Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “So, what’ve you been up to in the past twenty years or so?” I said.

  “Oh, you know. The usual,” Linda said, looking rather wistful. “I’m married. Three beautiful kids. I’m not Linda Stewart any more. I’m Linda Kirschnick.”

  “Not Doug? You married Doug? You lucky thing.” I swear that for a moment, Linda and I were fifteen again, staring into the past as if a veil had been lifted. Our voices had risen into the stratosphere, shrieking and giggling. We practically bounced up and down. Doug Kirschnick had been the hunk actor guy, the Grade Twelve Bogart with the bedroom eyes. We’d all had a massive crush on him, and Linda had married him. Gosh.

  “Yup. I snagged him,” Linda said, smiling proudly. “And we have three boys, Polly.” She snatched a framed photo from her desk and showed me—three young hunklets, all looking exactly like Doug had at various stages all through public and high school. All looking smug and self-satisfied.

  “So what’s Doug doing now?” I said, after admiring her brood. “Did he ever pursue his talent? He was an amazing actor.”

  “In more ways than one,” Linda said but did not elaborate. “He works here, actually. Real estate. A sales representative. He tried to be an actor, Polly, but never got anywhere. Real estate’s been good to us, though. We’re doing pretty well.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said, but there was a feeling of cold melancholy in the room, suddenly, as if the air-conditioning had been turned up a notch or two, if that were possible. Linda herself had been a brilliant math and physics student, destined we had thought for a PhD and a life of scientific research. I didn’t ask her about that. Her Chanel sweater and shiny receptionist’s desk were all the answer I needed.

  “What about you?” she said. “Married? Any kids?” I briefly sketched my life to date. I didn’t have any offspring to show her, but I did pull out a snapshot of me and the dogs on the front porch of the cabin.

  “You’re so lucky to be independent,” Linda said. “You can do anything you want. I find that hard, sometimes. The responsibility of a family.” I suddenly saw myself living in Mark Becker’s apartment, wearing a June Cleaver dress and fixing an after school snack for Bryan, Cheez Whiz and Ritz crackers, with the soap operas droning away on the TV in the background.

  “Independence can be lonely,” I said, surprising myself. There was no time for more, as the buzzer downstairs sounded and Linda became the Pitblado Kuskawa Enterprises receptionist again. After she had buzzed in whoever it was, she gave me a bright smile.

  “We’ll have to get together sometime,” she said.

  “Sure, that would be fun,” I said, but we both knew that was unlikely. In high school, all we’d had in common was drama class. It wouldn’t be any different now, and there’s nothing more depressing than playing “Whatever happened to so-and-so?” after you’ve realized there’s nothing else to talk about. Different circles, different lives.

  I followed her directions to the boardroom and began to set up my Kountry Pantree mascot sketches, feeling rather nostalgic and very slightly antique, as if I and my peers had all squandered our early potential and had nothing much to show for it.

  The Elliots, Winston and Serena, arrived with Duke Pitblado right behind them. Linda came in with fresh coffee and a tray of cheese, fruit and pastries from the French Loaf in Sikwan. I knew this because all their little petits fours have French Loaf logos on them in gold icing. Not exactly within the budget for the cheezie set. I hadn’t had dinner because my walking shorts, though fashionable, were a bit snug around the middle, so I’d planned to eat later. (A note to those of you on fixed incomes who sometimes have to show up at cadillacclass meetings. Eat lots of Kraft Dinner first so you don’t have to do battle with hunger when they bring out the high-end nibblies.) I waited until the men had loaded up their napkins with brie, stilton and strawberry tarts, then took a couple of grapes and a slice of perfect camembert on a whole wheat cracker. Ladies don’t pork out on the genteel finger food, I told myself, willing my tummy to stop gurgling.

