The Winners' Circle

by Gail Bowen

  “When she was still reeling from Chris’s death,” I said.

  “Delia got by fine as long as Zack and Norine MacDonald were around,” Margot said. Norine was Zack’s smart and indefatigable executive assistant. She had been with him since the day Falconer Shreve opened its doors, and she was a pillar of support for him and for the firm.

  As she spoke of Norine’s contribution, Margot’s eyes shone. She had always been a great fan of Zack’s EA. “When it came to hiring new lawyers, Norine knew what the firm needed, and she made certain we got it,” Margot said. “And, of course, Zack has always been the firm’s papa bear. The other partners have always looked to him for the final word about which associates got a partnership offer and which got the boot.”

  “And then Zack and Norine went to City Hall,” I said.

  “Yes, at exactly the time Falconer Shreve reached the point where it needed to grow,” Margot said. “Lorne Callow has been invaluable, but he’s being stretched too far, and he works for Delia. He’s not going to tell her that her refusal to accept new equity partners is going to strangle the firm.”

  “But somebody is going to have to make the case,” I said. “Zack told me that he’s hired a lawyer named Katina Posaluko-Chapman to lead the Calgary office and that she’ll be an equity partner.”

  “We’re lucky to get Tina,” Margot said. “She’s a fine lawyer, and the timing is right. Her appointment will force us to deal with the equity partner issue.” Margot tapped the folder she held on her lap. “Jo, Brock has some excellent ideas about how to handle that problem and get the firm on sound footing again.”

  “And you want Falconer Shreve to hire Brock to implement those ideas,” I said.

  Margot grinned. “No flies on you,” she said.

  “You built a solid case,” I said. “The firm clearly needs someone to take charge, and Brock is an ideal candidate. But bringing him in while you’re dealing with the equity partner issue might be problematic. Delia will already be in a defensive position. She might not be open to an outsider running the firm, especially one who’s not a lawyer.”

  “Ah, but lawyers love precedent,” Margot said. “And we have precedent on our side. Falconer Shreve is not the only law firm lacking a partner with management skills and the yen to put them to work. A number of firms are bringing in non-lawyers to handle their business practices. It makes sense. Someone with Delia’s legal talent shouldn’t be frittering away her time doing work for which she has neither the aptitude nor the interest. As a lawyer Delia can bring in the big bucks, and that’s what she should be doing.”

  “You certainly have logic on your side,” I said. “But Delia has a huge emotional investment in the firm the way it is.”

  “All the more reason for her to realize that Falconer Shreve needs what Brock has to offer. He has an MBA from Queen’s and he has experience. When Zack convinced him to spearhead the campaign to get the Racette-Hunter Centre built, Brock was a rising star in an investment management firm that handles more than a billion dollars a year. He’s doing a terrific job as director of the R-H Centre and in his work as a city councillor, and he’s recognized as an expert on analytical decision-making, change management, organizational behaviour, and strategic leadership. He’s conducted seminars for companies all over Western Canada.”

  “And Brock’s interested in making the move?” I said.

  “He’s always up for a challenge,” Margot said. “And God knows streamlining Falconer Shreve will be a challenge. Brock’s had conversations with Kerry Benjoe about taking over as director of Racette-Hunter. She’s been shadowing Brock for more than a year, and he’s confident she could take over now.” Margot’s pause was pointed. “Of course, all this is contingent upon the partners agreeing to my proposal.”

  “Delia has a trial in Saskatoon. She’ll be away for a week,” I said. “That gives you a week to sound out the other partners, but I don’t think you’ll have any problems there. Both Blake and Kevin have compelling personal reasons for being on board, and Zack’s aware of the situation, and he knows how capable Brock is.”

  “So that just leaves Delia,” Margot said. “Wish me luck.” She handed me the folder, took the plush toy from me and eyed its tail critically. “I declare this tail Max-proof.” After she’d knotted and snipped the thread, Margot looked into the face of the wild thing. “Go in peace, Moishe,” she said.

