by Mel Bradshaw
Karin got there first and slipped under the duvet while Ted was still brushing his teeth. Before joining her, he fed some Schubert into the CD player. Piano Trio in E-flat, Op. 100, it said on the box liner. His non-musical memory continued to struggle with these keys and numbers, but he knew the piece. The second movement in particular was a favourite of theirs. With the piano beating time in the background, the cello introduced the melody. Slow and catchy was how Ted described it in his offhand way. Karin had better words—dark, intimate, stirring, otherworldly—but what she did with it on her instrument was more communicative than any of them. She had yet to make good on her promise to record her reading, so they were going to make do tonight with Leonard Rose on cello.
Ted waited for the opening bars so he could adjust the volume. Then he slid in beside Karin, and around her, and it astounded him yet again how perfect every square millimetre of her skin felt against his. Soft, yielding, resilient, firm, warm, caressing to whatever part of him caressed her. How could anything on earth be this perfect? And within her now another her, another him. Quirk was already pulling him on top of her. He supposed in a few months, they’d find it more convenient the other way up. He looked forward to the swelling of her sweet, perfect belly above him.
He moved slowly but still came ahead of her. Extravagantly, joyously, but silently. Quirk was so quiet in bed that he always suppressed his own urge to cry out. When he rolled off to her right side, he slid his hand between her legs and helped her to her own mute convulsions of bliss before they breathed their tender goodnights and let sleep take them.
Karin and Ted thought of themselves as Torontonians and would have identified themselves as such in Moscow or Beijing. Ted’s department was at the downtown St. George Campus of the university. Karin taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music. In point of fact, they lived just to the west of Toronto in Mississauga. Their neighbourhood had a clean, safe, spacious, suburban feel, which they liked—though not so spacious as to make them indifferent to the charms of cottage country.
The couple had planned to spend the Labour Day weekend with Karin’s father in Muskoka. On Wednesday, when Ted was asked to fill in at the “Punishing Homicide” conference, he urged Karin to carry on with the original plan. It was still hot in the city. He would not be able to spend any time with her anyway, and Markus would enjoy her company. Ted had been perfectly sincere in this suggestion. He got on well enough with Markus himself, but Markus had a playful tendency to turn encounters with Ted into manly jousts, with Karin left only to applaud from the sidelines. It would be just as well for father and daughter to have some unhurried hours alone together. Things would be said on both sides that wouldn’t have come up in his presence. Markus had been a widower for some years and seemed to be managing well. Still, health questions could be gone into, questions of diet and hours of work. For all his twinkling smiles, Markus was an intense, lonely man, capable of using reckless activity to keep himself from brooding. Karin understood this yet put up some resistance at being pushed off to the lake while Ted batched it in the city. On Friday morning, in view of her news, Ted wished she had resisted more, and that he’d given way. He wanted her with him so they could go on savouring the long-awaited pregnancy. This was not the weekend he wanted her letting down her hair with her father. But by now Markus would have done his weekend shopping, and it was too late for him to invite anyone else.
Karin had lessons to give at the conservatory in the morning and a rehearsal of her chamber group in the afternoon. The octet. The way that gang went on, it was anyone’s guess when she’d get started on the one and a half hour drive to the lake. Two and a half on a summer Friday evening. Sometimes Ted thought the string quartet and the opera orchestra should be enough in addition to her teaching, but the clarinettist had a pretty decent studio in his basement and had promised to help her make a demo to send around to record companies.
They parted in the driveway.
“Can I drive you downtown?” Quirk’s cello was safely stowed behind the two seats of her gas-electric hybrid, as was her portfolio of scores. It was a sticky thirty-two degrees, and barely five minutes out of the air-conditioned house her face was shimmering above the collar of her white sleeveless blouse. Sweat had pasted strands of red hair to her cheek. “You could take the train back and a taxi from the station.”
Ted said he might be late that night; he wasn’t sure there’d be a taxi.
