A Killing Spring (25 page)

When she’d telephoned me from the Owl on the last night of her life, Kellee had bragged about getting “proof.” She hadn’t mentioned the tape-recorder, but Linda Van Sickle had.

I went to my shelf and took down the tape-recorder. Linda had said there’d been some sort of blowup when Kellee’s classmates had discovered she was taping their private conversations. I rewound the tape and pressed
play
, hoping, I guess, for some sort of revelation, but all I got were the sounds of a student bar on a Friday night: music; a burst of laughter; a drunken shout; more laughter. The first voice I was able to recognize belonged to a young woman named Jeannine who was in the Politics and the Media seminar, and who had told me on at least three separate occasions that I
was her role model. As it turned out, she was talking about me again.

“If I’d known Kilbourn was such a bitch about not letting people express their own ideas I wouldn’t have taken her fucking course. You know what she gave me on my last paper? Fifty-eight per cent! Just because I didn’t use secondary sources! I showed that paper to my boyfriend and a lot of other people. Everybody says I should’ve got an A.”

Unexpectedly, it was Jumbo Hryniuk who jumped to my defence. “Kilbourn’s all right,” he said. “She’s kinda like my coach – tough, but generally pretty fair.”

The conversation drifted to other subjects: exam schedules; a new coffee place downtown; the most recent movie at the public library. Then Jeannine was back, whispering sibilantly to Linda. “Doesn’t it piss you off,” she said, “that even though your marks are better, Val Massey’s probably going to get that
Globe and Mail
placement? And he’s only getting it because he sucked up to you-know-who. I know everybody brown-noses, but I hate the ones who get their nose right in there.”

Linda’s voice was mild. “Val’s not a brown-noser,” she said. “There’s no reason he can’t be friends with somebody on faculty.”

“If you ask me, I think it’s more than that,” Jeannine hissed. “I’d have too much pride to do what he’s doing, but it’s going to pay off. Wait and see.”

Someone whose voice I didn’t recognize joined the group, and the topic changed. I listened until the tape ended, but there were no more references to the
Globe and Mail
placement, and there were no more references to Val Massey.

As I walked to my car, Jeannine’s sour little discourse on brown-nosing was still on my mind. She had been wrong, at least in part. Not all students saw sucking up to professors
as the surest route to academic success. Still, a surprising number did, and an equally surprising number of faculty members fell for student blandishments, hook, line, and sinker.

It was an old game, but Val Massey had never struck me as a player. The only faculty member Val had ever seemed close to was Tom Kelsoe, and that relationship was more complex than a simple friendship. At twenty-one, Val was a little old for hero worship and, to my mind at least, Tom didn’t fit the job description, but there was no mistaking Val’s unquestioning adoration. It had puzzled me until the day the kids and I had stopped at Masluk’s Garage in Regina Beach. Given Val’s father’s performance the day we saw him, it wasn’t surprising that Val had been desperate for someone to look up to.

All things considered I had a pretty good day. By mid-morning the fog had moved off and the sun was shining. I bundled up and took my work and my coffee out on the deck. Just before noon, Taylor called me into the house to show me her mural. Nanabush and the Close-Your-Eyes Dance was taking shape. Most of the time there wasn’t much I could do to help Taylor with her art, but giving her the Chagall book had obviously been an inspiration. I’d hoped Chagall’s “Flying Over Town,” with its magical mix of reality and myth, would help Taylor paint the picture she wanted to paint, and it had. The world she’d created with her poster paints seemed to me to be very like the world Alex Kequahtooway had conjured up for us on those winter evenings when we listened to the wind howl and felt the darkness come alive with his tales of the Trickster.

Taylor was eyeing me anxiously. “Do you think it’s any good?” she said finally.

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“Do you think Alex will like it?”

“I know he’ll like it. As Angus would say, it’s the smokingest.”

She didn’t smile. “Jo, when is Alex coming back?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know for sure.”

