by Gail Bowen
I knew she was lying. If Helmut had murdered Kim, he wouldn’t be running from Con O’Malley and Lorraine, he’d be demanding that they protect him.
Lorraine cocked her head and gave me a winsome smile. “Don’t overreact, Jo. Remember those pictures Mieka took? Remember all those shots of the two mothers addressing wedding invitations that she’s saving for the grandchildren? Take Taylor back to the city now; I’ll drive in tomorrow, and we can all just pick up where we left off.”
I could see Lorraine’s body relax. She thought she had me. She’d thought she could win, so she played her trump card. “Our kids need us,” she said, and her voice was like honey. “Think of the children.”
“I am,” I said, sliding my hand into my pocket and curling my fingers around the handle of Jackie’s gun. “I am thinking of the children. All of them. That’s all I’m thinking about. At the moment I’m thinking about the children you’ve got locked up here. I want them. Jackie Desjarlais and I are going to take them with us, and you’re never going to touch them again. Do you hear me? You’re never going to violate another child.” My legs had started to shake, but my voice sounded strong. It sounded like a voice Lorraine should listen to.
I pulled the gun out and pointed it at her. “Come on,” I said. “You and I are going to walk out of this room, and you’re going to tell the people who work for you to bring the children to the dock. And Jackie and I are going to take them out of this cesspool. If it takes two trips, I’ll wait with them. We’re taking those children, and they’re never coming back.” My voice was rising. “Do you hear me, Lorraine? You’re never going to sell another child again.”
She looked at the gun, then she shrugged. “Have it your way, Joanne. I’ve never known how to deal with self-righteous women. You come in here like an avenging angel, sword in hand, all set to smite me down. Well, smite the fuck away. You won’t be the first.”
She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She looked weary and wounded. “Tell me, Joanne, how do you think I got into this business? Do you think it was a career option, like deciding between being a doctor and a lawyer the way you and your friends did?”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said.
Her mouth curled in derision. “Really? Well, I’ve decided you should hear this, Mieka’s middle-class mother. Do you know how I met Con O’Malley? He bought me.” She pointed in the direction of Blue Heron Point. “Over there at the Angler’s Corner. My aunt was in there, drunk as usual, broke as usual. When Con came in, she offered to sell me for a bottle of beer. I was eleven years old.” She looked hard at me. “What were you doing when you were eleven, Joanne? Dancing school? Pyjama parties with your friends? Con and I had pyjama parties, till he decided I was too old. That was when he gave me a choice: go back to the Angler’s Corner and be bought by anybody who had beer money or help him find some girls to replace me. Those were my career options, Joanne. Before you raise your sword, think about that. Think about how hard another woman had to work to make a good life for herself and her son. I’m not begging; I’m just asking for some consideration.”
“I’ll give you some consideration,” I said, and I meant it. But as I walked through the Lily Pad, listening to Lorraine instruct her employees to bring the children to the docks, I kept Jackie’s gun aimed at the back of her neck. No one gave me any trouble. Jackie was right. People were scared shitless of guns.
It took half an hour to get everybody down to the docks. There was a big cabin cruiser that belonged to the Lily Pad. Jackie was taking the children in that. We watched them climb on board. They were attractive and well dressed, but they seemed meek and spiritless. As they settled into their seats, I wondered if we’d been too late, if they were already beyond rescue. There were only seven of them, four girls and three boys. The woman who had cleaned off the tennis courts explained there had been a measles outbreak, and the others were quarantined in Blue Heron Point.
Two women whom Lorraine referred to as counsellors went in the boat with the children. The kids were afraid to be separated from them. Taylor and Lorraine and I were going to follow the cabin cruiser in Jackie’s boat.
Finally, when everyone was in, Jackie turned and yelled to me. “Ready? I’ll take it slow. Stay with me and you’ll be fine.”
I waved to him. Then a boy near the back of the cabin cruiser clambered over the seats to Jackie, leaned toward him and whispered something in his ear. Jackie nodded and the boy jumped out of the boat and ran to the Lily Pad. When he came back, Jackie gave me the high sign, and we began moving across the water.
