by Gail Bowen
I took a Valium with lunch, went home and slept through the afternoon. That night I went to Peter’s football game, came home, got into bed with the unauthorized biography of the PM and slept through the night.
The next morning in my daybook I wrote a tentative “Better” followed by a string of question marks. I had breakfast with the kids, took the dogs for their run, changed my clothes, grabbed the little pumpkin suit I’d bought for Clay Evanson and drove to Wolf River. I took a deep breath when I pulled onto the overpass. “So far, so good,” I said aloud and then something went wrong in my chest muscles. I couldn’t move the air in and out of my lungs. I took a series of gulping breaths. I managed to keep the car on the overpass and get onto the highway. I pulled over onto the shoulder at almost exactly the same spot where Eve and I had stopped six weeks before.
There was a paper bag from a take-out place on the dashboard. I held it over my mouth and nose and breathed deeply. The bag smelled of stale grease and salt, but after a while, my breathing became regular again. I sat by the side of the road for a few minutes, frightened and angry. Then I said loudly, “I’m not giving in to this, you know,” put the car in gear and finished the drive to Wolf River.
For once, Lori Evanson was not immaculate. I had stopped in at Disciples for a cup of coffee and was told that Lori was home and ill. When she opened the door of the trailer she and Mark and Clay lived in, she certainly looked ill and, without her careful makeup, very young. She invited me in, turned off the soap opera she was watching, made a futile stab at picking up the toys that were everywhere in the sunny living room, then collapsed on the couch.
Clay’s eyes had been drawn by the bright colours of the bag from Seasons, and he grabbed at it.
“Oh, Clay, no.” Lori’s sweet singsong voice sounded weary.
“It’s all right, Lori. It’s a present for him.”
Like a child, she was off the couch and over to where Clay was, helping him open the bag.
When she saw the pumpkin suit, she began at once to pull it over his little T-shirt and jeans.
“Oh, Clay, you are going to be such a cute little Mr. Pumpkin.” She sat back on her heels and looked up at me solemnly. Her eyes were as round and full of wonder as the eyes of her son. “How can I ever thank you?”
“It’s just a Hallowe’en costume, Lori. My kids are all grown up now – at least past the pumpkin stage. This was fun for me, and Clay really does look great.”
“Then I’ll just get up and give you a hug.” She was smiling when she reached her arms out to me but something she saw in my face killed the smile. My chest felt tight, as if something were squeezing it. Lori’s eyes were filled with concern. “Why, Mrs. Kilbourn, you’re sick. You look so very sick. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, it’s all in my head, Lori. I went to the doctor yesterday and she said it was just stress: Andy’s death and then Soren’s and then Eve – Mrs. Boychuk – getting arrested. I guess it’s just been too much.” My chest felt like it was caught in a vise. I tasted metal then my mouth filled with saliva. “It’s all in my head,” I said again lamely.
Lori looked at me and burst into tears. Clay, who was twirling in front of the window in his pumpkin costume, stopped and ran over to see what was wrong with his mother. Lori was sobbing brokenly, but between her sobs there were odd little fragments of self-accusation. “I’ve hurt you,” “It’s all my fault,” and “If I hadn’t done it, Mrs. Boychuk wouldn’t have …”
I went to her. When I bent to put my arms around her, the vise tightened on my chest. It felt as if my heart were skipping beats. I broke out in a clammy, cold sweat.
“Lori, why don’t you get us some tea, please.” I sounded sharp, but she got up and went into the kitchen.
I could hear her filling the kettle, still sniffling, getting down cups.
I sat and said under my breath, “You are not sick. It’s in your head, in your head.” My hands were shaking but I managed to pull the bottle of Valium out of my purse and get a small, pale green pill into my mouth before Lori came back.
It helped – or at least it seemed to. Lori gave Clay some juice in a plastic glass that had a picture of Big Bird on it, and she poured our tea into blue and green striped mugs. I put three teaspoonfuls of sugar into the tea, and when I took a sip, the metal taste left my mouth. I really did begin to feel better. I tried to sound kind but firm.
