The Winners' Circle

by Gail Bowen

  Delia sounded tense. “Jo, I need to talk to Zack.”

  “He’s in Toronto,” I said. “And he’s in meetings all morning.”

  “His phone is going straight to voicemail,” Delia said, and her own voice was tight with frustration.

  “He turns it off during meetings,” I said. “You know that, Dee. Is there something I can do?”

  “Exterminate that rat Emmett Keating,” she said. “Have you checked your mail today?”

  “Our mail doesn’t come till the afternoon.”

  “This will have been hand-delivered. Emmett made a copy of that photo of the five of us at the lake that first summer and defiled it. How could he do that to us?”

  The whine of privilege set my teeth on edge. “Dee, I’m not following you. Zack texted me that picture. What Emmett did is pathetic, and it’s creepy, but I don’t understand why you’re so upset. The only person that photo hurts is Emmett.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” Delia was clearly exasperated. “How does it hurt that little toad? We’re the ones whose faces were covered in excrement.”

  “Dee, you’ve lost me.”

  “Just check your mailbox,” she said.

  I tamped down my anger. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “Stay on the line.”

  Kevin was looking at me questioningly. “Delia,” I said. “Apparently there’s a problem.”

  I brought the padded mailing envelope inside, and heeding Delia’s words about what the envelope contained, I took the trash can out from under the sink and opened the envelope over it. Kevin was standing beside me. As the picture slid out, he whistled.

  I picked up the phone. “Okay, Dee,” I said. “Obviously we were talking about two different versions of the same picture. Warren Weber had an investigator go to Emmett’s apartment yesterday morning. The investigator found a doctored picture on Emmett’s desk.” When I described the photo, Delia was outraged afresh. “That photo is iconic. Keating had no right to steal it or tamper with it, and he had no right to defile it with excrement.”

  “I agree that was an ugly thing to do,” I said, “but none of you was harmed. It was just a photo.”

  “You can’t understand how it felt to open that envelope and see us like that.”

  Delia’s comment struck a nerve, and I made no effort to warm the chill in my voice. “Dee, people around you are dealing with far worse things than seeing poop smeared on an old picture. Maybe it’s time you thought about them.”

  She hung up. Usually after I lost my temper, I was sick with remorse. That day I didn’t feel a scintilla of guilt.

  Kevin sipped his coffee. “Dee certainly raised your hackles.”

  “I don’t like being treated like Aaron Slick from Pumpkin Crick.”

  Kevin chuckled. “No one who saw you in that black gown you wore to the dinner at the Scarth Club would have mistaken you for Aaron Slick.”

  I smiled. “You’re a good friend. Anyway, we have real problem to deal with.” After I told him that no one had seen or heard from Emmett since Warren made his offer, Kevin raised his eyebrows. “So we’ve got Emmett, the Missing Person, and Emmett, creator of the Emmett-as-Zelig photo. And we’ve got Emmett, the Poop Smear-er. Doesn’t add up, does it?”

  “No,” I said. “Emmett was obsessed with being a Falconer Shreve partner. He was so devastated about Delia’s summary rejection of him that he tried to blackmail her into promoting him. When the video that showed him being hustled out of the fund-raiser became public yesterday morning, it was too much, so he decided to take off. But before he left, he took the time to distribute a poop-smeared copy of the same picture he photoshopped himself into, and he still doesn’t seem to have made good on his blackmail threat.”

  “It was the weekend,” Kevin said. “Emmett could show up at Warren Weber’s office this morning, explain that he needed some time to think and accept Warren’s offer. Or he could follow through on his blackmail threat.”

  “Do you really believe he will?”

  Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. But whether or not he accepts Warren’s offer, I do think Emmett will turn up. Right now, he has no reason to believe anyone has seen his strange, sad alteration of our picture. The idea that anyone at Falconer Shreve could find out how desperately he wanted to be part of the firm will bring Emmett back – at least to clear out his apartment.”

