“I thought Stella was going to Nashville, like she usually does.” Roberta Axelsson was stirring a pot of soup, Hubbard squash that she’d grown in her garden when the days were warmer.
Margo Wishart watched from the kitchen table. Everything about Roberta was round and colourful. Her face was rosy, weathered from time spent outdoors, her body was round, even when it was cinched, as now, by an apron. Her jeans were worn and her sweater was an old red hand-knit, worn at the elbows and baggy, the sleeves rolled up. Her head was wreathed in golden curls. Margo doubted that the colour was real, but it didn’t matter. Their glow suited Roberta’s sunny disposition.
“No. Dublin first, then London and Italy. She was going to fly home from Paris.” Sasha Rosenberg stood at the kitchen counter. She was angular and bony in comparison, dressed in dark greys and purples. “Would have been a great trip if she had made it.”
Margo had driven Sasha the twelve kilometres north from Cullen Village to Roberta’s farmhouse. Sasha pulled a covered dish out of a bag.
“Meatballs. They should probably go in the oven.”
“That’s a good idea.” Roberta reached for the dish. “Annie will probably be late. Panda can’t make it. She had to go into Winnipeg to see a client.”
Panda worked as an accountant. She had cut back on her business when she moved out to the Interlake, but still balanced the books and did the occasional audit for customers she liked and others that paid well.
Roberta sniffed at the contents of the dish. “Did you cook these yourself, Sasha?”
“Who? Me? You kidding? I dropped by IKEA last time I was in Winnipeg. Picked up a bag.”
Roberta looked reproachfully at Sasha over the top of the dish. Roberta believed in natural food and avoided all things processed or preserved. Sasha didn’t care. Cooking wasn’t her thing.
“I made cheese scones,” Margo said. “From scratch. They didn’t rise the way they should but they taste okay.” She had grown up in Scotland and retained some of her accent. She peered out the window. The weather pundits had labelled this cold spell a “polar vortex.” The jet stream, which normally swooshed its way across the northern hemisphere, had stalled, creating a pocket of Arctic air that hovered above the prairies. The temperature hadn’t risen above minus twenty since Christmas. Three nights ago the thermometer had gone down to minus fifty. That was unusual even in this part of the world. Margo shivered, thinking of anything or anyone being out there in that freezing cold.
“If Stella was frozen outside in this weather she could have been there for days,” she said. She picked up a bundle of cutlery. Soon she was moving around the table laying out forks, knives and spoons.
“Do you think someone left her outside to freeze, deliberately?” Roberta’s eyebrows knotted in concern.
“No. The coyotes would have got her,” said Sasha.
“She might have been left in a shed,” Roberta suggested.
“Or maybe inside somebody’s freezer.” Margo sank into a chair and wrapped the scarf that was draped around her shoulders a little closer. The kitchen was snug but the thought was chilling. “But can you imagine living with a dead body lying there, right inside your house?”
“Whoever did it chopped her up and sent her to the dump.” Sasha parked herself opposite. “Freaky.”
“Bodies sometimes do end up in landfills, though.” Roberta put the lid back on the soup pot.
“Yes, but not our landfill. Not Cullen Dump.” Margo was relatively new to Cullen Village. She still viewed it through honeymoon eyes and hated the idea of her newfound paradise being tainted. “How long was she planning to be away?”
“Until April,” Sasha replied. “She would have been home by the beginning of the month, to get ready for StarFest. Guess that’s all over now.”
Erik, Roberta’s husband, strolled in carrying a guitar case. The Axelssons’ kitchen was connected to the back door by a corridor lined with coats on hooks. Boots and shoes lay strewn upon racks at the foot of each wall. A basket of slippers stood ready for visitors. Tracking snowy feet into the house was discouraged in Canadian homes. Erik was of Icelandic origin, like many of the inhabitants of the area. He wore his fair hair long, and sported a beard. He looked a bit like an aging Viking.
“What’s over?”
“StarFest. It’s too bad,” Sasha said, poking through the plate of scones and choosing one. “I’m having one of these right now. I’m starving.”
“Didn’t you make money at it?” Erik was pulling on heavy boots. Sasha made pottery and metal sculptures, tall and angular. Margo thought they looked a bit like Sasha herself. Her job at StarFest had been to run the crafts section, named Constellation Craft Corner.
“I did okay. I guess I’ll have to forget about that now.” Sasha spread butter on the scone and looked carefully indifferent. Margo knew that Sasha was always broke. She probably needed every cent she earned at StarFest. Roberta had gone to the sink to fill the kettle.
