The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  After the media wearied of their stories, the lost children’s pictures cropped up on bus shelters and milk cartons. And I would look at the pictures of these children, faces shining, hair freshly cut for the school photographer, and tell myself this wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been careful. This wouldn’t have happened if the parents had been conscientious; if they had really loved their kids; if they hadn’t taken chances. It was a mantra to distance myself, protect myself, and it had worked for twenty-one years.

  Now, without warning, I had crossed the line that separates the lucky ones from the losers. Now I would be the one on TV, and it would be Taylor’s picture that would be … A thought struck me, terrible, annihilating. I didn’t have a picture of Taylor. She had only been with us since February. I hadn’t taken her picture. I wasn’t a good parent. I was negligent. Without a picture, I could lose her forever. I could forget her face, and it would be as if she had never existed. Suddenly, finding a picture was the most important thing. There had to be one somewhere. My mind spun crazily through the possibilities. And then, I remembered.

  The new bike. The morning we bought her new bike, I had taken pictures of Taylor wobbling down the driveway. I remembered looking through the view finder and noticing that the pink stripe on her safety helmet was exactly the shade of pink on her two-wheeler.

  I hadn’t failed her, after all. Suddenly, as if it had appeared as a reward for my diligence, I saw the postcard. It was on top of the dresser. The printing looked hurried. “Don’t call the police for 24 hours and she’ll be back safe.” I turned it over; on the other side there was a picture of the Kingfisher Hotel, seductive under picture-book turquoise skies.

  Twenty-four hours … I began to shake at the thought of what they could do to her in twenty-four hours. I thought about the men next door. “So where’s the hairless pussy around here?” My stomach heaved, but I pushed myself up from the table and walked next door. Their car was still out back, but they could have taken her in a boat. A boat would have been the thing. They could have taken her out in the channel to the big lake, to the islands where you couldn’t hear a child screaming. Their screen door was unlatched. I went onto the porch and pounded on their front door. There was no answer, but I had to be sure. I tried to smash down the door, but it was surprisingly solid. They had left the front window open an inch. Only the screen protected it, but when I tried to loosen the screen by hand, it wouldn’t budge. Years of paint had stuck it firm. I went back to our place and picked up a butcher knife. I used the knife to cut through the screen and I reached in and raised the window. I crawled through onto the kitchen table. There was no one there.

  Their suitcases were open on the floor. I started rummaging in them, looking for something that might help me know what had happened. The cases were filled with clothes for the fishermen. Someone had bought these things for a man who was a husband and father. (“This will be a good shirt for Dad when he goes up north.”) At the bottom of the suitcases were the magazines. They were unspeakable. Think of the worst thing you know, and this was worse. The children looked as if they had been drugged. I hoped to God they had been drugged, anything so they wouldn’t feel the things that were being done to their bodies, those fragile, perfect bodies.

  When I looked at the magazines, I knew there was a connection between this perversion and Taylor’s disappearance. And I knew something else. Everything was connected somehow to the Lily Pad. But how? As I climbed the hill to the hotel, I repeated the word, pounding it into the ground with every leaden footstep.

  This time I didn’t use the phone in the hotel. There was a pay phone outside the restaurant where Taylor and I had eaten that first night. I went into the restaurant and got change, then I came back out and called Jill Osiowy.

  She answered on the first ring. “They’ve taken Taylor,” I said. “They left a postcard with instructions. They say if I don’t call the police, they’ll bring her back safe in twenty-four hours.”

  “Do what they say,” Jill said. Her voice was dead. “Jo, Helmut Keating called. The people who own the Lily Pad are after him. He found out something about Kim Barilko’s murder, and he got greedy. He says they’re going to kill him. Jo, I believe him. He wants me to get into their computer. He says if I key in the word ‘teddy,’ I’ll get everything I need. I can stop them, Jo. I can stop those bastards.”

  Suddenly, Jill’s voice broke. “Do you know what they did? They killed Murray and Lou. They slit their throats and dropped them in my garbage can.”

  There were black spots in front of my eyes, and my knees went weak. I thought I was going to pass out. I opened the door to the telephone booth and took deep breaths till the faintness passed.

  All the time, Jill was talking to me. “Jo, do what they say about Taylor. Don’t call the police. Don’t take a chance with her.”

  The line went dead. For a moment my options flashed wildly through my mind. There weren’t many. I thought of Jill’s old tortoiseshell-cats, killed as a warning, and I knew I wasn’t going to leave Taylor with those monsters for twenty-four hours.

  When I walked through the door to the Angler’s Corner, I was cold with anger. No one was going to hurt Taylor. Jackie Desjarlais was in the corner playing pool. I grabbed his arm and started dragging him toward the door.

  “You’re coming with me,” I said.

  “Are you crazy?” he said.

  I jerked him toward me till our faces were almost touching. “Do I look crazy?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “you do.” He tried to wrench away from me.

  “Someone’s taken Taylor,” I said, “and I think they’re going to hurt her.”

  “Little Sister,” he said.

  He had been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk.

  “I think they’ve taken her somewhere in the lake. To an island. I need you to –”

  “The Lily Pad,” he said.

