One Large
Coffin
to Go
One Large
Coffin
to Go
A Polly Deacon Murder Mystery
H. Mel Malton
Text © 2003 H. Mel Malton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
Cover art: Christopher Chuckry
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Malton, H. Mel, date—
One large coffin to go / H. Mel Malton.
(A Polly Deacon murder mystery)
ISBN 1-894917-01-4
I. Title. II. Series: Malton, H. Mel, date-. Polly Deacon murder mystery
| PS8576.A5362O64 2003 | C813'.54 | C2003-902840-2 |
| PR9199.3.M34O64 2003 |
Acknowledgements
Many people helped in the writing of this book. Thanks to Gillian and Steve Collins, who put up with me far longer than I had a right to expect during my stay in England, and who explained lots of English-y things to me. Thanks to Janet and Peter Gillham for train and coastal town information, and to Monica and David Hayes for their hospitality in Canterbury. Special thanks to David, who kindly allowed me to put words in his mouth. Any inaccuracies about the English stuff are my own mistakes, not theirs.
Huge thanks to Vianney Carriere, for moral and editorial support during the writing process, and to Saskia for throwing work my way that kept the wolf from the door. Thanks as ever to my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, and to my editor, Allister Thompson, for their infinite patience and support.
This is a work of fiction. While some of the locations are real, the events, characters and circumstances are entirely the figments of my imagination. (Father David is a real person, but he said it was okay—really.)
This book’s for Sam.
One
Mood swings, insecurities, fears, ambivalence, impatience, and anger are all likely to surface during your pregnancy—often at unpredictable times. Why do you sometimes feel so out of control while you’re expecting?
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
When a woman is noticeably pregnant, the normal rules of social interaction get thrown completely out the window. I learned this the hard way at about the seven-month point. Some women manage the earth-mother thing with extraordinary grace—they’re radiant, their swelling bellies draw the gaze as if they’ve been festooned with twinkly lights, they wear that joyful, wide-eyed expression that says: “Rejoice with me in this miracle, O my fellow humans! O frabjous day, callou, callay!” I, on the other hand, turned into a fat, ferocious, touch-me-you-die kind of creature, lank of hair and greasy of skin. I was the kind of pregnant lady you’d cross the street to avoid, like a barely-controlled pit bull out for walkies with a sneering, tattooed and pierced teenager.
This state of affairs didn’t happen overnight. I like to think that I started out as my usual pleasant and friendly self. It was all the attention I got that changed me. As soon as it was generally known that I was eating for two, (enceinte, expecting, a mother-to-be, a stinkin’ oven with a bun), and long before my delicate condition was visually inescapable, I began attracting comment from all and sundry.
“Congratulations!” said Donna-Lou Dermott, the egg-queen of Cedar Falls, whom I met as she was dropping off a couple of dozen at the General Store in the village. “I heard from your aunt Susan that you’re in the family way. Who’s the father?” My jaw dropped at the sheer nerve of the question, but I quickly learned that etiquette doesn’t apply if you’re knocked up. Donna didn’t wait to hear my answer, which was just as well, because I was choosing some words that don’t look very nice in print. “Oh, I sure hope you’re going to have it at the hospital,” she went on. “My first was a breech birth—hurt like hell and tore me open from front to back—but they have pain killers for that kind of thing now.” Then she smiled seraphically and sailed off, reminding me over her shoulder that I should eat lots of eggs over the next while.
That began it. Anyone on the planet who had ever had children accosted me on the street, in the FoodMart, the bank and the post office, sharing their horror stories, telling me what to eat and what not to eat, asking impertinent questions about my living arrangements and the identity of the father and about his reception of the news. By the time I was showing, as they say, absolute strangers had developed the curious habit of reaching out and patting me on the tummy. I learned to converse at a distance, out of arm’s reach. And eventually, I developed a Rottweiler approach—the permanent snarl, the “give me any advice and it’ll be the last thing you ever say” attitude.
My boyfriend and putative fiancé, Detective Constable Mark Becker, was the gentleman responsible for all this—at least in the biological sense. The moment of conception was far from blessed, though, having taken place at the tail end of a booze-sodden July evening. We were too plastered to bother with a condom—that’s the truth of it, and the later realization that I was hosting a little blastula somewhere in my gut was not exactly wonderful news. But as far as responsibility was concerned, Becker and I were equally culpable. I was the one directly and immediately affected, though, and because of this I didn’t actually let him in on the secret until I’d made my own decision about what to do.
Anybody who knows me will have gathered that I’m not big on babies. I have made no secret of my opinion that children should be caged until they’re fifteen, and after that, let out only occasionally for exercise and lessons in etiquette. I’m in my late thirties and have never in my life gone all soft and squashy at the sight of an infant. I do not make oodgy-woodgy noises and tickle the chins of Babes in Prams. I avoid McDonald’s restaurants and fun fairs and the Laingford Mall on weekends, precisely because there are always children present. One of the things I love about my remote cabin in the woods is that I am unlikely to come across any stray infants or toddlers while out walking in the bush.
You would be quite justified in wondering why the heck I didn’t opt for the medical solution to my urgent dilemma. I considered it very seriously, certainly. In fact, even now, I still wonder why I didn’t just call up Dr. Wright and ask her to book me for a D&C. But while I have always been willing to fight fiercely for every woman’s right to choose her reproductive moment, I found that my own choice in the matter had already been made for me by past experience. Been there. Done that. This time, I wanted to keep the T-shirt. You don’t want the details—stories of successful and trauma-free abortions are boring, and if you’re a Right-to-Lifer, you’d hurl this book across the room the moment you realized where the narrative was going. Simply put, I decided after much deliberation to go through with the pregnancy.
“Becker,” I said, “I’m going to have a baby.” (I have never been one to beat about the bush.)
It was the second