The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  As I looked at Taylor wearing a shirt that was right-side out and socks that matched, it was obvious that Angus had talked to her, too. The exemplary behaviour continued as we ran back and forth to the car, packing in the rain. There were no complaints from anybody about getting wet or about having to leave things behind. We hit the road early, just as the nine o’clock news came on the car radio, and no one suggested we stop for drinks or a bathroom until we drove into Chamberlain, about ninety kilometres from home. The station where we stopped gave out small Canadian flags with a gas purchase. Angus stuck his in his hat and Taylor put hers in her ponytail. They looked so patriotic that the gas station attendant gave them each a colouring book about a beaver who wanted to find the true meaning of Canada. Taylor was usually contemptuous of colouring books, but the beaver and his friends were cleverly drawn, and as we pulled away, she was already tracing the lines with her fingers, making them part of her muscle memory. The rest of the drive in the rain was quiet and companionable, and I enjoyed it.

  We pulled up in front of Hilda’s neat bungalow on Melrose Avenue just before noon. The Canadian flag was flying from the porch at the front of Hilda’s house, a bright splash of red and white through the grey mist of rain. As Hilda opened the door and held her arms out in greeting, there was another burst of radiant colour. In her early eighties, Hilda McCourt was still a riveting figure. Today, she was wearing a jumpsuit the colour of a Flanders poppy and her hair, dyed an even more brilliant red than usual, was swept back by a red-and-white striped silk scarf.

  The kids made a run for the house. Hilda stopped them at the door. “Let me have a look at you before you disappear,” she said. She examined them carefully. “Well, you’re obviously thriving. There’s a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table for you. Quite a challenging one, at least for me. Harold Town’s Tower of Babble. Taylor, your mother told me once that she thought Harold Town was splendid. Why don’t you and Angus have a look and see what you think?”

  As we watched the kids run down the hall, Hilda put her arm through mine. “Now, how about a little Glenfiddich to ease the traveller?”

  I followed her gratefully. As we walked through to the glassed-in porch at the back of her house, I caught sight of the table set for lunch in the dining room. Red napkins carefully arranged in crystal water glasses, a white organdy tablecloth, red zinnias in a creamy earthenware pitcher.

  “Lovely,” I said.

  “Not subtle,” she said, “but I don’t believe this is the year to be subtle about our country.”

  Hilda’s back room was as individual and fine as she was. On the inside wall, there was an old horsehair chaise longue covered by a lacy afghan. At the foot of the chaise longue was a TV; at the head was a table with a good reading lamp and a stack of magazines. The current issue of Canadian Forum was on top. Along the wall, a trestle table held blooming plants. In the centre of the table a space had been cleared for three framed photographs: Robert Stanfield, T.C. Douglas and Pierre Trudeau.

  “That’s quite a triptych,” I said, looking down at them.

  “Two men who should have been prime minister and one who probably shouldn’t have,” Hilda said briskly. Then she tapped the frame of the Trudeau photo. “But what style that man had, and what fun he was.”

  She poured the Glenfiddich, handed me a glass and raised her own.

  “To Canada,” she said.

  “To Canada,” I said.

  “Now,” she said, “let’s sit and watch the rain and you can tell me what brought you here.”

  As I felt the Scotch warming my body, I realized how much I wanted to talk.

  I took off the bracelet and handed it to her. “It all began with this,” I said.

  She turned it carefully. “ ‘Wandering Soul Pray For Me,’ ” she said. “Intriguing, but I’ve seen a bracelet like this before, you know. In fact, there were several of them at the duty-free shop in Belfast. The story was that monks hammered the silver by hand. Whoever did the hammering, these bracelets are costly – in more ways than one, but I presume by your face you’ve already discovered that. The intent, of course, is to remind the traveller that no matter how far afield she goes, the one left behind is still linked to her.” She handed the bracelet back to me. “Who have you left behind, Joanne?”

  In the garden a tiny pine siskin was feeding at Hilda’s bird feeder. I watched until it flew away, then I turned to Hilda.

