A Colder Kind of Death (22 page)

“Nothing that good,” I said. “Come on, let’s walk across the lake.”

“Are you sure? It’s longer.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I want to start this year’s store of Christmas memories off with a bang.”

We jumped off the shore and walked across the ice in the moonlight. Neither of us mentioned the case that had brought us together, and neither of us mentioned the Audi. We talked about good things: Christmases and hockey and ice-fishing, and I think we were both surprised when the lights from the Centre of the Arts loomed ahead of us.

We were late. The lobby was almost empty, and we slid into our seats, laughing and out of breath, just as the orchestra struck the opening chord of the Shostakovich Fifth. My heart was pounding from the walk, and the Shostakovich kept it pounding. At intermission, I said to Alex, “I’ve had enough excitement, let’s just stay here.”

He laughed. “That’s exactly what I feel like doing. I’m wearing dress shoes, and my feet haven’t hurt like this since I was a beat cop.”

The audience drifted off, and I picked up the program. “Which sonata are they doing?”

He shrugged.

I looked at my program. “The Kreutzer,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know it.”

“You don’t like it?” he said.

“I love it. It’s just that the Kreutzer Sonata was as close as my husband and I came to having a piece of music that was ‘our song.’ Tonight’s the first time since Kevin Tarpley was killed that I haven’t spent the whole evening thinking about Ian. You and I were having such a good time …”

“We still are,” he said. “If you want to remember, remember. Let the memories come.” He leaned towards me. “You had a good marriage, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I did. My friend, Jill, is a journalist, and she says, in her business, there’s nothing like death to airbrush the past. I try to remember that when I think of Ian. He wasn’t perfect. Neither was I. But there wasn’t a day in our life together when Ian and I didn’t know that being married was the best thing that had ever happened to either of us.”

“Twenty years of a good marriage is about twenty years longer than most people get,” Alex said.

“I know,” I said, “but it still wasn’t long enough for me.”

He reached out, took my hand, and we settled back in our seats, holding hands till the audience came back, the lights dimmed, the musicians came onstage, and the guest violinist stepped forward and played, unaccompanied, the heart-stopping opening of the Sonata No. 9 in A Major. The piano replied, then, after a few bars of tentative approaches, piano and violin began their tempestuous pursuit of one another in the presto, and I closed my eyes and remembered the first time I’d heard the Kreutzer Sonata. Ian and I were at the University of Toronto. It was January. We’d been dating for a couple of weeks, and I was sitting in a classroom on the second floor of Victoria College waiting for my English class to begin. Suddenly, Ian was there. He wasn’t wearing his jacket, and he looked half-frozen. Without a word, he grabbed my hand and led me down Vic’s worn marble stairs and outside, through the snow, to a little record store around the corner on Bloor. There was a listening booth at the back. We went in. Ian’s coat and books were on the floor where he’d left them, and the
LP
of the Kreutzer Sonata was on the turntable. Ian turned on the record player, I heard the violin’s luminous entry, and my life changed for ever. We took the record back to Ian’s room, and that afternoon we made love for the first time. Afterwards, as we lay in the tangle of sheets, listening to the violin and piano play their separate and confident variations on the single beautiful
theme of the second movement, I knew that, whatever else happened in my life, I would have known what it was like to be happy. Four months later, Ian and I were married.

Onstage in the Centre of the Arts, the piano and violin were moving from the tarantelle to the sensuous passage before the finale. Alex Kequahtooway looked closely at me, reached into his pocket, and gave me his handkerchief. I leaned forward to listen to the final dazzling burst of virtuosity, and the movement was over. The musicians bowed to the audience, the applause swelled, and I mopped my eyes and blew my nose. When I was through, I turned to Alex. “Not many men carry a real handkerchief anymore.”

He smiled. “My mother always made me carry two hankies. ‘One for show. One for blow.’ ”

“I may need both of them,” I said.

“It’s a powerful piece of music,” he said.

“There’s a Tolstoy story where a character says the Kreutzer Sonata should never be played in a room where women are wearing low-necked dresses.”

Alex Kequahtooway raised an eyebrow. “Tolstoy may have had a point there.”

