“I’m glad you’re okay, Polly,” he said, putting away his notebook. “You’ll probably have to testify.”
“Will it come out that we slept together?” I said.
“I doubt it. It was incidental.”
“Great. Incidental. Great.”
He came out from behind the table. “Dr. McCoy,” he said, really close to my face. “That goat-poison? There’s an antidote. It’s called work. Law. Stuff like that.” I kissed him, right on the mouth, despite the likelihood of cameras in the interview room and guys checking us out behind the mirror next door. Becker did not struggle, much anyway. Then he touched my face with a sad hand and led me out of the room.
Morrison took me back to George’s place. George made coffee and plopped his bottle of Glen-sneeze on the table beside our mugs. Morrison sighed deeply and reached for it before I could, but he poured a hefty slug into mine first.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Morrison said. “It was a close call, Polly Deacon. We could have lost you if it hadn’t been for that bear.”
“But there was no damned bear.”
“Well, there might have been. A second before we got there.”
“And Lug-nut didn’t notice? You got there before she fired at me, right? But she said it attacked her.”
“The bear must have been in her mind,” George said. “I‘v got a friend at the Rama reserve who would say that was powerful medicine.” I had a flash of the Vision-Quest workshop and Dream-Catcher. Good medicine, good medicine. Maybe my hamster had grown up, finally. I would never know for sure.
“Anyway, you did get there in time, Earlie. That was a good thing,” George said.
“Yup.” Morrison explained that it was Eddie who put the pieces together. “Poor kid was keeping a lot of secrets,” he said. “He knew his mother was carrying on with Travers. Knew it right from the beginning because he walked in on them in the Schreier’s barn. Knew she was pregnant, too. Heard her throwing up in the morning, he said. He’s had a hard time.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with John or Francy’s deaths, though, did he?” I asked.
“Not really, aside from covering up. He says you caught him in the Travers’ house after the police tape was up. How come you never told us?”
“I thought he was looking for a book Francy had lent him, one his mother had made him return. He confirmed it himself, later. I didn’t really think he was up to anything bad in there.”
“His mother sent him over to look for the crucifix,” Morrison said. “She told him that Francy had stolen it. He didn’t believe her, but I guess he realized it was important, somehow.”
“Was he carrying on with Francy, like Carla said? I hoped not, but I did wonder.”
“Not according to him, no. He just liked her, that’s all. He said that Samson had forbidden him to go over there, but he did anyway. His mother didn’t seem to mind. Probably gave her a chance to see Travers.”
“Was it Samson who gave him the black eye?”
“Nope. That was Freddy. Seems Eddie always suspected that Samson wasn’t his real father. When Carla let slip that the crucifix had sentimental value on account of the fact that his father had given it to her, he figured it out. Samson Schreier didn’t hold with that sort of thing, he knew that. So the kid sniffed around for a likely father and came up with Freddy.”
“Why would Freddy hit him?”
“The kid went over to the dump for the big father/son confrontation. Didn’t go too good, it seems.”
“Ah.”
Eddie had told the cops about the squirrel note, which his mother had pasted together one night when she thought that he was asleep. The police had grilled him for a while, and then decided that they needed to talk to the Schreiers senior.
“Just before we left we got a call from the Pastor at the Chapel,” Morrison said. “He told us that you had grabbed the crucifix and made a run for it. He said he’d called the Schreiers, figuring you’d gone over there, asking for you, and he let the story out. Carla Schreier’s reaction was a bit wild, he said, and he got worried.”
“Nice of him,” I said, faintly.
“That was when I high-tailed it over to your cabin. When Lug-nut saw me, he barked once, then ran off along the bush road. Kept looking back to make sure I was following.”
Lug-nut the wonder dog. I was bursting with pride. I patted Luggy’s head and he slobbered all over my hand.
“I called Carla Schreier, too,” George said.
“I know. She told me,” I said.
“After the telephone call I realized that you would never miss one of Rico’s parties, particularly if Ruth was there with her guitar. So I set out to bring you back and encountered a large number of screaming police cars headed for the Schreier’s farm. I knew that if there was trouble, you would be there.”
“Thanks, George.”
It was nine o’clock. I suddenly thought of Ruth Glass singing My Life, My Death in that haunting, healing voice of hers.
“Do you think they’re still at it?” I said. Then the phone rang. It was Rico, wondering where the hell we were. We looked at each other after George hung up.
“Earlie,” he said, “you off duty yet?”
He was.
EPILOGUE
Carla Schreier ended up in a criminal psychiatric facility It wasn’t a pretty trial, especially after the media got interested in it. We all had our pictures in the paper a few times, but eventually the fuss died down and people stopped talking about it. She lost the baby, and I feel bad about that. It wasn’t its fault and Carla would have loved it fiercely. Still, that’s another very, very big issue.
Freddy disappeared and people say the authorities are still looking for him. George thinks he’s probably managing some dump up in Temiskaming or somewhere. Nobody seems to care much.
None of us knows where Samson Schreier is either, although there’s a rumour going around that he and Mrs. Delaney opened up a bed and breakfast in Minnesota. Could be true. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve each other. Bet there’s a Gideon Bible at every bedside.
Eddie moved in with Aunt Susan after his mother was arrested, because he said he couldn’t handle living with Samson any more. He doesn’t like high school much and he and Susan fight a lot, but he’s still there, tossing bags of grain around the feed store. He wants to be an Olympic wrestler. Earlie Morrison’s coaching him.
I’m still living in George’s cabin with Lug-nut. A large family of squirrels has moved into the attic and they drive both of us crazy.
Every so often we take a hike down to the Chapel of the Holy Lamb to visit Pastor Garnet and put flowers on Francy’s grave, which is covered in snow, now. I still miss her a lot.
I finished the Becker puppet and then was at a loss as to what to do with it. I thought about giving it to him (minus the extra piece, which I pulverized), but I decided it would embarrass him, so I gave it to Earlie. He says he put it in his bathroom, which is fine with me. Becker and I haven’t kept in touch, and I try not to think about him. I’m still smoking dope, anyway.
Last week I signed a contract to build a bunch of black-light puppets for the Steamboat Theatre Company in Sikwan, a town south of here. I guess it’s back to contact cement fumes and theatre people, but we all have to eat.
Oh, and I stopped dreaming about