An Image in the Lake: A Joanne Kilbourn Mystery

by Gail Bowen

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Ellen was the producer of a national morning radio show. There was no risk in that.”

  Alison did not suffer fools gladly, even if the fool was a friend, and at that moment, she was unable to hide her frustration at my obtuseness. “Ellen was murdered, Joanne. Clearly there was a risk. I didn’t know Ellen well, but my parents did, and they respected her for her ethics and for the fact that she was a journalist who believed it was her obligation to discover the truth and make it public no matter what the cost.”

  “Obviously there’s some history here that I don’t know about,” I said.

  Ali unknotted her chignon and shook her hair loose. She looked very young. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Joanne. That tribute to Ellen Exton brought back memories.

  “Nationtv used to have a station in La Ronge. It wasn’t much — a couple of rooms over a store and one full-time employee — a jack or jill of all trades who acted as host. producer, newsreader, interviewer, roving reporter, plus a part-time cameraperson and a couple of kids from the high school who learned about working in media and kept the floors swept and the bathroom clean.”

  “Ellen was the only full-time employee,” I said.

  “It was an entry-level job,” Ali said. “The guy Ellen replaced did the minimum, and everybody was happy. He covered the softball games and hobby shows and he still had plenty of time to fish and hunt with the locals.”

  “But Ellen took the job seriously.”

  “She did, and it was a big mistake. A man named Grant Timberlake owned a number of businesses in the north, nothing big — some restaurants, two hotels, a small factory that made knock-offs of traditional Indigenous crafts, an auto repair shop, that kind of thing. Nothing spectacular but it added up. Grant was doing very well for himself.”

  “And Ellen found something out?”

  “She found out what everyone knew. Grant was, in my father’s words, ‘as crooked as a dog’s hind leg,’ but no one cared. A lot of people worked for him, and he was a generous donor to the right political campaigns. Favours were asked for and favours were granted.”

  “And everyone looked the other way but Ellen.”

  “She said there was no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil. So, she followed the money. She was dogged and meticulous, and she got the goods on Grant Timberlake. She had copies of receipts, cancelled cheques, complaints about health and safety regulations that had been swept under the carpet and blatant tax fraud.”

  “Let me guess — it was the tax fraud that got him.”

  “Yep. Like Ellen, the Canada Revenue Agency believes in telling the truth and shaming the devil. Grant served time, and he paid a whack of back taxes.” Her smile faded. “But Ellen paid a price too. When it became known that she was looking into Timberlake’s businesses, Ellen was ostracized and threatened, and a petition to have her fired was sent to Nationtv.”

  “But the company did back her up,” I said.

  Ali snorted. “Of course not. Once Nationtv received the petition, Ellen was on the next plane out of La Ronge, but the powers that be were smart enough to keep her on staff. Joanne, my point is that Ellen was aware that she was jeopardizing her relationships in the community, her reputation and her job, but that didn’t stop her from doing what she felt compelled to do as a journalist. I have no idea what injustice Ellen was pursuing when she died, but I hope the police will pick up the cudgels and finish the investigation Ellen Exton risked her life for.”

  * * *

  Alison Janvier’s visit had shaken me. We had misread Ellen Exton’s character. We had made false assumptions, and we had failed to ask the right questions. And now Ellen was dead. I was confused and unsure about the next steps. I needed a sounding board, and it was Zack’s turn. When he got home, we could thrash this through together. In the meantime, there was a task I was confident I could handle, and it was one that I knew would soothe and restore me.

  Harper Janvier’s delight at receiving a handwritten letter of apology from Clay Fairbairn had resonated with me. The sincerity of Clay’s apology was questionable, but Harper’s enthusiasm had inspired me to pay a visit to the Paper Umbrella, where I spent far too much on some irresistible ecru cotton notecards. I’d been planning to save them for a special occasion, and now I realized that expressing my gratitude to people who had sent me gifts I knew I would treasure was occasion enough. I made myself a pot of Constant Comment, cleared a place at the end of the dining room table and began.

