Balsam Sirens Read online

  Andrea’s raised eyebrow was far more eloquent than any question.

  “A lot of windows and window frames need replacing, there are electrical problems throughout some of the cottages, all the cottage roofs need to be checked, parts of floors in at least four of the cottages need replacing, and there are a hundred and one cosmetic improvements crying out to be done. Requests to use the church for weddings have doubled over the past three years, and parts of the inside are starting to look sad. Plus, the sprinkler systems in the church and administration building need upgrading or we’re going to be hit by higher insurance premiums.”

  As I stumbled through this laundry list, Andrea fixed me in an expressionless gaze.

  “We’re not seeing a lot of net cash flow from Largs as it is”, she said, by way of a caution. “If we’re not careful, we’ll be sliding into the red.”

  “True”, I agreed, “but we’ll be in the red anyway if we don’t stay on top of things. And there’s the potential to go solidly into the black if we tackle the problem systematically in a long-term plan.”

  Andrea stirred under the sheet, signalling her rising impatience at not seeing clearly what point I was making.

  “And who’s going to do all this work?” she asked neutrally.

  Here it was. Time to place my bet, put everything into the pot, up the ante.

  “You are”, I said, as calmly as possible.

  She was up on one elbow in a flash.

  Short digression here.

  I’m probably a fairly normal, well-educated male. I like discussion. I respond to intelligent people. Informed individuals, both women and men, turn me on mentally. Because of my background, growing up in what I still consider a perfect idyllic environment, living in a village that was constructed having substance and durability in mind, and most of all having had my own private Beatrice to guide me (my Beatrice being Balsam Lake), I tend not to be attracted to, or impressed by, ephemera.

  But …

  Then there’s that flighty part of masculinity. I have blind spots that shift unexpectedly and suddenly occlude whole areas of rational awareness. It was getting to know Andrea that made me conscious of my hormonal existence, and this upset my prior simplistic view of myself considerably. Realizing at last, in an honest, visceral way, that I am subject to random bursts of testosterone that can take me from lofty mountaintop contemplation to roiling in a fetid swamp, all in five seconds flat, was, well, revealing. Hearing the words “you can be difficult to get along with” took some time to square with myself.

  As I regarded Andrea now, resting in challenge on one elbow, I could see all the things that were so attractive about this person who is my soul mate but definitely her own woman: the open expression that revealed a clear, compassionate mind, the inquiring, ever-curious air that had helped lead us sometimes into long, sharply focused but labyrinthine discussions, sometimes into short, sharp-edged debates, and often into paroxysms of laughter, the sandy hair, cut to a plain mid-length that framed her oval, light olive face, the almond-shaped grey-blue eyes that were portals into an active intelligence, the firm but relaxed mouth that was never far from breaking into a range of smiles, the …

  But I was also keenly aware of all the aspects of her body: the bewitching sweep from shoulders to waist, the slender perfectly formed hips, the smallish breasts that were so inviting precisely because they were in such sweet proportion to the rest of the …

  “Me?”

  I couldn’t read her expression, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anger. More surprise than anything, but beyond that her expression was opaque.

  “Me? Did I just hear you right?”

  “Yes. It’s time I made my admission, Andrea. I’m good at conceptual stuff – planning, seeing what needs to be done and in what order. But I’m no good at all with my hands. Whenever I try to drive a nail, it bends over like someone about to be decapitated, and the board ends up being a case of terminal battery. On the other hand, you’re a natural with your hands, and I know you like doing that kind of work.”

  “Where is all this coming from?” she asked, but from her expression I thought she had a good idea.

  “This is my take on what the marriage counsellor said. She told us we had no real problems, but that we should, you know, think about some adjustments.”

  “Adjustments.”

  “Yeah. Both of us move to our strengths.”

  “Odd. I didn’t hear her say that.”

  Ignoring that comment, I was about to plunge on, but she got there first.

