The Last Good Day

by Gail Bowen

  “Why did she go away?” Taylor asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Did she and my father love each other?”

  “Truth?”

  “Truth,” Taylor said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think they did.”

  “Then why did they get married?”

  “I think your mother hoped she could have a different kind of life. She wanted a child, and your father did too.”

  “If my mother wanted a child, why did she leave me?”

  “Your mother was always searching for something.”

  “Is that why she made art?”

  “No. She made art for the same reason you do.”

  “Because she had to,” Taylor said.

  “She loved that about you. When she came back and saw that you were an artist, like her, she knew that you were what she’d been searching for all along.”

  “And then she died.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And then she died.”

  Beside me, Taylor stared up at the ceiling, her arms pressed against her sides, rigid as a soldier’s. When I drew her into my arms, she began to cry. She was not a girl who cried often and the intensity of her grief frightened me. Her body convulsed with sobs, and for a while it seemed as if the tears would never stop, but her grief had been gathering force for a long time. She had never cried for her mother and father. I buried my face in the lake-water smell of her hair and held her tight until the sobbing ceased and her breathing quieted. Finally, she seemed to fall asleep. But when I inched towards the edge of the mattress to leave, she reached out to me.

  “Do you want me to stay?” I asked.

  “No. I’m okay.”

  I got out of bed. “You know where I am if you need me.”

  “And if I call you, you’ll be there.”

  I kissed her forehead. “Yes, I’ll be there.”

  I stood outside Taylor’s room for a few seconds, listening, making certain that her reassurance wasn’t just bravado, but all was silent. I walked down to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. Our brown bags of spice cookies were on the counter. I picked mine up and carried it with me to the porch. I was sorely in need of something to take the sting out. Willie, ever faithful, lumbered after me. I’d just settled into the rocking chair and taken my first bite of cookie when my cellphone bleated from somewhere in the house. I almost let it ring, then I thought of Taylor sleeping, and I leaped up to answer and stop the noise.

  My caller announced her name straightaway. “This is Maggie Niewinski,” she said. I didn’t make the connection immediately. Luckily, Ms. Niewinski helped me out. “I’m Clare Mackey’s friend in Prince Albert.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  “That it has,” she said. “Nonetheless, I thought I should call and give you an update.”

  “Has Clare been in touch with you?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s the update. I’ve called everyone I could think of. All the women in the Moot Team have. Clare hasn’t been in touch with anyone we know.”

  Despite the warmth of the evening, I felt a chill. “I guess there’s still the possibility that she just decided to cut her ties here.”

  “Why would she do that?” Maggie asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just hanging on to the hope that there’s a logical explanation.”

  “There isn’t,” Maggie said sharply. Clearly she respected unvarnished truth. “Clare wasn’t an easy person to get close to. She was friendly with people, but she didn’t seem to have a need for friendship. That’s probably why it was so easy for her to simply vanish without anyone asking a lot of questions. But you asked questions. What’s your connection with Clare?”

  “It’s tangential,” I said. “Clare was the running buddy of a woman who’d once been my teaching assistant. Her name is Anne Millar. Anyway, when Clare stopped showing up for their morning run in November, Anne went to the police and she went to Falconer Shreve. Everybody gave her the brush-off. Anne and I spotted one another at Chris Altieri’s funeral, and she unloaded. I just agreed to do what I could to help.”

  Maggie’s tone was withering. “So a stranger and a casual acquaintance took the time to do what none of us who were with Clare every day for three years at law school bothered to do.”

  “You had busy lives,” I said.

  “Nobody should be that busy. But we’ll make up for it. You say the police gave Anne Millar the brush-off. Do you happen to know who she talked to?”

  I hesitated, but I knew it was pointless to delay the inevitable. “Anne spoke to Inspector Alex Kequahtooway.”

  “Kequahtooway,” Maggie repeated. “Okay, I’ve got it. He’s obviously the place to start. We’ll have to find out who’s issuing the inspector’s orders or who is paying him off.” For the first time, Maggie Niewinski faltered. “November to July. Eight months. It may already be too late.”

