Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “I just have a bad feeling about this trip,” Theresa Morton told me privately as I took her coat in the hall. She wears a cloak these days, a Harris tweed thing of enormous width and weight, like a blanket. Beneath it she was wearing black, a pleasant, floaty thing with jet beading.

  “Thanks for telling me. I’ll be fine, Terry,” I said. “Nice dress.”

  “It’s vintage,” she said. “Rico found it for me.”

  “He and Brent have been here about half an hour. They came early with lots of grocery bags, and they’ve taken over the kitchen. It smells wonderful in there.”

  Rico and Brent were determined to iron out any negative wrinkles in the evening and were performing very funny TV chef impersonations and whipping up something naked in the wok. George and Susan were having a blast being the audience, I think, although the raven had retreated long ago to the barn. Eddie was chef’s assistant and was playing his own riff off the Rico and Brent Show with prodigal flair. He was stone-straight, too—I asked. His exhibition was natural, not chemical. This confirmed for me a long-standing suspicion that he was destined for the stage. Lug-nut and Rosencrantz were doing a creditable job as busdogs, keeping the floor very clean.

  Later, we all gathered around the long harvest table in the kitchen to eat a shrimp and noodle dish that was so good we couldn’t help but gobble it. Dimmy Cox had come, and Earlie Morrison. No Becker, who had called at six to say he had to finish a seriously overdue report and couldn’t make it. He was sending Morrison in his stead, he joked, and did I mind if Morrison drove me to the airport tomorrow night, as this report was taking longer than he had anticipated? We both knew perfectly well that Earlie had been invited in his own right as an honorary member of the family, being Eddie’s wrestling coach and friend, so the joke, meant perhaps to be self-mocking, came off sounding mean. I was annoyed that he was ducking out, and I spent most of the evening trying not to let it show.

  At the serving-out, George had proposed a toast to “Polly’s first trip to the Old Country and a successful conference and safe return”. After everybody took a swig (I didn’t touch my ginger ale, because you’re not supposed to toast yourself, Brent said), I replied in kind.

  “I’ll be back in a week, so I hope you’re already planning my coming home party, which had better be as good as this one.” It got a laugh, but there was still an uneasy feel to things, and I wasn’t sure if it was real, or if I was projecting some personal apprehension onto everybody else. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the general cheer was false. It reminded me of the “NDP victory party” we had for Aunt Susan one election night years ago, when she’d been utterly buried under a Tory landslide. I thought about mentioning this, but didn’t.

  The whole trip had developed for me like a Polaroid photo labelled “escape”, and while that didn’t change my mind about going, it did make me pause to wonder what exactly I was running from. A decision, you think? Nah—too easy.

  “I’ve arranged a Hotmail address for you, Polly,” Susan said from across the table, over coffee and dessert.

  “A what address?”

  “Hotmail—it’s an email account so we can keep in touch when you’re there.”

  “I’m travelling light, Susan. It’s not like I’ve got room for a laptop in my knapsack. I’ll send you a postcard or two, don’t worry. And I’ll bring you back something from Fortnum’s.”

  “There’s such a thing as an Internet café,” Theresa said. “That’s a great idea, Susan. Then you can put us in a newsgroup and keep us all in the loop.”

  “What loop would that be?” I said. “I won’t have time to write a travel diary, guys. For pity’s sake, it’s only one week.”

  “Lots can happen in a week in your third trimester,” Rico added in a fake English accent.

  “Yeah, do you have all your medical info with you, Polly?” That was Dimmy. “Health insurance? Bet you had to pay a bundle, eh?” I ignored that one. I had paid a lot—through the nose, as a matter of fact. Not an item covered by the Puppetry Festival’s Mary Chambers Memorial Bursary, I might add.

  “Look, I’ll send an occasional email when I can, and Susan can pass on my love and regards to you all, but believe me, the silence will mean everything’s fine. I promise I’ll let you know if there’s a problem, but there won’t be.”

  “Postcards are nice to get,” Earlie said, accepting a black coffee but turning down seconds on the tiramisu. “I used to collect them when I was a kid.”

