The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  “Ali, good news. I’m not crazy. Somebody’s trying to kill me.”

  Her voice was warm and encouraging, but it was her professional voice, guarded, holding back. “Jo, why don’t you turn this tape back to the beginning and let me follow along.”

  I told her about Helke de Vries’s phone call, and his revelations. Ali listened without comment. When I finished, her questions were professional. She asked me to repeat the names of the insecticides the exterminators used, to tell her the size of the granny flat in square feet and to describe the kind of ventilation the room had.

  “Jo, I’m going to have to check this out in one of my college texts. I haven’t studied pharmacology for fifteen years. I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Stay where you are. You’re not in the –”

  “No, I’m out of there. I left the door open. I’m never going in there again. Ali …” I began to cry. “Oh, Ali, hurry.”

  She called back in five minutes.

  “Well, you have Mort to thank for this. He has the Oriental passion for order: a place for everything and everything in its place. Anyway, tell me if this sounds familiar. I’m going to read from the section on insecticides in a book called The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, Goodmand and Gilman – the G-men, we used to call them in med school. Here’s the clinical profile of exposure to organophosphates. ‘Respiratory effects consist of tightness in the chest and wheezing respiration due to the combination of bronchi-constriction and increased bronchial secretion. Gastrointestinal symptoms occur earliest after ingestion and include anorexia, nausea and vomiting, abdominal cramps and diarrhea, localized sweating, fatigability and generalized weakness, involuntary twitchings.’ ”

  My voice was small and frightened. “I’ve got all of them, Ali. Is it too late? Can you do anything?”

  “Yes, I can, or my brother-in-law can until I get there. When was the last time you were in the granny flat?”

  “Most of yesterday and all last night.”

  She swore softly. “Nothing for it but do the best we can. Go take a hot, soapy shower, wash your hair and your fingernails, and by the time you’re out of there, Phil will be pounding at the front door.”

  “A house call?” I said.

  “It’ll do him good,” she snapped. “Now into the shower. I’ll be there tonight. Mort and I will drive down this afternoon.”

  I began to cry again. “Oh, Ali, you’re so good.”

  “Jo, don’t. Mort bought himself a new BMW last week, and he’s been dying to get it on the highway. It’s a six-hour drive. We’ll be there by ten o’clock. Don’t fuss. In fact, it wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world if you spent a couple of days in bed. If you want to nap, do it. I still have a key from the last time I was there. Now, go get your shower, do what Phil tells you, and I’ll see you later.”

  I made the shower as hot as I could stand it, soaped my body with some antibacterial soap the kids had for zits and scrubbed at my skin until it hurt.

  By the time I was dry and in my robe, Dr. Philip Lee was at the front door, scowling.

  “It was good of you to come to the house,” I said.

  “My sister-in-law is a very persuasive woman,” he said. And then he smiled. “Well, what the hell, eh?”

  While he examined me, he asked about the granny flat, the same questions Ali had asked. How big was it? How was it ventilated? How often had the extermination people sprayed? What did they use?

  “Organophosphates.” He repeated my answer as he pressed down on my abdomen with his graceful hands. “Do you know what they used organophosphates for in Germany before the Second World War? They were active ingredients in nerve gases. Your granny flat was a little gas chamber for you, Mrs. Kilbourn. Amazing, eh?”

  “Amazing,” I agreed weakly.

  “Well,” he said after I’d pulled the covers over me, “you’re going to live. I would put you in a hospital if my brother and sister-in-law weren’t coming. But you need a neurologist and a psychiatrist and” – he snapped his long, tobacco-stained fingers – “presto, they appear … More house calls.” He grinned. “Ali says you’re a nice woman, Mrs. Kilbourn. You’re certainly a lucky one. I’m going to prescribe atropine sulphate – perhaps you know it by its other name, belladonna. You take it orally, every four hours. Set your alarm. The timing is important. The atropine should relieve your symptoms. My brother might wish to prescribe something to reverse the muscular weakness, but I’ll leave that to him. I’ll call in your prescription for you, and the drug store will deliver it.”

