And We Shall Have Snow Read online

  The two constables from the Ident team who had been sent out to search the Smedley home had been less than happy. One had given Brian an earful. His complaints echoed what Matt was telling them.

  “She sat there with a notepad watching every move we made over the top of her glasses. Took photos on her iPad. It was like we were the criminals. Kept threatening us with Alex Lazar. You know what that jerk’s like. We got out of there as fast as we could.”

  Roxanne faced Izzy and Matt. “Sergeant Donohue is going to stay in the city and see if he can get hold of Jeremy Andreychuk. Find out if he knew anything more about the StarFest money,” she said.

  “So we’re back to that?” Matt asked.

  “It looks like we’ve got another dead end.” Roxanne sounded exasperated. Izzy looked out the window.

  “Why is your aunt Panda pulling into the parking lot, Matt?”

  “She is?” He took a quick look. “Phyllis Smedley was having them over for dinner last night. She might have something to tell us.”

  Matt headed downstairs to the front office. Roxanne followed. Izzy lingered on the stairs, curious.

  Panda came in the front door, stomping snow off her boots onto the doormat. She waved away Ken Roach, who was manning the front counter with a big, mittened hand.

  “It’s not you I want to talk to, Constable, it’s him.” She pointed towards Matt. “That’s my nephew.”

  Sergeant Gilchrist poked his head around his office door. “Personal visit, is it?”

  “Personal be damned,” said Panda. “I’m here to help them with their inquiries. I’ve got something to show Roxanne.”

  Roach and Gilchrist exchanged a glance as Roxanne joined Matt at the other side of the counter. How come they were on first-name terms?

  “See this?” Panda dropped a brown envelope on the countertop. “It’s from Annie. She’s at the dentist. I said I’d bring it in.” She pulled off her mittens and opened it up. It contained a white paper napkin. She laid it out flat. “See,” she said. “Phyllis said you didn’t have a good photograph of George without his moustache, so Annie drew him for you.”

  They looked at it. On the white napkin, folded square, was a line drawing in fine black marker.

  “Geez,” said Bill Gilchrist, “that’s pretty good. Bet that’s what he really looks like.”

  Panda glanced upstairs to where Izzy was watching. “Hi, Izzy! You got a crime wall like on TV up there? Are you gonna stick it up there?”

  “Tell Annie thanks,” said Matt. “Was that all you had to tell us?”

  Roxanne stood beside Gilchrist and studied the drawing. “She really has got him,” she said.

  “You know,”—Gilchrist rubbed his chin and looked up from the drawing to Panda—“your pal, she could apply to be a real forensic artist if she wanted. They make good money. Maybe she could do another one, with a beard.”

  “Annie Chan is famous, Sarge!” Izzy came down the staircase. “That’s probably worth loads of money.”

  “You can keep it after this is all done,” Panda said to Roxanne. “Souvenir. Annie said to tell you. But right now someone needs to talk to me. I’ve got stuff to tell you. There’s what’s left of an hour until I have to go and pick up Annie. Can we go upstairs? See where you do the real work?”

  “Sorry, Panda. That room is off limits. There’s an interview room available. We could go in there.”

  “Nope. I’ve got a better idea. How about I take my favourite nephew out for a coffee and tell him what happened when Phyllis Smedley took us out for pizza last night.” Panda played her ace and grinned. She pulled her mitts back on.

  “Can I join you?” Roxanne wasn’t going to miss this. She put the drawing back in the envelope. “Is it okay if we copy the drawing? Send it out internally? We won’t tell anyone that it’s an Annie Chan.”

  “Sure,” said Panda. “Are you buying?” Roach watched as Izzy passed jackets over the banister and the women walked out the door.

  “What the hell, it’s just a doodle on a napkin,” he muttered as Gilchrist passed him on the way back to his office.

