Murder Sees the Light (10 page)

I'd never cleaned a fish before; there are surprising things inside that don't go along with the picture of crisp golden fillets frying in a pan. My heart wasn't in it I guess. I threw the head to the impatient cats. They didn't know about Aeneas. They weren't finding themselves sickened by his death all over again. I cleaned up the mess on the bench with the blade of my knife, letting the guts fall into the pail provided. The cats grabbed the head and tossed it back and forth. I took the more or less filleted remains back into the cabin with me, left one piece on the counter, and put the rest in a dish back in the fridge. Fish for supper. I didn't like the sound of that. Most of the fish I eat comes in cans. Fish for supper is a problem that goes with being alive. Poor Aeneas was beyond problems of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I put the fillet in the pan. I put the pan on the burner. I turned the stove on and then I turned it off again.

EIGHT

Maggie McCord had made herself very comfortable in her little house overlooking the lake. Down at the water a small dock sheltered a beamy rowboat with a small battery-powered motor for trolling as well as George's compact coast-guard cutter. A rack between two trees held three canoes that looked like they were ready to be donated to a museum. The paddles were cradled in a handcarved holder that had obviously been whittled with love from cedar. A large screened-in porch surrendered glimpses of the lake and island that looked like ads for coloured film. Bluejays were feeding out of a flat can on a rail at porch level and cedar waxwings were eating out of another.

Inside, the main room looked like a Victorian sitting room with antimacassars on the arms and backs of the chairs and the couch. In fact, every flat surface had been covered with a doily or scarf. The biggest of the latter showed a stag at bay with a hound already biting into its shoulder as hunters with spears closed in for the kill. The biggest piece of furniture was a large harmonium. This supported a skinny pyramid metronome on top. A hymnal lay open on the music rack, and I felt a little twinge as I remembered my performance the night before.

“Well, now, Mr. Cooperman, I'm glad you were able to come. That chair's the most comfortable. Men like a chair with backbone. It's we women who are given up to soft ways and luxury. Although, between the two of us, and since it's an old woman I am, I'll say I like a hard chair. A hard chair, like a hard pew, is good for the character, don't you think?” She didn't wait for me to answer, but swung out of the room into the kitchen and continued her polite chatter from there. I could hear cups and saucers colliding with one another. I got up from my place— I felt like I was taking advantage—and roamed the room looking at knick-knacks on what-nots and taking in the pictures, mostly watercolours and oils of scenes around the lake. They were all signed “R.B.” I recognized my island stake-out. A couple of enlarged snapshots, probably from the thirties, showed a man with a pipe and soupstrainer moustache casting into the lake, chopping wood, and holding a coffee pot over a campfire. He looked strong and at home in the woods. The broad braces holding up his heavy trousers were reassuring. I could almost smell the bay rum.

“My late husband, Mr. Cooperman.” I turned and she was standing behind me, cutting off most of the light of day, holding a tea tray. “Albert was a good man. He knew this bush like a deer or a bear. He could walk in with a hatchet and a clasp-knife and live off the land for a week or for a month. Never needed a compass or matches. He never could understand how other people were always getting themselves lost up here.” She put the tray down on a coffee table made from an old blanket box and straightened herself formally to pour the tea. Her many rings caught the slanting light from the lake and her chins quivered in tandem with the heavy flesh of her arms. She was wrapped in another of her flowing gowns that looked as out of place on the lake as a chipmunk in a boardroom. She was wearing makeup too, laid on a bit thick but not obscuring her best features. She'd been a handsome woman in her day and I wouldn't have minded knowing her in her prime.

“One lump or two, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Please, it's Benny. Everybody calls me that. Three, if you don't mind. I have a sweet tooth.”

“When you say three, are you admitting to the full size of this tooth? I have one myself, and I'm glad to see that you are similarly enlightened. Will you have four?”

“With great pleasure, Maggie, with great pleasure.” I felt relaxed for the first time at a tea party. I saw Maggie put four lumps in her cup and stir with one of the little spoons with figures of men on the stems. She must have seen me staring.

