by Joan Boswell
“Who are you, madame?” Gilles looked her up and down. “A qualified teacher or the waitress?” Kelly almost slugged him then and there.
“You must admit, sir, that the lady is making considerable progress with her English.” Kelly was surprised when Billy spoke. “What does it matter who’s teaching her?”
“Kelly is not only the waitress.” Francine raised her eyes to her husband. “She is my friend.”
“She’s also one damn good fishing guide,” Billy interjected. “Her dad was one of the best. Kelly was his right hand when she was growing up. She’s been building quite a respectable clientele.” The pride in Billy’s voice was a second surprise.
When Gilles’s condescending smirk was replaced by a flicker of interest, Kelly wondered if she could get at him this way. Take him out fishing and have a few words. “I’m booked the next three weekends, but if—”
The wild screech of tires snapped everyone’s attention to the window. Kelly swore under her breath.
Jay threw open the diner door and stormed toward them. “I thought I told that French broad that parking space was mine!”
Gilles turned round and rose to his feet, easily twice Jay’s size. “Are you referring to my wife, English?”
Jay had already stopped short. “I want that car out of my spot!” he raged, but well out of Gilles’s reach. “Now!”
“Unless that parking spot is reserved for the handicapped, my car stays where it is.” He took one step toward Jay. “Understand!” Jay, the weasel he was, backed up. Gilles turned on his heel and returned to the booth, ignoring Jay as if he’d been no more than a pesky mosquito. Kelly might have cheered. Except she wondered if Gilles used his size and temper to intimidate Francine in the same way.
Jay flipped Gilles the bird and hissed, more snake than weasel now. “You’ll get yours, Frenchie!”
Kelly saw the sharp expression on Billy’s face and knew he had heard Jay’s threat. She wondered what Billy T was thinking as his eyes followed Jay to his customary seat.
Jay would remain planted until Gilles left, Kelly was willing to wager. Once Gilles drove off, Jay might follow him for a while in his truck, transferring the rifle he usually carried in the cab to the more visible gun rack in the cab’s back window. At the moment, Jay contented himself with glaring at Gilles, trying to burn holes in his back.
Gilles didn’t spare Jay a second glance. “You were saying about fishing,” he said, returning his attention to her. Avid sports fisherman, Kelly thought. Maybe even obsessed, if catching a darn fish had a higher priority than what had just happened.
“Since you’ll be busy over the next few weekends, I wonder if you might recommend...” He flipped his hand back and forth, as though he weren’t asking for much. “...a good fishing spot.”
“Sure.” Perhaps if she got on his good side, it would be that simple. “I’ll draw a map.”
He took a pen from his pocket, a paper napkin from the dispenser and slid them across the table.
“It’s not well known. If you went on a Friday evening, you should have it to yourself.” She sketched the route on the napkin and made sure he understood.
“Bien.” He nodded, folded the napkin and tucked it into the breast pocket of his business suit. Kelly waited for the “merci”, but it never came, and she wondered what Gilles thought he’d gotten away with.
“Come, Francine,” he said. “I’ll take you and the children home.”
“Gilles, I wish to stay.”
He pointed through the window at the darkening sky. “It will rain again soon. I don’t want you getting wet or the kids with more colds.” He helped his children with their coats, folded the stroller, picked it up and gripped Francine’s elbow with his free hand. As he drew her toward the door, he spoke to her in French again, his head bent over hers. Kelly understood more French than she spoke and was amazed by how much she now remembered from her high school days.
“You are never to come here again. What were you thinking? Bringing the kids as well, with trash like that sitting at the counter. You will take proper English lessons at the school.” He gave Francine a shake. “And the friends you make will be the other wives and women from the company. Not a half-wit waitress.” Francine kept her head bowed, saying nothing. But as Gilles let her go to open the door, she looked back at Kelly, eyes brilliant with tears, and mouthed “adieu”.
“That bastard!” Billy exclaimed once the door slammed shut. It was the first time Billy had given any indication that he too understood French.
