Lake crescent, p.11
Lake Crescent, page 11
part #2 of A Creature X Mystery Series
— Muin’iskw (Jean Labrador), “The Legacy of Muin’iskw”
MRS. FLYNN’S HOME WAS A TINY A-FRAME nestled between two tall black spruce. The tiny gravel driveway out front was empty. A stone walkway led to the front door, and a wooden sign nailed to one of the trees read Hanlan’s Hideaway.
Saad took a few quick steps around me and took hold of the tarnished brass handle on the old screen door, pulling it open for Mrs. Flynn. She ambled inside like a raccoon, no word of thanks or even an acknowledgement that the door was anything more than automatic. She kept her slippers on and walked through a doorway that opened into the kitchen, bracing herself on the frame as she turned to face us. There was a mole on her chin, with long hairs growing out of it. Past her, on her kitchen counter, was a bottle of Alberta Premium rye whisky.
“Would youse like a drink?” she asked me, her free hand reaching toward the bottle.
There was the air of an aging country singer about Mrs. Flynn — the weight of a hard life bending her shoulders, a lifetime of smooth cigarettes and hard liquor giving her a voice that Stevie Nicks, Kim Carnes, or even Tom Waits would be jealous of. She spoke loudly, as though she was hard of hearing, and I raised my voice to match.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“You?” she asked Saad.
He raised a hand and shook his head.
She pointed the neck of the bottle at me again. “You sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, what was it you wanted to ask Pop about? That snowmobile accident with Lou Fenton?”
I nodded. “Did you happen to see it?”
“Can’t says I did,” she said, her answer leaving her out of breath. “I was asleep. My husband was still with us then, and believe me, I couldn’t hear nothin’ outside of his snoring.” She looked over my shoulder to Saad, who was framed perfectly by the front door. “You’d think it was a chainsaw when Carl really got going. I’d poke him sometimes with my knitting needle just to wake him up so I could get some peace and quiet.”
“It seems like Pop was the only one who saw anything,” I said.
“He was one to stay out on his bridge ’til all hours,” Mrs. Flynn said.
“Now that I’ve seen his home, I wonder how it was he could even see a snowmobile on the lake from all the way up here, at night, let alone identify the riders.”
“Oh, that’s an easy one,” she said, coughing a little. “Lou and that girl of his was living with Pop. He’d have seen them taking off all the way down the hill toward the lake.”
“Were Lou and Pop related?”
Mrs. Flynn shook her head. “Oh no, but Pop was like a father figure to a lot of the lads in town. He’d no wife or kin of his own, but he coached hockey. Plus, he hired a lot of the local boys to help him in his business.”
“What did he do?”
“He did whatever he could to earn a buck, like everyone else. Worked on fishing boats part of the year, but also cleared land.”
“Like construction?” I asked.
Mrs. Flynn slid a glass along the counter closer to the bottle of Alberta Premium. There was an amber resin in the glass that proved that she’d already finished her first drink of the day. She poured another, sloppily tilting the neck of the bottle into the glass, letting the whisky flow wildly, then wrestling with the bottle until she got it upright again. “More like destruction. He had himself a digger, some saws, even some dynamite. He’d get contracts to clear lots for houses and other buildings. He was always hiring boys like Lou, Beave, Fred, and John to help him, and they was thankful for the work.”
“He also gave them a place to live?” I asked.
“Only Lou,” she said. “There was a fire at Lou’s place sometime earlier, so he had nowhere else to go.”
“Did you know Sarah well?”
Mrs. Flynn squinted at me, adjusting her cheater lenses to see me better. Her eyes scanned my face like an old typewriter, smoothly going from left to right then slamming back again. “No, not well. She was a runaway. We get one around here every few years.” Abruptly, she stepped out of the kitchen and waddled back inside the living room, whisky sloshing around in her glass.
We followed.
Only when she was about halfway to an old rocking chair did she turn and give us another impatient wave.
