Deadly Appearances

by Gail Bowen

  The breakfast on the sideboard was the kind you see only in magazines and men’s clubs: grapefruit halves sectioned and dusted with brown sugar; silver chafing dishes of sausage and bacon and kippers; hash browns and toast and oatmeal kept warm in warming trays; eggs scrambled fresh in a copper pan.

  “Do you want food, Jo?” Craig asked.

  “Maybe some coffee to put the rye in.”

  Craig laughed, but there was no fun in the laughter.

  “A lady doesn’t drink liquor before noon. That’s what” – a flash of pain crossed his face – “that’s what the lady in my life always says.”

  I thought of Julie, guilty of God knows what, but not a lady to drink before noon. I sipped my coffee. The rye was smooth, and it felt good to be by the fire, but I couldn’t get warm.

  Across from me, Craig had filled his water glass with whisky. He raised it. “To you, Jo. A good person.”

  I lifted my cup, to return the toast.

  “No, don’t,” he said, holding up his hand to stop my toast. “At the moment, I would welcome a lightning bolt to blast me and mine out of existence.”

  When I spoke, my voice sounded unused and rusty. “You didn’t make the phone call that morning, Craig.”

  “I might as well have. She did it for me.” He drained the glass. His voice broke. “Sweet Christ, she did it for me.”

  The ambiguity hung in the air. She did what for him? The phone call? Or something unspeakably worse? I felt a spasm in my bowels.

  “Craig, I’m sick. I need to go home.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “I found out by accident, you know. I found out this morning. When the correctional centre phoned the house, it was Lori who answered. Julie’s gone to her mother’s for the long weekend – said she was exhausted from everything she was doing for me.” He laughed his new hollow laugh. “Everything – that covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?” He looked at the bottle speculatively, but he didn’t touch it.

  “Anyway, I thought with Julie away it was a good time for Mark and his family to come home. Lori answered the phone. I was still sleeping. The clerk at the correctional centre didn’t ask if the Mrs. Evanson he was talking to was my wife. Lori was hysterical when she heard about Eve. Jo, you know how sweet she is, but she’s a very limited girl, and she has that fundamentalist guilt to deal with. She’s taking all this on her shoulders. She told me the sequence of events before Soren Eames’s body was discovered – including” – he looked at his knees – “including that abysmal phone call from Julie about her anonymous caller. If,” he said softly, “there was an anonymous caller.”

  I felt a cold sweat breaking out on my skin, and my heart began to race. “Craig, could I go home now – please?”

  “Right, Jo, of course.” He went to the cloakroom and came back with my coat.

  We drove up Albert Street in silence. As we came to the bridge across the creek, the air was filled with the sound of gunfire. Terrible, pounding shots that made my head hurt and the marrow in my bones ache. One upon another they came – shots fired across the creek from cannons pulled into position in front of the legislature, shots to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Remembrance Day, the day they turned the swords into ploughshares.

  Craig walked me to the door of my house. I didn’t ask him in. As I started to go, he put his hand on my arm and turned me so he could see my face.

  “Joanne, are you okay?”

  I looked at him. The tall, floppy man shivering in the thin November snow, his future shadowed, the delicate fabric of his marriage ripped apart, his wife guilty of unknown cruelties and crimes in the name of love.

  “Nope. I’m not okay, Craig, and you’re not okay. And Eve’s not okay, and Julie’s not okay. Okay is a concept gone from the universe.” I felt hysteria rising in my throat. “I’m sorry, Craig.”

  As soon as I closed the front door I began to shudder, and my mouth filled with saliva.

  In the hall mirror I saw my face, yellow and covered with a sheen of sweat. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. It was the worst attack yet. I bent double and closed my eyes. Worried, the dogs began to nuzzle me and lick my face. I pushed them away. Upstairs, the boys were yelling. I didn’t even take my coat off. I walked out the back door and went across the yard to the granny flat.

