The Glass Coffin jk-8

by Gail Bowen

  A room service breakfast was laid out on the table. Only a yolk smear remained on Claudia’s plate, but Tracy’s fruit and yoghurt were untouched. Tracy herself was crumpled in an oversized armchair by the window. She was wearing a peony-strewn kimono, and in one of those sudden eruptions of memory that are all the more devastating because they’re unexpected, I remembered Gabe’s characterization of Tracy as a dewy bloom in the hero’s lapel. That morning as the unforgiving winter light revealed every blemish and sag, it was clear that the once-dewy bloom had become a slightly past-it posy.

  At first, she didn’t seem to realize we were in the room, but when she did, the effect was galvanizing. Suddenly, she was an actress with an audience. She drew herself up and ran a hand tenderly down the side of the long and graceful neck that was her best feature. In a breathless theatrical voice, she told her story. “The police came last night. They found my prescription in the alley outside your house, Joanne, but the bottle was empty.”

  Jill eased into the chair opposite Tracy’s. “I was asleep,” she said, “but Jo saw the lights and went out and watched the police dig through the garbage.”

  Tracy showed no interest in the fact that there was an eyewitness in the room. Unpleasant as this drama was, she was its star and she wasn’t about to share centre stage.

  “Those pills were stolen from my bag,” she said. “Someone is trying to set me up.”

  Claudia was standing behind Tracy; she dropped her hand to Tracy’s shoulder and began to rub it. “Eat your yoghurt and button your lip,” she said. “This is no time to be a loose cannon. Someone could get hurt.”

  Tracy jerked her shoulder away from Claudia. “I’m being hurt right now,” she said. “I’m the one the police harassed.”

  “No one harassed you,” Claudia said. “Given the circumstances, the questions Inspector Kequahtooway asked were perfectly logical.”

  Tracy drew her peony kimono tight. “The questions may have been logical,” she said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that someone is trying to implicate me.”

  “You’re right,” Jill said. “Maybe it’s time you started thinking about the evil twins: motive and opportunity. Tracy, who had access to your bag the night of the rehearsal?”

  “Everybody,” Tracy said. “We were all in and out of each other’s rooms that night. Even Gabe came down to talk to me.”

  “What did Gabe want to talk about?” Jill asked.

  Claudia clamped a hand on Tracy’s thin shoulder. “Personal matters,” she said. “Tracy is going to have to go through all this with the lawyer. I think once will be enough for her.”

  For a beat there was silence. I could feel Jill deliberating about where to go next. She decided on conciliation. “You’re probably right,” she said. “This isn’t an easy time for anybody. We should be kind to one another. Speaking of… I take it you two will be in town for Christmas.”

  “Inspector Kequahtooway was pretty clear about the fact that we shouldn’t expect to leave,” Claudia said.

  “Jo and I thought it might be fun to have dinner here at the hotel,” Jill said. “All of us.”

  Claudia and Tracy exchanged the briefest of glances. “It would be nice to have another Christmas with Bryn,” Claudia said.

  “It’s settled then,” Jill said, pushing back her chair and standing.

  Claudia walked us to the door. “I’ll give you a call about the time,” Jill said.

  “We mustn’t forget Felix,” I said.

  “Of course,” Jill said. “We can’t leave out the go-to guy.”

  I looked hard at Claudia. “Will it be a problem for you having Felix there?”

  Claudia met my gaze. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. “I’ll behave myself if he will.”

  When the elevator doors closed, Jill turned to me. “Some weird dynamics during that little encounter. Was Claudia trying to protect Tracy against herself or just shut her up?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “But Christmas dinner should be interesting.”

  “Speaking of,” Jill said. “What was behind that exchange about Felix?”

  Jill seemed genuinely baffled when I told her about the ugliness between Felix and Claudia. “I don’t get that at all,” she said. “Felix and Evan’s family go way back.”

  “Could Claudia be jealous of Felix’s relationship with you?”

