Reverend Al moves quickly to avert violence, leads Tabatha out. She turns and shouts, “You’re my age, you pedophile!”
That prods Cud to rise in pursuit. “She’s eighteen, she’s ready for life!” He stops at the doorway, calls. “Hey, Tabatha, Felicity says you stifle her artistic growth.”
As Reverend Al leads her down the hill, she shouts, “Your poetry stinks, according to what I read before I flushed your book.”
The meeting is far more sober when it reconvenes. The society hears a presentation from three strapping lads, Reverend Al’s high-riggers. They will haul up climbing gear, tools, two-by-fours, coils of cable, for an emergency supply route by zip line. After their bid is accepted, they head off in a van packed with supplies. Handsome fellows, Pyramus, Leander, and Adonis.
A discussion ensues about how to entice Lotis from her lair: there’s concern that the deposed rebel leader-she’s in her element, centre stage-won’t bow to the diktat of the Central Committee. Arthur can’t sit, tires of standing, sneaks off.
He’s still muttering about Lotis an hour later as he puffs past his farm gate. “There’s no room for an immature prima donna on the Nick Faloon defence team. You can’t run a murder trial this way. It’s not a film set where you can replay the scene a hundred times to get it right.”
A pleasant rhythmic sound from behind a big-leaf maple pulls him up. Squirt, splash. He carries on around the tree to the goat-milking parlour and sees Lotis milking a nanny. The lens-loving schismatic returned in a flash, she’s back without a struggle, she’s a Woofer again. He wonders how much of his rambling she heard. He steps forward, pretending he was reciting verse. “‘The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets.’”
“What’s that?”
“Milton.”
“Didn’t sound like Milton earlier.” Squirt, splash.
“Very well, I was musing about how a fine career would have been nipped in the bud if you hadn’t materialized.”
“I like this last bit, where you spank the udder to get the last few pulls of milk.” She slaps Annabelle on the rump and sends her away. She has milked other nannies, has a full pail. She looks tested and tough. A tangle of faded green hair. A pack of Nicorettes in her shirt pocket.
“And how did you materialize?”
She takes off her rubber apron, washes her hands. “Actually I sneaked down before dawn. I wanted to meet with my Greenpeace team, go over their presentation.”
“Your Greenpeace team.”
“Yeah, I put in an order for some of their top climbers.” The three high-riggers.
“How did you place this order? Through telepathy?”
“Satellite phone. We must use the weapons of the counter-revolutionary pigs to our advantage.” A fairy smile, her flower-petal lips. Teasing him, knowing such jargon rankles him. “These guys are running a zip line up to the bluffs, just below Gwendolyn Pond. Though maybe I shouldn’t tell Arthur Beauchamp, he talks to himself very loudly.”
“And what about Margaret? Is she on her way down?”
“After she does her full stint-two more days, that’s her goal. She’s a stick-to-it gal, give her a break.”
Arthur is silent as he totes the pail to his house. After they pour the milk in the cooler, he says, “Am I to understand that these…these eco-acrobats are going to be sharing the tree with her for two nights?”
“Jealous much? Come on, Arthur, they’re not planning an orgy.”
“I’m only worried about arrangements,” he says sharply. “All those cables and tools and two-by-fours, how can there be any room for people? How can the platform hold the weight?”
“It’s all being hauled up into canopy, Arthur. As we speak.”
He hopes Margaret’s new roommates, unlike Cud, do their armpits. “So what brings you scurrying back? The guilt, I suppose, now that the theatrical urge has been satisfied.”
“The Faloon case was bugging me. I kept thinking about how his semen ended up in Eve Winters. The theory that Angella kept it keeps dialling a wrong number.”
This ruse will not succeed. She wants him to think that while he was fuming, she was pondering, working.
“Something Claudette said kept niggling at me,” she says. “The bear or raccoon or whatever was getting into the garbage at Nitinat Lodge. I’d never thought to ask if she and Nick were using birth control, or what kind, so I got on the horn to her today. She’s not on the pill. Sometimes they played Vatican roulette. Otherwise, condoms. They’re on a septic field, so they don’t flush them. They go into the trash.”
According to Claudette’s best recollection, the last time the marauding pest showed up was three nights before Eve Winters’s murder. Unseen, in the blackness of the night. Though garbage was strewn, the culprit left no proof of identity, no bear-pies.
Arthur has a hard time seeing obsessively neat Adeline Angella rooting about the garbage for a discarded condom. On the other hand, the theory expands the list of perps who could have concocted an ingenious plan to murder Dr. Winters and leave Nick grasping at one chance in ten billion.
“What do you think?” Lotis asks. “It’ll float?”
Odd question-there are the makings of a reasonable doubt here, with some intensive digging and prepping the soil. “Why shouldn’t it float-isn’t it the truth?”
Her cocky smile.
“I’m going to presume this isn’t something made up between you and Claudette,” he says. “She volunteered this information?”
She looks shocked. “Of course, Arthur. Please.” She pulls out the Nicorettes.
On this, Day Twenty, the prospect of Margaret’s imminent return home is causing Arthur butterflies. He’s not eager to be in a courtroom today, he should be at home creating another lemon pie. Champagne is in the fridge-Margaret has every right to get a little tiddly tomorrow.
He was ribbed ferociously this morning at the General Store. “Hope your wife don’t find it too crowded up there with all them young studs.” “I bet she’s gonna come down smiling.” Arthur took it like a man.
The injunction hearing was put over to the afternoon, and it’s nearing two as he and Lotis make their way into the Great Hall of the Vancouver Law Courts. Themes, goddess of justice, greets them, proudly blindfolded. There are other sculptures, Inuit, on display where Selwyn Loo is waiting, his fingers lightly caressing a soapstone bear. “We don’t have Santorini today.”
Their judge has run off to the dry hills of the Okanagan, a pro-am charity event-he’s teamed with a guest celebrity, a Masters winner. There’s media coverage. Santorini has let it be known that nothing short of a terrorist attack-certainly not an environmental crisis on Garibaldi Island-will dislodge him from those fairways and greens.
“Fine, we’ll adjourn the matter until he gets back.” None of the other judges will stand in. This case has already bounced to the Appeal Court and back, and is likely regarded as in the same category as dogs’ breakfasts and cans of worms. Unless forced to by rare circumstance-such as Santorini drowning in a water hazard-no judge of sound mind will want to pinch-hit. But why is Selwyn looking more dismal than usual today?
“The Chief Justice himself insists on stepping in, Arthur.”
Arthur feels his jaw drop. Wilbur Kroop? Surely Selwyn is joking. Arthur looks up and locates Garlinc’s legal team at level four, in amiable conversation. It’s no joke, they’re enjoying their good fortune.
“I hear he can be difficult,” Selwyn says.
“He’s an irascible fathead.”
The wars are legendary. Twenty years ago, Arthur spent three nights in jail before surrendering to him, apologizing in court. Three nights withdrawing from alcohol were more than he could take.
“He won’t be pleased to see me,” Arthur says. “I’d best stay hidden.”
Despondent, he watches Court 41 fill with lawyers, public, and press. The door closes on them. He paces. There had been hope with Santorini, at bottom a fair-minded man. Wilbur Kroop sees protestors as outlaws bent on challenging the sacred institutions of capital and state. Society’s imminent collapse into anarchy is a theme that garnishes many of his judgments.