by Gail Bowen
I held up a greasy bag.
“You suppose wrong,” I said. She and Greg attacked the bag like kids, and Mieka ran through the evening’s messages. There were calls from old political friends, most of whom, according to Mieka, wanted to tell me what to say next time. Peter had called collect. He’d been in the middle of nowhere when the show came on, but had found a pub with a TV and made everybody watch his mother. He’d liked the show, and he said the guys in the bar thought I seemed sharp for a woman. My old friend Hilda McCourt called from Saskatoon to tell me I deferred to Keith and Sam Steinitz too much and that solid colours tended to photograph well and make the wearer look slim, but that she thought I had a future in TV. Keith and I had a final glass of wine with the kids, and by eleven-thirty, I was showered and in my nightgown. When I turned down the bedspread, I saw the picture Taylor had left for me. It was called “Jo on TV.” I was smiling and wearing my flowery dress. I looked very thin and very fashionable. When I went to tuck her in, I gave her an extra hug. That night I went to bed happy.
The next day I got a message from Kim Barilko.
CHAPTER
8
The morning of June fourth was glorious: hot, blue-skied, alive with possibilities. After I showered, I took the dogs for a run, got the kids off to school and sat down at the picnic bench with a cup of coffee. The tension of the first TV show was over; the kids were safe; the shoes I’d chosen to wear with my mother-of-the-bride dress were off being dyed. Life was under control. All I had to do was sit back and enjoy it. But I couldn’t.
Half an hour later, wearing sandals, a black-and-white checked sundress and my Wandering Soul bracelet, I pulled up on the street in front of the Lily Pad. I walked up the sidewalk and made my way through the smokers on the front steps. By now they were used to me; I was as unremarkable to them as the wooden frog sunning himself on the lily pad on the front lawn. I went straight to the Sharing Place. My note was there, but there was still no answering message. As I walked to my car, I felt the familiar sting of defeat.
That’s when I saw him. He was standing by my Volvo, slight, young, dressed to intimidate: sleeveless black shirt; skintight blue jeans, black hair pulled into a ponytail under a high-crowned black cowboy hat, black reflector glasses. He lit a cigarette and inhaled it lazily.
“I saw you on TV,” he said. “It was on in the place where I was,” he added quickly, in case he’d revealed something.
I could see myself reflected in his glasses. I seemed distorted. My forehead was huge, and my body seemed to dwindle off, caricaturelike, toward a point on the sidewalk.
“You’re the one looking for Kim,” he said.
My face in the shining black glass was suddenly alert.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
“She’ll meet you,” he said. “Until last night she didn’t believe it about you knowing someone on TV.”
“Where can I find her?” I said.
“She’ll find you,” he said. “Tonight at the coffee shop in the bus station, ten-thirty.” Then, for just a second, the tough-guy edge in his voice softened. “She’s a good kid,” he said. “She needs a lucky break.”
I called Jill and told her the news. She sounded tired and discouraged.
“Maybe some good will come out of this after all,” she said. “I’m certainly getting nowhere.”
“Darren Wolfe’s hot information wasn’t so hot?” I said.
“Oh, it was hot, all right, at least I think it could be hot, but somebody needs to do a lot of digging, and the network is determined it isn’t going to be us. I told you they were dragging their heels on this, so this morning I decided to fax Toronto all my notes from the interview with Darren. Jo, I was so sure if I just laid things out they’d see what a great story the Little Flower case is.”
“And they didn’t,” I said.
“Twenty minutes ago I got a fax telling me in no uncertain terms that street journalism is not the network’s mandate and that I’m the only regional news director who hasn’t submitted plans for Canada Day coverage. Here I am sitting on one of the best stories of my life, and I have to shut everything down so I can call Eyebrow, Saskatchewan, and see what they’re doing on July first.”
I laughed. “I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars they’re having a softball tournament.”
“No bet,” she said. “Listen, Jo, see if you can shake anything loose from Kim tonight, would you? Specifically, about kids disappearing.”
“You mean kids her age?”
“No, little kids.”
I felt a chill. “Jill, what do you think’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I just get glimpses. Be careful, Jo. I’ll tell you what I tell our interns from the school of journalism. Keep your eyes open, don’t believe anything until you’ve heard it from three sources, tell only the people who need to know and always remember where the door is.”
