Deadly Appearances

by Gail Bowen

  I held Carey’s hand and smiled at him, but he didn’t respond. When I straightened, I found myself face to face with Lori Evanson. She had stepped out from behind her husband, and she was looking at me with wonder.

  “Mrs. Kilbourn, we saw you on television,” she said. “Such a terrible thing – an evil thing! You were very brave to save Mr. Spenser’s life.” Her voice was light and sweet, with a lilting singsong quality, like a child’s reciting something she’s learned by heart. Lori was holding a baby I knew was her own, but there was a quality about her, a sense that somehow she would never move much past adolescence.

  It wasn’t her body. Physically, she was mature and beautiful. She looked the way we all wanted to look when we were eighteen. She was wearing a sundress the colour of a cut peach, and her arms and face were golden with tan. Up close, she smelled of suntan lotion and baby powder. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blond and streaked from the sun. She was incredibly lovely but in her eyes, which were as blue as forget-me-nots, there was such vacancy. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Lori Evanson’s soul was spotless.

  “We’re so glad you’re all right. ‘Praise the Lord.’ That’s what Mark said when he heard you were fine.” She stopped for a second and looked gravely at her husband, at this man who could say just the right thing; then she directed those incredible eyes at me. “You’ve always been so good to us – that toaster oven with sandwich grill when we got married, and the cheque for twenty-five dollars when Clay was born. Look, isn’t he a precious lamb?” She turned the baby toward me for inspection. The baby was handsome and reassuringly alert. “So kind,” his mother continued. “If ever there’s anything we can do for you.”

  “No thanks, Lori. I was just looking around. Perhaps I’ll go over to the prayer centre. Are visitors allowed?”

  Her perfect brow wrinkled. “Gee, Mrs. Kilbourn, I guess so, but you know, I don’t know if anyone ever asked. I mean we’re all, like, very proud of the chapel. It was designed by Soren Eames in consultation with a prize-winning Regina architect.” Her brow smoothed. “The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre seats 2,800 people and is a multi-purpose area that can be converted for other uses. The building also boasts four radiating modules: a cafeteria, a gymnasium, a faith life centre and a complex of state-of-the art business offices.” Her innocent blue eyes shone with happiness. She was on home ground again. I saw the care with which those vacant blue eyes had been made up – peach eye shadow blending into mauve and then a soft smudge of grey eye liner beneath the lower lashes. Suddenly, those perfect eyes focused on something behind me, and they lit up. I turned to see what she was looking at.

  On the main road that led through the campus, a man was getting out of a black Porsche. He was dressed like a university kid – denim work shirt and blue jeans – but even from this distance it was apparent that he wasn’t a kid. He was tall and boyishly slender but there was something defeated about the set of his shoulders that suggested this man’s worries went deeper than a conflict in his class timetable. When he began to walk toward us, I recognized him. He was the James Taylor look-alike, the one who’d run after Roma Boychuk to console her after Andy died. Lori grabbed my hand.

  “Here’s Soren now. Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, you have to meet him. He is so kind and good. He understands everything, and I mean everything.”

  But the man who understood everything walked past us with a curt nod for Lori and Mark and not even that for me. Lori’s face fell, but she was quick to defend him.

  “Mrs. Kilbourn, that is just not like Soren Eames. He is usually so friendly. I think he must be mourning Mr. Boychuk’s passing, too.”

  “I suppose he met Andy when Andy came to visit Carey.”

  She stood very straight and looked directly into my face. “I don’t know about that. All I know is that Mr. Boychuk came to see Soren almost every week, and lately a lot more than that. They were very close.”

  “Lori, I don’t think we should be talking about this – even with Mrs. Kilbourn. When a man talks to his pastor, that’s just like when he talks to his doctor. There’s a trust there, like an oath.”

  Lori looked so shattered that I jumped in. “I guess,” I said, “that he came to talk about Carey.”

  Mark was silent. “I guess if you two are going to talk about this, Carey and I better go down to Disciples and get a Popsicle. Lori, I’ll see you and Clay at home for lunch.” He kissed his son and wife and pushed the wheelchair toward the road to the restaurant.

