Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “Well, that was just a little mistake of mine, actually,” Carla said. “I didn’t realize it until you told me just now that you’d given my cross to her. Where did you find it?”

  I had told her briefly about Poe.

  “What a pity, “ Carla said. “Maybe she didn’t have to die at all. You see, after John’s death, I felt badly for her and went over to see if there was anything I could do and to tell her about my baby—-you know, share some womanly conversation. When I got there she was acting strange and she was wearing my cross. The last time I’d seen it was the night John died. I was wearing it when Eddie and Francine came home, telling me that Eddie had hit John. I reached for it and held it and prayed, oh, I prayed that John was dead. Then, after I’d put them to bed with a nice hot drink, I went over to see for myself.

  “I still had it on when I called Freddy to come help, because he smiled at it—he gave it to me, you know. It must have fallen off when we were moving the body. That’s why Samson put it in Francine’s coffin. He told me that part of our lives was behind us now.”

  “So you killed Francy because she was wearing your crucifix?”

  “Of course. She had found it, don’t you see? She knew it was mine. I’d worn it for years, when she lived with us. It was a part of me. Oh, I know it went against Pastor Garnet’s ideas, but I found it comforting. I figured she’d found it in her house and I’ve only been there once, when I went to execute John. I’ve worn it for sixteen years. She wore it to mock me.”

  “She didn’t, Carla. She just said it looked familiar, that’s all.”

  “Well, how was I to know that? She looked at me. She knew. So I made her a nice hot drink there in her kitchen to help her sleep.”

  “Then you wrote the note and strung her up like a bag of potatoes?”

  “Oh, she was much heavier than a bag of potatoes. But we farm-women are strong, you know?”

  “I know.”

  That was when Carla had told me to relax and not move around, then she’d lifted John Travers’s shotgun to her eye and taken careful aim. That was when I had been saved by a bear that didn’t really exist. I tried to explain that part to Becker, but he didn’t seem too convinced.

  “I’m glad you’re okay, Polly,” he said, putting away his notebook. “You’ll probably have to testify.”

  “Will it come out that we slept together?” I said.

  “I doubt it. It was incidental.”

  “Great. Incidental. Great.”

  He came out from behind the table. “Dr. McCoy,” he said, really close to my face. “That goat-poison? There’s an antidote. It’s called work. Law. Stuff like that.” I kissed him, right on the mouth, despite the likelihood of cameras in the interview room and guys checking us out behind the mirror next door. Becker did not struggle, much anyway. Then he touched my face with a sad hand and led me out of the room.

  Morrison took me back to George’s place. George made coffee and plopped his bottle of Glen-sneeze on the table beside our mugs. Morrison sighed deeply and reached for it before I could, but he poured a hefty slug into mine first.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” Morrison said. “It was a close call, Polly Deacon. We could have lost you if it hadn’t been for that bear.”

  “But there was no damned bear.”

  “Well, there might have been. A second before we got there.”

  “And Lug-nut didn’t notice? You got there before she fired at me, right? But she said it attacked her.”

  “The bear must have been in her mind,” George said. “I‘v got a friend at the Rama reserve who would say that was powerful medicine.” I had a flash of the Vision-Quest workshop and Dream-Catcher. Good medicine, good medicine. Maybe my hamster had grown up, finally. I would never know for sure.

  “Anyway, you did get there in time, Earlie. That was a good thing,” George said.

  “Yup.” Morrison explained that it was Eddie who put the pieces together. “Poor kid was keeping a lot of secrets,” he said. “He knew his mother was carrying on with Travers. Knew it right from the beginning because he walked in on them in the Schreier’s barn. Knew she was pregnant, too. Heard her throwing up in the morning, he said. He’s had a hard time.”

  “He didn’t have anything to do with John or Francy’s deaths, though, did he?” I asked.

  “Not really, aside from covering up. He says you caught him in the Travers’ house after the police tape was up. How come you never told us?”

  “I thought he was looking for a book Francy had lent him, one his mother had made him return. He confirmed it himself, later. I didn’t really think he was up to anything bad in there.”