“Right,” I said. I hung up and looked at my watch. It was going to be a long wait till ten-thirty. I went upstairs, made files for a box of clippings and started to organize my office. Busy work. At noon I picked up Taylor, and we drove downtown and offered to buy Mieka lunch at Mr. Tube Steak if she’d come and sit in the park with us. She did.
After lunch, Taylor and I had a swim and a nap and started to get ready for dinner. Keith was flying to Toronto that night, so I’d asked him over for an early barbecue.
Taylor and I made a potato salad and coleslaw. After she’d finished at Judgements, Mieka came by with a double chocolate cheesecake from another caterer. (“She’s good, but I’m going to be better,” she said, smiling, as she put the cake in the refrigerator.) Around five, Greg and Keith came over, and we barbecued chicken. It was a nice family evening. After coffee and dessert, I drove Keith to his place to pick up his bags. We walked upstairs together; when we opened the door, Keith’s apartment was hot and airless.
“Air conditioner must have gone again,” he said. “Do you want me to run inside and grab my bags? We can have a drink at the airport.”
“Let’s just sit out on your balcony,” I said. “I’ve got some news about Kim Barilko, and I’d rather you were the only one who heard.”
Keith took my hand and led me to the balcony. He was silent as I told him. When I finished, he looked at me searchingly. “Jo, are you sure you’re not getting in too deep with all of this? The Hardy Boys stories are fun when you’re a kid, but this sounds serious to me.”
“Nancy Drew,” I said.
Keith raised his eyebrows.
“For girls it was Nancy Drew,” I said, “and I know it’s serious, but, Keith, I can’t just walk away. Kim Barilko isn’t anybody’s ideal fifteen-year-old, but she’s funny and smart, and she deserves a chance not to be hassled by assholes.”
“I take it that’s a direct quote,” Keith said.
“Pretty much,” I said.
Suddenly there was a low moaning sound from the balcony below us. “Blaine’s air conditioner must be broken, too,” Keith said.
The air was split with hooting noises, and Keith smiled sadly. “Well, you are a miracle worker, Jo. Those are Blaine’s approbation signs. He agrees with you. Blaine believes that Kim Barilko deserves a chance.”
After I drove Keith to the airport, I came home, had a swim with the kids and got everybody settled for the night. Then I drove downtown. At ten-thirty I pulled into the parking lot opposite the bus station. Across the street at the Shrine Temple, men’s laughter escaped through an open door into the hot night. The bus station was brightly lit. I went into the coffee shop, sat down at the counter and ordered iced tea. There was a Plexiglas wall between the coffee shop and the bus waiting room. I could see people sitting on benches, patient, still. Mostly they were native people or they were old. The past winter a once-famous newsman from the east had said that our city was dying, that soon the only people left in Regina would be old or native. For most of us that prospect seemed a lot more comfortable than living in a city filled with once-famous
newsmen. I finished my tea and looked at the big clock over the coffee machines. It was ten forty-five.
The waitress came over and asked if I wanted a refill. She was a pretty young woman, with the dark slanted eyes some northern Cree people have. On her uniform was a button saying, “Smile, God Loves You.”
I ordered another iced tea. She brought it, then picked up a damp cloth and began wiping down the counter.
“Closing time?” I said.
“I wish,” she said.
The outside door opened and two young women came in. You didn’t have to be a sociologist or a cop to know how they earned their living. Low-cut sweaters, high-cut skirts, bare legs, shoes with three-inch heels. The smaller of the women was holding her hand against her cheek. Without a word, the waitress scooped up some ice, dropped it in a cloth and handed it to her.
“Thanks, Albertine,” the woman holding her face said. Her voice was muffled by her hand.
The other girl said, “Two Diet Cokes. Is it too late for fries?” Albertine shook her head, and the young woman with the swollen face said, “My lucky night. Two fries with gravy.”
