Читать книгу Bush Poodles Are Murder - Lou Allin - Страница 5

The hunchback of Notre Dame with a Rastafarian haircut. “Cute,” Belle Palmer observed as a six-pound bundle of coppery fur with a woolly chest squirrelled past, leaped to pose standing on thin, shaved legs on a rocky outcrop, and then sprang off to clamp onto Freya’s nodding German shepherd tail until long hairs dangled from its tiny jaws. An insult to the dog kingdom, she thought, a seven hundred dollar rodent.

“Strudel’s her name. She’s good enough to eat,” Miriam MacDonald said, at fifty-five Belle’s elder by a slight decade.

“Let’s hope Freya isn’t hungry,” Belle said with a grin. She’d suggested that their recent Christmas pounds might be pared by a long snowshoe. Gentle on the knees and hips, like walking on pillows, this exercise the aging boomers had adopted quickly. Their high-tech aluminum and neoprene models with the price tag of her old college VW glided over the narrow trail. Half an hour later, they were approaching a swamp she’d named after the conservationist Gene Stratton-Porter’s 1909 novel Girl of the Limberlost. A fan of classic films as well, Belle had enjoyed the film version, but mourned the former Indiana wilderness lost to resource exploration and agriculture.

“I never imagined you as a dog owner. But now that Rosanne’s living in North Bay . . .” Miriam’s daughter was getting her teaching certificate, a career choice Belle didn’t envy, given her own checkered experiences before a chalkboard.

“A thoughtful Christmas gift from dear Mel. The sweetie sensed that I was lonely and drove all the way to Kingston to buy her. Apricot mini-poodle pups are hard to find, especially off-season.” A perturbed look passed over her face. “One problem, though.” She called the dog, turned its face to Belle and spread its lips.

Belle squinted at the minute display, toy teeth next to Freya’s noble fangs. “Hmmmm. An underbite. Still, you aren’t going to breed or show her, are you?”

“No, but this mess has to be corrected, Shana says. She’s pulling the front ones tomorrow, a small fortune, and the anaesthetic is risky. The adult set will probably be normal once there’s room. It wasn’t Mel’s fault. The breeder said that the parents are champions. Makes you wonder.”

“When am I going to meet this answer to a maiden’s prayers?” She’d been listening to Miriam describe Mel’s virtues for over two months.

Rounding a turn, brushing against soft white pines, Belle eased down the bank sideways by forcing the metal grips into the snow and pulling on a willow bush for balance. The poodle was running circles around Freya, who pleaded soundlessly at her owner for moral support, soft brown eyes communicating that she hadn’t bargained for motherhood at the ripe age of eight, Mr. Red Chile Pepper toys aside.

Miriam dropped to her ample posterior, sliding the last two feet with a laugh. “Thank God, it’s not like skiing. I’d be lining up for a hip replacement. Six months’ wait under our pathetic health care system.” She blew her nose on a tissue, then clicked her snowshoes together like Dorothy in Oz, Redfeather models replacing ruby slippers, speedy but not built for the bullwork of trail-breaking like Belle’s Atlas tanks. “May I borrow these? Rosanne used the trails near Shield University’s Conservation Area. They sound a bit tamer than this.”

“Keep them until the lilacs bloom on Victoria Day. They’re better suited to townie paths anyway.” Discreetly she assessed her friend, glad that the crisp air, a mild minus ten Celsius, was putting bloom back into her cheeks. Miriam’s scare with a breast exam had worried her for several weeks before the biopsy had come back negative. “I’ve never known a Melibee. How could his parents do that to a child? Chaucer’s most tedious storyteller, as I recall—with considerable rue—from trying to introduce English lit to teenagers hooked on Goosebumps. They might have related to the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” with the bum kissing, but our version was expurgated.”

Miriam gave her a sharp look and perched on a large cedar stump. A light wind was rising across the expanses of the icy Limberlost, a frosty postcard of grey, leaning cedar spars, a few topped with five-feet-wide great blue heron nests. Leathery Labrador tea scrub rustled beside cattails leaking stuffing like exploding cigars. The dogs snuffled along a marten path and clambered to the white dome of a beaver house. “Takes a strong man to carry it off. The Elphinstones were titled back in Scotland. Lairds, or some such. The Isle of Bute. Some legendary Marjorie buried alive.”

Belle shuddered at the idea. “What happened to her?”

With a wave of her hand, Miriam said, “Robbers dug her up to take her jewels, she scared them away and went home to outlive her husband by six years.”

“What a woman. And the family property?”

“Gone now, even the baronial castle sold to rich Americans.”

