Murder At The Mendel (8 page)

“Then,” I said, smiling back at him, “it’s taken care of. There’s never been a problem yet that Nina couldn’t vanquish.”

As if on cue, Nina appeared in the doorway, flushed and laughing. “Jo has always been my one-girl fan club.”

“No longer a girl,” I said, “but still a fan. Nina, you look beautiful.” And she did, although it was a risky look. Her hair was smoothed into a French braid, not as long as Taylor’s, but I could see the intent had been to suggest relationship, and Nina’s dress was the same dusky rose as her granddaughter’s. It was a stunning outfit. The dress itself was very plain, high-necked and long-sleeved, but over the dress, she had a white organdy apron, full in the skirt, fitted in the bodice and gently flaring over each shoulder. Stunning, but a bit self-consciously domestic.

As she had been all my life, Nina was quick to read my expression. “I know, Jo, the apron is a tad too lady-of-the-manor, but an hour ago the roof of Taylor’s gingerbread house slid to the floor and smashed, so I just made a replacement.”

Not in that outfit, I thought, but it was such an innocent subterfuge, and Nina looked so happy, I couldn’t help smiling. “It’s a beautiful dress, Ni, and I notice it matches your granddaughter’s. Pink must be the colour of choice on Spadina Crescent this Christmas.”

“It’s Taylor’s favourite,” said her grandmother simply.

“Now, Stuart, why don’t you get us drinks.” She touched the little girl’s shoulder. “And Taylor and I will get our special cookies.”

Stuart came back with a tray full of soft drinks for the children and a bottle of Courvoisier for the adults. When Angus saw the soft drinks, he was jubilant.

“Great,” he exclaimed. “None of that crappy eggnog. Everywhere you go people give you that stuff, and it’s so gross.”

When Nina appeared in the doorway with a cut-glass bowl of eggnog, Peter turned to his brother. “Way to go, Angus,” he said.

“I can dress him up, but I can’t take him anywhere,” I said, laughing. Taylor came in, carefully balancing a plate of cookies.

“Why?” she asked, and in the set of her mouth I could see the girl who had told a classmate to lay off Sally because
his
mother had a mustache. “Why can’t you take him anywhere?”

“Because he always acts silly,” I said. “Those cookies are beautiful, Taylor. How did you make the ones with the little stars cut out on top?”

Gravely and in great detail Taylor gave me the recipe, then she told me how she and her grandmother had made the candy-cane cookies, twisting pink and white together, and the gingerbread Santas with the red sugar hats and the beards white with icing. As she explained, her dark eyes never left my face, just as Stuart’s eyes never left your face when he was trying to make you understand something.

“These cookies really take me back,” I said to Nina, “especially the jam-jams with the little stars. You must have spent a hundred hours making those with me when I was little.”

“You always dropped the cookie dough on the floor at least four times,” said Nina. “All those dirty little cookies.”

“But always miraculously perfect when they came out of the oven. How did you do that Nina, smoke and mirrors?”

“No,” she said, laughing, “more domestic than that. I always had an extra batch of dough in the refrigerator. I still do. Sometimes grown-ups have to intervene, you know, for everybody’s good.” She turned her perfect heart-shaped face to me and smiled conspiratorially. “While we’re being nostalgic, come upstairs with me and let me show you what I’m giving Taylor for Christmas.”

When we came to the guest room that Nina was using during her visit, I was surprised to see her take down a key from the molding over the door.

“A bit Gothic novel, I know,” she said, “but I’m a believer in Christmas secrets. Now you close your eyes, too. I want to see your face when you see Taylor’s present.” She led me into the room. “All right, Jo, you can look now.”

When I opened my eyes, I was back forty years in the brick house Sally and Nina and Desmond Love had lived in on Russell Hill Road in Toronto. On Nina’s night table, faces carefully painted into expressions of gentility, were those emblems of nineteenth-century womanhood, Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth, and Marmee from Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
. An American dollmaker had produced the dolls in the late 1940s. The woman’s name was Madame Alexander, and the dolls had become famous. Nina had gone to New York especially to buy a set for Sally’s fifth birthday.

“I see you replaced Amy,” I said.

“Yes,” said Nina, straightening the ribbon on the Marmee doll’s hair.