  Remembering the pleasure I’d taken in writing the script with Georgie Shepherd and the thrill of watching talented people bring our words to life was absorbing, and when Zack called, I was surprised to see that it was already four o’clock.

  “I’m on my way home,” he said. “And none too soon.”

  “Tough day?”

  “Actually it was pretty good. Our client is a yutz who thinks he knows how to argue his own case, but this afternoon I showed him the number of billable hours he’s racked up so far, and that gave him pause. He has now agreed to limit his role in the trial to looking contrite, so we should breeze through this. Anything I should bring home with me?”

  “I haven’t done anything about dinner,” I said. “How about Italian Star sandwiches and some of that fennel and olive salad they make.”

  “Sounds good to me. Should I get a sandwich for Taylor?”

  “Yes. She’s having supper at Mieka and Charlie’s, storing up time with Des and the girls before she moves to Saskatoon, but she loves Italian Star and she’ll have the sandwich for breakfast.

  “Got it. I’ll be home at the usual time.”

  “And I’ll be waiting with open arms and a very dry martini in each hand.”

  I’d left all the gifts we’d received on the dining room table for Zack to look at, so I set the table in the kitchen, made the martinis and returned to my thank-you notes.

  By the time Zack wheeled through the front door, I had a stack of stamped, addressed thank-you notes and a sense of satisfaction that bordered on smugness. The aroma of the sandwiches from Italian Star was seductive. Dinner was taken care of, so free of responsibility, Zack and I took our drinks into the family room and settled in front of the fireplace.

  “So, how was your day?” I asked.

  Zack sipped his drink. “It was fine, but we need a fairer way to determine who gets to report first. Remember that routine you and Georgie had when you were writing a script?”

  “We’d vote on whoever we thought had the best idea in the room and then we went with their idea.”

  “I never understood how you made that work. Didn’t you ever just vote for yourselves?”

  “Only if we really thought we had the best idea, and most of the time, we knew whose idea was better.”

  “What if you voted for each other?”

  “Then we’d each explain why we voted the way we had and take it from there.”

  Zack shook his head in amazement. “There’s no arguing with that logic. You go first.”

  The day of a Real Prairie Picnic, I’d told Lena that her grandfather was one of the best listeners I knew. As Zack and I sipped our drinks and watched the flames flicker in the fireplace, that assessment was born out. Zack listened attentively and without interruption when I told him how Alison had discovered the yearbooks in her mail folder at campaign headquarters that morning. When I’d finished, Zack was as baffled as I’d been at the fact that there’d been no explanations, no demands, no threats.

  “This is a new one on me,” Zack said. “Someone sets up an elaborate and time-consuming plan to either shake or shake down Alison Janvier, then apparently has a change of heart and just steps away.”

  “It makes no sense, but in case whoever is behind this has another change of heart, I suggested that she tell Harper everything.”

  “Good advice,” Zack sa
id. “Whoever sent those yearbooks to Alison wasn’t acting on a whim. They’d done some serious digging — first to figure out the identity of the man who raped Alison and then to discover where he is today.”

  “Then after all that, they leave Alison with a simple solution to the problem. If she tells Harper the truth, she strips the yearbooks of their power.”

  Zack’s lip curled. “Of course, before Alison’s benefactor disappeared, they did make certain Alison knew what could have happened.” Zack stared at the fire for a long while before he turned to me. “Jo, who do you think engineered this?”

