The Glass Coffin

by Gail Bowen

  It was immediately apparent that Bryn had decided to trust Dan Kasperski. As they walked down the snowy path towards the house, their faces were serious, but Bryn’s body had lost its supermodel runway rigidity. Their banter as I pulled on my boots and coat was easy and natural. When Dan suggested Bryn meet him at the same time the next morning, she was enthusiastic. “I’ll be here,” she said. “Early again, if that’s okay.”

  “Early is good,” Dan said. “Be strong.”

  “I will,” she said. As we drove home, Bryn sang Dan’s praises. “He’s so easy to talk to,” she said. “My other shrinks didn’t talk at all – they just pretended to listen. But Dan really listens, and he cares about what I say. Joanne, he cares about me. He’s on my side. Dan says seeing those movies my father made about me helped him come to know me.”

  “Understanding what happened to your mother might give him even more insight.”

  “What my mother did to herself shows zero insight. You saw how beautiful she was, but you know what she did? She ruined her beauty. She slit her wrist with a razor blade. She didn’t die, of course, but she gave herself these huge Frankenstein scars. She always covered them up with a bracelet, but I knew the scars were there.”

  “That’s why you were so upset about the bracelet Jill gave you?”

  Bryn didn’t answer. We pulled into the driveway, but instead of getting out, Bryn raised her arms towards me so that the cuffs of her coat fell back. The blue tracery of veins in her pale skin was as delicate as a design in fine porcelain.

  “See, no scars,” she said. “The inside of me may be totally fucked up, but the part people can see is perfect.”

  Jill was on the telephone when we walked in the door. “All I’m asking is that you handle it till I get things straightened out here. I just got off the phone with the network, and this can be big for us. But I can’t do it now. I’m in the middle of two murder investigations and my stepdaughter is having a breakdown.”

  Bryn grabbed the phone from Jill’s hand and slammed down the receiver. “Don’t you ever say that again,” she said. “I’m not a mental case.”

  Jill was clearly stricken. “I’m sorry. I should have been more careful about my language. I was trying to make sure I was here to protect you.”

  “I don’t need protecting,” Bryn said. “I’m getting help. Joanne took me to see Dan Kasperski this morning.”

  Jill whirled to face me. “Bryn’s my responsibility.”

  Bryn moved to position herself between us. “I’m seventeen years old, Jill,” she said. “I’m responsible for myself.” She touched Jill’s arm. “Why don’t we go somewhere and have a cup of coffee and talk about it.”

  For a beat, Jill was silent, taking the measure of her newly responsible stepdaughter, then she smiled. “I’d like that,” she said.

  I walked upstairs thinking how pleasant it would be to open my bedroom door and find a congenial man waiting with a blindfold and some dark designs on my body. What I got was Taylor, Willie, and the cats having a tug-of-war with an old towel.

  “This room is supposed to be my oasis of tranquility,” I said. “Dogs, cats, and kids are only allowed in here on serious business.”

  Taylor scrunched her forehead. “Is that one of your jokes?”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Good,” Taylor said. “Anyway, I am here on serious business. Today’s the day you and Julia and Erica and me go to see The Nutcracker. It was part of my birthday present, remember?”

  “I remember now,” I said. “So what time do we pick up the ladies?”

  “The ballet doesn’t start till two, but Erica says the GAP is having a big sale – butterfly shirts for ten dollars each. She thought it would be neat if we all got shirts the same and wore them this afternoon.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “Let’s take everybody to the mall around eleven, battle our way through the crowds, eat at the food court, and come back here so you can get into your butterfly shirts.”

  Taylor stretched luxuriously. “This day is going to be so great.”

  “You bet,” I said. “Starting right now because I have two whole hours all to myself.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” Taylor said.

  “See where they take me,” I said.

  Within fifteen minutes I had the house to myself. Taylor was spending the morning in her studio out back painting; Angus and his friends were cross-country skiing, and Jill and Bryn were taking a walk to talk things over. As soon as the door closed behind them, I went into the family room and slipped the tape of Black Spikes and Slow Waves into the VCR. I was convinced that the scenes Gabe Leventhal had been so intent upon the night before he died were key, but tense with the awareness that a single frame might illuminate the mystery, I was on the edge of my seat from the opening credits.