A memory. A room full of little girls in party dresses and patent leather shoes, clustered around the dolls, watching. And Nina with that same gesture. “You see, this is Marmee, the mother doll. She’s a mother like me, and these are her girls. This one with the brown eyes and the strawberry blond
hair is Meg. She’s the oldest, and this one with the brown hair and the plaid rickrack on her petticoat is Jo – she likes to read, like our Jo does, and this is Amy, she’s Marmee’s little artist, like you, Sally, and she has beautiful blond hair just like …”

But Sally wasn’t listening any more. Her face dark with fury, she grabbed the Amy doll by the ankles and smashed her china face against the edge of the table. Her voice had been shrill with hysteria. “She is not me. I am my own Sally Love,” and she’d hurtled blindly past all her birthday guests and out of the room.

In this room, now, Nina was talking. “Yes. I replaced her, and she cost a small fortune, but Taylor’s worth it. She’s such a bright little girl, and she’s like you were, Jo; she wants to learn. It’s fun to do things for her. She’s going to grow up to be a beautiful and gracious woman.”

“Like her grandmother,” I said.

Nina’s face shone with happiness. “Thank you, Jo. That means a lot. Everyone needs to feel valued. I haven’t had enough of that feeling lately.” She shrugged. “But no self-pity. It’s Christmas. And I have wonderful things to look forward to in the new year.” She took both my hands in hers. “Come on, let’s sit down for a minute. I have some news.”

We sat down facing one another on the edge of her bed. I could smell the light flowery scent of her perfume. Always the same perfume – Joy. “A woman’s perfume is her signature, Jo.” That’s what she’d told me. The glow from the lamp on the night table enclosed us in a pool of yellow light, shutting out the darkness.

“Stuart’s asked me to move here permanently,” she said. “When I came, we’d agreed to try the arrangement until Sally came to her senses, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen. Stuart thinks Taylor needs a mother or at least someone to take the place of a mother in her life. Jo, it
took me three seconds to give him my answer. I’ve put my house in Toronto on the market. It looks as if you and Stuart are stuck with me.”

I felt my heart sink. “That’s great news,” I said weakly.

Puzzled, Nina looked at me. “I thought you’d be thrilled, Jo. I know I was, at the thought that after all these years, you and I’d be in the same city again, able to pick up the phone and meet for lunch or tea or go for a walk.”

“I am thrilled,” I said. “One of the best Christmas gifts I could have would be having you here permanently. It’s just … has anyone thought about what Sally might want in all of this?”

“Sally always thinks enough about Sally for all of us,” Nina said sharply. “Damn it, Jo, she made her decision when she walked out on Stuart and Taylor. She didn’t go alone you know. She went with a student of hers, a boy of seventeen. It didn’t last, of course. Do you know the joke that went around the gallery? ‘Someone told Sally Love it was time she thought about having another child. So she went out and had herself a seventeen-year-old boy.’ You should have seen Stuart’s face the first time he heard that. He came home looking like a whipped dog. No, Jo, we haven’t given much thought to Sally in all this, or perhaps I can put it more acceptably, we’ve given her about as much thought as she gave us.” Her face, usually so expressive, was a mask.

I reached out to embrace her, and she turned away. “Nina, don’t,” I said. “Don’t be angry at me.”

She took my hands in hers again. “I could never be angry at you, Jo.”

“And don’t be angry at Sally. She wants what’s best for Taylor, too. And she has her own worries right now. Did you hear her gallery burned down last night?”

“Of course. It was all over this evening’s paper. Stu thinks
it must have been some sort of retaliation for Erotobiography. Sally’s always chosen to live on the edge, Jo. And if you live on the edge, you have to accept consequences. I’m just glad she’s out of this house. It wouldn’t have been much of a Christmas for Taylor being stalked by a lunatic.” She stood up and smoothed her hair. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. Come on, let’s go downstairs. We have one last Christmas Eve surprise.”

We came back to a scene of perfect holiday harmony. The boys and Stu were sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace looking at baseball cards, and Mieka and Taylor were sitting side by side at the coffee table, drawing butterflies.

It was Nina who broke the spell.

“All right, Taylor,” she said. “Time to come into the dining room for the big moment.”

