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  PLOTS

  Copyright © 2018 Sky Curtis

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Plots: A Robin MacFarland Mystery is a work of fiction. All the characters portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Curtis, Sky, author

  Plots / Sky Curtis.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  (A Robin McFarland mystery)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-537-9 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-538-6 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-77133-539-3 (Kindle).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-540-9 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Curtis, Sky. Robin McFarland mystery. III. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8605.U787P87 2018 C813’.6 C2018-904349-0

  C2018-904350-4

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  PLOTS

  A ROBIN MACFARLAND MYSTERY

  a novel by

  Sky Curtis

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  To my funny and feisty Aunt Patty,

  with love.

  1.

  AS I STRETCHED MY LEGS under the covers, I recalled a line from a novel I had just read. The silky sheets slid over her soft skin as she stretched her lithe body. Okay, let’s be real; the sentence didn’t apply to me. First of all, my sheets weren’t silky. They were a tough grey from being washed with blue towels. A mistake, I know. And slid over my skin? No, slid wasn’t quite the right word, either, my being fifty-six and all, sprouting various doo-dads all over my body. Skin tags. Bumps. Scaly bits. All of which snagged on sheets. No sliding here. And lithe body? Hahahaha. But still. I stretched and felt good.

  A day off from work. Sunday. No desk. No computer. No boss. No following hot leads about—oh my heavens, be still my beating heart—home furnishings for the newspaper. Today, the Home and Garden section of The Toronto Express could do without my ever-insightful epistles. Right now, the top story was doorknobs. Wowzer. Doorknobs. The new building code mandated levers, not knobs. Poof! Doorknobs were gone. Last week, it was the demise of ashtrays. So, now the world was free of doorknobs and ashtrays and I, lucky me, was free from my job. Today I would not be the harbinger of such absolutely riveting news. Today I was free, free, free.

  I lay in bed and watched a shaft of springtime sunbeams float slowly through the opening in the blinds covering my window. I pondered the suggestive word shaft for a second. Or two. Okay, a bit longer than that and where was Ralph anyway? Right. He had a double shift yesterday and then went straight home to his bed an hour after our dinner.

  My bed was so peaceful. As I stretched my legs, my mind danced with the dust motes and I connected the blood in my veins to the pulse of the slow inner music of the universe, to a oneness with all things in the world. It felt harmonious.

  Naturally, this feeling of peace didn’t last. It never did with me. I began to think, and thinking was my downfall.

  I was thinking about the sunbeams, and as lovely as they were, they had escaped through a small gap in my, quote unquote, “Room Darkening” curtains. Tiny sparks of anger burst in my chest. The light had woken me up. The lovely start of morning was infected with the more familiar angst that stayed with me all day. This anger, this worry, this tightening of my upper torso, this hornet’s nest of chaotic emotions, always seemed to begin with being ticked off at my curtains. Morning after morning, I opened my eyes and said to myself, “Fucking curtains.” Why would the package say “Room Darkening” if they weren’t? I should write an article for the Express about the stupid curtains. Expose the false advertising.

  But I knew it wasn’t the drapes that were churning me up. It was something within me that had lain dormant all night long, snoozing under the rock of sleep like a poisonous snake. A few minutes after the sun came over the horizon the viper lifted its head, tasted the air with its forked tongue, and then slithered towards me, its rattle going a mile a minute, jangling every nerve in my body.

  The drinking helped. Every night I got sloshed. My own little party. And it saved me. From what I wasn’t sure. Maybe my thoughts. Maybe the snake.I was getting help for the drinking. I wasn’t worried about my health. No, my liver seemed to be made of Teflon, deflecting the alcohol. But I didn’t like the image of an eighty-year-old grandmother hoofing seven bottles of wine from the store to her car every week, probably in her slippers because her bunions were so bad. In a tatty coat over a polyester nightgown. Hair in pink sponge curlers. So dignified. No time like the present to stop. Last fall I had started seeing Sally Josper, a naturopath, for my pesky problem.

  But then my path of righteousness had gone by the wayside because of a wild situation at work, one that involved not one but two murders. And almost mine. The initial theory about the motivation for the murders was the theft of Canada’s fresh water from Lake Ontario, but that lofty hot button concept collapsed under a wave of reality. The murders were caused by the usual dirt: jealousy and shame. The story sold papers like hotcakes. Death and sex on the front page. All by me. My brief foray into being a crime reporter had been a dizzying success. Did I like it? Yes! I liked the notoriety. Sure, who wouldn’t? But no! I didn’t like the notoriety, who would? I liked and needed a peaceful life, and the flamboyance of the case was anything but. I was happy to be back in the quiet folds of the dull Homes and Garden section. Bring on the doorknobs, yessiree. Shafts of light and doorknobs.

  Hmmm. When was I seeing Ralph next? I’d love to polish his knob. Robin, shut up. You are sex crazy.

