The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  I washed my hands and swiped them on a towel before rejoining my friend the second-storey gal in the hallway.

  “So you think that Kieran’s climbing ropes are how he got Eleanor into position under the river valley stairs and hoisted Christian into the bell tower?”

  “For all I know, they’re how he got onto my balcony the other night. And he would know where to find me. He has actually been here, which I can’t say for every other director in town.”

  Once again, she had a point.

  “Okay, give me five minutes to get dressed. I’m coming with you.”

  Steve was going to kill me, but that was only if we didn’t end up dead first. I slipped into socks, a pair of jeans, a bra, and a sweatshirt. The nights were just starting to cool down a bit from the heat of the days, and although we’d been stuck inside for three days, we had spent enough time on Denise’s balcony to gauge a slight chill in the weather.

  Denise was wearing her running shoes, but I grabbed my walking sandals. I hadn’t really packed for breaking and entering when we’d planned my extended sleepover. In fact, we were just lucky my sweatshirt was plain and dark-hued, and not my World of Science souvenir glow-in-the-dark constellations map.

  Denise popped her keys and a small flashlight from her kitchen drawer into a thin leather fanny pack. I grabbed my phone, setting it on silent, thinking it would be useful as either a way to call for help or to take photos of incriminating evidence we discovered in Kieran’s back shed. If we ever got to his shed.

  I whispered to Denise as we went down the stairs to her underground parking stall, “If the police have the place under surveillance, what makes you think they’ll not notice us driving away?”

  “They have been coming around on the hour. I don’t think there is anything happening out there right now, at 2:18. We can head out the parkade door, and left down the alley, drive through the next alley and be out on University Avenue within a block. Mostly, traffic goes in and out either on 76 Avenue to the east, or at the light right across from the Aberhart Clinic to the north. Very few people pay attention to the first Saskatchewan Drive entrance ever since they closed Keillor Road and the LRT tied things up at the other end. It just doesn’t pay to cut through Belgravia anymore.”

  I shrugged. She sounded like she’d thought things through, and that was enough for me. My friend was one of the top scholars in her field. If she had set her mind to this problem, she had dealt with all the potential pitfalls and possibilities. In fact, that was the reason I had always known without a doubt that Denise was innocent of the crimes, even when the police were considering her their prime suspect. If Denise had been the killer, not only would no suspicion have fallen on her, but all the murders would have looked like accidents.

  As we drove down a back alley completely free of police vehicles, I realized that the first death was indeed still looking like an accident. I glanced at my friend, so determined in her actions, which at present included driving down a narrow alley with only running lights on. This was no time to doubt her morality. Denise was no killer.

  She flipped the lights on when we got to the end of the second alley. Another turn and we were making a left out onto University Avenue.

  “Doesn’t Kieran live over in Old Strathcona?”

  “He’s in Mill Creek, but I figured we would take the scenic route.”

  “It’s almost three in the morning, what’s to see?”

  “Trust me, Randy.” And sure enough, once we were down the hill by Hawrelak Park, where I had spent so much of the earlier part of the summer, we crossed the bridge and beetled along the northside of the North Saskatchewan River and down River Valley Road toward the baseball stadium. Denise turned right onto the Macdonald Expressway and crossed the river again before turning right up the hill by the Old Timers’ Cabin. I had counted perhaps three lights, and with Denise’s luck, they had all been green. Had she used the south-side route, there would have been at least fifteen intersections with streetlights.

  “At this time of night there’s much less traffic, unless you are out on a weekend, but yes, if you try for the arterial routes through or around this city, you can mange pretty well.”

  I let Denise talk, mostly to keep us both from fretting about what we were about to do. She drove two blocks further than Kieran’s street and turned left into a leafy, dark avenue.

  We found a place to park a block and a half away. She and I walked quietly back the two blocks, turning down the alleyway behind Kieran’s house. After three or four lots, Denise shook her head and led me back to the mouth of the alley.

  “All the fences are high, and I can’t figure out which is his house. We’re going to have to go around to the street side and count from the corner.” We walked to the other side of the road, which was the side without streetlights, and counted seven buildings till Denise nodded and pointed at the tall house with the huge veranda. It looked well kept, but older than the houses on either side. Since this was a desirable neighbourhood, with access to a ravine park and five minutes away from either downtown or Old Strathcona, a lot of people had been buying up older houses and razing them to erect modern megahomes in their stead. Most had incorporated elements of the neighbourhood into their designs, so it could have been a lot worse than it was.

  Kieran’s house was painted in dark colours; maybe it was even black. All cats look black in the dark, as my grandmother used to say, which was some sort of sexual aphorism that I never wanted to get into with her. There were no lights showing from the front. There were no lights on in any of the houses, but of course, at three in the morning that wasn’t terribly surprising. Edmonton had never been accused of being the city that never slept.

  We doubled back to the alley and walked in, counting to eight. There was a two-car garage taking up most of the access to the yard and a six-foot gate filling in the rest of the space to the left of the garage. Even in the dark, the fence boards looked darker than their neighbours’. Denise looked at me and shrugged before reaching for the latch on the gate.