  I had to hold onto the rail to pull myself up the stairs. When I opened the door, the phone was ringing. It was Rick. A report about Eve’s suicide attempt had come to the newsroom. When I started to tell him about what had happened that morning, my voice was jagged, shrill.

  “Rick, we’ve got to do something. There are things you don’t know. Someone’s doing this to her. She’s innocent. I know it.” Then I broke down completely. I couldn’t go on.

  Rick’s voice was calm, almost professionally reassuring. He sounded like a social worker on the business end of a suicide hot line. “Joanne, where are you now?”

  “The granny flat. I couldn’t face the boys. I’d rather they think I don’t care about them than let them see me like this again.”

  “Stay where you are. Just curl up on that absurd hide-abed thing you stuck me on and spend a weekend in bed, away from the noise of the house and the boys.”

  “But Rick, we have to save Eve. She’s innocent. Someone is doing this to her. Someone has driven her to this.”

  When he answered me there was a new tone in his voice, something unpleasant and patronizing. “Joanne, listen carefully. There is no ‘someone.’ Eve drove herself to suicide just as she drove herself to murder. There’s a pattern there, a history. You know that yourself. The police have the right person. Now just rest.”

  “You think I’m crazy.” My voice was shrewish, accusing.

  He sounded exasperated. “I think you’ve been through a great deal.”

  “And cracked under the strain. I have a history, too, don’t forget. Well, I’m not crazy. Someone is out to get Eve. I know it.”

  “No one said you had cracked. The consensus of the doctors seems to be that you’re exhausted. Nobody could fault you for that.”

  “I don’t need you telling me I’m crazy. Now listen, Rick.” I heard my voice, triumphant, crazy. “I’m pulling the jack for this phone right out of the wall. Now try to get to me.” Then I was alone in the empty room, a room so quiet I could hear my heartbeat.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, shaking and exhausted. A queer phrase kept floating through my mind. “You’ve got to get your bearings.” But bearings had to do with navigation when you were lost, and I wasn’t lost. I was safe in my granny flat. “A room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf had said. Well, this room was my own. Joanne Kilbourn’s room. The walls were lined with pictures of my dead husband and the floor was littered with cartons and files that contained the record in words and pictures of the life of my dead friend, Andy Boychuk. My daughter had crocheted the bright afghan on the bed the summer she’d broken her leg. On the desk, dusty now but still heartbreakingly beautiful, was the crystal pitcher Rick had given me. It was filled with branches of Russian olive I’d cut by the creek. The olive berries were pale in the grey half light of November.

  In front of the window, as familiar to me as the lines of my own face, was my desk. On it, next to a picture of Mieka and Peter and Angus, soaked to the skin, laughing, giving the dogs a bath, was that other emblem of motherly pride, the ceramic cabbage I had bought for Andy, which Andy had given to Soren and Soren had given to me – a sequence out of a child’s book. The leaves curl back, to reveal the tiny figure inside, her face hard with triumph as she offers up her naked son to the world – Ukrainian genesis.

  At the edge of the desk was the phone; its cord, unplugged from the jack, hung lame and useless. Impotent. No one could get at me through that.

  My place, a room where I could get my bearings. A room where I could be safe. And then, across the window, the quick shadow of a man and the door opened and the room was filled with fresh, cold air and the dark outl
ine of my son’s body.

  His voice was deep, a man’s voice, but he sounded frightened. “Mum, are you all right? You looked like you had fallen asleep sitting up. Were you sleeping? You look kind of weird.”

  “I’m fine, Peter, just … I don’t know. Just working.”

  He looked at my empty desk and then, quickly, into my face.

  “Mum, Mieka just called. She wondered how you’d feel about Angus and me going up there for the weekend. I could have a look at the campus and maybe do a bit of Christmas shopping.”

  The band was tightening around my chest, and my mouth filled with the taste of metal. The bottom of my feet pricked oddly as if something inside my legs were short-circuiting.

  “Mum?” Peter’s face had the familiar look of worry.

  “Sorry, Pete. It sounds great. How are you going to get there?”

  He looked at his feet. “Mieka suggested we come up on the 5:30 bus.”

