The Recipe Cops

by Keith Weaver

  “Nonsense! I won’t hear of it. Drop by my office when you arrive, which will be, I suppose, about noon?”

  “Yes. About noon.”

  “Good! See you then Jim.”

  “Thanks Stephen.”

  Sanford’s mind was oddly blank during the two-hour run into Toronto. Once he had arrived in the office, he reviewed his projects with the people who were subbing for him, went over contingencies, made sure that they would call him if any of the projects suddenly lurched sideways, found not even a hint of a problem in any of his projects, and was back on the road to Stanley Falls by three o’clock, just barely missing the rising peak of the evening rush hour. He spent that two-hour return trip thinking about his mother.

  But not just his mother.

  It was clear to him by the time he left the office for his homeward trek, that the trip had been completely unnecessary. His time in the office had added nothing. In fact, it had served just to puzzle and confuse the people who had taken over his projects. This was so evident after the fact that he was amazed he hadn’t seen it immediately that morning and not made the trip at all.

  He had made the trip to Toronto to avoid something. Another day reading Joe’s files? Another day coming to terms with what had been lost? Another day of trying to make sense of, or perhaps just to ignore, what it was he had found? Another day approaching the tough decisions about Joe’s property and belongings? It was really none of these reasons on their own; it was all of them put together.

  Sanford drove mechanically, living within the internal silence and the unwelcome images that lurked in his mind. The lovely countryside, drenched generously in sunlight, drifted past almost unnoticed.

  Stanley Falls was just beyond the next hill, which, when crested, brought the town gradually into view, and this was the origin of the stale local joke “Stanley Rises”. As Stanley rose just now, Sanford decided that he wouldn’t be stampeded by some upstart inner voice into dropping everything and going in search of – what?

  Sanford pulled into Joe’s drive at just after five that afternoon. The day had gone from bright, clear, and hot, to hazy, muggy, and even hotter, and it looked like a thunderstorm was on the way. There was, first of all, the enjoyably energetic romp with Reggie before Sanford fed him, then the preparation of a quick and dirty Caesar salad with herby grilled chicken slices, which Sanford decided he would eat on the screened-in porch. Going out to the back of the house first, he looked at Reggie, who looked back expectantly. “Come on, then!” Sanford said to Reggie, who bounded alongside without hesitation, and the two of them settled on the porch just as the first lightning began splitting the dark clouds to the south. Within minutes, thunder was booming around the sky, as though hordes of giant lumberjacks were felling monster trees. Reggie edged closer to Sanford’s chair, and shivered a little less violently when Sanford reached down to scratch his ears.

  “What do you think Reggie, hmmm? Did Joe kill Jeffers? Did he bury his body under the manure pile?”

  Reggie looked up at him, wagged his tail uncertainly, and cocked his head the way dogs do when it seems that they’re trying to work out something.

  “I guess you wouldn’t know, would you? You probably weren’t there. But Joe might have said something to you. You look like the kind of guy who invites confidences.”

  Reggie groaned, licked his chops, and blinked.

  “But it’s a pretty drastic thing to do, isn’t it? Especially if it was premeditated, and what else would it be? Surely Joe didn’t have a plan in his head, ready to commit the perfect crime. Or did he?”

  They both looked into the night, listened to the thunder, and pondered that one.

  “And where did he do it, if he did it? It could hardly have been in my mother’s house. She wasn’t strong enough to be able to be complicit in something like that and then live with it, hide it successfully. What do you think?”

  Reggie uttered a low “woof”, and licked Sanford’s hand.

  “Well, I’m glad we agree on that.”

  There was another pause while they watched the sound and light show above. Reggie edged a little closer.

  “And Jeffers would have been no pushover. If he had the street fighter moves that his phantom record might imply, then he would have been more than a match for Joe. But even if that supposition is wrong, even if Jeffers had no special training, to live the kind of life he seems to have lived, among the kind of people he dealt with … well, he most likely wouldn’t have been a pushover.”

  “I hope that Joe didn’t kill him, Reggie. But whether he did or not, the fact that it’s almost certainly Jeffers’ body under Joe’s manure pile still leaves a lot of explaining.”