  “Lexi calls her stuffy Moishe?” I said.

  Margot shrugged. “That’s the name he came with. Moishe’s comrades in wildness are Sipi, Zippi, and Bernard. They’re scary-looking but kind. They want Max to stay forever.” Margot’s smile was impish. “Maybe restructuring will make Falconer Shreve as welcoming to outsiders as the land of the wild things.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The rainy weather had cleared and it was turning out to be a gorgeous day – not quite the day Keats had in mind when he wrote of the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” but close enough. After Thanksgiving in our part of the world, mild, still days are few and far between. Halloween was more than two weeks away, but there had been many times when the kids and I had trick-or-treated in full winter gear, and many more times when I had put up Christmas lights with biting northern winds shaking my ladder. I recognized a window of opportunity when I saw it, so after getting back from Margot’s I hauled the boxes of outdoor lights and the ladder out of the garage.

  I’d strung about half the lights when Gracie Falconer cycled up on her Trek WSD. She’d been riding hard. Her red-gold braids were coming undone; her freckled face was rosy with exertion; and her smile was a mile wide.

  “I can feel the endorphins from here,” I said.

  “It’s a sensational day,” she said. “What are you up to?”

  I pointed to the house. The east side was ready to sparkle, but a long string of lights hung forlornly from the roof over the porch. “Getting into the Christmas spirit,” I said.

  “Good for you,” she said. “For the past few years I’ve been putting up our lights and I always leave it too late. Need a hand?”

  “I do, and I’ll throw in lunch.”

  Gracie jumped off her bike, walked it into the backyard, and when she returned, she picked up the string of lights. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve got a lab at two. Takes me half an hour to ride from here to the university. That gives us two hours.” She squinted at the house. “Easy-peasy. We’ll be done in an hour, plenty of time for lunch.”

  We finished fifteen minutes early. Gracie flicked on the lights to test them and then took selfies of us with them to send to her dad and to Zack. Mission accomplished, we went inside for tuna sandwiches and iced tea.

  Gracie inhaled her sandwiches and made more. “I’m starving,” she said. “I went to Standing Buffalo last night and had Thanksgiving dinner with Rose and her family. Rose and I drove in this morning, but breakfast was hours ago.”

  Rose Lavallee had been Gracie’s full-time nanny from the time she was born. At eighteen, Gracie was too old for a nanny, but Rose had been a constant in her life, wheeling her pram through the park twice a day until Gracie was able to toddle along beside her; walking her to kindergarten; baking the cookies for the school bake sales; teaching her to swim; and, perhaps most critically, making certain that Gracie grew up knowing she was part of Standing Buffalo Dakota First Nation.

  Standing Buffalo was just across the lake from Lawyers’ Bay, so when the Falconers were at the cottage, Gracie spent as much time with Rose on the reserve as she did with her parents. She was fluent in the Dakota language and was an accomplished jingle dancer who always placed in the top three at the powwow jingle dance event.

  I refilled Gracie’s milk glass. “How was Thanksgiving at Standing Buffalo?” I said.

  “Except for the fact that somebody made gluten-free bannock, it was the same as it always is. We ate in the band hall. There were a hundred little kids. My aunties kept rearranging the pies on the dessert table to make sure theirs were in fr
ont. And Rose and her sister squabbled over whose wild-rice dressing was the tastiest.”

  “Sounds like a lot of fun,” I said.

  “It was.” Gracie hesitated before she continued. “I told Rose about our families’ plans to gather for our Day of the Dead.” Gracie’s face clouded.

  “Rose didn’t approve?”

  “No. She doesn’t like the idea. She’s Catholic. She made sure I was baptized when I was a baby, and we still go to mass together every Sunday. But our people have had first-hand experience with cultural appropriation. It’s hurtful when outsiders use stories and ceremonies that have meaning for us without understanding them. And Rose thinks we might be meddling with things we don’t really know about in order to bring the spirits close.”

