by Gail Bowen
Mieka put three bright rubber blocks that looked like bugs on the table. Jacob reached over and tried repeatedly to place one of the blocks atop another. “Jacob really is advanced,” my daughter said. “Not many children his age even attempt that.”
“Abby wanted a clever child,” Nadine said. “Her criteria in choosing a father for her baby were stringent, and high intelligence was at the top of the list.”
“Do you know the father?” Mieka asked. The question grew out of the conversation so naturally that Nadine didn’t appear to find it intrusive.
She shook her head. “No. Abby felt it would be difficult if I knew who he was. She was right. It would have been incredibly painful to think of her being intimate with someone I knew. Of course, even though I never knew who the man was, I spent hours imagining what he was like. I always thought it was someone who had already proven himself in the world. Abby wouldn’t have risked going through a relationship with a man unless she was as certain as one could be that she’d give birth to the child she wanted.”
After that, we were all silent. Jacob played with his three bright bug blocks, stacking them, knocking them over, and stacking them again.
“Why don’t I get us a carafe of coffee,” Mieka said finally.
“None for me, thanks,” Nadine said. “I’m content just to watch Jacob.”
I touched her arm. “Nadine, any time now Noah Wainberg is going to meet me here to pick up Jacob, so if you’d rather not see him… ”
“I appreciate the warning,” she said. “But I’ll stay. Maybe we’ve been given a second chance.”
Noah arrived almost immediately. I introduced him to Nadine. When Jacob saw Noah’s familiar grin, he held out his arms and said, “Da.”
“He is a clever boy,” Nadine said.
“You should see him when he’s on the move.” Noah looked at Nadine. “If you have a few minutes, we could put Jacob down and let him show you his stuff.”
“I have all the time in the world,” Nadine said.
Noah shrugged off his coat, picked up one of the mats Mieka kept for babies learning to crawl, and unrolled it on the floor. Nadine put Jacob down and placed the bug blocks at the far end of the mat. When Jacob dug his fingers and toes into the mat to press himself towards the pile, Nadine clapped her hands in delight.
Mieka walked me to the door. “Score one for second chances,” she said.
When I got home there was a shiny black Lincoln in our driveway. I walked through the front door and was met by air heavy with the scent of musk. Seemingly, Darryl Colby had arrived early. As I took off my boots and greeted Willie, a man, who I deduced was Darryl Colby, came down the hall towards me.
He was tall, heavy-set, and deeply tanned; his hair, black as a raven’s wing, was freshly barbered. As he came nearer, it was clear Darryl Colby used aftershave as a weapon. He was scowling, and I didn’t blame him. Pantera was behind him, his nose lodged between the man’s legs, pushing him towards the door. Pantera rarely left Zack’s side, so the situation must have been grave.
“Leave it,” I said. Pantera stopped, withdrew his snout, and loped back down the hall to our room.
“Pantera’s protective,” I said.
“He’s a menace,” Darryl Colby said, wiping drool from his slacks. “He’s ruined this suit.”
“When you have it dry cleaned, please send us the bill,” I said. “Shall I show you to the door or can you find your way?”
“I can find my way,” he said. He jammed his feet into a pair of toe rubbers on the mat in the hall and stormed out.
I went down to our room. Zack was dressed and sitting in his wheelchair. “I take it your meeting didn’t go well,” I said.
Zack shrugged. “Could have been worse. Darryl could have kicked me in the nads.”
“Actually, Pantera may have done some damage to Darryl’s nads,” I said. “Your dog had his muzzle shoved pretty firmly into Mr. Colby’s private parts. Pantera’s never done that before. What happened?”
Zack’s smile was innocent. “Peter told me that the night Noah brought Jacob by, he taught Pantera to obey the command ‘push.’ So when Darryl stepped out of line, I gave the command.”
I laughed. “You’d better watch it,” I said. “Darryl Colby strikes me as a litigious kind of guy.”