  “So, I’m going to be doing everything now, is that it?” Once again, more a question of curiosity, surprise, and confusion at not seeing something coming, but no real hint of rising anger.

  We had now reached the second breakpoint, and it was time to play my ace. Not without danger, I thought, and offering a little prayer to St. William, patron saint of stone cottages, I let go my handholds on our better-than-average marriage and dropped into what could end up being relationship free fall.

  “No. We just need to reorganize who does what. And it’s me who needs to take on a lot of the domestic stuff, particularly meals and cooking.” All I could do now was wait for the shotgun blast that would take my head off.

  “So, you think I can’t cook, is that it?” This surprisingly mild rejoinder bolstered my courage a little.

  “No. You’re a good cook, but so am I. And I love cooking. And I’ve had the feeling for some time that I’m not pulling my weight in this household.”

  She fell back onto the bed, folding her arms across her chest in an adult pout. We lay there, looking at the ceiling, my thoughts becoming darker, wondering whether I had miscued the whole thing, wondering if this entire initiative was going to crash and burn. I had worked out in my head what a reasonable readjustment would look like, and it seemed fine to me. So I thought. But, as I knew from experience, brilliant nighttime flashes of insight, when exposed to the cruel sunlight of midday, can turn out to be just watery redundancies or hazy mental confusions that don’t even pass the laugh test. Maybe I had tried to go too far on my own in search of the ultimate marital mantra. Maybe we should both start from square one. Maybe I was just digging a misadventurous hole …

  My jumble of looming cumulonimbus thoughts was interrupted as Andrea suddenly rolled over on top of me.

  “So that’s the way it is, is it?” she said in challenge. “You could have given me some warning. What do we do now?” The question was half complaint, half inquiry.

  “You mean right now, or …”

  A hand started doing things to me.

  “What we do right now should be pretty obvious, even to someone as poor at taking hints as you. What about later on?”

  “Later on. Well …”

  The hand was seriously at work now, and it was becoming difficult to think straight.

  “I phthink tongorrrow we ngake song lists ang theng go out ang guy song tools”, my pronunciation being warped in that predictable way when one’s lower lip is caught between a set of teeth.

  “Tools?” she asked impishly.

  “Tools.”

  “Big tools?”

  It was about then that the primal night took over once more.

  Five

  When I awoke next morning, the sky was full of light, and the air resounded to those avian declarations generally referred to as “songs” but which are actually open challenges, naked threats, and war cries. Andrea usually worked for an hour or two at home before going to the office where she and her two partners run their business. But it was still only a little before six thirty, and she was sleeping soundly, so I climbed carefully out of bed, grabbed my watch from the night table, my shoes from the floor, and some clean clothes from my closet, and I headed off to the shower. Our condo is in one of the old warehouses in the east end of old town Toronto. It was rescued from oblivion and converted to residential use about five years ago and was ahead of the curve in refusing to label the units “lofts”, despite the w
onderful fourteen-foot ceilings. Andrea convinced the developer to let her do all the interior design for our unit, and she did such a fantastic job that even at the initial drawings and artist impression stage, the developer wanted to use our unit as the basis for their advertising and sales literature. We accepted, for a small fee, of course, and it was that fee that allowed us to install the pool at Largs.

  I knew that by the time Andrea came down to our breakfast corner, I would need to have ready the details from last night on our proposed new division of labour, so over coffee and a freshly buttered kaiser roll, I set to work. By eight o’clock, I had a list of ten large tasks broken down into subtasks. I had made a list of the supplies and tools needed to finish those subtasks, highlighting the tools we didn’t already have at Largs. It wasn’t a huge list, although three of the items on it were bulky, and there were a few vanity items. I had printed off about fifteen pages from the Lee Valley Tools website, circled the items needed, and swallowed a bit at the $7000+ total. A first rough schedule for my ten tasks would stretch over more than two years, and the equipment needed could be purchased over that time. These calculations and small pile of figures would be enough to pinch off any snap accusations that I was shooting from the DIY hip.

