Burying Ariel

by Gail Bowen

  When I opened the door to the Window Room, it was clear that Rosalie Norman’s party had reached the sour stage of an event that had gone on too long. The Asti Spumante bottles were empty, the delicate Depression-ware glass plates were cake-smeared, and the pink-throated flowers that had decorated each of our places had begun to wilt. Fully a third of the guests had left, and those who remained were sprawled listlessly in their chairs. Behind her mound of gifts, Rosalie Norman had the fixed smile of the guest of honour at a party that has ceased to be fun. As all eyes turned to me, I remembered my reason for leaving the party. I’d been charged with the task of picking up the bouquet of long-stemmed roses that had been delivered to the Faculty Club bar. The flowers were the final gift. As soon as Rosalie had them in hand, the last photograph would be taken, and we would be free to get back to our real lives.

  Livia Brook cut a quick stare my way. “Where are the roses?” In the years since her husband had dumped her, Livia had meditated and soul-journeyed her way into a seemingly shatterproof serenity, but at that moment negative energies seemed to be getting the better of her. She tried to erase her rudeness. “We were beginning to be concerned about you.”

  Solange gave me a sly sidelong glance. “My theory was that you’d run off with your friend, Kevin Coyle. Not my type, but who could blame you for giving in to temptation?” She leaned back in her chair and raised a toned arm to indicate the decorations. “Such a romantic occasion. I was afraid this event would be quitaine.” She struggled for the translation. “You know, kitschy – too much – but it was quite lovely. I just wish Ariel had shown up.”

  I took a step towards her. “Solange …”

  Her face froze. She had cat’s eyes, tawny and green-flecked, and she had a cat’s instinct for danger. She knew the worst before I opened my mouth.

  “Something’s happened to her,” she said flatly.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Solange moved out of her chair slowly, like someone in a dream state. “She’s dead?”

  “Her body was found in an archive room in the basement of the library.”

  “When?” Solange said.

  “Not long ago,” I said. “Probably within the hour.”

  Solange covered her face with her hands and turned away, but the other guests had moved to the edge of their chairs. Like clever undergraduates, they were twitching with unasked questions.

  I headed them off. “I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But it isn’t much.”

  I gave a quick sketch of events. When I was finished, I turned to Rosalie. “I was grateful that Robert was there,” I said. “He was very helpful.”

  Despite the tears welling in her eyes, Rosalie coloured with pride. “He’s a credit to his profession,” she said.

  “He certainly was today,” I agreed. “And it can’t have been easy for him to decide how much he could divulge when the case was still unfolding. I guess, at the moment, the only unassailable fact is that the dead woman was Ariel.” I looked around the table. “Detective Hallam has asked us all to stick around so the police can ask their questions. It might be best if we just go back and wait in our offices.”

  Not surprisingly, it was Rosalie, our link with authority, who framed the question that was at the forefront of all our minds. “Do the police know who did it?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, “but I’m sure by now they have some leads.”

  “It will have been a man.” Solange’s voice was flat with resignation.

  Livia’s echo was choric. “A man,” she repeated.

  For a beat, the only sounds in the room came from the stereo. Carly Simon was singing “The Boy That I Marry.” My eyes took in the men in our department. None of them met my gaze. We all knew something ugly was being loosed in this room.

  “No one knows who did this, Solange,” I said quickly.

  She whirled to face the guests at the table. Her eyes blazed. For the first time in my memory, Solange was wearing a dress, a sleek black mini whose hemline skimmed the top of her thighs. When she arrived for lunch, she had pirouetted in it mockingly. “To prove to Ariel I can play the game if I choose to,” she had said. The young woman in front of me was through playing games.

  Howard Dowhanuik had been sitting closest to Solange. Now he stood and moved to comfort her. His old hawk’s face was broken, but his voice was steady. “We’re not all the enemy, Solange. Charlie loved Ariel. So did I.”

