Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “I know we kicked them out and everything,” he said, “but we could at least respect their cemeteries, eh?”

  Contacted at the Mohawk reserve in Goose River, south of Sikwan, Chief Pauline Joseph said that her ancestors regarded the Laingford area as a canoe route only. The meadow site in Laingford would never have been used to bury their dead. “It would be like having a funeral for your mom at a highway rest stop,” she said.

  Watson is the owner of Watson’s General Store, a grocery and butcher shop on Main Street.

  “He said it was just a passing comment,” Susan told me. “He thinks Grigsby was out to make him look bad.” We were having coffee on the farm house porch as I waited for the arrival of Becker and his son.

  “Well, the article certainly does that. Ancient burial grounds? Grasping at straws, wasn’t he?”

  “Archie has promised not to speak to the press again without consulting us first,” Susan said. “And Grigsby did rather take Archie’s words out of context. They were talking about the meadow, and how the children in the community used to play there.”

  “That’s sad,” I said. We sipped our coffee in silence, and I lit a cigarette—probably my last one of the day, as I didn’t want to smoke in front of the kid.

  “Polly, about last evening,” Susan said.

  “I wasn’t really on the phone to David Kane,” I said.

  “I know. You were just making a point, and I understand why. I just wanted to apologize for pressuring you to come in the first place.”

  “That’s okay. I should have said no, anyway. Next time I’ll declare a conflict of interest,” I said. “You could have found out who was on the committee quite easily somewhere else. Or you could have asked me earlier. It was the public grilling I didn’t like.”

  “Quite so. I got carried away, I think. Anyway, Emma said afterwards that she hopes you might drop in on her some time. She has something she wants to give you.”

  “Did you know she and Mom used to be friends?” I said.

  “Well, business associates really, Polly. Your mother was very choosy about her friends.”

  “You mean she didn’t have any,” I said.

  “Oh, she did, you know. Your father, for one.”

  “Right. And God. Very close friends with God, I seem to recall.”

  Susan nodded, gazing out across the fields. My parents had been what you might call “muscular Christians”, my mother from a fervent Irish Catholic background and my Dad an evangelical Baptist. When I was born, he’d agreed to convert to Catholicism for my sake. That particular combination of religious traditions had seethed and boiled and coughed up a household that had been zealous in the extreme. God, as they say, ruled. Or at least my parents’ interpretation of God did. After they died and Aunt Susan took me in, she told me that I could choose to attend church if I wanted to, but she wouldn’t be coming along. I never returned.

  Luggy, who had been splayed full length in the sun, catching some morning rays, suddenly sat up and wuffed. Rosie, ever his shadow, copied him. She was just learning to bark, little cartoon yips that were only endearing for the first couple of seconds. Moments later, Becker’s black Jeep Cherokee crested the hill and started down the long driveway into George’s valley.

  “I’ll see you later, Polly. Have fun,” Susan said and left the scene, perhaps not wanting to be perceived as a chaperone.

  You’d think that at age mid-thirty-something I would have moved past the sweaty palm stage in my dating career. After all, it was only a hike, and it wasn’t as if Becker and I were strangers. I squinted at the approaching Jeep and made out a small head in the passenger seat: the boy, Bryan. I realized that my nervousness was linked to Mark Becker the father, a person whom I hadn’t really met. There would be a triangular element to our outing that hadn’t been there before. Neither Becker’s son nor I would get his undivided attention, and we would not be able to give him ours. It would be a three-way thing, a dance, with each of us learning the steps for our respective roles of parent, child and romantically involved other adult. I’m a terrible dancer.

  The Jeep parked and the dogs did a Hello frolic as the doors opened.

  “Morning!” I called. The boy immediately got down to dog level and let Rosie climb all over him. “Dogs! A puppy! You’ve got a puppy!” he said. It was my little Webmaster of the day before, the fellow who had handed me his business card and offered to design a website for me. Becker, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, walked around the front of the vehicle and gave me a hug.

  “Hi there,” he said. “I knew your dogs would break the ice a bit. How’s it going?”

