Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  Juliet had requested a new number, “Axe Me No Questions”, for Brad to sing. We were going ahead with the idea of making the Axe a character, and while the prop would have no actual lines, it was allowed to make sort of whiny, inarticulate noises from time to time.

  This put added pressure on Shane, but he was enthusiastic and had won Brad over by sheer force of personality. The two actors had spent the last half hour of the day working up a schtick for the Woodsman’s first entrance—the kind of slapstick comedy that Juliet had envisioned when the idea popped out during morning rehearsal. The schtick was screamingly funny, and Juliet had asked Ruth to write the song as a kind of reward for Brad, who had finally accepted that he was going to be upstaged by a foam rubber axe.

  I had helped Ruth write a number of songs over the years, including some really neat ones for Shepherd’s Pie’s fourth album, Maple Tree Market, due out soon in a record store near you. We decided to get together that evening to work on the new number. I also took the opportunity of being alone to tell her about the earlier puppet-hanging and to suggest that we put the keyboard, amp and speakers away in the wardrobe room closet (which had a lock) every night.

  “That’s a pain in the butt,” Ruth said. “Couldn’t we just strike the cables and leave everything else?”

  “I’m just worried about your stuff,” I said. “I don’t know who pulled the stunt, but it’s the second time in two days that someone’s used your cables for weirdness, and I don’t think the person has a lot of respect for property. We’re better off storing the valuables, I think.”

  “What about the puppets and props?” Ruth said. “We can’t strike everything every night.”

  “Actually, we can, or we should fairly soon,” I said. “The cast is going to have to get used to setting everything up in the shortest time possible. I was going to do a strike and set-up on Thursday, anyway. We’ll add another strike and load at the end of the day tomorrow and haul everything downstairs to do the pack for the first time. It’ll be brutal—it always is. But then all the stuff will be safely inside the van, which I’ll be driving back to Cedar Falls every night. We preview Saturday, after all, and then we’re on the road next week, God help us.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, we lock up your equipment, and the puppets are on their own. I just hope some of them know karate.”

  “The Kevin puppet didn’t.”

  “No, poor little guy. I wonder if the person who did it was targeting the actor playing the role.”

  “Now, why would anyone want to hurt Shane?” Ruth said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “He’s beautiful, talented, a certified chick-magnet and a violent drunk. Everybody loves him.”

  “You weren’t in here doing puppet-murder earlier, were you?” I said.

  “Nope. Not me. I was in bed until eleven. Part of my contract, darling. Music rehearsals in the afternoon only.”

  “Except for yesterday,” I said.

  “That wasn’t planned. Juliet informed me of that in the wee hours of the party on Sunday night. I told her I’d only do a morning sing-through if she gave me fifty bucks. She did, too. Cash.”

  “Well, you are the famous folk singer,” I said.

  “That’s me. Oh, by the way, don’t worry about making Rico wait around. I told him I’d give him a ride home.” I’d totally forgotten about him, actually. Shows what a caring friend I am.

  “Thanks, Ruth. Tell him I’ll pick him up at the regular time tomorrow.” It was really time for Rico to get another car, I thought. His vintage Caddy had died that winter, after a long battle with chronic radiator-trouble. I’d been doing a lot of chauffeuring ever since. Not that I minded, but Rico was a bit tight with his cash, and I would have appreciated the odd twenty for gas. These unworthy thoughts embarrassed me, so I switched the subject.

  “Hey, you know what? Juliet gave me a computer.”

  “She’s corrupting you, Polly. First the cellphone, now this. You’ll be moving to Toronto and trading in goat futures next. Listen, with this computer—avoid the chat rooms, okay? Now, I’ve gotta go. See you tonight.”

  As she left, I wondered if Ruth, too, had met some sexy woman from Newark on the Net. Not likely. She and Rose had been together for twenty years, and a cyber-flirtation wasn’t her style. Still, my interest was thoroughly piqued by that point. I made a mental note to check out the chat rooms at the first opportunity, then headed downstairs to keep my appointment with Tobin, master of blowing things up.