The Stargazer Music Festival happened annually, on a large field behind Stella Magnusson’s house, in tents, with a centre stage that attracted crowds each evening. Stella had started the festival seven years before. It had been a success from the beginning and had grown each year. Since it happened at the end of June, on or around the summer solstice, it was seen as a harbinger of summer. Stella had established it with the help of a few friends who contributed their talents. Now it attracted guest artists from all over the country. StarFest, as it had quickly come to be known, had grown into a four-day event. Visitors paid for passes, which sold out, and camped in the surrounding fields. There was plenty of room. Stella owned eighty-six acres. She employed a seasonal staff of four and a squad of volunteers to help but the concept, the programming and the promotion were all unmistakably hers. There was little space left in StarFest now for local performers. It had become a professional event.
“I never had a chance to go,” said Margo. She had arrived in Cullen Village during the previous summer. “But it was obviously successful. Who would possibly want to kill Stella?”
Roberta lit the gas under the kettle. It fired up with a loud pop.
Erik zipped up his jacket. “It’s clouded over. Not so cold out there. Bet it’s going to snow,” he said, avoiding answering the question. When Roberta, Margo and Sasha’s book group got together, Erik knew to take himself off for the afternoon. The group started with lunch at one. It could go on for hours.
There was a knock at the door. Erik pulled it open and in walked a woman in a smart wool coat. Phyllis Smedley sat down to pull off tall leather boots. Under the coat, the sweater she wore looked like cashmere. It was pink.
“I’m off now.” Erik picked up his guitar case. “Don’t forget to feed the animals if it gets late.”
“Me? Forget?” But Roberta was busy filling up a large, stoneware teapot.
The book group met every six weeks or so. The members had all lived in Winnipeg before moving to the lake. The Interlake towns on the east shore welcomed incomers, even unconventional ones like artists, and an informal art colony had grown along the lakeshore over the years. Now all of the members regarded this place as home, and all of them had links to the art community.
They had decided from the start not to follow any fixed rules or to have an organized discussion about their chosen book. Margo, who was new to the group, had soon come to realize that the book club was just an excuse to get together, to eat and spend an afternoon in each other’s company and, in its way, it worked. Somehow the conversation flowed easily all afternoon, sometimes about the book, sometimes not.
“Has anyone talked to Annie and Panda about what happened at the dump?” asked Phyllis, bringing a bowl of potato salad to the table.
“I called,” said Roberta. “Got Panda. She says Annie’s doing a drawing of the head.”
“She is? That is disgusting.” Phyllis pursed her lips in distaste. Sasha took the bowl from her and peeled off a layer of shrink-wrap.
“Well, Phyllis, that’s what Annie does,” she said. “She paints everything.”
“And when is she going to get a topic like that again?” added Margo.
“It certainly must have been, well, memorable,” Phyllis grudgingly conceded. “George and I saw Stella just last week. We were going to check up on her house while she was away.”
“So you must have been among the last to see her.”
“I suppose so.”
Roberta brought over the large pot of tea. “Help yourselves.”
The group met in each other’s houses, but Roberta’s big farm kitchen was a favourite. The rectangular table, built to feed a large family, could easily seat ten people. The book group liked to put all the food in the middle, help themselves, sprawl around and eat while they talked. They sipped their tea as they waited for Annie to arrive.
Sasha looked across at Phyllis. “Wouldn’t you have wanted to photograph her head, if you had been there?” she asked.
Phyllis’s eyebrows shot up. “No, I would not,” she said. “I was going to be the official photographer for StarFest this year. This is all such a nasty surprise.”
“Was Stella going to pay you?” Sasha asked pointedly. “Or were you going to volunteer?”
“Panda’s kind of spooked by the drawing.” Roberta poured tea into the mugs, most of them handmade pottery. “She says it looks really ugly.”
“It can’t. Stella was beautiful,” Phyllis protested. “She always looked stunning. I took a great photograph of her last year, on the final day of the festival.”
“Remember that painting Roger Kato did of her, the one that caused all the fuss?” Sasha said. Phyllis’s precision and affluence irritated her. But Margo welcomed the question. She wanted to know more about Stella’s background. Roberta and Sasha had the longest history in the community and the memories that went with it. They knew all the backstories. The question was whether they were true or not.
