The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  When I walked across our backyard, I couldn’t tell if I was laughing or crying.

  Angus was sitting in the den watching a kids’ show that he’d outgrown years ago. He was wearing a T-shirt he’d bought himself at the joke shop in the mall. On the front a cartoon rooster with a huge beak and a macho leer was strutting on a beach filled with hens; underneath it said, “Chicks Dig Big Peckers.”

  I gestured toward the TV. “Anything new in Mr. Dressup’s world?”

  “Nope, everything’s just the same.” Then he looked up at me. I could see he’d been crying, but he tried a smile. “Nothing ever changes on Mr. Dressup. You know that, Mum. That’s why I’m watching.”

  At three o’clock I went over and gave my senior class a reading assignment. There was a message on my desk to call Izaak Levin. I shuddered when I noticed the message was dated the day before.

  When I got home, Angus met me at the door. “I’m going down to the Y to shoot baskets with James if it’s okay.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Supper’s at five-thirty.”

  “What are we having?”

  “Takeout, your choice.”

  “Fish and chips?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “I could use a load of grease right now.”

  He smiled. “Right. Oh, I almost forgot, Sally’s mother came over with some flowers,” he said. “They’re in the living room.”

  On the coffee table was the Japanese porcelain bowl with the painted swimming fish. Serene. Beautiful. Nina had filled it with white anemone, and there was a note card with a line written in her neat backhand propped up against it. “Remembering and cherishing, N.”

  I sighed and went to the phone. She answered on the first ring, and when she heard my voice, her relief was evident.

  “Jo, thank heavens it’s you. I’m feeling very alone right now. Stuart’s been drinking all day. He’s so withdrawn I can’t reach him. And I think the reality of her mother’s death is starting to hit Taylor. She’s just clinging to me. I haven’t been able to get anything done. You said this morning that if there was anything you could do, I should ask. Well, I’m asking.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Someone needs to go to the funeral home and make some decisions. And a curious thing. A priest came to the house this afternoon. He said Sally was a parishioner of his. That’s a surprise, at least to me. At any rate, he’ll do the funeral, but he needs to talk to someone from the family.” Her voice broke. “Jo, there is no one from the family. I’m all alone.”

  “I’ll go, Nina,” I said. “Just give me the names and addresses.”

  “Thank you, Jo. I knew I could count on you.”

  When I hung up the phone, I felt about as wretched as I could remember. I put my face in my hands and leaned against the telephone table. After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up. Peter was standing there.

  “I have to go and pick out the coffin,” I said.

  “You’ll need a ride,” he said simply.

  I was glad I had him with me. The people at the funeral home were kind and helpful, but making funeral arrangements was a lousy job. After we finished, Pete dropped me off at St. Thomas More Chapel.

  I had called Father Gary Ariano before dinner and told him I’d meet him at eight o’clock. The college bells were chiming when I walked in the front door, and Father Ariano was waiting for me. He was a dark-haired, athletic man in early middle age, very intense. He was wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt from Loyola University. He held out his hand in greeting, and I followed him up two flights of stairs through a door marked “Private” into the priests’ common room. It was a comfortable room, with an outsize aquarium, a wall of windows that looked out onto the campus and a generously stocked bar.

  “What’ll it be?” asked Father Ariano.

  “Bourbon, please, and ice.”

  Father Ariano opened a Blue for himself and poured a generous splash of Old Grand-Dad over ice for me. We sat down on a couch in front of the windows. It was a foggy night, and below us the lights of the campus glowed, otherworldly.

  I didn’t know where to begin but after we’d had a few minutes to grow easy with one another, Father Ariano began for me.

  “Sally told me once that the only good things about the Catholic church were its art collection and its funerals.”

  “And yet she was a regular communicant?” I asked.

  “She was,” he said. “She came most often on weekdays. There’s a mass around five, and sometimes we’d go out for a sandwich after or she’d come up here and we’d talk.”

  “It’s hard to think of Sally as devout,” I said.

  “I think Sally would have called herself interested rather than devout. The nature of faith and the faithful interested her. She was a very bright woman.”

  “Not just a holy innocent the great god of art dripped paint through,” I said.

  He smiled. “That sounds like a direct quote from our friend Sally. People always underestimated her. Stuart Lachlan certainly did. He put her in a terrible position when he wrote that book. It was an incredible breach of trust.”

  “Not the first in her life,” I said.

  He looked at me oddly. “No,” he said, “not the first and not the only. But don’t get me started on that. Look, I guess we’d better discuss the details for the funeral.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Father Ariano was, as they say, a godsend: factual, presenting options, suggesting choices. When we’d finished, I stood up.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess that’s it.”

  Father Ariano looked at me. “Except for one thing.”

  I waited.

  He squeezed his right hand together, crushing his beer can. “Except,” he said, “that this is the shits. It really is the shits.”

  “That’s what my son said, too.”

  “Smart kid,” he said, standing. “Come on, follow me, I’ll show you the chapel.”

  We went down the stairs to the main floor, but instead of going toward the front doors, we turned down a wide and brightly lit hall. On one side were pictures of the priests who had been heads of the order. On the other were clothing racks, the kind you see in department stores. Arranged on each rack, seemingly by ecclesiastical season and size, were dozens of clerical vestments.

