by Gail Bowen
“It would help me if I knew what happened before I walked in and saw Danny on the floor with his hand over the artery in Buzz Wells’s neck that was spurting blood. I told Danny that it was too late to save Buzz Wells. Then he asked me to call his pastor to come and pray with him. I called Pastor Kirk, but he said he was too busy to come, so I told Danny I’d pray with him.”
“All we can do is speculate, Joanne,” Robert Hallam’s tone was resigned. Buzz Wells’s suitcase and messenger bag were by the door. The officers surmised that Danny had caught Buzz on his way out. Wells had a plane ticket. What happened between the two men is anyone’s guess. But determining the cause of death requires no guesswork. Buzz Wells’s carotid artery was slashed by Danny Kerrigan’s cable-splicer’s knife. When the officers arrived the knife was on the floor by the body. Mr. Kerrigan was still wearing his toolbelt and the space where the knife belonged was empty.
Chapter Twenty
From that point on, as it always did, life continued. Katina Posaluko-Chapman, the lawyer Zack had called to be with Danny when he was questioned by the police, convinced the authorities that Danny should be hospitalized for a twenty-four-hour psychological assessment, and the police escorted Danny to Regina General Hospital, where he was admitted to the psychiatric ward.
Reasoning that living in the apartment directly below the active police investigation into Buzz Wells’s murder would exacerbate an already nightmarish situation, Georgie packed overnight bags for Ainsley and herself and checked them both into adjoining suites at a downtown hotel.
I’d put off telling Taylor and Vale about the tragedy until I had at least some answers to the questions I knew they would have. When I finally told her the news, Katina Posaluko-Chapman had already accompanied Danny Kerrigan as he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Regina General Hospital, and Ainsley and Georgie had moved into the hotel.
Taylor listened in silence as I recounted the indescribable horror of finding Danny kneeling beside Buzz Wells’s body with his hand over the slash he, himself, had made in Wells’s neck.
When I finished, she said simply, “We’re coming over,” and her voice quavered.
The rain hadn’t let up, and when the four of us went into the kitchen to talk, I switched on the overhead light hoping to dispel the gloom, but it seemed the pall of misery and remorse hanging over us was impenetrable.
“Danny did it to save my soul,” Vale said. “And now . . .” Vale turned her eyes to Zack. “What happens to him now?”
When the situation called for it, Zack could radiate a masterful lawyerly calm. Taylor and Vale were reeling, and as he explained Danny’s situation Zack was factual but positive. “I asked Katina Posaluko-Chapman to represent Danny. She’s an excellent trial lawyer and she’s experienced with cases involving the mentally ill. Katina was with Danny when he was questioned by the police, and she convinced them that Danny should be hospitalized for a twenty-four-hour psychological assessment.”
“What happens if they decide Danny planned to kill Buzz Wells?” Taylor said.
“Then he’ll be charged, and Katina will prepare him for trial. I don’t believe the case will go that way. I expect the psychiatrists at Regina General will recommend transferring Danny to the provincial psychiatric facility at North Battleford for a thirty-day assessment to see if he’s fit to stand trial.”
Taylor pressed on. “And if the psychiatrists decide Danny is not fit to stand trial?”
“He’ll remain at the North Battleford facility. The staff there is excellent.”
Taylor fingered a small stain on the sleeve of her sweater. “How long do you think Danny will be there?”
“He’ll remain in North Battleford until his psychiatric team is certain that he poses no threat to himself or others.”
“And that could be years,” Vale said, and her misery was palpable. “Danny’s entire life has changed course because of me.”
The horror and confusion in Vale’s face was now eclipsed by guilt. Zack touched her arm softly. “No,” he said. “The entire course of Danny’s life did not change because of you. His fate was determined by something that happened long before he met you. Fred C. Harney, the old lawyer with whom I articled, used to talk about what he called ‘the train of events.’ Fred believed our fate is as accidental as it is inescapable. Something happens and suddenly we find ourselves on the train of events that leads us inexorably to our destination.”
Vale nodded but it was clear from her expression she hadn’t accepted it yet.