  I could hear Andrea surfacing, and before she began her descent to the breakfast area, I had tucked my little pile of notes and calculations into a drawer, was deep into the morning paper, a typical male who, in the grip of a late-night testosterone inflammation, had made sweeping promises and commitments, and then almost immediately forgotten about them.

  “Ahh!” I said in greeting, folding closed the paper. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please”, Andrea said, as she went to the fridge for a yogurt. Returning and sitting in front of the cup of coffee I had just set down at her place, she pulled the plastic lid off the small yogurt container, took a spoonful, and smiled across at me.

  “Any further thoughts on what we discussed last night?”

  “What?” I said, looking up and playing dumb.

  “Tools.”

  “Oh! That!”

  Without saying anything in reply, Andrea rose, found a small roll and some butter, and returned to the table. Looking down at the notes and calculations that had materialized beside her placemat, she frowned, then smiled slowly and looked up.

  “So! You really are serious!”

  “We can go through that list of tasks today, take a look at the buildings tomorrow when we’re at Largs, and you can decide which one of them we should tackle first. Then I suggest we work out a detailed plan for that task, do a tabletop walkthrough to check that we haven’t missed anything important, and then make a final list of all the tools and fittings we’ll need right away. Before we head off to Lee Valley …”

  “Hang on!” she said, holding up one hand. “This is all going a bit fast.”

  “Okay. We can slow it down.”

  “Not just that. I want to think about it.”

  “You can’t think in a vacuum, Andrea. We need to pick something concrete, get our heads around it, try to see how we would do it, then we think about it. Really. We need to look at something specific at Largs.”

  “And if I decide it’s not for me, not something I really want to do?”

  “Then we find another way.” We looked at each other for a few seconds. “We spent the time and effort sitting with that marriage counsellor”, I began, breaking a lengthening silence. “She was very positive, and she did suggest a way forward. I’m all in favour of just trying something. If it doesn’t work, or we don’t like it, well, then we try something else.”

  The particular pattern of wrinkles on Andrea’s brow was easy enough for me to read, although from experience I knew not to make it too obvious that I could tell what she was thinking.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know very well ‘what’!”

  “Okay. This is new for me too. I’m not entirely comfortable with it. I’m not certain that it will work. But I’m not prepared just to do nothing. Maybe what I’ve suggested isn’t that good. Maybe there’s a better way. If so, let’s find it.”

  Her continued hesitation was a good sign, since she is strong-willed enough just to say “No dice” to something that she is sure isn’t right or won’t work.

  “On the other hand”, I chirped happily, after a silence had stretched out between us, “we could just default to what we do best and go back to bed”.

  The spoonful of yogurt splatted across my face, but Andrea’s smirk robbed it of any offence.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I put up with you.”

  “Ah! It’s just the celestial music we make together.”

  Andrea’s expression cleared, then she rose, got a piece of paper towel, and carefully cleaned the yogurt off my face. “Okay, hunk. Let’s go.”

  “Back to bed?”

  “No, you twit. We both need, or at least one of us needs, to go to work. But I know that I’ll be thinking about Largs all day now.”

  I knew that my attention would be drawn likewise, but the small smile on Andrea’s lips as she left the condo told me that feeling compelled to think about Largs would be no hardship.

  In the background, George and his brother and the “case” surged once more, demanding my time and attention.

  Six

  There isn’t any place I would call my office, except for our condo. That’s where my filing system is, an important component to be sure, but for me to be able to work, the essentials are just a cellphone, a laptop, a notebook, a pen, and, some way down the list, a car. I had established an early rule that people connected to jobs I’m working on don’t get invited to our condo. There is such a thing as mental contagion, and I don’t want any of it in our home. It’s not that I feel I’m susceptible to any particularly jaundiced view of the world, quite the contrary, but my work now, and previously in the police force, necessarily exposed me to the darker sides of our society. At the worst of times, almost all the people I come across seem to be from the “dark side”, dark not only in the sense of being constitutionally ill-equipped misfits, luckless, or feckless, but also unsavoury, dangerous, even satanic. I don’t work for the worst of these people, but they infect the lives of my clients, and the contagion can spread easily.