  Lori was solemn. She was attempting to analyze something, and it went against the grain. “Mrs. Kilbourn, please forgive me but I think you’re wrong. Mr. Boychuk never really spends – spent much time with Carey. I mean he was like good to him and all that but, you know, Mrs. Boychuk would spend like hours with Carey – watching TV with him and talking to him about the programs and reading to him and telling him about things, but Mr. Boychuk – well, you could tell he, like, loved Carey and everything, but it just seemed real hard for him to stay with him. He’d come in and he’d sit and hold Carey’s hand for a little while and then it was like he couldn’t take it any more. He’d kiss him and he’d just leave. No, Mrs. Kilbourn, Mr. Boychuk didn’t come for Carey. Anyway, Soren is the spiritual head of Wolf River Bible College and all, but he wouldn’t have been the one to like talk to about Carey – that would have been …” Suddenly a laugh as musical as the tinkle of a wind chime. “Well, of course, it would be Mrs. Manz. She’s the matron for special care – sometimes I can be so dumb.” She smiled shyly, waiting for approval.

  I gave it heartily. “Well, thanks, Lori, that’s good to know. It was kind of you to go to so much trouble.” We both smiled – neither of us seeing a barb in a comment that equated human thought with trouble, and we parted friends.

  I didn’t make a conscious decision to call on Soren Eames. It just happened. I’d turned down Lori Evanson’s invitation to have lunch at their trailer and walked down the path that led to the chapel. Close up, it seemed to change, to reveal itself. Somehow up close you didn’t notice the hard-edged bravado of the building as much as the simple fact that everything fit so well.

  The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre was a fitting building in both senses of the word. The parts fit together with the cool inevitability of a beautiful and expensive watch. The result, as I discovered when the front door opened to my touch, was a building where form and function meshed smoothly. It was a fitting building in which to worship God.

  The heart of the building, the octagon-shaped chapel, was a beautiful room. No stained glass or groined wood or silky altar cloths – just a room in which everything was practical and workable. All eight walls were glass – eight walls of windows filling the room with natural light. In the centre of the room was a simple circular altar. Suspended above it was an unpainted metal cross. Arranged in octagons around the altar were bright metal pews, covered in sailcloth cushions. The sailcloth was vivid: red, green, yellow, blue. I walked down the aisle and sat in a pew. From there I could see how pieces of pipe had been joined together to form the cross. It looked functional and heavy. Suddenly, everything caught up with me. Exhaustion and grief and the familiar clutch of panic. There had been other deaths: my grandparents, my best friend from high school, my father, my husband. I had survived, but as I watched the play of light on the cross, I began to tremble.

  I sat for perhaps half an hour. There were no tongues of flame. No pressure of an unseen hand on my shoulder. But after a while I felt better – not restored but capable of functioning.

  “I am going to make it through this day,” I said. There were no thunderbolts, so I picked up my bag and walked.

  I don’t know which I heard first – the man’s voice or the sobbing. But as I stepped outside the chapel, squinting against the harsh midday light, I heard someone in distress. The sound was coming from one of the wings – modules, Lori had called them – that radiated from the chapel like spokes from a wheel. The crying was terrible. It seemed to spring from a pain so pure a
nd so private that I knew there was no help I could offer.

  But there was another sound – the sound of a man’s voice. At first, I couldn’t catch the words, but I didn’t need to. The cadences were as familiar to me as my own, and I listened with my heart pounding against my ribs as the sounds shaped themselves into words. “I thought it was the right thing to do, but now I don’t know.” Then something I couldn’t make out, then, “It would have been kinder if I’d used a bullet.” The voice was tight with anguish. “Why can’t we go back? Oh, God, Soren, why can’t we go back?”

  Then nothing except the blood singing in my ears and the knowledge that the voice I was listening to was Andy Boychuk’s.

  I turned and walked to the double doors of the wing where the voice was coming from. When I came to the office marked Soren Eames, I didn’t bother to knock. Out of breath and close to hysteria, I opened the door.