“No one understands exactly what happened today,” Zack said. “We know that Buzz Wells died from the wound Danny Kerrigan’s cable splicer inflicted on Wells’s carotid artery. In law, we call that the proximate cause. The proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the court deems the event to be the cause of the injury. But there’s another kind of causation in the law. It’s called cause-in-fact. Cause-in-fact is determined by the ‘but for’ test. But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred. If x had not happened, y would not have happened. Cause-in-fact is where things get tangled.
“So the cause-in-fact that directly led to Buzz Wells’s death was Danny running into the commissionaire, who told him where he could find Ainsley,” I said. “If Danny hadn’t learned where Ainsley lived, he never would have knocked on the door of the College Avenue apartment. And if Danny hadn’t lost his phone on his way to work, he would have received Ainsley’s message about the shutdown and he would not have freaked when he saw that the production studios were empty.”
“And this is where I come in,” Zack said. “If I hadn’t tried to spook Buzz by convincing Ainsley to shut down production until further notice, work at the production studios would have gone on as usual, and right about now, Danny would be finishing his shift. But Danny did lose his phone and because of that, Buzz Wells is dead and Danny is facing an uncertain future.”
The note of self-reproach in Zack’s voice alarmed me. “This wasn’t your fault,” I said. “If Danny had never embraced the doctrines of a church that filled him with fear and hate, he wouldn’t have been convinced that he had a holy mission to save Vale from hell and damnation because she loves another woman.”
“And if Danny hadn’t felt the need for what that church offered, nothing that happened today would have occurred,” Vale said softly.
“I imagine that, as part of their treatment, the psychiatrists at North Battleford will try to discover the events in Danny’s life that made him so vulnerable,” Zack said. “Fred C. Harney would tell them that navel gazing is a waste of time, that once you’re on the train of events, there’s no getting off until you arrive at your destination.”
Vale reached across the table until the tips of her fingers touched the tips of Zack’s. “Is that what you believe?” she asked.
For the first time since the young women arrived, Zack smiled. “It’s been almost thirty years since Fred C. Harney introduced me to the train of events, and for me, the jury’s still out. But Vale, I am certain of one thing: you are in no way responsible for what happened this morning.”
Chapter Twenty-One
In the early months after Gabe Vickers’s death, Sisters and Strangers had seemed star-crossed, but Fate is capricious, and by June 11, the first day of principal photography, every department was prepared for the next step. Rosamond Burke, the last of the actors to appear, arrived in Regina on June 6, D-Day, as she crisply noted. The first three weeks of the shoot would take place at Emma Lake, and by June 11, actors, crew and equipment were within a stone’s throw of the island and prepared to make a six-part series.
Miraculously, they had a locked script with which to work. Georgie and I resisted the urge to feed the pages of Buzz Wells’s script to the flames in the nearest firepit and discovered that some of Buzz’s ideas were worth developing. Tog
ether she and I produced a script that we felt was true to Roy’s vision and, even more miraculously, satisfied Ainsley.
Georgie and Nick’s wedding took place on May 5 as scheduled. They had talked briefly about postponing the ceremony because of Buzz Wells’s all-too-recent death, but when Chloe showed them the Day of the Wedding scrapbook that she had created with elaborately drawn frames for the pictures they would take on the Big Day, starting with the appointment at the hair stylist and culminating in the cutting of the wedding cake, Georgie and Nick agreed a delay was out of the question, and their elegant, intimate wedding was even lovelier than the photos online suggested. On June 10, Georgie travelled north with her new husband and stepdaughter, and they were sharing Henry Chan’s cottage on Anglin Lake with Taylor and Vale. From all reports, everyone was happily settled in.
Zack and I were happily settled in too. On June 11 we were at Lawyers’ Bay with the twins, Charlie and Colin. The trial that Maisie and Angus were working on was in its second week, and June was a busy time on the farm for Pete and his new partner, Vince, so Maisie and Pete’s long-delayed honeymoon continued to be on hold. However, there was good news. Maisie and Pete had decided to buy Blake Falconer’s house. It was in our neighbourhood and the Crawford-Kilbourns would begin moving in as soon as the trial ended.
