Holly Martin Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lou Allin
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administrator in a college could sign the photo. “And they want to be called professors,” her father once said in a huff, rattling the paper as he read about a recent strike at the colleges. “Few have doctorates. Some have no degrees at all. Professors of welding indeed.” Her mother would have torn a strip off him for such elitism. For all Holly knew, she had.
Gall’s office was tucked away in a cranny at the end of a hall painted a psychedelic sunflower yellow and purple. A scribbled paper sign on the door read “Larry Gall. Social Work.” Posted nearby was his timetable with office hours highlighted in marker. Political cartoons taped on the wall featured George W. Bush, though a few involved the Prime Minister, to whose body were added horns, a tail and a long fork.
The door was closed, but she could hear vague music inside. Perky. Upbeat. Caribbean. Relaxing, sunny climes where fruit fell from the trees. She knocked.
“Come,” said a low voice.
On a quick assessment, she was surprised to see that Larry Gall was much younger than her mother, in his mid-forties even now. In opposition to her conservative, fussy father, his thick black hair was tied in a ponytail, and he wore chinos and a denim work shirt with a pelt of curly hair at the V. The bookshelves were crowded, and hanging baskets of spider plants and ivy competed for the sun through the institutional window. On the desk were requisite piles of marking and a CD case reading Songs of the Coffee Lands.
“Great music,” she said by way of opening the conversation. “Putamayo. Always cheers me up. Especially in the winter. Live here, you’ve got to make peace with the rain. Nirvana it’s not.” His lean face was brown and weather-beaten, as if he spent much time outside. A carved hiking stick with a silver knob leaned in the corner next to a battered pair of boots.
Holly gave the usual answer which helped islanders bond. “Don’t have to shovel it.”
He looked at her uniform, one corner of his thin mouth rising. “Speaking of shovelling, if you’ll pardon my French, you have me at a disadvantage. My name’s on the door. I don’t know yours, but you don’t look like a student.”
She extended her hand, and he gave it a perfunctory shake, earning 5/5 for comfortable pressure and duration. “Holly Martin. Bonnie Martin’s daughter.”
“Holly.” He made no effort to disguise the fact that he was searching her face. For her mother? A muscle twitched at the edge of his square jaw, a slight haze of beard showing. He pulled out a rumpled pack of French cigarettes and fingered one out, offering it to her. Holly shook her head. “Then this isn’t a social call.”
“Not exactly. But it could have been. I know you were...good friends with my mother.” Coy language sat ill with her, but she needed to find her bearings.
He groaned, tossing a glance of his head toward the wall behind Holly. She turned to see a large pastel portrait of her mother, expensively framed under anti-glare glass. Against her will, she gave a small gasp.
“I thought you might walk through that door some day. In fact, I hoped you would.” Then his face grew colder, as if a band of steel had tightened along his spine. With a book of matches, he lit the cigarette and pulled up a small ashtray shaped like a pitcher’s mitt.
Uninvited, she sat in an oak chair where many a student had waited. She expected no courtesy from this man, someone who had lurked in their lives all these years, yet she chose her words carefully. “Is that why you keep sending my father those notes? To bring me here?”
“I don’t keep tabs on you. That would be neurotic, but I see that you’re all grown up. Last I heard you were in university.” He drew in a long breath of smoke and exhaled with apparent contemplation. The air filled with the strange tang of exotic tobaccos foreign to North America. “The coward. He’d never come himself.”
She bristled at the insult, tempted to abuse her power. “Who’s the real coward if you don’t even sign these notes? You haven’t threatened him in so many words, but this harassment stops now. And this has nothing to do with my position.”
“The horsewoman rides to her doddering father’s rescue. Precious.” His lips appeared poised to spit. Yet he stood and went to the portrait, stroking her mother’s bright cheek, which shone with youth. She looked the same age as Holly, but she must have been older, because the hair had grey streaks. When had she posed? Or had the portrait been done from a photo? The glimpse into her mother’s other life frightened her.
“I loved her, you know.”
“You think you did.” She was still smarting about his comments about her dad. To many who didn’t look deeper, Norman was the quintessential professor, no mystique, no romance, just a dusty cypher.
He turned with a vengeance. “You know nothing of this. She and I were to be married.”
Standing abruptly, Holly mouthed the words like a death sentence. “Married. I don’t believe that.”
A desk drawer opened, and Gall lifted a pack of letters tied with a blue ribbon. “Here’s proof. She didn’t want to hurt your father, but by the time you left for university, our relationship had become serious. She was waiting for the right time to tell him. And she would have, except that...” He took a deep breath, then exhaled as if it were too painful to continue. “Anyway, I thought you were studying Botany, becoming a useless collector of information like the Professor.”
“I changed my mind, and you can imagine why and when.” She shot a finger at him. “So just before she disappeared, she was supposed to have told him?”
He cast down his oyster eyes, heavy with pouches, but creased at the corners from staring life in the face. The price of hard work, dissolution or genetics? “Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” Then he gave a dismissive gesture, and a long ash dropped to the tiled floor. “She and your father had nothing in common. I don’t understand why the marriage lasted so long.”
“I can’t speak for either of them. But he would never have harmed her.”
“And you know that I didn’t. I was cleared from the start...unless you think I had a body double to speak in Calgary that week.”
“Move on with your life. I have.” Or had she? The past was returning to bite her on the neck like a loving vampire.
“Have you? I think about her every day, and if you’re the daughter she deserved, so do you.” He stubbed out the cigarette, punishing it until the paper separated from the tobacco. But though he said nothing, his eyes glistened.
“You said ‘deserved’. Why the past tense?”
He barked out a laugh and coughed a cloud of smoke. “Oh, come on. You’ve been watching too many of those old movies with your father. Don’t start living in other decades like he does. Christ have mercy. What a useless dreamer.”
She ignored the gibe and took out a fresh notebook brought for this purpose. Hers alone, off the clock. “Tell me about that last week. Where did you see her? What did she say?”
He remained silent for nearly a minute. Then he firmed his lips. From under his shirt, he pulled an ornament that glittered as a shard of light punched from behind a cloud. “Recognize this?”
Holly tensed, steeled herself from reaching forward. She didn’t want to appear weak, so she forced her trembling grip to the chair arms. The rawhide cord held a round silver image of a raven with the sun in its beak.
A corner of his mouth rose at her reaction. “I see you remember it. Your mother probably told you the story. It’s one of my favourites, perhaps because of her.”
Raven the Trickster was one of the most popular figures in native mythology across North America. Suddenly Holly was back in her childhood bedroom in that dark East Sooke property. The papery leaves of the eucalyptus whispered prelude to the croaky warble in the night. Her mother was explaining that when the world was in total darkness, Raven was tired of bumping about. He learned that an old man who lived in the woods with his daughter had a secret treasure, all the light