The Dead Letter (12 page)

33.

The damp coolness of October struck Anne as soon as she stepped
outside the little house Lydia Vandermeer rented in Pownal, a village fifteen minutes east of Charlottetown. She pulled onto the road and followed a dim meandering path toward the city. It was eleven o'clock. Hers was the only car on the road.

She looked toward the blackness of the shore and the greyness of the sea beyond and turned over Lydia's revelation in her mind.
A kick in the nuts
, she had said.

No doubt
, thought Anne, but it could be more than that. It could have been the motive for Simone's murder. MacFarlane discovers that Simone is pregnant—perhaps she even told him. Simone wouldn't have known about MacFarlane's sterility. He knows he's not the father, becomes enraged at her infidelity, and kills her. Simone's mother had suspected that her daughter was cheating on MacFarlane.

On the other hand, maybe Simone's new lover had killed her. For what motive, we could only guess. Blackmail? The burden of child support? A wife? Social consequences of some sort?

Anne was drawn to suspecting MacFarlane much more than Mr. Anonymous. First, MacFarlane had a massive ego, and the thought of her dumping him would have been inconceivable. He may have overreacted, struck out, realized she was dead, and found someone like Dawson to blame. Second, MacFarlane had lied about the child being his from the get-go. Police had recorded his statement that she was pregnant in an early interview, and he had played that sympathy card with Anne when he dropped into her office to persuade her to drop the investigation. All deceptions. Intuitively, he kept that information from Lydia, who was smart enough to put two and two together. Third, he had frightened Carolyn Jollimore so badly that she lied about her proximity to the crime. Perhaps she had recognized him somehow.

Anne's cell phone buzzed. She glanced at the call display. It was a private number. The highway forked just ahead at the base of a hill. Anne pulled off at the junction onto a grassy area. As her wheels left the pavement, she felt the car dip to the right. The steering was sluggish and she noticed a wobble. She grabbed the cell phone just before the last ring would send it to voice mail.

“Who? Edna?” she said. “Wait a minute. I'm in the car…can't hear you…hold on.”

Anne got out of her car and wandered about the grassy lot to find a stronger signal.

“How's this? Better? Good. What can I do for you? I can meet you first thing in the morning. An update? Of course. Where? Okay, I can be there.”

Anne returned to her car. It was still running. The headlights cast enough illumination for her to see that the right rear tire was flat.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” She stomped her foot with each invective she hurled.

It took a minute for her frustration to settle.
Ben would be asleep
, she thought.
A tow truck might take a couple of hours. To hell with it. I'll do it myself.

Anne popped the trunk, located the spare. She thought it looked like a toy. The operator's manual was in the glove compartment. She sought it out. It would explain where to put the jack.

She was paging through the manual when high beams from an approaching vehicle enveloped her car. It had come from behind and stopped. She heard two creaky doors open. She looked back. She caught the outline of a pickup truck. Two figures emerged. They walked toward her, just silhouettes in the glare of the truck lights.

“Having trouble, missy?” said the larger silhouette.

“A flat,” said Anne.

“Need help?”

“I could do it myself,” said Anne, hesitantly, “but…if you're offering…”

“Say no more. Glad to be of service. Just stay right where you are, missy. We'll take care of it. I'm Buddy, this is Frank,” said the bigger of the silhouettes.

Buddy was medium height and bulky with the lumbering gait of a truck driver. Frank was taller, younger, and more fluid in his movements, but Anne could not clearly make out either of them in the glare of their truck lights, and she was content to remain in her car while they worked.

Frank pulled the jack from under a flap in the trunk. The spare thumped as it hit the ground. Frank loosened the lug nuts as Buddy placed the jack under the frame and cranked. Anne felt the car slowly rise.

“Excuse me, do you have a cell phone?” asked Buddy. “I have to make a quick call to my woman,” he said.

“Sure.” Anne handed him the phone.

Buddy reached for the phone. He took it and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

“You won't be needing this for a while,” he said. “Just stay right where you are…and you won't get hurt. Don't want this jacked-up car to drop on your foot or anything, right?”

Anne felt a chill. It wasn't the October air. It was fear, creeping up her spinal column. It tingled, and she shuddered. The numbness of adrenaline coursed through her body. Her eyes darted about the front seat for something sharp. There was nothing. Her left hand slipped down into a storage slot in the driver door. She felt a ball point pen and gripped it tightly out of sight.

“Ya know, Annie girl, some people have the idea that a woman should stay at home and mind things there and bring up the kids.” Buddy knelt by Frank on the other side of the car, but she could clearly hear his voice. She heard the pop of a hubcap.

“Not me, though. I guess I'm more liberal. I think a woman should do whatever she needs to do to feel good,” he said. Anne felt the chill of the night air brush her neck and the stickiness of the sweat on her hand as it squeezed the pen.