  “Bullshit.” Solange pronounced the expletive in faux French – bouleshit. As these two people whose lives had been transformed by Ariel Warren faced one another, the word hung in the air, sibilant and powerful. Finally, Solange turned away. She reached into her small, black over-the-shoulder bag. For a terrible moment, I thought she was going to pull out a weapon, but all she extracted was a package of Player’s and a Bic lighter. She removed a cigarette, then threw the pack down on the table. Her hands were trembling so badly she couldn’t make her lighter work.

  Wordlessly, Howard took the Bic and lit her cigarette. She dragged on it deeply, then turned and walked towards the window. It had been fifteen years since I’d quit smoking, but at that moment I badly wanted a cigarette. I wasn’t the only one. Livia Brook surprised me by taking a Player’s from Solange’s pack and lighting it. It was as startling as seeing Preston Manning at a Tool concert. Livia’s marriage to Kenneth Brook had flamed out in a haze of booze and cigarette smoke, but since they’d split she had become zealous about her health. Everything that entered her body or touched her person had to be organic and unadulterated. Suddenly, it seemed as if the whole world was out of joint.

  As the pungent bite of burning tobacco filled the air, I gazed again at the last of Rosalie’s guests. When the announcement had been made that Livia was the new head of Political Science, Ed Mariani had whispered to me that she would find running our department as rewarding as herding cats. There was more truth than poetry in the image. We were a group of proud and headstrong individualists, certain we’d worked out the answers to all the questions that mattered. Ariel Warren’s death was revealing an unpalatable truth: our assurance was veneer-thin. We were badly in need of direction. Despite the fact that her composure was showing serious fault lines, Livia Brook supplied it.

  She walked over to the stereo, flicked it off, and then returned to her place at the table. In her mid-forties, Livia still had something of the undergraduate about her. Her wardrobe ran to corduroy jumpers, tights, and Birkenstocks, and her hair, a mass of shoulder-length curls, now more grey than chestnut, still had a certain Botticelli abundance. She wore little or no makeup. Her great beauty was her skin, which she kept exquisite with Pears soap and hot water. On the wall behind her desk was a sampler done in cross-stitch. “No Surprises,” it said, and it summed up both her post-divorce philosophy and her administrative style. Livia did her homework, ran the department with a fair and equitable hand, and, despite her newly acquired penchant for the rhetoric of empowerment and uplift, had the common sense to extinguish brushfires before they flared out of control. It was a valuable attribute in a department as deeply mired in crisis as ours had been when she’d taken over. Now there was another crisis, and apparently Livia had decided that it would be wise to channel our emotions.

  “I think a moment of silence so each of us can deal with our feelings privately might be appropriate.” Her voice was firm, but as she steadied herself against the table edge, her narrow fingertips trembled. Like grateful sheep, all of us, including Solange, scrambled to our feet, and when Livia bowed her head, we followed her lead.

  When a suitable amount of time had elapsed, Livia rescued us from our private thoughts. “Some of you may be uneasy about what you’re experiencing right now. Don’t judge yourself. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. They simply are, and they deserve validation.”

  In the months since she’d become department head, Livia had often offered the soothing bromides of the self-help movement as a remedy for overheated passions, but today her delivery
of the articles of her faith was flat, like that of an acolyte who had suddenly become an unbeliever. She looked at us with unseeing eyes. When her glance fell on Rosalie Norman, she appeared to find her focus again. “We have to keep on keeping on. Continuance is the answer,” she said. “Rosalie will need some help getting her gifts back to the office.”

  Grateful for direction on a day that seemed suddenly to have broken from its moorings, people headed for the door. Ed Mariani scooped up an armload of pastel-wrapped presents. As he passed by me, he whispered, “At least we were spared a shower of healing stones from Livia’s enchanted ritual bag.” He sighed heavily. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having a hunk of rose quartz to clutch right now.”

  “I forget what rose quartz is supposed to do,” I said.

