Deadly Appearances (19 page)

When she saw me, her face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, you are just the person I was supposed to see, and now here you are. God always hears us.” She stopped for breath and looked at me confidingly. I’d forgotten how compelling that lilting singsong voice could be.

Lori Evanson was a compelling young woman. If the other college students looked like extras in a movie musical, Lori was the homecoming queen. Her dark blond hair was swept back into a thick braid that fell between her shoulder blades straight as the pendulum on the college clock. The braid was tied with a broad corded silk ribbon, the same russet red as her angora cardigan and the stripe in her tartan skirt. Her face and neck, still tanned from summer, glowed apricot against her white eyelet blouse. She was beautiful, especially now that this mission to talk to me was about to be accomplished.

“I have a nutrition break in –” She looked carefully at her watch. “Why, my break is right now.” Her voice trilled with good fortune. “Let’s go to Disciples and – please, Mrs. Kilbourn, let me buy you some pie.”

So we walked together through the leafy streets. We made slow progress. Every few feet Lori stopped to welcome someone back or to volunteer news about Mark and Clay. She told me how they’d chosen their son’s name. “You know, like in Jesus is the potter and we are the clay,” she said matter-of-factly.

Lori Evanson seemed to float in a little globe of uncomplicated and undifferentiated joy. She was as filled with delight at a girlfriend’s cute new school bag as she was when a thin, freckled boy told her that since June his cancer had been in remission, or with the news that the pie of the day at Disciples was deep-dish green apple.

When we settled into the booth she chose near the windows, she reached across the table and squeezed both my hands. “I prayed for guidance and here you are.”

Suddenly I felt cold and impatient. “What is it, Lori?”

But her vacant lovely eyes continued to look steadily into mine. “I have to ask you something, and I’ve prayed that my words will be the right words.”

“Lori, what is it? Just ask. If I can help, I will.”

“Well, here goes …” The pleasant, lilting voice rose into the singsong of a child reciting. “Will you support my father-in-law, Craig Evanson, for leader of the party?”

I was astounded. I had been so absorbed with Andy’s death that the leadership race just wasn’t there for me. Across the table, Lori Evanson looked at me with eyes as guileless as a child’s, and I was furious that Julie had put her daughter-in-law up to this. “Damn it, Lori, no! I told your mother-in-law no; I told your father-in-law no; and I’m telling you no. No! I will not support Craig Evanson for leader of the party. How many times do they have to be told, anyway?”

Lori’s eyes filled with tears. I could see that each of those startling turquoise irises was encircled – contact lenses. She pulled her braid around and began chewing on the end to keep from crying. I felt like I had kicked a puppy.

“Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Mark’s mother’s right. I’m stupid. But I wanted to do my part and she said I should ask you and now I’ve made a mess of everything, and I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad at her. It’s my fault. I knew I shouldn’t ask you. Will you forgive me, Mrs. Kilbourn?” She was crying noisily now, and heads were turning in our direction. This seemed to be my restaurant for scenes.

“Lori, please call me Joanne … and of course I forgive you if you’ll forgive me.” She was nodding energetically, so I kept on. “I just thought it was mean of her to make you do it. Lori, look at me. If you thought it was the wrong thing to do, why didn’t you say no?”

She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “Because I have to trust other people to decide for me.” She leaned over confidingly. “You know, Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m not very smart. Soren says most of the time I can decide myself what’s right and what’s wrong, but if it gets too hard for me, well, I just have to trust the people around me.”

“Like who, Lori?”

“Like Mark and his mom and dad and the teachers at the college and, of course, I have to trust Soren.”

“Is Soren a good man?”

A look of rapture crossed her face. “Next to Mark, he’s the best man I know.”

“What exactly does he do? Is he the principal or the head of the church here?”

“He cares for us, Mrs. Kilbourn. He does everything. He preaches and he helps the counsellors and he makes sure everyone’s fair and he gets our money for us. Before he came, this was just a little backwater Bible college, but Soren Eames had a vision.” (You could almost hear the violins soar on that one.) “Soren has made the college really special. He changes people’s lives – kids on drugs and runaways, but really just anybody. He could,” she said shyly, “change your life if you’d let him.”