“Now, my woman, she loved to dance and she kept a great house, but one time she convinced herself that she wanted to do more outdoorsy stuff. I didn't try to talk her out of it, no sir. She's kinda headstrong. Frank, put those lug nuts in the cap so ya don't lose 'em.”

The car quivered a bit as Frank pulled the wheel off the studs. Anne heard the clatter and clank of the spare.

“So one time, she takes the notion to cut out some brush behind her garden. I say I'll do it. She says no, no. She wants to do it herself. That's fine, I say. So I show her what she needs to know. She goes at it. An hour later she runs into the house covered in blood. It was awful. That chainsaw caught a branch, kicked back, and took a chunk out of her leg. Had to call 911. Paramedics patched her up, but she don't dance like she used to. Never will, I expect.”

Anne heard a soft squeal from the jack as Frank turned the crank. It sounded like the mouse she once caught by its foot in a trap. At the same time she felt the car dropping to the ground. That small motion was strangely dizzying.

“Snug 'em down good. Wouldn't want the little lady to have an
accident on our account?” he said to Frank.

“Too bad,” he said, his voice raised so Anne could hear him. “A hard lesson to learn. But that was her. This is you. I expect you'd be
different. I expect you'd be smarter than that. You look smart. Like you went to college. Smart people learn their life lessons early. Others only when it's too late.”

Anne jumped in her seat when she heard a thud. Frank had hurled the flat tire into the trunk. He roughly tossed the jack in after it.

“A pretty young woman like you still wants to dance and have fun, right? An old aunt of mine used to say, ‘A man who is warned is half saved.' Clever lady. Lived to be ninety-three. I always liked that one.”

“Have you finished your phone call?” asked Anne. She heard the fear in her own voice, but hoped that Buddy had not.

Buddy took her phone from his pocket and tossed it into the back seat.

The pickup truck backed onto the highway and returned the way it had come. Mud obscured the license plate number. Anne found herself shaking when she dropped the pen from her hand. She reached back for her phone.

“Dit, I know it's late, but I need to talk to somebody. Are you alone?”

34.

Dit lived on a groved estate across the harbour from Charlottetown.
His house was a two-storey brick with a mansard roof and resembled the old manor houses of Provence, but Dit had redesigned it with a modern interior and all the amenities needed by a paraplegic in a wheelchair. His surgeries the previous year had minimized his need for a wheelchair, and he greeted Anne at the front door on crutches.

Dit was alone. Gwen had gone to Nova Scotia to pick up some things from her apartment. She would be returning tomorrow or the next day depending upon other business she had to clear up.

Anne stood in the doorway. She looked like a lost puppy that had endured great misadventures before finding its way back home. He knew something had seriously upset her. He shifted a crutch to his other side and held his arms out. Anne rushed in, encircled him with her arms, and buried her head in his chest. Slowly his arms closed around her, and neither said anything.

After a moment, Anne loosened her grip, took a step back, and looked up at Dit. She wanted to burst into tears, to let everything just come flooding out, but she fought the impulse. It was something she might have yielded to years before, but in her more recent life as a private investigator she knew that she had to keep her “game face” on, even with friends. Otherwise, she would look too emotional and weak, the stereotypical woman, and then someone would inevitably suggest that she find something else to do, meaning “women's work.”

Already, in the eyes of the public, she had two strikes against her. One, she was female, and two, she was small and looked vulnerable. Some would go so far as to say three strikes were against her, Jacqui being number three, a child to protect and raise, though at sixteen Jacqui was hardly a helpless, needy child. Even Dit, who had been her supporter and rock when times had gotten tough, had from time to time backslid into that state of mind.

Instead Anne tucked her impulses behind a forced grin and a distracting remark: “I had a really, really, sucky day, and I need a friend. Any recommendations?”

“I think I have Rent-A-Buddy on speed dial. I could call. Or, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Captain Morgan are in the library. I believe they're having a quiet chat.”

With a sweep of his arm Dit motioned her in. They passed through the living room, spacious, open, and furnished in a smart, simple style. The skyline of Charlottetown glimmered beyond the window. It was the perfect room for dinner parties. It conjured up civility, good manners, cordiality, and fun, but Anne felt an odd aversion to that room tonight, and Anne was relieved when Dit led her past it.

The library was warmer, smaller, and furnished in leather and dark wood. A light scent of furniture oil hung in the air. The lamp was on when they entered. This was Dit's favourite room and where he spent much of his time at home.

Anne sank into a large supple chair, her legs curled up underneath her like a parlour cat. Music filled the room. It was a habit of Dit's, perhaps a need, a way to fill the quiet of an empty house. Frenzied rhythms flowed from unseen speakers.

“Who's your friend tonight?” asked Dit.

“I love a man in uniform,” said Anne.

“Captain Morgan it is then,” he said and grabbed a bottle of rum from a cabinet. “Straight?”

“I've never had that bad a day. Coke. Ice. A twist?”

“Can do,” he said. He finished mixing her drink. He poured himself one as well. Anne felt the rum tingle and her body slowly warm. Dit pressed a button on a console, and the music changed to Cuban.

