by Gail Bowen
I shuddered. “You mean fun and games that got out of hand?” I asked. “Is that a possibility? You’ve known her all these years. Were there other connections, another relationship that might have gone sour?”
“All her relationships turned sour,” Sally said flatly. “This city is filled with her failed relationships. Those baby cops we saw tonight are going to learn a lot about life before they’re through with Clea.” She stood up and stretched her arms above her head. “I’ve got to make tracks, Jo. That car of mine is fairly noticeable, and it’s only a matter of time before the media people start beating down your door.”
“Sal, stay here. The roads are terrible. I can open out this couch for you.”
“No,” Sally said. “The best thing for me right now is work. Take my mind off things. I’m going to go to the studio, take a bath, crack open my Christmas Courvoisier and make some art.”
I walked her upstairs and stood in the entrance hall as she put on her boots and parka. At the door, she turned and hugged me.
“Thanks for everything. I’m not sure I could have made it if you hadn’t been there.” She smiled. “People can always count on Jo, can’t they?” she said, and then she walked down our front path and vanished into the night.
I woke up early the next morning, anxious and restless. When I went down to make coffee, the sky was beginning to lighten, and I looked out on a white world. New snow was everywhere. The tracks I had made New Year’s Eve when I’d gone to the bottom of the garden and found Clea waiting were gone. Clea’s tracks would be gone, too – all her tracks, everywhere, filled in with snow as if she had never been.
I went out and picked up the morning paper from my mailbox. The double homicide had beaten out the blizzard in the headlines. Pictures of Clea and the Righteous Protester were on the front page. She was graduating from university, and he was standing in front of the Mendel with his placard and his Bible. I threw the paper unread on the breakfast table, went upstairs, showered and dressed. I still felt lousy, so I came downstairs, picked up the keys to the Volvo and headed out, figuring that maybe a drive would help.
Inevitably, I guess, I was drawn to the gallery. In the first light of morning, it looked quite festive. The bright yellow of the banners with Sally’s name was matched by the bright yellow crime scene tape; there were police around the front entrance, and on the lawn, police dogs were pawing at the snow. Other people had decided to take in the murder scene, too, and traffic was slow. I was inching along when I looked across the road and saw Stuart Lachlan out on his front lawn. His house was close enough that I had a clear view of what he was doing. Bundled against the cold, he was repairing one of Taylor’s snow people. Someone had knocked off an arm and caved in its side. Stu was methodically repairing the damage. In the doorway, I could see Nina’s neat figure, watching.
I drove past the gallery and made a U turn. I pulled over to the curb in front of number seventeen and rolled down my window. Stuart came over immediately and leaned in. When she saw me, Nina ran out, too, and stood shivering behind him. She was immaculate as always but she looked tired and old, and I realized what a toll all this was taking on her.
“I guess there’s no point asking if you heard about Clea,” I said. “I couldn’t sleep, either. But I didn’t think of making a snowman as therapy.”
Stu looked at me gravely. “It’s not therapy, Jo. It was vandalism. I didn’t want Taylor to wake up and see her snow lady wrecked. Nina was out here trying to repair it first, but … there are things a man has to do.”
I looked to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “You’re a good father, Stu,” I said, and meant it. “Anyway, I’m glad to see you’re up and about. You’re both okay, aren’t you?”
Stu shook his head and laughed humourlessly. “Couldn’t be better. Have you read your morning paper? The media are making certain connections between the murders and Erotobiography. Of course, Sally’s being discovered at the scene of the crime didn’t help matters. On the radio this morning there was a not exactly veiled suggestion that if I hadn’t been so anxious to push my wife’s pornography, two more people would be greeting the dawn today. And the gallery’s a disaster – police everywhere. Tracking dogs sniffing the galleries. Doors left open. Temperature control all shot to hell. I was over there this morning pleading with the police to let me move some paintings into the vault until they’re through.” He raked his hand through his thinning hair. “If I’d known there was going to be such chaos, I wouldn’t have …”
“You wouldn’t have what, Stuart?” Nina’s voice sounded small and frightened.
He gave her an odd look. “I wouldn’t have been so eager to accept Sally’s offer to donate Erotobiography to the Mendel. What did you think I was going to say, Nina?” There was an ugly edge to his voice. The spoor of murder and suspicion was already changing everything.
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely, “something else.” And then she asked the painful question, the one we’d all backed away from.
“Who do they think did it, Joanne? Is Sally a suspect?”
“I don’t think they’ve gotten that far yet,” I said. “Listen, I didn’t tell you, but I was there at the gallery last night. I … I was the one who found the Righteous Protester.”
I could hear Nina’s intake of breath. She looked quickly at Stu. In the hypercharged atmosphere of that morning, I could see the fear in her eyes.
“I know,” I said. “It’s terrifying, all of it, but, Nina, they’ll find out who really committed the murders. The police inspector who interviewed us last night looked as if she could see through walls. When she gets this case put together, she’ll know Sally was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Thank God,” said Stu.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Thank God. Stu, you’d better get Nina back inside. It’s too cold to be out with just a sweater. I’ll talk to you later. Ni, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right. It really is.”
