Izzy was already working at her laptop when Roxanne arrived back at their office the following morning
“My mom says, can you call her when you have a minute? She needs to meet you at Sprucewood Hall so she can get you signed up and give you a key, then you can go in and jog when nobody else is there.”
“I don’t jog, Izzy. I run.”
“Right,” said Izzy. “Whatever.”
“I get a key?”
“Gonna cost you ten bucks, I’m to tell you.”
“That’s all?”
“Yep.”
Margo Wishart came through the front door promptly at 10:00 am. Today she wore a red puffed jacket with a hood, which Roxanne hung up for her. Under the jacket was a cream sweater in an unusual, asymmetric cut, topped with a scarf streaked with warm browns. Her clothes blended with the colour of her hair. She wore earrings, sculptured bronze. A large leather bag was slung over her shoulder.
Izzy came downstairs wearing her parka. “Coffee?”
“Oh yes. That would be lovely.” Her eyes crinkled, the dimples appeared on each cheek. This was a woman who smiled a lot. Roxanne led her to an empty room.
“Did you want to make a formal report?”
“Oh no, no, nothing like that. I just want to talk to you.” Margo looked curiously around her. “I’ve never been in a place like this before,” she laughed, a little nervously. “It’s a bit like being in the movies.”
“How would you like to begin?” Roxanne sat.
Margo took the seat opposite. She hesitated. “This is a bit embarrassing, Corporal. I don’t really know if I should be here at all. Everything I am going to tell you is purely speculative. There’s no real evidence at all. But my friend and I are worried about Phyllis Smedley. We wouldn’t want to see her come to any harm.”
“Your friend being who?”
“Sasha Rosenberg.”
“Ms. Rosenberg is not here with you?”
“No. I didn’t tell her I was coming. We’ve talked about it, whether we should tell you what we suspect. There’s a group of us. We get together quite often. A book group. Sasha and I discussed it with them and they thought that we might have it all wrong. As I said, we have no facts to back up what we’ve been thinking.” She smiled ruefully.
“These friends, do they include Panda Stavros and Annie Chan?”
“Yes! How did you know that? And Roberta Axelsson, I expect you know her too.”
“Yes, we do.”
Izzy appeared at the door with a cardboard tray containing two paper cups of coffee and a plate of pastries.
“Did you go out for these? You should have said. Let me pay you for mine.” Margo reached for the bag at her feet.
“It’s okay. They’re on the house.” Izzy left. Roxanne peeled back the lid on her coffee.
“Phyllis Smedley is another one of your friends?”
Margo emptied a container of cream into her coffee and stirred it. “She is. But she doesn’t get together with us very much. She spends a lot of time with her husband, George. We were going to leave you to get on with your inquiries and say nothing. But then Phyllis had that strange turn yesterday. She keeps getting sick, Corporal. It’s not the first time. Sasha and I are worried that something is happening to her.”
“Something like what?”
“Well,” said Margo. “It’s like this…” And she proceeded to tell Roxanne all she knew about Phyllis’s illness and how it connected to aconite poisoning. She spoke about George’s naturopathic business and how they could find no record of it online. “I teach at the university, Corporal. I know how to do research. And I cannot find a single trace of that man.”
She talked about how George and Phyllis had met through an internet dating site. How recent the marriage was. How Phyllis would probably have been left quite comfortably off when she had been widowed.
“And I know that sounds like bad gossip, Corporal, but her first husband was a successful lawyer. She owned a big house in Crescentwood before she and George moved out to Cullen Village. It’s a cliché, isn’t it? The well-off, lonely widow being taken advantage of, but it happens, doesn’t it? And Phyllis does seem to be very dependent on George. She goes along with everything he says. He doesn’t think she needs to see a regular doctor, but she has recurring episodes of irregular heartbeat. He treats her for it himself. Shouldn’t she be getting that checked out by a regular doctor?” She looked at Roxanne over the rim of her coffee cup, her eyes bright with concern. “We’ve been told that you are investigating the StarFest finances…”
Roxanne was startled. She tried not to show it. “Did Ms. Rosenberg or Mrs. Axelsson tell you that?”