“Lori, about the money. Where does Soren get the money for all this? Is there a central church somewhere?”

“We’re the church, Mrs. Kilbourn. Soren just goes out in the world and gets the money for us.”

“But how does he do it?”

Unexpectedly, she giggled and leaned across the table. “Mark says Soren gets our money by” – and she whispered – “by cuddling up to rich widows.”

“The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre must have taken a lot of cuddling.”

“Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn” – she laughed softly – “aren’t we awful?” She looked at her watch. “Oh, fudge. I’m late. Thanks for being so understanding. This is my treat.”

“Lori, just one thing. Could you and Mark keep an eye on Mrs. Boychuk for me? She’s having a hard time.” Lori was nodding vigorously again. Grief and adjustment – we were on safe ground. “Please let me know if she gets too sad or …” I thought. “If she just isn’t herself.”

Lori seemed to know what I meant. “A change,” she said, nodding gravely. “I should let you know if there’s any change in her.”

“Yes,” I said, “a change. That’s the word.”

When Soren Eames came out of his office to greet me, he did indeed look like the kind of man rich widows would pay to be cuddled by.

“Black Irish,” my grandmother had said the first time I brought Ian to her narrow house on Yorkville Avenue. “Skin like milk, nose like Gregory Peck and broody eyes. You can always spot them. They’re passionate men, but often insane.” She’d been right, at least in part, about Ian, and Soren Eames had the same dark good looks that my husband had, that my sons have.

I hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at Soren Eames until that moment. He was older than I remembered. He was balding; there were hairbreadth lines around his eyes; and he was much too thin. But, romantic as it sounds, you could feel the fire there.

He played on that romantic sense, too. He was all in black again, and he had rolled his sleeves back past the wrist to show off his hands. They were artist’s hands, very white, with long, tapered fingers.

He smiled and offered his arm. “Let’s walk a little.” I would have given odds I was about to go on the widow’s tour – the crowded classrooms, the too-small dorms itching for endowment – but he surprised me. We walked away from the college, behind the
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Centre, over the construction rubble to a hill. As we climbed toward the sun, the air was hot and acrid. It smelled of burning rubber and stubble fires lit by farmers. At the top of the hill was a little windbreak of trees and in front of them a rock, smooth and ancient. Soren Eames gestured me to sit down, and then sat beside me.

Below I could see the whole of Wolf River Bible College. With its neat rows of buildings and lines of yellow aspens, it was, from this distance, as theatrically unreal as the model children who sat in its classrooms and walked across its lawns. Beside me, his profile sharp and oddly youthful in the haze, Soren Eames looked at his vision realized.

It was enough to make me toss my cookies. I had spent too much time around people who cruised from photo opportunity to photo opportunity to tolerate this.

“Very impressive,” I said.

“Very impressive, but you’re not impressed,” Eames said, and I was surprised to hear his voice shake. Normally that vulnerability would have touched me, but not today. There were things I needed to know.

“It’s a beautiful setup. Lori Evanson tells me you raised money for most of the new buildings. You must have raised a million dollars.”

“More,” he said flatly.

“And the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre,” I said. “For the past few months Andy was after me to take twenty minutes to come in off the highway and look at it. He thought it was a really great building.”

Eames was silent. I could see his pulse beating in his throat. He swallowed. I wasn’t going to be deflected.

“How did you come to know Charlie Appleby?”

“I didn’t. It was his wife. She just appeared one day.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. She came. I told her what we needed. She said, ‘Do it, and I’ll write the cheque.’ ”

“Just like that? That’s a rather spectacular act of philanthropy, Mr. Eames. A stranger comes in off the street and, with a stroke of her pen, grants your wish. Didn’t it seem a little – I don’t know – whimsical to you?”

