Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “Do you want to get together tonight?” Becker said, as we pulled into the driveway at the farm. “Bryan’s going to bed early, and we could watch a movie or something. I make a mean batch of popcorn.”

  “I don’t think tonight, thanks,” I said. “I have to get a head start on the mascot, and I have a meeting at nine tomorrow.” I hadn’t forgotten that Robin was supposed to come over to my place with her apple juice bottle. What Becker and I had not said, but both understood, was that if I went over to his apartment to watch a movie, I would very likely spend the night. Of course the prospect of curling up in bed with a good policeman had its attractions, but Bryan’s presence would have made me feel inhibited, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around when the Becker boys were bickering.

  Becker told Bryan to stay in the Jeep and came around to the passenger side as I was clambering out. “See you later, Bryan,” I said, and Bryan gave me a quiet “Bye” just before I closed the door. He looked small and lonely sitting there, and I felt a faint tug in the heartstring region. Poor little guy. All he wanted was to spend some quality time with his Dad. What was so wrong with that?

  “Have you given any more thought to what we talked about yesterday?” Becker said, his face close to mine.

  “I’ve hardly thought of anything else,” I said. “But I can’t answer you yet. Give me some time, okay?”

  “All the time you need,” he said and did that thing he does with the hair on the back of my neck that makes my knees go funny.

  “Becker, ease up on Bryan, eh? He may have the brains of a university student, but he’s only eight.”

  “I know. Don’t worry. This will blow over in about half an hour. We fight a lot, Bryan and I, but we work it out. The temper’s in the genes, eh?”

  “And in this corner, wearing the green trunks, we have Bryan Becker, weighing in at almost sixty pounds . . .”

  “Polly, I’m not asking you to be the referee, you know.”

  “I know,” I said, and he kissed me.

  The passenger window rolled down, and there was Bryan sitting where I had been. He was holding my drugstore bag. He waved the pregnancy test at me before cramming it in with the rest of the stuff.

  “This tipped over, but I put it all back,” Bryan said. “You forgot it. Here.” I took the bag, hoping that Bryan wasn’t savvy enough to have been interested in reading the labels. Giving Becker a final peck on the cheek, I headed up to the cabin to commune with my dogs in solitude.

  Thirteen

  The shots of a lifetime: Who is doing your wedding photos? Why not make sure they’re perfect? Our photo team at Kountry Pantree will coordinate your wedding shots and present you with a dream album at the end, at a fraction of the cost you might expect! Call us now!

  —A Kountry Pantree ad

  I am on a storm tossed cruise ship on the high seas, and I am struggling to keep upright as I lurch down the aisle of what seems to be a grand dining room. I am dressed in a 1920s sailor suit which is a little too big for me, and I’m about to get married to the captain. The wedding guests are holding on to each other for support, but there are only a few of them, and I know instinctively that a lot of passengers have abandoned ship already. I wonder why I haven’t.

  The captain, in a white dress uniform, has his back to me and appears to be steering, looking out of a large porthole at the end of the room. Through the porthole I can see waves that are miles high—it looks like we’re going through a mountain range. Oddly, I’m not seasick. I stumble and drop my bouquet, a cunningly arranged bunch of carrots, and I hear the band leader call out to his musicians to “keep on playing, chaps.”

  When I get to the end of the room, the captain turns around with a big smile on his face. He is very short. It is Bryan. He reaches out his hand towards me and at the same moment, I see the iceberg looming up in the porthole behind his head. The band strikes up the theme song to the movie Titanic. I wake up just before impact with Celine Dion’s wretched, saccharine bellow reverberating in my brain.

  As I swigged my first coffee of the day, I congratulated my subconscious for its lack of subtlety. In my sleeping state, at least, marriage to Becker spelled certain disaster. I lit a cigarette and looked at the list of pros and cons I’d written out (albeit in a somewhat chemically-altered state) the night before. The Pro list went like this:

  REASONS TO MARRY MARK BECKER

  If I love him, marriage is logical. (I wasn’t sure if I did, though.)

