by Gail Bowen
“Sally told me about the hair incident.”
He winced. “You know, then. Clea’s been better for so long, I guess we all thought that breakdown was an isolated thing. In fact, I arranged for her to do that work on the installation at the gallery. Usually a student would do that, but Clea seemed desperate for diversion.”
“Stu, I just came from the Mendel, and Clea didn’t look diverted to me. She looked like somebody who shouldn’t be spending her days and nights working with surgical instruments.”
Nina shuddered. “I’m sure Stuart will look in first thing tomorrow, Jo. Now could we please talk about something pleasant? I don’t think we’ve even said Happy New Year to one another.”
I smiled. “Happy New Year – I hope it’s a wonderful year for you both. You deserve it. Stu, that was such a generous arrangement about Taylor that you worked out with Sally. And, Nina, you deserve praise, too. I know how much being with Taylor day to day means to you. Not many people could have been so selfless.”
They looked at one another quickly, then Nina reached across the table and patted my hand. “Jo, if it were anyone but you, we’d take the praise and run, but you deserve the truth. Sally will never take Taylor. Stuart and I feel the idea of being a mother and mentor is just a flirtation for her. She’s between partners, and for Sally that always means a drop in creative energy. As soon as there’s a new relationship, she’ll be back painting fifteen hours a day, and she’ll forget all about her daughter.” Nina leaned forward and touched the petals of the flowers in front of her. “Mark my words, when the tulips bloom in the flower beds out front, Taylor will still be in this house.”
In the background the Brandenburg soared. Stu and Nina sat side by side, quietly waiting for me to say something. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how much they were alike physically: the same dark hair, the same fine features, the same intensity as they waited for reassurance.
I couldn’t give it to them. “There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you, Nina. And, Stu, you know I want you to be happy, but I think you’re wrong about this. Sally is very serious about having Taylor live with her. She told me last night she’s been looking for a house in Vancouver – something near a good school for Taylor. As painful as it is, I think you have to be realistic. Sally plans to take her daughter with her in February.”
They looked quickly at each other, but neither said anything. When I stood up to leave, they both followed me to the hall. It wasn’t until Stuart was helping me on with my parka that he finally spoke.
“She may not have that chance, you know. Events sometimes intervene.”
I kissed Nina on the cheek and grasped Stu’s hand. “Don’t count on it, Stu, just please don’t count on it.”
CHAPTER
6
I slept for a couple of hours when I got home, and by the time I finished lunch, I felt ready to start the new year. I spent the afternoon curled up by the fireplace reading an exposé of our current prime minister by his ex-chef. When I was finished, I was glad I did my own cooking. Around four, Mieka and Greg arrived with the news that there was a blizzard on the way, and the RCMP were telling everybody to stay off the roads. By the time Peter brought Christy over, the snow had started, the wind had picked up, and I sent Angus down to wash another load of sheets in case everyone stayed the night.
Dinner was an easy, happy meal, and afterwards it was good to sit in the candlelight, finishing off the Beaujolais and watching the storm gathering power outside. Safe. We were safe at home. We had finished cleaning up and the kids had gone downstairs to watch the last of the Bowl games when the phone rang.
At first I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Jo, I’m in trouble. Big trouble. I just got to the gallery and …”
I could hear sirens. They were so faint I couldn’t tell, at first, if they were coming from the TV downstairs or the phone. The doubt didn’t linger.
“Oh, God, the cops are here,” she said. “I’m just going to stick where I am, Jo, at the Mendel. I already said that, didn’t I? Jo, she’s dead. Clea’s dead.”
“Do you have a lawyer, Sally? Someone I can call?” On the other end of the line there was silence and then a click as the receiver was replaced.
My parka and boots were by the kitchen door. I started down to the family room to tell the kids where I was going, then changed my mind. I didn’t have time for explanations. I left a note on the table, picked up my car keys and headed for the garage. As I walked through the breezeway, I heard the crowd in Pasadena roar. It sounded like a touchdown.