“My favourite kind,” Zack said. “Now, could you help me get back into bed? Strategically, it was important for me to deal with Darryl from an upright position, but I’m beat.”
Zack shifted his chair so he could transfer his body from the chair to the bed. I didn’t comment when the move made him groan. I helped him ease his body into a lying position, unzipped his trousers, and pulled them off. “So the meeting did not go well?”
“Nah, just the usual shit. Darryl has lined up some people who are prepared to swear that Delia is, to put it kindly, an absent mother. I was prepared for that. I was also ready for his dark allusions to Noah’s violent past. But Darryl always surprises me.”
Zack pointed to some glossy black-and-white photos on the nightstand. “Check out the new additions to the Wainberg family photo album.”
I flipped through the photos. In all of them Noah was holding Louise Hunter in his arms. They were both laughing. Louise’s hair was tousled; her strapless gown had slipped on one side, revealing a nipple, and Noah’s hand was cupping her small breast.
I studied the photograph. “Who says pictures never lie? This looks bad, but if there’d been a photographer around the night I was putting Louise to bed, he could have snapped equally provocative pictures of us.”
“You know that, and I know that, but a family court judge wouldn’t, and Darryl assures me there are plenty more where these came from. His investigators have also dug up watchful neighbours who will testify that Noah spent the night at Louise’s on more than one occasion.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. “Not the fact that Noah stayed with Louise, just that an act of kindness can be deliberately distorted.”
“We’re doing it, too,” Zack said. “When Nadine and Abby were estranged, Nadine took a group of students to France. There were rumours that she became involved with one of the girls.”
I helped Zack into his pyjama bottoms. “There are always rumours like that.”
“These rumours were serious enough to warrant investigation.”
“And…?”
“And nothing was proven.”
“Nadine still has her job,” I said. “She teaches at a fine school, and they’ve produced a lot of lawyers. Nadine wouldn’t be teaching if there were any questions.”
“You sound like Darryl Colby.”
“I sound like a sensible person.”
“Well, that makes you a rarity in this situation.”
“Actually, it doesn’t,” I said. “Before I came home I was at UpSlideDown with Jacob. Noah had asked me to take care of the baby because Declan needed his help with Louise. Anyway, while I was at UpSlideDown, Nadine Perrault arrived. She must have come straight from the airport. She held Jacob and she and Mieka talked. When Noah showed up, he asked Nadine if she’d like to stay and play with Jacob for a while.”
“Reassuring to know that there’s some decency in the world,” Zack said. “Every so often the Darryl Colbys and the Zack Shreves crowd out the good guys.”
“You’re a good guy,” I said. “I’m not so sure about me any more.”
My husband opened his arms, and I leaned in. “Did you get knocked around a bit today?” he asked.
“I did. My visit to the Brokaws was a disaster. When I left, Theo was sobbing and Myra was livid. On the bright side, my blundering did result in one interesting piece of information. Myra told me that Theo had had many women, and all his women were the same type as Delia: ‘clever, pale, and Semitic.’ That’s a direct quote.”
Zack shook his head. “You hear something like that and it really does make you wonder about the old chicken-and-egg question.”
“You mean, which came first?�
�
“Right. Did Theo play around because Myra was a piece of work, or did Myra become a piece of work because Theo played around?”
CHAPTER 13
A phone call at midnight seldom brings good news, but since I’d married Zack, the shrill of a telephone in our sleep-quiet house had ceased to terrify me. Clients and enemies of trial lawyers tend to keep irregular hours, and so as I groped for the phone the night after my visit to the Brokaws’, I was more resigned than alarmed. The voice on the other end of the line was low, breathy, and vicious.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” the voice said. “Listen.”
I kept the phone to my ear a beat too long before I started to hang up. My caller was obviously holding out the phone to pick up the noise in the room. The sound I heard was primal – a man keening a loss whose magnitude I could only imagine. I knew immediately that Myra Brokaw was on the other end of the line, and that I had somehow speeded Theo Brokaw’s descent into the abyss.