  I didn’t hate my job, don’t get me wrong, but there were frustrations. For example, now that it was spring and the snow was melting away, people were looking around their properties and noticing what needed improvement. Decks were high on everyone’s list. Last week I wrote about the new polymers for outdoor decking. The fake wood never needed staining, lasted for decades, well, actually forever, so of course it ended up in a landfill, tossed by a bored homeowner who wanted the new style of decking. Glass barriers instead of banisters. Black metal railings instead of wood. My editor, Shirley Payne, the boozy-floozy who didn’t miss a trick, cut out the political environmental bit in the, I must say, well-written article. We had advertising from the company that sold the decking, she said. Snip, snip, out went my comments. So, yes, there were trials. At least I didn’t drink during the day like some newspaper people. Beers and burgers at lunch. Not me, I was purely an evening drinker. How puritan.

  The drinking situation was not so bad that it interfered with my day-to-day functioning, but I think Ralph was beginning to notice that my wine with dinner, a demurely sipped glass, somehow expanded into a wh
ole bottle guzzled down by the end of the night. I didn’t want to lose him because of Merlot. And he, I noticed, was knocking it back as well. Was he doing this to keep up with me? Or had he come to the relationship with his fondness for alcohol? I didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. Anyway, after all the interruptions to my resolve to stop drinking, I went back to see Sally a few weeks ago and started over.

  I wasn’t sure she was helping me, but I was sticking to it. She told me to write three things I was grateful for every morning. Apparently I was a crabby bitch. So I did it. I actually enjoyed it. I had bought a little notebook from Dollarama with a robin on it, symbolic, being my name and all. I religiously wrote down three things I was grateful for every day. I could feel my brain changing, but it was as slow as altering the direction of an ocean liner.

  At my last appointment, I told Sally how I used to feel a snake stalking me, but that it no longer sank its fangs into my jugular. How I used to spend my days feeling its venom coursing through my veins and wrapping tightly around my throat, cutting off my air supply, but that now there was only a rattling in my blood. She had tilted her head and looked at me as if I were a little nuts, which I had been trying to disguise. And then she said I was talking about anxiety and to remember to breathe. I was sort of ticked off that I had something so mundane. I liked my snake in the veins context better. She also told me that in addition to the gratitude exercises, I also needed a new totem, whatever that meant. Something to do with animals. I loved animals, so maybe she was right.

  As I lay in bed this pretty Sunday morning, I made the effort to clear my mind and do the gratitude job Sally had given me. She had told me that the first step to sobriety was to literally change my mind. Neuroplasticity. The buzzword of the century. But maybe it worked, so today, yet again, I was grateful for my little dog, Lucky. My hand searched over the duvet for my cute pup and played over his head, stroking his silky ears and scratching under his collar. I was also thankful for meeting Ralph Creston. Several nights a week he stayed over, but I didn’t know if he was The One. We seemed to get along okay. His saving my life last fall might have something to do with it. That awful day I had had an allergic reaction to almonds. I couldn’t reach my inhaler because my hands were bound behind my back and I was lying on my kitchen floor, face down. I had tried flopping over so I could stand up, but only made embarrassing slurping noises on the polished wood. Ralph showed up in the nick of time and administered the drug. I sucked on the canister as if my life depended on it. It did.

  Ralph had a lot of baggage from his previous marriage, and I was still unpacking my personal suitcase from mine. God knew I had steamer trunks of it. But if you threw out all that crap, I wondered if he was a good match for me. Sure, he was kind, gentle, smart, brave, funny, generous, the works. Plus, he didn’t smoke or indulge in recreational hunting and fishing. Those were deal breakers for me. I didn’t know his religious beliefs yet, but as long as he believed in the interconnectedness of life, I was sure we’d get along. I had recently become a Nichiren Buddhist slash Unitarian with a side dish of Christian traditions. Being a cop, he probably understood that what affects one person affects us all. We’d have that conversation eventually, I was sure, because I had to check it out. So far, he didn’t seem like a narcissistic guy who thought the rules didn’t apply to him, but the relationship was still young. We’d only been going out for eight months.

  Don’t kid yourself, Robin, you should know by now. Well, I didn’t.

  Which brought me to today’s third thing I was grateful for. I was beginning to know what I liked. This in itself was a bit of a miracle. My life had been spent surviving, first in my family of origin that was outwardly perfect until anyone sat at our dining-room table and witnessed how my father treated my mother and us kids. And then in my marriage, also outwardly perfect until anyone sat at our dining-room table and witnessed how Trevor treated me and the kids. You marry your father. That’s what they say. And, in my case, it was true. Trevor was constantly criticizing me for everything I did. Just like dear old Dad. In this lifelong atmosphere of disdain, I had lost who I was.

  But somehow, over the past five years, without Trevor and being on my own as a single parent, I had gained some self-confidence and dignity. I knew what I liked, most of the time, except about Ralph, and I was going to speak up about it. I would no longer nod compliantly if someone said something I didn’t agree with. I wouldn’t be with someone who demeaned me. No more trying and trying, begging really, to get a man to accept me and love me. I liked who I was and I was grateful for it. I was no longer going plead to be loved. Either love me for who I am or find somebody else. I read that on Facebook.

