by Gail Bowen
As I walked along Osler Street to my parking place, I tried to buy the officer’s explanation. What he had said was both reasoned and reassuring, but he hadn’t felt the fear in that barricaded room in Indian Head. I had, and I knew in my bones that his explanation was wrong.
When I got home, Leah and Angus were in the kitchen making a meal that seemed to involve every pot and utensil we owned, but I didn’t mind because I was ravenous and whatever they were making smelled terrific.
“What’s on the menu?” I asked.
“Pot roast,” Leah said. “And a salad and potato pudding and, for dessert, honey cake.”
“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said.
She raised a double-pierced eyebrow. “Actually, what you’re getting tonight is my entire repertoire. My grandmother says every woman should know how to cook one meal that will knock people’s socks off. This is the one she guarantees.”
“Does your grandmother live close by?”
“As close as you can get. She lives with us. So does my great-aunt Slava.”
“Slava,” Taylor said, rolling the word appreciatively on her tongue. “That’s a nice name.”
Leah wrinkled her nose. “I think it sounds kind of indentured myself, but the Russian meaning is nice – ‘glory.’ Slava’s my grandmother’s sister. Anyway, we all live together. It’s like something out of Tolstoy.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
Leah looked thoughtful. “Most of the time, I guess I am.”
We made an early evening of it. Leah’s grandmother was obviously no slouch; the pot roast knocked our socks off. After we’d cleared away the dishes, Angus walked Leah home, and Taylor and Benny went to the family room to watch television. I poured myself a glass of Beaujolais, sat down at the kitchen table, and thought about the day.
I was deep in the puzzle of the barricaded room in Indian Head when Julie called. She asked about my family, her house, and her mail. Her questions were perfunctory, and her voice was flat and spiritless. Her lack of interest in my family didn’t come as a surprise, but her listlessness about her own affairs was disturbing. Come rain or come shine, the one subject that had always engaged Julie’s complete and fervent interest was Julie.
She seemed anxious to get off the phone, but I cut short her goodbyes. “Wait,” I said. “There’s something I need to know. Did Reed ever mention a student named Kellee Savage to you?”
Suddenly, the torpor was gone, and Julie was hissing, “You mean she was a student?”
I was taken aback. “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, she’s in one of my classes. Then Reed did mention her.”
“No,” she said, and her voice was low with fury. “He didn’t mention her, but I found out about her.”
“What did you find out?”
“For God’s sake, Joanne. I thought you were supposed to be so sensitive. You know the answers to these questions or you wouldn’t be asking them. My husband was having an affair with that … student.”
“With Kellee? What on earth made you think that?”
“The usual. We hadn’t been married two weeks before he started going out nights – no explanations, of course, except when I pressed him, then my very original new husband gave me every cliché in the adulterer’s handbook: he had to ‘go back to the office’ or he had ‘a downtown appointment.’ The Tuesday before he died, Reed’s ‘downtown appointment’ called our home. We were having dinner, and I answered the phone in the kitchen. He ran down to our bedroom to take the call, but when he picked up the receiver, I didn’t hang up. Joanne, I heard that woman telling my husband that she had to see him that night. And I heard him call her ‘Kellee.’ When he left the house, I followed him. Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Married three weeks and following my husband down back alleys, like some slut from a trailer court trying to get the goods on her lover. But I’m glad I did it. I needed to know the truth. I saw him go into that place on Scarth Street. After that, it was easy enough. I just checked the room numbers on the mailboxes in the front hall. The occupant of room six was ‘Kellee Savage.’ Isn’t that just the dearest little name?” Julie’s composure broke. “Kellee Savage,” she sobbed. “She’d even stuck a goddamned happy-face sticker on her mailbox.”
“Julie, listen to me. Please. I just can’t believe Reed would have been having an affair with Kellee Savage.”
Her voice was sulky. “Why not?”
“Because Kellee has … she has these physical problems. I think something must have happened before she was born. Whatever it was, she’s terribly misshapen, and her face is … it’s painful to look at.”
“And you don’t think Reed could have …?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I don’t think Reed could have been involved with Kellee.”
“He kept saying he loved me,” she said weakly. “I just didn’t believe him.”
She sounded bewildered, as, of course, she had every right to. In six weeks, fate had cast her in the roles of proud bride, betrayed wife, and embittered widow. It was hardly surprising that she had lost her sense of self.
“Julie, maybe it’s time you thought about coming back here,” I said. “When Ian died, it helped a lot being in a place where we’d been happy together.”
My intention had been simply to give Julie an option, but she pounced on my suggestion. Five minutes later, it was all settled. Julie Evanson-Gallagher was coming home.
The next morning when I got to the university, Ed Mariani was already in my office. He was wearing a white turtleneck and a suede overshirt that I didn’t remember seeing before.
“Nice threads,” I said. “What do they call that colour.”
“Edam,” he said gloomily. He patted his belly. “You’ll notice that I’ve graduated to a garment that’s designed to cover a multitude of sins. On a brighter note, while I was shopping for my maternity top, I bought us a teapot.” He held up a Brown Betty. “I know old Betty here isn’t glamorous, but she does the job better than those pricey little beauties at the boutiques. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I could use a cup of tea.”