  Serena Elliot, rail thin and possessed of a face that had been lifted more times than I’ve lifted a beer mug, contented herself with a black coffee and two carrot sticks. Duke Pitblado, who is a very big man, worked steadily through the food that was closest to him, eating with a mindless determination that I found a little embarrassing. Winston Elliot ignored the food but filled his coffee cup almost half full of cream and added about seven sugars. We were waiting for David Kane, who, being the head honcho, could be as late as he damn well pleased. We made small talk, about the weather, the traffic congestion downtown, and how wonderful it must be for the local retailers but how dreadful for the locals, etc. Pitblado boasted about skyrocketing real estate prices, and Elliot offered the information that the resort had been booked solid since May. I could have talked about the bumper crop of zucchini in George’s garden, but I didn’t think they’d be interested. Serena just looked at her nails and said nothing.

  When Kane arrived at almost a quarter after six, all the nibblies on the tray in Duke’s corner were gone, and he was starting in on my sector. Oddly, I had lost my appetite.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Kane said. “Got held up at the construction site.”

  “Everything going smoothly?” Duke asked, spraying shortcrust pastry across the table. Serena flinched, and an expression of distaste passed briefly across her smooth, shiny face.

  “Absolutely!” Kane said. I’ve never really trusted people who use that word instead of “yes”. “We should be ready to open on September the first, if everything stays on schedule. We’ve got almost a full complement of staff now, and our marketing campaign is ready to move into full gear.” Kane looked at me expectantly. “Which is why we’re here, of course. Polly? I believe you have some sketches to show us.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I didn’t mean to, it just popped out. I saw a flicker of amusement in Serena’s eyes, but her face remained immobile. I presented my three sketches. First there was Grocer Goose, a cheerful fowl (the one Bryan thought looked like E.T.) with a nice white apron and huge yellow feet. I pointed out, however, that if they went with that one, they’d probably have to schedule several staff members per shift to wear the costume, as the head piece was as Bryan described—held aloft, which would be hard on the arms.

  “We can’t have that,” Duke said. “We’d have people coming down with repetitive stress or arm injuries, and we could be sued.” Kane agreed. The word “sued” made him go pale.

  The second option was Willie Gopher. I had to explain the pun. “Willie Gopher . . . you know, as in the question ‘will he go for groceries?’ You could have fun with it in your ad stuff.”

  “I don’t get it,” Winston Elliot said.

  “You never get jokes,” Serena said. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. She had a lovely voice, all bell-tones and treacle.

  “Aren’t puns the lowest form of humour?” Duke said. This, in retrospect, when you looked at the ad campaign that eventually emerged, was ironic.

  “What about the cow? I always liked the cow idea the best,” Kane said. I showed them Kountry Cow. Or Kow, as they would have it. They loved it, as I knew they would. The vote was unanimous. Kountry Kow it was.

  “Dairy nice choice,” Serena said, looking pointedly at Duke.

  “How soon can you have the costume made?” Kane said. “The Bath Tub Bash is next Saturday and we want to put a Kountry Pantree tub in the race, to show our community support. I want the mascot to be driving it.” The Laingford Bath Tub Bash is an annual publicity stunt that’s been a highlight of the summer tourist season for about twenty years. The racing vessels—a bunch of fibreglass tub-shaped boats with small outboards, sponsored by practically every business in the area—run an obstacle course on the Kuskawa River, with much kibitzing and merriment. It’s a major deal—a big attraction, loved by many, loathed by some. It pulls about eight thousand people into the downtown core for an afternoon, always makes the regional TV news and c
reates the mother of all gridlocks on Main Street. Wahoo.

  “It could be dangerous for the person inside the costume if the tub capsizes,” I said. “The foam rubber padding would take on water and sink like a stone.”

  “They’ve got all those safety people on Sea-Doos standing by,” Kane said. “It’ll be fine. So, can you finish the costume in a week?”

  “Oh, jeez,” I said. “A week? I can try, I guess. There would have to be an extra charge for overtime, if I have to make it waterproof as well.” I had given Kane an estimate for the job when I got the go-ahead to make the sketches, but we hadn’t signed anything. “I’d thought I had until the end of August.”

  “Oh, we can throw in an extra couple hundred for time and trouble, can’t we, Dave?” Duke said. “Don’t worry about it, dear.” Now, I don’t much like being called “dear”, but the fact that these folks could talk about throwing in a couple of hundred like it was a sneeze made me regret my modest estimate at the beginning of the business. Live and learn, I guess.

