An Image in the Lake: A Joanne Kilbourn Mystery

by Gail Bowen

  “Okay, let’s cast the net wider. Etienne Simard and Vale are the actors in the video. But when we saw the rough cuts for Sisters and Strangers, you said that for both Simard and Vale, those would be breakout roles. It would have been pointless for either of them to post the video, and I can’t see what someone who had it in for either of them would gain.”

  “Hurting Taylor,” I said. “So, we’re back to that again.”

  Zack rubbed his temples. “So, another loose end, and ‘it’s the loose ends of our lives that hang us.’ Jo, there are already too many loose ends here: Rosemary Morrissey’s disintegration and dismissal. Ellen Exton’s firing and inexplicable disappearance. The crap that’s going on at Ali’s appearances. And that enigmatic note on Ellen’s refrigerator door saying, ‘It’s not enough.’”

  “All the incidents are connected somehow to MediaNation,” I said. “Do you think it’s possible Ellen Exton discovered who was doing the targeting?”

  “I think it’s more than possible,” Zack said. “I also think the odds of Ellen turning up safe and sound are negligible. Debbie Haczkewicz isn’t talking, but I’m certain that’s what she believes too. The last time I talked to her, she said Major Crimes has theories but no hard evidence.”

  “And that’s exactly what we have: a theory without proof.” I took his hand. “So, where do we go from here?”

  “Back to the patio,” Zack said. “You hate wasting food, and I hate wasting booze, so let’s do the right thing and polish off the Boursin, those succulent B.C. cherries and the overpriced Riesling.”

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning when the dogs and I came home from our run, Zack was sitting at the kitchen table checking his messages. I was surprised to see him. Since we were driving to Lawyers Bay after lunch, he was only working a half day, but determined to make the most of his time, he’d scheduled a breakfast meeting with a client and a partners’ meeting that would last till noon.

  When he saw Pantera, Esme and me, he smiled. “Just in the nick of time,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to have to leave you a message. Maisie called. There’s a new development.”

  “Let me get these guys off their leashes and fill me in,” I said.

  As soon as he was leash-less, Pantera lumbered over to Zack and rubbed himself against Zack’s leg. It was molting season, and from the knee down, Zack’s pant leg was instantly covered with bullmastiff hair. Zack rubbed Pantera’s head and said, “Good boy.”

  When I pulled a chair up to the table, Zack began. “Last night Ali took part in that symposium on women’s rights. When the abortion question was raised, Ali gave her standard answer: that she supported a woman’s right to choose, and that whatever choice the woman made should be supported by the law and respected by the community. She then suggested that after the symposium, she and the questioner meet privately to discuss the matter further.”

  “All according to plan,” I said.

  “Yep. And also according to our plan, the questioner hightailed it, but Maisie was right on his heels.” Zack shook his head admiringly. “Our daughter-in-law is definitely a force to be reckoned with. Anyway, before the guy escaped, Maisie had grabbed his ball cap and his sunglasses and taken three close-ups of his face with her phone.”

  “I don’t suppose the man in Maisie’s photos was our pal, Clay Fairbairn?” Jill said.

  “No, but he did call Maisie a cunt, so he and Clay must have attended the same finishing school,” Zack said. He held his arms out for a hug. “Time for me to hit the road, but maybe give Jill a call about this. She’s been part of this since she forced Clay to delete the photos he took of Ali after he engineered her fall at the Real Prairie Picnic. We should keep her in the loop.”

  When I called, Jill was at her desk at MediaNation. She picked up on the first ring, but asked me to wait to talk until she closed her office door, so we could talk privately and without interruption.

  I hesitated before telling Jill that Harper Janvier had been conceived when Ali was raped, but I knew that fact was part of the story, and I was certain Jill would keep the information confidential. I finished by telling Jill that, like Clay Fairbairn, the mystery questioner had called the woman who confronted him a cunt, and that Zack said the men’s shared fondness for the word suggested that Clay and the questioner had attended the same finishing school. We both laughed, but when Jill responded to my description of the encounter, her voice was tense.

  “Remember those stories Mieka loved so much about the twelve little girls who lived in the old house in Paris that was covered in vines?”

  “Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline books — I think I can still recite every word of those books by heart.”

  “So can I,” Jill said. “The scene that’s been gnawing at me lately comes in the middle of the night when Miss Clavel turns on the light and says, ‘Something is not right.’ Jo, I keep coming back to Clay Fairbairn. We’ve drawn a straight line between Harper Janvier winning the prize Clay thought should be his and his attempt to hurt Harper’s mother. Do you believe that was an isolated incident?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I’m sure there’s more. Have you heard of any problems Clay’s had at work?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything. In theory, summer interns shadow people who are doing the work they hope to do someday. There is some of that, but primarily interns do whatever needs to be done to lighten the load of the full-time employees. Their duties are not onerous. They spend most of their time on research for the people they’re shadowing — nothing heavy, just monitoring what’s coming down the pike in entertainment and politics, gathering background material on guests and checking social media to see what’s trending. It’s a nice summer gig. These interns are twenty years old, and they’re being paid to do what they’d be doing anyway.”