  “This is where we robe,” Father Ariano said casually, “and here,” he said, as we walked through some double doors, “is where we go to work.”

  The air in the chapel was cool and smelled of candle wax, furniture polish and, lingeringly, of wet wool. The chapel was uncluttered and attractive: white painted walls and plain blond pews arranged in a semicircle to face the gleaming wooden cross suspended from the ceiling above the altar. It looked like any of a dozen chapels I’d seen that were designed for the university community at worship. But on the north wall was a mural, and it was to the mural that Gary Ariano directed my attention when we came through the doors.

  “There’s our prize,” he said.

  From a distance the mural was conventionally pretty: a prairie field on a summer’s day with Christ at the centre performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I wasn’t much interested.

  “The colours are lovely,” I said dismissively.

  Gary Ariano said, “Go closer. Get a good look.”

  Up close, the mural glowed with apocalyptic light. Dark storm clouds in the corner menaced the perfect blue of the sky; under the crowds that circled the field where Jesus stood, the earth was cracking open, and arms shaking their fists at God thrust themselves through wounds in the earth.

  “That just about reflects my world view at the moment,” I said.

  “I knew you’d like it,” said Gary Ariano dryly, as we turned and walked out of the chapel and back into the world.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Sally’s funeral was set for Monday afternoon, the first day of the university’s February break. The administration had introduced the break a quarter
of a century before because the university had the highest suicide rate in the country. The students still called it Dead Week. The period between Friday night when I walked home through the darkness from my meeting with Father Gary Ariano to the morning of the funeral was a blur for me: arranging for musicians, choosing the proper spray of flowers for the coffin, the right arrangements for the tall copper vases the college chapel provided, talking to Mieka about food for the reception afterwards – busywork, but anything beat thinking about Sally.

  And anything was better than thinking about Izaak Levin. I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that the brilliant man Sally and I had dreamed over that hot, starry summer was a killer. Looking at my reflection in the hall mirror, I saw the same woman I always saw, but I felt like Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive. In desperation, I grabbed my gym bag and went to Maggie’s. The aerobics class was in the same gym Sally and I had been in before Christmas, and she was everywhere in that room for me, face set in concentration, body slick with sweat, invulnerable. Halfway through the workout, I couldn’t take the memories any more, and I ran to the dressing room and wept.

  I talked to Nina many times that weekend but I saw her only once, when Mieka and I went Saturday morning to take Taylor shopping for an outfit she could wear to the services on Monday.

  We pulled up in front of the Lachlans’ at nine o’clock. Stuart met us at the door. He looked, as the Irish say, like a man who has spent the night asleep in his own grave, but he helped Taylor on with her coat and walked us out to the road.

  When he saw Mieka waiting in her car, Stu looked at me. “Haven’t you replaced your car yet, Joanne?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, “there doesn’t seem to have been any time.”

  Stu fumbled in his pocket and produced a set of keys. “Here,” he said, pointing to the two silvery Mercedes in his driveway. “Take one of them. I’m not going anywhere, and even Nina can’t drive them both at once. Jo, she told me you’re handling everything for us. Keep the car as long as you want. Keep it forever.”

  Taylor had already climbed into the front seat of Stuart’s car, so I went to tell Mieka I didn’t need a ride after all. When I slid into the driver’s seat, I smiled at Taylor.

  “Okay, miss, let’s go look at some dresses.” It wasn’t until I pulled into a parking place at the mall that it hit me. For the first time since the accident, I had driven a car again.

  I was still driving the Mercedes when I pulled up in front of St. Thomas More Chapel an hour before Sally’s funeral. I’d come early because I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.

  As I walked into the hushed coolness of the chapel it seemed as if everything was as it should be. A screen was in place to the side of the altar. Hugh Rankin-Carter was giving the eulogy, and he wanted to show some of Sally’s work as he talked about her life. The college’s copper urns had been replaced by two of Nina’s most beautiful lacquerware water jars, and they were filled with orchids. The mass cards with the reproduction of Perfect Circles, Sally’s painting of us that last summer at the lake, were piled neatly on a table by the door. “Je n’ai rien négligé.” Me and Nicolas Poussin.

  During the funeral, my children and I sat under the mural of the prairie Jesus performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He was wearing a white robe, and His arm was raised in benediction. I tried to keep my eyes on that sign of blessing, but I kept seeing other things: Taylor, looking like a Parisian schoolgirl in her black double-breasted coat and beret, pulling back from her father and grandmother as they walked up the centre aisle. Stuart stumbling and Nina reaching to steady him as they took their places in the front pew. Hugh Rankin-Carter at the lectern, unrecognizable for a moment in a dark business suit, his face broken by anguish. Hilda McCourt, back ramrod straight, saying good-bye to another free spirit. And in front of the altar, inescapable, the plain pine box that held all that was left of Sally’s grace and laughter and beauty.

  We had taken two cars to the chapel. Taylor was going to our house with my kids right after the funeral. She said she didn’t want to see them put Sally under the snow. I didn’t, either, but I was an adult; I didn’t have any options.

