“I’ve got to go. Merry Christmas, Ma.”
“Wait a minute.” She put her drink on the counter and held the receiver in both hands. “What about Justin and Emily? Have you spoken with them?”
“I think you better talk to them.”
“Answer me. Is your brother coming up?” Moira fought to keep her voice steady.
“I don’t think so.” His voice sounded distant, as though he’d already turned away from the phone.
“But why? Emily doesn’t have a ‘condition,’ as you call it.”
“But they are trying to get pregnant, Ma, you know that. And besides, I don’t think she’s ever gotten over losing Sadie.”
“Sadie? Sadie was a dog, for God’s sake. Not a child.”
“She was like a kid for Em.”
“Oh please. I’m sick of hearing about it. You have no idea how dreadful it was for me having that animal around. She went into heat. It was disgusting. The other dog owners complained. She dug holes all over the garden. My beautiful roses. All destroyed. And then she ran a—”
“She was just a dog, Ma,” Colin said, “doing what dogs do. I’ve got to go. You take care, okay?”
Moira slammed the phone onto the counter, drained her glass, and poured herself another. How dare he? How dare he throw Sadie in her face? She’d never asked to look after her. Royce was the one who’d capitulated. Couldn’t see the harm in taking care of the animal for six months so Justin and Emily could have a sabbatical in England. But had Royce looked after it as he’d promised? Of course not. It fell to good old Moira to do that chore as she did everything else. And then they’d all blamed her when the creature disappeared. She carried the phone and her drink into the living room and sank onto the sofa. A beeping sound told her a call had come in while she’d been on the phone with Colin. She keyed in the code to listen to the message.
“Moira?” Royce said. She could hear laughter and loud music and remembered that the firm’s Christmas party was tonight. It sounded warm and comforting and she felt a small stab of regret but quickly shook it off. She’d stopped going to the company party years ago. Why start missing it now? “There’s no way I can make it up there in this weather.” She had to press the receiver to her ear in order to hear his low voice over the din. “The forecast is for more snow and strong winds. They’ve already closed part of the 401.” She heard someone call his name. “Look. I’ve got to go. I’ll try to call again tomorrow.”
Moira rolled the cold glass back and forth against her forehead, trying to quell the angry thoughts, the thousand small resentments of a long and disappointing marriage. She took a long breath and dialed Justin’s number.
Emily answered in her little-girl voice. “Justin’s not here just now.”
“Well, dear, perhaps you could tell me what’s going on. Are you coming to the farm tomorrow or not?”
“Um. Hang on a minute.” The phone went quiet and Moira could hear footsteps on the hardwood floor. She waited and remembered the first time Justin had brought Emily over to meet them. The girl had reminded her of one of the strays he was forever bringing home for approval: starving dogs, feral cats, wild baby rabbits. And finally this pale little creature with a withered arm, some kind of reaction to a childhood vaccination, apparently. “A bird with a broken wing,” she remembered saying to Royce when Colin had left to take Emily home that evening. “He’s found the human stray of his dreams,” she’d said, but Royce had merely looked at her over the top of his glasses and she’d never said another word to him about the girl.
Emily came back on the line. “Um. I’d rather you call back when Justin’s here.”
But Moira had heard her son’s low, urgent voice in the background.
“It’s a simple question. Yes or no?”
“Okay then.” Emily’s voice quavered over the line. “No. No, we’re not coming. I’m supposed to be resting up for my in vitro fertiliza—”
Moira punched the disconnect button. She refused to hear of their unnatural efforts to get pregnant. The thought of it repelled her.
So that was that. No one was coming. She’d driven all this way, risking life and limb, and not one single member of her family could be bothered to come. How could they do this to her? Christmas at the farm was a tradition going back to Moira’s childhood, when she and her parents would spend most of Christmas Eve driving up here from Toronto, long before superhighways had cut the trip to a mere four hours. Moira remembered feeling carsick in the airless backseat of a Buick sedan, her parents chain-smoking and arguing about her father’s driving. She remembered her father’s long silences, her mother’s theatrical sighs.
She’d inherited the farm when her own boys were little. She and Royce had spent a fortune renovating it and making it the perfect weekend getaway. They dug a pond on the back forty and would come up every weekend when the boys were young. But for the last few years she’d driven up on her own, hiring Merv to fix things around the place and to keep the furnace going all winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. All this so the whole family could come up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. How long had it been since they’d all been here together? Was it last Christmas? The year before? She refused to think about it.
It was the damned dog’s fault. All of it. Sadie, an elderly Rhodesian Ridgeback. “Rhodesian swayback, more like,” she’d joked when she first saw the creature—only nobody had laughed. She was a rescue, Emily had said piously, as though she herself had fought her way across the grasslands of Zimbabwe to snatch the animal from the jaws of a lion.
How Moira hated the mangy bitch. Hated her wantonness, the disgusting teats swinging from her slack belly like overripe fruit, the look of disdain she’d given Moira the first time she went into heat and started flagging her tail at male dogs. She’d marched her off to the clinic to have her spayed, but the young veterinarian had refused. Too old, he’d said. It would endanger her health, he’d said. What about my health, Moira had wanted to wail. What about me?
