Condemned to Repeat Read online

  Condemned

  to Repeat

  A Randy Craig Mystery

  By

  Janice MacDonald

  Condemned to Repeat

  copyright © Janice MacDonald 2013

  Published by Ravenstone

  an imprint of Turnstone Press

  Artspace Building

  206-100 Arthur Street

  Winnipeg, MB

  R3B 1H3 Canada

  www.TurnstonePress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or ­transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or ­mechanical—without the prior ­written permission of the ­publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

  Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher ­Marketing Assistance Program.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens for Turnstone Press.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacDonald, Janice E. (Janice Elva), 1959– author

  Condemned to repeat / Janice MacDonald.

  (A Randy Craig mystery)

  ISBN 978-0-88801-415-3 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Series: MacDonald, Janice E. (Janice Elva), 1959–

  Randy Craig mystery.

  PS8575.D6325C66 2013 C813’.54 C2013-902241-4

  This is for Sharon and Steve Budnarchuk,

  of Audreys Books, who have done so much

  for Canadian writers and Edmonton readers,

  and especially me.

  Thank you for preserving the magic

  that is the bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore.

  1

  --

  It was a good thing Rutherford House was within walking distance from my apartment, as there was next to no desk space for me to actually spread out and work there. While I had been invited to use a desk that was set discreetly in the back of the gift shop in the basement, there I tended to be interrupted by someone wishing to purchase a vintage-like pocket watch or a painting of a grain elevator. I had tried to pitch in to help out, but had made the cash register seize up twice before the manager of the House agreed that it would be more advantageous to everyone concerned if I were to conduct my prime work from home.

  After all, it’s not as if you can sit down in too many places in a historic site like Rutherford House, except the restaurant. Everything in the House is an artifact, either actually belonging to the family of the first premier of the province or authentic to the time period. I sure didn’t want to go down in history as the girl who broke Alexander Rutherford’s library chair.

  In effect, I owed my present job to the insights and dreams of two separate premiers: Alexander Rutherford, who had the vision to create a university that would stand among the best in the world, and a more recent resident of the office, Ed Stelmach, who through the combination of his rural ties and innate sense of fair play, was instrumental in promoting an even playing field for all Albertans. The same governmental impetus to provide common access to services across the province was creating a need to have museums and historic sites accessible to all, and it was my job to concoct a reasonable facsimile of an actual visit to Rutherford House. While I wasn’t going to be able to provide the scent of furniture polish or old leather-bound books, or the creak of floorboards in the kitchen, I was doing my best to find a way for Sherry in High Prairie or Murphy in Milk River to have a virtual Rutherford House experience. My own feeling was that success would come from increased interest in actually visiting the House, since to me there is just nothing like knowing I’m standing where those before me have walked. However, we are a widespread province, a people who determine journeys in how many hours they take, not how many kilometres they span, and gasoline prices being as volatile as they were, who was I to make people stir from their front stoops? Further to that, far be it from me to question a government contract.

  The Friends of Rutherford House were the folks who were presently signing my cheques. They’d hired me to design and facilitate a virtual museum website that would underline the House’s importance in the firmament of historic sites of Alberta. It got complicated a bit, though, because I was being paid from a project grant funded entirely by the provincial Ministry of Culture. On top of that, I got tapped every now and then to pitch in as a part-time employee of the House, which offered more money and what I was telling myself was a better way to get a feel for the pulse of the House. If I was going to be honest with myself, though, the extra monies were going to really help out with Christmas gift buying.

  Tonight, for instance, the week after Thanksgiving, I was working on-site, but not in the capacity I had been contracted for. I had succumbed to the flattery of Marni Livingstone, the manager, and was signed up to be part of the Evening of Illusion, the Rutherford House way of getting the jump on Hallowe’en activities this year. A candlelit dinner and entertainment by a magician, followed by a mystery theatre enactment, was the basis of the event. Marni was perpetually short-handed at evening events, and so I had agreed to be part of the crew. Who knew, it could be fun, and Marni was offering more than minimum wage for one evening’s work. Mostly we were there just to guard the artifacts and make sure no one decided to take a nap on Cecil Rutherford’s antique bed.

  I got to the House, situated on the eastern edge of the university campus, at five, which was an hour ahead of the time the guests were expected to begin drifting in. The sun was hanging red in the river valley across the street, lighting up some ominous dark clouds dramatically, and aside from a couple of joggers heading down Saskatchewan Drive, I had the scene to myself. Not for long, though. The event had sold out, according to a phone call from a delighted Marni earlier that day. And justifiably so. She’d put a lot of effort into organizing it.

