She wasn’t sure what kind of privacy or protection Alexandra thought she was preserving. There was no visitor’s center-birder privilege. There was no reason for her to withhold records of interaction with the public, or video that had been taken in the past few days.

  There was no reason to hold anything back. No reason any employee or volunteer would have to be worried about a police investigation unless there actually had been a murder and they had been involved.

  And she didn’t think that the woman on the other end of the phone had actually murdered someone in the park. If she had been planning on such a thing, she would surely have done it outside of the park, somewhere that would not point a bright red finger back at her.

  “Do you need me to repeat everything back?” Margie asked as Alexandra continued to mumble what she was writing down.

  “Video surveillance,” Alexandra said slowly. “All kinds. Anything strange that has happened?”

  “Yes. Have there been any disturbances? Strange calls? People trying to break into the visitor’s center? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No, I can’t think of anything. Not lately.”

  “Okay. What about wildlife? Have you had any problems with beavers, or bears, deer, anything? Animals behaving strangely? Park visitors harassing the wildlife? Feeding them?” Margie thought back to the death at Nose Hill Park. She was sure she wasn’t looking at another case like that, but it gave her pause. Bad things could happen when people fed wild animals or tried to get too close to them. Even deer could be dangerous under the right circumstances.

  “No, nothing has happened.” Margie could practically hear Alexandra’s shrug over the line. “People come to the sanctuary… walk around one of the loops… take a few pictures… and then they go home. That’s all. Nothing… shocking or worrisome. It’s a very quiet place.”

  “You never have to tell people not to feed the animals? You never have anyone complain that an animal got too close to them?”

  “Usually, people are trying to get too close to the animals,” Alexandra dismissed. “They want to zoom in so it looks like they were right there. They want to be able to hold the birds, pet the deer, things like that. But of course they aren’t allowed. The animals don’t attack or get aggressive. They just move farther away. There might be the occasional instance where someone gets pecked by a goose or another bird protecting its eggs or fledglings, but certainly no one has ever been injured in a case like that. Just startled.”

  “So birds, occasionally, but that’s all you can think of.”

  “Yes. And not something dangerous,” Alexandra reiterated. “And never anything from the beavers.”

  “You have a good-sized colony there? How many do you think you have in the park?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve never done any kind of a count. Sometimes you’ll see two together, but usually, you only ever see one, and we don’t know how many others are in the lodge or working in another area.”

  “Never tagged them?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What else?” Margie mused, looking down at the list she had written before calling the Visitor’s Center.

  “You said that you wanted to know if I knew the victim. But I don’t really know anyone around here—just the staff. Visitors come and go, and we don’t get to know them very well. People who are regulars don’t usually come through the visitor’s center. They just go around and straight into the park.”

  “You don’t know a man named Tristan Elliott?” Margie asked. She picked up her phone and launched the photo app to find the picture she had of Tristan to text to Alexandra.

  “Tristan.” There was clear recognition in her voice.

  “Yes,” Margie confirmed. “I’m sorry, ma’am, if you knew him… but he is deceased.”

  “Well… of course everyone around here knew Tristan. He was here more than most of the staff. Always helping people out, telling them about the plants and animals in the park. He knew every inch of this place.”

  “I heard that he walked there often.”

  “You would have thought he owned it,” she said with a sad little laugh. “He was so proud of it. Just loved to spend time over here.”

  “So you would be surprised to hear that he’d had any trouble. With wildlife or anything else.”

  “Yes. He was very knowledgeable. I can’t imagine him having any problems.”

  “I need you to help me find out what happened to him,” Margie coaxed. “Any surveillance video that you can find. Anything you can remember about Tristan or anything you discussed in the last week or two? We really want to find out what happened to him.”

  There was dead air for a moment. There was no reply from the receptionist; she didn’t know at first if they had been disconnected. Then she could hear muffled voices.

  It was Tristan.

  Tristan?

  It was Tristan who was killed!

  There were louder exclamations from whoever was there with her. It would seem that everyone knew Tristan.

  Eventually, Alexandra apparently decided she had neglected her caller long enough and removed her muffling hand from the phone receiver.

  “I’m sorry. I was just telling the others. This is really awful. I never would have expected anything to happen to Tristan. He was a fixture! He was always here. Looking out the window now, I expect to see him walking down the pathway.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. But if there’s anyone there who can help us with this, tell us about any conversations they might have had with Tristan lately. And… whether he seemed different at all. Any mood or behavioral changes, problems you were aware of with his… domestic partner. Anything at all.”

  “I’m sure we’ll all try,” Alexandra agreed. “But I can’t think of anything. He always seemed happy enough. I don’t imagine things always went well with his boyfriend, but what relationship is perfect?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Margie pricked her ears at this comment. She felt a little thrill run through her.

  “Did you know his boyfriend?” she asked, trying not to sound too excited or careful. Just a casual inquiry. An answer she was noting on a form.

