Stain of the Berry (10 page)

Right before she moved back here."

"And then..." Missy began, faltering as her throat choked up. "And then she died in April."

"I am so sorry about that," I told the family. "I didn't know until Missy told me this afternoon."

"It's hardly been four months," Mrs. Banyon said quietly over the hush that covered the deck. "We're nowhere near over it yet. And now to hear about Tanya. This is so tragic. Two such beautiful young women. Too young for death. Too young for a lot of things."

I was momentarily speechless. How to proceed? This was a family still grieving for their lost daughter and sister and I needed to respect that.

I twisted a bit in my seat to face Missy Ollenberger face on. "Do you think Tanya's suicide might be related to her breakup with your sister?" Nice one, Quant. By the uneasy look that passed quickly over Moxie's sister's face I knew I'd blundered. But I couldn't take it back.

I sat silent, remonstrating with myself, while Missy thought about what I'd asked. She looked at her husband, at her brother, then back at me. "I don't know if I can answer that, Mr. Quant. Moxie and I were very close. We talked about everything, over the phone when she and her friend Duncan moved to Saskatoon, and all the time when she moved back in here. She was pretty serious about Tanya pretty quick. They talked about moving in together. They never did, but Moxie spent most of her time over at Tanya's place anyway." That would explain her having a key. "And they really seemed to get along well at first."

"At first?"

"Moxie was...well Moxie was going through some stuff...and I think it really took a toll on the relationship."

"What kind of stuff?"

Missy began to get that look people get when they think they've said too much but can't help themselves. "She just...she was having some problems, you know?"

Well, actually I didn't. I stayed quiet and stared intently at the woman.

"It's hard to explain, but part of it was that she was becoming paranoid about stuff going on around her."

Psychological problems? "I'm sorry," I said. "I don't think I understand. What sort of stuff?"

"Moxie told me..." Missy began, then shot an uncertain glance in her parent's direction, as if hoping she could shield them from what she was about to say. I was guessing I was about to hear something that had been a matter of consternation and disagreement amongst the Banyon/Ollenberger family members for some time. "You see, Mr. Quant," she falteringly began again, "Moxie told me that.. .that the boogeyman was after her. And that he was trying to scare her to death."

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The mood on the deck grew dark despite an evening sky tinged with the blues and golds of a long summer night's dusk.

"Boogeyman?" I repeated. The word chilled my skin. Why did it keep popping up? I had a squirrelly memory of a voice in my head, from the night Tanya Culinare died, warning me:
The boogeyman is gonna
get you.
And then the note in Tanya's desk that read: Boo. What the hell was going on?

"It's my fault," John Banyon told me in his low smoker's voice. "She got that nonsense from when the girls were just small. Marion here," he said with a side nod indicating his wife, "was a nurse in those days.

She sometimes worked night shifts which meant I had to get the girls to sleep. I wasn't very good at it, and to keep 'em quiet when I finally got 'em fed, cleaned up and into bed, I used to tell 'em that if they weren't good girls, if they didn't stay quiet and go right to sleep, the boogeyman would come and get 'em." He unsuccessfully tried to lighten the story with a half-hearted chuckle which curdled on his lips. He said,

"I'm sure your mama or papa told you the same thing, it was jus' the sorta thing we said in those days."

"Daddy, it wasn't your fault," Missy said charitably to her father. "You told me the same thing and I'm okay. I think there was stuff going on with Moxie that maybe we don't understand."

"Did Moxie tell you who this boogeyman was or what he was doing to scare her?" I asked the twin.

Missy gave me an odd look, as if surprised I was even considering Moxie might not have been off her rocker and that her story about a boogeyman coming to get her might be true. She shook her head. "Not really, nothing that made sense anyway. You see, Mr. Quant, Moxie was going through a tough time.

That's the reason she moved back here, back home, to get her head back together."

"And was she? Getting her head back together?"

