The Nesting Dolls

by Gail Bowen

  We’d just agreed that I’d buy some bags of cat food and pick her up after school when Gracie arrived, pink-cheeked and breathless. She jumped in, I pulled back into traffic, and my BlackBerry rang. Taylor answered. “It’s Isobel’s mum. She’d like to talk to you. She says it’s important.”

  “Tell her I’m driving, but I’ll run in when we stop by her house to pick up Isobel.”

  Taylor relayed the message and Isobel was waiting when we arrived. She and I waved at one another as we passed on the front walk. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I just have to talk to your mum for a minute.”

  Delia had been watching from the window, and she met me at the door and motioned me inside. She was on edge, but Delia was always on edge.

  “I know you haven’t got much time, but you and Zack need to know the latest. The police have traced the licence plate of the car Abby Michaels was driving. The licence was issued to Hugh Fraser Michaels of Port Hope, Ontario. Mr. Michaels is deceased. The police have also discovered that Abby has been staying in a suite she rented at the Chelton Inn. She checked in last Tuesday. She and the baby seemed to have a routine. She took him out in the stroller in the morning and then, in mid-afternoon, she took him out in the baby carrier.”

  “And stayed at UpSlideDown till closing time,” I said.

  Delia nodded. “Abby and the baby always returned around six, but Saturday night they didn’t come back.”

  “And there’s no indication where Abby is?”

  Delia half-turned from me. “None. According to Inspector Haczkewicz, the bed in the suite hadn’t been slept in, and the bathroom was pristine.”

  “So, Abby left town?”

  Delia slumped. “If she did, she travelled light. Her toiletry bag was in the bathroom, and her clothes were in the closet.”

  My stomach clenched. “What about the baby’s things?”

  “There was nothing to indicate that a baby had ever been in the room.”

  Noah came downstairs carrying Jacob wrapped in a thick white bath towel. “Dee, there’s a phone call for you. It’s a client, and he says it’s important.”

  Delia was already moving down the hall. “I’ll talk to you later, Joanne. Thanks for coming in.”

  I smiled at Noah and the baby. “The kids are waiting in the car,” I said. “But I have to say hi to Jacob. Can you bring him over here? My boots are wet.”

  Noah came close enough for me to smell the sweet smell of a baby just out of the bath. He pushed the towel back, so I could see Jacob’s face. The little boy’s hair curled wetly – the way Isobel’s did after she’d been swimming at the lake. As he took my measure, Jacob’s dark eyes were solemn. “Do you ever smile?” I whispered, and he rewarded me with a gummy grin. “Now that was worth tromping through the snow for,” I said.

  Noah capped the baby’s head with his palm as if to protect him. “I guess Dee told you about the room at the Chelton.”

  “She did.”

  “Do you think Abby Michaels is dead?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  Noah’s face was troubled. “You want to hear something lousy?” he asked. “I don’t know what I hope.”

  When I opened the car door, the girls were laughing and whispering, deeply engaged in exchanging the secrets of girl-land. I snapped on my seat belt. “With luck, we’ll make it, just before the bell,” I said. My announcement was greeted with a trio of groans.

  “Look at that,” Isobel said.

  I did a shoulder check. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  Isobel leaned forward, tapped my shoulder, and pointed. “Not on the road. At my house,” she said. I glanced towards the Wainbergs. Delia had joined her husband. She was holding Jacob, and Noah’s powerful arm encircled them, drawing them close. Framed in the rectangle of light from the living room, they were a Norman Rockwell image of family.

  After the last day of lectures, a university is a silent place. The students who come to campus are there to write exams or study for them. Most faculty members take advantage of their open calendars to work at home. Corridors and classrooms and coffee shops are virtually empty. It’s my favourite time in the semester.

  I walked into the political science office at the university and found Sheila Acoose-Gould, our administrative assistant, at her desk reading an old issue of Maclean’s. Twinkling silently behind her was a musical Christmas tree that had played twelve seasonal tunes until, by one of our few unanimous decisions, our department voted to rip out its musical heart.

  “Anything happening around here?” I said.

  Sheila leaned back in her chair and sighed contentedly. “Not a thing. All is calm. All is bright.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” I said.

  I picked up my mail and headed for my office. The message light on my phone was blinking. I pressed the message retrieval button and heard Myra Brokaw’s voice. “Good morning, Joanne. Just a gentle reminder that Theo and I are expecting you for tea today at two-thirty. There are no names on the security panel of our building, so I wanted to make sure you had our code. It’s 201. We’re very much looking forward to seeing you.” I deleted the message, uttered Zack’s second-favourite expletive, wrote down the Brokaws’ apartment security code, and moved a stack of essays from the side of my desk to the middle. It was going to be a long day.

  By eleven o’clock I’d made a large enough dent in the essay pile that I felt I could take a break and get something to eat. I went downstairs to the cafeteria, filled my mug with tea, and selected a Granny Smith apple. When I got back to my office, I stared at my essays and decided I needed a change of pace. I opened my laptop and found a file I’d started when I was considering Theo Brokaw as the audience’s guide to the workings of the Supreme Court. There had been plenty of sources to mine for nuggets about Theo’s philosophy of law, but very little biographical material, and most of what I’d found was without value. However, when I’d been seated at a dinner party with Nicholas Zaba, a man who’d grown up with Theo, I hit the mother lode. The two men had remained close, and my dinner companion had drunk just enough to make him an indiscreet and utterly charming raconteur.