  In the population at large, the fraction of people who are actively dark, the psychopaths, is small, just a few percent, and the majority of people seem able to field the right elements of temperament and motivation that allow them to find a path through life leading to some form of contentment. But everybody has a dark side, and under the right conditions that dark side can show its face. I guess my ongoing concern is that if I spend too much time exposed to those on, or tainted by, the dark side, and have no safe refuge from all that, such as our condo, the bright backlit face of the world that I’m always ready to perceive, the goodness, the wholesomeness, the real joy in life, could fade and die for me.

  As I cleared up the breakfast things, I roamed vaguely through my own life path to date: studying science at university, deciding I’d had enough of that by the time I had achieved a first degree, spending an appalling and excruciatingly boring year being a desk jockey at a chemical company, having a sudden enthusiasm for police work, being a beat cop and finding that I enjoyed it most of the time, moving up through the ranks quickly, being turned off by the internal politics, spending a year at Largs to regroup and to work on my property inheritance, meeting Andrea one night at a lakeside restaurant, being married, and then hanging out my own private investigator’s shingle. It all seemed a bit like a random walk when looked at from a distance, but as each change in direction occurred, that change seemed obvious, intelligent, and judicious. That was my sun-drenched happy-face self-image.

  I had worried about Largs for more than two decades, and I had struggled for more than ten years to bring the properties I owned there to a higher level of maintenance, appeal, profitability, and long-term viability. We were getting there, but the threat of some horr
or surging out of the murk and tipping us over into serious debt was never far away. Just selling up and being free of it was always a possibility, but even the thought of doing that was like putting my own arm on the chopping block. The place had a much-too-powerful grip on me. It was my refuge, my paradise, my own little continuously reappearing Brigadoon. Largs had been one of the few bright linings in what I came later to understand had been my mother’s otherwise generally unhappy life. So I had complex feelings for the place: visceral connection, responsibility, love. But, really, when I came right down to it, Largs reflected, and it has always felt right that it should reflect, my basic optimism, and Largs was always where I went to recharge that particular wellspring.

  Having thus dithered and procrastinated, not being able just to sit down and enjoy a Wednesday off, I slid into what turned out to be a partial working day at low revs on the terrace. My first call was to George. The end result, the kernel of intelligence, garnered from four minutes of pauses, hesitations, and backtracking, was that no further information had come to him from the police. I told him I would keep in touch.

  Bent Cromarty was less than ecstatic to receive my next call, but I did eventually manage to extract a promise from him that he would keep me up to date every two days or so, along with an acknowledgement that I was acting on behalf of George and that information on the case should be shared with me. Extracting blood from a stone fell well short as an accurate characterization of that discussion.

  Apart from my work on George’s case, my intention was to stick to my plan and take the week off. That message certainly hadn’t reached my telephone, which seemed to ring every fifteen minutes. In the end, three people said they would call me back in a few weeks, and I committed myself to three more jobs, but none of them would start for two weeks.

  I had two books on the go, but somehow reading didn’t seem to be the cure for what ailed me, and I couldn’t raise the interest to open either of them. Watering the plants on the terrace seemed like a good idea, and that took five minutes. Breezes lifted the leaves of the large trumpet plants that Andrea likes and brought the occasional scent from the herb garden to me. The watering finished, and being out on the terrace, it was natural just to collapse into a reclining chair. More breezes puffed into the terrace, and I slid down into the chair, put on my sunglasses, and enjoyed the morning. Lying there, behind my shades, was so reminiscent of the house at Largs, the trees that stand all around whispering bons mots, the lake resting happily in one of its surreal dreams, and the pool we had installed there. It’s a small pool for relaxing only, not large enough to do any swimming. We have the lake for that. But the pool is special, not least because of the features Jimmy had added.