“Oh, terrific,” I said aloud. Maybe I was going to get a ticket for loitering. I’d been doing seventy kilometres an hour on the upgrade, slow enough to warrant putting the hazards on, but it always embarrassed me to do that. I felt that if I did, the truck would know that I had no faith in it, and it would conk out in sheer disappointment. I pulled over and waited, trembling. Cops, as I’ve said, scare me, even if I’ve done nothing wrong.
I did a quick personal inventory. I was clean. I’d had not a drop of booze, not a puff of smoke, my license was up-to-date and the stickers on the plates were fresh that month. The insurance papers were in a plastic folder, paper-clipped to the visor. There were no empty beer bottles in the cab.
My pulse rate was still off the scale, and my palms were slicked up the way they used to get when I held hands with a boy in the Laingford Odeon.
I checked the mirror and cursed the hamster, who leered at me. Some mascot. Getting out of the cruiser was none other than Morrison the Large.
He took his time sauntering over to the truck. I couldn’t see anyone else in the cruiser, so I guessed that Becker had managed to steal a few moments away from his partner.
“Afternoon, ma’am.” He tipped his hat.
“Good afternoon, Officer. To what do I owe the pleasure?” My voice was shaking.
“You were going awfully slow, ma’am. I wondered if you were having some trouble with your vehicle. Stopped to see if you needed some assistance.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, yes, ma’am. Actually, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you, and as you have no telephone in that shack I hear you live in, and Hoito never answers his, I thought I’d just pull you over. Give you the message myself.”
“Mighty thoughtful of you,” I said. I wasn’t buying it. He pulled me over because he knew it would bug me. I was intrigued, though.
“We always try to be thoughtful,” Morrison said, smiling cheerfully. “Mrs. Travers show up yet?”
“No, Constable Morrison, but I have reason to believe that she’s safe and not wandering around in the woods somewhere.”
“Now how would you know that, unless you’ve talked to her?”
“I found another note from her after Detective Becker left my shack, as you call it. She signed it with a happy face.”
“So?”
“So, it’s kind of a personal code. We write each other notes all the time. A happy face means everything’s okay. So I figure she probably had a place to go, although of course I have no idea where that could be.”
“Uh-huh. Well, if you find out, you’ll let us know, right?”
“Of course. Can I go now?”
“Just a second. Becker was worried about that mutt at the Travers’ place. He said that if Mrs. Travers isn’t hiding out at home, the animal will probably starve. We could call the pound, but Becker thought you’d be willing to take it instead. I saw the way you acted with it. Real cute. Reminded me of that mountain gorilla movie.”
“Oh, golly. I forgot all about poor Lug-nut. Yes, of course I’ll look after him. I’ll go get him as soon as I finish my errands in town.”
“What errands would they be?” Morrison said. “Taking supplies to Francy Travers?”
I let out an exasperated breath. “Look, I’ve told you I don’t know where she is,” I said. “I can’t lie. It’s not in me.” He narrowed his eyes at me. They were very blue, set deep in the fleshy folds of his face.
“As for my errands,” I said, “I’m going to the Co-op to pick up some grain for the goats. Perhaps you’d care to accompany me. I hear they’ve got a special on pig feed.” I don’t know what made me say it. I was ashamed, instantly, when I saw the look on Morrison’s face.
“Watch your mouth, little lady,” he said. “You may think you have a friend in Becker, but I’m not such a pushover.” He was talking big, but he didn’t look angry, he looked hurt. Like Aunt Susan always said, retaliation only feels good while you’re doing it.
“Hey, just kidding,” I said. “Sixties flashback, eh? Won’t happen again.”
“Sixties? Hah. You couldn’t have been more than six when the seventies started,” he said.
“Seven,” I said, doing a quick calculation. “My aunt took me to rallies, though.” Aunt Susan was the one who had planted in me the notion that cops were, well, swine. Fascists. Nasty men. She had experienced their oppression, she told me, and she knew whereof she spoke.
“That would be your aunt that runs the feed store?”
“Yup.”
