by Gail Bowen
“I talked to Mieka yesterday. I told her I feared you were heading for another breakdown. Do you know what she said? She said, ‘That would just kill her. She’s such a good mother. I think she’d rather die than let us see her like that again.’ Your own daughter, Joanne.” He shrugged and gave me his professional smile, amused at the vagaries of the world. “Look at yourself. You’ve even dressed for the part – a crazy woman in a nightgown, a ripped ski jacket, a man’s snow boots and bare legs,” he said, bending closer and shaking his head.
“You were wearing a poppy,” I said.
“What?” I had thrown him the wrong line, and he was at a loss. “What did you say?”
Underneath my nightgown I could feel my knees knocking together, but my voice sounded okay. “Half an hour ago on your special report on the news, three million people saw you wearing a poppy on the day after Remembrance Day. A man as fastidious as you … Someone’s sure to put it together. Some smart young cop or some assistant producer you’ve been snotty with. Maybe even some hick out here in the prairies. Most of us know about the magic of videotaping by now.”
I had no plan. I watched his face in the flickering light from the vcr. There seemed to be something tentative in his smile.
Ad hockery. “It’s just a matter of time now, Eric,” I said. He flinched from the name as if it were a blow. I’d scored a hit. “They’re going to catch you, Eric, and then everyone will know. Not just that you’re a murderer – that still has a certain Nietzschean appeal.” I was shaking uncontrollably. “Or even that you’re gay.” My voice quavered. “That still has a certain cachet. But they’ll find those old pictures, you know.” In the silvery light, I could see a fine line of saliva between his lips. It was now or never. “Little Eric Primrose, the fairy boy. They’ll find those old pictures, and they’ll have a field day. Rick Spenser, the erudite friend of people who matter, is really little Eric Primrose. Little Eric, the delicate fairy boy who dreamed of weddings and lace and who connected his initial to his beloved’s with little curlicues and flowers. Just like a girl. O rose thou art sick. Blake will be in the headlines, Eric.”
As I talked, I stood and walked toward him, and he backed away as if I were exerting some kind of physical force. I had a vague idea that I might back him out the door and knock him over the balcony, like in the movies, but I was too sick and too terrified to focus on any plan.
Ad hockery. I had to keep talking. His chest was heaving, and there was an animal smell in the room. I didn’t know whether it was coming from him or me. He seemed mesmerized. The crueller the cut, the more intent he became.
“Poor Andy, having you in his life. But, you know, he did find real love with Soren Eames. He and Soren were equals. Soren told me once that when Andy touched him for the first time, he knew what it felt like to bloom. To bloom, Eric. It must have been so good for them both.”
He was going to break.
“I don’t blame Andy for falling out of love with you. Not just because you’re fat, but because you’re a fake.”
He braced himself against the desk. His fingertips touched the base of the crystal pitcher he had given me. His hand curled around the handle, then he raised it like a club above his head. Moonlight streamed through the open door and caught the curve of the pitcher. He looked as if he were holding a club of pale fire.
My eyes lost their focus. I blinked, then I blinked again. Standing on the balcony, just behind Rick, was Ali Sutherland.
She was a shade less than six feet tall, and heavy. She seemed like a match for him. She was looking straight at me. It was hard to read her expression in the half light, but she nodded her head slightly, and I took that as a sign of agreement and encouragement. I took a deep breath.
“Are you going to kill me with that? That would bring the total to three, wouldn’t it? Four, if you want to count Eve, who’s as good as dead, lying on her back, counting the cracks in the ceiling. Five, if you want to count her son – that beautiful bright boy who’s a vegetable now, his sister dead.” Then suddenly I knew. “Because that day, before Eve got behind the wheel of the car, you made sure she knew, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
He nodded, raised the pitcher higher and took a step toward me.
I moved toward him and I put my face so close to his I could smell his breath. And then very low, I said, “Why didn’t you just kill yourself, Eric?”