  This was a long bit of logic for a dog to navigate, even one as gifted as Reggie, and Sanford sat quietly for a minute.

  “But, supposing that Joe did do it. It couldn’t have been a crime committed on impulse. It must have involved just the right opportunity.”

  Reggie raised no objection to that.

  Even for a situation like that, and Sanford had to admit he had no real idea what that “situation” might have been, murder is a drastic measure to take. Surely there would have been other ways to get around or dodge whatever the problem was.

  “So, why –”, Sanford’s thought began, but then was interrupted by another.

  “Joe must have been worried about something. Very worried.”

  A brilliant flash seared the evening, and the violent crack of thunder that followed almost immediately felt like confirmation by a higher authority that Sanford was onto something. Joe’s primary worry would have been for Aileen. It was doubtful that Jeffers would have had any interest in Sanford, otherwise Sanford would have been the target right from the beginning.

  Reggie huddled against Sanford’s leg, shivering violently, evidently concerned that whatever caused all the flash and racket had a bite even worse than its bark.

  Sanford patted the side of Reggie’s head in reassurance, shunting aside another reflex attempt by the manure pile horror to force itself into his consciousness. “There’s something not right here, Reggie, something very much not right.”

  Eleven

  Once the peak of the storm had passed, the thunder had wandered off in search of some other innocent dog to frighten witless, and the rain had ceased, leaving only the comforting dripping sounds of wet trees, Sanford gave Reggie a handful of his favourite kibble in reward for keeping him company and being such a good listener, and led Reggie back to his luxurious, dry kennel.

  The night was not a restful one for Sanford. Fragments of thoughts crept in and out of his mind under cover of a fitful sleep. Images flickered behind his closed eyelids, too fleeting and too out of focus to capture. There seemed to be recurring and surreal unsettling strobe flashes of a man falling into a hole, of a car falling through space, of a woman crying.

  As happens in dreams, time often seems not to matter or not to play any sort of recognizable role, and in this dream the scene and the action changed abruptly but in a way that the dreamer found entirely acceptable. New images appeared. They were images from Sanford’s recent past, and he knew this in the dreamlike way best described as “just somehow”. The images shifted and tumbled, and although they were not unpleasant, they made him feel increasingly uneasy. One image began to stand out.

  The image became clearer, more appealing, more evocative. A young face hovered above his. Curly blond hair hung down. She smiled, then giggled.

  “Hi Daddy!” More giggling.

  “I sent you something.” And then joyous laughter.

  “I hope you come home soon”, but then an impatient voice sounded from an indeterminate direction in the middle distance.

  “Julia!”

  The child’s smile collapsed, then slowly began to form again. “I have to go now. Mommy’s not well again.”

  “Julia!”

  The image shimmered, began to dissolve. Sanford reached out in panic, trying to touch the face, the hair, the bea
utiful blue eyes, but he grasped only at air, darkness began to fall, and then Sanford realized that he was reaching up into the night, sheet and blanket thrust off his chest which was now covered in sweat.

  He recognized the features of Joe’s bedroom, having their cloak of invisibility lifted by the first grey fingers of dawn.

  Sanford uttered a single rough expletive, climbed out of bed, got himself a glass of water, then returned to bed hoping to sleep for another hour or two.

  Twenty minutes later, it was clear that all possibility of sleep was gone, and Sanford climbed again out of bed into the thin light. While washing, shaving, and dressing, he tried to put in place a plan for the day. There was still material in Joe’s office to go through, but there was also some thinking, pondering, to be done. He decided to spend an hour or so weeding Joe’s vegetable garden and having a morning romp with Reggie.

  Reggie was lying casually in the doorway of his largish kennel, one paw crossed over the other, one half-opened eye scanning the world in front of him, but his head rose in greeting as Sanford approached, and his tail thumped one wall of his kennel. Sanford had only to feign an energetic jump to one side, and Reggie was out and running, ready for his preprandial exercise. They both galloped around like puppies, Reggie’s sudden energy and his delighted barking being enough to dispel any grey mood. After fifteen minutes of that, Sanford put down a generous breakfast for Reggie, and then spent an hour and a half weeding. Not having looked closely at the garden in a couple of days, he realized that some harvesting would soon be in order, and began planning how to use the fresh vegetables that he was already listing in his head.