  If ever I’d needed proof that context is all, revisiting Black Spikes offered it. The first time I’d watched the movie I’d been seeking evidence that would nail Evan MacLeish to the wall – prove to Jill conclusively that he was a rotten choice for a marriage partner. That one had been a no-brainer, but as I watched Black Spikes, I knew that in my eagerness to indict Evan, I’d missed much that was significant about the film itself.

  First was the consummate skill with which the movie had been made. Using only a hand-held camera and available light, Evan had shown how life looked from inside the eye of the hurricane. The view was seductive. Annie might have been hurtling towards death, but there was an antic, reeling joy about her decision to fuel her passage with a high-octane mix of drugs, booze, and sex. Through the eye of Evan’s camera, we saw Annie’s refusal to capitulate to her illness as somehow heroic, a braver decision than choosing to live a life that would be measured out in careful teaspoonfuls.

  Second was the sensitivity with which Evan revealed the primal bond that linked his wife to her twin. The sisters’ constant need to reach out to one another as if for tangible reassurance that they were not alone was both powerful and poignant. When Annie had a seizure, it was Tracy who kept her sister’s windmilling limbs from damaging themselves; Tracy who touched her lips to the forehead of the blue-tinged face; it was Tracy who threw her own silk scarf over the urine-stained crotch of Annie’s expensive pants.

  And when Annie gave birth, it was Tracy who held the ice chips to her sister’s mouth, smoothed oil onto the mound of her belly, urging her to breathe deeply, and it was Tracy who held out the arms that caught Bryn as she came into the world. It took a moment for the significance of what I was seeing to register. When it did, I stopped the film and rewound it to the birth scene. The characteristic broad bracelet was on the arm of the woman who caught the baby; the arms of the woman giving birth were bare and flawless.

  The phrase “my mind swam” has always struck me as a cliché, but in the moment, I could feel my thoughts fin out in a dozen directions. Some things suddenly made sense: Tracy’s reference to herself as the third rail in Evan’s life on the night of the rehearsal dinner; the fact that she had shared a house with her dead sister’s husband and family for seventeen years; her fury when she discovered that Evan and Jill were taking Bryn to New York City; the curiously symbiotic relationship Tracy shared with Claudia MacLeish.

  But there were as many questions as answers. For me, the most pointed of them centred on Gabe Leventhal. When he had asked to see the ending of Black Spikes, he was searching for a piece that would complete an old puzzle. The realization that Tracy, not Annie, was Bryn’s birth mother had been that missing piece. But where had he taken that knowledge? What had happened to him between the time he kissed me goodnight and the moment when the delivery truck drove over his already-dead body? Seemingly, like X in Last Year at Marienbad, I had wandered into a world in which there were “always walls, always corridors, always doors – and on the other side, still more walls.” Like X, I had no idea how I was going to find my way out.

  Watching Taylor and her friends dart in and out of stores, trading
news of bargains, giggling over feathery hair clips and necklaces made of plastic flowers, helped combat what my grandmother called the “grabbers,” the painful stomach knots that come with the onset of deep-seated fear. By the time we stopped for lunch, I wasn’t in fighting trim, but I was up for an Orange Julius and a Nacho Dog. The girls were still savouring their food court options when, tray in hand, I started looking for a table. Space was at a premium, and when a table cleared, I swooped. So did Angus’s old girlfriend, Leah Drache.

  Her face lit up when she saw me; mine lit up too. Of all the girls my sons had dated, Leah had been my favourite.

  “This is serendipitous,” she said, placing her tray on the table. She shrugged off her pea jacket and pulled off her stripy knitted hat. “I’ve been trying to come up with a non-pathetic excuse to call your house.”

  “Since when did you need an excuse to call our house?”