“Oh, god, yes!” said Roberta, spluttering on a mouthful of tea. “Roger. Now there’s someone who might have had it in for her.” So far, no one had brought up the question of who could have carried out the murder, although that thought was on all their minds.
“Who was Roger?” asked Margo.
“An old boyfriend, painted her nude, kind of like the Goya Naked Maja. Years ago. He used to run a little art gallery at Cullen Village, where the ice cream shop is now. Hung the painting right in the middle of a wall. Everyone could tell it was Stella. Some of the villagers took offence, family values, that kind of stuff. They asked him to take it down. It was quite the controversy. Roger sold up not long after and moved back to Winnipeg. I think he lives mostly in Santa Fe these days.”
“Oh, well, that would count him out,” said Phyllis.
“She was married once, to some guy in L.A. That’s where she was living before she moved back here. Guess he couldn’t have done it either. Guys really liked Stella.” Sasha ate a last bite of scone.
“She certainly looked attractive,” said Margo. She had only seen Stella a couple of times. Sasha had told her in the car on the drive up that Stella’s father, like Erik’s, had been a direct descendant of the Icelanders, thus her white-blonde hair, pale blue eyes and high-cheeked, fine bone structure.
“I guess she wasn’t so pretty when they found her,” said Sasha. “Wonder how many more body parts they’ve found.” Phyllis looked disgusted again.
“Has anyone heard anything from the police?” Roberta asked. “Panda says the RCMP taped the place off, soon as they got there. She and Annie and a couple of old guys had to wait down at the shack. Once they’d given their statements they were sent home. The dump’s been closed ever since, although the guy who runs it is still around. They need him to help them figure out where to dig. There’s a bunch of police in white suits out from the city. All the village garbage is being hauled to Fiskar Bay until they’re done.”
Fiskar Bay was the nearest town, about fifteen kilometres north of Cullen Village. As well as being fiercely proud of its Icelandic heritage, it was also home to the local detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties, who wore dull navy, not traditional red serge, patrolled the highways in large, white Ford sedans.
“That sounds like Annie now.” Roberta looked out the window. Sure enough, Annie was manoeuvring her big red truck into a parking spot between Margo’s little blue Honda and a snowbank. “She always looks so little to be driving that big tank of a thing.”
Soon Annie was seated at the table with them and bowls of soup were being passed around.
“I bought a cake on the way here,” she said. “I didn’t have time to cook.” They were more interested to find out, first hand, what had happened the previous day at the dump. The RCMP sergeant, Bill Gilchrist, had interviewed her and Panda, she said.
“Matt, Panda’s nephew, was with him. You know he’s a constable in the RCMP? He got transferred to Fiskar Bay in September. We think that’s why they got us out of there first, because Panda’s related to him.” Yes, she had seen the foot. Yes, it was naked. It looked like cold, pink marble and yes, the toenails were painted turquoise. And the head? Annie paused and looked around the table.
“I woke up that first night with the image of Stella’s face staring straight at me and I knew I just had to get up and start drawing,” she said quietly. “I needed to get it down on paper, then maybe I’d get back to sleep. Panda doesn’t like it but she doesn’t have to look at it. I’m keeping it in a drawer.” For a few seconds all that could be heard was the sound of eating.
“It was definitely Stella?” asked Phyllis.
“Oh, it was her all right.”
“Do you think she had been frozen deliberately?” Sasha inquired, chewing on a meatball. “Did someone freeze her first and then cut her up after?”
“That is so sick,” Phyllis said with disdain.
“Something like that must have happened,” Sasha continued, watching Phyllis for a reaction. “Either she was chopped up first and then frozen or someone froze the whole body and then cut her up after.”
“Won’t they be able to tell?” Margo asked, genuinely curious.
“Do we have to talk about this while we are eating?” pleaded Phyllis.
Sasha continued, “Roberta, you cut up animals.”
Outside the house was the Axelssons’ small farm. They had sheep, some goats, chickens and an alpaca. Roberta spun wool and made soaps and lotions from the goats’ milk. Slaughter was a natural part of life for her. They sent their larger animals to a small abattoir, but dealt with the chickens themselves. Sometimes they fattened up a pig and had it killed in the fall, to eat during the winter months. Bacon, ham, pork chops and sausages filled two large freezers in a room off the kitchen where they were eating. Some lambs and goats went the same route.
“Could she have been cut up while she was still fresh, like a hunter does a deer?”
