“Where have you been?” Jeffers asked, exiting his car that was sitting in my driveway.
“I was over at—how long have you been here?”
Through the passenger window, I could see Jeffers’ front seat was littered with empty remnants of takeout coffee and snacks.
“It doesn’t matter. I gotta show you something.”
Moustache danced circles on our arrival, jumping back and forth from me to Jeffers, his whole body wiggling and his mouth open in excitement. Jeffers passed the sniff test and was allowed entry into the kitchen. I was detained under an umbrella of suspicion. His nose worked up one of my pant legs and down the other without getting any satisfaction. It was like Brimstone had left just enough of a trace to drive the dog crazy but not provide any definitive answers.
“Do you have anything to eat?” Jeffers asked. I could hear him rummaging through the fridge.
“Are you kidding me?” I said, wrenching free from Moustache’s probing snout and ushering him to the back door. “Your car looks like you’ve been in a burger-tasting competition. How are you hungry?”
“That’s not all from today.”
As long as I’d known Jeffers, he’d always kept his car immaculate. A speck of dirt would think twice before falling off a shoe and onto the floor mat.
“Lately a drive is the only thing that will quiet the baby. I’ve been taking him out in the night so Aria can sleep.”
He pulled a plastic container from the fridge, smelled its contents, and made a face.
“It’s curry,” I said.
“Doesn’t smell like curry. It smells like … I don’t know what. Not curry. Are those …”
“Raisins.”
“In curry?”
“Give me that,” I said, taking the container and replacing the lid. It was my lunch for the following day. “Here,” I said, tossing Jeffers a loaf of bread and some fixings.
He set about making a sandwich while I put the kettle on. Moustache scratched furiously at the back door as if every raindrop that fell onto his fur was a flaming poison arrow. He darted into the house, tolerated a once-over with a towel, and reattached his nose to my pants. I pulled a rawhide strip out of the cupboard and held it out for him. Normally, he would have snatched it and run out of the room to chew it in privacy, but today he was hell-bent on decoding whatever message Brimstone had left. It seemed the cat had woven quite a mystery. An amazing feat given that I’d had virtually no contact with the fiend. But I supposed the reach of evil could extend far beyond what one could imagine. I threw the rawhide, hoping a little play might entice Moustache away from me. He didn’t budge.
“What did you want to show me?”
“It would seem,” Jeffers said, holding his sandwich in one hand and operating his laptop with the other, “that our dear Mr. Leduc was not where he claimed to be on the morning of the murder.”
“What? I thought the surveillance video showed him at White Oaks?”
“It does. It shows him arriving at five thirty and walking into the weight room, and it shows him exiting out a back door at approximately five forty-five.”
Jeffers played the video and there, clear as day, was Vincent Leduc talking briefly with a man using a leg press before heading toward the towel rack in the back. Then I lost him.
“There,” Jeffers said, pointing at the screen. I could barely make him out through the grid of machines and the rising and falling of arms and legs, not to mention the distance. Jeffers pointed again. I watched Leduc put his water bottle and towel on the floor next to a rack of free weights then use a nearby wall to brace himself while he stretched out his quads. There was a door next to where he was stretching, and he inched closer and closer to it so that when it was time for him to switch legs, all he had to do was apply a little pressure on the push bar. The door opened a crack and he was gone.
My jaw dropped and I looked to Jeffers.
“That door opens to a staircase that leads down to maintenance closet and to an outdoor access,” Jeffers said. “I don’t know if he propped the door open or what, but he returns about an hour later, collects his things and leaves.”
“Would he have had time to get to the school? To kill Al? And what about Ellie? She was there around the same time?”
“It’s fifteen minutes to the school, give or take. Remember how Ellie said Macie wouldn’t let her in the office? Spoke to her from the doorway?”
“Which means Vince could have been inside and Ellie never would have known.”
“He would have had a half an hour.”
“That’s not a lot of time,” I said. “And to be fair, we don’t even know if that’s where he went.”
“No, we don’t. But we know he went somewhere. And he lied to us about it.”
“Can you play it again?” I asked. Jeffers restarted the video. “Pause it there.” Vincent Leduc froze midstride on his way to the weight room. “I know the footage is black and white, but check out his shorts. Any chance they could be the blue we’re looking for?”
“There’s always a chance, Samuel. Unfortunately, there’s no way of telling. Can’t extract colour from black-and-white digital images.”
“They don’t look black or white to me.”
“To me either. Looks like Leduc has more than just his whereabouts to answer for.”
