by Linda Moore
“I mean the least we could do, McBride, is check out the landscaping. Maybe the Kings have yews growing on their property. Peter King died on a Sunday, didn’t he? So we should find out if there’s a possibility he was poisoned right in his own home on the weekend. And since the yews are evergreen, it will be fairly easy to spot them in this weather. Besides—you’re the one who wanted us to look into poisoning in the first place!”
“No stone unturned,” he conceded. Enough of my hunches had yielded results that McBride knew better than to dismiss the yew tree idea out of hand, but he looked skeptical.
“So what do you have for me?” I asked him.
“Wait until you hear this, Roz.” He got up and pushed the message button on his telephone. It was a male voice speaking in a hasty whisper:
“Hello, Mr. McBride—I hope you get this before you go to meet me as we’d arranged. I—I can’t make it. I’m afraid I’m being watched. I’m sorry but I’m too nervous to go through with it. I’m really sorry.”
“Wow. This changes the water on the beans. Do you have an actual record of the time the message came in?”
“The telephone gives the time of the message as just shortly before our appointed meeting time, but I’d gone out earlier that day and didn’t make it home to pick it up.”
“So it doesn’t appear that you were tricked by the original caller as you thought, because if you’d gotten this message you never would have gone to meet him. That meeting was hijacked,” I said. “And whoever took it was counting on you showing up.”
“Yup,” he said. “They got lucky.”
He had nothing in the place to drink but tap water, but it was filtered and cold, and I took a long drink. Molly, thirsty from scouring the tuna tin, went to her big red bowl and followed suit.
“So now what?” I asked, putting down my glass.
“I’ve got more reason than ever to keep digging through all this water resource business,” McBride said. “It’s hugely fraught with power struggles and corruption and will only get worse as the fresh water supply dwindles in the world. Peter King believed that communities should have control of their water rights, and he had enough smarts, wealth and clout to really rock the boat.”
“So you’re saying he may have been gotten out of the way by someone who stood to gain from these privatization deals.”
“You know Roz, there are millions, probably billions of dollars involved in this stuff. I’m learning that what the multinational conglomerates like Europa do is first move in on the bottom rung—say, as experts in sewage treatment. That garners them a bundle to begin with in construction and management contracts, and then they go for control of the water supply, maintaining that if they’re responsible for what comes out in sewage it only makes sense they have control of the water supply to monitor toxins and all that. And you know what? That all makes good logical sense, and is a service a lot of places really need. The problem is greed. Given all that control, many of these corporations limit people’s access to the resource, charging everyone an arm and a leg for their tap water. What should be reasonably available to everyone becomes an out-of-reach commodity.”
“So our man King was a hero,” I said. “I mean it sounds as though he was instrumental in stopping Europa from getting a foothold here in Canada.”
“I think he was, and the irony is that most people simply have no idea what’s going on.”
“This is giving me the willies, McBride. We need to be really careful.”
“Always,” he replied.
“No comment.” I looked pointedly at his bandaged head.
Suddenly I felt a creepy, clammy wave of fear. I picked up a pen and wrote on the paper towel he was using as a napkin, “Bugs? Maybe they got you into the hospital so they could do a number here.”
He took the pen from me and wrote: “Or before, even. Maybe that’s how they knew about the meeting in the first place.”
We stared at each other. McBride got up and started to look around. I began searching carefully too. Listening devices had changed since I studied them years ago in a criminology course on surveillance. Now they were a lot smaller—tiny, in fact—and a lot more sensitive. Our chances of actually spotting them were slim. Besides, McBride’s place was its usual knot of untidiness. We needed some sophisticated detection gear. Molly, who had been lying down under the kitchen table, moved to the back door and wagged her tail, signalling that, in her opinion, there were better ways to pass the afternoon.
Chapter Five
I got to rehearsal about twenty minutes early. Sophie was already there working on her lines. As I was taking off my coat, she interrupted herself in the midst of, “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” to ask, “How’s McBride?” I decided to leave my scarf on—it was damp and chilly in the Crypt. “You got his car and all that?” she added.
“Oh yes—all done. I spent part of the afternoon at his place. We took Molly out for a run on the Commons.”
“She’s a great dog. Very special, I think.” Sophie spoke as though she knew all dogs.
“I’m fond of her. And believe me, I don’t take easily to dogs. But I kind of think of Molly as a person. I’ve known her since McBride rescued her—must be about four years ago now.”
“Really? From what?”
“I’ll let McBride tell you sometime,” I said. “How’s it all going?”
“I’m working ahead a bit, looking at that pesky nunnery scene. We probably won’t get that far tonight but I’m so antsy about it. If I know it really well, it’ll be easier to play. I mean, she really gets messed about by Hamlet in that scene, doesn’t she?”
