Sundowner Ubunta (2 page)

Mike, Gillian and the rest of the Insomniac gang, thanks for putting these stories between covers.

Michele Karlsberg, thank you for your continued support, guidance and friendship-I hope you enjoy Aquavit.

Excerpts from an editor’s letter: “Your penchant for long, often five-line sentences is getting under control…the sub-mystery is really a grand diversion…I really wasn’t sure what the heck was going on…the reader is able to stay focused on the mystery storyline while you quietly follow up with past circumstances…is this an inside joke?...I did find it incongruent…I want to see what he looks at for seven hours…I’m a bit torn in terms of directing you one way or another…either I’m suffering from brain sludge or I’m being too picky…really great here, no easy answers, no easy outs…the reader is left wondering about outcomes but with some hopefulness…confident, comfortable and believable…” Thank you, Catherine, for helping to make it so. Your heart and mind are so clearly a part of this.

And Herb.

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3/15/2011 11:02 PM

Murder.

There are many reasons to commit it.

Mine? My mother asked me to.

The snow was crunchy underfoot as I approached the weathered house where he lived. Although in my head I knew it was impossible, I had a feeling in my sour gut that he knew I was coming for him. As I hesitated outside the door, I passed the knife from hand to hand, feeling its unfamiliar heft in my sweating palms, then tested the glistening blade’s sharpness against my thumb.

My eyes crinkled against bright morning sun. “Quant,” I muttered under frosty breath, “what the hell are you doing?”

But, disgusted as I was, I could not turn away.

The door shuddered, then made a scraping noise as I slowly pulled it open, wrecking my hope for silence so as not to announce my arrival to Mr. Crow-or anyone else-inside. Not that it mattered much; my course was set. I poked my head inside and was instantly assaulted by an acrid scent;
eau de
ammonia.

Cloying warmth encircled me. As my pupils adjusted to the darkness, I heard sounds of burbling disturbance and discontent. Our eyes met. And so it began.

I quickly circled behind him, grabbing him and locking him in my arms. Surprisingly, he barely struggled as I took him outside. He knew. I splayed him on the white ground beneath my greater bulk, my knees and thighs keeping him in place, and shivered at the thought of what I was about to do. I began to entertain wild thoughts of alternative courses of action.

It was too late to turn back now.

I pulled back his head, revealing his vulnerable neck to the nippy air. Only then did he make gurgling sounds of protest. Maybe he hadn’t really believed I’d be capable of this until right then, in that last, defining moment of his life. But it was too late for Mr. Crow, way too late. This had to be done.

Tightening my grip around the wooden handle of the knife, knuckles white, I pressed the sharp cutting edge of the instrument against his throat. I was surprised by the ease with which the knife did its evil duty.

I was even more surprised by the amount of blood and how it spurted and spewed. The body underneath me shook with a death fury that unhinged me with its intensity. Although he was no match for me in size, I felt myself being bucked off; I fell back, slipping on an ice patch as I attempted to get a grip with my Timberland boots and pull myself up.

Dumped on my ass, the first thing I noticed was the knife, still in my hand. It looked perfectly clean, as if I’d wiped it off, yet I hadn’t. The steel had been cold, the blood hot; the two did not stick together.

The second thing I noticed was the headless body of my victim rising to his feet.

My face contorted in horror as I realized that Mr. Crow was not dead.

He turned a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, swayed left, then right, hopped from one foot to the other, then he turned again.

I haltingly made it to my feet, the knife falling to the ground, burying itself beneath reddened snow. Mr.

Crow made a jarring move towards me.

Then he charged.

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I turned and ran for the hills, a scream burning in my throat.

“Dat’s goot, uhuh?” my mother, Kay Quant née Wistonchuk, asked for the millionth time as I forked another heap of her home cooking into my mouth.

March had come in like a lion, a roaring storm chasing me from Saskatoon to Howell as I’d headed for my mother’s homestead farm for what was supposed to be a two-hour visit. That was two days ago. I’d been storm-stayed-and desperately trying to shovel my way out ever since.

“You haf no chicken?”