“Panda Stavros, actually.”
Roxanne should have guessed. She noticed a hint of laughter in Margo Wishart’s brown eyes. The dimples appeared again. “Look, Corporal. These murders are the talk of the whole village. Cullen Village is a small place. Stella Magnusson and then Angus Smith both being killed has shaken it up. Made everyone suspicious. Made us question whom we can trust. So of course we want to know as much as we can about what is going on. It’s an awful thing to happen in a place like ours. It’s like a virus that’s eating away at what holds us together.
“I thought that if you suspected George of something already, you should know about this. That’s all.” Margo drained the last of her coffee and rose to her feet. “Please be discreet if you decide to follow up on what I’ve said. I don’t want to make a bad situation worse. I just thought you should know.” She rearranged the scarf around her shoulders.
Roxanne and Izzy watched out the window as she walked to her car, her hood pulled up to ward off the cold. They turned back into the room.
“Nobody ate these?” Izzy helped herself to a lemon Danish and listened as Roxanne related the story. “She thinks George Smedley is after his wife’s money and he’s poisoning her?”
“Says he might be growing aconite in his herb garden. She showed me a photograph of what it looks like. It’ll be under two feet of snow right now and frozen solid if it’s out there.”
“And it connects to Stella Magnusson because they think George Smedley was after her money too?”
“She admits it’s all guesswork. There’s nothing to prove it.”
“Well,” said Izzy, “She’s right about one thing. George Smedley doesn’t show up anywhere online. I looked. I can’t find a thing either.”
“He’s not on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? ”
“Nothing. He’s not listed as a naturopathic doctor anywhere. There’s a list of all of them, the ones that are registered in Canada, by province. He doesn’t show up. There are two colleges, one in Toronto, one in Vancouver. I tried calling but I just get machines. I’ve left messages.”
Roxanne sighed. “I don’t think he can be poisoning her. We don’t see much of that any more. It’s too easy to track poison with modern medicine. Aconite poisoning would show up and lead us straight back to George Smedley. He’s not stupid enough to risk that. But if his wife’s having panic attacks, we have to wonder why. Maybe something is going on that makes her anxious enough to trigger them.”
“Like knowing that George murdered Stella? And Angus Smith?” Izzy had demolished the pastry. She dusted sugar off her hands. “Just supposing! If he did it, someone had to help him move those bodies, and who else is there but her? My aunt had heart palpitations for a while. Turned out to be an overactive thyroid,” she said, then picked up a second cake and bit into it.
“But that wouldn’t explain the nausea or the breathlessness. You saw her. She turned green. Izzy, how do you eat all that sugar and not put on weight?”
“I’m an active girl,” Izzy said, pulling the pastry apart, “with a healthy appetite. We could run down to Cullen and pay the Smedleys a visit. Just drop by to see how she’s doing?”
“No, we don’t want to set off any more alarm bells. Not yet. You’ve got dinner tonight at Annie Chan’s, right? Maybe you’ll find out something there.”
“Oh!” Izzy remembered something. “Matt talked to his aunt. You’re invited, too, if you want to come.”
Should she go? “It’s supposed to be a family dinner, isn’t it?”
“Oh, come. You can take the heat off me, and it’ll be fun. You want to see where the famous Annie Chan lives, don’t you?”
She did.
“Well then!”
Margo got home to find a message from Sasha on her answering machine. She called back.
“I’m home,” she said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I took Lenny around the block. That’s as far as I’m going today. Phyllis called. She wants to know if we want to go over there and play Scrabble tonight. Do we?”
“With her and George?”
“No. He’s gone down to the States to pick up some supplies for his business. He’s staying overnight.”
“He’s what? He’s gone away after she was so sick yesterday?”
