Condemned to Repeat Read online

  On Friday, I ate my lunch earlier than Mr. Maitland and got back to work as soon as I could. I flipped through the diaries, scanning rather than reading each and every word. It wasn’t till the seventh volume that my eyes hooked on another entry.

  This book was very clearly marked “1923.” The entry in question was June 15, and it was the use of initials once more that grabbed my attention.

  Cleaning the sitting room for the new girls. Found a loose floorboard, under which was a knotted handkerchief full of crumbled petals. Signs of a sad little romance left behind. Wonder which girl dreamed on her wildflower bouquet, then left it forgotten? My guess is it was B. Cannot imagine S. or G. as so sentimental. Had Stanley come nail down the board.

  So, Mattie had found the maids’ hidey-hole and, in her pragmatic and sensible manner, had sealed it. It made me wonder, though, if another hidey-hole existed, somewhere in the House, where “S” had managed to secrete the missing item, the loss of which had worried Mattie so. And it also made me wonder if something like the thought of hidden treasure was behind the tragedy during the magic evening at the House.

  I put the diary back in the box, intending to place the box on the “To Be Refiled” shelf. First, though, as an obsessive-compulsive tic, I ran my fingers over the spines of the blue books, counting them as I went. Frowning, I counted again, more focused. Thirty-two. I was sure there had been five guest books and thirty-three diaries in this box when I had first begun my research. Which one was missing? Was one missing? Maybe I was getting as bad as Mattie Rutherford, imagining things being ferreted away by a mysterious “S.”

  I checked the clock on the wall. It was almost time for the Archives to close to the public, and I didn’t want Mr. Maitland held up on a Friday afternoon on my account. I could see him on the other side of the window, pleasantly trying to shoo people out of the Archives store, without seeming to rush them.

  I checked the side of the box, but it only said “Mrs. Mattie Rutherford, Diaries and Guest Books,” leaving me uncertain whether or not I had miscounted in the first place. I had only ten minutes, too little time to ascertain whether a particular book was missing. Something occurred to me, though, and I hauled the diaries out of the box, piling them in four stacks. Hurriedly, I opened the fly-leaf on book after book, seeing the date written clearly on the front inside cover. Each of the thirty-two volumes had a clear date.

  Not one of them had a smudged, unreadable date.

  The volume dealing with “S” and the missing item was gone.

  I pulled my bag and coat out of my locker, trying to figure out what to say to Mr. Maitland when I saw him in the lobby. However, when I got out there, the grille over the gift shop area was pulled and locked and there was no sign of him. I presumed he was back in the vaults locking up. I let myself out, intending to email him from home concerning the missing diary.

  15

  --

  It was a novelty to be picking Steve up at his house in my car, instead of the reverse. I had driven through Tim Hortons on the way, and because I was not used to such things, had at first given my order of two large coffees with double milks into the garbage receptacle rather than the microphone. While there were likely several baristas laughing at me on their CCTV, I was not the one wearing a funny little hat pouring coffee that morning, so in my mind I was still ahead of the game.

  We drove out of the city on the Anthony Henday Drive ring road and peeled off toward Saskatchewan. The stubble in the fields was peeking out like an old man’s beard. The windbreaks between the farms were more bare of leaves than the trees in the city, and somehow it made the life of a rural Albertan seem that much braver in my imagination. The only thing worse than being cold and alone over winter in the vast parkland that was north-central Alberta would be being cold and alone and mauled by a bear in the mountains. Or anywhere, come to that. Being mauled by a bear in the Whitemud Creek Ravine would be equally terrible, but far less likely.

  “Which would you rather, Steve? Freezing to death on a winter road or being mauled by a bear?”

  “There are no other choices?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as deaths go, having an aneurysm during an orgasm would likely be my first choice.”

  “Ha! No, you have to pick between frostbite and bears.”

  “Okay, I would rather freeze. I understand you feel bizarrely warm just before you die, which accounts for why they often find people who have frozen after removing articles of clothing.”

