It was the following evening. Margo drove between snowbanks that formed ghostly canyons in the headlights. The moon was bright, the night full of shadows. A layer of snow remained on the road surface, but twin tracks shone, shiny and slick, where a few cars had already travelled. She and Sasha were on their way to dinner at Panda and Annie’s house. She turned onto a long, narrow driveway. The big wooden A-frame where Panda and Annie lived stood off the roadway, surrounded by trees, in a secluded spot. They parked beside a large garage with a workshop beside it. The big red Sierra was parked outside but there was no sign of another car. Matt Stavros hadn’t arrived yet.
Annie met them at the door, small and neat, her hair fastened up on top of her head. Panda was behind the kitchen counter, a tea towel tied around her waist. She waved a large metal spoon. “Hi, Margo. Hi, Sasha.”
“What’s for dinner?” Sasha asked, peeling off the outer layers of clothes. “Smells good.”
“I’m making Matt’s favourite. Greek lemon chicken and potatoes.”
“You won this time, did you?”
“Gotta butter him up, right? Anyway, he likes my cooking best.”
There was an ongoing battle between Panda and Annie as to who would cook when they had guests. Panda loved to feed people, and Annie had grown up in the restaurant trade. Her parents were of Chinese origin. Her great-grandfather had arrived in Canada over a hundred years before to work on building the Canadian Pacific Railway. Many Chinese men had died doing that work but he had survived. He had stayed and set up a restaurant in Virden, a small Manitoba town near the border with Saskatchewan. Because of a head tax that restricted further immigration from China to Canada, it had taken him a long time to find a bride, but eventually he had been able to bring one over from his homeland, and now his descendants ran that same restaurant.
Annie had grown up in the kitchen. She knew how to make everything on the menu, the ubiquitous Canadian Cantonese cuisine that their customers expected—chow mein, wonton soup, deep-fried battered shrimp in a sweet, slightly sour pink sauce and lemon chicken, the Chinese version—but her mother had also taught her how to make spicy Szechuan food. Today, however, they were going to eat the food that Panda and Matt Stavros had grown up on. The house smelled of garlic and lemon, reminiscent of summer.
Margo studied the large room with its tall, gabled windows along the side opposite the open kitchen. Annie’s paintings lined the side walls, large, vivid abstracts that evoked the prairie landscape with the occasional hint of a figure, a watcher. She had gone to have a closer look when the door opened and Matt Stavros appeared, stomping snow off his boots onto the doormat. Annie introduced them.
“Margo, Sasha, this is Constable Stavros, of the Fiskar Bay RCMP.”
“Hi, Matt!” Panda came out from behind the kitchen counter to plant a noisy kiss on his cheek. “My nephew. You can tell, eh?” You could. Panda was built just like Matt, tall and square. They had the same olive skin, dark eyes and straight black hair. Margo watched them look at each other and laugh. They sounded alike as well. Matt pulled a bottle of wine from the deep pocket of his parka.
“It’s not Greek,” he said, before Panda could ask. “It’s from B.C.”
Soon they were settled at the table. Food was eaten, wine was drunk, and the conversation took its inevitable turn.
“So, Matt, what’s been going on at the dump?” Panda asked.
Margo watched Matt smile and put down his fork. He must know perfectly well why Panda had invited him for dinner, she thought. He had probably figured out how much he could tell to keep her happy before he got here. He told them that more body parts had been found, stuffed into black plastic bags, tucked in with scrunched-up newspaper and items of the victim’s clothing. Digging at the dump had stopped. Sergeant Donohue from the RCMP Major Crimes Unit was pretty sure they had the whole body. A team from the Forensic Identification Unit had travelled out from the city to carry out the search.
“In the Force we call them ‘Ident,’” he said.
“Not ‘Forensics’?” asked Margo, surprised. She read a lot of crime fiction and was familiar with the terminology.
“Never. We don’t have detectives either. The RCMP is different. The Major Crimes Unit is in charge but the local constables get involved.” He described how dirty the work had been, made more difficult because of the intense cold, as they sifted through piles of garbage bags, rotten vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, dirty diapers, looking for the pieces that remained of Stella Magnusson.