  “Nobody,” I said. “And that’s the problem. There are two people I can’t seem to leave behind no matter how hard I try.”

  “And you’ve decided to confide in me about it.”

  “I’ve decided to let you tell me what to do next,” I said.

  I told her everything, starting with the morning Mieka found Bernice Morin’s body in the garbage can behind Judgements and ending with Beth Mirasty’s letter.

  When I was finished, Hilda looked at me levelly. “And your intention is to go to Havre Lake in search of Christy Sinclair?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When I put it all together like this, my behaviour seems quixotic even to me. My husband used to say that there was nothing more terrifying than blind goodness loosed upon the world. You meet a lot of Don Quixotes in politics, you know. Certain they know what’s best for everyone, tilting at windmills, rescuing the downtrodden whether they want to be rescued or not. I don’t want to be like that, Hilda.”

  “And yet you can’t walk away,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t walk away.” I held up the bracelet. “Because of this. Because a woman gave me this bracelet and then she died. And suddenly it wasn’t just a bracelet any more. Hilda, tell me honestly. Did you feel the power in this?”

  “No,” she said, thoughtfully, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Your grandmother wouldn’t have had any trouble putting a name to the pull you’re feeling. She would have called it conscience. And she wouldn’t have thought you were quixotic. She would have thought you were trying to right a wrong you did to another human being. Joanne, I’ve been listening carefully to you, and I know why you’re so resolute about Christy Sinclair. To use a word that makes people uneasy these days, you feel that you sinned against her. A sin of omission. In your dealings with her you showed a want of Charitas. Most often that word is translated as charity, but you have Latin, Joanne, you know the correct translation.”

  “Love,” I said. “Charitas means love. Christy needed my love and I didn’t give it to her.” Suddenly, I was tired of the burden. I slammed the bracelet down on the table.

  “Damn it, Hilda, how could I love her? She was so unlovable – the lies, the obsessions, the need. She needed so much. Every time I turned around, she was there, needing me to love her.” My voice was shrill with exasperation. “How could I love her? I didn’t even like her.”

  “According to Reinhold Niebuhr, God told us to love our enemies, not to like them,” Hilda said dryly.

  “Reinhold Niebuhr never knew Christy,” I said.

  The bracelet lay on the table in front of me, a dull circle of reproach. I picked it up and slid it on my wrist.

  “It’s too late, Hilda,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do to make it up to her now.”

  “It’s never too late, Joanne. You know that.”

  “But what do I do?”

  Hilda touched my hand. “You know the answer to that as well as I. You ask forgiveness, and then you try to make amends.”

  She held up the Glenfiddich. “Now before you begin that arduous work, would you like what the Scots call ‘a drap for your soul’?”

  I held out my glass. “I think my soul could use it,” I said.

  Lunch was good. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, garden peas, new carrots, and, for dessert, strawberry Jell-O and real whipped cream. By the time we’d eaten and I’d rounded up the kids, the rain had stopped, and I felt ready for the drive north. Hilda walked with me to the car. We said our goodbyes, then she put her hand on my arm.

  “I almost forgot to tel
l you how splendidly you’re doing on Canada Today. You were a little shaky at the beginning, but now you seem very assured.”

  “I’m feeling better about it,” I said. “And Keith and Sam have been a real help.”

  “There seems to be a certain warmth between you and Keith Harris.”

  I could feel myself blush. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only to someone who knows you well,” she said. “Is it serious?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve had so many outside problems to deal with. Keith was supposed to be with me today, but his father’s condition is worse, so he stayed behind to take care of things.”

  Hilda’s eyes were sad. “I’m sorry to hear that about Blaine.”

  “You know him?” I said, surprised. “I can’t imagine you two travelling in the same circles.”

  “He was a great proponent of regional libraries, as, of course, am I. We were on any number of boards and committees together when the libraries were being set up.”

  “What was he like?” I asked. “I didn’t meet him until after he’d had his stroke.”