“Kettle’s plugged in,” Ed said. He looked at me closely. “Joanne, is there something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know that I’m starting to get scared.”
I pulled the student chair closer to the desk and told him everything I’d learned the day before. When I finished, his expression was sombre. “Joanne, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “I’m absolutely in the dark about this.”
Ed sighed heavily. “I wish I was, because what I’ve come up with isn’t very appealing. But I don’t know what else it could be. Look at the facts. In the weeks before he died, Reed lied to his wife fairly consistently about where he was. She followed him and discovered him going into Kellee Savage’s room. The next thing we knew, Reed Gallagher chose Kellee for the prize internship, a position for which at least a half-dozen people are better qualified than she is.”
“Surely, you’re not suggesting an affair?”
“No,” he said. “When Reed and I went to the Faculty Club the night before he died, he was not a man in love. He was confused and bitter and disillusioned.” Ed paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was troubled. “Joanne, I think Kellee Savage was blackmailing Reed. I think she stumbled on something about him, and whatever it was gave her sufficient leverage to get the Globe and Mail internship.”
“And made Reed so sloppy about his sexual practices that he died,” I said.
“Or didn’t care if he died. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s all so incredible.” But the more I thought about it, the more credible Ed’s theory seemed. As well as explaining why Kellee Savage had gone to the top of the internship list when other candidates were better qualified by far than she, it pointed to a logical motive for Kellee’s decision to drop
out of sight on the night of March 17. It also, I realized with a start, put my promise to Neil McCallum in a troubling new light. If Kellee Savage had dropped out of sight, not because she was embarrassed about getting drunk and making a fool of herself, but because she was a blackmailer who had pushed her victim so hard he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died, she might not want to be found.
Ed poured boiling water into the Brown Betty. “Well,” he asked, “what are we going to do?”
“I think this may be case of ‘she’s made her bed, now let her lie in it,’ ” I said. “Neil McCallum told me Kellee has an aunt in B.C. Kellee’s probably out there right now, trying to figure out her next move. I don’t think we should do anything.”
And that’s what I did. My conversation with Ed took place Monday morning. Kellee didn’t show up for the Politics and the Media seminar at 3:00, and I had to admit I was relieved. It had been ten days since I’d last seen her, ten days of remorse and anxiety. The possibility that Kellee was manipulator not victim was seductive, and I grabbed it.
I was late picking Julie up from the airport. She was on the 5:30 flight, but when I went to my car, I noticed someone had left the side gate open, and the dogs had made a break for it. Rose and Sadie were of an age where the delights of the larger world had paled, but by the time I found them sunning themselves on the creek-bank and dragged them back to the house, it was 5:35.
When I finally got to the airport, Julie’s plane had landed, and she was already at the luggage carousel. As soon as she saw me, she threw her arms around me. The gesture was uncharacteristic, but there was a lot that was uncharacteristic about Julie that day. For one thing, there was a stain on her trenchcoat; for another, her roots were showing. The veneer was chipping away, but, in an odd way, she was more attractive than I had ever seen her. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks were flushed. It was as if she was feverish with relief that Reed Gallagher hadn’t been unfaithful to her after all.
The graduation photograph of Kellee Savage that Neil McCallum had let me take home was still in its Safeway bag on the front seat of the car. Julie had to move it to the dashboard before she could slide into her seat. I told her to take a look, and when she did, she became even more animated. After she’d clucked pityingly over Kellee’s deformities, she started floating theories about why Reed might have been visiting Kellee at the rooming house so late at night. All of Julie’s scripts cast her husband in the role of the caring and humanitarian professional who was going the extra mile for a needy student. I didn’t say a word. Julie was obviously delighted with her fantasies. It seemed cruel to suggest that, asked to rank the possible reasons a forty-eight-year-old man would visit a twenty-one-year-old woman late at night, most sane people would put altruism at the bottom of the list.
When I dropped Julie at her condo on Lakeview Court, she invited me in for a drink. I declined. I was sick of other people’s problems. As soon as I got home, I ordered pizza, took a hot shower, and got into my old terrycloth robe. It was Academy Awards night. I had seen three movies that year. Taylor had picked them all, and none of them featured flesh-and-blood actors. All the same, I knew that sitting in the family room with the dogs at my feet, Taylor and Benny sleeping beside me on the couch, and Angus braying loudly at the stupidity of the Academy’s choices, beat my other options that night by a country mile.
On Wednesday night, Neil McCallum called. From the time I’d talked to Ed Mariani, I’d been filled with guilt every time I walked by a telephone and thought of Neil. The truth was I simply didn’t know what to say, so I had taken the coward’s way out and avoided making the call. Now Neil had taken matters out of my hands.
He waited until 6:01 to phone, but even at reduced rates, Neil didn’t get his money’s worth. As I always do when I’m flustered, I talked too much. I gave him a detailed account of my encounter with Alma Stringer. He laughed when I told him how much Alma reminded me of a cranky old chicken, but he became vehement when I told him about Alma’s refusal to give us any information about Kellee unless we paid her.