  I hesitated before I spoke. “This afternoon, I made a deliberate effort not to dwell on the significance of what Alison told me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those yearbooks and the skill with which they’d been used. Of course, that led me down the rabbit hole to revisit all the horrors that have happened this summer: Rosemary Morrissey’s disintegration and her dismissal; Ellen Exton’s abrupt termination; Clay Fairbairn’s assault on Alison at the picnic; Patti Morgan’s increasingly irrational behaviour, including attacking her husband with a broken liquor bottle; Thalia Monk’s persistent attempts as Concerned Friend to destroy the relationship between Taylor and Vale; Patti’s untimely death, and the dark spoor it’s spreading over Mike Braeden’s life and reputation. And now the final horror: the discovery of Ellen Exton’s body in a culvert within easy driving distance of the city. It’s a real chamber of horrors, and everything that’s happened is connected, if only tangentially, with Thalia Monk’s tenure as a summer intern at MediaNation.”

  Zack shifted his weight in his chair. “You said that Thalia appeared to be genuinely shaken by what she’d done to Taylor. It’s possible that only dropping off the yearbooks is simply further proof that Thalia is committed to changing her life.”

  “I really want to believe that,” I said. “But Thalia is manipulative. The Webers’ account of their visit to Hugh and Julie Fairbairn’s proves that. I’m still amazed that Thalia managed to keep Julie upstairs during the Webers’ visit.”

  “It’s possible Clay intervened,” Zack said. “Hugh and Julie are his grandparents. More significantly, they’re his ticket to a golden future.”

  “True, but Julie says Thalia has Clay dancing on a string.”

  “I suspect Ms. Fairbairn is not taking that situation well.”

  “She’s livid,” I said. “If Clay is going to dance on a string, Julie wants to be the puppeteer. That said, Thalia does know how to take control of a situation. I saw that myself at the stew and bannock lunch.”

  Suddenly I felt drained. “Zack, I want to believe that the broken girl we saw at the Scarth Club on her birthday has changed — that all that anger and pain has gone, but I just can’t.”

  “People do change, Jo.” Zack’s voice was low and gentle. “Sometimes there really is that road to Damascus moment when a person realizes that the way they’ve been living their life is self-defeating, and they change course.” He paused. “To be fair to Thalia, something does seem to be driving her to make amends. She gave that statement to Debbie Haczkewicz detailing Patti’s irrational fears and risky behaviours and attesting that Mike Braeden is an exemplary husband and stepfather.”

  “Coming to our house to apologize to Taylor was painful for her, but she came, and I believe she was genuinely contrite.”

  Zack moved his chair closer. “You’re really struggling with this, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” I said. “I know you’re right. People do change, and the last five years of Thalia’s life have been a nightmare that was not of her making. I understand her need to take control of what she can.”

  Zack took my hand. “Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, Jo. After all, if Thalia was the person who sent the yearbooks to Alison, she deserves some credit for not pulling the pin out of the grenade.”

  “She does. But that raises another question. If, hypothetically, we accept the fact that the yearbooks were Thalia’s project and that she did the right thing by removing the danger before anyone was harmed, what could have happened? If, before her epiphany about changing her life, Thalia had already set her plan in motion, Harper would have received the yearbooks and her explanation of the role Dylan Kyle Beveridge played in his conception. Harper would carry the knowledge that his father was a rapist and that his mother had been the victim of that rape forever and, despite her change of heart, Thalia would have been powerless to undo what she had done.”

  Zack’s face was grave. “We’re no longer about the yearbooks, are we?”

  “No. We’re talking about Rosemary Morrissey’s disintegration and disappearance, and the possibility that both Patti Morgan and Ellen Exton were murdered.”

  Zack was clearly troubled. “Jo, where’s this coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded as uncertain and frightened as I felt. “I’m just wondering if we’re not seeing the whole situation clearly. Alison told me something this morning that made me realize you and I had misread Ellen’s character.”

  Zack’s eyes never left mine as I told him about how, years ago in La Ronge, a young woman had risked her career and her reputation by taking on Grant Timberlake. I was careful to include every detail in Alison’s account because it was essential for Zack to realize what I now realized: that Ellen Exton had been far more than a quietly efficient radio producer with cats named after characters in an old television show. Ellen was that person, but she was also a journalist who believed her duty was to discover the truth, no matter the cost, to see that the truth was told and the devil was shamed.

