The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  I felt safe enough walking in tandem, though, and we were soon at the car. Denise hadn’t said another thing since the restaurant, and while we were navigating the sidewalk crowds, I hadn’t particularly wanted to ask her anything more. Once we were in her Bug, though, I turned and picked up the thread of the dropped conversation.

  “Who do you think has started the gossip?”

  Denise looked grim as she turned the ignition key.

  “I’m pretty certain it’s Sarah.”

  11.

  Sarah?” I squeaked. If I’d been asked to place a bet on who might have it in for Denise, Sarah Arnold would have been the last person on my list. Sarah had been instrumental in getting Denise connected to the theatre scene, and she and Denise had been inseparable while putting together the Romeo and Juliet spring course. It was Sarah who had introduced Denise to Kieran in the first place. “What makes you think that? Surely Sarah would be on your side in all of this?”

  Denise shook her head slowly. “I’m not so sure. I have always had the sense that she vaguely resents sharing the credit for the Shakespeare project. I wouldn’t put it past her trying to discredit me this way, so that I would be all tied up in police investigations while she went to New Orleans to present our findings at the conference in September.”

  “I wonder if that gossip has already found its way to Detective Gladue, and that is why she is focused on you?”

  “That would be a relief, in a way. Because I can only imagine how much she is going to ramp things up once she hears it, if she hasn’t heard it already.”

  We were at my apartment. Denise had pulled in directly in front, by some miracle. The Garneau Cinema around the corner must not have been playing an 11:00 p.m. showing.

  “Well, let’s not worry about anything. They haven’t arrested you yet, and they can’t actually find any evidence proving it was you, because it wasn’t you.”

  The look Denise turned on me was so raw in its gratitude that I felt a bit embarrassed for her.

  “You have no idea how good it is to hear you say that. Right now, it feels like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole.”

  I nodded. I’d been there. There is nothing quite like being suspected of murder to let you know who your real friends are.

  “Just keep on trucking. We will get through this. And you know, the Edmonton Police Service are fantastic. They are going to find the killer, the real killer.” I leaned in and gave her an awkward side hug. Luckily I had already undone my seat belt, or it would have been really ungainly. “Meanwhile, go home and have a bath. Relax. And don’t let it get to you.”

  “Non illegitimi carborundum.” Denise saluted and smiled. I got out of the car and watched her shoulder check and pull away from the curb. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in her fancy shoes or perfect car for all the tea in China.

  Although it was late, I pulled open my laptop when I got into my apartment and hit the icon for my email. Steve had sent another missive with seventeen thumbnail photos of his travels. I scrolled through, marvelling at how clean everything looked in Scandinavia, and then hit the return arrow. I needed to unload on someone and it might as well be someone with big, gorgeous shoulders.

  I gave him a quick overview of the situation, how Denise was being isolated as the prime suspect and the way in which the community was staking her out as a scapegoat. I asked him if he could write a quick note to Iain McCorquodale to test the waters and find out how things were going. I stressed how brittle Denise was, knowing that Steve thought the world of my friend, too.

  I was probably overstepping my bounds as the girlfriend of a cop, something we usually tiptoed around semi-gracefully when Steve was right next to me. From halfway around the world, it felt as if things were slightly different, and that I could maximize my connection to the police in return for my lack of physical proximity. I thought about what I was doing for about five seconds, and then hit Send.

  Then I went to bed.

  The next morning I got up early and spent a little extra time getting ready for the day. I had plans to work all day in the festival office in the library, and was supposed to meet up with Micheline and Kieran for lunch at Kids in the Hall, the restaurant in City Hall, so we could check in on each other’s schedules and be sure nothing was being missed. I felt I was putting on armour as I buttoned up an off-white sleeveless cotton blouse and tucked it into my brown slub linen trousers. A peach-coloured cardigan, my hair drawn back into a tidy braid, and little gold hoops in my ears, and that was the best I could do. Still, it was more professional looking than my usual tee-shirt and cords, my mainstay outfit since grad school.

  I shoved my laptop, the file of Shakespeare word games, and three of the four decks of Shakespeare family cards I’d been working on. I was rather proud of how they’d turned out and intended to show them off to Kieran at lunchtime.

  I checked the apartment over, making sure I’d turned everything off in the kitchen, and then locked up and headed to the bus. Since I’d replaced my lost and broken essentials with brand new items, I tended to look things over and commit them to memory each time I left, just in case. On the whole, though, losing everything can be a freeing experience. While I was possessive and appreciative of the nice things I owned, I had fewer ties to anything, since there wasn’t much history attached to any of it.

  Still, it wasn’t as if I wanted to lose it again. There were bars on the windows and a massive deadbolt on the door now, and I took my locks seriously. Steve would have flayed me if I hadn’t. For the most part, I felt pretty safe. The home invasion hadn’t been random, after all. It was a targeted situation, which had been resolved. Anyone who had it in for me was either dead or behind bars.

  That wasn’t the case for Denise, though. And from past experience, I knew exactly how unnerving that could be. As I waited at the bus stop for the 9 to trundle along, it occurred to me that it might be more useful to think of who had it in for Eleanor Durant, rather than Denise. After all, Eleanor was the one who was dead.