  “Hey, so did I,” said Dimmy. “I have a cousin in Maine, and we’ve had a contest going for years to find the most boring postcard in the world. Right now, the winners are an exterior shot of the Parry Sound Hospital and some mall parking lot in Kennebunkport.” So the melancholy moment passed. Good thing I didn’t blurt out my memory of the NDP “we lost the election” party. Bad karma, as Theresa would say.

  My flight was scheduled for nine p.m., and baggage check was at eight, so Morrison was coming to pick me up at five-ish. Becker called to say goodbye an hour before that. It was a long phone call, and I felt a lot better about things after our final exchange of endearments and our gentle hanging up. Of course, Becker and I have never been ones for loving nicknames, so I suppose endearments is the wrong word. He was hardly a Boojums, and I’d stopped calling people Darling after I quit the theatre biz. He called me Polly. I called him Mark, and more often, Becker. Still, the tone of the “Polly” and “Mark” by the end of the conversation was deeply satisfying. The report he was working on was important—career-moving important—to do with the airport security thing, and I understood that better after listening for a bit. And at the end, he said he loved me. Right out loud, even. I wish I’d been there.

  Of course, it snowed for the first time since Christmas on the drive down to the city.

  “I love the way the weather gods time their stuff,” I said, mostly to relax myself, as I’m not the world’s happiest passenger. Actually, I was relieved that Earlie was at the wheel and not Becker, who drives his Cherokee a tad aggressively, as if it were a tank. The road was slick with wet snow, and visibility was crummy. Morrison’s car is one of those big, boat-like sedans, with an automatic transmission and bench seats as wide as sofas. He drove the speed limit in the slow lane, like I do, and his windshield wipers were new, so it wasn’t so bad, but I was still making liberal use of the phantom brake, and he could see me doing it.

  “At least you’re getting out before it gets ugly,” he said. “Over there, in mid-February, you’ll probably see flowers—snowdrops and crocuses.”

  “This early? Really?”

  “Yeah, England’s had a mild winter, too, you know.”

  “Mmm. Some sun would be a treat.” The winter had thus far been grey and dark in Kuskawa, and if there’s no snow, the meagre light has nothing to reflect it back and gets swallowed up by the trees and rocks.

  “Are you really planning to do some hiking? Dimmy mentioned you were thinking of it.”

  “Hiking may be too strong a term,” I said. “I do want to see the sea, just to say I’ve seen it, you know. And throw a rock in it or something. And I’d love to visit an old ruined castle.”

  “There’s lots of those,” Earlie said. “I took dad over a couple of years ago.”

  “I didn’t know that. Got any travel advice for me?”

  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

  “You’re a bit young for Polonius, Earlie. Laertes, maybe.”

  “The loyal brother to the girl? No way. Not the brother—way too whiny for me. Cast me as Guildenstern, and I’ll sit in the wings and share beers with your dogs.”

  “You never struck me as a Shakespeare buff.”

  “Oh yeah, I try to get down to Stratford once in a while and take in a play. You see Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet? I’ve got it on video.”

  Deconstructing Branagh took us all the way to Barrie, where we stopped at Tim Hortons for a pee and a coffee.

  “You want anything?” Earlie said as I set of
f at an urgent pace in the direction of the ladies’ room.

  “One large coffee to go, triple cream, half a sugar, please.” That was my personal mantra according to the litany of the Hortonite. Earlie’s was “small black to go”—the shortest version in the repertoire, while Becker’s was “medium double-double” and Susan’s was “medium coffee with milk, please, one sugar.” We all had them, and they fell trippingly off the tongue with long accustomed use.

  South of Barrie, the snow stopped suddenly, as if we’d passed through an invisible shield, designed to cut the greater Toronto area off from the real world. The pavement was bare and dry, and I could see in the twilight that there was a fair bit of green in the fields surrounding Canada’s Wonderland. The amusement park’s bleak, fake mountain rose from a nest of bare-branched trees—a grey and alien structure in the middle of what used to be prime agricultural acreage. Wonderland acts as a kind of city signpost for southbound drivers—a sentinel from which one could imagine George Lucas-type Star Wars army drones pouring out at the sound of the city hall alarm, fifty kilometers away on Queen Street.

