Deadly Appearances

by Gail Bowen

  There was a group photo of the class. Andy’s teacher looked like an original – hair frizzed out to shoulder length, hoop earrings, gypsy scarf, dirndl skirt – but even in the halftones of an old school photo she had an air of great vitality. I looked at the bottom of the page. Of course, Hilda McCourt. The one with the dazzling red hair and the sharp tongue who’d been onstage the day Andy was murdered and who’d been so angry with me when I underestimated her memory at the lunch after the funeral.

  She lived, I knew, in Saskatoon. Andy used to take her out for dinner every so often when he was up there. I thought of Saskatoon, and I remembered hugging Lori that morning and the smell of apples in her hair. Then I thought how good it would be to hold my own daughter, and I picked up the phone and dialled information. Five minutes later, I had arranged to meet Hilda McCourt the next day before noon.

  When Rick phoned that night, we talked for close to an hour. Like me, he sensed that the pieces were there if only we could see the pattern. I didn’t mention my illness. There was no point because it wasn’t there. It wasn’t real. All in my head.

  The next morning, when I went to get dressed, the first two skirts I tried on hung on me. When the waistband of the third skirt gaped, too, I went into Mieka’s room, found a wide belt and belted the skirt tight. Sort of like Scotch-taping a drooping hem, but I was starting to simplify.

  It was a mild day, but I was freezing. I put on a heavy sweater and then, when that wasn’t enough, I went to the basement and dug out my winter coat. The phone rang as I was about to go out the door. It was Dr. Philip Lee’s office, and they’d had a cancellation for the next day, late afternoon. Was I interested? If I left Saskatoon after lunch I’d make it easily. As soon as I hung up, I was hit with a knot of abdominal cramps. Just my body’s way of saying I had made a good decision, I thought, as I waited till the cramping stopped. I made a few arrangements with the boys, picked up my car keys, slung my purse over my shoulder and went out the door. It wasn’t quite 8:30 a.m. With luck, I’d have had my talk with Hilda McCourt and be at Mieka’s by noon.

  About an hour out of the city, the cramping hit again, and the diarrhea. I was lucky. There was a gas station with a garage – a real garage, the kind where men in coveralls come to watch other men in coveralls peer into the bowels of vehicles. There was a smell of oil and gasoline and something else – an artificial pine smell that must have come from the display of cardboard deodorant pine trees by the cash register.

  When I came from the bathroom, the man in the station looked up at me curiously.

  “You all right, lady?”

  “Fine thanks … Just the aftermath of the flu.”

  “It’s going around,” he said sagely, and then, surprisingly, “There’s coffee, but let me get you some tea. I had that flu and it’s a bitch. The tea will settle you, so you can get to … I suppose you’re going to Saskatoon.”

  I nodded.

  “Two more hours. If you feel as crappy as I did, you’ll need something. Put lotsa sugar in it for energy.”

  The tea got me to Davidson, a little more than halfway. Again, there was the cramping, like a fist tightening in my lower stomach, then I broke out in a cold sweat. I pulled into the parking lot behind a hotel and shook. Then I went into the hotel coffee shop, which was almost empty at this time of morning and still smelled of stale beer from the pub across the hall.

  There were cardboard cutouts of pumpkins and skeletons on the mirror behind the counter, and a young albino girl with her back to me was taping orange and black crepe paper around the mirror’s edge. On the radio, a woman who said she was a witch was taking calls on a phone-in show. The girl never said a word. She blinked at me incuriously through her white lashes while I gave her my order, set the soup down carefully in front of me, brought a glass of water and a cellophane-wrapped package of crackers and went back to taping her crepe paper. On the radio, the witch was explaining the witch’s alphabet.

  The soup and the fresh air seemed to do the trick. By the time I got to Hilda McCourt’s neat little house on Avenue B, I felt better. When I rang the doorbell, Hilda came around the side of the house from the backyard. The October sunlight was kind to her. She looked her age – eighty, give or take a year – but she looked great. She was wearing lime-green coveralls and a lime-green and cerise cotton shirt. Both had labels from a designer who had dominated the youth market for the past couple of years. She had covered her brilliantly dyed red hair with a scarf, and a slash of lipstick – cerise to match her blouse – was feathered across her lips. Her smile when she greeted me was as open and vital as the smile on her face when she posed with Class 12-A, E.T. Russell H.S. (1964).