  “Everything’s great,” I said, hugging him back.

  “How’s the mascot coming?”

  “Still in the planning stages. Maybe Bryan can give me a little advice from a smaller person’s perspective. We met yesterday, you know. At the library.”

  “I saw your truck there when I went to pick him up. That’s our meeting place. Catherine and I can do the handover while he’s picking his books. It’s sort of neutral there.” I thought the term “handover” was a little peculiar, but what do I know about the language of divorce?

  “He reads a lot, does he?”

  “Well, he takes a lot of books out. I don’t see him reading much, though. He spends most of his time glued to the computer.”

  “He offered to design me a website,” I said.

  “Did he tell you how much he charges?”

  “It’s a sliding scale, Dad,” Bryan said, standing up, his arms full of Rosencrantz. “I only charged you that much because Mom said you could afford it. Is this a boy dog or a girl dog?”

  “It’s a girl,” I said. “Her name is Rosie, and the other one’s a male called Lug-nut.”

  “They’re cool. Dad, I think she likes me. Can I get a dog?”

  “I doubt it,” Becker said. “Your Mom’s probably allergic to them.”

  “I promise she’s not,” Bryan said. “Anyway, we could keep it at your place. I’d come over and feed it and walk it and stuff. There’s lots of stuff about dogs on the Net. Pleeeze?” The boy’s voice had taken on that wheedling tone that hits the ear in the same way Rosie’s barking does. I think I winced.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Becker said. “Right now, let’s just have fun with these ones.”

  “Here, Bryan,” I said, handing him a tote bag filled with dog stuff, the puppy-mom’s version of a diaper bag. “You can be officially in charge of their gear. There’s biscuits, leashes, dog food and pooper scooper bags in there.”

  “Eeeew. Pooper scooper?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “When you take dogs to public places, you have to pick up their poop so people don’t step in it.”

  “I don’t have to do that, do I, Dad?”

  Becker glanced at me and grinned. “We’ll take turns,” he said.

  “We’ll call it being on doodie-duty,” I said.

  “Gross,” Bryan said, then gazed into Rosie’s big brown eyes. “When I’m on doodie-duty, try not to poop, okay?” She licked his face, and he chuckled.

  “Let’s go,” Becker said. “Dogs and boys in the back seat.”

  “Our kids seem to be hitting it off,” I said, buckling myself into the passenger seat.

  “They’ll keep each other occupied, anyway,” Becker said, pointedly, his expression suggesting that a little low-key fooling around might not be out of the question. This could turn out to be a good day.

  Kuskawa is full of walking trails, criss-crossing the landscape like a vast recreational web. It wasn’t always so—the thick forest which makes up ninety-five per cent of the surface area around here used to be untamed, but hiking and birding have enjoyed a vogue in recent years. Perhaps because of the ageing demographic (everybody with money retires here from the city), the local municipal governments all recognized that building trails would boost the tourism economy. Every time a new trail opens, there’s a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a blurb in the paper,
and another flock of fit, eager seniors bursts out of the starting gate, seeking the elusive fungus and the lesser spotted titwattle.

  The Oxblood Rapids trail is one of the older ones, a natural path worn down by generations of locals and summer visitors seeking a good picnic spot by the falls. The Oxblood Falls aren’t the biggest in Kuskawa, but they’re pretty impressive, and there are picnic tables under the trees. The trail is easy to follow, carpeted in a thick layer of aromatic pine needles. The sun filters through the trees, dappling the trail with light, and there’s plenty of room to walk side by side.

  Becker and I linked hands as we walked, Bryan galloping on ahead with the dogs. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, and there was a lot to catch up on. Cottage break-ins were up that season, Becker said.

  “More and more people are building summer homes up here and filling them with antiques,” he said. “Used to be, you’d furnish your cottage with garage-sale junk and old appliances. Now, they put in state of the art entertainment systems and fully stocked bars and leave the places empty for weeks at a time.”

  “Pretty tempting,” I said.

  “Unfortunately. The monster cottages always seem to be built in areas where jobs are scarce and people are hurting. However, theft was still a crime last time I looked.”

