A Colder Kind of Death

by Gail Bowen

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “There are some things I should take care of down at headquarters, but I’ll let the kids know where I’m going to be, and I’ll be back around supper. Try to get some sleep.”

  I tried. All that day, I lay in the dark, listening to the life of my house go on around me, hushed and alien. Late in the afternoon, I opened my eyes and saw Alex standing in the doorway, his silhouette dark against the bright light of the hall.

  “Do you want to talk?” he said.

  “Not yet. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I don’t mind. I have to go back downtown, but there’s takeout from Bamboo Village in the kitchen. Taylor made some pretty serious inroads on the almond prawns, but there’s plenty of everything else.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “My pleasure,” he said and closed the door.

  After he left, I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was midnight and I was hungry. I remembered the Chinese takeout and headed downstairs. Sadie and Rose were right on my heels. There had been too many upheavals in their old dog lives, and they were wary.

  The cardboard containers from Bamboo Village were neatly stacked on the refrigerator shelf. I’d moved them to the counter and taken the lid off the carton that held the three almond prawns Taylor had left for me when I heard a knock at the front door.

  It was Jane O’Keefe.

  As soon as I opened the door, she stepped into the hall. She was still wearing her white hospital coat and her picture ID.

  I touched her sleeve. “Are you making a house call?” I said.

  Jane looked down at the white coat, bewildered. “I thought I’d taken this off and left it in my locker.” Her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Jo. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I was just driving around … I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “Look, I was just going to have some Chinese food. There’s plenty.”

  I opened two bottles of Great Western, and Jane and I filled our plates and sat down at the kitchen table. We ate in silence. When she was through, Jane said, “I don’t think I’ve eaten since yesterday. There’s been so much to deal with …”

  “How’s Jess?” I asked.

  “Scared,” she said. “Confused. Sad.”

  “And Sylvie?”

  “She said her goodbyes to Gary a long time ago.” Jane’s voice went dead. “I wish I had. I was at the hospital this morning when they brought Gary and Tess in.”

  “Is Tess going to be all right?”

  Jane shrugged. “Physically? She should be. It’s pneumonia, but I think we got to her in time …”

  “Did you see her?”

  Jane shook her head. “No. But I saw Gary. I had a patient in emergency when they brought him in. It was just bad luck.” She laughed. “Of course, when it came to Gary, if I hadn’t had bad luck, I wouldn’t have had any luck at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Jane picked up her fork and began tracing a pattern of interlocking circles on her empty plate. She seemed mesmerized. Finally, she said, “At least he didn’t suffer.”

  Images of Gary in the last seconds of his life flashed through my mind: the pleading in his eyes as he asked if I understood, if I forgave; the curious resignation with which he positioned the rifle in the soft flesh beneath his chin.

  “No,” I said, “he didn’t suffer.”

  Jane’s fork hadn’t stopped moving. Round and round, round and round it went. “Did he say anything at the end?” she asked softly.

  “Let it go, Jane.”

  “I can’t spend the rest of my life not knowing what happened.” Her voice was thick with misery. “I loved him, Jo. I need to know why he killed himself.”

  She deserved the truth. “Gary killed himself because I wouldn’t forgive him for killing Ian,” I said.

  Jane’s head jerked up, and her eyes were bright with anger. “That’s bullshit,” she said. “Is that what he told you? That it was your fault?” She raked her fork across the plate. “That bastard. Trying to blame you. Trying to leave you with the guilt. Don’t let him do it, Jo. Gary didn’t die because you wouldn’t forgive him. He died because …” She looked around wildly as if searching for an answer. Finally, she said, “He died because he’d backed himself into a corner, and there was no woman there to show him the way out.” She threw the fork down and stood up with such violence that she knocked the table against me. “It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t mine. It was his fault.” She was crying now. “If just once that son of a bitch hadn’t taken the path of least resistance, he could have had a terrific life.”

