by Howard Engel
“Peggy O’Toole? I’d heard that she was up here somewhere.”
“You’re a fan, then?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
“I’ve seen a few of her pictures. She was terrific in Deadly Intent II. Did you see that?” I told her I agreed, but didn’t add that a few years ago, when she was still a young actress, I’d met her on location in Niagara Falls. She used to call me “Pistachio” for some reason. But that was many summers ago.
“Well, you just missed seeing her in the flesh. They say she loves running about in Wanda.” Norma had the blonde good looks of her kids. When they stood together, which wasn’t often, they looked like a set of pan pipes with a thatch of blond hair on top. Their skins already had the beginnings of a deep summer tan. Their mother quizzed me about my knowledge of Bracebridge. She recognized near complete ignorance when she tripped over it and proceeded to fill me in on where to buy everything from gas to worms. I knew that if the assignment up here threw me a curve, I could depend on Norma to help me out.
The opportunity for this came sooner than she might have guessed. I got her to go over the map with me, to fit Vanessa’s instructions into the real estate and lakes at hand. I watched while she charted my course from the main road that passed by the lodge to Milford Bay. From here, she abandoned my map and found one of her own, which showed the shoreline in greater detail. “The place you’re looking for, Benny, is not really that far away either by water or by car. Are you renting a boat or keeping your feet on terra firma?”
“I’ll take the car this time. How long a drive is it?”
“Not more than half an hour. Forty minutes at the outside. The road is fairly good. It’ll take you to the turnoff to Millionaires’ Row. The road after that isn’t much. I hope you’re carrying a spare tire.”
“Bad as that, is it? I’ll watch myself. What’s Millionaires’ Row?”
“That’s where the first families from the south, both Americans and Canadians, built their rather glorious summer homes. Mowed lawns down to the docks, whitepainted rocks, big verandahs and probably antique tickertapes under bell jars in the studies. Lots of them were top executives of big corporations. They’d come by train to Gravenhurst and be met by their private launches.”
“Like Wanda III?”
“Like Wanda I, II and III.”
“Interesting piece of local history. Thanks. Sorry I interrupted your instructions. After I pass the turnoff to Millionaires’ Row?”
“You’re looking for Evans’s Marina on this bay where the fold crosses. You see the red square? That’s Ifor Evans’s little goldmine. He spells Ivor with an f, for some reason. He services most of the boats on the row and winters the boats that don’t have their own boathouses. The ice up here after Christmas is murder on anything built on the water, Benny. Most of the people on the row lift their boats out of their slips with a vertical hoist, then lower them to rest on beams placed across the slips.”
“Like placing a casket above an open grave, with tapes laid out for the lowering.”
“Huh? Why, yes. Yes. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Have you been up on Lake Muskoka before this, Benny?” She was naturally and warmly curious about people; I didn’t get the impression that Norma had taken a course in public relations, even when she was trying hard not to look directly at my black eye.
Thirty-five minutes after the maps had been re-creased and returned to a plastic waterproof pouch, which she lent me, I was parking my car at the marina in Segwin Bay, looking across at the long promontory known as Moosehead Point. Ifor Evans, if that was he, was sorting out a package of stale worms with a large ruddy-faced man in a red plaid shirt and khaki shorts.
“Well, I’ll talk to them, Mr. Prendergast. I will. They’re sold to me as fresh, and if they ain’t fresh, that’s a fraud plain and simple. Here, let me get you your money back. No sense paying—”
“You hang on to the money, Ifor. You know I’ve got no complaint against you. I’ve known you for over twenty years.”
“That’s right. I remember your father and mother very well, Mr. Prendergast. Often think of ’em, yes, I do.”
“Dad was like a hound in rut every spring, Ifor. Couldn’t talk straight about anything else. ‘Is the ice out of Segwin Bay yet, Ollie?’ ‘Do you think the old roof held up through that bad patch of heavy snow in late February? Maybe I should call Ifor just to be sure.’ Oh, he loved these rocks up here something terrible.” Mr. Evans was eyeing me over the ample scarlet back of Ollie Prendergast. He was a tall, skinny man with wet grey hair plastered over a bare dome and large, almost pointed ears. His narrow chest looked as though it needed a smaller T-shirt. Both the cap on the counter and the shirt broadcast the name of a Texas oil company.