  “Well, not like we knew Tristan.” She gave a little laugh. “But I had met him once or twice. When he had come for a walk with Tristan.”

  “And you got the feeling that they didn’t get along that well?” Margie ventured. She remembered Ramsey confessing to arguing with Tristan that night. Devastated because their last words to each other had been said in anger. Yet he hadn’t been able to remember what had triggered the argument. That told Margie they probably argued with some frequency. If it had been a one-time thing, then surely Ramsey would have remembered what it had been about.

  “I didn’t say that. I just meant… no one gets along all the time. They must have had some differences.”

  “It sounded like more than that.”

  Alexandra tried to backpedal. “I didn’t mean to. Everyone has problems with their relationships now and then. I don’t believe there is any relationship where everyone involved gets along all the time. That just doesn’t happen.”

  “Of course not,” Margie agreed. “Were they ever arguing when they came here? Or the way they acted around each other, you wondered whether they were having an argument, even if you didn’t hear anything? It just seems a little odd that you had only seen Pete Ramsey a couple of times, but felt like they might not have the best relationship. Something must have happened to make you think that.”

  “No. Just that they were so different. I mean, Tristan was over here every day. Several times a day. And the other fellow wasn’t interested in it at all. That’s a really wide variation in their interests. And with Tristan coming here so often… I don’t know. I wondered if he was running away from something. Trying to escape… something.”

  “Domestic violence, maybe? Coming here for a walk while he waited for things to cool off at home?”

  Ramsey had said that Tristan would go to the park to cool off, that he went there when he needed some space. But that might only be part of the truth. Or the opposite of the truth.

  “I don’t know about that,” Alexandra said, but her voice suggested that she agreed with Margie’s suggestion. “I never saw any indication that there was any violence. He never had a black eye or any other kind of injury. He walked around the loops here again and again. He never had a limp or a twisted ankle. He seemed to be in perfectly good health. That’s why I’m so shocked about his death. I can’t understand how he could have died. He was a very healthy person. They say that walking is the best thing you can do for your body, and he was walking all the time.”

  “What did he do for a living, do you know? Did he have an office job? It seems like he had a lot of time to visit the park, and I can’t think of many jobs that offer that many off hours.”

  “He worked for himself. I don’t know exactly what he did. But he said he could work from anywhere. And he liked to come here to sort things out. He sometimes talked on the phone and had meetings or conferences while walking. Or he dictated on his phone, thinking and working at the same time. He seemed so healthy,” she insisted again.

  “I’m sure he must have been,” Margie agreed. “It sounds like he was always walking. He must have racked up hundreds of kilometers every month.”

  “Exactly. So how could he just drop dead? I don’t understand how he could… be so alive one day and gone the next.”

  “We are trying to find the answers to those questions. Anything you can tell us about his life and what he’s been working on the last little while would be helpful. If you were aware of any problems, especially with Ramsey…”

  “No, no. I don’t know anything that would interest you. I told you I never saw them fight or argue.”

  “You just suspected they did.”

  “They must have. Everyone does. That doesn’t mean anything.”

  Maybe it didn’t mean anything for ninety-nine percent of couples. But when one of them dropped dead, as Alexandra had said, when they appeared to be perfectly healthy, that posed a question that deserved to be answered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Then it was time to head home. Margie could technically have left anytime. Especially after starting so early that morning. She had put in more hours than anyone else and could have hit the door about the time she’d eaten her lunch. But the call from Dr. Kahn meant that she had a lot more investigating to do, and she had wanted to hit it while the case was still fresh. It didn’t take long before people’s memories started to degrade. She wanted to be ready once Dr. Kahn came back with the cause of death.

  But by four o’clock, she was dragging and decided she’d better drive while she was still fully conscious.

  Christina was home from school, on the phone when Margie arrived, as she often was. The girl lived with the phone pasted to her ear. Or with her Bluetooth earbuds in, anyway. Christina was helping herself to a bottle of water from the fridge and gave Margie a wave as she came in.

  Margie blew her a kiss in greeting. Stella came thundering across the house and danced around Margie, yipping and telling her how excited she was to see her other master home. Margie scratched the dog’s brown, floppy ears and told her what a good girl she was.

  “I gotta get off the phone now,” Christina told her friend. A dramatic sigh. “My mom’s home.”

  After a moment, Margie knew that the call had ended when Christina’s eyes focused on her again across the room.

  “Do your friends all think that I’m an old witch?” Margie asked.

  “No, more like a drill sergeant.” Christina grinned. “You know, putting me through the paces when you get home. ‘Hit the books. Get your homework done. Make me dinner.’ Like that.”

  Margie shrugged. “Whatever gets you off the phone,” she said agreeably.

  “How was your day? You must be tired.” Though Christina had just closed the door of the fridge, she opened it again now to see what was in there that could be transformed into dinner. “There’s chili from last week. We could make tacos.”