She raised the leg of her trousers to examine her knee. It didn’t look good. A deep purple bruise was spreading over the swollen kneecap and an inch or two up the tightening skin on her thigh. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, fished some ice cubes from her glass, and knotted them into a wet parcel. She yelped as the scotch hit raw skin.
At that moment, the lights went out. She listened as the refrigerator stuttered a couple of times and fell silent, and within a few seconds she heard the furnace click off. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the dark before heaving herself to her feet and, clutching her empty glass, limped slowly into the kitchen and felt through the drawer for a flashlight. When she turned it on, a weak yellow beam was all it could offer. She ran her hand over the counter until she found the scotch bottle, spilling some on her fingers as she poured. There were logs in the fireplace and a jar of matches in the cupboard above the fridge, but her knee felt too wobbly to risk climbing onto the stool to reach it. She wandered back to the living room and when her foot found the sofa again, she sank into it.
She woke to a definite chill in the air and a pounding headache. She should eat something, but the groceries were still in bags on the vestibule floor and she couldn’t muster up enough energy to search through them in the dark. She felt around on the floor for the flashlight, but the batteries were finally dead. There was no dial tone on the portable phone in her lap but she remembered the landline on the bedside table. She felt her way into the bedroom and punched in Merv’s phone number.
“You know what time it is?” Merv’s voice was hoarse with sleep.
“How am I supposed to know what time it is? I can’t see an inch in front of my face.” Moira’s mouth was dry, her throat scratchy.
“Hydro trucks are out, but it’s going to be awhile before they get things going again.” Moira could hear him lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag. “What made you drive up in this storm?”
Moira ignored the question. “You’re going to have to come over and start the
generator. I’m freezing to death.”
“It’s midnight, Mrs. Tappin. I’m not going out in this weather. I’ll try to get over on the snowmobile first thing in the morning.”
“Morning?” Moira cried. “I’ll be dead by morning.”
“I laid a nice fire for you. You won’t freeze.”
“I can’t reach the matches.” She was crying now, tears coursing down her cheeks.
“Bundle up and you’ll be fine until I get there. Just don’t turn on the taps. The pump’s off and—” A dog barked close to the phone.
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted him. “Whose dog is that?”
There was silence on the line.
“Merv? You don’t have a dog.” Her head was pounding.
“Well, sure we do, ma’am. Got ourselves a nice little puppy since you were here.” Merv’s voice had gone very quiet.
“That wasn’t a puppy. That’s Sadie, isn’t it? You didn’t shoot her after all.”
“Sure I did. She’s right where you told me to put her. In that big hole she’d dug by the barn.” Merv was speaking quickly now, anxious to get off the phone.
“I don’t believe you.”
“So long, Mrs. Tappin. See you in the morning.” Moira heard the click as he hung up the phone. She hit redial but the line went straight to voice mail.
“Coward!” she shouted into the darkness. “If I find ...”
She stumbled back to the parlor, shivering in her wool sweater and corduroy pants. She found her coat on the chair where she’d dropped it and limped into the vestibule to feel around for her boots among the fallen groceries.
The wind flattened her coat against her body as she stepped into the storm. Once off the steps she turned and moved slowly along the side of the house, supporting herself with her hands against the cold stone until she made her way to the back deck. She turned away from the house and into the gale. Fifty feet ahead of her the barn loomed black through the blizzard. She squinted and thought she could just make out a dimple in the snow where two months ago Sadie had dug her last enormous hole, throwing up stones and precious rosebushes in her wake, ignoring the screams and frantic pounding of Moira’s fists on the window. She knew she’d never get outside in time and had watched helplessly from behind the glass as the dog finally tired of her mad burrowing and lowered herself into the new lair.
Moira had reached for the phone and the deal was struck. Merv told her to tie the dog to a fence post when she left for the city and leave the check under the mat on the front verandah. Later, he would come over with his rifle. When the deed was done he would bury her in the hole she’d just dug. That was the way Moira wanted it. That way justice would be done.
But Merv had betrayed her, hadn’t he? Kept the dog and kept the money, too. The thought filled her with rage. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets and, leaning into the wind, set out, wincing from the pain in her knee and the sting of icy pellets on her face. Each footstep seemed to sink deeper than the one before. Her right boot stuck and she pulled her foot free and continued on in her sock. She tripped over a snow-covered boulder but kept going, crawling now and flailing snow out of her path with numb, bare hands. Somewhere along the way she lost the other boot and her mitts. No matter. She was nearly there.
She slid into the depression Sadie had made. There was an explosion of pain from her swollen knee as it hit a rock. She cried out and floundered, trying to scramble up the other side, but the pain was excruciating. She turned back and saw that the lamps were back on in the parlor, spreading their warm light across the snow beneath the windows. She smiled and rested her head against the side of the cavity, letting the snow cover her like a huge eiderdown. She wondered if the dog would come.
