The Dead Letter (4 page)

10.

The apprehension that had troubled Anne that morning crept into
her bones again. If she were superstitious, she might have attributed her unease to a forerunner, but Anne scoffed at such things as products of ignorance and dim thinking.

Anyway, this restlessness was different. She knew what caused it, or part of it, anyway. It was the suppressed tone of desperation in Carolyn Jollimore's letter, a letter that no one received and that no one had read until today.

Anne tried to imagine how Carolyn must have felt, waiting hours, and days, and weeks, and not receiving a reply. She must have been frantic. Perhaps terrified. And what would she have done then? Given up? Gone to the police? Kept the secret locked away in her memory for years?

And what did she imagine could have kept Bill Darby from contacting her? Did she believe he could be so callous as to ignore her? Did she think he dismissed her as some lunatic?

And how did all this reflect on her uncle? Anne fretted about that, too. Bill Darby had been a man who took pride in his work, someone who worked for next to nothing if he believed in a client's cause. Anne would have been appalled if anyone had thought him cavalier and insensitive when in truth he had been entirely unaware of Carolyn's dilemma. Perhaps that letter had lain, chewed up, in the belly of a mail-sorting machine for the last decade. Or maybe some disgruntled postal worker had dumped it with other undelivered mail on the floor of his woodshed until somebody finally stumbled upon it.

Anne tried, but she couldn't let go of the ideas that churned in her head. They circled like the seamless parade of wooden ponies on a merry-go-round, and they repeated like the never-ending song of a carousel. Carolyn Jollimore's letter had taken a firm hold on her. As a result, she was getting no work done, and she making no progress with her unanswered questions.

Jogging or walking might put her mind at ease, she thought. It had helped in the past. So Anne tied up her running shoes, strode out of her office, and headed up the street along the edge of the business district. She passed a vagrant dozing on a park bench. His cardboard sign read “Will Work for Food.” She walked north and east through mixed-class residential and small business neighbourhoods with no special purpose in mind and followed her curiosity into quiet cul-de-sacs, narrow alleys, and dead-end streets. Eventually, she tired, her head cleared of its clutter, and she found herself standing in front of Malone Electronics.

Malone Electronics was the brainchild of Dit Malone, a former local hockey star whose sports career ended after a diving accident had paralyzed him. In the years that followed, Dit displayed an extraordinary aptitude for computers and electronics. Eventually he built a company that developed specialty audio, visual, and thermal surveillance devices for law enforcement agencies across Canada, the States, and several foreign countries.

Anne and Dit had been friends since she came to the Island, but just a year ago, in the course of helping Anne with her first case as a private investigator, Dit was injured and sent to a Nova Scotia hospital. An unexpected side effect of his injury was the occurrence of a slight sensation in his legs, something he had not experienced since his paralysis. Several procedures and months of physical therapy followed but, in the end, his condition improved enough so he could move about with crutches.

Anne walked through the front door into the display room. No one was there, but a voice called out from behind the closed workshop door.

“Come on through.” Dit held a button down, the door buzzed, and Anne shouldered it open.

“Hey,” she said.

“I know the face, but I can't place the name. Pam? Tammy? Jan. That's it. Jan.”

“Is that what you learned in the big city? How to become a smart-ass.”

Dit sat in his wheelchair, pulled up to a work bench. A circuit board tilted up on the bench, a large magnifying glass in front of it. Dit chuckled quietly.

It suddenly struck Anne that she'd scarcely seen him in months. Over the last year he had spent long periods in Halifax hospitals. She had visited him several times, but her determination to keep the agency afloat and her teenage daughter from running wild consumed much of her time. As a result, her relationship with Dit, which had been growing, faded, almost without her noticing, and, as she looked at him now, he seemed, though not quite a stranger, not much more than a good friend. She felt awkward standing there. She suddenly realized how much she had missed him, and she regretted the change in their relationship but, for that, she had no one to blame but herself, her own preoccupations and personal distractions.

“You still have the Batmobile?” she asked, pointing to his wheelchair.