  He started to walk out of the room but turned in the doorway. He looked at his feet like a bashful boy in a movie, then shrugged.

  “Could I look at it, Mrs. Kilbourn?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Your gas chamber,” he said.

  “Absolutely, be my guest. What the hell, eh?” I said and sank down into the warmth of my bed.

  I waited for the prescription, and after it arrived, I took the phone off the hook, curled up and went to sleep. There were things I had to do: call the police, call the kids, call Rick. But the phone calls would have to wait. I needed sleep. I awoke around five o’clock, made myself a bowl of chicken noodle soup and ate it with some crackers, then I fell asleep again.

  When I woke, it was just before ten. The national news was coming on.

  I turned on the TV in my bedroom and put the phone on the hook. Sometimes Rick called as soon as his report was over, and suddenly I wanted very much to talk to him. I wasn’t crazy. I was a woman with a future again, a woman a man could think about loving, a woman who could think about having a man as part of her future.

  And not just any man. I lay back on the pillows piled against the headboard of my bed and remembered. I remembered how his smile started in one corner of his mouth and spread, slow and knowing, until his face was transformed. And I remembered how his hair, dark blond like mine, fell forward when he bent his head to look down at me, and how he had sat on the bleachers with me in the twilight, and cooked with me and laughed with me and worked with me. And I remembered how he’d fit so smoothly into all our lives at Thanksgiving, and I thought, when Ali and Mort come, I’ll invite them for the holidays here with us, with my children and me, with Rick.

  The phone rang and at just that minute his face filled the television screen. I picked up the receiver, but my eyes never left Rick’s image. He was still wearing his poppy. He must have rushed to the studio and grabbed yesterday’s jacket, with its poppy and its day-old creases, from the dressing room before going on the air.

  I strained to listen to the television, but in my ear there was a woman’s voice, familiar and old: “And I thought, well, I’ll put all these books I brought back from overseas away until after Christmas when I can have a really good look at them. So it was while I was trying to find some space in that little garage of mine that …”

  Rick was saying something about a group in the prime minister’s party meeting at a cottage in the Eastern Townships to talk about challenging the PM’S leadership before the next election.

  The voice went on in my ear: “And that’s when I found the box. I can’t imagine why it didn’t surface before.”

  Rick was taking a hard line against those who were plotting against the prime minister. “It is a question not just of party solidarity but of fundamental decency,” he said. “Decency has been a commodity in short supply during the life of this government, but in the dying days perhaps it is not too much to hope …”

  “At any rate, our little mystery is solved,” said the woman’s voice.

  “Hilda McCourt,” I said, suddenly making the connection.

  “Yes, Joanne, it’s Hilda. I’m sorry, I should have identified myself. Egotism seems to be as much a part of getting old as creaks and flatulence. Anyway, it is I, and the box I unearthed in the garage contained all my old grade books from E.T. Russell. It was the easiest thing in the world. I looked up grade twelve and found Boychuk, Andrue Peter – that’s Andrue wi
th a ue, as I’m sure you know.” Angus had left an old spelling test on my night table. I picked up my pen and wrote, “Boychuk, Andrue Peter” in a clear space at the top of the paper.

  “The boy with the unfortunate name, as I had remembered, came late in the year. His name is added at the bottom of the roll. The name is Primrose. Eric Spenser Primrose.”

  I wrote the name beneath Andy’s and circled the initials of their given names, Andrue and Eric.

  “You see it, don’t you, Joanne?” Hilda McCourt was saying. “That delicate boy, Eric Spenser Primrose, grew up to be Rick Spenser. Isn’t that a shocker? When I saw him after Andy’s funeral I knew there was something in Rick Spenser’s face that I recognized, but of course, I was upset. I remember you offering the explanation that I was just responding to the familiarity of celebrity. I didn’t care for that explanation, Joanne, and I was right not to. They can get grey or bald or even fat but I always remember my students’ faces. Still” – she laughed – “Eric Primrose being Rick Spenser strained even my powers. The last place one would think to look for a thin boy is in a fat man. Anyway, there’s our mystery solved.”