  While weeding, he was able to approach the topic that seemed to be behind his dream just before awakening. The child was his daughter, his beautiful Julia. The voice was that of his ex-wife, Helen. She had been “ex” now for almost six months. Two months ago, one of Helen’s friends, someone who was also sympathetic to Sanford, had approached him and made an impassioned plea for him to try to get together again with Helen. Sanford heard her out, but then walked calmly through all the reasons why it would not work, and concluded by saying, “Believe me, I have looked at this six ways to Sunday, and if there was even a glimmer of hope I would leap at it. But it simply will not work.”

  That much had become obvious to Sanford during the approach to divorce court, and the divorce arrangement itself. The evidence of Helen’s multiple adulterous affairs was so clear and so unambiguous that no judge could ignore it. Nevertheless, the two of them, Helen and Sanford, were encouraged to go through counselling and mediation. The only thing that accomplished, from Sanford’s point of view, was to show that Helen was deeply in denial about something. The counsellor took him aside near the end of their counselling sessions and said that she thought Helen ought to see a therapist.

  “A therapist? That will be a faint hope, I’m afraid. Why do you think she would benefit from a therapist?”

  “There seems to be something that is well beyond what we might accomplish through counselling.”

  “What is it?” Sanford asked.

  The counsellor was reluctant to go further.

  Sanford gave her a direct, focused look. “Tell me what you think. You can’t just raise something like this, then refuse to give your reasons.”

  “Please be clear that I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist. But I have seen a lot of couples. I’m afraid that your wife might be suffering from a borderline personality disorder, and I really think that she should see a therapist. Therapy might be able to help her.”

  “Is that what might be driving her self-destructive interest in sex?”

  “It could be part of the reason. Or not. I’m not a therapist, but if you can influence her at all to see one, I strongly recommend that you do that.”

  Sanford looked at her for a moment. “You’ve seen her and heard what she’s been saying, and probably you can get just as good an idea as me on what she’s thinking, perhaps even a better idea. I’ll try, but I think things have gone too far for her to take any notice of my suggestions, especially something that might be as incendiary as recommending therapy.”

  Sanford made the effort, and opened a discussion with Helen. It went nowhere, ending volcanically in less than half an hour.

  “Therapy!” she had shrieked in the end. “Whose fucking idea was that? Yours? I’m not crazy, I just made some mistakes, the kind of mistakes that people make all the time. It’s me who’s paying for that in blood, not you! And now you suggest therapy on top of everything else? You can just fuck off! You hear me? Fuck off!”

  Despite the emotional wounds that Helen’s actions caused, deep and painful wounds, she was still exquisitely attractive to Sanford. The sandy hair falling over her shoulders in long graceful waves, the arresting pale grey eyes, the perfect nose, the mouth that curled up slightly more on the left side than on the right when she smiled, and the smooth unblemished skin, these were the things that had smitten him in biblical might the first time he saw her, and he was attracted by them still, in all their visceral power. He recognized that this was partly just pure physical allure, but also partly the residue of the deep love he had once had for Helen. However, love for an image, a phantom, a memory, is a dead end, a road terminating in a brick wall. It took him weeks to admit finally that there was neither a way back nor a way forward with Helen. It was the end. The long, drawn-out, wrenching discussions he had had with Helen, now tearful, now screaming, now wanting to start over, now defiant, these were signs of an insuperable barrier. When he finally admitted to himself that it was over, that he really would have to let her go for good, he was overwhelmed by an unspeakable feeling of bleakness. The finality of it all, the bitterness of this personal defeat, at having to walk away from the person he had felt was his life partner, turned him into a psychological wreck. He came out of that situation slowly, through the help of a few solid friends, and by burying himself in his job, both of which allowed time, the great healer, to do its work.