  The next morning when I’d written up Nick’s memories of Mr. Justice Brokaw, I began as Nick had begun. “Theo owes everything he has to women,” he’d said, refilling my glass with a very fine Shiraz. “His genius is that he makes the women in his life feel as if they owe everything to him.”

  In Nick’s telling, Theo led a charmed life. He was the only son of hard-working, proud, first-generation Canadians who lived over the bakery they owned in Regina in the solid working-class area of Broders Annex. The Brokaws’ dreams for their four daughters were modest: they wanted the girls to grow into industrious and pious women who would marry good men and give them grandchildren. The girls were clever, but they were also dutiful, and so after they graduated high school, they worked in Brokaw’s Bakery, expanded to include delivery service, and in the butcher’s shop that the family had purchased, renovated, and transformed into Brokaw’s Market, a business with a generic name and an impressive ability to ferret out and supply the needs of the neighbourhood’s Eastern European population. The shops prospered, but the family’s most extravagant dreams were vested in their only son.

  Theo not only complied with their expectations; he excelled. After graduating from the College of Law, he articled for a respected Saskatoon law firm, decided that his real passion was not practising law but research and teaching, completed an L.L.M., discovered a talent for critical legal theory and analytical jurisprudence, taught law at the University of Saskatchewan, married the daughter of a distinguished jurist, was appointed to the province’s Court of Appeals, and found himself, at forty-five, appointed to the highest court in the land.

  His rise had been meteoric, fuelled by his powerful father-in-law and by his wife who knew how the game was played. As Nick Zaba wryly noted, the equation was simple: Myra’s father loved Myra, Myra loved Theo, and Theo loved Theo. The marriage
was a happy one. Until they retired from the family business, Theo’s sisters regularly wrapped and shipped his favourites from the bakery: the poppy seed cake; the thick black bread that his father credited with giving him the brains to become a judge; the special Christmas baking that Theo’s sisters knew, without asking, Myra would never think to make him. But Myra was, they hastened to add, the perfect wife for a professional man.

  When I finished reading I packed up the unmarked essays, put on my coat and boots, told Sheila that if any students wanted to get in touch with me, they had my e-mail address, and drove to Broders Annex. It wasn’t hard to justify my visit to Brokaw’s. Loaves of the elaborately twisted and braided Ukrainian Christmas bread were always on the table at our family’s Christmas Day open house and it was time to place my order. Besides, anything beat reading another paper on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

  On a day in which all colour and warmth seemed to have been leached from the world, the bakery, bright, warm, and redolent of fresh baking, was a welcome destination. Except for Christmas and Easter and an occasional impulse buy if I was in the neighbourhood, I wasn’t a regular customer, and so it was a surprise but not a shock when a young couple who introduced themselves as Tony and Rose Nguyen said they were the bakery’s new owners.

  I looked at the metal shelves of bread – whole wheat, multigrain, dense dark pumpernickel, sour rye, hearth loaves, and egg bread – and at the glass case of turnovers, doughnuts, strudel, poppy seed rolls, honey cake, sweet buns, and tarts. “Everything looks the same as it was,” I said.

  “Everything is the same,” Tony Nguyen said. He spoke with the care of someone for whom English is a second language. “We bought the bakery lock, stock, and barrel and that included the recipes. We follow them to the letter.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll have a loaf of the dark pumpernickel, an apple strudel, and three gingerbread girls. And I’d like to place my Christmas order: four dozen cinnamon rolls, half without raisins, and three loaves of Ukrainian Christmas bread.”

  “Kolach,” Tony Nguyen said, and he wrote my order in a small ringed notebook. “And your name?”

  “Joanne Shreve,” I said. I gave him my address and phone number and said I’d pick up the baking on December 24. “Are the Brokaws still in Regina?”

  “They moved to Victoria,” Tony Nguyen said. “They sought more pleasant winters.”

  His wife boxed the strudel. “They worked hard all their lives,” she said softly. “Now this is our dream.”

  “I’m sure you’ll have great success,” I said. “You seem to be doing all the right things.” I paid my bill; Rose Nguyen handed me my purchases, and I dropped them in my shopping bag.

  “My brother, Phuoc Huu, bought the grocery store,” Tony said. “His borscht is very good with pumpernickel.”