  “No,” she said. “There is someone in Felix’s life, but it isn’t me.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” Jill wrapped her scarf around her neck. “Felix and I are just business partners and friends – or at least we used to be friends.”

  We were silent as we walked across the crowded lobby, but when we hit the street, I turned to Jill. “So what happened to your friendship?”

  The light turned green and we started across. “You know that Felix and I have always worked well together,” Jill said. “But after the wunderkind incident, we really got tight. When Felix was pitching the show in New York, we were like kids. We’d parse every sentence the network and cable guys came up with – trying to read the signs. We went nuts when we finally got a buyer.”

  “What went wrong?”

  Jill shrugged. “At first, it seemed as if the Bluebird of Happiness was flying low, showering us with lucky breaks. The day after we sold the show, we had a call from one of the networks. They said that ‘Comforts’ wasn’t for them, but they liked our approach and they had a counter-proposal. They’d noticed their audiences were intrigued with seeing ordinary people confronting situations that could easily destroy them and they wanted us to develop a program around that concept.”

  “Sounds like a natural for you,” I said. “The dark side of ‘Comforts of the Sun.’ ”

  “Exactly,” Jill said. “The problem was we had to move quickly, and Felix and I were both crazy busy trying to put an American face on ‘Comforts.’ So Felix brought Evan MacLeish into the project. That was two months ago. The rest, as they say is history.”

  “Not great history for Felix,” I said.

  “Not great history for any of us.” Jill looked down the street. “Son of a bitch,” she said and broke into a sprint. Half a block away a commissionaire was standing beside my Volvo writing up a ticket. Jill caught up with him, took something from her purse, and handed it to him. He glanced at it, then ripped up the ticket.

  “Did you give him money?” I asked when I caught up with her.

  Jill raised her hands in mock horror. “Of course not,” she said. “That would be bribery. I gave him my business card. You have no idea how many people have a special Sunday-morning experience they want to share with Canada.”

  The unadorned plantation pine wreath on the door of Kevin Hynd’s shop was so serene in its perfection that it soothed me to look at it. The scene inside Kevin’s shop was tranquil too. He was sitting at his work table holding a fine-pointed bamboo brush and meditating on a square pastel-iced cake. When he heard us come in, he peered at us over his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Greetings,” he said. He dipped the point of his brush into a tiny porcelain dish of linden green colouring and painted what appeared to be a stylized leaf on the cake’s centre. “I’ve been thinking about this design for an hour,” he said. “I had to execute it while the idea was still fresh. Take off your jackets and come over here and tell me what you think.”

  “It’s exquisite,” I said. “You’ve come a long way from Dumped Dames.”

  Kevin gave me a beatific smile. “Not far at all,” he said. “What do you think this drawing signifies?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “It’s a wet leaf,” Kevin said. “The kind that sticks to your foot and won’t shake off. It’s the Japanese character for what my client tells me is called ‘a retirement divorce’ – the kind that happens when a man leaves the workforce and finds himself trailing his wife around the house all day. My client’s language is more piquant than mine.”

  “You seem to
have cornered the Angry Woman market,” I said.

  “Everybody deserves a cake,” Kevin said equitably. “And I do my best to give them what they want.”

  “That cake you made for me was a work of art,” Jill said. “Too bad it was wasted on a disaster.”

  “But there was a moment when it brought you pleasure,” Kevin said. “That’s all we can ask for in this changeable world.” He dipped his paintbrush into the porcelain dish and drew a smaller wet leaf on the side of the cake. “So what’s new?”

  Kevin continued to paint his pattern as Jill brought him up to speed. When she’d finished, he sat back on his stool. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. “Short-term, the prescription bottle is good news for you. The police will have to divert some of their energy into finding out what was up with that. But long-term, the picture is still murky.”

  “I know I’m still front and centre,” Jill said.

  “Do I have your permission to talk about your financial situation with Joanne present?”