  The court case had been brief, as these things go, and turned out just about the way his lawyer had predicted. Divorce granted on grounds of adultery. Custody of the daughter given to the mother. Father granted visiting rights one week out of two. His lawyer, a sympathetic-looking woman in her mid-thirties, had forewarned him not to expect custody, but had also said that the settlement would be far less onerous than most, in the financial sense, and that his primary ongoing responsibility would be to provide support for his daughter, Julia.

  A deep voice interrupted his flashback. After a few seconds, feeling that he was still being ignored, Reggie gave another low “woof”.

  Sanford realized, in some puzzlement, that he was standing in front of the compost pile, soil and bits of weed still clinging to his hands. Brushing his hands together over the compost heap, he turned to Reggie, who was sitting in front of his kennel, as though reminding Sanford that there was unfinished business still to transact.

  “What would I do without you Reggie?”

  Walking toward the kennel, he stopped so that dog and man were facing each other, as though each was looking for answers to unasked questions.

  “Two years ago, things could hardly have been better. I had a perfect soulmate who shared everything with me, a beautiful daughter who was the centre of our lives, a loving mother who had become a close friend, and a one-in-a-million mentor and friend I had known since before I could walk. Now, my wife is an ex, and a screaming virago beyond any hope of reaching, my daughter shuttles back and forth and I know that she doesn’t understand and isn’t happy, and both my mother and my lifelong mentor have died. What I have left is you, Reggie. Tell me what I should do.”

  Reggie gave another low “woof”.

  “Get back to Joe’s office and get to work, is that it?”

  The tail wagged hesitantly.

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. But I know you’re right, so thanks.”

  The tail wagged more decisively.

  �
��Tell you what, Reggie. It’s a little early to be thinking about this, but I’ve just decided I’ll make myself a mushroom risotto tonight. How would you like to join me again on the porch?”

  Sanford reached down to ruffle the fur on Reggie’s head, and the dog gave his hand a couple of gentle licks.

  Because of Sanford’s time spent with the vegetable garden and Reggie, the world now looked a somewhat better place than it did an hour earlier.

  Back in Joe’s office, Sanford was able to immerse himself in the files with new energy. He had thought of digging once again straight into the remaining files that Joe had labelled “Personal”, but he decided instead to complete some of the actions that he would take to dedicate a portion of Joe’s financial resources. He made a list of the various end uses that seemed the best way to commit some of Joe’s estate. Once he began, this work took on a momentum of its own, and before he knew it, early afternoon had rolled around. But he now had some quite definite plans, tasks to gain approval for those plans, and a list of the people he wanted to talk to about his ideas.

  At three o’clock, he rose from Joe’s chair, stretched, and decided to take a long walk through the meadow and poplar forest behind Joe’s barn. He found and pulled on long hiking pants that were gathered at the ankles, good hiking boots, and at the last minute decided to take his camera as well. Despite the fact that it would mean an hour combing the burrs and tangles from Reggie’s fur, he decided to take Reggie as company.

  Having committed to a number of positive steps as part of his review of Joe’s files, he was feeling much better, more buoyant. It took Reggie less than a second to realize that the two of them were going for a walk, and he began bounding about and yipping in anticipation. Sanford locked up and the two of them struck out.

  Despite the fact that the sun had poured energy onto the landscape all morning, the grass was still damp from the previous night’s storm. Sanford’s pants and boots were waterproof, so he didn’t mind squidging through the odd wet patch of ground. Reggie abandoned whatever concerns he might have had, and was soon a sodden mess, carrying a large cargo of burrs, grass seeds, twigs, mud, and anything else that could hitch a ride. The meadow was huge, about 600 metres wide and more than a kilometre long, and it was a meadow because the soil here was only about twenty centimetres deep, above a layer of mixed rock and subsoil, lying on limestone bedrock about a metre down. The centre of the field was a sea of daisies, and Sanford wandered toward them, recalling similar rambles in his past. The buttercups of his youth smiled up at him once again. He found morels and false morels. He remembered suddenly that on the east side of the meadow, not far from the stream, was a large patch of wild strawberries. Their season would be finished now, but he moved in that direction anyhow, soon coming across the first of the lovely, delicate little strawberry plants, and seeing them extend almost to the bank of the stream.