estate “part-time”. These opportunists had long departed, and a $2,000 licensing fee kept the field lean and mean. Belle ran the business with an answering machine, a cellular phone and Miriam MacDonald.
Her first lieutenant had signed off a lifetime of bookkeeping to join Palmer Realty five years earlier. “There is nothing creative about accounting,” she insisted, “unless you’re working for an American savings and loan or the Parti Québécois during a referendum.” She balanced her work for Belle with a passion for quilting. Her pieces had won awards, but she accepted commissions more for personal satisfaction: “That Log Cabin one for Alderman Winder cost me a month’s labour, design and sewing. The $500.00 wasn’t worth it.” To Belle’s embarrassment, Miriam had presented her with a stunning king-size quilt in the classic Whig Rose pattern for her birthday.
“How goes the battle?” Belle called as she pushed open the door.
Gray hair in a frizzy afro, her stockinged feet working a therapeutic wooden roller under her desk, Miriam grimaced, mouth tsking as her pencil checked a list. Gulping at intervals from her mug, she pummelled the computer keyboard and seemed annoyed at what she read on the screen. “Sacrifice. Hostie.” French Canadian minced oaths always made Belle laugh. How many other languages centred their curses around the church and its trappings?
“Stop swearing about communion wafers. You’re a Scot, or so you claim. Problems?” She sidled to the coffee machine and poured a generous cup, grateful for the practicality of black appliances. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to afford an office cleaner?
Miriam puffed an errant silver curl from her forehead. “I’ve got such a chain of conditional sales that I’m a screaming mimi. Even if we’re not the first realty on half of them, we’ll make out like our former Prime Minister. But there’s a fly in the proverbial ointment. Mr. Proulx on Norman Lake wants—get this—” she snarled, stabbing at a blurry black and white picture pinned onto the corkboard, “319K for his cottage. With only 65 feet frontage? It’s a fishing shack with an outhouse at a 45 degree lean. Everyone else in line is being quite reasonable.”
Belle smiled. “So it goes. He’ll come around if he really wants to sell.”
“If he really wanted to sell, he wouldn’t ask the moon. And the whole house of cards may collapse by then.” She muttered to herself, “Câlice.”
“Chalice. There you go again. But doesn’t this beat toting up a balance sheet in that cockroach race? Remember when you worked all night in an unheated shed to cook books for that sheet metal firm just before Revenue Canada hit town?”
Miriam stiffened. “Please don’t use terms like that. You know I have never done anything actually illegal. But you’re right. I don’t relish dancing to anyone’s tune. Thirty years of penal servitude was enough. And I’m not going to stew over this. Once I finish with Mr. P., he’s toast, as my daughter says, at least this week.” Her daughter Rosanne was twenty-three, a graduate from Shield University, now attending teacher’s college in North Bay. “I warned her,” Miriam said. “She’ll have her hands full. Has she forgotten what a rotten teenager she was? I needed an exorcist.” Then Miriam skidded to a stop between words and gave Belle a puzzled look. “You don’t seem yourself today, and I’ve been babbling. Thinking about Jim?”
“Oh, I had a call from his girlfriend. Every time I close my eyes, I imagine his body trapped in that swamp lake, turning in the tea-coloured water while the ice freezes over him like a glass ceiling. It haunts me like that Atwood poem: ‘The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.’ ”
“That hand you described would bother me, too. Like an accusation or a plea.” She tapped her forehead in rebuke. “Forget that last part. Guilt is not what you need. Think about this. Suppose you hadn’t come along, suppose more fresh snow had hidden the accident. The boy might never have been found. That’s a parent’s worst nightmare.”
“It was pretty remote. What with the occasional wolf and fox in the area, the body wouldn’t have lasted long if it had washed ashore in the spring. Still, it’s small consolation for the family.”
“So what does this girl want?”
“Lord, I have no idea. Perhaps a friend of Jim’s to talk to.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “The last time I saw him alive, he was writing a poem to her on his own heart. I do and I don’t want to meet her. What might have been, and all that Victorian sentimentalism. And I hate funerals and viewings. Probably be an open coffin.”
“The theatre of death. Morbid, if you ask me.” Miriam rummaged under her desk. “Maybe this will help take your mind from the situation . . . and don’t you dare offer to pay me after giving me every book in Sue Grafton’s alphabet.”
Belle opened the small parcel with a child’s wonderment. “Wild Orchids! Do I dream? Where on earth did you ever find this? Surely not in town.”
“No such luck. Got it in Toronto at Sam’s. They sell classic videos there now. Rows and rows, just like a bookstore.”
“You know I have none of the silents, Miriam. Thanks for thinking of me.” Belle handled the video with reverence as she studied the cover notes. 1929. Sudbury had passed the bushcamp stage and was manfully trying to grow into a city, entering the Great Depression on its magic carpet of silvery nickel. The Sudbury Wolves played in the NOHA, and 110 acres of parkland on Lake Ramsey had been donated by W.J. Bell. A World War One cenotaph had been unveiled, and Rudyard Kipling himself invited to pen an inscription. The Grand Theatre, formerly the Grand Opera House, had installed equipment for its first talkie. Maybe this delicate piece of celluloid had been the last silent shown to those lucky miners escaping the night shift, freshly scrubbed with carbolic soap and happy for relief from the dark tunnels beneath the city. She bent over and gave her friend a squeeze.
“Oh, hush up. Just let Rosanne use your computer for her term paper next time she’s home. I’d get her one except that Scrooge doesn’t pay me enough.” Miriam stuck out her tongue and winked.
“No problem. You know she’s welcome.” Belle paged through her notebook. “Hey, what about that Nelson place you went to last week. Are the Toronto people ready to bite?”
“Funny story, but we lucked out. Nelson had told me that the septic system had, in his clever little words, ‘been approved.’ When I visited for pictures, all I saw was a pipe sticking out of a partially buried holding tank behind the house. No field bed at all. Wet as a mad hen, I was. Of course those Toronto folks hadn’t even noticed. They think everything’s hooked up to sewers like in cities, but I saved us some embarrassment. Can you imagine the first flushes? Straight out the back and shut down by the health department.” She made a rude but descriptive noise.
Belle agreed. “And woe to us if the sale had gone through. Those weasel words might have held up in court. ‘Approved’ could have meant ‘approved for construction.’ ”
Satisfied that her paperwork was beaten into submission, Belle made her daily phone call to Rainbow Country Nursing Home. At 83, her father had become confused and tottery in his apartment in Florida. Since he had given up his Canadian citizenship, sliding him over the border at the crucial juncture when he could still walk and talk had been a miracle for which she still gave thanks. “Nursing station? It’s Belle Palmer. How’s the old man today?”
Apparently he was as cantankerous as ever, with his loud demands, and expecting his usual Tuesday shrimp lunch. She visited him once or twice a week, but their conversation seemed limited to the expected meal, the weather and television.
