by Gail Bowen
“Thanks, Albertine,” the woman holding her face said. Her voice was muffled by her hand.
The other girl said, “Two Diet Cokes. Is it too late for fries?” Albertine shook her head, and the young woman with the swollen face said, “My lucky night. Two fries with gravy.”
Then in the same flat voice with which she’d ordered the fries, she said to her companion, “Two blow jobs, two hand jobs and a half and half, so I’m thinking that’s enough. It’s too fucking hot for anybody to want to get laid, I’m going home, and if Rick says I didn’t make my quota, tough. Then this suit pulls up in a Buick and we go to the Ramada, and it’s cool there, and I think my fucking luck is maybe changing. A hundred, and all he wants is to do some lines of blow right off my belly, so it looks like an easy evening. Anyway, I’m lying there in the air conditioning with this pig snorting along my stomach, thinking I’ll maybe get home in time to watch Letterman, when he goes berserk and starts beating the shit out of me. I got out of there, but the asshole just about caved in my face. Asshole.” Then she lapsed into silence.
I got up and walked past them toward the bathroom. The one who had been talking had a pocket mirror in her hand. She was looking at her reflection with anxious eyes as she smoothed pancake makeup over the swelling line of her cheekbone.
When I came back, Albertine was bringing the Cokes and the fries and gravy – Angus’s favourite, too. Up close, these girls didn’t look much older than Angus, but, as I listened to their young voices trading street stories, I knew that the dates that appeared on their birth certificates were irrelevant. The morning Mieka had found Bernice Morin’s body, one of the cops had given Bernice her epitaph. “She was a veteran,” he had said. As I watched these girls, carefully eating French fries through lips thick with gloss, laughing at the vagaries of a world that should have been inconceivable, I thought that they were veterans, too.
Kim Barilko never showed up. I waited till midnight, then, bone weary and depressed, I gave up. I was tired of tilting at windmills. When I got home, I went upstairs to shower. After twenty minutes under the hot water, I still didn’t feel clean.
The next morning was overcast – more than overcast. The skies were heavy with rain, and the air was ominously still. When Taylor and I were leaving the house, the first drops began. Angus came out the front door just as we were getting in the car.
“Did you take out the garbage?” I asked.
He started with an excuse.
“No excuses,” I said. “You better get it out quick before the rain hits.”
Grumbling, he threw his books down on the porch and ran into the house. “You’re my hero,” I yelled, and Taylor and I drove off.
When I came back fifteen minutes later, it was raining hard. Angus’s schoolbooks were still on the front porch. I went into the house, calling his name. Uneasy, I opened the door to the backyard. Angus wasn’t there, and the gate that opened into the back alley was open. Angus never left that gate open. He always worried that harm would come to the dogs if they got out of our backyard. As I ran toward the gate, I felt the edge of panic.
There was a puddle just past the gate. I jumped it, but when I came down, I lost my footing in the mud and fell. In a split second, our collie, Sadie, was with me. My husband had always made jokes about Sadie. She was a beautiful animal, but not a smart one. Ian used to call her the show girl. That day the show girl was right on the money. She put her nose under my shoulder and tried to push me up. Then she barked and loped down the alley. She stopped in front of our garbage bin. Our other dog was there, and so was Angus. He was lying in the mud, moaning. I pushed myself up and went to him. His face was ashen.
“The garbage,” he said, in a small, strangled voice.
“Don’t worry about the garbage,” I said. “What happened to you?”
Mute, he shook his head. His eyes were wide with shock. He put his arms around my neck and pulled himself up.
“Don’t look in the garbage,” he said.
I lifted him up and carried him into the house. He was a dead weight and he was covered in mud. I put him on the chair in the kitchen, and he sat there staring into space, holding his leg and crying. His behaviour scared me. Our kids had had their share of sports injuries, but after the first shock, they’d rallied. Angus wasn’t rallying. In fact, he seemed to be sinking deeper into pain.
