A major storm blew in overnight, a Colorado low that roared up from the American southwest, then looped eastward over the prairies with Cullen Village directly in its path. It brought warmer air, but also carried fifteen to twenty centimetres of snow on its breath. Margo Wishart gazed out of her window. Usually she could see across the lake to the horizon, but not today. When the weather was clear she could see a dark shimmer out where the water met the sky that suggested the opposite shore, but that was an optical illusion, caused by the earth’s curve. From where Margo stood, the lake stretched for twenty-six kilometres before it reached land, all of it now covered in a solid layer of ice. The snow came down thick and steady out of a steely sky. When it gusted, she couldn’t see a thing. She sipped her coffee and was glad she didn’t have to drive into Winnipeg today.
Margo taught a couple of classes a week at the university. Her subject was art history, with women artists as her special area of interest. She had a grant proposal to work on—an idea for an art show about local women like Roberta who created art with textiles—and student essays to mark. This was a great day to get on with it.
Margo had bought her house at Cullen Village in May and moved in at the end of June. Her city friends all thought she was mad. Cullen Village was a fine place to hang out in the summer, when cottagers walked and biked its grassy paths and swam off rickety wooden piers that jutted out into the water for their special convenience, when boats were moored at the marina and the RV park was full of campers. In the evening there was music at the bandstand and the ice cream shop did a steady business. In winter it would be dead, they said. Her children worried that she’d be lonely. But Margo had needed a change. She’d married Rod Buchanan almost forty years ago, when they were students in Edinburgh. Now Rod was dean of education at the same university where she taught and he had found himself madly in love with a student. He’d left her. That old, sad story. She couldn’t stand being in the old neighbourhood with its memories, or the sympathetic, and inquisitive, looks she got from people she knew. She had needed to get away, but she still needed to work, so she couldn’t go too far. Life at the lake offered a good compromise. So she had insisted that the old family house be sold. Her share had financed buying this place. Just. A lake view came at a price, but so far she hadn’t regretted her choice. And it had turned out that the lakeshore buzzed with life during the winter months. She could join a choir, a dance class or do yoga, be out every night if she wanted. There was an active art club at nearby Fiskar Bay, and she was making new friends, like the book group. So far, it had been a good move.
But she wouldn’t be going anywhere today. Schools and public offices were closed. Highway travel was not recommended. The villagers were battening down to wait for the storm to blow itself out. Margo didn’t mind. Rod had never been home much. Working, he had said. Now she wasn’t so sure about that. Nevertheless, she was used to her own company and as long as she was busy she didn’t sink into the doldrums. Her laptop lay invitingly on her old wooden desk, one of the few items of furniture she had retrieved from that big, suburban house. She had her books, which lined the walls like old friends, and some favourite paintings hung between them.
This was a little old cottage, renovated and winterized. Small rooms had been opened up into one large space with an open kitchen. A wall of windows looked out over the lake with glass doors in the middle that led onto a deck. In the summer, there was grass that led to a protective berm. On the other side were a rocky shore, a tiny scrap of sandy beach, and the lake. Right now, there was nothing but greyness. She would have lights on all day. The wind raged and howled around corners and through trees. It would probably bring a few branches down before it was done, but, meantime, Margo was warm and safe inside and she had work to do.
She walked through her house, to open the door on the far side. A gust of snow blew in and with it Bob, her long-legged black dog. She pushed the door shut against the wind, grabbed a towel from a peg and rubbed snow off his back and feet. She’d found Bob at the Fiskar Bay Humane Society, shortly after she had arrived at Cullen Village. She’d missed having a dog. He was two or three years old, of unknown pedigree, amiable company and as happy to be home today as she was.
Most mornings, she and Sasha walked together along the snowy roads of Cullen Village. She’d known Sasha for years. They’d first met when Margo had curated an art show that Sasha had helped organize, and they had kept in touch. Winnipeg’s arts community was compact. Everybody knew everybody. Watching how Sasha lived at the lake had given Margo the courage to make the move. Now they spent a lot of time together, as did their dogs. Bob and Lenny, Sasha’s basset hound, got along just fine.
