“When did you guys lose touch?”
“Oh, geez,” Kyle said, thinking. “We were still in high school. We fell in with different crowds. His was faster—you know how it goes. Mine was more geeky art types.”
And the next thing you know, you turn around and you’re looking at a mug shot. Life is like that sometimes.
Kyle and I went to the events as planned, of course. I had a job to do. But both of us were a little sad after that.
SEVEN
I woke up early and excited the next morning. My first real in-person interview for a story. The ones I did for my column were different. A few casual words with glasses of wine between me and my subject, music blaring. Notes dashed off to myself on my phone (usually emailed to myself so I knew where to find them). And, very occasionally, I might follow up one of those impromptu questions with an email or a phone call to confirm a quote. This was different. This, I told myself, might matter.
I dressed caref ully. Then rethought the outfit and wore something entirely different. All the while knowing that what I wore would have no bearing on anything at all.
Still.
I got to the downtown lockup half an hour early. It was an immense maze of a building, and I wasn’t confident I’d be able to find my way around. I stood in front of the enormous putty-colored building for a few minutes, calming myself before I went in. This is it, I said to myself. A turning point. I was a real reporter now—or I would be soon. I was reporting. Doing what I had been trained to do.
I kept my voice even when I stood in front of the long oak counter and announced myself to the guard.
“I’m Nicole Charles from the Vancouver Post,” I said with all the authority I could muster. “I have an appointment. I’m here to interview Joseph MacLeish.”
The guard looked at me, blinking one, two, three times. He reminded me of a turtle. When he checked the computer, the way he stretched his neck and carefully turned his head made him seem even more turtle-like. I was afraid he was going to mention the whole “Nicole at Night” thing, like so many people did. But if he recognized me, he didn’t say anything.
“There’s no Joseph MacLeish here,” he said after a ridiculously long time.
“But I made an appointment,” I said lamely.
One, two, three more blinks. “Even so,” he said, “there’s no MacLeish here. I checked the record. More than once.”
Within minutes I was back on the pavement, exactly where I’d been less than half an hour before with my hopes high and my plans polished. And now I just had another dead end.
A few phone calls verified my suspicions. The charges had been dropped. If Rosa Itani was right and Mafia-types were involved, it seemed possible someone had enlisted a smart lawyer to get MacLeish sprung. My timing had been bad.
When I called Kyle to tell him that I had been too late to talk with MacLeish, he was surprisingly sanguine.
“Maybe I know how we can find him,” he said, sounding a little smug.
“You do? How? You have some of the same buddies?”
“No. As I told you, we do not. And haven’t for quite some time. No. What I’m suggesting is we find him through his mom.”
“His mom,” I said. “I didn’t even think about him having one.”
“Everyone has one, Nic.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did. And so we tracked her down. Kyle remembered her well. Though Joey MacLeish had spent a lot of time at our house when he was a kid, Kyle had also spent time at theirs. He remembered Mrs. MacLeish as “delicate and dear,” surprising me. Those were soft words from my big brother.
“I think it’s possible that their dad wasn’t around much. I don’t remember him anyway,” Kyle said. “But it seems to me his presence was always felt there even so.” I understood from the tone that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
It didn’t take us long to find a listing for an S. MacLeish on Capitol Drive in Burnaby. “That would be it, right? That’s pretty close to our house.”
“Yes,” my brother said, nodding with some satisfaction, “that’s the address I remember.”
“Should we call or go by?”
“Let’s go by,” he said without hesitation. “Phone would be too weird.”
It took a long time for Sari MacLeish to open the door after we rang. She was a dishwater blond, though I guessed her natural hair color now would be gray. I wasn’t sure if what she was wearing was part of a peignoir set or some type of weird sweater, but I decided not to think too much about it.
“Mrs. MacLeish?” Kyle said through the screen door.
She peered at Kyle, trying to place him. And then she peered at me, hoping that might add information. It did not.
There was a thin beauty about her, like we were seeing it from the wrong end of a lens. But her sea-green eyes were clear, and when she looked at us there was nothing fuzzy about her at all.
She extended one long finger in Kyle’s direction. “I know you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Kyle Charles,” my brother said. “And this is my sister, Nicole. We were Joe’s friends. In school.”
She seemed to brighten visibly at this.
“Oh yes. I do remember you, Kyle. Your smile! Would you like to come in?”
It was a nice house, and it had a lovely view. The living room she led us to was large and luxurious, but even I, who had never been there before, could see that furniture was missing. For one thing, the room was too sparse. For another, there were places where the carpet was darker than it was in other spots. You didn’t need to be a detective to see that large pieces of furniture had been removed. It was apparent to me that Joe MacLeish’s mom had hit on hard times.
“Do you see Joe very often?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I see him all the time.”