  I’d have financial security for the first time in my life. Becker could take care of the bills, and I’d never get another knee-capper letter from Petrocan again.

  It would be a chance to be intimately connected with a partner and share everything with him. (This also appeared on the Con list.)

  Marriage to Becker is a guarantee that I would never again be the “extra single person” at dinner parties. (And I went to so many, eh?)

  If I ever decide I want children, I will have a stable family relationship in which to bring them up.

  I would get to practice parenting on Bryan before I had one of my own. (This was where I started to go into surreal-mode. Having children was right up there with sticking needles in my eye and being set on fire.)

  In sharing my life with Becker, I would have support and comfort during the bad times and get to share the joy of the good times. (At this point in making the list, I wondered if there might be a job for me at the Hallmark card company.)

  In case there really is a God, marrying Becker would save us both from hellfire, seeing as what we were doing on a regular basis could be classified as textbook fornication.

  I would get unlimited sex whenever I wanted it, without the complication of arranging places and times.

  I would get to keep Becker’s pretty ring and wear it on my finger. I would also get to star in “Wedding Day, the Movie”.

  The Con list was longer:

  REASONS NOT TO MARRY MARK BECKER

  The institution of marriage holds little, if any, importance for me. However, perhaps it does for him. If I said yes, I would have to rethink my values.

  Although there would be financial security, I’d have to start being responsible about money.

  It would be a chance to be intimately connected with a partner and share everything with him. It would mean giving up some things, like dope and cigarettes and take-it-when-you-want-it solitude.

  Marriage to Becker would mean I could never lust after anyone else again, or at least I couldn’t act on it. (Not that I’m easy or indiscriminate, you understand, but I like my options to be open.)

  I get bored easily. What will happen if I get bored with Becker?

  I bet I would have to wash his socks.

  I might feel pressured to have a baby with him.

  I’d become the wicked stepmother of Bryan.

  As far as bad times and good times go, I kind of like to enjoy them on my own. Face it, Polly. You’re a hermit and you like it. Hermits shouldn’t marry.

  10. I am reasonably certain that if there is a God, he doesn’t much care about the rutting practices of his human creatures. I think he’s more concerned with whether or not they love each other and treat each other with respect.

  What if my husband wanted sex and I didn’t?

  I’d have to use the expression “my husband”. And I’d be “wife”. Yikes.

  I would wear Becker’s pretty ring on my finger, and I wouldn’t be able to take it off. “Wedding Day, the Movie” could turn out to be a turkey.

  I would have to leave my cabin and join the twenty-first century. I would have to have a TV in my home and a telephone. I know damn well that Becker wouldn’t seriously consider moving into the cabin with me. Or would he?

  Lug-nut would be very pissed off.

  All in all, the Con list was more compelling than the Pro list. Aunt Susan had taught me to make lists like that when I was faced with a major decision. I considered telling her about Becker’s proposal and showing her the list, but I wasn’
t sure what her reaction would be. A year previously I would have put money on her saying “Marry that policeman? You’ve got to be kidding!”, but now I wasn’t so sure. She seemed to be more concerned with my security and my future than she used to be. I guessed she was feeling her age.

  The thing is that for me, an attachment has always been something to be choked down, a cocktail of conflicting desires with the sweetest taste to be found in the dregs.

  The weaving together, the knitting of affections, has always been a challenge, a complicated obstacle course of cause and effect, clash and compromise. It isn’t that I set myself up for failure; I’ve always built my domestic constructions to last. They’re robust, towering things cemented together with plans for the future and constant reassurances of fidelity. My partners have trusted me, always. I don’t trust myself, ever. Discontent gathers like saliva, making whatever is good taste bitter. The biggest rush of all is cutting loose.

  I loved the idea of loving Becker, but that’s as far as I was willing to go. I knew that marrying him wouldn’t work, and if I was going to hurt him by saying no, at least that was better than going along with it and then screwing up after the deed was done.