  “Of course,”

  “Good,” Kevin said. “Let’s start with the fact that, for you, becoming a wealthy woman overnight is both a curse and a blessing.”

  Jill gave him a sidelong glance. “Where’s the blessing?”

  “Money’s always useful,” Kevin said. “Chances are that the person who dropped that prescription bottle in the garbage bin is someone you know. Who’s your candidate?”

  “I don’t have one,” Jill said quickly.

  “Because you lack knowledge about the possibilities,” Kevin said. “Money can buy you that knowledge.”

  Jill set her jaw. “I won’t do that. I won’t hire some sleaze-ball to ferret out secrets about Evan’s family.”

  “Your choice,” Kevin said. “But unless you do something to help yourself, you’re in for serious grief. The police are thorough, and you’ve worked in media. You know this will be a bonanza for the press. A lot of things about your private life are going to come out.”

  “I haven’t done anything I’m ashamed of,” Jill said.

  Kevin gave her a half-smile. “Neither have I,” he said. “But if I had a seventeen-year-old, there are a few things I’d rather explain to her myself. Face it, Jill, paying a little money to arm ourselves with information is the lesser of two evils.”

  Jill ran a hand through her hair. “Jerry Garcia always said that the lesser of two evils is still evil.”

  “You’re not going to shame me out of giving you the best advice I can.”

  “All right,” Jill said. “Do it, but I don’t want anyone going around asking Bryn’s friends and classmates about her. She’s off limits.”

  Kevin and I made eye contact, but neither of us said a word.

  Jill’s voice was steely. “That’s the condition,” she said. “Keep Bryn out of it.”

  “So where does that put us with examining Evan’s current projects?” Kevin asked. “If Bryn appears in a frame of film, do I hit the off switch?”

  Jill shook her head. “I’ll need to know everything about Bryn, but it can’t go any further.”

  Kevin turned to me. “I wrote down the address you gave me. Who are we dealing with?”

  “A psychiatrist named Dan Kasperski,” I said. “He’s a good choice. He’s absolutely trustworthy, and his speciality is troubled adolescents. Bryn has been through a traumatic experience. The police will believe it’s logical for Jill to be visiting his office.”

  “And while Jill’s visiting the good doctor, she can examine her late husband’s stuff,” Kevin said. “Very handy.”

  “In more ways than one,” I said. “You heard Bryn say she hated her father.”

  Kevin nodded. “On the night he was killed. It’s occurred to me since that she must have some complicated feelings to sort through.”

  “She does,” Jill said. “But there’s no way Dan Kasperski can help her if she refuses to see him. I’ve asked her if she wanted to talk to someone about her father, but she says what he did to her gives her every right to hate him.”

  Kevin leaned forward. “What did he do to her?”

  Jill’s voice was bleak. “He’s used her for material. Starting on the day she was born, he began filming her life. He never stopped. The night he died, Bryn said she couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t stalking her. She begged him to leave her alone. He just kept on shooting.”

  “Why wouldn’t he stop?” Kevin’s voice was barely audible.

  “Because the film about Bryn was going to be his magnum opus. He told Bryn that being in this movie would be the most significant thing she would ever do in her life, that when she was an old woman, audiences would still be watching her grow and develop.”

  “But she just wanted to be a kid,” Kevin said.

  “Exactly,” Jill said. “But when Evan weighed Bryn’s need to be a kid against his need to make a great work of art, it was no contest.”

  “Fucker,” Kevin said. He glanced towards Jill. “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize for the truth,” Jill said shortly. “I guess the next order of business is to check with Dan Kasperski to see whether he’s had a visit from FedEx.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Almost ten till. Dan’s appointments start on the hour and run fifty minutes. I’ll try him.”

  When he heard my voice, Dan was enthused, “Hey, your boxes arrived.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to send over a lawyer to go through them,” I said.

  “The goodies never end.”

  “You’ll like this lawyer. His name is Kevin Hynd. I’m with him right now.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  When Kevin rang off, he turned to me. “Sounds like a nice guy.”