“Have you seen him in the last few days?” I asked. Kyle shot me a glance.
“Why?” she asked, instantly alert. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no,” Kyle said. “It’s just…we’ve lost touch, and I’ve got some information that might be of interest to him.”
“It’s about a desk,” I said, watching her carefully. Nothing. “And Morrison Brine.” She lit up when she heard the name. It was like watching a slot machine hit a jackpot.
“That good-for-nothing reprobate!” Kyle and I sat up straighter and exchanged wide-eyed glances. There was no mistaking the tone. “I heard he finally died, didn’t he? Good riddance!”
“You weren’t friends?” I ventured.
She laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound. “I would not say so. No.” I was thinking we weren’t going to get much more out of her when she surprised us both by speaking again. “He gave me so much, but then he took it all back again. That’s the kind of man he was.”
“What kind, Mrs. MacLeish?”
But I could see she was thinking about something else. “Wait,” she said. “You guys are here about Joe. And you’re talking about Morrie. What’s he done? What’s Joe done? Please tell me he’s all right.”
The rising panic was easy to see. I flashed on the feeling of fear I’d had for my parents. She was concerned for her son. But what did she think he might have done? It hadn’t been until we’d started talking about Brine and connected him with Joe that her concern had shown up. Did she know something? I wondered. Was there some reason Joe would go after something of Brine’s?
“We have no reason to believe anything has happened to Joe,” I told her. “But we do believe he might have gotten himself mixed up with something to do with Brine or
his estate.”
I saw one spidery hand move to her throat and gently touch her clavicle. A gesture of deep thought. And maybe of worry.
“It’s my fault,” she said so quietly that I had to lean forward to hear her. “If anything has happened to Joe, it’s my fault.”
“Why do you think that, Mrs. MacLeish?”
She looked from me to Kyle and back again, as if searching for a way out. I was sure she could not see one.
“I told him.” Her voice was even quieter now. Whatever she was holding back was taking its toll.
“What did you tell him?” This was Kyle, matching her quiet tone.
“About Morrie. Morrie and me.”
“You were lovers,” I said.
She looked at me with alarm. “Certainly not! The very thought…”
There was something in her tone, or maybe in her eyes. I didn’t believe her. Not quite.
“But I worked for him after Joe’s dad died,” she said. “And we became friends.”
“When you spoke of him a few minutes ago, it didn’t sound like you liked him very much.” I said this as gently as possible.
“Oh, that came much later. When I worked for him, we got on well enough. And as I said, over the years we became friends. Okay”—she dipped her head, and I could see a pale pink darken her cheeks—“more than friends. There. I’ve said it. We were, for a time, in love.”
“Morrison was Joe’s father,” I said.
“Nicole!” This was Kyle.
But Sari MacLeish didn’t say anything. She just let her head fall forward, her hair moving with the motion and covering her face from my view. She sat quietly, as if thinking about what to say next. About what might be the right thing to say.
“I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?” In the silence of the room, her voice had startled me slightly. I’d been listening to the echoes of our breathing. “The secrets I’ve been holding.” That shrug again. And a sigh. “Morrie is dead. My son is grown. And it turns out that so many of the things I thought were important were not.”
“Do you know how we can get in touch with Joey, Mrs. MacLeish? We’d just like to talk with him.”
She hesitated, and Kyle pressed.
“We don’t want anything bad for him, Mrs. MacLeish. Remember—we were good friends at school.”
I felt her concede before I saw it. A sort of intake of breath that seemed to make her smaller in the end. But she nodded and drew out her phone. “I will call him.”
Sari called her son while Kyle and I sat there. We could see her working to convince him. Finally, Joe agreed to meet with us at his mother’s house at six, which was a few hours away
Since we were close to our parents’ place, Kyle and I ended up going there and hanging out with them rather than going back into the city. Time to catch up on family news and eat a meal and just enjoy our parents a little bit in the meantime. It seemed we did this too infrequently now that we were grown and out of the house and in our own lives. And maybe there had been something about spending time with Joey MacLeish’s mom that had made us both crave the company of our own parents. She’d seemed so small somehow. And vulnerable. We didn’t discuss it, Kyle and I. Just motored toward our parents’ place as soon as we were out of Sari’s house.
I was glad to see that things were calmer than they had been on our last visit. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, preparing a simple meal, when we arrived.
“So wonderful to see you both,” my mother enthused when we came in. “And it’s an easy matter to make a bit more so you can eat with us, all right?”
My mother is a stellar person in all ways. And she is a terrific mom. But she is not a great cook. That might be due to heritage more than talent or lack thereof. It’s true that Scottish food is getting better, but she left Scotland years before that was so. She cooks just about everything long enough to make it soft. It’s not always the best approach.