Lorraine didn’t speak on the trip back. Neither did Taylor. I was relieved. I didn’t have any words left in me. I was grateful beyond measure that Taylor was sitting less than a metre away from me, bright and unharmed, but I had been running on adrenaline, and the adrenaline had stopped pumping. I was bone weary, and I was overwhelmed with the problems that lay ahead, what to do about Lorraine, and what would happen to the sad beaten children in the boat ahead.
As Blue Heron Point came into sight, I noticed there were people on the dock. We came closer and I saw that there were three of them. Keith was there, and Perry Kequahtooway, but the third figure was the one on whom my attention was riveted. As he recognized us in the boat, Blaine Harris raised his arm. It looked as if he was offering a benediction. I drove the boat parallel to the dock, helped Taylor out and handed the rope for mooring to Keith. Then I walked to where the old man waited in his wheelchair.
“You want to tell me something,” I said.
“The rain. Killdeer,” he said. Then he handed me a piece of newsprint, soft with age and handling. It was the picture of Christy Sinclair that the paper had printed at the top of her obituary. I looked at the picture, then I repeated his words.
“Lorraine killed her,” I said. “Lorraine killed Christy Sinclair.” His arm fell limp at his side, and he smiled at me. I looked at the boat. Lorraine was alone there; her body had folded in on itself in defeat. Perry Kequahtooway walked down the dock and held out a hand to her. He helped her out of the boat, then walked her over to a black sedan that was parked on the service road behind the shacks.
“It’s over,” I said to Blaine Harris, and he nodded.
Keith came and put his arm around me. I was still wearing the drab green slicker Jackie had given me. The weather had become even muggier, and the slicker acted like a sauna, trapping the hot, moist air against my T-shirt. I could feel it sticking to my skin. My runners and the ankles of my blue jeans were crusted with beach sand and muck from the island.
“Keith, I’m so dirty,” I said, moving away from his arm.
“You look all right to me,” he said, pulling me back. This time I didn’t move away.
For a while I just stood there with his arm around me feeling tired. But I had to know. “Keith, what made you come up here?”
“My father.”
“I have a friend who says Blaine’s the most moral man she ever met.”
Keith nodded. “He is that. I think that’s why he’s been going through such hell since that night at the lake. He saw something terrible happen, and he couldn’t get anyone to understand what he’d seen.”
I thought of the phone calls, the anguished words in the night.
Keith said, “Today when Dad and I were at the airport, waiting to get on the plane for Minneapolis, he showed me the picture of Christy he just gave you, and he tried those three words again: the rain killdeer. For the first time I put everything together. I started to ask Blaine questions. Had he seen Lorraine and Christy together that night? Had they quarrelled? Had he seen Lorraine do something to Christy? Maybe give her something to drink?” Keith sighed. “We were quite a pair: me badgering my father with all these questions, and Dad hooting away whenever I guessed right. Anyway, we did come up with a few things.”
“Do you remember, Jo, that the room Dad was staying in out at the lake was Lorraine’s room? The night Christy died, Dad’s nurse had put him on
the veranda outside the room to watch the sunset. The door to the inside was open, and Dad saw Lorraine come in and shake some kind of powder into a glass of whisky. When Christy came in, Lorraine gave her the drink. She probably told Christy it would calm her down. Christy drank the whisky. That’s all we know for certain right now. But as far as I was concerned it was enough to call Perry Kequahtooway. He thought it was enough, too. That’s why he came up with us.”
Keith looked at the next dock. Jackie had tied up the cabin cruiser, and he and the women who worked for Lorraine were helping the children out of the boat.
“Jo, what the hell’s going on here?” he asked.
I looked at this man whom I was beginning to love, and at his father, sitting in his wheelchair, looking at the lake, at peace for the first time in weeks.
“There’s nothing going on that you have to know about now,” I said. “It’ll all be there tomorrow.”
He looked at me hard. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Then we should enjoy tonight,” he said simply. “Are you and Taylor ready to come to the cottage?”
“The one with the squeaky screen door and the dishes that don’t match and the wood box full of old Saturday Nights?” I said.