  I burned both lists and resolved to give Becker’s ring back, with a grateful, loving and gentle “thanks but no thanks.”

  Robin arrived on the dot of nine, apple juice bottle (still warm) in hand. She was pale and alone.

  “Eddie’s working this morning,” she said. Eddie worked in the bakery at Watson’s General Store in Laingford. I wondered suddenly whether David Kane would try to headhunt him for the Kountry Pantree.

  “So, let’s do the test,” I said, trying to be cheerful. After having come to my decision about Becker, I felt a little melancholy, as if I’d just buried something or someone I cared about.

  The pregnancy test included a couple of plastic swizzle sticks with little pill-sized orbs embedded in a mesh cage at the bottom. Sort of like a Q-tip with a candy at the end. There were two of them, and the accompanying literature explained that this was a two-for-one deal, in case you wanted a second opinion.

  The instructions were extremely simple but written in such a way that made it obvious the manufacturers assumed that the question of yes or no was a joyful one.

  “If the ball turns blue,” the pamphlet said, “congratulations! See your physician right away to confirm the results!” It didn’t say “Better luck next time” with reference to the ball not turning blue.

  “Oh, God, I hope it doesn’t turn blue,” Robin said.

  “Me too,” I said. “Now, what it says we have to do is put the swizzle stick here into this little test tube, with a slug of your apple juice. You do that part, okay?” I watched her perform the experiment with shaking hands.

  “We’ve got to wait for five minutes then put the stick into the other test tube with the stuff in this other bottle. Then we wait another ten minutes and then we’ll know. If it turns blue, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  I put my watch on the table so that we could both observe the minutes ticking by.

  “We were careful, you know,” Robin said.

  “So Eddie said,” I said.

  “It was just that the condom came off once, eh? We were so scared. It got stuck inside me, and he had to pull it out. I guess it leaked. It was so gross.”

  “Are you using anything else? Spermicidal foam or anything?” I felt like Doctor Ruth and suppressed the urge to speak in a German accent.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like hair mousse. You spray it in and then if the condom breaks or comes off, the foam kills those little sperms dead like bug spray.”

  “Eeew.”

  “Look, Robin, the whole sex thing is ‘eeew’ if you look at it that way. You have to protect yourself, though. Eddie—and yes, I know he cares about you a lot—but Eddie isn’t the one who would have to deal with pregnancy directly if it happened. You would.”

  “He loves me.”

  “I know he does, honey, but being a parent is hard work. It’s for life. Have you thought about what you’ll do if this swizzle stick turns blue?”

  “Yeah, I guess. There are some girls at school who had babies.”

  “Are they still at school?”

  “One is. She’s a friend of mine. Tanya. Her Mom takes care of Tyler when she’s at school. And I’ve met her for coffee downtown a couple of times. Tyler’s really cute, and Tanya really loves him.”

  “I bet she grew up really fast, though.”

  “Oh, yeah. She can’t go out with us any more, and she wears sweats all the time now. She used to be this really hot dresser, you know? Now she doesn’t even wear her nose ring any more.”

  “Would your Mom help take care of your baby, if you had one?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. She works full-time.”

  “I see. So you would probably have to find a daycare space and the money to pay for it,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess, if I stayed in school.”

  “Do you have plans to go to university or anything?”

  “Well, I’m in Grade Twelve now. I wanted to take international business. I don’t know now, though.” I thought of Linda Kirschnick at the Real Estate office and her promise of a career in physics. The five minutes were up, and we transferred the swizzle stick from the pee solution into the test tube with the clear solution that came with the kit. Now we had to wait for another ten minutes.

  “Let’s get a breath of air,” I said. Robin and I did a circuit of the cabin while Lug-nut and Rosie gambolled about, bringing us sticks to throw. It was one of those golden mornings when the sky was a heartbreaking blue and the birds were twittering like demented opera singers.

  “Did you ever think of having kids?” Robin asked me.