“Widows, especially in those first months after their husbands’ deaths, are often a little whimsical, Mrs. Kilbourn. You’ll have to accept it on faith as I did. The
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Centre was a good thing for Lane Appleby. She took quite an interest in it – spent a lot of weekends in Wolf River when it was going up. She’s been a good friend to the college, and I’d rather not say anything more about her.” He sounded ineffably sad.

The silence fell between us again, and I didn’t want it to. I knew there was a missing piece of Andy’s life in Wolf River. I didn’t know the shape of the piece I was looking for, but I did know that I needed to keep Soren Eames talking.

“Anyway, it’s an accomplishment,” I said lamely.

“But you question the value of that accomplishment,” he said softly.

I turned and looked at him. He was close to forty, and in the harsh morning sun every mark of living showed. But there was such vulnerability in his face, and something else – Fear? Hope?

It struck me suddenly that he was as tired of this aimless circling as I was. He had, after all, telephoned me. He wanted something, too. But neither of us would get anywhere till we cleared the air. I took a deep breath and waded in.

“All right, Mr. Eames –”

“Soren,” he corrected gently.

“All right, Soren, I’m mystified. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m a widow, but I’m not the kind of widow you’re interested in. I’m not rich. I can’t underwrite anything or give the school an endowment.” He winced, but I didn’t stop. “I don’t know why I’m getting the tour. What possible difference can it make to you what I think of all this?”

I looked into his face. It was hard to believe that this was the Miracle Man of Wolf River. The persona of the confident charismatic was as remote from this shattered man as the moon. When he spoke his voice was almost inaudible, but there was no mistaking his words.

“I wanted you to think well of me, Joanne. I wanted …” His voice broke. “I’m sorry. This isn’t working out. I’m sorry. I just wanted you not to have contempt for me. We can go back now if you want.” As we walked down the hill, the air between us was heavy with things unsaid. Like quarrelling lovers, we walked in silence.

When I pulled up in front of the house on Eastlake Avenue, a woman from a courier service was coming down our walk. I signed a form, took a fat striped envelope from her and went inside. It had been a while since we’d done any housework. The living room was not a disaster, but it wasn’t great. The boys had had lunch in front of the television. They had cleared away the dishes, but the coffee table was dusty with sandwich crumbs, and there were rings from their milk glasses. From talk at dinner lately, I knew the World Series was on. Angus had resurrected his baseball cards, and they were in unassailable piles on the sideboard in the dining room. The afternoon sun blazed through the window and turned the crystal vase Rick had given me to fire, but the daisies I had put in it last week were wilting, and the table it stood on was layered with dust.

I had two hours before the boys came home. I could clean house. If I started right away, things would be shining by supper. Or I could make a pot of tea, head for the granny flat, sit in the cool and read through the stuff Rick had sent.

It was the day before my birthday. My last day as a forty-five-year-old. The choice was easy. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I dumped the daisies and went into the backyard with a pair of scissors. I cut a generous bunch of giant marigolds, came back inside and filled the vase with fresh water and arranged the flowers. Their smell, sharp and fall-like, filled with room with other autumns, autumns when the kids were little and they’d go off to school with bunches of marigolds wrapped in waxed paper for their teachers. At that moment the mysteries of Andy Boychuk’s life seemed just the antidote I needed for the realities of mine. I made a pot of tea, poured a cup and took it and the courier envelope to the granny flat.

The place was beginning to have a comforting order. I had moved the desk in front of the window overlooking the garden. I worked better when I could see the big house and the shadows of the kids passing by the windows every so often. There had been enough rain in September to brighten the asters and the zinnias and the marigolds, so the garden was pretty to look at. But I couldn’t smell it. The windows of the granny flat, energy efficient, satisfaction guaranteed, sealed out dust and the smell of late summer garden alike.

I had come up with a filing system that any professional researcher would laugh at, but that I thought would work for me. I had labelled a vertical file for every year of Andy’s life, and into each file I was dumping everything that happened in a particular year, not just to Andy but to the people around him: his family, his friends, his colleagues. When I told Rick Spenser about it, there had been silence. For his research he had devised a computer program with a Byzantine system of cross-references. But I liked my files. We don’t live in a vacuum, and my vertical files took that into account.