After lunch, Taylor and I went to the mall to see the movie that was required viewing for everyone under the age of twelve that Easter. As I sat in the dark, smelling the wet-wool smell of little kids, watching the endless procession of parents and children moving up and down the aisles, slopping drinks, spilling popcorn, heading for washrooms, I felt my nerves unknot. The holiday matinee was familiar turf, and it was a relief, for once, just to sit back and watch the movie.

When we pulled up in front of the house after the movie, Angus and his friend Camillo were in the driveway, shooting hoops. I dropped Taylor off and went to pick up our dry cleaning.

Taylor was all smiles when I got back. “Guess who called?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who was here. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Alex. He said to tell you he’s sorry he missed you and he’ll call again Saturday night. He and Eli …” She scrunched her face. “Who’s Eli?”

“Alex’s nephew. He’s the same age as Angus.”

“Anyway, Alex and Eli are going to some island up there. He says he’ll bring me a fish when he comes back.”

“Did he say when that’s going to be?”

“No, but guess what, Jo? I invited Alex to the Kids Convention to see the mural and he says wild horses couldn’t keep him away. That’s good, eh?”

“That’s more than good,” I said. “The Kids Convention is on the tenth – not long at all.”

Angus and I were upstairs looking for the shorts to his basketball uniform when Annalie Brinkmann called. As soon as I heard her pleasant contralto, I felt a twinge. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant to get back to you. But when I got your message, I’d just had some bad news. I teach at the university here, and one of our students died.”

I could hear her intake of breath. “Not the one who was being harassed?” she said.

I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. “How did you know about that?”

“Then it was her?”

“Yes,” I said. “The student who died was Kellee Savage.”

“Kellee Savage,” she repeated dully. “Reed didn’t tell me her name. And now he’s dead too.”

“Ms Brinkmann, how are you connected to this?”

“Through history,” she said heavily, “and through Reed Gallagher. I have to know – did that young woman – did Kellee Savage commit suicide? Because if he drove her to that …” Her voice broke. When she spoke again, it was apparent she was fighting for control. “I’m not an hysterical person, Mrs. Kilbourn, but this case has a special resonance. Twenty years ago, what happened to Kellee Savage happened to me.”

“Ms Brinkmann, you’re going to have to …”

She cut me off. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being elliptical.” Her pleasant voice had gone flat. “I was in J school here in Toronto. Reed Gallagher was my instructor. Charges were made.” Unexpectedly, she sobbed. “Without ever seeing her, I can tell you what Kellee Savage was like. She worked hard. She took journalism seriously, and …” Annalie Brinkmann hesitated. “And she was ugly.”

“What else did Reed tell you?”

“Not much. He just left a message on my machine – said he was having a problem with a student, that she was accusing another student of harassment, and he was afraid there might be some truth to her charges. Then he said he thought, because of my history, I might be able to help him get to the truth.”

“Why would he drag you into this after twenty years? Did he just want your advice because what Kellee was going through was similar to what you’d gone through?”

Annalie laughed, not pleasantly. “It wasn’t similar; it was identical. I was the prototype: the ugly girl who worked hard and came up with something the handsome young man wanted; the ugly girl who couldn’t make anybody believe her when she said the handsome young man was pursuing her sexually. Mrs. Kilbourn, Reed Gallagher called me because he was suddenly facing the possibility that twenty years ago, when he believed the handsome young man instead of believing me, he’d put his money on the wrong horse.”

I thought of Tom Kelsoe taking the picture of Reed and Annalie and shoving it into the paper-towel receptacle in the Faculty Club washroom. Suddenly, in the midst of all the questions, there was one answer. “The man who did that to you was Tom Kelsoe, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yes.” Annalie’s voice was low with anger. “It was Tom, and I’ll tell you something else. Without knowing any of the circumstances of Kellee’s death, I can assure you that when the facts come to light, you’ll discover that that bastard Kelsoe might as well have been holding a pistol to her head.”

After that, Annalie’s account of her relationship with Tom Kelsoe tumbled out. Twenty years had passed, but the pain of what Tom Kelsoe had done to her was still acute.