When I pulled the Volvo out of the driveway, I leaned forward automatically to turn on the radio. Pete had left it tuned to a soft rock station, and a woman named Brie, who sounded too young to be out after dark, was saying her station was going to get us through the blizzard by playing the songs of summer. As I pulled onto Clarence Avenue, the snow had become a dense and dizzying vortex that looked capable of sucking me through the windshield, and Eddie Cochran was singing that there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.
There was also no visibility. I inched along using the streetlights as reference points until I came to the intersection of Clarence and College, just before the University Bridge. As I pulled onto the bridge, Brie said the Lovin’ Spoonful were going to do their classic “Summer in the City”; a hundred feet beneath me was the South Saskatchewan River, killingly cold but frozen only in parts because of the runoff from the power station. To my right, the guardrails that kept me from plunging over the top were an incandescent fuzz, but I couldn’t see in front of me – in fact, I didn’t know where in front of me was. Suddenly, I became convinced that I’d drifted out of my lane. I turned off the radio and rolled down my window so I could hear any car that might be about to drive head-on into mine. I could hear the wind keening along the river, but there were no sounds of cars. “I’m the only car on the bridge,” I said aloud. That should have made me feel better, but it didn’t.
When I turned off the bridge onto Spadina Crescent I could see the Mendel’s orange security lights. The word security had never seemed sweeter or more ironic. The front of the gallery was brightly lit. Sally’s Porsche was there. So was a police car, and two more were just pulling up. I could see an officer sealing off the entrance to the gallery with tape. It didn’t seem likely he was going to invite me in.
Frustrated, I rested my forehead against the steering wheel. I thought of Sally surrounded by police in that room with the scalpel junkie and the electric bed. And then I thought of the red glow of the exit sign over the emergency door in the education gallery. They might not have blocked that door off yet. It was certainly worth a shot. I drove past the gallery and parked on the side street north of the grounds. I covered my face with a scarf and started off across the lawn to the gallery. It was slow going. My legs ached from the effort of plodding through the heavy snow, but I held an image of Sally in my mind and kept trudging. Finally I could see the outline of the door to the education gallery, and I began to run toward it.
There was a little stand of bushes beside the door, and the snow had drifted deeply in front of it. When I climbed through the snowdrift, my foot caught on something and I fell face down in the snow. But not wholly in the snow. My legs were on top of something. When I reached my right arm out to see what it was, I touched the silky smoothness of a down-filled coat. It felt like the padding in a coffin. I moved my hand up, and under the snow my fingers touched the contours of a human face. When I sat up, I could see the orange glare of the security lights reflected in his eyes.
I had never seen him up close, but I would have known his face anywhere.
It was the Righteous Protester.
Suddenly I began to shake. I pushed myself up and ran toward the door. I pounded it, shouting for help, screaming for Sally. Desperate, I tried the knob. The door opened easily, and in a minute, I stepped from the cold into the hot craziness of a nightmare.
There was a smell in the room. Something fa
miliar, the smell of meat cooking. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust themselves to the half light and then to take in the scene.
Clea had made real progress on the installation since morning. The scalpel junkie had had her last surgery and was suspended from the ceiling on wires, like a marionette. Beneath her was the bridal bed. There weren’t any blue sparks coming off the wires. Someone had turned off the power. But there was a figure on the bed. Clea Poole was lying face down on the barbed wire. She was naked. When I saw her, I knew where the meat smell was coming from. The hooks from the barbed wire must have embedded themselves in her skin; until the power had been turned off, Clea had been slowly cooking. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see any more. The room swayed around me. In a minute I felt an arm around my shoulders, and I heard a familiar voice, choked but recognizable.
“I knew you’d come,” Sally said. Those were the only words she had time for. Suddenly we weren’t alone any more. Two policemen had come over: a young man who looked the way Burt Reynolds must have looked when he was twenty, and a heavier man. They seemed to have just arrived; their cheeks were still pink with cold. They were both very young, and despite their uniforms and their heavy regulation winter boots, it soon became apparent that nothing in the police college had prepared them for this.
