Murder Sees the Light (29 page)

“Sure. Just as soon as I can get clear of the other investigation that's going on up here.” Then I told them about the three deaths and how I happened to be involved in two of them. Ray told me to take it easy and to come into his office as soon as I got back in town. They had a cup of coffee with me, met Joan and the Pearcys, before they started the long drive back to Huntsville.

Then the unexpected happened. It was Mike Harbison standing in the doorway. I counted the days on my fingers but couldn't make it come out better than Wednesday, which Cissy, when I leaned over, corrected to Tuesday. He stood there for a minute. Joan hadn't noticed anything since she'd picked up a smoky globe from a lantern and started giving it a polish. Harbison went to the coffee urn, drew two cups, added sugar and stuff, then took them over to Joan. She looked up at him with a smudge of soot on her forehead, and her face lit up like she was the lantern. It was a smile that included all her features. She nearly upset the lantern when she pulled him over her for a hug and kiss. I caught myself smiling to myself, then looked around to see if anybody else had noticed. I could have guessed that it would be Maggie. Old Maggie hadn't missed the grand reunion or my observation of it.

For somebody who didn't like talking, I'd not been exactly silent that evening in the Annex. I had another cup of coffee, watched Mike and Joan sneak out the back door and saw Kipp bundle his two off to the cabin. By the time the fire was reduced to a fine grey ash, the company was reduced to the nub of regulars. Maggie was bidding a no-trump hand, Des and Delia were reading, and Paul Robeson was belting out “Mah Lindy Lou” as Lloyd turned the crank on the Victrola.

I'll lay right down and die, and die …

“I'll be heading back to Whitney for the night now, Benny,” Harry Glover said, placing his dirty cup near the urn. “Good night everybody. I'll be back in the morning. I think were beginning to get somewhere on this thing.” He went out, and everybody breathed a detectable sigh of relief when the two uniformed men followed him through the double screen door.

“I pass,” said Cissy, giggling at the loud noise she seemed to be making in the otherwise silent room. Even the fire had stopped snapping its fingers. Lloyd's record began to run down. I glanced in the direction and saw an empty place where Lloyd had been. I hadn't heard him go out, but he wasn't there. While I was wondering where he'd gone, leaving his pet spinning on the turntable, I could hear voices coming towards the door.

“Well,” Dalt Rimmer was saying, “it will have to wait until morning. Glover said he'd be here, so here I came. Good evening everybody!” Dalt was wearing a rustcoloured corduroy jacket, whose boxy shape whittled another two inches from his stature. “I just wanted to tell him my lad saw Aeneas run his pick-up truck up the old lumber trail behind my place last Thursday. The road's not on any of the maps, and I have them all.” Peg, who'd gone right over to Maggie when she came in to press her shoulder and whisper something, looked the room over while Maggie patted her hand with her thanks.

“Benny here's a private investigator from the city, Dalt. So you'd better watch what you say.”

“Hoots! I don't care whether he's the attorney general himself. They're all a bunch of Nosy Parkers.”

“When was that on Thursday, Mr. Rimmer?” I tried to put a kilo of authority into my voice and hoped.

“He went up just before the storm hit and came back about an hour and a half or two hours later. The lad only told me this evening.”

“Yes, you were away from the lake on Thursday. Is the boy sure it was Aeneas in the truck?”

“I only know what he told me. I said what I know, man, what else I say is no help to anybody.”

“Where does that road go?” Rimmer looked on me as though I couldn't tell the difference between Toronto and Timmins.

“You know the one I mean, Lloyd; it takes you in to Buck Lake …?”

“Sure. It's called Four Corners on the map.” I nearly rolled my eyes towards the spider-free beams of the ceiling. For a moment I thought Dalt Rimmer and Lloyd were going to lead me on that merry chase all over again.

“It heads north behind my place and circles around the south end of Little Crummock. It's a fair piece of road as those old trails go: deeply rutted in places, but you don't need a four-wheel drive to manage it. I'm sorry the lad didn't speak up sooner. He just remembered and asked me if it was important.”

