The Winners' Circle

by Gail Bowen

  Gracie got straight to the point. “Rose just got off the phone with Betty,” she said. “There’s been a fire at Standing Buffalo. Esau Pilger’s house burned down.”

  “Was Esau inside?”

  “No. But he was on the reserve. Betty says he got back to Standing Buffalo yesterday. Apparently, the morning after Rose called him to see if he’d used bad medicine on my family, Esau drove up to Wahpeton.”

  “The reserve up north, near Prince Albert.”

  “Right,” Gracie said. “The people of Wahpeton are Dakota Sioux like we are at Standing Buffalo. Esau told Betty that at Wahpeton he went to a sweat and spent time with a traditional healer. He says he came back yesterday and cleaned out his house. He built a big fire outside to burn up the trash, and the wind changed. By the time the fire truck got there, his house had burned to the ground.”

  “But Esau is all right,” I said.

  “Yes, and his cats and dogs are fine too. So no worries there, Jo, the dog whisperer.”

  “You know me too well,” I said. “Gracie, does it sound to you as if Esau is planning to make a new start?”

  “The indications are certainly there,” she said. “The first thing he did when he got back to the reserve was go to Betty’s house. Betty told Rose it took her a moment to recognize him. Esau was clean, his hair was neatly braided, and he was wearing fresh clothes. He said he wanted to see me.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “According to Betty, Esau said he wants to tell me he’s sorry for everything.”

  I felt a chill. “A blanket apology,” I said. My mind raced. I didn’t want to upset Gracie, but a half-formed thought had been gnawing at me. I hesitated, and then said, “Gracie, you don’t think the police got it wrong about Emmett Keating, do you?”

  Gracie sounded surprised. “I don’t believe that Esau had anything to do with what happened to my dad and Delia and Kevin, if that’s what you mean. And, Jo, Emmett Keating confessed.”

  An image of Esau sitting at the table, sharpening his knife, in the midst of the detritus of his wasted life as I called 911 for the granddaughter of the woman he loved flashed through my mind. “You’re right,” I said, but my body was taut with worry. “Of course, you’re right.”

  —

  That night sleep did not come easily for me. When, finally, I did fall asleep, I dreamed I was facing the iron pickets of the entry gate at Lawyers’ Bay, the one that kept the cottages secure. It was a bitter day, bitingly cold, windy and snowy, but I could see the cottages. Ours was the only one with the lights on. I knew Zack was inside waiting for me, but the gate was locked. The digital code that I had to punch in order to enter was as familiar to me as my own name but, numbed by cold, my fingers were too clumsy to hit the correct numbers, and the gate remained stubbornly locked. I called out for help, but no matter how often or how loudly I called, no one came. I grabbed the iron pickets of the gate and tried to shake it open. When one of my palms started to bleed, I gave up and turned to walk away. I took a step but then stopped to look back at the cottages one last time. I saw that ours had burst into flames. Frozen, I watched as it burned to the ground. With that terrible suddenness that comes at the critical juncture of a nightmare, I awoke. My usual pattern after awakening from a bad dream was to slow my breathing until my heart beat normally, move closer to Zack, and, as I tried to decipher the dream’s meaning, gradually drift back into sleep.

  Carl Jung’s theory that a dream is a message that can be understood only if you turn it over and over again in your mind had often led me to some surprising insights about my life. That night, I didn’t need to turn the cube to uncover what the dream was telling me: my husband was in danger, and I had to find a way to save him.

  CHAPTER

  18

  The next morning, for the first time since the tragedy on All Saints’ Day, I felt as if my brain was functioning. I was certain that my dream of the fire had been a warning. I had no plan, but I knew I had to take action. I had always been fond of a line in a book about medieval knights that my children had loved. Before a knight mounted his steed and set off, sword in hand, he would cry, “I’ll take the adventure God sends me.” Though I was without steed or sword, I was prepared to use whatever came my way.

