by Gail Bowen
“I just got here,” I said.
Flanked by the two women, her poppy shawl clutched tightly across her breast, Livia Brook looked anxious, a mother separating warring twins she can no longer control. She had reason to look uneasy. Naama’s reinvention of herself was proceeding apace. Since I’d last seen her, she’d added a triple ear-piercing, a smudge of black eyeliner beneath her lower lids, and a wrist full of delicate silver bangles. She was forty years old. Her transformation of herself into an imperfect imitation of an idol thirteen years her junior was both sad and scary. I wasn’t surprised that Solange looked ready to bolt.
“You’re obviously in the middle of something,” I said. “I came to ask about ‘Red Riding Hood,’ but from what Solange just said the issue’s settled, so I’ll let you get back to your discussion.”
Solange broke away from the others. “I’ll come with you, Joanne. There’s something we have to talk about.”
“So you’ve defected,” Ann said bitterly.
“A difference of opinion doesn’t mean a defection,” Solange said. “I’m surprised at you, Ann. Aren’t women allowed to disagree? And anyway, what I need to talk to Joanne about has nothing to do with you. Ariel’s ashes are being buried at a small service, and her parents have asked me to help with the planning.”
Ann Vogel was galvanized. “I’ll get on the e-mail. I can make sure every woman at this university turns out for Ariel. I belong to other groups, too. This can be city-wide.”
“No!” Solange’s response was adamant. “That’s exactly what the Warrens don’t want. When they’re ready, they’ll have a public memorial service for Ariel, but they want this ceremony to be private. They have a place on an island at Lac La Ronge.”
“The Political Science department should be represented,” Livia said.
“It will be,” Solange replied. “I’ll be there, and so will Joanne if she chooses to come.” She turned to me. “Will you come?”
“If the Warrens want me there, of course.”
“Joanne’s invited!” Ann Vogel’s words had the biting fury of a child shut out of a birthday party. “Livia and I were both closer to Ariel than Joanne was. Why was she invited instead of us?”
Solange was placating. “You’d have to ask the Warrens. They made up the list, and they had to deal with logistics. The only way to their island is by private plane – the seating is limited.”
Livia bit her lip. “I have a right to be there,” she said. She seemed close to tears.
“You can’t keep us away.” Ann Vogel’s voice was thick with menace. “Ariel was a Red Riding Hood. We have every right to be there. We have every right to avenge her.”
As we walked down the hall towards my office, Solange filled me in on our travel plans. “We’ll meet at the airport at seven Thursday morning and fly to Lac La Ronge. Of course, there’ll be a couple of stops along the way. From Prince Albert, we take a float-plane to the island. Molly said she thought we’d just spend a little time together with Ariel, then bury the ashes and come back to Regina. We’ll be home before dark. Sound okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m giving my mid-term Thursday, but I know Ed Mariani will invigilate it for me.”
“It’s settled then,” Solange said, then she looked away. “Joanne, I wasn’t honest about the number of seats on the plane. There’s room for one more. Molly didn’t want a circus, so she told me to use my discretion about whom, if anyone, we ask to take the extra seat. I honestly can’t think of anyone who won’t make matters worse, but if you know of someone who should be there …”
“I do,” I said. “But I’ll check with Molly Warren before I say anything to him.”
When I phoned Molly from my office telling her I needed to talk with her about something that was best dealt with face to face, she was apologetic.
“I hate to ask, but would it be possible for you to come down to my office?” she said. “I’m booking off Thursday, so we’ve rescheduled patients today and tomorrow. I won’t be able to get away.”
“I can come down there easily,” I said. “Is there any time that’s better than others?”
She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “All times are equally bad. And now is as good a time as any.”
Parking was usually next to impossible in the streets around the glass tower that housed Molly Warren’s offices, but that afternoon I was lucky. I found a spot half a block away, plugged the meter with enough quarters to let me languish in the waiting room for an hour and a half if need be, and took the elevator to the eleventh floor. The Delft-blue waiting room was standing room only, but when I announced my presence to Molly Warren’s nurse, Katie, she ushered me directly into Molly’s office. I was grateful. That day I didn’t have the heart to share couch space with the bountifully pregnant and the anxious-eyed.