When Prendergast had stepped back into his mahogany open launch and puffed a few billows of yellow smoke towards me, Mr. Evans waved a bony hand, then looked at me. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“You know Vanessa Moss?” I asked. Abruptly, Evans shifted from my side of the counter to the business side.
“Oh, there’s a lot of people come in and out of here, mister.”
“I’ll bet. Norma McArthur says you’ve got a good thing going here.”
“Norma McArthur’s not starving either. You can tell her that from me. She doesn’t have an empty cabin from July to October and that’s a fact.” He hadn’t moved during this sudden, viper-like attack, but continued to study my face like it was a chart of a dangerous passage.
“About Vanessa Moss,” I said, trying to look relaxed. “I work for her, and I’d like to rent a canoe to get over to her place.”
“She give you keys?”
“I know where she keeps ’em.” He was still sizing me up and not worrying much about being subtle. My knowing about the keys was a mark in my favour. He didn’t show that I’d passed a test, but he wasn’t watching me so closely after that. “You have a canoe for rent, Mr. Evans? I won’t need it for more than a couple of hours.”
“You’re not staying the night, then?” Information is power, and information is formed from trifles such as this.
“No, I don’t think I will this time. Maybe later in the summer. How’s the fishing been?” I didn’t know much about fish, but I was able to affect an interest for Mr. Evans. His monosyllabic answers to my questions suggested that he hated the slippery subject. One carton of bad worms could do it to him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to waste his breath on a customer who only wanted to rent a canoe. He slipped his cap over his bald head and headed out the door.
“This way,” he said without turning around. I picked up the pack I’d slipped my maps into and followed him to the side of the marina building, the part that faced away from the dock. “This thing passes for a canoe. She leaves it here. You know how to run ’er?” I could feel that he was going to have fun with me about my naval skills, but he was only going through the motions. There was no audience. As he lifted the green shell with its yellow interior, I could imagine him with an audience of cronies at his back. “You wear shoes like that when you go boating, boy?” The bite was there, but it was only—what’s the word?—perfunctory. Evans didn’t seem to enjoy his work the way Norma McArthur did. What was a strayed puritan doing in vacationland?
While he was feeding the length of the canoe out into the water beside his low dock, I slipped out of my shoes and pulled off my socks. I placed the paddle across the gunwales and placed one foot after the other into the centre of the craft, kneeling with my butt supported by one of the thwarts. I thought that by not sitting in the sternsman’s seat, by playing the rules I remembered from Camp Northern Pine, I might score points even with Ifor Evans. Of course, he’d be the last person in the world to be impressed.
It had been several years since my knees had felt the ribs of a canoe cutting into them. I didn’t try to put a date on it. I still remembered how to twist my paddle stroke at the conclusion of each stroke to keep me going in a straight line. But which straight line? I was headi
ng towards the middle of the headland in front of me, when I heard a shout behind me. Evans was standing on the end of the dock, his cap had been pulled off his head and he was pointing much farther to the right. I waved my thanks and corrected my navigation. I must have got it right, because the next time I looked back at the marina, Evans had vanished.
There wasn’t a lot of water to cut across. I probably could have walked through the woods and got there in about the same time, but this was fun, and there isn’t all that much fun in what I do, so I grab the moments when they appear.
I was on the water for less than twenty minutes. A proper canoeist could have done it in ten, and a powerboat could have sliced half of that time away. I took my heading on a brown inverted V I could see half-buried in greenery. As I got closer, it grew into the sort of cottage I had been expecting. I tried to remember the name she had called it; something with an Indian flavour. A few moments later, I could see a sign: Puckwana. It was painted in fading white on the side of a short cliff on the east end of the property. Between it and a small wooden dock lay a sandy beach. I headed the canoe there and gave a few strong strokes to bring the canoe as far up the beach as possible. I still wet my feet in the chilly sand. I pulled the bow higher out of the water and considered turning the thing over. I didn’t bother: Ifor Evans couldn’t see this far.