  “His mother sent him over to look for the crucifix,” Morrison said. “She told him that Francy had stolen it. He didn’t believe her, but I guess he realized it was important, somehow.”

  “Was he carrying on with Francy, like Carla said? I hoped not, but I did wonder.”

  “Not according to him, no. He just liked her, that’s all. He said that Samson had forbidden him to go over there, but he did anyway. His mother didn’t seem to mind. Probably gave her a chance to see Travers.”

  “Was it Samson who gave him the black eye?”

  “Nope. That was Freddy. Seems Eddie always suspected that Samson wasn’t his real father. When Carla let slip that the crucifix had sentimental value on account of the fact that his father had given it to her, he figured it out. Samson Schreier didn’t hold with that sort of thing, he knew that. So the kid sniffed around for a likely father and came up with Freddy.”

  “Why would Freddy hit him?”

  “The kid went over to the dump for the big father/son confrontation. Didn’t go too good, it seems.”

  “Ah.”

  Eddie had told the cops about the squirrel note, which his mother had pasted together one night when she thought that he was asleep. The police had grilled him for a while, and then decided that they needed to talk to the Schreiers senior.

  “Just before we left we got a call from the Pastor at the Chapel,” Morrison said. “He told us that you had grabbed the crucifix and made a run for it. He said he’d called the Schreiers, figuring you’d gone over there, asking for you, and he let the story out. Carla Schreier’s reaction was a bit wild, he said, and he got worried.”

  “Nice of him,” I said, faintly.

  “That was when I high-tailed it over to your cabin. When Lug-nut saw me, he barked once, then ran off along the bush road. Kept looking back to make sure I was following.”

  Lug-nut the wonder dog. I was bursting with pride. I patted Luggy’s head and he slobbered all over my hand.

  “I called Carla Schreier, too,” George said.

  “I know. She told me,” I said.

  “After the telephone call I realized that you would never miss one of Rico’s parties, particularly if Ruth was there with her guitar. So I set out to bring you back and encountered a large number of screaming police cars headed for the Schreier’s farm. I knew that if there was trouble, you would be there.”

  “Thanks, George.”

  It was nine o’clock. I suddenly thought of Ruth Glass singing My Life, My Death in that haunting, healing voice of hers.

  “Do you think they’re still at it?” I said. Then the phone rang. It was Rico, wondering where the hell we were. We looked at each other after George hung up.

  “Earlie,” he said, “you off duty yet?”

  He was.

  EPILOGUE

  Carla Schreier ended up in a criminal psychiatric facility It wasn’t a pretty trial, especially after the media got interested in it. We all had our pictures in the paper a few times, but eventually the fuss died down and people stopped talking about it. She lost the baby, and I feel bad about that. It wasn’t its fault and Carla would have loved it fiercely. Still, that’s another very, very big issue.

  Freddy disappeared and people say the authorities are still looking for him. George thinks he’s probably managing some
dump up in Temiskaming or somewhere. Nobody seems to care much.

  None of us knows where Samson Schreier is either, although there’s a rumour going around that he and Mrs. Delaney opened up a bed and breakfast in Minnesota. Could be true. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve each other. Bet there’s a Gideon Bible at every bedside.

  Eddie moved in with Aunt Susan after his mother was arrested, because he said he couldn’t handle living with Samson any more. He doesn’t like high school much and he and Susan fight a lot, but he’s still there, tossing bags of grain around the feed store. He wants to be an Olympic wrestler. Earlie Morrison’s coaching him.

  I’m still living in George’s cabin with Lug-nut. A large family of squirrels has moved into the attic and they drive both of us crazy.

  Every so often we take a hike down to the Chapel of the Holy Lamb to visit Pastor Garnet and put flowers on Francy’s grave, which is covered in snow, now. I still miss her a lot.

  I finished the Becker puppet and then was at a loss as to what to do with it. I thought about giving it to him (minus the extra piece, which I pulverized), but I decided it would embarrass him, so I gave it to Earlie. He says he put it in his bathroom, which is fine with me. Becker and I haven’t kept in touch, and I try not to think about him. I’m still smoking dope, anyway.