“Dr. Warren will be right with you,” Katie said. “She’s with a patient, but she should be finished soon.”
Katie was an attractive woman with brown eyes, dimples, a passion for pastels, and a professional manner that managed to be warm without being cloying. She gestured to a chair in front of the desk. “Make yourself comfortable. There’s coffee if you’d like.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve had a busy morning. It’ll be good just to sit.”
Katie didn’t leave. “People think if you work in health care you get used to death. But you don’t. At least I haven’t. I can’t believe Ariel’s gone. She was in the office last week. She was going to take her mother out to lunch, but Dr. Warren had an emergency and she had to cancel.” Katie shook her head. “I hope the two of them managed to find time to talk.”
“They were close?”
Katie hesitated. “They were mother and daughter,” she said finally, as if that in itself were an answer.
“How is Dr. Warren doing?”
“She’s unbelievable. I know she must be torn apart inside, but she hasn’t missed an appointment. If it had been my daughter, I’d be in the basement staring down the business end of a shotgun.”
“I’d probably be thinking about that, too,” I said.
Katie straightened the edge of the file she was holding. “I’d better get back out front. Dr. Warren will be in as soon as she can get away.”
“I’m in no hurry,” I said.
I waited a few minutes; then, restless, I began to explore. Two sides of the room were lined with bookshelves upon which framed degrees, awards, and photographs of Molly Warren at meetings of professional organizations had been interspersed artfully among medical texts and bound journals. I took out a bound journal from the bookshelf. Its table of contents listed articles dealing with the vagaries to which the complex, moon-tied bodies of women are heir: uterine bleeding, chronic pelvic pain, cervical dysplasia, endometriosis, infertility, menopause and peri-menopause, ovarian cysts and cancers, pregnancy (ectopic, hysterical, normal), and birth with its many complications.
I slid the book back into place, and picked up a high-gloss magazine that had been filed next to it. The magazine was really an advertising supplement, trumpeting the wares of a company that manufactured equipment that could produce three-dimensional ultrasounds. I flipped through and found myself looking at a reproduction of a three-month-old foetus, the age Ariel’s child had been. I wondered if its presence in this neatly shelved collection of texts meant that Molly Warren had been revisiting what she knew of the characteristics of the grandchild she would never see.
I was staring at the photo when Molly came in. She looked pale and tired, but she was immaculate: fresh makeup, hair carefully tousled, a champagne silk blouse with matching trousers, and her trademark stiletto heels in creamy leather.
She leaned over my shoulder to stare at the page. “The technology is amazing, isn’t it?”
“Neo-Natronix’s or Mother Nature’s?” I asked.
Molly gave me a wan smile. “Both.”
She made no move to sit down. There was a room filled with people waiting for her to diagnose, absolve, p
rescribe, or doom. She was allotting me precious time; it was up to me to use it.
“Did you know that Ariel was pregnant?” I asked.
One of Molly Warren’s gold and pearl earrings dropped from her ear and clattered onto the floor. “Damn,” she said, and there were tears in her voice. She bent to pick up the earring, then went over and sat in the chair opposite me, the doctor’s chair. She slid the earring back through the piercing in her lobe. “I’d suspected,” she said. “Ariel and I were supposed to have lunch together last week. I had to cancel on her. Maybe she was planning to tell me then.”
“Molly, I came down today because I wanted to talk to you about the baby’s father.”
Her azure gaze grew cold. “What about him?”
“Solange told me there was room on the plane for another passenger. I think the baby’s father should be there.” I could feel the chill so I hurried on. “I know him,” I said. “He teaches in the Theatre department. He really is a very fine man.”
Molly’s eyes grew wide, and she leaned forward in her chair. “You mean Charlie wasn’t the father?”
“No. Ariel wanted a child, and she asked a man she knew and respected to help her.”
Molly’s hand wandered to her earlobe to check that her earring was in place. It was, in every way, an uncertain world. “Ariel was always a mystery,” she said softly. “I never quite understood what made her tick.”
“Would it be all right if I asked Fraser to come tomorrow?”