Katina Posaluko-Chapman kept us informed about Danny Kerrigan, and the prognosis was not good. Danny was despondent because he was convinced he had failed God by not saving Vale from eternal damnation. Danny’s psychiatric team included a spiritual adviser, a young chaplain who had been at seminary with the dean of our cathedral, and the chaplain was already playing a key role in Danny’s treatment.
As Katina explained, Danny had, in layman’s terms, been brainwashed by Pastor Kirk and his cohorts, and the chaplain was attempting to give Danny a broader perspective so he could challenge the beliefs about God’s will with which he’d been indoctrinated. The process would be long and painstaking, but the psychiatric care at North Battleford was excellent, and Danny’s team was guardedly optimistic that he would make progress.
Kyle had been luckier. The police had tracked down the arsonist who set the fire at the production studios. He lived in L.A. and had learned how to stage a controlled fire from his work in movies. He was having money problems and Buzz had offered him cash and future employment in return for a few hours’ work and a return ticket to L.A. Because Kyle had approached the police voluntarily, they had been receptive to his story that in giving Roy the LSD, he believed he was acting on the advice of Roy’s therapist. Unlike Buzz Wells, Kyle had nothing to gain from destroying Roy. The absence of motive, Taylor’s description of Kyle’s suffering after Roy’s death and my statement that I had witnessed Kyle’s earlier desire to confess bore out Kyle’s story, so there were no charges.
Taylor had been concerned about the effect returning to the island on Emma Lake would have on Kyle, and everyone was apprehensive about how Ainsley would react, but according to Nick, Kyle had offered his hand to help Ainsley out of their boat when it docked, and Ainsley had linked her arm with Kyle’s as they walked to the site where the shooting would begin. Seemingly, Ainsley and Kyle were helping each other confront the memory of that dark March day.
* * *
When I awoke at Lawyers’ Bay on the morning of June 11, the anxiety that had dogged me for months was gone. I had slept well, and I was ready to resume my old life. When Charlie and Colin bounced in with the dogs and clambered onto our bed, I felt a wash of relief. I was home again.
We weren’t alone at the lake. Noah Wainberg, the husband of Zack’s late partner, Delia, always spent the last two weeks of June at Lawyers’ Bay getting everything ready for Falconer Shreve’s big Canada Day party. Zack and I were very fond of Noah, a gentle giant of man who had loved his wife deeply and who was now raising their three-year-old grandson Jacob, with the help of Rose Lavallee, a no-nonsense seventy-ish dynamo from Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation. I had come to know Rose through Taylor’s friendship with Gracie Falconer. Rose had cared for Gracie since the day she was born, and what Rose didn’t know about raising children wasn’t worth knowing. After Blake Falconer’s death and Gracie’s departure for university, Rose was at loose ends, but Jacob Wainberg was in need of a nanny, and Rose was in need of a child to care for and teach.
When the Falconer family was at Lawyers’ Bay, Rose and Gracie always stayed overnight at Rose’s house next door to her sister Betty’s on Standing Buffalo. Gracie’s mother was Nakota, and the sisters made certain Gracie grew up aware of her Nakota heritage.
Although they were sisters, Betty and Rose were, as my grandmother would say, as different as chalk and cheese. Rose was lean, limber and energetic. She loved the outdoors and rode her Trek bike everywhere. Her personal style was no frills; steel-grey hair tightly permed; wash-and-wear wardrobe and straightforward skincare regimen — sunscreen by day, Vaseline overnight. Like Rose herself, her house was neat as a pin with a decorating approach that placed function ahead of frippery. Rose’s house was a place to sleep, eat and retreat to if the weather was too miserable to be biking, hiking, swimming or cross-country skiing.