“Figures. She ran for parliament a while back, didn’t she? For the NDP?”
“More than twenty years ago,” I said. “How did you know that?”
“My Dad ran against her. Victor Morrison, MPP.”
“Tory,” I said. “That was your Dad? You don’t look like him at all.”
Morrison smiled. “Nope,” he said. “Don’t think like him either.”
He leaned against the cab of the truck. It looked like we were in for a chat, and what surprised me was that suddenly, I didn’t mind so much.
In Laingford, if you get pulled over by the cops, it’s all around town in two minutes. Traffic slowed as people drove past, craning their necks to see who was in trouble. I’d hear about it, later.
“You found John’s truck yet?” I said.
“Nope. Still looking. Damn thing’s disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“Too bad. No luck at Kelso’s, eh?”
“No point in asking,” Morrison said. “He drove home before he was shot, remember?” I was surprised that he was talking to me about the case. I thought he and Becker were trying to keep me out of it. Still, I wasn’t complaining.
“Are you sure he did that?” I said.
“The Schreier kid swears it. Travers died at home, with his truck in the driveway.”
“So you think somebody used his truck to move his body to the dump, then drove it somewhere and left it,” I said, carefully.
“You think so too, don’t you?” Morrison said. “Yes, but constable, Francy can’t drive. So it couldn’t have been her.”
He winked. That was all. By now I was thoroughly confused. If he was going to start playing Good Cop, who would that cast in the role of the Bad One?
“Now, you hear anything at all, you let us know, okay?” he said. “And try not to get involved.”
“If you don’t want me involved, why are we having this conversation?”
“Insurance,” he said, enigmatically. A Toyota buzzed by, way over the limit, honking loudly. Several young men wearing baseball caps leaned out and yelled something as they passed.
“Morons,” I said. Morrison was squinting at the retreating car. “PZI 952,” he muttered. Then he turned back to me.
“Mayors kid,” he said. “Gotta make a phone call.”
I started the truck, then remembered that I had some new information. “Hey, Morrison,” I said loudly, over the chugging of the engine. He looked back.
“John Travers was hurting for cash. He sold some stuff to Rico Amato and didn’t haggle over the price. Wonder why, eh?”
Morrison grinned. “Atta girl,” he said.
Aunt Susan’s feed store was busy when I arrived. There were plenty of cars in the parking lot and a Co-op truck was backed up to the loading door, delivering the week’s order. If I wanted to visit privately with my aunt, I’d have to wait.
Feed stores always smell wonderful, sort of a cross between a brewery and one of those brass and incense gift shops. Susan stocked hers with more than just feed. There were rubber boots and racks of work gloves, overalls and buckets, nursing nipples, milking pails, water heaters, bird feeders, tractor parts and tools.
If you were into agriculture, there wasn’t a thing she wasn’t happy to get for you, except American goods. She enforced a strict buy-Canadian policy, and although she would order items from the States if you insisted, she’d fill out the order form in icy silence and never look at you the same
way again.
Theresa, her assistant, was at the cash desk, ringing in a big bag of low-priced, economy dog food for a man wearing a furlined coat. If Susan had been there, she would have made him buy a better brand. Cheap, high bulk dog food will make your animal poop twice as much as it needs to, without much benefit. The guy in the coat probably knew that already, though. Probably poured the cheap stuff into a bag of Martin’s Best kept on display in the pantry. Rich people really bug me.
Theresa gave me a little wave as I came in, gesturing towards the back where Aunt Susan would be loading grain. Susans five-foot-three and 68 years old, but she’s built like a Massey Ferguson.
I excused myself past a woman and two small boys who were trying on rubber boots in the aisle, and headed for the door marked “Feed Bin”.
Susan was slinging fifty pound sacks of feed around like down pillows, her short iron-grey hair standing up on end like the feathers of a startled rooster. Her hat was on the floor and her sleeves were rolled up to expose the kind of muscles that I only dream about.