  Margie joined her in the kitchen. “Tacos sound good to me. I am tired… I don’t think I will be going anywhere tonight, if that’s okay.”

  Many nights, they went to the care center a few blocks away to visit Moushoom, Margie’s grandfather. He always loved to see them, and Christina was happier and more open with him than anywhere else. Moushoom still had the same magic he’d had when Margie was a little girl. The ability to fully connect with his family and be completely comfortable with them. There was no masking who she was with Moushoom. He saw and accepted her as she really was.

  Christina nodded understandingly. “You’d better get to bed early tonight.”

  “Not too early,” Margie protested with a bit of a whine.

  “You need your sleep,” Christina told her firmly. “You’re not a teenager anymore.” She laughed.

  Margie gave her daughter a quick hug around the shoulders. They moved around each other in the kitchen, getting out plates and taco shells, warming up the chili.

  “How was school?” Margie asked.

  “It was okay.” Christina shrugged.

  Things had been better since she had started working on a project with her friend-who-was-a-boy, Tracy, organizing an Indigenous Fair to help educate the school population on cultural aspects of the various Indigenous bands in the area and in farther-flung locations like Winnipeg, where Margie and Christina had moved from the previous year. Educating not only the non-indigenous students and staff, but also teaching each of the bands about the others and about their history and connections with places like Red River, Manitoba. A surprising number of the kids didn’t know their own bands’ histories.

  Before starting the project, Christina had been very moody, upset about not feeling as if she fit in at all in Calgary and in the school population. It was very different from Winnipeg and the transition had been difficult, especially during the pandemic when nothing had been normal. Margie knew all of the prejudices were still there, but Christina seemed to be handling them better now that she had a purpose.

  “How are you and Tracy doing with the Indigenous Fair? Do you need anything?”

  “No, we’re doing pretty good,” Christina said. “It takes a long time to get replies from people. They don’t call back. But if you can catch them at the right time… it’s great. They’re very helpful and want to come.”

  Margie had experienced the same thing. Voice-to-voice or face-to-face contact seemed to be the only way to deal with some of the more traditional members of their community. Voicemail or email and expecting callbacks didn’t seem to be effective. But then, that was probably true about dealing with anyone other than the “digital natives” who had been born with phones in their hands.

  “How do your friends feel about the fair? I know Tracy is helping you with it. Is anyone else?”

  “Sometimes. They’re not as interested. Everyone has schoolwork and studying to do now that we’re back at school and, when they’re not doing that, they just want to game or chat, not actually work on a project and get something done.”

  “A lot of that is probably stress. This is a difficult time for people, and they can react by just withdrawing, cocooning until it feels like things are safe and back to normal.”

  Christina pursed her lips while she thought about it. “Do you think so? Is that why everyone seems so… stuck and unmotivated? It seems like our whole lives have been put on hold. For the past year and a half, everything just shut down and all the opportunities dried up.”

  “And now people are caught by inertia,” Margie agreed. “When you stop doing something—everything—it is hard to get moving again. A lot of people have put everything on hold, not just students. People lost their jobs, their careers even. The whole world changed, and it’s not easy to pick up and start over.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t lose your job.”

  “Me too. I know you weren’t happy about moving here, especially in the middle of the shutdown, but I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t. Everybody is having to make cutbacks, and who knows whether I would have been able to keep my job in Winnipeg. Or to have my hours cut back. Or extended, but without a salary increase. It was good timing, being able to get the job here.”

  When the ingredients were ready, they sat down at the table.

  “So… what can you tell me about this new case?” Christina asked. “Without getting too gross.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Margie was surprised, when she got to the office, to find that she had not received any communications from Dr. Kahn. No email in her inbox with the preliminary information about Tristan Elliott’s cause of death. No voicemail messages. No sign that he’d tried to reach out to Margie at all.

  She checked the workspace for the case, to see if he’d uploaded his report directly and just hadn’t had a chance to call or email her about it yet, but there was no preliminary report there either. Margie hadn’t heard of any disasters or other big cases that would have interrupted his ability to perform the postmortem the afternoon before. Still, just because she hadn’t heard about it, that didn’t mean that nothing had happened to derail him.

  Margie refilled her coffee mug and sat back down at her desk. She picked up her phone and tapped in the extension for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

  The call was answered by the pleasant voice of the executive assistant, Nancy.

  “Hi, it’s Detective Patenaude. Is Dr. Kahn available? Or do you know how he’s doing on the Tristan Elliott case?”

  “Oh, hi Detective Pat. I think he wanted to talk to you. Let me get him for you.”

  Margie waited while the woman called or messaged Dr. Kahn or walked into his office or the autopsy room to talk to him. It was a few minutes before the line was picked up again, and Margie was able to review and classify most of the emails in her inbox while she waited. Eventually, the call was resumed but, this time, it was Dr. Kahn’s resonant voice instead of the assistant’s.

 

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