Deadly Appearances

by Gail Bowen

  When I pulled up in front of the pretty doorway of the house in Tuxedo Park, Peter and Angus were throwing a football around on the lawn with Morton Lee. Collectively, they were wearing enough equipment to get a CFL team through the season. Mort was a generous shopper.

  It was just before dusk, the time in autumn when suddenly the light fades, the temperature dips and I’m glad I have a place to go home to. When I opened the door, the house smelled of roast beef and pies browning. Somewhere Jussi Björling was singing “O Mimi, tu piu non torni” from La Bohème. Rick strode down the hall. He was wearing a huge butcher’s apron and he looked agitated.

  “Damn. I thought you were Mort,” and then realizing what he’d said, “Jo, I’m sorry, it’s just that …”

  “You wanted him to hear the Björling-Merrill duet from The Pearl Fishers – I have this record, too. Go get him.” And so Mort came in, face flushed with cold and exertion, and we three stood and listened to “Au font du temple Saint,” and I thought, Rick was right. It was the most perfect piece of music that’s ever been written. Then we drank Bordeaux and ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and Mort played Ravel’s Quartet in F and argued that yes, The Pearl Fishers was beautiful, but …

  In that civilized house it was easy to forget Eve sitting in a prison hospital cutting out turkeys with cruel little eyes, and Lane Appleby running her perfectly manicured finger around the frame of the picture of her dead son. It was even possible to forget for a while the monster who was loose out there just waiting.

  Sunday was damp, but Thanksgiving Day was bright and cool.

  “Last chance for the zoo,” Mort said, “Next week it’ll be too cold. Jo, throw that salmon mousse of yours into the oven and let’s go. If we’re going to eat half the stuff that’s cooking around here, we’ll need to work off a few calories.”

  At the zoo, Ali and I trailed behind, talking, while Rick and Mort walked with the boys. I hadn’t thought this would be Rick’s kind of outing. In fact, I had doubted he would come. But here he was in his heavy Aran Isle sweater, larger than life and as happy as I’d seen him. He was knowledgeable and he was fun. He made connections between the animals and political people: a huge, lugubrious female baboon was our ex-Minister of Energy; a sleepy, moth-eaten old lion who sprang across his cage in a single bound when someone pelted him with a pebble was, Rick said to me solemnly, “Your ex-Premier, Howard Dowhanuik.”

  “What about them?” Angus asked, pointing to some zebras chasing one another skittishly in an open field.

  “Glad you asked,” said Rick. “They’re the press gallery. In Ottawa, as in the zebra world, young males not mature enough or aggressive enough to claim a group for themselves or lead a herd live in bachelor groups.” And then, while we were still laughing, he added seriously, “The lion is their principal enemy.”

  Dinner was a splendid affair. The table looked like a cover of Gourmet. Mort found just the right Moselle to serve with the salmon mousse; the meal from roast turkey to pumpkin pie was as traditional as it was perfect. There was a sense of family at that table, and when Mort drove Rick to the airport to catch the flight to Ottawa, we all felt a sense of loss. It was as if the circle had been broken.

  Ali and I went into the kitchen, cleared a place at her oak table, poured coffee and split the last of the pumpkin pie. As we ate, we talked about old times. They hadn’t been good old times, especially at the beginning, but with Ali’s support and love they had become good times and I was, I thought, a happy woman. And it was me, past and present, Ali talked about as we sat in her handsome kitchen with the light dying outside and the good smells of a holiday dinner still hanging in the air.

  Her face was serious as she looked at me. “You know, Jo, I think you’ve really put it together this time. When I heard about Andy, I worried that maybe you weren’t strong enough yet to handle another trauma, but here you sit looking wonderful and full of energy, and with a remarkable man in the picture. As your doctor, I’m proud, and as your friend, I’m delighted.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “You’re made of good stuff, lady, really good stuff.”