Damnation, she’d noticed. I thought for sure that with all the other meats-meatballs, beef slabs, veal cutlets, farmer’s sausage-she wouldn’t.

“You don’t like de chicken, den? It’s goot.” She passed me the platter, heavy with deep-fried, golden pieces of Mr. Crow, and urged me with her eyes. “Have the
letka
.”

“My plate’s full right now, Mom,” I begged off on her offer of the drumstick, the leg of the same chicken that had tried to chase me down in that bloodied field of trampled snow, even after its owner had lost his head. “Maybe later.” Like never.

I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it, and perhaps I will never eat chicken again. Each time I see a leg or some other readily identifiable chicken part, I picture the
Braveheart
battleground of Mr. Crow’s last stand. Sure, he’d come to his execution willingly, with uncommon dignity even, but things got ugly after that. That damn Mr. Crow, named-by my mother-after his morning ritual, seemed as capable of living without a head as he was with one (at least for several, horrifyingly long minutes, and he’d made the best of them). By the end of his pursuit, during which he’d demonstrated an uncanny sense of where I was (
sans
eyes to see me with), the previously pristine landscape surrounding the henhouse-once gleaming white from the storm’s snowfall-was splattered a grisly crimson, as though a game of paintball had gone dreadfully wrong. I had taken refuge atop a nearby grain seeder turned flowerpot, amongst brittle stalks of long dead delphiniums and shasta daisies and watched in utter horror as Mr. Crow danced headless to his slooooooooooow death.

“Vell, ve go to town tomorrow, and I buy odder meat mebbe, uhuh? You tell vhat you like and I buy,”

my mother offered.

I finished chewing a tasty pickled beet before giving the reply I knew she’d been dreading. “Mom, I’m going home tomorrow morning. I’ve been here two days, and I really have to get back to work.”

“Not two days,” she argued back. “You vant cream in coffee? Vhat for dessert? I heat up some
nalesnehkeh
.”

“Yeah, Mom, two days.”

“But de roads, not safe yet. You vait one more day, dey be much better den, uhuh.”

I knew it wasn’t the roads she was really worried about; it was loneliness, the result of cabin fever that commonly sets in with farm folk, particularly near the end of long winters. She wanted me to stay. She always does, as a matter of fact, winter or summer. It makes me feel wanted, for sure, but it’s difficult being a detective from a desolate farmhouse, nestled in the hills that surround Howell, Saskatchewan, population too low to count.

When it comes to where I prefer to lay my head at night, I am much like my mother: stubborn. If at all possible, I want to be in my own bed, in my own house, with my dogs and things surrounding me, in the nest I’ve worked a lifetime to build. I want running water that is hot consistently, rather than on a whim as 11 of 170

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it is on the farm. I want it gushing from the shower head, not dribbling out between globs of rust. I want to flush the toilet with careless abandon, rather than with bitten lip in fear of the septic system acting up, as it so often does. I want Internet access and more than three channels on the TV. I want 7-Eleven and Mr.

Sub and a gym to go to rather than an exercise routine that includes a few laps around the barn with a mouldy German shepherd-husky-cross nipping at my heels and looking at me as if I’m crazy for running around with nothing to chase.

I do not want to murder my supper.

She was lonely. I got that. My father had died several years earlier and Mom had decided to maintain the status quo and remain on the farm. She did what she could to keep things as they had been, which included blocking her son from returning to his life in the city every chance she got.

“The graders have gone by a couple of times,” I told her. “The roads are good. I checked when I was outside earlier.” While escaping the beheaded Mr. Crow.

She nodded as if not really caring, and rose to reheat that morning’s coffee in an old tin pot that sat atop the stove.

“Why don’t you come into the city with me for a few days?”

Some time ago we’d even talked about her moving in with me-well, into the space above my garage, so technically she would be moving in
next
to me. Mom’s only sixty-seven, but I worry about her living in relative isolation. Even I get a bit creeped out being on the farm-it’s
really
dark, and when the coyotes start to howl at night it sounds as if they’re right at your doorstep.

What a city boy I’ve become.

“Vhat for? Vhat I do in city? You go. You go and take care of dose dogs. Your poor dogs, vhat’s happened to dose poor dogs?”

