by Mel Bradshaw
Ted didn’t feel the need of counselling. At the same time, he had never been the sort of person whose back went up at any suggestion he look for outside help, or who thought the less of people that do. If he had been, his recent experience with assisted fertility would have cured him. What billions of men and women throughout history had done unthinkingly, even unwillingly—namely, conceive a child together—had taken Karin and Ted more than three taxing years of medical procedures. Attempts at artificial insemination first, with all the attendant drugs and ultrasounds. Then, when conception did not occur, four cycles of in vitro fertilization. More hormones for Karin by mouth and by injection into her stomach, legs or buttock. Four cycles of aspirating eggs from her ovaries, introducing them to Ted’s sperm carefully separated from his semen, incubating embryos, and inserting said embryos into Karin’s uterus with a catheter. And daily hospital tests from the moment she started taking hormones. Karin had been magnificently plucky. But scarcely less magnificent had been the family doctor who had held their hand through every disappointment and supported them every step of the way, Rebecca Ornstein.
Ted thought that the advice he would most respect would be hers. He made an appointment for noon on September 18.
Dr. Ornstein’s office was in the same strip mall as a Thai restaurant. Her young receptionist Sally Lee had a container of noodles open on her desk when Ted entered the waiting room. On seeing him, she put down her chopsticks and wiped her mouth quickly.
“Mr. Boudreau, we’re so sorry about Karin.” She left a space in case Ted wanted to say anything to that, and—when she saw he didn’t—hurried on, “As soon as Dr. Ornstein is off the phone, I’ll let her know you’re here.”
Ted sat in a brightly upholstered chair and found himself facing the corner of the room filled with trucks, stuffed animals and building blocks. Much of his grieving up till now had been for the lover and wife he knew rather than for their future daughter or son, but all these reminders of childhood touched a nerve. If he’d had to lose Karin, he thought, why couldn’t he have kept a part of her—the human embodiment of their love and their hopes?
The top magazine in the stack on the table beside him was the children’s monthly Owl. He picked up a newspaper, flipping past front page stories of the most recent Canadian fatalities in Afghanistan to the technology feature. Usually he enjoyed descriptions of new gadgets or of gadgets’ new tricks. As fate would have it, today’s article was on the launch by Telus of a GPS tracking feature called Kid Find. On the comic page, Tom Fisher and his wife Alison had a new baby. Nice for them, but not many laughs. Eventually, he settled into a soothingly routine discussion of waste disposal. The sound of his name interrupted a deep consideration of incineration versus landfill.
“Ted, come in.” Dr. Ornstein had the look of an old-style grandmother. Her body underneath her dark dress and fresh lab coat was thick and shapeless, her hair silver-grey. Her deeply-lined face gave the impression of having seen a lot. She had been widowed young, Ted recalled, and had never remarried. It was a sad face in repose, so she usually tried to smile with patients. Today she didn’t make the effort. “How are you bearing up?” she asked.
“Pretty well.”
“That’s the social answer out of the way.” She beckoned him into her office, waved him into a chair, and closed the door before settling herself behind her desk. “Now if your doctor asked you the same question . . . ?”
“Nights are worst. I have trouble getting to sleep. Every noise startles me. Lying there in the dark, I see Karin stretched out on the basement floor, just as I found her.”
“Finding her must have been dreadful. Is sleeplessness interfering with your work?”
“My department chairman has relieved me of most of my work this semester. I really only came to see you as a courtesy to him. When I think about what happened to Karin, my difficulty sleeping is nothing.”
“Do you think you don’t deserve to sleep?” Dr. Ornstein asked.
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Good, and I hope you don’t act that way either. Your suffering can’t help Karin, or what would have been your child. I know it’s the last thing she’d want. Honour her by looking after yourself.”
“We were supposed to go up to the cottage together that evening. There was a conference at the university, but I wasn’t involved. Then a colleague was called away. I agreed to substitute for him. I let Karin drive up to Muskoka on her own.”