Beside me, Zack stirred and mumbled. I slid out of bed and moved across the room. “All right,” I said. “I’m listening, Myra. What’s happened?”
She spit out the words. “I found that picture you gave him – the picture of that ‘clever girl,’ as he calls her. I found it, and I made him watch as I ripped it up. There will be no more clever girls in his life and he knows it. Listen to him.”
Theo’s wails grew louder. Surprisingly, I was able to keep my voice steady. “Myra, Theo needs help. Take your husband to Emergency and get him admitted.”
Her laugh was harsh. “Oh, that would be perfect, wouldn’t it? Having Theo out of my control and medicated. Under those conditions, he would be capable of saying or doing anything. Believe me, I know. That would be the end of Mr. Justice Theodore Brokaw. That would be the end of the intellectual jewel of Canada’s Supreme Court.”
“Myra, if there’s anything I can do to help, I will.”
“Stay out of our lives,” she said.
“I will,” I said. “Good night.” I hung up, turned off the ringer on the phone, and crawled back into bed.
“Who was that?” Zack mumbled.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” I said. I put my arms around him and hoped he couldn’t feel the pounding of my heart.
In December in Saskatchewan, the sun doesn’t rise until almost nine, but dogs have their own internal clocks, and by five-thirty the next morning Willie and Pantera were pacing.
When I started to slide out of bed, Zack caught my wrist. “So what was that phone call in the middle of the night about?”
“It was Myra Brokaw,” I said. “I did something stupid, and she wanted to make sure I was aware of the consequences.”
“Stay here where it’s warm and tell me what happened,” Zack said.
I lay back down and put my arms around him. “Yesterday when I went to the Brokaws’, I had what seemed at the time to be a stroke of luck. Myra wanted to mail a gift, so she left me alone with Theo. As I’d planned to, I told him he had a daughter. He didn’t seem to grasp what I was saying, so I took out the family photo the Michaelses used as their greeting card last Christmas. Alwyn gave me hers for Jacob. The resemblance between Abby and Delia is so striking, I thought Theo might make the connection. Anyway, I showed it to him.”
Zack whistled. “That was a high-stakes move.”
“It was a stupid move.”
“Did Theo react?”
“He did,” I said. “He thought it was a photo of Delia. He called her ‘his girl,’ ‘his clever girl.’ He hid the picture in a magazine. Apparently, Myra found it. When she called last night, she told me she made Theo watch as she ripped it up. Zack, as long as I live, I will never forget the sound of that man’s anguish. It was terrible, and it was my fault.”
“You weren’t the one who ripped up the picture, Jo.”
“But I was the one who took it to the Brokaws’ home.”
“You had no way of knowing… ”
“The truth is I didn’t care. I just wanted the whole mess to be over. You were sick. We were both exhausted, and I was scared.”
“That’s not a crime,” Zack said quietly.
“Maybe not, but what I did to Theo was stupid, and now there are consequences.”
“The consequences may not all be bad,” Zack said. “What kind of professional help is Theo getting?”
“None that I know of. Myra anticipates Theo’s every wish. I think she enjoys the role of caregiver. She told me yesterday that a wise man realizes that when he’s lost everything else, his wife has to be enough.”
“But Myra isn’t enough. Theo’s problems are complex. I’m no expert, but I imagine that there are medications and therapies that could help him.”
“So you’re saying I can stop feeling guilty because Theo had to hit bottom before he could get the care he needs.”
“That’s about it.”
I kissed my husband. “Nice try,” I said. “But I’m not buying.”
When I got back from my run with the dogs, Zack was on the phone. “Ready for some good news?” he asked.
I peeled off my outer layers and flopped on the bed.
“God, yes.”
“That was Noah on the phone. He’s coming over later. He wants us to stop investigating Nadine Perrault.”