“Better,” said Anne. Her eyes brightened for the first time since she came in.

“You don't like Monk.”

“He's like…too many fireworks at once. I don't want my head pulled in so many directions, not tonight, above all, not tonight. I don't want to think anymore.”

“This kind of music,” she said, her arm circling vaguely toward the salsa rhythms that enveloped the room, “makes me want to get up, dance, and have fun.” Anne became abruptly conscious of her words. They conjured the ugly familiarity of Buddy's words. She turned cold, and her voice flattened. “I feel like I just got off the stress express.”

“So…you want to tell me what happened?”

“I didn't know if I was going to be raped or beat up or killed,” she said.

She looked up toward Dit. His lips parted with surprise, but he said nothing. Instead, he looked expectantly for her to explain.

Anne recounted the incident from the time she left Lydia Vandermeer's farmhouse. The dark road. The telephone call from Edna. The flat. Buddy and Frank's timely arrival, their offer to help, and the taking of her cell phone. Buddy's story of his woman, her chainsaw accident, and his disturbing application of it to Anne.

“It was like the nightmare I used to have as a kid. Being trapped, unable to move while shapeless, evil creatures swooped around me.”

Dit noticed a tremor in her hand, and he could hear the soft chatter of ice in her quivering glass. Anne noticed none of that. Her eyes remained fixed and wide as she relived the episode.

“Are you sure you weren't imagining the threat? Just about everyone would be uneasy in those circumstances. A benign remark, a sloppy choice of words, could spark an old fear.”

“You don't believe me?” Anne snapped back.

“Of course I believe you, but everything they did and said could be interpreted as your imagination magnifying the circumstances.” Dit felt pleased that he had preserved a calm, soothing, reassuring tone. He knew that Anne could “fly off the handle” from time to time. She had done so in the past, and he couldn't understand it. For that matter, he could never quite understand why so many other women he knew reacted the same way.

“He knew me by name,” said Anne. “He called me ‘Annie girl.' He did it just once, a slip of the tongue. That isn't a local phrasing. It's not a colloquialism. He knew who I was.”

“That's something, I suppose…but you didn't phone the police. Why?”

“Police couldn't do anything. The threat was implied. They would say that all they did was help some woman in distress on the highway. Good Samaritans with simple minds and maybe lousy social skills, the cops would say. I couldn't tell the cops, but I had to talk to someone. So here I am.”

“What next?”

“Just carry on as usual, I guess. And you?” Anne said, finished her drink, and stood up.

“The band plays on,” he said.

“Are they playing ‘The Wedding March' or ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover'?” As soon as Anne heard the words fly out of her mouth, she regretted them. She was tired and stressed. Dit's enumeration of possibilities, his unbearable parsing of Buddy's words, and his sparing support of her take on the evening had upset her. She didn't want analysis. Not now. She didn't want thinking. That could wait. Tonight she just wanted a shoulder to cry on. Tonight she just wanted to feel sorry for herself and for someone else to feel sorry for her…for ten or fifteen minutes anyway. Was that too much to ask?

“What do you mean by that?” Dit asked. He looked confused, and he sounded defensive.

“I think it's pretty clear,” said Anne. She felt trapped, but there was no way out.

“Are you questioning our relationship?”

“I guess I am.”

“What gives you that right?”

“We're friends, aren't we?”

“Say what you have to say, then.”

“I don't think you and Gwen belong together.”

“You're making no sense. Do you know that? None whatsoever.”

“How can you say that? You and Gwen are worlds apart. Anybody can see that.”

“Like who?”

“Anybody. You were pretty well confined to that hospital bed for months with surgeries and physio. You came to depend on her. After a while that became like a drug. That became your whole world. Now you can't see anything past your next fix of pretty attention. And she's in the business of caring about patients. It's not a quantum leap to imagine that she would be drawn to you after a while. I don't blame her, but I see this relationship falling apart in a year or two. Getting married so soon is like an act of desperation. Open your eyes! Look at reality!”

“The reality is that she's in love with me, and I'm in love with her. I think you're just jealous. I'm happy…really happy…for once in my life and you, my so-called best friend, try to snatch it away.”

“I'm doing nothing of the sort!”

“You're jealous of my good fortune and can't stand to let me enjoy it. I thought you were above that sort of thing, Anne. I guess not. Your own personal life is a sham and has been for years. Talk about dependency, you've hid behind your widow's shield for fifteen years. You've pushed away every man that got near. And, whether you realize it or not, you've even used your daughter as an excuse to put them off. You have a job, but you've got no life, and now you don't want me to have one either. Go! Go, dammit! Just go! Get out!”

Even after the door slammed behind her, Anne could still hear the
cubano son
rhythms of the Buena Vista Social Club. She had heard that song many times. The lyrics told a sad and tragic love story, but the beat was buoyant and filled with life and steeped in hope.

Anne cried for most of her drive home.