“The same,” he said.
“My car is parked up there behind the shacks. Why don’t you take Blaine up and get him settled?” I said. “I’ll be right along, but there’s some business I have to take care of. Could you give me five minutes?”
He smiled at me. “I told you before, Jo, I’m a patient man.”
I took Taylor and we walked to the next dock and watched as Jackie made sure the big boat was safely moored. When he finished, he leaped out, graceful as a cat, and walked to the end of the dock. We followed him. The sun was dropping in the sky; as it fell, it made a path of light on the water. The fishermen’s boats were heading toward shore. Time to come home.
It was Taylor who saw it first. She grabbed my hand and pointed. “Look,” she said, “there’s a fire over there, where we were.”
At first, it was just a kind of heat shimmer in the sky above the channel, then the smoke began to rise, and the acrid smell of burning wood began to drift toward us. We watched in silence as the sky close to the water glowed red and then grew dark.
When the smoke thinned into fingers that seemed to reach into the sky, I touched Jackie’s arm. “When that boy came over and talked to you in the boat before we left, what did he want?”
“Matches,” Jackie said. “Matches so he could set his bed on fire.”
“I’ll take that drink now,” I said.
The rye burned my throat, but it felt good. As I handed the bottle to Jackie, the sun glinted off the Wandering Soul bracelet. It was time. I slid the bracelet off and handed it to Jackie.
“I think she’d want you to have it,” I said.
He touched the letters carefully with his forefinger, like a blind man reading Braille. Then he pulled his arm back and, in a graceful sweep, he skipped the bracelet across the water. For a heartbeat, it bounced along, flashing in the light from the dying sun; then it sank beneath the surface without a trace.
CHAPTER
13
I made one final trip to Lorraine’s island. It was the morning after the fire. Taylor and I had spent the night at Keith’s cabin. We had all been too tired for anything beyond bathing in the lake and collapsing into bed; sleep had come easily. The next morning, early, very early, Taylor woke me up. She’d been awakened by a scratching at the window. It was Jackie Desjarlais.
“I want to take you and Little Sister to breakfast,” he whispered. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
I looked into the bedroom with the twin beds; Keith and his father were still sleeping. Taylor, ready for adventure, had already pulled her shorts on. I wrote a note for Keith and slid it under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, then I splashed water on my face, rinsed out my mouth and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. Everything else was still in suitcases at the shacks.
We had breakfast at the café next to the hotel. When we got there, an old man was sitting on the porch watching two dogs fighting in the dirt out front. They were the same dogs who’d been fighting the day we arrived at Blue Heron Point. When we left the restaurant, the old man was still there, and so were the dogs.
We walked down to the docks. For a while we just listened to the water lap the shore, then Jackie lit a cigarette and turned to me. “I’m going out there for a last look,” he said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing left of that fucker. You want to come along?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think we do.”
As we pushed off from land, it had seemed like a perfect day. The water was shimmering in the summer sunlight, and the sky was as cloudless and blue as the sky in the postcard Lorraine left when she abducted Taylor. But as we came through the narrows, the smell of wood smoke was heavy, and in the north a cloud, dense and malevolent, hung in the air above the island.
We moved slowly around the shoreline. We were, I think, stunned by the enormity of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. The devastation was Biblical. The pines that had hidden the Lily Pad from prying eyes had been savaged by the fire. Stripped of needles and branches, they seemed spectral in the hazy air. The building was in ruins; nothing remained of it but a charred and smouldering skeleton. At the back, the steel door to the storage room hung crazily from its metal frame, guarding nothing. Flames had licked the playground equipment black, but it had survived, at least for a while. Unused, forgotten, it would rust and corrode; some day, in a hundred years, or a thousand, it would be gone, too.
“I can’t believe that nobody even came out to the island to try to save it,” I had said to Jackie as we headed back across the lake.
He had shrugged. “I think a lot of people in town were glad to see it burn. A lotta secrets in that building. A lotta things people want forgotten.” Then he had turned to Taylor and smiled. “Come on, Little Sister. Time to learn how to drive a boat.”