  Leah squeezed mayo onto her poutine. “Since Christmas Eve. I dropped something by for Angus. It was just a compilation tape I’d made for him. The songs weren’t ‘deeply significant.’ ” She made air quotes with her fingers. “Just stuff I knew he’d like.”

  “He didn’t call to thank you?” I said.

  “Nope, and that’s not like him,” Leah said. “I wondered if he was angry with me.”

  The little girls had found a table across the room. Taylor waved. I gave her the thumbs-up and turned back to Leah. “No, in fact, he’s said a couple of things lately that made me think he’s really missing you.”

  “Even with the drop-dead gorgeous new girlfriend?”

  “Bryn’s not his girlfriend,” I said.

  Leah raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what she told me.”

  I took a sip of Orange Julius and winced.

  “Brain freeze?” Leah said sympathetically.

  “It’ll pass,” I said. “When did you meet Bryn?”

  “Christmas Eve,” Leah said. “I dropped by your house with the tape and asked to see Angus. She said he wasn’t in, but she was his new girlfriend and she’d give him his package.” Leah leaned towards me. “You’re sure they’re not a couple.”

  “Positive,” I said.

  Leah grinned broadly, then she pulled a paperback from the pocket of her jacket. “So I reread Madame Bovary for nothing. When you’ve been dumped, Flaubert is absolutely perfect. You need to know that one woman has suffered more for love than you have.”

  “Were you contemplating arsenic and a miserable death?” I asked.

  “Not for me,” Leah said. She hugged herself. “I am so relieved. I think Angus and I are really good together.”

  “I agree.”

  “Did you ever see The Matrix?”

  “Actually, Angus made me watch it a couple of weeks ago.”

  “So he’s still into it,” Leah said. “A good sign, because The Matrix was our movie. We really connected with the part where the Oracle tells Neo that ‘Being the One is like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love. You just know it, through and through, balls to bones.’ ”

  I nodded.

  Surprisingly, Leah coloured. “Maybe that’s not the kind of thing a mother likes to hear about her son.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, appropriating one of her mayonnaised fries. “That’s exactly the kind of thing a mother likes to hear about her son.”

  I had lost count of the number of times I’d been to a performance of The Nutcracker, but that afternoon, as always, Herr Drosselmeyer’s gift to Clara worked its magic. Watching three little girls in matching pastel butterfly shirts discover the lyrical power of ballet and Tchaikovsky soothed my soul. By the time the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Cavalier danced their final pas de deux, I was as rapt as the eight-year-olds beside me.

  Julia and Erica’s mother had invited Taylor for dinner and a sleepover. The sisters bolted out of the car and were almost into the house before they doubled back and hollered in unison, “Thanks for the neat afternoon.” I was smiling as I turned the keys in the ignition and headed home.

  Angus was out front drilling Willie in the intricacies of the “Down” command. “Guess who I saw today?” I said.

  “A bunch of people in tights and tutus twirling,” he said.

  “All that, and Leah too,” I said.

  His face grew soft. “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine,” I said. “But she was puzzled about something. She said she brought you a tape on Christmas Eve. She wondered whether you got it.”

  Angus scowled. “Taylor! That kid is such a space cadet.”

  “Leah didn’t give the tape to Taylor.”

  “Who, then?” Recognition dawned. “Bryn,” he said furiously. “What’s the matter with her?”

  “A lot,” I said. “But she is trying to make some changes. Angus, do me a favour. Don’t come down hard on her. Give her a chance to tell you about this herself.”

  “As long as she does tell me,” Angus said. “Mum, nobody is doing Bryn any favours by letting her get away with stuff like this.”

  “I’ll go in and introduce the subject diplomatically,” I said.

  “You’re going to have to wait,” Angus said. “Bryn and Jill went to the airport to say goodbye to her aunts.”

  “Later, then,” I said. “Thanks for helping Willie with his homework.”

  Angus shrugged. “Claudia says if Willie does fifty downs a day, in a couple of weeks he’ll be a new dog.”

  “When that happens I’ll buy you both a T-bone,” I said. “But right now, I’m going inside to get some tea.”