  “Is that a concern for you?” I said.

  Gracie’s gaze was steady. “I was raised in both worlds: white culture and Dakota ways. I value them both. If I have something straightforward like a cut that needs stitches, I go to the Medi-Centre. If I have something more complicated, like that rash I broke out in when I was in grade ten, I go to Standing Buffalo and visit Elder Bea.” Gracie scowled. “That rash was so gross.”

  “It was,” I said. “Except for your face and hands, it was all over your body. Not a great thing for a fifteen-year-old.”

  “Dad and I went to every specialist in the city,” Gracie said. “He was just about to fly me to the Mayo Clinic when Rose took me out to Standing Buffalo to see Elder Bea. She took us to a ditch where some little white medicine flowers were growing. We picked a bagful and then went back to Bea’s house, chewed the flowers until they were paste, then rubbed the paste all over my body. The taste of those flowers was unbelievably disgusting, but the rash was gone the next day.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  Gracie’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Not to me,” she said. “I believe in the Catholic saints, but I also believe in the sacred pipe. Elder Bea follows the good path. She has the power to use medicine that heals. But there are people who use their power to do harm. I’ve seen it.”

  “I’ve heard about bad medicine, but I’ve never heard about anyone actually witnessing it.”

  “We don’t usually talk about it,” Gracie said. “But it exists. When I was in high school, a young girl on the reserve was raped. The boy who did it was older, so handsome he’d done TV ads for the local stations. Everybody had been sure he was destined for great things. When the girl told her grandfather what the boy had done, the grandfather, who was a medicine man, paid the boy a visit. The boy said that with his looks he could have any girl he wanted and there was no way he’d screw a runt like the old man’s granddaughter. The next morning the boy woke up with his face twisted like an old Halloween pumpkin.”

  “Bad medicine?”

  “For the boy maybe,” Gracie said. “But for the girls who were saved because the boy’s face showed them what he was like inside, it was good medicine. Rose says you can’t always know ahead of time what powerful medicine will do.”

  “And Rose is concerned that by taking part in the Día de los Muertos you and your dad might make yourselves vulnerable.”

  Gracie finished her milk, carried her dishes to the sink, and rinsed them. “There’s an old man at Standing Buffalo who hates white people,” she said. “His name is Esau Pilger. He loved my grandmother, but she chose to marry someone else. And then her daughter, my mother, married a white man. Even worse, my dad is a white man with a home at Lawyers’ Bay. Esau Pilger hates the way our families changed the land around the lake – clearing away the brush, bringing in bulldozers to make roads and construction equipment to build the big houses. He hates the powerboats on the lake and the fact that Lawyers’ Bay is a gated community.”

  Gracie fell silent. She raised her strong, long-fingered hands to her temples and rotated her fingertips in slow circles. “Some people say that when my grandmother married Henry Redman, Esau put a curse on her. If he did, the curse was powerful. A white doctor fell in love with my grandmother, and then went crazy. He killed Henry and then he killed himself. My grandmother and my mother were in the room when he did it.” Gracie shuddered at the image. “Some people say that when my parents got married, Esau put a curse on my mother so that she would always do something to destroy her own happiness,” she said. “Of course, that’s exactly what my mother did. Nothing she accomplished was ever enough. More than anything she wanted people to respect her, and when they finally did she began acting out so she could destroy their respect.” Gracie shook her head as if to clear it. “I never understood her.” She leaned across the table towards me. “Did you?”

  “Lily and I never had an intimate conversation,” I said. “I only knew her for a few weeks before she died.”

  Gracie’s shoulders slumped. “That’s too bad,” she said, and the defeat in her voice saddened me. I racked my brain for something – anything – I could offer that would ease her burden.