Saad and I kicked off our boots in the hall and sat on a ratty old sofa with a ratty old quilt draped over the back.
“What do you mean by runaway, Mrs. Flynn?” I asked.
“Some from the big cities come out here tryin’ to escape their lives. They think it’s easy just to come out here and make a go of it. Think they can live off the land, live like us. Most of them don’t last. They go right on back where they came from. Just last summer we had a lawyer come through — a Yank like you. He was a real hotshot, but he couldn’t take the pressure.”
“What was Sarah Tindall running from?” I asked.
Mrs. Flynn cocked her head back. Her face scrunched up as she recollected, looking like a ball of dough. “Let me think now. Was she the one that had a husband? Got married at seventeen and regretted the whole thing? No, I don’t think that was her.” She tapped her fingers slowly on the carved wooden armrest of the chair. “Ah, yes, I do remember her. Nice girl. A skinny thing with long straw-coloured hair. A bit of a dreamer, that one was. Very low-minded when she came here, but we raised her spirits.” She laughed, then began to cough.
I leaned forward to help, but she waved me off and reached for her glass. She took a long pull of her drink, then seemed to cough and burp at the same time as though she’d swallowed as much air as whisky.
“Can you tell me when Sarah came to town? How long she lived here?”
“I don’t remember the year. But the time of year, well, it was sometime between the Paddy scad and the piss-a-beds, as I recall,” she said. “Now don’t go looking at me like I’m some kind of omaloor.”
“I’m sorry, I —”
Mrs. Flynn erupted in laughter that caused her to wheeze.
“I’m just kiddin’ ya. It was the late spring when she came. Still a little cooler than when the visitors show up.”
“So, she just showed up in town without knowing someone in advance? Or having a job?”
“We Newfies make it easy to fit in. And the boys were lining up to introduce themselves to a good-lookin’ thing like her. Men in this town only want two things: t’work, and for someone t’help them melt the snow!” Mrs. Flynn broke into a fit of laughter so severe I thought she really might be dying this time.
I shifted to the edge of the sofa, ready to leap to her rescue.
“I just dies at m’self!” she said, smacking the arms of her chair and laughing some more. “She fell in pretty quick with the boys. But she stuck with Lou Fenton. Maybe ’cause he always had one eye on the batty. Girls a that sort don’t want someone dotin’ on them. They likes a challenge.”
I wished I had a native speaker on hand to translate Mrs. Flynn’s regional dialect for me, to make sure there wasn’t some little nuance that I was missing. Nonetheless, a blurry image of Sarah Tindall was forming in my head.
“How long did she live here?” I asked.
“A year, maybe two. She settled in quick like a summer rain. You start seein’ a new face ’round town, then you see it everywhere. Then, well, the snowmobile accident.”
“Did anyone ever come looking for her? Family or some old friend?”
“No, not a soul. Makes ya wonder if she had anyone outside a this town.”
“But she fit in well here? She had friends? She made a life for herself?”
“She fit in a little too well, if youse know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
Mrs. Flynn shook her head. “I’m not some old gossip, so get that idea out of yer head this instant, but let me just say she was a girl smart enough to test drive before she’d buy, if yas catch my drift.”
I could feel Saad’s puzzled glance on the side of my face.
“It was hard for her to make friends with some of the younger women. They didn’t like this flighty beauty queen showin’ up and batting her eyelashes at all the boys, you know. But she was an easygoing sort. Her and Fern Devonshire was thick as thieves, though.”
Finally, someone who was actually close to Sarah. Fern Devonshire, the librarian. She wouldn’t be hard to track down. I stifled a smile, as it seemed inappropriate, but I couldn’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction.
Saad and I walked back down the limestone plain toward the inn. The moss under my feet felt like sponge, but with a finite give as the hard limestone below made its presence felt.
“What was that last part?” Saad asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
I listened to the sounds of our boots crunching the gravel, of outboard motors tearing through the water, of someone nearby chopping wood.