  On the TV screen, Rick’s face dissolved and was replaced by a commercial for camera film. A handsome family was getting ready for Christmas. Words came on the screen: “For the times of your life.”

  Hilda’s voice sounded in my ear. “And you can’t blame him for dropping the ‘Primrose.’ The jokes would have plagued him forever, and he suffered so with them. Memories are coming back to me now. Our grade twelve curriculum, for example. We used to do William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose.’ Do you know it, Joanne?”

  I said the lines mechanically in a voice that sounded like Lori Evanson’s.

  O rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  “You must have had a good teacher,” Hilda McCourt said admiringly. “Well, you can imagine what high-school children did with that poem and an effeminate boy named Primrose.”

  On the screen, the president of the United States boarded Air Force One and went somewhere.

  “Yes,” I said, “I can imagine.”

  “Joanne, this has been a shock for you, hasn’t it? But no harm done. I assure you, Eric behaved very handsomely when I confronted him with it, if ‘confronted’ isn’t too strong a word. He said he was upset that day, but he always finds it difficult to be reminded of those times. That’s understandable, I think. Adolescence must have been a painful time for him.”

  “When did you talk to Rick?”

  “Early this afternoon. I called him just before lunch.”

  On the television, there were pictures of a benefit production of a Broadway musical. The choreographer had died of aids the week before. “One more reminder,” said the announcer. The prime minister and his family, bundled into handsome fall sportswear, were going to Harrington Lake for the long weekend. Everybody was on the move. I reached over and turned them all off, vanquished them.

  “Joanne, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m all right, Hilda – just assimilating,” I said and wondered at my choice of words.

  “Good. Eric suggested that I shouldn’t tell you. He said you’d been under a great deal of stress.”

  “Yes,” I repeated dully, “a great deal of stress. Hilda, I’m grateful for your help – truly. I have to go. I have things to do.”

  I didn’t give her a chance to respond. I hung up the receiver and sat staring at the television set as if I could conjure up his face, make him materialize from the hidden electronic dots.

  “You bastard,” I said to the empty screen. Despite the atropine, my heart was pounding. “You murderous son of a bitch.” I stood up and grabbed my robe. There was something I had to see.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Peter’s snow boots lay abandoned. I shoved my bare feet into them and grabbed a ski jacket from a coat hook in the entranceway. It was an old one of Mieka’s, ripped under the arms and heavy with buttons and pins from rock groups that, by now, had disbanded and gone their separate ways. I put the ski jacket on over my nightgown and walked out the back door and across the yard to the garage.

  The door to the granny flat was still open. It had been open all day. My legs were trembling, but I climbed the stairs. I knew what I wanted.

  It was in the vertical files for the current year, in a box marked “August 28.” No other reference was necessary. I slipped it out of its box, checked the label and slid it into the VCR. My hands were trembling. I had had the tape for weeks. A woman I knew in the newsroom at CNRC-TV had given it to me when she heard about the book I was writing, but until that moment, I hadn’t been able to face looking at it.

  I hit the play button and it was August again. There were crowd shots. I recognized a few people, sweating and happy, and with a start, I saw the man from the poultry association brushing barbecue sauce on chicken halves that were just beginning to sputter and smoke.

  I hit the fast-forward button. There was the makeshift stage, empty still. There was Dave Micklejohn, bringing Roma on stage. And there was Eve, looking the way she always did in public, strained and anxious, ready to bolt. Then Dave leaned toward her and whispered something, and she smiled.

  In that moment, Eve Boychuk’s face was transformed. She was both carefree and lovely. There couldn’t have been more than a handful of such times in her life, and now her face was waxy white as she lay beneath stiff hospital sheets, her wrists blooming blood. “Eric Primrose, you bastard, you’ll pay for this, you’ll pay for doing this to her,” I said, and my breath made little clouds in the cold air of the granny flat.

