by Gail Bowen
“How well do you know her?” I asked.
“The J school is small,” he said, “so we’re a lot tighter with our students than you are in Arts. By the time the kids graduate we’ve usually had them in a couple of classes, we’ve helped them with practical skills like interviewing, we’ve supervised their independent projects, and we’ve spent time with them socially. Not that Kellee has ever been exactly a party girl.” He picked up my mug. “Weak or strong?” he asked.
“Strong.”
“A woman after my own heart,” he said. “What’s that old Irish saying? ‘When I makes tay, I makes tay, and when I makes water, I makes water.’ Anyway, what I remember most about Kellee Savage is the obituary she wrote.”
“Of whom?”
“Of herself. It’s an exercise most J schools assign in Print Journalism I. It’s partly to teach students how to make words count, and partly to help them focus on their goals. Most of the obits the kids write are depressingly Canadian. You know: ‘his accomplishments were few, but he was always decent and caring.’ Kellee’s was different. The writing was predictably pedestrian, but she had such extravagant ambitions, and she did have one glorious line. ‘Kellee Savage was a great journalist, because although no one ever noticed her, she was there.’ ”
I shuddered, “That’s certainly gnomic.”
“Isn’t it?” he said. He put a spoon into my mug, pressed out the last of the tea and fished out the bag. “I believe your tea is ready, Madam.”
After I picked Taylor up from her friend Jess Stephens’s house, we drove to Lakeview Court to feed Julie’s fish. For Taylor, most chores were obstacles to be dispatched speedily, so she could get on with the real business of her life, but Julie’s fish intrigued her, and she gave her full attention to feeding them. She had developed a routine, and I watched as she pulled a needlepoint-covered bench close to the tank, kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the bench, and shook the fish food carefully over the surface of the water. When she was done, she jumped down, pressed her face against the glass, and watched as the minute particles drifted down through the water, driving the fish crazy.
We watched for a few minutes, then I said, “We have to boogie, T. I haven’t even thought about dinner yet.”
“I have,” Taylor said. “Why don’t we have paella?”
“Why don’t we have fish and chips?” I said. “I think there’s a coupon for Captain Jack’s at home.” I looked at my watch. “Angus has a practice at six-thirty, so I might as well call the Captain from here.”
When I went into the kitchen to use the phone, the light from the answering machine on Julie’s desk was blinking. I hit the button, and a woman’s voice, pleasantly contralto, filled the quiet room. “Reed, it’s Annalie. It’s Sunday, ten p.m. my time, so that’s nine yours. My husband and I were at our cabin for the weekend, so I just got your message. It was such a shock to hear your voice after all these years. It’s funny, I thought I’d feel vindicated when you finally figured out the truth, but all I can manage is a sort of dull rage.” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was tight. “I guess Santayana was right: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ But Reed, remembering isn’t enough. Now that you know what happened, you have an obligation to make sure there are no more repetitions. If you want to talk, my number is area code 416 …,” she laughed. “Of course, you have my number, don’t you?” There was a click and the line went dead.
I rewound the tape and played it again. It still didn’t ring any bells for me, but while Annalie’s message was perplexing, her voice was a pleasure to listen to: musical and theatrically precise in its pronunciations. It was a professionally trained voice, and as I archived her message, I found myself wondering what part the enigmatic Annalie had played in the past that Reed Gallagher had chosen not to remember.
When we got home, Alex was there. I asked him to stay for dinner, but he insisted on paying.
“If I’d known you were picking up the tab,” I said, “I would have ordered Captain Jack’s world-famous paella.”
Taylor was placing knives and forks around the table in a pattern that a generous eye might have seen as a series of place settings. When she heard the word “paella,” she swivelled around to face me. “We could still order some.” She narrowed her eyes. “That was one of your jokes, wasn’t it, Jo?”
“It was,” I said, “and you fell for it.”
After Taylor sailed off, I poured Alex a Coke, made myself a gin and tonic, and we sat down at the kitchen table to exchange the news of the day. When I told Alex about the message on the Gallaghers’ answering machine, he tensed with interest.