Margo filled Bob’s food bowl. She made a fresh mug of coffee and sat down at her desk. She was still in her pyjamas. She’d work for an hour or so, then maybe get dressed. She opened up a document on her laptop and started to read. The phone rang.
“Hi! Whatya doing?” It was Sasha.
“I was going to get some work done,” Margo hinted.
“Me too,” said Sasha. “I’ve got the stove going in the studio. Should be warm enough to get out there soon.”
Sasha made most of her income by selling pottery to summer visitors. Mugs and bowls did well. She had converted an outbuilding into a studio. It housed a wheel and a kiln, but also an area where she created her sculptures. There was welding equipment on shelves alongside driftwood, beach glass, interesting stones and objects washed up from the boats that traversed the lake in the summer months. Scrap metal was stacked along one wall. Like Annie and Panda, she sometimes raided the dump for supplies.
“Are you feeling sick today?”
“Me? No.” Margo got up from her desk. She might as well abandon any thought of work for now. She didn’t really mind. She had all day to get on with it. She flopped down onto a large, comfortable sofa and put her feet up on the coffee table. Bob jumped up beside her. “Why?”
“Phyllis called. She’s feeling rotten. Wondered if it was anything we ate yesterday.”
“No. Maybe she’s coming down with something. Wasn’t she sick a couple of weeks ago?”
“She was. But she looked fine yesterday. Maybe it’s a bug.”
“Or maybe the conversation turned her stomach. You did kind of lay it on. About the murder. You and Roberta.”
“Oh well. Can’t help it if she’s squeamish.”
“You didn’t exactly like Stella Magnusson, did you?” Margo heard Sasha slurp her coffee.
“Hey, me and Stella go back a long way. We had our ups and downs. That’s all. I was still on her StarFest Committee, right? Lots of other people walked out—Roberta for one, but me, I learned to put up with Stella.”
“People like Phyllis thought she was great.”
“Suppose so. But what would Phyllis know? She just hung around last year and took snaps with that big camera of hers. Stella probably figured out real fast she could use her. Stella could turn on the charm when she wanted. She’d have had Phyllis eating out of her hand in no time. Stella always had a following. Her fandom. She was kind of famous, locally, anyway. Did you ever hear her sing?”
Sasha didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, she wasn’t all that good, but she had…?” She searched for the right word. “Charisma. That’s what Stella had. And the looks. That helped. She always reserved a spot for herself at StarFest, on the last night. People would go nuts when she came out onto that stage. And Stella liked the limelight. She glowed. You can see how Phyllis would enjoy being in her orbit.”
“So it wasn’t only Phyllis that thought Stella was great?”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Stella could manage people when it suited her. I happen to think the only person Stella liked was Stella but that’s just my opinion. Phyllis does take decent photographs. And she volunteers because she’s got the time and the money and she probably thinks it’s fun. Stella would have loved that. George helps out, too. He’s on the board with me. The treasurer.” George Smedley was Phyllis’s husband. “I shouldn’t talk, I’m just as bad. I sell a lot of my stuff at StarFest and I get to have a say on how the Constellation Craft Corner works, so it suits me too. It made it worthwhile to try to get along with Stella. But she could be pretty full of herself.”
Margo thought that comment was ironic coming from Sasha. She could be self-absorbed too. “So what was all that about the farmer next door?”
“John Andreychuk? Well, think about it. He’s got cows out in his pasture and suddenly there’s all this loud music, not to mention drunken festivalgoers partying next door. And the drugs. He complained to the municipality to try to stop them from giving her a licence. He thought he’d win, apparently. He’s an Andreychuk, after all. They’re one of the original families that settled out here and he has a lot of land, but it didn’t work. The village council put a word in on her behalf, I heard, so they let her carry on. They liked StarFest. It helped put the village on the map. The little village businesses benefitted from it. People would drop over to look at the beach and while they were around they’d spend money at the village shop, eat in the restaurants. Buy ice cream. The RV park’s always booked solid weeks in advance. And the noise and the traffic are far enough away not to be a nuisance to the cottagers. So Stella got her licence and she didn’t care if she annoyed the Andreychuks. She just ignored them.”