“I get pretty tired on the crutches, especially working here. I use them as much as I can, though. Good exercise. The doctors insist. The nurses, too.” He winked.

“The nurses are just afraid you might catch up to them.”

“No fear of that.”

“You're waiting for them to catch you?”

“Now that's a plan. Let me write that down. Still, I have to admit that I'm pretty slow on those things. Last night there was a film on one of the cable channels. I couldn't sleep. So I stayed up and watched it.
Zombies on the Isle of Skye
.”

“I thought you hated those walking dead movies.”

“I do, but at three in the morning, there's little choice. Anyway, after a bit, I began to wonder who moved faster, the zombies or me on crutches, and eventually I figured it out. If I was in a foot race with Scottish zombies, I'd probably become their ham and cheese special.”

“And how did you arrive at that depressing conclusion?”

“I used a metronome.”

“That's the silliest thing I've ever heard,” she said with a laugh.

“Blame it on insomnia. Anyway, I could hobble around the room no faster than forty-five beats per minute, but they clipped right along in the mid-fifties. An adagio beats a lentissimo any day. Remembered that from high school music classes. Played trombone.”

“That's really pitiful. You know that, don't ya?”

“You got an issue with trombonists?”

“No, just your absurd use of the metronome.”

“It's scientific methodology.”

“It's demented.”

“I think of it as cross-media experimentation. Musical free-thinking.”

“And now you've taken music to a place where no note has gone before. Wait a minute! Are you putting me on?”

“Hell no!…except maybe the part about the metronome…though I have to admit that I did think about using one. Great to see you, Anne. What are you busy at?”

“Oh, this and that. You know.”

Dit looked at his watch and said, “Do you ordinarily run out of this-and-that by mid-afternoon? The private eye biz must be goin' t' hell.”

“I had to clear my head. That's what I meant.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. This time his voice was serious.

Anne opened her mouth to say something just as Dit's wall phone rang. He picked it up and gave Anne a silent indication that he'd just be a minute. “Malone Electronics,” he said, and a large smile crossed his face. “Hey, babe. Where are you?… I'm glad…you made good time…yeah…yeah…plenty of room… I would think so…later…sure…not a problem…”

Anne got up and motioned that she had to go. Dit pulled the receiver from his ear and muffled the phone.

“Stick around. I'll just be a minute.”

“Gotta go. More this-and-that.”

“Are you heading to Mary Anne's later?”

She shrugged.

“Be there…around nine…someone I want you to meet,” he said. Then he returned to his telephone conversation and turned toward the wall.

Anne waved noncommittally and vanished out the door.

The walk had done her no good at all. The sun still shone, but her mind was a muddle again. Bits of thought and twinges of emotion whirled in her head like the scraps of debris whipped by wind in an alleyway.

11.

“It was the damnedest thing,” said Anne. She sat next to Ben Solomon in the large round booth at The Blue Peter.

Ben Solomon grunted. He read the letter again. Then he pushed it across the table to Anne with the back of his hand.

“Interesting,” he said. Ben could be an engaging storyteller at a party but, when it came to uttering a professional opinion, he was as talkative as a Himalayan mystic in a mountainside cave.

Ben had been Bill Darby's best friend. Like Bill, he was a big man. He had short, sparse, greying hair and a stout, firm build. He wore rumpled suits, white shirts, and unremarkable ties. They made him look like a none-too-prosperous sales rep, but all of that belied eighteen years' experience with the Ottawa and the Charlottetown police departments. As detective sergeant he had planned to retire in two years, but those plans changed when the last major case he closed launched him into a top cop position with the Provincial government.

“Interesting? What do you mean ‘interesting'? It's more than that. A lot more,” said Anne.

“It was written eleven years ago. Three years before I joined the Charlottetown Police. It seems a shame, but it's ancient history.”

“It doesn't feel that way to me, Ben. It's been nagging at me all day. When I opened that letter, it was like hearing a scream that had been choked back for eleven years. It brought tears to my eyes. It really did.”

Anne fingered the wedding ring that hung from the gold chain around her neck.

