by Mark Lisac
“If I had a gun, it would be a hunting rifle. It and the ammunition would be locked up according to regulation. And I wouldn’t be eager to pull it out anytime I heard a funny noise outside the back door. You’re asking the wrong question.”
“How’s that?”
“Anything can be a weapon. The advantage is in concealment and in spotting — good eyesight, good optics, situational awareness, attention to detail. Like noticing a stranger driving down the street in a vintage car.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Is that sufficient, Mr. Asher?” Mrs. Apson said. “I had a morning break, but I’ll have to get back to school right after lunch.”
“Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Apson. You have my card in case you think of anything else or if something happens you think I should know about. Gordon.”
He strode down the front walk. The grass was brown but neatly trimmed.
At Railway Avenue he asked for directions at a convenience store and then drove back and turned onto First Street. He parked and walked into the public library.
The librarian was easy to spot. She looked as if she had made it her mission to embody the popular image of her profession. She wore glasses with black frames and a long skirt that Asher knew Sandra would describe as taupe. She would have looked less judgmental if she hadn’t put on pale lipstick that made her lips look compressed.
When he explained that he was tidying up some client details and asked whether John Apson had been in the habit of looking through old copies of the Barnsdale Register, she blinked once and said yes. She remembered pulling copies from the archives going back about half a century. She had wondered if he were planning to write an article on some aspect of local history. No, she had not seen exactly what he was reading; he had chosen a corner desk and piled the bundles in front of him, as if he were creating a screen.
Asher thanked her and walked back out. He decided he would stop at the burger joint on the highway at the edge of town before driving back to his office.
The librarian watched him stride toward the curb. She registered the salient features — square shoulders, blond moustache and goatee, cowlick at the back of his head, jacket good quality but not new, a barely perceptible odd stiffness about his left arm.
Asher didn’t look back at her. He was thinking about Angela Apson’s nearly youthful figure and nearly full lips, and the still-alive eyes in her suppressed and worn gaze.
4
“HI, ANGEL FACE.” SHERRY KOZAK’S HONEYED VOICE AND THE crinkles at the corners of her eyes always made Asher happy to come into the office.
He said hello back and once again admired her as she walked toward the inner offices. It was Friday, her day to wear jeans, Asher’s day to admire her athletic trimness as well as the curve of her hips. Once again he was happy that he felt like he was admiring art rather than feeling a personal attraction — he shared the firm’s view that the office was a place for professional relations only. Not that he couldn’t easily become attracted. And once again he reminded himself that if a single mother with two pre-teen children could be energetic and friendly with the people around her, he had no complaints.
She reappeared as he finished taking off his jacket and said, “Morley would like to see you.”
“Thanks, and can you see if you can line up a time for Langerfeld to come in to finish the deal on that acquisition?”
“Okey dokey.”
He checked his office for mail, walked down the hall to the door with the sign reading “Senior Counsel,” knocked, and opened it on hearing the familiar voice say, “Come in.”
Morley Jackson was arranged in a typical attitude. His large bulk rested in his leather chair. The leg with the recently replaced knee was set on the floor. The left leg, with the knee that needed replacing, was propped on a leather footstool. He wore his customary striped shirt. His nearly shaved, bullet-shaped head was inclined forward, trained on his copy of Clausewitz’s On War, in the original German. He lifted his eyes to Asher, his smile the usual combination of friendliness, bemusement at the world’s vagaries, and readiness to understand and deal with anything. “Well,” he said, “and what brings you into the office when you could be out enjoying the brisk fall air?”
“Thought I’d come around and brighten everyone’s day. I guess I could ask you the same.”
“The doctor says I should take the new knee out for a spin now and then. Plus a senior counsel should set an example of being available for consultation, if not for actual work. Sherry tells me you went to Barnsdale to see John Apson’s widow. You’re looking into the Turlock case?”
“Karamanlis isn’t satisfied that everything has come out. He’s worried about what might still be hiding in the woodwork, and what it will look like if it ever comes out.”
“Jimmy didn’t get where he is by taking things for granted. Does he have reason to worry?”
“Probably. Turlock killed Apson because of some private grudge. The widow doesn’t know much, but she knows Apson was investigating something, and that he was getting seriously worried that someone didn’t like him being nosy.”
Jackson shifted his weight and put his book on the table by his chair. “Is there any reason to think that Turlock was worried about Apson looking into his business affairs? He kept a lot of irons in the fire. He always seemed to mix business, friendship, and politics. The police established that he’d had some work done on his house by a construction firm that had a government contract in the area. He could have been angry about Apson rooting around in that business. Or it could have been something bigger. Is there any sign he had a connection with the new mall down the highway?”
“I don’t think it was anything on that small a scale. Apson was an accountant. But he was also a gossip and a worrier. I think he stumbled across something else. Turlock was never intelligent. He is cunning, though. He’d have covered his tracks well if he had been involved in a shady deal. Or when he’d been involved in a shady deal. I think it had to be something he was emotional about. And something that he couldn’t completely control.”
