by Gail Bowen
Riding down in the elevator, Taylor was quiet. As we walked towards the parking lot, she said, “When’s he getting out?”
“Soon, I hope,” I said. “But I don’t know.”
“I’m almost finished that painting of us watching the dragon boats.”
“Good.”
“Do you think Eli would like it as a present?”
I smiled at her. “I know he would,” I said.
When we got home, the dishes were done, the kitchen was shining, and the table was set for breakfast. I pointed Taylor towards bed, stuck my head into the family room where Angus was listening to a CD, and went out to the backyard. Hilda was sitting on the deck with a gin and tonic.
She raised her glass when she saw me. “I bought a bottle of Beefeater this afternoon. Will you join me?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink gin before.”
“It’s been a gin kind of day,” Hilda said.
I poured myself a drink and went back outside. It was a beautiful night. The air smelled of charcoal and heat, and from the park across the way we could hear the sounds of an early-evening ball game. I sipped my drink. “The house looks wonderful,” I said. “I love it when you stay with us. Everything seems to run so smoothly.”
“I don’t do much myself, you know. Your children are very cheerful about pitching in.”
“Only when you’re here,” I said. “The rest of the time, they pitch in, but I wouldn’t characterize their attitude as cheerful.” I smiled at her. “You’re kind of like Mary Poppins.”
Hilda winced.
“You don’t like the comparison?” I said.
“Not much,” she said. “But I am relieved to hear that you welcome my presence, because I’m going to ask if I can stay a few days longer.”
“You can stay as long as you want to,” I said. “You know that. Has something come up?”
She sighed wearily. “This business with Justine,” she said. “I can’t seem to extricate myself from it.”
“Do you want out?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I went to see Eric Fedoruk this morning. My intention was to tell him that, after giving the matter some thought, I’d concluded my responsibility to Justine Blackwell was discharged.”
“That’s an about-face, isn’t it?”
Hilda turned towards me. “It is, but there are times when reversal is the only sensible course. Joanne, I went to Eric Fedoruk’s because it seemed that my commitment to Justine was a problem for you.”
“Hilda, you could never be …”
She made a gesture of dismissal. “I know what you’re about to say, but I saw your face last night when I told you a TV crew had interviewed me at your house, and I saw you change your plans this morning when Wayne J. Waters turned up on your doorstep. This business with Justine has simply become too much of a burden on you, and that’s what I intended to tell Eric Fedoruk.”
“You were going to step aside?”
“I was. This morning after you went to the university, I sat down with Justine’s letter. I read it many times, and as far as I could ascertain, I had honoured my commitment. The power of attorney she gave me ended with her death, and when I called Eric Fedoruk to ask if Justine had named me executrix of her will, he said she hadn’t. He told me he had the will on the desk in front of him, and it named him executor. I went down to his office this morning fully intending to tell him that I’d satisfied myself there was nothing more I could do for Justine, and that I was going home to Saskatoon.”
“But something made you change your mind,” I said.
“Not something … someone. More accurately, several someones. Joanne, when I got to Eric Fedoruk’s office, the Blackwell sisters were there. From what Tina let slip, I gathered they’d come about the will. They certainly had some agenda in mind. As soon as I came into the room, they began apologizing. Lucy said they were wrong to shirk their obligations to their mother. Signe said they should never have asked me to act as their intermediary with the press. Even Tina Blackwell chimed in; she said she was wrong to put her need for privacy ahead of my right to live my own life.” Hilda frowned. “Although having finally met her, I can understand why Tina Blackwell wouldn’t want to be photographed.”
I was baffled. “Hilda why wouldn’t she want to be photographed? She’s on TV all the time. She’s the anchor on the CJRG six o’clock news.”
“With all that scarring?”
“What scarring? I don’t watch that station much, but over the years I’ve caught their news a few times. Tina Blackwell’s a very attractive woman.”
