I spent the rest of my day doing research in the library and missed the call from Shannon, but Martha confirmed that the date was on — or at least that’s what she thought she’d gleaned from the garbled conversation.
I left work early, shopped along Elgin Street, and bought a good sturdy rope hammock that I’d been dying to get. The kind with the wide wooden spreaders. Then I walked down Elgin to McLeod and Shannon’s apartment. It was an old apartment building on the corner across from the Victoria Museum — a five-storey red brick affair with a wide central staircase going up to the second floor. I walked up the flight of stairs and found apartment 2. There was a little card identifying the occupants as Diamond and Johnson.
I knocked on the door and waited a long time before it opened and a tall blond-haired woman in a fashionable two-piece suit stared out at me. I wondered why Patrick had called her small until I remembered how tall he was. Anyone under six feet must have seemed small to him. Shannon stood a good three inches taller than I did. Her green eyes were puffy and red and her tiny features were the colour of sorrow — ash grey. There was a slight resemblance to Lianna, but this woman had more warmth. She kept wringing her fingers and looking behind her. I introduced myself, but Shannon ignored my hand and didn’t invite me in. She just stood there and stared at me and then said in a curiously emotionless voice, “I don’t understand why you think I can help you, why you think a bunch of stolen disks have anything to do with Jake.”
Her voice was soggy, her green eyes flat and dull, as she waited for some cue from me.
“I don’t know that it does, but Jake’s the only lead I have to go on.”
Shannon stood in the doorway fiddling nervously with the doorknob until I had the strongest desire to grab her hand and pull it away from the damn knob.
I repeated what I had said on the phone, all about my disks and Diamond. When I finished there was an uncomfortable silence as Shannon struggled with some inner battle and gripped the doorknob like a lifeline. She kept shooting looks at me and as quickly looked away, making up her mind a dozen times and changing it until I finally said, “Look, maybe now isn’t the best time.”
At that Shannon made up her mind.
“No, no I think it’s okay. I suppose you’d better come in.” She pulled open the door and let me in, then quickly closed and bolted the door behind her.
I followed her down a short, indigo blue hallway into a very large room. It had lovely high ceilings and large windows overlooking the museum, and the windowsills were wide enough to sit on, except that they were full of plants. The windows were open and a gentle breeze was blowing the pale peach curtains inward. There were boxes of books, some computer disks and file folders in the centre of the room, and papers spread over every surface. The back of a red velvet sofa had been slashed and the stuffing was all over the floor. Three pictures leaned against the wall, one of a lynx and two of Diamond and Shannon, with the glass shattered and the photos ripped.
“Oh, it’s kind of a mess,” she said, which I thought was rather an understatement. “Someone broke in and trashed the place sometime this morning. The police only just left.”
It was quite a mess. Diamond certainly seemed to have left a lot of paperwork behind him that interested someone. First his office ransacked and now his home. I wondered if he and his wife still kept a house together and if it had been searched too.
“I came home for lunch and found stuff flung everywhere. It’s horrible. It’s taken all afternoon to clean it up and figure out what’s missing. Just a bunch of vandals the police say. Why do people do these things?” I didn’t like the sound of her voice, a tight, bare-knuckled type of voice, on the verge of control and the abyss beyond.
“Look, maybe I’d better come back another day. It’s not a good time for you.”
She answered so quickly and with such vehemence that it made me start because it seemed so out of character. “It’s the perfect time. You can help me clean up while we talk.” She looked at me and softened her voice. “I sure could use the help.” She handed me a plastic bag and indicated a pile of papers in the corner. I picked my way through the mess and began stuffing papers into the bag.
“What did they steal?” I asked.
“Nothing important as far as I can see,” she said. “All our valuable stuff is here: the stereo, VCR, computer …”
I had sidled my way over to the computer, and the distinctive smell, though weak, made my skin crawl. The computer was covered with the same stuff that had wiped my own computer clean.
I looked around and saw her staring at me. “You didn’t keep any important records on this computer, did you?”
“We used to, but the computer had total system failure once and Jake never trusted it again. He used it only for small stuff anyway. He’d bring home his current work on those disks and feed them in. He never left any of his work on the computer, just games and things like that.”
“Any of your work?”
“Me? No. I don’t know anything about computers. I like a pen and paper better. I never used it.” I wondered if she knew what the formaldehyde had done to the computer — surely she could smell it — but I didn’t have the heart to bring it up. She’d find out soon enough, if it was important. “Do you know what was he working on? His grad student said he was excited about something. Any idea what it was?”
“No.” She hesitated. “But Patrick’s right. He was kind of excited about something, but when I asked, all he would say was that it was important and he wanted to surprise me.”
I idly started looking at the labels on the disks — all games of one kind or another, no data, no personal stuff.
“Was anything stolen, anything at all?”
“Yes. About two months before Jake died he brought back a little box filled with some mammal teeth and fur, said it had something to do with his lynx studies. You know about his lynx studies?” I nodded. “He sometimes brought stuff like that home, not often but sometimes, and only the really good specimens. He kept them in a box in his desk over there. Most of what he collected he gave to Patrick to catalogue, but sometimes, if a tooth was particularly good, he’d bring it back for himself.”
Her hand went to her neck and I saw she was wearing a necklace with a single tooth, embedded in silver, dangling from a silver chain.
She saw my eyes glance at her necklace and dropped her hand and smiled.
“This tooth is … was … his Florida Panthers’ tooth, he said.”
I raised my eyebrows in question.
“He liked to collect the teeth of all the sports teams named after cats, professional and amateur — Ottawa Lynx, Florida Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals, Bobcaygeon Bobcats, Dumoine Pumas — you name it, he collected them and turned them into necklaces.”
I remembered Lianna’s necklace and the much smaller tooth she wore. I wondered what cat that had been and what team it had represented. What a strange man. Most men give rings or earrings, but Diamond obviously handed out the canine teeth of felines to his women. Talk about being hooked on his profession.
“He gave me this just before he went into the bush. He had one just like it. They came from Florida and New Brunswick.”
His and hers necklaces, I thought with a shiver. Yuck.
“Anyway his collection is gone — he was very proud of it. Seems like a dumb thing to steal but there was a lot of silver too. The police figure that’s why it was taken, for the silver he used to make the necklaces.”
She stood there fiddling with her necklace for a long time.
“They say you found him.” Her voice cracked, and she sat down suddenly amid a pile of file folders and the stuffing from the sofa, which poofed up around her like dandelion fluff.
“Why’d