Margo wondered about that. She had learned already that in a small place you depended on the goodwill of the people who lived around you. She knew that if this storm left snow too deep for her snowblower to manage, she could call a neighbour who had a tractor and ask him to clear her driveway. She found it interesting that Cullen Village, the surrounding farming community and the artists who had migrated to the area coexisted as well as they did. She had been told that in Fiskar Bay the Icelanders, who fished the lake and had settled along the shore, did not always get along with the settlers, largely of Ukrainian origin like the Andreychuks, who had broken the land and built farms further inland. During the summer she had watched the tensions that arose among her own neighbours, the year-round residents of the village and the summer cottagers, who loved the village but whose interest sometimes rested in preserving tradition rather than in making changes to how things worked or looked. Harmony was only maintained by striking a balance between the needs of one and the demands of the other. Had Stella Magnusson created an imbalance that was serious enough for someone to want to murder her?
“Could the Andreychuks have hated her enough to want to kill her?” Margo asked.
“Oh, who knows? John Andreychuk wasn’t the only person Stella stomped on. She didn’t look tough, but she was, you know. She knew what she wanted and she made sure she got it. But it’s too bad StarFest’s over. People like me did well out of it.” Sasha sighed. “Oh well. It was a good run while it lasted.”
“I guess with this snow they’ll have stopped digging up at the dump.”
“Heard they got finished yesterday and cleared off back to the city before the storm hit. There’s still a couple of cops nosing around at Stella’s house.”
How did this news get around? Margo had noticed that Cullen Village often seemed to have eyes and ears of its own. “Have you heard anything from Panda and Annie yet about dinner? Will they get snowed in?”
Panda and Annie lived on a road that was further inland and not on a school bus route, so they had to wait until the end of the snow-clearing schedule for it to be dug out.
“Not yet,” Sasha replied. “Let you know if I hear anything.”
They hung up and went off to their separate, solitary pursuits. Writing and sculpting required time alone, but Margo was glad to have a friend like Sasha that she could count on for company, even if it was only a chat on the phone on a snowy day. Margo liked to tell her friends and relatives how safe she felt in her house by the lake. Now that this murder had happened, she had had a flurry of emails asking if she was okay and her son had called from Vancouver. Was she safe? Had she ever been? She tried to reassure herself. Stella’s death had to be about Stella and her lifestyle, her fame and her devoted fans, the people that it seemed she had offended. Her death couldn’t sully life in this beautiful, peaceful village, could it? Margo tried to shake the thought and went to her desk. She needed to get some reading done.
Sasha lived three streets over. She’d have to trudge through snow as high as her boot tops to get to her studio. Margo could picture her stomping along, Lenny flopping behind her from footprint to footprint. At least it would be warm and snug once she got inside, with the wood stove on.
Margo remembered a conversation not so long ago. Sasha had been over for supper. They’d eaten spaghetti and finished a bottle of wine. Sasha had told her that she was worried that Stella was going to close down the Constellation Craft Corner at StarFest, so she could turn it into a second stage for new songwriters.
Margo was just getting used to having to live on less money than she was used to. She didn’t know how artists like Sasha survived on what they made. “George Smedley told me Stella had even chosen a name for it. The Pleiades Platform.” Sasha had drunk more than Margo that night. Maybe she didn’t remember telling her. Margo reached for the phone. She should check up on Phyllis before she got busy.
George answered. “She’s gone back to bed,” he said. “I’m just making her a cup of peppermint tea to settle her stomach.”
“Can I talk to her?” Margo asked.
“I don’t think that’s wise, dear. She needs time to rest and recover. Don’t worry. She’ll be back to herself in no time. It’s a miserable day, isn’t it? I’ll tell her you called.” And he hung up. Margo stared at the phone. Who did George Smedley think he was, calling her “dear”? She opened up the laptop again. Bob snuggled down at her feet, and she got to work.