He spit his answer at me. “Because, bitch, I wasn’t the one who deserved to die.”
Behind Rick’s shoulder Ali Sutherland looked at me levelly, then I saw the slightest nod of her head, almost imperceptible. I thought, she’s going to make her move.
Ali’s voice and her hand came at the same time. “You must be so tired of all this, Rick,” she said, and she reached from behind him and took the crystal pitcher. And then, very calm and unhurried, she led Rick out the door, put the vase in the window box, took Rick’s arm and, murmuring reassurances, led him carefully down the stairs. I stood on the little balcony and watched them cross the yard and go into my house, two large and handsome people, silvery in the moonlight, visitors from another country, going home.
I went into the granny flat, called the police and turned off the television. Then I went to the balcony, took the pitcher out of the cold dirt in the window box, sat on the top step and waited until I heard the sirens. The crystal vase was safe. I used the hem of my nightgown to rub the dirt from the deep lines of its pattern. I rubbed until I thought they’d have enough time to take him. I rubbed until it was safe again.
When I went in the house, Ali was making tea. Beside her was a tumbler of Scotch – neat.
“The tea’s for you,” she said. “There must be quite a chemical soup in you at the moment. I don’t think alcohol would be a smart move.” She turned her back to me, swirled boiling water in the teapot. “Mort went to the police station with Rick. Mort really liked him, you know. I guess we all did.” She poured out the water and carefully measured tea into the pot. Suddenly, the kitchen smelled of oranges and spices.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” I asked.
Ali looked into my face. “Rick talked to me while we were waiting for the police. He wanted me to understand, I think. He and Andy were lovers for over twenty-five years. Then in the spring Andy suddenly left him. Rick hated Soren Eames for taking Andy away from him, but he hated Andy even more for leaving him. And so, he contrived to kill them.”
“His dark secret love/Does thy life destroy,” I said.
Ali looked concerned. “Perhaps you’re not ready to deal with this, Jo.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but one more thing. Why would Rick drink the water from Andy’s glass if he didn’t want to die?”
“Subterfuge?” said Ali. “You were a lucky break for him, but if you hadn’t happened along, he could simply have pretended to drink. You told me there were five thousand people in the park that day. There would have been one credulous soul prepared to swear that Rick was innocent because he’d lifted that glass.”
“Smoke and mirrors,” I said.
“Time for tea.” Ali put her drink, the teapot and a cup on a little tray and walked into the living room. I followed her. When she sat on the couch, I curled up against her warm bulk and cried like a baby. She held me in her arms and rocked me until I fell asleep.
CHAPTER
22
Writing this account was Ali’s idea. “Get it out,” she said, sitting on my bed one morning before she drove back to Winnipeg. “Give it shape then move along. You don’t need an analyst any more; you just need rest and a little time to evaluate. Besides,” she said, brightening, “a journal will give you something to do while you’re cooling your heels in all those specialists’ waiting rooms.” After the initial rounds, I ended up with just one specialist, a neurologist, a gentle man with a crewcut who explained in terms a lay person would understand what had happened to me. The pesticides had blocked the enzyme that governs the transmission of nerve impulses, so my nervous syst
em was in a constant state of stimulation. That, directly or indirectly, caused all my symptoms.
“So what do I do now?” I had asked him.
“Well, stay away from organophosphates for a start,” he said seriously, then smiled. “Sorry, that was stupid. From what Ali tells me, I gather you didn’t exactly bring this upon yourself. Anyway, I’m not planning anything heroic here – some B-12 shots, a prescription for oral B complex, some good food, lots of rest and an exercise regime. The CFL season’s over, and there’s a guy I know who’s a trainer for the Riders. He can help you with the exercising – muscle-strengthening stuff, some leg raising with weights, hamstring lifts. He’ll turn you into a jock, Mrs. Kilbourn. The only thing wrong with him is that he’s a Barry Manilow fan. He plays one tape after another.”