  Zack finished his drink. “Mary and Mr. Grant threw us off,” he said quietly.

  I nodded. “We seized on one detail and believed it revealed everything there was to know about Ellen. All we saw was, in Taylor’s memorable description of her future self, ‘a spinster with cats.’ Zack, neither of us ever set eyes on Ellen. The first we knew of her was when Charlie told us that MediaNation had just given her the Hobson’s choice of either signing a NDA agreement, picking up a generous severance package and walking away or being fired and walking away empty-handed.

  “We made assumptions. I remember that you asked Charlie if there was any reason other than the extortion threat for MediaNation’s senior management to want Ellen Exton gone. Charlie said the legal department had told all employees not to discuss the conditions under which Ellen left.”

  “But Jo, when I pressed him, he did tell us what happened, and he raised the possibility that there might be a connection between Rosemary’s disappearance and Ellen Exton’s termination. Somehow, I left that hanging.”

  When it came to his work, Zack was always his own harshest critic. I tried to remove the sting. “We were all flying blind.”

  “Jo, I’m a trial lawyer, and one of the cardinal rules of trial law is never leave anything hanging. I should have pushed harder, dug more deeply into why a corporation the size of MediaNation would terminate the contract of an experienced producer who, at the last minute, had been forced to assume a large role in ensuring the successful launch of an ambitious slate of fall programming and was handling the added burden of those duties well.”

  “If we’re ever going to understand what’s behind all this, finding the answer to why management felt the need to get rid of Ellen Exton will be a significant step.”

  “Do you have any idea what it might have been?”

  “Not yet, but I think the problem began with what happened to Rosemary Morrissey.”

  “We know that Thalia was angry at Rosemary’s dismissal of her ability to understand Thus Spake Zarathustra,” Zack said.

  “There had to be more to it than that,” I said. “Charlie told us that after Rosemary’s rebuke, all the summer interns started carrying copies of Nietzsche around. That’s exactly the level of revenge I’d expect from student interns.”

  “Smartass but
no harm done,” Zack said. “You’re right. But the torture that culminated in Joseph Monk’s edict telling everyone working in Rosemary’s unit to write a letter assessing her ability to carry out her responsibilities did start about that time. Given Ellen Exton’s murder, I’m sure Major Crimes is already taking a hard look at what happened to Rosemary and asking some probing questions.”

  “Given what we’ve just learned about Ellen, I’m sure she was asking questions too,” I said. “Remember the Post-it Note on the door of her refrigerator — ‘It’s not enough’? Kam Chau told me that Rosemary took Patti Morgan under her wing from the day Patti started at MediaNation. In the months before she died, Patti was deeply troubled. It’s possible that she confided in Rosemary, and that when Ellen was investigating her friend’s disappearance, she learned that same something, which put her in jeopardy.”

  Zack rubbed his temples. “And, of course, now there’s no way of learning what Ellen discovered.”

  “Because she’s dead, and in all likelihood, Rosemary is dead too,” I said. We were both silent for a moment, as if acknowledging that fact. Then I said, “So, you and I are in exactly the position Ellen Exton was in when she slapped that Post-it on her fridge door. We know more than we did before, but what we know is still not enough. Have you learned anything new about Ellen Exton’s death?”

  “I did, and none of it’s pleasant, so I’ll keep it brief. The forensics people have a saying, ‘The body always tells a story, especially when the heart stops beating.’ Ellen had been dead five weeks and a day when her body was discovered. The tests show the body had been outdoors in the culvert for all but a fraction of that time. There’s a lot of weather in five weeks. But the forensic pathologist was able to determine that death was caused by manual strangulation. It would have been over quickly for her.”

  “I guess we can file that under ‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’” I said, and I was surprised at the bitterness in my voice.

  Zack seldom left his chair during the day, but he wheeled over and transferred his body from his chair to the place next to me on the couch. He took me in his arms, and we held each other for a very long time. Finally, he said, “Are you ready to carry on?”