“So,” I said, thinking aloud, “Aeneas overcame his fear of Little Crummock. He had an argument with Hector about it, then decided to overcome his superstition.”

“He had an argument with his brother. I heard that in town,” Maggie said. “I heard people talking about it in Onions' store.”

“And he told me himself that the subject was Aeneas's long-standing fear of that part of the country.”

“So?” said David Kipp, putting in his hand-crafted paddle.

“So, not long after he left his brother, he drove his truck up that road. He went as far as he could go on wheels towards Little Crummock. He must have gone the rest of the way on foot.”

“Heading for Dick's cabin!” suggested Lloyd.

“Why would he want to go in there?” asked Maggie McCord, who had moved a chair up to where the talk was. “He wasn't seen after Thursday, the night of the big thunderstorm. Why would he pick a time like that?”

“But, you see, it was the thunder that frightened him.”

“Don't be silly, Benny,” Maggie said. “Aeneas wasn't frightened of anything.”

“He was frightened of thunder when it wasn't preceded by lightning, Maggie. That shook him all his life. But not this time. This time he was going to pursue his fear all the way to the lake, then along to old Dick's cabin.” Everybody'd given up all attempts at looking busy or being not busy. Delia Alexander dropped her knitting. Desmond sat with his mouth open. Maggie was on the edge of her chair, a dangerous place for Maggie.

“What he found when he got there exploded his superstition. What he found was a mine, with someone working it during the storm, blasting with black powder.”

“Well, I'll be!” Lloyd said, with his fingers in his mouth.

“Go on, Benny, please don't stop now,” said Cissy.

“He saw the mine. It was hidden by an outhouse. The workings were down below. Mining in the park is illegal, of course, and so far the miner had managed to keep the secret to himself. So he decided to kill Aeneas. It was nothing personal; just good business. Our friend the miner isn't a murderer by profession, remember. He's not naturally callous. He's not a hit-man. He probably didn't intend that the body would be discovered so fast. That put the wind up him. He didn't want Harry Glover running around asking questions. He'd been hoping for a crime that at best would be apprehended, snuck up on, come across. You know: Aeneas at first is just missing; after several weeks it becomes more serious, but still not a federal case, because Aeneas was quite a loner with only his brother to worry about his absence.

There's another thing about our miner: he wasn't the original miner. That was old Dick Berners, who hid his mining by pretending to still be prospecting. Berners was clever. He also had a soft spot for somebody who could take over the place for him once he got sick and knew he was going to die.

“A few days after Aeneas's body was found, I went up to Dick's cabin and stumbled across the mine. That was the second interruption for the miner. He hit me, tied a weight to my leg, and dumped me into the lake. Luckily, I cut free of the weight and came up for air. When I visited the mine again, I came across the miner again. Only this time he was dead.”

“Liar! Liar! Cut his tongue out!”

“Maggie!”

“George didn't do it. George wouldn't. Don't listen to him! George is dead. He didn't kill anybody.”

“It doesn't matter, Maggie. Not now. He had a larcenous streak in him, George did. You admitted that much to me. He was afraid because he was found out, Maggie. It's not like he'd planned to do it from the beginning. It's not like that other time.”

“What?” The voice was high, like a plucked string. “What other time?”

“I'm talking about another time, Maggie, and a time before that.” Maggie McCord slumped forward off her chair, upsetting the chair as she fell, so that it came down heavily on top of her large inert figure.

TWENTY-SEVEN

It was Wednesday morning. Through the screen I could see Mike Harbison cutting the grass in front of my place. Joan was replacing the green skirting around the motel units. Mike was whistling and from time to time went over to confer about something with Joan. He never forgot to collect a kiss or hug on each of these trips. Closer to home, I was completely out of socks, and the refrigerator was as bare as a peeled grape, except for half a dozen pieces of no longer freshly-caught lake trout, a jar of mayonnaise, and an egg. I put the latter on to boil and remembered to take it off after thirty minutes or so. While it boiled, I saw Harry Glover roll up in his car. A police cruiser followed him into the spongy lot and the two familiar uniforms climbed out. Glover tilted his hat at Mike and Joan, then ambled up to my screen door. He looked in, shielding his face from the sun so he could see through to my domestic mess. I opened the door.