  “There is that. I don’t suppose you feel anything but terror and pain before a bear eats you.”

  “There are not that many cases of bear deaths that I would worry about it, you know.”

  “Oh, I know that. I just don’t intend to sleep in anything except a cabin or a hotel when I’m in the mountains. I think sleeping in a tent is sort of like offering them a burrito.”

  “Why are we talking about bear maulings, anyhow?”

  “I was just thinking about how cold and lonely it must be to live in a farm in the winter.”

  “Ah, of course. Makes perfect sense.”

  I smirked at his teasing, but since the sign for the Ukrainian Village was just ahead on the right, instead of forming a retort, I just sang, “We’re here!” in my best Poltergeist voice and flicked on my turning signal.

  There was plenty of parking in the gravel lot outside the Administration Building. I guess an outdoor historic park is not the first thing you think of on an October weekend for amusement, unless there is a corn maze involved. People were probably already contemplating the various indoor water parks or the Galaxyland amusement park at West Edmonton Mall as their getaway destinations. That suited me fine. Crowds were not something I sought at the best of times, and I wanted a chance to take some photos of the various buildings here, in case I could use them as contrast for the website. Part of me was hoping for a suitably dressed young girl who would pose as a potential maid heading into the city for employment at the House.

  We pulled up near the Admin Building, and I hauled out my backpack.

  “What’s in there?” Steve asked.

  “Sandwiches, bananas, and another thermos of coffee, so keep hold of your Tim cup. I figure we may need sustenance by the time we get to the pig farm at the far end of the Park.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Once, when they were first starting out. It was the hottest day of the summer and one of the interpreters was in a tiny little kitchen making pickles over a hot stove. My mother and dad were visiting and both of them spent the rest of the day reliving their childhoods for me, along the lines of walking-seventeen-miles-to-school-uphill-in-a-snowstorm stories. Is this your first time here?”

  “Yep. I’ve been to Fort Edmonton and Heritage Park and out to the chimneys at Rocky Mountain House, but never made it here. There’s a Ukrainian house in Elk Island Park, too, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, but nothing like what you’re going to see here. No, put away your wallet, I am getting this.”

  I bought us two tickets, and promised Steve we’d look through the gift shop on the way out. He had spotted a rose-covered scarf he thought his mother might like.

  We passed through the back door of the building and ambled down the causeway over a reedy marsh and into the past. To the right was the iconic building from most prairie childhoods, a grain elevator. Steve was thrilled to go inside and see how everything worked. He pushed on the levers to change the grain bins and jumped up and down on the floor that was also a scale. The young man minding the area smiled at Steve’s city-boy enthusiasm, but managed to stay in character as Orest Simchuk, United Grain Growers officer. Steve tried to ask him about what was happening for farmers today with the dismantling of so many elevators, and what he thought it was doing to the sense of place for small-town Albertans, but Orest refused to step out of character and merely acted surprised to hear that other elevators were being torn down.

  That was the one thing that bugged me a
bout historic parks that chose to enforce the time period for their interpreters. I ended up having to work hard to place the facts I was learning in my own sense of historical perspective, and in some cases, I would end up feeling as if I was a trespasser into the homes of strangers. I preferred the way Fort Edmonton did it, with interpreters playing their roles, but happily willing to break character if you asked them a fiddly question or two.

  Still, the young folks of the Ukrainian Village knew their material, and as long as you didn’t push it, they were quite accommodating. Steve was also taken with the small steel jail cell in the front room of the policeman’s home.

  “How would you have taken to that in your parlour, Randy?”

  “Are you getting a hankering to be a small-town constable…in the last century?”

  We strolled up the road that took us past the newcomer’s sod house dug into the ground, which I had to admit was surprisingly cozy and reminded me greatly of Mr. Mole’s house from Wind in the Willows. At the next farmhouse, where thatching was taking place on the roof, I asked one of the young women if I could take her picture. I asked her if she thought about going to the big city to work as a maid, and she smiled and nodded. In her made-up historic world, two of her sisters had already moved to Edmonton to work as chambermaids and were sending some money home to their mother. She was hoping to go live with her older sister in a year’s time.

