Amateur Night

by K. K. Beck

  A pleasant-looking uniformed officer came up to the counter.

  “I was watching one of the Seattle stations last night,” she said, “and they had a composite picture of a man wanted for questioning in a murder down there. I think he's staying here in Tofino.” She tried to sound reluctant, rather than eager. A good citizen, squeamishly doing her duty.

  “I see,” he answered in the noncommittal tone of policeman everywhere.

  “The resemblance was striking,” said Jane, “but later, when I talked to him and learned he'd just been in Seattle, I thought I'd better tell someone.”

  The officer took the name of the hotel and Mr. Johnson's name. “I hope I'm wrong,” said Jane. “He seemed very nice. But when I teased him about his resemblance to the picture, he got very tense.”

  The officer nodded thoughtfully.

  “He grabbed my wrist, rather hard,” said Jane. She thought she'd better jazz it up a little with a Hitchcockian touch. “His face got kind of scary, and I guess he saw I was nervous, and then it changed back into pleasantness, but I was frightened and I thought I'd better tell you.” Now she'd probably overdone it.

  “We might go round and have a chat with him,” said the officer. “Thank you for the information. Could I have your name?”

  “No,” said Jane. “I'd really rather not. As I say, I was frightened, and I'd rather just leave town quietly, to be honest.”

  The policeman gazed at her thoughtfully for a moment. He had big round brown eyes. “We'll look into it,” he said. “But if you are frightened, wouldn't it be better to leave your name with us?”

  “I just want to go home,” said Jane. “The whole thing has been very upsetting. The man in the composite, he may have killed a woman. Strangled her.” Suddenly it occurred to her that her Mr. Johnson, the man with whom she had moments ago fantasized falling in love, might have done just that. Was there some denial mechanism working here, some force that made it impossible to believe a nice, personable man could have strangled someone? Why wasn't she frightened?

  Paradoxically, it began to frighten her that she wasn't frightened.

  “I hope you don't think I'm being hysterical,” she said. “I just thought it was my duty to tell someone in authority.”

  He clearly seemed to approve of her instincts in the matter. “You did the right thing,” he said.

  She felt a schoolgirlish pleasure in his saying that, but then reminded herself she wasn't being a good citizen at all, she just wanted to slow Steven Johnson down.

  “Well, thank you.” She made a rather clumsy retreat, got into her car, put it in gear, and felt a huge sense of relief as she left town.

  The next Brenda on her list lived on Denman, a small island halfway up the east side of Vancouver Island. She hoped she'd have a good start, hoped the RCMP would come by the hotel, hoped Johnson would get all tangled up telling them his story, whatever it was. If she made the first ferry in the morning to Denman, she'd beat him. She vaguely remembered reading somewhere that the Mounties had much broader powers than American law enforcement agencies. Maybe they'd keep him.

  Of course, she felt guilty. She'd led him on, and she knew he thought they were having dinner together. Instead, he'd find she'd turned him in. He'd probably think she was a duplicitous bitch. For a moment she thought about what it could have been like to have dinner with him, go along with his plan, travel with him, let him lead her to the real Brenda. Along the way, she'd find out why he was looking for her.

  Hours later, after night had fallen, she arrived in Qualicum Beach on the Strait of Georgia, less than a hundred kilometers south of the ferry to Denman Island. She stayed in a nice, quiet motel room, fell into bed hungry but too tired to eat, and reflected in the small moment of wakefulness that, despite her guilty feelings, Johnson would understand her turning him in like that. He seemed to like the idea she was a rival. And it served him right for being so smug. She couldn't believe she'd actually been tempted to have dinner with him. She also decided that there was indeed something medicinal in those hot springs. Despite hours in the car, her whole body felt terrific. She fell asleep feeling relaxed and floaty.

  By morning she was starving. She ate a big breakfast, then drove to the Denman Island ferry, which took fifteen minutes to make its crossing. It was a small vessel, with an open deck. Across Buckley Bay lay Denman, long and low and covered with fir, except for a large grassy oblong where a farm stood.

  The passengers had a festive air about them. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts, driving campers or vehicles with kayaks strapped to the top. A lot of the passengers, presumably the ones who actually lived on Denman, were chatting with one another, keeping an eye on their children.

  At the end of the short run, she drove up a hill, then turned left at a tiny wooden church half obscured by big shady maples. On her right was the general store, white with green trim, which looked as if it had been built in the twenties. It was a big square building with a false front, a gas pump in front, a deep shady porch. A couple of people were sitting on the porch—one of them a leather-jacketed young man with peroxided hair. Jane wondered if he wasn't hot in his leather jacket. He was talking to a middle-aged woman with an explosion of corkscrew curls bunched in here and there covered with a gauzy scarf, a tie-dyed tank top and khaki shorts. Perhaps they were mother and son.

  A sign announced that the store was also the post office and government liquor store. She pulled up and went in, stopping first to check the collection of posters on the bulletin board. The Polka Dogs, live from Toronto, were playing at the Community Hall. Someone had some prawns for sale. The Ratepayers' Association was meeting. Fish-net was available for fencing.