  “But Clay fits in,” I said. “There’s no evidence of friction with his colleagues?”

  “I’m not in a position to judge,” Jill said. “I arrived here when the interns’ tenures were just about over, and not surprisingly, Clay’s been avoiding me since our confrontation at the picnic. But I was curious about Clay’s ability to play well with others, so I talked to Kam Chau. He was here when they arrived in May. Kam said this year’s crop of interns are particularly tight. Apparently, they all attended the same high school. Actually I think it’s the school Taylor went to.”

  “Luther College High School,” I said.

  “Right. Jo, I didn’t want to pry, but now that the subject’s come up. How’s Taylor doing?”

  “She’s struggling. Taylor really believed she had found Ms. Right — that she and Vale belonged together, so this has been hard on her.”

  “She’s a fine young woman, and she didn’t deserve to have her private life exposed so brutally.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And Rosemary Morrissey didn’t deserve to have a hellish ending to a distinguished career, and Ellen Exton didn’t deserve to lose her job and perhaps her life for a lapse of judgment. Jill, after we talked to Taylor, Zack and I tried to come up with a factor that connects the troubling occurrences at MediaNation this summer . . . and we came up empty.”

  “Keep trying, Jill said. “Because my spidey senses tell me there’s something.”

  After the call ended, my body felt heavy, weighed down by the burden of unanswered questions, but as I turned on the shower and stepped in, I knew I had to shelve that particular burden. In a few hours Zack and I would be with our daughter, and she deserved our full attention. Twenty minutes later, dressed and ready for what came next, I turned my attention to the happy chore of grocery shopping for a holiday weekend that suddenly included Taylor and Gracie.

  * * *

  After I’d stocked up on food and liquor, I headed for my last stop, Pawsitively Purrfect where, thanks to Taylor’s patronage, I was welcomed royally. From the time she was six and decided it was her civic duty to feed t
he feral cats in the warehouse district during the winter, up to and including her years as a cat owner, Taylor had been a fixture at Pawsitively Purrfect, and the owners were so delighted to hear that she was back in Regina that they gave me brightly wrapped gift bags of treats for all three of Taylor’s cats.

  Cat food was not my forte, but I was doing my best, and I was pondering the list of ingredients in Kitty Kaviar when a compact, lightly muscled man with a smoothly planed face appeared at my side and tapped my arm. “You’re Joanne Shreve,” he said.

  “I am, and you’re . . . ?”

  “Kam Chau,” he said. “Charlie D’s producer. I saw you squinting at the list of ingredients on that can as if it were written in Cyrillic. Charlie tells me you’re a dog person, and I wondered if I could help.”

  I handed him the can. “Is this any good?”

  Without comment, Kam placed the Kitty Kaviar back on the shelf. “If you tell me something about the cat you’re buying this for, I’ll have an idea about what might work.”

  “There are three cats, and they belong to our daughter. They all just seemed to come our way, so I don’t know much about their history. We’re not sure of their ages, but they’re all fully grown, and Taylor makes certain they’re healthy and pampered.”

  “Another reason for me to hold your daughter in high regard,” Kam said. “Charlie has shown me photos of some of Taylor’s art. It’s impressive, but I thought she was in Vancouver.”

  “She was, but she’s spending some time at our cottage on Lawyers Bay. It was a last-minute visit, so she asked us if we could pick up some provisions from Pawsitively Purrfect.”

  “Got it,” Kam said. He took my shopping basket, started up the aisle and I followed along behind him. He was a decisive shopper with an easy manner, and it was fun to watch him make his selections.

  “This should take care of Taylor’s cats for a while,” Kam said, “but I have a suggestion. I make the food for my cats. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s better for them. I can recommend a book that Taylor will find helpful if you think she’ll be interested.”

  “She’ll be interested,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  Kam helped me carry my purchase to the car, but when he started to say goodbye, I stopped him. “There’s a coffee place two doors down from here. If you have time, I’d like to ask you about the summer interns. My treat, and the sky’s the limit.”

  Kam smiled. “Count me in,” he said. “But Dutch treat because half an hour ago something came across my desk that I could use a second opinion on.”

  “Dutch it is,” I said. There was no lineup at Brewed Awakening. Kam and I placed our orders, and when they were ready, we each paid for our choice, split the tip and headed for a booth at the back.

  After we’d settled in, Kam said. “Okay if I start?” When I nodded, he began. “All our summer interns are required to write an exit letter.”

  “Summarizing the pros and cons of their work experience?”

  “Right. In other years, we’ve received four individual letters, detailing four different working experiences. This summer’s interns submitted four copies of a single letter signed by them all. When I read what they’d written, I felt sick. That letter is a poisoned arrow.”

  “Aimed at whom?”

  “Rosemary Morrissey,” Kam said. He slid his tablet across the table at me. “Read it, and tell me what you think.”