  I felt as if I’d stepped through the looking glass.

  His voice was dead. “The Lily Pad. That’s where Theresa was. It’s a place where men can do things to kids. Theresa said it was just a business. That’s how much they fucked her over. That she would think it was just a business.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “My boat’s down at the dock. You got money for gas? I drank my last five bucks.”

  “I’ve got money,” I said.

  When he came back, he had a gas can and a bottle of rye. His boat was a new one, fibreglass with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor. It looked sturdy. Then I looked out at the lake, and suddenly Jackie’s boat seemed very small. He reached under the front and pulled out a khaki slicker.

  “Put this on,” he said. He opened the rye. “Take a slug.”

  I did. The whisky burned my throat, but it warmed and calmed me.

  It took us forty-five minutes to get to the island, forty-five minutes of being pounded by the storm and my own fear. We were heading into the wind and the rain was blinding. Every time Jackie’s boat slapped against the whitecaps, it shuddered as if it was about to split in two. My panic about Taylor hit in waves, overwhelming me. At one point, I looked out and I couldn’t see anything: no islands, no shoreline, no line dividing earth from heaven. In that moment I felt a stab of existential terror. I was alone in the universe in a frail boat with a stranger. It was a metaphor the psalmist would have understood.

  And then Jackie Desjarlais looked up and smiled at me.

  “Some fun,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “some fun.”

  Those were the only words we spoke until the island came into view. The rain had stopped, and as we came closer to shore, I turned to Jackie.

  “Shouldn’t we try to keep out of sight?” I asked.

  “They know the boat,” he said flatly.

  For a moment, I thought I’d fallen into a trap. I remembered Jill Osiowy’s warning: “Don’t take things at face value. For once in your life, Jo, don’t assume the best.”

&nbs
p; “Everybody here works for them one way or another,” Jackie was saying. “I’m one of the ones that brings the clients over.” He shuddered. “And I feel like shit. Theresa always said it was a business, a service. You asked me back there how she got out of Blue Heron Point. She worked for them. She started when she was a kid. Maybe eleven. She didn’t have no choice then. Our old man was a drunken son of a bitch and our mother …” He spat into the water. He looked at me and his eyes were dark with fury. “Our mother was no mother. A woman from town told Theresa that Social Services was going to take me and her, too, unless Theresa did something. So she did something …”

  “She must have loved you very much,” I said.

  “She woulda done anything for me,” he said flatly. “When she was older, they brought her into the business. They sent her down south to go to high school and look for more kids. For a couple of years she was a kind of manager at their place in Regina. She made a lotta money, bought me this boat, bought me everything. She always took care of me.” His voice broke. “Fuck,” he said.

  We were almost ashore. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. I looked into my bag for a Kleenex, and there, folded neatly, forgotten, was the picture Taylor had drawn the morning after Theresa died.

  I closed my eyes and remembered how Taylor had looked, running down the hill, hair tangled from sleep, laughing, eager to get the day started. And she had drawn this. I unfolded it and felt the tears come.

  Frogs. Dozens of frogs, big and little, smiling and sad, dozens of frogs for Angus because I wouldn’t let him take any home to the city with us.

  We were almost ashore. Through the trees I could see the outline of a low building that looked like a motel. I started to fold up Taylor’s frog picture. There was writing on the back of the page. The writing was familiar. I had seen it on the front of a hundred shell-pink envelopes the night Lorraine Harris and I addressed the wedding invitations. Here, in her familiar looping backhand, were the names of the players on the croquet teams the night of the engagement party.

  The Jacks: Joanne, Keith, Angus, Taylor.

  The Aces: Peter Kilbourn, Theresa, Mieka, Greg.

  I read the names again. She had written “Theresa,” not “Christy.” It was impossible. That night none of us knew who Christy Sinclair really was. Except Lorraine Harris had known.

  With a jolt, the boat hit the dock and Jackie jumped ashore.

  For a moment, I didn’t move.

  Jackie Desjarlais must have seen the bewilderment in my face. He reached his hand out and pulled me ashore.

  “Come on,” he said gently. “It’s time to go get Little Sister.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  As we moved from the dock to the shelter of the trees, I felt as if I was in a dream. As suddenly as it had begun, the wind had stopped, and there was a preternatural calm on the island. The air was dense with moisture, and as we moved toward the building, the ground was spongy beneath our feet. In the motionless air, every leaf and stone was thrown into sharp relief. It was a hushed and menacing world.

  I leaned close to Jackie Desjarlais. “Where would they have her in there?” I asked. “Is there some sort of security?”

  Jackie shrugged. “A guy I know says they don’t need much because of being on an island. He works there nights sometimes, in case things get out of hand. But from what I’ve seen, during the day it’s pretty much just the girls.”

  “Then we could go in and take Taylor,” I said.

  “I don’t think that’d be a smart move,” he said. “Let me check things out in there first.” He took the flask of whisky out of his jacket pocket and held it to his lips. Then he offered it to me.

  “Later,” I said. “After we get her back.”

  He started to put the cap on the bottle, then he changed his mind. He poured some rye into his hand and patted it on his cheeks as if it was aftershave. Then he wiped his hand on the front of his shirt.