“Now, what’s all this about Mrs. Boychuk’s problems being your fault?”
Lori was holding her mug in both hands, and she looked as if she were about to cry again. I remembered when she’d asked me to support her father-in-law. (“Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m not very smart. Sometimes I just have to trust the smart people to tell me what to do.”)
Well, I was smart people. “Lori, what’s all this about? Begin at the beginning and no tears. This is too important.”
She took a great hiccuping gulp of air, mopped at her eyes and began.
“Well, the beginning, I guess was …” She hesitated. “… was the phone call I got the morning they found Soren passed away. But it was before he died. This person told me to call Mrs. Boychuk to make sure she was at Soren Eames’s office by 7:30 a.m. It was very early but it was important. So I called Mrs. Boychuk and told her, and she asked, ‘Is it about Carey? Is he all right?’ and I said it was something else altogether, and she said, ‘What’s it about?’ and I said just what my – the person told me to say, which was ‘You’ll just have to trust me, Eve or Mrs. Boychuk.’ ”
“That’s what you said? ‘Eve or Mrs. Boychuk’?”
“That’s what the person told me to say, Mrs. Kilbourn.” She looked at me confidingly. “And it worked because she said she would go, and then” – her lower lip began to quiver – “and then after I got to work, I went over to the CAP Centre like I always do with some coffee and muffins for Soren, for his breakfast, you know, and there he was passed away and Mrs. Boychuk was all bloody and …” The scene was playing again in her mind, and she was beginning to hyperventilate.
“Easy, Lori, easy. Take a big breath … and another one … Better now?”
She nodded.
The vise was squeezing my chest again, but I got the words out. “You’ve done all the hard part, now I just need to know one other thing.”
“Yes?” She was steeling herself for the next question.
My heart was pounding in my chest. “Lori, who told you to phone Eve? Who told you to get her to Soren’s office that morning?”
There was silence in the sunny room. I could hear Clay Evanson in the kitchen opening drawers and talking to himself in a low baby voice.
“Lori?” I sounded strong, like the old Jo.
“Yes, Mrs. Kilbourn?”
“I have to know who called you that morning.”
She looked at me craftily. “Promise you won’t tell?”
“I can’t promise that, Lori, you know that. This is too important for games,” I said sternly.
She took a breath, licked her lips and out it came. “The person who told me to phone was my mother-in-law, Mrs. Julie Evanson.” Then she sat back and looked at me expectantly.
I was stunned. “But why? Did Julie give you any explanation?”
“Just that if Mrs. Boychuk was in Soren’s office that morning, he could help her.”
“Help her what, Lori?”
“I didn’t ask, Mrs. Kilbourn. I didn’t ask because Mrs. Evanson scares me. She’s never liked me because I was p.g. when Mark married me.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“I was p.g. – pregnant,” she whispered. “And Mrs. Evanson has, you know, held it against me, so when she asked me to do this …” Her face was clouding over again. “She promised me it would be okay, that Soren would help Mrs. Boychuk. But it wasn’t okay and then after when I wanted to go to the police she yelled at me and said I was stupid, which I know, and that Mr. Evanson, my father-in-law, would never become leader if this came out and if he didn’t it would be my fault.
Mrs. Evanson may be a witch, but Mr. Evanson has always been so good to me, and I wouldn’t betray him for anything. I knew it was wrong not to tell, but what could I do? And then when I saw you so sick from worrying … I hope it was right to tell you.”
I felt so tired I didn’t think I could move out of the chair. But I stood up and held my arms out to her. She came and laid her head on my shoulder. She was Mieka’s size. It felt good to hold her. Her hair smelled like apples.
“You did the right thing, Lori. You didn’t betray anybody. Mrs. Evanson was the one who did the betraying. I’ll make it all right with Craig – I promise. Now go in there and wash your face and bundle up your little guy and take him for a walk in the leaves. It’ll do you both good.”
Her lovely face shone with gratitude. Someone had taken the burden away. Someone had taken over. She looked better already.