  After Jane left, I couldn’t get her epitaph for the man she had once loved out of my head. I don’t know how long I sat at my kitchen table thinking about Gary Stephens. There were questions about him that would never be answered, but one fact was incontrovertible. Gary’s weakness, his inability to withstand the lure of the easy way out, had altered the course of all our lives. It was hard not to think of what might have been, and for many hours in that endless night, I didn’t even try.

  During the next week, I did a pretty good imitation of a woman who was getting her life back to normal. I finished off my end-of-term marking on Wednesday. To celebrate, I went to the art gallery and bought a poster of a Harold Town self-portrait to put in Hilda’s Christmas stocking. Thursday, Taylor and I made shortbread. Friday, I invited Alex to come over to meet Greg and Mieka and eat shrimp gumbo. I moved through all of this with the brisk assurance of someone who was putting the past behind her and getting on with her life. Then, on Saturday morning, Tess Malone phoned to say she wanted to see me, and I crumbled.

  I drove down to Regina General just after lunch. The day was overcast and mild, and there were pools of standing water all over the parking lot. A young woman in a pink quilted housecoat was standing outside the entrance to the old wing. Her body had the soft shapelessness of a new mother. She was smoking.

  When I passed her to go into the building, she grinned. “Unbelievable weather, eh?”

  “Unbelievable,” I agreed.

  “Lucky, too,” she added as she took a deep drag of her cigarette, “otherwise it’d either be give up these, or stand out here and freeze my buns off.”

  I climbed the back stairs up to Tess’s room on the fourth floor. The stairwell smelled of hospital cooking and disinfectant. Things were better when I got up to the ward. Someone had made an effort to make the area festive. There was an artificial tree in the lounge, garlands of red and gold foil over the patients’ doorways, and a huge pot of poinsettias at the nurses’ station. It was cheerful, but as I walked down the corridor to Tess’s room, I was far from merry.

  Tess met me at the door to her room. She was wearing the blue cotton robe the hospital provides for its patients, and her feet were encased in blue paper slippers. She looked ten pounds thinner and twenty years older than she had looked the night of Howard’s dinner. There was a package of cigarettes in her hand.

  When she saw me, she smiled guiltily. “I was just going out for a smoke,” she said.

  “Tess, you’re just getting over pneumonia.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Jo. Please.”

  I embraced her. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t lecture. I’ll even come with you. We can talk outside. But you have to wear your coat.”

  We took the elevator down, and I followed her to the steps where I’d seen the girl in the pink robe. As soon as she was out of the hospital, Tess lit up and inhaled deeply. Then she turned to me. “I can’t stop thinking about them,” she said.

  “Them?” I asked.

  She drew on her cigarette again. “All the ones who died.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about them, either,” I said.

  “Maybe it’ll be better after Gary’s funeral.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “When is it?”

  “After the police are through with the body,
I guess,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Tess, perhaps you’re not ready to talk about this yet.”

  “I thought there’d be things you’d want to know,” she said.

  “I guess by now I know most of it,” I said. “The one thing I don’t know is how Ian got involved in the first place.”

  Tess smiled sadly. “Ian got involved because Henry Rybchuk believed he was an honest man. That’s what he told me the night of the caucus office party. He said ‘the rest of you I wouldn’t give a rat’s turd for, but Kilbourn’s different. He won’t give a shit how many of you are involved in this. He’ll help me find my daughter.’ ”

  “And he was right,” I said. Tess flinched, and I hurried on. “But that night at the party wasn’t the first time you talked to Henry Rybchuk.”

  “No, it wasn’t the first time,” she said. “Henry Rybchuk came to Beating Heart the week before Christmas. He was already in a terrible state. Maureen had concocted some story about Jenny having to take the baby to Saskatoon for medical tests. That had put him off for a while, but when the days went by, and he still hadn’t heard from Jenny, he called the place where she lived in Saskatoon. They told him she hadn’t been there since early December. That’s when he came to me.”