  “My disguise,” he said. “Nobody worries about a drunk. I oughta know.” He slid the bottle carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’m gonna go in there and make a stink. It won’t be the first time. Anyway, if there’s security, that’ll flush ’em out. At least we’ll know what we’re dealing with. Unless you got a different idea.”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” he said. “Stay outta sight till I get back. Then, if it looks good, we’ll both go in.”

  I watched him lope across the clearing between the trees and the building; his legs were as long and as graceful as Theresa’s. The sun came out, pale through the clouds. It seemed like a good omen. I walked among the trees until the Lily Pad was in my line of vision. Taylor was in there. I was sure of it.

  The building looked reassuringly ordinary, like a motel or a private club. It was made of cedar, low-slung, sprawling, ranch style. There were a few windows; all were placed high, but there were skylights set into the roof, so there would have been light inside. I seemed to be standing at the side of the building. I moved around so I could see the back. There was a tennis court there, and playground equipment: a jungle gym, a swing set, a teeter-totter. I thought of someone ordering that gym set. (“No, it’s not for my own children, it’s for company.”) The banality of evil. That’s what Hannah Arendt had called her book about the men at the top of the Third Reich. The men who came here would be like those men, good to their dogs, fond of gardening, devoted fathers, even, and yet … I remembered the magazine photographs I had seen a little more than an hour ago, and my stomach clenched. What dark fantasies had been acted out on those swings? On that jungle gym?

  A woman came from the front of the house and began walking toward the tennis court. She was pushing an industrial broom, the kind people use to sweep the water off a court after a rainstorm. Everything about the woman was shapeless: her body in its flowered cotton dress was a mass of shifting contours; her bare legs were pale and lumpy; her ankles were thick and swollen; even the way she walked, with the shambling gait of the lifelong alcoholic, lacked definition. Give this sad woman a bottle a day, and she wouldn’t question anything.

  Things were starting to come into focus. The elaborate security system on the back door of the Lily Pad in Regina. The locked doors to the upstairs. (Not safe, Kim had told me, the kids might smoke up there. It was a fire hazard.) But it wasn’t fire the people who ran the Lily Pad were afraid of. They recruited from the street kids, lured them with the promise of a good life. (“Theresa was going to teach me about clothes and hair,” Kim said, her face transformed, “and we were going to talk about going back to school. She had this business, and she was going to train me …”)

  A business. It sounded so innocent, like a bed and breakfast. I remembered the shining kitchen in the Lily Pad on Albert Street, so out of sync with the rest of that mismatched furniture scrounged from the Sally Ann. Then I remembered Helmut Keating trying to keep me from seeing a twenty-pound roast thawing in a pan on the counter. Prime rib. Nothing but the best for the Lily Pad’s customers.

  How many Lily Pads were there? I thought of the water lilies in the pond by our cottage when I was young. The flowers were beautiful, white and luminous, but when I looked underneath I could see they grew from thick, creeping stems that were buried in the mud at the bottom of the stagnant water. They slimed my hands when I touched them.

  I heard a door slam, and Jackie came stumbling around the corner, a parody of a drunk. He picked up speed as he came toward me.

  “There’s nothing but the girls there. We’re okay. I’ve been trying to come up with something. How does this sound? I go back up there and get everybody crazy and you try the doors at the back of the house. Start with the one closest to us. It’s a kind of storeroom. I’ve delivered booze there sometimes. No one ever seems to worry much about locking it. The locks are on the side where they keep the kids.”

  I felt a rush of adrenaline. I wanted to find the people who had put the locks on those doors.

  Jackie reached i
nto the inside pocket of his jacket. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a gun. “I sort of borrowed this from the guy who sold me the gas for the boat. He keeps it around in case of trouble. I figured we were more likely to have trouble today than him.” He held the gun out to me. “You take it,” he said. “If things get hot, just wave it around. Guns scare the shit out of people.”

  As I took the gun, my hand was trembling. “They scare the shit out of me,” I said.

  Jackie looked at me levelly. “You’ll be all right,” he said. He pointed to the woman sweeping the tennis courts. “As soon as she leaves, we’ll go in.”

  It seemed like forever, and as we stood in the breathless mugginess of a July afternoon, I was half crazy with the thought of Taylor alone – or worse, not alone – in that malignant place. Jackie’s gun, a dead weight in the pocket of my slicker, seemed to grow heavier as the minutes ticked by.

  Finally, the woman picked up her broom and went toward the front of the house. As soon as she was out of sight, I curled my fingers around the handle of the gun and ran across the clearing. The first door at the back was metal, but it had been propped open with a wedge of wood. I opened it and found myself in a storage room. It was all very domestic and disarming. Facing me were two restaurant-size upright freezers. Next to them, in a kind of bin, were sacks of vegetables. Cartons of liquor were neatly stacked against the wall farthest from the door. There was a whole wall of canned goods. When I saw a low shelf near the front filled with tins of Spaghettios, I could feel the anger rising in my throat. I moved cautiously through the storeroom until I came to the kitchen. It was sleek and deserted.