  This was the sort of community from which the Rutherfords’ maids had likely come. There was no point in talking to the girl there about photographic rights for the use on web pages; she would likely try to tell me I was possessed by a devil for mentioning such bizarre things. I figured I would discuss it with someone back at the Administration Building.

  Steve was finished talking thatching with the fellows up on the roof, so we moved along to see the pigs. Three young pigs, maybe a year old, trotted about while a large sow lay on her side in the shelter of the rough-hewn sty; a middling large pig stood close to the fence. I noticed a couple of sticks leaning against the side of the fence between us and the placid animal, and handed one to Steve. Together, we leaned over the fence and scratched the pig’s back. Delighted, grunty drooling noises were our reward.

  One of the fancier houses was placed nearer the school and church, but even with its two storeys and wide front porch, it had nothing on the grandeur that was Rutherford House. It was much easier to see, amid the rural examples of the early twentieth century, just how spectacular the House must have been. Now, compared to places down east in Ontario or Quebec, where everything was older, statelier, and made of brick, or even Winnipeg, which was what westerners called central Canada, and what folks from Ontario lumped in with the prairies, Rutherford House was nothing out of the ordinary. Several houses on Winnipeg’s Wellington Crescent dwarfed the house I’d been hired to celebrate. But here in the brash, raw West, Achnacarry must have gleamed bright with promise that civilization was truly on its way.

  Steve and I sat on a bench in the sun near the gas station with its antiquated pumps and bizarre metal signs for soft drinks that no one remembered. We had to squint at each other from behind our sunglasses, but it was getting a little too chilly to sit in the shade. I was very happy he had made the time to come out with me. Although we could see a few people strolling about, it was enough off-the-beaten-track that one had to really choose to come out here. It would have been a very lonely proposition, otherwise.

  “Have you ever thought of living in a small town?” I asked Steve.

  “Not really, but I can see the advantages. It would be nice to walk to wherever you had to go, to know people by name, and deal with them on a daily basis instead of feeling so anonymous in grocery stores and post offices. And it would be great to have a big yard with room for your own garden and a place for kids to play.”

  “Really? You like to garden?”

  “I didn’t say that. I like to eat fresh vegetables. I figure that there is a bustling, industrious small-town wife in this fantasy who is doing all the things required of the lifestyle.”

  “Aha! Yes, well, here I was considering the fellow who would be shovelling that long expanse of driveway and supervising the septic-tank truck driver and teaching all those kids to skate and drive cars.”

  “Face it, we’re as urban as it gets.” He stood up and held his hand out. I took it and let him pull me to a standing position. We picked up after our makeshift picnic, dusted ourselves off, and headed back toward the Administration Building.

  “That sandwich was good, but it’s a shame their restaurant wasn’t still open. I could really go for some pyrogies.”

  “Just watching all that activity makes you think you can eat like a farmhand, eh?”

  Steve laughed. “I guess so. Those fellows were really working up a sweat, too.”

  He went off to price the scarf for his mother while I spoke to the woman in the glassed-in office. I explained who I was and what my project was, and that I might wish to use some of the photos I had taken for a contrast and connection to Rutherford House.

  As both sites were considered Provincial Historic Sites of Alberta and overseen by the Ministry of Culture, she could see no problem with the use of the photos. The interpreters all signed contracts that allowed their photos to be taken and used at the photographers’ discretion, which I supposed made sense when you were working in a tourist haven. I thanked her, took her card in case I needed to contact her, and went to find Steve.

  He was at the till, sheepishly buying not only a scarf, but two painted wooden pysankas, or Ukrainian Easter eggs, and a pair of pysanka earrings, which he presented to me.

  “It seemed like a nice memento for the day,” he said.