  “How did he know about you?”

  “Jenny told him. When she told him about the baby, she told him everything. I guess she wanted him to know she’d acted responsibly about her pregnancy and Jess’s birth.”

  “So Henry Rybchuk knew about Sylvie and Gary.”

  “He knew about them, all right. He’d gone to their house before he’d come to Beating Heart. He’d been trying to find somebody at home there for two days, but they were away. That empty house must have driven him over the edge. He was convinced Sylvie and Gary had taken Jenny and her baby away so he couldn’t get to them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I lied. I told him I had no idea where Jenny was. I said I’d met Jenny once, when she’d come to Beating Heart in April, but I hadn’t seen her since. He kept after me for a while, but I kept stonewalling. Finally, he seemed to realize he couldn’t force an answer out of me, and he left.”

  “And you didn’t see him again till that night at the party.”

  Tess shook her head. “No, I didn’t. But Gary did. Henry Rybchuk came to their house Christmas night. Luckily, Sylvie was upstairs with the baby. Rybchuk was drunk. He had a picture of Jenny and her baby sitting on Santa’s knee. Gary said he waved it in Gary’s face and said, ‘for the love of God, give me back my girl and her baby.’ Gary was beside himself. He couldn’t call the police, and it was only a matter of time before Sylvie came back downstairs. Then a woman walked by the house and asked Gary if she should call the police. Of course, that terrified Gary, but apparently it terrified Henry Rybchuk even more. He took off.” Tess lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of her first. “The next day he was waiting when Ian came to his office.”

  “And the endgame began,” I said.

  Tess covered my hand with hers. “I’ve tried to make amends. After Jenny and Ian died, I knew I had to give my life to Beating Heart. Since then, I’ve saved a hundred lives, Jo.”

  I walked Tess back to the elevator. When it came, she shook off my offer to go back upstairs with her, and she stepped inside. Just as the elevator doors began to close, she said, “It wasn’t enough, was it?”

  I was lucky. The doors closed before I had to come up with an answer.

  On Monday, when I walked into the kitchen and turned on the radio, the announcer said that Gary Stephens’s funeral was taking place that morning. I thought of what Tess had said, and I hoped she was right. Maybe once Gary was laid to rest, we’d all find some peace.

  I was having my first cup of coffee and savouring the quiet when Taylor came down to breakfast, carrying her cat. As she did every morning, she handed him to me while she got his food out of the cupboard and refilled his water dish. As he did every morning, the cat stiffened at my touch and stuck his claws through the material of my robe. Our time together was, it seemed, agony for both of us. Taylor was just about to shake the dry food into his bowl, when the phone rang. “Don’t let him down till I get the food in the bowl,” she said, and she scampered off to see who was calling.

  I tried to shift the cat’s position. “Bad luck for both of us, bub,” I said, “but she won’t be long.” With my free hand, I pulled the morning paper closer. Gary Stephens’s picture was on the bottom of the front page with the details of his funeral and a précis of the news that had been our breakfast fare all week.

  When Taylor hung up, I turned the paper over so she wouldn’t see the picture. She poured the food into the cat bowl.

  “Who was that on the phone?” I asked.

  She took the cat from me, and I could see his body go limp with joy. “Jess isn’t going to school,” Taylor said. “He’s going to his dad’s funeral.” As she poured her juice and got her cereal, she was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Finally, she asked, “Who goes to a funeral?”

  “A person’s family,” I said. “His friends. The people who loved him.”

  “There were a lot of people at my mother’s funeral,” she said.

  “A lot of people loved your mother,” I said. “And a lot of people respected her work.”

  She rested her spoon against her cereal bowl thoughtfully. “Do you think there’ll be a lot of people at Jess’s dad’s funeral?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think there’ll be many people there at all.”

  Taylor finished eating, then she got up from the table and put her bowl with the milk she always saved for her cat on the floor. “I was scared at my mother’s funeral,” she said.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Of what was going to happen next,” she said. The cat licked up the milk. Taylor took her bowl to the sink and ran the hot water on it. “Jo, I think we should go to that funeral today.”