  Those were my three things. Secretly, I was also grateful for that butter tart I ate yesterday. So delicious. It should be numero uno on my gratitude list, but of course, I couldn’t write it down. Shame, you know. Another buzzword of the century. I was way overweight, but that butter tart was worth it. I justified eating it even though I could feel flab being pressed up against my rib cage by my extra firm mattress. I told myself that the enzymes in butter were good for my digestion. And that bacteria from colds attached to the fat in butter and then were eliminated. That we needed plenty of oils in our diet. Then I wondered, briefly, why I hadn’t eaten two tarts of the magnificent health food.

  I reached for the robin notebook, which was beside my crusty wine glass on the bedside table, and wrote down my list. I made sure I actually felt gratitude for each thing. They say the mind doesn’t change unless one spends at least twenty seconds actually feeling the gratitude. Sally told me that. And it was true. I could feel my brain opening up and relaxing. The snake slithered away into the murk of my subconscious, its rattle barely audible.

  Making my gratitude list had gotten easier because I ensured I enjoyed things during the day. I planned ahead, channelling Pollyanna. And what was on my agenda today? I flipped through the pages of my mental calendar. Right. My family had been invited for Sunday dinner, kids and parents. I suppose I should ask my narcissistic brother Andrew and his fashionista wife Jocelyn to come. I hadn’t asked him for dinner since he’d been home from Europe. Germany consortium or some shit.

  That would make nine people for dinner. My four kids, my parents, my brother and his wife, plus me. I’d make a big vegetarian lasagna, a huge salad, and a dozen rolls. Watermelon, if I could find one, for dessert.

  With resolve and a cheery outlook, or the best I could muster, I got out of bed and flung open the fucking curtains. Yup, it was a beautiful day in May. The pastel tulips that lined my garden path were swaying in the lovely breeze. I ate some granola and called Andrew, and yes, lucky me, he could come. Fuckhead. At least my parents would be happy to see him.

  My brother was a colossal jerk. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Argumentative. Carried a grudge. A typical white fat cat, Rosedale kind of guy, with his studied and deliberate philanthropy. He wore his donations to good causes like a badge of honour. The type of guy who pranced by homeless people in his Harry Rosen suit, muttering “Get a job you lazy good-for-nothing,” while funding a new shelter. I personally thought he was unstable, bordering on OCD with a dash of psycho thrown in. But he was my brother and my parents adored him. Of course they did. My father thought he was the best thing since sliced bread and my mother went along with my father. Always.

  It was a typical Sunday. I did laundry, gardened, ate lunch, walked the dog, went to the store to buy some ingredients for dinner. Yes to watermelon and no to butter tarts. I was ready for the whole gang by the time the doorbell rang. It was my parents. Great. Here we go.

  “Hi Mom, Dad, how was the trip here?”

  “What, you think we can’t manage? Your mother’s a great driver.”

  Really? They no longer had a car. My father had lost many marbles and along with them his driver’s licence. My mother’s vision was deteriorating because of macular degeneration, and she too had no licence. But I was non-aggressive. I
dug deep within myself and tried to find my father’s subterranean Buddhahood. “I know she is, Dad.”

  See, I could do this Buddhist thing.

  I gave my mother a hug, hoping to erase the puzzlement from her face. I could feel her rib cage. She was so thin. Is this what happened to people in their early eighties? A disappearing act? Probably not me, I loved food too much. I was going to be a substantial old lady. “Come on in, out of the cold air,” I said. It was only mid-May and some evenings were still chilly.

  “Crisp,” my father barked. “Not cold, crisp. In the autumn we say ‘crisp.’”

  Robin. Don’t react. Pick your battles. Don’t correct him about the season. He strode into my living room as if he owned it and then suddenly braked in mid-step, looking lost. My mother hurried over to him and put her arm through his, leading him to the chair in the corner, where he always sat. He shook her off, leaving her with a tightly shut downturned mouth. “Janice, I always sit over here, by the kitchen door.”

  “Of course you do, Duncan, my mistake,” she whimpered, hurt. He was such an ornery asshole. Always had been.

  The door burst open and in flooded a tidal wave of kinetic energy. My kids. All four of them at once, plus Maggie’s partner. They were laughing and pushing and flopping down on the furniture, as if they lived there, which of course they had done. Maggie, my oldest, and her newish beau, Winchester, stuffed themselves into the La-Z-Boy in the corner opposite my father. They were clearly in love, arms and legs intertwined, like ribbons of milk in coffee. Calvin, my second oldest, sprawled on the couch, arms hanging over the back, a ready grin on his open face. Bertie, the baby, sat at the other end of the couch, legs tightly crossed a nd arms across his chest. Oh dear, we’d have to deal with that later. Evelyn, the second youngest, was repeatedly tapping her eyebrow and grinning.

  I twigged immediately; she’d been to a cosmetic surgeon and had the tattoo over her eyebrow lasered out. “Oh look, everyone. Evelyn had her skull removed.”