Margo remembered watching video footage about a plane crash off the east coast of Canada several years before. The plane and its contents had disintegrated on impact with the surface of the water. Fishermen had gone out in boats, to try to retrieve the debris and what was left of the passengers and crew. That, she thought, would have been worse.
On this search, the bitter cold had meant that at least there had been very little smell. Most of the rubbish had been frozen solid. The constables had taken turns to guard the gate to the landfill from intruders. They could sit in the police car and run the engine to keep themselves warm and the windshield free of frost. Archie kept the wood stove in his shack well stoked. It was snug in there. They had spent twenty minutes digging, taken ten to thaw out, and then gone back at it again. Matt had been happier poking around in the garbage dump with the other police than sitting alone in the car, although he said it was entertaining to watch the villagers drive by, slowing down to peer over, trying to get a look at what was going on. Margo watched Sasha look mildly guilty. She had probably been one of them.
There hadn’t been as much trash to sort through as the police had first supposed. Only the garbage from the past two weeks was accessible. The rest had already been compacted and frozen into the hill. If they had needed to get at that it would have been a much bigger operation. They had had a couple of days to search before the snow hit. Stella Magnusson’s remains were now in the care of the province’s chief medical examiner’s office. They’d have to wait for results.
“So you’ve got all of what’s left of her?” Sasha asked.
“We think so.”
There was a collective sigh around the table.
“Was there anything unusual at her house?” asked Margo. “Or in her car?”
“We don’t know where her car is. It’s not in her garage.” Matt thought it wouldn’t hurt to tell them that. The word would be out soon enough if the car didn’t show up. “So if you see it around, give us a call.”
“Won’t be hard to miss that big yellow thing,” Sasha said, pushing her empty plate aside. Stella had driven a distinctive Toyota FJ Cruiser, an SUV with the StarFest logo emblazoned on the back window. It would be easy to spot.
“Are you going to be part of the investigation?” asked Annie. “Will the Fiskar Bay RCMP take it on, or will it be a team from Winnipeg?”
“A bit of both, it looks like,” Matt said. “It’ll depend on how long it takes and how difficult it is to find out what happened. There’s been a sergeant and a corporal out from Winnipeg so far, but it’ll help to have some local guys, people that know the lie of the land and the people out here. That kind of cuts me out, though. I’m too new to the area. There are other constables that have been here longer.” Matt had arrived in Fiskar Bay in the fall. He’d spent the first three years after leaving the Depot, the RCMP training academy in Regina, in Flin Flon, a northern Manitoba mining town, before he had transferred to Fiskar Bay.
“It’s great!” Panda had reported to the book group around the time he had moved. He and Panda were the closest thing they had to family, she said. Margo watched them smile back and forth. They obviously got along. Lucky Panda, she thought.
“Annie’s done a drawing of Stella’s head.” Sasha’s voice cut across her thoughts. “Can we have a look?”
“Oh, it’s just a sketch,” Annie said. “Who would like their glass topped up?” She reached for the wine bottle.
“Come on, Annie. Let’s see it. Most of us have never seen a real severed head before.” Sasha held out her glass for a refill.
“You don’t have to, Annie.” Margo had noticed Annie’s reluctance and tried to be polite but really she was dying to see it too. Annie put down the bottle and smiled.
“Oh, it’s all right. Of course you can have a look.” She walked towards the staircase that led upstairs, a tiny little figure, slippers slapping on the floor. Margo would have loved to follow her, to see where the famous Annie Chan worked. The whole upper floor of the house was apparently given over to Annie’s studio. Maybe when they got to know each other a bit better she could ask to have a look.
Panda got busy clearing away plates and serving the pie that Margo had brought. Saskatoon. She still had a bag of berries in the freezer. Matt went to help his aunt. Margo noticed that they did differ in one way. While Panda was outgoing and talkative, her nephew was quieter and thought before he spoke. He stood beside Panda at the sink.
“You guys okay, Panda? Can’t have been easy, seeing that head fall out of the bag,” Margo overheard him say.
“Oh, I’m fine, you know me.” Panda shrugged. “Get some ice cream out of the freezer, will you?” She loaded wedges of pie onto plates. She didn’t say how Annie was doing.