“Hallelujah,” I said. “I take it Nadine’s side will reciprocate.”
“Nadine has already agreed. Darryl Colby will shit bricks when he sees his golden goose slip from his slimy fingers.”
“Glad to see the flu hasn’t robbed you of your way with words,” I said. “So what happens now?”
“I guess that’s what Noah’s coming to discuss.”
“Will Delia be with him?”
“He didn’t say, but I can’t imagine this is a unilateral decision. Anyway, Izzy’s coming.”
“Taylor will be happy to hear that.” I looked at him carefully. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“Yeah, I’m feeling better.”
“Honestly?”
“Absolutely. I had an erotic dream last night. That has to be a good sign.”
“The best,” I said.
“Kym’s coming over in a few minutes to give me a shower and shave.”
“Really,” I said. “So was the erotic dream about me or Kym?”
Zack smirked. “You know how erotic dreams are – everyone just kind of swims together.”
I turned so I could see Zack’s face. “What does Kym look like anyway?”
His expression was noncommittal. “Nice-looking, I guess – not as nice-looking as you.”
“That was the right answer,” I said.
He tapped his temple with his forefinger. “That’s why I earn the big bucks.”
The doorbell rang. “That must be Kym with a y,” I said. “I should have put on makeup.”
“Kym with a y doesn’t wear makeup.”
I groaned. “Now I really hate her.”
I opened the door to a red-headed bodybuilder with a brush cut, rosy cheeks, and a killer handshake. “You must be Joanne,” he said.
“And you’re Kym,” I said. “You have no idea how glad I am to meet you.”
I stood aside to let him come in. After he’d taken off his boots and jacket, Kym rubbed his hands together. “This warmth feels good. I had a cold walk from home.”
“Where do you live?”
“In the old nurses’ residences down by the General.”
“Nice digs,” I said.
“They are,” he agreed. “Hardwood floors, high ceilings. Big rooms. Neighbourhood’s a little sketchy, but you can’t have everything. How’s Zack this morning?”
“Trying to do too much, but I don’t say anything.”
“Very wise,” Kym said. “Why don’t I go spiff him up? Give you a break.”
On the way down the hall, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and decided I could use a little spiffing up myself. Taylor was already in her studio so I showered
in her bathroom, and helped myself to her copious supply of beauty products. The result was a decided improvement. I made coffee, tried to call Taylor, but her cell wasn’t on, so the dogs and I walked through the snow to her studio. This time when I knocked, my daughter came to the door instead of inviting me in. “Troubles?” I said.
“No. I just want to work on it for a while before you see it again.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Isobel’s coming over.”
“That’s good. She can come out here and read while I work. She’s interested in that poetry book you got me for my birthday.”
“That’s okay with Isobel?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “She and I like doing separate things together.”
“I underestimate you,” I said.
Taylor frowned and turned back to her canvas. “It evens out.”
“Meaning?”
She gave me the Sally smile. “Sometimes we underestimate you.”
Kym met me by the hall linen closet when I came in. “I changed the sheets,” he said.
“Our washing machine’s getting a workout,” I said. “I just changed those sheets last night.”
“I know, but Zack still has a fever, and clean sheets feel good.”
“I’m enjoying them too.”
“Zack tells me you’re still sharing a bed – despite the coughing and sweats and chills.”
“That’s part of the deal, isn’t it?” I said.
Kym nodded. “So they tell me. I’d better check on Zack. He wanted to shave.”
“Why don’t I go in and keep him company with that,” I said. “He must be the last man in the world to use a straight razor.”
When I went in, Zack was wearing a robe and sitting in his wheelchair shaving.
Being a paraplegic is expensive. Zack’s bathroom was, in the phrase of the day, “universal,” which meant it could be used by pretty much anyone whatever their physical limitations. We had been adamant about not having the bathroom look like a hospital, so all the features Zack needed to function independently had been incorporated into an innovative design that was sleek and beautiful.