The cottage looked about eighty years old, but it was hard to judge such things this far north, where the winters are severe and the maintenance is neglected. It stood about twenty metres back from the shoreline, with bush around all sides, and about the same distance above the lake. I climbed first up that forty-five-degree slant on a path cut into the red soil and marked by whitewashed rocks, and then up rickety steps to the screened-in porch, which wrapped around three sides. I remembered where the keys were hidden and found them without having to send up an S.O.S. flare. Inside the screens, chairs, all high-backed, and some of them rockers, invited the visitor to relax to watch the way the light hits the water from this height.
Inside, I found all of the things that go with a summer cottage in Muskoka. In the large kitchen, there were a leftover icebox and a kerosene refrigerator as well as an electric one. Three stoves told a similar history. The cupboard was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s. The main room, which was bigger than the outside dimensions of the cottage suggested was possible, appeared lined with bookfilled shelves running up well above my head. A fine old library ladder was asking to be rolled effortlessly along the wall. I tried it, and it coasted back to where it had been. I hadn’t noticed the canted pine floor. The books bore the imprints of vanished publishers. A stack of early New Yorkers, pillars of National Geographics, ghosts from another era such as Colliers, Esquire, Vogue, Life and Look. There were three bedrooms. Two were made up, one topped off with a patchwork quilt, the third stripped, with the mattress rolled at the end of the bedstead. In short, as I said to begin with, this was a very cottagey sort of place: comfortable and without pretension. I liked it. If I wasn’t under the pressure of work, I could easily have settled in. Here, at least, I had all of the books I lacked at the hammock back at the lodge.
The kitchen seemed to be the cottage’s centre of gravity. I could imagine people sitting around the wide pine table discussing the ills of the world over mugs of hot chocolate on a chilly morning or settling the NTC fall schedule over a glass of lager on a balmy day in August. The fridge was clean but, except for a bottle of Smithwick’s beer, empty. What I needed was a bag of milk with a date stamped on it. There was nothing to help me confirm Vanessa’s presence here at the time Renata Sartori was being shot. The foot-pedal garbage can was empty, already lined with a new unsoiled bag. A telephone hung from the wall near the door. There was a dial tone when I lifted it. Nearby, a piece of cardboard had been stapled with names and numbers. I made a note of these and pocketed my jottings. Also nearby, hanging from a finishing nail on the edge of a cupboard, dangled several sets of keys, all very helpfully labelled. One set belonged to a cottage marked “Ed,” others indicated “boathouse,” “generator” and “Johnson 55.”
Outside, I found a few paths. One led to a disused outhouse, which had been modernized in every way except in its plumbing: a citified toilet seat, a vase with dried flowers, even a David Hockney reproduction on the back of the door. Another path led to the boathouse mentioned on the ring of keys. It was high and dry, half hidden in the new spring growth, with a spidery window that looked in on a small fibreglass hull and motor. A low grey structure of peeling paint and cobwebs hid a Delco generator under stunted cedar shrubs. All of the keys but the bunch marked “Ed” were accounted for. On a hunch, I pocketed them. After a last longing look at a couch inside the screened-in porch facing the lake, I walked down the hill to my canoe.
Back at the marina, Ifor Evans was peering into the dark, oily secrets of an outboard motor. I know he heard me coming, but he didn’t turn around. I leaned my back against a warm wall and waited. When he finally looked up, he said, “I thought it would be you.”
He went back into the motor with renewed interest. I picked up a rag and handed it to him the next time he tried to reach for it. I don’t know why I try to be ingratiating, but I’m aware of doing it. It knocks off the rough corners of relationships. Sometimes, it puts me in the way of attracting more business. He took the rag from me and handed it back when he was through with it. I felt a little like an operating-room nurse, trying to outguess the surgeon on what he’d be needing next. I saw the hand reach out again and put the rag back in it.
