by Gail Bowen
“Don’t sell yourself short, but that metaphor is useful because it points to the problem Rosamond flagged.”
“Did she have a solution?”
Roy chuckled. “We’re talking about Rosamond. Of course she had a solution. She believes the weight of the sisters’ stories could be balanced by introducing a character like Ben Bendure, who’d known the Ellard and Love families from the beginning and who continued his relationship with both women throughout their lives.”
As he talked about possibilities for structuring the script, Roy spoke with energy and zeal, and I found myself experiencing the thrill I felt when I realized that the dissertation of a student I was supervising was first rate, or that momentum was finally on our side in an election campaign.
“You look happy,” Roy said.
“I am happy,” I said. “This is fun, but I feel guilty.”
“Don’t feel guilty. My work always carries me out of myself.”
“That’s a blessing,” I said. “Especially now.”
“And it’s one I’m grateful for,” Roy said. “But, Jo, let’s put the current situation aside and focus on the future. Rosamond would like to be considered for the Ben Bendure role.”
“Gender-blind casting?” I said.
Roy laughed. “No. There’s no reason the filmmaker in our script can’t be a woman, and it would be a crime to hide all Rosamond’s womanly vibrancy in a khaki vest and walking boots. It’ll be a great part to write. We have so much material to work with.”
“I talked to Rosamond yesterday, and I was surprised at how far Gabe had already brought the project.”
“Gabe had many skills,” Roy said. “But despite John Donne’s belief that that no man is an island, Gabe Vickers’s death does not diminish me; it diminishes no one because he was a man without a conscience.”
I felt the hairs on my neck raise. “Roy, I understand what you’re saying, but be careful to keep your feelings about Gabe to yourself. This morning Zack and I were talking about the contracts you and I signed. If Gabe were still alive, he could have produced Flying Blue Horses without you or Ainsley. I didn’t want that to happen any more than you or Ainsley did. Presumably, the option will now revert to his widow. We all had something to gain from Gabe Vickers’s death, and that fact will be of interest to the police.”
Roy’s nerves were too close to the edge for him to hide his feelings. His face flushed with resentment. “You think Ainsley and I had something to do with Gabe’s plunge over the edge of his balcony?”
I tried to keep my tone reasonable and reassuring. “Of course not, but there are details that don’t point to suicide, and the police will be looking seriously into the behaviour of everyone who stood to benefit from Gabe Vickers’s death.”
Roy stood suddenly, his hands balled into fists at his sides. His eyes were blazing. “Ainsley could not have killed Gabe,” he said tightly. “She was with me all night—every minute, every second. She was with me from the time she walked into my condo until we heard the ambulances, ran down the hall, and discovered that a person—who turned out to be Gabe—had jumped to his death. We weren’t apart for a millisecond.”
And with that, Roy stalked out of the room. I didn’t follow him. I waited until I heard the door slam, and then I sat down, picked up my cup of lukewarm tea, and tried to assess what I had just lost.
I was still replaying the painful scene between Roy and me when Zack called to tell me that he’d just spoken to Debbie Haczkewicz and the shit was travelling towards the fan at warp speed. A preliminary autopsy on Gabe Vickers’s body had shown that, in addition to the injuries he had sustained from his fall, there was evidence that Gabe Vickers had been badly beaten, and that he was self-medicating. His blood alcohol count was .10 per cent and he had ingested opioids at some point in the hours before his plunge.
“It was an ugly way to go,” Zack said. “Given Vickers’s injuries and the chemical-alcohol stew in his body, the medical examiner was surprised he was able to make it to the balcony.”
“What was he doing out there in the middle of a blizzard anyway?” I said.
Zack’s laugh was short and dry. “Having a cigarette. Gabe might have been six kinds of bastard, but he was considerate enough not to smoke in the house.”