  My voice was terrible. Falsely hearty. Mum the pal. “It sounds great, Pete. By all means, you guys take the 5:30.”

  “You’re sure, Mum?”

  “I’m sure, Peter … But one problem, money. I haven’t got any, and today’s a holiday.”

  “Barbara, next door, says she’ll lend us some till Monday.”

  “You went to Barbara before you came to me?”

  “Mum, I knew you didn’t have any money. You didn’t have any last night to pay for the paper. Remember, we talked about it?” His voice trailed away. “I didn’t want to make a problem for you.”

  “No problem, Peter.” That terrible voice again. I turned from him and picked up a folder. “You guys come over when you’re ready, and I’ll drive you to the bus station. Pete, could you make a sandwich or something for both of you? I’m a little shaky today.”

  The adult look again – worried, tentative. “Mum, we don’t have to go – really.”

  I tried to smile. “Peter, I want you to go – really. Now get out of here so I can get some work done.”

  I watched him walk across the yard toward the house. The footprints he left in the snow seemed much too big.

  I parked the car opposite the bus station and sat there, shaking with cold and something else, until the bus pulled out. As it disappeared up Broad Street, a swirl of snow curled behind it and a picture came into my mind, clear in every detail, of a blinding snowstorm and the bus sliding off the road and bursting into flames. “They’ll be killed, and I’ll be alone forever,” I said to the empty car. It was five minutes before I trusted my hand to put the key in the ignition and five more before I dared to turn it.

  The house was cold and dark when I got home. I made myself a hot lemon rum and drank it at the kitchen table, looking into the evening. When it was finished, I made another one, called the dogs and walked across the backyard to the granny flat. I plugged in the phone so I could talk to the boys if they called me from Mieka’s house, covered myself with the afghan and fell into a fitful sleep.

  I dreamed crazy things. I was looking for my sons on the bus, and it was filled with people I knew. Andy was there, pinning bright poppies to Eve’s bandaged wrists. “This is for me. This is for you, and this,” he said, driving a third poppy into her vein, “is for the devil.” And then his face became Rick Spenser’s face, leaning confidentially toward Eve, whose poppies were suddenly pulsing with bright blood. “There’s a pattern here, Eve.” And then I was Eve. I was the one with the bandaged wrists and the poppies blooming blood.

  And then the snow that had swirled around me, blinding me, suddenly cleared, and I could see the front of the bus. Terry Shaw was there with my sons, who were handcuffed together, and the prison security system was ringing and ringing, and when I finally came awake, the telephone was ringing, shrill and insistent.

  A woman’s voice – reassuring, familiar. “Oh, good – there you are. Well, the boys are safe. I haven’t killed them yet.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Mummy, it’s Mieka. Did I wake you up? You sound like you’re on the planet Org. Did you hear me? I said the boys are here, safe and sound. Angus is in the shower and Peter’s building a fire. Greg’s making popcorn. It’s a regular Disney movie here – a festival of wholesome family fun.”

  My voice was tight and falsely bright. “Great, good. Have fun.” And then, “Thank you, Mieka. I love you. I have to go now.” I hung up quickly because I could feel the tears coming. She didn’t need them. I reached down and unplugged the phone. Then I changed my mind. Peter was building a fire, Mieka said. The house was old. There could be a crack in the firewall and they could all burn to death, and I wouldn’t know. No, I’d have to take my chances on that phone. I plugged it in. The bottoms of my feet began to do their odd new trick – electric pins and needles.

  “The world’s a rational place, Joanne.” That’s what Andy had said that September night, nine months after Ian died. “The world’s a rational place,” I said to the darkness outside. The band around my chest tightened. The darkness outside knew better, and I knew better, too. “Andy, my friend, you were wrong.” I poured brandy into a snifter. “The world is not a rational place.”

  I watched my reflection in the window, lifting the glass, drinking, and I wondered if there’d been enough time for him to find that out before he died.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Sitting in the granny flat, looking into the November night, I knew all my protections were gone. Since we had come up here, my dogs and me, the snow had stopped falling. My backyard was a smooth expanse of white, shining in the light from the house.