  “You don’t think Clare’s alive?” I said.

  “I hope she is,” Maggie said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. If anything’s happened to her, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway is dead meat.”

  My mind was racing when I clicked off my cell. There was no way I could dismiss Maggie Niewinski. A telephone call was not an infallible indicator of character, but Maggie had not struck me as a fanciful woman, nor did she strike me as a woman who made idle threats. Obeying the adage that one picture is worth a thousand words, I walked back to my bedroom and picked up the yearbook from Clare Mackey’s graduating year at the University of Saskatchewan law school and returned to the comforts of the rocker on the porch and my bag of spice cookies.

  I turned to the photo of the Moot Team. Maggie was at the centre of the picture, a fine-boned blonde with an air of fragility that, given her determination to leave no stone unturned in her search for Clare, was deceptive. I leafed through the book, looking for Maggie in other pictures. She was there many times, and always with the other members of the Moot Team. Clearly, they were women of parts: members of the staff of the Law Review; revellers toasting their tablemates at the Malpractice Mixer; exultant hockey players wearing skates and oversized sweaters with the U. of S. logo. According to the text on the page, their graduating year had been a good one for the women’s hockey team. They had triumphed at the championships in Montreal. There was a picture of the team, beaming, arms draped around one another’s shoulders. Beneath the photo the caption read, “Raising hell and kicking butt.”

  Seemingly, they were about to continue the tradition. I put on my glasses and brought the photo of the hockey team closer to my face. Together, the women had the relaxed stance and easy body language of team players. They did not look like people who would relish destroying another human being, but that was exactly what they were about to do, and in my heart I knew that if I’d been in their position, I would have been leading the pack.

  The scent of nicotiana wafted through the screened windows. Unbidden, memories of other nicotiana-scented nights washed over me. Alex wasn’t a faceless enemy to me. He was a man whose hands had caressed me and whose body I had loved. Our relationship had never been an easy one. There had been unasked questions and stupid arguments. We had quarrelled over small things because we both knew the big issue between us was beyond solution. But as problem-ridden as our personal relationship had been, I had never doubted that Alex was a good cop and an incorruptible one. Now it seemed that that assessment was being called into question.

  The memory that drove me to pick up the phone and dial Alex’s number was not one I cherished. It was of a time when the door to Alex’s private world had opened and my cowardice had slammed it shut – perhaps forever. We had eaten dinner at my house and decided that, rather than driving, we would walk downtown to police headquarters. The night was unseasonably warm, and I hadn’t worn a jacket. When we started home, I’d been chilly, and Alex had put his arm around my shoulders. As we’d crossed the intersection near my house
, a man in a pickup truck yelled an ugly racial slur, not at Alex but at me. His words had branded us both. “When you’re through fucking the chief,” the man had said, “why don’t you try it with a white guy?”

  In the months afterwards, I replayed the scene a hundred times in my mind. Always in my revision, I behaved heroically. I raised my head and walked across the street with the man I loved. The truth was I had not been brave. Obeying an impulse as atavistic as it was unforgivable, I had shaken off Alex’s arm and run to the safety of the sidewalk. The men in the half-ton had applauded the fact that I had allied myself with them. My apology to Alex had been heartfelt, and he had been understanding, but there was no denying the truth: that split second at the Albert Street Bridge had opened a chasm between us that we had never again been able to close.

  I had failed him, and we both knew it. Tonight I had a chance to make amends. I picked up my cell and tried his number. Remembering what we had once been to one another, I wanted to warn him, but at another level I knew that I needed an explanation myself. The Alex I knew had been principled, a man of integrity who believed that every human being had an obligation to do what he could to make a difference. He had been one of the best things in my life. I needed to know that I hadn’t been wrong to love him. I needed to know that, no matter what had happened on that icy November day, Alex was worth loving.