  “Just invoice us,” Kane said. “We’re good for it.” He snickered then, and I realized that they were making fun of me. Well, a couple of hundred may be a joke to the Kountry Pantree magnates, but it wasn’t to me. I resolved at the next meeting to gorf out on all the pricey stuff on the goodie tray before anyone else got there.

  Ten minutes later, I was out in the parking lot with an advance on my fee burning a hole in my pocket, while the muggy July air burned a hole in my brain. I had one week to build a full-body cow costume, complete with detachable head, out of fun fur and foam rubber, and teach some poor teenager how to stumble around in it without falling on his butt. In addition, it appeared that I was also required to make the costume waterproof (which ruled out using hot-glue, my old standby) and provide enough visibility in the head-piece so that the person inside could see well enough to pilot a Bath Tub around a watery obstacle course without drowning. A puppet maker’s work is never done.

  Eleven

  Prescription for savings: Find all your drugstore needs right where you buy your groceries. The Kountry Pantree Drugstore saves you time and money, too.

  —An ad in the Golden Oldies monthly supplement to the Laingford Gazette

  I am not, as you may have gathered, a deeply religious person, but I do have some regard for the Sabbath. I like the notion that on one day out of the seven, a person is more or less forbidden to do any work. Not that I work particularly hard during the rest of the week, compared to the wage slaves who nine-to-five it in offices or factories, but a day of sanctioned idleness is welcome nonetheless. On Sunday morning, I closed the cover of my sketchbook and ignored the insistent whispering in my brain telling me I had less than seven days to create a cow. Instead, I lounged on the deck with L.R. Wright’s last book, Kidnap, and a cup of coffee with Bailey’s in it.

  Eddie Schreier and his girlfriend, Robin, found me snoozing there in the late morning.

  “Hey, Polly!” Eddie called from the path. Lug-nut and Rosencrantz, who had been dozing on my feet, scrambled up and went to meet them. I offered them coffee, and they joined me in the sun, sitting close together on the foldout patio lounger I’d scrounged from the dump. They were both a bit grubby, having spent most of the morning working in George’s vegetable garden.

  “We came up to deliver a message,” Eddie said. “Constable Becker called this morning. You and him are supposed to go to the police station.”

  “The station? I thought he was on vacation.”

  “Yeah. He said you had to go in to give a statement about the man that you guys rescued yesterday. He said to tell you that the guy died in hospital last night.”

  “Vic? Oh no. That’s terrible. He must have had a heart attack after all. Oh, poor Vic.”

  “Yeah, that sucks,” Eddie said. Both he and Robin had that sorrowful but slightly avid look you get when you hear about the death of someone you don’t know. It’s not that you’re glad they’re dead by any means, but the details are interesting. I told them about the river rescue and what kind of man Vic had seemed to be.

  “It’ll be a big loss to the town,” I said. “Vic was a councillor, and according to Becker, one of the only guys on council who really questioned things that everybody else blindly accepted.”

  “Susan says somebody probably bumped him off because he was against the Kountry Pantree project,” Eddie said. “That big store is sure making a lot of people mad, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Having a heart attack in hospital can hardly be construed as foul play, though,” I said. Vic had suggested the day before that someone was perhaps trying to nudge him off into the afterlife, but I didn’t mention it. I would definitely remind Becker, though. I sighed and tipped up my coffee cup to get the last drops of Bailey’s. My sabbath was over, I guess.

  “We also came to ask for your advice,” Eddie said, as I began to haul myself up out of my chair. His face had gone dead serious, and Robin’s had turned pink. I sat back down.

  “Ask away,” I said.

  “Ummm, well, it’s kind of hard,” Eddie said.

  “Anything I can do for you, I’ll do,” I said. “You know that, Eddie.”

  “Well, promise you won’t get mad? We can’t talk to Susan about this because she’ll go postal, and Robin’s dad’s going to kill her.”