“Is that his name? Fraser?”
“Yes,” I said. “Fraser Jackson. One other thing you should know. Fraser is black.”
“I couldn’t care less about that,” Molly said. “Just as long as he isn’t Charlie. I’m glad my daughter found someone else. Charlie was destroying her.” Molly’s face crumpled. “I guess in that archive room he just finished the job.”
CHAPTER
9
I called Fraser Jackson from the public telephone in the lobby of the building in which Molly Warren had her office. Phoning the father of Ariel’s baby was the right thing, but it was hard for me to do. I knew that Howard would see the call as a betrayal of Charlie, of Marnie, and of himself, and as I caught my reflection in the mirrored wall by the elevators, I thought that Howard might not be far off the mark.
Fraser Jackson seemed grateful to hear from me, but as I extended Molly’s invitation and ran through the travel arrangements, he was mercifully to the point. The trip north would be heavily freighted with emotion, and it was apparent we both wanted the logistics handled with dispatch. After we had arranged the details about where to meet the next morning, I thought I was home free, but Fraser had one final question.
“Is the service a burial?”
“Of the ashes,” I said. “Ariel will be cremated later today.”
There was silence, then a gentle correction. “Ariel and the baby will be cremated later today. When we fly north, we’ll be taking them both, Joanne.”
As I pulled onto Albert Street, I shrank at the thought of the next day. There was no getting around the fact that, in the words of that long-forgotten play, it would be filled with love, pain, and the whole damned thing, but for me there would be an extra agony, one that was both personal and shameful. I would be spending much of the next day in airplanes of one size or another, and I was terrified of flying. I went to embarrassing lengths to avoid even the most routine commercial flight, and the idea of being in a tiny float-plane hovering over the vast, unforgiving water of Lac La Ronge filled me with dread.
I had no choice about the flight north, but it was still in my power to make the next few hours bearable. If I could manage an afternoon in the sun, a pleasant dinner with the kids, a stiff drink, and an early night, I might just survive.
I parked in front of Pacific Fish, paid Neptune’s ransom for five tuna steaks, then walked across to the supermarket for new potatoes, baby carrots, asparagus, and a jar of giant olives. To complete the meal, I needed a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a good Merlot; the liquor store had both. Finally, obeying my old friend Sally Love’s dictum that “Life is uncertain; we should eat dessert first,” I drove to Saje Restaurant, and bought a chocolate truffle cake. As soon as I got home, I put the gin in the refrigerator, made a marinade of soy sauce, ginger, and rice vinegar for the tuna, scrubbed the potatoes and carrots, snapped the woody parts off the asparagus stalks, and went out to the deck with a cup of Earl Grey and a stack of essays from my Political Science 101 class.
For the next two hours, I sniffed the lilacs and wandered through the maze of freshman prose. It wasn’t fun, but it was familiar turf, and I felt my mind slip into cruise control. Halfway through the stack, I came upon something that pulled me up short: a truly original paper titled “Funkional Politix.” The essay took issue with the idea that in our post-ideological age, it was savvy to be without either ideals or ideas. It called for a new politics, characterized by civility, co-operation, and commitment. I read the paper through twice. It was the work of a student named Lena Eisenberg. Surprisingly, considering I had only met the class twice, Lena’s name conjured up a face, that of a whip-thin, tightly wound girl with dreadlocks and clever eyes. I was grateful to her. For almost an hour, her obvious delight in the workings of her mind kept my mind from thoughts of hurtling through space in a pressurized metal tube.
I was halfway through a turgid analysis of the role of the Speaker in the Provincial Legislature when Taylor peeled out the back door.
“There’s a lady on the phone,” she announced breathlessly. “She says she wants to talk to you about Barbies. I told her she must have the wrong number because you hate Barbies, and she said she had the right number and nobody hates Barbies, and I’d better get you lickety-split.”
Bebe Morrissey was direct. “Who was that kid who answered the phone?”
“My daughter, Taylor.”
“How old is she?”
“Seven.”
“Aren’t you a little old to have a seven-year-old?”
“Probably,” I said. “But I do my best. So, Bebe, what’s up?”