  “He is, and he’s amazing with kids. Jill, if you’ll give him permission to look at some of the footage Evan shot of Bryn, he’ll be able to tell you the best way to approach her.”

  “There’s no question that your stepdaughter needs help, Jill,” Kevin said. “Might as well pull out all the stops.”

  “Okay,” Jill said. “I’ll keep digging around for that binder Evan kept with the information about his works-in-progress.”

  “You can’t find it?”

  “No,” she said. “And that’s weird, because he was never without it.”

  “Anyway, you guys carry on with what Larissa sent from Toronto.” She walked over to Kevin and kissed the top of his head. “I really do appreciate this, Kevin.”

  He beamed seraphically. “Now that was nice,” he said. He glanced over at me. “Be careful,” he said. “The universe has a way of repeating itself.”

  When we left Kevin’s, Jill gravitated towards the window of his neighbour. Pinkies was offering Acrylics, UV Acrylics, Gel Nails, and Advanced Nail Art at Rock Bottom Stocking Stuffer Prices. “How do you think Claudia would feel about a little Advanced Nail Art?” she asked.

  In the end, we gave Pinkies a pass and hit the two last refuges of the desperate on the day before Christmas: the bookstore and The Body Shop. Jill shouldered through the crowds at the bookstore with the single-mindedness of a conquering general. Within ten minutes, we were walking out the door with a shiny Santa bag full of travel books for Claudia, who longed for escape, and a poinsettia-patterned bag of self-help books for Tracy, who longed for nirvana. Both outcomes seemed desirable; both seemed unlikely.

  Jill’s face relaxed as we wandered through The Body Shop, filling her basket with lotions, creams, glosses, blushes, bath beads, mascaras, eyeliners, and conditioners to enhance the beauty of a seventeen-year-old who had no need of enhancement. When the young woman at the counter wrapped the gifts in silver-starred Cellophane and tied them with shimmering bows, Jill turned to me with soft eyes. “It’s great to finally have someone of my own to shop for.”

  “I take it you’re not talking about Claudia and Tracy.”

  “Hardly,” Jill said. “For me, Christmas has always been a day to get through. Now, I can’t wait till tomorrow morning. I kn
ow this sounds bizarre, Jo, but at this moment, I feel incredibly lucky.”

  “Because of Bryn,”

  She nodded. “She’s my best gift. You feel that way about your kids too, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Speaking of, my youngest treasure is waiting to be picked up, so we’d better make tracks.”

  The fact that I cherished my children didn’t stop me from being realistic about them. Twenty minutes later, when Taylor, Jill, and I walked through our front door, I did what I always did when I came into a zone that had the potential to be hormonally charged – I made a lot of noise.

  “Anybody home?” I called.

  When there was no answer, Jill shrugged. “I guess they’re still at the mall.” She tapped Taylor on the shoulder. “I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for a cup of hot chocolate with about a ton of marshmallows.”

  “Jess’s mum made us hot chocolate just before I left,” Taylor said. “But she uses carob and she doesn’t believe in marshmallows.”

  “Holy Willie Wonka,” Jill said. “What an abomination! Let’s hit the kitchen and make some real cocoa.”

  After they left, I went up to the landing and tried again. “Anybody home?” I called. This time I hit paydirt. Angus, the King of Cool, appeared at the head of the staircase. His hair was tousled, his face was burning, and his fly was undone.

  “So, how’s everything here?” I asked.

  From the time he was three, Angus had flagged the fact that he was engaged in dubious behaviour by hitting me with a river of irrelevant details. When I’d heard more than I cared to about this really hilarious old Adam Sandler movie he had chanced upon, I zipped an imaginary fly.

  “So what was Bryn up to while you were sitting alone watching The Wedding Singer?”

  My son lowered his eyes and adjusted his clothing. “I’m a mutt,” he said.

  “No argument here,” I said.