“Wrench!” he said, in a tone that declared me a fool or an idiot. I obliged from the tools laid out on a board running between us. He took it from me, used it, and slapped it back into my hand again, like he was thinking of the operating room too. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, he looked up and out at me. He didn’t say “Thanks,” or anything as gauche as that. For a moment, he didn’t say a thing, then: “That Faulkner kid just about ruined this new motor. Took him only an hour and a half doing doughnuts in the lake. His father should talk sense to him. Kid doesn’t respect anything, least of all a good motor. Comes from a good family too. His people’ve been coming to the lake since my uncle Russell ran this place. We’ve been up here since the fall the S.S. Waome went down up by Beaumaris, coming out of Port Carling. I was a youngster. Nineteen and thirty-four.” I wasn’t surprised to discover that Evans was a bit of a moralist. The lake had its rules, and you disobeyed them at your own risk. Evans was a watcher and a judge. I could imagine him, when sufficiently moved, doling out summary justice to repeat offenders. But, I could be wrong. Maybe I was just tired of waiting for the moment to ask my questions. Before I could, he ploughed into me with one of his own.
“Why are you sticking your nose into this?” I caught my breath.
“Vanessa says she was up here when Renata Sartori was killed. I just had to see that what she said was true. Frankly, I haven’t found her all that truthful in other things.”
“Takes after her father. Always tellin’ fish stories.”
“Was it a fish story when she said she was at her place on Monday the fifteenth of May?”
“Oh, she was here all right. Took a briefcase in with her and some bread and cheese. Frozen dinners. She never could look out for herself proper like.”
A second chance for a question of my own finally came when we were both holding Cokes from the big cooler on his dock.
“Who’s Ed?” I asked.
“Ed? Which Ed do you mean?”
“I mean the one you thought of first. The Ed that gave his keys to Vanessa for safekeeping.”
“Oh, that’d be old Ed Patel. Lawyer from town. His place is at the end of the path that the road peters out into.” Here he indicated a direction with his right hand, vaguely in the direction of the parking lot, which was the official end to this spur of the highway.
“Why would Ed Patel give his keys to her?”
“What are friends for? Ed was like an uncle to Stella while she was growing up
.” He smiled to himself at the picture in his mind. Then his face darkened. “Ed’s been in and out of hospital for the last year. He’s in a bad way. Vanessa told him she’d see to his place.”
“She doesn’t take the time to see to her own place. How is she going to look after his?”
“You don’t miss much, for a …”
“She hasn’t had her boat out this year yet. There’s not much in the cupboards.”
“Don’t I know it. Oh, she came with a few groceries when she was up a few weeks ago, even bought bread, cheese and juice from the marina like I told you, but she didn’t bring any of the basics, you know, flour, soda, sugar, onions, potatoes. Just frozen stuff and a few boxes of Kraft Dinner was all she carried with her. She usually treats herself better than that.”
“So, you’ve been looking after Ed Patel’s place as well as hers?”
“Had to be done. A place can go to wrack and ruin in short order here at the lake. If I hadn’t kept the roofs of both places cleared of snow last winter, by now there’d be nothing you could salvage from either place. Ed found this place for Mrs. Moss and acted as her lawyer for the conveyancing. He’s got an office in town.”
“Which town would that be? Port Carling? Bracebridge? Gravenhurst?”
“Ha! Funny you said that. Ed used to keep offices in all three, but he’s closed the ones in Port Carling and Gravenhurst. Even the one in Bracebridge’s closed most times I go by. Now that Alma’s gone.”
“Who?”
“Secretary.”
“Oh. He’s that sick, is he?”
“You don’t go home again when you’re as sick as Ed is. I go see him once a week. We play cribbage. You know.”
“Hard?”
“Oh, he’s game. Yes, he’s game, but failing. Nothing left but the spirit holding him together.”
“Bracebridge hospital?”
“N’yup. Good little hospital. Had my gallstones out there. Dr. MacGruder.”