“I'll put some coffee on,” I said, and turned the propane stove back on. Glover settled down in one of the arrowback chairs and took one of my Player's from the table. He lit up with a wooden match, which he broke between his fingers after he'd shaken it out.

“Staff Sergeant Chris Savas sends his regards,” Glover said.

“Checking up on me in Grantham? Good.”

“He says the only hope for Niagara Regional is to keep you private.” He sounded like he enjoyed his work today. “Anything happen after I left?”

“You just missed Dalt Rimmer. His boy saw Aeneas drive up a lumber trail to Little Crummock and back on Thursday afternoon. He thought you should know about it.”

“I like his attitude.”

“It was on an abandoned trail just behind his place.” He nodded, put his cigarette in the ashtray, and went out the door. I found the jar of instant and began peeling my egg. Glover huddled with his men for a minute then they went down to the dock. Soon I heard a motor start. Before the sound began to fade, Glover had retrieved his cigarette and was watching me again.

“You sure got lots of excitement these last few days,” he said, talking through a wreath of smoke that was pulled apart by the sun coming in the open door. And I remembered that it was just under a week ago that I made tea for Joan and we'd watched the rain batter the Rimmers' cruiser and flatten the petunias together. From outside, I could hear Joan laughing. That was better.

“Patten's conscious and complaining, I hear,” Glover said, grinning wickedly and putting his feet up on another chair. “He's giving them a devil of a time at the hospital; threatens to buy the place just so he can fire the whole staff. Brave words from a man with a hole in his lung and a shattered shoulder blade.”

“What about Aline?”

“She got bail and is free to go back to the city.”

“And you don't like that?”

“I didn't say I didn't.”

“All the same …?”

“All the same they wouldn't have let her out if she'd been working in the poultry-packing house on a vacuum gun.”

“Special treatment for middle-class crime, eh?”

“Now you'll make me out a socialist. I should keep my mouth shut, Cooperman, when you're around.” He watched me for a minute mashing the egg and then mixing mayonnaise into it. “We weren't able to keep the lid on Patten. Newspapers are on to us.”

“Uh-huh.” There was a curling piece of stale bread that I moved the mixture to. Glover watched like I was walking a tightrope.

“Why aren't you fielding the journalists?”

“Getting my picture taken and my name in the paper?” He stared at the lighted end of his cigarette for a second. “I guess I don't care as much about that as I thought I did.”

“Can I see Patten?”

“Why? You re not one for gloating either.”

“If I can, I'll tell you on the road.”

“I can't leave here!” He got up and finished making the coffee I'd neglected.

“You're all finished here. Take my word for it.”

“Damn it, Benny. I just got here. Let me drink my coffee.” He drank and I wolfed my stale sandwich. I washed it down with a swallow of coffee and wiped spilled mayonnaise and egg off my fingers on a towel.

Ten minutes later, Harry Glover's police car was purring along at an even fifty miles an hour in the direction of Huntsville. He didn't break the speed limit, but he knew how not to lose time because of it.

“Okay, you were saying?”

“Yeah. I'm just trying to find a good place to start. Give me a minute.” Harry left me alone while pink granite outcroppings danced from one side of the road to the other. Sometimes the road went through the rock like we were Moses and it was a petrified Red Sea, with huge cleft waves on either side. “Well, no matter where it takes you, you have to start with Maggie McCord. You know she has a hard time telling the truth?”

“Yes, there's some cock and bull about coming from Scotland. She doesn't mean anything by it. I mean it doesn't fool anybody over twelve.”

“Well, there's been more pretending than most of us guessed. First of all, her name. She was born Adelaide Tait in Cornwall, Ontario. Does that ring a bell?”

“Can't say it does. Sound's like the name of an actress.”

“I found a book up in Dick's cabin that told all about her. Adelaide Tait was accused of killing her lover back in the twenties. She got off, but the case has remained one of the best-known criminal cases on record. The book says she got off because of her looks, which in those days were nothing less than spectacular.”