  There are three pyrotechnic devices, or flashpots in The Glass Flute. They’re guaranteed to thrill the Nikes off the preteen audiences and scare the holy heck out of their teachers and caregivers. In the show, the fireworks are synonymous with evil. The first pot goes off with the entrance of the serpent.

  “The first one is easy to set up,” Tobin said. “It’s placed in the branches of the tree at the top of Scene Seven, just before the serpent flops out of the branches and lands on top of Kevin.”

  I’d seen the video and I knew what the effect would be—a sharp pop and a small flash of fire, plus a lot of sparkly smoke.

  Tobin unsnapped the lid of the Pyro supply box, which held the explosives. The box was marked with all sorts of skulls and crossbones and danger signs, which I thought wasn’t the best idea, considering we were going to be unloading everything into school gyms across Ontario. Any kid getting a gander at that would be insane not to take a look.

  “There’s a padlock,” Tobin said, seeing my expression.

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I get the only key, right?” Tobin nodded and took out a small plastic bottle full of grey powder, one of several in the box. The bottle was labelled #1, in bright pink lettering.

  “This is the stuff that makes the bang,” he said. “It’s volatile, and you want to be sure to use only the tiniest bit.” He opened a small plastic cannister and extracted something that looked like a match, except that it was made of thin red wire, with a grey blob on the end. The end of the match was split into two copper leads.

  “These are electric matches,” he said. “They’re expensive, and hard to come by. We get them from a place in the States, and I’ve only got enough for the first week of the show. The ones we ordered haven’t come in yet. However, we’re going to waste some of them now so you’ll understand how they work.” He produced a nine-volt battery and pressed one of the leads onto the positive ring-thing on the battery-top.

  “Fired by itself, the match is harmless,” Tobin said, and pressed the other copper lead onto the negative ring. There was a tiny snap and a spark.

  “That’s your triggering mechanism,” he said.

  He showed me how the battery fitted into a little metal box, about the size of a small pack of smokes, with a red “go” button soldered on top. Originally, the box had held one of those flavoured coffee powders. A wire ran from the box, and at the end of it were two copper leads corresponding to the leads on the match. You with me so far? Good. Don’t try this at home, kids.

  “This is makeshift,” he said. “It works, but it can’t take rough handling. I’ll be sending you out with a soldering kit in case it gets wrecked.”

  “Gee. Electronics and Pyrotechnics 101, as well as computer lessons,” I said. “My brain hurts.”

  “That’s why Juliet’s paying you the big Kuskawa bucks,” Tobin said, without much humour. He put the battery box down and took a moment to tell me about a friend of his who had SM-ed the Flute some years ago and had lost a couple of fingers in a stupid pyro accident, because he got careless. I paid more attention after that.

  “If you follow the same procedure every time and observe the usual precautions, you’ll be fine,” he said. He took another match out of the tube and laid it on the table we were working at. Then he slipped a long piece of soft-looking paper from an envelope.

  “This is the coolest stuff in the world,” he said, allowing enthusiasm to creep into his voice. He ripped a small piece off, whipped out his lighter an
d set fire to the scrap, which ignited, flashed and disappeared with a woof. “Flash paper,” he said. “The magician’s secret.” It looked like thick Kleenex and had a sheen to it.

  Tobin tore off another scrap, about two inches square, placed it on the table and poured about a quarter teaspoonful of the pyro powder into the centre of it. Then he placed the head of the match on top, carefully wrapped it up and tied it with a piece of sewing thread. The result was something that looked like a big Q-tip. He wired the leads of the match to the leads of the trigger-box wire, then he handed the box to me.

  “Pyro demonstration number one,” he said, grinning.

  “Shouldn’t we do this outside?” I said, feeling distinctly nervous.

  “Heck, no,” Tobin said. “This stuff is designed to be fired off in theatres, places where there’s lots of curtains, paper and flammables. Where there’s smoke, you won’t find fire.”

