The Dead Letter

by Finley Martin

  “Everyone was concerned because it happened so close to home. The office was all abuzz with gossip.”

  “Had anyone in your office been close to Simone?”

  “Not that I knew, but on PEI you’re only a step or two away from knowing someone who knows anyone else.”

  “Was there gossip about Simone?”

  “A bit. She was flashier than most of the girls in our office and, where there’s flash, there’s fire, they say. She was pretty, and she flirted. That might have drawn out a few talons, but our staff and Tidewater’s never really mixed. In spite of that, everyone was relieved when that crazy homeless man was arrested. He was unpredictable. He would shout crazy things at people on the street. Throw things. The girls were scared of him.”

  “And Carolyn? How did she react to all this?”

  “She felt sorry for the poor girl, of course. She was the compassionate sort. Later, though, after it had sunk in, it must have hit her harder, that and her troubles at home, because she took a few more days off before she returned to work…and a few days after that, her car went off the road.”

  22.

  The empty board room displayed an impressive view of the city on two sides. It was a long room, carpeted. Dark cherry wood panels covered a third wall and a large rear-projection screen dominated the fourth. A security guard unlocked the door, flipped several switches. The soft drone of fluorescent lights broke the stillness. Another switch illuminated the screen. The guard stepped aside and made way for the fifteen or twenty suits and skirts which arrived for the scheduled ministers’ meeting. The ministers took their places at the table, and the stenographers and assistants filled the rows of plush chairs behind them along the wall. The initial flood of chatter quickly settled into a blend of subdued murmurs and quiet laughter. A few just stared reflectively into the empty projection screen.

  The chime of a cell phone drew attention and silent disapproval to the man in the navy blue sport coat at the table. Others surreptitiously fingered the off button on their phones before the premier arrived.

  “I’ve got to take this,” he said to the Fisheries Minister, a handsome woman in her mid-thirties, and removed himself to a nearby anteroom. He locked the door behind him. “This is a bad time. What is it?”

  “A private investigator is snooping around.”

  He recognized the voice. It belonged to Chief MacFarlane.

  “Is this a concern?”

  “She’s been digging into things she shouldn’t be. She has the case file, and she’s working her way through witnesses.”

  “Why are you calling me?” His tone shifted from agitation to anger.

  “You have as much to lose as I do.”

  “As I see it, the road doesn’t go that far.”

  “Nice choice of words, my friend. Maybe you should do some reflection.”

  “Can’t you handle it? I can’t get involved in such things!”

  “And I can only do so much. Some help from your corner would ease the situation. She’s getting a boost from Ben Solomon.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “She’s not there yet, but she’s beginning to put two and two together. By then it will be too late for the usual nudging. Listen to me. I’m trying to avoid drastic measures here, but it’s coming to that if we can’t stop her. You know what that means, don’t you.”

  It was not a question. It was the illumination of a fact, and it held strength enough to quell the unease that churned inside him and to replace it with a grudging conciliation.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  23.

  Anne finished the supper dishes and settled Jacqui into her studies. By then it had grown dark, but she still had one more task to complete—her interview with Bernadette Villier, Simone’s mother.

  Each time Anne drove across the Hillsborough Bridge, her eyes were drawn downriver. Each time, the view was a pleasant surprise, like a new painting on a living-room wall. This evening was no different. An oil tanker, moored to concrete piers in mid-channel, was awash with deck lights. Farther away and closer to the harbour mouth, a few white sails near the yacht club tacked in the gentle drafts. Splotches of light marked the Charlottetown skyline. Old groves of trees masked the light on the Stratford side of the bay.

  Anne turned right onto a winding road. It branched off into darker streets, one of which led to the Meriwether subdivision.

  Bernadette lived there in a small, neatly kept, older residence with a covered front porch. Her home sat on an oversized lot. That made her house look smaller. Luxurious, newly built split-level homes surrounded it, and they made it look out of place.

  Anne pulled to the curb in front of Bernadette’s house. On the corner, a red fox, stoic and attentive, watched her. Then, startled by the halogen headlights of a car, the animal fled toward the creek and a golf course that bordered the rear of the property.

  Anne mounted the stairs to Bernadette’s front porch and was about to knock when the door opened.

  “Come in, dear,” she said.

  Bernadette was short and trim. She had clear grey eyes and a young complexion that brought doubt to any guess at her age, but she spoke with the crispness and plainness of older women in the country villages.

  “Come in,” she said again and led Anne down a short hallway to a living room off the kitchen and pointed her toward a pillowed chair. “Make yourself comfortable. Tea’s near ready. Won’t be a minute.”

  The living room was tidy and had the lemony scent of household cleaners and furniture polish. It was simply furnished. A sofa and chair framed a space in front of a brick fireplace. A china cabinet fronted a wall to the kitchen. A drop-leaf dining table and two padded straight chairs stood alongside another.

