Aloha, Candy Hearts (9 page)

How friendly. I decided to take advantage of the lovely space on what was turning into a warm Sunday morning. I entered the garden and made my way down a stone path. At one end of the yard were two benches. One was occupied by an elderly woman who’d obviously had the same idea I did. But instead of solving a treasure map clue, she was knitting. Very sensible. I sat down on the other bench and smiled at her. She scowled back.

I read the next bit of Walter Angel’s poem.

There it is

What it is

Where it is,

But where is what it is where it wasn’t?

Of all the stanzas, I decided, I hated this one the most. What the heck was this about? I decided that “it” had to be the Marr Residence. Otherwise, why would Margaret send me here? That’s where my brilliant thinking process stalled. A sour feeling of hope-lessness crept up my spine. I thought about how vital it was that I get every one of these clues exactly right. If I made just one mistake, I would be on a wild goose chase that would never end. What if I was wrong about coming to the Marr House in the first place?

What if Margaret was telling me to go to the downtown 7-Eleven rather than here? If that were true, no amount of deciphering

“there it is what it is where it is” was going to help me. I could see why Walter Angel thought he might need help figuring the whole thing out.

I studied the gardens. Day lilies. Dogwoods. Several types of bushes. Lots of grass. Ill-tempered old woman. It reminded me of home when I was a kid. Except the ill-tempered old woman part (most of the time). I’d spent so many looooooong, hot summer afternoons playing outdoors. You couldn’t go anywhere in that farmyard without catching a whiff of Mom’s flowers. Wherever she found a spare patch of fertile dirt, she planted something.

Peonies. Sweet peas. Snapdragons. Wild rose bushes. As summer DD6AA2AB8

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moved on, the fruit trees matured and I’d snack on crabapples and raspberries. There was no mystery why my own backyard looked the way it did. I’d brought some of my childhood memories with me.

As I sat there, appreciating the mini-park, a peculiar thought came to me. Suppose the old gal was grouchy for a reason.

Suppose she’d been sitting on that same bench ever since whoever wrote this poem wrote it, waiting for a treasure hunter like me to come along and ask her to solve the riddle of this stanza.

I smiled again at the woman. She hadn’t taken her eyes off of me ever since I sat down. Amazing, really, how she could knit and be a crotchety vigilante at the same time.

“Excuse me,” I called across to her. “You wouldn’t happen to be waiting for…someone…would you?”

She continued to stare and knit, but uttered not a single word.

I got to thinking maybe she needed some sort of code word or something. “Margaret sent me,” I told her, my voice low and conspiratorial.

The creases in her forehead deepened.

“There it is,” I began, giving her a “y’know what I’m talking about” wink. “What it is.” Dramatic pause. “Where it is.”

The busy hands stopped moving in mid-knit. The woman’s eyes narrowed into slits and her nose began to quiver. Ah hah! I was right!

“But where,” I began meaningfully, “is what it is where it wasn’t?”

She got up and left.

Shit.

I stood and looked around, hoping no one had witnessed the silly and ultimately fruitless exchange. Thankfully, it seemed I was alone.

After a bit of a stretch, I walked around the property some more, waiting for inspiration. Eventually I found myself at the front of the house. There was a bronze plaque next to the front door. What would detectives and treasure hunters do without plaques? I read the first part out loud: “Built in 1884 by the Marr family, the Marr Residence is the oldest building in Saskatoon on DD6AA2AB8

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Anthony Bidulka

its original location and one of the first to be built in the settlement.

During the Rebellion of 1885, the residence served as a field hospital for the Canadian militia.” Interesting, interesting, interes…wait…my brain was clicking now.

There it is…the Marr Residence.

What it is…the oldest building in Saskatoon.

Where it is…on its original location.

But where is what it is…the oldest building in Saskatoon…where it wasn’t?

The poem wanted me to answer the question. The answer was where I needed to go next. That had to be it! Or so I hoped.