“The next event calls for champagne,” Stuart said, filling five glasses and splashing two more. “Now you Kilbourns stand right there in front of the French doors, and I’ll go back into the dining room and let you know when we’re ready.”

The kids and I stood obediently, with that self-conscious air of celebration that comes when you’re holding a glass of champagne. Someone turned off the lights; the doors to the dining room were flung open, and we were confronted with the extravagance of the Lachlan family Christmas tree.

It was a plantation pine, full and ceiling high; its fragrant, soft needles had the fresh green of new growth, but everything else was pink. There were dozens of dusty pink velvet bows tied to the branches, and each of them held a shining pink globe. And there were candles, pink, lit candles that sputtered a fatal hairbreadth away from pine needles, and there were pink roses, real ones suspended from the pine branches in tiny vials of water that glistened in the candlelight. Beside the tree, Stu and Nina and Taylor stood, hands
linked. “We wish you a merry Christmas,” they sang in their thin, unprofessional voices, and I felt a sense of dread so knife-sharp it sent the room spinning.

“Steady,” Peter said, and I felt his arm around my shoulder. The moment passed, and in seconds, we were all drinking champagne and exclaiming over the tree.

Twenty minutes later, Taylor’s stocking hung with care and the last holiday embraces exchanged, the children and I were walking along the river bank toward the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The church was packed, and we had to sit on a bench at the back. Beside us Mary, Joseph and a real baby sat waiting for their cue. I knew the girl playing Mary. She had borrowed our tape recorder at the beginning of school and gone out to the dump to do a project on all the reusable things people throw out. The local
TV
station had heard about it, and I’d seen her on the evening news, standing on a mountain of garbage, swatting at flies and telling us that time was running out for the environment. A real firebrand. At the front of the church a boy in a white surplice and Reeboks started to sing “Once in Royal David’s City” and Mary stood up, adjusted her baby, shook Joseph’s comforting arm off her shoulder and strode up the centre aisle. A Mary for our times.

It was a good service. Hilda McCourt had been right about the beauty of Charpentier’s “Midnight Mass” for Christmas, and as we left St. John the Divine’s, I felt happy and at peace. The anxiety that had been gnawing at me since Nina told me about her plans to move to Saskatoon was gone. That night when, stockings filled and breakfast table set, I finally crawled into bed, I fell into an easy sleep.

But not an untroubled one. Sometime in that night I dreamed a terrible dream. I was in Stuart Lachlan’s house, and Sally was there with me. There was a Christmas tree with candles, and Sally was lighting them, very carelessly
thrusting a lighted taper in among the branches. I kept pleading with her to be careful, but she just laughed and said, “It’s not my problem.” With the terrible inevitability of a dream, the tree caught fire, and as I looked through the burning branches, I could see Nina’s face. My legs were leaden, but finally, blinded by smoke, I pushed through the fire to get to her. Then we were outside somewhere and I was holding Nina, but it was dark and I was frantic because I couldn’t see if she was all right. Finally, I put her down in the snow, crouched beside her and lit a match. But the face on the woman in the snow wasn’t Nina’s. It was Sally’s. Her clothes had burned away, and her wonderful blond hair was just a charred frizz around her face, but her open eyes were still bright with defiance. And that was a strange thing because I knew she was dead.

CHAPTER

5

When I opened my eyes Christmas morning, the porcelain doll Sally had given me was on my nightstand looking back at me. I must have left it there when I’d gone to wash my hair after I got back from womanswork. That morning as I looked into the doll’s bright, unseeing eyes, it seemed as if my dream of fire and death had been carried over into the waking world, and I was uneasy. But after I’d showered and dressed, I felt better. It had, after all, been only a dream.

When I went downstairs, the kids were sitting in the living room trying to be cool about the fact that there were presents under the tree and it was Christmas morning. As soon as he saw me, Angus called out the name on the first present, and in the usual amazingly short time, the room was filled with empty boxes and wrapping paper and ribbons and it was over for another year.

Around noon, I called Sally’s studio. There was no answer, and I felt edgy. But when Nina called early in the afternoon to wish us happiness, she said Sally was sitting in their living room, and I stopped worrying. We ate around five. Peter’s girlfriend, Christy, had spent the day with us, and
when we came in from cleaning up the kitchen, the boys were already taking down the tree.