  Morrison took the toll highway to the airport, and the traffic was light. We arrived a whole hour before the recommended time for baggage check, which meant I’d have to hang around in the terminal for a while. This didn’t bother me, as I fly so rarely that it counted as a pleasant diversion, but Morrison seemed to want to linger and see me off.

  “You don’t need to stay, Earlie,” I said. I wanted to go and choose some inflight reading material and wander around the duty free by myself. I could feel my whole mind letting go of great wodges of anxiety and home-related unfinished business, as if it were peeling off my body in layers, like wet wallpaper. “I’ll be fine, and the weather’s not going to keep off Toronto forever, so you’d better drive while the driving’s still good.”

  “You won’t get distracted by something and miss your flight, right? And you’ll call as soon as you land?”

  “Call who?”

  “Call me,” he said, to my great surprise. He thrust a business card into my hand. I didn’t even know he had one, though I suppose all constables of the Ontario Provincial Police are given them as standard issue. “Put that somewhere where you won’t lose it,” he said. “I’ve been designated the official correspondent to Polly Deacon, woman at large—oops, sorry. No offense intended.”

  “Official correspondent?”

  “The Hotmail thing,” he said. “Or postcards—whatever. George asked me to have one more stab at making sure you stay in touch. He thought you’d be happier sending a word my way, rather than feeling pressured to call home, or feeling that everybody’s being nosy. Becker would be better, I said, but George didn’t think so. I said it was a long shot, but I’d try. I’ll relay any stuff you send to the interested parties.”

  “Who are the interested parties?”

  “Everybody’s on email, Polly, except you. There’s Rico and Brent, Theresa, Dimmy, me, Becker and George and Susan. That’s six computers. People care about you, Polly. You should let them. I’ll be posting regular updates, if you care to send any.”

  “If I find an Internet café in Canterbury, Earlie, I promise I will send you an occasional word or two, just to make you happy.” I stowed the card away in my purse, where my ticket and passport were zipped into an inside pocket. During the journey, I had checked them dozens of times to make sure they were still there. I’ll never be a seasoned traveller in the sense that I will never be blasé about my official paper-stuff.

  “And here’s something for you to put in your pocket,” Earlie said, reaching into his own and pulling out a handful of change. He fished in his palm and then pulled out an old brown coin, a little bigger than a quarter, wafer thin.

  “I don’t know where the heck this came from originally, but I’ve carried it around for years,” he said. “It’s a ha’penny—an English half-penny, 1919. It won’t buy you much, but maybe it’ll be good luck.”

  “You’re not afraid I’ll lose it?” I said as he dropped it into my upturned palm. King George V’s head on one side and a figure enthroned on the other. When it was minted at the end of the First World War, I imagine it would have bought something—a slice of bread and cheese, maybe, or a newspaper. In England now, it would be considered worthless, although an eighty-three-year-old coin here at home was considered a collectible.

  “You won’t lose it,” Morrison said. There was a little pause. I wasn’t sure if that was a declaration of faith or an order. Didn’t matter. I put it into the pocket of the incredibly attractive fat pants I was wearing for the flight. Tilley stuff. Drawstring-waisted, tough and very baggy. I could have hidden an Uzi in there, and the pockets were nice and deep.

  “Thanks, Earlie. See ya in a week.” I felt moved to give him a hug and did so. Our mutual girth meant that we had to stretch like giraffes to touch cheeks, which must have looked hilarious to any curious bystander, but I didn’t care. Suddenly, I was missing Morrison, although he was right there, which meant that I was having a maudlin episode—brought on, no doubt, by the personal hormonal martini I was currently mainlining.

  “Okay—I’m outta here. Take care of yourself, Polly, and have a good time, okay?”