  The old wooden screen door made a comfortable, summery bang. Inside, there were shelves of groceries, and, up on higher shelves, items like gumboots and film. Off to one side, past the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Times-Colonist and the Vancouver Sun, was the restaurant with a collection of oilcloth-covered tables. Glass doors led to a terrace and a small counter with some old-fashioned chrome stools. A young blonde girl was making a milkshake, and there was a lot of socializing going on at the tables and on the terrace.

  Clearly, this was the hub of the island. She supposed if she sat here long enough, Brenda MacPherson would be bound to come by eventually. But how would she know her?

  She bought herself an apple, and, over by the screen door, discovered a box with the local newspaper. The honor system was in force. She put a red two-dollar bill into the box next to it and took it out into the sun.

  The front page had a story about a crow who had been adopted by a local boy after it fell out of a nest. On the back page was an ad for the Kaleidoscope Market. She smiled happily. They had espresso.

  It was just a stroll down the quiet street, across from a worn and friendly looking baseball diamond in a grassy field.

  She bought herself a cappuccino, and asked the man behind the counter if he knew a Brenda MacPherson. “Sounds familiar,” he said. “Have you checked the phone book?” He showed her a yellow construction paper booklet stapled together. She was right there. Brenda MacPherson. There was a phone number.

  She took her coffee out to the phone booth in front of the first store, walking along the middle of the sunny street. Now that the ferry traffic had abated, the street was empty, except for a couple of dogs.

  A sleepy-sounding male answered the phone. “Penny-whistle Herb Farm.” He sounded the h in herb.

  Jane asked for Brenda, and was told she'd been gone all week, to visit her sister in Bella Coola. Jane loved the name Bella Coola. “When do you expect her back?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow. Around noon.”

  The man's lazy voice made her wonder if he hadn't been smoking some of his crops. She thanked him. “Hey, it's all right,” he said, in a peculiar overlay of Californese over Canadian.

  She needed a place to spend the night. She polished off the espresso, absentmindedly petted a yellow lab and went back to the general store. It
also had the BC TouristInfo logo on its crowded face.

  By that afternoon, she was installed in a bed and breakfast on the far side of the island, facing the next island, Hornby, a big green wedge of an island across a narrow blue channel.

  There weren't any hotels here, and a bed and breakfast sounded grim to her. She imagined waking up on a creaking hide-a-bed in some cheap little stucco house, listening to someone yell at the kids through paper-thin walls.

  Instead, she found herself driving down a long, forested driveway to a meadow where an old farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings sat, looking as if it had been there for a hundred years. Three of the outbuildings were trim little cottages, surrounded by a rose garden. The whole thing looked like a magazine layout in some country living kind of magazine.

  The place was run by Mrs. Bannon, a brisk Englishwoman in her sixties with steel gray shingled hair, a cotton twin-set, pearls and linen tweed skirt ensemble like something the Queen Mother would wear for a casual week end at Balmoral. Two meek-looking Bedlington terriers followed her around. Jane doubted they had Englishwomen like this in England anymore. One had to come to the outposts of Empire to find them.

  Mrs. Bannon charged a fortune, but Jane felt like a houseguest—a houseguest with a hostess who didn't expect anything. She spent part of the afternoon getting a tour of the garden while Mrs. Bannon dead-headed the roses. “Of course the deer eat absolutely everything, so we have to keep all the garden behind a fence,” she explained, wielding her pruning shears decisively. “Here's a lovely old rose. Not showy at all, but a lovely scent, rather like cinnamon, actually.” Jane bent to smell it. The garden was interlaced by meandering flagstone paths with thyme growing in the cracks. Besides the roses, there were wide borders, with clumps of lavender and old-fashioned perennials like sweet William, Canterbury bells and teetering delphiniums. The garden was encircled by a lattice-topped fence heavy with clematis. “We hang Irish Spring soap in the orchard. They absolutely hate it.”

  She spent another couple of hours in a hammock, reading one of the books she'd found in her cottage— Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist, whom she'd read as a child, and still found funny in a nice gentle but sprightly Edwardian way.

  But the roses and the bees in the honeysuckle and the general air of life slowed down and under control failed to distract her completely.

  She finally set down the book, lay back in the weak sun and thought about why she was searching for Brenda— such a slender thread, really, to the events at the Coxes' pharmacy. Just that Brenda and Jennifer, who might well have seen something, busted up that same day. So it was a day Brenda might remember. And the fact that Brenda's picture was taken from Jennifer's apartment. But even if Brenda remembered what had happened to her roommate, even if she knew, would any of that be admissible in court? Wouldn't it all be hearsay?

  And where was Sean? Would his father have hired someone to silence a witness—would he have done it himself? Had Jane tipped him off? But how would he have known who was in the pharmacy that day to see his son kill Mrs. Cox? Mr. Nguyen wouldn't tell her. Would he tell Sean's father? Would the elusive Mr. Cox have told him? Not likely. He'd made it clear he believed Kevin was guilty.

  And he wasn't the only one. The boy's own mother, his attorney and, through a druggy haze, even Kevin himself believed he'd done it.