“You are,” she cackled. “You’re up to bat. I’ve gone through the paper and discovered three garage sales with Barbies.”
“Okay,” I said. “Give me the addresses and I’ll be there first thing Saturday morning.”
“You really are a babe in the woods,” she said. “By Saturday morning, even the Barbies with their legs chewed off to their kneecaps will be gone. You should get there tonight. The paper says six-thirty, but six would be better. What time do you feed your kid?”
“Kids,” I said. “I have three at home.” I looked longingly at the refrigerator with its bottle of Bombay Sapphire chilling. The gin would have to wait. “I could be at the first garage sale by six. Can you give me the addresses?”
By 5:55, Taylor and I had inhaled our barbecued tuna and were pulling into Braemar Bay, a swank crescent of shining mock-Tudor homes on the east side of our city. The owner of number 720 told us she had only one Barbie, and it had been sold, but that she had some grapevine wreaths and wickerware we might be interested in. Taylor picked out a Thanksgiving wreath with fake Chinese lanterns and plastic turkeys, and a wicker cat-carrying case for Bruce and Benny, who were never carried anywhere except in Taylor’s arms.
Our next stop was an estate sale. One glance at the gleaming oak, bevelled glass, and paper-thin teacups and saucers led me to conclude that Bebe was a woman who savoured a practical joke. The woman in charge of the sale was a person of such pearled refinement that I was certain Barbie wasn’t even a figure in her cosmos. But she did have a tiny Lalique sparrow for sale. It wasn’t a nightingale, but it was the best Lalique bird I could afford, and Ed and Barry had been generous in lending us their cottage.
At number 982, Taylor and I finally hit paydirt: nine Barbies. Their hair showed evidence of brutal attempts at styling, but their toes were pristine. They were four dollars each, but the buxom brunette with the moneybelt said twenty-five dol
lars could buy the lot.
As I was paying, Taylor arranged the Barbies carefully in a cardboard box that was lying in the corner of the garage. She chattered about garage sales all the way home, and when I dropped her off she leaped out of the car with her wicker cat-carrier and a satisfied sigh. “That was so fun. Let’s do it again tomorrow night.”
My cellphone was ringing when I pulled up in front of EXXXOTICA. It was Howard Dowhanuik.
“Amazing timing,” I said. “I’m on my way to visit Charlie’s next-door neighbour?”
“Kyle Morrissey? What the hell’s that all about?”
“Unfinished business,” I said. “When you had me playing Nancy Drew, I talked to his great-grandmother. She asked me to run an errand for her.”
“Still working on stars for your heavenly crown.”
“How about you?” I said.
“No crown. No stars,” he said curtly. “So what’s happening out there?”
I glanced over at the perfect fifties house that Charlie and Ariel had shared. The vision of them happily planning, choosing the colours of paint and trim, the kinds of flowers that would fill the hanging baskets, made me drop my guard. The words tumbled out. “Howard, there’s something you should probably know. Ariel’s being cremated tonight. There’s a service up at her family’s place in Lac La Ronge tomorrow morning.”
I could hear his intake of breath. “Cremated. God, it’s hard to believe that she can just – cease to be.” For a beat, he was silent. “Are you going to the service?”
“Yes.”
“Say one for me, will you?”
“I will,” I said.
The penny dropped. “Jo, if you’re going to the Warrens’ island on Lac La Ronge, you’re going to have to fly.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Then I’ll say one for you.”
EXXXOTICA was looking remarkably shipshape. The front window had been scraped clear of the last remnants of the handbills, and two giant pots had been chained to steel poles and filled with those hardiest of floral survivors, dwarf marigolds. When I came through the door, Ronnie Morrissey was at the cash register facing a man in a sports jacket made out of some shiny synthetic. She glanced up, raised a finger to indicate she’d be with me soon, and went back to business. Her customer lowered his head when he saw me, but I had time to notice that his hair was freshly cut, and that he had doused himself with Obsession. The title of the video on the top of his pile was Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls. Judging by the way he bolted up the stairs and out the front door the moment Ronnie handed him his movies, he was a hungry man.