Dan Sharp Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jeffrey Round

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СКАЧАТЬ to one in time as well, cut off, isolated, and dwindling slowly to nothing. On Mayne Island he’d felt a sense of community. Here they were lost in the landscape and wanted nothing so much as to stay lost.

      He was at the dirt road leading to Magnus Ferguson’s trailer in less than half an hour. From a distance he saw the tall white-haired scarecrow tugging at the earth with a hoe. For a second, it seemed as though he were looking at a badly aged version of Craig Killingworth. He thought he’d found the missing man. A whole scenario flashed through his mind, how Killingworth had simply disappeared to escape his past and ended up in the woods of B.C., aged but alive, and mostly nuts.

      Magnus leaned the hoe up against the trailer and came over to meet him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, the way the Natives must have regarded the first white men to land on their shores right before it all went wrong for them.

      They walked slowly around the trailer as Dan described his search for Craig Killingworth and the events that had led him to contact Magnus. As they walked, Magnus appeared to be taking inventory of what he’d left behind on this plot of land as much as the measure of Dan’s intentions.

      Dan tried to look interested when Magnus pointed out the stubby basil and flat-leafed parsley. “They don’t thrive here — not enough light except in the morning. Then the deer eat the leaves down to the stems.”

      Crows hung and dipped their heads in the rust-flecked fronds of Western Redcedar waving overhead. “You must enjoy the solitude out here,” Dan said.

      Magnus scratched his chin. “Tell you the truth, most days I hate it. It’s a lonely life. Blacker than black. People always romanticize places like this. You’re still stuck with your own company, whether you like it or not.”

      He turned away and looked into the forest as though searching for a sign, some encouragement that what he’d endured hadn’t been in vain, or maybe just wanting a reason to go on. When he turned back, his face was set. “All right — I guess I trust your motives. Ask me what you want to know.”

      Dan nodded. “When we spoke on the phone, you said you had proof that Craig Killingworth was dead.”

      “I do.”

      “I was hoping you could show it to me.”

      Magnus waved him around to the front of the yard. He walked up to the steps of the trailer and pulled the door open.

      Inside was a world in decline. Everywhere were signs of hopelessness: cramped quarters that bulged with household goods, piles of discarded clothing, boxes making an obstacle run of the trailer’s length. The interior had been turned into a museum, a monument to lost time. There was more than a hint of mould in the air. Papers languished on shelves, letters whose corners had been nibbled by mice thieving for their nests, with droppings left on the counters and on the unwashed vinyl floor curling at the edges. It was a catalogue of despair, a last refuge of broken dreams.

      Dan watched Magnus insert his hand into a pile of papers and turn something over. A bundle of letters teetered and splashed to the floor. Magnus looked down at them with contempt, scratching through the refuse flattened into piles on the shelves. For a moment, Dan was afraid he’d come all this way to interview a crazy person who just wanted a little company.

      “Here — look at this.” Magnus handed him a photograph. Dan was expecting a picture of Craig Killingworth, but the attractive young man standing in a rose garden was a complete stranger. Dan stared at it, hoping to glean its significance.

      “Hard to believe that’s me, isn’t it?” Magnus said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I used to be very good looking. Turned a few heads in my day. Forty years of smoking will do it to you. I quit the day I got my death sentence.” Dan looked up from the photograph to the emaciated skull regarding him. Magnus nodded. “Terminal lung cancer. Well, here I am five years later with everyone telling me how lucky I am to be alive. ‘What’s so lucky about it?’ I ask them. ‘I haven’t had a cigarette in five years.’”

      His fingers went on scratching through the piles. He plucked out a page and stopped to read it, the contents unknowable from his expression. It could have been a laundry list or a love letter, an unpaid bill or an obituary. His hands shook with the weight of all those years of missing cigarettes. A tremendous burden.

      From out of the mire he lifted another picture, this one of two young men. Dan recognized a slightly older Magnus standing beside Craig Killingworth at roughly the age he’d appeared in the missing person report. But this was a transformed Craig Killingworth, smiling broadly and looking for once as though he knew how to enjoy life rather than just endure it. He seemed alive and vibrant. Dan thought of the hushed light falling in the Adolphustown sitting room.

      Magnus’s rasp intruded on his thoughts. “That’s Craig.”

      “Where was this taken?”

      He filched the photograph out of Dan’s hands and squinted, though he seemed to be focusing his memory more than his eyes. “Picton Town Fair sometime in June — maybe ’84 or ’85.”

      Dan looked up. “Do you recall the last time you saw him?”

      Magnus screwed up his face, summoning the recall. “Yes, I do. Twenty years ago this coming November first. That was the day I left Prince Edward County. I never saw him again.”

      It jived with the police reports, Dan noted. “Did you expect to?”

      Magnus turned a sorrowful gaze on him. “Son, I expected to hear from him every day for ten, maybe fifteen years. On a bad day, I still do.”

      “Why is that, if I may ask?”

      A spasm of emotion charged Magnus’s face. “That’s the day we were supposed to leave together.” He looked at Dan. “Me and Craig …”

      For a moment, nothing registered. Then suddenly the piece fell into place. “You were … together?”

      Magnus nodded. His eyes misted over, his voice came out a croak. “We had it planned. I couldn’t believe when he didn’t go through with it.” He sniffled. “It was Craig’s idea. He wanted us to be together, but because of his family we had to go far away. It’s why we planned to come out here. So that’s why I wondered, when you said his name on the phone, if you had some news of him.…”

      Dan leaned against the counter. Somewhere far away a dog howled. Twenty years ago a man had planned his escape, chosen his companion for another chance at life, and disappeared. An hour ago Dan had had no clue what had been going on in Craig Killingworth’s mind. Now here was the answer, but he was still no closer to knowing what had happened to him.

      “Did you ever try to get in touch with him again?”

      Magnus shook his head softly. “No.”

      “Why not?”

      “At first I just assumed he’d either ditched me or decided not to leave his family. He was awfully keen on his boys. It was harder back then to make such life-altering decisions. It’s easier today. Kids nowadays know what they want and go out and get it. Will and Grace and all that.”

      Easier for some, maybe, but not all. Dan thought of Richard Philips, newly christened Lester Higgins.

      “Back then if you were gay, you constructed a family life on top of what you were inside and prayed СКАЧАТЬ