  “Heal the heart.” Ed looked over at Solange. “If I had a piece, I’d share it with her, except I imagine that at this moment she isn’t making exceptions for gay men.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  Ed gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Good luck.”

  Solange was facing the window again, wreathed in cigarette smoke, which seemed to isolate her private and terrible mourning. I walked over and touched her shoulder.

  She turned, and the breath caught in my throat. She was transformed. Her face was ashen and carved with the lines of bitterness that mark those who have seen the worst and know there is nothing better ahead.

  “Solange, is there anything I can do to help?”

  “It depends.” She stubbed out her cigarette on a dessert plate that had been abandoned on the windowsill. “Can you raise the dead, Joanne?”

  She ran from the room, and I made no attempt to follow her. When I felt Howard Dowhanuik’s arm around my shoulder, I relaxed into it. We walked downstairs in silence. Instead of turning in to the glassed-in walkway that connected College West to the Lab and Classroom buildings, Howard headed for the doors that led outside. “Let’s take the long way back to the office,” he said. “I need to figure out how I’m going to break this to my son.”

  “The newsroom at Charlie’s station will be getting the story soon. They may have it already,” I said. “You don’t have much time.”

  When he turned to face me, Howard’s eyes were rheumy. “My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s this life, the next life, and a turnip patch on the other side.’ ”

  “Not much there to cling to when times get rough,” I said.

  Howard shrugged. “Have you got anything better?”

  As we approached the grassy slope where I’d seen Ariel and her class that morning, I had to admit I didn’t. At that moment, it was hard to envision a future that contained anything but pain. The University Day Care Centre was nearby, and the staff had liberated their preschoolers to take advantage of a five-star spring day. Wild with freedom, the children ran and somersaulted down the little hill, a kaleidoscopic, perpetually moving swirl of fluorescent wind-breakers and new sneakers. As they called out one another’s names in voices bright as May sunshine, I remembered other voices, other children.

  Ariel had been a golden child, tow-headed, cobalt-eyed, long-limbed. From the moment she came through the front door for Mieka’s party, she had been surrounded by other children. Charlie Dowhanuik had spent much of the party on the edge of the fun, watching intently, his small fingers splayed against his cheek, trying without success to cover the purple birthmark that threatened to engulf his face. When I served the food, he squeezed in next to Ariel. She had reached up, pulled his hand down with her own, and peered at his face closely. “It’s not so bad,” she said, “but if I get the dime in the cake, I’ll give it to you.”

  When Howard and I passed the closed door of Solange Levy’s office and heard weeping, Howard shot me a supplicating look.

  “I’ll see if there’s anything I can do,” I said. “You call Charlie.”

  Solange’s door was open a crack. I rapped on it. “Solange, it’s Joanne.”

  “Are you alone?”

  On the desk in front of her were her silver bicycle helmet and the lock to her prized Trek WSD, but Solange didn’t appear to be going anywhere. A cigarette smouldered between her fingers. She was holding a framed photograph in her hands. As I watched, she ripped the photo out, picked up a snapshot from her desk and slid it carefully into the pewter frame. “I have to protect this,” she said. “It’s of Ariel at Lake Magog. It was the first day of the New Year, and she was so happy. She’d always been so worried about other people’s happiness – so afraid to put her own wishes first.” Solange shook her head furiously. “So female and so destructive. But she found her strength on our hike at Mount Assiniboine. There were just the two of us. It was tough. There was a blizzard. There were places where the ascent was straight up the mountain. Once the path under her feet just gave way, but she held on.” Solange stared at the photograph. “All her life she’d had fears, but by the time we got to Lake Magog, she knew she’d never go back to being the compliant little girl. She had found her power.” Solange’s voice broke. “Then some bastard kills her as if she were an animal.” For a beat Solange herself seemed torn apart by the violence that ended her friend’s life; then she turned to steel. “He won’t get away with it.”