  Crisp and even, but not deep. I knew how thin that layer of snow was. If you stepped on it, your foot would break through to the leaves, under there, decaying, wet and black, on the cold ground. You weren’t safe on that snow.

  But you were never safe. Across the yard my house, a place where rational people had once planned their lives, stood in darkness. A spasm hit my bowels, then another. I doubled over, hugged my knees and rocked back and forth, back and forth, making a sound that was sometimes keening and sometimes a growl. Back and forth, back and forth until, sometime toward morning, the sky grew lighter and I slept.

  I woke up in the chair, cold and disoriented. The room was full of light. My head was pounding; my mouth was dry; and the telephone was ringing.

  The voice on the other end was male and pleasantly accented.

  “May I speak with Ian Kilbourn, please?”

  I thought, I must be careful here. I must sound sane. I mustn’t give anything away.

  “My husband’s dead.”

  An intake of breath on the other end of the line and then, “I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Kilbourn. Forgive me for disturbing you at this sad time.”

  “No, it’s … He’s been dead a long time. I was just surprised to hear you ask for him.” My heart was pounding.

  “Mrs. Kilbourn, I think, then, that I should speak with you. My name is Helke de Vries, and I’ve just purchased Homefree Insect Pest Control Service.”

  “I don’t need an exterminator.”

  “Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m not a salesman, but you’re correct about not needing an exterminator, because you already have one – me. Allow me, please, to explain. I spent yesterday going over invoices – familiarizing myself with the business. I’m looking at our records for services rendered to you, and I think there must be some mistake –”

  “My mistake?”

  “Please, allow me to finish. It is not money. All your bills have been paid promptly – in advance, in point of fact. You have done nothing wrong, but I’m concerned that we have. Are you there, Mrs. Kilbourn?”

  “Yes. Please, tell me what you want. I’m not feeling at all well today.”

  “It’s the carpenter ants in your addition. Perhaps if you’d just allow me to read you our instructions.”

  I was so tired I could barely speak. “Read them, do whatever you want.”

  “The service is to be provided to a residence at 433 Eastlake Avenue –
that is your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the backyard, over the garage, there is a self-contained apartment unit, 150 square feet, accessible through a door that opens off a small balcony.”

  “Yes.”

  “The key is in a plastic bag taped to the inside of a window box to the left of the door to the unit.”

  “No …” My voice was barely a whisper.

  Helke de Vries sounded uncomfortable but determined. “Spraying program for carpenter ants to begin Saturday, October 8, 9:30 a.m. and continue weekly – that is underlined in red, Mrs. Kilbourn – until notice to discontinue. Payment, cash in advance. In the space marked client, there is the name Ian Kilbourn. Then there’s something handwritten in red pen – ‘Under no circumstances is anyone else in the family to know of the spraying program. The wife and kids are Save the Whales environmentalist types. Trouble.’ That last word is in capital letters and underlined.”

  I felt like Alice after she walked through the looking glass. I picked up a pen and wrote “pest control” on the notepad in front of me.

  “Mr. de Vries, could you give me the name of what you’ve been using?” I was trembling.

  “Certainly. We have used an organophosphate spray and a methyl carbonate. In my opinion, we have used them too often, but today is Saturday, time for another treatment, so I thought I would check. Do you wish me to continue, Mrs. Kilbourn? We are paid, in cash, until after Christmas.”

  “No, Mr. de Vries, I do not wish you to continue.”

  “Then I should refund your money.”

  “It isn’t my money. Who paid you?”

  “The bill was paid in cash, and no receipt was given. The previous owners of the business assumed Mr. Kilbourn was paying.”

  “Keep the money.” I was beginning to see light. “I need to know more. Would any of that stuff, the organophosphate or the methyl whatever it is, leave a residue?”

  “The organophosphates would leave a yellow dusting.”

  “Would it look like pollen?”

  “Yes, an excellent description – like pollen.”