I had an idea. According to what I’d just read, the Marr Residence was one of the first to be built…but it wasn’t the first. It was the oldest building in Saskatoon on its original location. Was there a house older than this one still standing in Saskatoon, but not on its original location? That would be what it is where it wasn’t.

Wouldn’t it? My head was hurting.

Fortunately this was a Sunday in August, which, according to a poster in the front door ’s window, meant the Marr House was open today. I pulled open the screen door, turned the knob of the wooden door behind it, and indeed, it was unlocked. I stepped into the porch and just as I reached for the door into the house, it opened, revealing a middle-aged woman with a beaming face.

“Hello,” she greeted me warmly. “I saw you out here. I thought I’d come say hello. Have you been to the Marr Residence before?

Can I answer any questions for you?”

I debated using the code word thing again, but quickly abandoned the idea as passé. Maybe it worked for World War II double agent operatives and the Pink Panther, but it just wasn’t doing anything for me. Maybe one of these days…

“Actually, yes,” I told her. “I see by the sign out front that this house is the oldest in Saskatoon on its original location. I was wondering if you knew whether there is an older house in town that isn’t?” Let’s see how good she is with riddles.

“You mean Trounce House?”

I wanted to hug this woman. “Uh, yeah, I think so. Is that what it is where it wasn’t?” Couldn’t hurt to ask.

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Aloha, Candy Hearts

She gave me a blank look, then, “I don’t know about that, but Trounce House is actually the oldest house in Saskatoon. It was built in 1883, a full year before the Marr house. Wait until you see it. It’s just the cutest, teeniest, weeniest little brown thing. And if you can believe it, the family ran a store out of a lean-to addition, and even rented one of the rooms. And it only had three! Isn’t that something?

“It’s not far from here. Up on Tenth Street just off of Broadway.

You’ll have to go down the back alley to see it, though. They moved it to the back of the property to make room for another bigger house at the front. And that,” she smiled sweetly as she reported, “is why it’s not the oldest house on its original location.”

I thanked the woman profusely, got the address, and headed for Trounce House.

I didn’t get too far. Just as I hit Broadway Avenue, my cellphone rang. It was my home security company. Someone was trying to break into my house.

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Barking is not a means of communication favoured by Barbra and Brutus. They much prefer pointed looks or wet noses in delicate places. Barking is meant to call attention to something irregular. So when I screeched to a halt in front of my house and heard them, I knew my dogs were not pleased.

I hopped out of the car and was almost run over by a speeding vehicle.

White truck. Ford F-150.

Holy moly! The same damn vehicle I’d almost been flattened by the night before! What the hell? How had he found me? Then again, I knew he had my name and number. It didn’t take a profes-sor to look up my address in the phone book.

I could hear my house alarm blaring in competition with increasingly agitated howling and growling. I wanted to go after the white truck, but the screaming alarm won out over the mysterious vehicle. This time.

I bolted up the pathway to my front door. The alarm was mak-DD6AA2AB84

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ing a ghostly whooping loud enough to wake Dracula from a day-time nap. Upon any activation of the alarm, my home security company was instructed to first contact me. If that failed, they were to call Sereena. If they couldn’t reach Sereena, it was time to dispatch the boys in blue. Fortunately, I’d been available to take their call and, because I was only a few minutes away from home, asked them to hold off on alerting the police until I had had time to check things out.

I unlocked the front door and Barbra and Brutus bulldozed into me like Dalmatians fleeing Cruella De Vil. After a few reassur-ing words and head pats, I raced into my house, disabled the alarm, and did a quick inventory of each room. My last stop was the kitchen. And there it was. One of the windows in the nook area had a large crack in it.

Zipping out the back door, I found a shattered clay pot on the deck below the window. The crack, and ensuing alarm, hadn’t been caused by an unfortunate bird collision. This was no accident.