“That’s what she said.”
Margo sat down at her table, by the window that faced the frozen lake. Bob the dog, who had heard the word “walk,” sank to the ground at her feet. His head drooped down onto his paws.
“Sasha,” she said. “I did it. I went to the RCMP and talked to that woman officer. I told her what we’ve been thinking about George.”
“You didn’t! I thought we agreed not to.”
“Not unless she got sick again. And she did. You saw what she looked like. I’ve never seen anyone actually turn green before. I can’t believe those paramedics didn’t take her straight to the hospital. Anyway, I was leaving the funeral afterwards and I saw the corporal so I talked to her and made an appointment to go and see her. This morning. I’ve just got back.”
“And you didn’t call me? I’d have come too.”
“I didn’t want to get you involved.” Margo had thought about it but she knew from experience how Sasha’s flair for the dramatic could embellish a story. Margo didn’t want them to look like two gossipy old friends with overactive imaginations but she wasn’t going to tell Sasha that.
“It’s done,” she said. “If there’s any fallout from it, it’s going to be my problem.” Then she thought again. “Do you think I should phone and let the police know that George has gone south of the border?”
“Don’t think there’s anything to worry about.” Sasha dismissed the idea. “He’s done it before. He has a post box at Pembina.”
Manitobans who bought goods from companies in the States sometimes had them mailed to a postal warehouse in North Dakota, just over the US border. They would drive down and bring the materials through customs in person, rather than trusting them to the expense of Canadian postage rates and an unattended postal customs check. It was a three-hour drive from Cullen Village to the border.
“It’s still funny that he’d go off by himself and leave her at home, after yesterday.”
“We would find out all about it if we went to play Scrabble,” said Sasha hopefully.
“I don’t know.” Margo hesitated. Was it right to go when she’d just cast suspicion on the Smedleys?
“Oh, Margo. You didn’t say anything bad about Phyllis, did you? It was George that you told on.” That was true. “Shall we take some wine along? I’ve got a big bag of Cheezies.”
“That might be pushing it.” Margo laughed in spite of herself. “I could make popcorn.” She was never sure how seriously Phyllis took the health food regime.
They hung up. Margo pulled her hooded jacket back on and went to find a leash.
“Come on, Bob, we both need a walk.”
The dog bounded to the door, wagging his long tail. She’d go and try to walk away the dull feeling of dread that had lingered since she had made the decision to speak to the police.
It was dark by late afternoon. Coloured lights, strung along the eaves of houses and wrapped around evergreen trees, made the village appear cheerful and bright as the day turned to night. Margo and Sasha sat on either side of a Scrabble board, nibbling on pieces of homemade crispbread, loaded with seeds. It didn’t taste bad, and they had each brought a bottle of wine along. Margo was driving, but Sasha was enjoying a third glass. Phyllis took her time to play and was happy to talk instead. She hadn’t gone to Pembina with George because he thought she should have a couple of quiet days to herself to recover, but really, she told them quite smugly, she thought he wanted to shop for a present. Her birthday was coming up soon.
“So he’ll be back home tomorrow?” said Margo, staring at a rack of consonants, no vowels.
“Absolutely. He has clients to see in the city on the way back. One of them needs a special food supplement. He’ll be able to give it to him.”
It all sounded just fine, thought Margo. What was I worrying about?
A few kilometres west, Roxanne was sitting at Panda and Annie’s dining table, eating Szechuan noodles. Other dishes of food were laid out, crispy beef, a spicy chicken dish, tofu and vegetables, meat on skewers.
“Annie made her favourites,” said Panda.
“It’s all so hot!” The Chinese food Izzy was used to was of the milder, sweeter, Cantonese-Canadian variety. Out in the country cafes where it was served, you were still automatically given a fork to eat with.
“I cooked it mild.” Annie looked up at her. “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s great! I’m just not used to this heat.” Izzy picked up her bowl and chopsticks and tried to imitate Panda. For her, it was fiery.