  In one of those meaningful coincidences that suggest there’s a pattern to our lives, Noah Wainberg called just after breakfast to ask if we could get together that morning to talk about the service for Delia. Zack was planning to work a half day at City Hall, so as soon as I dropped him off, I went to the Wainbergs. I had seen Noah the day before, but when he answered the door I was taken aback. He had always moved with the ease of a man confident in the power of his body. That day he moved cautiously, like someone recovering from a serious illness.

  After he’d hung my jacket on the coat rack, he led me into the kitchen, where Jacob and Rose were making cookies. Rose was putting small spoonfuls of dough into Jacob’s palm so he could use his hands to roll the dough into balls. Over the years, I had made cookies with many children, but Jacob brought a unique and profound seriousness to the task. Standing beside me, Noah saw the similarity that had struck me. “Look at the way Jacob sets his mouth,” he said. “That boy is so much like Dee.”

  “And Isobel,” I said. I approached the cookie-makers. “What happens to the dough after you roll it into balls, Jacob?”

  “We put the balls on the cookie sheet and put the cookie sheet in the oven. And then – voila – we have cookies!”

  I laughed. “Voila?”

  Jacob nodded solemnly. “Granddad says you have to say ‘voila’ or the cookies don’t turn out. That’s why Rose and I say ‘voila.’ ” He looked up at Rose. “Don’t we?” he said.

  “We do,” Rose said. “And it works every time.”

  “I’m looking forward to tasting one of those voila cookies,” I said.

  “Jacob will make sure you get one when we’re through with the planning,” Noah said. “Meanwhile, Jo, Isobel’s in the dining room with her laptop.”

  —

  When she heard her father and me come in, Isobel half-stood. “Jo, we’re so grateful you’re helping with this. Dad and I aren’t making much progress.” She indicated the chairs on either side of her. “Sit close to me so we can all see the screen,” she said. “We’ve decided on Thursday at two and we were able to rent the university theatre, so the venue’s decided. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.”

  “We have made a few decisions,” Noah said. “The ceremony’s going to be secular.” His mind seemed to drift.

  I pressed on. “Beyond that, do you have any ideas about the kind of service you want?”

  Noah’s laugh, normally warm and robust, was a harsh bark. “I don’t want a service at all,” he said. “I want Dee to be alive. I want her to walk into this room, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”

  Isobel kept her eyes on the laptop screen. “That’s not going to happen,” she said. “Dad, if you don’t want a service, we don’t have to have one.”

  “We’re not having it for me, Izzie. Your mother was a remarkable woman. People need the chance to reflect on her life. She was a brilliant lawyer, one of the most prominent in the province, with an extraordinary record in front of the Supreme Court.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Isobel said tightly. She continued to stare at the screen for a few moments before she raised her eyes to meet her father’s. “Dad, do you think Delia changed at the end? She stood with us while we listened to the Ravel quartet. Was she just following a momentary impulse or did she suddenly see her life differently?”

  Noah seemed defeated. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think your mother would have tried to be different, but she was fifty-two years old. It might not have been possible for her to change.”

  Just as the silence in the room became unbearable, a small bright voice in the kitchen called out, “Voila!”

  All of us smiled. “Time to carry on,” I said.

  We made our ch
oices quickly. Zack would deliver the eulogy. A string quartet would play Debussy and Ravel. Isobel had always been a reader and she volunteered to choose the readings. Delia was being cremated, so her ashes would be placed in a carved teak box Noah had made for her when they married. The funeral would begin with Margot, Zack, and the new Falconer Shreve equity partners processing up the centre aisle of the university theatre and taking their seats with the family in the front row. The service would end when they all left. Lorne Callow had volunteered to work out the details of the reception.

  The first part of our meeting was over. Noah, Isobel, and I joined Jacob and Rose in the kitchen to snack on warm cookies and cold milk. Comfort food on a day when we sorely needed comfort.