“You think Pop made the whole thing up,” he said, more a statement than a question.
“I do.”
“And your theory is that it was Sarah Tindall that we pulled out of the lake.”
“Nope. That’s my hypothesis,” I said. If there was one thing I could not stand, it was the incorrect use of the term theory to invalidate science — Evolution is just a theory. “It’ll be my theory, assuming I find data to substantiate it. So far, we know that two people are missing, supposedly having fallen through the ice in Lake Crescent. We only have one source to corroborate that. We found the remains of a woman roughly the same age as the missing woman, but the circumstances in which we found her don’t support Pop Fitzcairn’s account of the event. From what Mrs. Flynn told us, Pop and Lou were close, so we can’t rule out the possibility that Pop would lie on Lou’s behalf.”
“So, you think Lou killed Sarah, dumped her body in the water, then took off?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Fred told me that Lou owed money around town, and Mrs. Flynn sure made it sound like Sarah had her pick of the men around here. What if Lou thought he was losing her to someone else? What if he killed her in a fit of rage, cracking her skull open, then needed a way out? He gets Pop to tell this story and then the world thinks they’re both dead, so neither the police nor Lou’s creditors are looking for him.”
Saad was quiet, looking down at his feet as we walked.
“Why wrap the body in a tarp?” he finally asked.
“I can’t figure that part out,” I said. “If it were me —”
“If you were a deranged murderer?” Saad asked.
“If I were a deranged murderer, I’d dump a snowmobile at the hole in the ice for the police to find. I’d hide the body, sealing it in plastic, maybe bury it. When the ice thawed, I’d dump it in the lake, in winter clothing, to further corroborate Pop’s account if the body was ever recovered.”
“What about the skull fracture?” I asked.
“That’s a good point, I’m not a very good murderer. Also, that would put the bulk of the work, and the risk, on Pop, which is probably too much to ask, no matter how close they were.”
“If either Pop or Lou had to store the body on land, waiting for the lake to thaw, they might have put the body in lye, or something to dissolve the flesh from the bones, then dressed the skeleton and wrapped it in the tarp. Maybe the whole idea was to have the clothes rot and the bones fall out and get moved around by the current.”
“Like it was meant to be time-released, scattered by the current?”
Saad shrugged. “If a pile of bones was discovered, it might have been assumed that the skull fracture was a result of the skull slamming about against a rock underwater. That’s why they didn’t dump the body too close to the site of the accident. They had a body to dispose of, and the official story calls for it to be found in the lake, so they dump it in the lake, hoping the bones will scatter and they’ll be no trace evidence leading back to them.”
“That’s possible, but seems too elaborate. But this whole thing is too elaborate, isn’t it? The Atlantic Ocean is just a few minutes from here, not to mention that there are fissures in the limestone fifty, even a hundred feet deep in some areas around town. Why not just dump the body down one of them? It would get so smashed up it would completely cover up the skull fracture, and that’s assuming anybody ever found it. No, somebody had a specific reason for wrapping the body that way and leaving it there.”
“Then there’s the coin …”
“That’s right. The coin. But we’ll have to table the speculation for now and get back to the inn to meet Lindsay. Dr. Willoughby is expecting us shortly.”
TEN
According to local folklore, in the 1950s two men said they spotted an overturned boat in Crescent Lake as they walked the shore, concerned they started to help but the “monster” turned and slipped into the water.
— Telegram (St. John’s), March 2, 2010
THE NEXT MORNING, THE SUN WAS OUT AND the boughs outside the window were alive with birds flitting around among the pine needles. As we set out in the van, it struck me how much of a difference sunlight can make. Even the rocks had some colour to them.
According to Beave, Frank Marsh was one of the few and best eyewitnesses to Cressie, and he’d set the whole thing up for us.
Danny, Chris, and I waited for Beave out front of Marsh’s house, a house with sky-blue siding at the end of a row of houses with sky-blue siding on Berg Street, opposite an outcropping of trees bordered by a wall of rocks. A detached two-car garage was half-built around the back.