  I glanced outside. The grey was oppressive. “It looks like a perfect day for borscht,” I said. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  Like the Brokaw’s Bakery, the Brokaw’s Market was unchanged: the refrigerated display cases were filled with fresh and deli meats and an impressive variety of sausages. The freezers held cabbage rolls, perogies of every permutation or combination, and borscht – vegetarian and meat. Even the aisle that displayed Ukrainian gifts and cards was the same. I considered a pretty embroidered cloth, then, remembering that I had thirty-five years’ worth of tablecloths at home, put it back. There was a glass shelf of Russian nesting dolls. They had fascinated my own children when they were little. Their dolls had long since gone the way of all toys with moveable parts, but looking at twin Natasha dolls, one with black painted hair, one blonde, I knew they’d be a hit in Madeleine’s and Lena’s stockings and I placed them in my basket. There was a larger matryoshka nesting doll, dark-haired, pink-cheeked, and very pretty. I wouldn’t have minded finding her in my own stocking, but the price tag was $37.50, so I left her behind and went off in search of borscht and sausage.

  Phuoc Huu Nguyen rang up my purchases. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “And to you,” I said. I started for the door, but the lure of the pink-cheeked bright-eyed matryoshka doll was powerful. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and I went to the gift area, found my doll, and handed her and enough additional cash to Phuoc Huu Nguyen.

  “Impulse buy,” I said.

  “Works for me,” Phuoc Huu said, and he slipped the money into the register and handed me my purchase.

  The Brokaws’ condo was downtown over a vintage record shop in a pedestrian mall of upscale shops and bistros. Whatever the season, Scarth Street Mall was a good place to be. Twice a week from the May 24 long weekend till Thanksgiving, it was the site of an open-air farmers’ market; in winter, the space became a skating rink. That afternoon the rink was all but deserted. The ice had been cleared, but there was only one skater, and he moved with a mechanical joylessness that seemed in tune with the grey and lowering sky.

  The entrance to the condos was unprepossessing – just an ordinary door opening into a small vestibule with a panel of buzzers. I touched 201 and waited. There was no response. I tried again – and again. Finally, I gave up. As I turned to open the door to the street, I walked into Louise Hunter.

  She was wearing a hot pink knitted cap with earflaps, a black leather jacket with matching pants, and knee-high black leather boots with knitted tops of hot pink – very chic and very youthful. She looked two decades younger than the world-weary, self-loathing woman I’d met at the Wainbergs’ party, but it wasn’t a question of clothes making the woman. That afternoon, Louise was sober, and that fact alone made all the difference.

  “I just got here,” she said. “But I think I understand your problem.” Her voice was full of life. “You’re trying to get through to the older couple who just moved in down the hall from me.” She opened the inner door and we walked together to the elevator. “They haven’t quite mastered the buzzer-door relationship,” she said as we stepped into a lift the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. “They really do need to learn how to let guests in. I know of at least one potential visitor who simply left in frustration. God knows if she ever summoned up the fortitude to try again.”

  She laughed. “I should probably introduce myself. I’m Louise Hunter. I’m a pianist and I have a studio here.”

  She had no memory of meeting me. I extended my hand. “Joanne Shreve,” I said.

  The light faded from Louise’s face. “You’re Zack Shreve’s wife,” she said. “I’ve probably met you a dozen times. I apologize for not remembering.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “A.S. Byatt calls it nominal amnesia – it’s common enough at our age.”

  Louise’s smile was wry. “Thanks, but I imagine my nominal amnesia was fuelled by Grey Goose vodka.”

  When we stepped off the elevator, Louise gestured towards an apartment with an open door. “That’s their place,” she said. “It was nice to meet you, Joanne. Sobriety has its advantages. Who knows? I might even remember who you are next time.”

  The door to the Brokaws’ was open wide. I called inside, but there was no response. A chair and a boot rack had been placed against the wall by the door. I took off my boots and stepped over the threshold and called again. The condo had an open-plan living-dining-kitchen area. Three chairs had been drawn around a low table that held everything needed for tea. As in a fairy-tale, all was in readiness but no one was there. I turned to leave but then I heard voices in the hall.

  The combination of relief and anger in Myra Brokaw’s voice was familiar. I’d heard it in my own voice when one of my children had wandered off and my mind had been a blur of terrifying possibilities until I’d found them. “Theo, you can’t just leave like that, without telling me,” she said. “If you get lost, and I have to call the police, they’ll take you from me.”

  Theo’s tone was querulous. “I just went out to get a… a… a thing I needed. I would have come back.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice lacked its previous assurance. “I do alw
ays come back, don’t I?”

  “Yes, Theo. You always come back,” Myra said. “Sit down and let me take off your boots. Our guest will be here any minute.”

  I was trapped, but anything was better than letting them know I’d heard their conversation. I walked to the window and looked down at the mall. The solitary skater was still making his joyless rounds, but there was plenty of activity: shoppers, their heads bent against the snow, darted into stores. A man, big as a sumo wrestler, had set up a charitable donation box and was loudly ringing a bell.

  “You’re here,” Myra said.

  “The door was open,” I said. “I thought you wanted me to come inside to wait.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Theo and I just had to step out for a minute. Let me take your coat.” She laughed. “Actually, I might have to ask you to help me off with mine.” She held out her arm awkwardly. “Last night, coming back from the party, I slipped and sprained my wrist.”

  I helped Myra and Theo off with their jackets, removed my own, and hung the jackets on a clothes tree just inside the door.

  “I apologize, Joanne,” she said. “To say the least, this is an unconventional welcome.”