And We Shall Have Snow Page 3

  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.

  4

  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. Th
e 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.