  There wasn’t much to see – a slender man with a receding hairline and on the desk in front of him a portable tape recorder clicking metallically to signal that the tape had ended. I don’t know what I’d expected. I was sick with anger and disappointment.

  I went over and pulled the tape out of the recorder. I had a hundred like it myself: small, cheap tapes that Andy used, when he was driving, to record an idea or his impression of a meeting or sometimes just the thoughts he had driving late at night across the prairie.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  Soren Eames’s voice was so low I could barely hear it. “He gave it to me.”

  “What’s it supposed to mean? All that about ‘the right thing to do’ and using a bullet.”

  Soren Eames looked steadily at me, but he didn’t answer.

  My voice was shrill in the quiet room. “I asked you a question. Why have you got that tape? What’s it all about?”

  “It’s a private communication.” He stood and walked over to me. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave me alone now.” His voice was gentle. He took my arm and led me down a corridor, through a door and into the light. For a few seconds, Soren Eames and I stood on the threshold looking into one another’s faces with the intensity of lovers. I don’t know what we were looking for – clues, I guess, some sort of insight into what had suddenly gone so wrong. Finally, I turned and began to walk down the path toward the highway.

  “Mrs. Kilbourn,” he called after me, “when you’re working through all this, try to remember that you’re not the only one. Other people loved Andy, too.” It was only later that I realized he had called me by name.

  There was one cab waiting outside the Regina bus depot, and I beat out an old lady for it. I’m not proud of that, but there it is. As the cab pulled away, I looked out the rear window. She was standing on the corner shaking her bag at me.

  It was two-thirty when the taxi pulled up in front of my house on Eastlake Avenue, less than twenty-four hours since Andy’s death. Our dogs greeted me hopefully, and I remembered that I hadn’t taken them for their run that morning.

  “Sorry, ladies,” I said, “it’s shower time. You can come up and bark your complaints through the bathroom door.” They did. By 2:35 I was in the shower, and by 3:00, clean and cool in a fresh cotton nightgown, I was lying on top of my bedspread fast asleep.

  It was late in the afternoon when I woke up. The room was full of shadows, and my son Peter was standing by the bed with a glass of iced tea. He is a handsome boy, dark like his father with the Irish good looks all the Kilbourns have. His sister, Mieka, thinks it’s a crime that she looks like me: “blond and bland” are her exact words. She’s right, but Peter carries his own burdens. At sixteen, he is as shy as Mieka and my younger boy, Angus, are outgoing. The political life with its endless rooms full of strangers has always been torture for him, yet he has walked into those rooms and offered his hand without grumbling. He is wonderfully kind with our dogs, with his sister and brother and with me. The tea was just the kind of thing he would do.

  He sat on the edge of my bed. “Mieka’s down there making dinner. It looks kind of gross but it smells okay.”

  “What’s she making?”

  “Pork chops something and chocolate mousse.”

  “Wow.”

  He smiled. “Right, and Angus and I rented a movie for you. Something with Robin Williams. The guy at 7-Eleven said it’s hilarious. And there were a bunch of phone calls for you but Angus took the messages so you’ll probably have to wait for people to call back. Anyway, here they are.” He handed me some slips of paper and grinned a little. “And that television guy – the one you decked yesterday – Rick Spenser?”

  I shuddered.

  “Right. Well, a delivery man came with some flowers he sent you.” He gave me the thumbs-up sign and closed the door behind him. He had not mentioned the word murder. It was a delicacy I was grateful for. I sat on the bed, took a sip of tea and looked through the messages Angus had taken.

  There were two surprises: Eve Boychuk and Soren Eames had phoned. I called Eve first. She sounded composed, and asked me to go to the funeral with her. She didn’t, she said, know who else to ask. She and Roma Boychuk, Andy’s mother, hadn’t spoken in years. “And that,” she said wearily, “leaves only Carey and, of course, you, Jo.” She didn’t explain the “of course.” I said I would go with her. She said she’d get back to me.