* * *
—
When the doorbell rang, I didn’t rush to answer. I was relatively certain that whoever was on the other side was not the bearer of good news. My visitor was persistent, and finally I admitted defeat. When I opened the door it was, in Yogi Berra’s immortal phrase, ‘like déjà vu all over again.’ The petite young delivery woman from Gale’s Florist was on my porch holding a large and heavy plant. When I held my hands out to take the delivery, she grinned. “You and I have been to this movie twice before, right?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the door earlier. I’m having a bad day.”
“Happens to us all,” she said. “Maybe the showgirl here will cheer you up.”
I took the showgirl into the kitchen and unwrapped her. I checked the card. Remember the rule of three. XO Margot. I was smiling as I carried the plant into the living room and placed it in front of the third window in the room that offered decent light.
When I stepped back to see whether the arrangement of the poinsettias worked, I knew immediately that it did. The three plants with their dark green foliage and rich burgundy bracts made the room tastefully festive. Margot’s client would have deemed them a statement, not a shout. I still had the florist’s card in my hand, and without thinking, I tucked it under the new plant—a habit I’d fallen into two years earlier when Zack had been ill and the florist was constantly at the door. Keeping the card with the plant was a way of remembering who sent what when I wrote the thank-you note.
On impulse, I went to the first poinsettia we’d received, removed the card and read the message aloud. “So a kingdom was lost—all for the want of a nail.” Thanks for taking charge. Gabe. The idea behind the old proverb had become an axiom in law. Zack said that his mentor had taught him early that the failure to correct some initially small problem could lead to successively more serious problems and ultimately to a dire outcome.
The note on the card was a powerful message, but it had not been intended for Zack and me. Gabe had ordered two poinsettias from the florist, and the cards had been switched accidentally. When I saw the twin of our plant in Zephyr Winslow’s living room the morning we had tea, I had known at once that the message we’d received had been intended for her. At the time, the mistake had seemed inconsequential. Now I wasn’t so sure. The poinsettias had been delivered the morning after Shawn O’Day had threatened to reveal what he knew about Gabe’s sexual perversions. Shawn very quickly became Zephyr’s constant companion.
The night Zephyr summoned me to her home, she had an agenda: she had been determined to sow doubts in my mind about Vale Frazier. Her modus operandi had been long on innuendo and short on specifics, but in retrospect, its timing was significant. Zephyr’s call had come just hours after the journalist from Nexus had interviewed Vale and Taylor. Gabe Vickers had been present at the interview, and Vale saying that she was absolutely open with Taylor had been a red flag he couldn’t afford to ignore. If Vale revealed what had been going on with her and Gabe to Taylor, what was to stop the news from spreading? The consequences could be catastrophic to The Happiest Girl. He needed an ally and Zephyr, as the anonymous bankroller of the project and a major funder of the Saskatchewan film industry, had a vested interest in keeping a lid on any scandalous rumours associated with the project.
But what if Zephyr had found out that Gabe was about to leave Canada, that after all her efforts to contain his secrets, after all her investment in him and the film studios, he’d been careless—and criminal? If Gabe were to flee Canada, Living Skies would follow shortly after The Happiest Girl was completed. That would be a blow to the resurgent Saskatchewan film industry, and to Zephyr Winslow herself. Had Zephyr once again ta
ken charge and this time stopped Gabe? The pieces were all there, but they were not firmly in place.
Zack’s advice that we step back and let the police do their job was the sensible course of action, but the police didn’t know about the message on the florist’s card. The least I could do was drop it off at the station, explain my concerns about Zephyr’s involvement with Gabe Vickers, and let the experts draw their own conclusions.
I put on my coat and boots and took my shoulder bag from the hook by the door. When I opened the bag to drop in the note that had come with the poinsettia, I saw the plastic keycard I’d picked up from the floor of the penthouse elevator barely an hour after Gabe died. I recalled that Lizzie had lost Vale’s keycard. In the turmoil that morning, no one had asked Lizzie where and when it had disappeared. My nerves twanged.