The Burt Reynolds officer looked up at the scalpel junkie and said in a tone of awe, “Jesus Christ, it must have been some sort of cult thing – a ritual murder or something.” His partner didn’t reply. He had taken one look at Clea and bent double with the dry heaves.
“There’s another man outside in the snow,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize.
The heavy cop straightened up, squared his shoulders and walked to the exit door. “I’ll check it out,” he said, and I thought how grateful he would be to fill his lungs with cold fresh air and have a chance to redeem himself.
The Burt Reynolds officer turned to us and said in carefully measured tones, “I think the inspector is going to be pretty interested in talking to you.”
Sally watched him walk across the room.
“You know, I’ve never had a cop,” she said.
“You’ll have the whole Saskatoon force to choose from before this is over,” I said, and I looked around that scene from hell and thought I had never said a stupider thing in my life.
In fairness, there didn’t seem to be much to say. Sally and I lapsed into silence until Inspector Mary Ross McCourt came over and introduced herself. She didn’t look like a cop. She was about average height, not good looking, but carefully groomed. Her hair was bleached an improbable white blond, and her makeup was dramatic, red 1940s lipstick, scarlet fingernails, but her eyes behind the bright blue eye shadow were intelligent and knowing. I had the sense, as my grandmother used to say, that not much got by her.
Inspector McCourt quickly established two things: in response to my question, she said that, yes, she was the niece of my old friend Hilda. But it was clear from her manner that I was not to presume that friendship with her aunt put us on social terms.
The Burt Reynolds constable brought her a chair, but Mary Ross McCourt did not sit down. She stood with her hands resting on the chair back and looked at Sally and me. Psychological advantage to the inspector.
“Under normal circumstances,” she said, “we’d go downtown, but those streets are lethal. It would be unconscionable to ask you to drive on them.” She looked hard at Sally and me. “I’m sure you agree that there’s been enough death for one night.”
Sally and I exchanged glances: two schoolgirls in the principal’s office struggling with the etiquette of whether to answer a rhetorical statement. We didn’t say anything. But we didn’t stay silent. I had a question of my own, and it wasn’t rhetorical.
“How did she die?” I asked.
Mary Ross McCourt sighed. “The pathologist’s initial judgement is a bullet through the heart. About here,” she said, tapping the centre of her own chest with a scarlet-tipped finger. “Now, Ms. Love, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to move out of earshot while I talk to Mrs. Kilbourn.”
Sally picked up her chair and carried it over to the area behind the scalpel junkie. Inspector McCourt moved her chair a little closer to mine but she still didn’t sit down. Up close, her hair was as blond and fluffy as Barbie’s, but she didn’t sound like a Barbie.
“Mrs. Kilbourn,” she said, “I want you to tell me about your life in the last few hours. Don’t edit. Everything is significant.”
I couldn’t seem to stop talking – shock, I guess, or aftershock. Mary Ross McCourt listened impassively, like a psychoanalyst in the movies. All the while I rattled on about preparing and eating the dinner with my children and driving through the blizzard, the crime site experts moved purposefully around us dusting surfaces for fingerprints; taking photographs; putting evidence in what looked like heavy plastic freezer bags; drawing floor plans. Across the room, prim as a schoolgirl, Sally sat in the shadow of the scalpel junkie. The scene was as surreal as a Salvador Dali landscape.
When I finished, the inspector thanked me and suggested I stay in touch with the police. Then her professionalism broke. She took a step closer to me. Suddenly the eyes behind the bright blue shadow were glacial, and her voice was low with fury.
“This is a terrible, terrible crime,” she said. “Whoever did this will never know another peaceful moment this side of the grave.” For the first time that night, Mary Ross McCourt reminded me of her aunt.