The drawing was in a folder, protected by a sheet of thin tissue. It was drawn in charcoal, stark black against the white paper. There was a suggestion of the shiny black garbage bag in which the head had been found, of the crushed newsprint that had spilled out of the bag with it. The mouth was coloured crimson. You could almost hear it scream. They passed it around, one to another. Margo looked first at it, then at Annie.
“She looks alive, Annie. It’s as if you’ve caught her as it happened, in the act of being killed, as she’s just about to die. She looks terrified. It’s not like a dead head at all.”
“That’s why Annie’s so good,” said Sasha. “She brings everything she draws to life.”
It was true. Annie deserved her reputation as one of Manitoba’s best-known artists. You could almost believe that the dead woman was calling out to them, that she was willing someone to find her killer, to discover how and why she had died. Matt Stavros took the life-size drawing between his fingertips.
“Can I take a photo, Annie?” he asked. “It’s a much better likeness than the ones we’ve got at the office. They’re all publicity shots from StarFest. This looks more real.” Again, Annie hesitated. Margo wasn’t surprised. Taking photographs of artists’ work was often frowned upon in these days of social media. But Panda intervened.
“Hey, Annie, take a picture of it yourself and email it to Matt. It’s just for the police to use.”
“Would be great if you could do that, Annie.” Matt handed the drawing back.
Annie put it back inside its folder and laid it aside, on a counter. “I’ll get it to you by tomorrow.” She smiled at Matt as she sat down.
“Now,” said Panda, “who wants ice cream on their pie? And Matt, listen up. We’ve been trying to figure out who might have killed Stella Magnusson.” And they told Matt about how the book group had got together and what people had said that afternoon.
“Of course, it’s all conjecture,” said Margo, who wasn’t sure they should be talking to a member of the RCMP about their suspicions.
“Gossip,” Sasha said bluntly. “But there’s no smoke without fire, right? Do the cops know that Stella was once shagging Roger Kato, the artist?”
“They split up ages ago,” Panda chipped in. “But he’s moved south, so he couldn’t have killed her.”
“Well,” Sasha confided, “There were always guys hanging around Stella. Not that she was really interested. She just strung them along. Flirted with them, then dropped them. She was married to a filmmaker in L.A. called Freddie Santana. He’s quite famous, but their marriage didn’t last long. And way back before that she was in a band, her and a bunch of guys. She toured all over the place with them. One of them was Leo Isbister.”
“The developer? The one who wants to drain the wetlands north of Fiskar Bay and build there?”
“The same.”
Margo watched Matt make a mental note of that.
“Do you have any other suspects?” he prodded.
“Well.” Sasha couldn’t wait to tell more. “Do you and your buddies know about Andreychuk, the farmer next door to Stella’s place? He has a son, Brad, who’s no good.”
She filled Matt in on what she knew about the Andreychuks. She didn’t tell him how much Roberta disliked Stella. She didn’t mention that she, herself, was on the StarFest board and her own worries about what would happen to the craft section. But by the time the evening was over, Matt had probably gleaned enough to feel he’d earned his dinner. He’d probably learned as much as he had told. He appeared happy as he got into his car and drove off home in the moonlight.
“Is Panda’s real name really Delphia?” asked Margo as she and Sasha took the road east, towards Cullen Village.
“Yeah. Don’t ever call her that, though, if you want to get invited back. People joke that she’s called Panda because she’s Annie’s pet bear, but Annie says it’s really because everything is black and white with Panda. She’s either for you or against you. Great to have as a friend but you wouldn’t want to have her as an enemy.”
“She does look kind of like a bear though,” Margo laughed. Her breath had moistened the scarf that was wrapped around her face.
“They’ve been together forever, her and Annie. Well, since Annie was in art school. They met at a party. Stella told me the story. They couldn’t remember anything about how they met, they were so blotto, but they woke up in the same bed and they’ve been together ever since.”
“How would Stella know that?”
“You’d be surprised how much Stella knew about people. She had lots of parties and she sucked people in. People talk.”
“Matt should know that. It’s a motive, isn’t it? What if someone killed her because she knew something she shouldn’t?”
“Maybe. Who knows.”
Ten minutes later they reached Cullen Village, back to their own houses and their dogs. The snow was blanketing the village and a wind was beginning to blow from the northwest.