Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

Trafalgar since she’d joined the police. The average annual murder rate of Trafalgar, British Columbia, was zero.
    She stuffed her hands in her pockets to keep them from touching anything, and dropped to her haunches to take a good look at the remains of Reginald Montgomery. She’d seen him around town, glad-handing everyone in sight—you’d have thought he was running for mayor. He’d made a point of being friendly with the entire Trafalgar City Police. She’d heard that he was angling for a place on the police board when an opening next came up. In life, Montgomery hadn’t been an attractive man: a belly that made him look nine months pregnant, thin, badly cut grey hair, a bulbous nose that testified to copious quantities of liquor. In death, now that he was no longer trying his hail-fellow-well-met routine, his face had taken on a repose that almost suited him.
    Proud of herself for keeping her stomach contents in place, Smith dared not look too closely at the seepage from the man’s skull: just close enough to see that the blood was still wet, glistening in the poor light from the back of the restaurant.
    She started at the blast of a siren, straightened up, and pulled her hands out of her pockets. Headlights flooded the alley; heavy doors slammed. Paramedics unloaded their stretcher and pushed it toward her. A bulky figure passed in front of the ambulance lights.
    “Smith,” Chief Constable Paul Keller said, “what have you got here?” His clothes smelled, as always, as if they’d been hanging in a tobacco barn when it caught fire.
    “It’s Reginald Montgomery, sir. Of Grizzly Resort?” Her voice squeaked as it always did when she was nervous.
    “I was having dinner with my wife and daughter when the dispatcher called. Said you told her suspicious circumstances?”
    Oh, God. Let it be so. If I’ve dragged the CC away from his dinner
en famille
because Montgomery tripped over his shoelace I’ll be finished.
    “Looks that way, sir,” she said.
    “Definitely dead,” one of the paramedics said, “visible grey matter.”
    The Chief Constable stepped forward to have a closer look.
    The investigating detectives wouldn’t be short of suspects. There were two camps in Trafalgar—everyone in town over the age of two either belonged to the group that hated Reg Montgomery, or the one that loved him.
    Smith pushed aside the thought that her mother could be counted prominently among the haters and tried to look as if she knew what she should be doing now.

Chapter Two
    Not long before Constable Molly Smith walked down Elm Street heading for the alley, Rosemary Fitzgerald flipped the sign on the shop window to “closed” with a happy sigh. It had been a good day. A long day, but a good one. She owned a small store on Front Street, between Mid-Kootenay Adventure Vacations and Wolf River Bookstore. The perfect location for her business: making homemade foods suitable to take camping. She also sold a wide selection of packaged and freeze-dried meals and ready-to-eat trail snacks. She and her husband, Ben, had often talked, while sitting around a campfire, or paddling across a lake, about the day when they’d pack their corporate cube-farm jobs in and move to a wilderness town. They’d vacationed in the interior of British Columbia ten years ago, and Ben announced that he’d found his own heaven on earth. But Ben had died, only a year later, struck down by a heart attack working late at the desk he hated. Rosemary continued to dream their dream, and last year she’d retired with a small pension and moved to Trafalgar. She loved her shop, loved being her own boss, and scarcely had time to miss her children back in Toronto.
    Rosemary grabbed her backpack, checked that the oven was off, turned down the lights, and let herself into the alley. She locked the back door and turned to get her bike.
    The blue bike lock lay on the ground. Rosemary stared at it. Where was her bike? The blue-grey mountain bike had cost more than she wanted to spend, but the town was situated at the bottom of a mountain, so she needed a good, sturdy bike.
    She looked around. The stores along the same stretch of Front Street as hers were closed, shadows deep in the darkening alley. A couple of cars drove by on Elm Street; to the west light spilled from the restaurant Feuilles de Menthe.
Leaves of Mint
. The scent of garlic and roasting meats drifted toward her. Two shapes stood under the light at the back of the restaurant.