A Colder Kind of Death (20 page)

“I’d be happy to.”

“Great,” she said. She threw her shovel into a snowbank and ran indoors. She came back with a box which she handed through the window to me. It was bigger than a shoebox, but not much. A box for winter boots, maybe. Someone had covered it in wallpaper, white with a pattern of ballerinas in pastel tutus. There was a yellowish stain on the wallpaper, and the box smelled musty.

“Sorry about the stink,” she said. “It was in the basement, and you know how they are.”

I thought about Henry Rybchuk committing suicide in the basement, and I shuddered.

The girl’s brow furrowed. “You will get it to her, won’t you?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

It took an act of will not to open the box before I got home, but I managed. When I walked through the front door, Taylor came running, eyed the box hopefully, then held her nose.

“What’s in that?” she asked.

“Just some old pictures that were in somebody’s house.”

“Okay,” she said, then she lowered her voice. “Angus is making dinner. It’s a surprise, so act surprised.”

“I will,” I whispered back. “What are we having?”

She pulled me down, put her mouth beside my ear, and stage-whispered, “Cinnamon buns!”

“Great,” I said.

“Remember the surprise.”

I gave her the thumbs-up sign, turned towards the kitchen, and said loudly. “I’d better go get dinner started.”

Angus came peeling out. He was wearing a shirt that said
NOBODY WITH A GREAT CAR NEEDS TO JUSTIFY HIMSELF
, and he had a ring through his left nostril. It hadn’t been there when I’d left him at lunchtime.

“Angus!” I said.

“I told the guys you were the coolest mother. I said my mother lived through the sixties, this won’t be a problem for her.”

“You were wrong,” I said.

“I knew it,” he said gloomily. Then he brightened. “I made cinnamon buns.”

“You thought I could be bought for a cinnamon bun?”

He grinned. “I thought it was worth a shot.”

That night we sat at the kitchen table, ate cinnamon buns, and watched the snow. The kids drank milk, and I drank Earl Grey tea. When I got Taylor into bed, and Angus was in his room listening to Crash Test Dummies and doing his algebra, I poured myself a glass of Jack Daniel’s, picked up the box with the ballerinas on it, and went to my room.

I was glad I had the bourbon. Jenny Rybchuk’s whole life was in that box. Her report cards, stacked neatly, were tied together by a thin blue ribbon. I looked at them all, and I read the teachers’ comments on Jenny’s development as avidly as a parent. (“Jenny is a sensible girl, whose cooperative attitude makes her a valued member of the class. She should work harder on Math.” “Promoted to Grade 7 with honours. Good work, Jenny!!!”) There were pictures, too. Baby pictures. School pictures. Thirteen of them. I arranged them in order on my bedspread. Kindergarten to Grade 12. The pictures were the kind a photographer who travels from school to school takes. Watch Jenny grow. Standard poses against standard backgrounds, yet something about them nagged at me. They were familiar somehow, as if I’d seen them before. Like a word on the tip of my tongue the connection was there, but I couldn’t make it. I put the pictures back and closed the box.

But there was one photograph that I couldn’t seem to put away. It was in black and white. Jenny looked to be about
five or six, and she was wearing a flower-girl’s dress. There was a blur of guests in the background, but she was alone and unsmiling. Her dress looked as if it was made of taffeta; she had a crown of flowers in her hair, and she was looking directly into the lens. There was something unsettling about those unblinking eyes. She seemed to be looking ahead into the future, collapsing the distance between past and present, seeking me out.

That night I couldn’t sleep. Sometime in the early hours of morning, I turned the lights on and picked up the flower-girl picture from my nightstand. “What happened to you, Jenny?” I said. “Where are you now?” I knew I had to find her, but if I was going to find Jenny, I had to find Tess Malone.

At 5:30, I gave up on sleep and went downstairs. It was too early for the paper to be delivered, so I went out back and got an old issue out of the Blue Box. The paper’s classified offices opened at 9:00. I wrote down the number. Then I turned to the classified ads and ran my finger down the column until I found what I was looking for. “If you’re pregnant and alone, we’re here. Beating Heart can help.”

I picked up a pencil and started to write. Three minutes later, I had what I wanted: “If you’re ready to talk about Henry and Jenny, I’m ready to listen. JK.”