  The local Tim Hortons was like all the others across Canada, decorated in varying shades of brown and beige, with plastic tabletops and glass countertop displays of doughnuts and muffins. There was bright signage advertising soup-and-sandwich combos and serving staff with professional smiles, even in a smaller town like Fiskar Bay. At mid-morning there was a smattering of older customers, retired people, three men at one table, heads together as they talked, a couple of single people reading the newspaper while their coffee cooled, a couple staring over each other’s shoulders with nothing much to say to each other. It was warm inside and smelled of coffee, cinnamon and newly baked buns.

  Panda inspected a rack of muffins. “I’ll have that cranberry one.” She pointed to the biggest. They found a corner table, away from prying ears.

  “Phyllis is calling herself by her name from her first marriage. Johnson.” Panda announced, pulling the paper casing off her muffin. “Kinda funny, isn’t it, being married to someone who doesn’t exist anymore?” They sipped their coffee. In house, it came in a real mug, instead of the usual paper, take-out kind Roxanne and Matt had become used to.

  “So she took you out for pizza? She said she was going to invite you over for dinner but the guys were there all afternoon.”

  “She’s dead annoyed about that. Said they took so long she didn’t have time to cook anything. So it was pizza, here in Fiskar Bay, instead. Her treat. She got Margo to drive her so she could drink some wine.”

  “Was she celebrating or drowning her sorrows?” Matt continued. Roxanne let him do the talking, an easy chat between him and his aunt.

  “A bit of both, maybe. Turns out things weren’t so great between her and George anymore. She says she was getting fed up with him fussing all over her. Thinks she maybe got married too soon after her first husband died. ‘I was lonely,’ she said to us, ‘I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t believe my luck that I found a partner again, and George, he was so, well, attentive.’ You know how she speaks.” Panda was doing a decent job of mimicking Phyllis. She was catching the polite, mannered cadence of her voice perfectly, and having fun doing it. And enjoying an audience.

  “She ordered a Hawaiian pizza. I hate it.” Hawaiian pizza has a pineapple and ham topping and was said to be a Canadian invention. “She ate most of it herself. I think she’s making up for all that health food she’s been eating. The rest of us ate the pepperoni. And she’d ordered two bottles of wine, but Margo was driving and Annie doesn’t drink, and I wanted to keep my head clear, so she and Sasha drank most of it. She got really chatty.” She got back to telling them what Phyllis had said.

  “She says it was lovely at first. They had a new life together, they moved out here, a new house, it was all quite exciting, but after a while it all got to be a bit much. George wanted her to be with him all the time. She said she used to be glad when he went into the office in Winnipeg. It gave her a day to herself. But then he wanted her to drive into town with him, to keep him company on the road, he’d say. She’d go and shop while he was at work or meet an old friend for lunch. But she was never getting any time on her own, in her house, and she missed that. When she was married before, she didn’t see her husband for days on end. He worked long hours, even on weekends. She had lots of time to do what she wanted to do. ‘I would have liked to be able to go for walks by myself with my camera, but I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I used to watch all of you getting together and I could make it to the book group, but that was about it. I wasn’t able to have my own friends out here. It was like George had gobbled up my whole life. He was beginning to get on my nerves.’

  “We told her we had thought they were devoted to each other and she laughed. ‘That’s what George wanted you to think,’ she said. ‘And I suppose I did play along. The good wife
. It’s how I was brought up, to have good manners and be considerate, you know, but sometimes inside I was seething. I think that’s what was making me sick. I knew I’d made a mistake and I didn’t know how to get out of it.’

  “We couldn’t believe our ears. ‘Why didn’t you just leave him?’ we asked her. And she said, ‘What? Leave the house? I paid for it. I wasn’t going to be the one to leave. I’m quite comfortably off, you know, and George, well, he said he didn’t have any money. He told me his last wife cleaned him out—isn’t that a joke? So if I’d asked for a divorce, he could have come after me for support and he probably would have got it. I wasn’t going to let him have my money.’

  “And we said to her, ‘but he did, didn’t he? He got away with a whole lot of your cash.’ ‘About a hundred grand,’ she said. ‘And now he’s gone. I think I got off lightly.’ Then she poured herself another glass of wine and downed half of it. Can you believe it?” Panda tore off a piece of muffin. “Wonder how much she’s really worth,” she said as she popped it into her mouth.

