Foul Deeds: A Rosalind Mystery (4 page)

As she walked away, I thought about how the suspicion of being spied on had made me feel just a couple of hours earlier. When McBride and I had taken Molly out to the Commons where we could talk freely, we decided he should call on his old buddy Andy—a specialist in the surveillance biz—to check out his place, his phone, and maybe even his car, just to make sure it was all clean. After our walk McBride was heading off to a meeting with our client, Peter King's son Daniel.

The actors were setting up for the scene between Ophelia and Polonius—her description of Hamlet's visit to her sewing closet, to be followed by the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the court. Sophie had pulled on her long rehearsal skirt and she came over to where I was sitting with my script, waiting for things to get rolling.

“By the way, Roz, in case we just do this one scene with me and I leave early, why don't you come over after rehearsal for a drink or some tea?”

“Sure,” I said. “I will. That would be great.”

“I have a surprise for you. ”

“What do you mean?” I said, ever wary of surprises.

“Well it's…no it's just a little present, really.”

A little present? What on earth could that be, I wondered as I drove along Gottingen Street to Sophie's apartment building in the North End. She lived at the edge of the Hydrostone, the part of the city that had been completely rebuilt following the devastating Halifax Explosion of 1917. The brainchild of renowned town planner Thomas Adams and architect George Ross, featuring design variations, gardens, and wide boulevards, the Hydrostone was a remarkable success story. Over three hundred homes were completed in 1921, all constructed out of the compressed concrete blocks known as hydro-stones. The dwellings were modern for that era—all equipped with electricity and plumbing—practical—they wouldn't burn down easily—and beautiful. Still beautiful, I thought as I drove by the little row of shops that ran along Young Street.

Sophie had indeed left rehearsal early; I stayed on to work Hamlet's wonderful fishmonger scene with Polonius, followed by his first scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. After a stressful day, I was feeling exhilarated, truly connected to something greater than greed and malice. While that was exactly what the play was about, the sheer joy of Shakespeare's language lifted my spirits. I was enjoying my work with the actors and they were all doing a superb job. Even though they had no money, no production support, no costumes, they were embarking on the
Hamlet
journey with full passion and commitment.

I parked in front of Julien's Bakery and walked across to Sophie's building and up to her apartment. She had the tea on—a new chai she was trying out—and the familiar bottle of single malt was sitting on the low table by the couch with a couple of small glasses.

“How did it go after I left?” she called from the kitchen.

“Really well,” I said, spreading some of our favourite St. Agur cheese on a Stoned Wheat Thin. “Lots of comedy in those sections, watching Hamlet get the best of those characters as they stand on their heads trying to figure him out. It's about as light as the play gets. The company seems to be relaxing more too,” I added as she came into the room with tea things. “I try not to interfere with what they're doing, and now they're readily coming to me to puzzle things out, so I think we've figured out our working dynamic. I'm really into it.”

“You sort of spend your life puzzling things out, don't you? I mean that's what you do with McBride too.”

“It is, although he takes the lead, directing me to do certain kinds of research and various other tasks. But occasionally I get very involved with the cases.”

“He's not married is he?”

I looked at her. “Oh my god, Sophie. Are you interested in McBride?”

“But is he…or does he have someone in his life?”

“He's married to Molly,” I said dryly.

“No, seriously—what's his story?”

“Well, he's divorced and his ex lives out in BC—Victoria, I think—with their teenage son, Alex. He used to lean pretty heavily on the bottle, and I guess she got as far away as she could. Honestly, in many ways he's your classic hard-boiled gumshoe, Sophie. It would be a tough slog trying to live with McBride.”

“Oh for heaven's sake Roz—I don't want to live with him. I'm just curious about him.”

“Well, just so you know,” I said. “Anyway, moving right along…where's the present?”

“Well, it's not really a present, I mean, not an actual thing. I have this old friend in Montreal—he's an actor that I went to theatre school with there, and we used to do tarot readings and stuff like that all the time. So recently, out of the blue, he sent me this deck of cards he found in an antique store—it's probably a collector's item, like a really old set of the Tarot of the Marseilles. The strange happenings of the other night got me kind of worried, so I decided I should do a reading for you.”

Sophie was a perfect combination of smart, independent woman, old world hippie-artist, and New Ager. There seemed to be nothing in the popular occult she hadn't familiarized herself with in some way.

“Do you know the tarot?” she asked.

“Not really. I think I had my cards read years ago. Remind me how it works.”

“Well,” she replied, “there are seventy-eight cards in the deck. Four suits—Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles—make up the fifty-six cards of what is called the Minor Arcana, and then there are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana—all of which have strong symbolic meanings which can be interpreted in many ways: images, numerology, astrology, archetypes. The cards are very potent if you're into interpretation.”

The next thing I knew, she was opening a lacquered wooden box and taking out an oversize deck of cards.

“Okay,” she said. “What you do is shuffle the cards for awhile and just think about your situation. You can actually fashion a question if you like, but really it's more about focusing in on your present circumstances.”

She put the worn cards in my hand. I looked at them. They were about one and a half times as long as normal playing cards, and made of heavier cardboard with a blue and white-checkered pattern on the back. The illustrations were bold, medieval-styled line drawings in black filled in with vivid red, blue, and yellow ink. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana each had a tiny publisher's stamp on the illustrated side that said the cards were from B. P. Grimaud—Paris. The edges of the cards were grayed with use but not frayed.

I felt the weight of them.

“I don't know,” I said. “You've kind of caught me off guard here. We might not like what we see.”

“Look, don't worry. I'll just do a short reading—a ten-card one. Come on, it'll be fun and I know you'll get into it.”

I started slowly shuffling the seventy-eight cards of the Major and Minor Arcana, thinking about the last few days, about McBride's incident in the parking lot, what I had learned about Peter King's work,
Hamlet
rehearsals. My mind drifted through the events.