  Anne didn’t sit. Instead, she looked over the framed photos on the mantel over the fireplace. Staggered among the old black-and-whites and a sepia were two faded colour pictures of Bernadette and her husband. They looked happy. She was young and pretty. Her husband was sturdy and sandy-haired. His arm draped over her shoulder. One hand held a beer, and he mugged for the camera. A photo next to it showed Simone with her arm around a girlfriend. Another shot captured her alone on the pier at Rustico.

  “That’s Simone,” said Bernadette, pushing through the door with a tray of tea and sugar cookies. “She had just turned fourteen.”

  “She looks older,” said Anne.

  “It’s the curse that every young girl wishes for…and every mother dreads. When she was fourteen, she looked seventeen. When she was fifteen, she passed for twenty-one. The cookies are homemade. You must try one. You said on the phone that you wanted to talk about Simone?”

  “I don’t mean to dredge up troubling memories, but I’m investigating a case. A few of the details overlap Simone’s death, and I thought you might be able to help me understand them.”

  “I’ll help if I can. What would you like to know?”

  “Well, first, can you tell me a little about Simone? What was she like?”

  “I suppose the polite gossips in the community would call her ‘a wild child’…and they wouldn’t be far from the truth, I s’pose. But she comes to it honest enough. She took after my husband in some ways. Luc, my husband, god luv ’im, was a rebellious and independent young man. He was a carpenter from North Rustico; I was a farm girl from Kelly’s Cross. He drank a bit. He got into trouble from time to time, but he wasn’t a mean man, and he was exciting. Maybe that’s what drew me to him. He worked hard, joked a lot, and most people liked him in spite of his faults.”

  “Was Simone well-liked, too?”

  “When she was young, sure, but as she got older, she changed. We never had much, you see. That never bothered Luc and me, but Simone was different. I think we embarrassed her. Eventually she moved out. She wanted more than we could give her.”

  “More?”
<
br />   “More money, more things.”

  “Did her boyfriend, Jamie, fill that need?”

  “Jamie was handsome, and funny, and being a policeman he had a touch of glamour to him. But I couldn’t see Simone waiting for a young cop to get her what she wanted. Now have a cookie, dear…and your tea’s getting cold.”

  She poured Anne a second cup of tea, and Bernadette chatted blithely about her old life in Rustico with Luc. She recalled fond memories of community lobster boils, dancing at the Legion hall, buying fresh cod and herring at the wharf, and being cheered by the houses all lit with Christmas lights. Then she turned to sadder memories—Luc’s fall through rotten planks in a roof he was reshingling, catching his neck on a ragged edge, and bleeding to death.

  “Two tragedies within a few years must have been devastating. Did family and friends help you through it?”

  “The community was good to me. Luc had no insurance, of course. But I was offered a job as bookkeeper in a local store. I was always clever with numbers. I got by. After Simone died, I moved to Stratford, a better job.”

  “I don’t see a picture of Jamie and Simone together,” Anne said, pointing to the mantelpiece.

  Bernadette thought deeply for a moment, then looked baffled, and said, “I don’t recall her having one.”

  “Have you kept in touch with Jamie since?”

  “He took a place in the receiving line at Simone’s wake and visited once or twice afterwards. That was about it. He never seemed comfortable, though, and we were never close. Everyone grieves differently, I s’pose. Anyway, he married a year or two later. Some Dutch girl from eastern PEI, but I hear they’re split up now.”

  “From what I heard, Simone and Jamie had been heading in that direction. Sounded like they were planning a future together, marriage even.”

  “Newspapers played that up after her death. Don’t know where they got it from.”

  “It wasn’t true?”

  “Can’t say it was…or it wasn’t.”

  “But you weren’t convinced?”

  “On the surface everything looked fine, but, call it mother’s intuition or what, I think she may have had her eyes on someone else.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “No.”

  “When Simone learned that she was pregnant, how did she react? Was she excited? Confused? Worried?”

  Bernadette became silent. Rigid. Her face paled, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

  After she left, Anne sat in her car for a few minutes and reflected on what had happened. Things had changed. Now there were two conflicting sides to the Jamie MacFarlane–Simone Villier love story: Jamie’s romantic recollection of Simone as a textbook Cinderella, and Bernadette’s suspicion that Simone was in the process of trading up.

  Which could be trusted, she didn’t know. MacFarlane was egotistical enough to fancy that Simone could only love him, but was he so egotistical that he missed any warning signs that she was cheating on him? Bernadette suspected her. Why wouldn’t MacFarlane? For cops like him, attention to detail and suspicion go together like a pair of handcuffs.

  Then, too, if MacFarlane suspected that Simone was playing around, how would he react? Dump her? Humiliate her? Hit her? And the other man? If there was one, what was his role in this drama?

  MacFarlane’s description of his relationship with Bernadette was skewed as well. He had depicted Bernadette as a lonely, distraught mother grieving for her daughter and husband almost to the point of alcoholism, but that wasn’t the same Bernadette Anne had spoken with. That woman was resilient, stable, and self-reliant. Had MacFarlane deluded himself? Had he reinvented his self-image as a more generous and altruistic person than he had ever been? Or was he just lying?

  Something else bothered Anne, too. Her reaction to Simone’s pregnancy was surprising. Perhaps Bernadette didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought.

