A Very Tranquil Murder

Chapter 2

A scream escaped my lips, rang off the concave walls of the grotto. I steped back. A stone bench kneecapped me from behind and I sat down hard on its cold slab. Who was he? One of my guests who'd passed out after too much partying? Or a random villager who'd trespassed for an illicit soak?

I couldn't see his face. I didn't want to. His shoulder-length brown hair floated gently on the water. His Hawaiian-print swim trunks billowed around his lifeless thighs. I pulled out my cell phone with numb, shaking fingers. There was no reception inside the grotto. I stepped into the freezing rain and dialled the police station.

A man's voice answered in French.

"Bonjour," I gasped. My mind went blank of French vocabulary. What was the word for 'drowned?' What was the word for 'dead?'

"J'ai un problème," I finally managed.

The voice switched to English

"What's the problem, Madame?" It was a deep voice, with the round vowels and soft r's of the Carribbean.

I explained. The officer took my name and address and promised to arrive in five minutes, along with an ambulance.

"Stay where you are until we arrive, all right?"

"Okay." I said. "Please don't go through the B&B. I don't want my guests to be upset. There's a parking lot around back and a path that leads down the hill. "

"All right. We'll be there soon. "

I stowed my phone and shoved my hands in my pockets. Feeling the presence of the body floating in the pool behind me, I walked a few paces to the river that bordered the back of my property. Chunks of ice encrusted the grey rocks around the river's edge; a brown oak leaf drifted on the open water in the centre.

I glanced to the left, where a small wrought-iron gate led out of the spa grounds and a paved path zig-zagged like a glistening black scar up the snow-covered hill to the parking lot. The landscaping contractors had built this path to haul the tonnes of rock and concrete needed to build my 'natural' grotto. There was a bin of road salt at the top; hopefully the police had the sense to use it before they ventured down. The last thing I needed now was for an officer of the law to break his neck.

"Good morning."

I whipped around.

Coming toward me across the terrace was the bride-to-be, Carmela Monk. She was dressed in a hot pink windbreaker, matching track pants and Nike running shoes. Her tanned face looked like a mahogany carving; her platinum-blonde hair streamed in silky waves from beneath a pink tuque. She carried a fluffy white towel over her arm, monogrammed with the La Tranquilité logo.

"I'm sorry, the pool's closed." I cut diagonally across the terrace, placing myself between Carmela and the scene of the drowning.

"That's okay. I'm going for a dip in the river." She crossed the terrace toward the icy banks.

"I wouldn't recommend it. The water's freezing."

"I'm training for a triathlon in the Yukon." Her bleached-white teeth gleamed in an athletic smile. "I can warm up in the hot-tub after."

"This whole area is closed," I said. "I'm sorry. You'll have to leave."

"Why?" She looked around. "What's the — what's that?"

She started toward the grotto. I took hold of her arm.

"I'm sorry, the lower thermal pool is closed. The upper pools are open, and the steam room —"

She wrenched herself free.

"Is that — oh, my God!"

She was in the grotto before I could stop her, deking around me in her Nike shoes and falling to her knees on the flagstones beside the thermal pool.

"Jerry! Oh my God, Jerry!"

A flashing red light signalled the arrival of a cop car in the parking lot at the top of the hill. In the grotto, Carmela grabbed the corpse's ankle.

"We have to help him!"

She grabbed his foot and tried to drag him out of the water. I was pretty sure that Jerry was far beyond CPR. But how did I tell that to his grieving sister?

"Please, don't touch anything," came a voice from the mouth of the grotto. It was the voice I'd heard on the phone, weary and authoritative.

"Sergeant Jovenal Toussaint." A tall Black police officer, fully uniformed and masked, flashed a badge at us. "Sûreté du Québec. I'll have to ask you both to step back."

I took Carmela's elbow and led her to the stone bench. I flicked a light switch, illuminating a dozen faux-candles in stone recesses. Their glow mingled with the grey dawn, casting a pallid light on the body floating in the pool.

"Which one of you called the station?"

I identified myself and answered his questions, while a pair of paramedics arrived, dressed in heavy first-responder jackets and white medical masks. One of them stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers, wading in to the pool to grasp the dead man beneath the arms. The other stayed on dry land to manoeuvre the corpse on to the stretcher. There was a gruesome fascination to the whole procedure that made me want to stare. I tried to stay focussed instead on Sgt. Toussaint, his brown eyes above the black mask.

Finishing his interview with me, he turned to Carmela. She was still sitting on the bench, her face buried in her hands.

"Excuse me, miss. May I take your name?"

She looked up. Sgt. Toussaint had positioned himself so that, when she faced him, her back was turned to the paramedics.

"It's Carmela." She wiped her eyes. "Carmela Monk."

"And I take it that you know the victim?"

"Yes, it's Jerry. Jerry Monk, my brother."

"All right. Now, I have to ask you a few questions."

I hovered in the back of the grotto while he walked her through the events of the night before. She told him she'd been partying in the upper thermal pool with her brother and the bridesmaids until about ten o'clock when she'd gone to bed, leaving them to continue the party.

"When you say 'partying,' do you mean that drugs and alcohol were involved?" he asked.

"They were drinking. I wasn't. I'm training for a triathlon."

"And drugs?"

"They were smoking up. And ... I saw him popping some pills..."

"What kind of pills?"

"I don't know." Carmela bit her lip. "Poor Jerry! He was trying to turn his life around."

The officer closed his notebook.

"If you don't mind coming with me, miss, there's some paperwork to fill out."

"Of course." She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her windbreaker. "What about my parents?"

"Would they be awake at this time?"

"No, probably not."

"Then we'll inform them when we get back. It should take about an hour."

He rose and turned toward me. The fatigue in his eyes told me that he'd dealt with one too many situations like this: a dead body after a night of supposed pleasure.

"Can you please keep your guests out of this area?"

"I'll close it off," I assured him.

He ushered Carmela gently out of the grotto, into the freezing rain and the greyness of the worn-out dawn.

The paramedics followed them, carrying the dead body of Jerry Monk on a stretcher. His right foot poked out of the sheet that they had laid over him, and I noticed that his second toe was longer than his first — a trait that was supposed to be a sign of wisdom.

It seemed that last night, Jerry's wisdom had deserted him.