  As I drove to the cemetery, I was glad to be alone. Nina had asked me to ride with them, but at the funeral Stuart had broken down completely, and I knew if I had to spend any time with him, I’d go over the edge, too.

  Prospect Cemetery was on the river south of the city. The road into it was narrow, overgrown with bushes. In the summer the bushes became a dense and primitive place where city kids would drink beer and make love. But as I looked at that windswept hill, bleak as a moor, it was impossible to believe in a world of pleasure and hot coupling.

  There were only a handful of us at the graveside: Father Ariano, Nina, Stuart, Hugh Rankin-Carter, Hilda McCourt and me. I didn’t react when they lowered Sally’s casket into the ground. I think by then I had entered a place in my mind that was beyond reaction.

  Nina had invited me to come back to their house for a drink. As I pulled onto Spadina Crescent, I wondered if I should have been so quick to say I’d come. I didn’t remember the drive from the cemetery at all, and when I looked at the art gallery I felt a stab of panic. It seemed unfamiliar, changed from the place I knew. Disoriented and frightened, I tried to grasp what was different, and then suddenly I knew.

  The banners were gone. They had taken down the yellow banners that had celebrated Sally’s name against the winter sky since the week before Christmas. In one of her books, Virginia Woolf says something about how we experience the death of someone we love not at their funeral but when we come upon a pair of their old shoes. I hadn’t come upon Sally’s old shoes in the portico of the gallery, but for emotional impact, the missing banners were close enough. I pulled into the parking lot, put my head on the steering wheel and wept.

  On the dashboard in front of me was the mass card from Sally’s funeral. Hugh Rankin-Carter had chosen the epigraph. It was from Jacques Lipchitz, the great sculptor. “All my life as an artist I have asked myself: what pushes me continually to make art. The answer is simple. Art is our unique way of fighting death and achieving immortality. And in this continuity of art, of creation and denial of death, we find God.”

  Tuesday morning was Izaak Levin’s memorial service. I wore the same black wool suit I had worn the day before to Sally’s funeral. Dead Week.

  Izaak’s service was at a small performance studio in the old fine arts building. Whoever had chosen the venue had made a wise choice. Not many people came to say good-bye to a man who was alleged to have killed four people. That morning as I had rummaged through my dresser for a pair of black panty hose, I had come up with a dozen reasons I shouldn’t go.

  A dozen reasons not to, and just one that compelled me to go, but it overrode all the rest. I was there for Sally. I had a sense that she wanted me there, and so I was there.

  Someone had taken pains with Izaak Levin’s memorial service. There was a good jazz quartet playing fifties progressive jazz: “Round Midnight,” “Joyspring” and some tunes I recognized from the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Between numbers, three men who looked like contemporaries of Izaak’s read from his art criticism.

  There was no coffin. Izaak Levin had been cremated as soon as the coroner released his body.

  I didn’t know any of the people in that room, but one woman held my attention, mostly, I think, because she seemed like such an unlikely mourner. She was a small, square woman in her sixties, nicely but not fashionably dressed in a royal blue crepe dress. Her jet-black hair was upswept, and her face still had traces of plump prettiness. When the service was over, she shook hands with the musicians and the men who had read. Then she turned and walked toward me.

  As she held out her hand, she smiled.

  “I’m Ellie Levin, Izaak’s sister, and I wanted to thank you for coming.”

  “I’m Joanne Kilbourn,” I said. “I knew your brother many years ago in Toronto and I was a friend of Sally Lo
ve’s.”

  She flinched but she looked at me steadily. “I was a friend of Sally’s, too. I didn’t see her often enough, but I loved to be with her. She always made me laugh. She made Izaak laugh, too. He used to say she’d lead him to an early grave, but he worshipped her.”

  Now it was my turn to flinch, but I reached out and touched her hand. “I know he worshipped her,” I said. I grasped for something else to say. “Miss Levin, I’m truly sorry his life ended so unhappily.”

  She covered my hand with her own. “So, do you think he did what they said?”

  The question took me by surprise, and so did my answer.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. They have all that evidence against him, but I just don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t believe it because it’s not true,” she said flatly. “He was my brother for sixty-five years. I knew his limits. He was no killer. He was a gambler, and like a lot of smart people he wasn’t smart about money. You would have been a fool to cosign a loan with him, but killing? Never. Izaak Levin was no killer.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. In the background, I could hear the sounds of the musicians packing up: instrument cases shutting, plans being made for lunch. I wondered if they knew how lucky they were to be part of the normal world.

  For a moment Ellie Levin seemed to be lost in her thoughts. Finally she said, “He was in a lot of trouble when he died.”

  “Money trouble?” I asked.

  “Worse,” she said. “In-over-your-head trouble. It started with money. Before Christmas it was money. He called me Christmas Eve and told me he was seriously in need of cash.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “Do I look crazy? I’m not a wealthy woman, Joanne. All I have is my home and some bonds our parents left me. I’ve always been firm with Izaak about money. I had to be. I was saving for our old age. I always figured somehow we’d end up together at the end of our lives, and I wanted things to be nice.”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to break, but she took a deep breath and went on.