  The hinges were well oiled and made no sound as we let ourselves into Kieran Frayne’s backyard. “The shed is on the other side of the garage,” Denise whispered into my ear. We crept forward along the dark path beside the garage, me hoping that Kieran didn’t have an outdoor security system, or a dog. As we rounded the corner, no motion detector lights came on, so we picked our way past the jardinières that lined Kieran’s brick-covered yard. The man had no grass at all. I doubted we’d be tripping over a lawn mower in his shed.

  Denise got to the shed first, but I managed to grab her shoulder before she touched the hasp on the door. I motioned to her to pull her sleeve down over her hand. She smiled grimly and did so. The door wasn’t locked, mostly I guessed because who would assume there was a narrow building wedged in between the garage and the neighbour’s fence? The shed was tucked back two feet from the edge of the garage, so from most of the yard it would be invisible. I wondered how Denise had known it was there.

  She turned to me and held her finger over her lips, the universal sign of “you’re too stupid to realize we need to be quiet now.” Reaching into her fanny pack—which she must have bought for her trail running, because there was no way Denise would keep something that was no longer in style just for sentimental reasons—she pulled out her penlight. It was a surprisingly wide and powerful beam.

  The first thing we saw inside was Kieran’s ten-speed bike. Or maybe it was a fifteen-speed; I couldn’t tell. My bike was a single-speed with the brake in the pedals A skateboard was leaned up against the wall between the studs, and some high-tech snowshoes were in the next section of studs. Cross-country skis and their downhill cousins were tucked back-to-back between large brad nails that appeared to have been pounded in deliberately for them. A scuffed pair of polymer-and-clamps speedskates hung from another nail.

  Denise knelt near a red bag and unzipped it to reveal its contents. “Here’s his climbing gear.” She sat back on her heels to le
t me see inside the bag. There were various shiny metal pieces with one sharp end and a hole at the other, a short-handled pickaxe, a belt or harness of some sort, a helmet that looked like fibreglass cladding on a Styrofoam bucket, and a bunch of carabiners and hooks.

  “Where are the ropes?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Denise whispered.

  I took pictures of the bag’s contents, the bag in situ, and the length of the shed, hoping the flash of my camera wouldn’t alert anyone to our whereabouts. Finally, I tapped Denise on the arm. She was poking about at the far end of the shed in a jumble of old lawn chairs and a frayed umbrella.

  “We need to get out of here.” She nodded. We made our way carefully past Kieran’s tidy sporting equipment and out of the shed. The space and relative brightness of the outdoors made navigating the backyard a breeze. Pretty soon we were heading down the alley and back toward Denise’s car.

  On the way home we stayed on the south side. Denise drove Whyte Avenue till it meshed with University Drive and then replicated her earlier route back to her condo. By mutual agreement, we decided sleep was out of the question. Although Kieran’s shed had been almost unnaturally tidy, I showered quickly to remove any possible residual cobwebs while Denise put on coffee. When I came into the living room in my sweats and a towel turbaned on my head, she excused herself to wash up.

  I drank coffee and uploaded the photos I’d taken on my phone to my laptop. The flash had done a good job of brightening the scene, showing more in the split-second captures than we had managed with a concentrated flashlight source. I was right. Kieran was an amazing housekeeper. Make that shedkeeper. Everything was in its place. Everything was clean and tidy. There was no dirt on the floor to show up footprints, which was lucky for us, because we hadn’t even thought about that when we’d sneaked in.

  There was a shot of half of Denise’s face in one photo, which was something we didn’t need to have as evidence. I scanned it for any other useful data, but it was mostly of the far end of the shed, where the junky stuff was stashed. I pulled the photo over to the recycle bin on my laptop and clicked on the next photo. The bag of climbing gear, open on the floor of the shed, looked even larger and emptier as I thought about the missing ingredient of ropes. I wondered if they were now in the evidence room at the southside police station, or still hanging in the bell tower of the Walterdale Theatre. Or maybe they were somewhere else, for a perfectly valid reason. For all I knew, climbers didn’t store their ropes with their clamps and hooks.

  I looked at the other pictures, and Denise came and sat beside me, eager to find something useful from our dangerous foray.

  “He’s awfully organized.”

  I nodded. “I’ve never seen such a tidy shed. Is his house the same?”

  “His pantry looks like a store display. And everything is where it needs to be. There is a second shampoo bottle behind the one presently being used. The recycle bin is under the mail table in the hall, and his chequebook, stamps, and extra envelopes are in a drawer there, in case he wants to send a donation to a charity that has written him.”

  “Wow, what sort of mind does it take to be that organized?” I wondered.

  Denise shrugged. “He directs two plays simultaneously each summer and is constantly looking ahead for the next winter projects to tide him over between seasons. To survive in that context, you’d need to be organized.”

  I gazed at the photos. Everything was in its place in Kieran’s world. Everything except his ropes.

  41.

  The phone rang, startling us both. It was barely 6:00 a.m. Denise unfolded herself from the couch and went to grab her cordless phone at the kitchen island. “Yes?” She listened for a moment and then handed me the phone.