“That was the whole thing?”
“I archived it, if you want to hear it yourself. What do you make of it?”
Alex centred his Coke glass carefully on the placemat. “It doesn’t sound good. All that talk about dull rage and vindication and making sure there are no more repetitions of history sounds like Reed Gallagher was getting hit with some pretty heavy stuff from the past.”
“I wonder if that’s what he and Julie quarrelled about the night before he died.”
He whistled softly. “Could be. Then to relieve tension after their fight, Gallagher went down to Scarth Street, broke into a rooming house, pulled on his pantyhose, opened the poppers, and tried his hand at erotic strangulation.” He shook his head in a gesture of dismissal. “This still doesn’t feel right to me, Jo. But we haven’t got anything else. We’ve talked to everybody we can come up with. We’ve gone over that room on Scarth Street with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, and Splatter’s spent so much time on Gallagher’s body that we’re telling him it must be love. Still, all we’ve got is what we started with – accidental death.”
“So what’s next?”
Alex shrugged. “Nothing. That’s it. No leads. No evidence. No case. They’re ready to release the body, so we’ll need a signature. I’ll have to phone Mrs. G. – unless, of course, you want to volunteer.”
“You’re buying dinner,” I said. “I’ll call.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “I got the best of that deal.”
“I know you did,” I said. “But I’m keeping track.”
After dinner, Angus talked Alex into letting him drive the Audi over to his basketball practice. As I watched the Audi lurch onto Albert Street, I decided if Alex could be heroic, I could too. I squared my shoulders, marched back inside, and dialled the number where Julie said she could be reached.
The listing was in Port Hope, a pretty town of turn-of-the-century elegance on Lake Ontario. I’d spent a summer there when I was young. Luckily, my memories were happy ones, because I had plenty of time to recollect summers past before Julie finally picked up the phone.
She did not sound happy to hear from me, and I didn’t waste time on pleasantries. When I told her that the police were releasing Reed’s body, she was curt. “I’ll take care of it,” she said. Then, mechanically, like a child remembering an etiquette lesson, she added, “Thank you for calling.”
I thought of the last time I’d seen her. She had seemed so alone the night she dropped her keys by my house. “Julie, wait,” I said. “Call me when you know your flight time. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”
Her tone was incredulous. “Why would I go back there? Hasn’t he already humiliated me enough?”
“You can’t just leave him,” I said. “Somebody has to sign for the body and make funeral arrangements.”
“There isn’t going to be a funeral.” She laughed bitterly. “What could people possibly say about the dear departed?”
The next morning, Ed Mariani and I had tea together in the office before class, and I told him about Julie’s decision to bury Reed without any formal ceremony. Ed was furious.
“Damn it, Joanne, I never liked that woman, and it turns out I was right. Reed was a good man. He needs to be remembered, and the people who cared about him need to take stock of what they’ve lost.”
“I
suppose if Julie doesn’t want to handle it, Reed’s colleagues at the university could organize a memorial service.”
Ed nodded agreement. “We could, and we should. But you and I aren’t the colleagues who were closest to Reed.”
“Tom Kelsoe,” I said. “He’s the one whose history with Reed goes back the farthest. He was Reed’s student. Reed gave him his first job, and from what I heard at the time, Tom was the real mover and shaker in getting Reed appointed as director of Journalism.”
Ed cocked an eyebrow. “So they say.”
I felt my face go hot with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Ed. You didn’t need to be reminded of that.”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t, but it wasn’t your doing. Now come on. Let’s get back to the memorial service.”
“Somebody should call Tom, so we can get some people together and make the arrangements,” I said.
Ed looked away. “Joanne, I’ll help in any way I can, but I don’t want to have anything to do with Kelsoe.”
I waited, but Ed didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask him to. Instead, I reached for the phone and dialled Tom’s office number. When an operator came on and told me the line was no longer in service, I remembered the chaos in the Journalism offices, and dialled Tom’s apartment.