“No one would describe the woman I saw this morning as attractive.” Hilda’s voice was thoughtful, then she added briskly, “But Tina Blackwell’s appearance isn’t the issue. The issue is whether my continuing to work on Justine’s affairs is going to be a problem for you.”
“It won’t be a problem. But, Hilda, have I missed a step here? What did the Blackwell sisters do to make you change your mind about bowing out?”
“They nettled me.” Hilda’s blue eyes were dark with anger at the memory. “They treated me as if I were an old family retainer who was, oh so reluctantly, being relieved of her duties. Lucy offered the usual sweet female banalities: “It was too much to ask anyone outside the family to do.” Signe Rayner wondered, sotto voce, whether the fact that I lived in Saskatoon would prevent me from acting effectively in a Regina-based case.”
“I take it you countered their arguments,” I said.
“I most assuredly did,” Hilda said. I reminded the Blackwell women that their mother had asked me to protect her interests and that we lived in the age of technological wizardry. There was no disputing either argument. That’s when Signe Rayner turned cruel.”
“Towards whom?”
“Towards me and towards the memory of her mother. Dr. Rayner said that psychotic patients can often be quite charismatic, especially with elderly people. In her view, psychotics often infect those around them with their delusions. I asked her if she thought her mother had infected me. She said that, in her opinion, my determination to take on this commitment bordered on the obsessional.”
“But she and her sisters asked you to handle the funeral arrangements.”
“A decision they apparently regret,” Hilda said tartly. “Dr. Rayner’s attack on me was personal and it was vicious.”
I shook my head. “All this from someone whose profession involves teaching other people to handle their anger.”
Hilda sniffed. “Dr. Rayner didn’t bring much honour to her profession today. At one point, Eric Fedoruk literally jumped between us. He was quite sensible. He said that things were being said that could not be unsaid, and that perhaps we should go to the restaurant on the main floor of his building and have a drink.”
“Did you go?”
“No. At that point, I’d had enough. But when I started to say my goodbyes, Lucy Blackwell came over and put her arms around me. Joanne, it was the strangest thing. She was almost weeping, and she said, ‘Hilda, don’t be mad at us. It’s for your own good. My mother left everything in such a mess, and my sisters and I would feel terrible if anything happened to you.’ ”
I looked across at her. In the dying light, a truth that I tried to banish was apparent. While Hilda’s spirit was as robust as ever, there was no denying that physically she was becoming more fragile. I didn’t want anything to happen to her either.
“Let’s go inside,” I said. “Even on a night like this, it’s possible to get a chill.”
CHAPTER
5
The next afternoon, when Taylor came home from school she grabbed an apple and her cats and headed out to her studio to work. She went back after dinner. She continued the pattern all week. “I want the painting to be ready for Eli as soon as he comes back,” she said.
Taylor wasn’t the only busy member of our household. As the first Friday after Labour Day approached, it was clear that the aimlessn
ess and languor of summer was well and truly over. Angus’s football team started practice, and his girlfriend, Leah, came back from theatre school in Toronto. I sorted my classes out and began to lecture in earnest. We all took turns visiting Eli.
Hilda spent Wednesday and Thursday downtown, continuing her investigation into Justine Blackwell’s affairs. She described her movement back and forth between the courthouse on Victoria Avenue and the shabby storefront offices on Rose Street that harboured Culhane House as spider-like. In her attempt to connect the disparate strands in the complicated web of relationships that Justine had established in her life, Hilda talked to everyone she could find who had known the dead woman, from the small circle of colleagues, family, and friends who had watched with dismay as she metamorphosed from figure of judicial rectitude into eccentric advocate for prisoners’ rights, to the ex-prisoners and their families and lawyers who exulted as Justine embraced their cause.
