at a time. Should she even mention Melibee?
“Ted’s idea. The classics are relaxing, at least to my age group. His sessions have helped a lot.” Her voice seemed vaguely slurred but under tight control. She wore cotton pants and a cardigan over a Shield University T-shirt with a toothy beaver brandishing a hockey stick. Miriam’s sense of humour hadn’t vanished, or was she merely prisoner of the random choices Belle had made when packing that suitcase?
“Do you need anything else from the apartment?”
“You did fine. Thanks for the clothes and quilting book. And those movie tapes.”
Belle knew Miriam loved mysteries, and in haste that night, without a thought about her criminal situation, had selected more than one tale of vicious murder.
Miriam held out one hand, straight except for a tiny quaver of the little finger. “Damn meds, a necessary poison, they claim. They give you something that makes you feel good when you have no right to. But every time I think about . . .” She swallowed and gazed toward the lake, where in the distance a cross-country skier forged along with a leaping black Lab. “My God! Where’s Strudel?” She choked back a sob. “What a mess I am.”
Belle passed her the tissue box. “Your poodle is at my place. Eating like a stoat, or is it shoat? Probably both.” She neglected to add that Freya had shown the pup the miracles of birch bark toys, and that the little dog had added the bulk to her diet. “I’ll keep her for as . . . until your cranky alter ego surfaces, Madame Hostie. Now here’s the good news. Jesse’s back in harness. No sub for you, of course.”
Miriam’s pale cheeks flushed, and she stared at the floor. “I’m ashamed to confess that I haven’t given the office a thought. What miracle brought her back from Israel?”
Belle made the sign of the cross, then switched to a complicated star of David. “Loaves and fishes to follow after the news at five. She’s already logged two old dolls who want to dump the monster houses now that they’re widows.” Untrue, but it coaxed a smile from Miriam.
Her eyes slightly pink at the corners but penetrating, Miriam took her hand in a rare gesture. “I didn’t do it. I couldn’t.”
“Of course. You’re all bark and no bite.” She squeezed back, tallying the evidence that Miriam had been deeply disturbed. Forgetting the job Belle could understand. Sometimes she’d like to do the same. But the poodle? Were there hidden depths to her friend that she didn’t want to probe? Who had killed Melibee?
At a nearby card table, where three people sat, a spoon clinked on a glass. A chubby woman in a sweater set with a string of pearls rose with a book in her hand. Lipstick had been clumsily applied in a clownish fashion.
“Poor lady. She does this every day at the same time.” Miriam whispered as she cocked a surreptitious thumb at the audience, one snoring Afro-Canadian man, a spaced-out teenager, and a thin woman playing solitaire, her mouth working like a hungry bloodsucker.
“Archibald Lampman’s ‘The City of the End of Things,’ 1895, a prophesy of environmental disaster. ‘Beware!’ ” the woman announced, clearing her throat. “ ‘All its grim grandeur, tower and hall,/ Shall be abandoned utterly.’ ” She paused and gestured toward a wall of grainy black and white photos of 1900 Sudbury, miners leaning on shovels by a slag pit, wooden hovels in the background and the rising smoke of open pit fires forming a hellish background. “ ‘Nor ever living thing shall grow, /Nor trunk of tree, nor blade of grass.’ ”
Belle observed quietly, “The Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t like this performance after the regreening campaign. Who is this woman?”
Miriam hid her mouth with her hand. “Bev Martin. High school English teacher. On stress leave in her thirty-fifth year on the job. Frankly, I think it’s going to be permanent.”
With the final post-apocalyptic image of the poem in her head, the abandoned town guarded by a “grim idiot at the gate,” Belle found herself applauding, along with a few appreciative patients.
Relieved for the moment at Miriam’s recovery, she returned to the office to find a banquet: chopped chicken livers, matzo crackers, pepper salad, and bananas from Costa Rica. “Union grown, of course. And here’s The Sudbury Star,” Jesse said, handing her the page with their ads. “I caught a typo. Something of interest on the front page, too.” Her wrinkled mouth twitched as she brought a steaming cup of herbal tea from an assortment of boxes by the abandoned coffee maker. Then she logged onto the computer, shoving Miriam’s foot roller aside with an annoyed look.
Belle gulped at the “beadrooms” in one listing, then unfolded page one. “LOCAL INVESTMENT COUNSELLOR’S EMPIRE COLLAPSES,” it read. “Less like a house of cards than a mountain of matchsticks.” Melibee Elphinstone, found bludgeoned to death (three words always used together), had been operating a variation on a Ponzi scheme, placating older suckers with largesse from new fish, the article explained. Aside from a few flyers in risky software companies reduced to penny stocks thanks to the tech implosion, the tempting portfolios he had amassed were entirely fictitious. Over one hundred people, mostly pensioners, had entrusted sums reaching over three million dollars. Marilyn Rice, seventy-five, said, “He was the son I never had. I mortgaged my home and gave him everything.” As for the penthouse, it had been rented, along with his powder blue Lexus, and even the furniture and art. Belle bit her lip until it hurt. Her friend’s savings were gone. One hope remained. A brief examination of his records led investigators to believe that some assets might lie in offshore bank accounts in Turks and Caicos, sunny, impoverished islands which a few years ago had asked to be annexed to Canada, a consummation devoutly to be wished as far as many were concerned.
She picked up the phone to call Steve for details and then decided to let him alone, declining to face another scornful refusal. Miriam would be released soon. What then? Between mouthfuls of the peppery pâté, full of minced onion and hardboiled egg, she summed up the situation to Jesse. “I know a few local lawyers,” she said, “but their focus is on civil cases, real estate lawsuits, not violent crime.”
“Funny you should mention that,” Jesse said, finishing a cracker with a burp and patting her mouth, leaving large cerise lipstick blossoms on the serviette. “My great-niece Celeste in Ottawa . . .”
Seven
En route to Rainbow Country Nursing Home, Belle stopped at the former Granny’s Kitchen, now Our Place, a local restaurant in Garson, which changed hands, but luckily not menus, every few years. The new owner, an eager young woman with energy and optimism, had readied her father’s special order: minced chicken, gravy and mashed potatoes, cherry pie to follow.
Juggling the styrofoam boxes, Belle navigated the well salted path to the two-storey residence, formerly a series of bachelor apartments. Unlike the impersonal high rises that warehoused Sudbury’s increasing elderly, Rainbow was frayed at the edges like an old carpet, but offered maximum personal care. Recently the Finnish community had bought in and begun renovating, adding a state-of-the-art tub room with mechanized hoists. Eventually all tenants would be relocated in the final expansion of their Minnow Lake retirement complex in town.
“Rumour has it you’re an honourary Finn now,” she said to her father, spruce in a Blue Jays shirt and practical navy washpants.
“Scot, Finn, same thick blood. Who else could stand the cold?” George Palmer answered, his handsome lips in a pout. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I left word at the desk that Tuesday, Tuesday had been moved to Thursday, Thursday,” she said, wondering in the recent miasma if she actually had. Due to periods of confusion from small strokes known as TIA’s, followed by bills listing calls to Malaysia, Cape Verde and Tasmania (to congratulate Errol Flynn on his marriage to Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire), he was no longer allowed a telephone. She tucked a handy bib under his chin, moving to the small bathroom to fill his mug with cold water. The cup portrayed him with arm around his zaftig Italian girlfriend in happier days in Florida. Mary LaGrotta wrote regularly with news of their Life Goes On social club, but it saddened Belle