Murder Sees the Light (14 page)

“I heard about that. They say he was a terrible one for the bottle.”

“Dead drunk the night of the fire, you know.”

“You make it sound like yesterday.”

“Now, what about yesterday? Poor Aeneas. That was a shame about him, a nice man like that, never a bad word to say about anybody.”

“He lived in Hatchway, didn't he?” A question was beginning to form: was there a link between Aeneas and Patten, apart from old times?

“Aeneas rented the second-floor front room from Mrs. Kramer across from the liquor store. Aeneas scarcely used it in the summer. Preferred camping out. Paid only fifteen dollars a week, and it's a big room. Used to be the master bedroom before her husband died. Maud said she should be able to get twenty-five now without even painting.”

“Across from the liquor store?”

“It's the place with the bird bath and the wind chime. It was built for Horace Waggoner, you know, of the Waggoner Mill, but he sold out in the thirties to Ed Kramer who was with the Hydro …”

I didn't stay to hear more than another twenty minutes of oral history. I paid up and walked down towards the liquor store. The house across the street was a buffcoloured frame house with a sagging veranda across the front and most of one side. The front door had stained glass in the fanlight over it, giving a cranberry look to a hall chandelier that hung just inside. The wind chime was rusty and soundless, the bird bath rusty and dry. I turned the old-fashioned bell in the middle of the door, and presently saw a woman coming through the lace curtains covering the two oval glass panels in the door.

“Yes?” It was a short, grey-haired, rather transparent woman who answered the door. There wasn't very much to her, apart from the freckles of age on her face and wrists, a hair-net, and steady eyes.

“Are you Mrs. Kramer?”

“That's right. Are you another policeman?”

“I hope I'm the last of them.”

“Well, I declare I hope you're right. If I've swept those stairs once, I've swept them a hundred times. You aren't going to ask more questions?”

“Not many, I promise.”

“I've heard promises before. I'm an old woman. A woman grows old on promises.” She led me through the hall and up the banistered stairs to the front room. “I'll leave you alone in there to look around. Most of the things belong to the house. The carvings and pictures are his.” I opened up the door to Aeneas DuFond's room and went in. There were two large windows on the street side, a high ceiling with a plaster moulding all the way around. There was a centred plaster medallion from which dangled an old twisted electric cord ending in a light fixture of monumental ugliness: a cross between a seashell and a hoop skirt. The walls were covered with a patterned paper running through the various coffee tones and set off by watermarks which looked serious. The bed was narrow, but neat marks on the worn carpet showed the bigger bed that the Kramers used to occupy, or maybe the Waggoners. There weren't very many personal things: a yellow hard hat in the cupboard, yellow working boots like George's, overalls, plaid shirts in flannel, plastic slickers, rubber boots, hip-waders, and, at the back, a pair of snowshoes. The chest of drawers revealed underwear and shirts in various stages of wear. He darned his own socks; I found evidence.

The paintings on either side of the big dark dresser were amateurish and crude. I wasn't surprised to see Dick Berners's name signed in the bottom right-hand corners. Dick had a belly full of expression, but the trail out was badly marked. He was on a par with the restaurant decorators in Grantham who sign their murals with their names and their telephone numbers. The drawers yielded no letters, laundry tickets, racing forms, or code messages. The OPP were pretty thorough, even up here. The best I could do was a wad of chewing gum. It had been well and truly chewed then wrapped in its own wellknown Spearmint wrapper. I couldn't make much of it, so I went back to the paintings. One was a view of a lumbermill from a lake. I recognized the smaller building next to the mill as the Annex at the lodge. The hills behind were about the right shape, but I doubt whether they'd ever achieved the degree of mauve shown above the rooftops.