  As the phone rang, images of the apartment I knew so well flashed through my mind. It was in a small old building downtown, not posh, but comfortable, with high ceilings and a bedroom with a small balcony where, after love-making, we would take our chairs and sit and look out across the street at the blank face of the church. The memories absorbed me. I didn’t notice how many times the phone rang. When, finally, the phone was picked up, the voice on the other end was not Alex’s. It was a woman’s voice. “Hello,” she said. “Hello,” and then in a voice in which anger and fear were mixed, “Hello. Who’s there? Hello.”

  I hung up. Those few words weren’t enough to reveal whether the woman in Alex’s apartment was Lily Falconer, but one thing was certain: the man I’d loved for three years had found someone else to come home to.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The next morning the skies were grey and there was a drizzle that looked like it had staying power. It was a day to sit on the porch, wrapped in an afghan, reading Virginia Woolf, but Taylor, Isobel, and Gracie had other plans. Recognizing that it would be difficult to keep a scheme involving a quantity of rocks secret on a horseshoe of land from which all rocks except those in ornamental groupings had been removed, the girls decided to spill the beans about their top-secret project.

  Taylor’s enthusiasm for the Inukshuk book had infected her friends. Inspired by the tale of a man who had travelled almost two thousand kilometres guided only by the Inuksuit described in a song his father had taught him, the girls had drawn up plans for a series of Inuksuit that would lead a traveller around the land surrounding Lawyers’ Bay. Each Inukshuk would have a sight hole in the middle. When a lost soul peered through it, he would find his bearings and be guided along the route to the next Inukshuk. Ultimately, he would end up where he wanted to go. The girls had chosen their sites with care, sketched each Inukshuk, and made a rough estimate of the number and sizes of the rocks they would need. They had done their homework, and, in my eyes, the value of their efforts was not diminished by the fact that it was unlikely anyone at Lawyers’ Bay would ever get lost. Except for my ancient Volvo, every car there had a state-of-the-art global positioning system.

  As if to offset the dreariness of the day, the girls were all wearing crayon-bright cotton shirts: Gracie’s was tangerine, and she had gathered her red-gold hair in a ponytail held in place by an orange scrunchy. With her rosy freckled skin and bright blue eyes, it was impossible to imagine that her mother was a member of the Dakota First Nation. Blake Falconer had said that his wife’s sadness at not having a daughter who was more in her image was enduring, but that morning Gracie seemed remarkably free of any marks of her mother’s rejection.

  Cheerful and practical, she identified the role I’d been called upon to play in the scheme. “We need you to phone the rock company,” she said. “They won’t accept an order from a kid – take my word for it. I tried the company my mother used when she got the rocks for the gazebo and they insisted on speaking to an adult. My house is short of adults at the moment, so we thought maybe you’d help us out.”

  “There’s a place in Fort Qu’Appelle we could try,” I said. “We might even be able to get what you need delivered today. Besides, I wouldn’t mind doing a little grocery shopping.”

  Isobel gave me a puckish three-cornered smile. “You mean you’re unable to meet all your shopping needs at the Point Store?”

  “Every so often I just have a hankering for something that doesn’t cost twice as much as it should,” I said.

  Peter’s Rocks was one of those curious businesses that appear to spring up as backyard ventures, and then spill into the vacant lot next door, defying zoning laws and the dreams of fastidious neighbours. It might not have been nominated for any chamber of commerce awards, but Peter’s seemed to be exactly what the girls had in mind. Despite the misting rain, they stormed the rock piles with a passion they typically would have reserved for a sale at Old Navy. They argued good-naturedly over their selections, replaced hotly disputed choices with better choices, and generally settled in for a morning of solid trading. They were dressed for the long haul in waterproof ponchos, but the wind-breaker I’d hurriedly bought at a discount house before I came to the lake turned out to be worth exactly what I’d paid for it. It wasn’t long before I hightailed it to the shelter of the corrugated plastic roof that covered the concrete lawn ornaments.