I had just about decided he wasn’t there when Jill Osiowy picked up the phone. She sounded distracted, and for a beat I worried that I’d got her at a bad moment, then I remembered the scene at the Chimney Saturday night, and I hoped, childishly, that her morning had been filled with bad moments.
“How are you, Jill?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “How are you?”
“Never better,” I said. “But I need to speak to Tom. Is he there?”
“I’ll see if he can come to the phone.”
When Tom Kelsoe picked up the receiver, he barked his name in my ear, and I felt my gorge rise. But this wasn’t about me. I tried to make my voice civil.
“Tom, Julie Gallagher has decided against a funeral for Reed, but some of us at the university have been talking about a memorial service. You and Reed were so close. I thought you’d want to be part of the planning.”
He cut me off. “I don’t get off on primitive group rituals, Joanne. I think the idea sucks. I won’t help and I won’t be there.” He slammed the receiver down.
I turned to Ed Mariani. “Tom declines,” I said. “And without regrets.”
Ed put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself up heavily. “Then I guess it’s up to us,” he said.
CHAPTER
7
Reed Gallagher’s memorial service was held at the Faculty Club on Friday, March 24, a week to the day after his body had been discovered in the rooming house on Scarth Street. In every detail of the planning, Ed Mariani’s watchword had been dignity; the service seemed to become his way of reclaiming for Reed the respect and regard which his bizarre death had stolen from him. The rooms I walked into that afternoon were an invitation to celebrate civility and the pleasures of the senses: simple bowls of spring flowers touched the tables with Japanese grace. At the grand piano in the bar, Barry Levitt, trim in a cream cable-knit sweater and matching slacks, was leafing through his sheet music, and in the club’s window room, a buffet with hot and cold hors-d’oeuvres had been set up beside a well-stocked bar. Ed Mariani had done Reed Gallagher proud, but as I picked up a glass of champagne punch at the bar, I was edgy. I’d been tense all week, made restless by the deepening mysteries in the lives of two people I didn’t really know. One of those people was Reed Gallagher.
Ed Mariani and Barry Levitt had volunteered to organize Reed’s memorial service, but they had entrusted one job to me. Because I had keys to the Gallaghers’ condominium, I was to find photographs and memorabilia for the display celebrating Reed’s life. At first, I burrowed through the boxes of memorabilia I found in his closet as dispassionately as an archaeologist on a dig, but as the man Reed Gallagher had been began to emerge, Annalie’s cryptic allusion to Santayana took on a haunting resonance. Try as I might, I could not reconcile Reed Gallagher’s sad and tawdry death with the life that was emerging from the boxes and cartons that surrounded me. As Mr. Spock would say, it didn’t compute. Nonetheless, the more I dug, the more I became convinced that the answer to the enigma of Reed Gallagher’s last hours lay somewhere in his past.
By any standards, his life had been extraordinary. Before he had turned his hand to teaching, he had covered wars and political campaigns and natural disasters. He had been present at many of the events that had defined our history in the past quarter-century. He had known famous people, and he had, if one could judge from the affectionate inscriptions on plaques and photographs, been liked and respected by those who worked with him and knew him best. Everything I came up with reflected a life lived with gusto and commitment. Perhaps more significantly, my burrowing uncovered no evidence of the negligence Annalie’s message had suggested, nor did it bring to light even a hint of an ache so ferocious that it would someday drive Reed Gallagher up a flimsy fire escape to his appointment in Samarra.
But, as I kept reminding myself, my job wasn’t to analyse; it was to gather together what Barry Levitt called my Gallagher iconography, and that afternoon, as I stood in the Faculty Club looking at the graceful mahogany table that held my handiwork, I was pleased with the job I had done. Reed Gallagher had not been badly served by his iconographer.
Scattered among the awards and testimonials were pictures of Reed flanked by two prime ministers, of Reed gripping the hand of an American president, of Reed conferring with media figures like Knowlton Nash, Barbara Frum, Peter Newman, and Richard Gwyn, people who come as close to being legendary as our country permits anyone to be. But my real coup was a picture of Reed with a woman who, in all likelihood, would be of no significance to anyone in the room but me.
