A Nose for Death (2 page)

Mort's other preoccupation, besides food, was figuring out what made people tick. After a dozen weekend workshops, he fancied himself an amateur psychologist. “By the way, Joan. What's this?” He picked up the gold-trimmed reunion invitation from the kitchen counter and waved it at her. “Are you going?”

“Someone sent it by mistake. Or as a joke.” As she spoke she grabbed it from him and nervously folded the invitation into a tiny square.

“You don't know that.” He didn't take his eyes off her.

“If they wanted me there they would have invited me to the tenth reunion or the twentieth. No, someone's made a mistake. That or they want money for their alumni fund. They probably saw my name in the paper or they've got some new hotshot development officer who's turning over every rock to find cash.” She dragged her sleeve across her eyes, mindless of the streak of mascara. “Madden's the distant past. I just need some sleep, is all.”

Mort knew the tragedy that had been her final year in high school, why she'd left without graduating. Was he being cruel because she'd asked him to leave or was he just playing analyst? At that moment he put one of his big arms around her shoulder. She sank into his chest, quivering. She hated herself for crying.

“They want you there. Who wouldn't want you around?” He was fingering the top button on her blouse. “Sleep? You sure?”

“I'm sure, Mort.” She moved his hand away firmly.

“Go, Joan. It would be good for you. There must be someone you'd like to see again. What about the geek and the dyke?”

She bristled at his flippant reference to Gabe and Hazel, her two best friends from high school, her only close friends. Mort could be so shallow, so insensitive, and he wasn't even aware of it. No wonder she kicked him out. Gabe and she had kept in touch for a couple of years after high school, then she'd lost track of him. He'd been a brilliant anarchist and was probably running a small Latin American revolution by now. She'd heard that Hazel had gone to San Francisco, the only place you could be out and happy thirty years ago.

Mort read her tight-lipped silence. “Sorry.”

“They won't be there. They'd never go. I'd be all alone. Still shy, single, and plump.”

“Demure, Rubenesque, and I'll go with you.”

Her jaw dropped. “No! Absolutely not.”

He raised one eyebrow and grinned.

Forty minutes later the light was fading and she was watching him sleep. Why did she do this to herself? Every time she let him stay it was harder to make him leave again. Shaking him gently, she whispered, “Did you mean it?”

“Huh?”

“Did you mean it when you said you'd come with me?”

He pulled her toward him. “Can't wait. Now go to sleep.”

Joan lay awake watching the late-afternoon shadows on the spackled ceiling, imaging the contours of Madden as it had been thirty years ago. Thinking how the tradition of taking yearbook photos in the autumn sometimes misrepresents the truth. A lot can happen between September and June; yet on picture day, the record is set. On that crisp day thirty years earlier, Joan's greatest concern had been whether she should wear her hair in a ponytail, as she did most days, or down and straight, which was hipper. She couldn't ask Gabe Theissen, who was in line ahead of her. Her best friend had no patience for vanity. He'd only lecture her about all the cancer patients in the world who had no hair.

Joan wrinkled her nose. Someone was wearing too much candy-scented perfume and it mingled with the musk of three-hundred teens packed into the gym. As the line shuffled forward, she daydreamed, imagining the message she'd write in the yearbooks of her classmates when they were issued in the spring. Those words and that photograph would be how people remembered her for eternity. The flash of white light brought her back to the moment. Her photo had been snapped. There'd be no second chance.

As the spots cleared from in front of her eyes, the principal entered the gym. A teacher pointed in her direction. Her first thought was that one of her brothers had done something wrong. Anthony had started tenth grade that fall and she'd been waiting for embarrassing repercussions.

When she reached the office she saw her mom through the large glass window. Their eyes met and she knew that something had happened to her dad, and at that moment she became the caretaker of her mother. In her darkest hours she'd wondered if her dad's heart had given out because he could no longer cope with having a child for a wife.