“Hey,” she said, “catch.” A bag of feed came sailing towards me. Susan was always doing that kind of stuff when I was living with her, but I was in better shape then. Back then, I would have tossed it back. I had to catch it—or lose face, and I did both. The bag bowled me right over and I landed on my butt with the feed sack in my lap like a large, unwanted baby.
“Thanks, Susan,” I said.
“Not at all. Toughen you up. You okay?”
“I’m fine.” The feed truck guy had come around the corner at the moment of impact and looked mildly surprised, but very kindly did not laugh. I scrambled to my feet and put the feed onto a storage rack. I can’t say I tossed it. Not really. But I tried.
“Can you give us a hand?” Susan said, and I spent the next twenty minutes acting stronger than I am, which I would undoubtedly pay for the next day.
It was just as I was easing the last sack into place and Susan was signing the invoice that I heard a noise from Susan’s apartment upstairs. It was the cry of a baby.
Thirteen
Old man singing songs to a hairless child
lullabies in his eyes
and he wonders was he ever that damn small?
—Shepherd’s Pie
I pretended I didn't hear that cry. I suspected that Francy was up there with Beth. In fact I was surprised that I hadn’t figured it out right away, but I had promised the cops that I would tell them if I found out where she was. I wouldn’t know for sure unless I asked, and I wasn’t planning to ask.
I didn’t promise the cops I would report all my suspicions. I could suspect that Francy was there without actually knowing it for a fact. That little detail would keep me from blushing like a tea rose the next time I saw Becker or Morrison. The most important thing was for me to find out who killed John Travers, before the cops got to Francy.
Aunt Susan heard the little Beth-cry as well and gave me a sharp look, one eyebrow raised. Her eyebrows are bushy and black and it’s quite the effect. She taught me how to do it when I was twelve, both of us practising together in front of the mirror. I still can’t do it as well as she does, although my eyebrows are pretty severe, too.
I started whistling, picked her hat up off the floor, dusted it off and handed it to her with a smile. She handed the clipboard back to the feed guy, and we headed back out to the front of the store.
The woman and the kids were still trying on boots in the aisle and one child seemed to have its foot stuck. The dog food buyer at the counter was gone, replaced by Otis Dermott, one of the Cedar Falls holy rollers. I’d seen him handing out tracts outside Rico Amato’s antique store. Theresa, Susan’s help, beckoned us over.
“Afternoon, Susan,” Otis said, touching his hat. He’s bald as a baby and wears the hat all the time, probably even in the bath.
Susan gave him a curt nod.
“Donna-Lou’s been thinking to install some more waterers in the chicken house,” Otis said. His wife had a successful egg-business in Cedar Falls. She started out with a couple of laying hens for bingo money and found a big local market.
Otis still kept pigs the way he always had, but it was “Donna-Lou’s Dozens” that kept the farm afloat. You could get them in Cedar Falls and a couple of places in Laingford, and people kept telling her to expand. Guess she was doing it, finally.
Otis saying something like that to Aunt Susan was like saying “Donna-Lou’s been thinking to give you a couple of hundred dollars.” She just had to pay attention.
“How many?” she said.
“Thirty,” Otis said.
“Business must be picking up,” Susan said.
Otis just grinned. “What have you got in stock?” he said.
Susan gestured with her head for him to follow her into the aisle where the water stuff was. I like agri-plumbing—it’s unpretentious physics at its best, so I tagged along. We squeezed past the rubber-boot family and a mountain of small boots. They were having some disagreement about which colour to buy.
“We’ve got a couple of raccoons hiding out in the barn,” I said, generally.
“That’s awkward,” Aunt Susan said.
“Real varmints,” Otis said.
“The Boss-man is trying to trap them,” I said.
“Of course. They’re wily, though,” Susan said. “Especially if it’s a mother with her young.”
“I haven’t seen them, but I know they’re there.” I said.
“What kind of trap’s he set?” Otis said. “If it was me, I’d just shoot ’em.”
“Raccoons are survivors,” Susan said. “They can elude a man with a gun, no problem.”
“I hope so,” I said. “You heard Dweezil died?”