  “How far away do you have to be?” I said.

  “Just don’t put your face directly in front of it,” Tobin said. “Even then, it would only singe your eyebrows. My friend got hurt because the pyro power spilled and then someone tripped the trigger, which he’d wired up first to save time. Bad move. This stuff’s safe, as long as you’re in control.”

  “Okay, then. Here goes,” I said and pressed the button.

  It was beautiful. There was a loud pop, a shower of sparkly stuff, a big puff of smoke and it was gone in a moment. The spent match cooled in seconds, and Tobin untwisted it, then made me set one up.

  My first flashpot was a bit big, too much powder and flash paper, the next one was too small (to make up for it), and, like Goldilocks, I got it just right on the third try.

  We made up Q-tips of the same powder to construct the second and third flashpots, which were set off in specially-made bowls—pots, really, from whence came the name. The bowls were metal, wired with thick cable and triggered by a Pyro-pack, a remote switchbox that could be set ten feet away from the flashpot.

  Neither of the other two was dangerously big. After all, they would be set off in the curtained playbox, fairly close to the actors and the puppets, but they used more powder, a combination of several different types from the plastic bottles.

  Setting them off was a hoot, and I could have spent hours making bigger and bigger bombs. Tobin told me that the compulsion to do so was what led to accidents.

  “Always stick to the recipe,” he said. “Don’t give in to the temptation to experiment. It’s part of the preset and has to be just so.”

  At some point during the tour, I was supposed to pass on my secret flashpot expertise to another cast member, just in case something came up during the set-up that required my absence, like the van being stolen or something. I figured I’d probably pick Meredith, whom I expected knew how to do it already, or had a pretty good idea, considering that she’d done the show before. Letting Meredith play with explosives didn’t seem terribly sensible, but heck, she was the Equity deputy.

  We put the pyro supplies carefully back in their death-box, and Tobin handed me a small padlock and key.

  “I hereby confer on you the mantle of pyro-master and the key to Armageddon,” he intoned. “Use it at your peril.” I locked the box solemnly and took it upstairs, where I put it in the lockable closet with Ruth’s equipment. The phantom trickster was not going to get the chance to muck about with this stuff.

  As I was packing my briefcase, laptop and paperwork box into George’s truck, the Laingford OPP cruiser pulled up beside me and Morrison stuck his head out the window.

  “Polly,” he said, “I think you’d better follow me to the station.”

  “If this is another ‘identify the body’ trick, I’d rather eat ground glass,” I said.

  “It’s no trick, kid. Your friend George is in the lock-up, climbing the walls, swearing in a foreign language and calling for you. We were thinking you might be able to talk some sense into him.”

  Twenty-One

  MOTHER: You’re all I have to light my world, my son, so please take care / to lose you in my final hours would be too much to bear.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene i

  Morrison gave me a police escort all the way up the highway to the Laingford cop-shop. It was kind of fun, following a cruiser that was breaking the speed limit, flashing its lights and sticking to the fast lane as people pulled over and slowed down. George’s truck struggled valiantly to keep up.

  When we got to the police station, Morrison took a moment before we went in to tell me what had happened.

  “We got a call a couple of hours ago from a guy who said he lives next door to Mr. Hoito’s place,” he said. “Guy was pretty incoherent, crying and slurring his words, so we figured he was drunk, but he was plenty upset.”

  “Where was he calling from? George told me they didn’t have a phone.”

  “He was calling from a neighbour’s about a kilometre away. He said he ran for help after Mr. Hoito kidnapped his grandkids.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, we thought it was pretty odd, considering what we know of George Hoito, but we had to check it out, Polly.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Well, the two kids were definitely at Hoito’s place. They were locked in an upstairs bedroom, and they were scared but unharmed. Hoito was fine until we asked him to make a statement, and then he went sort of haywire and started spouting Polish, or whatever it is he speaks.”

  “Finnish.”

  “Finnish, then. He was so mad he was practically frothing at the mouth, and we couldn’t get a word of English out of him.”