Leo and Vi had both been twenty-two when they married and he had adored her wide-eyed wonderment at the world. She never lost that awe but it also meant she seldom bothered with the responsibility of adulthood. It had been Leo who had made sure that the three kids got off to school on time, that there were groceries in the house, and the utility bills were paid. Vi cooked dinner, occasionally did laundry, and never broke a fingernail over dishes or yard work. And she always, always looked beautiful when Leo arrived home. Despite the demands on the home front, he managed to build a successful roofing company. Vi never had a day of worry.

When Leo died, that all changed.

At eighteen Joan had planned her father's funeral. His brother, Uncle Nick, came from Waterloo for the service. Her mom's two sisters and their husbands arrived a day early from Vancouver to fuss over their youngest sibling. Neighbours left casseroles and cakes. Then, after a week, the circus was over and the bomb dropped. Vi had no idea whether or not Leo had insurance. It had been as irrelevant to her as gas bills and house payments. Joan turned the house upside down looking for a policy. She went through boxes, drawers, and his overstuffed, disorganized filing cabinet, but it soon became obvious that her father had made no provisions for this to happen. Leo didn't expect to die. And he had lived life large, spoiling Vi and the kids to the point where Joan had thought they were well off.

When he had a big contract, he'd spend big. But in roofing there are slow times. None of them had known that the house had been mortgaged to their own roof to keep the business going. There was nothing in the bank and Leo owed salaries that would never be paid. Their life had been an illusion.

When the cupboards were down to cream corn and luncheon meat that smelled worse than dog food, Joan found a cashier gig at the gas bar owned by Dan Prychenko. His daughter, Marlena, was one of the popular girls at school. The job started as a part-time position at night, but the bills were mounting quickly. More hours became available, and by Christmas, Joan had stopped going to school altogether. She wasn't around to pick up her diploma the following June and had often wondered if her photograph had made it into the yearbook.

“I'm driving to Madden this weekend.” Joan watched for her mother's response.

Vi lived in the basement suite of her sister Heather's house in East Vancouver. It had been her home for over twenty-seven years. Name-brand lemon cleaners didn't completely mask the underlying mildew and the apartment was in its usual state of colourful disarray, made worse by the ceramic knick-knacks and garage sale treasures. The dust collectors that gave her mother pleasure drove Joan crazy. The living situation had been a godsend for Vi, In the early days she had lived rent-free in exchange for babysitting Heather's children. It had been crowded back then, when Joan's brothers, Anthony and David, were still living at home. Now, though, the two elderly widows were good company for each other in the faded and aging splitlevel home.

“That's nice, dear. Do you have a safety kit in the car? I heard on the radio the other day that you should always carry one.” Vi went off on a tangent about the recommended contents of an auto safety kit, avoiding asking why her daughter was returning to their old hometown for the first time in three decades.

“You were younger than I am now when we left Madden, Mom.”

“Uh huh.”

How many times had Joan felt that she was the one who had had to deal with the real world in her mother's place? She felt the energy sap from her body. Then, just as she was wondering why she'd even bothered to tell her mother, Vi veered back.

“You'll have to say hello for me.”

“To who?” asked Joan.

“Well, to whoever you come across.” Vi smiled. “After all, it was our home for nineteen years. Remember all the good times we had? Picking berries by the river, the outdoor skating rink, your dad barbequing steaks the size of tires. Oh, he was good on the barbeque, that man. Those long summer nights. Oh! And the northern lights.”

Joan watched her mother stare wistfully. That had been Vi's time, so fleeting.

“I'm going to my thirtieth high school reunion,” Joan stated flatly.

“Oh?” Vi's response left Joan hanging. She didn't know if her mother remembered that she hadn't graduated in Madden.

“I have no idea why they sent me an invitation.”

Vi looked her straight in the eye and spoke with clarity and vehemence. “You're better than any one of them. You remember that.”

That pointed insistence gave Joan an unexpected boost. As she was leaving, Vi gave her a list of people to see, including Joan's old English teacher, Mr. Fowler.