  On the television, the big woman who would hand Andy the black Thermos of water appeared at the top of the portable staircase at the back of the truck, and in the cold, dead room, I stopped breathing. She picked her way carefully through the snakes of wires from the sound system and finally, safely across the stage, she put the leather speech folder on the podium.

  He always did that, handed the speech to someone who’d be onstage before him, so he could bound on boyish, spontaneous. There she was, putting the folder down so carefully, right where we had told her. Inside was the sheet of paper, grey as a dove’s breast, and on it the Blake poem, and at the top of the page, two letters, A and E, curled together like the initials of a husband and wife on a Victorian headstone. A and E, Andy and Eric. But Andy hadn’t seen that – not yet.

  My teeth were chattering. In the yard, my dogs were barking, but I was transfixed. Craig Evanson was on the screen, introducing Andy. Another victim, but I didn’t want to see him. I pushed the fast-forward button. There was a blur then Andy was there, suntanned, so slight in his blue jeans and cotton shirt as he walked across the stage to his death. He was laughing. Then he took off his baseball cap and waved it. Graceful, doomed, he was, in that moment, the last of the boys of summer. In the cold moonlight in the yard, my dogs were barking frantically, but I was lost in the eternal summer of Andy’s last picnic.

  Then he turned from the podium and the woman in the flowered dress handed him the tray and on the tray were the black Thermos and the glass. I couldn’t watch it. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I saw myself on the TV screen kneeling by Andy, twenty pounds heavier, and so strong and capable. I had forgotten I was like that. I pulled the hem of my nightgown around my knees for warmth. Rick Spenser was on the screen, his back to the podium, shakily raising the glass to his lips. Then there was a blur. In the next shot, I was wrapped around his knees, and he was coming down hard.

  In the yard the dogs were frenzied, yelping and growling. On the tape, Andy and Rick were lying on a metal truck bed under the August sun. Then Rick was talking, but not on television. He was in the doorway of the granny flat, his bulk blocking out the moonlight. I could smell f
ear, but he didn’t sound afraid. He sounded like he knew he was going to win.

  “I have always detested ad hockery, Joanne.”

  “What?” My voice was barely audible.

  “You had an excellent education. You know the meaning of the term ‘ad hoc,’ and this whole affair has reeked of it. Everything cobbled together on the spot. You know, I’m not a monster. It’s never been a question of calibrating the attacks against you. I’ve just had to do the best I could. Improvising, although I’ve always shrunk from improvising.”

  He moved closer, and I could see his face in the moonlight. He didn’t look like a maniac, but he was saying terrible things.

  “It’s working, though, Joanne, and that, of course, is the test, isn’t it. There are no loose ends. Certainly there’s nothing to connect me with this place tonight. I’ve discovered there’s an advantage to dealing with women. There’s always such a miasma of hysteria around them that you can get away” – he smiled a little sadly – “well, with almost anything. You’re not quite as dramatic as Eve, but still, no one would be surprised if you walked down the stairs and into the garage. I think it would be a very logical way for a despondent woman to die, asleep in her own car with the motor running.

  “I talked to Mieka yesterday. I told her I feared you were heading for another breakdown. Do you know what she said? She said, ‘That would just kill her. She’s such a good mother. I think she’d rather die than let us see her like that again.’ Your own daughter, Joanne.” He shrugged and gave me his professional smile, amused at the vagaries of the world. “Look at yourself. You’ve even dressed for the part – a crazy woman in a nightgown, a ripped ski jacket, a man’s snow boots and bare legs,” he said, bending closer and shaking his head.

  “You were wearing a poppy,” I said.

  “What?” I had thrown him the wrong line, and he was at a loss. “What did you say?”

  Underneath my nightgown I could feel my knees knocking together, but my voice sounded okay. “Half an hour ago on your special report on the news, three million people saw you wearing a poppy on the day after Remembrance Day. A man as fastidious as you … Someone’s sure to put it together. Some smart young cop or some assistant producer you’ve been snotty with. Maybe even some hick out here in the prairies. Most of us know about the magic of videotaping by now.”