  The articulated bus arrived at that moment, and I stepped up through the door and showed the driver my bus pass. Making my way haltingly down the aisle as the bus took off and headed immediately down a forty-five-degree hill into the river valley, I grabbed at the hand grips along the way. No one watched me, although I felt all eyes on me as I almost toppled over into the lap of an old woman who was spitefully taking up two seats by placing her enormous tote bag made out of tapestry kittens on the seat closest to the window. She glared at me, and I hastily excused myself and slid into a seat past the accordioned twisty middle of the bus.

  There are a few lengthy bus runs that cover the city from one end to the other. The 9 was one of these, going from the Southgate terminal to way past the Northgate one and making every single stop along the way. Express buses that picked up in two or three neighbourhoods and then zipped along downtown or to an LRT station tended to be quicker and somehow filled with more purposeful people. When you got downtown on the 9, though, you had the feeling half the riders would just sit there and traverse the city a few times until the driver noticed their ninety-minute transfer time was up. I approved wholeheartedly of buses in the abstract, as public transportation made so much sense economically, environmentally, and sociologically. Practically speaking, though, I tended to use a lot of hand sanitizer to get me through.

  I got off the bus at City Centre, a Felliniesque stop under a pedway between two parts of the upscale shopping mall in the centre of town. Here you had to watch where you stepped amid sputum and suspicious puddles. It wasn’t entirely obvious whether the people huddled outside here were actually waiting for a bus or a drug score or just hoping to panhandle out of the wind.

  I bustled through, pretending to be deaf, which fooled no one, and pushed open the door to the mall. Inside, patrolled by vigilant security, far fewer indigent people roamed. In fact, the marble and mirrors and shiny central core of escalators were a startling change from what you passed through outside to get there. Two
office towers and a four-star hotel were accessed from here, and another fancy hotel was built right into the west part of the mall. The CBC broadcast from one corner, where the Bay had stood in the ’80s, and three floors of mid-level chain stores and high-end boutiques, two food courts, several doctors’ offices, an eight-screen movie theatre, three or four nice restaurants, a large Winners and the new Bay made up the scope of City Centre Mall, which advertised itself by means of edgy black and white banners featuring moody models and sentence fragments. Still, the people in the shops tended to be cheerful and pleasant, and the different parts of the mall were connected by enough pedways that you could navigate them in the winter from two different subway stops at least four blocks away.

  I walked the length of the east portion of the mall and exited through the corner doors kitty corner from the Stanley Milner Library. While I was aware of Vitamin D deficiencies and the need for sunlight, walking the streets of downtown Edmonton in some areas was akin to walking through a wind tunnel. This was especially true of 102 Avenue, which I had avoided by going the indoor route. My braided hair would survive the wind, but grit from the road always aimed for my eyes when I walked downtown. Though they were swept diligently in the spring, Edmonton roads were sanded so thoroughly throughout the winter that you couldn’t help but still have it slipping into cracks and potholes, to be churned up in the winds through the concrete canyons.

  I waited for the light, smiled and shook my head at a panhandler, and crossed toward my destination. The elevators to the sixth floor were running during the day, since there was enough traffic to keep people in the upstairs areas safe.

  Micheline was already in the office and smiled as I walked in.

  “Hey Randy, it’s been forever. How are you?” I was glad she seemed to be in a good mood. I quite liked her, but when she was annoyed about something, it turned into everyone’s problem.

  “Micheline! I am well, on the whole. I managed to get quite a bit done, and I think I might just survive this summer. How about you? How are things going, what with having to work around a police investigation?” I had learned that you had to deal head on with Micheline. She didn’t understand tact. Or maybe she just liked screwing with people’s minds.

  “You would not believe it. They have wanted to see everything, as if looking at contracts or cuebooks was going to help them figure out who killed Eleanor. They even took Kieran’s directing binder away and photocopied it. They’ve taken statements from everyone and have an officer sitting in on rehearsals over at the Fine Arts Building.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “Well, I think they have the idea that Kieran might have killed Eleanor, because they were having an affair, but Sherry thinks they are watching David, who has a police record and was dating Stacey, the girl who now is playing Desdemona.”

  “David has a police record?” I tried to imagine what sort of trouble the shambling, amiable fellow hired to play Don Pedro and Iago could have got into that would warrant a warrant, and grinned at my own internal wordplay.

  “Well, apparently he did community volunteer hours to work off being caught with marijuana at a peace rally a few years back.” That sounded easier to believe than seeing David as some Napoleon of crime or gangland hood. Of course, he was a pretty good actor and could be fooling me right now with his genial granola goodness.

  “So why does his dating Stacey have anything to do with it?”

  “Well, Sherry thinks he could have got rid of Eleanor to clear the way for Stacey to have her big break.”

  Like Alice, I could believe seven impossible things before breakfast, but this wasn’t one of them. Not only was David incapable of presenting as a killer in my mind, the thought of killing to help someone make it big in a secondary role in a tent in a park was a little too much to swallow. I snorted and Micheline cracked a bit of a grin as well. The next thing I knew we were wiping tears from our eyes as we laughed. All the tension of the past few days were likely requiring the catharsis our laughter provided.