  A lot of questions, thought Anne, not many answers.

  Anne started the car, turned around, and headed up the street. A breeze had come up and stirred a drift of leaves across her path. Another car turned up the avenue behind her. Its headlights illuminated a cold, bluish path ahead of it. She hated halogen lights. They were bright and glaring. Even in her rear-view mirror, they were distracting. She speeded up. So did the driver behind her.

  Anne’s hand reached up to flip the dim switch on her mirror at the same time as a large red fox darted in front of her. She slammed the brake pedal. Her car skidded and slid to a stop, but Anne’s eyes locked on the glare in her rear-view mirror. She saw the cold blue lights of a car hurtle toward her. She heard the screech of its tires, and she braced for collision, but the other car stopped. Just inches from her bumper.

  The driver, impatient or angry, slammed his gear shift in reverse, spun tires, and squealed backwards until he intersected a side street and roared away.

  Anne’s hands trembled. The fox had vanished into the night.

  24.

  Anne pulled into a no-parking space near her Victoria Row office building. It was early morning. The sun was low and carried little warmth. Dew dampened squares of grass along the street. The few cars parked overnight reflected the hysterical flash of red and blue lights from a Charlottetown police cruiser.

  Mary Anne MacAdam was waiting at the curb.

  “What happened?”

  “I came in early to check last night’s receipts and noticed your door ajar. I thought you might be up for a cup of coffee. I went upstairs, I pushed the door open, but you weren’t there. Then I phoned the police…and you.”

  They reached the second floor. Inside were Constables Frieda Toombs and Jeremy Willis. They turned when they heard footsteps.

  “I’m Billy Darby. This is my office. Whaddaya got?”

  “A mess,” said Constable Toombs with a sweep of her arm.

  Anne looked at the overturned furniture and ransacked filing cabinets. She looked past them into her private office. It was the same there.

  “What’ve you found?”

  “There’s tool marks on the front door and the door to the office inside,” said Willis.

  “…and more on the safe,” said Toombs. “But their pry bar couldn’t open it.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Most break and enters are drug-related.”

  “Well, that narrows it down to a few thousand suspects,” said Anne. “What now?”

  “We’ll make some inquiries. There’s a couple of security cameras in the area. Maybe we’ll get lucky. For now, we need you to check what’s here…and what isn’t. Make a list. The sooner we get it the better.”

  The police left. Anne walked into her office, stood by the window as the police car pulled away, turned around and stared back at the trail of debris leading back toward the front door. She felt like hitting something. Anger welled up, and like a passing wave, it sank into dejection. Mary Anne rested a hand on Anne’s shoulder.

  “Come down for a coffee. You can deal with this later,” she said.

  “I’ll be there in a bit,” Anne replied.

  Anne heard a scrape against the fractured doorjamb as Mary Anne closed it behind her. By then, the anger had diminished. The dejection had dissipated, and Anne began her clean-up in the reception area.

  Chaos, she thought. Friggin’ chaos.

  The filing cabinet and her desk had been ransacked. Notes, memos, invoices, notices, manuals, bills, directories, and magazines littered the floor. Cabinet drawers dangled open, and the contents had been strewn about. Knick-knacks had been swept off tables and desktops. The more fragile ones were broken. The bulb in a lamp had shattered, and the shade had twisted.

  The scene in her private office followed the same theme: overturned furniture, a shambles of paper from files, and damaged bric-a-brac, but it took less time
to put back in order than the reception area. Anne went to the safe. It was a large floor safe, something that could have come out of an old payroll office. She noted the tool marks on the door. She spun the dial and entered the combination. The door swung open.

  She reached for a file labelled “Carolyn Jollimore.” It was intact, and Carolyn’s last letter was inside, where Anne had last put it.

  Mary Anne brought a fresh coffee to Anne’s table in The Blue Peter and slipped a Danish on a small dish alongside it.

  “How ya feeling now?”

  “This helps a lot,” said Anne taking a long sip. “Thanks.”

  The Blue Peter was empty except for the wait staff preparing lunch. Mary Anne had brought a coffee for herself and sat down across from Anne.

  “Anything missing?” she asked.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “It is, and it isn’t.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “If it were druggies, like the cops say, something would be gone…computer…something. I’m not sure I buy that story. First of all, an upstairs office like mine isn’t an ideal target. What’s to steal in an office? No cash, no jewellery, no guns. No fancy electronics.”

  “I suppose.”

  “They’d make a better score here,” said Anne with a sweep of her arm. “A quick smash and grab. Most places leave a little float of cash in the till. Take that, grab a ham sandwich from the kitchen, a sackful of cigarettes, and an armload of liquor from behind the bar, and they could be out of here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Great idea but, please, don’t spread it around. Keep it between yourself and your closest friend. That would be me, by the way.”

  “A drug-related B and E just doesn’t seem right…”

  “…unless they’re complete dough-heads,” said Mary Anne, “…and that’s not unheard of.”

  “But there was something else, too,” said Anne. “The place was trashed.”

  “So?”

  “Why trash a place?”