  “And then what? More photos smeared with excrement? Kevin, Emmett has done some terrible things, but no matter what Delia believes, he didn’t do that. There’s no way a man who can’t get through an hour without sanitizing his hands would dig into a pile of excrement just for the sheer pleasure of wiping it on the faces of Falconer Shreve’s founding partners.”

  Kevin frowned. “You’re right, of course. Delia has always had this laser focus, but lately she’s just not thinking clearly.”

  “And that has to end,” I said. “Kevin, I like Delia, and I understand that she’s going through a bad period in her life. She’s a perfectionist and nothing’s working for her. But, sympathetic as we all are, Delia’s doing real damage. If Zack and Margot hadn’t stepped in, Delia’s mismanagement of the firm would have pushed Falconer Shreve over the edge.

  “And that’s just the beginning. This whole mess with Emmett Keating started with Delia, and God knows where that’s going to lead now. The firm can’t afford to have Delia going around accusing Keating of defacing the photo. He still has the information about the defalcation in his back pocket, and if he’s feeling cornered, he’ll use it.”

  Kevin pushed his chair back. “Was Dee at work when she called?”

  “She’d just found the envelope, so she was probably still at home.”

  “I’ll track her down and try to talk her off the edge.” Kevin gave me a quick hug. “Thanks for breakfast. I wish we’d managed to do it more often.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  After Kevin left, I put on a pair of disposable latex gloves, slid the photo back into its envelope, and put it on a shelf in the mudroom. If there were any further developments, the police would be interested, but at the moment, I was simply hoping the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” would be proven true.

  It wasn’t.

  Nagging as a toothache, a vision of Esau Pilger’s living room pushed itself into my consciousness. I closed my eyes and I saw that foul room and the two framed photographs on the wall: the one of Gloria Ryder, who broke Esau’s heart, and that of the five young lawyers whose presence across the bay was a constant reminder of the land and life Esau’s people had lost. Logic had eliminated Emmett Keating as the person who dropped the envelopes into Delia’s mailbox and ours, but someone had done the deed, and Esau Pilger seemed a likely suspect. I took out my phone and called the Falconers. When Rose Lavallee answered, I told her about the photo and said I’d stay on the line until she’d checked the family’s mailbox.

  When she picked up again, Rose’s voice was taut. “Who do you think did this?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we have to consider Esau Pilger.”

  Long pauses in conversations never troubled Rose. If she didn’t have anything to say, she didn’t say anything. So when she was silent, I didn’t assume our talk was over. I waited.

  “I’ve been with Gracie since the day she was born,” she said. “Last night I called Esau. I asked him flat out if he’d used bad medicine against Gracie and her family. He flew off the handle. He said white people were the ones that used bad medicine – they took what our people had and all they gave us was sickness and death. Esau said other things but none of them bears repeating. When I told him I’d had enough – that unless he calmed down and started making sense, I was going to hang up – he beat me to the punch and hung up on me.”

  “Do you think he was angry enough to deface the photos? He has a copy. I saw it in his house.”

  “Hard to credit that a person you know would do something as nasty as that.”

  When Rose lapsed i
nto silence again, I pressed her. “We should talk about this face to face,” I said.

  “Face to face is always better,” Rose said. “Could you come here? The heating people are scheduled to give the furnace its fall checkup and I don’t want to miss them.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said.

  —

  The Falconers lived in a mock-Tudor house on Leopold Crescent, in a historic and affluent neighbourhood known as the Crescents. Rose met me at the door and ushered me into a pretty sitting room that overlooked the street. Two upholstered club chairs faced each other across a small table upon which rested a tray set for tea with a plate of Rose’s homemade ginger cookies, a Brown Betty in a knit tea cozy, and two delicate cups and saucers.

  Rose gestured for me to sit. “We’ll give the tea a few minutes to steep,” Rose said. “I know you like your tea to have a good colour.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Might as well get down to business then,” Rose said. “This morning after I drove Gracie to school, I went out to the reserve to talk to Esau. He wasn’t there and neither was that old truck of his. He never leaves Standing Buffalo. He could have been anywhere.”