  Hilda looked thoughtful. “I think Blaine Harris is the most moral man I’ve ever met. There’s an incident I remember particularly. During the summer of 1958, we had a series of community meetings, and after one of them we had lunch at a diner in Whitewood. Later that afternoon we stopped for gas and Blaine noticed he’d received a dollar extra in change from the cashier at the diner. He drove back to Whitewood to return the money. He apologized to me for what he called our thirty-mile detour, but he said he couldn’t have slept that night if he hadn’t known things were set right. That’s the kind of man he was, utterly fair and just.”

  We spent the night in Prince Albert, a small city 150 kilometres north of Saskatoon, famous for the fact that when it had the choice of being home to the province’s university or a federal penitentiary, it chose the pen. In fact, the reason we were stopping in Prince Albert was the jail. Angus had seen a TV program about the prison museum, so late on the afternoon of July 1, Taylor and I were following Angus through dim rooms filled with painfully crafted weapons confiscated from hidden places in the bodies of prisoners. A celebration of Canadian ingenuity.

  That night we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant Ian and I had liked when we had campaigned in the north. Taylor ate a whole order of almond prawns and nodded off at the dinner table. We went to the motel and I switched on Canada Today. The warmth between Keith and me was apparent even on TV; just to see him made me lonely for him. I’d forgotten how painful physical longing could be, and after five minutes I turned the television off and took a shower.

  We were all in bed by nine o’clock. The kids slipped into sleep easily. I lay in the dark, listening to the radio. There had been a contest earlier that day; people from all over Canada had been asked to call in with their renditions of our national anthem. A physics class from Halifax played ten pop bottles filled with water; four high-school principals from Saskatoon sang a barbershop harmony; a young girl from Manitoba sang in Ojibway; a Canada goose from Don Mills, Ontario, was disqualified because she was a fraud; a Vancouver group called the Raging Grannies offered a social commentary.

  O Canada.

  I slept well and woke up to a room filled with sunshine and fresh northern air. On impulse I called Peter. The phone rang and rang, and I was about to hang up when Peter answered, sounding breathless and happy. He had just come in – it was a beautiful morning in the southwest, hot already, and still, and he and Susan, the young woman who trained horses, had just come in from riding through the hills.

  “It sounds idyllic,” I said.

  “It is idyllic, Mum,” he said quietly. “Everything is starting to look very good again.”

  “And Susan is …”

  “Susan is the best part,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “I love you, Peter.”

  “Same here, Mum.”

  I was hanging up when I heard his voice. “Mum, I haven’t forgotten Christy.”

  “Neither have I,” I said. Then I did hang up.

  The Northern Lights Motel was just off the Hansen Lake Road. It was the kind of place I would have picked to stay in myself: a low-slung log building that housed a restaurant and a store. In the pines out back, I could see a dozen or so log cabins. On each side of the door to the restaurant, truck tires, painted white, bloomed with pink petunias. The effect was clean and cheerful. Other people must have liked the place, too; a no-vacancy sign hung on the hitching post near the entrance.

  There were two people in the restaurant. A man, dressed in the newest and best from the Tilley catalogue, sat at a back booth, looking at the menu through round-lensed tortoiseshell glasses. A slender young native woman, wearing blue jeans and a dazzlingly white sleeveless cotton blouse, stood beside him, taking his order. She was a striking figure; her profile was delicate, and her hair, held back from her face by beadwork barrettes, fell shining and straight to her waist.

  The kids and I sat down at the counter. There wasn’t much of a demarcation between the restaurant and the store. I knew that if I ordered lake trout, the fish would have been swimming in Havre Lake twenty-four hours earlier, but if I ordered beans, the cook would walk three steps to the store and take the beans off the shelf. The wall behind the counter was filled with Polaroids of weekend fishermen squinting into the sun, holding up their prize catches: northern pike, walleye, lake trout, whitefish.