As I turned onto the University Bridge, I wondered if my assurances had sounded as hollow to Nina’s ears as they had to mine. I looked back at Stuart Lachlan’s house. Stu and Nina were standing on the front lawn watching me, and Taylor had come out and joined them. Behind them, in exactly the same grouping – Daddy on the left, Mummy on the right and the little girl safe between them – was Taylor’s family of snow people. As Angus would say, “Deadly.”
I drove straight to my office at the university and worked for a couple of hours. I made up a syllabus for each of my classes, checked some handouts and read over my lecture notes for the first day – busywork to make me believe I was in charge of my world.
It was a little after noon when I went home to the hollow feeling of an empty house. There was an empty ice-cream pail on the counter in the kitchen, and when I put it under the sink to keep kitchen scraps in, I noticed two burrito wrappings in the garbage. Wherever they were, Peter and Angus were well fed.
I found their note on the kitchen table. They’d gone tobogganing at Cranberry Flats with some of Peter’s friends from the university. They’d be home for supper. I could imagine how pleased Pete would be to have Angus along. I made myself a sandwich, then I peeled a bag of onions and threw them in the processor to slice for onion soup. Homemade soup would taste pretty good after an afternoon tobogganing.
I was just cleaning up when the phone rang. It was Sally. Her gun was missing.
“What gun?” I said. “For God’s sake, what kind of person owns a gun?”
“A person like me who works alone at night in a house that sometimes has a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of art lying around. God damn it, Jo, don’t yell at me. Stu bought the gun for me the first year we were married, and it was a good idea. That studio of mine is right on the river bank. Anyone could break in. And someone has. Remember I told you I had two break-ins over Christmas? Well, both times whoever was there left things behind: more used sanitary napkins, a bag of kitty litter, also used, and some stuff that’s
too disgusting to talk about. But the point is, because they were leaving things, I never checked to see if things were missing. The paintings were okay, and that’s about all that’s of interest there.”
“Except your gun,” I said.
“Yes, except my gun,” she repeated. “And according to the police, it appears to have been the same kind as the one that did the job on Clea and poor old Righteous Protester.”
“How do they know?”
“The same way they knew to look for a gun at my house in the first place. From the registration. God, Jo, it looks like I’ve really managed to get myself up shit creek.”
The realization seemed to hit us both at the same time, but I was the one who put it into words.
“Sally, I think we’re going to have to stop talking about what you’ve managed to do to yourself. Too many things are going wrong for you. The police show up at the gallery as soon as you discover Clea’s body; your gun, apparently the same kind as the one that committed the murders, suddenly disappears. I think there’s somebody else involved here.”
Her voice on the other end of the line was small and sad. “Yeah, I think you’re right, Jo. And you know what else? I think whoever wants me up shit creek is doing everything they can to make sure I don’t have a paddle.”
CHAPTER
7
When I read the paper’s lead story the morning of Clea’s funeral I could feel my throat closing. The police had started to give the media details about their investigation, and there weren’t many arrows pointing away from Sally and me. There was one item of hard news: Kyle, the museum guard, told the police that minutes before they arrived, the burglar alarm had gone off in the delivery area at the back of the gallery. When he went out to investigate, he saw a figure running down the hill toward the river bank. The snow was so heavy that he couldn’t give the police a description, couldn’t in fact tell for certain whether the runner had been male or female. Kyle had given chase but when he heard the siren from the police car, he returned to the gallery. The only thing that seemed to be missing from the gallery was the film from the video camera suspended over the bridal bed.
A mystery runner and an empty camera: it wasn’t much.
The human interest angle was more fertile ground. From the beginning, the local paper couldn’t seem to get enough of Clea and Sally. The morning after the murder, the obituary column had carried the details of Clea’s funeral: services were to be conducted at the University Women’s Centre by a woman named Vivian Ludlow from the radical feminist community. She taught a course called Human Justice, and I knew her slightly from the university. Interment was at a cemetery on the east side of the city. While men were welcome at the interment, they would not be permitted to attend the funeral service.
The paper managed to repeat the details of the funeral arrangements in most of the stories about Clea’s life and death. Those few lines always gave a titillating but not libellous spin to their stories. Clea’s association with Sally at womanswork; the arson that destroyed their gallery; the public outcry against the bisexual imagery of Erotobiography: all were suddenly set against a dark feminist world, a world where men were not welcome. It was hot stuff.
The Righteous Protester wasn’t hot stuff. Even on the day of his funeral, he only rated a column and a half on page three. His name was Reg Helms, and as I read his obituary, I was struck again with how sad and stunted his life had been: a childless marriage to a woman who had died the year before of cancer, no friends to speak of, and a dead-end clerical job with a company called Peter’s Pumpkin Seeds. Reg Helms was a great writer of letters to the newspaper; and every talkshow host in town recognized his voice. His preoccupation was our disintegrating society, and it was a theme he played with variations. Sometimes it was Quebec that was destroying the country, sometimes ethnic groups or Aboriginal peoples, but the subject that really warmed his heart was sexual permissiveness. Sally’s show had been a holy mission for him. He had been fifty-four years old when he died.
