Cue the Dead Guy. H. Mel Malton
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the case.”
“We can only hope it’s the video,” I said. The Glass Flute is sort of like a ballet, in that all the puppet manipulation is precisely choreographed to music. Juliet liked to make her actors study the old videotapes of past productions in order to get the hang of how it was supposed to look. Most performers really hated this method, as it left absolutely no room for original interpretation. (“No, no, sweetheart. It’s always been done like this . . .”). However, I would be willing to bet that nobody would complain about sitting quietly in a darkened room nursing a cup of coffee the morning after a party that had still been rocking at two a.m.
On the way out of town, I discovered that I was out of smokes. There was an all-night convenience store on the corner just before the Old Rock Cut Road, which was our route back home, and as we neared it, I tried to decide whether or not I was up to the embarrassment of letting Lori Pinkerton, the night cashier, see me like this.
Lori and I had attended Laingford High together, and we had been rivals of sorts. She had been one of the fluffy, cheerleader types with perfect clothes who dated grade twelve boys. Everybody wanted to be seen with her and to be her friend. I, on the other hand, had been a charter member of the “out-crowd”, a browner who got high marks, spazzed out in gym class and listened to classical music on purpose. I also didn’t sprout breasts until I was sixteen. Bad move. I had been the butt of most of her clique’s jokes, an object to be pitied, and in Grade Nine, I would gladly have murdered her.
Of course, getting over my adolescent hatred of Lori was made easier by the fact that she was the night clerk in a convenience store and the mother of several small, smelly, squealing humans, but she still had the power to make me feel inadequate. I knew that showing up in her store at two-fifteen a.m. with a broken nose stuffed with cotton, while wearing a blood-stained goat costume, might possibly draw comment. Still, I had a nicotine habit to cater to, and I couldn’t send poor Rico in there to do my dirty work.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and left the engine running. Lori was not as tactful as the admissions nurse had been. She burst out laughing.
“What the hell happened to you?” she said, reaching automatically for my tobacco brand of choice. I grabbed a chocolate bar from the rack in front of the counter and tried to smile. It hurt.
“I got mugged,” I said.
“No kidding. Somebody tried to milk you, eh?” She was referring to my udder. I blushed, feeling a lot of blood rushing to my battered nose. We must suffer for our vices. I was overwhelmed by the need to explain. Lori always made me feel like that.
“Actually, I fell down some stairs at a costume party, Lori. Broke my nose. It feels like hell.”
“Hey, that’s too bad, eh? Sorry for laughing, Polly, but you do look sorta weird.”
“I know. It’ll pass.” I paid and went out, almost bumping into a tall figure in blue who was coming in.
“Polly?”
Oh, God. “Hi, Mark.” Mark Becker, police officer, looked me up and down and whistled. It was not an admiring whistle—not the kind you get on a sunny summer day when you’re wearing shorts and a tank top and you walk by a construction site. This was the kind of whistle people make when they’ve just been told that you, an upstanding member of the community, have been hauled away to the loony bin after running down the street bare-ass naked singing a Bobby Gimby song.
I felt very angry suddenly, seeing the next few weeks stretch ahead of me in a never-ending stream of questions, explanations and pitying shakes of the head.
“I was at a party, okay?” I said, belligerently. “I fell down the stairs and hit my nose on the bannister. It’s broken. My nose, I mean. It’ll probably be crooked forever. I’m wearing this because it was a costume party, and I bled all over it, and I’ll probably never get the stains out. Lori was just laughing at me. If you say one word about my udder, I’ll kill you.” Then I burst into tears.
Four
WOODSMAN: When you chop down a tree, don’t believe that it’s dead / For the spirit inside will take root in your head.
-The Glass Flute, Scene vi
He wrapped me in his arms and let me sob on his shoulder, stroking my back with a sure, safe hand. He lifted my chin gently and wiped the tears from my cheek, then he said very softly . . .
“How much have you had to drink?” He grabbed my arm and led me out to the cruiser where his partner, Earlie Morrison, was sitting waiting for him, sipping a Tim Horton’s cappuccino.
“Hey! Let go of me!” I said, and he did. I was humiliated. I could see Lori standing in the doorway of the convenience store, gloating. I glanced over at the truck, whose motor was still running, and noticed that Rico had scrunched down in his seat so that just the tangled top of his wig was showing. Good move, I thought. Becker wasn’t all that positive towards persons with alternative lifestyles.
“Hey, Polly. What’s going on?” That was Constable Morrison, giving me a big, sympathetic smile, which made the tears prick again at the corners of my eyes. When you’ve been crying, a friendly voice and a bit of sympathy will start you up again much more efficiently than harsh words will.
Morrison looked good—better than he had in a long time. He’d dropped some weight, definitely. When I first met him, he’d weighed close to three hundred pounds. I knew he’d been hanging around my Aunt Susan a lot lately, because he was doing the Big Brother thing with Susan’s ward, Eddie Schreier. Maybe she’d dragooned him into helping load feed at her agri-store in Laingford, a job that had been mine when I was a teenager. Anyway, he looked good, and I was glad he was there, because Becker was being a jerk.
“Ms. Deacon has been at a party where she fell down and hurt herself,” Becker said, speaking for me, which I hate. “I just want to give her an opportunity to blow into a little machine before we let her drive home.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said, letting fury overcome all the other emotions I was currently wearing on the sleeve of my goat get-up. “Do you really think that I, of all people, would be driving drunk?”
Mark Becker knew, because I had told him about it when we were getting to know each other, that my parents had been killed by a drunk driver. It had happened a long time ago, but that didn’t mean that I had forgotten, or that I was the kind of person to risk doing the same thing myself.
“No, I don’t think you would, normally, Polly,” Becker said. “But you’re acting in an erratic fashion, and you don’t look good, and you just burst into tears for no reason, so I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t check it out.”
“Why not just ask me, then?”
“Ask you what?”
“Ask me if I’ve been drinking.”
“Would you tell me the truth if I did?”
I just glared at him.
“Okay, okay. Ms. Deacon, have you taken a drink tonight?”
“Yes, officer, I have.” That surprised him. “I had a small, watery scotch at about midnight, but I didn’t finish it because halfway through it, I broke my nose. Satisfied?”
He made me do the breathalyzer anyway. It didn’t register. He seemed disappointed and shook the machine a couple of times, like it was a watch that had stopped. I think he was stalling, trying to think of another way he could get my goat, so to speak. Geez. Ex-boyfriends can be so vindictive. Whatever you do, don’t go to bed with a cop. You’ll never live it down.
He escorted me back to my vehicle and watched me get in. I made a show of doing up my seatbelt and checking the mirrors.
“Who’s that?” Becker said, peering in the window. Not that it was any of his business. Rico was pretending to be fast asleep in the seat beside me.
“A friend from