That morning, as the five of us had sat in the shadowy light of the spa waiting room, something had been weighing heavily on Lizzie’s mind. In assuring Lizzie that she had nothing to fear from the police, Zack said, “You’ve done nothing wrong.” Lizzie tried to correct him, saying, “You don’t know what I did before.” Zack assumed, as I did, that she was talking about something much earlier in her life, and he said, “What happened in the past doesn’t really matter now.”
Remembering how Lizzie’s dark eyes had continued to dart anxiously despite Zack’s attempts to calm her fears, I was certain that when she told him he didn’t know what she’d done before, she was talking not about the distant past but about the minutes before Gabe went over the rail of the balcony. In her interview with Debbie Haczkewicz, Lizzie became agitated when Debbie asked her to picture exactly what happened that morning, and she repeated Zack’s assurance that she didn’t have to talk about what happened “before.” Only when Debbie agreed that all Lizzie needed to talk about were the first moments after she went outside did she relax. Lizzie had never been asked about where she was and what she was doing during the early hours before Gabe fell to his death. It was time we heard her story.
Zack was still in court, so I sent a text: “Closer to discovering what happened on Gabe’s balcony the night he died. Call ASAP.”
Fired up by the prospect that Lizzie had information that would shed light on the circumstances surrounding Gabe Vickers’s death, I drove to the production studios. Tobi was on set. I gestured to her and explained that it was imperative that I talk to Vale. Tobi waited for Ainsley to call a break then spoke briefly to her and when Ainsley nodded assent, Vale approached me.
She was in costume: blue jeans, walking boots, and the colourful Fair Isle sweater that Ursula wore throughout the story because her grandmother had knit it for her. When I showed Vale the keycard I’d found in the elevator and said I was certain it was the keycard Lizzie lost, Vale’s face remained impassive, but I could feel her anxiety. I wasn’t surprised. Lizzie’s behaviour was unpredictable.
Taylor was in Vale’s dressing room working on a sketch and we joined her there. After I explained again the circumstances under which I’d found the keycard, Vale’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure this is actually my keycard,” she said. “Gabe gave me one for his and Ainsley’s penthouse too, and Lizzie could have picked it up at my place.”
As she twirled a strand of her auburn hair, Vale was thoughtful. “It sounds ridiculous, but I haven’t had time to get any sort of perspective on what happened. I didn’t learn about Chloe’s reaction to seeing Gabe until late in the day. Lizzie told me what happened when we took a break just before dinner.
“That’s when I called Taylor and asked her to find out exactly what the man who attacked Chloe did to her. When Taylor told me what she’d learned, I knew immediately that Gabe was the man. I told Tobi I thought I was coming down with the flu and needed to go home. Lizzie came back to the condo with me. She was hovering. I told her there was a problem that I had to work through and asked her to get herself something to eat and go into the bedroom and watch TV.”
“How long did Lizzie stay with you that night?” I said.
Vale shrugged. “I don’t know. After Gabe showed up, there was just so much emotion.”
“Had you asked him to come?” I said.
“He was the last person I wanted to see. I was sitting at the table trying to focus on my pages for the next morning and he just came through the door.”
“He had his own key?” I said.
Vale’s voice was thick with disgust. “Of course. His schedule was erratic, and he said he wanted to take advantage of every chance to be with me. Anyway, that night he said that if rumours started circulating about him not to believe anything I heard, that I was the most important person in his world, and that we were going to make amazing movies together.
“I told him I couldn’t talk about what we were going to do together until he explained what had happened with Chloe.” Vale’s extraordinary turquoise eyes were brimming. “I didn’t want to think that he had done this to her, Joanne. I think I would have accepted almost any explanation Gabe offered, but he actually laughed when I confronted him. He said he’d just acted on impulse and she probably didn’t even understand what had happened.” Vale’s complexion flushed with anger. “I couldn’t believe he had done something so vile and said something that cruel. I told him that we both knew it was too late to replace me in The Happiest Girl, but our personal relationship was over.