Like so many tragedies, Annalie’s grew out of an act of misplaced altruism. When Annalie left her home town and
moved to Toronto to study journalism, she was lonely and homesick. Working on the premise that one way out of her misery might be to help someone whose problems were larger than her own, she became a volunteer at a private hospice for children with incurable diseases. The place was called Sunshine House, and it didn’t take Annalie long to realize that it was an institution with serious problems: administrative staff had thin credentials and fat expense accounts; the personnel charged with the care of the children were incompetent or indifferent; the children themselves were casually ignored or abused. Despite the conditions, Annalie stayed on for two and a half years – in part because she felt the children needed an ally, and in part because she was patiently building up a dossier on the mismanagement at Sunshine House.

By the time Annalie Brinkmann and Tom Kelsoe were thrown together in an investigative journalism class, two things had happened: the dossier on Sunshine House was bulging, and Annalie had been fired as a volunteer. She’d been caught in the director’s office photocopying a particularly damning file. Sunshine House was about to launch a major fundraising campaign, and they had put together a series of heartbreaking pictures of dying children; the problem was the children had all been recruited from a modelling agency, and they were all healthy as horses. The director of Sunshine House had been brutal in his internal memorandum justifying the expense of hiring professionals: “a picture of any of the kids here would make Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public throw up. We’re not going to get our target group to write big cheques if they’ve got their eyes closed.”

Even without the modelling-agency file, Annalie knew she had a story, but the director’s letter was dynamite, and she wanted it. When a fellow student in the investigative journalism class confided that he hadn’t come up with a
subject for his major report, Annalie thought she’d found a perfect fit. No one at Sunshine House would suspect a connection between her and Tom Kelsoe. Tom could copy the relevant file and dig up whatever other dirt he could find. He would come out of the experience with enough material for a term paper, and she’d have a shining bauble to dangle in front of the Toronto media.

It was, in Annalie’s mind, a fair exchange, but after agreeing to her plan, Tom Kelsoe decided not to trade. After he’d photocopied the modelling-agency file, he told Annalie he’d unearthed some material that was even more damaging, and that he needed time to bring it to light. When she objected, he surprised her by making a crude but unmistakable pass.

The pattern continued. Every time she pressed him about the file, he fondled her and murmured about their future together. Annalie was, by her own assessment, both plain and naive. She had never had a date in her life. A more experienced young woman would have seen through Tom Kelsoe’s ploy, but Annalie didn’t. She believed the lies and she enjoyed the sexual stirrings. She created a fantasy in which she and Tom were journalists, travelling the world together, famous and enviable. She knew the Sunshine House story was their entrée into the glittering media world. So complete was her belief in the fantasy that, on the day she passed a newsstand and saw the Sunshine House exposé on page one of the evening paper, her first thought was that Tom had surprised her by getting their story published. When she saw that the only name on the by-line was Tom Kelsoe’s, she fell apart.

By the time she pulled herself together enough to go to Reed Gallagher, Tom Kelsoe had beaten her to the punch. Tom’s version of the story had enough basis in truth to be credible. He acknowledged that Annalie had been a volunteer at Sunshine House, but he said she’d been fired before
she had anything more solid than suspicions. He acknowledged that Annalie had suggested that he volunteer his services at Sunshine House, but he said the story he dug up was all his own.

Then Tom Kelsoe made a pre-emptive strike. He confided to Reed that he had a terrible personal problem. Annalie had, Tom explained, become obsessed with him. She was phoning him at all hours of the night, following him on the street. He was, he told Reed, afraid for her sanity, but he was also afraid for himself.

Annalie said Reed had been very compassionate with her, very concerned. He heard her story, then he suggested she seek counselling. When she objected, he talked gently to Annalie about the importance of a journalist’s good name. When that didn’t work, he talked less gently about the possibility that, if she kept harassing him, Tom might be compelled to seek legal redress against her. By the time she left Reed’s office, Annalie knew that Reed Gallagher hadn’t believed a word she’d said. She also knew she had no alternative but to withdraw from J school.

She’d been lucky. She’d got a job at a small
FM
station that played classical music, and had been there ever since. She had married. Her husband didn’t want children. He didn’t like confusion. It had been, Annalie said, a very quiet life.