  “Come around back with me. I’m just about through turning over my garden for the winter. Carpe diem. We may not get many more days like this. I’m going overseas for a short holiday next week, and I want to leave everything shipshape.”

  “It looks shipshape to me already,” I said when we came into the backyard. Orange plastic garbage bags full of leaves were neatly lined up against the garage, shrubs were tied with sacking, rosebushes were covered in dirt, and the flower beds had all been turned over.

  “Just this last bit of the vegetable garden to go,” she said, “and then we can go in and have a glass of sherry.” She picked up her shovel. “Why don’t you sit down on one of those lawn chairs and get some sun? You look a little green. What is it, that godawful flu that’s going the rounds?”

  “Something like that.”

  Hilda McCourt wasn’t a woman who felt she had to amuse a guest. As soon as she saw I was settled, she went back to her digging. She worked with energy and efficiency, and as I watched her, I had a memory of how good it had felt when my body had worked that way, strong and obedient. I wondered if it ever would again, and I shuddered in the warm sunlight.

  “That’s it,” she said finally. “I leave that for the devil,” she said, pointing to an unbroken piece about three feet square at the corner of her vegetable garden. “Have you heard of the devil’s half-acre? There are a hundred names for it in folklore – all wonderful, all nonsense, of course, but a nice idea still. A little gesture of conciliation to the dark powers. I even have an incantation I use when I sow my seeds: This is for me. This is for my neighbour. This is for the devil. It’s American, but before that from Buckinghamshire and before that – who knows? Probably our ancestors were saying it when they were still painting themselves blue. Anyway, it’s good to feel connected with what went before.” She took off her gardening gloves, undid the scarf and shook her head. Her hair, improbably orange, fuzzed out around her head. It seemed to have an energy of its own. “Come on.” She reached out a hand to help me up. “By the looks of you, you could use a real drink. I have a bottle of Glenlivet an old student brought me at Thanksgiving. The sun must be over the yardarm somewhere.”

  She sat me down in a little glassed-in porch that overlooked her garden. “Why don’t you put your feet up – lie down on that lounge there while I get our drinks.”

  It was a fine and individual room. Along one wall there was a trestle table filled with blooming plants: hydrangea, azalea and hibiscus. Across from it was an old horsehair chaise longue covered in a bright afghan. At the foot was a television set; at the head, a table with a good reading lamp and a pile of best sellers. The walls were covered with pictures of pilots and aviators, dashing young men in bomber jackets or RCAF uniforms or – in the most recent ones – the red coveralls and white silk scarfs of the Snowbirds.

  “Heroes,” said Hilda McCourt as she came into the room. She was carrying a tray with a bottle of Glenlivet, an ice bucket, glasses and a round of Gouda cheese. With one hand, she pulled out a little nesting table from the corner, and she set the tray on it. “Now, here’s our lunch. I don’t share the old country passion for drinking whisky neat, but there’s no need to dilute good Scotch with water.”

  She poured us each a stiff drink over ice, then she reached into the back pocket of her overalls, pulled
out a Swiss army knife and cut us each a wedge of Gouda. We lifted our glasses.

  “To heroes,” she said.

  “To heroes,” I agreed. The Scotch was smooth and warming. I felt the bands that had been enclosing my chest relax a little.

  Hilda leaned across the table to look at me. “You look better,” she said. “Now, what’s all this about?”

  “Andy Boychuk,” I said.

  “Andy was a hero of mine,” she said simply.

  “Me, too,” I said, and I was surprised to feel my eyes fill with tears. I took another sip of Scotch. “Miss McCourt, this isn’t going to be easy for either of us, but I have to ask some questions, and I think it’s best if I come right out with them.”