“You're reading too much into it, is what I'm saying. You're thinking too much.”

“It's not what I think. It's how I feel.”

“I think you're spinning wheels over nothing. Take a step back. Look at the facts.”

“How is this nothing, Ben?” Anne wagged the letter in his face. She was feeling angry now.

Ben caught the edge in her voice. He leaned back against the leathery cushion of the booth, raised his glass of beer, and sipped, and thought. Then he leaned forward again.

“Okay, let's take a look. What facts do you have?”

“An undelivered old letter to Uncle Bill from a woman who witnessed a murder.”

“Now, do we know that it was a homicide…and not the death of someone's family pet…or her imaginary friend?”

“No, but…”

“Is it possible that the woman couldn't go to the police because she was a known pain-in-the-ass? A local kook?”

“Maybe, but…”

“Is it possible that she followed up her unanswered letter with a phone call after no one got back to her?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe Bill did handle it or referred her to another agency.”

“Okay.”

“And, even though she may be a kook, she sounds like an intelligent one. So there's every reason to think she would have followed up in some other way.”

“Okay.”

“And notice that the woman used the word
believes.
She said she
believes
that she knows the killer and she
believes
somebody else is taking the fall for it. That's pretty fuzzy language. Maybe she heard a rumour from a friend of a friend of a friend.”

“Okay, okay, enough. I got it. You're right. But, Ben, I just can't forget about it.”

“I never said you should. Turn the letter over to the police. It's their job. Let them handle it. They'll get paid for it. You won't. It's not like it's a real case. Oh…before I forget…one more thing…maybe…
if
it was a real murder…maybe the killer was caught and convicted. There aren't any open murder cases from that time period. So maybe right now he's kicking back and enjoying the ambience of one of those fine cabanas they got over at sunny Dorchester Penitentiary.”

“I love it when you get all optimistic like that, Ben.”

12.

Anne returned to The Blue Peter that evening. She had left Jacqui at
her desk, analyzing the humour of Stephen Leacock stories for an English project. Anne had suggested that topic after a satirical line from
Nonsense Novels
popped into her head.

“It goes something like this,” she had said. “‘Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.'”

After Anne left the house, Jacqui was still giggling at the theatrical manner with which her mother delivered that line but, by the time Anne arrived at The Blue Peter, the humour of it all had vanished from her mind and, strangely, she felt like a twelve-year-old sitting with the “big people,” even though all of those who gathered around the large, round-tabled booth were friends or long-time acquaintances.

Ben Solomon and his wife Sarah had been first to arrive. Brenda Malone and her husband, Dashiell, Dit's brother, came in with Urban Nolan and Eli Seares, two eccentric bachelors who made up what Anne called the “geek squad” at Malone Electronics. Mary Anne MacAdam hovered over the group and popped in and out of conversations between her restaurant duties and staff crises. Anne just curled up in the midst of them all, feet drawn up beneath her on the leather upholstery and a half-empty glass of Cabernet in front of her.

Laughter and chatter swelled and fell away and, during a subdued moment, Mary Anne nudged Anne.

“You seem out of sorts,” she said. “Not feeling well?”

“It's been one of those days,” Anne said, “and I'm not convinced it's over yet.” Then she added quietly, “Why are we here anyway? What's going on?”

“Dit wanted us to meet.”

“But why? What's up?”

“Well, if I had to guess, I'd say that he has a new friend and wants to show her off. At least, that's what I hope we're here for. He needs a serious upgrade to his social life. All work and no play, if you know what I mean.”

“Hmmph,” said Anne.

“Speaking of which…,” Mary Anne said and bent her thumb toward the door.

Dit pushed through the foyer doors. He had strong, kind features, a muscular build, and brown curly hair. He wore dark trousers with a sharp crease and a cream-coloured sweater that showed off his lingering summer tan. A woman walked next to him, her arm linked loosely under his. She wore high heels and a low-cut, peacock blue dress with one shoulder strap. It shimmered under the dim overhead lights. She carried a white knit shawl.

