by Gail Bowen
One evening the September after my husband died, I was in my backyard cutting flowers, and I sensed someone behind me. It was Andy, and there was a look on his face that was hard to read in the half light. As always when he talked with friends, there was no preamble.
“Jo, I’ve had a hell of a time dealing with what happened to Ian. I know it’s been a thousand times worse for you, but today something came back to me, and it’s helping. When I was in high school we read Heart of Darkness – I guess all the grade twelves read it that year. Anyway, the woman who taught us said that Kurtz possessed a mind that was sane but a soul that was mad. I think those kids who killed Ian must have been like that. Somehow that explains a lot. The world’s a rational place, Jo. Anyway,” he had said, “that’s all I came to say.”
Much later, as I thought back to the words, they didn’t seem particularly profound, but on that September night I clung to them. In isolating my husband’s murderers as mutants, spiritual misfits, Andy had made it possible for me to reclaim the image of a world that made sense. But now the man who had touched my shoulder and turned me from the heart of darkness had been swallowed by the darkness himself.
I turned onto the path that curved around Speaker’s Corner. “A mind that was sane, but a soul that was mad,” I said. A woman walking by with her basset hound looked at me curiously. I smiled at her. “Just saying my mantra.” She tightened her grip on the dog’s leash and quickened her steps. I didn’t blame her. If I could have managed it, I would have run from me, too.
Considering what was waiting for me at the hospital, perhaps leaving reality behind wasn’t such a bad idea. Howard had called at five o’clock that morning sounding tired and worried.
“Jo, I’m at Prairie Hospital – all hell’s about to break loose here. How long would it take you to get over here?”
“Howard, I was sleeping. Can’t it wait?”
“Would thirty minutes be all right? If you don’t want to drive, Dave’ll come over and pick you up.”
I looked at my clock. I had slept for three hours. Obviously, Dave and Howard hadn’t slept at all. They didn’t need a prima donna.
“No, I’ll walk. I could use the air. Why doesn’t Dave meet me in the park and he can fill me in on the way to the hospital.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll tell him to meet you at the flowers.”
“Howard, the park is full of flowers.”
“The red ones. You know, the weird little ones – the ones that bite,” he said and hung up.
In the shower, it came to me. The ones that bite were snapdragons; there was a bank of snapdragons on a little hill past the bandstand. Sure enough, when I came over the hill, Dave Micklejohn was waiting. He was still wearing the white shorts and the Sartre T-shirt he’d had on at the picnic. He must have been at the hospital all night.
I put my index finger in the middle of his chest, right on the bridge of Sartre’s nose.
“Existence precedes essence,” I said.
“Never truer than today,” said Dave, straightening his shoulders. “Oh, Jo, this thing just gets worse and worse.”
“What now?” I said.
“Well, there’s no doubt at all that Andy was murdered. The pathologist is ninety-nine per cent certain Andy ingested potassium cyanide seconds before his death. They think it was in the water that he drank at the podium. You know, the stuff in the black Thermos that I filled myself and then put the little note on for good measure.”
I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. Cyanide in the water. My instincts had been right.
Dave waited for reassurance. “Oh, Dave, the police will know the note was a joke.”
“Well, for the moment they’re entertaining that possibility, hence I’m still a free person. You, incidentally, are a hero, Jo. When you decked that bigwig Spenser, you saved his life. If he’d managed to get the water down, there would have been two of them dead instead of …” He swallowed and looked toward the marina. The striped windsocks on the poles around the deck of the restaurant hung limp in the hot stillness of the morning. Dave swallowed again.
“Speaking of heroes, Dave, you’re not doing too badly yourself,” I said, touching his arm gently. “What’s happening at the hospital?”
“It’s full of media people. Jo, you wouldn’t believe the mess and the confusion in that lobby. They’ve already got a crew setting up a live feed to Good Morning, Canada. Andy’s murder will be coast to coast by 7:05. Great coverage, kiddo.” And then, smiling ruefully, he gave me the final piece of news. Eve Boychuk was insisting that she would take Andy home to their place in Wolf River and handle the burial herself. That was where I came in.