The second picture was more ambitious. It was an interior scene with people in it. There were three of them, two men and a woman, standing in the middle of an octagon drawn on the floor in orange. Behind them a snake dangled like a fire hose on a cross. The figures were wearing black capes; the woman was clearly naked under hers. Three candles were shown burning at the angles of a triangle drawn on one of the right sides of the octagon. A pot or cauldron was steaming inside the figure near the older of the two men. What looked like a double-edged dagger rested with a drinking horn on top of a stone that looked like a millstone, but I could see that it too had been etched or painted with a triangle and a goat's head. It was a very ambitious scene for old Dick. It had an intensity about it that none of his other pictures had. A witches' sabbath or diabolic ritual, whatever it was, made a big impression. There was little attempt to show what the setting was. I recognized the vague shapes of tables and chairs and even some sort of machinery, but nothing further in the magic line.

“Oh,” a voice said behind me, “I thought you'd be one of the policemen I knew.” I turned around to see the fairly familiar face of a man about my height. It was Hector DuFond in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt with a collar. “Wait a minute, I
do
know you. You were staying at the Harbison's. What the hell is going on?” He looked a little hunched up, like he was protecting himself with lowered shoulders. “I'm Hector DuFond.”

“That's right, I met you at the lodge. My name's Cooperman. Ben Cooperman.” We shook hands formally.

“Mrs. Kramer said you were up here, but I was expecting someone I'd already talked to. Harry Glover told me I could come up and make an inventory of Aeneas's stuff. The coroner's still not released anything to the family.” He was pale and tense. “Are you some kind of cop specialist?”

“I answer to that,” I said with becoming modesty. Hector's eyes scanned my face, trying to make me out. I flashed my open wallet at him, displaying a selection of credit cards and a reduced version of my PI licence.

“But you were up at the lodge before it happened?”

“Just coincidence. Don't worry about it.” He looked like it was going to take a while before he'd be able to master that. I thought I'd better sound professional and not just idly curious. “This picture,” I asked, turning back to the wall and letting Hector gain a bridgehead in the room. “What do you know about it?”

“Aeneas got it from a fellow called Berners, a trapper and—“

“I know about Dick. Tell me more about the picture.”

“Well, now, I don't know. It's just one of Dick's fancies, I guess. I don't think I ever looked at it and saw it, if you know what I mean. Let's see. Looks like some mystical rite going on. That's inside the mill at Big Crummock. I recognize the machinery. Old Wayne never did get rid of it; he just lived around it.”

“So, it was painted before the big fire?”

“He gave it to Aeneas when he retired back to Huntsville. He gave me one of a sunset painted from the Rimmers' point at the same time. But I don't know how he dreamed up the goings on in this picture. He wasn't one to go to the movies.”

“Then it might be a picture of something he actually saw at the mill?”

Yes, I guess it might be.” Hector reached into a back pocket and brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. He waved the pack at me, and I took one. When we had both lighted up off my match, I told him that I was sorry about what happened to his brother, and that everybody I'd talked to had a great deal of respect and affection for him. He nodded slow agreement while he smoked.

“I can't get used to the idea that he's really gone this time. He used to be gone on trips through the country around here most of the summer. I rarely saw him from June to late September.”

“When did you see him last?”

“The same old question.” He laughed through a pasted-on smile and looked at the end of the cigarette. “I told Glover and the others, six or seven times. And you were there yourself, for God's sake. He had a camp at the Pearcys' old place, I mean where their cabin used to be years ago. The dock's still there, but in 1954 the provincial government started trying to phase out lessees in the park. The Pearcys held on for a good few years, but they had to get out. It was a tidy little cabin too. I'm losing track. Aeneas had pitched a tent on the high ground between the old footings of the Pearcy place. He was worried that the blocked culvert was backing up water so that it was beginning to threaten his camp. I hadn't seen Aeneas since the beginning of the spring term.”

“I heard somewhere that you met in town outside the hotel and that you'd had words.”

“You mean Wednesday night? Yeah, we had words, as you say it. He told me that one of the guests up at Petawawa Lodge, Lloyd Pearcy, in fact, had tried to hire him to take him into Little Crummock Lake. That was always a sore point between us, because my brother was superstitious about that country, wouldn't ever go there.”

“Was he like that about other places?”