Roxanne was enjoying the food. She was reminded how different life was out here in a rural community. In the city you got used to being able to eat food from all over the world.
“You should try eating in Chengdu,” said Panda, reaching for a skewer. “There, it’s really hot. Burns the roof off your mouth.”
“Does not,” said Annie. “Have some more tea, Izzy. Roxanne?”
It was a night off. She’d asked them to drop the job title while they were off duty. She liked that too. She’d be Corporal Calloway again tomorrow. Times were changing in the RCMP but some of the old formalities that propped up the hierarchies still needed to be observed.
“How come we don’t get this kind of Chinese food here?” asked Izzy. She drained her teacup. Annie filled the little cup again.
“You can,” she replied. “My mom, she was born in Szechuan, she gets what she needs sent over, or buys it in Winnipeg, in Chinatown. So I ate a lot of this food when I was growing up. She makes a great fish dish with chili broth. Here, she uses whitefish. I sometimes take her one, fresh out of the lake, when I go to visit.”
“Where do they live?
“Virden.” That was a small town to the west, near the Saskatchewan border.
“Did they run the local restaurant?” Roxanne asked.
“Oh yes. I waited table when I was a teenager,” said Annie, laying down her chopsticks. Everything she did, even the way she spoke, was clean and neat. “But I was an only child and I was a girl. The restaurant wasn’t going to go to me. I have a couple of male cousins. One of them got it. Not that I wanted it. I couldn’t wait to get out of that town. And I didn’t want to end up like my mother, cooking chickens and chopping vegetables all my life. Try some of this beef. It’s very chewy.” Annie picked up some pieces of dry fried beef and dropped them into Izzy’s bowl, then passed the dish to Roxanne.
“So that’s when you became a nurse?”
“That was my dad’s idea. I wasn’t given a choice. He really wanted what was best for me, but I didn’t like nursing. Then I met Panda and I was able to quit.”
The lower floor of the house was built on an open plan. The kitchen area was behind a counter, the table set in front of it, opposite a large wood stove that warmed the whole house. Tall windows faced into the blackness of a dark wood. The nearest neighbours were a couple of kilometres away. Annie’s paintings hung on either side of the room, brightening the room with their rich colour.
“Annie’s studio is upstairs,” said Matt as the meal drew to a close. “Can you take Izzy and Roxanne up to have a look?”
“No.” Annie stopped clearing dishes from the table. “Not right now. I’m working on something.”
“What is it you’re doing?” Matt sounded surprised. Was Annie usually so reluctant to show people her work? “Is it something to do with the case? Like the drawing you did of Stella?”
“Never you mind.” The corners of Annie’s mouth flickered. She picked up the used bowls and moved towards the kitchen. “You’re not going to see it right now.” Then she turned and smiled at them all. “It’s going to be a surprise. Maybe when you find the murderer I’ll let you have a look.”
“It’ll be finished long before then at the rate they’re going,” said Panda. “Let’s move over to the sofa. Have you ever eaten Chinese candy?”
Izzy and Matt sat down. Roxanne stopped to study a painting on the wall. It was darker than the rest, browns and black with vivid splashes of yellow and purple. Panda passed around a bowl of little wrapped candies. “Did you know,” she began, “that George Smedley’s taken off down to the States for the night and left poor Phyllis home, all on her own?”
“He’s what?” Izzy and Matt said, simultaneously. Roxanne stared at Panda. “He’s gone where?”
“Oh, just down to Pembina to pick up some stuff for work.” Panda was delighted by the reaction. “Maybe he’ll go as far as Grand Forks. He’s supposed to be back tomorrow.”
“What else do you know, Panda?” Roxanne asked.
“Nothing. Phyllis is at home right now, playing Scrabble with Sasha Rosenberg and Margo Wishart. She’s fine. Wow. You really think George Smedley did it?”