  Last week I signed a contract to build a bunch of black-light puppets for the Steamboat Theatre Company in Sikwan, a town south of here. I guess it’s back to contact cement fumes and theatre people, but we all have to eat.

  Oh, and I stopped dreaming about bears.

  One

  SERPENT: Beauty pothetheth a dangerouth punch / She will make you her thlave and then have you for lunch.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene vii

  Rico Amato makes a great woman. When he’s in drag, he looks like a twenty-ish university student—an ultra-hip babe studying environmental science, with a minor in theatre arts. His look is purely classy. No flashy jewellery, no blue eyeshadow or platform heels. He has better taste in clothes than I do.

  When he’s decked out, he likes to call himself Ricki, and because he’s a friend of mine, I play along with it. That’s how I ended up with a broken nose at the tail end of Steamboat Theatre’s “meet the cast” masquerade party.

  My name is Pauline Deacon, and I’m a puppet-maker by trade. You may think that’s a ridiculous thing to be doing for a living these days, but actually, the puppet market is booming. Perhaps it’s because the current political and economic climate has made us all search desperately for something we can control. There’s nothing like pulling a few strings to make you feel powerful. Lately, there’s been a run on police marionettes and Prime Minister hand puppets.

  I have a fair amount of experience building big, theatrical pieces, and that’s what got me involved with Steamboat Theatre. They’re a small children’s touring company based in Sikwan, a town in the Ontario cottage-country District of Kuskawa. Just north of Sikwan is Cedar Falls, the village I call home.

  Steamboat was remounting a guaranteed moneymaker called The Glass Flute, a black-light production in which puppeteers, dressed from head to toe in black (so they can’t be seen) manipulate large, glow-in-the-dark puppets under ultra-violet light. Kids really love black-light theatre. Watching it is like watching a live cartoon, except that it’s bigger than a TV screen, and when you throw stuff at the actors, they throw it back.

  The theatre was reeling with the shock of a ninety percent cut in government funding, and needed a sure-fire hit. The Glass Flute was it—the kind of show that schools and library associations book faster than a Sharon, Lois and Bram concert.

  It was an old show, written in 1980 by Juliet Keating, the company’s founder and artistic director. It had been revamped and remounted so many times that the theatre’s staff groaned at the mention of it. They called it “The Glass Fluke” or “The Fluke”, for short, but the truth was that it had saved Steamboat’s ass more than once, and Juliet had decided to trot it out again. That’s where I came in.

  The props, larger-than-life foam-constructed animals, people, trees and flowers, had taken a battering over the years and their original designer had moved to L.A. to work in film. So, Juliet called me and asked me to re-design everything.

  I jumped at the offer. What I said before about the puppet-business booming? I lied. I was broke and starving. So there. I’d done well at Christmas with my patented Jean Chrétien sock-puppets, but the rest of the winter had been very, very lean, made worse by the fact that I was nursing a wounded ego following a stupid affair with a cop. When Juliet called on the first of April, I was drinking the last of my home-made dandelion wine and going quietly bonkers. She offered me the gig, four weeks of puppet-making followed by an intense, one-week rehearsal period, teaching the actors how to be puppeteers. I made sure it wasn’t a sick April Fool’s joke, then got so excited I danced around like an idiot, which made Lug-Nut (my dog—an idiot too) so hyper he peed on the rug.

  The masquerade party was Juliet’s idea. It was a sort of “get acquainted” thing on the eve of the first rehearsal. Maybe she thought that the cast and crew, many of them fresh from Toronto and suffering from culture shock, would be more at ease if everyone dressed up funny the night before and got howling drunk. Juliet’s an odd one. Raised in an old-money Boston family, she spat out the silver spoon at the age of seventeen, ran away and joined a Vegas-style touring show as a chorus girl. She immigrated to Toronto in the mid-sixties and co-wrote and produced a series of naughty musicals that shocked the straight-laced Canadian audiences, who, nonetheless, flocked to the theatre to be outraged. Juliet and her business partner, Dennis Gold, made pots of money, particularly with their last one, Hogtown Hooker. When Dennis died of a sudden heart attack, Juliet closed up shop and moved north, settled in Sikwan and started Steamboat.