  I hugged those words to myself all the way to Regina.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The next morning I woke up in my own bed in the house on Eastlake Avenue. The room was full of light, and as I lay there, I could hear in the distance the mournful cries of geese flying south. I got out of bed, opened the window and curled up in the window seat to watch. The air that came into the room was fresh and cold and smelled of the north. I hugged my knees for warmth and looked out. There were no clouds. The sky was a clear, hard blue. It was a flawless October day.

  Suddenly the air was black with geese, hundreds, then thousands of them. Their cries filled the room and, like a tuning fork, a part of me that I had forgotten resonated, responding. It was a pure and shining moment – one of the best and one of the last.

  That day it all began to fall apart and, for a while, it looked as if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put it together again.

  Nothing seemed wrong at the beginning. When the dogs and I came back from our morning walk, there was a Canada Messenger truck in front of our house. Two men were unloading boxes. I’d been expecting them. Before we left for Winnipeg, a woman from Supply and Services called and told me there was still a lot of Andy’s stuff (“Boychuk-related material,” she had called it) in a storeroom at the legislature, and they needed the space. They didn’t want to distress Mrs. Boychuk further. (Yes, I thought, the permanently bewildered should be spared something.) Dave Micklejohn had suggested I was working on a book and … Here it was. The machinery of government had been kicked into high gear to clean out a storeroom, and I wasn’t ready.

  I signed the invoice and said I’d pay the driver and his helper if they’d carry the boxes up to my office in the granny flat. I hadn’t been in there since I went to Winnipeg, and it was cold. I turned on the heat and paid the men, then I went to the house to warm up. I made a couple of phone calls, so it was after ten by the time I got to the office. I was feeling edgy and frustrated. I hate days that fritter themselves away; this seemed to be shaping up as one of them. And to add to my frustration, there was a fine dusting of pollen over everything: the boxes from the Caucus Office, the desk, window-sills, files. Obviously, the pollen had settled into the heating system all summer long, and when I’d turned on the heat, it had blown out. I tried to ignore the pollen and started to unpack a box of files, but it was getting into everything. I filled a bucket with hot soapy water and washed everything down. By the time I was ready to unpack the government boxes, it was noon, and Angus was home for lunch. As I turned on “The Flintstones” and poured tomato soup into his bowl, I gave myself a little pep talk. “You’ve learned to handle the big stuff, now don’t let the little stuff eat at you.”

  After Angus went back to school I decided to celebrate my resolve. I unwrapped a basket of dried fruit Craig Evanson had sent for Thanksgiving and took it to the granny flat. An incentive. But I didn’t need one. Once I started going through the boxes, the afternoon flew by. There was a huge box of clippings, arranged, of course, by subject, not by year. Getting all the material refiled was too daunting a job for that afternoon, so I opened another box. It was full of gifts, the kinds of things all politicians acquire in the course of a career: a provincial crest made from bits of broken bottles set into a concrete block; a pair of pillowcases with Andy’s and Eve’s faces drawn on with liquid embroidery; a stack of amateur oil paintings of prairie scenes, garish sunsets and grain elevators that bulged and tilted against turquoise skies; a metal lunch box with Andy’s initials. The potash workers at Lanigan had given it to him at the beginning of August so he could “go to work on those bastards in the next election.”

  Junk, but hard to deal with if you remembered the day the junk was presented and the look on the face of the presenter and how you laughed about it on the way back to the city.

  O
f course, some of it wasn’t junk. I was sitting looking at the weaving in a lovely and intricate Métis belt and eating the last of the sugared figs when the boys came racing up the steps to the granny flat. They looked winsome – always a trouble sign.

  Peter began. “Since it’s almost dinnertime and since I don’t think you’ve had time to cook …”

  Angus finished the preamble. “And since we all love pizza and since we have a two-for-one coupon for that new pizza place, why don’t we …?”

  “Order Chinese food?” I suggested.

  “Oh, Mum,” said Angus, “you never used to say dumb stuff like that when Mieka was here.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Pizza it is, but I insist on anchovies.”

  “On one quarter only?” said Angus.

  “Half,” I said.

  “A third,” he said, beaming.

  “Fair enough” I said. “But this place better give double cheese.”