“We can pay her,” Neil said. “I’ve got money. I can send it on the bus. All you have to do is pick it up and take it to Alma. Then she’ll tell us about Kellee. It’s simple.”
“It’s not simple. You can’t always trust people to do what they say they’re going to do.” Remembering the promise I had made to Neil, the words resonated painfully. He deserved to know the truth, or at least Ed Mariani’s theory about what the truth might be.
“I need to talk to you about Kellee,” I said. “There’s a chance she’s gone away because she’s done something wrong.”
“She wouldn’t do anything wrong,” Neil said angrily. “Kellee’s my friend. I don’t want to hear this.”
For the first time since Neil called, I found myself wishing we were face to face. Over the telephone, it was impossible to tell if he was defending Kellee out of conviction or bravado. In the long run, I guess it didn’t matter. Neil believed in Kellee; it seemed both pointless and cruel to disillusion him before disillusion became inevitable.
Before we said goodnight, Neil said he was sorry if he’d been rude and he thanked me for helping him look for Kellee. When I hung up the phone, I felt like hell. Neil’s trust in me was absolute, but it seemed that, once again, he’d put his money on the wrong horse. He wasn’t having much luck with the humans in his life. I was glad he had Chloe.
Life wasn’t all grim that week. The next weekend was Easter, and my daughter Mieka, her husband, Greg, and my son Peter were coming home. Angus and I made up the beds, got out the new bath towels, and brought the leaves for the dining-room table in from the garage. Taylor and I drove out to the nursery and bought lilies and a pot of African violets the colour of heliotrope for Mieka and Greg’s room. As I made up the list of food we’d need for the holiday, I could feel, despite everything, the darkness lift. It was Easter, the time, as the Prayer Book says, to be “inflamed with new hope.”
When Alex called Thursday morning, I could feel the flames of new hope leaping. It was early when he called, so early, in fact, that I was still in bed. Hearing his voice in my bedroom brought back memories of other mornings: mornings after the kids had gone to school, when Alex would come over and we’d make love and lie in bed listening to the radio and feeling warm and blessed.
“I’m missing you,” he said.
“I’m missing you, too,” I said. “The room is full of sunlight, and the paperwhites in the window are blooming. If you give me five minutes, I can put on Mozart, slip into something erotic, and send the kids to school without any breakfast.”
“I really do miss you, Jo,” he said.
“Then come back.”
“It wouldn’t work the way I am now.” I could hear his intake of breath. “Joanne, I called to tell you I’m going away for a while.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Partly because Eli – my nephew – needs more help than I can give him. There’s an elder up at Loon Lake who helped me through a bad patch once. I think he might be able to help Eli.” Alex paused, then he said quietly. “And I think he might be able to help me. I seem to have been making a lot of lousy decisions lately.”
“Lousy decisions don’t need to be carved in stone.”
“Maybe Loon Lake will make me as sure of that as you seem to be.”
“Alex, I’m glad you called.”
“So am I,” he said.
After I had showered and dressed, I felt so grateful that I thought it was time to get a few karmic waves going. As soon as I got to my office, I called Jill and invited her for Easter dinner. She said she and Tom had plans, but she sounded friendly, and when she heard Mieka and Peter would be there, she was wistful. “Don’t let them go home without seeing me,” she said. Jill had known Mieka and Peter almost all of their lives, and they had always enjoyed her as much as she enjoyed them. I promised they’d get in touch. Then I took a deep breath and dialled Julie Gallagher’s number. To my surprise, she said s
he’d be delighted to join us. As I hung up, I sensed that we were, at long last, heading into the final act. If we were lucky, the play that had begun as a tragedy might end up like a Shakespearean comedy, with all past cruelties forgiven, all misunderstandings corrected, and all broken relationships mended.
When I got ready to leave the office late Thursday afternoon, I came upon the copy of Sleeping Beauty Kellee Savage had thrust into my hand a thousand years ago. Remembering Kellee’s misery that afternoon, I felt a stab of remorse, but if Ed Mariani’s reading of the situation was right, wherever Kellee was she should be feeling remorse, not evoking it. I flipped through the book in my hand, and noticed that it had been checked out of the Education library. I might not be able to exorcise Kellee from my consciousness, but at least I could get rid of a painful reminder of her.
The staff at the Education library were in the process of closing up. The next day was Good Friday, and with so many students out of town, there was little reason to stay open. I recognized the young woman on the desk as an old student of mine, Susan something-or-other. Not smart, but pleasant, and very cute: a mop of curly hair, big brown eyes, and a quick smile. She made a face when she saw me.
“You’re not going to be long, are you? I’m hoping to get on the road before dark.”
“Going home?” I asked.
“You got it,” she said. “Three whole days with no texts, no assignments, and no research papers.”
“I won’t hold you up,” I said. “I’m just returning a book.” I slid the Sleeping Beauty across the desk to her.
She glanced at the cover. “I love fairy tales.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “Do you still believe in happy endings?”
“Depends on which day you ask me,” I said. “Today, I do.”
“Me too,” she said, and she took the book and started to place it on a trolley for re-shelving. Out of nowhere, Kellee’s face flashed into my mind.