  We chatted about the changing face of Laingford, and I found myself telling him about the League for Social Justice. I wasn’t tattling, I swear. It just made a good story.

  “What do you think this group is planning to do?” Becker said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. More letters to the editor, I guess. A delegation to council. Won’t do any good. David Kane’s on a roll.”

  “It’ll be good to have another photo lab,” he said. “I got a bunch of prints back from Shutterbug the other day, and half of them didn’t turn out.”

  “That usually has more to do with the photographer than the processing,” I said.

  “What, me? A bad photographer? Not my fault I keep forgetting to take the lens cap off,” he said.

  “Don’t give up your day job.”

  “Actually, I was planning to quit the force and become a fashion photographer,” he said, pulling one of those disposable cameras out of his backpack. “Pose for me against that tree, would you? Good, good. Chin up. Now work with me, babe.” Bryan rushed back down the trail, his face pale, the dogs behind him, barking excitedly.

  “Dad! Dad! A guy just fell over the falls and he’s floating in the water at the bottom and I think he’s dead!”

  Six

  All set for camping? Forgotten something? Kountry Pantree has all your campsite food needs at “In-tents” prices! Fill your cooler at the Pantree!

  —A billboard at the corner of Hwy 14 and the off-ramp to Laingford, 2 km. from Kuskawa Provincial Park

  Becker immediately went into full alert mode. The camera disappeared, and, in two big strides, he was crouched at Bryan’s level, looking him right in the eye. The terror on the kid’s face was real. No way this was a little boy joke. “Where?” Becker said.

  “Back there along the trail. In the shallow water,” Bryan said. His face crumpled, and he fought back tears. Becker gave him a quick, powerful hug then ran down the path, the dogs following at his heels.

  Bryan and I stared at each other for a moment, biting our lips, suspended in child/adult limbo. What was I supposed to do? Should I take him back to the Jeep? I tried to remember what it was like to be eight, although Bryan was more savvy than I’d been at twelve. He’d had a shock, certainly, but wouldn’t it be worse not knowing the outcome? No way I was doing the nanny thing, I decided. Not my style.

  “Let’s go, Bryan,” I said. “Your Dad may need help. Just stay back, okay?” He looked relieved. We ran together in the direction his father had taken. Around a bend in the trail, the shallows of the falls lapped against a rocky shore. Becker was already in the water up to his armpits, hauling a motionless figure to the edge.

  “Take care of this,” I said to the boy, handing him the backpack that Becker had dropped before he ran. Bryan took it mutely, his eyes wide. “If it’s too scary, you don’t have to look,” I said, then waded in to help. The guy in the water was very big.

  “I don’t think we’ve lost him yet,” Becker said. “You know CPR?” I nodded. We laid him out and began, Becker doing the mouth-to-mouth yucky part and me doing the push-on-the-chest bit. We worked together as if we’d been doing it for years, like the guys on that seventies TV show, Emergency. The expression “Ringer’s Lactate” popped into my head by itself, and I heard a snatch of the theme music. (The guys on the show were always plugging their rescued victims into an I.V. drip of Ringer’s. It was kind of a catch word for those of us who watched it.) Funny where the mind goes when you’re high on adrenaline. It only took a few moments of work before the man twitched, vomited all over Becker and started coughing.

  Becker and I looked at each other for a long, joyful and triumphant moment. Since we’d known each other, our eyes had met over several lifeless bodies. Death had engineered the initial introduction and continued to check in on us from time to time to see how we were doing. There’d been my friend Francy, hanged in her kitchen; there’d been Francy’s husband, shot in the chest; there’d been an anonymous drowned snowmobiler, a garotted actor and another I can’t talk about. All very horrible, traumatic and gruesome. The emotional fallout had been brutal, and it wasn’t as if we’d ever really sat down and discussed it. I’d never said “Hey Becker, how do you feel about all the dead bodies between us?” He had never asked me if I was troubled by ghosts. I was. I had nightmares sometimes.