“Isn’t everything? But God bless our patriotic cousins. They always let us bring our wagon when a war starts.” Joking aside, Belle persisted in her questions. If this affair were serious, apparently the only one since Miriam had divorced a decade ago, would she lose her cohort at Palmer Realty? Who else would work for little more than shelled peanuts, even with rare bonuses? Belle’s business tiptoed on the financial edges that ruled Sudbury’s boom-and-bust Northern Ontario economy, and even diversification and the civil service infusion of the Taxation Data Centre hadn’t slowed the bleed. Ten thousand people were “missing” since the last census, a job plague that had the mayor under constant harassment.

“So how did this paragon escape the clutches of matrimony?” she asked, her mouth running on like a bad pup’s.

“He’s a widower. Poor woman passed on from lymphoma years ago. He’s poured himself into his work as a grief response. It took a long time before he was willing to commit to someone, risk getting hurt again.”

“Sounds like the perfect reason for dinner. On me.” She had to scope out this man, discover his intentions. Calling him “sweetie” and “dear,” Miriam sounded like a schoolgirl. Or was Belle jealous of sharing her friend?

“On you, Madame Scrooge? Are my ears frostbitten?” Miriam pinched them, then gave an impish look.

Though cooling off as they stood, Belle felt her face flush. “I’m not cheap, just prudent.” She pondered the choices. Nickel City College’s Versailles Room, run by the Hospitality Program, had theme nights. At a government business, liquor sold at cost. Surely there would be one decent wine.

Unused to rigorous exercise, checking her watch pointedly, Miriam begged for rescue, so Belle chose a secret loop back to the path, breaking carefully for her friend. They stopped to admire a squared pattern in the snow, trodden stitches that resembled a crazy quilt. Suddenly Freya dashed into the woods. A fat grouse fluttered up, heading for the tall pines. Typical of companionable species, another followed. Picking up a shining tailfeather, variegated stripes of black, brown and burgundy, Belle tucked it carefully into her inside pocket. “They nest under the spruces and cedars, nibble the tender cones. Often snow covers them, except for a breathing hole. Not very smart birdies to advertise a delicious lunch for a roaming fox.”

Back at the trailhead, Belle shoved the fidgety poodle under her arm for safety as a pickup truck hauling a trailer with two snowmobiles buzzed by soundlessly on hard-packed Edgewater Road. Three feet of snow had fallen in December, yet on weekends, the municipality rarely sent the plow, reasoning that schools were closed and most people didn’t have to get to work. The Sudbury Star pegged the cost for a single scrape at sixty-five thousand dollars. This budget-balancing mentality irked Belle, who often showed houses on those days. Why pay high taxes with no sewer, water or sidewalks? To subsidize pampered townsfolk?

Ed DesRosiers, Belle’s retired neighbour, was backing his ancient plow truck out of her long driveway as they took off their snowshoes. “Smooth as a baby’s butt for you ladies,” he said, nub of a cigar in his broad mouth, his diesel exhaust puffing clouds of potent fumes as he headed home.

“I’ll leave Strudel in the car. She’s only ten weeks old. If she whizzed in your living room, I’d be appalled,” Miriam said, opening her battered Neon and wrapping the dog snugly in several comforters.

Inside the storey-and-a-half cedar house, the women peeled off layers of clothing and wiped their fogging glasses. Belle propped the icy snowshoes by the woodstove, then, from a full wheelbarrow beside the tile platform, added a huge maple chunk, sending up sparks. Miriam planted herself on the blue leather sofa, wiping sweat from her face. “I don’t know how you live out here, though the view is spectacular.” She swept her hand toward the rows of six-foot windows framing the vastness of Lake Wapiti, a meteor crater deep as hell itself. Gelid waves undulated toward the shore, doubling the protective rock wall with layers of ice, but relentless when the wind blew from the northwest and besieged the dock, constructed in the year of Belle’s birth and long overdue for destruction.

Belle whistled to herself in the compact kitchen as she prepared coffee, adding a vanilla bean for flavour. Then she brought their mugs, Miriam’s triple creamed and sugared. Her friend’s bulldog exterior hid a vulnerable core. What a great prison guard she would have made, except that she’d have cried herself to sleep every night. How odd it seemed to imagine her in a hot romance.

“What exactly does Melibee do, or is he a man of leisure?” she asked, tongue in cheek.

Miriam bridled at the insinuation, arching a fuzzy eyebrow, which matched her short, grey, Brillo-pad hair. “He owns a penthouse at San Rudolpho, Balmoral Drive, which as you well know is our most prestigious address.” A cool million way down south in Toronto, but in the newly amalgamated mouthful called the City of Greater (in winter, dubbed Crater) Sudbury, still a solid three hundred thousand.