  It was Steve. “I tried your cellphone, but you weren’t picking up so I chanced waking you both up.” I had plugged my phone into its charger after depleting most of its reserves taking photos.

  “That’s okay, we were awake.”

  “Well, you may be off the hook and out of purdah soon.”

  “Why, what’s happened?”

  “Cars were called to Kieran Frayne’s house an hour ago. Apparently there was a break-in. I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything more. I’m not sure whether it was Frayne who called it in, or his house-sitter, or what.”

  “Uh …”

  “What? Randy, I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “What sort of a break-in are we talking about?”

  “Side door smashed in, main floor trashed, some things probably stolen, but it’s unclear, because of the mess. You know the drill. Why?”

  “I think you need to come over here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s something I’d rather not say on the phone.” Steve muttered a few choice words, but I chose to ignore them. He would be even angrier when he heard what we had to say.

  “Okay, I can be there in an hour. Put on the coffee.”

  I pressed the red button on Denise’s phone and handed it back to her.

  “We’re in so much trouble. Kieran’s house was broken into tonight. Maybe while we were in the shed.”

  Denise paled. “They’re going to think it was us, aren’t they?”

  “I am not sure what will happen. We have to tell Steve we were there. But since we didn’t see anything happening in the house, we’re not much good as witnesses. So, we just have to figure out how not to be fingered for the break-in. Why did someone break into his house tonight of all nights? We have been sitting here on ice for four days and nothing has happened out there. The one night we do something stupid, and bam.” I looked at Denise and she looked at me.

  “Someone is watching us,” we said in unison and looked out into the sunrise-lit, tree-filled window. Out there, someone knew exactly what we were up to and how to manipulate the information to our detriment.

  True to his word, Steve was there within the hour. I had changed from my sweats into clothing a little more armour-clad: a tee-shirt, cardigan, and jeans. I needed to feel my strongest, because I had a feeling this was going to be a dressing-down like I’d never seen before.

  Denise volunteered to start. She told the story, stressing how it had been her idea, and that I had gone along only to help and protect her. Steve’s eyebrows arched almost into his hairline as she explained the drive through two sets of back alleys to get out of the neighbourhood, and he put his head in his hands as she described sneaking into Kieran’s back garden and rifling through his sports equipment shed.

  “It never occurred to you that this is exactly why I asked you to stay locked away?” he said finally. “Whoever is using you as the scapegoat for his or her crimes obviously has you under surveillance. You were just playing into their hands.”

  “But how could we know they would be robbing Kieran’s house at the same time?”

  “I doubt if they planned to. Your being there was all the opportunity they needed. We’ll probably discover there was nothing stolen from Frayne’s house at all. It was just done to implicate you once more.”

  “That’s going to an awful lot of trouble, though.”

  “Murder is an awful lot of trouble.”

  “But Kieran wasn’t murdered, right?”

  “Lucky for you. What the heck were you looking for, anyhow?”

  I opened up my laptop. “We have pictures.”

  “I don’t think I want to see them. I shouldn’t even know about them.” Steve still sounded mad, angrier than I’d ever heard him.

  “Look, we’re not going to lie about going over there, so you might as well see the pictures, right?” I opened up the file I’d emailed to myself from my phone. Steve sat down heavily beside me on the couch. I wiggled closer to him to let Denise sit on the other side of me, and felt him solid and resistant against me. I wondered if I’d pushed him too far this time.

  “Here is the shed.” I pointed to the screen.

  “Which wasn’t locked,” Denise interjected.

  “Rig
ht, so even if we ‘entered,’ we didn’t actually ‘break,’” I said. “I hope you can persuade Keller of that finer point.” I clicked through to the next photo. “Denise had a flashlight and these are taken with the camera flash, so it looks really bright, but you know, as sheds go, you could eat off the floor. Kieran is compulsively neat about his stuff. I hope they didn’t do too much damage to the inside of his house. I have a feeling that untidiness hurts him.”

  “Maybe whoever did it knew that.” Denise nodded. “Going for the worst they could do to him.”

  Steve looked skeptical. “Someone who has been murdering folks suddenly starts punishing others by disarranging their houses? It doesn’t totally compute.”

  I continued to click through the pictures, which were amazingly good for having been taken by a phone camera under less than perfect conditions.

  “And that is his gear for ice climbing.” Denise was narrating the photos to Steve as I clicked through.

  I stared at the photo of Kieran’s climbing gear sans ropes. I had captured a bit of Denise’s feet as well. Her shoes were tidy in the shot, lined up evenly, just like Kieran’s would be.

  “Hang on,” I said, and clicked backward to the beginning of the file. There was his bike and his skateboard and his snowshoes and his skis, but where were any boots or shoes for these sports? “His shoes and boots are missing, too.”

  “What do you mean?” they asked in unison, and then laughed a bit across my head. I was too caught up in my discovery to care.

  “See? All the equipment except the shoes or the ropes or a sleeping bag or anything fabric. I bet you his ropes weren’t used on any of the victims. I’ll bet you they’re inside the house, somewhere a mouse couldn’t chew on them. That may be why this shed is so preternaturally clean. Kieran might have had an infestation of mice.” I sat back, proud of my deductions.