  All the usual suspects were there: jockeys, saucer-eyed fawns, huddled gargoyles, gargoyles with wings spread, Dutch girls saucily lifting the backs of their skirts to reveal ruffled concrete panties and sturdy legs, mother rabbits, bears wearing sweaters, angelic doomed children, gnomes, a flock of plaster owls that I glanced at only briefly, a solitary Sacred Heart, three Holy Families, and a phalanx of Blessed Virgins. Freed of the obligation to buy anything or pass judgement, I gave the ornaments my full attention, listened to the rain bounce off the roof above me, and tried to think of nothing at all.

  It took the girls an hour to make their choices and another half-hour to watch a buff young man in jeans that appeared to have been put on wet load the rocks they had selected into the back of a pickup and tot up the bill. Then it was my turn. We hit the IGA, where, in honour of customer-appreciation day, the manager had slashed 10 per cent from the cost of all purchases, excluding tobacco and drugs. A good morning’s work all around, and we drove home content.

  As we warmed soup and cut sandwiches, the girls dreamily revisited the many charms of the young man at Peter’s Rocks. Clearly, breasts were not the only things budding that summer for my daughter and her friends. The goofiness and speculations continued during lunch, and I was relieved when the girls asked if they could skip dishes so they could start levelling the ground where the first Inukshuk would be built.

  We were without an automatic dishwasher at the lake, and I’d just submerged my hands in warm sudsy water when I heard a car pull up. I grabbed a tea towel and headed to the front of the cottage. When I saw that the visitor trudging through the rain towards my front door was Detective Robert Hallam, I opened the door with a smile.

  “Come in,” I said. “There’s still soup in the pot.”

  Robert was wearing a trench coat, a Tilley hat, and a look of abject misery. He stepped inside, but as he stood dripping on the hooked rug in the entry, he made no move to take off his wet outer clothes.

  I reached for his coat. “Let me take that,” I said. “Come in and dry off. If you get pneumonia, Rosalie will never let me hear the end of it.”

  The mention of his wife’s name brought a faint and fleeting smile to Robert’s face. “Thanks,” he said. “But this isn’t
a social visit, Joanne.”

  The penny dropped. “You’re here to talk about Alex,” I said.

  Robert was clearly taken aback. “How did you know?”

  “Maggie Niewinski called me last night. She said some friends of Clare Mackey’s were going to force the police to find out why Alex quashed the investigation into Clare Mackey’s disappearance.”

  Robert had adjusted his expression, but it was clear he was still genuinely dumbfounded. “Joanne, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never even heard of Maggie Niewinski. I came out here today because Inspector Kequahtooway has gone missing. He booked off to attend to personal business, but he was supposed to be back yesterday. He still hasn’t shown up, and no one knows where he is.”

  I felt as unsteady as Robert looked. “Come in and sit down,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  Robert followed me into the kitchen. He perched on the edge of a chair, but he didn’t take his coat off. His normally ruddy face was leached of colour. “I might as well deal with this right off the bat,” he said. “Joanne, I need to know exactly when you told Inspector Kequahtooway that there were questions about how he was handling the Altieri investigation.”

  “I never told him,” I said. “I tried to call him a half-dozen times, but he was never there. The last time I phoned I left a message, but he never got back to me.”

  The colour returned to Robert’s face. “Thank God,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, tilted his head, and exhaled. “You have no idea what a relief that is,” he said. “I could hardly keep the car on the road today because I felt so sick about what I’d done.”

  “You tried to give an officer you respected a chance to get things in place so he could defend himself,” I said. “No one could fault you for that.”

  “I could fault me,” Robert said, sitting upright again. “I must have gone soft in the head. Joanne, if the inspector had taken off because you’d warned him there was trouble brewing, I would have been responsible. After thirty-five years on the force I don’t know how I could have faced that kind of betrayal of my fellow officers.” Robert snapped his fingers. “And my sister officers,” he added hastily. “Rosalie tells me I have to watch that kind of stuff.” He took off his hat and placed it, dripping, on his knees. “I’m making a mess,” he said.