“Hey, Kelly, how about a beer?” Jay made no move to follow Gilles but remained perched on his stool.
Kelly went behind the counter and reached for bottle and glass with a steady hand. The hopelessness in Francine’s eyes had extinguished the bright flame of her hatred for Gilles, leaving something dark and sinister in its place.
She set the beer in front of Jay.
He leered up at her. “So Frenchie’s going fishing Friday, eh?”
Kelly caught Billy watching Jay, and for a second glimpsed the frustration that seethed behind his cold, hard stare. She poured Jay’s beer, intent on the foam rising in the glass. “That’s the impression I had,” she quietly answered. Not that she would consider entrusting the job to Jay.
The judge rapped her gavel, silencing the court. Billy T raised his right hand and swore that the testimony he was about to give was the truth. Kelly rolled her shoulders, relaxing tensed muscles, and thought of how lucky she’d been. As though fate had indeed played a hand.
One clean shot—bang!—had caught Gilles in the chest, killing him instantly, the force of the blow tumbling him into the river. She’d then been able to drive Jay’s truck, with the unconscious Jay inside, back to his isolated shack without incident, and hike home through the bush.
By the time Francine had convinced the Mounties her husband was missing, Kelly was out with her fishing party, and they had to locate her, first, to learn where Gilles had gone. More time was spent in finding and recovering Gilles’s body—with Kelly worried criminal evidence would be trampled in the search.
Enough time elapsed between Gilles’s disappearance and the homicide investigation that it allowed Jay to wake up, wash up and to piss out of his system the date-rape drugs, purchased in Vancouver, that she’d put in his beer. She’d thought it unlikely that Jay would clean his boots—she’d worn them over two pairs of heavy socks—or wipe down the rifle she’d covered in his prints.
“Now, Mr. Thomas,” the prosecutor began, and Kelly looked up. “You’ve heard that Ms Reid and Mr. Morris carried Mr. Pierce to his truck after he’d passed out in the diner.” She’d convinced Gus the drunken Jay, sprawled across the counter, was turning off customers, that if Jay ultimately found the keys she hid in the glove compartment after they’d dumped him in the cab, he would be sober enough to drive home. Should forensic experts find any evidence of her having been in the truck, it was readily explained.
“Did you see this happen?”
“No,” Billy T answered. “The diner sign hid the truck.” But he did see the truck later when it sat near the parking lot’s exit, engine idling. He’d focused his binoculars to see what was up.
It was Jay’s truck, he’d written the plate number down. The driver was wearing the plaid shirt he’d seen Jay wearing earlier in the day, the familiar ball cap with F and U emblazoned on the back, the wraparound shades that Jay thought made him look cool.
Kelly had also been lucky no one had seen her climb into Jay’s truck the second time. Good thing Jay was a small man. She’d sat on a couple of her grammar books to give her the height, and bulked out his shirt with a padded vest she’d brought to work that morning. She wore work gloves to grip the steering wheel.
“Then it was Jay you saw in the truck?” the prosecutor asked.
Billy T was under oath. “I told you what I saw, and I’m letting the members of the jury draw their own conclusions. I don’t want to seem prejudiced.”
The
prosecutor insisted on a yes or no, and Kelly held her breath. Billy T hadn’t looked at her once during the course of the trial. He didn’t look at her now. “Who else would it have been, you tell me?” Billy demanded. The judge allowed his response as an affirmative, and Kelly breathed again.
Billy said the truck’s driver seemed to be watching traffic on the road, waiting for someone. Kelly had leaned forward over the steering wheel, nestling her head in the fold of her arms, her face half-hidden to the oncoming cars. Everyone driving past assumed it was Jay at the wheel. It was Jay’s truck. And everyone on the road that night assumed they saw Kelly walking home from the diner as she did every night. Especially after she’d testified that was the day she was sure Bertie Sanders had offered her a lift.
“As soon as the blue station wagon drove by,” Billy said, “Jay’s truck pulled out behind it.”