  There would be appetizers and drinks offered, then the magician would perform in the front parlour. After this, the party would adjourn to the Arbour Tea Room, where the meal would be served. During the meal, a murder play would be enacted, and clues placed on a bulletin board in Premier Rutherford’s study for post-prandial perusal. The guests would write down their guess of who the murderer was on an entry slip, which would be tallied up while the actor playing the detective walked them through the denouement. The winner received a coupon for high tea for two, and everyone went home happy. Three or four of us would stay to clean up, after having monitored the House during the play. It was practically guaranteed that at least seven people would write down “that tall woman with the braid guarding the hat collection” as their guess for the murderer, even though I would have told at least forty people who asked that no, I wasn’t part of the mystery itself. This was not what I’d signed up for, but on the whole, it didn’t matter. Rutherford House got under your skin really quickly and I felt sort of territorial, wanting to make sure the furniture and artifacts remained safe and scuff-free.

  I was excited to watch the magic show, too. Marni had been thrilled to book Stephen Dafoe for the event. Dafoe da Fantabulist had been a huge draw around Edmonton in the early ’70s, when he was just a young teen. He had probably appeared on the Harry Farmer TV show as many times as Edward Connell, the keyboard prodigy. Not as flashy as some of the other Canadian magicians of the era, like Doug Henning, Dafoe was renowned for his close-up w
ork and his ability to make a deck of playing cards do pretty much whatever he wanted it to do, and what most people would consider impossible.

  Magic had always fascinated me. Of course, I still had to really focus when tying my own shoes, so I had no idea how rope tricks worked. I would likely be amazed by illusions a ten-year-old could replicate with one viewing. Some of the other workers weren’t as jazzed as I was to hear we’d be seeing a professional magician.

  “He was at the Magic School a while back,” sniffed Jossie, one of the tea-room waitresses, who was barely in her twenties from what I could gather, way too young to sound so jaded. “I’ve seen his show.”

  From her I got the sense that Mr. Dafoe was a prickly sort, so I was hoping that I wouldn’t be stationed anywhere too close to his show area. The last thing I wanted to do was wreck a magic act by barrelling through the room at the wrong time. And I certainly didn’t want to telegraph something inappropriate to the audience. As my boyfriend Steve said, I had a face that would lose any poker hand; I could not keep a bland expression to save my life.

  They really needed to come up with better words than “boyfriend and girlfriend” for people in their forties. “Partner” was too ambiguous, “lover” not ambiguous enough. Steve Browning and I had been together, more on than off, for the better part of a decade now, and though we were considering cohabiting on a regular basis, I was still too enamoured of my tiny vintage apartment to make the leap. Instead, we installed toothbrushes in each other’s homes and considered ourselves committed exclusively to each other, which most of the time was fine by me. I wasn’t one of those girls who had doodled wedding gowns in the back of her binder during chemistry class. In fact, I would have been the one looking quizzically at the over-foaming beaker, or trying to live down the slight explosion. It wasn’t just love of literature that had led me to English literature in university. An outrageous lack of absorption for anything scientific made the choices much more limited to begin with.

  In the context of Rutherford House, home of the first premier of Alberta and president and founder of the University of Alberta, the whole concept of “university” took on historical meaning and seemed much more up my alley. Knowledge was considered of value in the abstract, or to make you a more valuable citizen and member of society, in the days when Rutherford and his cronies sat in this leather-lined study and envisioned the future down the road. Students would be educated so they could dream a new tomorrow, not in order to walk into better-paying jobs.

  If only I hadn’t been quite so willing to buy into the concept of the liberal arts education for education’s sake, I might by now have a condo overlooking the river valley, a tidy sum accruing in an RRSP, and a dependable source of income. Instead, armed with an MA in English literature, a quiver full of useful computer and audio-visual skills, and some handy recipes using lentils, I had managed to gypsy my way through four and a half of Shakespeare’s stages of man, and all I had to show for it was a banjo, several hundred books, a small Jane Ash Poitras painting, and a laptop computer that was probably out of date the week after I’d bought it. Still, if you were of a mind to measure out life in coffee spoons, I have indeed had my share of coffee.

  My last gig of writing for a university website had been mostly wonderful, though there had been some associated troubles. References from Dr. Fuller and the Centre for Ethnomusicology had been what had landed me this contract, which was a shared project of the Province of Alberta, the University Archives and the Friends of Rutherford House. In 2011, the brick house on Saskatchewan Drive had celebrated its one-hundredth birthday and the City had commissioned a book about the house itself, stemming from research and interviews with surviving Rutherfords, neighbours, fraternity boys who had been members of the Delta Upsilons, who had used the house later, and early members of the committee to turn it into a historic site. The interest in this book had led to the concept of a virtual museum website, bringing Rutherford House to the world. The website I had helped to create for the folkwaysAlive! folks in the Department of Ethnomusicology had been my ticket to this job.

  So far, I had read the book, several transcriptions of interviews that hadn’t made it into the book, and a coffee-table book about Achnacarry, the home of the Camerons in Scotland, after whom Alexander Cameron Rutherford had named his own Alberta castle. I was slowly getting a feel for the place, and I certainly had a delight in entering the House and being surrounded by the atmosphere of another era, right down to the smell of ginger cookies wafting in from the back kitchen.