  “Who was there besides you and Annie?” Matt asked. She washed the muffin down with a mouthful of coffee. “Margo. Sasha. Roberta didn’t come. Hey, that’s something else you should know. She went to Winnipeg and fetched Erik home.”

  “So he’s been forgiven?” Roxanne couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “Not yet, she says, but she didn’t think she could leave him in the hospital with nowhere to go when he got out. And they were dying to get him out of there. You know what those city hospitals are like. She’ll get over the affair with Stella, of course she will. She’s mad about him. It’s those old Viking good looks. He’s had to have the hair cut, she says. They shaved half his head for the surgery. Maybe he doesn’t look like one anymore.”

  Matt had finished his coffee. “That’s it? We done here, Panda?”

  “No!” She leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “Did you really think that George Smedley was trying to poison Phyllis?”

  “Who said that?” Matt asked, though he realized the question might be futile. What the grapevine didn’t know it made up and sometimes it got it right.

  “You did! That’s why you dug up her delphiniums. You thought they were aconite! That’s hilarious.” Panda’s voice had risen.

  “Shh, Panda.” Matt looked cautiously around. No one appeared to have heard her.

  “Sasha told her. Gets loose lips when she drinks too much, and she must have drunk a bottle of wine herself. She told her that Margo had been to see you guys. Margo sat there looking like she wished the ground would swallow her up. Phyllis got really mad at her. How could Margo not have had a quiet word with her, stuff like that. Margo said that she’d been worried about her. We said we all were, but then Phyllis knew we’d been talking about her and that got her even madder.

  “‘The police got suspicious because you interfered,’ she said. She was sitting right across the table from Margo, just about spitting at her. ‘That’s what really drove George away, it’s all your fault.’ So she probably isn’t telling the truth about being glad he’s gone. Maybe she’s kidding herself. Who knows? Anyway, Margo got the blame. Phyllis isn’t speaking to her anymore. She asked Annie and me for a ride home. She’s talking about going to visit her son and the grandkids in Boston. Don’t know how Margo and Sasha did, driving home by themselves. I think Margo’s pretty mad at Sasha for telling. So they’ve all fallen out with each other.” She clambered to her feet. “I’d better go get Annie. She hates the dentist, she won’t want to be kept waiting. Hey, gimme a hug.”

  Soon after, Roxanne and Matt stepped around a snowbank and slid back across a road still covered with a skin of slippery, packed snow. Panda got into her truck. Roxanne and Matt made their way around the side of the RCMP building.

  “So Phyllis Smedley’s planning a quick trip to the States?” Matt said. “Is it all a scam?”

  “You think she and George planned the disappearing trick? That she’s planning to rejoin him south of the border?”

  They walked in the front door of the office. A young woman stood in front of the counter, Sergeant Gilchrist and Izzy behind. The woman turned to look at them. Her hair was almost all white, spiked and tinted in shades of green and purple. Rings and studs fringed her nose and ears. She wore a pale layer of makeup and her lips were painted a deep purple. Dark smudges and black liner framed eyes that were a startling ice blue. She was dressed entirely in black, from her leather jacket, to her leggings, to her thick-soled boots.

  “Here’s Corporal Calloway and Constable Stavros now,” said Gilchrist. “This here is Maureen Penner.” The woman held out a hand laden with silver rings.

  “Hi there,” she said. “You can call me Mo. Stella Magnusson was my mom.”

  20

  Mo Penner had arrived in Fiskar Bay in a beaten-up old Ford Fiesta driven by her boyfriend, Keenan. They had followed Roxanne’s car to Stella Magnusson’s place. Now they wandered from room to room, fingering the furniture, checking out the appliances, the rows of glasses and dishes on shelves. The big piano impressed them. So did the Apple TV. And the well-stocked wine rack.

  “How big is it?” Mo looked out the window.

  “Eighty-six acres, I’ve been told,” Roxanne replied.

  “So how far does it go?”