Often Hilda arrived hard on the heels of the police, whose frustration as they continued to come up empty-handed in their own investigations was growing. They weren’t short on suspects. Justine Blackwell had spent the last night of her life in a room filled with people she had sent to prison. The final year of Justine’s life might have been given over to making amends, but delayed charity can be cold comfort. Most of the guests at Justine’s party would have known only too well the truth of the old saw that “a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.” They would have known, too, that in the course of history few places have proven themselves more congenial to the study of revenge than the slammer.
The theory that Justine’s death had been an act of prisoner vengeance was given credibility by the nature of the weapon the police now believed had been used to kill her. On the night of Justine’s final party, Eric Fedoruk had presented her with handsomely engraved marble-based scales. The doorman at the hotel had seen Justine put the scales on the seat beside her when she stepped into her BMW, but they were nowhere in evidence when the police examined the car after Justine’s body was found. The scales still hadn’t been recovered, but the forensics unit, having examined both Justine’s injuries and photographs of Eric Fedoruk’s presentation at the banquet, had concluded that the marble base could have inflicted the fatal wounds. A healthy percentage of those who had watched the presentation had proven themselves adept at the art of assault with a deadly weapon. An equally healthy percentage had no alibi whatsoever.
The police weren’t alone in feeling disappointed that the truth about Justine was eluding them. Friday morning, when I came back from taking Rose around the lake, Hilda was sitting at the dining-room table surrounded by library books.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’m trying to unearth a few appropriate passages for Justine’s memorial service. It’s tomorrow.”
“I saw the notice in the paper.” I sat down in the chair across from her. “Do you realize we haven’t really talked about Justine all week?”
“You’ve had enough on your mind with Eli,” Hilda said. “Besides, all I’d have had to contribute was a litany of failures. I can’t even succeed at this.” She picked up the letter Justine had written her and slipped it into the book she was reading.
I glanced at the book’s title. “Montaigne’s Essays,” I said. “Searching for insights?”
“That’s precisely what I’m doing. Lucy asked me to choose some readings that would sum up her mother’s life.”
“Another task,” I said. “The Blackwell sisters must have decided you’re too useful to alienate.”
“That possibility has occurred to me as well,” Hilda said. “But their motives don’t interest me a whit. I’ve undertaken this assignment for Justine. I just wish I were making a better job of it. How can anyone sum up a life, if she’s not certain what that life truly added up to?”
“You’re no closer to understanding what Justine’s state of mind was in the last year of her life?” I asked.
Hilda frowned. “It’s as if I’m hearing about two separate and distinct human beings. Justine’s legal colleagues speak of her with pity and anger. The people at Culhane House talk about her as if she were a saint.” Hilda shook her head in a gesture of disbelief. “Joanne, I know that human beings contain multitudes, but as a rule one can reconcile the disparities.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. “What was Justine like when you knew her first, Hilda?”
“Bright, independent, ambitious.” Hilda smiled. “I don’t mind admitting that I saw a great deal of myself in her. She was, as my beloved L.M. Montgomery’s Anne would have said, ‘a kindred spirit.’ ”
“Then I would have liked her,” I said.
Hilda took the compliment coolly. “Yes, you would have liked her. There was no reason not to. We met in 1946. I’d just bought my house on Temperance Street. It was a chaotic time, Joanne; the universities were jam-packed with returned soldiers. It was wonderful, but it was madness: students sitting atop radiators, on window-ledges, in the aisles, and still spilling out into the halls. Of course, housing was at a premium. That September, I decided that by offering room and board to a woman student, I could do a good deed and expedite the process of paying off my mortgage. I put a notice on the bulletin board in the administration building at the university. Within an hour, Justine, or Maisie, as she was known then, was standing on my doorstep.”
“Justine changed her name?” I asked.
“Justine changed both her names,” Hilda said. “She was born Maisie Wilson. Blackwell is her married name; Justine was her nom de guerre. The choice was a wise one. By the time I met her, it was plain that she saw her destiny as going far beyond that of a Saskatchewan farmgirl. For the future she had in mind, Justine was a much more suitable name than Maisie.