  What Juliet doesn’t know about life on the road would fit comfortably on the back of a pack of piano-lounge matches. She’s in her late fifties, favours short skirts and tight, low cut T-shirts, and has a smoking habit that makes me look like a nun. She’s good at what she does, though, and while she might scare some of the more staid Sikwan-ites, she is generally respected.

  I invited Rico to Juliet’s party because he’s my new best friend. My old best friend, Francy, is resting peacefully in the Temple of the Holy Lamb cemetery and I haven’t forgotten her, but Rico helped me through some rough times after she died, so he gets the dubious honour of replacing her in my affections.

  The transvestite community up here in Kuskawa is somewhat limited, and I knew Rico would enjoy the opportunity to dress up. He always struts his stuff at Hallowe’en, whooping it up at a nearby resort that’s gay-positive, but once a year is not enough when you’ve got a hobby you really like. Juliet and Rico know each other because they’re both on the board of the local AIDS foundation, but I had to ask if I could bring him as a guest, because Steamboat parties are known to be somewhat exclusive.

  When I arrived to pick Rico up outside his antique store by the highway leading into Cedar Falls, I hunkered low in the cab of the truck, which I had borrowed from my neighbour and landlord, goat-farmer George Hoito. I was rigged out as a goat (a costume I’d made three years before for a mascot-gig at a dairy-farming conference) and I felt a little goofy, because it wasn’t Hallowe’en, and the costume had enormous goat ears that flopped around a bit.

  I felt even goofier when I saw the pretty young woman standing by the phone booth outside the Tiquery, presumably waiting for her boyfriend to come out of the Quick-Mart next door. She was pretty hot, and made me feel frumpy and old. I’m only in my mid-thirties, but still. She was dark-haired, about twenty-four, with large flashing eyes and a red mouth, sulky-looking but very sexy. I remember thinking that she wasn’t from around here—that she must be from the city. She wore black jeans, red Doc Martens and a tight red sweater. She was, as they say, stacked. A black leather biker jacket was draped casually over her shoulders. I looked around for the Harley. When she walt
zed over to the truck and got in, I almost screamed aloud.

  “Er . . . can I help you?” I said.

  “Boy, is it ever cold for May,” Rico said. I waited until my heart had stopped doing push-ups in my throat.

  “Jesus, Rico. That you?” Duhh.

  He giggled. “Fooled ya, huh?” Fooled was not the word. Bowled me over was more like it.

  “Rico, you are amazing,” I said. Even his voice was different. Sort of Demi Moore-ish. It was going to be an interesting evening.

  When we got to the theatre, the place was ablaze with light and we could hear the music from the parking lot. I’d taken the back roads, not because it was faster, but because George’s truck, born a year before I was, didn’t like modern speed limits.

  We were a little late.

  Most of the cast had arrived that day from the city. (After all, very few professional actors live in cottage-country.) They were all staying in hotels or B&Bs in Sikwan, prior to the road-tour, where they would all be staying together in whatever accommodation presented itself. Juliet had made Kim Lee, Steamboat’s general manager, include an invitation to the party when she sent their contracts. The invitation said something like “We’re glad you’re coming aboard Steamboat, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll come to the party and provide your own costume as well!”

  An actor-friend from way back, Simon Wolfe, once told me that he would never, ever wear a costume unless he was being paid to wear it, and I wondered how many cast members might share his views. It was pretty unusual, and not, I dare say, a terribly professional request. Typical Juliet. People who act for a living, even those poor souls who have to take badly-paid, under-rehearsed gigs in the boonies, have some pride.

  Juliet met us at the door dressed as Snow White. She was carrying a martini glass in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Her Snow White outfit was close to the Disney original in colour and design, but the cut was tweaked high and low to show off her ample physical features. The effect was startlingly soft-porn, as if old Walt had overdosed on Viagra before dreaming up the character.