The receptionist at Beating Heart had said that Tess checked the classifieds every day to make sure its ad was there. If I was lucky, she’d keep on reading. My ad would be the one right after Beating Heart’s.

My ad in the personals column appeared for the first time on Tuesday. There was no response, and life went on. The jack-o’-lantern was still on the deck, and Taylor still hadn’t named her cat. Angus’s nose had become infected over the weekend and, by Wednesday, he had to admit defeat and take the ring out. “Temporarily,” he said, but I recognized a window of opportunity when I saw one. As soon as the ring was out, I called Jill and asked her to come over and take some family pictures for our Christmas cards.

Thursday afternoon, there was a half-day holiday at Taylor’s school, so she came to the university with me. She brought her sketchbook and the drawing pencils Hilda had given her for her birthday. On the way to my office, we stopped off at the cafeteria for a can of pop, a bag of chips, and box of Junior Mints; then we went to the departmental office where Rosalie Norman agreed, reluctantly, that if there was an emergency, Taylor could call her. All the bases had been covered. Still, when I picked up my notes to go to class, I was anxious.

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” I asked.

Taylor was adjusting my desk lamp so the light fell on her sketchpad. “I’m fine,” she said without looking up. “There are a couple of things I really want to work on.” As I watched her choose a pencil from her case, I marvelled for the hundredth time at the metamorphosis that Taylor underwent when she was making art.

An hour later, when I came back from class, she was still at work.

“How did it go?” I asked.

She held up her sketchpad. “Take a look,” she said.

She had drawn Jess Stephens, surrounded by a series of quick line drawings of her kitten. The cat sketches were fluid and funny, but the drawing of Jess was remarkable. Taylor’s art teacher, Fil, had told me she still had a lot to learn about technique, but she’d captured Jess: the dreamy little boy with the great cheekbones and the eyes that tilted upwards and made him look always as if he were laughing.

I had seen Jess Stephens a hundred times, but it wasn’t until I looked at Taylor’s drawing that I knew why the pictures of Jenny Rybchuk had nagged at me. I tried to remember the months before Jess was born. Sylvie had gone to a fertility clinic in Vancouver. Later, because the doctors knew the pregnancy would be a difficult one, she had spent the last months of her pregnancy at the clinic and had the baby there. That had been the story. Sylvie and her baby had come back in the fall. Jess was six now. Taylor had gone to the party for his sixth birthday in September. The baby in Jenny Rybchuk’s arms in the Santa picture seemed to be two or three months old. It all fit.

When I got home, there was a message from the classified department of the paper. Did I want my ad in for another three days? I called back and said I did, but I was going to change the wording. I wanted the new ad to read: “If you’re ready to talk about Jenny and Jess, I’m ready to listen, JK.”

Tess Malone called Saturday night. I’d just gotten back from the station after doing our show, and I was in that state that Angus calls wired but tired.

Tess just sounded wired. “I saw your ad, and you’ve got to take it out of the paper. You have no idea what you can bring down on yourself if you pursue this.”

“Is Jess Stephens Jenny Rybchuk’s son?”

“Jo, why are you meddling in this?”

“I’m not meddling,” I said. “Tess, it’s important that I know the truth.”

“Dammit, Jo. Leave it alone.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I need to understand what happened. Tess, you’ve known me for years. Give me a little credit. I’m not stirring this up just to make trouble.”

She sighed. “I know you aren’t.” For a moment, she was silent. I hoped the silence was a good sign and it was. When she finally spoke, her voice was resigned.

“I hope you’re not going to be sorry you forced this, Jo. I don’t know how you found out, but you’re right. Jess is Jenny Rybchuk’s son.”

“And you knew her,” I said. “You met her when Carolyn Atcheson brought her into Beating Heart.”

“Yes.”

I felt a rush of excitement. “What was she like?”

“Young. Scared. Decent. Trying hard to do the right thing. I’d only been a volunteer at Beating Heart for three or four months when Jenny came in. I would have remembered her even if …” Her voice trailed off.

“Even if what, Tess?”

“Even if … if she hadn’t been one of the first girls I counselled. Sometimes it’s so easy to get a girl to see that having the baby is the right option. But when Jenny started to talk to me, all I could think of was how amazing it was that she was even considering going through with the pregnancy.”