I had searched hard for a photograph of Annalie, but in the end I had almost passed it by. My aim had been to balance photos of the public Reed Gallagher with some that captured his private moments, and I had found some lovely and evocative snapshots: Reed as a teenager, taking a chamois to a shining convertible with fins while two middle-aged people beamed with parental pride; Reed as a college boy in a bathing suit, exulting in the pleasure of holding a sweetly curved young woman in his arms; Reed as the very young editor of a small-town newspaper, proudly showing off his twin proofs of authority, a shining brass nameplate on his desk and a brand-new moustache on his upper lip.
By the time I came upon the carton that Reed, in his large and generous hand, had labelled RYERSON – DESK STUFF, I thought I’d made all my choices. But remembering Reed’s affinity for the students at our J school, I decided to see if I could ferret out something from his early days as an instructor. The yellowed newspaper clipping of the photograph of Annalie and Reed was in an envelope with a clutch of odds and ends: a dry cleaner’s receipt, an old press pass from a PC leadership convention, a ticket stub from a Leafs-Blackhawks game. In the photo, Annalie, in her capacity as editor of the Ryersonian, was presenting Reed with a bound copy of the past year’s issues. Both she and Reed were smiling.
Her full name was Annalie Brinkmann. On the phone, her voice had been filled with lilt and magic, but the picture showed a plain girl, heavy-set and wearing horn-rimmed glasses which had apparently failed to correct an outward-turning squint. Twenty years can change many things, and the girl of twenty is often barely discernible in the woman of forty, but I was hoping the picture might jog the memories of some of Reed’s friends from the Ryerson days. There was even an outside chance that Annalie herself would appear. Ed had written an elegant obituary of Reed for the Globe and Mail, and placed a notice of Reed’s death in the Toronto Star. Both had mentioned the time and place of the memorial service. If Annalie was a newspaper reader, chances were good she would know about what Ed Mariani had come to call Reed’s last party. It was a slim straw to cling to, but if I was lucky, one way or another, the memorial service would link me
and the woman who had left such a troubling message for Reed Gallagher three days after his death.
The newspaper clipping was unmounted, and I would need a frame. Fortunately, there was a small silver one at hand that was just the ticket. I didn’t feel the smallest pang as I replaced the photograph of Tom Kelsoe with the one of Reed and Annalie Brinkmann. Tom had made it clear that he didn’t want to be part of Reed’s last party, and it was a pleasure to honour his request.
As the guests started arriving at the club, it seemed that Tom and Julie were the only people who had chosen not to come. Twenty minutes before the farewells were scheduled to begin, the room was packed, but newcomers were still appearing. I scanned the door eagerly, looking for two faces: one was Annalie’s; the other was Kellee Savage’s.
Kellee still hadn’t shown up. As acting head of the School of Journalism, Ed had checked with all her instructors. Their reports had been the same: Kellee Savage hadn’t been in class all week. Ed and I had taken turns calling the number Kellee listed as her home number, but we’d never connected. When I told Alex I was growing uneasy, he was reassuring. Kellee Savage was, he said, a white middle-class twenty-one-year-old who had got drunk and humiliated herself in front of her friends. Nothing in her life pointed to a fate worse than a bad case of embarrassment. In his opinion, when she screwed up her courage, she would be back.
Alex’s logic was unassailable. Even I had to admit that Kellee’s disappearance fell well within a pattern I knew. It was not uncommon for university kids to disappear from classes for a while, especially this close to the end of term. Sometimes the triple burden of a heavy workload, parental expectations, and immaturity was just too much, and the kids simply bailed out. Among themselves, the students called the syndrome “crashing and burning,” but the image was hyperbolic. Most often, after a week or so, they came back to class with a stack of hastily completed term papers or a doctor’s note citing stress and suggesting mercy.