“Apostle spoons, Benny. I have a large collection from my mother's family. If you look close, you'll see they're all different. I grinned over my cup and took a slice of chocolate cake from a crystal cake dish. We stopped talking while we both ate, washing the cake down from time to time with a swallow of tea. When she swallowed, Maggie's chins bobbed like the Pacific at the change of the tide. There was something Scottish about the way she said
look
and my name, but for the most part her speech was standard flat Canadian, with maybe a trace of heather around some of her vowels.

“You seem to have recovered from the shock of your unfortunate discovery this morning, Benny.” She wanted to talk about the murder. Fine.

“I won't go out without my flashlight tonight.”

“Well, I just hope that Harry Glover didn't frighten you. He has that effect on people who don't remember when he used to poach game in the park along with the other boys his age. He tried to—what's the expression?
— grill
me about poor Aeneas this afternoon. It seems an unthrifty extravagance when his superior will have to do it all over again. Or will they have lost interest by that time? Have another piece, Benny, I can see you looking at it.” I did. She refilled my cup and I settled back. Maggie McCord knew how to live, and I admired her for it.

“Why would they lose interest?”

“It seems they'll have to admit it was a bizarre accident. Dear me, poor Aeneas never caused such a fuss when he was alive.”

“What sort of man was he?” She tasted the question, moved it around in her mouth a little to get the proper flavour of it, then settled back farther in her seat.

“Aeneas DuFond? Albert said there wasn't another guide like him in the park. I don't wish to introduce clichés about Indians, Benny, but Aeneas was born to it as surely as Hector, his younger brother, wasn't. Hector learned about the bush the way you or I might. But Aeneas just knew. Strange, isn't it. And when you try to explain it in words, it sounds very backward, even racist. I think he was a good man. I'll swear he didn't have an enemy in the world. It's a great shame, really. But I think it's absurd, Harry Glover jumping in and calling it murder. Murder? It's ridiculous.” She was prodding her open right hand with her left fist. Small hands, alive with flashing rings.

“What do you think happened?”

“Oh, it was some strange kind of accident. Something quite simple if you could have seen it, but because he can't explain it, we'll probably never know.” I nodded at the possibility. “It's like that painter who was drowned in Canoe Lake during the Great War. People are forever thinking up plots that will explain how an expert woodsman and canoeist can be discovered drowned in water he knew as well as I know the recipe to that chocolate cake. I can't remember his name. But it's the same thing with Aeneas.” She paused, waiting for my nod of agreement. I didn't agree necessarily, but I nodded to be polite.

“Cissy Pearcy says that Aeneas wouldn't take Lloyd into the bush back of Little Crummock Lake. Why would that be?”

“Superstitious. He'd never go in that way. He didn't hold with that country back in there. Didn't like it, kept away from it. That's the way he was with people, too. If he didn't like you, he kept his distance.”

“Who didn't he like that much?”

“Well, for a start he didn't think much of Harry Glover. How's that for an ironic garland?”

“The police aren't everybody's favourite people.”

“Something more than that. Something they should know about. And he didn't get on with Mike Harbison, you know, Joan's husband. Mike didn't like the way Aeneas played up to Joan while he was away in the city. They had a big fight the time Aeneas built that cedar-strip canoe for Joan. He wouldn't take any payment. He just left it for her on the dock and never said a word.”

“Sounds like what you're saying is that Joan's husband had a gripe against Aeneas. How did it affect Aeneas? Did he stop coming around?”

“Oh, Aeneas was like the weather. You couldn't outguess him. He never gossiped, but he knew everything that was going on like he was the keeper of the forest. When a family named … no, the name doesn't matter … started pumping their septic waste into the lake, I always suspected that it was Aeneas who found out about it and got the authorities to put a stop to it. He was simple that way. Something wrong? Get it fixed. Put a stop to it.”

“What about George? How did he get along with George?”

“I don't know that I like that question Benny. What's a mother to say about a quarrelsome son? George goes his own way. He's not a diplomat. Aeneas rubbed George the wrong way.”

“For a man without enemies, Aeneas put a few backs up.”

“He did and he didn't. He was a quiet man. Private, you know?”

“And he's always been a guide here at the lodge?”