  A dark SUV pulled up as I was looking out the window of the study, and out stepped a man in his late forties or early fifties. He stood for a minute, taking in the House. I understood the feeling. There was just something so right about the impressive symmetrical construction of the place that wasn’t something one came across too often in Edmonton, which was more a place of split-levels and ranch bungalows. The stranger with whom I now shared an architectural affinity straightened his shoulders and turned to the hatchback of his car. He pulled out the first of what turned out to be six plastic tubs, which he stacked in two piles on the sidewalk in front of the vehicle. Stencilled on the side of the tubs was the word DAFOE.

  The magician had arrived.

  2

  --

  Stephen Dafoe was not really what I had expected from what Marni had told me about him. First off, since he had been such a child prodigy and local icon, I sort of expected more ego to be emanating from the man. Instead, when I went out to the curb to see if I could help him with his equipment, he introduced himself with a bright smile and a firm handshake.

  “I’d love some help. You know, most magicians have assistants just to help schlep equipment. Fishnets and a Vanna White presentation arm are incidental.”

  We propped the front door open with one of the bins and began hauling the rest in, straight to the kitchen hall. We were going to have to close one of the public doors for this event, which had already been agreed to when they were negotiating Dafoe da Fantabulist. The mystery event actors had been a bit miffed that they wouldn’t be able to lead participants up the maid’s stairs at the rear of the House, but I figured they’d find a way to get by.

  By this time, Marni had arrived to introduce herself and determine what extras Mr. Dafoe was going to require. Luckily, he provided for his own animals, so water and a plate of food kept warm till after his show was all the sustenance required. The mystery players would eat with the group of participants, jollying them into the fiction of the evening. Dafoe would be entertaining prior to dinner taking place, then would recuse himself and the dinner theatre would begin.

  The gist of the evening was that a group of magicians were having a reunion, ten years after the terrible accident that had killed the Great Guilfoyle’s assistant. Guilfoyle had taken to drink and was now a mere shell of himself. Three other magicians had returned, ostensibly to have an intervention, to keep him from tipping over the edge, but there were various hidden agendas. Two of them were hoping to steal his greatest trick, The Disappearing Dame. One of them wanted the Great Guilfoyle’s patronage, because his name was still a known factor in Las Vegas, and his protégé would have more doors open to him. One of the other magicians’ assistants still carried a torch for Guilfoyle and there was a hint that they’d possibly had an affair. Another assistant was certain that Guilfoyle’s late assistant had had an affair with her husband. And finally, a writer hoping to write a sensational true crime book had insinuated himself into the gathering.

  I was impressed with Marni’s foresight to hire an actual magician to set the scene and create the aura for the evening. This way, the audience would be buzzing with that “how’d he do that” mind tilt that always happened to me after a good magic show.

  This event was completely booked, which was totally a tribute to the actors hired. In the relatively short time I’d been working around the House, one thing I had realized was that the level of promotion of events was pretty paltry. Secretly, I had
a feeling Roxanne, Marni’s counterpart with the province who oversaw the historic site aspects, was willing these things to fail. Her view was that people should just appreciate the fact that we had these lovely resources being preserved for us. Marni would knock herself out to get events organized, to help promote the House. But for some reason, all the energy went into the creation of the event; putting out advertising became almost an afterthought. As a result, the board of directors for Rutherford House were seriously considering pulling special events from the roster and focusing their energies entirely on the tea house and tours.

  Marni had something to prove with this event. Two or three of the board members had apparently signed up for the mystery dinner. Luckily, thanks to Marni’s decision to hire actors from the talented crew who populated the Die-Nasty Live Soap Opera, the improvisational theatre that had flourished for over two decades in town, word was getting around and tickets were selling.

  Once it was learned that Die-Nasty actors were involved in a mystery dinner theatre, the phone had rung off the hook and tickets were gone within a day. With any luck, the theatre lovers would become House patrons and this would be exactly the sort of cross-pollination that Marni had been hoping for all along. If she could prove that these events promoted the House, her programming would live to serve another term.

  There is just nothing like a little job-on-the-line pressure to bring up the pitch in someone’s voice. Today, as everything came to a head, she was beginning to sound like Topo Gigio. Already, I was regretting agreeing to help her with the set-up. Another couple of hours of shrill was going to send me to the ibuprofen bottle. Pasting a plastic smile on my face, I nodded and agreed to bring up more chairs from the basement, and then to set out the candelabra table centres for the tea room, to match the set-up in the Rutherfords’ dining room. The mystery elements at the dinner could be stymied by the popularity of the event, since the guests would be eating in three separate areas, the dining room, the glassed-in sun porch, and the inner room of the tea house. Still, savvy actors could create events in each room to bring out the necessary information.