“Who’s Dweezil?” Otis said.
“Poor old Dweezil,” Susan said. “Randy bugger though, wasn’t he?”
I lost the subtle thread for a moment. “Randy? Susan, the poor thing had asthma. You know that. It wasn’t his fault.” Up went the eyebrow. Oh. Duh.
“Well, he did mess around,” I said. “Probably got what was coming to him,” I said. “Old goat.”
“Who’s Dweezil?” Otis said.
“At least we know what killed him,” Susan said. “Now Otis, we have a full set of Grunbaum waterers and all the hookups in stock—look at this.” She pulled a bunch of plumbing off a rack and started to talk business. I crept away, having got what I wanted.
As I passed the rubber-boot family, I leaned down to the smaller of the two children, who was crying.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Is there a problem here?” He was about three and looked up at me with some surprise.
“He wants the same kind as his brother, but they don’t make them that small. They only have these,” the woman said, holding up a very small pair of black wellies. The older child was looking smug and holding a pair of camouflage green rubber boots to his chest.
“Hey,” I said to the small kid, “see these?” I was wearing my barn boots, size eight versions of the tiny ones in the woman’s hand. The kid looked. Then he nodded.
“These,” I said, “are the very coolest boots in the world. If Michael Jordan was a farmer, he’d wear these boots.”
By the time I got to the counter, the older child was frantically searching for black wellies. I only hoped Susan had them in his size.
I bought and paid for a couple of bags of Shure-Gain and Theresa helped me carry them out to the truck.
“Polly,” she said, “can you do me a favour?”
“Sure,” I said. “What?” I didn’t know her very well, but any friend of Susan’s, etcetera.
“Well, my uncle’s in the hospital, eh?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Not serious, I hope.”
“No. Just a head injury, they said. He’s conscious, but I ain’t been able to go see him yet and the hospital switchboard keeps saying he’s asleep whenever I call.”
“You want me to drop in on him for you, to make sure he’s okay?” I said
.
“Would you? He knows you, so it wouldn’t be that weird.”
He knew me? Did I know him? I barely knew Theresa, who lived in Laingford and came from, according to Susan, a huge family. I didn’t even know her last name. Luckily, she was wearing her store name-tag. I let my eyes flicker over it. Theresa Morton. Morton. Oh.
“Spit’s your uncle?” I said without thinking.
Theresa frowned. “I heard some people call him that,” she said. “He’s Uncle Gerald to me. He says nice things about you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not very polite, I know. But he likes it. The nickname, I mean.”
“Not from me I bet he wouldn’t,” Theresa said. “So you’ll go see him?”
“Sure. Is he allowed to have visitors?”
“Only family members, but I’ll fix it. Just say I said hi, okay? Let me know how he is. Him and my Dad, they don’t speak, eh?”
“Your Dad would be Hunter Morton, the funeral director?”
“Yup. He hasn’t said a word to Uncle Gerald since they had that big fight about the hearse. So, like, he’d kill me if he knew I’d went there.”
“I’ll find out, Theresa,” I said. “I’ll call you.” I got in the truck and headed for Laingford Memorial.
I am not, like some folks, squeamish about hospitals. When I was in to get my tonsils out, the nurses were great and I developed a hopeless crush on my doctor and wanted to stay for ever. Aunt Susan says I screamed and cried when it was time to be discharged, although I don’t remember that part. Probably the best thing about being in hospital was that there were no chores to do and nobody was throwing sacks of grain at me.
I hadn’t set foot in Laingford Memorial since George had been there for a cataract operation three years before. Someone, in the interim, had taken away the scruffy old lobby. In its place was a vast atrium with gleaming marble tiles and swish modern sofas upholstered in mushroom polyweave. The reception area was now protected by what looked like bullet-proof glass, and there was Muzak.
I went up to the bullet-proof glass and spoke through a little speaker-thing to a woman wearing a crushed-raspberry-coloured uniform. Why is it that medical personnel don’t wear white any more? Has it gone out of fashion, or did someone make it illegal?
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 9