  We are all honour students entering our second year of B.A. studies at the University of Regina School of Journalism. Aware of the ambitious slate of programming MediaNation was undertaking, we anticipated that our internships would give us the chance to grow both professionally and personally.

  We were excited to be part of the MediaNation team, but as it turned out, there was no place for us on that team.

  We have chosen to write our exit letter collectively rather than individually because if MediaNation is to learn from our experience, it must understand that the problems we dealt with are systemic and that solving them will require an examination of the protocols that govern the rights and responsibilities of the summer interns it employs.

  On May 4, our first day at MediaNation, the senior executive tasked with mentoring the interns publicly cautioned one of us against reading the philosophy book she was carrying. In the senior executive’s words, “the ideas expressed in the book required a discernment beyond [the intern’s] level of understanding.”

  When the intern approached a permanent staff member and explained that the senior executive had publicly scorned the intern’s level of intelligence without ever having exchanged a word with her, the permanent staff member urged her to ignore the slight. He said that the senior executive was under a great deal of stress, and it would be in everyone’s best interests if the intern kept silent about the incident. We interpreted his words as a clear warning to us to remain silent about questions or concerns. We were powerless.

  In the period between May 19, the day we returned to work after the May long weekend and the Canada Day weekend, the atmosphere in our workplace grew steadily worse.

  The senior executive charged with launching the new season and with “mentoring” us was clearly unstable. Frequently, she was unable to remember either the decisions she’d made or the names of the staff members she’d assigned to carry out those decisions. Her allies attempted to cover for her, and when her errors and omissions became too numerous to paper over, they heaped the blame on the interns.

  Later the senior executive suffered a major mental breakdown and left her position at MediaNation, but the damage had been done, and the problems remained.

  Had we been made aware of the executive’s disintegrating mental faculties, we might have worked with permanent staff to deal with their colleague’s emotional problems. We were never told anything. We were shut out, and we struggled.

  Had our roles and responsibilities as interns been articulated, we could have worked to fulfill them, but we were never given even a minimal job description. We had hoped that our work at MediaNation would give us the opportunity to form relationships with colleagues that would deepen our understanding of the calling we shared. However, because of the corporation’s internal tensions we were uneasy about reaching out to staff.

  To say that we are disappointed with our experience this summer would be an understatement. We were given a unique opportunity, and we failed to make the most of it. That said, we do not believe the fault was wholly or even largely our own.

  We recommend that, in future, protocols are in place for interns who have concerns and that members of permanent staff with whom they can speak frankly be identified.

  We send this letter without prejudice and with the hope that no other group of interns will feel the disappointment and disillusionment we feel as our tenure as summer interns ends.

  I slid Cam’s tablet back to him. “That is one deadly letter,” I said. “It puts the interns squarely on the side of the angels, shames MediaNation and hammers the final nail into Rosemary Morrissey’s coffin. How widely was it distributed?”

  “To every member of our unit.”

  “The unit that Rosemary supervised. Has there been any response from HR in Toronto yet?”

  “Nothing so far,” Kam said. “But there’ll be something. It’s established corporate policy to answer a letter of complaint from employees. The company has to show they respect the people who work for them enough to find out exactly what happened.”

  “That’s a sound policy,” I said.

  “It is,” Kam agreed. “Except in this case, there’s nothing to find out. The people involved, and that includes me, know exactly what happened.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  “With you, yes. But the facts do not reflect well on Rosemary, so I hope HR in Toronto doesn’t dig too deeply. I’ve tried to pinpoint exactly when
Rosemary’s behaviour became erratic.” For at least a minute, Kam was silent, watching the pattern the tip of his spoon made as he drew it through the hearts the barista had created on the surface of his latte. Finally, he raised his eyes and met my gaze. “The confrontation between Rosemary and the intern with the book occurred the day after the interns arrived. The intern was Thalia Monk.”

  The image of the shattered girl fleeing her birthday celebration at the Scarth Club flashed through my mind. “Thalia Monk is Patti Morgan’s daughter?”

  “Yes, and I was the staff member Thalia came to when she felt slighted by Rosemary’s dismissal. I produced the final year of Patti’s show, so Thalia knew I was aware of how close she and her late brother were, and she thought I would be on her side. I was, and I still am. But I’m also still baffled by the fact that Rosemary accosted Thalia about the book. Rosemary knew that Thus Spake Zarathustra had a special significance for Thalia. Patti told her that Nicholas had introduced his sister to Nietzsche’s writings, and they had discussed his work together.”

  “I thought Nicholas was seventeen when he committed suicide?”

  “He was, and Thalia was sixteen, but they were both brilliant and they were attracted to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch.”

  “The idea of a superior being who believes there are no moral truths, so the Übermensch is free to create their own morality. That is certainly part of what Nietzsche wrote, but . . .”

  “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Kam said. “My father was a scholar. He quoted those words many times to the arrogant kid I was when I was growing up. I haven’t studied Thus Spake Zarathustra, but I am aware of its complexity and I understand why Rosemary might be concerned about Thalia embracing it.”