“You know there is only one ruling emotion in his life, if you leave out making money and keeping the locals happy enough to re-elect him for nearly forty years.”
“I know. Loyalty to the Parson.”
“George Manchester. You’ve never understood how he could inspire loyalty, have you?”
“I hear the words but I don’t get it. Okay, he built roads, helped get the oil and gas industry off the ground, built hospitals wherever the locals raised enough of a demand. He was also a Bible-thumping, Red-baiting, walking incarnation of vanity.”
“All true. You could add that he was always sure he was right. That meant he was always ready to be sure that everyone else was wrong. He may have developed that habit of doubt because of the quality of the people he had to rely on. The people around him never measured up to his standards. Calling him the Parson was a way of mocking his tendency to preach, as if everyone else was a weak soul in need of guidance. But he never took a dollar from anyone and he gave people self-respect. This province was still emerging from two decades of desperate times when he became premier. It was a laughingstock or an object of pity in most of the country. Everyone living here felt the same stigma. George Manchester took the shame away. Farber began that task but Manchester completed it. He showed people here they were just as good as anyone in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver — or New York or London, for that matter. Self-respect is an essential thing. It’s as important as having roads and thousands of pumpjacks pulling energy out of the ground.”
Asher saw no point in weighing the historical balance again. He simply said, “And whatever self-respect he g
enerated in Turlock was essential. Because Turlock was never going to get it from anyplace else.”
“That’s right.”
“Then if Apson wasn’t a threat to Turlock directly, he could have been posing a threat to the Parson.”
“That’s the only other thing that would have sent Turlock off the deep end. The obvious question is what that threat was. Less obvious but just as important: why was Apson messing around with anything that would threaten George Manchester? He’s been retired for years. He isn’t active in politics anymore, and his mind isn’t what it was.”
Asher momentarily considered the last sentence an invitation to a cheap wisecrack, but he continued reviewing what he had learned so far.
“Apson had an obsessive streak. He didn’t so much get bogged down in details as wade into them like he was getting into a hot tub. He wouldn’t have minded pursuing something and tracking down every last thing he could find. He would have enjoyed it. Filling in details was practically a compulsion with him. His wife thought he wanted to modernize the party, too. He had no time for the old gang like Turlock. He wouldn’t have cared if he was digging up something that Turlock or the Parson would have wanted to keep buried. But if that’s what happened, he must have latched onto something highly damaging or embarrassing.”
“Purity colliding with purity. The man obsessed with clean books clashing with the man who was obsessed with politics as a moral force.”
“Neither of them can have lived a spotless life.”
“Some are driven to try more than others.” Jackson stared benignly at Asher. Asher stared back. They let the ripple in the conversation flow away.
“Maybe it’s time you met the Parson yourself,” Jackson said. “I haven’t talked to him in two years, but I think I could arrange an introduction. He never minded talking about himself — as long as he wasn’t consumed with suspicion about the other person’s motives.”
“What good would talking with him do? I haven’t found anything definite. I don’t even know if he’s still in good enough shape to follow a conversation.”
“Every day is important, then, isn’t it?”
5
THE FIRST SNOW HAD STARTED FALLING DURING THE NIGHT. It was melting in the driving lanes as Asher left his riverbank condominium. At the curbs and on the lawns it was building up, probably there to stay for the next five months. Asher listened to the new, muffled note in the rumbling of his winter tires. He hoped that none of the drivers behind him were trying to squeeze another week out of summer tread. The sky above the flakes was an indeterminate blank, halfway between grey and white.
He parked at the provincial archives building and walked in. Twenty minutes later, he was turning over decades-old copies of the Barnsdale Register.
Whatever Apson had been looking for may or may not have been prominent. Asher guessed it was probably important enough to make the front page of the local weekly. He flipped through the copies. Rural life flashed past him. A car dealership reopened under new management. High school graduations took place. Fire destroyed an abandoned women’s clothing store. Crops looked promising or poor, depending on how far into the summer the story had been written.
The premier visited. Asher stopped flipping the papers and began reading:
On Monday, Premier Farber arrived in Barnsdale to speak with the mayor and council and to tour the hospital.
He was accompanied by Provincial Secretary George Manchester and other staff.
At an official luncheon, the premier praised the energy and dedication of the council in its efforts to improve town life and maintain town facilities during a difficult economic time. He also promised to consider adding a four-bed ward to the Barnsdale Hospital, although he said that would depend on budget considerations.
“I always look forward to meeting the real grassroots people who have made this province strong,” the premier said. “The weak sisters and book-reading doubters can try to tempt and mislead you all they want. I know you will continue to plow that furrow straight and true.”