I drove to the Evanson house on Gardner Crescent. All the way to the city, my chest muscles ached and my heart banged against the hollow of my rib cage. But I wasn’t sick. The doctor had told me. It was all in my head. I pounded on the front door.
“Come on, Julie. Come on out here and deal with your mess.”
She was wearing a flowered silk dress, the colour of raspberries, and her hair was a smooth platinum cap.
“I was just going out,” she said, and then an honest outburst, “Joanne, you look like …”
“I know, I look like hell. Let me in, Julie. You’re not going anywhere.”
The dining-room table was covered in photographer’s contact sheets. I picked one up. Some of Craig, some of both of them.
“Picking the official photo for the new leader?” I asked. “What’s your stand on justice, Julie? Are you for it or against it? How about the family? How about the dim and trusting? In favour of giving them full employment doing your dirty work?”
“You’d better leave, Joanne. You’re hysterical.”
“No, Julie, I’m not. I’m just sick of people dying and people being hurt.” A spasm of nausea hit me, and the metal taste came into my mouth, then the saliva. “What’s your game, Julie? Why did you set Eve up? Why did you have your daughter-in-law, who is as innocent as she is slow, call Eve and tell her to go to Soren’s office the morning he was murdered?”
Julie had gone pale under her makeup. Her hands were clenched into fists.
“That’s family business, Joanne.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s police business, and I’m going to drive down there now and tell them to pile into a cop car, turn on the sirens and come and get you, Julie. They’ll be so interested. Cops are funny that way. They wait and wait, and then finally they look at all the evidence” – I shook the contact sheets in her face – “and they figure, well, what’s her connection here? How is the wife of this guy who wants to be premier involved? What the hell is going on? That’s what they do, Julie. Take my word for it.”
She grabbed me by the wrists and brought her face close to mine. Her breath smelled of coffee.
“Send the police here,” she said, “and I’ll tell them your beloved Andy Boychuk was a fag.”
For a moment, my eyes lost their focus. Julie’s face blurred; I blinked, and she became clear again.
“What did you say?” My voice sounded small and frightened.
She pushed her advantage. “You heard me, I said Andy was a faggot. You know, Joanne” – She moved her face so close to mine our noses almost touched – “a pansy, a fruit, a fairy, a ho-mo-sex-u-al.” She enunciated each syllable of the word.
“I’ll tell them myself,” I said and I shook my wrists loose from her grasp and headed for the door. “After I tell them about how you set up Eve Boychuk.”
It worked. I’d called her bluff, and she gave in.
“Jo, wait. Hear my side.”
I turned the doorknob.
“Not for me, but for Craig. I know you still like him.”
I walked into the living room and sank into a chair by the window. Across the road the trees on the creek bank were bronze and gold in the October light. It seemed impossible that there could be such beauty out there, while in here …
“All right, Julie, let’s hear your side.”
Julie’s story was weird enough to be credible and unsettling. Early on the morning that Soren Eames’s body was discovered, the phone had rung. She’d answered it “in this room here,” she said, gesturing to the living room. It was a man’s voice on the other end. He identified himself as a supporter of Craig Evanson, and he said he’d come upon some information that could clinch the nomination for Craig. The man was, Julie told me, very knowledgeable about their campaign. His estimate of the number of delegates supporting Craig was just about the same as Julie’s. What the man knew and what Julie knew was that Craig didn’t have enough votes for a first-ballot win, and it didn’t seem likely that he’d be the one who would pick up votes on the next ballots. “You and I know,” the man had said, “that it isn’t going to work for him unless you can get some of the Boychuk loyalists to support him.” Julie looked at me. “He mentioned your name, Joanne, and Dave Micklejohn’s, and he said to me, ‘You know who the others are’ and of course, I did. He said the only way ‘to pry you people loose’ – that was the phrase he used – was to get someone you trusted to ask you to support Craig, and the person he named was Eve. He said that if I could get Eve into Soren Eames’s office within the hour, Eames would give Eve some information that would guarantee she’d do what she was told about the election.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“It was all so bizarre, and it was early, before seven, I think, but I remember I said, ‘What’s the information?’ He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he kind of laughed and said, ‘Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. Soren Eames has information that will prove that Andy Boychuk was involved in a sordid homosexual liaison at the time of his death. Eames has agreed to keep quiet if Eve can get the people around her to support Craig Evanson.’ ”
“Did that make sense to you, Julie?”