  Isobel had decided it was time for her to go back to classes, and after she left for the university, Noah and I returned to the dining room. We had always been comfortable enough with each other to stay silent if we had nothing to say, and it took me a while to decide how to broach the subject that had been not far from my mind all morning. As I told him about my nightmare, Noah listened intently.

  “I haven’t been able to shake it off,” I said. “That dream embodies a possibility I find almost impossible to face.”

  “The possibility that this isn’t over,” Noah said. “I can’t shake that thought either. I’ve tried to convince myself that Emmett Keating’s confession and suicide really was the end, but I can’t.”

  “Neither can I,” I said. “And here’s another loose end to pull on. There was a phone call on our landline the day the police discovered Keating’s body. The voice was muffled, so I’m not certain whether the caller was male or female. Whoever it was said, ‘They thought they got away with murder. They didn’t and they won’t.’ ”

  The muscles in Noah’s face tensed. “Did you report the call to the police?”

  “No. Since…” I stumbled and started again. “Since the day everything happened, Taylor had been staying with Margot. The night the phone call came was Taylor’s first night back with Zack and me. We were all fragile, and I thought the three of us needed a quiet family dinner. I honestly didn’t give the call much thought. Noah, I’ve been involved in electoral politics for much of my adult life. Crank calls come with the territory. None of them has ever been a real threat.”

  “But this caller mentioned not letting someone get away with murder,” Noah said quietly. “Which means the call might amount to something. Joanne, Delia never knew the specifics about the information Keating had on Chris. She told the partners she assumed it was about the defalcation but, in private, she confided in me that she was worried Keating had found out about the circumstances of Murray Jeffreys’s death.”

  As Noah’s words trailed off, I felt a coldness grow in the pit of my stomach. It was a story I had not thought of often since I had learned of it a few years ago, but I had never forgotten what Zack had told me about that ugly passage in the otherwise golden story of the young lawyers’ early years.

  It began when Noah, along with Delia, Zack, Blake, Kevin, and Chris, crashed a Christmas party thrown by Murray Jeffreys & Associates. Over the years, Jeffreys had earned a reputation for being a successful but unscrupulous lawyer. The party had been out of hand and, except for Chris, the young friends were drinking heavily.

  At some point in the evening Murray Jeffreys came onto Delia. When she rebuffed him, he turned mean. Chris saw the threat and shepherded their group out of the building into a back alley. Jeffreys followed them. When he lunged at Delia, Noah began throwing punches, and the older man went down. Noah was certain none of his punches had connected, but when Chris knelt beside Jeffreys, there was no pulse. Chris made a quick decision. Recognizing that his friends were too intoxicated to deal with the authorities, he sent them away. When the police arrived, he told the officers that Jeffreys was already down when he found him. Later, the autopsy concluded that the cause of death was a massive heart attack.

  “That case was closed the year they were all articling,” I said. “If Delia thought Keating might be blackmailing her about Jeffreys’s death, why didn’t she say something the night of the dinner?”

  “She was caught off guard,” Noah said. “Dee believed she’d handled the situation with Keating. Suddenly, he was standing in front of her making accusations, and Margot was demanding answers. Delia made her case with the first thing that came to her mind: the defalcation.”

  “Even if Emmett Keating did know something about Jeffreys’s death, from what Zack told me Chris was the only one of you who did anything wrong, and in the end, what he did didn’t make a difference. The coroner ruled Jeffreys died of a heart attack. Delia knew that,” I said. “She could easily have called Keating’s bluff and told him to do his worst.” Not until I uttered the words did I realize how ill chosen they were.

  Noah stood, shaking his head. “That’s what Keating did, Jo. That’s exactly what he did.”

  —

  When Zack came home after his half day at City Hall, it was clear that half days would be in order until we’d made it through the funerals. I decided not to burden him with speculations about the nature of Emmett’s blackmail. He was tired but in good spirits. LivingSkies, one of the Toronto production companies Zack had courted during his week in Toronto, had secured funding for a CGI project about a young girl who searches for her grandmother among the polar bears and northern lights of Churchill. The company was moving its offices to Regina at the beginning of the New Year. Movie jobs were clean and they paid well. Between LivingSkies and Caritas, which would occupy its former offices on the old campus of the university, Zack was hopeful the city’s film industry had been born again.