Betty was Rubenesque, voluptuous and languid. Her home — a snuggery filled with plump silk-covered pillows, deep cushy chairs and an impressive collection of Beanie babies — was a castle through which Betty moved in a cloud of White Diamonds eau de toilette. She was a beauty, with gently waved jet-black hair, deep-set brown eyes and a wardrobe chosen to reveal just enough of Betty to leave a man wanting more. She took pride in the fact that none of her three husbands had ever seen her without makeup and that, except for time spent in bed, no man had ever seen her without high heels.
That first night we had dinner on the Wainbergs’ front porch, and as we sat down to a meal of Betty’s bannock, Rose’s moose chili and Jacob’s favourite cookies, I realized how much I needed the peace and familiarity of Lawyers’ Bay. Charlie and Colin’s day had been an active one, running along the shore, throwing sticks in the water and digging in the sand. As a child, Taylor described the way she felt after a busy day outdoors as “good tired.” The boys were good tired, and we were eating early to make sure they were fed before they fell asleep.
Moose chili was a new item on the twins’ menu, and they were tentative as they took their first spoonful, but Rose’s moose chili was generally acknowledged to be the best on Standing Buffalo, and after a few seconds of deliberation, Colin and Charlie dug in. It was a time to experiment with the new. For the next two and a half weeks, except for unavoidable commitments in Regina, Zack worked from the lake, and for once, he didn’t push himself. More often than not, when Rose, Betty, Noah and I set out with the three little boys for an adventure, Zack joined us. Revelling in the quotidian was a new path for Zack, and I was hoping it would become a habit.
July 1, Canada Day, was always a red-letter day for Falconer Shreve Altieri Wainberg and Hynd. The summer after they opened their law office, the young partners invited friends and the firm’s small but growing list of clients to a BYOB barbecue bash at Lawyers’ Bay. The invitation suggested that guests bring blankets and pillows because, in all likelihood, they would end up sleeping on the beach.
Times had changed. Over the years, the party had evolved into a very large affair for clients, would-be clients, partners, staff, friends and families. Everything about the day, from the beach towels to the fireworks, was now organized by an event planner. Progress. The Canada Day party was always a hot ticket, but this year there was a special cachet — the cast and crew of Sisters and Strangers were joining the group.
Except for Rosamond Burke and Vale, I hadn’t met any members of the cast. Usually at the Canada Day party, Zack and I split up to welcome guests and make certain they had everything they needed, but sensing my apprehension about meeting the actors who were playing the people who, for good or ill, had shaped me, Zack stayed close as cars began pulling up.
The firs
t guests to arrive were Taylor and Vale, and they were dressed to wave the flag. Taylor wore very white, very short shorts and a red crop top; Vale, a white T-shirt and a red-and-white-striped miniskirt. Both young women sported red baseball caps with visors, and in my opinion, they were perfect. They’d flown in from Prince Albert the night before, so Zack and I hadn’t seen them in three weeks. There was much news to catch up on, but in the way of big parties, everyone suddenly arrived at once. Vale and Taylor sprung into action, helping Sisters and Strangers’ cast and crew get the lay of the land and introducing them to other guests, and Zack and I followed suit.
With a couple of notable exceptions, Falconer Shreve had good luck with Canada Day weather, and that July 1 it seemed the firm’s lucky streak was continuing. The day was sunny, clear and warm but not hot — in short, a perfect day for water-skiing, swimming, canoeing, beach volleyball and croquet on the lawn. I’d been keeping an eye out for Georgie and when she, Nick and Chloe arrived, I joined them. All three were tanned and beaming.
“Northern Saskatchewan was obviously good to you,” I said. “You look great.”
Nick grinned. “Hard not to look great when you’ve spent three weeks in paradise.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “We used to go to Anglin Lake when Taylor was little. At dusk when the loons start calling to each other, the lake seems primeval.”
“Calling is how the loons find each other,” Chloe said. “Taylor told me one loon says, ‘Where are you?’ Then the other one says, ‘I’m here.’ Then they can be together to go to sleep.”
“Did Taylor tell you about the time she was treading water and a loon came right up to her?”
Chloe nodded vigorously. “Taylor said for a while she and the loon looked at each other, and then the loon swam away. She said it was one of her bests.”