LITMIR.BIZ

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in on the strategy session. I know how good you are at keeping secrets from the authorities.”

      “Thanks a lot, Susan,” I said. I guessed she was referring to my relationship with one of Laingford’s policemen, Mark Becker. A couple of times in the past, I’d been involved in some messy situations that had required police investigation. It seemed I was always saying the wrong thing to the cops, which usually led to them arresting the wrong person. “You’re not planning to do anything illegal, are you?”

      “Never you mind,” Susan said and drained her Kuskawa Cream Ale, depositing the empty bottle on the table with a decisive thunk. “Just be there tonight, if you please.” She stood up to leave, brushing peanut shells off her green work pants. “Your puppy has just defecated under the table,” she said.

      “Oh, Rosie!” I said, picking up Rosencrantz and carrying her to the door. Rosie was a three-month-old yellow lab who had experienced a certain amount of stress in her first few weeks on the planet. I’d inherited her from a screwed-up actress at the end of an ill-fated puppet show I’d been working on in May. Her mistress had treated her like a human baby, carrying her everywhere wrapped in blankets. No attempt had been made to housetrain her, and she was still unclear on the concept. My other dog, Lug-nut, was doing his best to be a mentor, but he wasn’t exactly police-dog material either.

      “I don’t know what on earth induced you to take in that creature,” Susan said, as I carried Rosie to the poop-place next to the composter.

      “Compassion, Susan. Your feeding her all those peanuts probably didn’t help.”

      “Nonsense. It’s fibre. Very good for dogs.”

      “Precisely my point,” I said. Lug-nut, seizing the opportunity to provide a little canine instruction to his young housemate, watered a nearby fern, and Rosie followed suit. I administered lavish praise.

      “You can bring them too, if you come,” Susan said.

      “Since when did I need your permission to bring my dogs to George’s house?” I snapped. Susan had recently moved in with George Hoito, my farmer-landlord and good friend and, incidentally, her lover. She and her teenaged ward, Eddie Schreier, had kind of taken over his life, and I resented it.

      “Touchy, touchy,” Susan said. “See you at eight.” She set off down the path through the woods to George’s place. I watched her go, inwardly fuming. Susan had brought me up after my parents died in a car accident. We were very fond of one another, really, but this new domestic proximity wasn’t working very well.

      Before Susan and Eddie had moved in, I was the official farm hand, helping to take care of George’s herd of dairy goats, milking them, assisting at births and doing chores around the farm. Now my position had been usurped. Eddie did most of the chores I used to do, and Susan was filling George’s head with all sorts of newfangled ideas. She’d bought him a computer and was setting up a bunch of goat-husbandry programs. I knew that automatic milkers weren’t very far away, and I wanted no part of it.

      I’m a puppet maker by trade and don’t make much money at it. The arrangement, pre-Susan, had been that I did the chores in lieu of rent. Now that my job had effectively been taken over by Eddie (who is seventeen and as strong as a horse), I felt I had to pay George something for the privilege of living in his homestead cabin. The log cabin, set on a hill overlooking the farm, is primitive, with no running water (there’s a hand pump at the well), no hydro and no plumbing (outhouses are very low-maintenance). It’s heated by a small wood stove, and it’s perfect for someone like me, a slob who needs a lot of space. George had so far refused payment, but I didn’t think he’d refuse forever. Milking machinery is expensive, and I knew perfectly well that Susan thought I shouldn’t be living there for free. She was the one who had arranged for me to move into the cabin in the first place, four years ago, when I had been suffering from a bad case of city burn-out. It was supposed to be temporary, until I could find an apartment in town, but frankly, I had never bothered to look. George’s place was my dream home. Perhaps Susan still believed I would one day return to the Big Smoke. It was decidedly awkward.

      Now she was holding subversive political meetings in George’s old farmhouse in the valley and was planning some sort of revolutionary tactic that would probably get her into trouble.

      When I’d taken the Kountry Pantree job, I had thought it would signal a new, calmer period in my life. In the previous year, I’d been involved in, well, a couple of murders. That’s how I’d met Becker, the cop Susan thought I couldn’t keep secrets from. We’d had a sort of on-again, off-again flirtation going, and after the last mess in May (involving the theatre company I was working for) we had both worked hard to repair the damage. Now it was late July, and we were actually “seeing each other”, as the saying goes.

      Trust Susan to wreck it. She’d never liked Becker, and I could just imagine the triumphant look she’d give me as he was forced to haul her away from some sit-in protest in the Kountry Pantree parking lot.

      “Stay, Rosie, Luggy,” I said, using the hand-signal I’d learned from reading Your Perfect Puppy. I wanted to go clean up Rosencrantz’s poop, and the book said you’re not supposed to let them see you do it, or they’ll treat you as a housemaid. The dogs stared at me for a moment, then bounded up the stairs ahead of me. By the time I’d gathered up paper towels, disinfectant and a spatula, the poop was gone and Luggy was licking his lips.

      Fighting nausea, I went back to the drawing board.

       Two

       Everything is at steak! At Kountry Pantree, our meat’s the freshest in town. Let our experts help make your family barbecue sizzle! This coupon entitles you to three free steaks!

      —A flyer distributed with every new gas barbecue at the Laingford Canadian Tire

      In the District of Kuskawa, true summer is a fleeting thing. Most of June’s a write-off, because the blackflies and mosquitoes gather in thick clouds that block the sun and drive all but the insane indoors. Before you know it, you’re in the last week of August, and you can see your breath in the mornings again. Blammo, it’s fall. The trees put on a spectacular show of colour, delighting the tourists and reminding the locals that there’s another nine-month winter just around the corner.

      July had been unusually hot and sunny—the kind of picture postcard weather that people around here regard with deep suspicion.

      “Another gorgeous day,” we whispered to each other, as if saying it too loudly might make it disappear. Day after day the sun rose unencumbered, magnificent in an azure sky. We trod the baking pavement in a daze, dodging the crowds. Summer visitors swarmed over everything, thick as ants on a dropped ice cream. Downtown traffic was solid from eleven in the morning until dusk, and local retailers developed goofy, banner-year grins.

      The Laingford Library was an oasis in all this. Tourists tend to purchase their reading matter from bookstores and checkout displays, believing perhaps that using the library in a strange town is as unthinkable as using a stranger’s toothbrush.

      “Nice and quiet in here today,” I said to Evan Price, the head librarian, a gaunt, melancholy man with thoughtful hair who ruled his territory with the threat of incipient tears.

      “Quiet for now,” Evan said. His voice sounded as if it were coming from some distance away, down a long tube. “We’ve got a children’s entertainer coming in at four to do a concert in the boardroom. Audience participation. Lots of hand-clapping and shrieking. It’ll be chaos in here in about half an hour.”

      “Awful for you,” I said. “I won’t stay long, then.” I was headed for the children’s area, where I was hoping to find some good source material for my drawings.

      My preliminary sketches for the Kountry Pantree mascot were expected on Saturday, when the PR committee would discuss them and choose one. They wanted me to come up with a couple of different designs based on the ideas thrown around at the first meeting, a brainstorming session where its members had tossed suggestions at

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