“I’m taking you to emergency,” I said. “I think we should let a doctor have a look at you.”
“Don’t leave her there,” he said. “We can’t go to the hospital and just leave her out there.”
“Leave who?” I said. “I got the dogs in. We’re all okay.”
“There’s a girl out there in our garbage,” he said. “She’s dead.”
I looked at him. Telling me seemed to calm him. I ran through the yard to the alley. Our city sanitation unit uses industrial waste bins, the kind a garbage truck can unload automatically. I looked into ours. On top of the garbage there was a girl. She was lying on her back. Her peroxided Madonna hair shot out like a halo around the bloody ruins of what had once been her face. Her shirt was soaked with blood, but the rain had washed one patch clean, and I could make out the original colour. Popsicle orange. I would have known it anywhere. Suddenly the air was split with the sound of screaming. Frozen, I listened until somewhere inside, I recognized the voice of the screamer as my own.
The next minutes still have a special terrible clarity for me. I ran to the house. I put on the kettle, called the doctor, and then I called the police. I called Mieka at Judgements, told her there had been a problem at home and asked her to pick Taylor up from school at lunchtime and take her somewhere. I could hear Mieka’s voice, urgent, still asking questions, when I hung up the phone. The kettle boiled. I made Angus tea with a lot of sugar and gave him two Aspirins, then I sat at the kitchen table with him until the police and our doctor came.
The police made it first. I had thought when I met Inspector Tom Zaba that he had the kind of face that was made for smiling, but when I looked at him as he came through the doorway of our kitchen that morning I thought he would never smile again. He was wearing a slicker and he was soaked with rain. Even the ends of his moustache drooped with wet. He looked ineffably sad.
When our doctor came, she took one look at Angus’s leg and said he needed to be seen by an orthopedic surgeon. Inspector Zaba asked if he could talk to Angus first. She agreed.
Inspector Zaba was very gentle with Angus, and he was very gentle with me. But all the gentleness in the world couldn’t undo the horror of what had happened to Kim Barilko. From my kitchen window I could see police cars driving along the rain-pounded alley, disgorging people into the muddy gravel so they could bag evidence and measure and photograph and turn the last hours of a human life into something that could be contained in a storage box. An RCMP cruiser pulled up, and I saw Constable Perry Kequahtooway get out. Outside the rain pounded on, implacable.
When I’d finished answering Inspector Zaba’s questions, I stood up to go to the hospital with Angus.
Inspector Zaba stood, too. “One more question, Mrs. Kilbourn,” he said. “Was Kim Barilko on her way to tell you something last night?”
“No,” I said, “I was going to tell her something. There was someone I knew who wanted to help Kim make some changes in her life.” I told him about the Lily Pad and the mentor program, and he wrote it down without comment. When he’d finished, he put the cap on his pen and fixed it in his shirt pocket.
“Mrs. Kilbourn, you must have been struck by the pattern here,” he said. “Two girls are murdered in less than a month, and a third young woman commits suicide. In all three instances, a member of your family is on the scene when the death is discovered. Bernice Morin dies hours after she is seen by Christy Sinclair. Two days later, Christy Sinclair dies. Kim Barilko goes to Christy Sinclair’s funeral, and now she dies. There’s got to be a connection.”
“I know,” I said dully. “I just don’t know what it is. But I have to know
something. Did Kim have a tattoo? A teddy bear tattoo on her left buttock?”
He looked at me hard, and in his eyes I could see the bleak knowledge of human depravity that had been in Jill Osiowy’s eyes when she had shown me the photos of the Little Flower murders.
“No tattoo,” he said. “But there was another trademark. Kim Barilko’s tongue was split,” he said simply. “Someone had slit it right from the tip to the place where it hinged at the back of her mouth.”
I could feel the gorge rise in the back of my throat, and I covered my mouth with my hands.
“Why?” I said.