“Carol is looking after them,” I told her. By Carol I meant Errall, and by Errall I meant Sereena. When I’d called her about being stuck in the country, my neighbour Sereena had agreed to look after my pooches, Barbra and Brutus. My mother and Sereena have met, but their very essences are at such polar extremes, they’ve chosen to ignore the existence of one another. So that’s why I told Mom that my friend, Errall-which she pronounces as Carol-was looking after the dogs.

“We can hang out, go to movies, whatever, but Mom,” I said with an unpleasant lump of guilt in my stomach. “I’ve really got to get back.”

“I know, Sonsyou, I know.”

Clara Ridge was half an hour late for her appointment, which was going to make things tight; I had to be at the airport by five.

“I’m very sorry,” she apologized as she lowered herself into the chair in front of my desk, pulling off black leather gloves by their fingertips. “I hate being late.”

Usually a statement like that is followed by an explanation, but when it became apparent none was forthcoming I moved along. “Are you sure I can’t take your coat? Would you like a coffee or something else to drink?”

She shook her head and I noticed her hair, styled to within an inch of its freshly dyed life, moved along with it, without one follicle falling out of place. “Thank you, but your receptionist already offered. I’m a little chilled, so I’ll keep my coat on.”

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Clara Ridge was a handsome woman in her mid fifties who’d obviously gone to some trouble to appear in my office looking well-groomed. Along with the too perfect hair was a spotless makeup job and fresh manicure complete with bright red nail polish. Her coat was dark fur, real fur; don’t see those around much anymore.

“I saw your ad in the Yellow Pages,” she told me. “I hope that’s okay. I haven’t been referred or anything. You know how it is with doctors-specialists especially-if you haven’t been referred by another doctor, they simply won’t see you, no matter how long you’re willing to wait for an appointment. Are private detectives like that? I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

I smiled. “Not this one.”

In fact, I wasn’t too picky at all about how my clients came to me. Being a detective in Saskatoon, a small prairie city, has its challenges. There isn’t a mysterious dame (or dude) smoking a long, slim cigarette, wearing a jaunty hat low over worried eyes, silhouetted against the frosted glass of my office door at midnight, nearly often enough to keep a private dick like me in continual work. I’d been lucky of late though, working fairly regularly, usually on rather pedestrian cases, affairs of domestic or financial distress, but they pay the bills and allow me a few indulgences (nice coats and scarves in winter, bedding plants in summer, shoes and good wine always).

“How can I help you?” I asked the woman.

“I want you to find my son. Can you do that?”

Immediately my mind went to some likely scenarios: runaway, druggie, custody battle. I nodded. “I can certainly give it my best, Mrs. Ridge.” I reached for a pad of paper and pen. “Let’s talk about details.

What is your son’s name, and when did he go missing?”

“His name is Matthew and he’s been missing-or rather I haven’t seen him-for about twenty years.”

Holy Amelia Earhart! And you’re just realizing it now? Not a very observant parent. “I see,” I said with little conviction. “How old was Matthew the last time you saw him?”

Mrs. Ridge was staring straight at me, eyes wide, as if waiting to be led into telling a story she didn’t want to tell but knew she had to. “Sixteen.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” I was betting on a runaway.

“He didn’t run away from home,” she said, guessing my thoughts. (Either that or I’d said it out loud and didn’t know it.) “He was…taken.”

For a split second I had an unsettling feeling that aliens were going to come into this story, but I brushed it off. More likely a divorce custody arrangement gone bad. “By whom?”

“The police.”

Although I wrote the two words on my pad, I didn’t quite comprehend the connection between the cops and a missing kid. I stayed silent.

“You see, Matthew was a good boy; he really, really was.”

Uh-oh, the deluded-and usually misguided-parent’s refrain. How many teachers and police constables and social workers and babysitters and detectives had heard that one before?

“He was such a beautiful boy, too; tall, with the most gorgeous blond hair, like straw, and a sweet, sweet smile. He enjoyed school, did well, loved sports and had lots of friends. And we tried our best with him, but you know how it is, you get busy with life, work and all. We had a struggling business, a corner 13 of 170

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