“That’s when he lost it. He’d been in control until then, but he begged me to forgive him, and he cried. I cried too. He said his need for me had ruined his life and I told him it had done the same thing to me. We both said hurtful things. It was loud and it was ugly. Lizzie gets very upset by conflict. That must have been when she slipped out of my condo. I didn’t hear from her again until she texted me the next morning to say she’d found Gabe’s body.” Vale covered her eyes with her hand. “That’s it, I guess.”
“Unfortunately, this isn’t over, Vale. Lizzie told you that she spent that night in the vestibule at the front of your building because she’d lost her key. The vestibule would have provided shelter, but it was unheated and the temperature outside was thirty below zero. When we met you and Lizzie the next morning, she had been inside for less than half an hour, but nothing about her suggested that she’d spent hours in an unheated space when the temperature outside was thirty below.”
“You think she wasn’t outside,” Vale said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There are just too many unanswered questions. That’s why we have to find Lizzie.”
“It won’t be easy, Vale said. “I’ve asked, but she won’t tell me where she lives. She says she needs her space. She never mentions any friends. Everything she gets she gives to strangers. I think she mostly just hangs out at the library and at the food court at that mall downtown.”
“Cornwall Centre,” Taylor said.
Vale nodded. “Lizzie likes the library because they never hassle her, and as long as she has a drink or something to eat on her table at the food court, they leave her alone.” Vale frowned. “And she likes this place she calls ‘the ladies.’ The first time Lizzie mentioned it, I thought she was referring to a public washroom, and I told her to steer clear. But she said ‘the ladies’ isn’t a bathroom, just a place that makes her feel safe, so I didn’t press her.”
Taylor and I exchanged glances “We know where to find The Ladies,” I said.
The buzzer in Vale’s dressing room sounded. “I’m wanted on the set,” she said.
“Jo and I will see if we can find Lizzie,” Taylor said.
“She’s so vulnerable,” Vale said. “I’d prefer not to involve her.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “Right now, a cloud is hanging over a number of innocent people. I think Lizzie has information that can help dissipate it.”
The three of us walked together to the end of the hall. Vale was clearly troubled. Taylor put her arms around her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This will work out.” Vale turned so that her face and Taylor’s were almost touching. For a f
ew moments, they simply looked at each other, and then, very gently, our daughter kissed Vale’s lips.
* * *
—
Taylor and I didn’t mention the kiss as we drove downtown. We went to Central Library first, the largest of the city’s libraries, with diverse patrons. As always, Central was filled with people in search of answers, questions, new worlds, fresh perspectives on old worlds, and just plain diversion. Also as always, there were those, like Lizzie, who simply sought a haven where they could be safe, warm, and treated with dignity. Taylor and I split up to search. She took the children’s library in the basement. I took the library’s second floor, and we checked the main floor together. Our search was thorough, but we came up empty.
The parking space we found in the mall’s parkade was on the second floor, home of the food court. The place was crowded, noisy, and redolent of the aromas of food courts in malls throughout Canada and the U.S. Scores of people loaded down with holiday packages were arriving, lining up, elbowing for tables, savouring their Orange Julius drinks and New York Fries, dumping their trays, and leaving, but Lizzie was not among them.
When we admitted defeat and left the food court, Taylor was philosophical. “Looks like The Ladies will have to come through for us,” she said.
The sculpture my daughter and I were headed for had been installed when the Cornwall Centre mall opened in 1981. Its official name is Regina, but most people just call it The Ladies. It’s a lovely and welcoming piece. Three larger-than-life women, dressed in the kerchiefs and outfits of their homeland, are standing with their children, looking out at this new land where they will make a life. Situated in a space designated for lounging and visiting, the sculpture’s warm colours and the soft curves of the women’s bodies make it an ideal place to meet friends or to chat.
As Taylor and I stood side by side on the escalator carrying us to the main floor, I said, “When you were little and we came to the mall, I always told you that if you got lost, I’d be with The Ladies, waiting for you.”