"She was jus' fine," John Banyon answered. "There was nothin' wrong with Moxie. She jus' got a little spooked by the big city. Not everyone's cut out for that type of life. Moose Jaw is a lot smaller than Saskatoon, see. People are friendlier here. What you see is what you get. Not always the case in bigger cities. Once Moxie got back here, she was jus' fine."

Uhhhh, but she's dead. I looked around the room to see if the others concurred with Moxie's father's assessment. I got nothing. The faces were blank. Somebody wasn't saying something-I just couldn't figure out who or what. "I'm sorry if this is uncomfortable, but could you tell me how Moxie died?" I threw the awkward question out there for anyone to answer.

"She drowned," Shane finally responded once it became apparent that none of the others had it in them.

"She got an admin job at one of the public pools here in town. She often stayed after closing hours to finish up stuff; she was a real hard worker, dedicated-like. It was an accident. They think she must have gotten a cramp or something, panicked and...well..." He let the sentence die off.

I stared at Shane, then at Missy. "So she drowned in the pool when no one else was around?"

Nods.

"Was she in the habit of going for a swim after she finished work? Was she a good swimmer?"

At first there was quiet, then Missy said, "She wasn't swimming."

I must have missed something in the story. I raised my eyebrows to indicate my confusion.

"From where her office is-was-Moxie had to pass by the pool area to leave the building. She must have slipped on some water. You know how the floor around a pool can get all slick-like. And she fell in."

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Another chill. "She was found in the pool with her clothes on?"

Nods.

"She was pretty athletic, especially baseball; she loved baseball," Shane told me. "But swimming she just couldn't get. She tried, but never got the hang of it. It was funny, we even joked about it when she got the job at the pool, we..." He stopped there, realizing nothing was very funny anymore.

I didn't understand how Moxie's family wasn't jumping to the same conclusion I was. This smelled so fishy I could've used some tartar sauce. But then again, their lives were those of ordinary Saskatchewan folk, where the reality of murder rarely occurs off the TV screen. It wasn't my job to incite unsubstantiated suspicion, so I left it alone. For now.

"You mentioned something about someone named Duncan who lived with Moxie in Saskatoon?"

"They didn't live together," Missy told me. "But they were friends since grade school and they moved to Saskatoon at the same time, when they were in their twenties. It was an adventure. They were inseparable for years. But you know, people change and mature and all that, and I think they had drifted apart before Moxie moved back to Moose Jaw. At least she didn't talk about him much anyway. I don't know where he is now."

I asked for Duncan's full name and the last contact information they had for him. It was getting late and I could tell the family was feeling the strain of discussing a sad part of their lives that was in many ways still as raw and painful as the day it happened. It was time for me to go.

After a quick clean up in my hotel room, I headed across the street with a pocket full of cash I was pretty sure I wouldn't return with. The casino is small, like a taste-test version of Las Vegas, but it has all the right bells and whistles and glitz, complete with gaudy carpet and close-to-sexy servers in tawdry outfits. I settled in front of a pleasingly mind-numbing, button-pushing terminal that featured dancing cowboy boots and was well into a second twenty-dollar bill when my cellphone rang.

"Hello," I answered as quietly as the ching-ching, ching-ching cacophony around me allowed. I'm not fond of people who use cellphones in public places-as if everyone else around them would like nothing better than to hear their conversations-but when I'm on a case, well, I've been known to use double standards to my advantage.

"Is this Russell Quant?" a man's voice said. He sounded young.

"Yes. Who am I speaking with?"

"This is Roger Hannotte. I'm the maintenance manager for the Broadway Condominium building. I got a message here saying you wanted me to call you 'bout something?"

"Yes, yes, that's right," I said, getting up and walking away from the bank of legal bandits to what I hoped was a quieter location near the glass doors of the front entrance. "Thank you for calling back, Mr.

Hannotte. As you must know, one of your building's tenants committed suicide last week."

"Yeah, 863."

I guess Tanya was just an apartment number to him. I put on my best detective-pretending-to-be-a-cop voice. "Due to the nature of the death we're doing some investigating and I had a question for you."