  So why was she chasing Brenda MacPhersons all over the map?

  And why was Steven Johnson doing the same?

  Maybe Kevin did kill Mrs. Cox. There was still something else going on here. Or Jennifer wouldn't be dead. And she and Steven Johnson wouldn't be chasing Brenda. Maybe her hopeless case wasn't a matter of saving a wrongly accused boy—well, young man, actually—from prison. Maybe she would find another hopeless case in the midst of her search. That irritating committee of old geezers, however, might not like that. They'd given her a hard time before because she had found out she'd been pursuing the wrong trail, and then, when she'd presented the right solution, they'd rejected it. She wouldn't let that happen again. If this case panned out, she wanted it all to herself. She wasn't going to share it with anyone—not even the police.

  Chapter 23

  It rained in the night. In the morning, the air smelled fresh and damp, and the ground was wet.

  Jane walked down a long, muddy drive to the Penny-whistle Herb Farm, picking her way through ruts filled with water. On either side of her was a wall of fir trees. Their trunks were wrapped in sheets of moss, and the moss glistened with a million raindrops clinging to a million woolly green strands.

  She'd parked her car on the main road, but when she got to the end of the drive, she saw another visitor who'd driven up there in his four-wheel-drive camper. She didn't have to see the American plates to guess the man was American.

  For one thing, he spoke a decibel louder than a Canadian. He seemed to be lecturing a short young woman in a heavy Cowichan Indian sweater—geometric patterns in gray and brown on white—jeans and rubber boots. Her hair was dark and she was short. Maybe she was the right Brenda.

  “If these things worked,” he said, gesturing toward rows of dreary-looking plants set in rows in a muddy garden, “don't you think doctors would prescribe them?”

  Jane thought he had a point, but she also saw an immediate opening. If this woman was Brenda, Jane would make an instant ally of her. “But the doctors and the big pharmaceutical companies don't really want people to take care of their own health,” she said. They'd be out of business.”

  The woman looked at Jane and smiled, managing to cast a piteous sidelong glance at the man in the baseball cap.

  The man shook his head sadly, and walked off down a row of some gray-looking leaves. “What's this for?” he demanded over his shoulder, pointing at a row of peaky-looking plants.

  “It's terrific for arthritis and other inflammatory diseases,” said the woman rather defiantly. “Many people find it a very helpful herb.” She pronounced the h in herb.

  “Mind if I look around some more?” he said, disappearing behind a rather pathetic little greenhouse that seemed to be made of rickety two-by-fours and flapping plastic sheeting.

  “I know these things do a lot of good,” said Jane solemnly. “Because women have traditionally been herbalists, their knowledge has been denigrated by the men who've controlled science.”

  “Absolutely,” said the woman, nodding with an air of wisdom, and the satisfaction felt by someone who finds her views reinforced.

  “Is there anything for hay fever? I have a nephew who has terrible hay fever.”

  “Let's check on that,” said the woman, leading Jane to the door of a dark little shed. Inside was a shelf with a few books and a clutter of earthenware pots. From the roof hung a row of crystals, looking like giant earrings.

  The woman began flipping through a large, well-worn paperback book. The cover showed a vaguely art nouveau portrait of a woman's face with stylized flowing orange hair and wide gray eyes, surrounded by a border of green leaves.

  Jane thought that Brenda, if she was Brenda, having to look it all up in a book detracted from the wise woman of the woods mystique, and, although she agreed with the man in the baseball cap about the value of most of these herbs, she found herself disappointed nonetheless.

  “Goldenrod,” she said.

  “Poor little guy,” said Jane. “It makes him so irritable.” She wasn't sure hay fever made children irritable. Maybe it made them listless.

  “A few drops of lavender oil in the bath soothes irritable children,” said the herb lady. It occurred to Jane that if this was true, the remedy would be more widely known, but she just nodded. “Of course a lot of irritability is allergies to all the horrible things in the environment,” continued the woman, rummaging in a drawer and coming up with a small plastic bag of dried leaves. “Brew it up into a tea,” she said, with the cozy air of a benevolent sorceress. “Do you want some lavender oil too?”

  Jane took the bag of goldenrod and a vial of lavender oil and paid
her ten dollars, which the woman folded up and put into the front pocket of her jeans. The whole thing had the feel of a drug transaction.

  “You do crystals too?” said Jane, looking around the shed.

  “Yes, I've been doing it for quite a while now. The body heat activates their powers. There are special ones for special needs. The way I see it, the herbs cure the body, the crystals blast a message right into your soul. It's more a spiritual thing.” She fished into her sweater and pulled out a leathery thong with a purplish-looking hunk of rock. “For prosperity,” she said.

  “How's it working?” said Jane, reflecting that at ten dollars (Canadian) per plastic bag, the woman was going to have to do a pretty hefty volume, and her location on a remote island made that pretty unlikely.

  The woman's face clouded over a little. “Pretty well. I had a life reading, though, that said my karma this time is involved with money. I was very rich during a lifetime in China. I was a princess and I didn't have compassion for the poor.”