Inspector Tom Zaba was impassive. “The tongue thing is a street punishment for a snitch.” He waited for a beat. “I’m not swaggering when I tell you this, Mrs. Kilbourn. I’m trying to impress you with the fact that these people don’t have a special code for dealing with nice ladies who want to help fallen girls. If you’re in their way, they’ll kill you. It’s that simple. I don’t think either of us wants to see that. Stay away, Mrs. Kilbourn. These people play by rules a woman like you couldn’t even begin to understand.”
As we pulled up at the emergency ward, Inspector Zaba’s warning was replaying itself in my head. Our doctor and the police officer who’d come with us to the hospital took Angus up to X-ray and I sat alone in the emergency room, waiting. I don’t know how long I waited. Twice, volunteers, nice-looking women with pastel smocks and expensive perfume, came over to ask if they could get me anything, but I waved them away. My mind had gone into white space. When the orthopedic surgeon came to tell me about the extent of Angus’s injury, I had trouble for a minute sorting out what he was talking about. He was an earnest young man with a quick grin and a reassuring manner. His identification tag said his name was Dr. Eric Leung.
“We’ve X-rayed it twice,” he said. “It’s a simple triangular break in the tibia.” He touched the front of his leg to show me. “Angus tells me when he saw the dead girl, he started running and his toe caught on something and snapped his foot back. There’s no need for surgery. You can come back with me while I put the cast on, if you like.”
I followed him into the elevator.
“Angus will need the cast for about three weeks,” he said. He looked at me. “Are you all right, Mrs. Kilbourn? The break could have been a lot worse. It was really a lucky break.” Then, shaking his head at his joke, he stepped out of the elevator.
As I followed him down the hall, the words pounded against my consciousness. Lucky break, lucky break. The boy at the Lily Pad had dropped his guard long enough to say that Kim Barilko needed a lucky break. Now my son had one. Who made the decision about who lost and who won? As I stepped into the brightly lit cast room, I knew I didn’t want to know the answer.
When Angus and I went home an hour and a half later, Mieka and Greg were waiting at the front door. Angus was still punchy from the Demerol, so Greg carried him to his bedroom, and Mieka went along to tuck him in.
I was pretty punchy myself. I was trying to decide whether I wanted a cup of tea or three fingers of bourbon when Jill Osiowy walked out of our kitchen. She was ashen, and her eyes were swollen.
“It was the girl I was supposed to be the mentor for, wasn’t it?” Jill said.
I nodded.
“One of our guys lives in your neighbourhood. He took some footage of her. I couldn’t believe it …” Jill’s voice was very small and quiet. “I think you have to back off, Jo. They’re starting to get close to your family now.”
“I think we should both back off,” I said.
Jill raked her hands through her hair. “No,” she said, “I’m not giving up. If the network won’t give me any help on this, I’ll do it on my own time. People can’t be allowed to get away with this.”
I put my arms around her. “No,” I said, “they can’t. But, Jill, I don’t want to think about any of this right now. In fact, for about twenty-four hours I don’t want to think about anything.”
Just then the phone rang. Jill shook her head. “Good luck with that wish,” she said.
It was Peter. He’d just gotten Mieka’s message to call. When he heard the news, he said he was coming home. I told him not to. He said he was coming anyway. Then Keith called from Toronto. He said he was coming back on the four o’clock flight. It was going to be a full house.
By seven-thirty everyone was sitting in the living room. Only Taylor and Angus were missing. Samantha’s mother had called offering to take Taylor for the night, and Angus had eaten a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and slipped back to sleep.
It was an awkward evening. After the initial embraces and reassurances, no one knew what to do next. The wound of Kim Barilko’s death was too fresh for reflection and too overwhelming to make other conversation possible. At nine, the storm knocked the power out, and I think all of us were grateful for the sense of purpose hunting down candles and flashlights gave us. Mieka and Greg took candles to the kitchen and came back a little later with a tray of sandwiches and beer. It was reassuring to know that in a world of unspeakable horror, we could still handle the small stuff.