  “I don’t think so, T,” I said.

  For a long time she didn’t say anything. When she turned her face was strained and white. “If you died, I’d want Jess there,” she said.

  Three hours later, Taylor and I were walking up the centre aisle of Lakeview United Church. I’d been right about the crowd. I saw some familiar faces: Lorraine Bellegarde, Craig Evanson, a few people I knew from the Legislature, some members of the media, but most of the blond ash pews were empty. The band of mourners was small, too. Sylvie and Jane, and between them, Jess, looking small and sad in his new suit.

  When I saw Jess, I thought of what Alex had told me about the police investigation. Everything they turned up had substantiated their theory that, for the last weeks of his life, Gary was a man possessed by his need to keep his son. The letter Kevin Tarpley had sent to Gary was in a box of unfiled correspondence Lorraine Bellegarde had packed when Gary had moved out of his office. Alex said the letter had been only three sentences long. Kevin had printed out Exodus 20:13 – the sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not commit murder.” He had promised Gary that, if he asked Jesus to forgive him, he would gain eternal salvation. And then Kevin had written a final and fatal sentence in which he told Gary he could no longer let his son be raised by a man who had sinned as Gary had sinned. There was a receipt from the private airline that had flown Gary to Prince Albert on Hallowe’en and brought him back to Nationtv in time to do the promotion for Howard’s dinner. There was a bank statement showing that Gary had withdrawn all the cash in his business account the day after Hallowe’en. The amount wasn’t large. Certainly, it was nowhere near the amount of money Maureen Gault had been flashing when she’d made the offer to buy Ray-elle’s beauty salon.

  It had taken the police a while to find the source of Maureen’s bonanza. When they questioned the people Gary knew, a sad picture of Gary’s activities in the days before Maureen’s death emerged. He had gone to everyone he knew asking for money. He’d been so desperate he hadn’t even bothered to fabricate a story. He j
ust said he was in trouble. Most of the people Gary had gone to had already bailed him out when he’d skimmed his legal accounts after Ian died, and they turned him down flat.

  Only one person was willing to help, and her identity was no surprise to me. Lorraine Bellegarde owned a small house on Wallace Street. She had been proud of the fact that it was paid for “right down to the last nail,” but she had mortgaged it for Gary.

  Alex had been the one to interview her, and her behaviour had baffled him. “She seems like such a sensible woman,” he’d said. “Do you think he just laid on the charm or what?” I told him that Lorraine had been around Gary long enough to be immune to his charm. Then I remembered the story of how Gary hadn’t let Lorraine get rid of the prostitutes who’d been using his car as pick-up point. “I guess she decided he deserved a hassle-free zone,” I’d said.

  Alex had shaken his head in disgust. “What kind of guy would let a woman mortgage her house for him? He must have really been a piece of work.”

  “He was that, all right,” I said. And we didn’t talk of the matter again.

  In the church, Jess laid his head against his mother’s arm. The service was generic: the Lord’s prayer, the twenty-third Psalm, a few mournful hymns. The young minister spoke obliquely about the mysteries of the human heart and seemed relieved when he was finished.

  So was I. Gary had been cremated, and, despite everything, the cloth-covered urn on the altar was painful to contemplate. When the minister said the closing prayer and invited us all to join the family in a reception room at the back of the church, Taylor looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. I’d had enough. When we came into the vestibule, Sylvie and Jane were talking to a man from the funeral home. I headed for the door, hoping Taylor and I could slip out of the church unnoticed. But Sylvie spotted me and came over.

  She seemed preternaturally calm, and I wondered if Jane had given her something. Then I remembered what Sylvie had endured in the last few days, and I knew there was nothing in the pharmacopoeia that could have even made a dint in her pain. Sylvie was a strong woman, and she was drawing on her strength.