to visit her at her sister’s at odd hours, only to learn that she was entirely faithful.
His father had suggested that maybe she felt she was too good for him now that she had been promoted, but Helen was no snob, and she had no difficulty in being pleased with him at the occasional university function that would let her take him along. It was just, as she pointed out, that they had never discussed what being the wife of a provincial policeman was all about.
In answer to Wilkie’s next question, Charlotte described what little she knew about Thompson’s life in New Brunswick. “He used to come in the restaurant sometimes for a cup of coffee. He told me it was a real treat, because the Maguires did not drink coffee, only herb tea.”
“Was this part of their religion?”
“Probably. I heard there wasn’t any church around here strict enough for them. Norbert never went with them to church, but he had to toe the line in the house, so he never got any coffee at home.”
“Why did he stay?”
Charlotte tried for an answer. “Maybe he felt needed. Wanted, too. Maybe it was a home. He used to sort of brag about his brother like a kid, as if he was proud just of having a brother. You’d have to look at how he was raised after his mother died.”
“And yet they pretty well kicked him out, right?”
“His sister-in-law and her new husband did, yes. After his brother died. At least, that’s how it looked. Norbert never said anything about it while I was listening.”
Wilkie said, “In a way, it would have made more sense if Thompson had killed Sproat, not got killed himself, wouldn’t it?”
“In a way.”
“Can you come back up to the cabin tomorrow, Mel? I’d like you to take a good look around. See if anything catches your eye.”
“Nothing caught my eye so far, but okay.”
“Pick you up here about ten.”
Pickett had erected his cabin on a rise of land in the middle of five acres of otherwise undeveloped bush. On the edge of the lot, separated from the cabin by a patch of dense scrub, a small pond, fed by an underground stream, supported a pair of otters. The pond should have been the redeeming feature of the site, but Pickett had not yet cut a proper trail to it from the clearing. The cabin sat on a naturally bare patch of land where an ancient glacier had thrust up a mound of rock so smooth it had never acquired topsoil. Outside this area, Pickett had cut back the bush to make sufficient grounds for the trailer and two storage sheds he had built.
A trail wide enough for a one-ton truck led from the road up to the clearing. Beyond the fence, the trail met Duck Lake Road, the graveled county road that ran from Larch River, a mile away, to the bridge over the river, where it split east and west to serve the summer community along the riverbank.
When Pickett bought the lot, it was untouched; the timber was too scrubby to be worth harvesting, even for pulpwood, and there was nothing obviously pretty about the site to attract anyone wanting to build a summer cottage. Most of all, the rock, swamp, and pond created too many obstacles to any conventional development, and there was no access to water suitable for swimming or fishing. But Pickett had only been looking for an outdoor workshop, a piece of land on which he could try building a log cabin just for the experience, and the place suited him perfectly.
Although some of the locals had let him know afterward that he had been grossly overcharged, he didn’t mind because it was still a cheap piece of land by city or lakefront standards, and he had built his cabin on the rock, liked what he had done, and decided to live there when the weather permitted, tinkering with such landscaping as the site allowed. Then he had met Charlotte and they had begun the pleasant process of deciding how best to enjoy all thei
r properties.
Wilkie parked in the road and they ducked under the tape that was keeping sightseers away, for the townspeople were still driving by to look at the scene of the crime, stopping for the ritual five minutes in case there was anything of interest to see. The two men walked to the trailer, where Pickett called Eliza, hoping to get a look at her mysterious boyfriend, but whoever he was, he stayed out of sight. They came back along the path and followed the yellow tape to the cabin.
“We’ve done the house and these paths,” Wilkie said. “I’m hoping we don’t have to do the rest.” He waved a hand at the thick tangle of brush around the cabin.
“There’s just one path I cut through, to see where the property line runs. It starts behind the cabin and goes to the line—nowhere, really, but it might seem promising to someone trying to find another way out, so I’d take a look along that.”
Wilkie nodded. “We’ve already done it. My boys couldn’t figure out why it stopped. So we’ll go over the clearing and the paths again and take a look along the edges. If we have to go into the brush, I’ll get more men.”