“Aeneas was here before I arrived, and that's going back. He helped Dalt and Peg fix up this old lumber camp and build more cabins. After they sold it to Wayne Trask he tried to help him out too, but Wayne was stone-headed most of the time and drunk the rest of the time. That man doted on noise. I never met anybody who had a good word to say for him.”

“Then the Harbisons bought the lodge from Trask's estate?”

“That brings you up to date. More tea?” I nodded, this time because my mouth was full of cake. Together we'd made a fair dent in it, about as wide as the Niagara gorge. I reached into my pocket and brought a pack of Player's into view. Then sensing that the time wasn't ripe, I started putting them back again. Maggie set her chins wagging, miming her insistence that I make myself at home, and produced an ashtray to prove her goodwill. I lit up and settled back watching Maggie McCord. Maggie held her pinky out straight as she poured. Very lady-like, I thought, the way her mother had taught her.

“You seem to know a lot about the people up here.”

“Well, Benny, there are no books. If you don't read people, there's nothing to read at all. My late husband wasn't a reader, and living with him for so many years I got out of the habit. I used to love reading romances when I was a girl. Of course, I always made myself the heroine. But up here I've learned to read hands and faces the way a gypsy reads tea leaves.” I looked into my cup to see what my leaves were whispering about me and my business. I stopped myself from pocketing my hands. “I guess,” she went on, “I've always had a gift for reading character. My father noticed it and told me it would serve me well throughout my life. And it has. Albert McCord was a good man, even though he wasn't an educated one. Nobody could have provided for me better. I gladly changed my Highland home for the peace and tranquility of this northern clime. Excuse me. It's a touch of the poet in me.”

“Not a bit. I'm on a sugar high myself. That's good cake.”

“It's my mother's recipe, and hers before her.”

“You said that you came from the Highlands?”

“Yes, and now I'm going to end my days here in the Highlands of Haliburton. My late father was Daniel Cruickshank, a doctor with a practice in Dundee. Have you ever been to Scotland, Benny?”

“No, but I was in a play at school about the escape of Bonny Prince Charlie. I liked the sound of the place names: Rannoch Moor, the Atholl hills; the soft sound of the language: ‘… and those in hiding, no used to sore lying, I'll be thinking …'” I looked down into my tea, turning a little warm on the back of my neck. I hadn't recited a line from that play in more than ten years. I tried to concentrate on the initial “T” on the silver service. Then I added, a little lamely: “I always thought it would be a nice place to visit.”

“Indeed it would. Albert said that we'd return for a visit, but we never did, we never did.” We listened for a moment to the sound of regret running its finger over the dust on the window sill, then I changed the subject.

“I was admiring the pictures. Real oils.”

“Painter was a smelly silent old hermit who owned a shack back in the bush. He was a trapper, outside the park, of course, but he pretended to be a prospector. Old Dick Berners said he was looking for gold.”

“You used the past tense. He's not there any more?”

“Oh, no. He died. Cancer. He went back to his shack after checking himself out of the hospital. He went in there to die. Wouldn't be talked out of it.”

“I'll have to break the news to my chess partner in the next cove. At the Woodward place. Mr. Edgar says he knew Berners when he was a kid.”

“Oh, he knew him all right. Until the senator took a shine to him, then Dick Berners was just a quaint part of the scenery and not Uncle Dick anymore. Just a funny old prospector. Gold! Imagine prospecting for gold up here.”

I heard a screen door slap open and then shut against the spring catch.

“George? Is that you, George?” Maggie had a high, flutey voice for George. I heard heavy footsteps coming into the front room. Looking up I saw yellow Kodiak boots with laces like spaghetti, dirty drill trousers stuffed into them, and a faded green flannel shirt hanging out over an ample beer belly. The face over a thick neck looked a little small. He was like a kid's idea of a fully grown adult: huge feet, tiny head. It was a trick of perspective, I guess. I was sitting down. But I wasn't as far down as all that. George's head was small. He had a red nose the shape of my thumb, deeply lined on either side, and heavy meeting dark brows with frightened little eyes under them. Perched on top of his head was a striped engineer's cap. On George, it looked wilted. He didn't have the features of a big shaggy dog, but he moved like one.