  Rose picked up the teapot, poured a little in my cup, and looked at me questioningly. The tea had good colour. I nodded, and Rose filled my cup and then her own.

  “Possibly delivering those pictures,” I said.

  “It’s possible,” Rose said. “The band office has a scanner, and they’ve given up locking the building, so Esau could have just walked in and used the machine. There are office supplies there too.” The sentence trailed off.

  “So he could have taken what he needed,” I said.

  Rose sighed. “Yes, but I don’t believe he did. Esau’s been around my whole life,” she said. “He’s over twenty years older than me. In most places, that would mean different worlds, but there’s only one world on Standing Buffalo. People said he was a sweet, friendly boy, but he went off to residential school and that changed him the way it changed so many – some for better, some for worse.”

  “And with Esau, it was for worse?” I said.

  “He was afraid of people. He withdrew. When his mother and brothers moved into the city, Esau wouldn’t go with them. He stayed in that house by himself. He hired out as a farmhand and when winter came, he did odd jobs in town. He earned enough to keep body and soul together and – here’s the sad part – he earned enough to buy an engagement ring for Gloria Ryder.”

  “Gracie’s grandmother,” I said.

  “And the woman Esau fell in love with,” Rose said. “The way I hear it, Esau and Gloria had never even been alone together. He loved her from afar. By the time he got up the courage to give her the ring, she was already set to marry Henry Redman. When Esau asked her to marry him, Gloria fainted dead away. When she came to, she told him about Henry Redman, and people say when that happened, Esau went a little crazy.”

  “So crazy that he cursed her?”

  “Some say that. Some don’t. But the fact is Esau never got over her turning him down. He was one person before Gloria told him she couldn’t marry him. After that, he was another person.”

  “Gloria must have been extraordinary to inspire that kind of love.”

  “There’s something about the Ryder women,” Rose said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there. I’ve seen pictures of Gloria, and she wasn’t a beauty. Neither was Lily. Not like my sister. Betty was a looker from the day she was born. Men have always been drawn to her like moths to a flame, but here’s the difference. When Betty said no to a man, he just flew on and found another flame. But once a man fell in love with one of the Ryder women, he never flew on. He just stayed where he was, staring at the flame and hoping.”

  A landline in the next room rang and Rose sprang up to answer. When she returned, she was frowning. “That was Gracie. Her class was cancelled, so she’s ready to come home.” Rose glanced at her watch. “The furnace people were supposed to be here by now.”

  “And if you leave, they’ll arrive just as you pull away,” I said. “I’ll be happy to pick up Gracie. If she’s in the mood, we might go to Magpie. Gracie loves their cinnamon buns.”

  On our way to the front door, Rose and I both stopped to look at the portrait of Lily that was hung over the fireplace. Rose was right about Lily’s appearance. She was not conventionally pretty. Her features were too sharp, and her obsidian eyes too sorrowful. But her body was lovely – full-breasted, slim-hipped, and long-legged. She had chosen a strapless silk dress the colour of a new leaf for the portrait, and she’d allowed her hair to fall loose to her shoulders, brush strokes of jet against the glowing bronze of her skin. She was mesmerizing.

  “Blake will never get over her,” I said. “The other day at the hospital when he talked about Lily, I wanted to weep.”

  Rose nodded. “There were many, many nights when I did just that,” she said.

  —

  Rose had arranged to pick Gracie up at College West. During all the years I taught at the university my parking spot was in the faculty lot close to the building, and it seemed odd not to pull into my old space, grab my briefcase, and head for my office. When Gracie got into the car, she kissed my cheek, thanked me for pinch-hitting, then slid into silence.

  As I turned off Wascana Parkway to take the route home, Gracie touched my arm. “Jo, could we drive around for a while. My class wasn’t really cancelled. I just didn’t feel like going.”

  “Think you might have rushed your re-entry into the world a little?” I said.