Sophie had turned off the bright reading lamp at the end of the couch and we were in the candlelight. The air was scented with a mix of amber and patchouli aromatic oils, and she was sitting on the carpet on the opposite side of the low table, very still, watching me.

“Okay,” she said, “first, you take one card out of the deck and that will be your Significator; it will be you. Go ahead.”

I pulled out a single card and gave it to her. She placed it in the centre of the table face up. It was number seventeen from the Major Arcana, The Star.

“What does it represent?” I asked.

“Gifts of the spirit—the Water of Life,” she responded.

“Get out of town!” I said. “Water…is definitely on my mind. It's what our case is all about.”

“Well, water is at the heart of this card. The naked woman pours the water of life from two ewers—one onto the land and one into the stream. She is replenishing the stream so that those who are thirsty may drink, and watering the earth so that the seeds will grow. Behind her rises a hill with a shrub or a tree on it, and in the night sky are seven—”

The telephone rang, startling us both. She looked at me and I nodded for her to go ahead and answer it.

“Hello. Oh, hi! How are you feeling? Oh that's great—I'm glad to hear it. She is, yes. How's Molly, by the way? Good. Here she is. Guess who?” Sophie handed me the receiver.

I set the cards down on the table. “What's up? Lonely?” I smiled at Sophie. “What? Well, no kidding? See! What did I tell you!” Standing up, I put my hand over the phone and asked Sophie if I could invite McBride over.

“Why not?” she said.

“I'm sure Molly will show you which apartment it is,” I said, giving him the address and then hanging up. I looked over at Sophie. “I'm right!” I said.

“Right about what?” she asked.

“They have yew trees. Daniel King confirmed it.”

“Yew trees?”

“
The juice of curs-ed hebenon
,
”
I answered. “Ring a bell?”

“The poison that Claudius used to kill his brother is from the yew tree?”

“This might bring us a step closer in our investigation. Let's take a rain check on the tarot for now Sophie,” I said, feeling relieved. The water imagery in The Star card was already too unsettling, and the idea of a tarot reading was making me nervous. “I'm too wired about this yew tree thing.”

“Hey, isn't the yew part of the runic alphabet?” she said.

“You got me,” I replied.

“Yes, I'm sure it is. It represents death, doesn't it? I believe the yew tree was traditionally planted on graves. I have some runes here.” With that, she pressed her finger on a decorative motif on the side of the low table and a drawer suddenly popped forward.

“That's pretty cool,” I said.

“Yes, it's my secret drawer,” she said, taking out her set of rune stones. “In fact, this will tickle your etymological fancy. The word ‘rune' comes from
Runa
, the Germanic word meaning ‘secret.'”

“Really?” I said, getting interested.

“We could read runes instead of cards,” she said, teasing me with a wicked laugh.

“Another time I think, Sophie.”

“You don't like anyone getting too close to what's going on with you, do you?”

“Can I see the yew stone?” I asked, changing the subject.

The letter carved into the stone looked like a tilted backward letter “Z”—a kind of zigzag that in itself represented a double-ended staff of life and death and would have been originally carved from a yew tree. Sophie was reading this information to me from the little paper that was in the box.

“It's number thirteen in the runic alphabet. It says here the oldest existing yew tree is possibly nine thousand years old. The yew is considered a very magical, sacred tree—the tree of life—but with its enormous, far-reaching roots it also represents death and the underworld.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Oh, and the yew can also mean assertiveness, masculine aggression, or master of the estate.”

“You know, this is all starting to make sense. The runes were Scandinavian, weren't they? That might explain why clever Shakespeare would have Claudius use the yew to kill Old Hamlet the Dane, thereby becoming the new master of the estate, in this case the King of Denmark.”

A sudden knock at the door took our attention. McBride and Molly hadn't wasted any time getting across town.

McBride settled himself in the wingback with a glass of orange juice and soda water—his current choice of non-alcoholic beverage—while Sophie whipped up a bread and milk special for Molly in the kitchen. Molly could make a variety of soft noises that McBride called whispers, and it sounded as though the two of them were actually having a conversation. I asked McBride how our client Daniel King was doing.

“He's a wreck. He looks like he hasn't slept since his father died and when I told him about the brutal little encounter I had in the parking lot, and my anonymous caller being too spooked to show up, he took it quite hard—since it likely proves his theory. I was sorry I had nothing solid for him except the certainty that we're on the right track. He'd like us to keep going.”

“And at some point you asked him about the yew trees?”

“I just got him to describe all the plants and shrubbery around the property if he could. He also mentioned foxglove, which is on your list.”

“That's right,” I said. “Digitalis. Too much can stop the heart, but it's the wrong time of year to access it. If garden digitalis was used to poison Peter King, then this was planned several months ago.”

“It seems King was an avid gardener. Daniel said he would often come home in early June to help out with the spring landscaping.”

Sophie had entered the room with a new cup of hot chai. The aromatic scent of the sweet spice drifted over us.

“So I gather Daniel King doesn't live in Nova Scotia,” she said.

“No. He's an architect with a firm in the Niagara district in Ontario, and he's got to head back to meet some deadlines for his current project. In fact,” McBride paused, looking at Sophie as she sat
down on the couch, “it's a theatre building he's designing.”

“Really? I'd love to see it.” Sophie made herself comfortable opposite McBride.

“What about Peter's wife—Mrs. King?” I asked. “What's her story? Is she also a gardener?”

“Daniel said she puts most of her landscaping talents into cultivating rose bushes. She's presently in London, England. Went over after the funeral. Apparently has an old friend there. He gave me a contact number for her in case we need to reach her.”

“So Daniel's leaving when?”

“Early tomorrow morning,” he said.