  “Well, I’ve thought about it, Robin, but I’m not the maternal type. The noise drives me crazy, and I honestly don’t like being around babies. I’m always afraid I’m going to drop them.”

  “Really? I just love them. I do a lot of babysitting, eh?”

  “Good for you. But I think that having one of your own is a bit different. You can’t, you know, go home at the end of the evening.”

  “Yeah, there’s this one little guy, Adam, who’s a real handful. I charge extra when I go there.”

  “Think of how his mother must feel.”

  We went back inside. I’d put the test tube out of the way on top of the ice box.

  “You look,” Robin said. “I can’t. I’m too scared. Is it blue?”

  I looked. I held the test tube and swizzle stick up to the light and shook it a couple of times.

  “Robin,” I said, “the little ball-thing is as white as it was when we put it in. According to the whatever-it-is company, you’re not pregnant.” I held her while she cried.

  Robin had not wanted to use the back-up second-opinion stick. “No way I want to go through that again,” she said. She said she thought that her period might have been late because she’d been dieting lately.

  “I actually feel that I could get my period tonight, you know? I sort of feel heavy down there.” She left, beaming, after having promised to visit her doctor to get a prescription for the pill. Maybe after this scare, she and Eddie would be more careful. If I had my way, kids would be kept segregated until they were thirty.

  I poured the contents of the apple juice bottle out on the ground and threw the test stuff in my bathroom cabinet, then fed the dogs and prepared to head out. I was supposed to meet the members of the Weird Kuskawa Art group at noon in town, because the show was now being advertised in the Laingford Gazette, which meant it had to happen. We had planned it to coincide with the Bath Tub Bash on Saturday, to take advantage of the crowds. With the new Kountry Pantree cow deadline, I was in crunch time, but that was for later. For the time being, it was still a figment of my imagination, like Robin’s baby had been. I also had to get in touch with Becker, so I could tell him about my decision while causing him the minimum of pain.
I was feeling full, pressured to complete too many tasks in too short a period of time. Never mind that I thought Vic Watson had been murdered in his bed at the Laingford Hospital and agreed with Becker that constable Morrison, distracted by the charms of Constable Marie Lefevbre, might make a botch of it. Whatever happened to the back-to-the-land puppet-maker thing I’d dedicated my life to? How did it all get so complicated?

  Fourteen

  Nothing perks up a drab wall like a picture! And you don’t have to spend a fortune. Drop in to the Kountry Pantree home decorating centre and choose one of our top quality prints in a stunning variety of designer colours! Make your home a special place at Kountry Pantree.

  —A Kountry Pantree ad in the Kuskawa Home Improvement Guide

  The Kuskawa region, several hours north of Toronto, is a rugged, exquisite landscape full of deep, cold lakes, pink granite bedrock and dense forests. It’s a tourist-magnet, a resort developer’s wet dream and a haven for artists. The creative urge seems to lurk in the soil and in the air, and the local “find-it-here” maps are dotted with galleries and art supply stores. In the autumn, the hardwood forests of Kuskawa vibrate with fluorescent oranges, yellows and reds, impossible colours, really, the kind that you have to see to believe. The trees seem to give off a light of their own.

  For a few weeks every September, Laingford hosts thousands of Japanese and German tourists who wander blissfully through the streets, expensive cameras festooned around their necks like garlands. Vistas and lookouts become crowded with portable easels, the painters jostling for position and eyeing each other’s work with varying degrees of admiration or contempt.

  It’s not only the fall colour that inspires art here. The winters are magical; thick snow blankets everything and glitters in the cold sun, softening the sharp outlines of tree and cliff. Icy mists lift from the rivers and lakes, clothing the naked shoreline with silver. In spring, there are always a few days of tender beauty, when leaf-buds hover like smoke in the tops of the birch trees. The melting snow finds its way down to the lakes, forming merry brooks and rills that meander their way through the forest, catching the light in unexpected places. When summer hits, as it always does with a quick backhand we never expect, the forest floor bursts into a carpet of trilliums, red and white, and the ferns grow so fast you can almost hear them.