Copyright © 2010 Sue Pike
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Fiction
SNOWMAN STEW
By James Powell
James Powell’s stories are always full of interesting references. In this one, his allusion to the silent movie version of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables comes from Montgomery’s diaries, which were published a few years ago. “It stayed with me,” he says, “because the Regent, the movie theater where she saw it, was one of my boyhood haunts.” Mr. Powell is the recipient of many honors for his stories, including a nomina-tion for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for his story “Clowntown Pajamas.”
Mattie Claussin arrived at Toronto’s Union Station in late October, 1944, a plump, middle-aged woman in a stout overcoat with a striped fiberboard suitcase in each hand. The four pinch-faced little boys crowded around her wore imitation leather helmets with fur-lined earflaps buckled under their chins. All five looked like they’d come from a colder place.
With much to be done, she quickly found an office on Queen Street East near Sherbourne, a third-floor front over a notions and sundries shop. In this down-at-the-heels part of town many storefronts stood empty. One or two had windows draped in black with gypsy women sitting at the door inviting people in to have their fortunes told. Any color came from the metal streetcars on Queen and the poster-sized photographs of men with upper bodies, arms, and faces ravaged by venereal diseases placed in vacant shop windows by Saint Michael’s Hospital, which had a clinic treating such disorders. Well, the public expected shabby for people in her line of work.
Mattie’s office was up two narrow flights of stairs—“I wish you people lived in pleasanter climes,” the telephone installer had remarked—and down a dusty corridor to a door whose opaque glass would soon read “Claussin Private Investigations.”
As part of Mattie’s divorce settlement the North Pole had given her the annual naughty-or-nice contract, the job of separating the world’s good little boys and girls from the bad. Contrary to popular legend, these naughty-or-nicing elves did not wear uniforms with lug epaulettes so one could stand on the other’s shoulders to peer through keyholes. In fact, they dressed in children’s wear with headgear to hide their pointed ears. Nor were there enough of them to do the whole world. Much of the work was farmed out to private detectives and national police agencies like Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
So Mattie and her loyal elf assistants, Nutkin, Hopkin, Timkin, and Bodkin, who’d followed her into exile, busied themselves arranging the files sent on ahead and working the phones with subcontractors all around the world.
It was seasonal work, of course. Afterwards Mattie’d have to find clients to support the detective agency. But she planned on keeping her elves in children’s clothes. “Stick close behind the guy you’re tailing,” she instructed them. “If he looks back over his shoulder, chances are he won’t look down, and if he does, he’ll see a kid.” For the places where children weren’t allowed she taught the elves the trench-coat-for-two trick. A large one like Timkin, who was nicknamed Tiny because he was big for an elf, would carry a wee one like Bodkin on his shoulders and they’d share a trench coat, Bodkin wearing a fedora ingeniously designed to hide his ear points.
The elves slept in the spare office filing cabinets and used the washroom down the hall. Fortunately, the odor of stale elf which the office quickly developed resembled dried lavender.
Mattie found herself a rooming house around the corner on Moss Park Crescent facing a bleak little park. She shared a gas stove in the second-floor hallway next to a window on which an orange crate had been nailed to serve as a common icebox in winter.
Walking home late that first night, Mattie saw a policeman on horseback beneath a streetlight on Sherbourne just above Queen. He wore a greatcoat against the weather and a tall hat of gray Persian lamb in place of the bobby helmet worn by Toronto’s constables on foot patrol. Sitting at the curb across from him, as if they were his flock and he their shepherd, were a dozen men who’d missed closing time or were too drunk to be admitted to the Salvation Army hostel up the street, the Sally Ann, as it was called. They sat quietly, arms or head or all three between their legs.
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The first heavy snow came in early November, casting a blanket of startling white over the general drabness. Leaving for work that morning, Mattie discovered two freshly made snowmen in the park. These carrot-nosed, many-buttoned personages wore top hats and bright wool scarves and their twiggy arms held old hockey sticks. She knew her elves would want to see them. The North Pole’s songs and stories borrowed heavily from the “Snowmanslandia” saga, which recounted the history and terrible extinction of the original snowmen.
Clever Snowmansland had made its coinage out of ice. So no one hoarded money that would only disappear in the spring thaw. Instead, snowmen bought things or started factories to churn out goods for themselves and for export. As they prospered, they built the sub-tundra railroad to carry their wares down to Fort Churchill (whose name came from the ice cathedral they erected there) and beyond. But then cold Phrygia, Snowmansland’s northern neighbor, invaded, defeating the snowman army and driving the country’s inhabitants southward to below the tree line, never to been seen again.
The elves were very eager to come back with Mattie and took pictures to send home. They enjoyed seeing the snowmen so much she didn’t have the heart to tell them that coming out the next morning she’d found nothing but two naked stumps of snow in the park.
They were very busy at the office now. The naughty-or-nice reports were due in by the first Friday in December, so the North Pole’s packaging and labeling department could do their work. This information was a deeply guarded secret. Children must never know that after that date they could be bad and Santa would be none the wiser.
Busy or not, elves always took Sundays off. But Toronto was a hard place to find things to do on a Sunday. The city’s blue laws closed down all movie houses and beverage rooms, as beer taverns were called. Sometimes Mattie took them to the Royal Ontario Museum, which the law judged more educational than recreational.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 6