  That afternoon, Norine stopped by with paperwork for Zack to catch up on. He’d had a rest after lunch and he mowed right through the paperwork and asked Norine to bring more on her way home in the evening. He was doing a credible imitation of a man who was back in the saddle, but the sorrow never left his eyes. We had dinner with Taylor and were in bed early again that night.

  Within moments of Zack’s resting his head on the pillow, he fell into a deep sleep, but I lay awake. That morning, I had been ready to take on whatever came my way, feeling sure that the day would yield answers to niggling thoughts and uncertainties. Now, all I had was more speculation, and any answers there might be, it seemed, were snuffed out when Emmett Keating took his own life.

  —

  Tuesday morning, after a fitful night’s sleep, I was weary and on edge, but it was the day before Remembrance Day, and the service to commemorate those who had died in war was being held that morning at my granddaughters’ school. I had promised to be there. Madeleine was reciting a poem and Lena was carrying up the paper wreath her class had made. Both girls were in the choir and were singing “In Flanders’ Fields.” Zack had planned to attend the ceremony, but he’d already missed too much work, and on Wednesday he would be presenting a wreath on behalf of the city at the cenotaph in Victoria Park. He needed the time in the office to catch up on more paperwork before his first public appearance since he’d fallen ill.

  When Gracie Falconer called that morning to ask if I had any time to meet her, I told her I was free all day except for the 10:30 service at the girls’ school. Gracie said she’d made arrangements to go through her father’s safety deposit box as soon as their bank opened, but she’d be through by ten, and as a graduate of Pius X she’d welcome the chance to go to the Remembrance Day service with me.

  The ceremony was being held in the gymnasium. Gracie had been withdrawn when she picked me up, but the moment she walked into the gym, she was her old self. She gazed at the walls filled with banners for teams that had won championships. Gracie had been on the Pius Patriots for four years, and in every one of those years, the Patriots won the girls’ basketball city championship. When the school principal, Mo St. Amand, spotted Gracie, he came over and embraced her. “I’m so very sorry about your father,” he said. “He was a good man. I don’t think he ever missed one of yo
ur games.”

  “He didn’t,” Gracie said. “He was a terrific dad.”

  Mo turned to me. “It’s good to see you too, Joanne. Madeleine and Lena are excited about their part in the program. All the children are. It’s important for them to remember the ones who went before.”

  “It’s important for all of us,” Gracie said. She drew Mo’s attention to a teacher standing at the door to the gym who was gesturing to him. “You’re being summoned,” she said. “Thanks for your condolences.”

  As the classes filed in, each child wearing a poppy, Gracie was intent. “I think I remember every second I spent at this school. Not much has changed. More kids. New portables. Some new teachers, but it still feels like home here. I’m glad I came, Jo.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  Gracie leaned closer and looked at me closely. “Are you okay, Jo? You look a little pale.”

  I was inwardly debating the wisdom of telling Gracie about the questions that had been nagging me since Noah and I had talked the day before when my eldest child arrived. Mieka never missed her daughters’ events, but owning and managing UpSlideDown and April’s Place kept her busy, and that day, as always, she arrived breathless, with only seconds to spare before the program began. She slid into the chair next to mine. Mieka relished her role as Taylor’s big sister and as honorary big sister to Taylor’s friends. When she asked if we could trade places so that she could sit next to Gracie, Gracie’s face lit up. The two of them sat close as the program moved along, and both had their cameras out when the girls performed. We managed to stay dry-eyed until the choir sang “In Flanders’ Fields,” and then Mieka had to pass the tissues. After we’d praised the ladies for their respective performances, and congratulated Mo St. Amand on another moving Remembrance Day service, the three of us walked together to the parking lot.