During the week she prepared for her trip. Months in the lab had left Joan looking as though she belonged in the morgue. She made her first trip to a tanning salon. As a fake ‘n' bake virgin, she got the willies sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a
People
magazine. It reminded her of the dentist's office. She sniffed discreetly and was relieved not to smell burning flesh. After the tanning session she broke down and bought a rinse to hide the needles of grey in her hair. She grabbed a box of royal plum henna, later wondering if the choice had been bold or batty. How could a respected, upwardly mobile member of the science community do these things unless she was utterly deranged? A fraud? Those feelings gradually passed when she discovered that she hadn't been cooked alive on the tanning bed and that the hair colour had turned out quite well. A couple of visits to Tropic Tans and a decent haircut calmed the nagging feeling that the invitation was a ticket to disaster.

Before going to bed on Thursday, Joan called Mort and got his answering machine. It was probably his turn to work late. Or was he out seeing someone? Another woman? Joan dismissed the thought. If he was, he would have told her. Despite the mountain of differences between them, they'd never told lies. She fell into a comfortable sleep, a whisper of coconut tanning oil reminding her that she was actually going on a holiday. As she slept she dreamt. She was on a bicycle, not her own mountain bike, but the old-fashioned kind where the rider sits upright. She was barreling down the long hill leading into the river valley where Madden was situated. Her mother was perched on the handlebars and Joan had no control over how fast they were moving.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

F
IRST THING IN THE MORNING
J
OAN
called Mort but, again, there was no answer. A few minutes later he rang her doorbell. When he stepped into her front hallway, he handed her a brown paper bag.

“Thank God. We have to leave by eight-thirty. It's an eight-hour drive.”

“I can't go.” He looked tired and rumpled, as though he hadn't been home all night.

“What do you mean you can't come? I'm not going without you.”

“One of the stores had a fire last night. Nobody was hurt but there's no way I can leave town.”

What a switch, she thought. It had always been her putting off their life because of work. “Just as well. I didn't want to go anyway. Sit down.”

She ground coffee, and while the aromatic dark roast was brewing they argued. Mort insisted that she face her demons. Joan denied that she was avoiding anything. He was the one suffering a crisis. The harder she tried to divert the conversation to the fire, the more resolute Mort was that she make this trip. They lost track of time. It was almost ten when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“I'm calling for Joan Parker.”

“Speaking.” She didn't recognize the girlish voice on the other end of the phone and braced herself for a charity pitch.

“Joannie! It's Peg. Peg Chalmers née Wong.” She sang it out as though she'd been announcing herself that way a lot lately. “I'm just making sure you're going to be here in time for the welcome buffet and dancing tonight.”

Joan suddenly felt trapped.

“Peg . . . ” She hesitated then decided to face it head on. “I thought there had been a mistake. The invitation, I mean.”

“Heavens no! I'm the reunion coordinator and head of the invite committee. I was in charge of the list. We were all thrilled, just thrilled, to get your RSVP . . . even though, technically, it was late.”

Memories of Peg Wong came rushing back. In the days when fake fur and leather looked more ‘fake' than anything else, Peg always wore pink in layers of nylon pile and shiny fabrics. As Joan listened to the sixty-second recap of Peg's life over the past thirty years — moved to Calgary, studied nursing, married, bred a couple of kids, divorced, then moved back to Madden sixteen years ago — she could see the Chinese-Canadian Marilyn Monroe wanna-be, too fluffy to be sultry. The constant gob of strawberry-flavoured gum hadn't helped. Peg had been one of the harmless ones. Although she had hung out with Marlena Prychenko and Candy Dirkson, she didn't have their mean streak.

“I've thought of you so much, Joannie, and wished I would have done something. You know, to make things easier.”

Joan couldn't believe what she was hearing — that anyone had thought of her for a minute after she'd left Madden. Her throat tightened when Peg asked after Vi and the boys. She seemed sincerely glad that everyone had done okay.

“What time will you be here? The welcome desk closes at seven.”

Joan listened to the silence. “I'll be there by then.” She glanced at Mort. He was smiling. To her surprise, so was she.