  For once, Death left the party early. Becker and I had just spent a few amazing and terrible minutes together in a place where the only thing that mattered was pumping life back into a soggy stranger, and we had done it. We had brought someone back. Oddly, this rescue utterly cancelled the other stuff out. I felt all those wispy, pathetic ghosts depart en masse like puffs of smoke, twisting in the air above us for a moment before being whisked away by the wind. I was soaked, and my heart was thumping so hard my ears were ringing, but I could feel the grin stretching my face muscles.

  “Is he dead?” Bryan called timidly from his perch on the rock above us.

  “I think he’s going to be all right, son,” Becker called back.

  “You saved him?”

  “I guess so,” Becker said. The man was struggling to sit up now, still coughing, but obviously out of danger. Bryan cheered, his young voice sounding thin against the roar of the falls.

  “Bring me that blanket in the knapsack, will you, Bryan?” Becker said. The boy did so, and Becker wrapped it around the man’s shoulders.

  “My camera? Where’s my Leica?” the half-drowned man croaked.

  “Take it easy, Vic,” Becker said. “Don’t try to talk for a bit. You had a close call there.” Vic? Becker knew him?

  “Where are the others?” the man said.

  “The others?” I said, glancing around. There was nobody else to be seen.

  “The Camera Club. We were all up there, getting shots of the falls,” the man said, pointing above our heads to where the Oxblood Falls cascaded down a steep incline, thundering over rocks and throwing up spray. How he had survived the descent without being battered beyond recognition, I couldn’t imagine.

  “Vic’s a town councillor. Volunteer firefighter too, as well as a pretty good photographer,” Becker said to me. “Vic, this is my friend, Polly Deacon.”

  Vic shook my hand. His was cold and wet. “I guess the Leica’s in the drink,” Vic said, grimacing. “Better it than me, I suppose.”

  “You remember what happened?” Becker said.

  “Not really. One second I’m trying to get a close-up of the spray over one of those rocks, and the next second I’m ass over teakettle in the wash cycle,” Vic said. His throat sounded raw, and he was shivering. “You know what? It’s true what they say. Your life does flash before you.”

  “My s
on saw you fall,” Becker said. Vic turned his head to look at Bryan, who had recovered a bit of his colour and was listening to the conversation with lively interest.

  “You did, eh? Lucky for me. You didn’t happen to see if I was pushed, did you?” Bryan blinked, and I felt Becker stiffen beside me.

  “Pushed? Someone pushed you?” he said.

  “Could be,” Vic said. “It’s kind of fuzzy, but I don’t think I slipped. I’d remember that.”

  Becker gazed up at the falls, his expression doing a Polaroid transformation into grim cop-ness. “So how come the rest of your group hasn’t noticed you’re missing?” he said.

  “We were fanned out all over the place,” Vic said. “We were supposed to meet down here for lunch, actually. I guess I’m a little early.”

  As if on cue, a trio of retirement-age women appeared from behind a clump of bushes near the falls-side of the trail. When they saw us, they exclaimed loudly and hurried over. All three had cameras slung around their necks and camera bags over their shoulders.

  “Land sakes, Victor, what happened to you?” the tallest one said. Her iron-grey hair stuck out like thatch from under her Tilley hat, and she had a comfortable, baggy face that spoke of years spent happily in the great outdoors.

  “I fell in, Sophie. Detective Becker here and his friend rescued me. The breath of life, eh? Mark, I don’t know how to thank you. Sorry about your shirt.”

  “We need to get you to Emerge and have you checked out, Vic,” Becker said.

  “No way,” Vic said. “Hate hospitals. I’m fine. Besides, I don’t want to miss the picnic.”

  “You almost drowned, buddy. You’re in shock.”

  “Not half as shocked as I’ll be if you drag me to Laingford Memorial. All I need is a couple of Sophie’s lemon squares, and I’ll be fighting fit in no time.” The lady in the Tilley hat chortled.

  “What makes you think I brought my squares, Victor?” she said.

  “Saw them in your camera bag when you gave me that film,” he said, then grimaced. “Lost my camera, though. At the bottom of the Oxblood, I guess.”