“Well, she’s totally set up, Sophie. I mean she knows Polonius and Claudius are using her. She must feel like a complete jerk. What does Claudius say to Gertrude right in front of Ophelia?” I took the script from her and looked at the scene. “Here it is—‘Her Father and myself, lawful espials, will so bestow ourselves that seeing, unseen, we may of their encounter frankly judge.’ God, lawful espials! Sounds like the Bush admin. And then Polonius hands her a prayer book and says—‘Ophelia, walk you here. Read on this book that show of such an exercise may colour your loneliness.’ He’s telling her how best to play her role in order to sucker Hamlet in. Ophelia’s not by nature deceptive, but she’s obedient to her father. That Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom—you know him?—he writes that when Ophelia says, ‘I shall obey my Lord,’ in that very first scene with Polonius, her tragedy is already in its place. So, okay, inwardly she’s compelled to obey her father, but at the same time she cares deeply for Hamlet, who realizes the second he encounters her that something’s up—he can smell it. The whole situation just releases this venom in him.”
“I see what you mean,” Sophie said. “He must be horrified she’s become part of the dissembling he sees all around him at the court.”
“That’s right,” I said. “So then at the beginning of the scene when she starts the conversation by trying to return the things he’s given her—an obvious artifice—something in him just snaps, and he rages on, completely insensitive to her fragile state. He’s partly railing against his own mother and partly lashing out hard for the benefit of the listeners—those “espials”—and he gets very carried away. It’s ruthless, but he’s in a world of treachery and he knows it. Part of what is truly tragic in this play is the bulldozing of the sweet love between Hamlet and Ophelia. They don’t stand a chance.”
I stopped ranting. The others were starting to arrive. Sophie nodded, taking the script back from me, “Okay, thanks Roz—that really helps.”
As she walked away, I thought about how the suspicion of being spied on had made me feel just a couple of hours earlier. When McBride and I had taken Molly out to the Commons where we could talk freely, we decided he should call on his old buddy Andy—a specialist in the surveillance biz—to check out his place, his phone, and maybe even his car, just to make sure it was all clean. After our walk McBride was heading off to a meeting with ou
r client, Peter King’s son Daniel.
The actors were setting up for the scene between Ophelia and Polonius—her description of Hamlet’s visit to her sewing closet, to be followed by the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the court. Sophie had pulled on her long rehearsal skirt and she came over to where I was sitting with my script, waiting for things to get rolling.
“By the way, Roz, in case we just do this one scene with me and I leave early, why don’t you come over after rehearsal for a drink or some tea?”
“Sure,” I said. “I will. That would be great.”
“I have a surprise for you. ”
“What do you mean?” I said, ever wary of surprises.
“Well it’s…no it’s just a little present, really.”
A little present? What on earth could that be, I wondered as I drove along Gottingen Street to Sophie’s apartment building in the North End. She lived at the edge of the Hydrostone, the part of the city that had been completely rebuilt following the devastating Halifax Explosion of 1917. The brainchild of renowned town planner Thomas Adams and architect George Ross, featuring design variations, gardens, and wide boulevards, the Hydrostone was a remarkable success story. Over three hundred homes were completed in 1921, all constructed out of the compressed concrete blocks known as hydro-stones. The dwellings were modern for that era—all equipped with electricity and plumbing—practical—they wouldn’t burn down easily—and beautiful. Still beautiful, I thought as I drove by the little row of shops that ran along Young Street.
Sophie had indeed left rehearsal early; I stayed on to work Hamlet’s wonderful fishmonger scene with Polonius, followed by his first scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. After a stressful day, I was feeling exhilarated, truly connected to something greater than greed and malice. While that was exactly what the play was about, the sheer joy of Shakespeare’s language lifted my spirits. I was enjoying my work with the actors and they were all doing a superb job. Even though they had no money, no production support, no costumes, they were embarking on the Hamlet journey with full passion and commitment.
I parked in front of Julien’s Bakery and walked across to Sophie’s building and up to her apartment. She had the tea on—a new chai she was trying out—and the familiar bottle of single malt was sitting on the low table by the couch with a couple of small glasses.
“How did it go after I left?” she called from the kitchen.
“Really well,” I said, spreading some of our favourite St. Agur cheese on a Stoned Wheat Thin. “Lots of comedy in those sections, watching Hamlet get the best of those characters as they stand on their heads trying to figure him out. It’s about as light as the play gets. The company seems to be relaxing more too,” I added as she came into the room with tea things. “I try not to interfere with what they’re doing, and now they’re readily coming to me to puzzle things out, so I think we’ve figured out our working dynamic. I’m really into it.”
“You sort of spend your life puzzling things out, don’t you? I mean that’s what you do with McBride too.”
“It is, although he takes the lead, directing me to do certain kinds of research and various other tasks. But occasionally I get very involved with the cases.”
“He’s not married is he?”
I looked at her. “Oh my god, Sophie. Are you interested in McBride?”
“But is he…or does he have someone in his life?”
“He’s married to Molly,” I said dryly.
“No, seriously—what’s his story?”
“Well, he’s divorced and his ex lives out in BC—Victoria, I think—with their teenage son, Alex. He used to lean pretty heavily on the bottle, and I guess she got as far away as she could. Honestly, in many ways he’s your classic hard-boiled gumshoe, Sophie. It would be a tough slog trying to live with McBride.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake Roz—I don’t want to live with him. I’m just curious about him.”