"Sure officer, whatever."

Sure was noisy in that casino, barely heard what he called me. Oh well, whatever. "When we searched Ms. Culinare's apartment, I noticed her front door looked as if it had been sanded down. Had you been doing repairs to it recently?"

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"Uh, yeah," Roger said. "It was weird. Vandalism I guess."

"Did someone write something on the door? Graffiti maybe?" A threat?

"Graffiti? Uh, no. Like I say, it was weird. Graffiti I could sorta understand, but this was some whacked-out stuff."

He had my attention. "Why, Mr. Hannotte? What was it?"

"The door was covered with scratches," he said. "Deep scratches. It was like some kind of animal or something was trying to get into that apartment."

An unbidden shudder ran through me. The boogeyman. I was beginning to form an image in my mind of what he might actually look like. It wasn't a pleasant picture.

After hanging up from my conversation with Roger Hannotte, I stood for a moment staring at nothing, thinking about what he'd told me, feeling a little spooked. What could possibly have made those marks on Tanya Culinare's door? A neighbour's dog? A really aggressive Avon representative? When I'd asked Mr.

Hannotte what Tanya had told him when she reported the damage, he'd said she'd told him she didn't know how it had happened.

Through the glass of the casino doors I could see that it was dark outside, very dark, and lurking somewhere out there I could imagine a creature...oh blast it! I admonished myself; I do not believe in the boogeyman. I was about to head back to my hotel room when my eye caught something just outside the front doors and part way down the block.

No way.

Couldn't be.

A dark blue Envoy. It had an Avis sticker on the front bumper.

I'd last seen the exact same vehicle in Saskatoon, parked outside my office. Only that time it had been accompanied by a man looking at me through a pair of binoculars.

I pushed my way through a gaggle of grey-haired women who'd just been dropped off at the casino entrance by a harried looking man driving a van-possibly the sole widower amongst a group of energetic widows from the local care home. Just as I stepped outdoors onto the pavement, I heard the squeal of tires and watched the blue vehicle pull away from its spot. Damn. I decided to give chase on foot, thinking maybe I'd get lucky and catch up with the SUV at the nearest red light or at least get close enough to get a peek at the driver or the plate number. Fate, however, had a different plan for me.

I was getting up a good head of steam, repeating the mantra, "I know I can, I know I can," when an arm shot out from the shadowed depths of a doorway. The forearm caught me right at the Adam's apple and pulled me up short, leaving me stunned and staggering. The force of the unexpected impact had spun me around and I narrowly avoided a fast trip to the sidewalk. As I fought to catch my breath, I saw a man closing in on me.

"Are you okay?" he asked in a surprisingly sincere voice, even though he'd come this close to decapitating me (well, not really, but I was in the mood for over-dramatization).

"Are you crazy?" I queried the man as if he just might be. My voice was a raspy, smoker's, hard-drinker's version of its normal self. Now that I knew this wasn't an attack and the Envoy was long gone, I lowered my hackles and took some time to regulate my breathing, keeping myself slightly stooped over, hands on my thighs. "Ever try getting someone's attention with a simple 'Hey You'?" I asked the 46 of 163

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man, who I had come to think of Mr. Asshole Jerk in my head.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Quant, it's just that you were running away and I wanted to talk to you."

Hey! How'd he know my name? I swivelled my head to look up at him then straightened to my full height, flexing a muscle or two (just in case he needed convincing that, despite recent events, I was no pushover).

Wait a sec, I recognized this dude. It was Cameron Banyon, Moxie and Missy's younger brother. He was mid-twenties, blond hair long and scraggly-which was in vogue for people his age who weren't suit-wearers-and the skin on his face was pocked from too much scratching during a case of childhood measles. He gave off a friendlier vibe than he had back at his sister's house, but then again, he had just tried to sever my vocal chords.

"So talk," I said, massaging my throat where his arm had nearly guillotined me. "Because I am momentarily speechless."