“Jo, for fifteen years we’ve managed to smooth over the fact that Andy was married to a person who, to put it kindly, is unusual. Now, when we’ve got every media person in Canada here, Eve is going to throw our leader’s body into a bag, pitch him into the back of her half-ton, drive down the Trans-Canada and bury him in the garden next to her cat.”
As we walked across the parking lot to the emergency entrance, we were both laughing. We must have sounded crazy, but the laughter helped. Suddenly, Dave pointed to the emergency room door.
“Well, how about that?”
I looked. There, bigger than life, left arm in a sling, was Rick Spenser. The doctors must have kept him in the hospital overnight for observation. His beautiful cream suit was filthy, and there was a nasty crosshatch of cuts on his forehead, but as a taxi pulled up to the door, his wave was imperious. He settled himself beside the driver, closed the door smartly and was gone.
I said to Dave, “Another myth shattered.”
Dave grinned. “You mean our boy Rick in a dirty suit?”
“No, I mean our boy Rick jumping into the front seat of a taxi. A cabbie told me once that he could always spot easterners by the way they head for the back seat, even if they’re alone. And there’s Rick Spenser, an easterner right to the tip of his Dack’s, diving into the front seat like a stubble jumper. A mystery.”
“A day for mysteries, my friend,” said Dave as he opened the glass door to admitting.
The hospital smell stopped me. Memories. I had come here the morning they brought Ian’s body in. I hadn’t believed Andy.
Dave was looking at me hard. “Jo, are you all right?”
“No,” I said, “but I’m still functioning. Use me while you can.”
“In that case, I’ll go find Howard and meet the press and you take care of the Lady. That’s what Andy used to call her, you know. He’d say, ‘Well, Dave, looks like we’re going to have to go to the Elstow Sports Day alone. The Lady has declined our invitation.’ ” He shook his head at the memory. “They’ve put her in the conference room. It’s just through those doors at the end of the hall. Be firm with her, Jo. Don’t let her make Andy look ridiculous. This has to be first class all the way.”
He gave me a hug and walked to the foyer, where media people were drinking hospital coffee and checking sound systems and lights. Two men carrying hand-held TV cameras trailed him. I watched as he picked his way carefully over the tangle of cables and wires on the floor and moved a pot of pink azaleas from the reception desk to the table where Howard would be holding the press conference; then, shaking his head, put them back where he’d found them. Virgo all the way.
Then I opened the double doors and walked down the corridor, in search of the Lady.
CHAPTER
3
The room that they’d put Eve in was in the new wing. The corridor I walked down smelled of fresh paint, and the floor was soft with carpet. The names and titles on the doors that opened off the hall made it clear that this was where the power of the hospital, medical and administrative, went to work. When I came to the door marked Conference Room, I took a deep breath, knocked and walked in.
The first thing I noticed was that, by anyone’s standards, the room was luxurious. During the election campaign seven years before, the other party had promised a massive program of new hea
lth-care facilities. “A hospital for every patient,” Howard Dowhanuik had scornfully called their program, but the people had bought it, and we lost the election. Now, seven years of scandals and kickbacks later, the number of hospitals in the province was exactly the same as it had been the day we left office. However, as a sop to the electorate, the government had, the winter before, begun construction on a new wing for the biggest hospital in the capital, Prairie General.
This was their showpiece, their shining rebuttal to nagging questions about available beds and state-of-the-art medical equipment. They would use this as evidence of a promise fulfilled, but we could use it too – as an indictment of a government that starved rural hospitals but emptied out the treasury for the folks in the capital. As I stood in the door of the conference room, I filed away details: the shining oak of the conference table, the deep chairs upholstered in leather the colour of a dove’s breast, the handsome pieces of aboriginal art that blazed on the muted grey walls. Andy could get a great ten-minute speech out of this room … Then, like a blow to the temple, the correction, the change of tense – Andy could have gotten a great ten-minute speech out of this.