  “No, I’m fine – at least physically. No pain, and the meds aren’t affecting my energy level. I’m bummed about losing my season, but I’ll get over it. I just need some time to think.”

  “I know just the place,” I said. I chose a parking spot overlooking an area on the shore of Wascana Lake, which because of its shallowness often attracted water birds. The path around the lake was busy. Retirees in sensible walking shoes and young mums with babies in jogging strollers had replaced the super-fit young joggers whom I often saw on my morning run. When offices closed for the day, the second wave of super-fit young joggers would appear. After their run, they’d meet friends for coffee or drinks. Later, in the gloaming, lovers and lonely people who had nowhere else to go would take their place.

  For perhaps five minutes, Gracie and I sat in companionable silence. “You were smiling,” Gracie said finally. “What were you thinking about?”

  “I was remembering something significant that happened here,” I said. “Zack and I hadn’t been married very long. On my run that morning I’d seen a pair of American avocets.”

  “Those shore birds with the slender legs and the long thin beaks,” Gracie said. “This spot is on my running route too. Avocets are lovely, but we don’t see them often in the city.”

  “That’s why I told Zack about them. He was going to be in court all day, but we agreed to come here when he was finished. As it turned out, we had a fight – a serious one, and we weren’t speaking. Finally, Zack said, ‘If an actuary were here, do you know what she’d say? She’d say, Count up the years you two have left to be together, and then go and see the fucking avocets.’ ”

  “And did you?”

  “We did.”

  Gracie’s laugh was rueful. “Why can’t everybody be like you and Zack?”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Isn’t there always something?” Gracie said. Her voice wavered between anger and despair. “Isobel wasn’t in our ten o’clock class, so after it let out I called her. There was a big blowup at their house this morning. Izzie’s mother said she’d changed her mind about the dinner on Halloween. Izzie tried to convince her not to back out, but Delia was adamant. She said she was already under a great deal of stress and she pleaded with Isobel to accept that she couldn’t be part of the evening.”

  “Dee’s had a difficult morning. She might come around,” I said.

  “Isobel told her moth
er the evening would go ahead without her, and Noah supported Isobel. That, of course, was a seismic shock to everybody. Delia lost her temper and stormed out. She said she’d send her assistant to pack her clothes and she’d be at the Hotel Saskatchewan until the Day of the Dead nonsense was over. Isobel’s absolutely miserable. She believed that if Delia could see how much Abby meant to their family, she’d start to be more open about her so that Noah, Isobel, and Jacob would feel they could be too. Now the gathering that was supposed to bring everyone together is driving Izzie’s family further apart.”

  “The distance has been there for a long time, Gracie. You know that.”

  “Do you think we should forget about the evening?”

  “It’s a tough call,” I said. “It’s right for Izzie, Jacob, and Noah. You think it will help your dad, and I agree. Zack and Kevin need to acknowledge how much Chris meant to them. But Delia won’t do it, and you’d rather not.”

  “I have to admit getting hurt out at Esau’s has made me more nervous about our plans.”

  “That’s understandable,” I said. “And, Gracie, there’s a new development in the Esau Pilger saga.”

  When I told Gracie about the photographs that had been hand-delivered to our mailboxes that morning, she made a moue of disgust. “Gross, but I don’t believe it was Esau. He’s been nursing a grudge for over fifty years, and he hasn’t acted out like that.”

  “Rose doesn’t believe Esau defaced the pictures either, but there’s something puzzling. Rose was upset about your accident and she called him last night to ask him directly if he’d used bad medicine on you. Apparently, he lost it. He said some ugly things and hung up. This morning after she dropped you off, she drove to Standing Buffalo to straighten out the situation. Esau wasn’t there. Neither was his truck.”

  Gracie frowned. “He’s always there,” she said.

  “Not this morning,” I said. “And it’s a troubling coincidence. I don’t think Rose believes Esau used bad medicine on the Ryder women. She pointed out that the men who fell in love with Gloria and Lily suffered as much as Gloria and Lily did, and these men were never able to move on.”