  “I’m not sure. Those trees are at the property line on the west side.” Roxanne pointed in the direction of the Andreychuk farm. “It goes way back from there.”

  “Cool house,” said Keenan. He was as pierced and studded as Mo. His dark head was shaved. He sported a stubbly beard and a tattoo could be seen creeping up from the back of his neck onto the base of his skull. He dressed similarly to Mo, except his coat was of ancient, worn tweed. They had not removed their outerwear. The heat in Stella’s house was turned down as low as possible to prevent the pipes from freezing. It was cold enough that you could see your breath when you spoke.

  Back at the office, Mo had pulled a birth certificate out of a pocket and waved it under Roxanne’s nose.

  “It’s a copy. I’ve got mine at home. You can have this one. Look what she called me. Ariel Star Magnusson. And they changed my name to Maureen Penner. How boring is that? I thought I’d start calling myself Star Magnusson but Keenan says he likes Mo, says it suits me. Maybe I’ll change it to Mo Magnusson. I kinda like the sound of that.”

  She’d been born in Brandon, Manitoba, twenty-nine years ago. Her mother was named on the certificate as Stella Louise Magnusson. Her father was not named. Stella must have been eighteen. How had she ended up in Brandon?

  “You were adopted?” Roxanne asked.

  “Yeah. Two weeks old, my mom says. I grew up in Winkler, a good Mennonite girl.”

  Winkler lay in a part of Manitoba known as the Bible Belt, largely settled by people of the Mennonite faith. They practised pacifism, which caused them to migrate every time armed conflict arose in the country where they lived. They spoke a form of Low German, were religious conservatives, but were also shrewd and successful prairie farmers. The towns where many of them now lived had flourished. Mo Penner did not look at all Mennonite but the hair without the dye, the face minus the decorative metal, were all Stella’s.

  “Did you get in touch with her?”

  “Tried. I phoned at first. Left a message. She didn’t reply. So then I wrote her a letter. She wrote back. Said she’d never wanted kids, still didn’t. Wanted me to leave her alone. So I did. No big deal.”

  “Do you have a copy of the letter?”

  “Not on me. I can get it. It’s in Winnipeg.” If Mo had a birth certificate and a letter from Stella acknowledging that she was her child, she probably really was who she said she was. So when she had said she wanted to see Stella’s house, Roxanne had agreed to take her. She was also curious to see how Mo would react.

  “Can I take photographs?”

  “No.” />
  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s still related to a crime and it isn’t yours,” said Roxanne. It wasn’t yet, but who else was there to inherit? “You know Stella’s parents are still alive? They live in Victoria. He’s got dementia.”

  “Oh. Well, won’t matter that he’s forgotten me then, will it.”

  “I can give you their address.”

  “Sure.” Maybe Mo’s grandmother would like to know about her granddaughter after all these years, even if she hadn’t wanted to stay in touch with Stella. Mo was still busy scanning each room and its contents with those blue eyes, making an inventory in her head.

  “Where’s her computer?”

  “She had a laptop and an iPad. They’re missing. So is her cellphone. Her work computers are with us, in Winnipeg. They’ll be returned.”

  “So who lived here before?”

  “Two old uncles. Bachelors. There was no one else to leave it to.”

  “And now there’s just me.”

  “Maybe.” They were in the hallway lined with photographs. Keenan was picking out a tune on the piano. He wasn’t bad.

  “Hey, babe!” he called. “Can we keep this thing?”

  “There’s no will, right?” Mo was checking out the photographs.

  Roxanne stared at her. “How did you know?”

  Mo laughed. Her tongue was studded. “Figured it out! See this one?” She was focused on an old black and white photo in a black frame. “That’s my mom, right? Must be younger than me in it. Think I look like her?”

  The photograph was the one Roxanne had seen before, from the years when Stella was still in her teens, in the Winnipeg band. She and Mo certainly looked alike. Keenan came up behind them and looked over Mo’s shoulder.

  “Sure do,” he said. “She was great looking, your mom, eh? Just like you.” He peered closer at the photograph. “Hey, isn’t that the Isbister guy there, playing the bass?”