Roberta thought for a moment. “Be messy.” She had friends who hunted deer and butchered the carcasses themselves. “There would be a lot of blood. And guts.” Phyllis took a deep breath and exhaled, loudly. “If she was frozen, you could just use a saw. It would be easier.”
“They’ll have a forensic team working on it, won’t they?” asked Margo, reaching for the potato salad.
“Don’t know,” said Roberta. “Murder doesn’t happen much out here. There was a kid killed in Fiskar Bay a few years back, on a holiday weekend, but that was a gang, out visiting from the city. It wasn’t like this. This is local, I suppose.”
“So someone we know might have done it?” Phyllis asked. They all paused again. Annie broke the silence.
“I know how we can find out what’s going on,” she mused aloud. “I’ll get Panda to invite her nephew Matt, the one that’s the Mountie, for dinner. He’ll tell us.”
“Isn’t he supposed to keep all that RCMP stuff confidential?” Margo asked.
“Yeah,” said Annie. “But Panda will get him to tell her.”
“I can’t believe this!” Phyllis put down her fork. “What’s happened to Stella is appalling. Don’t you care? Who could have hated her enough to do that to her? She was so popular! She had so many friends.”
“Stella had a lot of acquaintances,” Roberta said, her voice unusually cool.
“That’s right. There were folks that didn’t like her much, Phyllis,” Sasha added.
“Well, they were probably jealous of her.” Phyllis looked from one to the other. “She did everything so well! Who would be angry enough to freeze her and cut up her body and dispose of it at the dump? Look at what she did for Cullen Village. StarFest is marvellous. It’s a huge success. And all thanks to Stella.”
“Yup,” said Sasha, “and it’s over.”
“You helped run it, didn’t you, Sasha? Aren’t you on the board?”
“Sure, but we didn’t do much. Stella made all the decisions. We just did as we were told. We’ll have to have a meeting, I suppose. Figure out how we shut it down.”
Margo watched anxiety flicker behind Sasha’s eyes. Roberta stood up and began collecting the soup bowls. “Didn’t the farmer that lived next door to Stella cause trouble?”
Sasha smiled again. “Oh, him!” she hooted. “He couldn’t stand Stella, or StarFest, all the noise, all the people. He hated the arts, at least so Stella said. But you couldn’t always believe what Stella said.”
Roberta lifted the teapot. “Does anyone want more tea? Will I make another pot? You know, we haven’t talked about the book yet.”
They pulled out copies of the book they had been reading, a winner of the Giller prize, the top event on the Canadian literary calendar, from a few years back, but their hearts were not in it. Try as they might, Stella Magnusson’s death preoccupied them, making it hard for them to talk about anything else. They finished early, put on coats and boots and mittens and headed out into a late afternoon that was already getting dark. Snowflakes were beginning to fall.
Annie was just reaching her truck as Margo backed out. Sasha sat, bundled in the passenger seat, scarf up over her nose, hat pulled down, trying to keep warm. The car hadn’t heated up properly yet. Annie waved to Margo to stop and open the window.
“If we get Matt to come for dinner, do you want to come over? Both of you?”
Sasha poked her head out from under her wraps. “Sure, just tell us when!”
“Let us know,” Margo agreed, “and I’ll bring dessert.”
Margo followed Phyllis’s red taillights down the long driveway. She saw Erik’s headlights come towards her and wait at the road end to let them pass before he headed home. She drove towards the highway that would take them back home to Cullen Village. Sasha was unusually quiet. Stella’s murder and the afternoon’s conversation had made them uneasy.
“Phyllis really admired Stella,” Margo said.
“I can think of a few people who’ll be happy to see her gone.” Sasha’s voice came darkly out from under her wraps. “You couldn’t trust Stella, not ever. She was always out for herself.”
“Don’t go around saying that in public, will you?” said Margo. “People might think it was you that did it.” Snowflakes were drifting down. She turned on the wipers. Sasha didn’t reply.
“The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow…” Margo sang to break the silence.
“Don’t know that one,” muttered Sasha.
“Don’t you? Old kid’s song. My Scottish granny used to sing it:
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then?
Poor thing.”
“Canadian robins fly south for the winter,” Sasha grouched. “They’ve got more sense than to stick around.”
“Suppose so.”
The flakes were coming down thicker. Margo turned up the speed on the wipers. They swatted back and forth, clearing a space on the windshield.
“Going to be a doozer,” said Sasha, sitting up to peer through the window. “Bet it’s a snow day tomorrow.” She sounded almost cheerful at the thought.