  Out of nowhere, a talk I’d had with Rose Lavallee came into my mind. Lily Falconer’s penchant for casual sexual liaisons had been common knowledge, but believing that Lily’s behaviour was her family’s concern, I kept my thoughts to myself. My decision to stay on the sidelines ended not long into the short period during which I knew Lily, a day Gracie came to our house in tears. She said that Lily had returned after spending a week with the man who delivered water for the office’s water coolers. Lily told her daughter she’d come back because she had nowhere else to go. Gracie’s hurt and confusion had touched something deep within me. I was livid. I’d gone to Rose and asked her why Lily was determined to destroy everything she had. Rose often answered a question with a story that contained the answer, so I wasn’t surprised when, in response to my concerns, she recounted a Greek myth that she’d studied in school.

  That October day, as I looked across the table at Lily’s daughter and the lines that pain had etched on her face, I hoped Rose’s insight would enlighten Gracie as it had me. “Did Rose ever tell you the story of Penelope?” I said.

  The tension drained from Gracie’s face. “Rose told me that story a hundred times when I was growing up. It was comforting – like the spice cookies she always made when Lily took off. I still remember it.” She smiled wistfully. “Penelope’s husband didn’t come back from the Trojan Wars. Many men wanted to marry her, but she was determined to remain faithful to her husband. Penelope promised the men that as soon as she finished weaving a shroud, she’d marry one of them. But Penelope believed her fate was to be with her husband, so every night she ripped out her weaving so she wouldn’t have to marry another man.” Gracie’s expression hardened. “I never quite got the connection between faithful Penelope and my mother.”

  “Rose saw a connection,” I said. “Your mother didn’t believe that she deserved a good life, so when things were going well for her, she unravelled them by running off with other men.”

  For a minute or two Gracie was silent, deep in her own thoughts. “My mother, like Penelope, took steps to make sure she got the fate she thought she deserved,” Gracie said. She swallowed hard. “I just wish I knew why she believed she didn’t deserve a good life.”

  “Being in the room when the doctor killed her father and then himself must have been traumatic for your mother,” I said. “And the suffering continued. Rose told me that Gloria Ryder blamed herself and spent the rest of her life trying to atone for what had happened.”

  Gracie was clearly exasperated. “But why did my grandmother punish herself for a crime that a seriously disturbed man committed against her family? Rose told me that she was a fine woman, smart and kind and very proud of being a nurse. What happened wasn’t her fault. Why did she let it destroy her life? Jo, you might not be convinced of the existence of bad medicine, but sometimes it’s hard not to believe in it, especially when I look at my grandmother’s life and my mother’s.”

  “So you believe the people who say that Esau Pilger put some kind of curse on them?” I said.

 
Gracie’s eyes were troubled. “They say he has the power.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s old, shrivelled, and mean – just mean to people, though. He takes in any animal that’s hurt or hungry. His hair is white and he wears it long in the traditional way. He’s a chain-smoker, and his skin is the colour of tobacco.”

  I felt a chill. “I saw him last summer in the Lake View Cemetery,” I said. “I’d taken some flowers over for your mother’s grave and Alex Kequahtooway’s. I knelt down to say a prayer, and suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone. I turned and saw a man behind me. When I started to stand up, he spat at me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. He was an old man, and you and I both know how shamefully the Dakota people were treated by the white settlers.”

  Gracie was bemused. “So you didn’t do anything. You just took one for the team.” She shook her head as if to clear away her confusion. “I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do for our gathering.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rose’s concerns really got to me, Jo. But I spoke to Izzie this morning, and she sounded so hopeful. She’d just gotten off the phone with Abby’s life partner. Nadine Perrault told Izzie about Abby’s favourite music, the books she’d read, and the art she cared about. Isobel is convinced that sharing what she’s learned about Abby and talking openly about Chris is going to help her family.

  “So there’s my dilemma. I’d rather walk on broken glass than make Rose worry, but my best friend needs my support.” Gracie shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. “So what do I do?”