“Well, just so you know,” I said. “Anyway, moving right along…where’s the present?”
“Well, it’s not really a present, I mean, not an actual thing. I have this old friend in Montreal—he’s an actor that I went to theatre school with there, and we used to do tarot readings and stuff like that all the time. So recently, out of the blue, he sent me this deck of cards he found in an antique store—it’s probably a collector’s item, like a really old set of the Tarot of the Marseilles. The strange happenings of the other night got me kind of worried, so I decided I should do a reading for you.”
Sophie was a perfect combination of smart, independent woman, old world hippie-artist, and New Ager. There seemed to be nothing in the popular occult she hadn’t familiarized herself with in some way.
“Do you know the tarot?” she asked.
“Not really. I think I had my cards read years ago. Remind me how it works.”
“Well,” she replied, “there are seventy-eight cards in the deck. Four suits—Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles—make up the fifty-six cards of what is called the Minor Arcana, and then there are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana—all of which have strong symbolic meanings which can be interpreted in many ways: images, numerology, astrology, archetypes. The cards are very potent if you’re into interpretation.”
The next thing I knew, she was opening a lacquered wooden box and taking out an oversize deck of cards.
“Okay,” she said. “What you do is shuffle the cards for awhile and just think about your situation. You can actually fashion a question if you like, but really it’s more about focusing in on your present circumstances.”
She put the worn cards in my hand. I looked at them. They were about one and a half times as long as normal playing cards, and made of heavier cardboard with a blue and white-checkered pattern on the back. The illustrations were bold, medieval-styled line drawings in black filled in with vivid red, blue, and yellow ink. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana each had a tiny publisher’s stamp on the illustrated side that said the cards were from B. P. Grimaud—Paris. The edges of the cards were grayed with use but not frayed.
I felt the weight of them.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve kind of caught me off guard here. We might not like what we see.”
“Look, don’t worry. I’ll just do a short reading—a ten-card one. Come on, it’ll be fun and I know you’ll get into it.”
I started slowly shuffling the seventy-eight cards of the Major and Minor Arcana, thinking about the last few days, about McBride’s incident in the parking lot, what I had learned about Peter King’s work, Hamlet rehearsals. My mind drifted through the events.
Sophie had turned off the bright reading lamp at the end of the couch and we were in the candlelight. The air was scented with a mix of amber and patchouli aromatic oils, and she was sitting on the carpet on the opposite side of the low table, very still, watching me.
“Okay,” she said, “first, you take one card out of the deck and that will be your Significator; it will be you. Go ahead.”
I pulled out a single card and gave it to her. She placed it in the centre of the table face up. It was number seventeen from the Major Arcana, The Star.
“What does it represent?” I asked.
“Gifts of the spirit—the Water of Life,” she responded.
“Get out of town!” I said. “Water…is definitely on my mind. It’s what our case is all about.”
“Well, water is at the heart of this card. The naked woman pours the water of life from two ewers—one onto the land and one into the stream. She is replenishing the stream so that those who are thirsty may drink, and watering the earth so that the seeds will grow. Behind her rises a hill with a shrub or a tree on it, and in the night sky are seven—”
The telephone rang, startling us both. She looked at me and I nodded for her to go ahead and answer it.
“Hello. Oh, hi! How are you feeling? Oh that’s great—I’m glad to hear it. She is, yes. How’s Molly, by the way? Good. Here she is. Guess who?
” Sophie handed me the receiver.
I set the cards down on the table. “What’s up? Lonely?” I smiled at Sophie. “What? Well, no kidding? See! What did I tell you!” Standing up, I put my hand over the phone and asked Sophie if I could invite McBride over.
“Why not?” she said.
“I’m sure Molly will show you which apartment it is,” I said, giving him the address and then hanging up. I looked over at Sophie. “I’m right!” I said.
“Right about what?” she asked.
“They have yew trees. Daniel King confirmed it.”
“Yew trees?”
“The juice of curs-ed hebenon,” I answered. “Ring a bell?”
“The poison that Claudius used to kill his brother is from the yew tree?”
“This might bring us a step closer in our investigation. Let’s take a rain check on the tarot for now Sophie,” I said, feeling relieved. The water imagery in The Star card was already too unsettling, and the idea of a tarot reading was making me nervous. “I’m too wired about this yew tree thing.”
“Hey, isn’t the yew part of the runic alphabet?” she said.
“You got me,” I replied.
“Yes, I’m sure it is. It represents death, doesn’t it? I believe the yew tree was traditionally planted on graves. I have some runes here.” With that, she pressed her finger on a decorative motif on the side of the low table and a drawer suddenly popped forward.
“That’s pretty cool,” I said.
“Yes, it’s my secret drawer,” she said, taking out her set of rune stones. “In fact, this will tickle your etymological fancy. The word ‘rune’ comes from Runa, the Germanic word meaning ‘secret.’”
“Really?” I said, getting interested.
“We could read runes instead of cards,” she said, teasing me with a wicked laugh.
“Another time I think, Sophie.”
“You don’t like anyone getting too close to what’s going on with you, do you?”