“Car-pooling is doomed,” she laughed. “The two of us can’t even do it.”
“See you Monday night.” He was waiting for her to go before he backed his second-hand Corolla out of the garage.
She had her keys in her hand as she threw her arms around him. “No need to tell you not to wait up,” she said over his shoulder.
“Wake me.”
They faced each other. How beautiful she was! This was the worst time for a weekend apart. They kissed hungrily.
Ted knew this was making it harder. In their marriage, he’d slid somehow into the rôle of timekeeper. He’d balked at first, pointing out as an example of his own unpunctuality his extreme lateness for the recital where they’d first met. Karin laughed at his protest. What had ancient history to do with them now? She disliked wearing a watch—especially if she were playing or practising, but at other times too—disliked the feel of metal around her wrist. No, Ted was to be the sensible one. It was up to him, she said, to know night from morning, the lark’s song from the nightingale’s. And he indulged her, no matter that he had never heard either bird.
Usually being sensible was easier than this. Their lips parted. He kissed her again on her unbearably sweet lips, but lightly.
“See you Monday,” he said again.
After Karin left, Ted drove to the Clarkson GO Train station. Plainly, many regular commuters were starting their September holiday weekend early: there were dozens more parking spaces available in the south parking lot than was usual for a weekday, and more seats on the upper level of the second last coach. He’d found this railcar tended to be the least crowded. The trip took just under half an hour, barring mishaps, and this morning he spent the time reading the paper. He usually did—although he had had occasion to correct colleagues who supposed there would be nothing but industrial wasteland to see out the windows anyway. While Mississauga might still fall a blossom or two short of Arcadia, this rail corridor was for the most part a leafy green, interrupted only by the very occasional school or commercial enterprise. The factories, rail yards and graffiti-spattered abutments didn’t begin till you were into Toronto proper.
He spent the morning at his desk in the University of Toronto’s Department of Criminology. He was late with his peer review of an article a lecturer at Simon Fraser had submitted to one of the learned journals, but he had time to give it only a passing glance at present. It dealt with the Mafia and had been sent to Ted because someone had reported he was interested in gangs. The report had some foundation, but Ted didn’t consider it safe to be known as a mob expert. Besides, the subject of this paper wasn’t one of the criminal organizations he was collecting data on. More urgent this morning was the tweaking of an unpublished article of his own on young offenders into something he could deliver at one of the conference’s workshop sessions on Sunday. And his first duty was getting ready to moderate a panel discussion on sentencing at seven o’clock that evening.
The conference proper, a symposium on punishment, was open to registrants only, mostly academics with positions at universities as far flung as Hong Kong, Cape Town and Helsinki. Proceedings would be launched with a keynote address tonight at eight thirty by a big cheese from the Australian Institute of Criminology. His subject, according to the program that Ted now retrieved from a drawer in his desk, was to be “Life Sentences as Overkill: the Need for Evidence-based Penalties.” A good, progressive topic without being really provocative to the criminological community.
The panel discussion, open to all comers and featuring politicians and social activists as
participants, had been publicized as a gesture of goodwill and inclusiveness towards the larger community. It had been organized also—Ted suspected, although this goal had been less explicit—as an opportunity for the academics to see how unenlightened the masses really were on the subject of sentencing and hence how vital it was that there be criminologists to straighten them out.
Shortly before noon, the man he was substituting for at the conference dropped by. Ted heard the rackety approach of the hard plastic wheels on the rolling suitcase before Graham Hart’s tall frame filled the doorway.
“Lend me a blank DVD, Ted?” The suitcase was quite small for all the noise it made. Graham parked it in a corner and leaned on the back of a chair. He wore a buckskin jacket with fringe.
“Sure.” Ted opened his top desk drawer and groped around.
“Some soc prof at Lakehead is going to let me copy his whole dossier on the Ojibway.”
Ted’s hand came out empty. “I could have sworn I had one.” A quick check showed it wasn’t in any of the other drawers either. “Sorry. Say, shouldn’t you be on your way to Thunder Bay by now?”