  They were lovely, intricately patterned in black and white and red, emulating the stylized patterns stencilled and wax-resist coloured onto delicate eggs, from which the inner yolk and albumen had been blown out a tiny hole in the bottom. This was the true Ukrainian icon; no wonder there was a huge version on a pedestal in Vegreville. It ranked as one of the greatest of those “world’s largest” roadside attractions.

  I popped the hooks of the earrings out of their paper card and into my ears.

  “Thank you,” I said, and leaned up to kiss him, to the shy delight of the young woman behind the till, who probably thought people in their forties just wrote sonnets to each other for erotic release.

  We walked hand-in-hand back to my rental car, and settled cozily into its warmth from the sunny parking lot. It was a forty-minute trip back home, but Steve had suggested we head for an early dinner downtown, so I was keeping my eye peeled for the turnoff to the Victoria Trail rather than the Henday.

  “So why are you so interested in the maids of Rutherford House all of a sudden? Are you looking for something to add to the research already done? Or is there something about a particular maid that has your interest?”

  I told him about Mrs. Rutherford’s diaries, her distrust of one of her maids, the loss of something she wouldn’t mention in the books, and almost as an afterthought, the fact that one of the books had disappeared.

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure I can be. That particular book had the date badly smudged, as if liquid had got on the fly-leaf. You could see the first two numbers, but not the second two. And not one of those diaries in the box yesterday had that fly-leaf.”

  “Did you mention it to the archivist?”

  “We had been talking about the diaries and my interest in the maids over lunch a couple of days earlier, but on Friday afternoon, Mr. Maitland was busy with some folks in the store when I let myself out. He’s been short-staffed the whole time I was there, so I didn’t want to disrupt him. I am planning on calling him next week, to talk to him about it. But you know, part of me is just in denial, or was, until I mentioned it to you. It must have been him removing it from my research grasp, right? After all, who steals a diary that is almost one hundred years old?”

  “Someone who is looking for something they don’t want
other people to find first?” Steve supplied. “After all, someone cared enough to kill someone at Rutherford House. I don’t think we can overlook the connection, Randy. You need to mention this to the archivist and to Detectives Gibson and Howard.”

  I sighed.

  “You’re right. I was just hoping it was nothing, you know? For once, I would like to be totally uninvolved.”

  Steve laughed. “Sure thing. I have a feeling you want to be so uninvolved that you were going to head in to the House looking for the floorboard Stanley nailed down in the maids’ sitting room, when, tomorrow? Or were you going to be really reserved and mature and wait till Monday?”

  “Damn your perspicacity, Steve Browning.”

  “And bless your little gumshoes, my dear. Just don’t get all girl sleuth on me and go do this on your own. Do not forget, there’s someone out there who takes whatever this is seriously enough to kill. I don’t want him or her setting sights on you next.”

  I shivered. “No, me either.”

  16

  --

  I had only one more day with the car, or technically twelve hours, if you wanted to get picky. My contract was to get it back to the lot by six with a full tank of gas. While my plans had been to drive to Fort Edmonton Park and tour the other Rutherford House on 1905 Street, walking around yet another historic park with costumed interpreters trying to engage me in make-believe just seemed like far too much work for a Sunday. Instead, I found myself sleeping in for the first time in ages, then padding about my apartment making a grocery list.

  Treats, when you are young, consist of presents and toys, or splendid outings. As you get older, treats realign themselves into more mundane and useful considerations, like being able to venture to a grocery store for a substantial shopping expedition. My biggest goal of the day was to drive to the closest Superstore to stock up on canned goods, cleaning supplies, and fresh produce, and then come home by way of the M&M Meat Shops for a box of frozen chicken breasts. The glory of having wheels was not going to be used up by merely ferrying me back and forth to the Archives. This little car was going to be put to use. I was seriously considering a quick jaunt out to IKEA as well, but the sad truth was that my apartment couldn’t actually contain one more BILLY bookcase; I was going to have to cull some books instead.