  “What about the guy who called?”

  “We picked him up at the neighbour’s on the way to Hoito’s farm. He was drunk all right and loaded for bear. Said he left the kids playing in the yard and went inside to make dinner and when he went to get them, they’d disappeared. He used one of his dogs to track ’em, he said, right to Hoito’s farmhouse.”

  “Why did he think they were kidnapped?” I said. “Couldn’t they have just, you know, wandered over for a visit?”

  “Mr. Gamble—that’s the guy’s name—said that Hoito threatened him with a shotgun.”

  “Oh. And George? Was he drunk too?”

  “Didn’t appear to be. Why do you ask? He got a drinking problem?”

  “No,” I said. “What about the parents? There’s a pregnant woman and her spouse who live in that shack too. Where were they?”

  “No sign of them. Gamble says they were gone when he woke up this morning, and he hasn’t got a clue where they went. Says they’ve done it before, though. They leave the kids behind and take off for two or three days, and then turn up again with no warning.”

  “Where are the kids now?”

  “Back with Grandpa, of course.”

  “Geez, Morrison. Did you see that place? Isn’t there an alternative?”

  “We called in a social worker to do an evaluation. They’re being monitored.” I could only wonder what kind of criteria, after an evaluation, would deem the slum next door to George an appropriate place for two small kids.

  “Couldn’t you rack ’em up as abandoned?” I said.

  “Not with a blood relative handy,” Morrison said. I could see he didn’t like it either. “Let’s go have a chat with Hoito,” he said, and we stepped inside.

  “Hello, Ms. Deacon,” Becker said. He was sitting at his desk filling in a bunch of forms. He was inordinately cheerful, which ticked me off. “Come to bail out your buddy?”

  “Hey, Becker,” I said. “Found any more sled-sicles lately?” I wasn’t about to let him think for one minute that his little caper of the morning had affected me one bit.

  “No more so far. We’re going fishing again tomorrow,” he said. “The perp’s through that door, first cell to your left. Hasn’t said a word in English since he got here, except your name.”

  “Why’s he so chipper?” I muttered to Morrison as we passed by his desk and headed for th
e cells.

  “Well, actually, he’s loaded for bear too,” Morrison said. “The happy face is his way of pretending nothing’s wrong.”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  Morrison gave me a mournful look. “We’ve been assigned to marine duty,” he said. “Starting next week. Until we find the eleven other snowmobilers in Kuskawa Bay, we’re gonna be shipmates.”

  “Isn’t that a great gig, though?” I asked. “Deck shoes, sunscreen and short-sleeved shirts? Stopping speeding babes on Seadoos and giving them stern warnings?”

  Morrison glowered. “Not in the middle of May it isn’t,” he said. “The ice is barely out of the lake, the wind is cold, and police boats are tubs.”

  “Oh. Sorry about your luck, Earlie.” We reached the cells and there was George, sitting on the side of a cot with his hands clasped between his knees, his head down. Seeing him like that made my heart hurt. There’s a sweet little bald patch on the top of his head, which I rarely get to see, as he’s over six feet tall. He wears his yellowish-white hair long, pulled back in a pony tail, and he usually cuts a commanding figure. Now he just looked forlorn and crumpled. What the hell had happened in the past few hours? Why was he refusing to speak?

  He looked up as we approached.

  “Polly,” he said, “I am sorry about this.”

  “Me, too, George. What’s going on?”

  “I lost my temper,” George said. His accent was very thick—far more so than normal, and I was suddenly very worried about him. Had he experienced some sort of weird mental episode? Had he regressed, or something? Was he all there?

  “George,” Morrison said, using a gentle voice I’d never heard from him before, “if you’re not comfortable telling us what happened, I thought you might be able to tell Polly. How about it?”

  “I was waiting for you,” George said directly to me, ignoring Morrison. “You know what it has been like. They do not.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Morrison said. I felt like an interpreter in a bad cop-film.