At eleven, the power came back on, and we watched the local news. Everyone was silent as the image of our house filled the screen. The camera lingered just long enough for the curious to know which house to stop in front of when they came looking, then there was a long shot of our back fence and our cottonwood tree, and finally, the big payoff, our garbage bin. There wasn’t much information, just that there had been a murder and mutilation; that the victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been found in a garbage bin beside Wascana Creek in South Regina. Name was being withheld until notification, et cetera.
The next story was the storm. There were shots of trees with severed limbs and scarred trunks, of people being rescued from cars trapped in underpasses, and on the lighter side, as the news reporter said, shots of kids waving and grinning as they canoed down residential streets. When the news was over, I turned off the television. In the sudden silence I sat awkwardly twirling the Wandering Soul bracelet on my wrist till Mieka suggested we all go to bed.
The kids went up to shower, and Keith and I were left alone in the kitchen. I walked to the window that faced the backyard. I’d opened it that morning to let the fresh air in. It was still open; in the distance I could hear a radio playing. I stood for a moment, listening, looking at the soft fuzz of yellow the garage lights made in the rainy night. Keith came over and put his arms around me.
“I’m wondering if anything is ever going to be the same again,” I said.
He pulled me closer, but he didn’t answer.
It rained more that June than it had since our provincial weather bureau began record keeping, but the really bad storms began on the day of Kim Barilko’s death. That night as I listened to the rain falling, implacable, unrelenting, images of Kim kept swimming up behind my eyes. Sometimes the image was of her face the day we had walked to the Lily Pad together, defiant behind the makeup mask that couldn’t disguise the pubescent bumps of a child’s skin. Then, horribly, there was the other face, the appalling mutilation I had seen that morning. Outside the thunder cracked and the lightning split the skies. It would have been comforting to believe the heavens were crying for Kim Barilko. It would have been comforting, but it would have been a crock.
CHAPTER
9
The letter came the last week of June. For three weeks I had made a conscious effort to pull Angus and me back into our old, safe world. The small triangular break in Angus’s tibia that I had seen on the X-ray was just the tip of the iceberg. More than one fragile bone had been shattered by the grim reality of Kim Barilko’s death, and the knitting together of these hidden fractures was not going to be easy.
Kim Barilko’s murder didn’t have much staying power as far as the media was concerned. By the time the weekend edition of the newspaper was published, the story had moved off the front page to page five; the following Monday, it had disappeared altogether.
But for me Kim would not disappear.
Our last official visit from Inspector Zaba came late Friday afternoon. He had shaved his moustache, and the pale line of his lip made him look more wounded by life than ever. His news wasn’t much. Forensic evidence seemed to suggest that Kim had not been killed in our alley. She had been murdered somewhere else and dumped there. There were no leads to the identity of her murderer.
“Trust me, Mrs. Kilbourn, this is not surprising in a street death,” he had said. “Most of the time we don’t settle these things. The Lily Pad angle was a blank, too. The board of that place is as close to an elite as you’ll find in a city this size.” He sounded exhausted.
When he left, he warned me again about the need to be careful. “Put this behind you, Mrs. Kilbourn. Put the experience behind you, and put the people behind you. What’s done is done.”
But try as I might, I could not put Kim Barilko’s death behind me because there was no doubt in my mind that I was responsible for it. Keith had tried to reassure me: “Jo, you don’t like it and I don’t like it, but face facts. The day Kim was born a lot of things were already settled for her, and one of those things was that she wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. You know the kind of world she lived in. Violence is always the first option there. You can’t hold yourself responsible for being part of her life when someone exercised that option.”
“That’s the third time I’ve heard that argument,” I said. “I still don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Keith said.
And I tried. I tried, because the alternative was unbearable. In those first days, I was haunted by my guilt. If I had reached out to Christy Sinclair, she wouldn’t have committed suicide; if I had left Kim Barilko alone, she wouldn’t have been murdered.