The facts of Reg Helms’s life had become as familiar to me as my own, but today there was something different. There was a final paragraph that laid out the medical details of his death. Helms had died of a bullet in the carotid artery. The pathologist said death had come swiftly; nonetheless, there had been a second shot. Police theorized that when Reg Helms had raised his hand to his shattered throat, his murderer had fired again. The second bullet had struck Helms’s watch. He had died at 6:21 on Tuesday, January first. His watch had recorded hour, minute, day and date. Cosmic timekeeping.
As soon as I saw the numbers, I felt a rush of excitement. Sally’s phone call had come at ten to seven, and she had told me she’d just arrived at the gallery. I’d left home immediately. Under ordinary circumstances, I could have been at the gallery in ten minutes, but the blizzard and the walk across the lawn outside the gallery had slowed me. It would have been after seven when I found Reg Helms’s body. At 6:21 I’d been at home with my kids cleaning up after dinner, getting ready to watch the end of the Rose Bowl game. I had an alibi. And if there was justice, Sally would have one, too.
She answered the phone on the first ring. When I told her about the story in the paper, she was restrained.
“It’s great for you, Jo. Really, I’m happy and relieved that you’re off the hook. It was awful knowing I’d involved you in all this. But it’s no out for me. I don’t know what time I got to the gallery. I don’t even wear a watch. If you say I called you at ten to seven, then I must have gotten to the Mendel at about a quarter to. I called you as soon as I saw Clea.”
“But, Sal, don’t you see, I can tell the police that. I can swear to it.”
“It’s not enough. My best friend swearing that I told her I’d just arrived at the scene of a crime and found a body – it’s just too thin, Jo. The cops would blow that alibi out of the water in about eleven seconds. I need more than that. I’ve been sitting here figuring out times. Let’s say I got to the Mendel at 6:45. The roads were bad so it took me about ten minutes to drive there. That puts me out in front of my house at 6:35. And I must have been out there five minutes or so having my altercation with the guy in the ski mask.” She laughed. “That probably happened around 6:30, so he’d be the one to give me the alibi. Do you think I can count on him?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said.
“No,” Sally said, “stranger things than that have not happened. Face it, Jo. Nothing’s changed. I’m still up the creek.”
As I went upstairs to dress for the funeral, the relief I’d felt earlier was gone. Sally was right. Nothing had changed. She was still up the creek. And she still didn’t have a paddle.
When Sally came in to have a cup of coffee before we went to the funeral, the paper was lying on the kitchen table. She picked it up and started reading aloud. There were signed messages of condolence from a local women’s art co-operative and the Daughters of Bilitis. There was also a full-page ad from one of the fundamentalist churches containing a number of first-person accounts from men who described themselves as victims of pornography. All of them described exemplary boyhoods that ended abruptly when they were exposed to pornographic pictures and began to masturbate their way down the slippery slope to damnation.
When she had read the final confession, Sally slapped the paper down on the table.
“God, these guys are amazing. The old monkey-see-monkey-do theory of art and sex. Didn’t the mums who taught these good boys ever tell them to keep their hands above the sheets?”
Angus, sitting opposite her, tried to look suave, as if he had conversations about masturbation at the breakfast table every day.
Sally seemed to dawdle over her coffee. I was the one who finally stood up and said it was time to go.
“My first all-girl funeral,” Sally said to Angus as she zipped up her parka. He gave her a look that made me realize he was growing up.
It was a brilliant January morning, so cold there were sun dogs in the sky. We didn’t talk
much as we walked the few blocks to the campus. Classes started the next day, so there were students around with winter tans and new knapsacks and bags from the bookstore. On the signpost outside the University Women’s Centre was an old poster with a picture of Paul McCartney and the word HELP in block letters above his head. Someone had drawn a balloon around it and given Paul some additional dialogue. “HELP – I’m old and boring,” Paul said.
“No one can accuse Clea of that one any more,” said Sally, and there was an edge to her voice that I should have picked up on, but didn’t. In retrospect, it would have been better if Sally had not gone to the funeral. From the minute we walked up the steps to the women’s centre, she was edgy and combative, and there was nothing inside that building to chill her out.
The women’s centre was hot, and it had that egg-salad smell that seems to linger in all public buildings that serve short-order food. It was a pretty barren place: some posters on reproductive choice and date rape on the walls, and chairs arranged in semicircles with an aisle up the middle. By the time we arrived, almost all the chairs were full. Even so, the sister Sally sat next to ostentatiously got up and moved to the back of the room, and there was a nasty hissing sound from the people in the row behind us.
“Cows,” Sally said under her breath. “So fucking self-righteous, so fucking precious about the place for women’s art, but not one of them had the decency to ask if they could use my work on their little card here. Look at this.” She tapped the front of the memorial card with one of her long, blunt fingers. It was a reproduction of a painting Sally had done in the early seventies: an adolescent girl sat legs apart, naked in front of the mirror over her dressing table. Her look, as she sat absorbed in the mystery of her body, was both radiant and fearful. The girl was Clea Poole.
“Not that I mind,” Sally was saying, “but these women are always whining about being used by the power structure, you’d think one of them might understand the laws of copyright.”