Then in the same flat voice with which she’d ordered the fries, she said to her companion, “Two blow jobs, two hand jobs and a half and half, so I’m thinking that’s enough. It’s too fucking hot for anybody to want to get laid, I’m going home, and if Rick says I didn’t make my quota, tough. Then this suit pulls up in a Buick and we go to the Ramada, and it’s cool there, and I think my fucking luck is maybe changing. A hundred, and all he wants is to do some lines of blow right off my belly, so it looks like an easy evening. Anyway, I’m lying there in the air conditioning with this pig snorting along my stomach, thinking I’ll maybe get home in time to watch Letterman, when he goes berserk and starts beating the shit out of me. I got out of there, but the asshole just about caved in my face. Asshole.” Then she lapsed into silence.
I got up and walked past them toward the bathroom. The one who had been talking had a pocket mirror in her hand. She was looking at her reflection with anxious eyes as she smoothed pancake makeup over the swelling line of her cheekbone.
When I came back, Albertine was bringing the Cokes and the fries and gravy – Angus’s favourite, too. Up close, these girls didn’t look much older than Angus, but, as I listened to their young voices trading street stories, I knew that the dates that appeared on their birth certificates were irrelevant. The morning Mieka had found Bernice Morin’s body, one of the cops had given Bernice her epitaph. “She was a veteran,” he had said. As I watched these girls, carefully eating French fries through lips thick with gloss, laughing at the vagaries of a world that should have been inconceivable, I thought that they were veterans, too.
Kim Barilko never showed up. I waited till midnight, then, bone weary and depressed, I gave up. I was tired of tilting at windmills. When I got home, I went upstairs to shower. After twenty minutes under the hot water, I still didn’t feel clean.
The next morning was overcast – more than overcast. The skies were heavy with rain, and the air was ominously still. When Taylor and I were leaving the house, the first drops began. Angus came out the front door just as we were getting in the car.
“Did you take out the garbage?” I asked.
He started with an excuse.
“No excuses,” I said. “You better get it out quick before the rain hits.”
Grumbling, he threw his books down on the porch and ran into the house. “You’re my hero,” I yelled, and Taylor and I drove off.
When I came back fifteen minutes later, it was raining hard. Angus’s schoolbooks were still on the front porch. I went into the house, calling his name. Uneasy, I opened the door to the backyard. Angus wasn’t there, and the gate that opened into the back alley was open. Angus never left that gate open. He always worried that harm would come to the dogs if they got out of our backyard. As I ran toward the gate, I felt the edge of panic.
There was a puddle just past the gate. I jumped it, but when I came down, I lost my footing in the mud and fell. In a split second, our collie, Sadie, was with me. My husband had always made jokes about Sadie. She was a beautiful animal, but not a smart one. Ian used to call her the show girl. That day the show girl was right on the money. She put her nose under my shoulder and tried to push me up. Then she barked and loped down the alley. She stopped in front of our garbage bin. Our other dog was there, and so was Angus. He was lying in the mud, moaning. I pushed myself up and went to him. His face was ashen.
“The garbage,” he said, in a small, strangled voice.
“Don’t worry about the garbage,” I said. “What happened to you?”
Mute, he shook his head. His eyes were wide with shock. He put his arms around my neck and pulled himself up.
“Don’t look in the garbage,” he said.
I lifted him up and carried him into the house. He was a dead weight and he was covered in mud. I put him on the chair in the kitchen, and he sat there staring into space, holding his leg and crying. His behaviour scared me. Our kids had had their share of sports injuries, but after the first shock, they’d rallied. Angus wasn’t rallying. In fact, he seemed to be sinking deeper into pain.
“I’m taking you to emergency,” I said. “I think we should let a doctor have a look at you.”
“Don’t leave her there,” he said. “We can’t go to the hospital and just leave her out there.”
“Leave who?” I said. “I got the dogs in. We’re all okay.”
“There’s a girl out there in our garbage,” he said. “She’s dead.”
I looked at him. Telling me seemed to calm him. I ran through the yard to the alley. Our city sanitation unit uses industrial waste bins, the kind a garbage truck can unload automatically. I looked into ours. On top of the garbage there was a girl. She was lying on her back. Her peroxided Madonna hair shot out like a halo around the bloody ruins of what had once been her face. Her shirt was soaked with blood, but the rain had washed one patch clean, and I could make out the original colour. Popsicle orange. I would have known it anywhere. Suddenly the air was split with the sound of screaming. Frozen, I listened until somewhere inside, I recognized the voice of the screamer as my own.