Joining Mayor Hartley and the councillors in the enthusiastic applause for the premier’s speech was the premier’s correspondence secretary, Mary Simmons. The vivacious Miss Simmons had earlier joined the ladies from the Royal Purple in helping prepare the luncheon. She said, “I grew up on a farm and I enjoy helping out. It reminds me of harvest lunches.”
Asher read through to the end. He was about to start flipping papers again but stopped to consider the last paragraph of the story:
Mr. John Finley, prominent local businessman acting in his capacity as unofficial town historian, took photographs of the day’s visit. He said copies will be available at cost for anyone interested and all his photographs will join the collection he intends will commemorate contemporary life in the Barnsdale district.
The weekly was printed long enough ago that it did not feature photographs. Asher thought Angela Apson looked like someone who would keep old photos. But she wasn’t in her own house and her brother wasn’t the stuffed-attic type. The local library was a possibility but was small. The provincial archives, on the other hand, had become the home for hundreds of such collections. It was the storage bin into which thousands of nostalgic tokens had drained, the residue of the lives of people who hoped they were important enough to remember.
He returned to the catalogue files. He searched quickly and found an entry for a Finley collection. It was described as two boxes of reminiscences and photographs of life in the Barnsdale district.
The archive staff needed time to bring out the boxes. Asher picked up his jacket and went outside into the chill air. The snow had stayed dry rather than melting into slush. It was beginning to get firmly packed where the foot traffic had been heavier.
Asher walked over to the small park area where the archives’ prize display stood under a pavilion roof that protected it from the weather. It was a faded red McCormick Farmall with worn rubber tires on the two narrow-set front wheels — a genuine relic from Tractor Tom Farber, the visible symbol of the great man’s tie to the land and to the ordinary people who worked it.
The provincial government had bought the tractor from Farber’s estate and put it on display. Asher remembered the rationale famously delivered at the time by Manchester, who had become premier after Farber’s death. Manchester said Farber had always been open and honest with the people and he was going to have an open and honest monument in the outdoors, free for visiting by all, cleansed perpetually by the winds of the great land.
Jokes had immediately sprung up about the winds from the legislature. Asher grinned at the thought of what time had done to the symbolism. Only the occasional hobby farmer rode a tractor in the open air now. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Farber’s supporters worked their fields in air-conditioned cabs filled with GPS steering devices and other electronics; when they worked the land they were comfortably tucked in away from any weather, free to check markets or watch movies on laptops, free to drift off into a ten-minute nap if they chose.
He strolled to the top of the riverbank and looked out over the deep valley. He could still make out the spruces and poplars through the screen of white flakes. Here and there, the trees stopped where the banks on each side steepened into sheer, muddy cliffside. The grey and light brown mud was striated with thin streaks of coarse, low-value coal.
The river was shallow now. The rainy season of May through July was long gone. Soon ice florets would float along its surface. Asher thought about ice. He had once wanted to spend most of his adult life on ice. It had ended up hurting him. He still wanted to be on it, skating hard in a game, or gliding on an outdoor rink for the sheer pleasure of speed and the feeling of wind on his face. He still wan
ted a lot of things.
He turned and went back into the building. The cream-coloured marble facings on its side always looked to him like they needed washing. Inside, he found two cardboard boxes at his desk and started rummaging methodically through their contents. It took him several minutes to find the tangible relics of Tractor Tom Farber’s visit to Barnsdale.
There were seven photographs. Two showed the lunch with the town dignitaries. One showed a three-car cavalcade entering town. The other four were from Farber’s outdoor speech to the general population.
In one of them, Finley had managed to persuade Farber to stop long enough for a portrait with his right-hand man. Farber’s familiar bulk filled much of the image. He was the grinning fat bear, much bigger than most men but too muscular to be regarded as sloppy — a larger version of Karamanlis. Beside him, his eyes apparently focused on the photographer rather than on the camera lens, stood Manchester, a grim beanpole in a double-breasted suit. Both men wore fedoras. In the background between them stood a woman.
6
ANGELA APSON FILLED A POT WITH WATER AND DUMPED IN the peeled, quartered potatoes. She sprinkled a light seasoning on the pork chops and poured a thin film of oil into the frying pan. The turn in the weather was regrettable although right on schedule. She wondered whether she would persuade herself to use the barbecue after the snow stopped and was replaced by mere cold air.
Her brother came in through the front door, stamped snow from his boots before taking them off, and hung his jacket in the open closet. He walked into the kitchen as she busied with the ingredients of a salad. She noted he had not opened a beer first and waited for the questions she knew were coming.
“That lawyer’s a good-lookin’ guy, isn’t he?”
“If you say so. I didn’t think you’d show any interest that way.”
“I kind of liked him. He didn’t act like a snob. People come here from the city, they usually bring along ideas about everyone in Barnsdale — the last town in the province to have a KKK cross-burning, the first to have a public rally for the party that wanted to separate from Canada, the one with the biggest number of kids in an evangelical Christian school. He treated you like a real person. He didn’t act like I was a snag-toothed freak.”
