Last Song Sung. David A. Poulsen
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I relied on after Donna’s death. Yet it had felt somehow wrong to have even that small pleasure while I looked out these windows hoping to spot a killer. I wondered if Marlon Kennedy looked at his time on the surveillance stools the same way.
Cobb texted just after eleven o’clock:
Read again your report on the conversation with the former assistant manager of Le Hibou. Good work. Want to hear your thoughts. Interesting the attitude change in Ellie after she’d played the other club. Might be a good idea to do some checking on the place when you get time. I’ve got a lot on my plate today — some domestic, some case-related. I’ll call when I get some time.
And that was my morning. For lunch I went down to the kitchen and made myself two baloney and lettuce sandwiches and took them and a Diet Coke back upstairs. But this time I decided to take my laptop with me. I pushed aside cords and power bars and made space on the table that occupied much of the centre of the room. I set up to do a little work on the Ellie Foster disappearance while I kept an eye on the scene outside.
The afternoon went by surprisingly quickly. I divided my time about equally between surveillance and research, looking, as Cobb had directed, for connections to Ellie Foster’s music career. And I spent a fruitless hour and a half trying to find out something about the coffee house known as The Tumbling Mustard. Found one mention — actually, a poor-quality photo of a poster from the club dated October 17, 1964. It was promoting a singer who called herself Angie. That was it — just the one name. Nothing on anyone named Fayed. I wasn’t sure I’d learn anything even if I was able to track down Mr. Fayed, but I was intrigued by the notion that Ellie had undergone some kind of personality or attitudinal change during or around the time of her Tumbling Mustard gig. Maybe Fayed could shed some light on that.
On a whim I checked out performers named Angie and actually surprised myself when I discovered a Wikipedia mention of a “Fredericton-born folksinger who enjoyed a brief career in the early and midsixties and retired to a sheep farm in the Shuswap area of B.C.” I tried to find more about the elusive Angie, who may or may not still have been raising sheep in British Columbia, thinking she might be able to direct me toward Fayed, but I turned up nothing. Then I came across a brief notation that offered “prayers and thoughts to the family and friends of Angie Kettinger, the wonderful New Brunswick–born singer who passed away last night in the Salmon Arm hospital at just sixty-six years of age.” The piece, dated April 29, 2011, included details of a memorial service to celebrate Angie’s life and music.
I was hoping that the passing of Angie Kettinger wasn’t a harbinger of things to come as Cobb and I tried to track people with some knowledge of Ellie Foster’s life and disappearance.
When I broke for dinner — a pizza warmed up in the oven — I had an almost blank page where I’d hoped several lines of meaningful text would be. After I’d cleaned up the dinner dishes — one plate, one glass, my kind of cleanup — I once again returned to the surveillance locations. As I sat on the upstairs stool looking at the quiet scene that was the house across the street, I realized how little I had accomplished that day. At eight o’clock I broke for a run, weaving my way around the pleasant neighbourhood and passing in front of both of the houses I had been watching on cameras. Back in Kennedy’s house I spent twenty minutes sitting in the dark of the dining room, trying without success to pull together even one thought that would move the Ellie Foster investigation forward.
After a quick check of the two cameras I was back at my computer feeling, more than anything, useless and depressed. For the next while I again immersed myself in the musical career of Ellie Foster. It wasn’t a long career. She had sung professionally for just over two years, but even in that time — as I read reviews, promo pieces, and comments about her from those who had seen her perform at Le Hibou in Ottawa, the Louis Riel coffee house in Saskatoon, a couple of Toronto and Vancouver clubs, or even Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York — it was clear that a great many people thought she was a special talent.
There were countless glowing commentaries and predictions of a major musical career that would rival those of Baez and Mitchell. I put in another hour of Google searches and phone calls and finally came up with something. Nothing major, but something. I tracked the number of a former Herald writer who used to write a music column. I’d met Bert Nichol a couple of times, but he’d retired by the time I started at the paper, so I didn’t know him well, and I doubted he’d remember me at all.
I had no idea how old he was, but I figured old was the operative word. Nevertheless, I hoped he could tell me a little about The Depression … if he was still lucid. And willing to chat. I called the number. It was coming up on ten o’clock, and I knew I was pushing my luck, but maybe the guy was still up and about.
A woman’s voice came on the line.
“Hello. Is this Mrs. Nichol?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
Ah, careful. Good girl.
“This is Adam Cullen. I used to work at the Herald and met Bert a few times, although I didn’t really have the opportunity to get to know him. Right now I’m working with a detective on the Ellie Foster disappearance from 1965. We’ve been contracted by a family member. I was hoping I could speak to Bert if he’s still up.”
There was a long pause.
Finally she said, “He’s still up, the damn fool. He watches reruns of those game shows — says it’s research for when he’s a contestant. I think he’s kidding, but with Bert you never know. I’ll take the phone to him.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I’ll take the phone to him. Bedridden? Wheelchair bound?
A couple of minutes later, a voice that would have fit perfectly on an old 78 rpm record came on the line.
“This is Bert.”
I went through the self-introduction again, hoping I wouldn’t have to repeat it a third time. No danger there. Bert was 100 percent sharp. And business-like. Or maybe I was keeping him from one of his shows and he just wanted to get rid of me.
“What can I do for you?
“I wondered if you covered The Depression when you were writing music for the Herald and if you could tell me a little about the place?”
“I didn’t get the music beat until ten years or so after The Depression was gone from the scene.”
“Oh,” I said, knowing my disappointment was likely evident in my voice.
“But hell, I guess I knew the place as well as anybody. Went there lots — even took Rose a time or two — that was Rose, my wife, you were talking to before. I saw Ellie Foster perform maybe three or four times. In those days I was just dipping a toe in the music world, and I remember I wrote two or three pieces about her for a couple of smaller music publications — the ones that paid in free copies and once in a while an album in the mail. In fact, me and a couple of friends of mine, we were supposed to be there the night she was kidnapped or whatever the hell happened to her. But one of the Herald sports guys asked me to cover for him. The Saskatoon Quakers were in town to play the Calgary Spurs. Senior hockey. He was supposed to do a piece on Fred Sasakamoose, who was travelling with the Quakers at the time. You heard of Fred Sasakamoose?”
“I have, yes.” I’d caught a CBC documentary some years before on Canada’s first-ever First Nations player in the NHL. “Cree elder. Former NHLer.”
“Exactly right.” Bert sounded like he was happy I was up on my hockey history. Which I wasn’t. But I did know of Fred Sasakamoose.
“He’d retired as a player a few years before,” Bert Nichol went on, “but he was coming to Calgary with the Saskatoon team, so I got to interview him. Good guy, as I recall. But it meant I missed that night at The Depression, all the shooting and shit … ah, sorry, Rose … all that stuff that went down that night.”
He dropped his voice a decibel or two. “Heard about Ellie when I got home later that night. A goddamn … uh … bloody shame.” He dropped his voice even