“The airport limo’s waiting as we speak. So just a quick heads-up on what to expect tonight. There’s a victim of violent crime—suggested by our department chair, who knows her somehow. There’s old Kerr, the happy warrior from U. of Calgary. He was your idea, wasn’t he? And I dug up a fire-and-brimstone Toronto city councillor and a Brampton-based Crown counsel to round out the bear pit.” Graham dropped an annotated list of names on Ted’s desk. “As for topics, be prepared for concurrent versus consecutive sentences, conditional sentences, the faint hope clause. Capital punishment probably won’t come up.”
“The hang-’em-high crowd has had to do without since ’62,” Ted observed. “I guess folks get discouraged.”
“More than that, there’ve been too many wrongfully convicted. It’s one of the universe’s little jokes that obtuse juries have done more for progressive penology than acute criminologists.”
“Do the Ojibway do a better job selecting members of their sentencing circles?”
“Ask me Tuesday,” said Graham and clattered off. He’d been trying to get a first-hand look at how aboriginal communities dealt with crime for more than two years, and yesterday without warning an accused and his chief had agreed to let the white scholar attend. An opportunity not to be missed.
Ted looked over Graham’s notes. He thought the tone he should strike as moderator would be imperturbable good humour, evinced by a tolerant smile and a willingness to interrupt when panellists and questioners weren’t letting each other be heard. The main work remaining was to make sure he could pronounce the participants’ names. A couple of phone calls established that both Cesario and Szabo started with an S sound.
Karin didn’t get back to the house until seven thirty. She would have left the rehearsal early without scruple, but the music had absorbed her, and she had lost track of time. It still shouldn’t be a problem. Unlike Ted, Markus was a night owl. She’d just have to warn him not to keep supper for her. In the shower, she remembered she had meant to pack her bag Thursday night. Hearing the results of the pregnancy test had driven all such thoughts from her head. Well, she needn’t pack much: she was sure she had some cottage clothes up there. The worst of it was she was bone tired, in no condition to thread her way through hours of snarled traffic and to make allowances for other drivers’ weary irritability. On her way to the basement to pick up her knapsack, she stopped by the range to put on water for a quick cup of tea.
The basement was full height, which—as the real estate agent had delighted in pointing out—they’d appreciate if they ever decided to finish it, or to sell the house. In the meantime, the correspondingly numerous basement stairs were one of Karin’s pet hates. She imagined builders overdue at their next job slapping together scraps of wood and tacking on a thin railing with sparse supports. Never had she seen stairs so cheap, steep and flimsy. And the low basement floor, far from being a plus in her eyes, only increased the odds that someone ascending or descending with less than full concentration would someday come to grief.
Hand on rail down. Knapsack. Hand on rail up. Kettle boiling. Tea bag in mug. Water in mug. Tea bag out. Carry mug of tea and knapsack back to bedroom. Pack. Dress. Slurp down tea. Phone Markus.
He wanted to know where she was calling from and chuckled when he heard.
“Still at home? My goodness, Ted’s timetables have slipped for once.”
“Ted’s conferencing, remember? It’ll just be me and you this weekend.”
“Maybe I’ll ask that movie star on the next lake to come over and keep you company.”
Her answer came a beat late. “I’m bringing my cello. There may not be room for him in the bed.”
“You sound tired, Karin. Why not drive up tomorrow morning?” No banter now.
She said she was looking forward to a midnight swim and rang off quickly. She didn’t want to be here in the city when Ted got back and have to go through the parting scene again Saturday.
Her father made his living by counselling and could be expected to be sensitive to fine shades in voices, but she was supposed to be a performer, and it irritated her that she hadn’t been able to sound more upbeat for the space of a brief phone call. Her tea bag was already in the recycling bin, but not touching anything gross. She wiped it off and popped it into a mug she knew would fit in the holder by the driver’s seat of her car. Wine for her dad? She opened the fridge and found a bottle of Sauvignon blanc to stuff into her knapsack between the underwear and her toilet case. As soon as the kettle was back at the boil, she was ready to go, knapsack on her back and tea mug in her hand. She pulled the front door to and tested it. Firmly locked.