We walked home through the park. The temperature had risen, and the snow on the trees looked heavy and wet. Suspended from the wrought-iron lampposts along the path were globes of light that reflected red and green and white on the slick pavements.

“Do you think we’ll have a green Christmas?” I said.

He shuddered. “I hope not. I can remember only one green Christmas, but it was awful. No snow for tobogganing, and the ice was too thin for skating.”

A car speeded by, splashing water on us.

“Never a cop around when you need one,” Alex said mildly.

I laughed. “I wouldn’t say that. You were there when I needed someone to take care of that Audi. Incidentally, it
seems to have decided to play hide-and-seek with somebody else. I didn’t see it at all today.”

“Good.”

“I probably overreacted,” I said. “But there’s been so much weirdness in my life lately.”

I could see his body tense. “Such as?”

“Such as an old friend – no, not a friend, an acquaintance – telling me something disturbing.”

Alex turned to me. “What did you hear?”

The decision to tell him didn’t take long. I was sick of secrets. “I guess I should tell you who the acquaintance was first. It’s a woman named Julie Evanson.”

“Craig Evanson’s first wife,” he said.

I looked at him questioningly.

He shrugged. “Mouse work,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “You must know more about the Seven Dwarfs than we know about each other.”

“Probably,” he said.

“Then you know that Julie Evanson will never be anyone’s candidate for humanitarian of the year,” I said.

He smiled. “That seems to be the consensus.”

“Nonetheless,” I said, “Julie’s no liar.”

As I told Alex about Julie’s encounter with Maureen Gault, we didn’t break our stride, but when I repeated Maureen’s line about knowing where the Seven Dwarfs had hidden their skeleton, Alex stopped abruptly. In the street light, I saw that his expression was all cop. “Did she elaborate?”

“No, that’s not her style. Julie’s the surgical-strike-and-withdraw type. She’s happy just to leave you standing there bleeding. But that’s not the point. The point is I think Julie really believes she knows something. Look, Alex, tell me if I’m getting into an area you can’t talk about, but when you were investigating all of us, did you find anything really questionable?”

In the light his face was unreadable. “Was there something to find?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“This case isn’t over, Joanne. There are things I can’t talk about with you.” He took both my hands in his and turned me towards the light so he could see my face. “Do you understand?” he asked. “There are things you’re better off not knowing.”

I felt a chill. When I shivered, Alex Kequahtooway put his arm around my shoulder. We walked home that way, not talking but close. When we turned the corner onto my street, I pointed at my house. “Look,” I said, “we’re the only house without Christmas lights. I guess I’d better get out my ladder tomorrow.”

“Do you need somebody to hold it steady?”

“Are you volunteering?”

“I guess I am.”

“You’re on,” I said. “Is 9:00 tomorrow morning too early? My son’s coming home from university around lunchtime. He puts up the lights every year; it would be great if they were blazing when he pulled in.”

“Nine’s fine,” he said.

We were standing in front of my door. “Do you want to come in for a drink?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “Nine o’clock comes early.”

“I had a good time tonight,” I said.

Alex Kequahtooway reached out and touched my cheek. “So did I.” Then his face grew serious. “Be careful, Joanne. Don’t take any chances.”

I unlocked the front door. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m a very prudent person.”

Saturday morning I woke up to the radio weatherman telling us we were in for a record-warm December 5. “Get out the sunscreen, folks,” he said. I looked out my bedroom window. Maybe not sunscreen weather, but there were patches of dark ground beneath the melting snow, and I could hear water dripping off the eaves. When Alex came, his windbreaker was open, and Angus refused to wear a coat at all.

“Somehow, when I envisioned this, I thought we’d all be rosy-cheeked in our toques and ski-jackets,” I said.

Angus shook his head. “Dream on, Mum.”

Alex and I put the lights on the house while Angus and Taylor did the trees. When we were through, Taylor brought her pumpkin out and placed it on top of the painted cream can I was going to fill with pine boughs and red velvet bows. She smiled at Alex. “Can you light him up, too?”

Alex looked at me questioningly. I nodded. “It can be done,” he said, and he threaded the lights expertly through the pumpkin.