Maybe Beave was confused? Maybe he expected us to pick him up in the van? Chris drummed on the steering wheel; Danny stared at his phone, typed, and stared some more. When he looked up, he prolonged his gaze out the windshield, then across the van out Chris’s window, before looking over at me. He wouldn’t say anything, or look at me for more than a millisecond before dropping his eyes back down to his phone. It was only after the third performance of the routine that I called him out. “Okay, I’ll phone Beave.”
Beave’s number was saved in my new phone that the network had supplied me, so after a few taps on the screen I was holding the phone to my ear and listening to it ring. I got his answering machine. Not voice mail, but an old-fashioned machine with the mini-cassette in it and the pops, clicks, and feedback that go along with it.
“Good morning, Beave, it’s Laura. We’re at Frank Marsh’s house. I hope you’re on your way here. Call me if you get this.”
Eventually, Frank himself came out on his bridge and waved us in. “No sense in you waiting out there,” he said.
We — meaning Danny, who lived his life by the motto the show must go on — decided to start without Beave. He jumped out of the van and followed on Frank Marsh’s heels. Chris and I lumbered slowly after them. We had lost some momentum after finding that skeleton in the brackish water of Lake Crescent.
Frank paused on the sill of his open front door, gesturing for us to enter. Danny waited on the porch steps for Chris and I to catch up. Chris went up the steps first. As I followed, Danny leaned toward me.
“We should cut that runt from the program,” Danny whispered “I don’t get dicked around. Ever.”
Frank led us into his dining room, a terracotta-coloured room with an oak table in the centre surrounded by oak chairs. An oak cabinet sat in the back corner. Frank took a seat at the head of the table, facing a window that looked out onto the backyard. Outside I could see three birdfeeders atop poles buried in the lawn. A blue jay appeared and chased away some chickadees, only to be sent on its way by a black squirrel jumping onto the feeder, rocking it violently.
There was a chemical stink in the air of the dining room, like Frank had tried to mask the odour of cigarettes with a cheap deodorizing aerosol spray. I could hear footsteps upstairs, but whoever it was didn’t come down.
Chris set the camera up in the farthest corner from Frank, and I sat opposite him. I didn’t need to be in the shot. In fact, the less of my coaching the better.
“It was a real duckish evening,” he started.
“I’m sorry, what do you mean by duckish?”
“Kinda gloomy like,” he said.
“Okay, go on.”
“I was just sitting out back,” he said. “Watching the water. It helps me think.”
He paused. I nodded at him.
“So then I see something moving. Not swimming really, it didn’t leave a wake or anything like that. It was more like churning in the water. It created more of a swell, a deep swell. Then a head came out of the water. It had long features, it was long, and pointed.”
“How far out was it?” I asked.
“Not more than fifty feet away from me, I’d say.”
“And you say the creature wasn’t swimming?”
“No, it was just out on the water there, shivering, if you like. Just floating there.”
“What can you tell me about its features?” I asked.
“It had a little round snout. The whole thing was about fifteen, twenty feet long.”
“What did it do next?”
“It just sorta ducked under the water,” he said. “I was fit to be tied. I’d heard of Cressie me whole life, but I never thought I’d see it.”
Frank insisted we stay for tea or coffee, but we passed. Beave was still on my mind. I double-checked my phone to make sure I had no missed calls. We had a few more interviews to conduct, and I was concerned that the other subjects wouldn’t be as agreeable as Frank with letting strangers into their homes, without Beave as a go-between.
“We should have brought the sketch artist,” Danny said, pulling his door closed as he got in the van.
“What good would that have done?”
“It would’ve made better TV,” he said. “And having someone who has worked in law enforcement goes over big with the older male segment of our audience.”
Frank waved to us from his porch, and continued waving as we began to drive away. The small window just below the apex of his roof was dark except for white curtains. I swear I saw the curtains move a little as we were leaving.