Gas? No, she’d filled the tank Tuesday at Meryl’s gas bar, and topping it up at one of the highway service centres would give her an excuse to break up the trip. She’d taken less than an hour at home on the turnaround, so she’d be at the cottage by eleven or a little after. The tea was starting to perk her up, and perhaps even more so the feel of the steering wheel in her grip. Karin liked driving. It was absorbing, with life and limb dependent on how you performed, but the demands—unless you were a NASCAR or F1 race driver—were looser than in the world of classical music. Karin believed her driving was “good enough for jazz,” and jazz was fun.
When she pulled onto the northbound 400, she called the cottage again and left a report of her progress on Markus’s machine.
An hour later, she was yawning her way through a bumper-to-bumper stretch of highway and having much less fun. Impatient drivers were cutting in front of her with millimetres to spare, while the four-by-four behind her was practically climbing her little Honda’s sloping hatch. She began to think of car seats, wondering how often they had to be changed as an infant grew into a toddler. There’d be the home to childproof too. Before long, she and Ted would be stuffing protectors in every electrical outlet and fencing off the heads of the stairs. Fine, every danger would be provided against in time—no need to work herself up right now. Except . . .
Except that the suspicion was also beginning to gnaw at her that she had left something undone at home tonight. Not something inconsequential either. She had locked the door, and every last window as Ted had asked, and turned down the air conditioning, even though the house would be stifling when he got home. She had turned off the water in the shower and hadn’t left the toilet running. What else could it be? Her eyes dropped down to her empty tea mug. That was it. She might not have turned off the element on the stove top after the second boiling. She’d lifted off the kettle, poured and placed it to cool on the unused small back element. But she had no memory of reaching over to switch off the heat in the large one. She looked across the median. The southbound traffic was light. If she could get across, she’d be home by ten fifteen. She could call Markus again and take him up on his suggestion that she drive up tomorrow. She could spend one more night with Ted. Was she just looking for
an excuse?
It wasn’t like her to worry this way. She believed she had a good memory for the things that mattered. Then again, Markus liked to twit her on little duties neglected, and there was always the possibility—when she was tired as she was tonight—that she’d forget something not so little.
If she had left the element on, she wasn’t just wasting electricity. There was a kitchen cupboard above that element. The heat could cause the paint to blister and perhaps fall off onto the red-hot metal. Flames would shoot up. The wood would get dryer and hotter, until their house would be on fire. Maybe she had turned the element off and didn’t remember it. Yes, that was more likely. She was ninety-five per cent certain. But no, she couldn’t take the chance. Just ahead, a bridge carried a county road across the highway. An exit lane was opening up to Karin’s right; she committed to it.
Chapter 2
The conference was being held in the various lecture halls of University College, but the panel discussion was to take place across King’s College Circle in the seventeen-hundred-seat Convocation Hall. It was routinely used now for first-year psychology lectures as well as for graduation ceremonies, and the enclosed circular space could be almost as hot and humid at this time of year as the inside of a clothes dryer.
Ted dropped by the athletic centre for a swim and a shower in the late afternoon before heading over to the hall. He’d brought a freshly pressed golf shirt to change into, leisure wear that had become the work uniform of everyone from burger flippers and supermarket checkers to library technicians and massage therapists, and would—he hoped—be accepted as suitable for an unpretentious academic as well. In keeping with the folksy tone, Ted and the panellists sat at their places, chatting pleasantly as members of the public filed in. By 7:05, the hall was a quarter full. As it was little more so by 7:10, Ted tapped his mike and got proceedings underway. After a few standard remarks, he asked the first speaker to introduce herself and her position on the question, “Is Canada soft on crime?”