The defense lawyer, during the cross examination, asked Billy if he didn’t think Jay following the station wagon was more than a little obvious.
Billy answered he’d never known Jay to be too bright. On the other hand, he supposed, Jay had been careless, trusting his lawyer uncle would get him off, as he usually did. This observation, of course, was stricken from the record.
“We find the defendant guilty.” The jurors’ verdict after four hours of deliberation. That Jay had sworn he didn’t remember shooting Gilles, didn’t remember a goddamn thing, made no impression. Either the jurors didn’t believe Jay, or they refused to accept alcoholic blackout as a legitimate excuse. The judge was a teetotaler, and even the suggestion of Jay driving drunk was enough to raise her ire. “Life imprisonment.”
That Billy T showed no reaction to the sentencing, maintaining his poker face, didn’t surprise Kelly. As the courtroom emptied, though, she waited for him to raise his eyes to hers. Waited for him to acknowledge everything was square between them, that she’d done what she’d done for Francine’s sake and given Billy what he wanted, Jay off the street. Billy left it almost too late, until he would have had to stop and turn round. It was the merest glance, lacking emotion, and Kelly wondered if their relationship would survive.
As for Francine, Kelly found her a changed person, happier, more self-assured and more beautiful than ever. When Kelly said her farewells, Francine pulled her into a tight embrace, kissed her cheek. “Au revoir, mon amie.” Not” adieu “this time, but “au revoir”, to see again. Kelly took comfort from that.
Sandra Beswetherick lives near Seeley’s Bay, Ontario, with two cats, who come when called, usually, and her husband, who feeds raccoons and chainsaws trees. Her short stories have been published in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the US and have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Storyteller, and the mystery anthologies When Boomers Go Bad and Locked Up. She has yet to afford a BMW, her husband’s aspiration.
The Robber
Joy Hewitt Mann
The robber was down on his luck,
Bought a cheap gun from a man in a truck,
But when it was loaded,
The gun it exploded.
You get a lot of bang for a buck.
The Thrill of the Chase
Mary Keenan
With a mangled book at his feet, Gilbert Harrington reflected on the number of people who might be, at this moment, considering the slow murder of their employers. Hundreds, perhaps. It would be interesting to know whether the number would increase as the week progressed; it was now just eleven o’clock on Monday morning.
Past experience had taught him the value of flicking a handkerchief out of his pocket before attempting to touch the gnarled mass of paper and leather. He could not bear to resign possession of a signed first edition to the estate’s caretaker, even if it was worthy now only of the burning pile. Perhaps he could salvage just part of the signature...
No. What had not been pierced by that cur’s sharp teeth had been smeared beyond recognition by a mouthful of drool.
Mr. Harrington dropped what remained of The Welder’s Guide to Lunchbox Design into the trash can under his desk and sank into the leather banker’s chair afforded the keeper of the Culpepper Estate Memorial Library.
He could, of course, give notice. Nobody else would put up with these conditions—the dogs charging around the library, the intrusion of visitors asking to look at the precious books in his care, the subtly amorous attentions of Wilhemina Culpepper... this alone could drive a man mad. He hesitated between the horror of those attentions becoming more overt and the gratification of legitimately suing for sexual harassment. On the other hand, if he left his job, where would he go?
Mr. Harrington sank more deeply into his unquestionably comfortable chair and considered where he had been: living with Mother and working a few hours a week at a string of public libraries, where his concern for the structural integrity of books was met with no support whatsoever by his fellow librarians. Instead, the fools favoured getting books into the hands of as many people as possible, without making any effort to ensure the books in question would be treated properly. He was certain he had been let go from one position for his policy of “lecturing”, as his supervisor called it, young people about not eating anything while holding a book and the importance of washing one’s hands before picking one up. This sort of humiliation was repeated over and over until he had read of the opening at the Culpepper Estate, shortly after Mother’s death.