Someone had tried to get into my house. Fortunately the glass had held, but the impact caused the alarms to go off and scare away the would-be intruder.

I could see how he or she would choose the back side of the house for the break in. My backyard is extremely private, with no easy sightlines from outside the property. Even so, it was a pretty ballsy move in broad daylight. That being said, I was pretty sure that whoever did this was not an experienced burglar. Tossing a clay pot against a window? Come on.

Back in the house, I further placated the dogs with a couple of their favourite treats. They appeared satisfied, and after wolfing down the bits of faux bacon, insisted on being let out into the backyard to carry out their own investigations of the distressing incident. Grabbing the cordless phone from the kitchen, I followed them out and settled on a chair around the patio table. I called the alarm company to confirm everything was all right, then left a message with a window company (it was Sunday) about replacing the glass. When I set the handset back on its cradle, I noticed the indicator light was furiously blinking. Again. I didn’t need to check the calls. I could pretty much make a good guess who they DD6AA2AB8

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were from. Instead, I called Darren Kirsch. Sunday or not, I knew he’d be in the office working on his juicy new murder case.

At first he actually scoffed when I told him I wanted to report a break-in. He took me more seriously when I added that I had some information on Walter Angel he might be interested in. With some persuasion, he finally agreed to meet me for lunch. I used (cringingly) one of my mother ’s favourite lines: You have to eat anyway.

It’s an odd sight indeed. At the corner of 21st Street and Spadina Crescent, downtown Saskatoon, right across from the Bessborough Hotel, is a bright red, double-decker bus. It never moves. It just sits there, looking like something from EastEnders. Come the first warm day of spring, one side flips open and, voila, it becomes a wildly popular hotdog stand until the first flake of snow flies in the fall.

Kirsch and I each ordered a Riverbank dog loaded with good stuff like hot chili peppers, sauerkraut, and spicy salsa. While we waited for our order, I tried my hand at small talk, and Kirsch tried his hand at grunting and scratching his butt. He was wearing a pair of what I think of as Texas Ranger sunglasses, with reflective surfaces he could see out of, but no one could see in. I knew that as a cop, it was sometimes preferable that bad guys and/or suspects not catch a glimpse of whatever might be going on in your eyes—anger, doubt, maybe fear. But come on, this was lunch with me.

Once the food and cold drinks arrived, we took our bounty across the street into Kiwanis Park. We found an empty bench fac-ing the South Saskatchewan River and started chewing and sipping.

Seeing as I was the one to call this meeting, I knew I’d have to start the dialogue. Otherwise I wouldn’t put it past the burly cop to finish his meal and walk off without uttering a single word.

“Have you made any progress on Angel’s murder?” I asked with what I thought was respectful politeness.

“None of your business. Next.”

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Aloha, Candy Hearts

With few people do I have as short a fuse as with Darren Kirsch. And now he’d pissed me off. “You know,” I said with mock sincerity, “I really love it how our relationship has progressed over the years and blossomed into something I’ve really come to cher-ish. I hope you feel the same.”

Darren gave me his snarly-Elvis-lip-curl.

I mimicked it back.

Hotdog halfway between lap and mouth, he stared at me for a count of two. His jaw was tight, his lips tighter. And then, he couldn’t help himself, his face broke. He grinned. And that was it.

That smile was exactly why I even bothered to keep up a relationship with the big lug. Every so often, the broomstick wedged in his ass at birth dislodged just enough to reveal a real person with a decent sense of humour. Well, that and the fact that as a private dick it helped to have a contact in the local police department. And none of the other cops returned my calls.

If I let him be, Constable Darren Kirsch would likely slip into comfortable homophobia like many men of his background, position, and mentality. But I wasn’t about to let that happen. I’d been muscling my way into his life ever since we first met at the police academy several years back, and I wasn’t giving up anytime soon.

I think he finally got that, and, for the most part, had given up trying to resist with any real force. He didn’t know it yet, but I’d won.