  “That’s always the best plan of attack.” She took a thin slice of Gouda and peeled the red wax from it. Her army knife gleamed sharp and lethal in the sunlight.

  “When Andy was in high school, was there ever any unpleasantness?”

  Her clever old eyes looked up at me, alert to a threat to her hero.

  I continued. “Anything involving another boy? I don’t mean bullying.”

  “You mean, of course, something sexual,” she said, and then, hostile, defending her hero: “What? Has some tabloid got hold of something?”

  “It’s more serious than that.”

  She sat back, plunged the knife into the wedge of Gouda and cut again. “Yes, I guess I knew it must be serious for you to come here.” She finished her drink and poured another. “To answer the question you pose, Mrs. Kilbourn, yes, there was some unpleasantness, but it was an isolated incident. Over the years, I have decided to disregard it. Teachers see a lot, and that kind of thing happens more than you can know.

  “Generally, it doesn’t amount to much at that age. The hormones are racing, you know. Sometimes they just boil over. I never worried about Andy. He was always so masculine.” She turned and looked out the window, and I knew there was more.

  “But you did worry about the other one,” I said, “the partner.”

  “Yes, I did worry about the other one. He was …” She turned her hands palms up. “He was different, tall but very delicate and slender, a poetic boy. Now what was his name? It was something unfortunate. A name to plague a boy, but I can’t call it to mind now. It’ll come to me. Is it important?”

  “I think it may be a matter of life and death,” I said. “But it’ll be in the yearbook.”

  “I don’t think so. He came right at the end of the year.” She shook her head with frustration. “I can’t remember the boy’s name, but I can close my eyes and remember that desk in home room – right in front of me, empty all year, of course, until this poor, sad boy was transferred to Russell. I was furious, too, that that kind of rumour had to attach itself to Andy so close to the end of high school. A blameless record – absolutely blameless.”

  She looked at my glass. “Damn, you’re empty. I’m not much of a hostess, am I? But I can do this for you.” She splashed the Glenlivet into my glass. “And one other useful thing: I can go to the board office. They keep records for years. I’ve looked up students before, for reunions and sometimes just out of idle curiosity. Nothing simpler. Are you planning to drive back to Regina today?”

  “No, I’m staying with my daughter tonight. She’s going to school here.” A spasm hit me in the stomach, and the metal taste came in my mouth.

  “I think that’s a wise decision, Mrs. Kilbourn. You’re looking tired. Does your daughter live far from here? You don’t look well at all.”

  “Not far,” I said, standing up. “If I could just use your bathroom.”

  When I came back, Hilda McCourt was standing by the front door wearing her jacket.

  “I’ll drive you,” she said, holding my coat for me.

  “I’ll make it,” I said sliding my arms into my coat, trying to look capable. “It’s not far at all.”

  “That’s a blessing,” she said. “Now what’s your daughter’s number? I’ll call you when I get back from the board office. Take care of yourself, Mrs. Kilbourn.”

  I felt strange when I pulled up in front of Mieka’s house on Ninth Street, weak and heavy-limbed. I reached into my purse and pulled out my makeup bag. I rubbed blush across my cheekbones and drew a fresh lipstick mouth over my own. “Putting on my face,” as the old ladies always say. I didn’t look in the mirror – I was feeling rotten enough already.

  I had hoped my visit would be a surprise, and it was. From the length of time it took Mieka and Greg to answer the door and from the way they looked when they finally did, it was apparent that they had been making love.

  Mieka opened the door, blinking in the sunlight, looking rosy and happy and vague. Greg was behind her, his arms wrapped protectively around her. She tried to smile.

  “Oh, Mummy. I wish you’d called ahead.”

  I walked past them into the hall. I was trembling. That was a new symptom. “I thought you’d be baking bread or something,” I said and kept walking toward the kitchen. There’d be a chair in the kitchen.

  “I baked bread this morning,” she said, following me. Amazingly, she had – half a dozen loaves of crusty dark bread were sitting on racks.