  That night I woke up with a terrible cramping in my stomach. When I turned on the light and sat up to look at the clock, a wave of nausea hit me. I ran to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, shivering and reading an old Chatelaine. Finally, I pulled on a robe, went to the kitchen and poured some milk into a saucepan to warm. The dogs were nuzzling me worriedly. In our house, people didn’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and sit huddled over the kitchen table. But the warm milk helped, and after a while the dogs and I went upstairs and I slept until morning.

  I keep a little daybook by my bed. That morning I wrote in one word – “sick” – but then I got up, showered and felt better. I called the correctional centre to check on Eve, phoned Patterson, New Jersey, to see why the Mets jacket I’d ordered six weeks ago for Peter’s birthday hadn’t come yet, made a pot of tea, took it to the granny flat and began on the files. At lunch I had some soup with Angus, and by the time Rick called that afternoon, I felt so much better I didn’t even mention my bout the night before. The boys weren’t sick. I decided it had been the anchovies on my third of the pizza that made me ill. Rick sounded up, buoyed still by Thanksgiving and excited about the stuff the Caucus Office had sent.

  “Stick with it, Jo. How I envy you that granny flat. Right now, I’d give six bottles of Beefeater to have the kind of quiet you have there. That’s what we need – a place where we can lay out all the material and then just look at it in peace until the answers start to emerge. And they will emerge. Trust me.”

  The strength of his assurance got me through the rest of the afternoon. I had dinner with the boys, showered, and by 8:30 was in bed with a new unauthorized biography of the PM, good gossipy stuff. I fell asleep still grinning about some of the revelations. No wonder he hadn’t called an election at the end of summer. I woke up in the night with another attack, the same thing but worse – nausea, cramping and this time diarrhea. Again I went downstairs and made myself warm milk. This time I took a couple of yogurt pills, which I had bought at a health-food store, to counter the diarrhea. I fell into bed exhausted, but I slept. The next morning in my daybook I wrote the word “sick,” followed by the symptoms.

  It was a significant moment. I had begun to track this illness, whatever it was. Without realizing it, I had moved across that fine line that separates the world of the well with all its dear and familiar preoccupations to the world of the sick where the only real concern is the sickness itself.

  That first week I continued to function, to keep up at least the appearance of business as usual. I went to the correctional centre to visit Eve, who seemed to be sliding away; to Craig Evanson’s office to drink tea and talk about Eve’s defence; around town to do family errands; to the granny flat to unpack and sort and file. Saturday morning the kids and I even made it to the Lakeshore Club, but I spent most of my time sitting on the edge of the pool shaking. And, last thing at night, every night, I talked to Rick Spenser, whose voice, warm and full of concern, was increasingly becoming my reason for getting through the days. As long as I could keep up the rounds of ordinary domestic routine, nothing was wrong.

  By the second week it was becoming harder to pretend. The evidence of my daybook was there every morning in black and white: the word “sick” followed by a growing list of symptoms – diarrhea and cramps and nausea, but also a cold, clammy feeling and, something new, a taste of metal in my mouth that for the first time in my life made eating a chore to be endured.

  That second week I played a game with myself – if it’s not better tomorrow, I’ll call the doctor – but I never did. By the weekend I was frightened and exhausted. I didn’t even bother to take my bathing suit to the club. I sat in the coffee shop and watched the boys playing tennis through the glass. The morning seemed endless, and when finally we did get home, I noticed the boys exchanging worried looks. To escape, I told them I had to work. I went to the granny flat, shut the door and collapsed on the couch for most of the afternoon. Peter brought me a tray at suppertime. He was seventeen years old, but he looked close to tears. He remembered the bad time after Ian died, too. I felt so guilty that I followed him to the house like a whipped dog.

  “Okay, you guys, if you want to pamper me, go to it,” I said and I went upstairs, showered and crawled into bed. In the night the cramps and nausea hit me in waves. I got up and went and sat in the bathroom. But the memory of Peter coming to the granny flat with the tray fired something in me. I heard my voice, frightened but defiant. “I am not going to let this happen again. I am not going to give in.” Finally, I went back to bed and slept until morning.