The next minutes still have a special terrible clarity for me. I ran to the house. I put on the kettle, called the doctor, and then I called the police. I called Mieka at Judgements, told her there had been a problem at home and asked her to pick Taylor up from school at lunchtime and take her somewhere. I could hear Mieka’s voice, urgent, still asking questions, when I hung up the phone. The kettle boiled. I made Angus tea with a lot of sugar and gave him two Aspirins, then I sat at the kitchen table with him until the police and our doctor came.
The police made it first. I had thought when I met Inspector Tom Zaba that he had the kind of face that was made for smiling, but when I looked at him as he came through the doorway of our kitchen that morning I thought he would never smile again. He was wearing a slicker and he was soaked with rain. Even the ends of his moustache drooped with wet. He looked ineffably sad.
When our doctor came, she took one look at Angus’s leg and said he needed to be seen by an orthopedic surgeon. Inspector Zaba asked if he could talk to Angus first. She agreed.
Inspector Zaba was very gentle with Angus, and he was very gentle with me. But all the gentleness in the world couldn’t undo the horror of what had happened to Kim Barilko. From my kitchen window I could see police cars driving along the rain-pounded alley, disgorging people into the muddy gravel so they could bag evidence and measure and photograph and turn the last hours of a human life into something that could be contained in a storage box. An RCMP cruiser pulled up, and I saw Constable Perry Kequahtooway get out. Outside the rain pounded on, implacable.
When I’d finished answering Inspector Zaba’s questions, I stood up to go to the hospital with Angus.
Inspector Zaba stood, too. “One more question, Mrs. Kilbourn,” he said. “Was Kim Barilko on her way to tell you somethi
ng last night?”
“No,” I said, “I was going to tell her something. There was someone I knew who wanted to help Kim make some changes in her life.” I told him about the Lily Pad and the mentor program, and he wrote it down without comment. When he’d finished, he put the cap on his pen and fixed it in his shirt pocket.
“Mrs. Kilbourn, you must have been struck by the pattern here,” he said. “Two girls are murdered in less than a month, and a third young woman commits suicide. In all three instances, a member of your family is on the scene when the death is discovered. Bernice Morin dies hours after she is seen by Christy Sinclair. Two days later, Christy Sinclair dies. Kim Barilko goes to Christy Sinclair’s funeral, and now she dies. There’s got to be a connection.”
“I know,” I said dully. “I just don’t know what it is. But I have to know something. Did Kim have a tattoo? A teddy bear tattoo on her left buttock?”
He looked at me hard, and in his eyes I could see the bleak knowledge of human depravity that had been in Jill Osiowy’s eyes when she had shown me the photos of the Little Flower murders.
“No tattoo,” he said. “But there was another trademark. Kim Barilko’s tongue was split,” he said simply. “Someone had slit it right from the tip to the place where it hinged at the back of her mouth.”
I could feel the gorge rise in the back of my throat, and I covered my mouth with my hands.
“Why?” I said.
Inspector Tom Zaba was impassive. “The tongue thing is a street punishment for a snitch.” He waited for a beat. “I’m not swaggering when I tell you this, Mrs. Kilbourn. I’m trying to impress you with the fact that these people don’t have a special code for dealing with nice ladies who want to help fallen girls. If you’re in their way, they’ll kill you. It’s that simple. I don’t think either of us wants to see that. Stay away, Mrs. Kilbourn. These people play by rules a woman like you couldn’t even begin to understand.”
As we pulled up at the emergency ward, Inspector Zaba’s warning was replaying itself in my head. Our doctor and the police officer who’d come with us to the hospital took Angus up to X-ray and I sat alone in the emergency room, waiting. I don’t know how long I waited. Twice, volunteers, nice-looking women with pastel smocks and expensive perfume, came over to ask if they could get me anything, but I waved them away. My mind had gone into white space. When the orthopedic surgeon came to tell me about the extent of Angus’s injury, I had trouble for a minute sorting out what he was talking about. He was an earnest young man with a quick grin and a reassuring manner. His identification tag said his name was Dr. Eric Leung.