“I told you, it was early in the morning, Jo, and face it, he was saying what I wanted to hear. After I’d called Lori, I thought about it. And it did make sense. Eames could have wanted to help Craig out of loyalty to Mark and Lori. And, you know, some of those fundamentalist churches really hate homosexuals. If Soren had come upon that kind of information, he might have felt he had to use it.
“Anyway, I called Lori. Joanne, you’ll have to believe me. I didn’t mean to hurt Eve. But …” And then the old Julie was back, defiant and shrill. “It’s not my fault Eve went crazy and killed him.” She looked at me. “Are you going to the police?”
“Not this minute, but I suggest you do.” I stood and started for the door. “Julie, do you remember anything at all about the man on the phone? Even a general impression?”
She looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. He was agitated, and that ‘sordid homosexual liaison’ thing seemed overdone.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “it sounds that way to me, too.” My hand was on the doorknob again. “Well, Julie, I’ll be seeing you.”
“Joanne?” Her voice was small and tentative.
I turned wearily, prepared for a last-ditch appeal that would keep me from exposing her to the police.
“Julie, what is it?”
She looked around then lowered her voice. “It’s someone we know, Joanne.”
“Who?”
“The man on the phone. He’d muffled his voice, but I still knew it. And he knew so much about our campaign and so much about all of us – about Andy’s people. It’s someone close to us, Jo. It has to be someone we know.”
CHAPTER
18
Where to begin? I sat in the granny flat and thought about what I had to go on. The muffled voice on Julie’s telephone; Howard Dowhanuik’s voice, exasperated and embarrassed: “For God’s sake, Jo, it’s been almost twenty years. Andy said it was his one and only.” I stared at the vertical files
and finally I picked up four and put them on my desk. I chose 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964 – Andy’s high-school years, the years of sexual awakening. It seemed as good a place as any to start.
There wasn’t much in the files. Some photos of Andy receiving awards from the Knights of Columbus for essays on chastity and obedience. Roma had given me those. Four years of Intra Muros, the yearbook of E.T. Russell High School in Saskatoon. Four years of photos of Andy with his class, with the debating team, with the track team. Four years of end-of-the-year messages. “I’ll never forget you,” “To a great guy,” from girls named Barbara Ann and Gloria and Sharon, and joking insults from people who signed off, “Just kidding, your great!!!” Remembering my own yearbook, I shook my head, smiled and started to shut the cover of Intra Muros. In the corner, tiny and feathery, was some writing that had been obscured by my thumb. I bent to look at it more closely. “Forever, E.” I looked again at the cover: 1964, grade twelve, graduation year. I looked at the signatures in the other years of Intra Muros. Nothing. I went back to 1964. There were forty-five people in the graduating class. Counting surnames and given names, in Andy’s class alone there were twenty-three people with the initial E. Those had been big years for Elizabeths and Edwards.
There was a group photo of the class. Andy’s teacher looked like an original – hair frizzed out to shoulder length, hoop earrings, gypsy scarf, dirndl skirt – but even in the halftones of an old school photo she had an air of great vitality. I looked at the bottom of the page. Of course, Hilda McCourt. The one with the dazzling red hair and the sharp tongue who’d been onstage the day Andy was murdered and who’d been so angry with me when I underestimated her memory at the lunch after the funeral.
She lived, I knew, in Saskatoon. Andy used to take her out for dinner every so often when he was up there. I thought of Saskatoon, and I remembered hugging Lori that morning and the smell of apples in her hair. Then I thought how good it would be to hold my own daughter, and I picked up the phone and dialled information. Five minutes later, I had arranged to meet Hilda McCourt the next day before noon.