  “Oh, Mieka,” I said and slumped into a kitchen chair. The nausea hit like a breaker, and then another spasm, wave after wave. I was crouched in my chair like an animal. My mouth filled with the taste of nails and then saliva. Finally, unforgivably, in the middle of that kitchen that smelled warmly of yeast and fresh baked bread, I vomited.

  They were both there at once. She, wrapping her arms around me as the spasms hit and I retched and retched; he, wrapping his arms around her.

  “I’m all right, Mieka,” I said at last, sitting up.

  “I know, Mum, I know,” my daughter said in a voice weary, resigned, determined, a voice I remembered from the time after her father died, and I had cracked into a thousand pieces.

  “Damn it, Mieka, don’t patronize me.” I moved to get loose from her grasp. And there in the mirror above the sink I saw it, a tableau. Call it Paradise Lost or Mother Comes to Call: a young dark-haired man, his face still tanned from summer; a girl with ashy blond hair and an oversized university sweatshirt. Handsome people, but looking frightened of the grotesque burden in their arms: a woman with dark ash-blond hair and wild eyes and hectic makeup, circles of colour on her white cheeks and a slash of lipstick smeared across her mouth. Old womanish, clownish – me. The vise tightened around my chest and then, merciful and tender, the blackness came.

  I awoke in an unfamiliar room, in a strange bed that still, in its soft flannelette sheets, held the smell of sex. Of course, they wouldn’t have had time to change the sheets. And outside the room, voices young and deep and urgent.

  “Mieka, I know you love her. I’m going to love her, too, but you could smell the Scotch a mile away. Babe, if that’s the problem, we need to help her. I’m not saying we don’t. I’m saying face it.”

  And then my daughter’s voice, strong, defending me. “She’s not a drunk, Greg. Even at the worst, she didn’t go that route. She’s been through so much and she wasn’t over that horror show about Daddy. Nobody could come through what’s happened to her without some sort of reaction. They would have had to peel me off the walls of my rubber room. But she’s not a drunk. It has to be something else.”

  Good old Mieka, defender of embarrassing mothers. I curled up and went to sleep and dreamed strange dreams: Rick Spenser in Mieka’s kitchen making bread, pulling points of dough from a long, thin baguette. Soren Eames at the kitchen table with Andy, laughing and saying to Rick, “Now don’t forget a seed for you and a seed for me and one for the master,” and then the bell on the stove ringing and ringing and then floating up through consciousness to the knowledge that the phone was ringing. I picked it up.

  “Joanne Kilbourn speaking.”

  On the other end, husky-voiced and excited, was Hilda McCourt. “Well, Mrs. Kilbourn, may I call you Joanne? I feel we’re into an adventure together, so l
et’s use first names.”

  “Fine, Hilda. What did you find out?” My voice sounded a hundred years old.

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing. Someone sliced through the microfiche.”

  I felt a prickle of excitement. “Someone did what?”

  “Sliced through the microfiche. The board transferred all their school records to microfiche a couple of years ago. Joanne, do you know what microfiche are?”

  “Those films that you scoot through a projector and then you see your document on a screen?”

  She laughed. “Well, that’ll do. Apparently someone scooted the grade twelve records of E.T. Russell High School through the blade of a knife.”

  “When?”

  “The people at the board don’t know. Employees are in and out of there all the time. You’re supposed to sign in and out, but they’re quite lax. These aren’t precious documents or even particularly confidential ones. Twenty-five-year-old school records have pretty well done whatever damage they’re going to do.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. I felt deflated, and I guess I sounded weary.

  “Are you all right?” The surprisingly young voice was alert, concerned.

  “Well, I’m going to disembowel the next person who asks me that, but, yeah, I think I’m okay, just disappointed. I think that boy’s name could help us.”

  The us I meant was Rick Spenser and me, but Hilda McCourt, my co-adventurer, picked up the reference happily.

  “I agree, Joanne, I believe it can help us, but don’t despair. I have an excellent memory, and I expect that name will surface. Now give me your Regina number so I can call you as soon as it does.”

  I gave her the number.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” she said, “never fear, and when we do I still have almost half that bottle of Glenlivet left for our celebration.”