  Angus grabbed my arm and pointed to a sign over the cash register: “Shower Free with Meal. Otherwise $3.50. $5.00 deposit on towels.”

  “That wouldn’t exactly bankrupt you, would it?” I whispered.

  He grinned, slid off the stool and went over to look at a display of hooks and lures. Taylor followed him.

  The woman who had been taking the order came over to our table. She touched my wrist with her index finger.

  “Her bracelet,” she said softly. “I’m so glad you came, Mrs. Kilbourn. Just let me put in that man’s order and we can talk.” She turned to Angus. “If you walk down that road out there toward the lake, you’ll see my son fishing on the dock. He says the jack are really biting today.”

  Angus shot me a pleading look.

  “Half an hour,” I said. “We have to get you settled in camp and get ourselves to Blue Heron Point.”

  He was out the door in a flash. When Beth Mirasty came back, she had a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses.

  “Let’s go out back where we can be quiet,” she said. She smiled at Taylor. “Would you like to learn how to make wishbone dolls?” she asked softly. “My kokom’s sewing today. She could teach you.”

  Taylor looked at her curiously. “Is Kokom your little girl?” she asked.

  “Kokom is Mrs. Mirasty’s grandmother,” I said. “That’s how you say grandmother in Cree.”

  The back room appeared to be the family living room. It was simply furnished, and everything in it shone. The linoleum was hard-polished and the pine furniture gleamed. I thought I would like to stay in a motel owned by Beth Mirasty. An old woman sat in a rocking chair by the window. There was a lace curtain behind her, as dazzlingly white as Beth Mirasty’s blouse; the old woman was wearing a pink dress, and her white hair was carefully fixed with beadwork combs, pink and green and white. In front of her was a birch basket filled with scraps of fabric. She was sewing one of them onto a quilt on her knee.

  When she heard us, the old lady looked up. She didn’t smile, but there was something about her that was welcoming.

  “The little one would like to know how to make wishbone dolls, Kokom,” Beth said.

  The old woman leaned forward and said something to Taylor. Then she pointed toward a doorway that seemed to lead into the rest of the flat. Taylor ran off where she had pointed.

  “First, you need chicken bones,” the old lady said to me.

  After Beth introduced us and poured the lemonade, the old lady sat with her hands folded until Taylor came back with a coffee
can. The old lady reached into the coffee can, took out a wishbone and handed it to Taylor. “Think about the face you want to put on the little part that sticks out at the top,” she said.

  In the corner was the TV. A large coloured photo of Christy and me was in a frame on top of it. I went to look closer. It was a shot of us in front of the Christmas tree. Christy was wearing a Santa Claus sweatshirt and red overalls. She was holding an old plastic angel.

  I remembered the moment. We were decorating the tree, and after the picture was taken, Christy had asked me to tell her the story of how we got the angel.

  I had laughed and said, “Oh, it’s just one of those boring family stories.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “please.”

  And so I had told her how, when Mieka was in kindergarten, she had told her teacher that we were a Catholic family who had lost our angel, and the woman had given it to her for Christmas. And I had told her about how Angus had eaten the pasta off the jar-ring-framed picture of the dogs he had made in grade one, and about the time when Sadie was a pup and Peter had hung dog biscuits on the branches of the tree and we had come down Christmas morning to discover that Sadie had knocked down the tree and eaten the dog biscuits and half the ornaments. Ordinary family stories, but Christy’s yearning as I told them had been almost palpable.

  Behind me, Beth Mirasty said, “She brought me that picture herself when she came home before New Year’s. She was so proud of it.”

  The week between Christmas and New Year’s. We had all planned to go skiing that week. Then, out of nowhere, Christy had announced she was going to Minneapolis with friends. When she came back, she had talked endlessly about the operas they had seen and the restaurants where they had eaten. More lies.

  “She said last Christmas was the best one she’d ever had,” Beth Mirasty said softly. She picked up the picture and we walked over and sat on a couch in the corner. “Theresa told me you had made her part of your family.”