“None of those things are wrong, Ted.”
“She got partway up and turned back. We’ll never know why. The upshot was she entered the house alone when the burglar was there, and he killed her.” Ted paused for breath. The pain of missing Karin, which he had thought at its maximum, ratcheted up two more notches. “It’s hard,” he said, “not to think, ‘If only . . .’ ”
“If one thing had been different, many things might have been different. You can’t hear that right now, but think it over later, when you’re better rested. And to that end, I’d like you to consider moving out of the house for a while. Your home is where Karin was attacked. All its sounds and smells and sights can’t help but remind you. A week with family or friends or even in a hotel might buy you—not hour after hour of sound sleep—but enough extra rest to give you back your edge and keep other health problems from developing. If a change of beds doesn’t do that, I am willing to prescribe you a ten-day course of benzodiazepine, though I find it constipating myself.”
“Wouldn’t it be unhealthy to run away from the house? I already find I’m avoiding the basement.”
“I’m not telling you to avoid the house.” Now Dr. Ornstein did permit herself a smile. “Just don’t sleep there. Ted, go easy on yourself. This is going to be a long road. I’m not speaking only as a doctor now, but as a survivor. I’d like you to call me in a couple of weeks. Come and see me in six months at the latest. You’ll be due for a checkup then anyway. Will you do that?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Have charges been laid yet in Karin’s death?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” said Ted.
“The best we can hope is that the monster is killed by police while resisting arrest. We’ve no sentences in law that wouldn’t be too good for him.”
Ted decided to move in with Markus for a week. His father-in-law had invited him repeatedly since returning from Muskoka for the funeral, and had been politely put off. Now Ted thought that, while giving himself a break from the house on Robin Hood Crescent, he might as well work at keeping Karin’s dad company.
The evening Ted drove around with his suitcase, they ate again at the Irish pub. Markus still appeared to be medicating his grief with Scotch and showed surprise that Ted had no interest in doing the same. Notwithstanding, the old Viking was affable company through all three courses, salad, steak and lava cake. He wanted to reminisce about his various careers as a jazz drummer on the Prairies, construction worker in B.C., and social worker in Ontario before he really found his niche. Ted wanted to know about the workshop where he’d met James Nelson.
“Ah, yes, I had these stressed-out detectives from the Major Crime Unit, people that were doing just fine, but were afraid that at the pace they were going, something was bound to snap. They were sure they were about to snarl at family members, harangue other drivers, belittle witnesses. I said, ‘Don’t get angry. Get mad.’ I tried to get them to see the power of creative insanity—not true insanity, but crazy jokes. I don’t even know if it made any sense, but Nelson loved it. He sent me an e-mail about how the very next week he’d put my idea into practice. Seems someone always parked his VW Beetle in front of a fire hydrant on Nelson’s street. Nelson and his buddies finally picked the little buggy up and turned it 180 degrees. Then on the windshield they left a note purporting to be from the Fire Department. The note said they were sorry but that they’d had to move his vehicle to get water to put out a fire, and they hoped they’d put the car back right and that everything still worked. Let’s have
coffee at the house, shall we?”
Only when they got back to Markus’s living room and the whisky was wearing off did Markus become argumentative.
“What did that woman Nancy mean by saying Karin looked too good in a bathing suit?” he asked from his place in the centre of the couch.
“She meant she was jealous. It was supposed to be a compliment, a light note to end on.”
“Karin didn’t wear a bathing suit.”
“Maybe not at your cottage after dark,” Ted replied.
“Never.”
“Come on, Markus. You remember the scarab green one-piece with the white straps?” Inane conversation, thought Ted. That bathing suit had looked as if it had been custom made. Quirk has a sweet butt. Dammit, now he was going to cry. “I’d better call the police to let them know where I am,” he said, jumping up from his chair and turning his face from the light.
“Here, relax. They have your cell number, don’t they?”