  I followed her as she strode down the hall. There were three people in the main office: Detective Robert Hallam was watching Rosalie search the drawer of the cabinet where we kept personnel files, and Livia Brook was hovering between them like a duenna.

  Solange paid them no heed. A counter separated the reception area from the office. When Solange set the photograph on it, Livia came over immediately. She picked up the picture, glanced at it quickly, then thrust it at Solange. “It’s too much,” she said. “We don’t need a reminder of what we’ve lost.”

  “You’re wrong.” Solange’s tone was coldly furious. “We do need a reminder. We all need to be reminded every minute of every day that what that monster took from us was beyond price. Otherwise, there will never be justice.” Solange returned the photograph to the counter, but her fingers lingered, caressing the curve of the frame. “When I was young,” she said, “I was prepared for confirmation by a Spanish priest – a fat, useless old man, peddling cruel patriarchal dogma, but one of his lessons stayed with me. He told me there was a Spanish proverb I should remember whenever I had to make a choice in life.” Her voice deepened into a parody of the old priest, and she wagged her finger theatrically. “God says, ‘Take what you want. Take it, and pay for it.’ ” She turned to face me. “The man who killed Ariel took the best, Joanne, and if God won’t make him pay for it, I will.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  After her diatribe, Solange seemed on the verge of shock. The carapace of the warrior had shattered. She was hugging herself, but as strong as her arms were, they seemed incapable of holding the pieces together, and her tawny green-flecked eyes were unblinking and wary. I reached out to her, but Livia stepped between us and slid her arm around Solange’s waist. “She needs to be alone for a while. She has to find the place inside herself that will enable her to accept this.”

  Robert Hallam raised an eyebrow. “When she finds that place I’ll want to talk to her. Meanwhile,” he said, turning to Livia, “I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time.”

  “Of course,” Livia said. “Just let me get Solange settled.”

  Rosalie removed her pale yellow jacket, hung it carefully on the back of her chair, filled a glass at the water cooler, picked up a box of tissues, and followed Livia and Solange into the inner office. Too exhausted to move, I stared at the closed door, hoping against hope that somewhere in Livia’s endless store of New Age baloney, there was a mantra that could fix everything. I wasn’t optimistic.

  Rosalie was back almost immediately, but Livia stayed with Solange for several minutes. By the time she emerged, Robert had his notebook and pencil at the ready, and his foot was tapping. “Let’s get to the questions, Dr. Brook,” he said. “I haven’t got all day, and there a
re a lot of people to see.” I took that as my cue to leave.

  When I got back to my office, Howard was waiting for me. He was standing at the window, looking out at the campus. The early-afternoon sun poured in on him, softening his angular features, changing him from a wary old eagle into someone kindly and avuncular. The metamorphosis was more apparent than real. He gazed at me through hooded eyes.

  “Is it my imagination or is the number of dumb fucks in the world increasing?”

  “I take it your question isn’t rhetorical,” I said.

  “You tell me.” Howard ran a gnarled hand over his head. “The young cop they sent to interview me had a pronunciation problem. Every time he said the word ‘deceased,’ it came out ‘diseased.’ ”

  I bit my lip to keep from smiling. “As in ‘How well did you know the diseased?’ ” I said.

  “Exactly. Jesus, Jo. That kid must use the word ‘deceased’ a hundred times a week. You’d think somebody would have told him, wouldn’t you? Then, after he left, I tried Charlie’s house. No answer, so I called the radio station. They’ve got the Queen of the Coneheads answering the phones there. She refused to put me through to Charlie directly. Told me it was station policy to screen all calls. I told her my call was important. She said every phone call CVOX gets is important. I told her it was an emergency. She said if I considered myself suicidal, she’d redirect my call to a crisis line; if not, I could leave my name and number like everybody else.”

  “Did you tell her you were Charlie’s father?”

  Howard looked abashed. “It didn’t occur to me,” he said quietly. “Talk about dumb fucks. I’m going to call a cab and go over there.”