Pickett asked, “You looking for anything special?”
“The usual. A baseball bat with blood on it. The killer’s wallet with his picture in it. You know.”
They entered the cabin and Wilkie moved to the telephone to organize his team. Before he spoke, he fumbled an envelope from his jacket pocket and gave it to Pickett, who was standing in the doorway surveying the cabin.
Pickett took out the picture of the dead man lying as Eliza had found him, facedown on the floor. He studied the photograph for a long time, then put it on the seat of a chair and began to look around. His job was to find something missing or out of place. It was a small chance, because any discrepancy between his memory and what he saw could probably be accounted for by the fact that Thompson had been living there for three months. The man was entitled to rearrange the furniture and ornaments to suit himself, and also to break or lose something without scrupulously reporting it to Pickett. But Pickett was a policeman, and Wilkie thought it was worth a try.
He began in the bedroom. A few work clothes, a laundry bag, an extra belt, and a red-flannel nightcap with a tassel—unused, and almost certainly some kind of joke gift or prize—hung from the row of hooks Pickett had put up to serve as a closet. On a single peg on the opposite wall, an old black suit and a tie were draped on a wire hanger, and a pair of polished black shoes was lined up on the floor, the whole ensemble reminiscent of whatever formal occasions Thompson had been called upon to attend in the last thirty years. A small pine bureau, which Pickett had bought from an antiques store because it seemed to be the kind of thing a pioneer might have made, contained a few pairs of socks, some underwear, and three shirts neatly ironed and folded, but without the starch of a laundry finish.
Pickett came out of the bedroom, looked around the kitchen—none of the implements was missing—the little bathroom, and then less attentively around the main room; which had been thoroughly scoured by Wilkie’s men.
“I can’t see anything unusual,” he said to Wilkie.
“Outside?”
Outside, stove wood was stacked on the deck of the porch, as always. The main woodpile had collapsed slightly, but no more than it would have from natural depletion. There was nothing else.
“So he opened the door to a caller, turned around, and got clobbered.”
“What with?” Pickett asked.
“Something heavy, round, and smooth.”
Pickett said, “He was hit with a piece of two-inch oak dowelling, about two feet long.”
Wilkie grinned. “Now just tell me the color of the villain’s eyes, his height, which leg he limped on, and I’ll have him picked up this afternoon.”
But Pickett was looking at the photograph again. “He could’ve been waiting. Inside.”
“Who, for Chrissake? What are you talking about?”
Pickett stared at him for a while, then broke out of his thoughts. “Sorry. Sorry. Look, I’ll show you. Gimme a hand.” He moved to the end of the couch and signaled for Wilkie to go to the other end. The couch was made of pine, the back and seat identical so that it could be converted into a double bed by lowering the back.
“Lift it up,” Pickett said. Wilkie raised his end off the floor. “No,” Pickett said. “Like this.” He pressed the back of the couch down toward the seat and took out the peg that held the back in place. Wilkie, watching, did the same at his end, and they lowered the couch flat onto the floor: a bed.
Pickett held up his peg, a piece of dowelling about three inches long. “This couch was the first thing I bought to sleep on. Then I moved it in here when I got the bed. It was missing one of these pegs at first, so I got a piece of two-inch dowelling and made a new one. Now I had two feet of two-inch, finished-oak dowelling I didn’t need. I chucked it in the wood box, but I could never bring myself to burn it—it costs about a dollar an inch, and besides, it was a nice piece of oak. So I left it there in case I ever had a need for it. It’s not there now.”
“So Thompson burned it.”
Pickett shook his head. “Maybe. I doubt it, though. He noticed it when I was showing him around, admired it, because he was a bit of a carpenter himself. I told him how I had come by it, and he agreed it was too good to burn. In fact, he got it out of the box and stood it against the wall so it wouldn’t get burned by mistake.”
“It was always simple when Sherlock explained it, too.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. So he let the guy in, then got clobbered?”
“Could be.”
“Or he opened the door, warylike, with the wood in his hand, and the guy took it off him and clobbered him? No. Thompson was hit from behind.”