  “’Kay. Safe home, Earlie.” Then he was gone, leaving me in the middle of Pearson International Airport, rubbing my fingers over the surface of the ha’penny in my pocket, standing beside an airport luggage cart containing one big knapsack (maple leaf proudly displayed) and an old instrument case, containing two puppets, one male, one female, labelled “fragile”. I watched his back until he was swallowed by the crowd. I must have had a similar label attached to my forehead, because a moment later I had company. He was a big guy, simply oozing vegetable magnetism, one hand on my knapsack and the other on the puppet case, just about to heave them off the cart.

  Eight

  The ultrasound test provides obstetricians with a unique opportunity to evaluate the fetus at different stages of his or her development. No x-rays are used, only sound waves. As far as we can tell to date, ultrasound is perfectly safe. Still, this procedure should be performed only when the information obtained will help in the prenatal care of your unborn baby.

  -From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

  Hey, leave that alone!” I yelled, at the top of my lungs. His eyes bugged out as if I’d kicked him in a very private place, and he dropped the bags and ran. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that yelling something—anything—loudly in an airport, in this day and age, would attract some attention. It didn’t. At least, not in the “is something wrong—can I help you?” category. The crowds, which in the moment before had been quite thick and animated, burned off rapidly and silently, and I felt myself standing alone, ringed like a fire-juggler at a buskerfest. I stared back at a few faces, then hauled my gaze off into the middle distance, where the almost-thief was disappearing behind a pillar.

  “That guy tried to grab my stuff,” I announced, generally. “He ran away.” An airport security guard pushed through and approached me somewhat warily. I was suddenly aware that, with my khaki fat pants, my big belly and multi-layered Polly-Goes-on-Safari outfit, I could easily be taken for more than flesh and less than sane. I didn’t muck about.

  “My name is Polly Deacon, and I have a nine p.m. flight on Canada Jet to Gatwick,” I said quietly to the security guy. “Canadian citizen, my papers are all here. Someone just tried to do a grab-and-dash on my bags. I’ll give you a description, and maybe you can nab him before he gets someone else.”

  I think the guy appreciated my businesslike attitude, because he immediately let go of some of his extreme surface tension and pulled out his radio.

  “What’d he look like?” he said.

  “White—about five foot three, muscular and heavy-set, shaved bald,” I said. “Very light blue eyes and a squashed nose. I didn’t see what he was wearing.”

  “Black track pants and a Dodgers T-shirt,” said a man in a turban nearby. “I saw him run.”r />
  “Thanks,” the security guard and I said in unison. He relayed the information to somebody at the other end, got the name and number of the witness who had spoken up and directed the crowd to disperse. Then he turned back to me.

  “You have a flight in an hour and a half?” he said. “We’d better get you checked through early so you can make a statement and still catch your plane.”

  “A statement takes an hour and a half?” I said. He gave me a tired look.

  “If you’re lucky,” he said. “Come on. I’ll try and get you through fast.”

  Usually, you hand over your ticket and have a nice brief chat with the ticket-person about seating and departure gates and so forth, and then off you go. This time there was an awkward little pause. The ticket person cleared her throat, stepped back and then turned off the conveyor belt, just as my luggage moved to her side of the counter.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Your ticket number seems to have been selected for a random security search,” she said. I heard a little hiss of annoyance from my friend the guard, whose name tag said Marcel. “I need her for a statement,” he said. “She don’t need that crap. She’s okay.”

  “Yeah, and make me lose my job, why don’tcha?” she said back at him. Then she looked me in the eye. “No big deal,” she said. “It could happen to anyone. Don’t sweat it, if you’ve got nothing to hide. They’re on their way already.”

  “Who are ‘They’?” I said.

  “Gate Security.” And then they were there—two of them, a man and a woman. They each took possession of my bags, the man took the knapsack and the woman took the puppets and off we all went to a little room. Marcel came with me to the door, arguing with the male gate-guy about custody rights. It was truly unpleasant, and I wished with all my heart that I hadn’t sent Morrison off so quickly.