“Do you really think this Vince guy could have done it?” Natalie asked over the phone after Jeffers had eaten me out of house and home and finally left.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything anymore. This case has Jeffers and me going around in circles.”
I plopped down on the sofa with a glass of wine and pulled a blanket over me. As soon as Jeffers left, I had removed my pants and thrown them onto Moustache’s chair. The dog was fully engaged and fully entangled.
“Did you find out anything more about Laura?”
“She was a vegetarian and not really into mac and cheese.”
“What?”
“Nothing. No. I haven’t really asked and he hasn’t offered.”
“Is it still driving you crazy?”
“Not really. Maybe a little.”
“Bel?”
“Okay, yes!” I confessed. “It shouldn’t! It’s a relationship that’s way in the past. She’s dead, for crying out loud! It shouldn’t matter at all!”
“So why does it?”
I shook my head and escaped into my wine glass. It was a very good question for which I didn’t have a very good answer.
“Maybe because I want him all to myself,” I conceded. “When a relationship ends, the heart eventually lets go of the other person. But when someone dies … there’s always a part of them there, you know?”
“That’s true,” Natalie said. “But, Bel, he’s with you now. And you two are making your own memories and writing your own inside jokes. There may always be a shadow of Laura, but a shadow can’t compete with you.”
“Yeah,” I said, not entirely convinced. “But how could they not find her body? I could understand if she’d been murdered. There are a million ways to dispose of a body. But you can’t do that to yourself. Can you?”
“Sure you can. Jump into a volcano.”
“Natalie—”
“What? Tell me that wouldn’t work.”
It was actually pretty genius, but highly unlikely in Laura’s case.
“Best bet is probably tying rocks around your body and throwing yourself into the water and letting nature eat away at you,” Natalie said.
Again the image of the torso sprang to mind.
“I suppose you could encase yourself in concrete,” she said. “Or—”
“Okay!”
“Google it, Bel. You can find anything on the Internet nowadays. I bet it’s not as hard as you think. Listen, why don’t you and Paul come into the city for supper? Zack would love to see you. It’s been so long. We can do dim sum!”
It had become a thing, early in our friendship, to gorge ourselves on Chinese food. Toronto’s Chinatown was a culinary paradise that was a must-visit whenever I was in the city and one that saw all of my self-control fly out the window.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for Paul to see that side of me,” I said, laughing.
“It’s all about making new memories, remember?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll check our schedules.”
“Hey,” she said. “Maybe it’s not so much circles as it is a spiral,” Natalie said.
“What?”
“You said before, you felt like you were going in circles.”
“Yeah? So?”
“With a spiral, you’re still moving in circles, gathering information, but the circles get smaller and smaller until you reach the centre.”
“Yeah, but with a spiral, it’s a common thing around which everything else swirls. I don’t think that’s the case here. All of the suspects—the Penners, Vince, Powell—there’s no relation. Except Al, I guess.”
“And maybe the person who killed him.”
“I’m not sure I understa—Oh my god, Natalie. Are you suggesting that all of the suspects know who the actual killer is and that the killer is at the centre of the spiral?”
“They may not know the killer is the killer.”
“No. But maybe he’s someone they’re all connected to in some way.”
I ran Natalie’s theory by Jeffers the next day as we made our way to the school. It was one of my teaching days and I was resentful. I wanted to be at rehearsal patching things up with Powell. Not to mention actually rehearsing. Previews were approaching quickly and while I had reached a comfortable place in my scene with Eeyore, I was feeling more and more insecure about my impending musical debut.
“I can see how Leduc and the Penners might know some of the same people, but I don’t know how Powell Avery would figure in,” Jeffers said.
“That’s what’s tripping me up too. As far as I know, he has no association with the school. Vince has no connection to the hospital or Adele. And we know Armin Penner’s view of the theatre. So how can they all possibly be related?”
“Let’s not worry about that for now. Let’s first get to the bottom of Leduc’s little disappearing act and see if that clears anything up.”
Vince was in the studio arranging chairs when we arrived.
“Oh good, you’re here,” he said. His acknowledgment was brief, and he immediately returned his focus to the chairs. “There’s a Spirit Day next week and all of the classes with visiting artists have been asked to do a little showcase of sorts at the assembly. I thought we might—” Vince looked up and registered Jeffers’ presence for the first time. “Detective.”
“If you have a minute?” Jeffers said.
“I don’t actually,” Vince said. “I have a class starting in five minutes and—”
“The question was just a courtesy.”
Vince pursed his lips, pulled a chair out of his careful arrangement, and sat. He indicated that we should do the same.
“The morning Al died, you said you were working out at White Oaks.”