  I was drawn to Bryn’s room like the proverbial moth to the flame. I prided myself on being scrupulous about respecting other people’s privacy, but it wasn’t difficult to spin out a rationalization for searching for the compilation tape. The day of the wedding, Bryn had stood before the mirror with her inscrutable bud of a smile. “I like to have things that belong to people,” she had said. “Not just material things, secrets too.” Her words made the unthinkable easy. I needed to find out what else Bryn had considered valuable enough to appropriate.

  I checked the drawers in the dresser I’d cleared for her. I had to search carefully. Even Bryn’s underthings were folded as meticulously as the stock in a well-run store. As in a well-run store, there was nothing in the drawers that didn’t belong. Her suitcase was empty too. I was about to give up when I remembered that among the items Claudia had sent over from the hotel there had been a jaw-droppingly pricey red Hermes Birkin Bag.

  I found it at the back of the closet behind some of my son Peter’s camping gear.

  The bag was heavy, and when I opened it, I realized it was stuffed with items that had struck Bryn’s fancy. The compilation tape, still in its bright holiday wrapping, was on top. Beneath it was a manila envelope filled with Polaroid pictures of schoolgirls at a slumber party doing the kinds of things parents didn’t want to know their daughters did at slumber parties. There was also a note card of heavy cream vellum with a handwritten note: For Felix, who turned my bread into roses. C. There were photos from Evan MacLeish’s first two weddings. Linn Brokenshire had been a blissed-out bride with flowers in her hair, a young husband on her arm, and a New Testament close to her breast. Annie Lowell had been wary. Her vintage sleeveless dress and white mantilla were classic, but her expression was mournful, as if she knew that marriage would bring her more misery than joy. There was a roll of undeveloped film, which, after a split second of deliberation, I pocketed. There were a half-dozen pieces of antique jewellery, carefully wrapped in filmy handkerchiefs. Finally, there was a small three-ring binder.

  One look inside and I knew this was Evan MacLeish’s “Bible,” the binder that contained the notes for his current works-in-progress. The information explaining tape reports, times, shot descriptions, size and movement, and best shot was neatly annotated on photocopied forms. At the bottom was a space for the director’s notes. The alphabet soup of notations: T, W, C, ZI, ZO, P, and F meant nothing to me; neither did the title of th
e project to which at least more than half the sheets were devoted. The Glass Coffin had not been among the upcoming projects mentioned in the New York Times article Jill had e-mailed me, but it was an evocative title. As I closed Bryn’s bag, I wondered which of the women in Evan MacLeish’s life he had decided to immortalize as a princess waiting under glass to be awakened by a kiss.

  I was in the front hall adding water to the tree stand when I heard a car pull up out front. I opened the door and saw Felix Schiff getting out of a red Intrepid.

  “Nice wheels,” I said.

  Felix’s face was grave. “Jill’s been trying to locate you,” he said.

  “Here I am,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Tracy attempted suicide this afternoon,” Felix said.

  I was glad I had the door to lean on. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Tracy is always all right,” he said. “They’ve taken her to the hospital. Jill’s there. I’ll drive you over.”

  “I’ll get my purse.”

  On our way to the car, I stopped to praise Willie and tell Angus I wouldn’t be long.

  Felix was silent until we pulled onto the expressway that led to the hospital. “That stunt was typical of Tracy,” he said furiously. “Narcissistic, melodramatic, and futile.”

  “Considering the circumstances, that seems harsh,” I said.

  “You might want to save some of that compassion for the people who have to clean up after her little venture.”

  “Felix, why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

  His voice was monotone. “Bryn and Jill went to the airport to see Claudia and Tracy off. Apparently the prospect of returning to the house on Walmer Road without Bryn was too much for Tracy, and she made some dramatic last-minute plea to the girl to go with her.”

  “And, of course, Bryn refused,” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t she refuse? Tracy has never shown the slightest interest in her. At any rate, there was a scene. Finally, Tracy excused herself to go to the bathroom. When the boarding call came, and Tracy hadn’t come out, Claudia went to get her. Tracy was in a stall slitting her wrists.”