“No, just that lake and around it. I never heard of him going near there.”

“Was the superstition one known to you? Is it part of a tradition or something like that?”

“Well the story he told about hearing thunder—”

“Yes, I know that part. Do you know anyone else who had similar fears?”

“No. And Aeneas wasn't ever able to talk about it much. He wasn't one for talking much at the best of times.”

“Is that what the argument was about?”

“Well, I guess, if you want to call it that. Harry Glover calls it an argument, because it makes him feel important. He has me written down as his leading suspect. Well, that would make my brother laugh, that would. He just doesn't have a glimmer about what happened, that's all.”

“Get back to the argument.”

“Well, yes. It was about his guiding Lloyd Pearcy into Little Crummock, like I said. I told him he was being stupid and backward and giving the impression that we were all superstitious and backward. He didn't argue back. That was his big weapon—silence. He won more points by saying nothing than anybody I ever knew.”

“You had this argument before?”

“Every year or two he'd beg off going up there, and I'd give him hell. Aeneas was a poor man. He couldn't afford to turn down a guiding job, and I told him. I tried to explain to him the way it is with thunder and lightning, how the one is the sound of the other, and how you can't have one without the other. I told him about the speeds of light and sound. But it didn't do any good.”

“How did you part?”

“As usual. He was quiet, reflective, a little drunk, maybe, a little truculent, but nothing wild.”

“Was it an 'I'll show you' kind of mood?”

“Maybe. He often went off to prove he was right about something, then dumped the proof on my floor. I remember one time I said there were no pike in a certain river. Next week I found one wrapped in a green garbage bag on my floor. Never said anything about it. He just went and caught one.”

“Have you ever been to Little Crummock Lake?”

“I don't get the time. I'm marking papers most of the year.”

“Yes, but not right now. What about lately?”

“No, I'd get lost. I'm not much of an outdoorsman.”

“Maggie McCord says that you know your way around.”

“Maggie's romantic about Indians. She thinks we are all out of Fenimore Cooper.” We both smiled, while I tried to remember whether Cooper wrote
The Last of the Mohicans
or
The Song of Hiawatha.

“But you can paddle a canoe?” I asked. He nodded. “You would be unlikely to get lost or be eaten by bears in the park?”

“No more than my grade-eight kids,” he admitted. That seemed to be the end of the conversation, but on my way to the door another question hit me.

“When you saw Aeneas on Thursday night, either at his camp or at the Annex, did he say anything to you that referred back to your argument and his superstition?”

“He didn't say anything. But he had his special look on his face.”

“What sort of look?”

“Whenever he'd won a point or beaten the odds. Call it a look of pride, or inner calm. I don't know how to describe it.”

I said I thought he'd done a good job of it; we shook hands again. He told me about the funeral arrangements and I repeated my condolences, and found my way down the linoleum-covered stairs into the cranberry-lit hall, where Mrs. Kramer was waiting to show me off the property.

TWELVE

I returned to the lodge in the cab of a lumber truck. The driver was a cousin of a friend of Bonnie's sister. Bonnie was the waitress at the Blue Moon Café. The driver and I spent the first half of the trip bouncing along in complete silence. The view from the cab of a lumber truck makes you feel both giddy and king-of-the-highway. The last part of the trip was as full of gossip as the café. I was reeling with news about the intermarrying heads of the lumber companies and fairly drunk on talk of provincial patronage and evil doings. I slipped into my cabin without seeing anybody but one of the Kipp kids wrapped in a towel.

I picked up my car keys from my other pants and walked through the dust of the parking lot to turn my motor over. That swim I'd promised myself came to mind as I sat behind the wheel. It was hotter than the sweat room in a men's club.

Starting back to the cabin still shaking from the truck ride I came abreast of the motel building, and could hear raised voices. I stopped in my tracks like a milk train. The noise was coming from Westmorland's unit. The voices erupted out of the screen door before I could even turn and hide. It was George McCord reeling out backwards down the steps with Des Westmorland almost on top of him.