“Carolyn said Jenny was poised between two very painful alternatives.”

“That about sums it up. Jenny was a very loyal girl, but when she talked about her home situation and what her father would do to her if he knew she was pregnant, I understood why she was considering abortion. When she came to Beating Heart, she was already three months’ pregnant. High-school graduation was another three months away. All her life she’d worked towards getting that diploma. It was her ticket out of hell, Jo. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it was. Once she had her Grade 12, Jenny wouldn’t be dependent on her father anymore.”

“From what Carolyn said about Henry Rybchuk, that must have been a powerful argument.”

“It was,” Tess agreed, “but it wasn’t the most powerful. Jenny’s biggest concern wasn’t herself. It was her baby. She was worried sick about what might happen to her baby if she gave it out for adoption. I guess she knew first-hand what an abusive parent could do to a child, and the idea that her own child would be raised by people about whom she would know nothing terrified her.”

“So you convinced her to have the baby and give it to Sylvie and Gary.”

“You make it sound as if I was just using Jenny to do a favour for friends. It wasn’t like that. Abortion is wrong, Jo, and, in her heart, Jenny Rybchuk knew that. She knew a foetus wasn’t just a collection of cells that you scrub away like dead skin. She knew she’d never forgive herself for committing murder. Sylvie and Gary offered the perfect solution. It wasn’t common knowledge at the time, but before Jess came into their lives, Gary and Sylvie’s marriage was in serious trouble. They’d just turned forty. There was no baby, and it didn’t look as if there was ever going to be one. They were desperate.

“All I had to do was pick up the phone. I could save the marriage of two people I cared for, keep a fine young girl from making a mistake that would ruin her life, and make certain a baby came into this world. It all seemed so right.”

“And so you made the call.”

“Yes,” she said. “I made the call, and that night Sylvie and Gary came down to Beating Heart to talk to Jenny. They were all so excited and so committed to making sure the baby had a wonderful life.” She was silent for a long while, then she said, “It should have been perfect.” She sounded as if she was speaking to herself, not to me.

“What went wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said flatly. “Everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Jenny got her high-school graduation diploma. Carolyn Atcheson went to old Henry Rybchuk and told him she’d found his daughter a job babysitting for a family on Vancouver Island, starting in June, and that she was arranging to have Jenny write her final exams in B.C.”

“And Henry Rybchuk went along with that?” I asked.

“According to Carolyn, he was relieved. He’d been laid off at the plant, and money was tight. He gave Jenny his blessing. She went to Vancouver, and, a few days later, Sylvie joined her. They stayed together until Jess was born. Sylvie didn’t want to miss any part of the experience.”

“They must have become very close.”

Tess’s voice was dead. “I guess they did.” She sighed. “Jo, I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’ve told you everything you need to know. Goodnight.”

“Don’t hang up. Please, don’t hang up yet. I need to know one more thing.” I could feel my muscles tense. “Tess, who was the baby’s father?”

“What?” she said.

“I said, do you know who Jess’s father is?”

“The name’s in our records,” she said.

“Who was it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Was it Ian?”

The shock in her voice seemed genuine. “Whatever made you think that?” she said.

“Then it wasn’t him?”

“Of course not.” For the first time that night, she sounded like the old Tess, gruff and confident, and I remembered how often that gruff confidence had got all of us through a tight spot. Now it sounded as if she was the one in a tight spot.

“Tess, are you all right?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just take the ad out of the paper, Jo. Please.” Then she hung up.

I went to my purse and pulled out the picture that had been in Ian’s wallet. Now that I knew the truth, the photo had lost its power. It was just a picture of a shopping mall Santa, a pretty young woman, and a baby whose father was a man I didn’t know. The big question had been answered, but there were others. Why had Ian been carrying the picture? What had Henry Rybchuk talked about with Ian and then with Tess the night before Ian was murdered? Why had Henry Rybchuk committed suicide? And, most naggingly, where was Jenny Rybchuk?

I opened the box of Jenny’s mementoes, and put the Santa Claus picture on the top. As I replaced the lid, I thought about the girl who had pasted ballerina-covered wallpaper on to an old box to make it pretty. Jenny’s Grade 6 teacher had said she was a sensible girl, and a sensible girl would know when it was time to put away the past. By now she probably had another baby and a new life.