“So?”
“So nothing. You could make up ten stories to fit. There was no sign of a fight, or even of a scuffle.”
“Then either he knew the caller or someone was waiting for him in the cabin.”
“Either way, we’re looking for a piece of oak dowelling. Right? You watch a lot of TV?” Wilkie pointed at the set on the table.
“That’s Thompson’s. I did without.”
“Really? I’d’ve taken you for an addict of those Sunday-night shows.”
There was a knock on the door. Eliza stood on the porch with a tray. “I figured you guys might like a cup of coffee, so I made enough for everybody. Do I still have to walk down to the road and come back up the path to get over here?” She pointed behind her to the yellow tape that marked out the permitted walkways.
“Just for another hour or so,” Wilkie said. “We’ll sweep the yard now. The team is on its way back.”
She watched him pour out two cups of coffee and then look inquiringly at her. She shook her head. “I’ll have mine in the trailer.”
An hour later, Pickett said to Charlotte, “The only thing I could tell you about the guy is that he was clean.”
“Clean?”
“Yeah. I guess I was kind of braced for a bunkhouse scene—you know, a fifty-year-old bachelor living alone, maybe a one-man mining camp. I just assumed he would have lived a little rough, but all the stuff in the drawers was clean, and he had this bag hanging on the wall with the week’s—I guess it was a week’s—dirty stuff. Nothing smelled at all. Even the bed looked as if he changed the sheets every week. But I didn’t see anything else that showed what kind of person he was. None of his own reading matter—magazines, books, not even a newspaper. Just this television set that he’d put on the table in the middle of the room.”
“What did he cook for himself?”
“There wasn’t much there—bacon and eggs, couple of tins of stew, cold cuts, bread and jam. Didn’t look as if he’d ever learned.”
7
The next afternoon, Wilkie gave Pickett back his cabin. Everything had been measured, photographed, and dusted, and the yard and the first few feet of brush around the cabin had been scoured in the search for a two-foot piece of dowelling. Whil
e Pickett tidied up the remaining few traces of Thompson’s tenure, Charlotte scrubbed off the black, greasy photographic powder that seemed to be everywhere.
When Pickett could find nothing else to do, he said, “Let’s invite Eliza and her boyfriend to supper.”
“Tonight? Here? For canned stew? There aren’t even any crackers.”
“No. Up to the house. Pizza. That’s what they were probably planning to have anyway. The Pizza Palace next to the gas station just opened for the summer. We’ll pick some up on the way home.”
“Do we have any wine? Did he look more of a wine or a beer person?”
“I’d say beer. He was drooling a bit and scratching his balls. Actually, I haven’t seen him yet. Hang on.” He disappeared and came back ten minutes later. “Still didn’t see him, but Eliza said she’d bring some wine.”
“What time?”
“Five.” Pickett looked at his watch. “They’re driving back to Toronto tonight.”
Charlotte untied her apron. “We’d better scram. Get some ice cream at the IGA.”
Eliza’s boyfriend was a surprise. Pickett had first met Eliza two years before when they had both been involved in the production of a Canadian version of She Stoops to Conquer. And then, on a golden day in the fall, Eliza and her then boyfriend went for a hike in the bush, paused in a litle grove blanketed and cushioned with pine needles, to discover when they returned to the trail that they had been making love twenty feet from a body lodged in a crevice in the rock. They had come for help to Pickett’s cabin, the nearest house.
The discovery had revealed a deficiency in the boyfriend, a lack of the instincts the circumstances called for. The lovers had become estranged as a result and she left him, but by then, Eliza was vital to the theater group and she now needed somewhere to stay until the play was ready, so Pickett had offered her the little house trailer he had used while building the cabin. Since then, she had used it as a kind of weekend cottage on the understanding that her job was to keep the trailer, and the cabin when it wasn’t occupied, from looking derelict simply by keeping the weeds—young spruce trees, most of them—out of the path. It was also understood that Pickett might sell the trailer at any time, since of all his dwellings, it was certainly the one most obviously surplus to his requirements, but once Eliza was installed, he made no effort to do so.