In the kitchen, Ted helped himself to a paper towel and dried his cheeks while waiting for Nelson to answer. Eventually, he did. “Ted, I’ve been meaning to have a word. The head of my unit is not pleased about the conversation you and I had regarding the pathologist’s report. So far I don’t think he knows about the call I made to you after Shawn’s arrest in the Falls, so I’m asking you to keep that one under your hat.”
“I have so far,” said Ted, watching his words in case Markus could hear. “And will do in future. Does Shawn’s DNA match what’s on the gum?”
“I am not authorized to tell you anything about that. Here’s the question I’d like you to ponder: if Shawn stole your computer, where will we find it? Let’s talk soon.”
Just as Ted was hanging up, Markus ambled in from the living room. “Do you think Nancy is a lesbian?” he said.
Chapter 9
Relieved of teaching duties, Ted found he had time on his hands. He could have got on with writing and research, but ideas and beliefs that had seemed rock solid before Karin’s death now looked problematic and out of touch. This shift made it difficult for him to spend time at his office, surrounded by colleagues for whom the old verities still held.
When, for instance, Parliament began its fall session, a backbench MP resurrected the familiar idea of a fetal homicide bill. His idea was to make it a separate criminal offence to harm an unborn child in cases where the expectant mother was attacked or killed. Graham Hart went on CBC Radio, his voice dripping with disdain, declaring this bill a sneaky way to establish the personhood of a fetus, despite previous rulings by the Supreme Court.
“It’s nothing less than an attack on a woman’s right to choose,” he said. “All the supporters want is to make abortion difficult or impossible.”
“What would you say,” asked the interviewer, “to those people we have heard from, many of them pro-choice, that want this bill because they have been touched personally by the death of a pregnant loved one?”
“I’d say nothing at all if they are in the first throes of grief, because they won’t be capable of hearing anything. To those that’ve had a little more time to reflect, I’d say, ‘Be careful not to become dupes of the anti-abortion lobby. This bill won’t give you what you want in any case, because sentences for separate crimes are commonly served concurrently in Canada.’ ”
When Graham next appeared at the Department of Criminology, he was greeted with the academic equivalent of high fives. Asked over coffee in the lounge what he thought, Ted replied that the question of concurrent versus consecutive sentences needed to be better explained to the public, and might in some cases bear re-examination by the lawmakers. Eyebrows went up. People remembered suddenly they had a class to teach.
Ted didn’t blame them for not knowing how closely the private member’s bill touched Karin’s circumstances. He had confided in no one regarding her pregnancy, let alone the hard-won victory over infertility it represented. Yet he now saw the criminologists from the outside, saw them not as the loose collection of enquiring minds and free spirits he had thought he belonged to, but as a narrow sect with a rigid orthodoxy. It was as if the boundaries were invisible from the inside, but once you’d been out in the world where real crimes happened, you would never again be able to forget those boundaries were there.
The office felt stuffy these early days of fall. And besides, Ted could see his presence made his colleagues uncomfortable. From their perspective, he was a wounded animal. The herd had to move on for its own survival. So he thought about ways to be elsewhere.
His persistent suspicion that his Dark Arrows dossier had been the object of the fatal break-in made it hard for him to take a hands-off attitude to the police investigation. He remembered the elderly neighbour who had seen the black pickup on the night of the murder. Mentally, he reviewed Nelson’s account. Yes, this was someone he and Karin had noticed taking regular walks around the subdivision. In accordance with suburban tradition, few adults did so unless they had a dog to air. Since Karin and Ted were walkers too, they had got in the habit of greeting each other. Karin had somehow discovered that their neighbour’s name was George Panopoulos. He wore cardigans for half the year and a blanket coat for the other. Ted thought he must often be too hot or too cold. He appeared to live with a married son or daughter.
To secure an opportunity of speaking to him alone, Ted intercepted him as he was setting out on his afternoon stroll.
“Hello, Mr. Panopoulos. I’m Ted Boudreau.”