And that’s my life: vitamin shots, eating, resting, jock stuff and writing this. Ali says I should give myself over to invalidism for a while. And introspection. “But don’t let it go on too long,” she said. “Watch out for the Magic Mountain syndrome – taking your pulse every thirty minutes and checking out your BMS. New Year’s Eve seems a nice symbolic time to move along, but until then let the world dance without you.”
And so I do. The leadership convention came and went without me. The party elected a radical young farmer from the southwest of the province. He won’t win the election for us, but in the long run he may be what we needed all along. Craig Evanson nominated him. Julie was not there.
Christmas is two weeks away, and although I have a nice stack of invitations for holiday parties, I am not taking part in what Ian used to grimly call “the mulled wine and salmonella season.” Mieka and Greg will be home next week, and Ali and Mort will arrive on Christmas Eve. Mort made reservations for Christmas dinner at a splendid old hotel downtown. This will be the first year since I was married that I haven’t cooked a turkey. Somehow that seems significant.
Peter and Angus are doing most of the cooking around here, so we’ve been through the take-out list a couple of times. For the first week or so after the “incident in the granny flat,” as my friend Millar Millard calls it, the boys were unnervingly solicitous, but we’re back in our familiar grooves now. They come, singly or together, and throw themselves on the bed to pass along the news or gripe about each other, and I ask them why they can’t get along better and complain about no one recognizing my need for peace and quiet. We’re all relieved to pick up the old roles and the old lines.
I find it odd to be an outsider. Everything I know about other people comes from Christmas cards. In the normal course of things, I’d pick them out of the mailbox, rip them open and glance at the signatures, but this year I’m reading the cards carefully, looking not just for news but for subtext.
There are some beside me now that I keep coming back to. There is a lithograph of Osgoode Hall in Toronto from Howard Dowhanuik. The card came tucked inside a silk scarf. He is staying in Toronto for the holidays but will be back early in the new year. Not a word about Marty.
Terry Shaw from the correctional centre writes a note of thanks for a small gift I sent and says that she is “not hopeful about Eve’s chances of psychological recovery but after all this is the season for miracles.”
Hilda McCourt’s card is hand-done, a brass rubbing from the tomb of the Venerable Bede (“Something I did for some special friends when I was overseas”). With her card, she encloses a letter in which she details the contributions “gays” (her word, carefully chosen) have made to the arts and asking me not to be embittered by “one tortured boy.”
Lori and Mark Evanson’s card is a conventional and pretty nativity scene. Inside, behind a cutout oval, is a picture of Mark and Lori and their son, Clay. Mark stands behind a chair with his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Clay is on his mother’s knee with his face turned toward her. As she looks down into her son’s face, Lori Evanson’s look, dim, radiant and trusting, seems to me eerily like that of the Madonna on the front of her card.
There is one final card, a large and handsome one on which a grey dove with an olive branch flies against a pale grey sky. Inside in raised letters is a printed message:
Peace on Earth. Goodwill to All.
A Holiday wish from
Homefree Insect Pest Control Services
The Name Says It All.
GAIL BOWEN’s first Joanne Kilbourn mystery, Deadly Appearances (1990), was nominated for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award. It was followed by Murder at the Mendel (1991), The Wandering Soul Murders (1992), A Colder Kind of Death (1994) (which won an Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel), A Killing Spring (1996), Verdict in Blood (1998), Burying Ariel (2000), The Glass Coffin (2002), The Last Good Day (2004), The Endless Knot (2006), The Brutal Heart (2008), and The Nesting Dolls (2010). In 2008 Reader’s Digest named Bowen Canada’s Best Mystery Novelist; in 2009 she received the Derrick Murdoch Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Bowen has also written plays that have been produced across Canada and on CBC Radio. Now retired from teaching at First Nations University of Canada, Gail Bowen lives in Regina. Please visit the author at www.gailbowen.com.