It had seemed like a perfect opportunity. He had tired of eating toast at every meal, yet worried about the expense of eating out. He needed the stimulation of some form of employment, and it seemed his particular organizational skills held little value outside the library system. Also, the roof of Mother’s house had begun to leak, and he was at a loss what to do about it. The Culpepper’s librarian, by contrast, was traditionally given a small but luxurious apartment within Culpepper Manor and invited to enjoy meals prepared by the Culpepper chef. The library itself was well stocked with unusual and beautifully-bound volumes collected by the current owner’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather, begun once the latter had retired from the doorknob factory that had made and still fuelled the family fortune.
Best of all, the comparatively remote location of the property and obscure value of the books stored there meant that visitors to the library were few and far between. Admittedly, the town was encroaching on the edges of the Culpepper Estate. Construction equipment was rampant just outside its gates, as builders churned out hideous mansions along the road that led out into open country. Inside the gates, however, the world was still at peace. Mr. Harrington could look forward to long days reading whatever he liked, without any pressure to computerize the card catalogue, thanks to Miss Culpepper’s preference for the traditions of the past.
The first signs of trouble, he realized now, appeared during his interview. Miss Culpepper, in her forties but favouring a style of dress that made her appear thirty years older, sat in an armchair with her knobby-kneed legs crossed. As they talked, he was distracted by the irregular swinging of a foot which Mr. Harrington estimated was the length of a fair-sized trout. Her eyes, set deeply into her skull on either side of a nose that dominated not just her face but most of her upper body, sparkled more vividly the longer he talked, and she leaned forward, eventually putting both massive feet on the floor as if to hold herself steady. Her hair, straight and thin and oddly heavy with what Mr. Harrington hoped was merely some product intended to bestow beauty where none naturally occurred, slunk forward toward the tip of her monumental nose. Whenever it obscured her unwavering examination of him, she shoved it back with long fingers marked by knuckles as enormous as beads on a string.
She hired him on the spot. It was not until after he’d moved his favourite books, his suits and his impeccably white shirts into his beautifully appointed, mahogany-lined suite that he encountered Miss Culpepper’s odious pets. She worshipped these three tall, thin, hopelessly clumsy dogs—some sort of hound, he suspected, though it was clear they were not purebred. Whate
ver intelligence they might have possessed at birth had eroded away over the years they had spent lowering themselves to their mistress’s expectations. They received no more training than was required to lick their besotted owner’s face whenever she demanded a “kissy”, and no correction whatsoever. Their names were Becky, Bert and Bertram, Bertram being the sole male of the group and the one most likely to knock down any low-lying book and chew it beyond recognition. Invariably, Miss Culpepper’s response to Mr. Harrington’s outrage was, “Can’t you just buy another copy? I’m sure we can afford it.”
To make matters worse, a group of students at the local secondary school had expressed interest in local history, as documented by a group of books that resided only in the Culpepper Memorial Library. Miss Culpepper, whose father had written and self-published the books, was keen to have the “nice young things”, as she called them, report on his genius. Mr. Harrington, who had read and been appalled by these volumes, was equally keen to relax his rule about books being used under supervision only. Miss Culpepper, however, overruled him and insisted that all research take place under her roof.
And so, here he was—surrounded by book-chewing dogs and noisy teens and an employer who pestered him constantly as he tried to read.
Mr. Harrington sighed and imagined how different it would all be if Miss Culpepper’s cousin, Frederick Culpepper, had been her father’s heir, instead of the next in line. Mr. Harrington had met him only once but had been impressed by his quiet demeanor, hatred of all dogs, and aversion to the company of others. It seemed likely that if Mr. Culpepper owned the estate, Mr. Harrington’s job would be a good deal more pleasant.
Mr. Harrington’s fingers stretched out on the arms of his chair and slowly tightened their grip. Could he...?
Wilhemina Culpepper waded through a seething mass of paws and tails, oblivious to the plaintive and persistent requests for treats as her mind turned over the events of the last few days. Life had been so perfect, and now it was nearly unbearable. What had happened to prompt such a change? And what could be done about it? She simply did not know.