She moved to sit beside him. As she steered the boat across the shining lake, her face was flushed with pride. So was Jackie’s. Once Theresa Desjarlais had taught her brother how to guide a boat through uncertain waters; now it was her brother’s turn. As if he’d read my mind, Jackie Desjarlais looked up at me and yelled over the sound of the motor, “It all comes around, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling back. “It all comes around.”
Mieka and Greg were married in the chapel of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Labour Day weekend. It was a small wedding. Hilda McCourt came down from Saskatoon, and Jill Osiowy was there to tape the ceremony for the mother who was not there. But these old friends aside, just Keith, Blaine and my children and I were sitting in the pews of that old and beautiful chapel.
In July, the papers had been filled with stories about Lorraine and Con O’Malley. At the beginning of August, the police solved the Little Flower case. When he realized that there would be no big payoff from NationTV, Darren Wolfe decided to become the police’s star witness. His information was right on the money. The police moved quickly with their arrests, and the familiar picture of Con O’Malley touching the hibiscus in Lorraine’s hair gave way to shots of four young pimps with smouldering eyes being escorted to and from their court appearances. As Tom Zaba had surmised, the Little Flower case was a simple matter of pimp justice. It lacked the cachet of the Harris-O’Malley case, but it pushed Lorraine’s case to the back pages during the dog days of August, and we were grateful. Lorraine’s story would, we knew, resurge when the trial began in early winter, but until then we all welcomed the protective cloak of a private wedding.
From the day Lorraine Harris was brought back from Blue Heron Point, Greg and Mieka had been her support and her comfort. Lorraine was being held at the correctional centre where Jill and I had visited Darren Wolfe, and Mieka and Greg hadn’t missed a visiting day. They had no illusions about the horror of what she had don
e, but she was family, and for both of them, family was a link that was permanent.
Mieka and Greg’s wedding day was a poignant one. They had learned early and publicly that marriage means caring for one another in good times and bad, and the knowledge had left its mark. As the summer sun poured through the stained-glass window, I leaned forward to look at my daughter. Under the filmy circle of her summer hat, Mieka’s profile was as lovely and delicate as the face on a cameo, but there was sadness there, and there was sadness in the face of the man she loved.
The archdeacon’s voice was solemn as he read from the Book of Alternative Services: “The union of man and woman in heart, body and mind is intended for their mutual comfort and help, that they may know each other with delight and tenderness in acts of love.”
I thought of the seven children who had come back with us from the island to Blue Heron Point. Seven faces, pale, dead-eyed, not young, not old, not fearing, not hoping. They were in foster homes now, their futures dark and uncertain. And I thought of Bernice Morin, the veteran of the streets who believed in unicorns, and of Theresa Desjarlais standing in the field watching the tundra swans – “if they’re smart and they’re lucky, they’ll make it” – and of Kim Barilko, her expression flickering between longing and contempt as she looked through the glass at wedding dresses that would always be for others, never for her.
“Pray for the blessing of this marriage,” said the archdeacon. Beside me, Hilda McCourt, magnificent in mauve, dropped to the kneeler like a teenager. After a moment, I knelt, too. I prayed for Greg and Mieka, that their marriage would be a good one and that their lives would be happy. And then, as I had every morning that summer, I prayed for the wandering souls.
GAIL BOWEN’s first Joanne Kilbourn mystery, Deadly Appearances (1990), was nominated for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award. It was followed by Murder at the Mendel (1991), The Wandering Soul Murders (1992), A Colder Kind of Death (1994) (which won an Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel), A Killing Spring (1996), Verdict in Blood (1998), Burying Ariel (2000), The Glass Coffin (2002), The Last Good Day (2004), The Endless Knot (2006), The Brutal Heart (2008), and The Nesting Dolls (2010). In 2008 Reader’s Digest named Bowen Canada’s Best Mystery Novelist; in 2009 she received the Derrick Murdoch Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Bowen has also written plays that have been produced across Canada and on CBC Radio. Now retired from teaching at First Nations University of Canada, Gail Bowen lives in Regina. Please visit the author at www.gailbowen.com.