  Uh-oh, I thought, guessing what was coming.

  “I can’t promise I won’t get mad, but if I do, I promise I won’t lecture you,” I said.

  “See, I told you she was cool,” Eddie said to Robin, who looked ready to hyperventilate. “Go ahead, Robin.” I waited. There was a long pause. Eddie was holding Robin’s hand very tightly, as if to give her strength for the next part, as they had obviously agreed that she would do the telling.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” Robin whispered. Yup. Figured.

  “We were always real careful, eh?” Eddie said. “It’s not like we’re a stupid couple of kids, you know?”

  “You just think you’re pregnant?” I said, gently. “You’re not sure yet?”

  “Well, my period’s late and everything,” Robin said. “I can’t go to the doctor because he’ll tell my Mom, and there’s no clinic around here.”

  “Your doctor isn’t allowed to tell her,” I said. “They’re supposed to keep that stuff confidential.”

  “Oh, right,” Robin said, her voice weighted with sarcasm.

  “Well, they’re not,” I said, but I didn’t sound all that confident myself. Small town and all that.

  “So what do we do now?” Eddie said.

  “Well, I guess the first thing to do, before you both flip out completely, is to find out for sure,” I said. “Then when you know, you can start to look at your options.”

  “I’m so scared,” Robin said.

  “You know I won’t let you go through this alone,” Eddie said. Well, that was a blessing anyway, I thought. There were plenty of teenaged boys who would disappear like smoke at the first whiff of fatherhood. I spent a moment swallowing the speech that popped into my mind—the “if you’re not prepared to take responsibility, why the hell did you have sex in the first place” speech, which is what they’d have got from Susan. I was flattered that they’d decided to confide in me, but I also wondered if they did so because they thought I approved of teen sex.

  “How old are you, Robin?” I asked.

  “Seventeen,” she said. Same age as Eddie.

  “Well, if you are pregnant, you won’t be the first seventeen-year-old mom on the planet,” I said. “In some cultures, you’d be an old married lady with three kids by now. Juliet was about twelve, you know. So was the Virgin Mary.” Robin smiled wanly.

  “Robin and I love each other,” Eddie said. “And we’re going to get married some day.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “But you’d probably like to have some control over the timing, eh?” They both nodded.

  “So, how are you going to find out for certain whether or not you’re pregnant?” I said. I w
asn’t going to lead them by the hand.

  “Ummm, there are tests you can get, right? I’ve seen them in magazines,” Robin said.

  “Yup. That’s right. You can pick them up at the drugstore for about ten bucks,” I said. “And the Downtown Drugstore’s open on Sundays. You can go right now.”

  “But what if somebody sees?” Robin said. “Then they’ll tell my Mom. She knows a lady who works there.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Eddie, you two have been using condoms, right?” He nodded, blushing. “And how do you acquire those?”

  “Ummm, a friend gets them for me.”

  “Uh, huh. And I expect that the drugstore checkout person blabs it all over town that he’s buying condoms, right?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s never made a big secret of it,” Eddie said.

  “I see. So it’s cool to be seen buying condoms, because that means you’re ‘getting it’, right? But it’s uncool to be seen buying a pregnancy test, because that means you’re getting it, but you messed up.”

  “Sort of. I guess.”

  That was as far as I was willing to go in lecture mode, for now. Although I had plenty more where that came from. We all make mistakes, but they were so young, dammit.

  “So, you need a pregnancy test, but you’re too scared to go buy one.” They nodded and looked at me beseechingly.

  “I’d do it, but I just know Mrs. Hillman would tell my Mom,” Robin said. “And everybody knows that Eddie’s my boyfriend, so he can’t either.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s not illegal to procure a pregnancy test for a minor,” I said. “That’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it?” They both nodded, doing the kicked-puppy-eyes thing. I felt like a sucker, but then I am one.

  “Okay, but I want you to pay me back the ten bucks, Eddie.”

  “Oh, I will, Polly. Right away. I’d pay you now if I had any money on me.”

  “Would you help us, you know, do the test?” Robin said. “I’m not very good in science.”