  Sunday was cold and sleety. The boys volunteered to stay home from church, and I was too weak to fight them. I stayed in bed most of the day and slept through the night. Monday morning I awoke feeling better – not completely well, but well enough to make some plans.

  Hallowe’en was a week away. I decided to treat myself. Andy’s old administrative assistant, Rosemary Vickert, had opened a store a couple of weeks before. She’d sent me an announcement. The store was called Seasons, and it sold everything I could want for celebrating a holiday. I dressed with more than usual care, and noticed with a certain grim pleasure that the Black Watch tartan skirt that had been snug around the waist at Thanksgiving was now not just comfortable but loose.

  “Today I declare myself not only well but thin,” I said as I ran my finger around the waistband.

  Rosie’s store was in a strip mall, the same strip mall where Ali Sutherland had once had her partnership. I parked as far away as possible from Ali’s office. Today I was well. I had no need of doctors.

  Seasons was a wonderful store. Rosie was downtown on an errand but her partner was cheerful and unobtrusive and I found some great stuff, a Hallowe’en wreath with orange ribbons and little black cats for Mieka’s door, a spooky ghost windsock for our front porch and some cards for friends. I was standing by the cash register when I spotted a pumpkin suit in size two or thereabouts. On impulse I decided to buy it for Clay Evanson, Lori and Mark’s little guy. I’d just put the suit on the counter when Rosemary Vickert came in the door. When she saw me, her face lit up, but as quickly as it had come, the joy was gone.

  “My God, Jo, what’s the matter with you? You look like hell.”

  “I’ve had the flu, but I’m better now.”

  “The hell you are,” she said. “How much weight have you lost?” She reached up and felt my forehead. “You feel like you’ve got a chill.”

  “I’m better,” I repeated numbly.

  “Take a look, lady,” she said and spun me around so that we were both looking in the mirror over a display case by the door. Suspended from the ceiling were dozens of rubber skeletons. Rosie swept them aside so I could see myself.

  It was a shock. Rosemary, pink with wellness, was looking over my shoulder into the mirror. But she wasn’t looking at herself. She was looking at a yellow-skinned woman with dry, chapped lips and sunken eyes. She was looking at me.

  “What does the doctor say?” asked Rosie, looking over my shoulder at my mirror imag
e.

  “I haven’t been,” I said.

  “Well, we’re going now,” she said. “Do you want to get taken to a doc in a box or do you want to see if someone at Ali’s old place can look at you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Jo,” she said, “we’re not negotiating whether you are going. We’re negotiating who you are going to see. Whether is off the table. Now who will it be? Somebody at the Medi-centre or someone from Ali’s?”

  “Ali’s,” I said numbly, looking at my feet. I knew I’d been defeated.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” the slim woman in the medical coat and the impossibly high heels said, smiling as she came into the examining room. “I can’t see anything. I’ve made an appointment with a gastroenterologist just in case, but my guess is you won’t need it. No harm in having an appointment, though. Those guys have waiting lists that are yay long.” She swung herself up on a stool at the side of the examining table. “Mrs. Kilbourn, I had a quick look at your records. I noticed you had a pretty bad time after your husband died and you know that was only a couple of years ago.”

  “Three,” I said numbly. “It’ll be three years in December.”

  She looked at me kindly. “You’ve been under an incredible amount of stress, you know. I read the papers, and it seems to me you’ve been right at the centre of Andy Boychuk’s murder – terrible in itself. It must have opened a lot of old wounds for you.”

  “You’re saying this is all in my head.”

  “I’m saying we can’t rule that out, Mrs. Kilbourn. As you well know, the body often has its own way of coping with stress. Now this is what I think we should do. I’m going to prescribe something to help you over this rough spot – very short term. Sometimes that’s all it takes, you know – a tranquillizer to unknot the knots and let your body get in touch with its own wisdom. Why don’t we try that, and then if things don’t sort themselves out, you can keep the appointment with the gastroenterologist. His name is Dr. Philip Lee. He’s a bit brusque, but he’s good.”