Andy was dead. There wouldn’t be any more speeches. But I could do this much for him. I could take care of his wife. She was sitting at the head of the oak table. Her back was to a wall of windows that filled the conference room with the raw light of a city in the grip of a heat wave, but this room was cold – unnaturally cold – and quiet. Through the windows I could see the traffic on the street, but the air in the room was silent and dead.
I walked toward the window and sat in the chair beside her.
“Hello, Eve. How’re you doing?”
Her voice was low and strong. “On a scale of one to ten, I’m about a minus five.” She tried a smile. “They didn’t want me to be alone last night, so I stayed here.”
“You’re looking fine,” I said, and it was true. She was still wearing the unbleached cotton sundress she’d had on at the picnic, but her thick grey hair was brushed smoothly and caught in a barrette at the back, and her makeup was fresh. On the floor beside her was a bag, a large, tooled-leather bag with a shoulder strap, the kind travellers carry. With her deep tan and her Greek sandals and her self-contained, slightly abstracted look, she had the air of a traveller who suddenly finds herself inexplicably in the wrong place.
“Eve.” I covered her strong brown hand with my own. “Dave thinks we should talk.”
“Sort of widow to widow?” she asked and then she laughed.
“Yeah, kind of like that,” I said and wondered if the doctors had given her something. “It’s about –”
“It’s about Andy’s funeral,” she said. “Dave told you he’s afraid that I’ll disgrace you all.” She sounded distanced, ironic.
I took a chance. “Yeah, that’s about it.”
“Did he tell you what I want to do?”
“He said you were thinking about taking Andy home to Wolf River and having a private burial.”
“And you don’t think I have that right?” Her voice was low and controlled, but there was an edge in it.
“I know you have that right. It’s just that Andy meant a lot to a great many people, and I think we should give them the chance to say good-bye.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were extraordinary – grey-green with little flecks of yellow, cat’s eyes that seemed focused on something behind me that I couldn’t see, that I would never see.
“Of course,” she said, “a big funeral would be good politics. All those people talking about what Andy believed in, and all of you rededicating yourselves to Andy’s principles. By the time we left the cemetery you guys would be way ahead in the polls.”
She was right. None of us had illusions about the next election. It was, as they say, a crap shoot. The polls were good for us now, but polls change, and it would be nice to have a cushion. A big, emotional funeral would get a lot of print, and we would use the coverage.
There wasn’t a political person in Saskatchewan who hadn’t thought of the impact Andy’s funeral could have. What amazed me was that Eve had thought of it. Eve hated politics. We all knew that. And she hated political people. I had known Andy fifteen years, and I could count on one hand the number of times Eve had talked to me and on two hands the number of times I’d seen her in public.
But here she was, sounding as shrewd as a party organizer. She was Protean – changing shape before my eyes – and I was knocked off base. I didn’t know where to take the conversation.
Eve did. “Jo, what would you do?” Another surprise. Eve asking advice, looking for a reasonable solution.
Well, I had one. Burying a murdered husband was an area in which I’d had some experience. I tried to keep the relief out of my voice. “I’d do what I did when Ian was killed. I’d ask Dave Micklejohn to arrange everything. I’d show up for the funeral. I’d do the best I could till everything was over and then I’d go home and fall apart.”
Eve got up, walked to the windows and looked at the street. The minutes passed. I stored away more details about the room in case I ever wrote another political speech for anyone: the smoky glass of the wet bar tucked discreetly in the corner; the handsome oak sideboard with the circle of crystal decanters gleaming in the sunlight; the spiky beauty of the vase of prairie lilies placed dead centre on the conference table.
Eve turned to face me, picked up her bag, slung it over her shoulder and shrugged. “Okay, let’s go find Dave Micklejohn.”