With the sudden appearance of her two chicks home for the evening meal, she replaced the bacon butties she’d been making (“We can have a sandwich any old day of the week. With my wee ones here, I need ta make a meal!”) with mince and tatties. Which means she’d been planning on making bacon sandwiches. But with us home she would make hamburger stew with mashed potatoes instead.
Kyle and I winced at the mention of mince and tatties. It was a family standard. Essentially, gray hamburger in its own gray sauce, with a fleck of carrot thrown in for the vegetable component. It is served with boiled and unseasoned potatoes, mashed to a coarse pulp. But today, the four of us enjoyed the meal as much as we used to when Kyle and I were kids. It was like tasting childhood on our tongues.
“So you think it might have been Joseph MacLeish what broke into our house,” my mom said at the dinner table when we told her what we were up to. “Well, doesn’t that take all? I remember him. Why, I think he even spent a Christmas or two with us. Imagine!”
“Well, not Joe himself,” I said. “We know he was in jail when your house was broken into.”
“But maybe someone who worked for or with him,” said Kyle.
“I oughta give that boy a hiding,” my dad huffed.
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Dad,” I told him. “He’s been through enough already from the sounds of things.”
“Anyway,” Kyle chimed in, “we’re seeing him afterward. If it comes to pass that it was something to do with him, we’ll convey your displeasure.”
“Right,” Dad said. I could see he was only half kidding. “You have my permission to do so.”
Our mother was not so easily diverted. “What I don’t understand is this,” she said. “If it was young Joseph, or at his direction, why search everywhere? If it’s as you say, you’d have thought he would look for the desk, then leave when he did not find it. But you saw the place. Whoever it was made a right mess.”
I’m not sure I stopped with a bite of food in midair, but it felt that way. “Mom’s right,” I said to Kyle. “As she said, he attended Christmases here. And too many nights and meals to count. He knew his way around our house. Besides, he was like family at that time. Everyone thought so. The Joe I remember would not have ordered someone to break into our home.”
“People change,” Kyle said darkly. Dad echoed the sentiment with a firm nod.
“Well, we’ll see anyway. When we meet with him, just keep an open mind. In any case, everything seems different now. Knowing what we know.”
“How do you mean?” Kyle asked.
“Well, Joe’s mom. Look how she’s living. However this all came about, she has more of a claim to that wine than I do, and it could make a huge difference in her life. It’s been bugging me anyway. It’s a real conflict of interest in terms of my job. This is my story. And here I am again, right in the middle of it.”
“It’s your call for sure, Nic. It was always going to be yours. You bought the desk.”
“Well, I might be able to make an argument that it’s mine,” Mom said, “as I paid for the desk in the first place!”
There was laughter after that. Based partly on the general knowledge that, whatever else was true, Mom would always do the right thing.
After dinner we made our way back to the house on Capitol Drive, where there was now a car in the driveway that hadn’t been there earlier.
Seeing Joe again was odd. Despite the strained circumstances, you could tell that Kyle and he had been good friends at one point. And now it was like no time had passed, in that their comfort with each other came back quickly.
“It has been an unusual, unfortunate situation,” Joe told us. “When I saw who I was bi
dding against, it made it very awkward. But there was more at stake.”
“You recognized me?”
“I did. And I could see you didn’t recognize me. And I was glad, because I had to have that desk.”
“Why, Joe?” I asked. “Why did you want it so badly?”
“You have to ask?” he said, and I could see he meant it.
“I do.”
“She told you,” he said. Then, to Sari: “You told them, didn’t you?”
Sari just nodded.
“Well then,” he said, a little bit triumphantly. “You see, don’t you?”
“I don’t, Joe. I’m sorry. Please tell me what I’m missing.”
“Well, Brine was…he was…my…father.” This last word was said in a whisper. And then with more force and voice. “I wanted something that had been his.”
“Wait,” I said. Whatever else I had been expecting, it wasn’t this. “Are you saying you wanted the desk just for the sake of having it?”
“Yes, that’s right. I wanted something of his. Something…significant.”
I had to be clear. “You mean you only wanted it because it was your father’s desk?”
Another nod.
“But then why have my parents’ place tossed? If you didn’t know about the wine.”
I didn’t need an answer from him. I could see from his reaction that he didn’t know what I was talking about, something he confirmed right away.
“I don’t know anything about any wine, but if a place needed tossing, I wouldn’t have done it to yours.”
“That’s what I told her,” Kyle said. I didn’t contradict him.
“Okay, but if not Joe, then who?” I insisted.
“Wait,” Sari said. “You’re accusing Joe? Is that what this is about?”
“It’s okay, Mom. I can handle this.” He turned to me. “I didn’t know anything about any wine. I just wanted my father’s desk.”
When Blood Lies Page 5