She's beautiful
, Anne thought and straightened up. The sneakers on her feet dangled near the floor. She glanced at Dit. She gave her over-stretched sweater a few subtle tugs to imply some shape, but it had no effect whatsoever.

“She's gorgeous,” said Ben.

“She's kinda cute,” said Anne. “I guess,” she added.

Sarah jabbed Ben in the ribs. “You look like an owl,” she said. “Stop staring.” Then Sarah turned to Anne. “Let me know if he starts drooling, and I'll take him home and lock him in the basement until the next lunar cycle.”

“Of course, you must realize that it's against the law to lock up a cop,” he said, “…unless it's Saturday night…and bondage gets your motor running…” Ben quickly shifted into the lyrics of a Steppenwolf song and began to sing softly to Sarah, “head out on that highway…lookin' for adventure…in whatever comes our way…yeah darlin' gonna make it happen…take the world in a love embrace…”

Sarah's face turned red.

“Stop it! Stop it!” she growled under her breath. She forced a smile and at the same time poked Ben sharply under the table.

“What? What!” protested Ben.

Anne laughed. Tears came to her eyes.

“Everyone, this is Gwen Fowler. Gwen, this is Ben ‘Easy Rider' Solomon and his long, long-suffering wife, Sarah. You know Brenda and Dash. Urban and Eli are my electronics gurus. Mary Anne owns and operates this wonderful establishment and keeps our favourite table reserved, and, next to her, is Anne Brown, fondly named Wilhelmina A. Darby by her parents…”

“The detective?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Anne.

“…but as a detective, she now goes by the name of Billy Darby.”

“You work under a pseudonym?” asked Gwen.

“I do.”

“But why? Wil… Anne's such a lovely name.”

“I guess the simple answer…if there is one…is I inherited my uncle's agency after he died last year. His name was Bill Darby. He had a heart attack. It was unexpected. It became awkward to explain to new clients who asked for him that Bill Darby was dead, and that I was taking care of business. Then I'd have to explain who I was and so on. It just became too…awkward…like now.”

“I'm sorry…didn't mean to pry. I was just curious.”

“It doesn't matter. Anyway, some people think my name change is as odd as a top-hat on a dinosaur. I won't name names, but it rhymes with
Dit.
”

“Rings a bell,” said Dit. “I probably know the guy.”

Anne ignored the comment and went on.

“My birth name was Wilhelmina Anne Darby. It became the endless source of torment in middle school. Later I shortened it to Willy…then Billy. So Billy Darby, the woman detective, was born. End of story.”

“Sorry again.”

“What's in a name? A rose by any…,” Dit mused.

“You're no rose, and you're not Romeo and, as long as you've brought up the subject of odd names, let's look at yours. What kind of name is ‘Dit' anyway? It doesn't even have enough letters for a real name.”

“The Malones may be an economical gang, for all that, but they've managed to provide me with half the entire Morse code in my good name.”

“Actually,” interrupted Gwen, “‘Dit' isn't his real name.”

Anne looked blank. So did Sam and Sarah and Mary Anne.

“I knew that,” said Dashiell with a smirk.

“It's ‘Diarmuid,'” she said, pronouncing it again more slowly, “DEEar-mut.”

“That's even more pathetic than Wil-hel-MEE-na,” said Anne. “My condolences. And how did Diarmuid become Dit?” she asked.

An embarrassed grin swept across his face.

“I couldn't pronounce ‘Diarmuid' when I was young. “‘Dit' came out, and ‘Dit' stuck.”

“And Gwen,” asked Sarah, “how did you uncover this delightful
family secret?”

“It was on his wrist bracelet in the hospital. I was one of his caregivers on the spinal trauma ward.”

“So you're a nurse?”

“I'm a nurse practitioner.” Gwen noticed some blank looks again and added, “It's two steps above an RN and a giant step below doctor.”

“Impressive. And how long are you visiting?”

Gwen looked questioningly at Dit. He nodded back in return. Then he pulled himself up on his crutches, stood, and smiled.

“The short answer is…forever. Gwen and I are getting married.”