I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. I had told Dave I was functioning. Apparently, I was functioning pretty well. As I grabbed my purse and headed out the door with Eve, I congratulated myself on a job well done.
The congratulations were premature. I had forgotten what waited for us when we left the new wing and went into the centre block of the hospital. It didn’t take long to be reminded. There they were – the Good Morning, Canada people and half a dozen others. Howard Dowhanuik and a woman wearing a white medical jacket with a hospital ID picture clipped to the lapel were standing behind a row of microphones. The woman was reading a statement. It was 7:05 and we were going live – coast to coast.
I’d set her up. Eve had trusted me, and I’d led her right into shark-filled waters. It didn’t take long for one of the local journalists to recognize her, and the crew turned the cameras on us. Someone stuck a mike in Eve’s face and asked her if she had any idea who had murdered her husband. I was furious at the predatory smile on the face of the man who asked the question, and I was furious at myself. But Eve was wonderful. She said she knew people would understand if she didn’t say much, she was still shocked. She would help the police in every possible way. Funeral arrangements were in the hands of Andy’s friend, David Micklejohn. I looked at Dave, who was standing out of camera range beside the hospital spokesperson. I could see the relief on his face.
I grabbed Eve’s arm, pulled her along with me and said, “Let’s get out of here. Walk as if you know where we’re going.” Together we strode purposefully toward the heavy glass doors that opened on the parking lot. After the chill of the conference room, the hot city air was like the blast from one of those automatic hand dryers in a public washroom.
Eve is tall, five foot ten or so, at least a head taller than me. As we came to the fence that divided the doctors’ parking lot from the public one, she leaned down and whispered, “Do you know where we’re going?” We stopped and looked around. Not twenty feet away was an old maroon Buick – Andy’s car. Dave must have driven it to the hospital from the picnic. I pointed it out to Eve, and she rummaged in her purse and pulled out some keys.
“Bingo,” she said. We slid into the front seat of that car as coolly as two women driving to the office. Eve slammed her door shut, then put her head on the steering wheel and began to cry great, noisy, racking sobs.
She was entitled. So was I. But it wasn’t my turn. Today I was supposed to be the strong one. I sat beside her and played with the paper coffee cu
ps that were lying on the dash. Dave and Andy and I had driven to the picnic in this car together. Just at the edge of town we’d stopped for ice cream and take-out coffee. These were our cups.
Outside in the heat, barelegged women in bright summer dresses were walking to work. It seemed like such an ordinary thing to do that I felt a stab of envy as I watched them. Inside the Buick, Eve wept and I played with the paper cups. One, two, three – one for Dave, one for Andy, one for me.
As suddenly as she had begun, Eve stopped crying. She reached over to the glove compartment and came up with a crushed box of moist towels. We each took a couple and wiped our hands and faces. Then Eve turned to me.
“Joanne, I’m going home. I hate this city, and if Dave Micklejohn is taking care of the funeral, there’s nothing for me to do here. I should go and see Carey and tell him his father’s dead. We never know how much he understands, but I don’t want him to hear about Andy on television.” She had not mentioned murder. Her mind was protecting itself more efficiently than mine was. She was devastated but she was coping. As she sat there, pulling a comb through her hair, looking critically at her face in the rearview mirror, she was, I thought, more centred than we had given her credit for being. Maybe I’d been too quick to dismiss all the New Age theories about quartz crystals and cosmic harmony.
However she managed it, Eve was a strong woman and a brave one. Her tender and unpitying reference to her son touched a vulnerability in me, because until that moment I had forgotten all about him. He must, I thought, be in his late teens now. It had been more than ten years since the accident. I’d seen those flat, factual lines in Andy’s biography so often that they didn’t register any more.
“Andy and his wife, Eve, have one child, son, Carey, who is learning disabled and lives at the Pines, a special-care facility operated by Wolf River Bible College in Andy’s constituency. Both parents visit their son frequently.”