  “Somehow that seems sacrilegious, after Eleanor dying and all, but oh man, I needed that,” wheezed Micheline. I sat down at the desk across from her and grinned with that drunken haze that comes from near-hysteria. I hauled out my laptop, signed into the network, and logged into my email. While I was waiting for the connection, I pulled out my decks of cards and tossed one set over to Micheline. She was appropriately fawning, and it was with utter contentment that I turned my attention to my computer screen.

  That was a short-lived feeling. There was a return email from Steve. Curt and businesslike, all it said was: “Keep out of Iain and Jennifer’s way. See you when I get home. Love, Steve.”

  12.

  Now I felt entirely adrift and for all I knew, Micheline could have been talking to me for quite some time before she finally tapped me on the shoulder. Startled, I turned toward her. She pointed to the phone.

  “Kieran wants to talk to you.”

  I got up and moved around her desk to reach for the receiver. I hoped whatever he had to say wasn’t terrifically private, because there was no sanctuary from Micheline’s eagle ears.

  “Hello? Kieran?” The curt email from Steve was still stinging; my reaction to chastisement was always to close down. I could hear the bruised tone in my voice and hoped it didn’t translate as such across the fibre optic line. I didn’t need my boss thinking I sounded whiny.

  “Hey Randy. I just thought I would check in with the two of you because I’m not going to make it downtown today for lunch. Rehearsals are a zoo, and I need to devote more time here at the moment.”

  “Oh, no problem.”

  “Was there anything you particularly needed to go over with me? Or are you feeling on track still? I take it you and Amanda have kept each other up to speed on things?”

  “Pretty much, though I sort of need to know whether any of your actors will be available to my students, and when and how long I could expect them. Micheline says there is some sort of proviso in the contracts of several of them, but not all?”

  “We only wrote it into four or five contracts, thinking it would be a particular specialty we’d tap for the campers. Let me get back to you on that. I know David has worked with the younger kids in past years and I am sure he’d be up for a soliloquy talk, or some such. Not totally sure about the others, but you are right, there is an expectation in a few of the contracts.”

  “Well, that’s all I really had to talk about. I did want to show you my Shakespeare card game, but that can wait.” Micheline gave me a smiling thumbs-up, confirming for me that she was listening to every word and probably extrapolating the entire conversation.

  “Well, good then. Keep on keeping on, and remember, we move down to the park in another two weeks. That’s when the fun really starts.”

  I was about to answer, then realized he had hung up on me without a farewell. I replaced the receiver and moved back to my desk.

  “It’s the murder that’s changed everything,” Micheline said, which to me was stating the bloody obvious but might have seemed profound to her.

  “Guess so,” I agreed. “Oh well, gives us a chance to go shopping at lunch instead of meeting. Want to hit Winners?”

  Lucky for me, Micheline had no more desire to hang out with me than I did to spend my off hours with her. She muttered some excuse about needing to pay some bills, and I grabbed my laptop and shoved it into my bag.

  I was out on the street in front of the library before I had decided in which direction I was headed. All I knew was I needed to clear my head from Steve’s email and figure out my next move.

  I had tried, for Denise’s sake, to get closer to Iain McCorquodale, but Myra wasn’t having any of that. I doubted I would be able to win over Jennifer Gladue, so Steve needn’t have been quite so explicit in his directives. There had to be some other way I could help Denise. Maybe what she needed was more support from the theatre community as a whole. After all, she was a generally likeable person. If more
people knew she was in trouble, surely there would be a groundswell of support for her.

  Who was I kidding? The long view was more likely that the community would far rather have unpleasantness pinned on a relative outsider, or at least outlier, so they could then pick themselves up and go back to pretending everything was rosy in their little world. Denise was a very convenient person on whom to hang everything unseemly.

  I found myself walking along 104 Street, heading toward Grant MacEwan University, where I had worked when it was still Grant MacEwan College, having only recently shucked off its “Community” designation. Although they could now grant degrees in some choice areas, I was in agreement with Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein, and like the rose in question, MacEwan was still the second-string institution in town.

  I loved its campuses, though, especially the downtown one with its striking postmodern take on spires and the bold clock face over the main doors. The classrooms were on the whole smaller than the U of A’s, and I’d enjoyed the group dynamics that had formed in the classes I’d taught there. On an impulse, I veered across the lawn to the doors nearest the campus bookstore and popped in to browse.

  A bright assortment of insignia-emblazoned backpacks and binders was on display, ready to beckon the new students who would arrive in town shortly, or perhaps to attract the summer students who descended from all over the world to learn English while taking courses like calculus, the international language of numbers. I glanced over the small fiction section not tied to course selections and then poked about in the stationery section, coveting a few small booklets and a pen that looked like a red crayon.

  “Randy?”

  I looked up to see my friend Valerie Bock smiling at me from over the bank of animal-shaped paper clips. “What are you doing here? It’s been ages!”