  Soren Eames, sounding tentative but friendly, said he just wanted to make sure I’d gotten home safely. I thanked him and told him that the next time he was in the city, I’d be pleased if he’d call me. I hung up, certain I would hear from him again. The lady whom I’d beaten out for the cab at the bus depot didn’t call, but I was two for three on my morning encounters. Things were definitely looking up.

  There was a call from a detective named Millar Millard of the city police. Detective Millard was out of the office but he would be in touch with me, said a young woman named Ironstar, who added that one winter she had taken a class in human justice my husband had taught at the university.

  And there were phone calls from friends. Ali Sutherland, who had been my doctor and my friend when Ian died, had called to send love and condolences. And there were invitations to dinner from two of the people in this world I would under most circumstances have liked to have dinner with – Howard Dowhanuik and Dave Micklejohn. I turned them both down. They would have talked about Andy’s murder, and I couldn’t face it. That night, nothing could compare with the prospect of sitting in my cotton nightgown at our kitchen table, eating Mieka’s pork chops something and chocolate mousse, then curling up and watching a movie some guy at the 7-Eleven said was hilarious. Safe in my house, I could vanquish the word murder.

  When I padded downstairs in my nightie and bare feet, I felt virtuous – all those phone calls answered – and I felt hungry. What Mieka was cooking smelled of ginger and garlic. As I entered the kitchen, she was putting a loaf of sourdough bread into the oven to warm, and Angus was chopping vegetables. When Mieka told me to fix myself a drink and check out the dining-room table, I kept walking.

  The table was set with the knives and forks reversed – Angus again – but in the centre of the table was a crystal pitcher so exquisitely cut I knew it was Waterford. It was filled with gerbera daisies. Half were that vibrant pink we used to call American beauty, and the others were rosy orange. The late summer sunshine poured in the window, turning the facets of the crystal to fire. It was a centrepiece from a Van Gogh picnic. There was an envelope propped against my water glass. Inside, on hotel stationery, was a note from Rick Spenser: “On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley died. His death will always be merely a footnote to the Kennedy assassination. Thank you, my dear Mrs. Kilbourn, for keeping me from becoming a footnote. I have never liked seeing my name in small print.” It was signed “RS.” I called the hotel and left a message thanking him.

  All things considered, it was a happy evening. Mieka’s dinner was great, and after we ate I made myself a gin and tonic and plugged in the fan and we all sat and watched the movie. The guy at t
he 7-Eleven had been right. It was pretty funny. Angus fell asleep on the couch, so when the movie was over, I brought down a blanket and pillow for him, tucked him in, kissed the big kids and went up to bed.

  The light from the little brass lamp on the bedside table made a warm pool in the darkness. Under the lamp, a stack of novels in bright dust jackets sat unread and inviting. The bed was turned down and the pillows were fluffed against the headboard. Peter again. Obviously today he was bucking for sainthood. He had my vote.

  When I walked toward the bathroom to brush my teeth, I noticed a splash of material on the chair by the window – my dress from the picnic. I picked it up to throw in the laundry hamper. Under it was Andy’s blue leather speech portfolio. Printed in gold Gothic type on the cover were the words “Property of Every Ukrainian Mother’s Dream.” Dave Micklejohn and I had given it to Andy for Christmas, when he’d announced that he was running for the leadership.

  When I opened the folder, I expected to see that last speech. What I saw was not my words triple spaced on the familiar buff paper, but a single sheet of dove-grey paper – expensive paper. A third of the way down the page, handwritten in elegant calligraphy, were eight lines of poetry:

  O rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  At the top of the page, centred the way they would be on engraved notepaper, someone had drawn the letters A and E. But they weren’t separate; they were linked with little swirls and flowers the way they would be on a wedding invitation.

  “His dark secret love/Does thy life destroy.” Those had been the last words Andy Boychuk had read before his death, the last image retained on his eye. The warm, familiar room suddenly seemed alien, violated. My hands went slack, and the portfolio slid off my knee to the floor.