“Good job,” Taylor said approvingly.

“You’d be amazed at the things they teach us at the police college,” he said.

Angus ran in the house and turned on the lights, and the four of us stood on the soggy lawn assessing our handiwork. In the rotting snow, the lights looked like decorations for a used-car lot, and there was no denying that Jack was more battle-scarred than ever.

“I think my Hallmark Christmas just went down the dumper,” I said.

“Let it go,” Alex said. “We’ll come up with something better.”

I smiled at him. I liked the sound of that
we
.

We had an early lunch because Alex was on duty at noon. Peter drove up just as he was leaving. As I saw Peter pull up out front, I tried to think how his old green Volvo would look to someone who hadn’t known it as long as we all had. Rust had eaten serious holes in the car’s body, and the trunk was tied shut with a piece of rope, but the homemade canoe rack on top was still in A-1 shape. I turned to Alex. “As a cop, are you are obligated to do something about a car like Veronica?”

He pointed towards the Volvo. “That’s Veronica?”

“Peter’s pride and joy,” I said.

Peter came, and after the hugs and the introductions, Alex pointed to the canoe rack.

“You enjoy the water?”

Pete grinned. “Sure, but I don’t have a boat. That thing just came with the car. It seems kinda pointless to take it off.”

Alex nodded in agreement. “Who knows? One day you might get a kayak or something.”

Pete’s grin grew even wider. “Exactly,” he said, and he shot me a look of triumph. I had never been a fan of that canoe rack.

Angus and Taylor came out and hauled Pete into the house to show off the cat and see if he’d brought them anything. Alex watched their retreating backs thoughtfully. “Nice kids,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I was afraid that between Peter’s car and Taylor’s superannuated pumpkin you’d be ready to write us off by now.”

He shook his head. “Actually the car is pretty much like most of the cars I had when I was a kid, and Taylor’s pumpkin looks like my captain.” His words were casual, but when he turned to me, his dark eyes were grave. “Are you planning to stay pretty close to home today?”

“I’ve got our
TV
panel at 6:30. Till then, I hadn’t planned much beyond visiting with Pete and getting ready for the show.”

“Good,” he said.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but it never hurts to be careful.”

Our topic that night was changes in the delivery of the health-care system, and I spent the afternoon catching up on Peter’s news and rereading my notes. It was a subject I was up on, but the questions viewers called in were quirky sometimes, and I wanted to be prepared. As Alex said, “it never hurts to be careful.”

We ate early, and I was at Nationtv by 6:00. I had trouble finding a parking place. When I got to the entrance I remembered why. There was huge fir tree in the middle of the galleria, and the area around it was filled with people. I spotted Jill at the far end of the room, talking to a cluster of technical people who were watching a choir arrange themselves on a makeshift stage. When Jill saw me, she gave one final instruction to the camera people and came over.

She was wearing a dark green silk skirt and a matching
blouse covered in Christmas roses. In her ears were gold drop earrings which, on closer inspection, turned out to be reindeers.

“You look like the spirit of Christmas,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to find the fuckhead vice-president who came up with this community tree-lighting idea. Do you know the network’s doing this all across Canada? Coast-to-coast, people are jumping in their cars so they can come down to their local Nationtv station, hang their trinket on our tree, and get a glass of warm apple juice and a dead doughnut. And people like me are trying to figure out where we’re gonna find the money to pay all our technical people time-and-a-half. Do you know what I was doing when you came? Setting up to reshoot a segment because a little girl in the front row of the choir peed herself in the middle of ‘Frosty the Snowman.’ She didn’t even stop singing. The cameramen noticed it dripping off the edge of the stage.”

I started to laugh.

“It’s not funny, Jo,” she said. Then she started to laugh, too. “Well, maybe it is funny, but a real friend wouldn’t have laughed. Come on, let’s go downstairs. We can run through the show when you’re in makeup.”

After I was made up, Jill and I walked onto the set. I sat in my place, and Leslie Martin came over and clipped my microphone on my jacket. She was wearing dark green tights, a red and white striped jerkin, and a red stocking cap with a jingle bell on the end.