“Your wife died.” Panopoulos touched his white moustache, as if thinking how to soften this abrupt beginning. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Do you mind if I walk with you?”
“Please.”
Ted fell into step beside Panopoulos. He was a heavy man with a rolling gait. There were no sidewalks, but the two were facing the traffic, which drove around them.
“The police tell me you saw an unfamiliar truck that night.”
“Yes. Through the window. I didn’t go out.”
Ted had the man confirm all the details he had got from Nelson as to colour, make and model. Then he asked, “Was anyone with you at the time? Did anyone else see it?”
“No. Everyone was away that weekend. Camping.” Panopoulos gave a little shiver, as if to signify that camping was not to his taste. “They all asked me to go. I said, ‘You go. I can camp here in the house’.”
Ted smiled. “Was there anything about that truck that would make it easy to find again?” he asked. “Any scratches or dents you could see? Special hubcaps? Missing hubcaps? An extra big radio antenna perhaps, or a hood ornament?”
When he got no answer right away, Ted wondered if he had gone too fast, asked too many questions at once.
“Everything was standard,” Panopoulos said at last. “This is the truck of the man that killed your wife?”
“The truck he was driving, at least. We think so, yes.”
“Maybe you’d better talk to the man with the sausage dog.”
“Which man?”
“He was going by when I looked out the window. He takes his dog out after dinner. I never meet him on my walks.”
“A sausage dog?” Ted searched his memories. “I don’t think I’ve seen him. Does he live on this street?”
“I don’t know. Young guy—thirty-five, forty. Fat.” Panopoulos laughed and patted his stomach. “Fat like me.”
“Did you tell the police about him?”
“I didn’t think of him. He was just passing by, nothing to do with the truck. I don’t like to tell the police about people that aren’t doing anything wrong. But you—you’re a neighbour.” Panopoulos stopped in his tracks and patted Ted’s shoulder. “Somebody killed your wife.”
Ted wasn’t sleeping at the house, but he paid it a visit after parting with George Panopoulos. He forced himself to go down to the basement, to make sure the wood was holding over the broken window. He made a mental note to call a glazier. Then he drove back to Etobicoke to cook supper for Markus and himself, using
commercially prepared pasta sauce, plastic-wrapped linguini, and a Caesar salad kit. He got none of these from the Handy Buy. He had no idea what he could say to Meryl, or Dwayne for that matter.
Returning to Robin Hood Crescent after the evening meal, he started his search by knocking on neighbours’ doors to see if any of them owned a dachshund or knew anyone that did. No luck there. Some thought they had seen the man and dog, but not often, which suggested the route of the walk varied from night to night. One thing Ted believed to be in his favour was that a dachshund’s legs are short, and he was unlikely to have to scour an area larger than a few blocks. He chose four streets including his own to drive up and down for the hour between nine thirty and ten thirty.
Ten thirty came and went. He decided to extend his patrol by one more full circuit. If that failed, he’d try again next day. Then he saw them on William Tell Boulevard. A heavyset but brisk man encouraging, not to say dragging, a long, low-slung dog. Ted parked well ahead of them and stood waiting as unthreateningly as he knew how on the edge of the road.
“Hi there,” he said. “Could I have a word?”
“Lost?” The dog walker had floppy brown hair and a loose, friendly smile.
“No. The fact is I live in this neighbourhood, and my house was broken into sometime before ten p.m. on the Friday of the Labour Day weekend. Were you in town?”
“Yep. Working all weekend, worse luck. Are you on this street? Merkel and I were out walking off our dinners at that time, and we didn’t notice anything like a break-in.”
The dachshund started to bark at the sound of her name. Ted raised his voice. “I’m on Robin Hood Crescent, the next left there. Were you over that way at all?”
“Quiet, girl. We sometimes go that way, but again there was nothing—”
“Might you have seen a fairly ordinary black pickup truck, North American make?”
Merkel had fallen silent. She was taking the weight off her back legs and looking thoughtful.