“Didn’t you mention once that he was my age? Does that make you a cradle robber?” She toyed with her friend, their banter balm to a healthy relationship.

Miriam stuck out her lower lip and nodded in a worldly way. Belle hadn’t forgotten that her background included a soupçon of spicy book cooking for shady small businesses before she had joined Palmer Realty as accountant cum everything. “Investments, Belle. With international instability and our third-world, resource-based economy, the only way to ensure a comfortable future.” She flashed a wry look. “Especially with your slave wages and the meagre Canada Pension, which by the time I collect will pay in Canadian Tire money.”

Mild alarm bells went off as Belle put down her coffee on the glass-topped table. “What kind of investments?”

“Oh, not like yours in the conservative old bank, though I do understand that you have to be cautious with your father’s money. Even before September 11th, most mutual funds had been hanging at four percent, hardly more than GICs. Mel is tuned to global finance, a man who knows the edges, the big picture as well as the small details.”

Belle shifted her stocking feet, resisting a poke at the jargon. “You’re not into anything risky, are you? Like emerging nations, Afghani railroads?”

“Hardly. High-yield bonds. Small caps. Value funds. But he has a free hand. Timing is critical. Most fortunes are made during one percent of the trading opportunities. And don’t give me that skeptical glare. Dividends speak louder than theories.” She wiggled her index finger in a teacherly fashion.

“How much profit are we talking about?” Belle lapsed into rude mode. Mincing words was no polite option when her friend’s savings were involved.

Miriam beamed like a student displaying an A plus. “On my forty-eight thousand a month, one thousand since last month. Cash in hand. Twenty-five percent a year if it keeps up.”

“ ‘If’ indeed. Belle’s nostrils flared with suspicion. Biting her tongue, she rose to close the red-hot keys on the front of the stove, ignoring to her peril the nearby work gloves. “Ouch.” She licked her blistered fingers. “Too-good-to-be-true time. You could be in for trouble.”

“Don’t be jealous. Join me in early retirement. We’ll toast our toes in the sands of Curaçao. Here’s a card.” From her purse she pulled an engraved rectangle with his name and the title Investment Broker.

Belle fingered the cream vellum. “No business address?”

“He has a small place in the Lome Street area, more for record storage. But he prefers visiting people’s homes where they can be comfortable. Many of his older clients can’t travel easily in the winter.”

With feathery clumps of snow beginning to fall, Miriam climbed quickly into her battered Neon, the poodle pawing mindlessly at the rear window. From the huge, L-shaped deck, Belle waved goodbye. “Be sure to stay to the right, but watch out. The plow covers ditches like silk.”

Miriam turned on the wipers and waited for the windshield to clear. “I wouldn’t live here at the back of beyond for all the perogies in the Donovan. Give me my no frills, easy-care apartment near the mall.” A dust cloud of snow and the spinning of balding tires forestalled her quick exit. Belle cringed to see her muffler bobbling on the icy heaves.

“Back up, switch into second for traction and curb that heavy foot,” Belle called, smiling to herself at the city slicker, but feeling guilty that her friend couldn’t afford new snow tires. December had been slow as usual, but with a bit of luck . . .

Inside the house, she undressed to customary T-shirt and panties now that the temperature had risen to bake. Only in late spring or early fall would she juice the propane furnace, which invited the bulbous gas truck to deliver a bill the size of Alberta. Twenty cords of dry, split maple and starter cords of pine sat under a tarp beside the house. Shovelling snow off the pile was small payment for the bone-warming heat.

Six o’clock. Too late and too lazy to cook. She opened the hall closet and sighed at the Millennium stockpile, barely dented from that non-event. From a large carton, she plucked a Kraft dinner well past the best-before date, then added a no-name can of green beans. Freya got five cups of Purina Seniors kibble sprinkled with Metamucil.

Parking in the TV room on a pasha chair with giant ottoman, she turned the satellite dish on the dock to Turner Classic Movies and munched thoughtfully at Clark Gable playing the ad game in The Hucksters. How that moustache twitched like an innocent mouse’s, or was it a tomcat’s? Did Melibee have a moustache? The name befitted an interior decorator. She watched patrician Deborah Kerr fall pray to Gable’s charms. Miriam was the sister she’d never had. If the man were providing some needed harmless attention, well and good. If not . . . She tapped the tines of her fork on her front teeth as Deborah succumbed to the King’s irresistible kiss.