“I expect you can tell from the photographs in the paper that Justine was attractive, but in 1946 she was ravishing, no other word for it. Her hair was white blonde, and she wore it in a pageboy, as young women did in those days; it was immensely flattering. Her skin was flawless, and her eyes were the same colour as Lucy’s. Since the advent of contact lenses, I’ve seen a number of young women with those aquamarine eyes, but the shade of Justine’s was God-given. She had the same generous mouth Lucy has, and the same dazzling smile. When she asked me about the room, my first thought was that my house would be overrun with eager young men, so I asked her straight out how serious she was about her studies. She assured me there would be no late-night visitors, because her only goal in life was to graduate at the top of her class in law school.”
“I take it she realized her goal.”
“She did indeed. Top of her class. But she worked hard for it: left the house at seven sharp every morning; took one hour off for supper at five; then back to the library till it closed. It was a monastic life for such a handsome young woman.”
Hilda seemed about to let the subject drop, but I wanted to hear more. “You did like her, though,” I said.
Hilda seemed perplexed. “I’m not sure ‘like’ is the word I would use. I respected her. Justine knew what she wanted, and she went after it.”
“Dedicated and persistent,” I said. “She does sound like you.”
Hilda laughed. “Justine made me look lackadaisical. There was an incident the first year she lived in my house on Temperance Street that revealed her measure. I owned a gramophone and an extensive library of recordings, and when Justine moved in I invited her to make use of them. She never did. Then one day, I came home and found her listening to Manon Lescaut. She was reading the libretto, taking notes. She didn’t appear to be enjoying the music much, so I asked her if she liked Puccini. Justine said she didn’t have an opinion one way or the other, but one of the men in her class told her that the senior partner in Blackwell, Dishaw and Boyle, the law firm with which she planned to article, was an opera lover, and she wanted to be prepared. Three years later, when she walked into Richard Blackwell’s office, Justine Wilson could have won the Met
ropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon quiz.”
“And she married the senior partner?”
“She did indeed – a month to the day after their first meeting. Richard Blackwell was twenty-five years older than Justine. He’d never married, and he was eager for a family. Justine complied. Signe was born in 1950, and the others followed. Justine never seemed very interested in motherhood. She was combative by nature, and she loved the rough and tumble of the courtroom. Richard retired to raise those children. He and his little girls became quite a well-known sight in Saskatoon.”
“A wife with a high-powered career and a husband who stays home with the kids – the Blackwells were about forty years ahead of their time,” I said.
Hilda’s face grew sad. “From what I saw, Richard Blackwell relished every moment he spent with his daughters. It’s too bad he didn’t have longer with them.”
“When did he die?”
“In 1967. I remember because he died at one of the banquets we had in Saskatoon that year for Canada’s Centennial. The Blackwells had moved to Regina by then. Justine had already made a name for herself as a criminal lawyer, but she was ready for the next stage. She wanted to be noticed by those who influenced judicial appointments. Richard had come back to Saskatoon for the dinner. I was there. It was terrible. There were hundreds of people in the room. Everyone was rushing about, trying to summon help. But nothing could be done. It was a heart attack. Massive. The worst thing was that Lucy was with him. Richard had brought her over for a chat when they came in. She would have been about fifteen, I guess, and she was so proud of being at a grown-up event with her father. Then, in an instant, he was gone. I’ve often wondered if that trauma spawned the need to be surrounded by men which seems to have been so much a part of her life.”
A line from one of Lucy’s songs came back to me. He painted a rainbow and took me along, then lightning split us, shattered my song. I turned to Hilda. “I think that’s probably a pretty solid observation.”
Hilda’s voice was thoughtful. “Justine didn’t appear to suffer any permanent ill effects from her husband’s death. Not long after Richard died, she was appointed to the bench. As I told that odious Detective Hallam, Justine and I lost touch except for the occasional lunch and holiday letters. Of course, Saskatchewan is a small province, so it was impossible not to hear news of her.”