“Welcome to The Georgian Bay,” Shelagh Hubbard called from the door. “Park around the side. I’ll meet you.”
When he stepped into the summer kitchen that stretched across the back of the house, connecting it to a drive shed, she was just coming out, having, he noticed, tightened her hair in the interim. The bare overhead bulb illuminated her features, casting a pallor over her skin and accentuating her cheekbones and the sharply defined line of her jaw. She was dressed casually in slacks and a sweater, wearing makeup.
“My goodness,” said Morgan, “you have a beautiful place.”
“Thank you.”
“Do I get the tour?”
“But of course. We’re in the summer kitchen. The ceiling is sagging, but in no danger of immediate collapse. To your left are two doors. The choice is yours: the lady or the tiger. One leads to the shed and the other, the sauna, which is fired up in case we want to relax later on.”
There was no mistaking which door led to the sauna. It was made of double layers of heavy tongue-and-groove cedar, reinforced with iron flanges extending from the hinges across it entire breadth, and with a heavy bolt, securely padlocked.
She interpreted his gaze with an explanation. “I’m wary of kids getting in there; you’ve got to think about things like that when your house is empty a good part of the year. Imagine: if you were racing around back-country trails on a snowmobile in sub-zero weather, the sauna might be an irresistible temptation. They could burn the place down.”
“Why not just turn off the power?”
“A lovely idea, David, but it’s an old-fashioned wood-burning affair. The stove is underneath, stoked up from outside.”
As an inveterate urbanite, such things were beyond his experience. Saunas were something he avoided in gyms. He couldn’t imagine going outside in mid-winter to build up a fire so that you could roast yourself in an airless room, then go back out and roll in the snow.
“It would be too dangerous with the fire inside,” she explained. “You could turn the room into a raging inferno; or it would suck the air out of your lungs; or create a bone-shattering draft from under the door. Or you’d scald yourself trying to cool the flames.”
She seemed to be mocking herself, reciting her litany of possible disasters as if the full range had never before crossed her mind.
“Burn, bake, or broil,” she went on. “Steam cook, dry preserve, or boil — everything but fricassee or southern fried! It gets hot as Hell in there; it’s an oven, after all.”
He glanced at the bottom edge of the door. It looked to be a pretty tight seal.
Morgan sniffed the air like a cat trying to determine whether it is the predator or the prey. Shelagh Hubbard leaned against a workbench and watched him, apparently fascinated by his ambivalence.
His mind shifted and, leaning against the bench beside her, he relaxed. He was not used to the sensuous impress of a country place. He could separate the sweet odour of a smoky fire from the dry smells of ancient boards and musty walls that were stuffed with horsehair and dust, and the organic smells of linoleum ground through with dirt from the fields and the barn, smells of leather cracked with age, of horse collars and harnesses hanging from pegs against the stone wall. The visual scene was as rich. A couple of bicycles leaned at the end of the bench in casual clutter, an older one supporting the weight of a sporty all-terrain model. By the outer wall, between the shed door and the sauna, a derelict sideboard — with layers of original paint showing through in a medley of blues and greens — held a motley array of old bottles, canisters, and arcane culinary instruments, including a potato peeler and a small glass butter churn. Dusted off and placed on display in a shop on Avenue Road, all this would be worth a small fortune. On the floor was a hooked rug in such disrepair as to be of indeterminate design, yet strangely enough it was clean. There were several pairs of rubber boots and workboots in various stages of decomposition beside a new pair of cross-country Solomon ski boots. In the corner, by the door he had come in, a twenty-two calibre single-shot rifle leaned casually against the wall.
“There’s no bolt in it,” she said.
“What?”
“The gun. I keep the bolt with the cutlery and the bullets by my bed.”
“Why?”
“Strategic disarray — it’s a psychological prop. I would not enjoy shooting someone.”
“Really?”
“Too abrupt. With a bang, everything changes. There’s no time to consider the consequences. Guns are for stupid people, present company excepted. Are you carrying a gun?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Do you hunt?”
“It’s only a twenty-two. For varmints, really.”
“Varmints?”
“Rats, I suppose, but I’ve never even seen a rat — the barn’s been abandoned for years. Come on, let’s get something warm into you. We may be in for some weather tonight so I’ve cooked dinner. I figured we’d eat here.”
Morgan was astonished by the work in progress. The kitchen had been completely done over to create an ambiance that honoured the past while acknowledging the present. Major appliances were new, sheathed in stainless steel, and a pantry wall was staffed with all sorts of food processors and culinary paraphernalia. But the walls were antiqued plaster and the woodwork had been lovingly restored. Wood and plaster were painted in deep colours of the early Victorian era, before garish hues and wallpaper came into vogue. Beyond the kitchen, the central front hall was in a state of suspended endeavour, with a stepladder still in place and tools on the floor.
“Now you see why I admired the handiwork at your Hogg’s Hollow crime scene,” she said, gesturing with a sweep of her arm. “I’m doing this myself. It’s slow-going, but it’s coming along. Looks pretty good, eh?”
He felt a chill as he surveyed her work. Was she taunting him? Why would a person capable of devising horrors with pathological precision now run the risk of exposure, simply to show off her talent in a far more conventional context? Unless that was the point; unless she felt certain she would not be caught, and got a thrill from being under suspicion. A dangerous game, he thought.
Despite her protestations that dinner would be made up from a few odd things lying around, as she hadn’t had the opportunity to get into Meaford to shop, the meal was sumptuous. She had fresh romaine in the fridge and made up a delicate dressing of olive oil, mint, garlic vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, salt, and a grinding of pepper. While she fired up the electric grill and got the vegetables on, she sent Morgan out to retrieve a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino from the sideboard in the summer kitchen, which, while she was in residence, remained above freezing but a little too cold for Brunello, he thought. She asked him to bring in a package of lamb chops from the large chest-freezer in the drive shed. The freezer, Morgan observed, had been recently defrosted and immaculately cleaned. It was almost empty.
During dinner they chatted amiably. He told her about Easter Island and she talked about her project in the nearby Midland area, where she intended to dig in the coming summer if her grant came through. Digging up saints, she explained.
“Seriously, I’m on the trail of the bones of the Jesuit martyrs.”
“I thought they were burned at the stake.”
“Cooked; then the flesh was stripped from their bones. But their bones, Morgan, their bones were strong medicine. The Black Robes died with extreme valour, and so their bones were venerable artifacts for the Hurons who killed them — my theory is that they were treated like holy relics in the Middle Ages. At first I thought bits and pieces might be found among medicine bundles. Now I suspect their bones were gathered together at some point and buried in a sacred place.”