Vince smiled sardonically, brought his elbows to his knees, and laid his head in his hands. Eventually he met Jeffers’ gaze. He knew he’d been caught.
“You want to tell us where you really were?” Jeffers asked.
Vince took an excruciatingly long pause then, very simply, said, “Here.”
“At the school?”
“That’s right.”
“With Al?”
“Yes. Well, no, not exactly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I came here to see Al, but I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Why did I come or why didn’t I see him?”
“Both,” Jeffers and I said at the same time.
A group of girls, Ellie among them, came chattering into the room. I caught Ellie’s eye. She looked away and separated herself from the group.
“Morning, Mr. Leduc. Hi, Bella,” one of the girls called.
“Hi, Samara,” Vince said. I waved and offered a smile. “Listen, Bella and I need to finish up here. We’ll just be a minute. If you guys can get the rest of the chairs in a circle, that would be great. And maybe one of you can lead the class in a warm-up?”
“Sure,” said the girl.
Vince nodded his thanks then gestured to Jeffers and me to join him in his office.
“OK,” he said, when Jeffers and I were seated. He remained standing, his arms crossed against his chest and the bookshelf taking on much of his weight. “Every year, on the anniversary of Avril’s death, I pay a visit to Al.”
“Are you saying Al died on the same day as your sister?” I asked. I could see puzzlement on Jeffers’ face as well. Neither of us had put the dates together.
Vince nodded. “Irony. Coincidence. Karma. Maybe a little bit of all three … It wasn’t a surprise. My visit. Al expected me. Like I said, I did it every year. I wanted to be sure he never forgot her.”
“And what would you do during these visits?” Jeffers asked.
“Nothing really. A bit of chit chat. We’d catch up. Not friendly or anything. It wasn’t like that. And it never lasted too long. Seeing me was enough to get him thinking of Avril. Of his part in her death. He was never punished for it. Not legally. This was the only way I could think of to make sure he never got away with it completely.”
“You’ve done this every year for—”
“Twenty-three years. Almost a life sentence.”
“Is that why your career seems to have mirrored Al’s?” I asked. “Because it was easier to stalk him?”
“It wasn’t stalking. I just—”
“How did you know where he’d be every year?” I asked.
“Sounds like stalking to me,” Jeffers chimed in.
“We work for the same board! It’s not hard to know where people are!” Vince said.
“And how did you come to work for the same board?” Jeffers asked. “What prompted the decision to leave acting and move into education? To relocate to this region?”
“I didn’t—. You’re making it sound like—”
“Because it is like!” Jeffers said.
The two men stared at one another.
“You know what else it sounds like to me?” Jeffers persisted. “It sounds like you gave up your whole life, your whole career to—”
“What about Avril’s life?” Vince said, viciously. “What about the career she should have had? The things she wanted?”
“Would she have wanted this?” Jeffers asked.
“Okay. That’s enough,” I said. I knew Jeffers was trying to drive Vince to the edge so he’d talk, but I was worried he’d gone too far. Jeffers didn’t like Vince. He’d made no secret about that. But we couldn’t risk losing Vince. Not now. “Can we just focus on the morning Al died?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Jeffers said, after a moment.
Vince pulled himself away from the support of the shelf and shoved his hands into his pockets. What Jeffers said had clearly hit home. His shoulders slumped and his gaze fell to the floor. “I got here a little after six,” he admitted. “Al was in here. He was talking to someone. A man. The door was closed. It sounded a little heated.”
“Did you recognize the voice?” I asked.
Vince shook his head. “It sounded like the man was crying.”
“Could you hear what they were talking about?”
“No. I waited for a bit. Then I heard someone coming, so I ducked around the corner.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t feel like seeing anyone.”
“Go on.”
“It must have been a student. Sounded young. Had a brief exchange with Al. I didn’t stick around for all of it. She was upset too. Figures Al would leave a wake of misery.”
“Where did you go?” Jeffers asked, ignoring the dig at Macie.
“I was getting impatient and irritated and was on my way back to my car.”
“Did you see anyone else at the school?”
“No.”
“Dammit,” Jeffers said, before he could help himself. The same thought ran through my mind.
The dejected silence in the room was broken by the sound of the students playing the Shakespearean game, Forsooth, in the studio. It had quickly become their favourite warm-up.
“I went back though,” Vince said.
“To … here?” I asked. “To Al’s office?”
“When?” Jeffers asked.
“I was on my way back to my car, but I turned around. It was coming up on six thirty. Twenty after or so.”
“And?” Jeffers and I said in unison.
“He was dead.”