Holly Martin Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lou Allin
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from the realities of the present. A savoury stew infused the hall as she entered, a mysterious ingredient teasing her nose. Her father loved to cook for his research, and she loved to eat. She blessed him for waiting for dinner. Reunited only a few weeks ago, already they had an understanding that if she wasn’t back by seven, unable to call due to her remote location, he’d chow down.
“Get in here. Your old dad’s nearly faint,” he said, waving a wooden spoon from the kitchen. He wore a gingham apron over his chinos. Definitely not her mother’s. Bonnie Martin had never made a meal in her life. Food was a fuel to reach her goals, the simpler and faster the better, often no more than fruit, bread and cheese eaten on the go in her Bronco and washed down with cold green tea.
“Let me climb out of this gear. The vest is smothering,” she said, taking the winding staircase to the upper floor. Oblivious to its view, his nose in books, he had given her the master suite, taking the two back rooms for his bedroom and study. It gave her an odd feeling to have her parents’ room, but its double occupancy had been short. Perhaps her father wanted a fresh start, too. For all she knew, he’d abandoned that room to far-off memories. But he hadn’t sold the house, though he knocked around in its sprawl. Did he hope Bonnie would come home?
After a quick shower, she tossed on shorts and a T-shirt. At the pine table in a sunny, adjoining alcove overlooking the strait, she sat down to a Fifties meal. Shelves in the oak kitchen were lined with cookbooks, from Mrs. Beaton to Betty Crocker to Joy of Cooking to the Barefoot Contessa. He served a rich beef stew made with beer, boiled potatoes and a can of green peas. Starving, she dug into the meal, pausing only for appreciative nods and sips of the rough red wine he made at a local do-it-yourself vintner for three dollars a bottle. No need to make conversation. His commentary would be forthcoming.
Norman blotted his mouth with a pure white cloth serviette. “If they couldn’t get to a market or raise their own, even in summer canned vegetables would be welcome. Birdseye had just brought in the frozen variety.” He scrutinized the soft, mushy pale-green balls. “A different animal, but I crave them from time to time. Takes me back to my boyhood in Sudbury. Had a friend in Little Britain there whose mother served them mashed with fish and chips.”
Holly was transported to her childhood. “Mushy peas, I remember.”
Norman, never Norm, Martin was closing in on sixty, but she knew he’d retire only when they wrenched the cold chalk from his dead hands. Whip-slim at six feet, recently his shoulders had assumed the beginnings of a stoop, and his sleek blond hair was shading to grey. She doubted that he got regular exercise, though Otter Point had many excellent walking areas, from residential streets to clear-cuts, and the shortcut to the beach. Except for his professorial mien, an off-putter for some, he was an attractive man. She could imagine him fending off advances from middle-aged female staff. Sometimes she wondered about the unmarried departmental secretary, Frances, who baked him blackberry pies and used to call in a worried voice when he was running late.
Like companionable stablemates, they quickly slipped back into old familiar routines. “How did everything go, little freckle-pelt?” he asked. That curious lichen had been her pet name, a step up from the ubiquitous frog-pelt which Bonnie had showed her in the Plants of British Columbia guidebook, a gift for her twelfth birthday.
On the stereo in the tiled solarium down the stairs, a CD of Kate Smith played “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”, then “Be My Love”, and “Danny Boy” as she gave him an update. His tastes in music were as eclectic as his many rotating historical periods. One semester he was enjoying Scott Joplin, the next the Beatles. “That woman could belt them out,” he said, pumping his fist in an unusually assertive gesture. “Whenever I hear ‘God Bless America’, I could almost march off to war myself.” An incongruous comment from a peace-living NDPer who drove a Smart Car, she thought as she managed another swallow of ghastly wine. If it had been in the bottle three weeks, she’d be surprised.
“Sorry, what did you say about the poor girl? That must have been a rough introduction on your first day. This is supposed to be a quiet place. I was relieved when you got the post. Never liked it when you were so far from civilization in that darn bush.”
“Sometimes the bush is safer. Give me bears over brawls. We’ll know more when the medical examiner takes a look,” she said.
He seemed pensive, shook his head and pushed the last pea to the side. “Terrible place for young girls. The morgue. So wrong. Any woman...” He paused and gazed across the strait to Washington State. A bank of clouds was dissecting the landscape, suspending a cruise ship in the air. Each year five thousand vessels used the passage. The possibilities for accidents were becoming exponential. Another Exxon-Valdez waited around every cove.
She knew he was thinking of her mother. Ten years had passed since she had disappeared, past the legal time for a person to be declared dead, such an artificial line. She knew nothing about what life insurance the woman might have had. To ask would be not only crass but an affront to her father.
Her mother had First Nations blood, growing up on a Coastal Salish reserve near Cowichan. When Bonnie had failed to return from a trip to the Tahsis area to start a safe house for abused native women, a search had started. At first they thought she’d driven off the road in a snow storm, but days had gone by, then weeks. Even when spring had revealed the landscape, her Bronco had never been found. The months that followed had been grueling. It had even been whispered that her father had played a role, not surprising, given the statistics in domestic killings. Normally he was peaceable, but her mother’s long absences in her social causes exasperated him, and the neighbours beside the eighty-foot lot had heard arguments, she suspected. Nor did Bonnie appreciate his career. “A waste of time,” she would say, considering the plastic black-cat clock he had found at a garage sale and mounted in the kitchen. “Why chew old bones? Do something for the living, for god’s sake.”
“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to—” He’d retreated into professor mode. Fifteen-year-old Holly had been outside on the deck, but with the thin walls of the house, she heard every word.
“Give me a break, Norman. I know all about the past...and so do the women I help. We’re trying to make a difference.” Bonnie left to answer the phone, one of many calls which arrived at all hours.
Coming back inside that sad day and trying to feign ignorance, Holly had never forgotten his defeated look. With his tenure assured at last, he’d bought the Otter Point Place house for Bonnie, a sunny change from their dark A-frame in East Sooke, where the sun cast a fleeting glance down through the dense firs, and lights burned in the daytime. But it hadn’t helped. She cared little where she hung her hat, straw in summer, a warm toque in winter. Holly supposed she got her contempt for fashion from her mother. Bonnie would have liked the freedom of the uniform. Imagine starting each day with a series of bothersome decisions about what to wear and what makeup might complement it.
After dinner, they took their desserts and tea to the TV room for his favourite channels, Turner Classics or American Movie Classics. In keeping with his Fifties theme, they were watching River of No Return. Robert Mitchum was solid and upright for a change, even if he had killed a man in self-defense. Marilyn was buxom and casual, a wasp waist cinched in her blue jeans. Her scenes with young Tommy Rettig, Jeff in the Lassie series, were honest and touching. “Weren’t we watching this movie when I left for university?” she asked.
“You can never see this couple too many times,” he said. “Mitchum wasn’t just the dope-smoking bad boy in the tabloids. He was talented in many directions. Did you know he composed a symphony that was played at the Hollywood Bowl? Orson Welles directed it,” her father said, a master of trivia.
A sea change from Mitchum’s villainous roles. Even here in a quiet backwater, chances were strong that a sociopath lived within range, whether or not the person would ever act violently. “No return, no return, no return,” the theme song warned as she thought about her mother.Was he thinking the same thing? She shook her head and finished the prune whip. Not as good as his floating island.
When the movie ended, she looked at her watch. “Damn.”
Norman