"Sorry to bother you," Angélique said, crossing the foyer in a taut, barefoot motion that hinted at the energy compressed into her muscular frame.
Her black eye-makeup looked thick and smudgy, as though she'd cried it off and reapplied it. Her voice was husky. The 'sorry to bother you,' really got me. In the time I'd been running the B&B, it was seldom enough that a guest had said 'sorry' for anything. Usually they were the ones complaining, and I was the one apologizing: Sorry the coffee wasn't hot enough. Sorry there weren't enough towels in the room. And, recently, Sorry that your loved one died in my thermal pool. Yet here was this tough lady, apologizing for bothering me with her pedicure appointment.
"It's no bother," I said. "Come this way."
She drew a silk mask from the pocket of her robe and put it on, as I led her through the bistro tables of the breakfast area toward the aesthetics room. I donned my mask as well, recalling the bad rap that nail salons had gained as spreaders of the coronavirus.
It had been one of the first incidents of unneighbourly conduct to hit the headlines last spring: as Ontario eased out of lockdown, the personal care businesses like hairdressers and nail salons had opened in smaller, more northerly towns, while still legally shuttered in Toronto and southern Ontario, the epicentre of infection in the province. This had prompted a group of Toronto women to drive two and a half hours to Kingston to get their nails done. You had to wonder what was so critical about a buff and a polish that people would go to these lengths in the midst of a pandemic. In any case, it turned out that one of the women was infected with COVID, and this had sparked a chain of transmission in a city that, previously, hadn't recorded a single case. In a sense we were all playing with fire, trying to keep our businesses open while not inadvertantly killing anyone.
I flicked a switch as we entered the room: salt lamps filled the room with an amber glow. A diffuser wafted lavender-scented mist into the air. Soothing music burbled from speakers hidden amidst leafy, green plants. I ushered her to the reclining chair in the middle of the room, laid a warm towel over her eyes, and set her feet to soak in a swirling bath of warm water. Her face, clenched tight with suppressed emotion, gradually relaxed. A tear trickled down her cheek.
"I'm really sorry about your friend," I said.
"Damn, I wasn't gonna start crying again. I told myself I wasn't gonna start crying again."
"Can I get you something to drink? A cup of tea, or maybe a glass of wine..."
"A glass of wine would be great, thanks."
Normally, I didn't serve alcohol to guests. Not only did I lack a liquor license, but as the owner of what strove to be an upscale B&B, it went against my brand to serve people the Chateau de $9.95 Plonk which I kept in the fridge to help me through the evenings when I had to work late. But I could make an exception for a woman who'd just spent the day making funeral arrangements for her friend who'd died in my thermal pool. I rummaged in the kitchen and came back with a generously-poured glass of red, provenance indeterminate.
"Thanks," she said, taking a gulp. "It's been a rough day."
I lifted her left foot out of the warm water and began to rub it with a gentle exfoliating scrub. She had callouses on the balls and heels of her feet. Apart from that her feet were well cared-for, though hardly delicate: square-toed, wide and strong.
"Tell me about Jerry," I said.
"Oh, Jer' was a real sweetheart. He came out to New Brunswick, about two, three years ago. He'd had some kinda big fight with his dad, I don't know what it was about. Anyway, he shows up at Carmela's place with everything he owns in the world stuffed into the back of this beat-up Datsun. And of course she takes him in.
"He was good with his hands, y'know? He could fix anything. That's how he got to be known around, like the guy you could call up to fix stuff and he'd give you a good deal, because he wasn't in the union. He didn't have the certificates, eh? But he could do all that stuff: plumbing and electrical wiring and plastering, and, I dunno, everything. He only took cash. But people took advantage of him."
"How do you mean?"
"Like, this one time, this guy he doesn't even know calls him up and asks him to fix some plumbing. Tells him he got his number from a friend. So Jerry goes out to the address — turns out it's a biker clubhouse. Jerry's too nice, or maybe too scared, to walk away from the job, so he fixes the pipes. The guy doesn't have any cash, so he pays him with a bag of drugs. Well, shit, Jerry don't do drugs. I mean, he smokes pot, everyone smokes pot, that doesn't count. But hard drugs? Jerry comes home to Carmela's place, he's freaking out. He's got this bag of biker-gang drugs, he doesn't know what to do with it. So Damion takes it off his hands."
"Carmela's fiancé?"
I switched to exfoliating her other foot.
"Yeah, Damion," she spat out the name like a piece of gristle. "Made a good profit too, I bet. Jerry never saw none of it. Damion acted like he was doing him a favour, getting rid of it for him. Sometimes I wish to God none of us had ever laid eyes on Damion. Drivin' around in his friggin' orange Ford Mustang, acting like he's all that."
"How did you meet Damion?" I couldn't help being curious about Carmela's mysteriously absent fiancé, especially having gotten a taste of his mother.
"It was through wrestling. See, Damion owns this bar in Moncton — 'Sideburns,' it's called. It's a big biker hangout. The basement's set up with a wrestling ring, and he holds matches there a couple of times a month. It pays like shit but it's a real high. Natural high."
"So you and Carmela are both wrestlers?"
"It's not my 'real' job. More like a side-hustle."
"What about Darlene?"
"A wrestler? Naw — are you kidding me? Me and Darlene grew up together. She did my homework and I beat up the kids who tried to bully her. I know it's weird 'cause we're totally opposite — I mean, she listens to friggin' Billie Eilish — but she's still my best friend."
I worked in silence for a while, rinsing off the exfoliating scrub then clipping and filing her toenails. Was Angélique sleeping with Jerry? Was Mrs. Monk right, that he told her he was leaving, and she couldn't let him go? Angélique didn't seem to me like the kind of woman who let her happiness depend on a man. But then again, you couldn't judge people by their external appearances.
I offered Angélique a choice of nail polishes. She chose a bright red that matched her fake fingernails and the dragons on her robe .
"I'm so pissed off at Carmela," she confessed, as I began applying the polish with quick, short strokes. "I know it's wrong. She lost her brother, and all. But I don't understand why she couldn't hold a proper funeral. With a visitation, y'know? Why did she have to go off and get him cremated? Darlene and me, we didn't even get a chance to say goodbye."
"Were you and Jerry together?" I asked delicately, dabbing polish on her toe.
"Me and Jerry? Nah, he was more like my kid brother. A bit of a goof. A bit of a screw-up sometimes. But a good guy, y'know?"
"I only asked because, when I was cleaning up Jerry's room, it seemed like he'd been with someone that night," I said.
Her foot jerked. The nail-polish brush veered off course, leaving a slash of red across her toe.
"The poor guy's dead," she said.
"I'm sorry."
I cleaned off the nail polish with a dab of acetone on a cotton fluff.
"We'll just let that dry, and I'll put on a second coat."
"Nah, that's all right." She slipped from the chair. "I'm gonna get back to my room. Thanks for the pedicure. And the wine."
She dodged across the room and was out the door before I'd screwed the top back on the nail polish bottle.
How had this strange non-wedding, with its motley cast of characters, descended on my idyllic B&B? There seemed to be a tinge of danger surrounding Carmela's fiancé: the drugs, the muscle car, the biker gangs. If there was violence to be done, he seemed like the guy to do it. Yet — perhaps incongruously — Damion DePaor and his tough-as-nails mother were the only wedding guests who hadn't been present when Jerry Monk had died.
Which raised the question: where had Damion been?
For that matter, where was he now?