The inspector took her chair over to where Sally was sitting, and I was interested to see that she established the same relationship with Sally as she had had with me: questioner standing, witness sitting. Then they brought in the Righteous Protester and some new cops came to take Clea’s body and I lost interest in police procedures.
I followed along as they carried the bodies toward the front door. At first, the scene outside seemed like an instant replay of the night Erotobiography opened. The blizzard had stopped, and some hardy souls had braved the snow to come and gawk. The media people were there, too, adjusting equipment, waiting. But there were differences. This time the centre of attention wasn’t Sally Love; it was the two blanket-covered shapes on the stretchers being loaded into twin ambulances. And this time the target of the crowd’s moral outrage wasn’t art but murder.
I was standing in the foyer, watching the ambulances pull away, when Sally came up beside me. She couldn’t have been with Mary Ross McCourt ten minutes.
I was surprised. “You certainly got off lightly,” I said.
Sally shrugged. “I didn’t have much to say. Jo, I haven’t got an alibi. I was working all day in the studio. I didn’t go out. I didn’t see anybody until I ran into one of the merry pranksters in my driveway after Clea called. He was hunkered down behind the Porsche – probably giving me a flat tire.”
“In the middle of a blizzard?” I asked.
“Jo, these guys are on a holy mission. Snow doesn’t mean diddly to them.”
“I hope you told Inspector McCourt,” I said. “Sal, that could be important. Did you notice anything about him that could help the police find him?”
“Sure,” she said, “he hates art, he hates me, and he was wearing a ski mask. That should narrow it down for them. But I got my revenge. I stole his tuque.”
“What did Inspector McCourt say?” I asked.
“About the hat?”
“No, about the whole thing?”
Sally shrugged. “What could she say? She did her best Katharine Hepburn imitation of the public official who means business, then she just gave up – probably told me what she told you: ‘Don’t leave town. Keep in touch.’ Now come on. Let’s get out of here. My bravado is failing fast.”
“We still have the rest of that bottle of Jack Daniel’s at my house,” I said. “Bourbon’s good for bravado – actually I could use a little bravado myself. Let’s go.”
My kids greeted us at the door, white-faced and concerned. The local TV station had interrupted the
Rose Bowl festivities to show the bodies of Clea Poole and the Righteous Protester being loaded into ambulances, and there had been a shot of Sally and me running for her car. Pete helped us off with our coats, and Greg, without being asked, brought us each a stiff drink. I was liking him better by the moment. I gave the kids an abbreviated account of what we knew, assured them that we were okay and told them they could get back to what they had been doing. Sally and I needed to talk.
We took our drinks downstairs to the family room. There was a fire, and Sally sprawled on a rocker near the fireplace. I curled up on the couch in front of it.
“I can’t get warm,” Sally said.
“Here,” I said, handing her an afghan. “Mieka made this for me the year she broke her leg skiing.”
Sally wrapped it around her shoulders. “I wonder if Taylor will ever want to make an afghan for her notorious mother.”
“Sure,” I said. “Notorious mothers are the best kind.”
Sally smiled and lifted her glass. “To mothers,” she said. Then her smile faded. “And to Clea Poole, may she rest in peace.”
We drank, and Sally said thoughtfully, “You know, Jo, I’m glad she’s dead. She was my – what was that bird the old sailor had hung around his neck in the poem?”
“An albatross,” I said.
“Right. Clea was my albatross. She wanted me to carry her around forever. She would have done anything for me; you know, she did some terrible things. She had no morality when it came to me.”
Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had heard her. “Sally, you can say that to me, but I’d be careful not to say it to anyone else. Clea didn’t put a bullet through her own heart and throw herself down on that bed because she was in a snit. Somebody murdered her, and until the police find out who did, you’re going to have to watch what you say.”
The fire was dying down, and I got up and put on another log. Behind me, Sally said, “I wonder who they think killed her? The nakedness makes it look like some kind of sex thing.”
